Further information may be added to the earlier biography.2 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 772-3 (where he is called Thomas More).
In the Cumberland subsidy returns of 1435-6 Thomas de la More was assessed on an annual income of £20 derived from property in both that county and Westmorland.3 E179/90/26. While such an income was less modest by the standards of the far north than by those of further south, it was hardly sufficient to underpin the very prominent part he played in the administration of Cumberland. He owed that to his place in the service of Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury. On 30 June 1443 he was among those who gathered at the earl’s castle of Middleham (Yorkshire) to witness the settlement of a dispute between William Stapleton* and Thomas, Lord Clifford, and, although this is the first evidence of his place in the comital retinue, it is likely that their relationship was not then new. Later, when the earl became chancellor in April 1454, he admitted some of his followers, de la More among them, to the privilege, customarily enjoyed only by Chancery officers, of suing debtors in his court of Chancery.4 Cumbria RO, Carlisle, Musgrave of Edenhall mss, D/Mus/E172; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 123.
The resumption of de la More’s parliamentary career in the 1450s, after a break of over 20 years, was an aspect of his service to Neville. In the first of his two returns, at the hustings held at Carlisle on 17 Oct. 1450, he seems to have been the Neville candidate in an election compromised with the Percys, whose candidate was their retainer, Thomas Crackenthorpe*. There was, however, no compromise when he was again returned five years later at hustings from which the followers of the Percys were notably absent. His fellow Cumberland MP was then Thomas Colt*, an intimate follower of the Nevilles’ ally, the duke of York.5 C219/16/1, 3.
Between these two returns to Parliament, de la More, as sheriff, had played a part in the intervening election. This election was irregular in two respects. First, because an unusually short period had been allowed between summons and meeting, de la More did not hold the election until 13 Mar. 1453, a week after the Parliament had begun. Second, he named in his election indenture as many as 154 attestors, far more than in any other surviving fifteenth-century indenture for the county, which very strongly implies that it was contested. Significantly, the Neville interest dominated: the attestors were headed by the earl of Salisbury’s younger son, Sir Thomas Neville; and those returned for both county and the city of Carlisle were Neville men. It would be surprising if de la More did not play a significant part in thwarting the Percy interest at the hustings.6 C219/16/2.
De la More’s partisanship in the Neville interest made his shrievalty a particularly uncomfortable one. In a petition to the King, probably during the final session of the 1453 Parliament, when the duke of York was Protector, he complained of the ‘grete discensions, riotes and debates’ which divided one half of the shire from the other, and the opposition to his efforts to raise the county farm by Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, who allegedly assaulted his under sheriff and bailiff and declared ‘in the presens of notable persones’ that he would have the sheriff’s head.7 SC8/29/1446; RP, vi. 63-64 (where the petition is misdated to 1472 – cf. PROME, xiii. 324). The petition was successful in its purpose, securing for de la More the privilege of accounting at the Exchequer for only that part of the county farm he was able to levy: E159/230, brevia Trin. rot. 8; E28/85/21-22.
De la More died on 1 June 1459 before he had to commit himself to the Nevilles in their opposition to Lancaster. He left two daughters, Margaret and Isabel, as his heiresses. According to a much later inquisition, Isabel was ‘a natural idiot’ from birth, but this did not prevent her marrying William Vaux of Catterlen, a kinsman of Roland Vaux*, who acted as one of the administrators of our MP’s goods. The son of the match, John Vaux, was retained by Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, in April 1461.8 CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 749; CPR, 1461-7, p. 253; Cam. Misc. xxxii. 138. De la More’s other daughter married into the Hansards, a Lincolnshire family with interests in county Durham. This match probably took place soon after Hilary term 1444 when de la More sued a gentleman of the latter county, John Hedworth, for abducting Margaret from his custody. Our MP’s widow, Maud, was still alive in Easter term 1466.9 CP40/732, rot. 421d; 819, rots. 170, 171.