WESENHAM, Thomas

The Wesenham family owed its position in landed society to Thomas’s great-grandfather, John Wesenham. An influential merchant, wool customer and financier of Edward III’s reign,8 The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 811; Finance and Trade under Edw. III ed. Unwin, 208, 216, 264. John bought the wardship of Agnes Bruce and her three younger sisters from Simon de Islip at about the time of the latter’s elevation to the see of Canterbury in the late 1340s. The girls, descended from Robert Bruce, King of Scotland, were the daughters of John Bruce (d.1346) and the coheiresses of their brother, Bernard, who had died in his early infancy shortly after their father. In about 1353 John Wesenham arranged the marriage of Agnes to his son, Hugh, having placed her sisters into nunneries in order to secure all of the Bruce inheritance in Rutland and Huntingdonshire for his own family. A few years later, however, the second sister, Joan, escaped from Nuneaton priory and married Nicholas Green, a gentleman from Isham, Northamptonshire, whereupon she and Green claimed a share of the inheritance, consisting of the manor of Exton in Rutland and the manor and advowson of Conington in Huntingdonshire. The Wesenhams would not accept the findings of inquisitions subsequently held in these counties, which found that she and Agnes, but not their younger sisters, Elizabeth and Helen, who had already professed as nuns, were the heirs of the Bruce lands. The matter came before the council sitting in Chancery in 1359, during which hearing the Wesenhams asserted that Joan had also fully professed as a nun before her flight, thereby invalidating her claims and her marriage. Yet the council upheld Green’s claims to the contrary and a partition took place a few weeks later, whereby Agnes and Joan each received a moiety of the two manors and the right to present to Conington church at every other turn.9 VCH Rutland, ii. 128-9; VCH Hunts. iii. 146-8; CIPM, x. 484; CCR, 1354-60, pp. 549-60, 667-70. The partition arrangements, including the construction of a new doorway at Conington, were no doubt inconvenient to both sides. Probably by mutual agreement, the Greens came to own the whole of the manor of Exton and the Wesenhams all of Conington (which in due course descended to the MP), before the end of the century, although the Greens continued to share the advowson in the Huntingdonshire parish.10 CIPM, x. 484; CFR, xi. 92 (shows that Agnes had no interest in Exton at her death); VCH Hunts. iii. 147. In The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 710; iii. 638, it is incorrectly stated that the partition awarded Agnes and her husband the whole manor and advowson of Conington, and that the manor descended to Joan’s grandson, John Culpepper.

Thomas was born in the late 1380s at Bexwell in Norfolk, where his father Robert, Hugh Wesenham’s son and heir by Agnes, held property and resided before he succeeded to the manor at Conington.11 F. Blomefield, Norf. vii. 306. Robert owned serfs in west Norfolk, suggesting that he had manorial rights there: CPR, 1422-9, p. 202. At the time Robert had yet to come into his own, for Agnes’s second husband, Robert Lovetot†, had outlived her and held the Wesenham property at Conington by the courtesy of England until his death in 1393.12 VCH Hunts. ii. 147-8; CIPM, xvii. 375; CFR, xi. 92. Robert Wesenham did not enjoy his inheritance for long, however, since he himself died seven years later.13 CIPM, xviii. 1. A month after Robert’s death, the King’s clerk, John Elvet, acquired Thomas’s wardship, only subsequently to relinquish it to John Wynter†.14 CPR, 1399-1401, p. 333; CIPM, xix. 536-7. It is unclear how long the wardship remained in Elvet’s hands, and it is impossible to tell whether the clerk had any role in directing his ward towards a career in the Household. Thomas had come of age by September 1409, when an inquisition to prove his age was held in the county of his birth, and in the following month the Crown ordered the escheator in Huntingdonshire to deliver seisin of the Wesenham lands to him.15 CIPM, xix. 668; CCR, 1409-13, p. 11.

