WYCHARD, Thomas

A somewhat elusive figure, Wychard owed his connexion with Bedfordshire to his second marriage and his seat in the Commons to his patron, Henry Holand, duke of Exeter. Of obscure background,6 It is not known if the Wychards of the east Midlands in the 14th and early 15th century were from the same family, or whether the MP was the Thomas Wychard who resided in Yorks. in the mid 1420s. In 1431 the dowager countess of Westmorland and others demised the manor of ‘Ulshowe’ in that county to Thomas (s. and h. of Robert Wychard of Ulshowe) and his wife for a term of 50 years. This Thomas’s wife was named Alice, but she cannot have been the Alice previously married to Roger Hunt, since Hunt was still alive at this date: Derbys. Feet of Fines (Derbys. Rec. Soc. xi), 9; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 178; E159/201, brevia, Mich. rot. 48d; E210/7154. he was probably the Thomas Wychard who campaigned in France with Robert, Lord Willoughby, during the late 1420s and first half of the 1430s.7 Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Fr. mss, 25768/439; 25769/474; 25770/684, 721; 25771/839, 865, 893, 898; Archives Nationales, K63/24/2; Add. Chs. 11660, 11663. If so, he perhaps came into contact with the Holands through Willoughby, whose stepmother was both a Holand by birth and the cousin of Henry Holand’s father, John Holand, earl of Huntingdon.8 CP, xii (2), 663. Wychard had become a Holand retainer by the later 1430s. In early 1437 the earl granted him an annuity of £10 for life from his hundreds in Somerset,9 E152/10/544, m. 5. and in the spring of 1438 Thomas Bodulgate*, a prominent servant of the Holands, took part in a settlement of a moiety of the manor of Denton in east Sussex upon him and his first wife, Beatrice Jardyn.10 CP25(1)/241/87/34. Denton was part of Beatrice’s inheritance, she having succeeded to a share of her family’s estates in Sussex and Berkshire after the death of her brother John. Following her own death, her heir was John Knottesford*, her son by her previous husband, but Wychard was permitted a life interest in Denton and her moiety of the manor of South Mundham and Bowley in west Sussex, even though it is highly unlikely (given her age) that she bore him any children.11 CIPM, xxiii. 35; VCH Berks. iii. 293; CP40/826, rot. 136. Although Beatrice’s father had been linked with Thomas, earl of Arundel, Wychard had probably met her through the Holand nexus, since Arundel’s widow, another Beatrice, had married John Holand in 1433.

In the summer of 1439 Wychard was a member of the retinue which Holand took to France as the new lieutenant of Gascony, and in the following March the earl granted houses in Bordeaux and the vicinity of St Macaire to him and John Vill, another esquire of his household. Sent to Gascony to counteract aggressive French campaigns against the duchy, Huntingdon succeeded in recapturing the fortress at La Roquette, which had posed a threat to English shipping in the Gironde, and in late August 1440 he and Sir Thomas Rempston†, seneschal of Gascony, began a long and ultimately successful siege of Tartas.12 E101/53/22; M.G.A. Vale, English Gascony, 115, 116; B.P. Wolffe, Hen. VI, 155-6. The earl returned to England before the end of 1440, but Wychard did not necessarily sail home at the same time, since some of Huntingdon’s retinue remained behind for further service in the duchy,13 Vale, 23. but he was certainly back in England by early 1442. On 21 Mar. that year he, Thomas Bodulgate and others were in London where they gave Henry Drury*, a servant of Humphrey, earl of Stafford, a bond for 100 marks, although for what reason is not known.14 CP40/734, rot. 314. Drury’s widow sued Wychard over the bond in 1444. He is referred to as ‘late of London, alias of Sussex’ in the pleadings for this suit, which do not reveal the reason for that security. He was likewise referred to as ‘late of London’ when Richard Caudray, dean of the city’s collegiate church of St. Martin le Grand, sued him in the later 1450s over another bond, for £40: CP40/786, rot. 319d. Wychard must have become close to Huntingdon, who was created duke of Exeter at the beginning of 1444, since he witnessed the will made by his master shortly before Exeter’s death in August 1447. After Holand died, he acted as a mainpernor for those trustees who took possession of the duke’s estates in south-west England and London.15 Collection All Wills ed. Nichols, 286; CFR, xviii. 77.

It seems that at this date Wychard was mainly associated with south-west England, in spite of his first wife’s lands in Sussex. It was ‘of Somerset’, the county from which he derived his £10 annuity, that he stood surety for the Holand trustees, and by then he was farming the Dorset hundred of Redhone and Beaminster Forum from the Crown.16 CFR, xviii. 23. Within a few years of John Holand’s death, however, Wychard had settled in Bedfordshire. He had acquired an interest there through his second marriage to Alice, widow of Roger Hunt, a former Speaker of the Commons, since she held Hunt’s manor of Chawston, either in dower or jointure, for life.17 CP40/816, rot. 223.

