There were Trevelyans living at Trevelyan in St. Veep by Henry III’s reign, but John was his family’s first prominent representative. (It is worth noting that he appears at the head of the Trevelyan pedigree drawn up by the visitation heralds in 1620.)
The 1440s were years of great profit for Trevelyan. Possibly a personal favourite of the King, his chamber office afforded him privileged access to the royal presence and many opportunities to importune for rewards. In October 1441 he became bailiff-itinerant for life in Cornwall, and the following April he and two other Hhousehold men were awarded certain forfeited goods and merchandise lying in the port of Margate. In October 1442 the King granted him a daily wage of 6d. from the issues of Cornwall,
Trevelyan’s interests were not, however, restricted to the south-west. In any case, his Household duties meant that he was frequently away from the region, and his purchase between the second half of 1447 and March 1449 of three properties within easy range of London (the manors of West Wickham, Keston and Southcourt in north-west Kent), suggests that he was spending much of his time at Court.
It is nevertheless interesting that Trevelyan also began his parliamentary career in the east, as a Member for the borough of Huntingdon, which he represented in 1442 and 1447.
Trevelyan’s pursuit of Crown offices and rewards is the dominant feature of his early career, but something is known about his other activities during the 1440s. In April 1445 he obtained a papal indult to keep a portable altar and two months later he secured a pardon from the King, although it is not known why he should have felt it necessary. He also acted on behalf of others, since he was a mainpernor for John St. Loe*, a long-serving esquire for the King’s body, and, in February 1448, he was pardoned in his capacity as one of the sureties of the duke of Norfolk’s riotous opponent, Sir Robert Wingfield*. Several weeks after receiving this pardon he was appointed to act as an arbitrator between his friend Bodulgate and a Calais merchant, and later in the same year he, Edmund Lacy, the bishop of Exeter, and John Copplestone* obtained a royal licence to found a guild in the collegiate church at Crediton, Devon.
By the beginning of 1448 William de la Pole, who that summer would be elevated to the dukedom of Suffolk, was at the height of his power. While he determined policy about the King, his allies and servants governed the regions. Thus, in the autumn of that year, Trevelyan was appointed to the Cornish shrievalty. Within two months of his taking office, Parliament was summoned to meet at Westminster in the second week of February. The Commons were expected to be restive: the price the government had paid for the renewal of the truce with the French, the surrender of the county of Maine, was widely held to be excessive, and questions could be expected to be asked about the conduct of the war more generally. The Court needed its own supporters in the House, and there can be little doubt that as sheriff of Cornwall Trevelyan played his part in securing one of the county seats for Thomas Bodulgate, and borough seats for his associates Thomas Tregarthen* (his brother-in-law), Thomas Penarth* (his lieutenant at Trematon), Thomas Clemens*, Nicholas Hervy*and Thomas Lymbery*. Overall, the administration’s preparations proved effective. John Say II*, an established Crown servant, was elected Speaker, and under his stewardship the Commons agreed to several, albeit limited, grants of supply. At the end of the first session, they also agreed to send to sea a fleet under the overall command of the leading courtier Thomas Daniell*, with several sub-commanders (including the Dartmouth shipman Robert Wenyngton alias Cane*) taking charge of operations under him.
Already, however, storm clouds were gathering for Trevelyan. Early in the year he incurred the displeasure of Bishop Lacy of Exeter concerning his administration of the estate of another John Trevelyan, a relative who had been vicar of St. Piran and had named the MP as an executor. The bishop wrote to the King’s judges requesting them to bar Trevelyan, whom he had recently excommunicated for violating the deceased priest’s estate, from all actions in the royal courts. It would appear that Trevelyan was subsequently taken into custody, for in March Lacy asked the King to release him from prison because he had by then submitted to episcopal authority.
