Like his father, Tresham pursued a career of self-aggrandisement which led to a bloody end.
Shortly after this last grant, Thomas joined his father on the Huntingdonshire bench, and by November 1446 he was receiving robes as one of the esquires of the King’s hall and chamber, a position he would appear to have held until he became an usher of the Chamber. Both Thomas’s membership of the Household and his influential father must have helped him to gain election to his first Parliament as one of the knights of the shire in Buckinghamshire. While William Tresham certainly held lands in Buckinghamshire, his son was, strictly speaking, probably not qualified to represent either that county or Huntingdonshire, the county for which he sat in the following two Parliaments. Despite the residential qualification demanded by statute in 1445, the younger Tresham probably continued to live in Northamptonshire during the late 1440s.
The date of Thomas’s marriage is unknown but it is possible that it took place not long after his first Parliament, since his wife’s first husband, Edmund Lenthall, had died in April 1447. The Treshams were well placed to hear about Margaret’s availability, for Lenthall had also served in the Household. No doubt William Tresham used his influence to secure the daughter of Lord Zouche for his son, despite the fact that the King had granted the marriage of the young widow to John Montgomery*, a royal retainer.
The Parliaments of 1449 and 1449-50 must have occupied much of Thomas’s attention, given that he spent a total of 111 days in attending or travelling to and from the first of these assemblies alone.
Parliament broke up at the beginning of June upon hearing the news of Cade’s rebellion and the insurgents’ attack on London. Later that year the duke of York returned from Ireland and on 23 Sept., as he travelled south towards London, William and Thomas set out from Sywell, apparently to meet him. Shortly after leaving home, however, they were ambushed at Thorplands near Moulton, on the road to Northampton. William was either killed outright or died soon afterwards, and Thomas was wounded; both men were robbed. During the Parliament of 1450, Thomas’s widowed mother, Isabel, presented a petition seeking the right to act by means of a criminal appeal against the killers, whom she identified as Simon Norwich, a Rutland esquire, and a band of men from Bedfordshire, Northamptonshire and Wales. Yet they were not indicted until October 1452 and it is unlikely that they were ever brought to justice. Norwich was the common-law heir of the Holts, the family whose valuable estates in Northamptonshire William Tresham had acquired in the later 1420s. There is little doubt that the crime arose from his grievances about the loss of these estates, not least because the lands in question were the subject of arbitration between him and Thomas a few months before he was indicted.
A month after the ambush at Thorplands, Thomas had recovered sufficiently from his wounds to participate in the Northamptonshire election to the Parliament of 1450, but he was not returned in his father’s place, even though his uncle, William Vaux*, was then sheriff of the county. Assuming he had wanted to re-enter the Commons, his failure to gain election was probably due to the political situation in which the Parliament was called, for the government was extremely unpopular, a situation that York was able to exploit to his own advantage. He is said to have ‘laboured’ to ensure the return of men who sympathized with his views and, once proceedings had opened, his councillor, Sir William Oldhall*, was elected Speaker. An Act of Resumption was passed and the Commons petitioned for the removal of the duke of Somerset and other prominent courtiers from the King’s presence. Tresham was not one of those named, but earlier he had been among the courtiers indicted at Rochester in the aftermath of Cade’s rebellion.
Upon succeeding his father, Tresham fell out with his mother, if only temporarily, over what she should have of William Tresham’s goods. The matter was referred to arbitration, and on 22 Oct. 1451 Isabel’s brother, William Vaux, and Thomas Salisbury, archdeacon of Bedford, made an award between her and her son, according to the terms of which she was to receive 500 marks.
Soon after the close of the second parliamentary session in July 1453, Tresham was placed upon a commission of oyer and terminer instructed to inquire into unrest occurring in the north riding of Yorkshire. In August a far more serious crisis developed, for the King suffered his first bout of insanity and Queen Margaret began to compete with York for control of the government. The queen’s fears of the duke’s intentions are underlined by a report of January 1454. This alleged that Tresham and other officers of the Household were drawing up a bill seeking to have a garrison established at Windsor to guard the King and his infant son, which they were planning to present to the Lords when Parliament reopened in February.
Early in 1455 Tresham travelled abroad on royal business. On 22 Mar. a privy seal warrant was issued on behalf of him and two companions, Thomas, Lord Roos, and John Butler, brother of the earl of Wiltshire, prior to their crossing the Channel to Calais, ‘for certayne grete and chargeable matiers whiche they by oure commaundement shal haue to doo and execute there’.