Three years later, an assessment of Thomas’s property at Conington valued it at only £12 p.a.,16 Feudal Aids, vi. 464. probably an inaccurate rating, since it was valued at £21 p.a. half a century earlier and at £25 p.a. in the late fifteenth century.17 The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 638; C140/64/71. It appears that Thomas, styled ‘of Bexwell’ in 1417,18 CCR, 1413-19, p. 432. succeeded to his father’s holdings in Norfolk as well, only subsequently to sell some (if not all) of these properties to John Bekyswell, an alien from Flanders.19 CCR, 1422-9, p. 202; CFR, xvi. 321-3. He would, however, assert a claim to other lands in the later 1420s, when he and another descendant of the Bruce family, John Culpepper*, sued Robert Dabrichecourt and his wife for former Bruce properties in Cottesmore and Greetham in Rutland.20 CP40/664, rot. 125d; VCH Rutland, ii. 122. In the mid 1430s he was estimated, for the purposes of taxation, to enjoy a landed income of £40 p.a.21 E159/212, recorda Hil. rot. 14 (ix).

Never a major landowner, Wesenham owed what prominence he achieved to his membership of the Household rather than his estates. He had certainly joined the royal establishment by the reign of Henry V, during which he became a serjeant of the pantry, a position he would hold for some 30 years or more.22 Although he is listed in a damaged Household acct. for 1438-9 as a ‘serj. of the wardrobe’ as well as of the pantry: E101/408/25. While his everyday duties as such were often mundane (in December 1425, for example, he was issued with the sum of 13s. 4d. to buy a pair of carving knives for the King’s use),23 Issues of the Exchequer ed. Devon, 394. he also served the Crown as a soldier in France. He participated in the Agincourt campaign as a member of the retinue of Robert, Lord Willoughy of Eresby,24 DKR, xliv. 574. suggesting that he had yet to join the Household in 1415,25 The pardons he purchased at the end of 1413 and the spring of 1416 simply refer to him as ‘esquire’ and do not indicate whether he was a Household man at that those dates: C67/36, m. 7 (13 Dec. 1413); 37, m. 5 (12 Apr. 1416). although it is not known how he came to form a connexion with that peer. When he crossed the Channel again in 1417, however, it was apparently as a member of Henry V’s immediate retinue, rather than that of a subordinate commander.26 DKR, xliv. 598. Wesenham’s military experience ensured that he featured in a list sent to the Council in about January 1421 of Huntingdonshire landowners considered suitable for service in defence of the realm.27 E28/97/14. While on his deathbed, Henry V granted a release to various Household servants, Wesenham among them, of any debts or actions that the Crown had against them. By the later 1420s, however, the grantees were facing demands from the Exchequer, prompting them to petition the Parliament of 1427. Through the petition, Wesenham and others secured charters of pardon, all dated 13 Oct. that year, the first day of the Parliament.28 CPR, 1422-9, p. 463; PROME, x. 318-25, 344-6.

The first evidence of Wesenham’s involvement in public affairs at a local level relates to the controversial election of the knights of the shire for Huntingdonshire to the following Parliament. On 20 Aug. 1429, Sir Thomas Waweton* and a gang of ‘outsiders’ from Bedfordshire secured the return of Robert Stonham* and Sir Thomas’s relative, William Waweton*, who, unlike Stonham, was not then a Huntingdonshire resident. At the next county court, however, Sir Nicholas Styuecle* and 13 others, including Wesenham, challenged this election. As a result, there was a new election on 17 Sept., just five days before the Commons assembled, at which Styuecle and his ally, Roger Hunt*, were the successful candidates. What lay behind these events is debatable, but they probably arose out of worsening rivalry between John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, and a patron of Sir Thomas Waweton, John Holand, earl of Huntingdon, despite the more recent (but unsubstantiated) suggestion that they were the result of infighting among the gentry themselves. Wesenham’s involvement in this affair was uncontroversial, since he had taken the side of the majority of the gentry of Huntingdonshire.29 J.S. Roskell, Commons of 1422, 17-18n; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 482, 528.