Parliament was eventually dissolved on 16 July, just two weeks before the French declaration of renewed war and writs for a fresh Parliament were issued on 23 Sept. Once again the conduct of the Cornish elections fell to Trevelyan who still occupied the shrievalty. It may be a measure of the strength of popular feeling that Bodulgate failed to secure re-election and the county seats were taken by two independent landowners of substance. Yet in the urban constituencies Trevelyan’s efforts met with greater success: Clemens, Lanhergy, Lymbery and Penarth all retained their seats. The administration certainly needed all the friends it could find, for the Commons were in uproar as soon as they assembled. The reverberations of Wenyngton’s exploits apart, over the summer the military position in Normandy had turned from bad to worse. On 29 Oct., a week before the opening of Parliament, the Norman capital of Rouen was surrendered to the French by the duke of Somerset. The popular mood, both on the streets and in the Commons, now turned increasingly ugly, focusing blame for the military disasters on those seen to have benefited from royal patronage. Before long Trevelyan came under attack. As for many other Cornishmen, privateering was a routine part of his life, and following his complicity in Wenyngton’s exploits he was implicated in similar activities, albeit on a lesser scale. In late 1449 he was charged with having that November taken goods worth some £12,000 from a Spanish ship anchored off Plymouth. Accordingly, Trevelyan’s own vessel, the Edward of Polruan, was confiscated, and he was placed temporarily in the Tower – in itself a measure of the increasing inability of the Court to protect its own. The Crown sold the Edward the following February, but since the purchasers were none other than Trevelyan’s associates, Arundell and Bodulgate, it is more than likely that he was able to come to a financial arrangement with them.
By this stage, however, Trevelyan had other things to worry about, for the impeachment of Suffolk in February 1450 left him dangerously exposed. The Act of Resumption passed by Parliament in the late spring of 1450 cost him his bailiffship in Cornwall and his duchy of Cornwall stewardship in Devon. Although he secured a partial exemption, a contemporary estimate reckoned that the Act still cost him £6 out of the £26 he was by then receiving annually in fees and wages.
When Parliament assembled again, on 6 Nov., Trevelyan again came under attack. In early December he was one of those whom the Commons actively sought to have banished from the King’s presence; he retained his place in the Household only because of the King’s insistence that those who were accustomed to wait on him should be allowed to stay. At the same time demands were made that the goods of Trevelyan, Wenyngton and Daniell should be confiscated and handed over to the Hansards in compensation for the taking of the Bay Fleet. The fresh Act of Resumption passed in the same Parliament cost him his keepership of the castles and parks at Trematon and Restormel.
The eclipse of the duke of York and his supporters after his ill judged Dartford campaign in early 1452 put the Court back in the ascendant, and it did not take long for Trevelyan to recover much of what he had lost. In October, he was reappointed bailiff itinerant in Cornwall and duchy steward in Devon, and had control of the castles of Trematon and Restormel restored to him.
It was during this same period of the early 1450s that Trevelyan established a connexion with the young and unstable duke of Exeter, Henry Holand. In November 1451, he shared with the duke an Exchequer lease for ten years of the manors in Restormel and elsewhere which he and Thomas Bodulgate had previously held, and when this grant was renewed for another ten years in September 1456 the fishery of the Fowey and the borough of Camelford were added. Almost certainly one of Exeter’s retainers, Trevelyan is known to have had access to the Coldharbour, the duke’s London mansion and received bonds on his behalf. Furthermore, he actively participated in Holand’s dispute with Ralph, Lord Cromwell, over the Bedfordshire manor of Ampthill. In Hilary term 1455 he was one of those against whom Cromwell brought a writ of trespass in the court of King’s Bench (the others were the duke’s friend Lord Richemount Grey, his two bastard brothers and 16 lesser men) for forcibly taking away 11 horses and £1,000-worth of goods from Ampthill some three years earlier.
