DANIELL, Thomas

Few of those who sat in the Commons during the reign of Henry VI enjoyed a career as long, wide-ranging and chequered as that of Thomas Daniell. While he advanced himself in the household service of Henry VI, he was a maverick figure devoted to the ruthless pursuit of his own interests, whether by fair means or foul, rather than a typical royal servant. Self-interest led him to become an opponent of the King’s leading courtier and chief minister William de la Pole, 1st duke of Suffolk, in East Anglia, a startling indication of both his own strong position at Court and his extremely forceful personality. He was to remain true to the Lancastrian cause for some years after 1461, but he was not an out and out diehard and eventually made his peace with Edward IV. As his willingness to embark upon a new career in Ireland demonstrates, he retained his formidable energy even into old age.

From a Cheshire family of no great distinction, Thomas was a younger son of William Daniell, a former retainer of Richard II who appears to have pursued a career primarily within the county palatine and lived until at least the mid 1430s.18 CAD, i. A195; iii. A5630, 5649; CCR, 1429-35, p. 168; CHES31/30, 13 Hen. VI, no. 5. It is not known when Thomas attained his majority or if he was the ‘Thomas Daniell of Middlesex’ who stood surety for John Lyndefeld, archdeacon of Chichester, and others in 1429-30, although he may have spent at least part of his early career in Hertfordshire where a Thomas Daniell was commissioned to collect a tax in 1434.19 CFR, xv. 273, 323-4; CFR xvi. 190. By the later 1430s he had managed to gain entry to the King’s household, for he was one of five henchmen to whom the wardrobe issued robes, other garments and footwear in 1438-9.20 E101/409/2, f. 39, 39d. During the first half of the 1440s, he was frequently a royal messenger, and it was as such that he rode to Henley-upon-Thames in early July 1442 with a message for the King’s secretary, Thomas Bekynton, then about to depart on an important embassy.21 E404/60/188; E403/753, m. 7; Corresp. Bekynton ed. Williams, ii. 177.

It was not long before Daniell began to reap the rewards of entering Henry VI’s personal service. In May 1440, he received an assignment of £100 from the Exchequer, in return for some unspecified service or services he had performed for the King, and he and three other royal servants received a grant of wool, wool fells and tallow in the following autumn, after the discovery of these goods in London and their seizure for the Crown.22 E403/775 m. 3; CPR, 1436-41, p. 493. More significantly, the Crown assigned to Daniell the manor of Frodsham, situated near Daresbury in his home county in the spring of 1441. Through the King’s own carelessness, this grant, which was for life, proved more generous than intended since he had made it on the unconfirmed understanding that the manor was worth no more than £20 p.a., well below its true value. Initially, however, it was far from secure, for the council revoked it on 14 May, following a query from the chamberlain of Chester, John Troutbeck.23 R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 365; L.E. James, ‘William de la Pole, 1st duke of Suffolk’ (Oxf. Univ. B.Litt. thesis, 1979), 23-24; PPC, v. 144-5. In its place, Daniell received fresh letters granting him £20 p.a. from Frodsham, although a month later he prevailed upon the King to supersede these letters with a new grant awarding him an annuity for life of £30 from the same source. In the following September, moreover, he was able to recover possession of the manor itself, having surrendered this latest annuity and undertaken to answer to the Crown for any income beyond £30 p.a. which he derived from it.24 DKR, xxxvii (2), 179. It seems likely that Daniell retained Frodsham for the rest of Henry VI’s reign and lost it at the accession of Edward IV, who farmed it out to Richard Carlisle* in September 1461.25 CHES2/134, m. 4d. It is unlikely that Troutbeck had played a wholly disinterested role in the Frodsham affair, even if he had fulfilled his duty in querying the King’s misplaced act of generosity. Over the previous four decades, he and his father had played a dominant role in the administration of the county palatine, effectively controlling its finances. He himself was a staunch Lancastrian and a member of the Household, but he cannot have viewed with equanimity the rapid rise to favour at Court of another, extremely ambitious Cheshire man.26 T. Thornton, Cheshire and the Tudor State, 161.

Frodsham was just one of a series of offices and grants the King bestowed on Daniell in the mid and later 1440s. The most significant was a grant of the reversion of the office of chamberlain of Chester in February 1445. This was to vest on the death of Troutbeck, but the grant also stipulated that Daniell would become chamberlain should Troutbeck commit any offence in the future or if evidence emerged that he was guilty of any past transgressions.27 CPR, 1441-6, p. 333. (Conceivably, the prominent role that Troutbeck played in opposing the government’s attempt to impose the subsidy of 1450 on the county palatine arose from resentment over the position of chamberlain, an office his father had held before him.)28 Thornton, ‘A Defence of the Liberties of Cheshire, 1451-2’, Hist. Research, lxviii. 340. The fact that Thomas Daniell was among the Cheshire gentry who put their names to the petition of protest which the tax provoked (Clayton, 64) does not necessarily preclude this hypothesis. First, this man could have been a namesake; secondly, if the MP, he could well have felt it politic to lend at least nominal support to this defence of the county’s liberties. To make matters worse for Troutbeck, Daniell was appointed steward and chamberlain of Middlewich for life in March 1446, obtained a lease of the estates in the county that made up the inheritance of a minor, Thomas Gerard, in September 1447,29 DKR, xxxvii (2), 180. and became bailiff of the hundred of Eddisbury, again for life, in June 1448. Exploiting his powers of chamberlain, Troutbeck forestalled the last of these grants by leasing out the bailiwick (by means of letters to which he affixed an earlier date to those issued to Daniell) to (Sir) Thomas Stanley II*, Geoffrey Starky and Robert of More, even though by doing so he was deliberately flouting the King’s wishes. Stanley and his fellow farmers held the bailiwick for three years, until it returned to the Crown by virtue of the Act of Resumption passed in the Parliament of 1450. Daniell received no compensation for his loss until February 1453 when the King, noting that his rival had acted out ‘of grete malice’, ordered the Exchequer to pay him £24, the total rental value of the property during the period Stanley and his associates had held it at farm.30 E404/69/97; E403/791, m. 10. Given the tensions between Daniell and Troutbeck, it is striking that the King made a joint grant to them of the office of remembrancer at the Exchequer, to hold for their lives in survivorship with a fee of £20 p.a., in March 1447.31 E404/65/177; 67/78. The grant was either yet another example of pure ineptitude on the part of Henry VI, or an ill-judged attempt to keep his servants’ rivalry in check by forcing them to work together. Whatever the case, it is unlikely that they were willing partners, for they were again at loggerheads in 1451. In Trinity term that year, a suit that Troutbeck had brought against Daniell, his elder brother John Daniell and several other Cheshire esquires came to pleadings in the court of common pleas. He alleged that they, along with John Salghall, abbot of Chester, and Henry Boolde of Lancashire, had spread a false rumour that he had sheltered a felon at Great Saughall in the county palatine. In the following Michaelmas term, Daniell was obliged to provide security that he would not harm Troutbeck; such was the animosity between him and his opponent.32 CP40/762, rot. 310; 763, rot. 659.

Not all of the grants of land and office that came Daniell’s way during the 1440s related to Cheshire. In February 1446 the King awarded him the farm of two parts of the lordship of Troutbeck and an island on Lake Windermere in Westmorland, a grant soon amplified by further letters patent awarding him additional interests in that county.33 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 399, 440-1, 453. Later that year, Daniell committed the stewardship of that part of these holdings that lay within the lordship of Kendal to Sir Thomas Strickland* and his son Walter Strickland II*.34 Recs. Kendale ed. Farrer and Curwen, i. 149; ii. 72. In the meantime, he and a fellow esquire of the Household, Edmund Mountfort*, jointly acquired the offices of master of the game and steward on the estates that Henry Beauchamp, the late duke of Warwick, had held in Warwickshire and Staffordshire, by grant of 14 June 1446. The grant was for the minority of Beauchamp’s infant daughter and heir, but proved short-lived since she died before her fifth birthday. Daniell and Mountfort were again associated in September 1446, when the Crown awarded them the reversion of the stewardship of the royal manor and park of Cheylesmore near Coventry. The reversion vested before the end of the year, following the death of its former holder, William Stalworth. Daniell also succeeded Stalworth as searcher in the port of London, having obtained a like reversionary grant for life of that office in the previous August. In the meantime, the Crown granted him and his heirs a 99-year farm of lands at Scotforth in Lancashire, which he sublet to Lambert Stodagh soon afterwards.35 E159/226, commissiones Hil.; CFR, xviii. 46-47.

