WARD, Thomas

There can be little doubt that the MP for Wootton Bassett in the Parliament of 1447 – the first assembly to which that borough returned representatives – was a royal servant, who, a few months after the Parliament, was granted for life an office in the royal forest of Windsor.1 CPR, 1446-52, p. 64. By this date he had long had a place, albeit a very minor one, in the Household. His promotion had been slow, for he had served there since at least the spring of 1430, when he was one of 134 yeomen retained to go with the young King to France. Later, in 1444-5, he was again in France, on this occasion as part of the large contingent that escorted the King’s prospective bride, Margaret of Anjou, to England.2 SC8/153/7626, 7629; Add. 23938, f. 15; E101/408/11, f. 15; 25, f. 6; 409/16, f. 36; 410/3. By then Ward was probably one of yeomen in the domestic office of the ewery, a position he is known to have had by July 1447. His election to the Parliament summoned to meet at Bury St. Edmunds five months earlier, an assembly designed to serve as the forum for the court’s attack on Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, was another aspect of his royal service. These bare facts are all that can be certainly said of him. It may be that he was dead by 13 Nov. 1454, when he does not appear in a list of the officers of the reformed and reduced royal household.3 PPC, vi. 231.

It is, on the other hand, possible that he served again in the Household in the early years of Edward IV. He, or a namesake, was then one of the ushers of the royal chamber. As such, in August 1461 he was rewarded for riding about England on certain unspecified business, and in the following December he had further reward for delivering woollen cloth to the city of Hereford for the making of the King’s livery. He was still in office in February 1463, when he had assignment of £50 in repayment of a loan he had made to the King.4 E403/823, m. 6; 824, mm. 4, 5; 827A, m. 12; E404/72/2/49. This survival in the royal household, if such it was, may be explained by a connexion with Richard, duke of York. The duke was, after all, lord of Wootton Bassett. Further, it may be more than coincidental that the forester-ship granted to our MP in 1447 related to an outlying part of the royal forest of Windsor, in the duke’s chase of Cranborne. So much, however, is speculation, and, it must be admitted, the borough’s representation shows little sign of the duke’s influence in the late 1440s and 1450s.

The MP’s social and geographical origins are also doubtful. Nothing in the routine will of a namesake of Pritwell (Essex), made in July 1469, identifies the testator as a former Household official; and there is no reason to identify the MP with another namesake of Irthlingborough in Northamptonshire, assessed on an income of £5 p.a. in the subsidy returns of 1436 and a tax collector in that county in 1453, nor with the contemporary surgeon of Westminster.5 PCC 28 Godyn (PROB11/5, ff. 231v-2); E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (iii)d; CFR, xix. 52; CPR, 1422-9, p. 480; CCR, 1454-61, p. 270. Another namesake, resident at Castle Bromwich (Warwickshire) and twice escheator of Warwickshire and Leicestershire in the 1470s, could be cited as a better candidate, for he attracted minor local grants of royal patronage from Edward IV in that decade. Yet he lived into the 1490s and perhaps beyond, and it is unlikely that he was elected to Parliament as early as the 1440s.6 CFR, xviii. 83, 414; C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 526, 552n., 580, 669. For want of a better candidate, the MP may therefore have been local to the borough he represented. Several Wards appear on Wiltshire inquisition post mortem juries, including a Thomas Ward, who sat in three juries at Swindon and Warminster between 1476 and 1481.7 C140/55/31; 59/73; 79/9.