MULSHO, Thomas

This MP poses problems of identification. The Mulshos were unusual among gentry families of middling rank in making generous provision for younger sons. Together with their fondness for the Christian name Thomas, this makes it difficult to separate one family member from another. There were four contemporary Thomas Mulshos (three of the same generation), only two of whom cannot have been the MP. One of them, who sat for Northamptonshire in 1417, died in 1446; another, the younger brother of John Mulsho of Finedon and nephew of the MP of 1417, makes only one certain appearance in the records and was almost certainly long dead by 1450.3 He was named as a remainder-man in the manor of Finedon in a final concord of 1403: CP25(1)/178/90/31. The remaining two are very difficult to disentangle, and the survival of the 1417 MP long into the majority of his heir adds to the difficulty. The one was this heir; the other was another of the MP’s nephews, namely the son of Henry Mulsho, who had represented the county in the Parliament of 1422.

Contemporary records only occasionally distinguish between these two men. A case pending in the court of common pleas in 1445, however, provides a useful clue: Thomas Mulsho of Newton was suing his namesake of neighbouring Geddington for a debt of £40. The latter was described as executor of the will of Joan, widow and executrix of Henry Mulsho, and there can be no doubt that he was Henry’s son and heir.4 The case originated in 1439: CP40/715, rot. 460d; 739, rot. 90d. Similarly the former must be the MP of 1417 (who was succeeded by his son and namesake in the following year). It is thus legitimate to conclude that when contemporaries felt the need to distinguish between these two branches of the family the one was described as ‘of Newton’ and the other ‘of Geddington’. This allows the careers of the two cousins to be disentangled, at least in part, but throws no light upon which of them was the MP of 1450. For this one has to turn to the political circumstances of the election of that year: the Thomas Mulsho returned for Northamptonshire was undoubtedly a partisan of Richard, duke of York, following a family tradition of service to the house of York that extended back to the 1390s. Fortunately for the purposes of identifying the MP, there is evidence to show that his namesake was of a different persuasion, having strong associations with the royal Household, and that he was resident at the royal manor of Geddington (where the MP’s branch of the family also held lands). The two careers can thus be distinguished along political lines and the MP identified as resident at Newton. They can also be clearly distinguished in another way: while the MP spent the bulk of the 1440s serving in France, his namesake (after earlier military service across the Channel) followed a life of crime at home. It is, in short, possible to separate the surviving references to the two men, the wealthier and most important of whom was Thomas of Newton.

Our MP’s father lived to a considerable age. First appearing in the records in the mid 1390s, the older Thomas largely retired from public life in the early 1420s and was probably in his eighties when he died more than 20 years later.5 He continued to attest parlty. elections until 1437: C219/15/1. A writ of diem clausit extremum was issued in respect of his Northants. lands on 10 Feb. 1446 and his will was proved three days later: CFR, xviii. 2; Lambeth Palace Lib. Reg. Stafford, f. 131v. This long wait to inherit his patrimony (valued at £54 p.a. in the subsidy returns of 1412 and including a valuable outlying property at Kettleburgh near Framlingham in Suffolk),6 Feudal Aids, vi. 496. may have prompted young Thomas to follow the example of his uncle, Henry, and embark on a military career. By the spring of 1436 he was serving at Arques under the captaincy of Sir John Montgomery*. Two years later he was John Nanfan’s lieutenant in the garrison at Touques (on the Norman coast to the west of Honfleur) and by the autumn of 1444 he was the garrison captain at Tancarville on the other side of Honfleur.7 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris, fr. 25773/1065; 25774/1336; 25776/1509; Clairambault mss, 184/58.

