TREGARTHEN, Thomas

Tregarthen’s parentage and much of his early career are obscure, but he is known to have trained in the law at Lincoln’s Inn. The extent of the family estates is similarly uncertain, but they centered on the Cornish manor of Tregarthen and also included some 700 acres of land in Trevalscoys and Nansframan in the same county. C1/27/388; C142/27/136. Thomas himself had acquired some of the lands in Trevalscoys from Tywardreath priory in 1458, at an annual rent of 26s. 8d. and perhaps as a reward for his services, for he had been witnessing deeds for the prior from at least 1444. Cornw. RO, Arundell (Tywardreath) mss., ART1/39, 40. Employment in the Crown’s service among the officials of the duchy of Cornwall soon followed, and in April 1447 he was granted the office of bailiff of the stannary district of Penwith and Kerrier, although he does not seem to have taken up his official duties until the autumn of 1450. By the time of the grant Tregarthen held the rank of King’s serjeant, and it is possible that he owed it to his connexion with the prominent courtier John Trevelyan*, bailiff itinerant of the duchy, with whom he had been acquainted for several years. Ibid. ART1/39. Tregarthen was soon able to repay his patron for his good offices. Trevelyan was a trustee of the lands of Robert Kayl†, a one time MP for Lostwithiel, but instead of using the accrued revenues for the benefit of Kayl’s soul as intended, he instructed Tregarthen to receive them on his own behalf, in return allowing him to retain a share. C1/31/138. On another occasion, Tregarthen was associated with Trevelyan in a shady transaction involving the sale of some of the property of the latter’s son-in-law, Henry Ash. The connexion between them was maintained until the late 1470s. C1/28/301-2; CCR, 1476-85, no. 389; Trevelyan Pprs. i (Cam. Soc. lxvii), 85.

Meanwhile, Tregarthen’s links at court had brought him further reward when in November 1448 he and William Bryan, a fellow King’s serjeant, were granted the reversion of the offices of gauger in the port of Bristol and of water-bailiff in Dartmouth. The grant of a reversion rather than the office itself was a symptom of the financial crisis the Crown faced at this date. Parliament had not met since early 1447, and an assembly willing to provide a generous grant of taxation was badly needed. When Parliament was finally summoned to meet in February 1449, the government had an interest in seeing its supporters returned wherever possible, and prime targets in this exercise were the boroughs of Cornwall, where Trevelyan presided over the elections as county sheriff. Tregarthen was duly returned for Liskeard, a place well-known to his patron, who was parker there. Nothing is known of his actions while in Parliament, but he was either still in London or returned there in the autumn. His absence from the West Country was a fortuitous one, for on 27 Nov. an Aragonese galley owned by one Francisco Jungent was driven into Plymouth by a storm, and its cargo, said to be worth more than £12,000, promptly carried off by local men. Tregarthen was accused of having been involved, but protested that not only had he been in the capital at the time of the crime, but when he had learnt that some of the stolen goods had been acquired for his use, he had immediately handed them over to the attorney of their rightful owners. Furthermore, the said attorney had come to him at Lincoln’s Inn and begged his assistance in persuading the men of the south-west to make restitution, which he had readily agreed to do. Indeed, as a result of his efforts, so he proudly claimed, one of the pirates involved had been arrested, brought to London and imprisoned in the Marshalsea. C1/28/465, 467. Yet Tregarthen was not as innocent as he claimed: the principal vessel implicated, the Edward of Polruan, was owned by none other than his old friend Trevelyan.

Although never formally convicted of direct participation in this act of piracy, Tregarthen now faced other difficulties. The Commons’ impeachment of the duke of Suffolk and his subsequent murder spelled trouble for those associated with his regime, and Tregarthen’s close ties with Trevelyan, who was himself targeted, gave him cause for concern. Although he managed to retain his office as stannary bailiff for the remainder of the 1450s, he gained no further office or reward, and the Yorkist ascendancy from the summer of 1460 proved his final undoing. The victors had not forgotten to whom Tregarthen owed his advancement, and stripped him of his offices. Seeing his loss of influence, various men sought to settle old scores. Within weeks of the decisive Yorkist victory at the battle of Towton on 20 Mar. 1461 armed servants employed by Henry Bodrugan† entered Tregarthen’s estates, carried off goods worth 500 marks and occupied land at Pollakka, which he had acquired from Bodrugan in 1448. Tregarthen’s petition to the chancellor for a commission of inquiry fell on deaf ears, for Bodrugan was one of the new government’s trusted supporters in the region and was regularly appointed to such bodies. It took a few years for the matter to be settled and Tregarthen was sufficiently reconciled to Bodrugan as to attest deeds for him. C1/27/388; CCR, 1447-54, p. 245; 1468-76, no. 85; Cornw. RO, Arundell mss, AR1/270. In the same period of the early 1460s Tregarthen faced the hostility of Robert Curteys† of Pill, a former mayor of Lostwithiel. In October 1462 one Thomas Dreweston appealed Tregarthen of the murder of his brother, John, which he was said to have carried out at Restormel on 5 Mar. 1461, with the support of John Trevelyan, while Curteys claimed to have been assaulted on this same occasion, as well as in an incident dating back to 1449. Tregarthen and his son Thomas were placed in the Marshalsea at Easter 1463, but released on bail as Dreweston failed to appear, and a jury summoned in June acquitted them of the charge on finding that Dreweston had made a false claim at the instigation of Curteys, who had been bound in £500 to keep the peace towards Tregarthen. Even so, this was not the end of the matter, for litigation between the parties was still ongoing two years later. KB27/807, rot. 52d; 815, rot. 53; KB146/7/3/1, 3; CP40/761, rots. 117, 148; KB9/300/7-8; CCR, 1461-8, p. 184; The Commons 1386-1421, ii. 723. Tregarthen had other enemies too: he was said to have been repeatedly ambushed in an attempt to kill him. KB27/823, rots. 13d, 51.