It was another five years before Wesenham joined his first commission in that county but in the meantime he spent much of the first half of the intervening period abroad. He was certainly not at home when he suffered a burglary at his house at Conington in July 1430,30 The man indicted for this crime, William Grene, a local labourer, was subsequently acquitted: JUST3/209/40. having embarked on the young Henry VI’s coronation expedition to France the previous April.31 SC8/153/7628-9. The King returned to England in February 1432, and Wesenham was one of the Household officers who successfully petitioned the Parliament that opened three months later for pardons of arrears in their accounts.32 PROME, xi. 27. Less than two years later, while yet to hold office in his home county of Huntingdonshire, he became water-bailiff of Bristol, a sinecure he was permitted to exercise through a deputy, during pleasure. In May 1434 he was included in the list of residents of Huntingdonshire whom the government expected to swear to keep the peace,33 CPR, 1429-36, p. 375. and in the following November he was pricked as sheriff of that county and Cambridgeshire.34 CFR, xvi. 221. As it happened, he never served as sheriff: the almost immediate and unexplained rescinding of this appointment ensured that his ad hoc commission of January 1436 was his first office in Huntingdonshire.

A year later, Wesenham was sitting for the county in the Parliament of 1437. Given his modest estates and previous lack of involvement in its affairs, his Household status must have assisted him to gain election to the Commons. During the Parliament, Wesenham stood surety at Westminster for the King’s physician, the influential John Somerset*.35 Ibid. 319-20. It was perhaps also during the same assembly that he and other Household men who had served the King on his coronation expedition to France put their names to a petition, presented to the Commons, by which they sought payment of their wages for their part in that enterprise.36 SC8/153/7626, 7629. Alternatively, it is possible the petition was heard in the Parl. of 1435. A few weeks after the dissolution of the Parliament of 1437, Wesenham and his fellow MP, Walter Taylard*, were acting as feoffees for Robert Stonham and his wife, suggesting that any animosities arising out of the 1429 election dispute, in which Stonham and Wesenham were on opposite sides, were short-lived.37 CPR, 1436-41, p. 51.

Wesenham’s first Parliament was the last of Henry VI’s minority and, like other royal servants, he received his share of largesse after the King assumed full control of the kingdom. In January 1438 the Crown confirmed him in the office of serjeant of the pantry, which it now bestowed on him for life, and it likewise converted his position of water-bailiff at Bristol into a grant for life a year later. A fortnight after this extension to his office at Bristol, he and two other royal servants, John St. Loe* and Richard Clevedon, received a grant of a ship from that port with its cargo, confiscated for breaking trade regulations while in Scandinavia. There followed two further grants augmenting Wesenham’s interests at Bristol: he became controller of the customs and wool subsidies there during pleasure in 1440, and surveyor of the search (for life) and chief customer of the port a year later. The last appointment in particular was a sign of the King’s trust in him. The grant, which refers to Wesenham’s ‘faithfulness, circumspection and discretion’, gave him or his deputy the superior place in the customs house, with special powers to survey the records of the other officials there. Meanwhile, in October 1440, he received a pardon covering his debts, arrears and any other shortcomings as serjeant of the pantry.38 CPR, 1436-41, pp. 156, 229, 236, 469, 519-20.

By now, as the evidence of his commissions indicates, he was more involved than hitherto in local affairs in eastern England. He had sat on the bench in Huntingdonshire since 1437, and gaol delivery rolls show that he was an active rather than a purely nominal j.p. in the early 1440s.39 JUST3/220/3. He was also entrusted with a more special task in this period, being one of the Household men whom the King appointed to guard Eleanor Cobham, duchess of Gloucester, at Leeds Castle, Kent, in July 1441. Tried in the following autumn for sorcery and high treason, she received a sentence of life imprisonment, a scarcely surprising outcome given the political nuances of her case. The following February, Wesenham and his fellow warders delivered her to the custody of (Sir) Thomas Stanley II* at Chester castle, her final place of confinement.40 R.A. Griffiths, King and Country, 248; E404/57/304; 58/104, 110, 111; SC6/796/7, m. 8d. Despite his duties as a warder, Wesenham still found time to stand for election to the Commons in December 1441, and he and Robert Stonham represented Huntingdonshire in the Parliament which met the following January. During this assembly, he received a renewal of the grant – evidently never implemented – of the Bristol ship and its cargo made to him three years earlier.41 CPR, 1441-6, p. 39.

