CURWEN, Thomas

The Curwens were among the most ancient and greatest gentry families of the north-west, and one with a remarkable tradition of parliamentary service. The three heads of the family before Thomas were returned on at least 15 occasions for the counties of Cumberland and Westmorland and the borough of Appleby. Tradition and the family wealth no doubt explain why the young Thomas, when he can barely have reached his majority, was elected to represent Cumberland in the Parliament of 1435 at hustings attended by his father and uncle, John Curwen.1 C219/14/5. No more is known of him until 14 Sept. 1439 when he served on a jury at Keswick at the inquisition held on the death of another Percy man, Sir William Leigh*; and, if the record is to be taken literally he was one of several of Leigh’s friends who, on the following 15 Feb., arrived at Surlingham in Norfolk to witness the assignment of dower in the Leigh manor there to Sir William’s widow, Isabel, a sister of his own wife.2 CIPM, xxv. 250, 448. Later in the same year he was named as escheator, and it was probably at about this date that he entered the royal household. His father had a close connexion with the Lancastrian house, having served with distinction in the French wars, a military tradition continued by Thomas’s younger brother, William. By 1441 Thomas was in receipt of robes as an esquire of the Household, and a few years later William joined him in this privilege.3 E101/409/9, 16. For William’s military career: J.H. Curwen, Hist. House Curwen, 80-87.

It was thus as a Household esquire that he was elected to his second Parliament, in what appear to have been contentious circumstances. The indenture, dated at Carlisle on 13 Jan. 1442, names as many as 73 attestors, sufficient to imply a contest. Further, it is unusual in that they are headed by a peer, Thomas, Lord Dacre; that the first two named, Dacre and Sir Christopher Curwen, are the fathers of the two MPs; and that they include one of those returned, namely our MP. Clearly both the Dacres and the Curwens were anxious to be represented, but the seat of their anxiety can only be a matter for speculation. The return is, perhaps, to be seen in the context of Lord Dacre’s dispute with Marmaduke Lumley, bishop of Carlisle, over the wardenship of the west march; if so, our MP is probably to be numbered among Dacre’s supporters. Since the Neville earl of Salisbury, who himself reassumed the wardenship in 1443, was sympathetic to the bishop, such a stance is consistent with the principal loyalty of the Curwens, namely to the Percys, historic rivals of the Nevilles.4 C219/15/2 (misfiled between the Oxon./Berks. and Rutland returns); H. Summerson, Med. Carlisle, ii. 410-11. However this may be, our MP seems to have put his time at Westminster to personal use, perhaps lobbying there for the grant made to him on 2 May 1442, a little over a month after the end of the Parliament, of the keeping of the royal fishery (‘le frithnet’) in waters of the river Eden below Carlisle castle. This was not a particularly valuable grant, but it was a significant one: the fishery had once been in the hands of the earl of Salisbury during his first term as warden and was to be re-granted to him in 1452. In November 1443 Curwen added to what must have been a modest income by leasing, for the term of four years, the Percy lands at Birkby in Allerdale, a few miles north of Workington, at an annual rent of £6.5 CFR, xvii. 213; xviii. 268-9; Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xiv. 410-13.

By this date Curwen was already the father of at least one son, Christopher, who, if we may draw an inference from a bond of 1444, was already of an age to be contracted in marriage. By that bond our MP, together with his father, promised another Percy retainer, Sir John Pennington*, on the large penalty of 1,000 marks, that the bulk of the family property would ultimately descend to this son. This undertaking was almost certainly part of a marriage contract, with Christopher contracted to a kinswoman, probably a grand-daughter, of Sir John. Such bonds between its members strengthened further the powerful Percy affinity in Cumberland, and it is not surprising to find that Curwen was present at Carlisle on 24 Jan. 1447 to attest the election to Parliament of two of his fellow Percy retainers, John Pennington*, the probable father of his son’s wife, and William Martindale*. At the end of the same year he made a further gain from his lord’s patronage. On 23 Dec. the earl granted him in fee his lands at Derwentfells and his fishing rights in Bassenthwaite Lake; the value of this property is unknown but it was no doubt more than the meagre annual rent of 3s. fixed in the grant.6 HMC 10th Rep. IV, 227; C219/15/4; Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xiv. 417-18.

Soon afterwards Curwen was probably involved in the sort of active service such grants were designed to secure. In the autumn of 1448 the Scots raided as far as Carlisle, burning the suburbs of the city, and it is likely that our MP accompanied the earl of Northumberland’s son, Henry Percy, Lord Poynings, in the retaliatory raid which ended ignominiously in Poynings’s capture in a battle on the river Sark. The disturbed conditions on the border prompted the Crown to exempt the northern nobility from attendance at the Parliament summoned to meet at Westminster on 12 Feb. 1449, and, although Curwen was returned in company with his wife’s brother, Hugh Lowther*, it must be doubted whether he saw the three sessions through. Indeed, in April, during the first recess, the King granted him 24 oaks from the royal forest of Inglewood, ‘toward the making of a balynger of werre for the defence of our west marches against our enemies of Scotland’, and the fact that he was knighted during the course of the following summer implies military rather than parliamentary service.7 Summerson, ii. 435; C219/15/6; PSO1/17, no. 866.

