TRESHAM, Thomas

Like his father, Tresham pursued a career of self-aggrandisement which led to a bloody end.8 Unless otherwise indicated, this biography is based on J.S. Roskell, ‘Wm. Tresham’, Northants. Past and Present, ii. 189-203, and ‘Sir Thomas Tresham’, ibid. 313-23. A leading adherent of Henry VI, his political loyalties, mixed with resentment and self-interest, meant that he was ultimately unable to accept Edward IV as King. Tresham was brought up in Henry VI’s service from childhood, so it is possible that he spent his youth as a page of the Household. In 1443, while he was still short of his majority, he and his father were appointed joint stewards for life of all the duchy of Lancaster estates in Northamptonshire (except the lands of the honour of Leicestershire) and three neighbouring counties. William Tresham undoubtedly made use of his position as a trusted and useful servant of the Crown to have his son associated with him in both this and future grants. Later, in February 1445, the King settled an annuity of £40 drawn from the issues of the royal manor of King’s Cliffe in Northamptonshire upon the two men for life in survivorship, a perquisite which William had previously enjoyed alone. Early in the following year the Treshams obtained on similar terms another annuity of £40, this time charged to the receiver-general of the duchy of Lancaster and backdated to the previous Michaelmas.

Shortly after this last grant, Thomas joined his father on the Huntingdonshire bench, and by November 1446 he was receiving robes as one of the esquires of the King’s hall and chamber, a position he would appear to have held until he became an usher of the Chamber. Both Thomas’s membership of the Household and his influential father must have helped him to gain election to his first Parliament as one of the knights of the shire in Buckinghamshire. While William Tresham certainly held lands in Buckinghamshire, his son was, strictly speaking, probably not qualified to represent either that county or Huntingdonshire, the county for which he sat in the following two Parliaments. Despite the residential qualification demanded by statute in 1445, the younger Tresham probably continued to live in Northamptonshire during the late 1440s.

The date of Thomas’s marriage is unknown but it is possible that it took place not long after his first Parliament, since his wife’s first husband, Edmund Lenthall, had died in April 1447. The Treshams were well placed to hear about Margaret’s availability, for Lenthall had also served in the Household. No doubt William Tresham used his influence to secure the daughter of Lord Zouche for his son, despite the fact that the King had granted the marriage of the young widow to John Montgomery*, a royal retainer.9 PROME, xi. 499-501; E101/409/16; CPR, 1446-52, p. 37. Montgomery’s grant had given him the option of marrying Margaret himself, ‘if she will’; evidently she did not. Through Margaret, apparently his first and only wife,10 HP Biogs. ed. Wedgwood and Holt, 618-19, erroneously (since Margaret outlived him) states that Thomas later married Alice, da. of Thomas Mulsho*, but in fact Alice married William Tresham’s younger son, Henry: C139/181/66. Thomas gained an interest in the south of England, for Lenthall (a descendant of Richard, earl of Arundel, executed by Richard II in 1397) had given her a life interest in several manors and other properties in Sussex. Thomas promised to settle lands worth £100 p.a. upon his wife and 300 marks p.a. upon any male heir he had by her, but apart from her Lenthall dower and jointure what she brought to the marriage is unclear.11 CIPM, xxvi. 577-8; C139/136/42; C141/4/43; C145/321/54.

