HUNGERFORD, Thomas

There can be no doubt that Hungerford was still under age when he was elected to the Coventry Parliament of 1459. His great-grandfather Walter, Lord Hungerford† (d.1449) obtained the wardship of Eleanor Moleyns (who was to be Thomas’s mother) in June 1439,4 CFR, xvii. 91. and she made proof of age when she turned 14 in 1440.5 C139/104/49. Even if Thomas was born that same year he can have been only 19 when he sat in the Commons. By then the financial circumstances of his family made grim reading. Thomas’s father, Robert, Lord Moleyns, had been taken prisoner at Castillon in 1453, and was still detained in captivity in France, putting his grandparents to enormous expense for his maintenance. In order to raise Moleyns’ ransom of £6,000, a sum which had since swollen to £9,961, the captive’s father Robert, 2nd Lord Hungerford, had been compelled to mortgage all his estates, and his mother Lady Margaret to waive her dower and jointure. The interests of their dependants had to be sacrificed for the time being to secure Moleyns’ release.6 Hicks, 167-8. In May 1459, a few months before Thomas’s Parliament assembled, his grandfather Lord Hungerford died, having left Thomas in his will a bed of cloth of white velvet, lavishly embroidered, on condition that in his turn he would bequeath it to the next male heir of the Hungerfords.7 PCC 17 Stokton (PROB11/4, ff. 131v-133), printed in Som. Med. Wills (Som. Rec. Soc. xvi), 186-93. But there was little else in immediate prospect for the heir presumptive to the barony. He witnessed a grant made by his widowed grandmother in July,8 CCR, 1468-76, no. 248. and over the coming years he did his best to support her in trying to overcome the many difficulties, political and financial, which beset the family. Lady Margaret was to be compelled to sell the plate and mortgage many of her own paternal estates, the Botreaux inheritance. During Lord Moleyns’s absence in captivity, the effective male head of the family was Sir Edmund Hungerford, who for very many years had held a prominent position in the household of Henry VI. It was no doubt to this great-uncle’s influence that Thomas owed his election for Wiltshire to the Parliament summoned to meet on 20 Nov. 1459. By the time the Parliament assembled he had been made sheriff of the neighbouring county of Gloucestershire, where Sir Edmund was an important landowner, so either he was absent from the Commons or else from his duties in his bailiwick at least some of the time. During his shrievalty the Yorkist earls, attainted by act of the Coventry Parliament, returned to England and raised forces to defeat the supporters of King Henry at the battle of Northampton in July 1460.

Thomas’s whereabouts at the time of the battle are not known, although he may have been with his father Lord Moleyns, who having been freed from imprisonment early in 1460 and made his way back to England,9 Thomas was party to his father’s transactions regarding the manor of Folke, Dorset, in Mar. 1460: CCR, 1454-61, p. 439. assisted other Lancastrian lords to hold the Tower of London against the Yorkists in late June. Following the battle which gave the Yorkists control of both King and government, Moleyns made his escape from the Tower and secured a pardon for his life. His mother, Lady Margaret, by means of ‘gifts and rewards to great lords’ and at a cost of £768 procured a licence for him to go out of harm’s way to Florence. Then, while Moleyns was overseas, she arranged for her grandson the Hungerford heir Thomas to marry Anne Percy, a daughter of the earl of Northumberland. The marriage took place before 16 Oct. that year, when lands were settled on the couple in jointure; and a portion of 3,500 marks was promised to the Hungerfords (although apparently only a fifth of this sum, 700 marks, was actually handed over before Lady Margaret’s death in 1478).10 R.C. Hoare, Modern Wilts. (Heytesbury), 101-2; Hicks, 168-9. The negotiations for the match were conducted with Anne’s mother, the countess of Northumberland and heiress of the Poynings estates, who as the daughter of Lord Walter Hungerford’s second wife was no doubt known personally to the family. By the agreement certain manors were settled directly on Thomas and Anne by his grandmother or by his grandfather’s feoffees; others were to pass to them only on the death of his father. Among the properties thus conveyed to them was Rowden in Chippenham, where they took up residence. The jointure, comprising 13 manors, was said to be worth £200 p.a.11 Hoare, 101-2; HMC Hastings, i. 237, 253-4, 256-7.

