THORNBURY, John

It is tempting to identify this MP with the Hertfordshire knightly family of Thornbury and assume that he was a son of Sir Philip Thornbury*, MP for that county on three occasions between 1417 and 1426. This temptation is, however, to be resisted. A settlement made in 1457 strongly implies that Sir Philip had only one son, Richard, then living, and although our MP is known to have had a brother Richard, his brother was alive as late as 1488 whereas Sir Philip’s son died ‘ex morbo pestilenciali’ in 1458.5 CP25(1)/91/117/181; KB29/88, rot. 11d. Our MP’s origins are thus to be sought elsewhere. His parentage is given in the will his brother Richard made in 1488 which provided for masses for the souls of their parents, John and Agnes. It may be that this elder John was a cousin of Sir Philip but this can be no more than speculation.6 W.G. Davis, Ancestry of Mary Isaac, 79-80. It is, however, probable, that our MP was of gentle birth and that he began his career as a soldier. In May 1420 either he or a namesake mustered at Southampton with a retinue of five men-at-arms and 18 archers; and in May 1425 it was presumably the same man who sued out letters of protection as travelling abroad in the retinue of Sir Lancelot Lisle.7 E101/49/36; DKR, xlviii. 326. Nothing, however, is certainly known of the MP until December 1433 when he and his second wife, Margery, acquired the manor of Ospringe, near Faversham, from John Poultney, the heir of Thomas Poultney.8 No more is known of Thornbury’s first wife than her Christian name, Mary. His brother Richard, in his will, names his late brother’s three wives as Mary, Margery and Anne: Davis, 80. It was to be held for a nominal rent during Margery’s lifetime and thereafter by the payment of 20 marks p.a. by Thornbury to Poultney. It seems certain that Margery was Thomas’s widow and that the manor of Ospringe had been settled on her in jointure. The Poultneys, whose wealth derived from the mercantile career of Sir John Poultney (d.1349), maintained connexions with London’s merchant community and this may explain the appointment of Thornbury’s brother, Richard, a London draper, as John Poultney’s attorney.9 E159/210, commissiones Mich. d; C140/31/20.

The acquisition of the manor of Ospringe established Thornbury among the Kentish gentry, and in the parliamentary subsidy of 1435 he was assessed as having lands worth £20 p.a. in the county.10 E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14d. Soon afterwards Thornbury purchased the freedom of Faversham, a member-port of the Cinque Port of Dover, thus escaping liability for future parlty. taxation: E179/234/4/87-88. Margery’s death soon afterwards provided him with a new opportunity to extend his landholdings well beyond Kent. By May 1438 he had married the widow of Richard, brother of Sir Hugh Halsham (d.1442). In that month Richard’s Wiltshire manor of Collingbourne Valence, worth at least £10 p.a., was settled on the new couple for the term of her life.11 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 161, 164; Wilts Feet of Fines (Wilts Rec. Soc. xli), 587; C139/178/53. This acquisition, albeit only for his wife’s lifetime, helps explain Thornbury’s appointment as escheator of Wiltshire and Hampshire, but he may have owed both the marriage and the appointment to a connexion with Cardinal Henry Beaufort, bishop of Winchester. The origin of his link with Beaufort is not known, but by Easter 1441 he was acting as bailiff of the bishop’s liberties in Hampshire and in the following year he was given custody of the cardinal’s manor of Bishop’s Waltham. He continued to hold the office of bailiff for long periods throughout the remainder of Beaufort’s episcopate and beyond.12 CFR, xvii. 54; Reg. Common Seal (Hants Rec. Ser. ii), 94, 222.

More responsibility followed and throughout the 1440s Thornbury proved himself a valuable servant of both the Crown and the cardinal. He remained active in the administration of all those counties in which he had interests. In 1441-2 he served as escheator of Essex and Hertfordshire, perhaps reflective of connexions with the knightly family in the latter county, and in November 1445 he was pricked as sheriff of Kent. In 1446, before the end of his shrievalty, he purchased a general pardon as bailiff of the liberties of Cardinal Beaufort.13 CFR, xvii. 206; xviii. 9; C67/39, m. 42. At the end of his term of office he acted alongside another of Beaufort’s leading servants in Kent, Richard Waller, and two London merchants in entering into a recognizance for 100 marks to Thomas Kirkby, the master of the rolls, and around the same time he and William Mareys, one of Beaufort’s most trusted servants (and ultimately executor of his will), were sent to Canterbury, perhaps to offer assistance in the disputed election of the bailiffs there.14 CCR, 1441-7, p. 450; G.L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 368; Canterbury Cath. Archs. Canterbury city recs., chamberlains’ accts. 1445-1506, CCA-CC-F/A/2, f. 7v.

Even after Beaufort’s death in April 1447 Thornbury maintained his connexion with the cardinal’s family, and he may have resumed a military career. In 1448 he took out letters of protection as travelling to Normandy in the retinue of the recently-appointed lieutenant there, the cardinal’s nephew, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset.15 DKR, xlviii. 379.

In July 1450 Thornbury took the opportunity to buy the general pardon offered in the wake of Cade’s rebellion, but it seems unlikely that he took any active part in the uprising.16 CPR, 1446-52, p. 364. He did not feature in the reorganization of the administration of Kent that occurred in the immediate aftermath of the revolt, but in 1452 he was appointed to two important commissions directed against Richard, duke of York, and his adherents in Kent. His nomination reflects his transition to the service of Queen Margaret of Anjou. Since Michaelmas 1451 or earlier he had been acting as her receiver of the important Kentish lordships of Milton and Marden (properties formerly belonging to Humphrey, duke of Gloucester).17 CPR, 1446-52, p. 577; SC6/893/17. His position as one of the queen’s leading servants in the county may have been instrumental in his election, on 19 Feb. 1453, to the Parliament summoned to Reading. The election, held at Canterbury, was witnessed by several men with connexions with him, including his neighbours, the Dreylonds of Faversham, Humphrey Eveas (who was married to Mareys’s sister and for whom he had acted as feoffee in the previous year) and several Rochester men.18 C219/16/2.