The Parliaments of 1449 and 1449-50 must have occupied much of Thomas’s attention, given that he spent a total of 111 days in attending or travelling to and from the first of these assemblies alone.12 E13/145A, rot. 39 (suit of 1452 in which Tresham sought his expenses, totalling £22 4s. as an MP in the Parl. of Feb. 1449 from the sheriff of Cambs. and Hunts., Sir Walter Trumpington). At the same time he was also kept busy with his duties as the escheator in Northamptonshire and Rutland for 1448-9. Both of these Parliaments proved difficult ones for an unpopular government. In the second his father was obliged, as Speaker, to preside over the impeachment of the King’s chief minister, the duke of Suffolk. Just before the final session of the same Parliament opened at Leicester in the late spring of 1450, Thomas was appointed to a commission of oyer and terminer to investigate the treasons of John Harris. Harris, a ‘shipman’ from Yorkshire, had wielded a threshing flail in front of the King and his lords as they journeyed to Leicester, to demonstrate how Richard, duke of York, foremost among the opponents of the government and Court, would thrash the ‘traitors’ attending the Parliament. (Harris paid the price for his rash action, for he was subsequently arrested, imprisoned and condemned to death.) During the same Leicester session the assembly passed an Act of Resumption, as a result of which the Treshams lost their King’s Cliffe annuity. William was also obliged to surrender another annuity of £20 which he had held alone.

Parliament broke up at the beginning of June upon hearing the news of Cade’s rebellion and the insurgents’ attack on London. Later that year the duke of York returned from Ireland and on 23 Sept., as he travelled south towards London, William and Thomas set out from Sywell, apparently to meet him. Shortly after leaving home, however, they were ambushed at Thorplands near Moulton, on the road to Northampton. William was either killed outright or died soon afterwards, and Thomas was wounded; both men were robbed. During the Parliament of 1450, Thomas’s widowed mother, Isabel, presented a petition seeking the right to act by means of a criminal appeal against the killers, whom she identified as Simon Norwich, a Rutland esquire, and a band of men from Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Wales. Yet they were not indicted until October 1452 and it is unlikely that they were ever brought to justice. Norwich was the common-law heir of the Holts, the family whose valuable estates in Northamptonshire William Tresham had acquired in the later 1420s. There is little doubt that the crime arose from his grievances about the loss of these estates, not least because the lands in question were the subject of arbitration between him and Thomas a few months before he was indicted.13 Add. Ch. 62431. According to one chronicler, the Treshams’ assailants were ‘gentes domini Gray de Ruthyn’: he was probably correct, since Norwich was indeed a follower of Edmund, Lord Grey, and it is very likely that the Welshmen implicated in the murder came from the Grey estates there.14 KB9/94/1/10, 22; PROME, xii. 175-9; Add. Ch. 21555; C140/27/16; KB27/769, rot. 51d; 770, rot. 76; Grey of Ruthin Valor ed. Jack, 74n. Even if Norwich had exploited his place in Grey’s service to pursue a private quarrel, it is possible that he enjoyed at least the passive support of that lord. On the other hand, the victim’s widow did not mention Grey in her petition, and his son and that peer, by then earl of Kent, were to be associated with each other in 1470, as feoffees for a settlement made for the marriage of Anne, daughter of William Feldyng*, to Grey’s cousin, Humphrey Grey.15 HMC Lothian, 55; CIPM Hen. VII, ii. 355. R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 306, 644, claims that Grey was engaged in a personal feud with the Treshams, but also states that there is no sign that he was privy to the crime. The elder Tresham had certainly not enjoyed universal popularity during his lifetime. A London chronicler who recorded his fate referred to him as ‘an extorcioner’, probably a reference to the methods by which he acquired some of his estates.16 C.L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 372. But why had the Treshams set out to meet York?17 Assuming that this was their intention: in her petition, Isabel claimed that it was, but was she seeking sympathy from an anti-Court Parl.? Perhaps William’s main motive, despite his close associations with the Court, was to ingratiate himself with the duke, now an important political figure.

A month after the ambush at Thorplands, Thomas had recovered sufficiently from his wounds to participate in the Northamptonshire election to the Parliament of 1450, but he was not returned in his father’s place, even though his uncle, William Vaux*, was then sheriff of the county. Assuming he had wanted to re-enter the Commons, his failure to gain election was probably due to the political situation in which the Parliament was called, for the government was extremely unpopular, a situation that York was able to exploit to his own advantage. He is said to have ‘laboured’ to ensure the return of men who sympathized with his views and, once proceedings had opened, his councillor, Sir William Oldhall*, was elected Speaker. An Act of Resumption was passed and the Commons petitioned for the removal of the duke of Somerset and other prominent courtiers from the King’s presence. Tresham was not one of those named, but earlier he had been among the courtiers indicted at Rochester in the aftermath of Cade’s rebellion.18 PROME, xii. 184-6; Kingsford, 365.

