THROCKMORTON, John II

Originally from Throckmorton in Worcestershire, the parish to which they derived their name, the Throckmortons owed their rise to John’s father and namesake. A successful lawyer, the elder John Throckmorton achieved prominence through his legal and administrative expertise and service to the Beauchamp earls of Warwick. He almost certainly had the Beauchamp connexion to thank for his marriage to one of the daughters and coheirs of a fellow Beauchamp retainer, Guy Spyne†, by virtue of which he acquired landed interests in Warwickshire. The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 606-9.

The elder John provided for the subject of this biography by marrying him to an heiress in the later 1430s. John junior’s bride was Isabel, a grand-daughter of Thomas Brydges (d.1408) of Haresfield and Matson, Gloucestershire, and a niece of the half-blood of Giles Brydges* of Coberley in the same county. A gentleman of uncertain antecedents not known to have inherited any land, Thomas had advanced himself in the service of Richard II’s adherent Thomas, Lord Despenser, and through marriage. His first wife was Elizabeth, the only child of Nicholas Apperley (d.c.1407), lord of the Gloucestershire manors of Apperley in Deerhurst and Tirley. She bore him two sons, Edmund and Edward, of whom the eldest, Edmund, survived their father by just a few months. Edmund’s infant son and heir died without issue before attaining his majority, and in due course the Apperley inheritance passed to his uncle, Edward, Isabel’s father. J. Duncomb, Herefs. iv. 158; VCH Glos. viii. 38, 98; x. 193; VCH Worcs. iii. 480; CPR, 1391-6, pp. 507, 509; CIMisc. vii. 54. Thomas Brydges’s second wife was Alice, the younger of the two daughters and coheirs of the well-connected Thomas Berkeley† of Coberley, by whom he fathered Giles and several other children. CIPM, xviii. 1020-2; xix. 42-45; xx. 148. Thanks to his maternal inheritance, Giles became a figure of greater significance in county society than his elder half-brothers. Giles also succeeded to two manors, Haresfield in Gloucestershire and Pendock in Worcestershire, which Thomas Brydges had purchased, although at some stage in the first half of the 1430s he alienated Pendock – or at least a share of it – to Edward. VCH Glos. x. 193; VCH Worcs. iii. 480. He is likely to have had regular dealings with Edward, who likewise possessed land at Haresfield.

When Edward Brydges died at the beginning of September 1436, his only surviving child was Isabel, then 13 years of age. Her inheritance comprised the former Apperley estates in Gloucestershire, property at Haresfield and holdings elsewhere in that county, as well as lands at Pendock, Berrow, Eldersfield, Birtsmorton and Droitwich in Worcestershire, including a moiety of the manor of Pendock. The elder John Throckmorton purchased her wardship from the Crown for £40. On 16 Nov. the Crown granted him her marriage and the keeping of her late father’s holdings in Westbury on Severn, Gloucestershire; and on the following 24 Feb. he received letters granting him custody of her inheritance in Worcestershire. For some reason, the Apperley estates did not feature in either grant. In due course, however, they passed with the rest of Isabel’s inheritance to the Throckmortons. She had become the younger John’s wife by 4 Nov. 1437, when she proved her age in Gloucestershire at an inquisition that found that she had reached the age of 14 on the previous 13 Aug. On the following 5 Dec. writs were issued to the escheators in that county and Worcestershire, ordering them to give Isabel seisin of her inheritance. CIPM, xxiv. 632-5; xxv. 132; CFR, xvi. 304, 321; CPR, 1436-41, p. 23; CCR, 1435-41, p. 145.

Undoubtedly still a young man at this date, the subject of this biography is next heard of in the spring of 1445 when his father made his will. The will was dated 12 Apr., the day of the elder John’s death. In it he forsook all the money that his second son owed him, although without specifying the total sum of the forgiven debts. Later that year, the widowed Eleanor Throckmorton secured the admission of her deceased husband to the martyrology of the cathedral priory at Canterbury, and letters of confraternity from the priory for herself and her two sons. PCC 31 Luffenham (PROB11/3, f. 251); HMC 9th Rep. pt. 1, 114.

So far as is known, John was not active in public affairs before the death of his father. Yet he played next to no part in local government thereafter. He was appointed to just one ad hoc commission in Worcestershire, probably because his brother regularly represented the family as an office-holder in that county, but there is no ready explanation for his non-involvement in the administration of Gloucestershire where he possessed interests in the right of his wife. It was thanks to those interests that he attested the return of the latter county’s knights of the shire to the Parliament of 1447. In spite of his lack of involvement in local administration, he enjoyed sufficient standing in Worcestershire to win a seat in the Commons of 1450, at an election attested by his elder brother. A few weeks after the dissolution of the Parliament in late May 1451, he and his wife received a papal indult permitting them to keep a portable altar. In the indult he is described as ‘lord of divers places’, although he was referred to as ‘late of’ Tewkesbury (lying immediately north-east of Apperley) and Haresfield in a pardon he received in January 1458, suggesting that Gloucestershire was his primary county of residence. CPL, x. 95; C67/42, m. 21.

