THORPE, Thomas

Thorpe was a professional administrator who committed himself too far to a cause ultimately lost. As such, he exemplifies the dangerous temptations created by the dynastic crisis of the mid fifteenth century for men whose prosperity depended solely upon office and patronage. Most careerists contented themselves with the rewards of professional employment alone, their service remaining administrative rather than political, and they readily surmounted the change of regime in 1461. Thorpe, by contrast, coveted the much greater rewards that went with political involvement, and, as a result, the later part of his career was beset by a series of setbacks of mounting and eventually fatal severity. The pattern of that career marks him out as a man of ambition, seeking accelerated promotion in the Exchequer more through his connexions outside it than long service within. D. Grummitt, ‘Public Service, Private Interest and Patronage’, in The Fifteenth Century III, ed. Clark, 158. A touch of irregularity attached to several of his appointments: his nomination as treasurer’s remembrancer was secured on terms that compromised the treasurer’s customary right of appointment; he obtained, through the favour of William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, the reversion of the chancellorship of the Exchequer to the detriment of an earlier purchaser of the office; and the means by which he won a place as a baron of the Exchequer amounted almost to blackmail. Such conduct was unlikely to win him friends, and in the later part of his career he attracted the enmity of Richard, duke of York, seemingly as much for personal as political reasons.

Thorpe’s relentless appetite for advancement was fed by modest birth. His parentage and even his geographical origins are uncertain. The only reason, beyond that of a common surname, to connect him with the minor gentry family of Pilton in Rutland is his later purchase of property in a neighbouring county. Roskell wrongly believed that these purchases – at Barnwell and Lilford – lay in the immediate vicinity of that family’s home at Pilton: J.S. Roskell, ‘Thomas Thorpe’, Nottingham Med. Studies, vii (1963), 203. But he has conflated the Rutland Pilton with the Northants. one. There are stronger, but still inconclusive, grounds for placing his origins in Lincolnshire. In 1440, as he was coming to prominence in the Exchequer, he acquired from Thomas Claymond of Great Hale, a small estate in Braceby, Heckington and Whaplode, three scattered south Lincolnshire vills. CP25(1)/145/159/3. Thorpe is here described as ‘of London’, and there can be no doubt that he was the MP. Two years earlier, styled as ‘of the Exchequer’, he had taken a bond from Claymond, and in 1443 he used the privilege of his office to have a quitclaim from Claymond’s brother enrolled on the memoranda roll: E210/2825; E159/223, commissiones Trin. This suggests that he was a kinsman of the Thomas Thorpe, who in 1409 had secured licence to alienate property to two chantries dedicated to the memory of his family in the church of Rippinghale, a few miles to the south-east of Braceby. Suggestively, Claymond’s father was one of the feoffees employed to make this alienation: CPR, 1408-13, p. 151. This Thomas may, in turn, be identified with a minor royal functionary, King’s serjeant under Henry V and porter of the Household in the early years of the next reign. The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 603. If our MP was his son, it would help explain his own entry into royal service.

The case, however, is far from proven, and it is a plausible alternative that Thorpe was a Londoner. Many of those for whom he acted early in his career were from the city; he is known to have owned a tenement, called the ‘Walnut Tree’, in the parish of St. John Zachary; and his wife, who died in 1453, was buried in the church of that parish. On the other hand, this evidence is also consistent with his emigration from country into city. The tenement may have been his inheritance, but, more probably, it came to him either by purchase or marriage. His marriage is known to have occurred before his career began in earnest, and it is tempting to believe that he found a minor London heiress as his bride, not because he was himself a Londoner, but because he had come to the city to study at an inn of Chancery or court. J. Weever, Funeral Mons. 179; CCR, 1447-54, p. 484. The only evidence to date the match is the chronology of the career of their son, Roger, who was of age by the late 1440s. Later evidence strongly implies that he had had a formal legal education: his appointments to the Exchequer bench and the quorum of the peace are most easily explicable in such terms, as is his alleged involvement, late in his career, in drawing up the Act of Attainder against the Yorkists.

Whatever his origins, Thorpe was established as an attorney in the Exchequer of pleas by Michaelmas term 1431, and he was soon working for some important clients. In Trinity term 1432, for example, he represented John Sutton, Lord Dudley, Richard Wydeville* and William Estfield*, a wealthy London mercer. E13/139, bills of att. 1, 1d. Other clients were also prominent Londoners: in 1433 he was attorney for the draper Almaric Mattany, and the mercer James Strangeways; and in 1436 he joined Alexander Farnall, a prominent tailor, in the taking of a statute staple, and was later named among Farnell’s executors. E5/3/10; C241/228/115; Cal. P. and M. London, 1437-57, p. 63; CP40/724, rot. 16. Such connexions were no doubt helpful to him, but the surviving evidence does not allow the firm identification of a particular patron. The most likely candidate is Henry Somer*, the long-serving chancellor of the Exchequer. In Easter term 1437 Thorpe was described as the chancellor’s clerk, and shortly afterwards Somer appointed him to an Exchequer office in his gift, that of summoner, with its annual fee of £4. E5/506. He was appointed between 10 Oct. 1437, when Robert Shireokes, relinquished the office, and 24 Feb. 1438: PRO List, ‘Exchequer Officers’, 101. Yet whatever he may have owed to Somer, Thorpe, like other careerists, took help where it could be found, a consideration of importance in the interpretation of his later career.

This first modest step on the ladder of Exchequer promotion recommended him to the service of others, notably the wealthy Goldsmiths’ Company. On 1 Apr. 1438 he stood surety for a group of London tradesmen, headed by one of the King’s goldsmiths, as farmers of Crown property in Buckinghamshire; and on the following 19 May he was admitted to the Goldsmiths’ livery and retained as counsel, taking an annual fee of 40s. with, whenever issued, five yards of cloth for a gown and hood. Since, in his letters of retainer, he is described as summoner, there is no reason to doubt that it was his place in the Exchequer that made his counsel desirable. CFR, xvii. 33; Wardens’ Accts. of Goldsmiths’ Mistery, ed. Jefferson, 494. He retained his close connexion with the Goldsmiths into the 1450s. A damaged petition of c.1455, alleging some indecipherable extortion against him, describes him as a ‘brother’ of their craft: C1/74/82. Others, however, treated him with less respect. Nicholas Bildeston, dean of Salisbury, judging from a letter of 1438, did not find his services satisfactory: ‘Thorp I prey yow doth yo[ur] diligence that I may this day haue a ful ende as I truste to yow. I haue writen to S[ir] Nicol Dicson [Nicholas Dixon, baron of the Exchequer] for to helpe forth and therfore doth yo[ur] devoir that I be taried noo longere as eu[er]e I may doo for yow in tyme comyng.’ E5/510, unnumbered, dorse. The peremptory tone of this letter demonstrates the relatively lowly status of the summoner, but Thorpe, either through ability or connexion, made it, as his predecessors had not done, a stepping stone to greater things. For his predecessors: PRO List ‘Exchequer Officers’, 100-1. Of the 11 summoners of the 15th century, only Thorpe and Thomas Morton† became men of importance.

One form of advancement was through the effective exploitation of royal patronage. Exchequer officers were well placed to benefit, particularly in the form of leases and offices of revenue collection, and Thorpe took full advantage, although, like others, he suffered from the short-term nature of many royal grants. On 1 Apr. 1438 he joined Dynk Pyle (a Dutchman in the royal service) in a lease of property in the London parish of St. Martin Vintry at an annual farm of ten marks; and on 2 Nov. 1439 he and a yeoman of the royal chamber, Thomas Skargill*, were granted the keeping of Thomas Leigh’s property in Essex, Kent and Surrey, together with the marriage of the young heir. CFR, xvii. 34, 110-11. This latter grant illustrates the intricate and unsatisfactory workings of royal patronage in the early years of Henry VI’s majority. Leigh had died on the previous 23 June, leaving a baby son as his heir, and only five days later, long before the relevant inquisitions could be taken, John, Lord Scrope of Masham, a former treasurer, had sued to the Crown for the wardship. His failure to agree terms resulted in the grant to Thorpe and Skargill, a grant made on the day after the first of Leigh’s inquisitions had been returned into Chancery. C139/90/13. Thomas Leigh’s kinsmen, Roger* and James, stood sureties for the grant to Thorpe and Skargill, implying a prior connexion between the family and the grantees: CFR, xvii. 110-11. Leigh’s property was reasonably extensive – our MP and his colleague agreed to pay 40 marks for the marriage and £13 8s. 8d. p.a. for the land – but, unfortunately for them, their lease was compromised by a previous interest. On 26 Nov. Thomas Arblaster* and two others undertook, on the pain of £100 each, to deliver the ward to them at St. Albans on 6 Dec., and they duly did so; yet, only three days later, the Crown granted the wardship to Arblaster to hold without payment. The most likely explanation for this convoluted arrangement is that Arblaster was the dead man’s feoffee, and that, between 6 and 9 Dec., his right was vindicated against the Crown to the loss of Thorpe and Skargill. E159/216, recogniciones Mich.; CFR, xvii. 121. Thorpe’s interest in the London property was also to be short-lived: on 18 June 1440 it was entrusted to Pyle alone, quit of rent, perhaps because he too could show prior title. CPR, 1436-41, p. 425.

