STANLEY, Thomas I

The rise of the Stanleys was swift, and at its beginning stands the brilliant career of our MP’s father, lieutenant of Ireland and steward of Henry IV’s household. Through his marriage to the Lathom heiress in the mid 1380s and the considerable benefits of royal patronage, most notably the grant to him in fee of the Isle of Man in 1405, Sir John became immensely wealthy, and it is thus not surprising that he should have been able to find a profitable marriage for our MP as his second son. M.J. Bennett, Community, Class and Careerism, 215-19; Oxf. DNB. The bride had sure prospects of inheritance at the time the match was made. Her father, Sir John Arderne, died on 16 July 1408, leaving her, as a girl of 12, his heir, and she was married to Thomas Stanley soon afterwards. CHES2/80, m. 9d; CHES3/24, 9 Hen. IV, no. 21; C137/71/29 (erroneously calendared in CIPM, xix. 539, where the heir is said to be a son named John).

Judging by the part our MP played in Staffordshire affairs early in 1409, he then had in his possession the principal property of the Arderne inheritance, namely the manor of Elford near Lichfield. Sir John Arderne was born there, and the magnificent tomb of his parents still survives in Elford church: CHES3/12, 15 Rich. II, no. 7; F.H. Crossley, English Church Mons. 18. In acquiring it he must have come to an agreement with his mother-in-law, who had a life interest in it by a fine levied in 1401, and she later proved herself to be accommodating in respect of the rest of her late husband’s lands. Although Elford was the main residence of the Ardernes, they had more considerable holdings in Cheshire, comprising manors at Aldford, Etchells and Nether Alderley. The widow had a jointure interest in these manors, but on 1 May 1413, in company with her second husband, Robert Babthorpe (who was to be controller of Henry V’s household), she alienated her interest in Aldford and Etchells to our MP. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. xi. 211; CHES2/95, m. 1d. Margaret also did the couple another service. Her late husband’s title to these Cheshire manors had depended on the disinheritance of the legitimate line of the Ardernes in favour of Sir John’s illegitimate father, Sir Thomas Arderne, and in a plea in the Cheshire palatinate court in 1410 she successfully repudiated the rival claim of Sir Robert Legh of Adlington (Cheshire) and Hugh Wrottesley of Wrottesley (Staffordshire), descendants of Sir Thomas’s legitimate sisters. This claim, however, together with that of another legitimate line, the Ardernes of Harden (Cheshire), was later to trouble our MP. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. vi (2), 192-5.

The combined value of the Arderne property in Staffordshire and Cheshire, which came to Stanley in its entirety on the death of his mother-in-law in 1423, was probably in excess of £150, but even this was not the limit of the gains that his wife brought this younger branch of the Stanleys of Lathom. In 1346 Sir Thomas Arderne had married Katherine, daughter of Sir Richard Stafford† (d.1380) and the niece of Ralph, who was to be created earl of Stafford in 1351. When our MP married the grand-daughter of this marriage some 60 years later, this match’s legacy to him was confined to a family relationship with the powerful Staffords. Yet, with the death in 1425 of Richard, the young son and heir of Thomas Stafford† of Pipe (Staffordshire) and Baginton (Warwickshire), Stanley’s wife fell heiress to an inheritance at least as substantial as the Arderne lands of her father. This unexpected windfall comprised the manors of Pipe and Clifton Campville in Staffordshire, Sibbertoft in Northamptonshire, Quorndon in Leicestershire and Chipping Campden and Aston Subedge in Gloucestershire. Birmingham Archs., Elford Hall mss, 3878/24; CIPM, xxii. 571-8; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 446-7.

