The Throckmortons owed their rise to Thomas’s father, a successful lawyer who achieved prominence through his legal and administrative expertise and service to the Beauchamp earls of Warwick. It is very likely that Thomas also joined the legal profession. At the very least, he must have possessed a good working knowledge of the law, given that he was on the quorum throughout his service as a j.p. If a lawyer, he may have attended an inn of court, since he is referred to as ‘late of London’ in a royal pardon of November 1455.
The death of John Throckmorton in April the following year may well have helped to bring such behaviour to an end. Thomas now had important responsibilities, as the new head of his family and as one of his father’s executors, and in the later 1440s and early 1450s he and his co-executors, his widowed mother Eleanor Throckmorton and Ralph Ingoldesby, pursued suits in the court of common pleas against those in debt to John’s estate.
Six months after his father’s death, Throckmorton reached an agreement with the Buckinghamshire esquire Robert Olney for a marriage between himself and Margaret, Olney’s daughter and heir presumptive. The match probably came about through the nexus of the Beauchamp affinity, since Olney’s father John had served William Beauchamp, Lord Abergavenny, the uncle of Richard Beauchamp, earl of Warwick. In return for his service, Abergavenny had granted John Olney the manor of Birdingbury in east Warwickshire – held of the earls of Warwick – so giving the Olneys a landed interest in that county. The marriage settlement itself has not survived, although Robert Olney’s obligations are recorded in an indenture drawn up between the two parties on 3 Oct. 1445. First, he undertook to settle lands worth £20 p.a. on the couple before the following Christmas. Secondly, he agreed to convey the greater part of his estates, situated in Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Warwickshire and Oxfordshire, to feoffees, to hold to the use of himself and his wife Goditha for his life and then, should he die without legitimate male issue, to the use of the Throckmortons and their children. Finally, should Goditha bear him any more children, Margaret was to share these lands with them, although his principal manor at Weston Underwood in Buckinghamshire was reserved for the Throckmortons.
The Olney lands were probably more considerable than those that Thomas brought to the marriage. While his father had died owning reasonably substantial estates, John Throckmorton was by no means a major landowner. From his own parents John had inherited the farm of the manor of Throckmorton and holdings at Rous Lench. At Throckmorton he was a mere tenant of the bishops of Worcester but in 1436 Bishop Bourgchier granted him the manor in fee simple, in exchange for other lands worth £12 p.a. John also acquired property elsewhere in Worcestershire and gained interests in neighbouring Warwickshire, where he bought the manor of Spernall and held a moiety of that of Coughton in the right of his wife.
The Throckmortons took an active interest in exploiting their estates and their acquisition of the Tracy moiety of Coughton was prompted by the need to consolidate, and ultimately to enclose, for pastoral farming. By the mid fifteenth century their holdings included a particularly compact block of land centred on Coughton and Spernall in Warwickshire and Wyke in Worcestershire, some of which they leased rather than owned.
Thanks to his estates and legal expertise, Thomas was well qualified to follow in his father’s footsteps, as a parliamentarian and an active participant in local government. He entered his first known Parliament, that of 1445, while his father was still alive, although John Throckmorton died in the recess between the first and second sessions of this assembly. At this date Thomas was a man of little administrative experience, but no doubt he had received a good knowledge of parliamentary procedure from his father, a knight of the shire in at least five Parliaments. His fellow MP, John Nanfan*, another novice to the Commons, was a servant of the Beauchamps, and his own connexions with that family may have assisted his candidature when he stood for election. Throckmorton’s first known county commission arose directly from his Membership of the Parliament of 1445 since it related to the lay subsidy that the Commons had granted the Crown. He was appointed to a like commission in the summer of 1449, following the dissolution of his second Parliament.
During the same summer, Throckmorton was also placed on a commission charged with investigating what lands the late duke of Warwick, Henry Beauchamp, and his short-lived infant daughter and heir had held in Herefordshire. Given his family’s longstanding ties to the Beauchamps, he was as well qualified as any to serve on such a body. No doubt these ties were also an important consideration when he was appointed steward of Elmley castle and other estates in Worcestershire that were part of the Beauchamp inheritance in June 1451. The appointment was made jointly by the husbands of the four coheiresses to the Beauchamp inheritance, Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, George Neville, Lord Latimer, and Richard Neville, the new earl of Warwick. Throckmorton maintained his family connexion with the earldom of Warwick by becoming a retainer of the last, who granted him an annuity of £10 for life in the same year.
The Nevilles were far from Throckmorton’s only noble patrons, for he also maintained ties with the supervisor of his father’s will, the prominent courtier Ralph Butler, Lord Sudeley, and served William, Lord Zouche. One of Sudeley’s feoffees, in 1453 he was involved in the arrangements for the marriage of that peer’s son and heir apparent to Eleanor, daughter of the earl of Shrewsbury, a lord whom his own father had served as an attorney, feoffee and surety.
Lay magnates were not alone in seeking the services of Throckmorton, who also possessed ecclesiastical patrons. Prominent among them was John Carpenter, bishop of Worcester, in spite of a previously poor relationship between the two men. Upon becoming bishop in 1444, Carpenter had vigorously expressed his opposition to the grant that his predecessor, Bishop Bourgchier, had made to John Throckmorton in 1436. He had also threatened the monks of his own cathedral priory with excommunication for alienating part of the village of Throckmorton to the Throckmortons. The monks had appealed to the archbishop of Canterbury, asking that Thomas Throckmorton might answer the bishop, but by 1459 the two men had reconciled their differences so successfully that they became firm friends. On 5 Aug. that year Carpenter appointed Throckmorton as steward of his estates, with a fee of £10 p.a. Just under a decade later, Throckmorton agreed that he and his heirs should pay the bishops of Worcester an annual rent of £10 for a term of 47 years, and then £12 p.a. thereafter, from the Throckmorton manor of Black Naunton, Worcestershire, and in May 1469 he and his wife were admitted to the guild of the Holy Cross at Stratford-on-Avon, a town of which Carpenter was feudal lord.