Although by Michaelmas 1454 Thornbury had relinquished the receivership of Milton and Marden in favour of the local Exchequer clerk, Richard Appultrefeld, his Lancastrian credentials led to him being summoned to the Great Council intended to meet at Leicester on 21 May 1455.19 DL29/75/1495; PPC, vi. 341. For the rest of the decade he continued to take a part in Kent’s administrative affairs. In June 1456 he was among those leading men of the shire who were ordered to attend upon the commissioners at Maidstone in the wake of John Percy’s rebellion; in the following November he was appointed escheator of Kent and Middlesex; and his final involvement in public affairs came in January 1460 when he was named to a commission of array to resist the Yorkist earls, whose forces had recently raided Sandwich.20 PPC, vi. 288; CFR, xix. 176; CPR, 1452-61, p. 563.

There is no evidence that Thornbury took an active part in the civil war of 1459-61, but little reason to doubt that his strong sympathies lay with Lancaster. Not only did he serve Queen Margaret and the Lancastrian Bishop Waynflete (under whom he retained his position as bailiff of the episcopal liberties in Hampshire), but he had a close family connexion with at least one other committed Lancastrian. His only child, a daughter named Philippa, had first married John Pympe of Nettlestead, a member of one of Kent’s most ancient gentry families, but on his death in 1454 she had made an even better match to the Essex knight, (Sir) William Tyrell II*, a staunch Lancastrian and servant of the Staffords.21 Archaeologia Cantiana, xiv. 4-5; xviii. 166, 168-9; PCC 32 Godyn (PROB11/5, f. 254v).

Almost nothing is known of Thornbury in the 1460s. Several matters conspired to diminish his standing. The political eclipse, albeit a temporary one, of Waynflete; what were probably perceived his own Lancastrian sympathies; and, perhaps most pertinently, the loss of the lands of his third wife with her death in 1460. He sued out general pardons in May 1462 and April 1469, but most of what is known concerns litigation.22 C67/45, m. 22; 46, m. 4. In 1465 he joined two others in suing their ward, Joan, daughter and heiress of Humphrey Eveas, for refusing the suitable marriage they had offered her. Her father had appointed Thornbury as one of his executors, and he and his co-defendants had then purchased the wardship from its royal grantees, John Roger III* and William Ludlow II*. They now seemingly found themselves out of pocket.23 CP40/778, rot. 44; 814, rot. 231; CFR, xix. 89-90. Soon after Thornbury was himself a defendant when, in a petition to the chancellor, the widow of John Hussey complained that he and another feoffee of her late husband had refused to convey a manor in Kent to her as they were bound to do under the terms of the feoffment. 24 C1/33/272-4.

Another matter much more directly concerned Thornbury’s interests towards the end of his life. The heirs of his second wife had become impatient that they were for so long being kept out of her manor of Ospringe. According to an inquisition post mortem, taken at Dartford on 8 Nov. 1472, they, the descendants of her brother Thomas St. Cler (d.1435) – namely Thomas’s daughter, Elizabeth Lovell, and his grandsons, William Gage and Christopher Harcourt – had entered the manor on 20 Feb. 1471, only to be expelled four days later by our MP.25 C140/42/46. The St. Cler heirs did not have much longer to wait. Thornbury made his will on 10 Apr. 1473. He made provision for his soul at the parish churches of Ospringe and Faversham, and asked for masses to be said in the latter for a year for his own soul and those of ‘suche frendes of myne as shall apper in a Table bifore hym [the priest] upon the auter’. He also provided for 200 masses to be said in churches throughout Kent and Essex and requested that his brother, William, then vicar of Faversham, keep his obit annually in that church. His extensive provision for his soul also included dirges and requiem masses to be sung at Boxley and Faversham abbeys and the Grey Friars in Canterbury. He specially requested that his daughter maintain his almsfolk in Faversham and she ‘have my soule in her remembraunce whiles she lyveth’. He made extensive gifts of plate, silver and household stuff to his brothers (Richard received a silver cup formerly belonging to Sir William Tyrell), his daughter and her children by John Pympe and a daughter, Jane, by Tyrell. Much of Thornbury’s plate had been placed in the safe-keeping of various religious houses at Boxley, Dartford and Faversham, and his executors would have to recover this before fulfilling the bequests. Thornbury left his property at ‘Syndon’ to his daughter with remainder to his granddaughter, Anne Pympe, and grandson, Reynold Pympe, while his inn in Faversham was settled on his eldest grandchild, John Pympe, and his heirs. Property at Hadley was bequeathed to his servant and ‘frende’, William Barbour, while other servants received gifts of household stuff, and his unnamed ‘cousin’, the vicar of Eastchurch, Kent, another bequest. Thornbury appointed his brother, William, and John Pympe as his executors. Writs of diem clausum extremum were issued on 23 Oct. 1473 and probate was granted on the following 16 Feb.26 PCC 14 Wattys (PROB11/6, ff. 91v-92v); CFR, xx. 160.

After her father’s death, Philippa married again into one of Kent’s leading families. Her third husband was Sir John Guildford†, son of Edward Guildford* and widower of one of the daughters of Cardinal Beaufort’s servant, Richard Waller.27 Vis. Essex (Harl. Soc. n.s. xiii), 111; C1/51/99-102.