When Stanley began his adult career this windfall lay in the future. His early career was dominated by the disorders that overtook his adopted county of Staffordshire late in the reign of Henry IV. Their primary cause appears to have been the resentment felt by a group of the county gentry, headed by Hugh Erdeswyk*, at the dominance of local retainers of the duchy of Lancaster. Initially, Stanley was among Erdeswyk’s supporters. In March 1409 he was one of the prominent men of the shire who gathered at Rocester, near Uttoxeter, to defy a commission for Erdeswyk’s arrest and to intimidate one of the principal Lancastrian retainers, Sir John Blount, who lived at nearby Barton Blount. As a result, he was among those named in a petition of complaint presented by the Commons on 16 Feb. 1410, in response to which the Crown sent a writ to the sheriff of Staffordshire to make proclamation for the appearance of the accused on pain of forfeiture. Fortunately for Stanley and the others, these proclamations were rendered nugatory on 10 Feb. 1411, when the accused had pardons enrolled on the patent roll. E. Powell, Kingship, Law and Society, 208-16; PROME, viii. 471-6; CPR, 1408-13, p. 277.

Thereafter Stanley played a more circumspect role when new troubles overtook the county due to Erdeswyk’s feud with Edmund Ferrers of Chartley. In the autumn of 1413, with his stepfather, Robert Babthorpe, he was one of those who tried, unsuccessfully, to arbitrate a settlement. RP, iv. 32 (cf. PROME, ix. 63); Powell, 241-2. These placatory efforts, however, did not protect him from indictment when the court of King’s bench came to Staffordshire in the following May 1414. Two indictments were laid against him for the illegal distribution of livery at Lichfield and Elford in December 1413. CPR, 1408-13, p. 277; KB9/113/11, 28. A heavy fine of £60 was imposed on him on these indictments, but on 19 Mar. 1416 both he and the 13 to whom he allegedly gave livery were pardoned their fines on the grounds that the livery had been distributed ‘to no other purpose than to serve the King’s kinsman the earl of Warwick and cross with him on the King’s service to the town of Calais. Powell, 215-16, 235; CPR, 1413-16, p. 403; KB27/613, fines rot. 4. This may or may not have been true – the earl was not appointed as captain of Calais until some six weeks after the livery was given – and there is no direct evidence that Stanley had military experience. The probability, however, is that he did. Several of those implicated in the Staffordshire disturbances sought rehabilitation by participating in Henry V’s invasion of France, and it is significant that Stanley was on the list of men sent to council in about January 1420 as fighting men. E28/97/29B.

A period of service abroad would also help explain why Stanley’s public career did not begin until early in 1422, when he was appointed to his first local commission. This was the prelude to his election to Parliament for his adopted shire on the following 29 Oct. Returned with him was Sir John Gresley*, whose father, Sir Thomas†, conducted the election as sheriff. CPR, 1416-22, p. 422; C219/13/1. Later, in about 1440, Stanley’s daughter was to marry Sir John’s son, another John*, and, if, as seems probable, he was already on friendly terms with the wealthy Gresleys in 1422, this association may have been a factor in his election. He may also have had a particular personal motive for seeking election. Bonds entered into on the previous 9 Mar. suggest he was facing a further assertion of a rival claim to his wife’s inheritance, on this occasion, by Ralph Arderne of Harden, representative of the disinherited legitimate male line of the Ardernes of Elford. He and Ralph entered into mutual bonds in the massive sum of £1,000, presumably to abide arbitration, and these bonds were delivered as escrows to John Hope, the mayor of Chester. CP40/723, rot. 527; G. Ormerod, Parentalia, 89; CAD, vi. C3923. Perhaps Stanley saw parliamentary service as a means of protecting his title. However this may be, he secured a small recognition of his local standing at the end of the assembly. On its last day he was commissioned by the Crown to inquire into wastes in the endowment of the collegiate church of Tamworth, not far from his home at Elford, and he quickly discharged the responsibility entrusted to him. On 23 Jan. 1423, before him at Tamworth, a jury laid a series of complaints against the long-serving dean of the college, John Barnard. CPR, 1422-9, p. 66; CIMisc. viii. 5.