The mid 1440s also witnessed the beginning of Daniell’s parliamentary career, for in 1445 he was returned as a knight of the shire for Cornwall alongside Thomas Bodulgate*, a fellow member of the Household. Bodulgate was a west-country man as well as a royal servant, but Daniell appears to have had no previous links with the south-west, making his election something of a mystery.36 Earlier in the decade, a near namesake, Thomas Danyelles, brought a suit against Thomas Loveney of Devon, for assaulting one of his servants in that county, but it cannot be proved that this was the MP: CP40/720, rot. 260d; 721, rot. 119d. Ironically, the Parliament of 1445 passed the well known statute requiring future knights of the shire to be ‘notable Knyghtes of the same Shires for the which they shall so be chosen; other ellys such notable Squiers, Gentilmen of birth, of the same Shires as be able to be Knyghtes’.37 PROME, xi. 499-501.

Yet statutes regulating elections, especially those held in the shires, were not always observed. It is possible that two constituencies elected Daniell to the following Parliament, that of 1447. As it happened, he sat as a knight of the shire for Buckinghamshire in that assembly, but a ‘Daneell’ features in the return for Great Bedwyn, a tiny Wiltshire borough represented almost exclusively by outsiders after 1441.38 The Commons 1386-1421, i. 67, 701. Just as is the case with Cornwall two years earlier, his election for Buckinghamshire in 1447 is puzzling, although the fact that he was a j.p. of that county by then suggests that he had acquired lands there.39 It is not impossible that he owed his links with Bucks. to a marriage with a woman from that county, for he did not marry Margaret Howard, his only known wife, until the early 1450s. Whatever his links with Buckinghamshire, it is no surprise that he should have sat in 1447. The purpose of the Parliament of that year was to bring down the government’s opponent, Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and he and his fellow MP, Thomas Tresham*, were part of a larger than usual Household contingent in the Commons.

At the calling of the Parliament, Daniell held the office of sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, in which capacity he presided over the elections of the MPs for those counties. Like him, all of these knights of the shire were members of the Household or otherwise associated with the government and Court. At a national level, such returns were in the interest of the King’s chief minister William de la Pole, marquess of Suffolk, but the intrusion of Daniell into East Anglian affairs would prove a serious challenge to de la Pole’s regional authority.40 Where not otherwise indicated, this biography relies on H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster and eadem, Blood and Roses for Daniell’s career in E. Anglia. Daniell’s connexion with the region was a very recent one, and during his shrievalty he was still in the process of creating a power base for himself there. The extremely valuable estate he acquired in west Norfolk in the later 1440s comprised the manors that the late John Wodehouse*, an influential servant of the Lancastrian Crown, had acquired at Roydon, Grimston, Congham and Gayton, and included a grand manor-house that Wodehouse had built at great expense at Roydon.41 William of Worcestre, Itins. ed. Harvey, 252. The victim of Daniell’s ruthless acquisitiveness was John’s hapless son and heir, Henry Wodehouse. How or where the two men met is not known, but in the mid 1440s Henry, a man of far less influence and ability than his father, either sought or was offered the hand of Daniell’s sister Elizabeth. To prove his willingness to proceed with the match, and to provide an appropriate jointure for his prospective bride, the eager and gullible Wodehouse instructed his feoffees to convey his estates to Daniell and the latter’s servant John Dowebigging (who had served as under sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk during Daniell’s term in the shrievalty) to hold in trust. It was only after the completion of a series of conveyances putting Daniell in legal possession of the manors that Wodehouse was astounded to discover that Elizabeth was already married to Richard Torbok, an esquire from Lancashire or Cheshire.42 RP, v. 340-1 (cf. PROME, xii. 445); CP25(1)/170/190/227; CP40/751, rot. 463. Following this extremely unpleasant surprise was another, for Daniell refused to relinquish his title to the properties. To make matters worse, the Crown sanctioned his outrageous behaviour by licensing him to crenellate Roydon, and granting extensive jurisdictional and other rights on his new Norfolk estates to him and his heirs.43 CChR, vi. 80. It is impossible to establish the exact chronology of this affair. From Castor’s otherwise admirably lucid account of it in Blood and Roses, one might assume that the transfer of the Wodehouse estates to Daniell had been completed before the end of 1446. The MP did indeed receive his licence to crenellate in April 1447, but Henry did not formally make over the manors of Wells and Grimston to him until two months later. Even more puzzling is the fact that the fine for this conveyance bears a postea of the octave of Hil. 1450, by which date Wodehouse was all too aware of the fraud committed against him: CP25(1)/170/190/227. Yet these anomalies do not alter the salient fact that the whole episode amounted to a piece of breathtaking fraud on Daniell’s part. Wodehouse’s understandable unwillingness to accept the loss of his inheritance ensured that there followed a bitter quarrel between him and the MP. The dispute had wider ramifications, because in usurping the Wodehouse estates in west Norfolk Daniell came into conflict with Henry’s friends in the de la Pole affinity. Foremost among these men was Wodehouse’s former brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Tuddenham*, whose own manor at Oxborough lay a few miles south of Daniell’s ill-gotten gains. At one time John Wodehouse’s ward, Tuddenham had married Henry’s sister Alice. The match had ended in divorce but Sir Thomas owed much to his late guardian for his early advancement and he had remained on good terms with the Wodehouse family.

By the end of the 1440s, the quarrel between Wodehouse and his allies on the one hand and Daniell on the other was sufficiently acrimonious to threaten violence. As a result, Daniell was summoned before the court of King’s bench and formally confined to the Marshalsea prison, from which he was bailed on 1 Dec. 1449. To secure his release, he and two mainpernors, his fellow Household men Ralph Legh* and John Gargrave*, undertook that he would keep the peace towards his opponent.44 KB29/81, rot. 3d. In the following Hilary term, he reappeared in King’s bench, where he provided a like security, this time assisted by two other sureties, John de Vere, earl of Oxford, and the Essex esquire, John Bendish, who vouchsafed for his further appearance in the same court later that year.45 KB27/755, rex rot. 5. The earl was one of Daniell’s neighbours, for his manor of Winch was close to Roydon. Pentney priory also lay in this part of west Norfolk, and its prior petitioned the Crown in the early 1450s, alleging that servants of Oxford and Daniell had assisted an absconding bondsman belonging to his house, attacked his properties and servants and driven away his livestock to Roydon. He also claimed that he could gain no equitable compensation, because his two powerful neighbours had insisted that he would have to accept whatever settlement they were prepared to offer him.46 SC8/135/6739. The earl of Oxford was not the only lord whose acquaintance Daniell cultivated in the later 1440s, for by 1448 he was a feoffee of John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, and by 1450 a retainer of the courtier John, Lord Beauchamp of Powick.47 CPR, 1446-52, p. 145; M. Hicks, Warwick, 75.