In respect of offices, Thorpe fared better. On 2 Feb. 1440 he was granted, during pleasure, the office of tronager and pesager in the port of Berwick-upon-Tweed, a post that could easily and profitably be discharged by deputy; on 12 Apr. he shared with two others the subsidy and alnage of cloths for sale in Hertfordshire; and on 19 May, again during pleasure, he was given the same responsibilities in Newcastle-upon-Tyne as he held in Berwick. CPR, 1436-41, p. 442; CFR, xvii. 155. Even here, however, the benefits he enjoyed were brief: in October 1440 he was joined in the Berwick office by William Grendon, and they were both replaced three years later; and in October 1442 he lost the Newcastle office to a merchant of Boston. Only as alnager did he serve a reasonable term, retaining the office until 1448, two years after the expiry of the original grant. CPR, 1436-41, pp. 570-1; 1441-6, pp. 128, 194; CFR, xvii. 155.

It is an open question whether those, like Thorpe, who saw their grants quickly superseded, won compensation beyond the hope, very much vindicated in his case, that they might gain as well as lose in this system of rapidly changing grants. The circumstances of Thorpe’s acquisition of the chancellorship of the Exchequer, discussed below, demonstrates that royal offices were bartered between grantees, current and aspiring, and that the issue of new letters patent was a matter, at least in some cases, of negotiation between them. It might, therefore, be more accurate to describe our MP, and others like him, as bargaining away rather than losing their offices. Such conjecture aside, however, it is clear that Thorpe’s admission as a player in the complex game of royal patronage betokened a new standing. This is evident in his admission on 23 Apr. 1441 to the freedom of the Goldsmith’s Company, who now saw him as more valuable than merely retained counsel. Soon after, he gained new grants of royal patronage, sufficient to more than compensate him for the loss, if such it was, of earlier grants. On 18 Apr. 1442 he was awarded a life annuity of £10, a clear sign of his advancement among the Crown’s servants. Even better, in the following September he joined the London goldsmith, Henry Ragley, in the office of controller, changer and assayer of the Tower Mint with its generous fees of 40 marks p.a. Wardens’ Accts. of Goldsmiths’ Mistery, 510; CPR, 1441-6, pp. 125, 128, 193; E159/220, recorda Mich. rots. 17d, 19d. The grant of the annuity did not take effect, but the loss was more than made good on 21 Dec. 1442, when he was awarded an annuity in the same sum charged on the issues of Essex and Herts. and backdated to 20 Jan. 1437, the date of the previous patentee’s death: CPR, 1441-6, p. 137. This morsel of unclaimed royal patronage probably came to his attention as escheator of the two counties in 1442-3. This was the most valuable position to come to him to that date, but he soon improved upon it: on 4 Feb. 1444 he secured significant promotion within the Exchequer with appointment as treasurer’s remembrancer.

This last grant proved to be contentious, at least in respect of the terms on which it was made. The treasurer customarily nominated his own remembrancer, and the memoranda roll duly records Thorpe’s appointment as the nominee of the current holder of that office, Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley. Other evidence, however, implies that he was the Crown’s choice. By letters patent of the following 16 Sept. he was given the office for life, notwithstanding the treasurer’s right of appointment. These letters are said to have been issued with Sudeley’s approval, yet it is hard to see why he should have deprived himself of the right to make a later nomination, and, even if he did so willingly, Thorpe’s life tenure was likely to prove an offence to Sudeley’s successor. In any event, the point was more one of principle than practical advantage. Although it was not customary for a new treasurer to replace the serving remembrancer – indeed, between 1397 and 1505 only six men held office as remembrancer – the privilege of appointment was his and not the Crown’s. E159/220, recorda Hil. rot. 3d; CPR, 1441-6, p. 363; PRO List ‘Exchequer Officers’, 53-54. Thorpe’s appointment also meant the setting aside of the more experienced Exchequer man, John Cerf*, who had been remembrancer since 1435. Since, however, Cerf died soon after our MP’s appointment, it may be that he resigned on health grounds. By securing the office on such favourable terms, Thorpe invited the charge that he was exploiting special favour to subvert the customs governing Exchequer appointments. Further, two unaccustomed privileges granted to him soon afterwards strengthened this case against him. On 8 Jan. 1446 the King awarded him, above the remembrancer’s established renumeration of 40 marks p.a., a further 50 marks p.a. in consideration of the office’s charges. Such supplements were routinely awarded to the remembrancer, but Thorpe was not only given ten marks a year more than his predecessors but the grant was backdated to 31 Mar. 1442, two years before his appointment. More divisively, by the same grant, he was to have an annual livery of the kind worn by the more senior Exchequer officials, the barons, so, it was said, that he might hold his own office ‘with more credit’. Such a dispensation was hardly likely to endear him to other Exchequer officers. CPR, 1441-6, pp. 396, 418, 419; CCR, 1441-7, p. 336. This backdating was made on the spurious grounds that he had had no advantage from the earlier grant of an annuity of £10 to hold from that date, a loss for which he had already been recompensed.

Thorpe also benefited at this time from some of the lesser plums of royal patronage. On 11 July 1448 he regained the office of tronager and pesager in Newcastle-upon-Tyne that he had lost six years before, and on the following day he had a new patent of the office of controller, exchanger and assayer of the King’s money in Tower of London, which he had previously held jointly with Ragley. In the following January, he added to his posts the sinecure of the porter-ship of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to be held in survivorship with his son, Roger, at the far from negligible wages of 2s. a day; and in July 1449 he received a special payment of 30 marks for various work undertaken on the Crown’s behalf, both in the Exchequer and as a commissioner in the counties. CPR, 1446-52, pp. 180, 226; E159/225, brevia Easter rot. 19; E403/775, m. 8.

Clearly, by the late 1440s Thorpe stood high in official favour, and it was probably this that gave him the confidence and influence to speculate in the acquisition of one of the most important of the Exchequer offices. A deposition made in Chancery by Master John Somerset* provides a unique insight into the trade in offices in the late 1440s. According to Somerset, John Lematon* had paid him, for the reversion of his office of chancellor of the Exchequer, no less than 1,000 marks, and a further 100 marks to the most important of the King’s ministers, William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, to facilitate the grant. At the following Christmas (either 1447 or 1448), Thorpe petitioned the King for a grant of the reversion of the chancellorship, expectant on the deaths of Somerset and Lematon, in tail-male. Suffolk was willing to indulge him, no doubt on the payment of a reward, and Lematon thus faced the prospect of being unable to profit himself from the reversion’s sale. His anger at Suffolk as ‘Thorpys frende and doer’ turned, in Somerset’s view, to his disadvantage: the chancellor thought Lematon might have undone the damage had he been willing to make a further payment to the rapacious chief minister. C1/19/60-65; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 50-51. If this story is true, it serves as an indictment of Suffolk’s conduct of royal patronage. But it also reflects badly on Thorpe. His petition for a grant of the chancellorship in tail-male was a gross presumption, for the office had never before been granted more generously than for life. Somerset’s conduct, even on his own account, is also questionable. Having taken so large a sum from Lematon, was he not bound to mediate with the duke when our MP intervened to effectively reduce the value of the office Lematon had purchased? He ascribes to himself a disinterested motive for failing to aid the unfortunate Lemanton, that is, ‘to teach men [not] to buy reversions by maintenance of lords’, yet he was ready to see Thorpe prosper by doing precisely that. One might suspect that he let Lematon lose because of his own association with Thorpe. On several occasions between October 1442 and July 1445 Thorpe had received payments in the Exchequer on Somerset’s behalf, and in May 1443 the two men had shared with John Hampton II* a royal grant of a minor wardship. E403/747, m. 1; 749, m. 11; 751, m. 2; 757, m. 8; CFR, xvii. 262-3.