Mulsho was thus probably absent from home when, on 20 May 1439, his father drew up a will that followed family tradition in its generosity to younger sons and had unpleasant implications for the future prosperity of the heir. Under its terms our MP’s interests were significantly compromised by the provision made for his younger brothers, William and Edmund. On the death of their mother Anne, the manor of Newton and land at nearby Stanion were to pass in tail to William and then to Edmund, and only on the failure of their issue were these properties to pass to Thomas and his issue. A similar settlement was to be made of the family’s property in Geddington with the difference that Edmund was given preference over William. Moreover, the will laid a firm injunction on the feoffees to prevent our MP disturbing terms so damaging to his own interests. If Thomas pursued this course the feoffees were empowered to settle the rest of the Mulsho lands on the testator’s widow in fee to dispose of as she should think fit; if, on the other hand, he accepted his partial disinheritance the feoffees were to settle these lands on him and his heirs, namely the manors of Stoke Doyle and nearby Pilton (a few miles to the east of Newton), a toft and ten acres of land in Newton (probably the family’s main residence), property in Northampton, other unspecified lands bound by entail and the remaining fee simple lands.8 Lambeth Palace Lib. Reg. Stafford, f. 131. The fee simple lands presumably included the family’s property in Suff. and Rutland.

This threatened diminution of his expectations together with the survival of his mother gave motive to Mulsho to continue his military career beyond the death of his father in the mid 1440s.9 Unfortunately it is not known how long his mother survived. She last appears in the records in 1446: KB27/739, rot. 35d. In this he was joined by his brother Edmund, who seems to have first come to France in the retinue of Richard, duke of York, in 1441. Edmund was soon to outshine his elder sibling: by November 1446 he was a knight and captain of Pont-de-l’Arche with our MP as his lieutenant.10 E101/53/33; A. Marshall, ‘English War Captains in Eng. and Normandy’ (Univ. of Wales M.A. thesis, 1975), 264. In June 1442 our MP took the muster of his brother’s troops at Neufbourg: ibid. 63. Thereafter their careers diverged. While Sir Edmund accompanied the duke of York to Ireland in the summer of 1449, Thomas (after a brief return to England in the summer of 1448) remained in France and so saw the final defeat of the English in Normandy. He may have been at Pont-de-l’Arche when it was captured by the French on 9 May 1449; and late in the following summer he was in command of the duke’s fortress at Bernay, which he was obliged to surrender by composition in the wake of the surrender of Lisieux.11 Add. Ch. 6987; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), 621.

No sooner had Mulsho returned to England than he had the chance to serve the duke in a different arena, that of Parliament. There can be no doubt that his election to the assembly of 1450 was engineered by York. At or soon after Michaelmas the duke had sent his auditor, Thomas Willoughby, to Milton and Harringworth to talk with William, Lord Zouche, and Henry Green*, then to the place of the sheriff of Northamptonshire, William Vaux*, expressly ‘pro suis amiciciis habendis in ellecione militum comitatus’. These negotiations had the desired effect. At Northampton castle on the following 22 Oct. Vaux conducted an election at which Mulsho was returned.12 Egerton Roll 8783, m. 3 (quoted in K.B. McFarlane, Eng. in the 15th Cent. 233n.); C219/16/1. The duke himself was at Fotheringhay from 17 Oct. for at least four days: P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 85. Elsewhere the duke’s influence was less directly felt, but when the assembly met, on 6 Nov., our MP was one of 14 with very close Yorkist connexions, among whom was his brother Sir Edmund, returned for Suffolk.13 Johnson, 87, 105.