An office that Throckmorton certainly held by the first half of the same decade was that of auditor on the estates of Humphrey Stafford of Grafton, a prominent member of the west Midlands gentry. As one might expect of a lawyer, he was frequently a trustee and witness for other members of the gentry, usually but not exclusively from his own part of the country. He also had dealings with various prominent Londoners, performing like services for some of them. Among those whom he served as a feoffee were two of his brothers-in-law, Thomas Winslow I and John Marney of Cornwall and Essex (the father of Henry Marney†), and (Sir) William Catesby*.
In spite of acting for the Herberts, John Throckmorton took up arms against York and his allies during the conflicts that marred the latter stages of Henry VI’s reign. He paid for his loyalty to the Lancastrian cause with his life, for in February 1461 he was taken prisoner at the battle of Mortimer’s Cross and executed. By contrast, his more circumspect elder brother survived this troubled period apparently unscathed. In all likelihood the pardons Thomas obtained in 1455 and 1458 were a sensible precautionary measure and had no political connotations.
In December 1459 and again in the following February, Throckmorton was placed on anti-Yorkist commissions, and in March 1460 he and (Sir) Walter Skulle* were ordered to defend the city of Worcester against the Yorkists. Notwithstanding his ties with Warwick, his sympathies were with the Lancastrian Crown for as long as Henry VI was on the throne, sympathies that were clearly expressed in the foundation deed, dated 1 May 1460, of his father’s chantry. Its chaplain, for whom he provided lands in Fladbury, Hill and More worth ten marks p.a., was not only expected to pray for members of his own family, both living and dead, but also for the wellbeing of the King and queen and for the souls of the King’s mother and the two previous Lancastrian monarchs.
At the accession of Edward IV the new government removed Throckmorton from the commission of the peace, no doubt because it was uncertain of his loyalty. Whatever his previous political sympathies, he was no partisan and he was restored to the bench in March 1464. In August the following year, he was made a j.p. in Warwickshire and appointed to a commission of oyer and terminer in the same county, and a few months later he was pricked for a term as sheriff of Warwickshire and Leicestershire. The oyer and terminer commission was issued in the wake of disturbances among the gentry of Warwickshire. In an escalation of a quarrel between Sir Simon Mountfort† and Richard Clapham, there was an outbreak of serious disorder in that county during the summer of 1465. According to later indictments, on 31 July that year Mountfort, along with Sir Richard Verney and John Brome II, attacked Clapham’s property at Alspath with a large band, a raid that led to the death of a man, apparently one of Clapham’s servants. Clapham was a retainer of the earl of Warwick and it is possible that Mountfort was attempting to challenge the earl’s rule in the shire. Whatever the case, on 31 Aug. Warwick joined Throckmorton and other members of the commission at Warwick, to hear a jury indict the offenders.
At the end of the same decade, Throckmorton was still in the employ of the earl of Warwick, for he was serving as receiver-general of Warwick’s lordship of Glamorgan in south Wales, in the autumn of 1469. During the Readeption of Henry VI, so prominently supported by the earl, he remained a j.p., as he did after Edward IV recovered the throne in the spring of 1471. A few months later, however, he took the precaution of securing a general pardon.
The conveyance to Tocotes and his associates occurred just 12 days before Throckmorton died, on 13 July 1472. He was buried with his parents in the parish church at Fladbury and was succeeded by his eldest son Robert, a young man who had only recently attained his majority. On the following 24 Oct., there was an inquisition post mortem for the MP in Warwickshire. In that county he was found to have held the manors of Coughton and Spernall, along with lands in Kinwarton and elsewhere, in his own right and that of Birdingbury in the right of his wife. Excluding Birdingbury, these estates were estimated to bring in an income of some £35 p.a.
Throckmorton’s widow did not enjoy an easy widowhood, because in the later 1470s Robert Neville† challenged her title to Weston Underwood. The grandson of a former owner of the manor and a trusted servant of the Yorkist Household, Neville had formally relinquished any claim to the property many years earlier but now he chose to resurrect his claim. Among those drawn into the resulting dispute was Richard, duke of Gloucester. Initially Gloucester was probably acting on Neville’s behalf, but by mid 1476 Neville and his son had granted the title they claimed to him and he was seeking to take the manor for himself. The duke’s intervention represented a formidable challenge but, supported by her son Robert, Margaret Throckmorton stood her ground, writing to him in humble but firm terms in defence of her title. In due course she was able to make good her claims, and Weston, along with the rest of the estates that she had inherited from her parents, passed to Robert Throckmorton. In the same period Margaret fell into dispute with Henry Stafford, duke of Buckingham, over her manor of Roxton, held of the duke’s honour of Gloucester. In April 1478 Stafford forgave her and her feoffees – in return for a payment of 20 marks – for entries that they or their predecessors had made on to the property. In all likelihood the quarrel concerned a feudal due that the duke claimed from the manor.
Margaret Throckmorton survived until at least the early 1480s, for she was still alive in the autumn of 1481. At the end of October that year John Throckmorton, one of her younger sons, acknowledged that he had received 100 marks from her in full satisfaction of all goods and chattels bequeathed to him, presumably in his father’s no longer extant will.