The Thornburghs, established in Westmorland since the mid thirteenth century, were one of the leading families of the county behind a very small knightly elite. In the subsidy returns of 1435-6 William was assessed on an annual income of £20, a modest income by the standards of the gentry of many counties but sufficient in impoverished Westmorland to give a family a prominent place in public affairs.
The roots of Thornburgh’s involvement lay in a tangled web of relationships arising from the three marriages of his stepmother, Katherine. Her first husband had been Sir William Threlkeld†, by whom she had a son, Henry*. On Sir William’s death in 1408, this Henry (b.1398) came into the wardship of our MP’s father, who both married the boy’s mother and contracted the boy in marriage to our MP’s sister, Margaret. A potential rival grouping to this alliance of the Thornburghs and Threlkelds arose out of the earlier marriages of the young Henry’s much older half-sisters, the one to to Sir John Lancaster†, and the other to Sir John’s younger brother, William. The Lancasters must have expected to inherit the Threlkeld lands but Henry’s birth frustrated these expectations. The hope of reviving them may have been a factor in prompting Sir John, now widowed, to become a suitor for the hand of Katherine, who was the stepmother both of his own first wife and of our MP. At first the Thornburghs seem to have violently objected to the match. According to a petition presented to the Parliament of December 1421 by Lancaster, then an MP, Thornburgh’s four paternal uncles, acting on the orders of our MP’s elderly grandfather, had, on the previous 27 July, planned to kill him when he was visiting Katherine at her home at Maulds Meaburn.
Whether our MP was himself involved in this affair is not known, but if he initially did share his uncles’ hostility to the marriage he was soon ready to make a friend of Lancaster. This alliance was the beginning of a violent and dangerous feud, with our MP supporting Lancaster’s efforts to disinherit his four daughters by his first wife in favour of the male heirs of the Lancaster family. He was no doubt brought to do so by the benefits the plan brought to his stepmother. By a fine levied in Easter term 1425 Sir John settled all his lands upon himself and Katherine in joint tale mail with remainders over to a number of his male kin.
This dispute over the Lancaster inheritance, threatened before Sir John’s death in 1434 and active thereafter, is the clear explanatory strand in the political events of early 1430s Westmorland, and Thornburgh’s alliance with the Lancasters explains his involvement in the serious disorders that overtook the county in that decade. The first serious episode of disorder in these years, although initially apparently unrelated to the feud between Lancaster and Crackenthorpe, soon became subsumed within it. According to a petition presented by the victim to Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury, a group of prominent Westmorland gentry – led by Thornburgh and his brother-in-law, Sir Henry Threlkeld, and acting at the behest of his stepmother and Threlkeld’s mother, Dame Katherine – attacked the house of John Cliburne at Cliburn, ‘at which assawte thei shot a ml arrowes’. They desisted only upon the arrival of three of the county j.p.s, Sir Christopher Moresby†, Hugh Salkeld† and, significantly, Crackenthorpe.
The precise date of this assault is unknown, but there can be little doubt that it was one of the ‘graundes et outragiouses riotes’ involving the Thornburghs and Threlkelds which was set to be investigated at the meeting of the county bench at Appleby on 23 Mar. 1434. What happened next is laid out in a petition presented by Crackenthorpe soon afterwards to Chancellor Stafford, which alleged that Thornburgh and Sir Henry successfully intimidated the jurors into refusing to reveal the truth about the riots. Then, as Crackenthorpe as one of the j.p.s made his way home, Thornburgh joined his uncle, Oliver Thornburgh, and Sir John Lancaster’s fraternal nephew, William, in laying in wait to kill him in Whinfell forest. Forewarned, the j.p. returned home another way. He claimed in his petition that his would-be assailants were acting on the order of Sir John Lancaster, Katherine, and other Lancasters, who were anxious to prevent inquiry into recent disorders. His testimony was supported by Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland, and (Sir) Thomas Parr*, who, in an attached schedule, repeated his account.
None the less, despite this support, the petition achieved nothing. Indeed, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that Crackenthorpe was the representative of the weaker of two factions in the county’s politics. This had been made clear at the elections held in the previous summer: Sir Henry Threlkeld and Thornburgh’s father-in-law, Sir Richard Musgrave, were elected for the county; and Thornburgh himself was returned for Appleby.
This period of prosperity for Thornburgh was not destined to last as tensions in the county came to a boil. Sir John Lancaster’s death in 1434 had brought the quarrel over his inheritance into the open.
In these circumstances, and even given the striking laxity with which the law was applied by the Crown in the far north, it is not remarkable that Thornburgh was removed from the county bench in the following November. Thereafter he and his family struggled to regain a position in local affairs, and it seems that the murder also marked the effective defeat of their Lancaster allies in the quarrel over Sir John Lancaster’s inheritance. It may also have led Thornburgh into financial difficulties: in 1440 he sold over 100 acres in Brougham to one of the j.p.s before whom he had been indicted, Thomas Burgham.
Not until 1 Apr. 1442 did Thornburgh secure letters patent of pardon, but then he and his brothers were able to win a little ground. It was presumably at their petition that, in the following July, a writ of certiorari called the inquisition held before Parr into Chancery. Eleven months later, on 3 June 1443, his brother Roland and uncle Oliver secured a royal pardon on the contradictory grounds that they had been maliciously indicted for Crackenthorpe’s murder and that they had reached a settlement with his widow on her appeal.
Thereafter, however, Thornburgh’s undistinguished career quickly came to an abrupt end, at least as far as the records are concerned. In view of his turbulent life, it is fitting that the last reference to him in an active role should concern another dispute, on this occasion with his erstwhile friend, Sir Henry Threlkeld. On 9 Nov. 1447 (Sir) Thomas Haryngton I* returned an award after the two men had entered into mutual bonds in 300 marks. If its terms are any guide, the matter dividing them was a petty financial one: Haryngton awarded that Thornburgh pay Threlkeld seven marks in cash in discharge of a debt together with a further mark ‘for a gowne of blak the whiche the said William knowledge that a man of his ware’.
In interpreting Thornburgh’s career, it is unfortunate that it is not known when he entered the Neville retinue. It can only be said that there is no direct evidence that he had done so before the summer of 1443. It might, however, be the explanation for his designation as a royal esquire as early as 1438, and if this is so it is possible that the earl’s great quarrel with his nephew of the half blood, the earl of Westmorland, exacerbated our MP’s own dispute with Crackenthorpe, who was prominent in the nephew’s service. However this may be, Salisbury’s patronage was significant in advancing our MP’s brothers, Leonard and Edward, in the late 1450s, probably after our MP’s death.