Tresham’s career provides an illustration of how a family could be elevated to the first rank of a county’s gentry through the success of one man. His origins are uncertain. The most likely speculation is that he hailed from a family settled at Tresham in the Gloucestershire parish of Hawkesbury, even though he is not known to have inherited lands there. In 1415, when offering mainprise in Chancery, he is described as of that county, and Leland, writing of the family in the 1540s, noted that ‘Sum say that there is a manor place in Glocestreshire caullid Tresham Haule ... and that by likely hod that should be the auncientest house of the Treshams’. Our MP’s father may thus have been Thomas Tresham, who served as both coroner and tax collector in Gloucestershire during the last years of the fourteenth century, and it is a further point in favour of this identification that our MP gave his eldest son the same Christian name. The coroner was a descendant of Lawrence Tresham, summoned in 1300 for military service against the Scots as having lands in Gloucestershire worth more than £40 p.a.
The records are silent on the question of when Tresham moved to Northamptonshire. He does not seem to have inherited any property there, and it is not known when he married the daughter of another family who had recently settled in that county, the Vauxs.
There is nothing in his early career to identify Tresham with a particular patron.
Such service brought rewards of great significance to one who began his career landless, and it was largely through royal grants that Tresham established his place among the gentry of his adopted shire. On 17 Oct. 1415 he shared with Ralph Green†, one of the wealthiest Northamptonshire gentry, and William Aldewyncle*, a lawyer with whom he was to maintain a long and close association, a grant of the wardship of the lands and the marriage of William Tyndale (b.1397) of Deene, at a farm to be agreed with the treasurer. Since the inquisition into the Tyndale lands had been held only the day before, Tresham and his colleagues had lost no time in petitioning for the wardship, but despite the grant they were to be quickly disappointed. On the following 1 Dec. the land and marriage of the heir were entrusted to the noted soldier, Lewis Robessart.
Tresham was more fortunate a few years later. On 16 Nov. 1420, he joined two other local lawyers, Thomas Billing* and Thomas Compworth*, in an undertaking to pay the King £100 for the wardship and marriage of Ralph (b.1409), grandson and heir of Ralph Parles† of Watford. This was a bargain price since the marriage alone was worth that sum.
With the benefit of these grants, Tresham quickly assumed a prominent role in Northamptonshire affairs at the beginning of the next reign. In 1422 he was named among the feoffees of a local esquire, John Seyton of Maidwell; and on 5 May 1423 he joined three senior lawyers in returning an award in the property dispute between Roland St. Liz of South Luffenham (Rutland) and Sir Thomas Chetwode of Chetwode (Buckinghamshire). Two months later, on 5 July, he acted for William, Lord Lovell, one of the two peers resident in the county: he was party to a bond in as much as 700 marks to Henry Chichele, archbishop of Canterbury, in connexion with Lovell’s sale of two manors to the archbishop. He was to remain closely associated with Lovell throughout his career, although there is no reason to suppose that he owed his advancement to the young nobleman.
Even against this background, it is slightly surprising that Tresham had local standing enough at this early stage in his career to secure a county seat in Parliament and begin what was to be a virtual monopoly of one of the county seats for more than 25 years. On 30 Sept. 1423 he was elected in company with one of the county’s leading gentry, Richard Knightley*, who was also one of Tresham’s colleagues in the Exchequer. As he was to do for the rest of his career, he took the opportunity of presence at Westminster to make himself useful to himself and his local clients. During the first session of the assembly, he entered mainprise in Chancery for Thomas Chamberlain of Raunds to do no hurt to Margaret, widow of Sir John Pilkington (sheriff of Northamptonshire in 1419-20), and acted in a final concord with two Northamptonshire lawyers, Aldewyncle and Richard Willoughby, concerning property in Warwickshire.
Tresham was again returned to Parliament on 25 Sept. 1427. While at Westminster he acted for another rising young lawyer, Thomas Palmer*, in the purchase of two manors in Leicestershire, and offered mainprise for the prosecution of a petition in Chancery against two former bailiffs of Northampton. He also appears to have been deputed to settle a dispute pending in that court over lands in Peterborough.