This connexion with Somerset and Master John’s supposed kinship with the Beauforts has led to the speculation that Thorpe owed his rise, in part at least, to the patronage of Edmund Beaufort, created duke of Somerset in March 1448. The Exchequer chancellor was not, however, a kinsman of the duke – he was a Londoner – and, on closer examination, the surviving evidence for our MP’s service to Beaufort is weak. It is true that his career, in the febrile atmosphere of the early 1450s, ‘followed the ups and downs of the Beaufort party’, but so too did the careers of other courtiers not bound to the duke. J.S. Roskell, Parl. and Politics, 201. In truth, direct evidence of their association is scarce. In 1446 Thorpe received reassignments in respect of uncashed tallies issued to the duke’s late brother, John Beaufort, but he performed the same service for many others, including, on one occasion, the duke’s adversary and later his own, Richard, duke of York. Later, in 1460, his son, Roger, was in the retinue of the duke’s son, Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset, at Guînes, but this hardly serves to connect the two fathers. E403/765, m. 7; 785, m. 12; PROME, xv. 146-9.

The story of Thorpe’s efforts to secure the chancellorship suggests the duke of Suffolk as a more likely patron for our MP than Beaufort, although there is nothing to suggest that their relationship was a close one and later evidence shows that he did not number among the duke’s intimates. What is known of Thorpe’s connexions in the later 1440s concerns lesser figures. On 7 Mar. 1446 Thomas Spofford, bishop of Hereford, granted him, ‘ob sinceram affeccionem quam ergo personam vestram gerimus’, the use of his inn in Old Fish Street, London; and in January 1448 he was named among the feoffees of the soldier and courtier, Sir William Lucy*, ironically, in view of later events, alongside the duke of York. Reg. Spofford (Canterbury and York Soc. xxiii), 279; Salop Archs., Corbet of Acton Reynald mss, 322/2/258. Taken together, this evidence leaves the impression that Thorpe was not the protégé of a powerful individual, but that he owed his success largely to his own efforts, exploiting the associations he formed through his place in the Exchequer as occasion offered.

In the late 1440s Thorpe made a marriage for his daughter, Beatrice, that arose from connexions at court. The future groom, Richard Strickland*, may have been brought up there. There is no directly contemporary evidence for the marriage, but it is cited in a much later Chancery petition concerning rival claims to Richard Strickland’s lands: C1/224/62-64. In 1443, although only 12 years old, he was joined with his father, Walter Strickland I*, in a royal grant of the office of master of the King’s harriers (or small hounds). Thorpe became involved in his affairs on Walter’s death in April 1446. In the autumn of that year he joined Richard in an action to contest the King’s right of wardship and marriage, perhaps because he had already contracted for the marriage. CPR, 1441-6, p. 452; E159/223, brevia Mich. rot. 15. On 22 Sept. 1448 Richard, although still a minor, granted his principal property, the manor of Haversham in Buckinghamshire, to feoffees headed by the duke of Suffolk, and other courtiers, among whom was our MP. There are grounds for believing that the feoffment was connected with the marriage: two of the feoffees were Exchequer officials, namely John Croke and Brian Roucliffe, and others of them were associated with Thorpe in other capacities, that is, Lucy and William Venour, keeper of the Fleet, for both of whom he acted as a feoffee. E326/4220. If, however, the manor of Haversham was intended as Beatrice’s jointure, it was, seemingly, never settled as such. In 1445 Venour had sued out a licence to grant his manor of Liston (Essex) to Thorpe and others: CPR, 1441-6, p. 345. A later Chancery petition puts a more sinister gloss on these proceedings. The grandson and heir of Walter Strickland II* claimed that Richard, throughout his life, had been a natural fool, and that Thorpe made the marriage to obtain a generous jointure for his daughter. This may be no more than the special pleading of a later land dispute, but, if it is true, it provides yet another instance of our MP’s ruthlessness. C1/224/62-64.

This marriage, whatever its circumstances, emphasizes the fact that Thorpe’s world was largely confined to Westminster. None the less, in the 1440s, as he turned the profits of government service to the acquisition of the landed estate with which birth had not provided him, he also developed a role in local society. Regrettably, his land acquisitions can only be reconstructed from scattered and unsatisfactory references. By as early as 1437 he had purchased property in Croydon in Surrey, if one may infer his ownership from an action of close-breaking he brought in the Exchequer of pleas, and in 1440, as mentioned earlier, he made a small purchase in Lincolnshire. E13/140, rot. 38. At this early stage in his career he appears also to have acquired land in Essex, where, at his death, he held several properties. This is implied by his rather surprising appointment as escheator there in November 1442, a nomination that would not have been made had he been landless locally. There is no direct evidence for his holdings in the county before February 1447, when he acquired from Matthew Hay a tenement called ‘le Belle super le Hoop’ in Great Ilford. But this was probably merely an addition to land he already held there. By the mid 1450s, at any event, he is known to have held the manor of ‘Clayhall’ and other property at Great Ilford, smaller holdings at Barking and Chigwell, all conveniently near London, and a tenement, called the ‘Bellhouse’, further afield at Stanford Rivers. To these he added, in the last years of his life, the manor of Cranbrook, also in Barking. E210/4346; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 255-6, 483-4; C1/558/47. Some of his Barking lands were purchased from Alice Cergeaux (d.1452), the widowed countess of Richard de Vere, earl of Oxford: CCR, 1447-54, p. 483.

Thorpe, however, did not confine his major acquisitions to Essex. Proximity to London intensified competition for land there, and if this meant that property came more readily to the market than in more distant shires it also inflated prices. It may, in part, have been for this reason that Thorpe turned to more distant Northamptonshire for his largest single purchase: in 1446-7 he acquired the manor of Barnwell All Saints, an extensive property of more than 1,000 acres. J. Bridges, Northants. ii. 214; CP25(1)/179/97/39. His nomination among the feoffees of one of the county’s wealthiest men, Sir William Lucy, followed soon afterwards, and on 5 May 1448 the Crown added him to the quorum of the county’s bench (five weeks after he had received the same appointment in Essex). His place in the county was strengthened in the following May, when the King granted him the keeping of the large royal manor of Brigstock, a few miles from Barnwell, at an annual farm of £40 for ten years. It is unlikely, however, that he had any serious intention of establishing himself among the county’s gentry and assuming the associated burden of local administration. In February 1447 he had taken the precaution of securing a royal exemption from such appointments against his will, probably to prevent a repetition of his nomination as escheator, and such ad hoc commissions as came his way did so in Essex rather than Northamptonshire. CFR, xviii. 110; E159/223, recorda Hil. rot. 5. This might explain his apparent readiness quickly to surrender the farm of Brigstock. A few weeks after it had been entrusted to him, it was re-granted to the manor’s tenants, who had held the same since the death of Queen Joan in 1437. One might assume a quid pro quo here, after all Thorpe was far more influential than the tenants, and it may be that he sold his interest to them. CFR, xvii. 211-12; xviii. 112. An inquisition held at Northampton on 14 June 1451 that, between Nov. 1449 and Mich. 1450, he took £20 from the farm of the manor, perhaps as compensation for his surrender of the farm: CIMisc. viii. 256.

This is the context in which Thorpe’s elections to Parliament are to be interpreted. He sat not as a representative of communities of which he was scarcely a part, but as a government servant anxious to forward his own career. On 23 Oct. 1449 he was returned for Northamptonshire in company with another royal servant, William Tresham*. C219/15/7. The two MPs had much in common, for both were royal servants who began their careers as lawyers in the Exchequer, but, curiously, this joint election is the only occasion on which they are found acting together. His return was unusual in two respects: not only had he only just acquired land in the county he was to represent, but it was rare for so senior an Exchequer official to sit in the Commons. Of the six treasurer’s remembrancers of the 15th century, three are not recorded as MPs, and one, Cerf, was elected shortly before appointment to the office but failed to sit. Serving barons of the Exchequer were very rarely MPs, either in this period or beyond. In short, he was a far from obvious choice on the part of the county’s electors, and one might suspect a certain amount of engineering was required to secure his election. There is indirect evidence that his cause was forwarded by another royal servant, William Catesby*, one of the county’s leading gentry and its MP in the previous Parliament. On 20 Oct. he had secured election for Warwickshire, perhaps with the intention of leaving the Northamptonshire seat for Thorpe, whose return he then attested.