Before this term as sheriff came to an end, Tresham was appointed to another shrievalty, that of Surrey and Sussex, a part of the country in which he had an interest in so far as his wife’s dower properties from her previous marriage lay in the latter of those two counties.
As a regime loyalist, Tresham profited from the suppression of the King’s enemies. In February 1460 he was granted an annuity of £40 for life from lands and rents at Stamford and Grantham in Lincolnshire forfeited by the duke of York, as a reward for his services as Speaker in the Coventry Parliament and in recompense for certain losses he had incurred on the King’s behalf. In the months following this grant, he was included on several commissions of oyer and terminer and arrest appointed to deal with Yorkist supporters in England and Wales. In response to one of these commissions, he and other prominent Lancastrians, among them Sir John Chalers*, (Sir) Edmund Hampden* and Edward Langford*, forced their way onto the manor belonging to the Yorkist Sir Robert Harcourt* at Stanton Harcourt in Oxfordshire and took him prisoner. They held him captive for seven weeks, until the Yorkists defeated a royal army at Northampton on 10 July, so changing the political situation completely.
It is not certain that Tresham was at Northampton, even though the battle occurred on his doorstep; and there is no record of his whereabouts between mid 1460 and the following January, when he joined Margaret of Anjou at Durham. At Durham he was one of those who undertook to repay a sum of 400 marks that the queen extorted from the prior and convent in the city (a ‘loan’ still outstanding 13 years later). He then accompanied her army on its march south, and on 17 Feb. he received a knighthood from the young prince of Wales on the field of the second battle of St. Albans. It was probably immediately in the wake of the battle that he became controller of Henry VI’s household, in place of (Sir) Thomas Charlton*, one of the Yorkists whom the victorious Lancastrians had taken prisoner on the field.
Immediately prior to his attainder, Tresham had possessed extensive holdings in Northamptonshire, including manors at Sywell, Hannington, Brampton, Great Houghton, Stanwick, Ringstead, Rushton, Lyveden, Hazelbeech and Wolaston.
Given Tresham’s record of service to Henry VI, the new King had every reason to view him with disfavour and his rehabilitation was a slow and costly process. Ultimately he came to resent this and rebelled against Edward, who might possibly have secured his loyalty, had he taken the risk of showing him more generosity. It was not as if Tresham lacked connexions that could vouch for him at Court. Besides his wife’s family he also had a potentially useful stepfather in Sir William Pecche*, a prominent Yorkist Household man whom his mother had married after the death of her first husband. He had, however, to wait until 1464 to receive a general pardon of all offences for which he had been attainted, after which (if not before), he set about the expensive business of buying back his lands from the King’s grantees. In the spring of 1465, for example, he paid an unspecified sum for Sywell, Lyveden and Broughton to Lord Ferrers, who conveyed the manors to him and his nominees on 13 May that year. The nominees included leading Yorkists like the chancellor and archbishop-elect of York, George Neville, and William, Lord Hastings, and the former Lancastrian who was about to become Edward IV’s father-in-law, Richard Wydeville, Lord Rivers.
Nearly five years after Towton Tresham had gained enough political credit to rejoin the bench in Northamptonshire, and early in 1467 the King appointed him to arbitrate in a minor dispute. In the following June he was elected as a knight of the shire for the county. During the first session of the Parliament of 1467 he submitted a petition, addressed to the King, seeking formal recognition of his de facto recovery of much of his lands. He asserted that he had not been at the battle of Wakefield in December 1460, the Lancastrian victory in which the King’s father, the duke of York, had lost his life. Furthermore, he had acknowledged Edward’s ‘title roiall’ and, unlike other Lancastrians, he had neither borne arms against him since the battle of Towton nor left the kingdom to join the exiles abroad. In mitigation of his past service to Henry VI, he said that he had grown up in that King’s service and, as a ‘menyall servant of Household’, could not have avoided Towton. He claimed that he had spent over 2,000 marks buying back properties he had forfeited but, since his title to them was unsure, he could neither offer them as security for loans nor attract a wife for his heir. (This was not, however, strictly true, since he had managed to raise 600 marks by mortgaging his manor at Broughton to William Staveley† in 1466.) He concluded by asking for a formal restoration of his lands, except those Henry VI had granted him.