In spite of having formed ties with Oxford and Norfolk, two of the most important magnates in East Anglia, Daniell was scarcely a typical client of either lord since the Wodehouse estates made him a powerful regional figure in his own right. When asked, probably in mid 1447, whom he thought ‘schuld rewle’ in Norfolk, ‘myn master Danyell’ or ‘myn lord of Suffulke’, Edmund Paston replied ‘bothe… and he þat suruyuyth to hold be þe uertue of þe suruyuyr’.48 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 147-8. Edmund’s response is startling to say the least, indicating as it does that Daniell was now competing with de la Pole for influence in East Anglia. In spite of his closeness to the King, he showed considerable nerve in challenging Suffolk’s regional authority, even if that authority was not as extensive as historians have in the past tended to assume. It is particularly ironic that Daniell made such a challenge, given that a Court-based government, like the administration de la Pole then dominated, best served his interests as a Household man. During the late 1440s one of his supporters was Edmund’s elder brother, the lawyer John Paston*, who had made a release of the Wodehouse manors to him in November 1446. It is impossible to tell if Paston, whose role in this transaction was probably that of a Wodehouse feoffee, deliberately connived in Daniell’s fraud. He was certainly in need of the MP’s friendship and patronage, for at the time he was embroiled in disputes with Henry Wodehouse’s stepfather, Edmund Wynter I*, and with Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns. As it happened, Wynter died in early 1448, so removing one opponent from the scene, but Moleyns, who had laid claim to the Paston manor at Gresham, remained a formidable adversary. In April that year, several weeks after the peer had first entered Gresham, the Pastons were concerned to hear a rumour then current in Norfolk that ‘Danyel js owth of þe Kyngys gode grase’. If the MP had incurred any royal displeasure, it was short-lived, for in the following September he obtained a grant, to himself and his heirs, of the reversion of the offices of constable, steward and forester of the royal lordship of Castle Rising. Castle Rising, which lay only a mile from Roydon, was then in the hands of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, who held the offices for life. In the event, Cromwell agreed to relinquish the lordship at an earlier date and Daniell appears to have taken possession of Castle Rising in the spring of 1450.49 Ibid. i. 221-3; ii. 34-35. The alliance with Daniell brought the Pastons few practical benefits. It earned them the enmity of Sir Thomas Tuddenham, previously not one of their opponents, and they soon discovered that the MP was far too concerned with the ruthless pursuit of his own interests to spare any energy in helping them.

In any case, there was much outside East Anglia to occupy Daniell’s energy during the late 1440s and early 1450s. In spite of his newly acquired interests in Norfolk, he attested the election of the knights of the shire for Hertfordshire to the Parliament of February 1449, an assembly in which he himself sat, again as an MP for Buckinghamshire. Outside Parliament, naval affairs occupied a significant amount of his time during 1449. At the end of the first parliamentary session, Gervase Clifton*, Alexander Iden and Robert Wenyngton* were retained to raise a fleet for the Crown,50 Griffiths, 428; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, i. 489. which bestowed on Daniell overall command of the keeping of the seas on 27 July. (John Paston’s wife Margaret subsequently referred to him as ‘amrel’, although there is no evidence that he ever held that title.)51 CPR, 1446-52, p. 270; Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 235. Upon his appointment, the Crown directed the Exchequer to provide him the wherewithal to procure 1,000 longbows, along with arrows and other arms and armaments for the fleet, and it is possible that he led an attack on the Breton coast during that same summer.52 E404/65/212; James, 124, 175; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 60. It would seem that a spectacular act of piracy that Wenyngton had committed off the Isle of Wight had prompted the appointment of Daniell as overall commander, a novel expedient designed to ensure naval discipline and the co-ordination of tactics. On 23 May, Wenyngton and his squadron had intercepted and plundered the Bay fleet, a large convoy of merchantmen comprised of Hanseatic, Flemish and Dutch vessels. A completely unprovoked peacetime attack, this action did nothing to serve the King’s interests since it seriously injured English trade with the powerful Hanseatic league. Just two days afterwards, Wenyngton wrote to Daniell to try to justify his conduct and to ask him to intercede with the King and his councillors on his behalf. Ironically, one of the tasks for which the Crown had retained Wenyngton was to keep the seas against pirates; equally ironically, it is likely that Daniell had encouraged Wenyngton’s piracy, since he owned some of the vessels that had attacked the Bay fleet. Some members of the King’s council and household sympathized with Wenyngton’s actions, but those who suffered most from the breakdown of relations with the Hanse were the English merchants involved in the Baltic trade. It is worth noting that neither these merchants nor the Hanse were in any doubt that Daniell and a fellow Household man, John Trevelyan*, were deeply implicated in the piracy.53 Griffiths, 431; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 103-5; Hanserecesse, 1431-76 ed. von der Ropp, iii. 506, 511. Given that London was the most important centre for the English merchant community, the whole affair can have done nothing for the good name of Daniell and Trevelyan in the City, where their activities may well have extended to committing acts of extortion against some of its citizens.54 In a suit heard before the mayor and aldermen of London in 1471, the mercer John Lambard and grocer John Bassenthwait alleged that another Londoner, Alexander Marshall, had procured Daniell and Trevelyan to extort £400 from them on his behalf. In spite of the date of the suit, much of it, including the alleged extortion, clearly relates to previous decades: Cal. P. and M. London, 1458-82, pp. 57-64.

Accusations of piracy constituted just some of the fierce criticism that came Daniell’s way in 1450. Associated as he was with an unpopular government and Court, and having profited richly from the misguided largesse of the King, he met with as much opprobrium as other prominent Household men. The fact that he was no friend of the discredited duke of Suffolk made no difference, for in the public mind he was one of de la Pole’s creatures.55 Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxviii), 101; Trevelyan Pprs. i (Cam. Soc. lxvii), 67; Excerpta Historica ed. Bentley, 162, 360. Daniell refused to hide away in the face of such criticism, choosing instead to accompany the King to Leicester in late April that year, for the opening of the final session of the Parliament of November 1449. Upon reaching Stony Stratford, the royal train encountered a Yorkshire shipman, John Harries, who declared that Richard, duke of York, would deal with those ‘traitors’ about Henry VI when he returned from serving as the King’s lieutenant in Ireland. Harries was promptly arrested and Daniell was a member of the commission of oyer of terminer set up to investigate his treasonous utterances. The shipman incurred the ultimate penalty for his audacity, subsequently suffering execution at the insistence of the MP and his fellow Household men.56 Griffiths, 685, 706. At Leicester Daniell was one of those whom the Commons blamed for the death of Humphrey, duke of Gloucester, and the disastrous situation in France. Suffolk, the man held to be most culpable, had been impeached in the previous session, but given the light sentence of banishment by the King, contrary to the Lords’ advice.

About a fortnight after arriving at Leicester, Daniell sent word through Thomas Denys, a servant of the earl of Oxford, that he wished John Paston to join him there. In the same letter, Denys told Paston that the Crown had appointed Daniell steward of the northern parts of the duchy of Lancaster, and that he, Denys, was to serve as his under steward. In fact, Denys, who was writing from his master’s manor of Winch rather than Leicester, was misinformed. Daniell never acquired the stewardship, although he may well have made a bid for it. The recently murdered duke of Suffolk had held the office in association with his retainer Sir Thomas Tuddenham, but Tuddenham continued as sole steward for another 11 months after Suffolk’s death.57 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 37-38; Somerville, 520-1. Why Daniell should have summoned Paston to Leicester is unknown, but it is possible that he wished to gauge his feelings about Braydeston, a manor to the east of Norwich belonging to Paston’s relatives by marriage, the Berneys of Reedham. Quite unabashed by the venomous criticism levelled at him and other courtiers at Leicester, Daniell was still looking to further his own interests and may even have regarded a time when the authorities were particularly distracted as good a moment as any in which to break the law. By the spring of 1450, he was casting covetous eyes on the manor, then in the hands of Osbert Mountford, the stepfather of John Berney†, a minor who had yet to come of age. He had no legitimate title to Braydeston whatsoever, although subsequently he was to claim quite brazenly that he held it by virtue of a supposed demise from Robert Mortimer, and that the Berneys held it from him as his tenants-at-will. Daniell’s plans to seize Braydeston were soon common knowledge, prompting Mountford to seek the assistance of his feudal lord, Thomas, Lord Scales, a courtier with estates in west Norfolk. In a letter he wrote to Paston a week before Parliament met at Leicester, the peer stated that he was not convinced that Daniell really did mean to take the manor but declared that he was ready to uphold Mountford’s right.58 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 34-35. Events soon disabused Scales of Daniell’s intentions, for the MP’s men entered the property while the Parliament was still sitting. It took Mountford some three months to recover it, which he did with the assistance of John Heydon*, a lawyer and member of the de la Pole affinity. Bound by his ties of kinship with the Berneys, Paston had supported Mountford, meaning that he had found himself temporarily allied with Heydon, a long-standing opponent of the Pastons, against his own patron. Daniell’s claim to Braydeston brought his relationship with the Pastons to near breaking point and only served to confirm that they could hope for little from him.