Within a couple of years of the dissolution of the Parliament of 1450, Throckmorton was associated with Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, the successor to the Beauchamp earls whom the elder John Throckmorton had served for so long. In April 1453, when Neville secured the keeping of a moiety of the castle and lordship of Ewyas Lacy in the Welsh marches, Throckmorton was one of his mainpernors at the Exchequer. CFR, xix. 28. Neville had become earl in the right of his wife, Anne, the daughter of Richard Beauchamp, 13th earl of Warwick. Through her mother, she was also the joint heir of the Despenser inheritance, of which Ewyas Lacy was part, and it was at the request of her and her husband that the Despenser feoffees appointed Throckmorton parker of Tewkesbury in May the same year. Hicks, 78. Throckmorton also served as constable and receiver of Cardiff under Neville, offices in the latter’s gift as lord of Glamorgan in the right of his wife. As such, he participated in the earl’s dispute with Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, over the Despenser estates, joining Neville’s sheriff of Glamorgan, Sir William Herbert*, and others in making ‘greet assemblees and Rout[es] of peple’ in the summer of 1453, to prevent Beaufort taking control in that lordship. As a result, he, Herbert and their associates were summoned before the King to explain themselves on 19 July that year although they appear to have escaped punishment. Ibid. 84; E28/83, no. 32; Glamorgan County Hist. iii. 196. The quarrel between Neville and Beaufort was instrumental in causing the former to ally with Richard, duke of York, another lord with whom both Throckmorton and Sir William, one of York’s most prominent followers in south Wales and the marches, were associated. Just days before acting as Warwick’s surety in 1453, John joined his brother Thomas Throckmorton and others in standing surety for the good behaviour of the knight’s unruly brother, Thomas Herbert†, another of York’s retainers, and he visited the Exchequer again in December the same year, this time to receive a reassignment of tallies on the duke’s behalf. Later, in June 1457, the two Throckmorton brothers received a pardon in their capacity as sureties for Sir William Herbert himself. CCR, 1447-54, p. 426; E403/796, m. 6; CPR, 1452-61, p. 360.

Ultimately, however, John remained loyal to the Lancastrian throne and, as a dramatic incident testifies, he fell out with Richard Neville before the end of the same decade. In early November 1458, the earl was caught up in a disturbance at Westminster Hall, perhaps while leaving a meeting of the Council. Apparently emanating from an altercation between one of his retinue and a royal servant, it led to an exchange of blows between members of his party and a mixed band of Household men and other supporters of the Court. Matters got so out of hand that Warwick was compelled to make a hurried escape by his barge on the Thames. Afterwards naming Throckmorton, as well as the treasurer of the Household, Sir Thomas Tuddenham*, the esquire for the body, Thomas Daniell*, and others as his assailants, Neville viewed the fracas as an attempt on his life. Hicks, 152-3; CP40/799, rot. 490.

In the autumn of 1460, while the government was in the hands of the Yorkists, the earl took the opportunity to seek redress at law over the incident. He sued his alleged assailants in the court of common pleas, claiming they had lain in wait to kill him and had wounded four of his servants. The matter was still pending when Henry VI was ousted from the throne a few months later. CP40/799, rot. 490; 800, rots. 87d, 94d. Exactly when Throckmorton took up arms for that King is unrecorded. In the same autumn, the Yorkist-controlled government ordered the sheriff of Dorset to arrest him, so that he might answer an indictment for felonies and trespasses committed in that county. There is no evidence that Throckmorton had a previous connexion with Dorset and possibly his activities there were linked to Lancastrian resistance to the Yorkist authorities. The sheriff returned that he could not find Throckmorton in his bailiwick, so a like writ was issued to his counterpart in Gloucestershire, who was ordered to bring him to Westminster on 3 Feb. 1461. As with the earl of Warwick’s suit, he was never to answer the indictment. On the very same day (or perhaps 2 Feb.) he fought for the Lancastrians at Mortimer’s Cross in Herefordshire, one of the most obscure civil war battles of this period. The Yorkist army, led by York’s eldest son Edward, earl of March, and numbering Throckmorton’s erstwhile associate Sir William Herbert in its ranks, roundly defeated the opposing forces, commanded by the earls of Wiltshire and Pembroke. Both Lancastrian earls escaped the field but ten of their captains, including Throckmorton and Owen Tudor, were captured. March was in no mood for mercy following the recent death of his father at the battle of Wakefield, and the prisoners were taken to Hereford and beheaded. KB27/798, rex rot. 44; A. Goodman, Wars of the Roses, 49; William of Worcestre, Itins. ed. Harvey, 203; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii. [776].

In spite of the circumstances of his death, there is no evidence that Throckmorton was attainted when Edward seized the throne soon afterwards. He did not die intestate, for he had made a will, no longer extant, in which he named his wife Isabel as his executrix. By the spring of 1463 she had found another husband in Thomas Lucy of Gloucestershire. In Easter term that year a suit that the London goldsmith Matthew Philip had brought against Isabel and Lucy came to pleadings in the common pleas. Philip stated that in April 1454 he had taken a bond for 20 marks from Throckmorton in London. The latter had failed subsequently to pay this sum, which he was now seeking from Isabel in her capacity as her late husband’s executrix. In response to his plea, the Lucys obtained permission to negotiate with their opponent out of court. CP40/808, rot. 77.

Throckmorton’s heir was his son and namesake. In spite of his father’s fate, he also fought for the Lancastrians, in his case at the battle of Tewkesbury in 1471. Like the elder John, he was taken prisoner; unlike his father, he had the good fortune to escape with his life and to receive a general pardon. A year later he accompanied Earl Rivers to Brittany where he died. He therefore never sat in the Parliament of 1472, to which he was posthumously elected as a burgess for the Wiltshire borough of Wootton Bassett. In the autumn of 1474 Rivers obtained the wardship of his son and heir Christopher from the Crown. J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, iv. 163; CPR, 1467-77, pp. 262, 475; C140/43/16; Carpenter, 520n.