Upon succeeding his father, Tresham fell out with his mother, if only temporarily, over what she should have of William Tresham’s goods. The matter was referred to arbitration, and on 22 Oct. 1451 Isabel’s brother, William Vaux, and Thomas Salisbury, archdeacon of Bedford, made an award between her and her son, according to the terms of which she was to receive 500 marks.19 Add. 39828, f. 14. Not ‘1,000 marks’ as in Roskell, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham’, 269. In the following month Tresham was pricked as sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire and during his year in office he also became a j.p. in Northamptonshire. He was probably chosen as sheriff because the government wanted a man it could trust, since there were outbreaks of unrest in Cambridgeshire during the early 1450s. The King was prepared to ease the burden of office for his servant, for the Exchequer was ordered to allow Tresham £50 of his charge.20 E159/229, brevia Easter rot. 9d; KB9/7/1/4, 10. At the end of 1452 Tresham was made a member of a Northamptonshire commission appointed to raise loans to assist the earl of Shrewsbury’s army in France. By 1453 at the latest he had also become chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster lands enfeoffed to the use of the King’s will, although he may have succeeded to this position directly after his father’s death. In March that year he was elected, for the first time as a knight of the shire for Northamptonshire, to the Parliament which opened at Reading. This assembly, shocked by the increasingly hopeless situation in France, was as compliant as any of Henry VI’s reign and made generous grants of taxation to the King. The other knight of the shire for Northamptonshire was William Catesby* (who had sat for the county alongside William Tresham in the Parliament of 1449), for whom Tresham was a feoffee of a settlement made for Catesby’s second marriage while the Parliament was taking place.21 E40/4369.

Soon after the close of the second parliamentary session in July 1453, Tresham was placed upon a commission of oyer and terminer instructed to inquire into unrest occurring in the north riding of Yorkshire. In August a far more serious crisis developed, for the King suffered his first bout of insanity and Queen Margaret began to compete with York for control of the government. The queen’s fears of the duke’s intentions are underlined by a report of January 1454. This alleged that Tresham and other officers of the Household were drawing up a bill seeking to have a garrison established at Windsor to guard the King and his infant son, which they were planning to present to the Lords when Parliament reopened in February.22 Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 296. The bill does not seem to have made any progress, but this was no doubt because the following month York had become Protector, a position he held until Christmas, when the King came to his senses. A few days after the royal recovery, Tresham, Sir Richard Roos and John Lovet obtained the farm of the subsidy and alnage of cloth in Northamptonshire and Rutland for 20 years.23 But it was re-granted to John Hampton II* and William Essex* just over a year later.

Early in 1455 Tresham travelled abroad on royal business. On 22 Mar. a privy seal warrant was issued on behalf of him and two companions, Thomas, Lord Roos, and John Butler, brother of the earl of Wiltshire, prior to their crossing the Channel to Calais, ‘for certayne grete and chargeable matiers whiche they by oure commaundement shal haue to doo and execute there’.24 E404/70/2/48. The garrison at Calais was the most important standing military force available to the Crown and the town played a significant role in the civil wars of the second half of the 15th century. Tresham’s mission, which perhaps involved delivering a message to the duke of Somerset, who had recently replaced York as captain of Calais, was obviously an important one, since the warrant directed that the messengers should suffer no delay in receiving their wages. He was probably back in England by the following 14 May, when he was appointed to raise loans for the defence of the town. A week later a great council to which Tresham had been summoned was overtaken by events.25 PPC, vi. 341. He was almost certainly present at the first battle of St. Albans, fought on 22 May, a day after the council had been supposed to meet. A contemporary account identified him as one of the ‘solecytouriz and causerys’ of the battle, although he was not made a scapegoat like two other Lancastrian servants, Thomas Thorpe* and William Joseph. Not surprisingly, he was not elected to the Parliament which met in the wake of the Yorkist victory, although he did attest the election for Northamptonshire and retained his place as a j.p. there and in Huntingdonshire. In February 1456, however, the King regained control of affairs, and in the following year Tresham served on commissions appointed to raise archers and array soldiers in Northamptonshire and Huntingdonshire and was pricked as sheriff of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire for the second time. During his shrievalty he found time for his own affairs, purchasing a royal pardon in January 1458,26 C67/42, m. 1. and, in the following August, enfeoffing his estates upon his father-in-law Lord Zouche and others, to hold during his wife’s lifetime with remainder to John, his heir by her.27 Add. Ch. 62433; CIMisc. viii. 457.

