MAKWORTH, Thomas (d.1439), of Mackworth, Derbys.

The Makworths had been long established at Mackworth near Derby, but it was not until the early fifteenth century that they made a notable mark on local affairs. They were a family of middling gentry rank: in the tax returns of 1435-6 our MP was assessed on a modest annual income of £20, derived from property at Mackworth and nearby in Derby and Ash. Derbys. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. Jnl. xi. 1; E179/240/266; Feudal Aids, i. 264, 278, 299, 305. His first appearance in the records is a striking and unusual one. On 1 Aug. 1404 his neighbour and overlord, John Tuchet, Lord Audley (d.1408), granted him and his brother, John, in recognition of the good service their ancestors had rendered to his, the right to bear a compound of the arms of Tuchet and Audley, namely party per pale indented, sable and ermine, a chevron gules, fretty or. This signal mark of favour raises the possibility that our MP had served with Tuchet in the campaign against Owen Glendower. He certainly fought in Wales soon after: between 13 Oct. and 1 Dec. 1404 he was there in the retinue of Sir Richard Arundel. Vis. Rutland (Harl. Soc. lxxiii), 12-13; T. Blore, Rutland, 130; E101/44/7, m. 2.

Although Makworth had seemingly succeeded to the family estates by this date, there can be little doubt that he was younger than John, who enjoyed a successful, if controversial, ecclesiastical career. John’s success may explain his apparent willingness to surrender his birthright to our MP. Nor was this the only service he provided for his younger brother. In 1404 he was presented by Henry IV to the prebendal stall of Empingham in Lincoln cathedral, and it is reasonable to conclude that it was he who arranged Thomas’s marriage to Alice, sister and heiress-presumptive of the lord of the manor of Empingham. This marriage had taken place by February 1407 when the couple acted together in a fine concerning the manor of Ash, which had, probably only very shortly before, been settled on them and their issue with remainder to John in fee. Blore, 127; Derbys. Feet of Fines (Derbys. Rec. Soc. xi), 1022. For John Makworth: Award of Wm. Alnwick, bp. of Lincoln ed. Wolley, 15.

Makworth began to play an active role in local affairs in 1410 when appointed to the office of escheator. Over the following decade and more he was a frequent attestor to election indentures, and when commissioners to inquire into serious disorders in the county came to Derby in June 1414 he sat on the grand jury. C219/11/2, 5; 12/2, 3; 13/2; KB9/204/2. However, it was not until the mid 1420s that he gained any real prominence in local affairs. In June 1424 he was named to his first duchy of Lancaster office, that of parker of Mansell, and soon afterwards he was named as escheator for the second time. It was while escheator that he was elected to Parliament on 12 Apr. 1425, and during the parliamentary session his responsibilities were further enhanced by appointment to the duchy office of receiver of the honour of Tutbury. This promotion may have been something of a mixed blessing – on 21 June 1425 he entered into a bond to the King in the massive sum of £1,000 that he would account as receiver on a month’s notice – but it was a potentially influential post. The records give no indication to whom he owed this advancement. DL42/18, ff. 210v, 216v; R. Somerville, Duchy, i. 542; C219/13/3; CCR, 1422-9, p. 205. It may have been his brother John, who had been dean of Lincoln since 1412, or else the new Lord Audley, James Tuchet, who had been appointed chief justice of South Wales in 1423 at the beginning of a distinguished career. A different, and potentially more lasting, form of advancement came to the family soon after this. Following the death of their neighbour, George Sallowe of Stanton by Dale, in 1417, the wardship and marriage of his daughter and heiress, Agnes (b.1414), was granted to Dean Makworth, and she was later married to Thomas’s son Henry. CIPM, xx. 848; CPR, 1416-22, p. 128. On 6 Oct. 1430 the couple had seisin of her father’s lands after Henry had proved her age, and it was presumably in right of her estates that Henry was assessed on an annual income of £7 in the tax returns of 1435-6: CCR, 1429-35, p. 78; CIPM, xxiii. 597; E179/240/266.

Soon after the end of his second term of escheator Makworth was involved in an episode of disorder that came to the notice of the royal council. In the summer of 1427 Queen Joan, who had a special interest in the affairs of the borough of Derby as its fee farm formed part of her dower, complained to the council that, on 13 June, the men of the town had been prevented from attending the market at nearby Ashbourne by the threats and violence of Thomas Milner alias Macworth at the head of some 200 men. The petition does not implicate our MP but later evidence shows that Milner was one of his household servants. Further, Queen Joan accused Milner of assaults upon two named townsmen, a barker named John Notyngham and William Pecok, a servant of John Heuster, and the same two men appear as victims of our MP himself in an indictment taken before the j.p.s. at Derby on the following 26 June. A jury then claimed that Makworth and others had assaulted them at Derby on 13 June in revenge for an attack on one of Makworth’s servants on the previous day. There can, in short, be no doubt that our MP instigated the offences complained of by the queen and that, for a reason now lost, he was in dispute with the townsmen of Derby. How the matter was resolved does not appear in the surviving records. On 6 July the council awarded that Milner should be summoned before it on pain of £200, but there the record fails. SC8/158/7900; KB27/693, rex rot. 7.