Thorpe’s first experience of service in the Commons proved an uncomfortable one. He must have viewed with perturbation the Commons’ petition against the extortions of Exchequer officials, who, it was claimed, had demanded a share of sums due to royal creditors in return for securing repayment of these sums at the Exchequer. PROME, xii. 152-3. Even worse from his point of view, the attack of his fellow MPs on the duke of Suffolk during the second session (22 Jan. to 30 Mar. 1450) threatened the dawn of a new dispensation far less conducive to his advancement than the old. What that dispensation might mean to him in material terms was made clear in the third and last session (which convened at Leicester between 29 Apr. and early June), when the Commons forced an Act of Resumption upon a reluctant Crown. Whether Thorpe was present to witness the passing of this Act is doubtful. On 30 Apr. he was in the Exchequer receiving assignments on behalf of William Neville, Lord Fauconberg, Richard Wydeville, Lord Rivers, Sir Henry Percy and others, and it may be that his duties detained him there at least until the end of the Easter term on 19 May. E403/779, m. 2. Given the later hostility between Thorpe and the Nevilles, it is worth noting that he was not only employed by Fauconberg in the Exchequer, but, by Mich. 1445, he had been retained as legal counsel by Fauconberg’s brother, the earl of Salisbury: SC6/1122/3, m. 4d.

The practical consequences of this important Parliament did not prove, at least in the short term, as damaging to Thorpe as he might have had reason to fear. He, like other royal servants, escaped the worst effects of the resumption, winning exemption in respect of all his grants save the annuity of £10 assigned upon the issues of Essex and Hertfordshire. Further, on 13 May 1450, during the last session and 11 days after Suffolk’s murder, this loss had, seemingly, been more than made good by the grant he shared with the former treasurer, Ralph, Lord Cromwell, of the wardship and marriage of the heir of the wealthy midland knight, Sir Henry Pleasington*, at a farm to be agreed. The grant was, however, premature. Pleasington was not dead: Thorpe and Cromwell sued for it on mistaken intelligence. PROME, xii. 145; CFR, xviii. 155; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 87. None the less, Thorpe’s association with Cromwell at this date is revealing. According to one well-informed contemporary, Cromwell had taken a leading part in engineering Suffolk’s downfall, and it is thus unlikely that the grant would have been made if our MP had been identified too closely as one of the fallen minister’s creatures. Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii. [766].

Yet Thorpe did not escape entirely unscathed. On 21 May 1450 he lost his office as changer and assayer within the Tower of London to the King’s serjeant and London grocer, Richard Joynour*. CPR, 1446-52, p. 334. Further, even though he was not an intimate of the duke of Suffolk, he shared, in the popular imagination, some of the unpopularity of his regime. In the summer of 1450, during Cade’s revolt, he was included in a ‘dyrge made by the comons of Kent’, composed as a parody of the office of the dead sung for the soul of the murdered duke:

A-rys up thorp and cantelowe and stond ye togeder,

and synge ‘dies illa, dies ire’. Political, Religious and Love Songs ed. Furnivall (EETS, xv), 11; R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 639.

It is not known why, in the minds of Kentishmen, he should have been connected with William Cantelowe*, a wealthy London mercer and victualler of Calais, but this is not the only evidence that they identified him with the unpopular court clique. In August he was one of 32 courtiers indicted by local jurors for various offences in Kent. C.L. Kingsford, English Historical Literature, 364-5; R. Virgoe, ‘Ancient Indictments in K.B.’, in Med. Kentish Soc. (Kent Rec. Ser. xviii), 216n.; I.M.W. Harvey, Jack Cade, 133. Clearly he was seen by his detractors as more than an Exchequer civil servant. He was already playing the political role that was to make his career in the 1450s so turbulent. One indication of that role is his nomination, alongside the prominent courtiers Lord Rivers, Thomas Daniell*, John Say II* and Thomas Tresham*, to try John Harries, a Yorkshire shipman, who, as the royal entourage made its way to Leicester for the opening of Parliament’s third session, had confronted the King at Stony Stratford. Menacingly wielding a flail, Harries had declared that Richard, duke of York, would ‘in lyke manner fight with traytours at Leicester Parliament and so thrashe them doune as he had thrashed the clods of erthe in that towne’. Whether this amounted to treason was a mute point, but Harries was, improperly in the view of one chronicler, condemned to death by the commissioners. CPR, 1446-52, p. 383; R.A. Griffiths, King and Country, 281-2. Open to the same interpretation is his appearance on 28 Mar. 1450, in company with (Sir) Thomas Stanley II*, controller of the royal household, and other courtiers, among the commissioners before whom a London vintner was condemned to execution for fomenting a rising: CPR, 1446-52, p. 320; R. Virgoe, ‘Death of Wm. de la Pole, duke of Suffolk’. Bull. J. Rylands Lib. xlvii. 491n.; KB9/73/1.

The change in the political climate meant that Thorpe had no chance of repeating his election for Northamptonshire at the hustings in the autumn of 1450. The duke of York, recently returned from Ireland, actively intervened in that county to ensure the return of those friendly to his cause. Thorpe instead found a seat for the Wiltshire borough of Ludgershall. He seems to have left it to the last minute to do so, perhaps because his hopes of securing a county seat, that of Essex, had only ended with that county’s election on 27 Oct., just ten days before Parliament met. When the sheriff of Wiltshire drew up a schedule of those returned for the many parliamentary boroughs of the county, he named John Yelverton*, son of William Yelverton*, j.KB, as MP for Ludgershall. Later, however, Yelverton’s name was erased and Thorpe’s name written over. This amendment may even have occurred after the schedule had been returned into Chancery; and it seems fair to conclude that Thorpe, unsuccessful in his pursuit of a more prestigious seat, used his influence at the centre of government to have the Ludgershall return amended. C219/16/1. Yelverton was, however, returned for Old Sarum.

Thorpe’s determination to secure a place in a Parliament set to meet in an atmosphere of such acute tension is a further indication of his commitment to a political role. As in the previous Parliament, he must have watched the Commons’ proceedings with distrust if not dismay. His fellow MPs, or at least a powerful faction among them led by the Speaker, York’s servant, Sir William Oldhall*, condemned the regime he served. Nevertheless, there is no reason to suppose that, at this date, he was seen, as he was later to be, as one of the duke’s intractable opponents. He was not, for example, among the 30 courtiers, headed by the duke of Somerset, whose exclusion from the royal presence was unsuccessfully called for by the Commons in December 1450, further evidence that he was not counted among Somerset’s intimates. PROME, xii. 184-6. There is some doubt about the precise date of this petition, but it was probably prompted by the duke of York’s entry into London on 23 Nov.: P.A. Johnson, Duke Richard of York, 88, 91-92. Indeed, to outward appearances, Thorpe himself was unaffected by the momentous events about him. On 20 Nov. he sued out a writ of privy seal, ordering the Exchequer to repay him the 160 marks which he had loaned the Crown in the previous year together with £10 due to the abbot of Peterborough of a loan of 40 marks that Thorpe had solicited from him. E404/67/92. The abbot had made the loan on 25. Feb. 1450: E403/779, m. 6. Three weeks later, on 10 Dec., as the political waters were briefly closing over his supposed patron, Somerset, a Hertfordshire maltman deemed him as an appropriate trustee of his goods. E159/227, commissiones Hil.

This is not to say that Thorpe escaped undamaged from the general attack on the royal household. On 22 Dec., immediately after the end of first session, he lost his office as tronager and pesager in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, to Richard Weltden*, a Neville servant, and, like other royal servants, he was unable to evade the more comprehensive Act of Resumption passed during the second session (20 Jan. to 29 Mar. 1451). CPR, 1446-52, p. 418. Yet he had attracted none of the ad hominem hostility that was to bedevil the later part of his career, and he was well-enough established among the King’s servants to be confident of making good his losses when royal fortunes revived. That recovery came more quickly than he can have anticipated. Parliament ended suddenly late in May after Thomas Young II*, a lawyer in the service of the duke of York, presented an ill-judged petition, asking for the recognition of his master as heir-presumptive to the throne.