Before this term as sheriff came to an end, Tresham was appointed to another shrievalty, that of Surrey and Sussex, a part of the country in which he had an interest in so far as his wife’s dower properties from her previous marriage lay in the latter of those two counties.28 C141/4/43. He was still sheriff of Surrey and Sussex when, shortly before the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford, the Crown summoned Parliament to meet at Coventry on 20 Nov. 1459, an assembly to which he and many other adherents of the Lancastrian regime gained election. The Parliament marked the zenith of Tresham’s career. When it opened he was elected Speaker of the Commons, and as such he presided over the wholesale Act of Attainder convicting York and his allies. Although this was the main business of the assembly, time was also found to change the feoffees of those duchy of Lancaster estates set aside to the use of Henry VI’s will (of which he was possibly still chancellor), among whom he was now included. A day after the dissolution of Parliament he was placed on a commission of array intended to counteract any Yorkist unrest in Northamptonshire.

As a regime loyalist, Tresham profited from the suppression of the King’s enemies. In February 1460 he was granted an annuity of £40 for life from lands and rents at Stamford and Grantham in Lincolnshire forfeited by the duke of York, as a reward for his services as Speaker in the Coventry Parliament and in recompense for certain losses he had incurred on the King’s behalf. In the months following this grant, he was included on several commissions of oyer and terminer and arrest appointed to deal with Yorkist supporters in England and Wales. In response to one of these commissions, he and other prominent Lancastrians, among them Sir John Chalers*, (Sir) Edmund Hampden* and Edward Langford*, forced their way onto the manor belonging to the Yorkist Sir Robert Harcourt* at Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire and took him prisoner. They held him captive for seven weeks, until the Yorkists defeated a royal army at Northampton on 10 July, so changing the political situation completely.29 KB27/798, rot. 63. In the following September Tresham was removed from the Northamptonshire bench, and when Parliament met in October it reversed the attainders implemented by the Coventry assembly. It also reconstituted the committee of feoffees who held the duchy of Lancaster lands to the use of Henry VI’s will, from which Tresham was now excluded. In the same autumn the liberated Harcourt brought a plea of trespass in the court of King’s bench against those who had allegedly held him captive. Sheriffs were ordered to arrest them and bring them to court the following term, but the continued disruption of the civil war effectively ensured the postponement of legal proceedings. After Edward IV’s accession, however, Harcourt took further legal action, this time in the court of common pleas, against Langford and Chalers’s son-in-law, John More.30 Ibid.; CP40/808, rots. 188, 355.