Meanwhile, in the spring of 1453 Trevelyan had once more been elected to Parliament, now taking his seat as a knight of the shire for Cornwall. His election should come as no surprise, for the Parliament of 1453, in contrast to the two preceding assemblies, was one of the most royalist and compliant of the reign and marked the zenith of Henry VI’s political recovery after the crises of 1450-2. Among its business was the attainder of the duke of York’s servant, Sir William Oldhall*, and the resumption of grants made to those who had accompanied the duke on his armed demonstration at Dartford the previous year. The Commons held two sessions, lasting for much of March and all of May and June, before rising for the summer on 2 July. During the recess, Trevelyan contracted a marriage to Elizabeth, the daughter of Thomas Whalesborough, a fellow Household esquire and Cornishman. The marriage was potentially valuable in terms of connexion, for Whalesborough was related to Alice de la Pole, the dowager duchess of Suffolk, and connected by marriage to both Robert Hungerford, Lord Moleyns, and Thomas, Lord Scales. There were other reasons to recommend the match from Trevelyan’s point of view, because Elizabeth and her sister, Katherine, were Whalesborough’s immediate heirs.
Close to the date of Trevelyan’s marriage, in the summer of 1453, and between the second and third sessions of this Parliament, the King suffered a serious mental collapse. His resulting incapacity became a cause of grave concern for his courtiers and in January 1454, a few weeks before the last parliamentary session opened, Trevelyan and three other Household servants, conscious of their absolute dependence on the monarch, were rumoured to be drawing up a bill for the establishment of a garrison at Windsor to guard the King and his infant son.
The flight of the Yorkist lords in the aftermath of the stand-off at Ludford Bridge in October 1459 left the Court in undisputed control of the kingdom for the first time since Henry VI’s initial collapse. Fresh shrieval appointments were among the first measures taken, and Trevelyan now once more assumed office in his home county, nominally by appointment of the young prince of Wales and duke of Cornwall. This placed him at the forefront of the efforts to mount a defence against a potential invasion by the exiles, and in the first days of June 1460 he was among the commissioners instructed to investigate insurrection and to commit all adherents of the duke of York to prison. When the invasion came just weeks later, it targeted the south-east rather than Cornwall. It is not clear whether Trevelyan played any part in the decisive battle of Northampton that placed the King and with him control of the government in the hands of the Yorkist lords. What did, however, fall to him, was the duty of presiding over the elections to the Parliament summoned by the victors. Regrettably, no returns are known to survive for either Cornwall or any of its boroughs, but there can be little doubt that Trevelyan would have sought where possible to engineer the return of supporters of the old regime, as he had done in 1449. His subsequent moves are largely undocumented. The Parliament assembled in the autumn agreed to the disinheritance of the prince of Wales in favour of the duke of York and his descendants, and York was assigned an apanage from the revenues of the duchy of Cornwall. Whether Trevelyan was allowed to retain his duchy offices is not known, for no new appointments are recorded before the following summer. Nor is there any record of his participation in any of the important battles of 1460-1, although he may have been rallying forces for the house of Lancaster in the south-west in the spring of 1461, for at the end of March commissioners were appointed to arrest him and others who were in insurrection against Edward IV in Cornwall, and in July the escheator in Surrey was ordered to confiscate Trevelyan’s possessions in that county.
Despite this order, Trevelyan apparently escaped formal attainder in the first Parliament of Edward IV’s reign, and was thought to have given up resistance to the new King by January 1462, when he obtained a general pardon for all treasons and other offences committed before the opening of that Parliament. But he was by no means reconciled to the change of dynasty. Among the surviving Trevelyan family papers is a bede-roll containing prayers and poems to Henry VI, including one from that year headed ‘Here ys a devoute prayer of Kyng Herre’, and Trevelyan was soon in trouble again, since another commission for his arrest was issued in May 1463.
More serious than these comparatively minor challenges in Chancery was the seizure by the dowager duchess of Suffolk of her relative Thomas Whalesborough’s manors at Michaelstow in Cornwall, Wrington in Somerset and Llancarfan and Llantwit in Glamorgan. Such an action was of immediate concern to Trevelyan, since it threatened his wife’s future inheritance, and he petitioned Alice’s son, John de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, for redress. In the letter he wrote to Suffolk he said that the ‘sterynge’ of Sir William Herbert*, now Lord Herbert, had encouraged the duchess to enter the manors, and that her claim to hold them as the heir of her father, Thomas Chaucer*, was invalid because Chaucer had only ever held them as a feoffee. Trevelyan must also have petitioned the King, since at some stage before the duchess’s death in 1475 Edward IV ordered her son ‘to do what was right’ with regard to the properties, which were subsequently restored to Whalesborough.