By the early 1430s Tresham was becoming a lawyer of more than merely local significance, establishing a string of important connexions, and it may be that his parliamentary service played a part in enabling him to do so. In February 1430 he had been granted an annual fee of 40s. by Anne, dowager countess of Stafford, and three years later her son, Earl Humphrey, appointed him as his steward of the manor of Rothwell.
Had Tresham chosen to do so there can be no doubt that he could have followed John Hody* in further advancing himself through promotion in the legal profession, but his expertise appears to have been as much financial as legal. He decided instead to resume his employment in the Exchequer, perhaps because of an association with Ralph, Lord Cromwell, who became treasurer in August 1433.
A further avenue of employment and advancement for Tresham was the administration of the duchy of Lancaster. He was retained as an apprentice-at-law by the duchy early in 1438, if not before;
Tresham’s service as Speaker marked a watershed in his career, elevating him to a higher rank among the King’s servants at a time when the fund of royal patronage in his native county had been expanded by the reversion of Queen Joan’s dower. He was rewarded accordingly. On 15 May 1440 he was granted £40 p.a. out of the issues of the royal manor of King’s Cliffe for his good service to both Henry V and Henry VI. In the following May he added to this a joint share in a further £20 p.a. assigned on the manor of Brigstock, and in September 1441 he joined with a senior Household servant, John Hampton II*, in the purchase from the Crown, no doubt at a favourable price, of the wardship and marriage of John Woodhill (b.1435).
On 28 Dec. 1441 Tresham was again elected to Parliament, but it is possible that his dominance of one of the county seats was beginning to lead to local resentment. The election indenture suggests the possibility that there was a contest, for it has two unusual features. First, it names no fewer than 86 attestors, more than double the number that had attested any previous Northamptonshire return. Second, the name of the second attestor has been quite deliberately erased in the two places it occurs on the return. There can be little doubt that the election was contested, with Tresham and his brother-in-law, William Vaux, representing the successful ‘ticket’, and it is a reasonable speculation that the second attestor refused to append his seal.
In the aftermath of his second Speakership Tresham was again significantly advanced by the Crown. This time the pretext was the resumption of the duchy lands. On 3 July 1442 he was appointed for life, in reversion after the death of Walter Shiryngton, clerk, to the chancellorship of both the duchy and the county palatine of Lancaster. A year later, in July 1443, he had licence to hunt in the royal forests of Northamptonshire and Buckinghamshire, taking annually for term of his life a buck and two does. On the following 27 Nov. he and his son Thomas were appointed (in joint survivorship) to the office he had previously held under the feoffees, namely the stewardship of the duchy of Lancaster lands in Northamptonshire and three neighbouring counties. Two days later, he received the honour of nomination as one of the feoffees for the implementation of the King’s will. Further, in 1445 he was able to convert his life grant of an annuity of £40 assigned upon King’s Cliffe to one in survivorship for his own life and that of his son, and a year later the two men received on the same terms another £40 annuity chargeable on the duchy.
On 19 Jan. 1447 Tresham was returned once more, on this occasion in company with another member of the royal household, Henry Green, who had briefly been in his wardship; and his son Thomas was elected for Buckinghamshire (where the family held the manor of Broughton Parva by the grant of Lord Lovell).
Tresham’s involvement in the principal concerns of Suffolk’s regime found further expression a few months after this Parliament. On 8 July 1447, at Deptford in Kent, he was among the royal commissioners of inquiry, headed by Suffolk himself, who took treason indictments against the late duke of Gloucester’s leading retainers, and 11 months later he joined Suffolk and others in arbitrating a dispute involving tenants of Eton College. He continued to benefit from royal patronage. On 10 Dec. 1447 he was appointed chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster lands in the hands of feoffees (of whom he was one) from the previous Michaelmas at a fee of £40 p.a. On the following 8 June he secured a royal grant designed to enhance his local authority in the estate he was building in central Northamptonshire: he was given in fee the view of frankpledge in the manor of Sywell.
On 16 Jan. 1449 Tresham was elected to Parliament once more, but he was not the choice of the Commons as Speaker. This fell upon another royal servant, John Say II*, who shortly before the beginning of the third session of the assembly received a grant of the reversion of Tresham’s duchy of Lancaster chancellorships.
