WHARTON, Thomas

The Whartons were a numerous clan. Between 1407 and 1478 a dozen of their number attested Westmorland parliamentary elections, and another, Richard†, was returned for both the county and the borough of Appleby in the second decade of the fifteenth century. Its most prominent member was Henry Wharton, who served three terms as deputy sheriff in the county between 1411 and 1435, attested many elections between 1407 and 1442 and served briefly as a j.p. at the end of his career.4 PRO List ‘Sheriffs’, 150-1; C219/10/6-15/2; CPR, 1441-6, p. 480. In the subsidy returns he was assessed on £25 p.a., a significant income in the context of the far north. In the same returns Gilbert Wharton was assessed at £10 p.a. and they represented two branches: the one established at Wharton, the other at Kirkby Thore.5 E179/195/32. Both branches were closely connected with the Cliffords, the hereditary sheriffs of Westmorland. The manor of Wharton, where the main branch of the family had been established since the late thirteenth century, was held of that baronial family, and it was John, Lord Clifford, the hereditary sheriff, whom Henry served as deputy. Later, in the 1450s, John Wharton of Kirkby Thore (also a tenant of the Cliffords) was auditor to Lord John’s son and heir, Thomas.6 Nicolson and Burn, i. 558; CIPM, xxi. 348; Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. viii. 268.

Little flesh can be added to these basic bones of the family’s fifteenth-century history. No reliable pedigree can be drawn up, and it may be that there were two contemporary Thomas Whartons: the elder one, described as ‘of Orton’, appearing on the Westmorland gaol delivery panel in 1431 and serving on the jury three years later; the younger one, described as ‘of Nateby’ near Wharton, making his first appearance in Trinity term 1435 when he sued several yeomen of Swaledale in Yorkshire for killing two bullocks worth six marks at Hartley near Wharton.7 JUST3/70/6, m. 5d; 70/8, m. 3; CP40/698, rot. 39. It was probably another Thomas Wharton, described as ‘of Wharton’, who undertook to serve in France in the retinue of Thomas Warcop† in 1420: E101/49/36. If these references do refer to two men rather than one, it is safe to assume that it was the latter who was the MP. Further, since the Whartons of Wharton held property at Nateby, it is likely that the MP was Henry’s son and heir. His election to Parliament for Appleby in 1437 was probably the product of the family’s connexion with the Cliffords, lords of the borough. On 29 Sept. 1435 our MP had served on a jury to inquire into the lands of the new Lord Clifford’s grandmother; and it may also be significant here that the assembly of 1437 was the first in which the new lord, who had recently reached his majority, was summoned to the Lords.8 Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. viii. 278; C219/15/1: CIPM, xxiv. 393; CP, iii. 293.

It is not known when Henry Wharton died, but he last appears in the records early in 1444 and it was from about that date that Thomas began to play a more important part in local affairs. In 1448 he had status enough to be named to a commission of array in the county; between 1447 and 1455 he attested four parliamentary elections; and he sat on a gaol delivery jury in 1444 and 1446.9 CPR, 1446-52, p. 238; C219/15/4, 7; 16/2, 3; JUST3/70/16, 18. These activities leave little doubt that he was then the tenant of Wharton. He was certainly so by 1450 when he was described as ‘of Wharton, gentleman’ as a defendant, with four other Whartons, in an action concerning close-breaking at ‘Caltclowe’ (probably Catholes) in Sedburgh, a few miles to the south of Wharton. His tenure of the family estates also explains why, on 28 Sept. 1455, he was among the jurors at the inquisitions taken at Brougham and Penrith after the death of Thomas, Lord Clifford, on the Lancastrian side at the first battle of St. Albans.10 CP40/757, rots. 356d, 367; 758, rot. 240; C139/159/33.

This Clifford connexion is likely to have made Wharton sympathetic to Lancaster, but there is no evidence that he played any active part in the civil war of 1459-61. Indeed, his appointment to a commission of array by the new King in 1463 implies that he had not been with John, Lord Clifford, in the Wakefield and Towton campaigns. Helpful to him here may have been his probable kinship with his important near neighbours, the Musgraves, who had shifted their allegiance from Clifford to Neville.11 CPR, 1461-7, p. 280. However, there is one piece of evidence that indirectly implies Wharton’s hostility to the new regime, or at least to the followers of the Nevilles. In Michaelmas term 1465 Margaret, widow of Thomas Thornburgh, appealed a large number of Whartons, including our MP, for the murder of her husband. The Thornburghs were closely associated with the Nevilles, and it is a fair speculation that the rivalry between the two families arose from the civil war.12 KB27/818, rot. 41.

Little else is known of Wharton. In 1466 he had a suit pending against various yeomen for close-breaking at Tebay.13 CP40/819, rot. 171d; C219/17/3. He may have been alive as late as 7 Jan. 1478 when a namesake, described as an esquire, headed the attestors to the county parliamentary election, but this was very probably his successor at Wharton. The family later achieved great advancement. Another Thomas†, who was probably our MP’s grandson and, like him, MP for Appleby, enjoyed a brilliant career, first in the service of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, and then in that of Henry VIII. In 1544 he was raised to the peerage as Lord Wharton, an advancement unimaginable to the medieval Whartons.14 The Commons 1509-58, iii. 597-9; CP, xii (2), 594-5; A. Emery, Greater Med. Houses, i. 255-6.