It was as of Bedfordshire that Wychard took part in the quarrel between his patron, Henry Holand, and Ralph, Lord Cromwell, over the Ampthill estate in that county. Cromwell had bought these lands from the executors of John Cornwall, Lord Fanhope, but Exeter, having manufactured a false claim, seized them in June 1452. Cromwell responded by taking legal action in the common pleas against the duke and his retainers. Wychard was a defendant in one of the suits he brought. In pleadings of Easter term of 1453, Cromwell alleged that eight of Exeter’s servants, including Sir Henry Norbury* and Wychard (described as ‘late of Chawston’), had entered the manor at Ampthill and carried away goods worth no less than £1,000.18 CP40/769, rot. 328. Presumably Wychard had broken his ties with the by now elderly Lord Willoughby (assuming he was indeed the man who had previously served that peer), who was one of Cromwell’s friends and was still alive when Ampthill was seized. When the suit came to pleadings Wychard was already at Westminster attending the Parliament of 1453, and he appeared in person to answer the plea. A jury was summoned, first for the octave of Trinity and then for the following octave of St. John the Baptist, but there was no trial. In a petition seeking the restoration of Ampthill which he subsequently presented to the same Parliament, Cromwell alleged that the jurors had dared not appear, for fear of Exeter and his servants, then present in Westminster Hall. The servants in question were not named, but it is likely that Wychard was among them, since Parliament was still in session. In reality, the petition gave a one-sided account of what had actually happened, for Cromwell and his men had also come to the hall and a serious disturbance had occurred. The King had reacted by ordering the arrest of Exeter, Cromwell and the latter’s supporter, Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, and all three peers had been briefly imprisoned. The suit eventually came to trial in June 1455, by which time Cromwell had recovered Ampthill from his opponent. Wychard appeared in person for the trial, at which the jury found four of his co-defendants guilty but acquitted him, Norbury and the two others.19 S.J. Payling, ‘Ampthill Dispute’, EHR, civ. 881-907; CP40/769, rot. 328; KB27/777, rot. 90. There is little doubt that the dispute between Exeter and Cromwell played a significant part in Wychard’s election to Parliament, for Exeter used his influence to secure the return to the Commons of men favourable to his cause. Six of his followers were elected for boroughs in Devon and Cornwall and Norbury and Wychard were returned as the knights of the shire for Bedfordshire, a county in which their patron had an interest as lord of the manor of Stevington. The indenture lists no fewer than 113 attestors, many of them obscure men, so raising the possibility of an irregular election. Neither Norbury, a resident of Cheshunt in Hertfordshire when the suit began, nor Wychard is known to have sat in any other Parliament and neither of them had a significant role as an office-holder in Bedfordshire. As it happened, Exeter’s servants in the Commons could do nothing to help him, since they were powerless to block his opponent’s petition. The Ampthill dispute had important ramifications on a national level, for it prompted Cromwell to seek the support of the powerful Nevilles and Exeter to ally with their rivals, the Percy family. It also helped to confirm Holand in his opposition to his father-in-law, Richard, duke of York, who played a crucial role in assisting the passage of Cromwell’s petition through Parliament.20 Payling, 895 et seq.; C219/16/2; PROME, xii. 306.

In May 1454, two months after York had assumed the office of Protector of England, Exeter and Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont, rebelled in northern England. There is no evidence that Wychard was involved in the uprising or that he followed his patron’s example and took up arms for the Lancastrian cause during the later years of Henry VI’s reign. Whatever his political sympathies, his age may have prevented him from playing an active part in the civil wars, although it is striking that he is not heard of in the after 1455. He next comes into view in 1465 when Thomas Rede sued him and his wife in the common pleas for the manor of Chawston. The parties were ordered to appear at Westminster on the quindene of Trinity that year, on which day Rede was represented by his attorney, Alice appeared in person and Wychard (who had perhaps followed Exeter into exile abroad) defaulted. Rede claimed the manor through his descent from the Grymbaudes, earlier lords of Chawston, but Alice referred to a settlement, made by her previous husband’s feoffees, which recognized her right to hold it for life, with reversion to Roger, her son by Hunt. The case dragged on for a number of years and Wychard died before it was resolved. In the autumn of 1467 the sheriff of Bedfordshire was ordered to take the manor into the King’s hand after the by then widowed Alice had failed to appear in the common pleas on a given return day, but ultimately Rede was unsuccessful in his claim and in due course Chawston reverted to the Hunt family.21 CP40/816, rot. 223; 825, rot. 258; 827, rot.85; VCH Beds. iii. 219-20; E150/13/7.

It is not known exactly when Wychard died. His will has not survived but the records of the common pleas reveal that he appointed Alice and his stepson, John Hunt, as his executors. It was as such that the pair pursued suits for debt in that court in the late 1460s, against the Northamptonshire esquire, Thomas Osberne, and William Synyer, a husbandman from Bowley in Sussex. In one of these suits they claimed that Wychard had leased his first wife’s share of the Jardyn manor at South Mundham and Bowley to Osberne at Michaelmas 1463, for a three-year term at 13 marks p.a., and that he still owed 12 marks in rent. The action they brought against Synyer, for a sum of £4 13s. 4d., had yet to come to pleadings in June 1469 when the husbandman was pardoned his outlawry for failing to answer their suit.22 CP40/825, rots. 56, 215; 826, rot. 136; 827, rots. 341, 427d; 828, rot. 188; CPR, 1467-77, p. 143. The suit over Osberne’s unpaid rent refers to the ‘manor’ of Bowley, even though a moiety of that property had passed to the heirs of Margaret Jardyn (Beatrice Wychard’s sister and coheir) by her husband John Soper†: The Commons 1386-1421, iii. 489; CIPM, xxiii. 35.