HARDGILL, Thomas

Hardgill may have belonged to the Yorkshire family of this name,1 R. Horrox, Ric. III, 50. but he made his career in the south of England, as a retainer of (Sir) John Stourton II*, the treasurer of Henry VI’s household who was created Baron Stourton in 1448. Perhaps a kinsman of John Hardgill, a member of the Household at that time, it is possible that he owed his introduction to Stourton’s service to John,2 E101/410/6, f. 42. but whatever the case his links with the peer’s family were firmly established before he first entered the Commons. Precisely how he came to be elected for the impoverished Dorset borough of Lyme Regis in 1453 is not documented, but there is no doubting the significance of the facts that the sheriff of Dorset who made the parliamentary returns was Lord Stourton’s youthful son-in-law, Richard Warre*, that Members for other boroughs in the county, Dorchester and Shaftesbury, also belonged to his immediate circle, and that one of the shire knights elected, John Carent*, was his nephew. This group with mutual links to Stourton joined others representing constituencies in Somerset and Wiltshire who also looked to him for leadership. In his turn, Stourton, continuing to be treasurer of the Household until the close of the first session of the Parliament at Reading, may well have found it useful to have servants sitting in the Lower House, especially during the crisis engendered by Henry VI’s mental collapse in the summer. As a member of the Council, Stourton played an important part in the events of the final session of the Parliament, held at Westminster from February to April 1454, as one of the lords who visited the unresponsive King at Windsor to inform him of the death of the chancellor and primate Cardinal Kemp and subsequently put into effect the appointment of the duke of York as Protector. In the course of that session, too, he was formally given joint responsibility for naval defence.3 PROME, xii. 255-67, 274-5; PPC, vi. 167. The group of lords then made keepers of the seas were to be paid by assignments on the subsidy of tunnage and poundage, collected by officials they themselves nominated, and it was probably in Stourton’s interest that Hardgill was appointed in the following spring as controller of the subsidies levied in Newcastle.4 CCR, 1454-61, pp. 461-2; CPR, 1452-61, p. 202. He was removed from office when Stourton was discharged of the keeping of the seas, at his own request, in the Parlt. of 1455: PROME, xii. 345.

On 1 May 1455, described as ‘gentleman of Stourton’ (Lord Stourton’s seat) Hardgill provided securities in the Exchequer for the lord’s younger son, Sir Reynold, who with others was given the farm of the rabbit warrens in Groveley forest.5 CFR, xix. 131. Like him, his fellow mainpernor, Stephen Haytfeld*, was to represent a Dorset borough in the Parliament which assembled two months later on 9 July (with Hardgill sitting for Melcombe and Haytfeld for Shaftesbury). Shortly after his appointment as controller of customs in the north-east, on 30 Mar. Hardgill had obtained a royal licence to ship 20,000 woolfells to Holland and Zeeland from Poole, the port that had replaced Melcombe Regis as the centre of customs administration along the Dorset coast.6 DKR, xlviii. 403; E159/233, brevia Easter rot. 9d. This involvement in the wool trade would have made him known to the burgesses of Melcombe, although no evidence survives of any direct contact between him and the borough which returned him to Parliament on this occasion. He shipped 2,300 fells from Poole to Holland in March 1456 on the George of Amsterdam, but although the customers charged him poundage at the normal rate for denizens (12d. per pound), the Exchequer challenged their account, assessing the shipment at the rate imposed on alien merchants. Hardgill petitioned for the error to be corrected, but it was not until November 1457 that he proved successful.7 E159/234, brevia Mich. rot. 19.

In the course of Hardgill’s second Parliament, summoned after the Yorkist victory at St. Albans, the duke of York’s second Protectorate began in November 1455, under terms negotiated between the duke and a committee of eight lords, including Stourton.8 PROME, xii. 345. Even so, five years were to elapse before Stourton finally committed himself to York, who in the Parliament assembled in October 1460 was formally recognized as Henry VI’s heir. This was Hardgill’s third Parliament, in which he represented yet another Dorset borough, Shaftesbury, which pertained to Shaftesbury abbey. His lord, who held property in the locality, was the brother-in-law of the abbey’s steward William Carent*, and had long exerted influence over the borough’s representation. Hardgill appears to have established close links with the town. In April following, as Thomas Hardgill, ‘esquire’, he was commissioned with the mayor of Shaftesbury to arrest a local woman and other seditious vagabonds.9 CPR, 1461-7, p. 35. He had followed Lord Stourton’s lead in supporting the accession of Edward of York, and two of his close kinsmen found favour with the new King immediately after he took the throne: Edward Hardgill†, who was also linked to the Stourtons, entered royal service as a yeoman in the Household, and in September 1461 the King requested the abbess of Shaftesbury to give George Hardgill the pension which the convent was bound to award one of the royal clerks.10 CCR, 1461-8, p. 99. For George, originally of the diocese of Durham, who was educ. at Oxford from 1455 and held the prebendary of Gillingham in Shaftesbury abbey from Jan. 1467, see Biog. Reg. Univ. Oxf. ed. Emden, ii. 870. He was to be an executor of Edward Hardgill’s will: C67/53, m. 28. The abbess, Margaret St. John, became a personal friend of the Hardgills. Two months later the MP received an assignment at the Exchequer on her behalf in repayment of a loan of £40 she had made to the Crown,11 E403/824, m. 3. and when the time came he singled her out to be one of his executors. The date of his death is not known, but it occurred at some point after the close of his fourth Parliament, that of 1467-8 (when he again represented Shaftesbury, while his kinsman Edward Hardgill sat for Weymouth). The Commons were dismissed on 7 June 1468, and Hardgill is last recorded in the following Michaelmas term, bringing a suit in the common pleas against a gentleman from the Stourton estate at Mere in Wiltshire and a Bristol merchant, who allegedly owed him £40.12 CP40/829, rot. 164d. Other actions for debt were left to his executors to bring to a conclusion. Four years later they (his widow, Philippa, the abbess of Shaftesbury and Stephen Payne), had pleas pending against a Shaftesbury gentleman, merchants from Melcombe and Bridport and a Bridgwater mercer, in an attempt to recover money owed to the deceased.13 CP40/844, rot. 217.

Hardgill’s principal heir appears to have been his daughter, Margaret, who by November 1478 had married William Godwin of ‘Godwynsbowr’ in Bridgwater. She survived her husband who died in 1502.14 CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 756.