It is not certain that Tresham was at Northampton, even though the battle occurred on his doorstep; and there is no record of his whereabouts between mid 1460 and the following January, when he joined Margaret of Anjou at Durham. At Durham he was one of those who undertook to repay a sum of 400 marks that the queen extorted from the prior and convent in the city (a ‘loan’ still outstanding 13 years later). He then accompanied her army on its march south, and on 17 Feb. he received a knighthood from the young prince of Wales on the field of the second battle of St. Albans. It was probably immediately in the wake of the battle that he became controller of Henry VI’s household, in place of (Sir) Thomas Charlton*, one of the Yorkists whom the victorious Lancastrians had taken prisoner on the field.31 CSP Ven. 1202-1509, no. 370. Everything changed when Edward IV seized the throne in the following month. The new government put a price of £100 on the heads of Tresham and 21 other Lancastrian notables then at large in the north of England. On 12 Mar. King Henry (liberated at St. Albans), ordered Tresham, Sir William Plumpton* and Sir Richard Tunstall† to array the liege men of the forest or demesne of Knaresborough against the enemy.32 Plumpton Corresp. (Cam. Soc. iv), p. lxvii. At the end of the month Tresham fought at Towton and was taken prisoner. Thanks to Edward’s magnanimity, his life was spared, but he was attainted of high treason and his estates, most (if not all) of which he had inherited from his father, were confiscated. The Crown also seized those lands in which Edmund Lenthall had given Margaret Tresham a life interest. Left with no means of support, she was obliged to petition Edward, who ordered the Exchequer to pay her a mere 20 marks.33 E404/72/1/27; E403/823, m. 6. The lands Margaret had from Lenthall (and the jointure given her by Tresham) were not, of course, subject to forfeiture, but the common law did not allow possession to a woman in her situation until after the death (or restoration) of her attainted husband: J.R. Lander, ‘Attainder and Forfeiture’, Historical Jnl. iv. 119.

Immediately prior to his attainder, Tresham had possessed extensive holdings in Northamptonshire, including manors at Sywell, Hannington, Brampton, Great Houghton, Stanwick, Ringstead, Rushton, Lyveden, Hazelbeech and Wolaston.34 C145/321/54. In north Buckinghamshire his properties had included manors at Broughton Parva and Wavendon and he had also held lands in Leicestershire, Rutland, Bedfordshire and Middlesex. Among those granted Tresham lands after the attainder was the usher of the chamber, John Don, who in 1462 received the bulk of those in Northamptonshire, although not the manors at Sywell and Lyveden. These went to Walter Devereux II*, now Lord Ferrers, who also acquired Broughton. The Buckinghamshire manor of Wavendon, along with burgages that Tresham had held in Northampton, were given first to the King’s uncle, William Neville, earl of Kent, and then to the duke of Clarence. Later, at the end of 1464, Ralph Hastings†, an esquire for the body, obtained several small parcels of land and tenements that Tresham had held in Buckinghamshire and Northamptonshire.

Given Tresham’s record of service to Henry VI, the new King had every reason to view him with disfavour and his rehabilitation was a slow and costly process. Ultimately he came to resent this and rebelled against Edward, who might possibly have secured his loyalty, had he taken the risk of showing him more generosity. It was not as if Tresham lacked connexions that could vouch for him at Court. Besides his wife’s family he also had a potentially useful stepfather in Sir William Pecche*, a prominent Yorkist Household man whom his mother had married after the death of her first husband. He had, however, to wait until 1464 to receive a general pardon of all offences for which he had been attainted, after which (if not before), he set about the expensive business of buying back his lands from the King’s grantees. In the spring of 1465, for example, he paid an unspecified sum for Sywell, Lyveden and Broughton to Lord Ferrers, who conveyed the manors to him and his nominees on 13 May that year. The nominees included leading Yorkists like the chancellor and archbishop-elect of York, George Neville, and William, Lord Hastings, and the former Lancastrian who was about to become Edward IV’s father-in-law, Richard Wydeville, Lord Rivers.35 Worcs. RO, Hampton (Pakington) mss, 705:349/12946/495218-20. Twelve days later, the Crown assigned the MP’s former property in Northampton to Neville, Hastings, Rivers, Thomas Hunt*, mayor of Northampton, and Thomas Merton, a servant of the Tresham family, as part of a complicated arrangement allowing Tresham to use the collateral of his forfeited lands to raise the capital necessary to repurchase them from their royal grantees. On the following 14 July Hunt’s fellow assignees farmed the property at a nominal rent to him and three other prominent townsmen, Thomas Braunfeld*, William Hayrofe* and Thomas Saxby. They were to hold it for a term of five years from the following Easter, a lease that would terminate when Tresham discharged the farmers of the sum of 200 marks they had advanced to him.36 C145/321/3; CPR, 1461-7, p. 470; Add. Ch. 22374. Politic though his choice of nominees undoubtedly was, Tresham seems to have formed a good relationship with George Neville. In August 1468, for example, one of the MP’s servants, Ralph Sybill, went to the Exchequer on that ecclesiastic’s behalf, to receive an assignment made to Neville for his attendance at Council meetings.37 E403/840, m. 16.