No doubt Mountford would have found it considerably more difficult to recover Braydeston had Daniell not been distracted by events elsewhere, for Cade’s rebellion broke out while Parliament was still sitting at Leicester. To the rebels, the MP and other courtiers were ‘traitors’, and at Blackheath mutinous members of the royal army threatened to desert to Cade if he and other hated Household men were not executed.59 Chrons. London ed. Kingsford, 159; Griffiths, 613. During 18-20 June Daniell and other courtiers rode out against the insurgents in Kent,60 Griffiths, 612. and his absence from London ensured that he escaped the fate of the chamberlain of the Household and treasurer of England, James Fiennes*, Lord Saye and Sele, sent to the Tower on the 19th and subsequently executed by the rebels.61 Given that Daniell was then in Kent, the assertion by Hans Winter, a Bruges-based correspondent of the Grand Master of the Teutonic Order, that Daniell was among those arrested with Fiennes on 19 June is incorrect: Hanserecesse, 476. After Cade’s men entered the City, a mob ransacked Daniell’s town house, and a jury indicted him of treason at sessions of oyer and terminer held at the guildhall in early July.62 Griffiths, 624, 626-7. According to some contemporaries, he behaved with considerable ruthlessness while in Kent, looting churches and committing murders, but these claims seem far-fetched.63 Ibid. 651; John Benet’s Chron. (Cam. Miscellany xxiv), 199; Six Town Chrons. ed. Flenley, 131-2. In the end, the offer of a free pardon, rather than the sort of coercive measures he allegedly employed in that county, persuaded the rebels to disperse. Such a soft-handed approach came with a price, however, for the Crown was obliged to set up a commission of oyer and terminer for Kent on 1 Aug., to investigate the oppressions of which Cade’s followers had complained. Over the following weeks the commissioners took indictments against the likes of Daniell, John Sutton, Lord Dudley, Sir Thomas Stanley and others, including Ralph Daniell of London, esquire, no doubt one of the MP’s relatives. Not at all cowed, the presenting juries held Daniell among those responsible for breaking into properties, stealing crops, goods and money and committing an assault, all in west Kent.64 Med. Kentish Soc. (Kent. Rec. Ser. xviii), 224-5, 232, 241-2. According to A. Curry, ‘Introduction to 1450 Parl.’, PROME, xii. 167, Daniell was likewise indicted in Norf. in the aftermath of Cade’s rebellion, but this assertion appears to rest on a misunderstanding of I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade, 144. Although serious, these charges were a far cry from the plundering of churches and murder, and it is likely that he was held responsible for pilfering and other misdeeds committed by his retinue rather than himself personally.65 R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 67.

Popular discontent survived the by no means crushing circumstances in which the rebellion ended, and the authorities remained on the watch for further dissension and the possibility of new uprisings. In the following autumn Daniell failed to reappear in King’s bench in connexion with his undertaking to keep the peace towards Henry Wodehouse, his excuse being that the unsettled state of the countryside and ‘indisposition’ of the people made it too dangerous for him to come to Westminster.66 CPR, 1446-52, p. 413. Two years later a Kentish spurrier who had turned approver in the court of King’s bench claimed that Robert Stokker, a merchant from London, and others had conspired at Cromer in Norfolk to kill Henry VI and his counsellors, Daniell among them. He further alleged that Stokker and his associates had agreed to emulate Cade’s rebellion by congregating with an armed following on Blackheath. Whatever the truth of the matter, the court found his allegations insufficient in law and released those whom he had accused without charge.67 KB27/770, rex rot. 47d.

In the aftermath of the rebellion, the duke of York assumed the role of leader of the opposition to the deeply unpopular Court and government, and he actively canvassed for the return of his supporters to the Commons during the electioneering for the Parliament of 1450-1, not least in East Anglia. The duke of Norfolk was among his allies in that region, but Daniell’s attachment to the discredited Court ensured he was unable to benefit from his patron’s association with York. Heartened by this turn of events and Osbert Mountford’s success in winning back Braydeston, Henry Wodehouse renewed his efforts to recover his lost estates. Daniell had installed Thomas Denys at Roydon, to keep that manor on his behalf, but Denys soon found himself in an increasingly desperate situation. By the beginning of October, Wodehouse and his allies had gathered their forces and were preparing to move against Denys and his garrison. Having discovered that the earl of Oxford was not interested in his plight, Denys frantically sought the support of John Paston. By now, however, William Wayte was advising Paston to tell Denys to withdraw from Roydon, for there was ‘non oþer remedy but deth’ for the likes of Daniell.68 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 45-49.

Later that autumn, Daniell and Troutbeck lost their office of King’s remembrancer to William Essex*,69 CPR, 1446-52, p. 405. and the former came under further attack during the first session of the 1450 Parliament. Just as Cade and his followers had done a few months earlier, the Commons sought the dismissal of Daniell and other courtiers, although in the event the King insisted on making an exception for those accustomed to wait on him.70 PROME, xii. 184-6. Shortly before the end of the same session, John Stafford, archbishop of Canterbury, brought the controversy over the Wodehouse estates to Parliament’s attention. Stafford, one of the feoffees involved in the transactions by which the lands had come into Daniell’s hands, made a declaration before the Lords and Commons about the abortive match between Henry Wodehouse and Elizabeth Daniell. According to the archbishop, Wodehouse had visited him at Lambeth palace before any of the conveyances had taken place. There, in Daniell’s presence, he had granted Henry a licence to marry secretly, in order to spare the couple the ‘outerageous’ expense that their marriage would otherwise entail. While the purpose of Stafford’s declaration is not entirely clear, it appears that he was attempting to exculpate himself from any part in Daniell’s fraud rather than acting at Wodehouse’s behest.71 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 354-5. Whatever the case, Daniell managed to retain Roydon during the crisis years of 1450-1, in spite of all Wodehouse’s efforts to wrest it back from him. Perhaps with the aim of thwarting Wodehouse, he reached a temporary truce with leading followers of the late duke of Suffolk, and their new patron, Thomas, Lord Scales. In December 1450, he and John Heydon stood surety for Scales and his feoffees, among them one of Wodehouse’s closest allies, Sir Thomas Tuddenham.72 CFR, xviii. 183-4.

When Parliament reconvened in the New Year, the main item of business was an Act of Resumption, a further threat to those associated with the Court. Daniell managed to secure an exemption allowing him to keep all his royal grants, save for a lease of the manor of Geddington in Northamptonshire. He had given up this farm some time previously (presumably with some reluctance since it was thought necessary to refer to it in the exemption), for the King had granted Geddington to Lord Rivers several months before the Parliament opened. In practice, the exemption offered Daniell limited protection from the Act, because he had to surrender his lands in Westmorland.73 PROME, xii. 122; B.P. Wolffe, R. Demesne in English Hist. 252, 274; E163/8/14; CIMisc. viii. 221. In spite of this loss, Daniell was already enjoying a change in fortune when Parliament dissolved in late May 1451, for by then the Court was well on the way to recovering from the traumatic setbacks of the previous year. According to two of the chroniclers, while Parliament was still sitting he and his fellow courtiers, John Trevelyan and John Say II*, were tried and acquitted of the charges of treason laid against them in London during Cade’s rebellion.74 John Benet’s Chron. 205; Wars of English, ii. [770]. While acknowledging the lack of evidence for these ‘major state trials’, J. Watts, Hen. VI and the Politics of Kingship, 275, accepts that they did indeed occur. There is no trace of any such proceedings in King’s bench, but it was just one of several courts which could hear treason cases: J.G. Bellamy, Law of Treason, 175-6. If so, this was not quite the end of the matter for Daniell since in the following autumn the authorities issued a commission of oyer and terminer to the duke of Exeter and others, ordering them to proceed against him on the same charges. Probably, it was to nullify the threat of these proceedings, and the indictments taken against him in Kent, that the MP secured a general pardon, dated 10 Nov. 1451. No doubt the commission and pardons were formalities, now that York had lost the political initiative, but the savage criticism the Court had so recently faced must have made it politic for the government to demonstrate a willingness to take action against the King’s men.75 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 498, 532; Watts, 289.