The years immediately following his single Parliament were a period of dislocation for Mulsho. The forced end of his military career and the declining fortunes of the duke of York combined to drive him to rebellion. The first sign of impending trouble came on 18 Apr. 1451 when an order was issued for his replacement as one of the verderers in the forest of Rockingham. The pretext was that he was ‘too busied elsewhere’ to discharge the office (perhaps because he was devoting himself to the duke’s service), but there was almost certainly an overt political motive. According to a later bill, when, on the following 6 May, a yeoman of the Crown, Henry Castwode, came to Great Oakley (near Mulsho’s home) to deliver the writ of privy seal removing him from the office, Mulsho defiantly refused to receive it and trampled it under his horse’s hooves.14 CCR, 1447-54, p. 204; KB9/94/1/11. But by the date of the bill he had been involved in more serious offences. Indeed, it was one of several laid against him before a powerful royal commission of inquiry, headed by the courtier magnates, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, James Butler, earl of Wiltshire, and John, Viscount Beaumont, which came to Peterborough at the end of October 1452 as part of the campaign against the Dartford rebels of the previous February. If these bills are to be accepted at face value, Mulsho had been the duke’s principal agent in Northamptonshire in raising forces for the abortive rising. One accused him, as ‘once of Newton, esquire’, of raising war against the King at the duke’s town of Fotheringhay and elsewhere on 8 Feb. 1452; another more detailed bill joined his name with those of his brothers, Sir Edmund and William, and his son, John, in an accusation that they had made insurrection and imagined the death of the King at Fotheringhay and elsewhere on the following 22 Feb.15 KB9/94/1/4, 12. The second of these bills was endorsed as true by a county jury of rank, headed by Sir William Lucy* and including Henry Green, Thomas Wake*, William Vaux, Thomas Tresham and Mulsho’s colleague of 1450, Thomas Seyton*.

This last date is significant: on that day the King, having ridden from Westminster via Barnet, was at Northampton and send a deputation to the duke, who appears to have been in the vicinity of the town. This strongly suggests that our MP and his kinsmen were in the duke’s company, particularly as Sir Theobald Gorges*, Gorges’s son, Walter, and Thomas Willoughby, prominent Yorkists from outside the county, were also named in the bill. It is therefore a reasonable inference that our MP was with the duke at Dartford a few days later. With regard to another of the bills laid against him there is greater room for scepticism as to its truth: it links his name with that of Sir William Oldhall* and others in making insurrection at Fotheringhay on 11 Nov. 1450 in support of the duke of York and conspiring to bring about the deposition and death of the King. Scepticism is aroused by the fact that the Parliament, of which both Mulsho and Oldhall were Members, had met at Westminster five days before. Further, in view of indictments in other counties concerning similar alleged insurrections in the Midlands, it seems that demonstrations in the duke’s favour as he himself made ready to attend the Parliament were now being portrayed as treasonable.16 KB9/94/1/5; Johnson, 88. It has been suggested that the alleged risings are dated 1450 in scribal error for 1451, but, since they fit equally well with the known events of both years, the date in the indictments is to be preferred: R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 249; Marshall, 163-4. Nonetheless, whatever the truth of individual bills, there can be no doubt that Mulsho was intimately involved in the duke’s machinations during the early 1450s.

It was fortunate for Mulsho that the Crown was not intent on pursuing the rigours of the law against the Dartford rebels. On 28 May 1452 he had been able to sue out a general pardon for offences before the previous 7 Apr., and thus the subsequent bills posed no threat to him. He waited until the following 20 Nov. before producing in Chancery the sureties necessary to make the pardon effective.17 C67/40, m. 8; C237/43/129 (he relied on professional sureties rather than friends). Thereafter his fortunes improved with those of his master in the mid 1450s. On 12 Nov. 1454, during the duke’s first protectorate, he shared a grant (for a term of 20 years at an annual farm of £29 p.a.) of the keeping of the royal manor of Geddington, which had been in the hands of the courtier Richard Wydeville, Lord Rivers. As a tenant of the manor and a significant landholder in its immediate vicinity, he had particular reason to welcome this enhancement of his standing in the county.18 CFR, xix. 117; B.P. Wolffe, R. Demesne in English Hist., 274. Four days before this grant a commission was issued to inquire into the value of the manor. The inquiry was held on the following 23 Jan., but strangely it was not delivered into Chancery until 1461: C145/315/8. Although direct evidence is lacking, it would be surprising if he did not repay the duke’s patronage by fighting at the first battle of St. Albans on the following 22 May. He was certainly present on 6 June (along with his son John) at the Northamptonshire election to the Parliament which met in the aftermath of the battle. Significantly this is the only election he is known to have attended.19 C219/16/3. No doubt had the Yorkists maintained the initiative in local affairs Mulsho would have assumed the place in local administration previously denied him. Instead the Lancastrian recovery returned him to obscurity. He makes few appearances in the records in the last years of his life. On 19 July 1456 he was outlawed in London on a plea of debt sued against him by Thomas Thorpe*, a Household official with Northamptonshire connexions, and on 15 June 1458 he took the precaution of suing out another general pardon. His last certain appearance in the records in an active role dates from Hilary term 1460 when he appeared in person in the court of King’s bench to sue some minor local men for taking 40 of his sheep from Newton.20 CP40/786, rot. 207; C67/42, m. 17; KB27/795, rot. 63.