Nearly five years after Towton Tresham had gained enough political credit to rejoin the bench in Northamptonshire, and early in 1467 the King appointed him to arbitrate in a minor dispute. In the following June he was elected as a knight of the shire for the county. During the first session of the Parliament of 1467 he submitted a petition, addressed to the King, seeking formal recognition of his de facto recovery of much of his lands. He asserted that he had not been at the battle of Wakefield in December 1460, the Lancastrian victory in which the King’s father, the duke of York, had lost his life. Furthermore, he had acknowledged Edward’s ‘title roiall’ and, unlike other Lancastrians, he had neither borne arms against him since the battle of Towton nor left the kingdom to join the exiles abroad. In mitigation of his past service to Henry VI, he said that he had grown up in that King’s service and, as a ‘menyall servant of Household’, could not have avoided Towton. He claimed that he had spent over 2,000 marks buying back properties he had forfeited but, since his title to them was unsure, he could neither offer them as security for loans nor attract a wife for his heir. (This was not, however, strictly true, since he had managed to raise 600 marks by mortgaging his manor at Broughton to William Staveley† in 1466.) He concluded by asking for a formal restoration of his lands, except those Henry VI had granted him.38 PROME, xiii. 350-2. Although the petition achieved royal assent Tresham still did not regain all he had lost, for between Parliament’s second and third sessions John Don was able to secure a grant in tail-male of the former Tresham manors of Rushton, Stanwick, Ringstead, Great Brampton and Great Houghton in Northamptonshire. He had, however, recovered some influence, because he was one of those chosen by the Commons to serve on a parliamentary commission of oyer and terminer set up to investigate corruption at the Mint.

Despite the granting of his petition Tresham remained in an indebted state and in August 1468 he was obliged to release Broughton to Staveley. Taking into account the cost of recovering his lands, some of which still remained outside his grasp, and his background as a former servant of Henry VI, it is scarcely surprising that he became embroiled (or was suspected of having become embroiled) in the disaffection against Edward IV in the late 1460s. In July 1468 he took the precaution of taking out a pardon, but in the following November John de Vere, earl of Oxford, was arrested. Oxford soon confessed to treason, implicating a number of other prominent men in the process, including Tresham, who joined the earl in the Tower at the end of the month. In December Robert Palmer, the escheator in Northamptonshire, entered the Tresham property at Sywell and Rushton (where the MP evidently still had a house, despite the grant to Don),39 Although he may recently have bought back the manor of Rushton from Don. and took away numerous goods and chattels. Word soon went around that Tresham’s ‘livelihood... is given away by the King’. Yet he was not, as hitherto believed,40 By Roskell, ‘Sir Thomas Tresham’, 274. incarcerated for the rest of Edward IV’s first reign, since in November 1468 he was at liberty to file three bills in the Exchequer against Palmer for making these seizures.41 E13/155, rots. 60, 61, 64. Furthermore, he maintained links with the Yorkist establishment until just months before Edward lost his throne at the Readeption. As already mentioned, in June 1470 he was a feoffee of a settlement made for the marriage of Anne Feldyng to the Yorkist earl of Kent’s cousin, Humphrey Grey, and he was appointed a feoffee of the will that another Yorkist peer, John, Lord Dynham, made in the following month.42 Cornw. RO, Arundell mss, AR/37/31.