Within a few months of the short Parliament of 1442, Wesenham was acting as a feoffee for Margaret, widow of Richard Hille of Paddington, Middlesex.42 CCR, 1447-54, p. 93. Further away from the capital, he was one of the feoffees who transferred lands in Windsor which had belonged to the late John Thorpe of Surrey, to Thorpe’s daughter and heir and her husband Robert Osbern, in December 1442, although only after the couple took action in the Chancery to secure their compliance.43 C1/9/7; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 136, 351. By that date Wesenham was also a trustee of estates in Sussex on behalf of Alice, former governess of the King and the long-lived widow of Sir John Dallingridge†, a role he had taken on some time before the end of the previous decade.44 CCR, 1441-7, pp. 94-95. Later, in 1445, he, Sir John Chalers*, Laurence Cheyne* and Gilbert Hore* obtained a royal licence to grant lands in several Cambridgeshire parishes to a chantry that the rector of Burrough Green, John Bateman, had recently founded in his church, and Bateman’s deed of foundation named him as a benefactor for whom prayers were to be said.45 CPR, 1441-6, pp. 329, 358.

In January the following year, Wesenham received a pardon for offences he had committed against the statute of liveries.46 CPR, 1441-6, p. 396. In practice, the pardon, which does not indicate where he had breached the statute, was a means by which the King licensed him to grant his own liveries.47 R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 592-3. He remained a trusted royal servant and, in the summer of 1447, the Exchequer delivered £30 to him, to dispose of as the King commanded.48 E404/63/103; E403/768, m. 9. Later that decade, King’s College, Cambridge, successfully petitioned the Parliament of February 1449 for various lands, including a messuage in Huntingdon that Wesenham, Ralph Babthorpe, Robert Stonham and Walter Taylard had conveyed to the King; presumably as a preliminary to an endowment sought by the college. Wesenham also features in a subsequent Parliament roll, for he obtained an exemption, as serjeant of the pantry, from the Act of Resumption passed in the Parliament of 1450.49 RP, v. 162 (cf. PROME, xii. 70); PROME, xii. 133; E163/8/14.

Some eight months before that Parliament met, Wesenham was appointed to an oyer and terminer commission directed to inquire into the abbot of Ramsey’s complaint that rioters had attacked and ransacked the priory of St. Ives, a daughter house of his monastery. Although most of the alleged rioters were husbandmen, labourers and rural craftsmen, the leader, John Plomer alias Palgrave, bailiff of Fenstanton, was of yeoman status, and his two leading associates were Robert Digby of Offord D’Arcy, esquire, a relative of Everard Digby*, and Robert Walton, a gentleman from Great Stukeley. They were said to have led some 100 men from Huntingdonshire and Cambridgeshire in an assault on the priory, most of whose inmates had then fled to the safety of Ramsey abbey. In the event, Wesenham and his fellow commissioners were unable to find Plomer, obliging the Crown to issue further commissions for his arrest in the following May.50 CPR, 1446-52, pp. 378-9, 381.