By now, Daniell’s relationship with the duke of Norfolk had come under considerable strain. Mowbray’s alliance with York and his own association with the Court cannot have helped matters, although it is likely that the personality of Norfolk, an inept lord who fell out with many of his most prominent retainers at one time or another, had played its part in the deterioration of their relationship. They were however reconciled, thanks to the efforts of Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, who had assumed the role at Court formerly occupied by William de la Pole. By about the end of 1451, Somerset had persuaded various other lords and Norfolk’s mother to approach her son on Daniell’s behalf, and these representations proved so successful that the MP married the duke’s cousin, Margaret Howard, at Framlingham, the Mowbray castle in east Suffolk soon afterwards.76 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 145. Margaret is incorrectly styled the duke’s ‘niece’ in Castor, King, Crown and Duchy, 172. There is no information about Daniell’s married life, for Margaret is an extremely shadowy figure, but the match was a success in as much as it produced at least four sons who survived infancy.

The reconciliation between Norfolk and Daniell was still pending when Mowbray’s servant Richard Southwell* wrote to John Paston on 18 Dec. 1451. Having referred to Somerset’s intervention, Southwell also informed Paston of rumours that Lord Scales was now offering Daniell his good lordship and promising to bring about an accord between the MP and Tuddenham and Heydon.77 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 76-77. These rumours were probably unfounded, for Daniell was not to reach a lasting accommodation with either Scales or the other two men until the later 1450s. Of more immediate concern for Paston and his Berney relatives was the news that Daniell had every hope of regaining Braydeston, suggesting that Scales, while not supporting Daniell, was no longer willing to stand by Mountford. Just four days after Southwell wrote his letter, Daniell and some of his servants re-entered Braydeston, although they cannot have remained in possession for more than a few weeks. Mountford subsequently went to law against Daniell and his men for this trespass and won damages of nearly £70. In the end, his was probably a hollow victory, since it is unlikely that this money was ever paid.78 KB27/769, rot. 103.

While planning and implementing his second entry into Braydeston, Daniell also made a highly speculative but characteristically audacious bid to succeed to the estates of the elderly and childless Sir John Fastolf, a considerable landowner in East Anglia. With outrage and dismay, Fastolf discovered that Daniell was claiming to possess documents proving that he was the knight’s heir. In January 1452, Sir John presented a bill to the chancellor, requesting that Daniell should appear in the Chancery to explain himself. No further evidence relating to this affair survives, and it is likely that Fastolf’s reaction was sufficient to put paid to Daniell’s fraudulent claims.79 C1/19/115; C253/33/18. In any case, by now the matter of Braydeston was again fully engaging the MP’s attention. On 8 Feb. of the same year, while Osbert Mountford and his stepson were serving the King at Calais, he sent his servants, headed by Charles Nowell, to seize the manor for a third time. News of this entry soon reached the duke of York in London and Mountford in Calais. According to the bishop of Ely, Daniell was claiming that York and other powerful lords stood enfeoffed to his use in the property, but York, who had absolutely no reason to favour Daniell, was prompt to deny any involvement in the matter. Presumably, the MP was putting about this blatant falsehood for tactical reasons, to forestall any local resistance while his men established himself on the manor. Upon hearing the unwelcome news from home, Mountford sent letters to John Paston and divers other friends. He informed Paston that he was also writing to the King and ‘to other my gode lordes’ for redress, adding that he would take action in the law courts with Paston’s advice should he receive no help from the King and the lords in question.80 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 77-79.

To discourage anyone feeling disposed to support Mountford, Daniell had appointed the thuggish Nowell as his bailiff at Braydeston. Not content simply to keep the manor for the MP, Nowell sought actively to intimidate Osbert’s family and friends. On 3 Apr. 1452, he and others assaulted John Paston outside Norwich cathedral, and later that day they ambushed Philip Berney (Mountford’s brother-in-law and uncle of Margaret Paston) near his house at Reedham. The seizure of Braydeston also had wider consequences, for Nowell and his gang established the manor as a base from which to pursue their own quarrels, and to break the law at the behest of Daniell and the duke of Norfolk. Both Daniell and Mowbray were seeking to increase their influence in East Anglia by destroying the still resilient de la Pole affinity in the region, and they conducted a campaign of harassment against the estates and servants of the widowed duchess of Suffolk during 1452. In August that year Daniell’s servant John Dowebigging and an armed gang surrounded the home of the de la Pole retainer John Ulveston* at Henham in Suffolk. According to a subsequent indictment, they intended to kill him, although Ulveston was not there and escaped any harm. Daniell himself took part in a raid on the duchess’s estates later in the same month, when he and several Mowbray retainers, including his brother-in-law John Howard, entered her manor at Henham, and that of Bulchamp in the same county. Some of the indictments of Daniell for such activities described him as ‘late of Framlingham’, a further indication of just how closely he and Mowbray were co-operating with each other in this period. The commission of oyer and terminer for East Anglia that took these indictments was appointed in early 1453, when Mowbray was obliged to enter a bond to guarantee that he would keep the peace towards the duchess of Suffolk. Daniell was one of his mainpernors for this bond, which bore the huge penalty of £10,000.81 KB9/118/1/8, 22, 28-29, 36; 118/2/16-17, 24, 167. There was no shortage of complaints for the commissioners to deal with, for the region’s gentry had temporarily put aside their rivalries to unite in protest against the disorder that Mowbray (nominally a member of the commission),82 CPR, 1452-61, p. 60. Daniell and their men had caused. By now, the duke of Norfolk was losing even the allegiance of his traditional gentry supporters, and his inner circle comprised a ‘new cownseyll’ in which Daniell was a dominant figure. The commission of oyer and terminer had the effect of bringing the campaign of lawlessness instigated by Daniell and Mowbray to an end, although Mountford was unable to recover Braydeston until the following November.

Just as the commissioners began their work, the duke of Norfolk made a determined effort to exert his authority in East Anglia by controlling the return of the knights of the shire for Suffolk to the Parliament of 1453. According to the sheriff, Thomas Sharneburne*, prior to the election Sir William Ashton, John Howard and many other servants of the duke had threatened his under sheriff, Thomas Grys, and abducted William Peyntour, the sheriff’s clerk. He further alleged that on election day itself (12 Feb.) several of Mowbray’s leading retainers had brought a force of 600 armed men to the county court at Ipswich, where they had elected Daniell, who held no lands in Suffolk, and John Wingfield†, who did not reside there. In spite of Sharneburne’s own partisan interests as a member of the de la Pole affinity, the election was clearly irregular since it had taken place when neither he nor Grys was present. It was therefore declared invalid and (Sir) Philip Wentworth*, a de Pole retainer, and Gilbert Debenham I*, were returned at a new election held at the following county court.83 R. Virgoe, E. Anglian Soc. ed. Barron, Rawcliffe and Rosenthal, 54-57; KB27/775, rex rot. 20d; PPC, vi. 183. Daniell’s involvement in the controversy saw him at odds with fellow courtiers, for both Sharneburne and Wentworth were members of the Household as well as of the de la Pole affinity.