The actions that Tresham brought against Palmer are worth attention for the glimpse of his lifestyle that they provide. At Rushton he claimed to have lost numerous fish (bream, trench and other varieties) from his ponds, along with livestock and household goods. From Sywell he alleged that Palmer had taken lengths of cloth, curtains and hangings, beds, utensils and food, as well as hunting paraphernalia (‘hawkes gloves’, ‘Goshawk belles’ and ‘grehownde colors’) and various books and muniments. The books included a missal, a book of the Blessed Virgin Mary (no doubt a devotional work) and a large register containing all the evidences relating to the Tresham properties. Among the deeds were three charters, one of which exemplified the Act passed in his favour in the Parliament of 1467. Of the others, the first was a deed from the abbot of Peterborough appointing Tresham steward of that abbey; the second purported to be a charter of 664 AD, by which Wulfhere, king of Mercia, made extensive endowments to the monks.43 The charter of 664 was in fact a forgery of the late 11th or early 12th cent. It seems likely that Tresham had held a copy, of which many were made, rather than the original forgery itself: Carts. and Regs. Peterborough Abbey (Northants. Rec. Soc. xxviii), p. xi. Also taken were a series of obligations which, presumably, had been entrusted to Tresham for safekeeping. Dated 1458, they were bonds by which his father-in-law Lord Zouche and Ralph Beaufo* bound themselves to the Lincolnshire esquires, Richard and John Pynchebek. Besides the evidence of the Exchequer plea rolls, there survives an undated paper probably connected with the suits against Palmer. A list headed ‘This ys parte of the Stuffe that the Eschetor hadde from Sywell of Sir Thomas Treshams’, it was perhaps drawn up by one of Tresham’s servants.44 Add. 39828, f. 19. The loss of the Wulfhere charter and the Pynchebek obligations formed the matter of one of the Exchequer bills. Tresham won this case, but the other two suits had still not reached any conclusion in late 1470.

By this stage, however, Henry VI was again on the throne and Tresham soon began to profit from the Readeption. On 5 Nov. that year he received a grant of the keeping of the honours of Peverell, Boulogne and Haughley, along with the castle and honour of Huntingdon, for seven years at an annual farm of £6 6s. 8d. (He had probably solicited this grant, for these properties had once belonged to John Hastings, earl of Pembroke (d.1389), an ancestor of his wife.) More importantly, the Readeption Parliament annulled the attainders of Edward IV’s reign, thereby at last enabling him fully to recover all his estates. It is conceivable that he himself was a Member, perhaps even the otherwise unidentified Speaker, of this assembly, for which most of the returns are lost and which does not feature in the Parliament rolls, most likely as a knight of the shire for his home county of Northamptonshire. An Exchequer Chamber case of 1485 concerning MPs returned to the Commons while still subject to a previous Act of Attainder raises this possibility. The Year Book record of the case shows (Sir) William Hussey*, cj.KB, referring to a Parliament, postdating Tresham’s attainder in 1461, in which it had been intended to elect the subject of this biography as Speaker. While the assembly is unspecified, an earlier contribution to the debate does refer to that of 1470-1. Perhaps the Readeption government had wanted him as Speaker only to receive legal advice that he could not preside until the formal reversal in Parliament of his attainder, notwithstanding his general pardon of 1464 and petition of 1467. Yet, even if this interpretation is correct, there is no way of telling whether he did end up holding the office again in the Parliament of 1470-1. On the other hand, Hussey’s exact remark

que Sir John Markam disoit au Roy Edw. 4, que il ne poit arrestre un home sur suspeceon de treason ou felony, sicome ascuns e son liges puissent, pur ceo que s’ il face tort, l’ party ne poit aver accion; come fuist in le cas Sir Thomas Thressam, qui fuit attaint d’ treason, et fuit intende que il sera Speaker del’ Parlement

might suggest that he was referring to a time when Edward IV, rather than the restored Henry VI, was on the throne. If so, it is even possible that the Commons in the Parliament of 1467 (the last in which Tresham certainly sat) had attempted to elect him as Speaker although in the event it was the time-serving bureaucrat, John Say II*, a much more acceptable nominee for the Yorkist Crown, who took up the office.45 Year Bks. Mich. 1 Hen. VII, pl. 5, f. 4b.