Later in that year Mulsho met a violent death. According to his inquisition post mortem he died on 25 July 1460. Given what is known of his political affiliations, it is tempting to conclude that he died of injuries received at the battle of Northampton a fortnight before. However, an appeal sued in Michaelmas term 1461 by his widow against seven husbandmen and tradesmen of Oundle and Stoke Doyle, both lying a few miles to the east of Newton, raises the alternative possibility that he met his death in a local dispute (albeit one which might have been pursued under the cover of the battle). Unfortunately the appeal gives no details and, in common with the great majority of such actions, was soon abandoned: in Trinity term 1462 the widow’s default led to the issue of a writ for her waiver and she made fine of 6s. 8d. in the following term. The circumstances of our MP’s death must thus remain a mystery for the appeal is not paralleled by a surviving indictment of the alleged murderers.21 KB27/802, rot. 84; 805, rex rot. 18d; 806, fines rot.

Mulsho’s son, John, may have died at the same time as his father. John was still alive on 1 May 1458, when he was remembered in the will of his uncle, Sir Edmund, but he was dead by the time of his father’s inquisition post mortem on 6 Nov. 1460. The jurors returned our MP’s heirs as his three daughters: Alice (b.c.1439) by his first wife and Anne (b.c.1449) and Elizabeth (b.c.1454) by his second.22 PCC 24 Stokton (PROB11/4, ff.186v-187); C139/181/66. Interestingly, the eldest had been married in our MP’s lifetime to his neighbour, Henry, younger brother of Thomas Tresham*. Thomas was a prominent Household man and committed Lancastrian, and it may be that Mulsho was seeking insurance for the secure future of his family’s estates by developing an important connexion on the other side. Indeed, it is possible that the marriage took place in the aftermath of the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge in October 1459, for on 13 Mar. 1460 lands at Turvey (Bedfordshire), belonging to the Treshams, were settled on the couple and their issue, very probably in fulfilment of a marriage contract.23 Northants. RO, Stopford Sackville mss, 2916. Our MP’s widow sued the couple for dower in Mich. Term 1461: CP40/802, rot. 395; 804, rot. 277d; 812, rot. 44d. Mulsho’s other two daughters came into the wardship of his overlord at Newton, Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, whose treachery at the battle of Northampton had been a significant factor in the Yorkist victory there. On 12 July 1461, by a deed dated at Westminster, Grey granted their custody and marriages to our MP’s sister, Margaret, and her husband, John Langley, a former annuitant of the duke of York and now a household servant of the new King. This, however, was not to the liking of Mulsho’s widow. Soon after Thomas’s death she had married one of Lord Grey’s servants, Walter Stotfold of Stevenage in Hertfordshire, and on 20 Mar. 1462 her new husband, in company with Richard Clapham, a servant of the earl of Warwick, allegedly abducted the younger of the two girls from Merevale in Warwickshire. Litigation followed and the subsequent jury verdict provides some interesting detail. Stotfold defended himself on the grounds that, on the day of the writ sued against him, he was resident at Ampthill (where Lord Grey had a castle) and not, as the writ had it, at Northampton. On 17 Feb. 1466, before justices of assize, a jury returned a complicated answer. The jurors said that, immediately after the couple’s marriage at Northampton, Stotfeld had boarded his new wife there with Elizabeth Stannop (probably the widow of Edwin Stannop*, a prominent townsman with Yorkist sympathies) and had then departed the town. He was thus resident there only to the extent that he occasionally came to visit his wife. It is not known how the matter was finally resolved.24 R.I. Jack, Grey of Ruthin Valor, 92; CP40/811, rot. 268; 812, rot. 125.