Thorpe’s career resumed a calmer course. In June 1451 he was one of a syndicate of four who loaned 200 marks to an Essex knight, Sir John Fitzsymond. On the following 3 Aug. he received assignments at the Exchequer on behalf of the duke of York, among others, an indication that he was not yet identified among the duke’s opponents. E210/10325; E403/785, m. 12. Soon after, by agreements made in February and March 1452, he agreed to pay the Crown 260 marks for the wardship and marriages of two daughters and coheiresses of the Essex landholder, John Helion (d.1450). CFR, xviii. 259, 263-4; C139/140/31; A.R. Myers, Crown, Household and Parl. 178. By 8 Apr. 1452 he had paid only £40; on that date he contracted with Hugh Kingston, a royal receiver, to pay the remaining 200 marks by Easter 1453: E210/4518. Yet he appears to have been aware that this apparent calm would not last. At the time of the Dartford crisis he took the precaution of divesting himself of his estates. On 4 Mar. 1452, two days after the duke of York had been deceived into ending peaceably his confrontation with the King and duke of Somerset, he quitclaimed his estates, by a series of separate deeds, to a group drawn from the legal and Exchequer community, namely the under sheriff of London, Thomas Burgoyne*, four Exchequer officials (Thomas Stockdale†, John Croke, Brian Roucliffe and Gerard de la Hay) and a cleric, Roger Burgh. CCR, 1447-54, pp. 483-4. This may be a sign of insecurity on our MP’s part, one which later events were to prove fully justified. The first crisis of his career came soon afterwards. In the following Trinity term, John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, newly-appointed as treasurer, ordered Thomas Combe*, clerk of John Holme, one of the barons of the Exchequer, to inquire into defects discovered in the records of the treasurer’s remembrancer, a strong indication that he was unsympathetic to Thorpe as the holder of that office. It is not clear whether antagonism was aimed at him personally or to the generous terms on which he held an office customarily in the treasurer’s gift. But whatever his motive, Tiptoft was successful in removing him for, on 7 July, two days after the end of Trinity term, Richard Forde, clerk of the pipe, was promoted to succeed him. E403/796, m. 6; PRO List, ‘Exchequer Officers’, 54. Given that the office carried with it both status and fees of 90 marks p.a., this represented a disaster for our MP, and it is a measure of his influence outside the Exchequer that he was able to turn an apparent crisis to his advantage. That influence was exemplified in the following autumn when he was employed by the chancellor, Cardinal Kemp, to carry confidential messages to the King, who was on a judicial progress. C81/1371/47. Not surprisingly, then, he had the confidence to defy the treasurer. If a petition presented in the Parliament of 1455 is to be credited, he ejected Forde from the remembrancership and refused to surrender it unless he was promoted to the office of third baron of the Exchequer. Forde’s friends, bowing to this pressure, contrived the retirement of the third baron, the elderly clerk William Fallan, on the understanding that Forde would pay Fallan 40 marks p.a. for life unless the King made similar provision. All this must have occurred before 2 Dec., when the King issued a mandate for Thorpe’s admission to the place of the third baron. RP, v. 342-3 (cf. PROME, xii. 445); E159/229, recorda Mich. rot. 31.

It cannot be coincidental that, at the very same time as he was winning this office in these contentious circumstances, Thorpe received two other important royal grants. On 22 Nov. he went some way to making good his purchase of the chancellorship of the Exchequer, when he was formally granted the reversion expectant on the death of Master John Somerset. CPR, 1452-61, p. 43; PRO List, ‘Exchequer Officers’, 37. His rival for the office, John Lematon, had died in 1449, and on 19 Dec. that year the reversion, contrary to the undertaking our MP had received, had been granted to two King’s knights, Sir John Beauchamp and Sir William Beauchamp*: CPR, 1446-52, p. 313. They now surrendered their grant in his favour. Eight days later he had a gift from the King of the substantial sum of £200 for the ‘greet costes, charges, troubles and vexacions that he hath hadde and suffred for us’, perhaps an indirect reference to his troubles with Tiptoft. E404/69/74. However this may be, Thorpe’s behaviour and the government’s indulgence of it was an open affront to the earl as treasurer. It was probably at this point in his career that our MP, perhaps in reaction to the earl’s attack, became prominent among the opponents of the duke of York’s pretensions.

This recovery of the government’s fortunes in the aftermath of York’s failed Dartford rising was the prelude to Thorpe’s election to a third successive Parliament, that summoned on 20 Jan. 1453 to meet at Reading on the following 6 March. At hustings held at Chelmsford on 13 Feb. he was returned for Essex in company with John Doreward*, son of one of the wealthiest of that county’s gentry. The indenture survives only as a fragment, and gives no clue to any unusual circumstances that might have attended his election: C219/16/2. On the day before the election Thorpe had been in London, but this does not exclude the possibility that he was present at the hustings: E159/229, recogniciones Hil. An abnormally high number of royal servants were elected, giving colour to the claim of one contemporary chronicler that the Parliament was packed, and it promised to be far more favourable to the King’s interests than the last two assemblies. Six Town Chrons. ed. Flenley, 139-40. Thorpe himself may have played a part in mobilizing the government’s electoral interest. This, at least, is implied by the number of his close associates who secured seats: his son, Roger, was returned for Truro, and his Exchequer subordinates, Thomas Cross* and Thomas Bourne*, the lawyer Thomas Umfray*, the ‘clerk’ Thomas Preston II*, and his son-in-law, Richard Strickland, were elected for Heytesbury, Steyning, Great Bedwyn, Wallingford and East Grinstead respectively. Irregularity attached to at least three of these elections. The indenture drawn up on 24 Feb. 1453 between the Wiltshire sheriff, Edward Stradling, and the Heytesbury electors shows clear signs of later amendment: the names of the MPs originally elected have been erased, and those of Cross and Richard Keston* have been added over the erasure. Neither had any connexion with the borough, and it is a fair speculation that the indenture was amended after its return into Chancery, perhaps on Thorpe’s initiative. The same argument can be made in the case of the Cornish indenture, which was not drawn up until the day before Parliament was due to assemble. In an attached schedule the names of our MP’s son and John Norris*, an esquire of the King’s body, have been added as the Truro MPs over an erasure. Preston’s name replaced that of an ‘armiger’ on the Berkshire return. C219/16/2. Further, an irregularity of a different sort attached to Strickland’s return if any credence is to be accorded to the later claim that he was an idiot.

If, however, Thorpe’s apparent electoral manipulation was a declaration of his intent to play a prominent part in the assembly’s proceedings, much more so was his readiness to put himself forward as Speaker. On 8 Mar., no doubt with the backing of the government, he was nominated to the office by his fellow MPs. PROME, xii. 230-3. In one regard, his nomination was an curious one: he was the first serving senior Exchequer official to hold the Speakership and his appointment entailed an abdication of professional responsibilities. None the less, all seemed set fair for a recovery of both his personal fortunes and those of the Crown. During their first two sessions the Commons proved remarkably generous to the regime, most notably in their grant to the King of the customs’ revenues for life, and openly hostile to the duke of York, successfully petitioning for the attainder of Sir William Oldhall. No doubt Thorpe played some part in bringing about this happy state of affairs, and he benefited accordingly. On 29 Apr., four days into the second session, his son, Roger, was reappointed to the portership of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and on 17 May father was re-joined with son in the grant. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 64, 81. These re-grants to father and son were backdated to their loss of the office under the resumption of the Parliament of 1449 (Nov.). Curiously, it had not been bestowed elsewhere in the intervening period, and the Thorpes took advantage, suing (Sir) John Heron*, former sheriff of Northumb., for their wages from the period Mar. 1451 to Sept. 1452: E13/145B, rot. 74. Soon after, on 23 May, our MP was both confirmed in his wardship of the Helion heiresses (against the counter-claims of the wards’ stepfather, John Green III*), and pardoned for all amercements and forfeitures due at the Exchequer. CPR, 1452-61, p. 113; E368/227, Hil. rot. 21. On 13 June 1453 he sold the wardship and marriage of Isabel Helion to Sir Thomas Tyrell: CCR, 1447-54, pp. 446-7. Better followed for him just after the second session ended: on 11 July he made his first recorded appearance as a member of the royal council, and the Exchequer was ordered to pay him £200 as a gift from the King to be charged, in an open affront to the Yorkists, against the mainpernors of Oldhall, then in sanctuary. PPC, vi. 143; E404/69/179; E403/793, m. 14. It is a moot point whether this payment was intended specifically to reward his service as Speaker: J.S. Roskell, Speakers, 110.