The Parliament of 1453 contained a larger than usual Household element in the Commons. The election of so many of the King’s servants marked the completion of the Court’s recovery of the initiative from its opponents; only for Henry VI’s descent into mental illness in the following summer to result in yet another change of political fortunes. In mid November, the duke of York regained admission to the council and a few days later the duke of Somerset was committed to the Tower. At the forefront of Somerset’s critics was York’s ally, the duke of Norfolk, who drew up articles accusing Somerset of treason.84 Curry, ‘Introduction to 1453 Parl.’, PROME, xii. 220. Such developments stretched the alliance between Daniell, who as a Household man identified strongly with Somerset, and Norfolk to breaking point, and he and Mowbray were never again to join forces as closely as they had done in the previous year. In mid January 1454, it was reported that Thomas Tresham, William Joseph, Daniell and John Trevelyan (all ‘Somerset men’) were preparing a bill seeking to have a garrison established at Windsor to guard the King and the infant prince of Wales, to present to the Lords when the Parliament reconvened for its last session.85 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 296. Events overtook any such plan, for just over two months later the Lords chose York to act as Protector of England during Henry VI’s incapacity. By now, Westminster was becoming an uncomfortable place for anyone associated with Somerset. It was perhaps for his own safety that in late April 1454, just as the Parliament was ending, Daniell departed for the north, to serve on the east march towards Scotland with Henry Percy, Lord Poynings, a loyal supporter of Henry VI and a bitter enemy of York’s Neville allies.86 Presumably, the Thomas Daniell who sued the goldsmith, George Willerby of York, in the common pleas later that year, for assault and wounding at London, was the namesake from York who was a chamberlain of that city in 1449-50 and one of its sheriffs in 1451-2. The suit appears not to have reached pleadings and reveals nothing about the plaintiff beyond his name, making it impossible to identify him with absolute certainty: CP40/775, rots. 224d, 568; 776, rot. 64d; 779, rot. 605d; 782, rot. 190d; York City Chamberlains’ Acct. Rolls, 1396-1500 (Surtees Soc. cxcii), 89; York Memoranda Bk. iii (Surtees Soc. clxxxvi), 200. He was with Percy for no more than a month, although during his absence he incurred an outlawry at the suit of the earl of Oxford, who had begun proceedings against him in the common pleas over a debt of £100 in Easter term 1453. Relations between him and the earl had probably soured some time before Oxford went to law: Daniell’s failure nearly four years previously to reappear in King’s bench in connexion with his quarrel with Henry Wodehouse meant that the earl had forfeited the 100 marks he had pledged on the MP’s behalf. Even though the Crown had subsequently pardoned both Oxford and his fellow surety, John Bendish, their forfeits, the earl is unlikely to have viewed the whole episode with equanimity. By means of a writ of error, Daniell eventually had his outlawry overturned in King’s bench in the autumn of 1457, on the basis that his absence on the King’s service in the north rendered it invalid.87 KB27/782, rot. 114; CPR. 1446-52, p. 413. It is unclear how the debt of £100 arose since the common pleas case never reached pleadings, but it is possible that Daniell had proferred this sum to Oxford as a security for acting as his mainpernor.

The outlawry was hardly Daniell’s most pressing priority in the latter half of 1454. Of far greater concern was the loss of the sumptuous manor-house at Roydon, which Lord Scales, acting at the behest of Henry Wodehouse, razed to the ground in September that year. Wodehouse had sanctioned such drastic action having decided that he could no longer bear to see the house in his hated enemy’s hands.88 Worcestre, 252. Daniell could expect no sympathy from the authorities for the destruction of Roydon because York was still Protector and would remain so until the end of the year. He cannot have felt much more secure after York stood down as Protector. In early 1455, several of his confederates in the disputed Suffolk election of 1453 were obliged to surrender themselves to the Marshalsea, although subsequently they regained their liberty sine die on a legal technicality.89 KB27/775, rex rot. 20d. His whereabouts in the spring of 1455 are unknown, but it is possible that he accompanied the King to the first battle of St. Albans. The Parliament summoned in the wake of this Yorkist victory brought further trouble for Daniell, since Henry Wodehouse took the opportunity to petition the Commons for the restoration of Roydon and his other lost estates. In his petition, Henry complained about the fraud he had suffered at the hands of the MP, who had encouraged him to ‘woo’ his sister, even after her marriage to Richard Torbok. The King granted the petition, finding that Wodehouse had conveyed away his estates while he was ‘accombred and blynded with unsad trust and promysse of Mariage’ and completely lacking in discretion. The only compensation for Daniell was that he was not required to make any financial amends to Henry (by now surely regretting that he had allowed Scales to destroy Roydon) for the revenues he had taken from the Wodehouse lands while they were in his hands.90 SC8/28/1391; RP, v. 340-1. HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 253-5, assumes that Daniell himself sat in this Parl., but it seems very unlikely that such a notorious courtier would have done so, not least because the duke of York was the lord of Cricklade, the small Wilts. borough he is supposed to have represented: The Commons 1386-1421, i. 693. According to OR, 351, ‘[...] Danyell’ was one of the men returned for Cricklade in 1455. No doubt this is true (even though now the surname is also no longer visible on the indenture), but it does not in any way prove that the man in question was the subject of this biography rather than an unimportant namesake.

The battle of St. Albans proved a watershed for Daniell in particular as well as the country in general, since during the remaining years of Henry VI’s reign his East Anglian interests coincided with those of his erstwhile opponents in the region. No longer closely associated with the duke of Norfolk, he now had far more in common with the likes of Tuddenham, Heydon and other de la Pole men aligned with the Court, as well as with Lord Scales. Daniell and Scales were reconciled within two years of the destruction of Roydon, for the peer wrote a letter on his behalf to John Paston in August 1456,91 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 158. Neither the context nor the purpose of this letter is known. and by the end of the decade some believed that Tuddenham and Heydon had become the MP’s ‘counsellors’.92 Ibid. 205-6. The pair were certainly co-operating with Daniell by the end of 1456, for they, Lord Scales and others accompanied him when he seized the manor of Stanhoe in north-west Norfolk from a namesake, Thomas Daniell of Walsoken, on 23 Dec. that year.93 It was probably this Thomas, rather than the MP, who had served the late Sir Andrew Ogard* as his dep. in the office of constable of the bp. of Ely’s castle of Wisbech: C1/24/45. As with the Wodehouse estates and Braydeston, Daniell had no right to the property, which the Walsoken man (not related) had inherited. Thomas of Walsoken responded with a series of legal actions against the MP and his associates in King’s bench. The criminal law supported his reaction in the following April, when Daniell, along with his relative Henry Daniell and his servant Thomas Bury, all ‘late of Castle Rising’, were indicted for their part in the forcible entry. In due course Thomas of Walsoken recovered Stanhoe, for a Norfolk jury rejected his powerful namesake’s claim to ownership (based on a supposed demise to him by one Thomas Walle) in the summer of 1458. His victory was nevertheless far from total, since he subsequently agreed (whether through his own volition or otherwise) to remit the £60 in damages and expenses which the court had ordered the MP to pay him.94 KB27/783, rot. 56; 786, rots. 40, 40d, 53, 70; KB9/285/65. Henry Daniell cannot have been the MP’s son of that name by Margaret Howard, since the son in question would have been a young child at this date.

While the controversy over Stanhoe was still ongoing, Daniell helped to maintain a false indictment that the de la Pole retainer John Andrew III* had secured against Sir John Fastolf’s servant Thomas Howes,95 Add. 27444, f. 57. and became embroiled in a dispute with Sir John Colville. His attempt to seize Stanhoe was just one part of a campaign to rebuild an estate for himself in Norfolk after losing the Wodehouse lands, for his quarrel with Colville concerned his purchase of a manor at Hoe in the west of the county from the knight. In a bill he brought in the Chancery, he alleged that he had paid in full the asking price for the property but that Colville and his feoffees had refused to make it over to him.96 C1/26/143. Another part of the same campaign was his apparently fraudulent acquisition of the manor of Burton Pedwardine in Lincolnshire. The manor had belonged to Roger Pedwardine, an esquire from that county, but Daniell, one of his feoffees for the property, took possession after his death in August 1457. In the following month Roger’s widow Beatrice began legal proceedings against the MP in the common pleas, although her suit did not to come to pleadings until Easter term 1459. She claimed that her late husband had provided for her to hold Burton Pedwardine for life, but that Daniell had conveyed it away to ‘divers persons’ unknown to her. A trial was still pending when Edward IV assumed the throne. By that date, however, Daniell was on the run as a Lancastrian rebel, and Beatrice was able to re-enter the manor.97 CP40/792, rot. 133; 793, rot. 434; CIMisc. viii. 362.