On 14 Dec. 1430 Makworth was again elected to Parliament. The return was irregular in that his name and those of the others returned for county and borough were added in spaces left by the clerk. The clear implication is that the 13 named attestors witnessed a blank return. Unfortunately no other evidence survives to illuminate this peculiarity. On the following 28 Jan., while Parliament was in session, he acted as a mainpernor for John Manchester*, the serving MP for Nottingham, and on 4 Mar. 1432 he added the office of bailiff of the new liberty of the duchy in Derbyshire to his administrative responsibilities. C219/14/2; CFR, xvi. 24; Somerville, 549. Soon after, however, his advancement within the duchy administration came to an abrupt end. In July 1432 he was replaced as receiver of Tutbury by Robert Whitgreve* and in the following July he also lost his recently-acquired office as bailiff, perhaps because of a failure to account. Earlier, his failure to account after his second term as escheator had resulted in the seizure by the Crown of the issues of property in Ash together with two horses to a total value of 25s.: E199/35/8. Certainly he was being pursued for debt: on 24 May 1433 he was summoned to appear before the council of the duchy to account for the sum of nearly £200. Somerville, 543, 549; DL42/18, f. 15. Another factor in this reverse may have been, it might speculatively be suggested, his family’s persistent involvement in criminality. His dispute with the townsmen of Derby was not an isolated incident in an otherwise blameless record. In July 1433, the same month as he was replaced as duchy bailiff, his presence was required in Chancery to answer an unspecified charge. More seriously, the coming of royal justices of oyer and terminer to Derby on 1 Apr. 1434 resulted in several presentments against both him and Dean Makworth. One of the two grand juries claimed that, in October 1427, the brothers had conspired at Mackworth to have two servants of the prior of Lenton indicted of felony; the other presented our MP for illegally giving livery to the lawless Milner and illegally receiving it from both Joan Beauchamp, Lady Abergavenny, and Ralph, Lord Cromwell. KB27/693, rex rots. 4, 7; C244/8/81; KB9/11/15d, 17.

The Makworths, however, were the victims as well as the perpetrators of crime. According to a bill laid in the court of King’s bench by the MP’s son Henry on 13 June 1434, on the previous 13 Feb. Thomas Longford, a scion of one of the leading Derbyshire families, had abducted Henry’s wife, Agnes, from Buxton in the High Peak. She may, as so often in such cases, have been a willing victim, and her abduction was probably the pretext for divorce (since when she died, many years before Henry, she was the wife of Thomas Marmyon). Longford pleaded a protection as in the retinue of John, Lord Clinton, and it is highly unlikely that the Makworths obtained the £200 damages they claimed against him. KB27/693, rot. 10d; C140/10/24.

Makworth did not live long enough to recover from the setbacks that assailed him in the early 1430s, dying on 15 Sept. 1439. What followed suggests that he left his affairs in disorder. On 10 Oct. the Crown issued a commission for the seizure of his estates and inquiry into concealments and alienations in respect of them, and a further 18 days elapsed before a writ of diem clausit extemum was authorized. On 5 Nov. juries from Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire, sitting before the escheator, returned that Thomas held no lands at his death, and, more surprisingly, declared ignorance as to his heir. The most likely explanation for this curious chain of events is that Makworth had died in debt to the Crown, presumably as a consequence of his Tutbury receivership, and that his son and heir was attempting to protect the family property from seizure. No doubt all the Makworth property was in the hands of feoffees, hence, on 19 July 1440, the feodary of Tutbury was ordered to exonerate Henry Makworth of relief due from the manor of Ash as it was, without collusion, in the possession of others. CIPM, xxv. 333-4; CPR, 1436-41, pp. 368-9; CFR, xvii. 103; DL42/18, f. 146. Moreover, our MP may have been indebted to others than the King: in the last years of his life he was defending actions of debt sued against him by Sir Richard Vernon* and of account sued by the dean and chapter of New College in Leicester, Beatrice, widow of Sir Hugh Shirley†, and Sir John Gresley*. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. new ser. iii. 140-1; CP40/699, rot. 236; 705, rot. 443.

Makworth did not live to see his wife fall heir to the valuable lands of the Basynges family nor to witness the sordid circumstances in which she and their son make good their title to them. Shortly before his death in September 1445, the elderly Sir John Basynges sought to settle a life interest in the bulk of his holdings, including the manor of Empingham, on his bastard son. His plans were thwarted by the violent intervention of his sister Alice and her son, Henry. On 23 Sept. 1446 Henry and others, acting at Alice’s instigation, murdered the bastard at Empingham, an offence for which they were subsequently pardoned at the price of alienating the lands of the Basynges family in Kent to the corrupt James Fiennes*, Lord Saye. The acquisition of the manor of Empingham in this deplorable way entailed the move of the family to Rutland. There they long remained. Our MP’s descendant, another Thomas Makworth, was created a baronet in 1619. In 1723 yet another Sir Thomas Makworth† was forced to sell Empingham as a result of ruinous expenses incurred when winning the parliamentary seat for Rutland in the previous year. S.J. Payling, ‘Murder, Motive and Punishment’, EHR, cxiii. 2-11; VCH Rutland, ii. 245; The Commons 1690-1715, iv. 735-7.