Yet these propitious circumstances for Thorpe and the government were soon to be brought to a sudden and unexpected end by the King’s catastrophic mental collapse late in July or early in August. Thorpe now found himself dangerously exposed, and, during the Parliament’s lengthy prorogation, he received a reverse of far greater proportions than his loss of the office of treasurer’s remembrancer. In Michaelmas term 1453 (9 Oct. to 28 Nov.) the duke of York sued him in the Exchequer of pleas, claiming that he had come to the London inn of Robert Neville, bishop of Durham, and attached some of his goods, said to be worth as much as £2,000. The date of Thorpe’s alleged offence is given in the Parl. roll but only the day (Monday) and year (31 Hen. VI) are legible: PROME, xii. 254-5. The probability is that the date lies between 2 July, the end of the previous parliamentary session, and the end of the 31st year of the reign, namely 31 Aug., in other words, either shortly before or after the King’s mental collapse: The Commons 1386-1421, i. 152. The action is noted as sued in that term in a contemporary index of the plea rolls of the Exchequer, but the relevant roll is lost: E14/1, Mich. 32 Hen. VI. A Middlesex jury awarded the duke massive damages of £1,000 and costs of £10, and Thorpe was committed to the Fleet pending payment. It is not clear exactly what lay behind this famous episode. According to a petition presented by Thorpe’s son, Roger, to the Parliament of 1485, the duke was instigated to bring the action by his councillor, Thomas Colt*, who then, by his ‘speciall labour and untrue means’, caused the defendant to be condemned in these heavy damages and imprisoned. PROME, xv. 146-7. There is no reason to doubt that a basis of truth underlies this accusation – Colt’s Membership of the Parliament of 1453 adds colour to it – and a motive can be suggested for his action. Colt was in dispute with John Brome II* over the Exchequer office of deputy chamberlain, and our MP, given his association with the anti-Yorkist faction, was, very probably, one of Brome’s supporters. Intra-departmental rivalry may, therefore, be a factor in York’s action against Thorpe. On the other hand, given the later determination of the Yorkists to single Thorpe out as a particularly malign influence on the King, there was probably more to the matter than this. Roger Thorpe’s petition implies as much: he claimed that the goods taken by his father were ‘certeine Harnesse and other Habiliments of Warre’, and, in seizing them, his father had been acting on the King’s command. If this is the truth, then one might infer that the government suspected the duke of planning another armed rising after his failure at Dartford in the previous year, and that our MP was acting lawfully to thwart it as an agent of the Crown.

Doubts about the motives of both Thomas Thorpe and the duke in this controversial episode are matched by uncertainty as to when our MP’s imprisonment began. On 20 Oct. 1453 an Exchequer syndicate, which included Thorpe, made a loan of 2,000 marks to the Crown, and one must suppose he was at Reading for the reassembly and immediate prorogation of Parliament on 12 Nov. E403/796, m. 1. By the end of that month, however, he clearly felt his enemies closing about him. On 25 Nov., three days before the end of the Michaelmas law term, he granted all his goods to a group of courtiers, headed by Richard Caudray, dean of the collegiate church of St. Martin-le-Grand, and Laurence Booth, Queen Margaret’s chancellor, and on the following day he took the precaution of having both this gift and the quitclaims of 1452 enrolled on the close roll. The other trustees reflect Thorpe’s connexions in the Exchequer and the city of London: Master Thomas Ardern, probably a near-kinsman of Peter Ardern, chief baron of the Exchequer, Thomas Burgoyne, under sheriff of London, Stephen Forster*, a wealthy London merchant, Thomas Hoo II*, John Croke, Thomas Stockdale, William Coote (Queen Margaret’s attorney-general by 1459), Thomas Umfray, Thomas Cross, Richard Esthorp and Thomas Preston*, clerk: CCR, 1447-54, p. 484. A few days earlier his exposed position had become the more so with the committal to the Tower of the head of the court faction, Edmund, duke of Somerset, and it has been suggested that he alienated his goods as a preparation for fleeing into Caudray’s sanctuary at St. Martin’s (where, incongruously, he would have joined Oldhall). The Commons 1386-1421, i. 152. But he had another motive, either additionally or alternatively, namely, to avoid execution of judgement on his goods in the case brought against him by York. Indeed, one suspects that that judgement, rather than Somerset’s arrest, was the immediate pretext for the gift, and that it had probably, like Somerset’s arrest, come only days before. Thereafter he appears to have remained at large for at least a few weeks. On 7 Dec. he had influence enough to secure the revocation of letters patent of February 1452 that had deprived him of part of the lands of the Helion coheiresses. Further, it was reported, in the famous newsletter of John Stodeley* dated 19 Jan. 1454, that ‘Thorpe of th’escheker articuleth fast ayenst the Duke of York’, and on 4 Feb., only ten days before Parliament was due to reassemble, royal letters of non molestetis were sent to the treasurer and barons of the Exchequer in respect of a pardon Thorpe and others had sued out in the previous May. CPR, 1452-61, p. 144; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 296; E368/227, Hil. rot. 21. None of this proves that Thorpe was free as late as this, but it certainly raises the possibility that his committal to the Fleet occurred only very shortly before the new parliamentary session.

In these circumstances, there is a strong possibility that the whole matter was contrived by York to bring about the effective removal of a Speaker antagonistic to his interest. If this is the case, then his resort to such underhand methods suggests that Thorpe had exercised great, and, in York’s view, malign, influence over the Commons. That influence may partly explain the hostile reaction of the Commons to their Speaker’s detention. Their open displeasure, however, had a broader constitutional justification, namely the defence of the parliamentary privilege of freedom from arrest for offences less than felony, its infringement brought into sharper focus by the fact that Thorpe was Speaker. On their reassembly at Westminster on 14 Feb. 1454, they invoked this privilege in asking for the release of Thorpe and William Ralegh*, an MP detained on another matter. On the following day, before the Lords, the duke of York’s counsel made the case for Thorpe’s continued detention: their grounds were twofold, first, privilege did not apply because Thorpe’s offence post-dated the beginning of Parliament and his conviction had come ‘in tyme of vacation of the same Parlement’; and, second, that his release would leave the duke without remedy for the payment of the damages and costs awarded him. They thus asked that he be detained until he had discharged the debt to York. The Lords consulted the justices, who protested that it was not their place to ‘determine the Privelegge of this high Court of Parlement; for it is so high and so mighty ... that it make lawe, and that that is lawe it may make noo lawe’. Chief Justice Fortescue*, however, while accepting the principle of freedom of arrest, made it clear that he viewed it unfavourably. He remarked that, ‘ther be many and diverse Supersedeas of Privelegge of Parlement brought in to the Courtes, but ther ys no generall Supersedeas brought to surcesse of all processes’; if any such existed, ‘it shuld seeme’ that Parliament, where common-law actions could not be determined, was interfering inappropriately with common law and leaving complainants without remedy. In other words, the justices, although formally declining to give a judgement, came down on York’s side, and, not surprisingly, the lords followed their lead, ruling that Thorpe should remain in prison. Accordingly, 16 Feb. a man of very different stamp, Sir Thomas Charlton*, was elected as the new Speaker. PROME, xii. 254-6; The Commons 1386-1421, i. 153-4.

The election of a more acceptable Speaker was probably as much as the duke of York intended to achieve by his campaign against Thorpe. This would explain why our MP’s detention, despite the political and legal controversy to which it had given rise, was brief. Indeed, he was certainly free by 23 May, when he appeared personally in the Exchequer to acknowledge the payment of a bond, and he may even have left custody as early as 6 Mar., when named as a feoffee of an Essex glover. E159/229, recogniciones Trin.; CCR, 1454-61, p. 353. If the 1485 ex parte petition is to be credited, the release came because he had paid York the whole sum in which he had been condemned, but this was certainly not the case. On 26 July 1454, before the mayor of the staple of Westminster, he entered a statute staple for the payment of 200 marks to the duke on 1 Nov. 1455, an indication that part of the debt remained undischarged. PROME, xv. 146-7; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 108-9. Further, in a petition he presented in the Parliament of 1455, when Thorpe’s stock had sunk yet further, the duke complained that, in discharge of the sum of £210, perhaps the last of the money owed, the debtor had fraudulently given him an obligation in his own name and that of William Bennington of Walthamstow (Essex), knowing that the latter had not consented to be so bound. The duke, ‘trustyng of the trouth and worshipp to be stablisshed of presumpcion in personez called the office of baron, and the hounour that belongeth thereunto’, had thus been defrauded, and he now asked for execution on Thorpe, ‘as yf he had bounden hym self in a statute of the staple’. SC8/152/7596; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 108-9.

Despite the financial penalty hanging over him, Thorpe’s career entered a brief period of calm after his release. On the negative side was to be set the appointment, on 8 July 1454, of Thomas Witham, a servant of the Nevilles, as chancellor of the Exchequer. This confirmed to our MP that he would struggle to make good the earlier grant of the reversion, a reversion that had fallen in with the death of Master John Somerset on 4 June. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 161-2. On the other hand, although the duke of York dominated the government, he did not find himself entirely in the cold. He retained his places as an Exchequer baron and as a j.p. in Essex and Northamptonshire. In this latter role, he took some active part: on 26 Nov. 1454 he received at London a writ of certiorari addressed to his fellow j.p.s there. In the same month he was named to a commission of oyer and terminer in Essex. KB9/276/19; CPR, 1452-61, p. 222.