At around about the time he seized Burton Pedwardine, Daniell agreed to return to the north of England with Henry Percy, by now earl of Northumberland. In spite of this undertaking, he remained in London and the letters of protection issued to him as a member of the earl’s company were withdrawn in late November 1457.98 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 396-7.

For much of the following two years, Daniell’s whereabouts are unknown, although he was certainly at Westminster just under a year later and present at the notorious Parliament that met at Coventry in late 1459. In early November 1458 York’s ally, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, was caught up in a disturbance at Westminster Hall, perhaps while leaving a meeting of the Council. Apparently emanating from an altercation between one of his retinue and a royal servant, it led to an exchange of blows between members of his party and a mixed band of Household men and other supporters of the Court. Matters got so out of hand that Warwick was compelled to make a hurried escape by his barge on the Thames. Afterwards naming Daniell, as well as Sir Thomas Tuddenham, then treasurer of the Household, and others as his assailants, Neville viewed the fracas as an attempt on his life.99 Hicks, 152-3; CP40/799, rot. 490. It is more than likely that Daniell was a Member of the Parliament of 1459, which attainted York, Warwick and the other leading Yorkist lords and their supporters. Even if he had not found a seat, he played an important role in the work of the Parliament, as a member of the committee that drafted the bill of attainder, an appointment suggesting that he possessed a good knowledge of the law, despite all too often flouting it.100 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 210. Considerable legal knowledge is also suggested by his role as an arbitrator in a dispute over lands in Kent just a few months previously (CCR, 1454-61, pp. 389-90), and his service late in life as a j.p. of the quorum in Norf. He had also, in 1447, arbitrated between Hen. VI’s foundation of King’s Coll., Cambridge, and the last prior of Wootton Wawen, Warws., an alien religious house granted away to the college by the King: CAD, ii. C2746; VCH Warws. ii. 135. Daniell’s membership of the cttee. is the basis for the suggestion that he was an MP in 1459. Given the circumstances in which the Parl. was called, and the fact that it was packed with Household men and other hard-line supporters of the Lancastrian dynasty, it is not at all unlikely that he sat. The committee, otherwise composed entirely of eminent professional lawyers, was probably responsible for the detailed provisions of the bill and the extremely partisan tone of its preamble, and its members appear to have expected rewards for their work. Less than a year after the Parliament met, one of their number, Dr. John Aleyn, was said to have regretted that the Yorkists had subsequently regained the political initiative; on the grounds that had they not he and his fellow committee members would have been ‘made for evir’.101 Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 221; Griffiths, 824. In spite of his role in drawing up the bill, Daniell seems not to have given up hope of furthering his own interests in Norfolk after the Yorkists had regained control of the government in mid 1460 and he had become persona non grata. In October that year, John Paston’s correspondent, Friar Brackley, advised him to apply to the chancellor for a commission of arrest against Daniell, Tuddenham, Heydon and their adherents, but the MP remained at liberty. In the following month, Margaret Paston heard that he was making his way to Castle Rising and that his servants were openly boasting that he would soon retake Braydeston.102 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 262; ii. 212-14. Osbert Mountford could no longer defend the right of his stepson, for the Yorkists had executed him the previous June after capturing him at Sandwich where he had been raising troops for the Lancastrian garrison at Guînes.103 Hicks, 177. Evidently, Daniell cared little that Mountford had died for the cause with which he himself associated. Even if there is no evidence that the MP did attempt to re-enter the manor on this occasion, he did not relinquish his claim to it until nearly two decades later.

Soon much more momentous events overtook any plans Daniell may have had for regaining Braydeston. In early 1461 the queen, who had remained at large after the Yorkists had seized control of the government and the person of the King, left her Scottish refuge and marched south at the head of an army. It appears that Daniell attempted to rally support for her in west Norfolk. On 7 Feb., the authorities ordered the escheator in the county to seize Castle Rising, but it remained a centre for resistance against the Yorkists until the earl of March took the throne as Edward IV.104 CPR, 1452-61, p. 658; Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 519-20. Whether Daniell directed operations at Castle Rising in person is unknown, although he was certainly a member of the Lancastrian army defeated at Towton. He escaped the field, but the authorities in Kent received orders to proceed with the indictments taken in that county against him and other courtiers in the wake of Cade’s rebellion, and he was among those whom Edward IV’s first Parliament attainted.105 PROME, xiii. 42-44, 49-51; KB29/92, rot. 2. Following his attainder, the Crown granted away the manor of ‘Hereford’ (perhaps the property he disputed with Sir John Colville) to his Yorkist brother-in-law, Sir John Howard, in tail-male, in February 1462.106 CPR, 1461-7, p. 111. The manor of ‘Hereford’ in Gressenhall extended into Hoe: F. Blomefield, Norf. ix. 515; x. 50. In the following month, the Lincolnshire lawyer William Hussey* obtained a like grant of Burton Pedwardine, even though it was then in the hands of Beatrice Pedwardine rather than those of Daniell. In the event, Hussey was unable to make good his grant, and the Crown assigned it to John Harley, again in tail-male, in November 1465.107 CPR, 1461-7, pp. 182, 479; CIMisc. viii. 362. Presumably, Beatrice’s claims to the property had been rejected by the time the grant to Harley was made, although it is also possible that she was no longer alive at this date.

After Towton, Daniell took refuge in his native Cheshire and in north Wales. At the end of 1462, the authorities in the county palatine issued a commission for the arrest of him, his old associate John Dowebigging and other rebels, but he and Dowebigging subsequently found sanctuary in Harlech castle, a fortress still in Lancastrian hands.108 DKR, xxxvii (2), 645; PROME, xiii. 122-8. Early 1464 saw risings in north and south Wales, Lancashire and Cheshire.109 C.D. Ross, Edw. IV, 58. In a letter of 1 Mar. that year Sir John Paston†, then campaigning with the duke of Norfolk against the rebels in North Wales, sent his father news of the rebellions and informed him that Daniell (presumably involved in the recent unrest) was back in Cheshire, although ‘I wot not in what plase’. He also wrote that the MP had sent three or four letters to Sir John Howard, another member of Norfolk’s retinue.110 Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 525-6. If so, it would appear that Daniell, whose sons he had placed in Howard’s household,111 Howard Household Bks. pp. xv, xvii. was now seeking to make his peace with the Yorkists through the medium of his brother-in-law. Whatever the case, in the spring of 1465 the government appointed commissioners to inquire into the estates he and other attainted Lancastrians had held in East Anglia and Essex, and he had another decade to wait for the reversal of his attainder.112 CPR, 1461-7, p. 452.