The difficult circumstances in which Trevelyan found himself during the early 1460s probably explain why, in 1461 or 1462, he deposited certain evidences with his relative, Henry Trevelyan, formerly one of Queen Margaret’s chaplains and by then master of the hospital of St. Katherine beside the Tower of London, and with Dame Elizabeth Blount some five years later. (He later sued the executors of both for withholding these documents from him.) Equally, his reduced circumstances serve to explain his sale in May 1468 of West Wickham and the other Kentish manors which he had bought 20 years earlier to Richard Scrope for 300 marks. Two months later he felt it necessary to obtain another pardon from the King, perhaps having come under suspicion in the volatile political atmosphere of that summer and autumn.
Trevelyan’s later years saw some of his earlier endeavours come to fruition. By the late 1470s he would appear to have achieved reconciliation with his son-in-law, Henry Ash, for in June 1478, shortly before Ash’s death, he was appointed to act as a feoffee to the use of the last will of Adrian, Henry’s son. In March 1481 Thomas Whalesborough died and his daughter Elizabeth’s substantial inheritance came to the Trevelyan family. Although the inquisitions post mortem taken in Cornwall and south Wales after Whalesborough’s death have not survived, his properties at Whalesborough, Michaelstow and elsewhere in Cornwall, along with the manors at Llancarfan and Llantwit in Glamorgan, are known to have come the Trevelyans’ way. Elsewhere Elizabeth inherited a manor at Wood next ‘Chikstone’ in Devon, lands in Wootton Fitzpaine, Dorset, and, in accordance with her marriage settlement, several former Raleigh properties, comprising four manors in Nettlecombe and Knole and other lands in Somerset. According to the inquisitions which have survived, Whalesborough’s lands outside Cornwall and Wales were worth nearly £40 p.a. but this was clearly a considerable underestimate, since the Raleigh properties alone were worth some 50 marks annually.
When Richard III seized the throne, Trevelyan was dismissed from the Somerset bench, even though – unlike his eldest son and namesake – he is not known to have participated in the political opposition to the usurper. The younger John was attainted for taking part in the duke of Buckingham’s rebellion, and, although pardoned in December 1484, had to wait until Henry VII’s accession for a full restitution.
Trevelyan’s will is now lost, but a draft paper dated 9 Mar. 1490 and in his own handwriting has survived. In it he outlined his intentions with regard to his lands, of which a year earlier he had enfeoffed the archbishop of Canterbury, the bishop of Worcester and the King’s uncle, Jasper, duke of Bedford. The instructions he gave to these feoffees made generous provision for his younger sons out of his patrimony. To his heir, John, he left his properties in Trevelyan and other parishes in the vicinity of Lostwithiel and Bodmin, along with tin and coal mines and tolls pertaining to the same. To Thomas, he left his properties in several parishes situated further south, in the vicinity of Truro, and to Richard, his third son, the lands he had acquired in Surrey and Sussex. His fourth and fifth sons, Nicholas and another Richard, were each to have moieties of his Cornish manor of Trewennack, and he provided Humphrey, his youngest son, with lands in Trefrew and at Burrington in Devon along with an annual rent from his manor of Knole in Somerset. George, his sixth son, who would enter the Church and later became one of Henry VIII’s chaplains, was left £76 13s. 8d. to ‘fynde him to scole’. Presumably Trevelyan was as generous as he was to his younger sons because their brother, John, was already well provided for as the heir to their mother’s substantial estate. Trevelyan died on 20 June 1492, having apparently outlived his wife. Among the family papers there is a list of expenses incurred at his funeral on food, wine and other commodities, including ‘bokeram’ [buckram] for his hearse, totalling £9 11s. 9d. A further £13 4s. ½d. was expended during his month’s mind.