The King’s partial recovery at the end of 1454, however, provoked another graver crisis. York lost control of government to his rival, the duke of Somerset, and the prospect receded that the polarization of national politics would be contained without destabilising violence. Not surprisingly the new situation initially brought a major improvement in Thorpe’s circumstances. On 15 Mar. 1455 the earl of Worcester was replaced as treasurer by the courtier, James Butler, earl of Wiltshire, and nine days later Thorpe was granted for life the disputed chancellorship of the Exchequer. CPR, 1452-61, p. 230. What followed, however, gave a foretaste of the greater disaster later to befall him. There is no independent evidence to illustrate his part in the events immediately preceding the first battle of St. Albans on 22 May, but he is assigned a central role in the partisan and highly tendentious Yorkist account which has survived to posterity. This was embodied in a bill brought before the Commons in the first session of the Parliament which began in the following July. It alleged that the King had been led into a fatal misunderstanding of the benign intentions of the Yorkist lords by the duplicity and lies of the duke of Somerset (killed on the field), Thorpe and the household servant, William Joseph. On this account, it was they, who ‘sollicited’ Henry VI ‘by diverse meanes to mistruste’ the Yorkists, ‘affermyng theym not oure true Liegeman’, and so moved him to raise a great force. Then they concealed letters of explanation and justification written by the Yorkists to the King and chancellor in the two days previous to the battle, and forcibly attempted to prevent the Yorkist lords from coming to the King. PROME, xii. 338-43. Hardly less flattering to Thorpe is the only source to mention his part in the battle itself: a contemporary newsletter, with a distinct Yorkist bias, claimed that he was among those, the most notable of whom was the treasurer, who cowardly ‘fledde and caste awaye thair harneis in ditches and wodes’. Paston Letters, iii. 28; John Vale’s Bk. ed. Kekewich et al. 192.

No doubt these claims about Thorpe’s duplicitous conduct in the prelude to the battle are, at the least, a distortion of the truth, assigning him an implausibly prominent part in events. Indeed, the whole story of the concealed letters was, in all probability, a convenient fiction designed to deflect blame from the aggression of the Yorkists to a dead duke and two comparatively minor royal servants, an effort, in other words, to limit the recriminations to which the battle must inevitably have given rise. Some contemporaries may have seen it as such: a contemporary correspondent remarked that, when the bill was passed putting all the blame on Somerset, Thorpe and Joseph and entirely exculpating the Yorkists, ‘mony a man groged full sore’. Paston Letters, iii. 44. None the less, the question of truth aside, this bill and his removal from the Speakership in 1454 must have left Thorpe with the certain conviction that the Yorkists, and perhaps particularly the duke of York himself, viewed him with intense hostility.

The consequences promised to be severe. York successfully petitioned for the sequestration of Thorpe’s lands pending the payment of the sums owed him under the earlier award of damages. Much more potentially damaging for him, however, was the Commons’ petition that he and Joseph suffer resumption and exclusion from the presence of the royal family and that, for good measure, they be imprisoned for 12 years and fined £1,000. CCR, 1454-61, pp. 108-9; RP, v. 332-3 (cf. PROME, xii. 444); M.A. Hicks. ‘Propaganda and the Battle of St. Albans’, Nottingham Med. Studies, xliv (2000), 179-80. Clearly, although some of the Commons were unhappy about the parliamentary endorsement of the Yorkist narrative of the battle, others were happy to pursue the scapegoats. Henry VI, however, rejected these draconian measures, leaving Thorpe in a curious position. A bill had been passed charging him as guilty of a heinous offence; and yet the related bill imposing penalties suitable to the alleged offence had been rejected. He must have been acutely aware that only the King stood between him and potential ruin, and, in this regard, his worst fears were to be realized. In the period that Parliament was prorogued, that is, between 31 July and 12 Nov., the King suffered a renewed mental collapse. Unsurprisingly this prompted the Commons to renew, albeit more moderately, their attack during the second session. A petition accused Thorpe of using ‘unfitting demeanyng’ in the King’s presence and of committing ‘diverses grete offenses and mesprisions within the said Chequer, wherof oftymes it hathe been grevously compleynede’, and again asked for a resumption against him. These new charges are perhaps indicative of a general unease about the bill passed in the first session. If Thorpe was indeed guilty as charged therein, the concealment of the letters was enough in itself to justify resumption; the addition of these new and vague charges suggests that the drafters of the bill wanted his punishment to depend on something other than that which was generally regarded as false. Even so, the result was the same. With the duke of York now Protector once more, the petition was accepted, to be effective from 13 Dec. 1455. Three days later our MP’s most important office, that of chancellor of the Exchequer, was committed again to Witham. RP, v. 342 (cf. PROME, xii. 445); E159/232, recorda Hil. rot. 1d; CPR, 1452-61, p. 276. The grant to Witham of the chancellorship was extended from ‘during good behaviour’ to ‘for life’ on 11 May 1456: CPR, 1452-61, p. 286. By the end of 1455 Thorpe was thus bereft of all offices and grants.

To add to these grave difficulties, Thorpe was also under pressure to complete payments of the damages awarded to the duke of York. His lands had seemingly been sequestrated to this end, but a statute staple of 7 Jan. 1456 suggests that this had not taken full effect. Under the terms of this statute, he undertook to pay a rising lawyer, John Catesby, and John Snype £100 within a month, or else to make estate to their nominees of property in Barnwell, Ilford and Lilford as surety for two payments of £50 at Christmas 1456 and 1457. Probably, through a series of arrangements such as this, the necessary payments were made to the duke. By 27 Jan. he had paid him 500 marks, receiving an acquittance for that sum dated at Northampton, and four days later he made two further payments of £200 and 200 marks. E326/201; CCR, 1454-61, pp. 108-9. Successful though his career in the Exchequer had been, the loss of so large a sum was likely to have left him facing severe financial difficulties, which could only be remedied by a revival of his political fortunes. This may help to explain why he committed himself so thoroughly to the Lancastrian cause, gambling all, in a way that other royal officials did not, on its victory.

At first, the world quickly changed in Thorpe’s favour. York’s hold on power lasted only a matter of months, effectively terminated by opposition in the Lords to another general resumption. Signs of our MP’s recovery are apparent even before the duke had formally surrendered his protectorate. He and his son began to regain the grants and offices they had lost. On 7 Feb. 1456, only a week after Thorpe had discharged his debt to the Protector and only ten days after the act ordering resumption of his grants had been sent into the Exchequer, the Crown granted him, for the long term of 24 years, the custody of the honours of Peverel, Boulogne and Haughley in Buckinghamshire, Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, together with the castle and honour of Huntingdon; and in the following July the estates of these honours in East Anglia and the home counties were added to the grant. CFR, xviii. 197-8; xix. 147, 163. In July 1456 he won a small victory over the duke of York, securing the outlawry of the duke’s servant, Thomas Mulsho*, on a plea of debt: CP40/786, rot. 207. His son, Roger, who had formerly had that custody in company with two of his father’s associates, was more than handsomely compensated. By Michaelmas term he had found a place in the royal chamber as one of the King’s four henchmen; on 27 Oct. he was granted the office of tronager and pesager in the port of Berwick-upon-Tweed, which his father had held in the 1440s; and on the following 6 Apr. he was named as porter of Newcastle-upon-Tyne castle, a post he had formerly held with his father until, in the words of this grant, they had lost it, ‘without reasonable cause’, by the parliamentary act of 1455 against our MP and Joseph. E101/410/4, f. 6v; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 329, 365-6.

Even so, for all that Thorpe had been, at least in the eyes of the Yorkists, a leading protagonist in the events of 1453-5, and had suffered for it, these grants do not suggest that he was in the front rank of Lancastrian servants. Indeed, his recovery was slower than might have been anticipated. This is most clearly exemplified in his failure to oust Witham from the chancellorship and the delay in his restoration as a baron of Exchequer. The latter did not come until the autumn of 1458, although, when it did, he was slightly recompensed for the delay by promotion from third to second baron. An earlier grant may also have been intended as compensation. On 16 Nov. 1457 he was granted for life the keepership of the privy wardrobe in the Tower of London with wages of 12d. a day for life, but this was not a particularly significant office. With restoration to the Exchequer bench, however, he began to fare better. CPR, 1452-61, pp. 392, 458. This improvement has been related to the increasing influence of the young Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset: Roskell, Parl. and Politics, 223. The evidence of their personal association is, however, weak. On 26 Oct. 1458 he and the other Exchequer barons were paid £10 each, ‘as special regard’, for expediting certain unspecified matters to the King’s profit. A month later, on 30 Nov., he was granted 50 marks p.a. charged on the farm of London and Middlesex, as his fee as second baron, and on the following 20 Feb. he leased from the Crown a manor in Bulmer (Essex) and a messuage in Hadley (Suffolk), seised from royal debtors, at an annual rent of £7 16s. 8d. E403/817, m. 2; CPR, 1452-61, p. 477; CFR, xix. 228.