After securing a royal pardon from Edward IV in 1462, Tregarthen recovered some of the confidence of the government and was appointed to a commission of inquiry in 1464. He probably followed Trevelyan’s lead in providing no more than lukewarm support, if any, for the restored Henry VI in 1470. Trevelyan Pprs. i. 85; CCR, 1468-76, nos. 44, 46. Nevertheless, his former proximity to the Lancastrian court may have played a part in some of the transactions to which he became party during the Readeption. The clients who entrusted him with their lands included among others the filacer John Glyn (who back in 1456 had stood surety for Tregarthen’s son and daughter-in-law in the court of Chancery). However, after Glyn’s murder in 1472 a disagreement arose between Tregarthen and Glyn’s son and heir John†, who sued the lawyer for return of evidences relating to the enfeoffed estates. C1/25/16; 1502/4; C140/46/57. In the event, maintaining his distance from the restored Lancastrians proved a shrewd decision, and in 1475 Tregarthen returned to the Crown’s service as a local commissioner. By the later years of Edward IV’s reign he had established ties with the greatest of the Cornish gentry, the powerful Sir John Arundell of Lanherne, for whom he attested deeds. Alongside a fellow Lincoln’s Inn lawyer, Thomas Lymbery* (who had sat in Parliament with him in 1449 as a representative of Launceston), he was entrusted with a large part of the Arundell estates to oversee the fulfilment of Sir John’s will, a task which was to preoccupy him for the rest of his life. Standing surety for Arundell’s debts, the two men faced litigation in the court of common pleas over the repayments and had to seek redress in Chancery from the merchant Richard Tomyowe. CCR, 1468-76, nos. 797, 1009, 1384; C1/59/123; Arundell mss, AR19/24-8, AR20/27-33. Tregarthen’s earlier connexions with the inhabitants of Plymouth had not always been amicable. On one occasion he had successfully sued a local merchant, Richard Dabernon, for eight silver cups, two silver covers, 16 silver spoons, 16 oz. of broken silver and a purse worth £36, as well as a bag containing £55 in money, which Dabernon was said to have unlawfully taken from him. CPR, 1461-7, p. 544. Yet in the 1470s he may have been ordinarily resident in the town, and was elected mayor in the autumn of 1481.

Nothing is known for certain of Tregarthen’s attitude to the ursurpation of Richard III, but as much as a result of his old Lancastrian sympathies as of his increasing proximity to the Arundells of Lanherne, who had faced forfeiture under Richard, he may have favoured the accession of Henry Tudor, for within weeks of Bosworth the new King added him to the Cornish bench, where his son was to join him in February 1486. It was probably also in the new reign that he was elected one of the coroners of Cornwall. C261/2/22. Prominent private clients also continued to seek his services: in 1486 Walter Reynell* entrusted him with the estates with which John Jaybien† had endowed his chantry. Cornw. RO, Edgcombe mss, ME773. The precise date of Tregarthen’s death is not known, but by the autumn of 1489 he was becoming frail with age, and an inquiry into his suitability for the office of coroner was ordered. He is last recorded as party to a land transaction in March 1491 and probably died before the end of 1492, when he was omitted from the commission of the peace. He was survived by his son Thomas (d.1509), who had married Margaret (d.1500), daughter of Richard Hendour. Their son John (d.1503) predeceased his father, so in 1509 the family estates were split up between John’s two young daughters, Joan and Margaret. The wardship of the girls was granted to Sir Peter Edgcombe† and William Trevanion even before their grandfather’s death. Joan was married to John Kelway by February 1514, although her sister remained single for at least four years longer. C261/2/22; CIPM Hen. VII, iii. 181, 857; CPR, 1494-1509, p. 512; C1/78/101-2; 473/9-15; C142/27/30, 136; 79/211; E41/43/(i); Arundell mss, AR20/33.