It is in the context of this involvement in the duke of York’s affairs that Tresham’s final appearance in Parliament is to be seen. On 23 Oct. 1449 he was elected in company with another royal servant, Thomas Thorpe*.
This was, however, the last significant act of Tresham’s career, and it is tempting to see its tragic conclusion as a product of the growing contradiction between his court connexions and service to the duke of York. But if this did contribute to his murder it was only a subsidiary factor: the main one was a long-standing local quarrel. The best source for the circumstances of his death is the well-known petition presented by his widow Isabel to the King in the first session of the Parliament which met on 6 Nov. 1450. His death, it claimed, was the result of a conspiracy headed by Simon Norwich (described as a gentleman of Bringhurst in Leicestershire), who ‘of sotill ymagination and malice of longe tyme forethought’ had planned to kill her husband. On the evening of 22 Sept. the conspirators, having discovered that Tresham had been summoned to the presence of the duke of York (recently returned from Ireland), sent William King of Kislingbury to visit him at Sywell to find out his proposed route and time of travel. Armed with this knowledge the conspirators with ‘dyvers mysdoers and murderers of men, to the nombre of an CLX persones or moo’ were waiting for him at 6 a.m. on the following morning at ‘Thorplandclose’ in Moulton as he travelled from Sywell to meet the duke. There a Welsh yeoman, Evan Aprice, ‘with a Launcegay, smote [him] thorough the body a fote and more, wherof he died’. On 20 Dec., two days after the prorogation of the first session of this Parliament, a writ was sent to Thomas Wake* as sheriff of Northamptonshire, ordering him to make proclamation against those named in Isabel’s petition. It was delivered to him at his home at Blisworth on the following 4 Jan., and a week later he duly made the proclamation. Predictably this had little effect. Of those named in the petition only Simon Norwich appeared in King’s bench, and the curious pleading which ensued shows that he did so only because he had already reached a settlement with Tresham’s widow. She claimed that he was the son of another Simon Norwich and thus not the same man as cited in her petition, who was, she said, the son of Alexander Norwich; the fortunate defendant acknowledged this and was dismissed from the court. This was clearly collusive: Simon Norwich was the only man of account accused by Isabel and the pleading was designed to terminate her appeal against him, probably because he had agreed to pay her damages.
Even by the lax standards of the time, the murder of one of the most influential gentry in the realm appears to have generated remarkably little heat. No inquest before the county coroners or indictment before j.p.s. survives, and it is unlikely that any such was taken. Isabel claimed in her petition that this was due to the threats of the perpetrators, who had allegedly told jurors called by the coroners that, ‘uppon peyne of their lyfes … they shuld no verdit gif, but if they wold endite the seid William Tresham of his owen deth’. Even so, while this might explain the lack of action in the immediate aftermath of the murder, it does not explain why it was not until 26 Oct. 1452, when a powerful commission of oyer and terminer visited Northamptonshire to take indictments against those involved in the duke of York’s Dartford rising, that any jury was called upon to bring the crime to the notice of the Crown. Then a minor jury endorsed as true a lengthy bill which leaves no doubt as to the motive for the murder and confirms the validity of the widow’s accusation against Norwich. Nearly all of this bill was concerned with describing a series of feoffments of the Holt estates as a preface to the indictment of Norwich and his father-in-law Hugh Boyville* for several forcible entries upon the possession of the feoffees in the weeks preceding the murder. Tacked on to the end is an indictment for the latter crime with, significantly, two clauses struck out: first, that the murder had been brought about ‘per excitacionem, procurationem et mocionem’ of Norwich and Boyville, and, second, that these two esquires had feloniously received the murderers. Equally strikingly, the grand jury made no reference at all to the murder although it did endorse a less detailed bill concerning the entries.