Despite the granting of his petition Tresham remained in an indebted state and in August 1468 he was obliged to release Broughton to Staveley. Taking into account the cost of recovering his lands, some of which still remained outside his grasp, and his background as a former servant of Henry VI, it is scarcely surprising that he became embroiled (or was suspected of having become embroiled) in the disaffection against Edward IV in the late 1460s. In July 1468 he took the precaution of taking out a pardon, but in the following November John de Vere, earl of Oxford, was arrested. Oxford soon confessed to treason, implicating a number of other prominent men in the process, including Tresham, who joined the earl in the Tower at the end of the month. In December Robert Palmer, the escheator in Northamptonshire, entered the Tresham property at Sywell and Rushton (where the MP evidently still had a house, despite the grant to Don),
The actions that Tresham brought against Palmer are worth attention for the glimpse of his lifestyle that they provide. At Rushton he claimed to have lost numerous fish (bream, trench and other varieties) from his ponds, along with livestock and household goods. From Sywell he alleged that Palmer had taken lengths of cloth, curtains and hangings, beds, utensils and food, as well as hunting paraphernalia (‘hawkes gloves’, ‘Goshawk belles’ and ‘grehownde colors’) and various books and muniments. The books included a missal, a book of the Blessed Virgin Mary (no doubt a devotional work) and a large register containing all the evidences relating to the Tresham properties. Among the deeds were three charters, one of which exemplified the Act passed in his favour in the Parliament of 1467. Of the others, the first was a deed from the abbot of Peterborough appointing Tresham steward of that abbey; the second purported to be a charter of 664 AD, by which Wulfhere, king of Mercia, made extensive endowments to the monks.
By this stage, however, Henry VI was again on the throne and Tresham soon began to profit from the Readeption. On 5 Nov. that year he received a grant of the keeping of the honours of Peverell, Boulogne and Haughley, along with the castle and honour of Huntingdon, for seven years at an annual farm of £6 6s. 8d. (He had probably solicited this grant, for these properties had once belonged to John Hastings, earl of Pembroke (d.1389), an ancestor of his wife.) More importantly, the Readeption Parliament annulled the attainders of Edward IV’s reign, thereby at last enabling him fully to recover all his estates. It is conceivable that he himself was a Member, perhaps even the otherwise unidentified Speaker, of this assembly, for which most of the returns are lost and which does not feature in the Parliament rolls, most likely as a knight of the shire for his home county of Northamptonshire. An Exchequer Chamber case of 1485 concerning MPs returned to the Commons while still subject to a previous Act of Attainder raises this possibility. The Year Book record of the case shows (Sir) William Hussey*, cj.KB, referring to a Parliament, postdating Tresham’s attainder in 1461, in which it had been intended to elect the subject of this biography as Speaker. While the assembly is unspecified, an earlier contribution to the debate does refer to that of 1470-1. Perhaps the Readeption government had wanted him as Speaker only to receive legal advice that he could not preside until the formal reversal in Parliament of his attainder, notwithstanding his general pardon of 1464 and petition of 1467. Yet, even if this interpretation is correct, there is no way of telling whether he did end up holding the office again in the Parliament of 1470-1. On the other hand, Hussey’s exact remark
que Sir John Markam disoit au Roy Edw. 4, que il ne poit arrestre un home sur suspeceon de treason ou felony, sicome ascuns e son liges puissent, pur ceo que s’ il face tort, l’ party ne poit aver accion; come fuist in le cas Sir Thomas Thressam, qui fuit attaint d’ treason, et fuit intende que il sera Speaker del’ Parlement
might suggest that he was referring to a time when Edward IV, rather than the restored Henry VI, was on the throne. If so, it is even possible that the Commons in the Parliament of 1467 (the last in which Tresham certainly sat) had attempted to elect him as Speaker although in the event it was the time-serving bureaucrat, John Say II*, a much more acceptable nominee for the Yorkist Crown, who took up the office.
Whether a Member of the Readeption Parliament or not, Tresham remained true to old loyalties and took up arms to resist Edward IV when the deposed King returned to England in March 1471. In the following month, he joined Queen Margaret and her son following their landing at Weymouth, and he was among those named as notorious traitors and rebels in proclamations issued in Edward’s name on 27 Apr. A week later, he was at Tewkesbury and, having survived the battle, joined other Lancastrians in seeking sanctuary in the church of the local abbey. It is said that the fugitives only escaped immediate death inside the church because a priest carrying the sacrament admonished their pursuers. In order to remove them without violating the sanctuary, Edward offered them a pardon, but two days later they were tried before the dukes of Gloucester and Norfolk, respectively the constable and marshal of England. The duke of Somerset, Tresham and others were condemned and taken to the market place in Tewkesbury for immediate execution. Spared the gruesome degradations usually meted out to traitors, they were simply beheaded. Among those executed was Henry Tresham, Thomas’s younger brother.
Tresham was posthumously attainted in the Parliament of 1472. The profits arising from the custody of his lands and heir were at first assigned as a source of revenue for Edward IV’s household,