In the event, Daniell’s rehabilitation began before the attainder was finally set aside, for he regained a place on the Norfolk bench, as a member of the quorum, in February 1470. By now, he appears finally to have shaken off his Lancastrian antecedents, since later in the same year the Readeption government removed him from the bench once again.113 HP Biogs. 255, assumes that he afterwards joined Edw. IV’s household, identifying him with the Thomas Daniell who was granted a daily fee of 6d. for life as a yeoman of the Crown in March 1475: CPR, 1467-77, p. 570. But it is unlikely that the MP, however anxious he might have been to prove his loyalty, would have taken on such a lowly office at this stage in his career. The yeoman was probably Thomas Daniell, a royal servant who owned or leased a residence at South Mimms, Mdx. in the late 1470s: VCH Mdx. v. 272. The pardon he obtained after Edward IV had recovered the throne in 1471 was probably a sensible precautionary measure on his part rather than politically significant.114 CPR, 1467-77, p. 332. HP Biogs. 255, is almost certainly wrong in identifying a ‘Thomas Danell’ whose arrest was ordered in July 1471 as the MP: CPR, 1467-77, p. 287. It is unlikely that he had reverted to his former loyalties, not least because the Parliament of 1472 annulled his attainder, having received a petition from him in which he described himself ‘as repentant and soroufull as any Creature may be’ for his past opposition to Edward IV.115 PROME, xiv. 217-19. A Thomas Daniell attested the elections of the knights of the shire for Norf. and Herts. to this Parl., but it is possible that the Norf. attestor was either his eldest son or Thomas of Walsoken, who lived until the spring of 1474: PCC 19 Wattys (PROB11/6 f. 143); CFR, xxi. no. 225. While there is no evidence that his powerful Yorkist brother-in-law (now Lord Howard) forwarded the petition, he owed much to the King’s attorney-general, William Hussey, for its success. As an agreement he and the attorney-general reached at some stage before the beginning of the penultimate session demonstrates, Hussey’s motivation for acting in the matter was his continuing desire to gain possession of Burton Pedwardine, which lay conveniently close to his manor of Sleaford. Hussey undertook to use his influence to have the attainder annulled, and to secure a royal grant to Daniell of the Irish manors of Rathwire and Ardmulchan in county Meath, along with the fee farm of the manors of Leixlip and Chapelizod in county Dublin. In return, Daniell agreed that he would allow Hussey to farm Burton Pedwardine for a rent of ten marks p.a. Performing his side of the bargain obliged Hussey to intercede with the Speaker, William Allington†, to ensure that he would not oppose the petition, an illustration of the control that Speakers could exercise over the promotion of private bills. The approach to Allington proved necessary because he was no friend of Daniell, who had once somehow caused his father, William Allington II*, to be imprisoned in London. In the weeks following the reversal of his attainder, Daniell conveyed Burton Pedwardine to Hussey’s feoffees, and received a grant, to him and his male heirs, of the Irish estates. The two men reached a further agreement on 12 Mar. 1475, just before the Parliament ended. In return for a payment of 12 marks from Hussey and a further royal grant, again to him and his male heirs, of two other Irish manors, Belgard and Castlerickard (also in county Meath), Daniell made a release of Burton Pedwardine to the attorney-general in fee simple.116 J.S. Roskell, Speakers, 94-95; idem, ‘Wm. Allington of Bottisham’, Cambridge Antiq. Soc. Procs. lii. 51-52; CCR, 1468-76, nos. 1286, 1288, 1437, 1474; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 458, 512; Analecta Hibernica, x. 22; New Hist. Ire. ed. Cosgrove, 610.

Just a few weeks later, Daniell was preparing to go to Ireland, for on 18 Apr. 1475 he indented to serve the Crown there in a military capacity for a year, perhaps a quid pro quo for his grant of lands in the lordship. In spite of his age, he was evidently still a man of considerable vigour, given his willingness to agree to active service in the lawless conditions across the Irish Sea. By means of an indenture drawn up between him and the Crown, Daniell contracted to take a force of 100 archers to Ireland, where he was to serve under the King’s lieutenant (in practice, William Shirwood, bishop of Meath, the deputy of the absentee George, duke of Clarence). He agreed that he and his men would muster at Chester by the following 11 May and further contracted to hold further musters of his troops, whenever the Crown required, after his expedition had arrived in the lordship. In addition, he undertook to ensure that his men did not rob or otherwise mistreat the Crown’s Irish lieges. For his part, the King agreed to give Daniell £100, to cover the costs of shipping himself and his men, to pay the archers’ wages of 4d. each per day and to excuse him from his duties should these wages fall into arrears by as much as eight months.117 Analecta Hibernica, x. 47-48.

Five days after the making of the indenture, the Crown commissioned Sir William Stanley and others to take the musters in Cheshire of Daniell and his men, and of a further 120 archers who were to serve in the MP’s company at the expense of the inhabitants of Ireland. At the same time the King instructed Stanley, Daniell and others to arrest those soldiers who had reneged on an undertaking to accompany the Irish chancellor, (Sir) Gilbert Debenham II*, to the lordship on an earlier expedition. Upon apprehending these men, they were to hold them in custody until they repaid those wages they had already taken from the Crown or found security that they would join Daniell’s company.118 CPR, 1467-77, pp. 520, 524, 526, 572. Daniell must have served on the southern reaches of the English Pale once he had arrived in Ireland, for he took up office as constable of the royal castle at Wicklow. A threat to this appointment and his title to his Irish lands arose when the Irish parliament of 1475-6 drew up an Act of Resumption, prompting him to petition that assembly for a confirmation of his grants. The Parliament duly obliged, in recognition of his ‘true and faithful conduct’ towards the King in England and his efforts to defend the Crown’s Irish subjects. He also secured new English letters patent of 18 June 1476, confirming him in the office of constable, granting to him afresh his Irish lordships (again to him and his male heirs, although this time with the addition of Fore, another manor in Co. Meath) and rewarding him an annuity of £50 from the customs and subsidies of Dublin.119 Statute Rolls Ire. 283-4; CPR, 1467-77, p. 598. It is scarcely surprising that he was anxious to safeguard his Irish estates. Their total value is unknown, but the fee farm of Leixlip and Chapelizod alone amounted to no less than £200 p.a. and Rathwire and Clanrickard together were probably worth over another £25 annually. By now he was Sir Thomas Daniell, ‘lord and baron of Rathwire’, but neither the exact date nor circumstances of his knighthood are known, and it is possible that he never resided at Rathwire since he farmed that manor out to Sir Alexander Plunket, one of the greater gentry of the Pale. Plunket, whose farm was for life, was still in possession in 1485.120 Statute Rolls Ire. 739-40; Analecta Hibernica, x. 22; New Hist. Ire. 610.

Affairs in England remained a concern for Daniell after he crossed to Ireland. He was still a Mowbray feoffee, in spite of the cooling of relations between him and the then duke of Norfolk two decades earlier, and it was such that he featured in settlements made on behalf of Elizabeth, dowager duchess of Norfolk, the recently widowed daughter-in-law of his former patron, in 1476-7.121 CPR, 1461-7, p. 293; E210/9415; Add. Ch. 26598. He was also a party to a couple of conveyances of property in London, again in the mid 1470s, as a feoffee of Edward Ellesmere, a former household servant of Margaret of Anjou who had likewise made his peace with the Yorkist Crown. The relationship with Ellesmere was as long standing as that with the Mowbrays, for Edward had appointed Daniell one of his trustees some three decades earlier.122 CCR, 1447-54, pp. 35-36; 1468-7, no. 1489; 1476-85, no. 261; Griffiths, 258; SC8/30/1454; CAD, ii. B2088, 2244; iv. A10355. Daniell relied on his son Edmund to help him manage his English interests while he was in Ireland, and Edmund was associated with his father at the resolution, through arbitration, of the long-running controversy over Braydeston at the beginning of 1478. In return for 100 marks, the Daniells agreed to leave the young John Berney (son and heir of Osbert Mountford’s stepson) and John’s guardian Richard Southwell in ‘quiet possession’ of the property.123 CCR, 1476-85, no. 274; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 137, 165. If Daniell was in England when the agreement was made, he was soon preparing to return to Ireland since in the following July he formally appointed Edmund to act as his attorney in all his English lawsuits and property transactions. In all likelihood, he died in the lordship, perhaps in 1480. He was certainly dead by May 1482, when the Crown granted his Irish estates to Thomas Fitzjames.124 CCR, 1476-85, no. 381; HP Biogs. 225. Howard Household Bks. p. v states that he died in 1480, although on what authority is unknown. The grant to Fitzjames is perplexing, given that Daniell held his Irish estates in tail-male and left several surviving sons. His heir was his eldest son Thomas, although two younger sons, George and the already mentioned Edmund, also survived him. Edmund was buried alongside members of his mother’s family in the parish church of Stoke Nayland, Suffolk, following his death in late 1498. His brief will, made just over a year earlier, does not refer to the MP.125 PCC 29 Horne (PROB11/11, f. 230v). The younger Thomas Daniell was still alive in the autumn of 1483, when he helped Howard to put down the duke of Buckingham’s rebellion. George was a member of the retinue that Howard, by then duke of Norfolk, raised for Ric. III early in the following year (as was Edmund): Howard Household Bks. pp. xxi, 488, 489.