There can be little doubt that Tresham’s leading part in keeping Norwich, as the common-law heir of the Holts, out of that family’s valuable estates, was the reason for his murder. This is implicit in the lengthy bill endorsed by the lesser jury with its concern to detail conveyances of the disputed lands dating back to the 1420s. According to this testimony, Tresham and four lesser men had been feoffees for the implementation of Richard Holt’s will and had continued their estate for 20 years or more, distributing issues in works of charity for the benefit of Holt’s soul according to the terms of the will. Thereafter, for a reason unstated, the lands had been divided into two: in respect of one part, five new feoffees had been added to the surviving three; the other part had been settled on a much more distinguished group, headed by the King’s carver, Sir Robert Roos, and including Tresham and three other prominent lawyers. These two sets of feoffees had then remained seised until disseised by Norwich.
Norwich may have felt himself empowered to act by the dislocation in central politics, and, more importantly, by the support of the unscrupulous Edmund, Lord Grey of Ruthin, who was becoming a potent force in the politics of the county. According to the chronicle attributed to William Worcestre, Tresham was killed by Grey’s men, and this assertion is repeated by Leland, who, reflecting a tradition current in the Tresham family in the 1540s, names two of the perpetrators as ‘Salisbyri and Glin of Wales’.
These circumstances help to explain why the murder seems not to have been a matter of outrage for the leading men of the shire. Tresham was probably considered to have brought his sad end upon himself. In any event, by the time the indictments were taken in the autum of 1452, the cause of the dispute had been laid to rest: in the previous May our MP’s son and heir, Thomas, and Simon Norwich had put the dispute over the Holt lands to the arbitration of an influential panel of local arbiters, headed by Thomas Wake and William Catesby*.
Other evidence adds to this impression that Tresham had made himself unpopular. An anonymous chronicler, referring in passing to Tresham’s murder, describes him as ‘an extorcioner’, and there is some indirect evidence, independent of the circumstances of his death, to support the accuracy of this description.
Like other substantial purchasers, Tresham probably exploited the unfair advantage the common law gave the mortgagee over the mortgagor. Direct evidence is lacking, but it seems very likely that his important acquisition of the manor of ‘Westhalle’ in Rushton together with the advowson of the church there arose out of a mortgage. It appears that the property had originally been mortgaged by William Penythorne to a group including two London citizens, and in 1438 Tresham took quitclaims from both the Penythornes and their putative mortgagees. Further, when, in 1441, Sir Ralph Bulmer (d.1444) of Wilton in Cleveland (Yorkshire) conveyed his Northamptonshire properties to Tresham and others, it is probable that this too was a mortgage for not only was the deed witnessing an apparently minor conveyance enrolled on the close roll but Tresham’s co-feoffees all numbered among his intimates.
However questionable some of Tresham’s business practices, his expertise and obvious ability made him a useful agent for many greater men and this, in turn, was another source of profit for him. Indeed, to William, Lord Lovell, whom he served almost from the moment he entered his inheritance in 1423, he was probably indispensable. By 1440 he had an annuity of £10 assigned on Lovell’s lordship of Titchmarsh. In return, he seems to have been responsible for the administration of all Lovell’s legal business. This, at least, is the implication of the surviving account of the sum of £50 dispersed in the furtherance of that business during Hilary and Easter terms of that year, for which Tresham accounted to the lord’s receiver on the following 12 July at Sywell.
Tresham had other important connexions among the peerage. As we have seen, he was routinely employed in land transactions by Lord Cromwell, and he was the Northamponshire steward of another great lord, Humphrey, earl of Stafford.
The profits of Crown and baronial service funded Tresham’s purchases of land, almost exclusively concentrated in Northamptonshire. The surviving records allow the annual value of these purchases to be calculated. The account of his receiver for 1446-7 records a total charge of over £356. Of this, arrears accounted for £63, royal annuities (although not designated as such), £85, foreign receipts, £43 (namely, £33 from the sale of wood and underwood and £10 from Tresham’s expenses as an MP in the Parliament of 1447), and landed revenues, £165. Cash liveries amounted to an impressive £263 and the accountant went quit as the rest of the charge was allowed him as expenses. These expenses are not detailed, and it is not possible to reach an accurate estimate of the clear annual value of Tresham’s lands, particularly because his valuable tenements in the county town do not figure in the account. None the less, there can be no doubt that this value was well in excess of £100, and this is confirmed by an inquisition of 1477 which assigns the Tresham lands in Northamptonshire a clear value of just under £150 p.a.