By this date the national political situation was again becoming critical. The loveday of March 1458, intended to lay to rest the personal rivalries engendered by the first battle of St. Albans, had done nothing to reconcile the Yorkists with an increasingly militant Lancastrian faction, headed by the queen. Thorpe himself experienced the mounting tension in his capacity as keeper of the privy wardrobe in the Tower: on 7 May 1459 the government ordered the treasurer and chamberlains of the Exchequer to purchase and deliver to him as keeper 3,000 ‘bowesstafes and stuffe’ to make 3,000 ‘shef arows’, considering ‘thennemies on euerysyde aproching vpon us as wel upon the see as on land’. E28/88/49; E404/71/3/77. Another resort to arms was not long delayed, and when it came it proved initially disastrous to the Yorkists. They were humiliated at Ludford Bridge in the following October, abandoning the field when faced with a superior royal force and desertions in their own ranks. Whether Thorpe was present on this occasion is not known, but he soon offered the King service of other sorts. In early November he took a part in organizing an expedition to Calais, where Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, had taken refuge after Ludford, to be led by Edmund’s son, Henry Beaufort, duke of Somerset. He spent £40 in finding shipping and a further £4 on messengers, and on 10 Nov. he had letters of privy seal ordering the Exchequer to reimburse him. E404/71/3/18; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English, ii. 512. More importantly, he won election, perhaps for Northamptonshire, to the Parliament summoned to meet at the Lancastrian stronghold of Coventry on 20 Nov. 1459. Thorpe was not returned for Essex; if he sat for a county it can only have been for Northants. There he played an important role, at least according to the credible testimony of two letters written by Friar John Brackley to John Paston* in the very different political circumstances of October 1460. Brackley identified him as one of a small group of lawyers responsible for preparing the attainder of the Yorkist lords, a measure that brought to an end all hope of reconciliation. He reports that one of this group, Doctor Aleyn, had been heard to say after the attainders that, ‘yf the lordys that tyme reynyng and now discessed myte haf standyn in gouernauns, that Forteskv the Justise, Doctowr Moreton, Jon Heydon [John Heydon*], Thorp, and he schuld be made for evir; and yf it turnyd to contrary wyse it schuld growe to here fynal confusyon and vttyr destruccyon, for why, the parlyows writing and the myschevous inditing was ymaginid, contrivid, and vtterly concludid by here most vengeable labowr … and here most malicyows conspiracye ayens the innocent lordys, knytis, gentilis, and comonys, and alle here jssv perpetuel’. Paston Letters, ed. Davis, ii. 221; Griffiths, Hen. VI, 824. In a letter written shortly before, Brackley gave a slightly different list of those responsible, omitting John Morton and adding Thomas Daniell and Alexander Hody*: Paston Letters, ed. Davis, ii. 210. In Thorpe’s case, Aleyn’s prediction proved fatally accurate.

If Thorpe did take this prominent role, he must have been disappointed that he did not make more extensive gains from the forfeitures he had helped to bring about. The grant to him, on 8 Jan. 1460, of the office of second baron on more favourable terms – ‘during good behaviour’ rather than ‘during the King’s pleasure’– was hardly a drain on royal patronage. Further, his hopes of quickly making good his interest in the chancellorship of the Exchequer were frustrated. The resumption passed against those who had taken up arms against Lancaster contained an exemption in favour of the Neville servant, Thomas Witham, in respect of the chancellorship. Witham was to hold the office until his death or Michaelmas 1465, only then was it to come to Thorpe. PROME, xii. 497-8. None the less, although he might have expected more, he was given enough to ensure his continued active loyalty and service. On 9 Apr. 1460 he had £40 p.a. from forfeited estates of the duke of York and the earl of Salisbury; and on 17 May he shared with an old associate, (Sir) Thomas Tyrell*, MP for Essex in the Coventry Parliament, a grant of the custody of the keeping of the valuable Essex lordship of Havering atte Bower for the long term of 20 years at the favourable rent of £102 p.a. CPR, 1452-61, p. 585; CFR, xix. 275. Important employment also came his way. On 16 Mar. he had been nominated at the head of a group of five Exchequer officials appointed to act for the following three years as receivers of forfeited estates, and three days later he was one of a committee of four entrusted with the supervision of the customs revenue collection. CPR, 1452-61, p. 572; CFR, xix. 254, 256, 258. A few weeks afterwards, on 7 Apr., he was at Deptford in Kent to take indictments concerning the Yorkist raid on Sandwich in the previous January, and on 23 May he was commissioned to conduct the muster of men to reinforce the duke of Somerset in Guînes, where his son, Roger, was then serving. CIMisc. viii. 256; CPR, 1452-61, p. 609; PROME, xv. 146-7. He may also have been involved in the gathering of intelligence. On 14 June ‘Symonde L’ wrote from Calais to his ‘gode master Thomas Thorpe in the medyll Temple yn London’. The tone of the letter is highly favourable to the earl of Warwick and apparently written in the Yorkist interest, and our MP is thus, on the face of it, an unlikely recipient. Yet all might not be as it appears, and it lies in the realms of the improbable rather than the impossible that the correspondent was spying on the earl’s activities: C.L. Kingsford, ‘The Earl of Warwick at Calais’, EHR, xxxvii. 544-6.

Unfortunately for Thorpe, all was again to change. Yorkist fortunes recovered with a speed that could not reasonably have been foreseen at the time of the attainders. Somerset’s expedition had failed to dislodge the Yorkist lords from Calais, and by the early summer of 1460 they were ready to go on the attack. Landing at Sandwich on 26 June and meeting scant resistance, they reached London on 2 July. A contemporary London chronicler identifies Thorpe as one of the leading Lancastrians who then took refuge in the Tower and, from there, made ‘grete werre’ against the city. In this account, he then attempted to flee from, disguised as a monk, but was captured, brought back ‘with a newe shave crowne, and so brought to the Erle of Salysbury place and afterwarde sent to the Toure of London’. Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. n.s. xxviii), 73, 75. The Tudor chronicler, Edward Hall, follows this account, saying explicitly what the account implies, namely that Thorpe’s disguise was that of a monk, and adding the detail that it was the earl of Warwick who committed him to the Tower: E. Hall, Chron. ed. Ellis, 245. A petition presented by his son, Roger, gives a more flattering account of his activities: Thorpe is said to have been captured fighting for Lancaster at the battle of Northampton on 10 July and despatched to prison first in the Newgate and then in the Marshalsea. PROME, xv. 146-7. A letter of Oct. 1460 names ‘Thorp de Scaccario’ as a prisoner in the Tower of London or Newgate: Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. no. 611. The two accounts cannot be reconciled, but the latter, although undoubtedly a biased source, is probably to be preferred on two grounds: Thorpe was not among the defenders of the Tower indicted on 23 July, after the Yorkists had retaken it, and his name appears in a near-contemporary list of those knighted at Northampton. KB9/75/2; W.A. Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 12. The fact of his knighthood, if not its occasion, is confirmed by CPR, 1461-7, p. 134. Roger goes on to describe his father’s fate: after being ‘long kept in streit Prison’, he was ‘cruelly, contrary to all law and concience, beheaded and put to dethe, in Haryngey Parke’ and despoiled of all his goods ‘by divers misruled persounes, Rebelles to the said late King [Henry VI], in the time of grete commocion and trouble had in thys land’. It is implied that this execution occurred while Roger was in the service of the duke of Somerset at Guînes, that is, before the duke’s return to England in October, but the only other surviving account of Thorpe’s death gives another date. This claims that, on 17 Feb. 1461, the day of the Lancastrian victory at the second battle of St. Albans, he escaped from prison, presumably in the hope of joining the approaching army of Queen Margaret, only to be captured and executed by a group of Kentishmen at Highgate. PROME, xv. 146-9; J. Stow, Annales of Eng. ed. Howes, 414. This dating is to be preferred to that given in his son’s petition, for it corresponds well with the order issued by the new government on 20 Feb. for the seizure of his property at Barnwell. CPR, 1461-7, p. 134.

One can only speculate upon Thorpe’s ultimate fate had he escaped the mob. If, however, one may judge from his son’s failure to secure rehabilitation under Edward IV, he would have fared ill. Too often he had forsaken his administrative role for the political one of the partisan, most notably in the drafting of the contentious and divisive attainders in 1459, and he was the only senior Exchequer official to suffer death for his political allegiances during the civil war of 1459-61. (Sir) Thomas Brown II*, under treasurer in the late 1440s, had retired from the Exchequer before his execution as a Lancastrian defender of the Tower in 1460.