In January 1461 Thomas and his wife were staying at her mother’s manor-house at Petworth in Sussex,12 Petworth House, Suss. mss, 7221 (MAC/13), f. 20. Lady Anne was briefly there again in Nov. 1462, and in 1467-8: 7224 (MAC/16), 7226 (MAC/19). and it is not known whether from there Thomas travelled north to take up arms for the house of Lancaster, as did other members of his family. On 17 Feb. his uncle Arnold died fighting on Qeen Margaret’s side at the second battle of St. Albans, leaving our MP to inherit the Somerset manors of Flintford near Frome and Feltham, in accordance with an entail made by Lord Hungerford in 1452.13 Add. Ch. 40054; CP, vi. 621; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of the English ed. Stevenson, ii. 776; CFR, xx. 65. He sold the manors to Thomas Rogers† and his wife Cecily in 1465: Add. Chs. 40056-62; Som. Archs., Som. Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. mss, DD\SAS\C/795/FR/56. At the end of March both his father-in-law and father fought for Henry VI at Towton, the former being slain, the latter fleeing after the battle to Scotland; both suffered attainder in Edward IV’s first Parliament in the following November. While Lord Moleyns was still alive his wife Eleanor and younger children were placed in the custody of (Sir) John Wenlock*, newly-created Lord Wenlock, along with the lands she had inherited.14 CPR, 1461-7, p. 181. While Moleyns continued in opposition to the Yorkist regime by occupying Alnwick with a force of Frenchmen in 1463, his heir, Thomas, had little option but to assist in the efforts of his grandmother Lady Margaret to pay off the family’s debts and safeguard its patrimony, which was resettled that year with a view to his own eventual succession. Of necessity, he was also party to transactions regarding his grandmother’s Botreaux inheritance, made in the interest of her widowed stepmother, and in a succession of deeds the two of them alienated various parcels of land, coming from Margaret’s Botreaux estates and certain Hungerford properties acquired by the first two Lords Hungerford and never placed in enfeoffment. In all they sold land worth £200, some ten per cent of the total worth of the Hungerford inheritance that Thomas might otherwise have expected to fall to him.15 CIPM Hen. VII, i. 462, 1198; Wilts. Feet of Fines (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xli), 656; A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parl. 286; Hicks, 197, 204.

In their parlous financial situation, and with his father an attainted rebel, it made sense for Thomas and his grandmother to come to terms with the new regime. Accordingly, Thomas served under the command of the earl of Warwick against the Lancastrians (perhaps even his own father) in the north of England: he was ‘in the Kyng’s servyce after the departing of Kyng Harry, arrayed and accompanyed for the warre’, which cost his grandmother £800, so she said. He obtained a pardon on 4 Nov. 1463 as ‘of Salisbury, esquire’ and former sheriff of Gloucestershire,16 Hoare, 101-2; C67/45, m. 10; Hicks, 169-70. and a few months later, before 23 Apr. 1464, he was knighted. But not long afterwards his father Moleyns was taken prisoner at the battle of Hexham and beheaded at Newcastle on 18 May. Meanwhile, a substantial part of the Hungerford estates had been seized by the Crown after inquiries held on 19 Mar. found that feoffees had held them to Lord Moleyns’s use. Sir Thomas and his wife had to petition to recover the lands they had been given in jointure which had been wrongly taken into the King’s hands and granted to John Dynham, later Lord Dynham. It took two years or more for matters to be put to right – if they ever were.17 CFR, xx. 133-4; CPR, 1461-7, pp. 364-5; CIMisc. viii. 319, 327-8, 332; Hicks, 170-1. In November and December 1466 Sir Thomas relinquished his title to a number of properties in Cornwall and elsewhere, pertaining to his grandmother’s Botreaux inheritance,18 CCR, 1461-8, pp. 386, 395; CP25(1)/34/44/11. and at the beginning of January 1468 he gave up his interest in other Botreaux lands, at the same time as he and his wife parted with the Hungerford manor of Little Cheverell in Wiltshire.19 Hungerford Cart. (Wilts. Rec. Soc. xlix), 926; Wilts. Feet of Fines, 665; CCR, 1461-8, p. 465. Such losses and difficulties led to increasing frustration and ultimately, it was alleged, to rebellion against the King. In this, Hungerford found an ally in a distant kinsman Henry Courtenay, the dispossessed heir to the earldom of Devon. Their connexion, perhaps even a personal friendship, had been formed by November 1466 when Hungerford enfeoffed Courtenay and others of the rent of £30 he received from his grandmother from the manor of Kilmersdon, Somerset, and the reversion of this manor after her death, so that they could fulfil his will.20 Hungerford Cart. 920-3.