Thereafter Stanley’s career developed rather strangely. Over the next 20 years, as befitting a man of his wealth and family connexions, he played a prominent part in local affairs. He is probably to be identified with the namesake who in 1425-6 was in receipt of an annuity of £5 from Joan, Lady Beauchamp of Abergavenny, and who, in 1427, was named as sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire. SC11/25; C. Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 387n. Later he was twice to hold the same office in Staffordshire, and was appointed, albeit intermittently, to ad hoc commissions of local government between 1422 and 1451. He also served a term as master of the guild of St. Mary in Lichfield, an institution in which his family were long to play a prominent part. Harwood, 402. Yet, for all this, he made few other marks in the records, and he seems gradually to have disengaged himself from public activities. This may have been a matter of choice: on 7 Sept. 1438 he sued out an exemption from office. CPR, 1436-41, p. 250. Here he is described as a ‘King’s esquire’, although there is no other evidence that he had a place in the royal household. Although this did not prevent his appointment as sheriff only two months later, greater significance should probably be attributed to the fact that he was not appointed again and that he did not take the place on the county bench that his wealth demanded. Another possibility, additionally or alternatively to a willing disengagement, is the growing prominence of his eldest son, John. One clear reason for this prominence is clear: the Stafford inheritance, on the failure of the Stafford of Pipe line in the mid 1420s, came to the son rather than the father. Again one can only speculate as to why this was so: either the father surrendered the lands to establish him in his place or else the reason was simply a legal one, that is, the Stafford feoffees retained the lands until after the death of the heiress thus depriving the father of his right to the courtesy.

Whatever the reason, so thoroughly did the younger man supplant his father that very little is known of the last 25 years of Thomas’s life. What can be discovered largely concerns litigation. In the autumn of 1432, soon after his wife’s death, he was called upon to defend his title to her Cheshire manors. In an assize of novel disseisin at Chester on 16 Sept. 1432 he won damages of £200 against Hugh Wrottesley and Robert Legh, son of the claimant of 1410. These he remitted, suggesting that the matter had been compromised, and this particular claim was not again asserted until the 1480s. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. n.s. vi (2), 202-5, 246-8. More tantalizingly, in 1442 he and his son sued John Verney, dean of Lichfield, and nearly 50 others, mostly tradesmen of Lichfield, for assaulting and wounding their tenants. No more is known of the affair, although it anticipated the famous clash between the family and the dean and chapter in the late 1480s when our MP’s grandson, Sir Humphrey†, cut off the cathedral’s water-supply. CP40/724, rot. 232d; KB27/723, rot. 72; VCH Staffs. xiv. 95.

Other references from Stanley’s later career show that, although he had largely retired from public affairs, he remained well connected. In 1447 he was one of many named as a feoffee of lands in Leicestershire and Derbyshire by Sir James Butler (later earl of Wiltshire), grandson of Lady Beauchamp of Abergavenny; and in 1450, along with several leading Staffordshire gentry, he and his son were sued for maintenance by Sir Richard Vernon*. Since other of the defendants were closely associated with Humphrey Stafford, duke of Buckingham, it is probable that this action represents the ducal retinue acting as a body against Vernon, who appears to have forfeited the duke’s goodwill by pursuing a baseless property claim against Sir William Trussell†, another of the duke’s retainers. HMC Hastings, i. 1-2; KB27/757, rot. 31d. Although this is the only evidence to place our MP in the duke’s service, the kinship between them together with his son’s office, from 1446, under the duke in the forest of Needwood strongly suggests that their relationship was closer than revealed in the surviving records.

The last meaningful act of Stanley’s career again involved his disputed Cheshire manors. On 9 Apr. 1455 he appeared personally before the justices of assize at Stafford and won damages of 35 marks against two Cheshire gentlemen, Charles Arderne of Timperley and George Arderne of Harden, for an assault on one of his servants. No doubt this assault was related to the claim of the legitimate male line of the Ardernes to the manors they had lost more than a century before. He last appears in the records in January 1458, when he sued out a general pardon as former sheriff of Staffordshire. KB27/773, rot. 38; C67/42, m. 32. Nothing is known of his part in the civil war of 1459-61, and it is unlikely that he took one. He died on 13 May 1463, and the Arderne part of his late wife’s inheritance, namely, his manors at Elford and in Cheshire, passed to his heir. His will has not been traced, but his sons, John and George, appear as his executors in litigation in the court of common pleas. C140/9/17; CHES2/135, m. 5d; KB27/773, rot. 38.