Curwen was a knight by the time he was again elected to Parliament on 30 Oct. 1449, on this occasion for Westmorland, a county in whose affairs he had previously played no part, although one in which his family had long had a residence at Bampton Patrick. During the first recess of this Parliament he was named as sheriff of Cumberland. He had been considered for appointment as early as November 1443, when he appeared on the pricked list, yet it is still surprising that he should have been appointed while his father lived.8 C219/15/7; C47/34/2/2, 5. Further, if he attended to the duties of that office, he must have been largely absent from the two remaining sessions of an assembly that was not dissolved until the outbreak of Cade’s revolt in the following summer. On 12 Apr., during the second recess, he petitioned the Crown for relief from the particular burdens attached to his shrievalty. He complained that, ‘because of the manyfold Ruynes and decaies’, the farm of the county had long been largely un-leviable by the sheriffs, ‘unto theire right grete charges and likely often tymes to theire undoiyng’. As a result, those lately nominated to the office had ‘estraunged theym therefro[m]’ to the damage of the King and his subjects, ‘because of the noone execucion of lawe’. The royal reply was a favourable one: Curwen was to be allowed to account at the Exchequer by oath for only that sum he was able to raise.9 E28/80/42; E159/226, brevia Easter rot. 2.

The death of Curwen’s father in the summer of 1450 brought Sir Thomas one of the principal gentry inheritances in Cumberland, which, although it was burdened by his mother’s interest, no doubt enhanced his value to his lord. This value is reflected in the surviving receiver’s account for the Percy lands in Cumberland in 1453-4: it records him in receipt of annual fees totalling as much as £18 19s. 10d. In January 1453 he gathered with other important members of the affinity to witness an award returned by the earl’s son, Thomas, Lord Egremont, in a dispute between the widow and heir of Sir Henry Threlkeld*.10 J.M.W. Bean, Estates Percy Fam., 97; Cumbria RO, Kendal, Le Fleming of Rydal mss, Box 92/93. More importantly, it seems that he was in the Percy army, led by Egremont, which confronted the Nevilles at Heworth Moor near York in the following August. His name duly appeared in the bill presented before jurors when Richard, duke of York, came to York at the head of a commission of oyer and terminer in the following June, although, along with several others, it has been struck out.11 KB9/149/1, pt. i, m. 89; P. Booth, ‘Men Behaving Badly?’, The Fifteenth Cent. III ed. Clark, 115-16.

Curwen’s own concerns were more peaceful. On 1 May 1454 he entered into an indenture with his mother by which she agreed, ‘of good hert and fre wyll withoute any maner of constrent’, to farm to him the manor of Thornthwaite (in Bampton Patrick) and all the lands she held in Westmorland, at an annual rent of £20. The indenture also concerned provision for her private comfort in the manor-house there: she was ‘to have hir chambre fre to hir self and hir servants’, of whom there were to be six, maintained at her son’s expense, together ‘with sufficyent fuell to her chymney’ and the nightly provision of ‘brede ale and candell like as she hath had afore tyme’. If she chose to quit the manor-house her son was to pay 20 marks p.a. to her maintenance over the annual rent of £20. Even in such a private arrangement the influence of the affinity is apparent, for among those he called upon to give surety for his performance of the bargain were his fellow Percy retainers, Pennington, (Sir) William Martindale and William Leigh*. Whether he followed the retinue into battle a year later at St. Albans, where the earl met his death, does not appear, but his younger brother, William, certainly did, for he was among the several Percy men to die with their lord.12 Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xiv. 419-21; C.A.J. Armstrong, ‘Politics and the Battle of St. Albans’, Bull.IHR, xxxiii. 71.

There is, unfortunately, no evidence to show what part Sir Thomas played in the civil war of 1459-61. As one of the leading Percy retainers he was an obvious candidate for election to the Parliament which saw the attainder of the Yorkist lords, and, on 13 Nov. 1459, he was duly returned for Cumberland with another Percy man, William Leigh. It was during this assembly that he was belatedly added to the county bench, and on 21 Dec., the day after the prorogation, he was named to the commission of array in his native county. It would be strange if he was not in company with the Percy earl at the battles of Wakefield and Towton, where the earl was killed. None the less, like many Percy retainers, he escaped attainder in 1461 and, although he played a much reduced role in local affairs during the 1460s, he was able to adapt to the new regime and the temporary loss of Percy lordship. He retained his place on the Cumberland bench and, in December 1462, he and his eldest son took part in the campaign to reduce the northern strongholds of the Lancastrians.13 C219/16/5; Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxviii), 157. Further, on at least three occasions in the 1460s he was called upon to act as an arbiter by his neighbours: in 1465 he was among those nominated by John Salkeld of Rosgill near Bampton Patrick to settle a dispute with Thomas Sandford of Askham, a Neville retainer; in 1467 he was sole arbiter in a dispute in the Keighley family; and in 1469 in joined Sandford in arbitrating a dispute between two yeomen of Bampton. In the meantime he headed the attestors to the Cumberland election of 1467 when two Neville men, one of whom was his maternal kinsman, Sir John Huddleston†, were returned to Parliament.14 Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xxi. 187-8, 190; Curwen, 89; C219/17/1.