In May 1468 these two heirs to forfeited peerage titles, Hungerford and Courtenay, allegedly plotted together at Salisbury to deprive Edward IV of the throne and restore to power Henry VI or his son the prince of Wales. For plotting Edward’s death and conspiring to counsel Margaret of Anjou and her son to invade the realm, they were arrested on suspicion of treason towards the end of the year. Sir William Plumpton* learned of their arrest from a letter written to him from London on 9 Dec., which also informed him that the earl of Oxford and (Sir) Thomas Tresham* had been committed to the Tower and three lesser men beheaded. Hungerford’s great-uncle Sir Edmund had been sent for by the Council for questioning. In January 1469 Sir Thomas and his colleague Courtenay were brought to trial at Salisbury before a special commission of oyer and terminer headed by the King’s 17-year-old brother Richard, duke of Gloucester. Despite their denials of guilt they were convicted by a jury, and speedily hanged, drawn, beheaded and quartered at the gallows outside the city on 18 Jan.21 Plumpton Letters (Cam. Soc. ser. 5, viii), no. 16; KB9/320; PROME, xv. 164-8. In his will Thomas Tropenell* (d.1488), long a retainer of the Hungerfords, arranged for a priest to pray in the chapel in Corsham church for the soul of Sir Thomas together with those of his grandparents and great-grandfather: PCC 7 Milles (PROB11/8, ff. 56v-57). It has been suggested that Gloucester’s own aspirations lay behind Sir Thomas’s execution. Most of the Lancastrian plotters of 1468-9 were allowed to make their peace with the King by paying fines; among the people of consequence who were charged only Hungerford and Courtenay were executed and suffered forfeiture. Following Courtenay’s death, most of his lands were granted to Humphrey Stafford IV*, Lord Stafford of Southwick, who was now created earl of Devon, and Courtenay’s execution was explained by contemporaries as being attributable to Stafford’s ambitions to have the earldom. Similarly, Gloucester’s intentions might explain Hungerford’s death sentence and the forfeiture of his inheritance. Stafford was not created earl of Devon until five months after Courtenay’s execution, but Gloucester was granted the Hungerford inheritance on 23 Oct. 1468, three months before Sir Thomas’s death. Furthermore, the duke was to benefit substantially from later royal grants of Hungerford manors.22 Hicks, 175-6, 179-80; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 139, 156.

The attainted Sir Thomas left a widow, who retained her jointure, and his only surviving child Mary, aged just six months. She, the heiress of the combined Hungerford and Moleyns estates, was also to inherit in 1478, on the death of her great-grandmother Lady Margaret, those of the Lords Botreaux.23 C140/29/43; 32/29; CPR, 1476-85, pp. 101, 129. The King’s friend William, Lord Hastings, secured her wardship and marriage, and in 1472 successfully negotiated with her grandmother Eleanor, Lady Hungerford and Moleyns, and the latter’s second husband Sir Oliver Manningham for her to be married to his eldest son, Edward.24 HMC Hastings, i. 303-4; CP, vi. 622-3; CPR, 1476-85, p. 233; C1/80/45-56. Mary was Baroness Botreaux from the death of her gt.gdmother. Edward Hastings was summ. to Parl. in 1482 as Lord Hastings of Hungerford. Before February 1480 our MP’s widow took as her second husband (Sir) Laurence Raynford (d.1490), and she married thirdly, by December 1493, Hugh Vaughan, an esquire for Henry VII’s body. Having agreed to relinquish her Hungerford jointure in return for a payment of £168 a year, she lived on until 1522.25 CPR, 1476-85, p. 171; CCR, 1485-1500, no. 731; CP, vi. 621-2. Meanwhile, in a petition presented by Sir Thomas’s brother Sir Walter Hungerford to Henry VII in his first Parliament of 1485, it was asked that the attainders of Sir Thomas and their father be made void in consideration of the ‘true service and alegeaunce which [they] owed and dyd to the seid moste blessyd prynce Kyng Herry the Sext, your uncle’, that all records relating to the attainders be annulled and that their heirs be restored to their estate. The petition was granted, enabling Sir Walter to start the long process of recovery for his family.26 PROME, xv. 164-8; CPR, 1485-94, pp. 145-50; Hicks, 180-1.