Among the other commissioners was Robert Stonham, alongside whom Wesenham gained election as a knight of the shire for Huntingdonshire to the Parliament of 1453. As on previous occasions, Wesenham had probably relied on the backing of the Court when standing as a candidate for this Parliament, usually regarded as one of the most royalist and compliant of Henry VI’s reign. Before the end of the year, however, Henry VI suffered his first bout of incapacitating illness and in the spring of 1454 Parliament agreed that Richard, duke of York, hitherto a strong critic of the Court, should assume the role of Protector of the realm. In all likelihood, it was during York’s first protectorate that Wesenham was removed from the royal pantry. In spite of his grant of January 1438, he was not listed among its serjeants when the Council drew up ordinances for the regulation of the Household during the King’s illness in November 1454. Whatever the circumstances in which Wesenham lost office, he must have retained an association with the Court. In the spring of 1455 he received a summons to the abortive great council at Leicester,51 PPC, vi. 226, 341. to which the first battle of St. Albans put paid, and it is possible that he accompanied the King to that engagement. In the wake of this Yorkist victory, his brother, Robert Wesenham, took the trouble to acquire a royal pardon in the following autumn, just after York had assumed the role of Protector of England for a second time.52 C67/41, m. 18.

Notwithstanding wider events, old age and infirmity rather than political considerations may explain why Wesenham, by then over 70 years of age, relinquished the office of surveyor at Bristol in October 1456 and that of water-bailiff in the same port by February 1457. Having acquired his last recorded royal pardon in February 1458,53 C67/42, m. 34. he survived until 10 Nov. 1460, after making his last will on the 4th of the same month. The only known copy of the will is preserved among the records of the court of King’s bench, where he appeared on 5 Nov. that year to have it enrolled. In the will, he directed the rector of Conington and the other feoffees of his manors at Conington and Denton, also in Huntingdonshire, to initiate the conveyance of those properties to the feoffees to the use of the will, a powerful panel that included the two chief justices, (Sir) John Fortescue* of King’s bench and (Sir) John Prysote* of the common pleas. Having used the manors’ revenues to fund the construction of his tomb (presumably at Conington), these latter trustees were to settle them in tail male on his great-nephew, Thomas Cotton. Thomas was the son and heir of the late William Cotton of London by his wife Mary, in turn one of the daughters and coheirs of John Folville of Rearsby, Leicestershire, and his wife Joan, the MP’s sister. Among those whom Wesenham named as remaindermen, in case of the extinction of Thomas Cotton and his male heirs, were Mary and her then husband, Thomas Lacy of Grantchester, Cambridgeshire, and two other great-nephews, John and Thomas Kebell. The Kebells were the sons of another of the MP’s nieces, Mary Cotton’s sister Anne (or Agnes), who had married Walter Kebell, a servant of Joan Beauchamp, Lady Abergavenny. Of very modest origins, Walter owed his status as a landowner in Leicestershire to this match although his son Thomas had already embarked on what would become an extremely distinguished legal career at the time of Wesenham’s death. Apart from these family connexions, the will and an associated deed reveal that at the end of his life the MP resided in a messuage, leased from the monks, within the stable complex at Westminster abbey, and that he shared this accommodation with Thomas Lacy. How he had come to acquire the lease is a matter for speculation although his Household connexions may have played a part. In the will he reserved the income from the property for the marriage of his great-niece, Thomas Cotton’s sister Eve, and the settlement of his debts. The deed, also dated 4 Nov. 1460, recorded that he had conveyed his interest in the messuage to Lacy and another former member of the Lancastrian Household, John Grenefeld II*, for them to hold it for those purposes.54 KB27/798, rot. 28; 900, rot. 37; E.W. Ives, Common Lawyers: Thomas Kebell, esp. 23-28.

An inquisition post mortem was held for Wesenham in January 1461 although it failed to mention that he had held a manor and advowson at Denton as well as at Conington. Notwithstanding this omission, he had not, as already observed, been a significant landowner. Perhaps he had lacked any incentive to try to enlarge his estate, for he left no surviving children; indeed, it is unclear whether he had ever married. The arrangements he had made for Conington and Denton meant that his heir, his 66-year-old brother, Robert, succeeded to an extremely paltry inheritance. The elderly Robert, a servant of the barons Roos of Helmsley, survived until 1477. His heirs were the surviving offspring of his sisters, Joan Folville and Cecily Rydhyll.55 C139/181/63; C140/64/71; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 75, 77; CPR, 1446-52, p. 217, 1461-7, p. 286.