The restoration of the young Percy earl to lands and honours in March 1470 promised the Curwens restoration to their former prominence, and it was natural that they were one of the families that the earl should turn to in the rebuilding of his affinity. On 16 Dec. 1470 the earl retained our MP’s son and heir, Christopher, by indenture, at an annual fee of 11 marks.15 Cam. Miscellany, xxxii. 150; M.A. Hicks, Ric. III and Rivals, 368. By this date Henry VI had been restored, but, contrary to earlier allegiances, the earl and his affinity were not among the Readeption’s most enthusiastic supporters. The earl lost his recently-restored office of warden of the east march to John Neville, Marquess Montagu, and our MP lost the place on the bench that he had retained throughout the 1460s. Famously, the earl did nothing to oppose Edward IV’s landing in the north in March 1471, and some of his retainers may have offered Edward active support. The Curwens may have been among them. This is implied in a petition (albeit an unsuccessful one) presented by our MP’s son, William, soon after Edward had reassumed the throne. He asked for a grant of the keepership of the gate of Carlisle castle as reward for his father’s good service to Edward, especially his ‘fidelis et diligentis attendencie ac grandium onerum et laborum ... in repressionem magne rebellionis’.16 Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xiv. 423-5.

Despite this favourable change in the county’s political climate, Curwen’s advanced age was against him reassuming the role he had enjoined in the 1450s, and little can be discovered about the last years of his career. The most interesting reference concerns a further attempt to conclude the family’s minor, but long-running dispute, with their neighbours, the Salkelds. This arose out of the extension by the Curwens of their park at Thornthwaite in Bampton, a process begun by our MP’s great-grandfather, Sir Gibert Curwen† (d.c.1403), and the consequent loss of rights of common enjoyed by the Salkelds and their tenants. An arbitrated settlement had been reached as long before as 1429 and the two families seem to have remained on good terms into the late 1460s, but, in February 1473, the disputants’ mutual neighbour, Richard Redmayne, abbot of Shap, was called upon to make a further settlement between them. Clearly new hostilities had arisen – the award refers to a tenant of our MP ‘sore hurt atte the foteball’ by a servant of Salkeld and a tenant of the latter beaten and hurt by our MP and his servants – and the abbot, returning his award in the parish church of Penrith, decreed minor compensatory payments and confirmed the boundaries of the park laid down by the earlier settlement.17 ibid. n.s. ix. 276-81.

Curwen’s advanced years did not prevent his pricking as sheriff for the third time in 1474, although, no doubt to his relief, his term was brought to a premature end in the following February, when the office was granted for life to Richard, duke of Gloucester.18 CPR, 1467-77, p. 485. The duke’s great power in the far north compromised that of the Percy earl, but it led to no realignment of the loyalty of Curwen’s family. On 11 May 1475 Sir Thomas was named among the earl’s feoffees in Alnwick and the rest of his Northumberland property, and it was as a Percy man that our MP’s younger son, William, was named as escheator in Cumberland and Westmorland in the following November. By this date his sons were coming to take his place in local affairs: the eldest, Christopher, took up the rank of knighthood in his father’s lifetime, and one of the younger, Thomas, was named to two commissions of array in 1484. Our MP last appeared in the records in an active role late in the previous year, when he was named to the Cumberland bench for the last time, but, according to the inquisition post mortem taken after the murder of the Percy earl, he was still alive as late as 1489.19 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 542; Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xxviii. 256-7; CPR, 1476-85, pp. 400, 492. It was in these last years that he made a feoffment of his lands in Westmorland to (Sir) Christopher Moresby†, who was prominent in the service of Richard III and Henry VII, and other lesser men, including his younger sons, to hold to his use for his life and then to the use of his heirs male.20 The last surviving feoffee, John Curwen, was seised as late as 1522: C142/38/6. Although his son and heir, who survived him by less than ten years, is not recorded as an MP, the family’s strong tradition of parliamentary service continued until its failure in the male line in the late eighteenth century, most notably in the time of Sir Particius†, who sat in the Commons over a period of nearly 40 years between 1625 and 1664.21 CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 811; The Commons 1660-1690, ii. 181-2.