Whether a Member of the Readeption Parliament or not, Tresham remained true to old loyalties and took up arms to resist Edward IV when the deposed King returned to England in March 1471. In the following month, he joined Queen Margaret and her son following their landing at Weymouth, and he was among those named as notorious traitors and rebels in proclamations issued in Edward’s name on 27 Apr. A week later, he was at Tewkesbury and, having survived the battle, joined other Lancastrians in seeking sanctuary in the church of the local abbey. It is said that the fugitives only escaped immediate death inside the church because a priest carrying the sacrament admonished their pursuers. In order to remove them without violating the sanctuary, Edward offered them a pardon, but two days later they were tried before the dukes of Gloucester and Norfolk, respectively the constable and marshal of England. The duke of Somerset, Tresham and others were condemned and taken to the market place in Tewkesbury for immediate execution. Spared the gruesome degradations usually meted out to traitors, they were simply beheaded. Among those executed was Henry Tresham, Thomas’s younger brother.46 J. Warkworth, Chron. Reign Edw. IV (Cam. Soc. x), 18-19; John Benet’s Chron. (Cam. Miscellany, xxiv), 233. Henry founded a cadet branch of his fam. at Newton-in-the-Willows, Northants.: Vis. Northants. ed. Metcalfe, 50, 201; E150/696/2; N. Pevsner, Buildings of Eng.: Northants. 397. Also executed was a Thomas Tresham, clerk of ‘Mastar Gogh, squire’, but his connexion, if any, with the MP is unknown: Kingsford, 378. Most of the dead were buried in the abbey church or precinct; Thomas was placed in the church ‘byfore a pilar betwyxt ye awtar of seint james and seint nicolas’. His end was perhaps inevitable; above all a courtier, he could not adjust to political changes in the adept manner of a bureaucrat like John Say.

Tresham was posthumously attainted in the Parliament of 1472. The profits arising from the custody of his lands and heir were at first assigned as a source of revenue for Edward IV’s household,47 CPR, 1467-77, p. 478. but in June 1475 his lands were granted to the queen, the bishop of Salisbury and William Dudley, dean of the Household chapel. This transaction was probably connected with the King’s will of the same month, in which Edward directed that all the issues of the Tresham forfeitures should go towards the building of the new Garter chapel at Windsor. Two inquisitions subsequently taken in Northamptonshire in 1477 and 1480 found that Tresham’s properties in that county alone were worth just under £150 p.a.48 CIMisc. viii. 457-8. Despite his attainder, his widow was not left bereft of all support after his death, for by the end of 1475 she had married a third husband, the royal servant, William Sayer, to whom the King granted the Tresham manor at Sywell for life in 1480. When she died, a few months after Sayer, in January 1484, she was also in possession of the Sussex properties in which Edmund Lenthall had left her a life interest.49 Ibid.; VCH Northants. iv. 134; C141/4/43; Logge Reg. of PCC Wills ed. Boatwright, Habberjam and Hammond, 220-1. After Sayer’s death Ric. III granted Sywell to Edward Brampton for his good services against the rebels of 1483. Sometime between his father’s death and 1485, Tresham’s heir, John, married Elizabeth, daughter of Sir James Haryngton†. Ironically, Haryngton, a firm Yorkist, was attainted in the first Parliament of Henry VII’s reign, the same assembly which restored the Tresham lands to his son-in-law. Described by a historian of the later Treshams as ‘merely a country squire’, John opted for a quiet life, so avoiding the violent end suffered by both his father and grandfather. His sister, Isabel, married Henry Vere of Great Addington, who was in possession of the Tresham manor of Sywell when he died in 1493.50 Five Northants. Families 1540-1640 (Northants. Rec. Soc. xix), 67; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 997. John may also have had a brother, a namesake of the MP: CPR, 1494-1509, p. 474.