TUDDENHAM, Henry

Despite the notoriety of his father, little is known of Tuddenham’s early career. The only surviving child of Sir Thomas Tuddenham, whose ill fated marriage to a daughter of his former guardian, John Wodehouse*, ended in divorce in late 1436, he was the illegitimate offspring of a liaison between the knight and an unknown woman. Although Henry was accepted by Sir Thomas and resided at Oxborough, the knight’s manor in south-west Norfolk, his illegitimacy ensured he was not the heir to the family estates. R. Virgoe, E. Anglian Soc. ed. Barron, Rawcliffe and Rosenthal, 117-31. Virgoe speculated that Henry was a more distant relative of Sir Thomas, so prompting Colin Richmond to suggest that the knight was homosexual, but both Exchequer and Ipswich borough records identify him as the MP’s son: C.F. Richmond, ‘English Gentry and Religion’, in Religious Belief ed. Harper-Bill, 133n; E403/817, mm. 7-9, 11; 819, mm. 2, 4; Suff. RO (Ipswich), Ipswich bor. recs., composite roll, 1438-60, C/2/10/1/1, rot. 9d. With no landed inheritance to look forward to, he entered the law, although the almost complete lack of evidence relating to him as a lawyer indicates that he never achieved any great distinction in his profession. He was, however, a member of the Middle Temple, and at some stage in the years 1446-53 he and a fellow lawyer, John Fincham, sued John Fyst of Bury St. Edmunds in the Chancery over the admission of Fyst’s son, Richard, to that inn of court. They had stood surety on behalf of Richard when he joined the inn with the support of William Babington, abbot of Bury, and the purpose of their action was to seek an indemnity for a bond that they had entered into on that occasion. C1/1514/17. The reference to Babington dates the bill to 1446-53, the period of his tenure as abbot. Tuddenham would have spent an appreciable amount of time in London and its environs while attending the Middle Temple. He certainly made use of one of his father’s properties at Shoreditch, from which a mob stole horses and bridles belonging to him during unrest in the City and Middlesex directed against Sir Thomas and other unpopular courtiers in December 1450. KB9/270A/42.

These disturbances followed the impeachment and death of Sir Thomas Tuddenham’s patron, William de la Pole, duke of Suffolk, and Cade’s rebellion, a serious threat to those associated with the government and Court with which the knight was so closely identified. Initially this turn of events left Sir Thomas and other members of the de la Pole affinity in East Anglia feeling distinctly vulnerable, to the extent (or so one hostile observer reported in the autumn of 1450) that he and his associate, John Heydon*, were even prepared to pay no less than £2,000 to secure the protection and ‘good lordship’ of Richard, duke of York, the leader of the opposition to the Court faction. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 47-48. Yet, to the frustration of its opponents in the region, the affinity proved remarkably resilient, rallying round the widowed duchess of Suffolk and enjoying the support and patronage of Thomas, Lord Scales, a courtier with landed interests in Norfolk. Ibid., 60-63; H.R. Castor, Blood and Roses, 81; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, i. 112. The Tuddenhams remained active in local affairs, including a dispute over the Wodehouse lands.

In spite of his divorce, Sir Thomas Tuddenham owed much to his late guardian and father-in-law, John Wodehouse, for his early advancement and he had remained on good terms with the Wodehouse family. H.R. Castor, King, Crown and Duchy of Lancaster, 122, and n. During the later 1440s, John’s guileless son and heir, Henry Wodehouse, fell victim to the ruthless and wily Thomas Daniell*, who swindled him out of his estates in west Norfolk, including the manor of Roydon and its sumptuous manor-house. SC8/28/1391. Daniell installed Thomas Denys, a servant of the earl of Oxford, at Roydon to hold it on his behalf with a small garrison, but by early October 1450 Henry Wodehouse and his allies, Henry Tuddenham among them, had gathered their forces with a view to retaking it by force. In spite of Denys’s fears of an imminent attack, Daniell managed to retain possession of Roydon. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 45-49. In September 1454, however, Lord Scales razed the manor-house in order to deny it to him, an action sanctioned by a despairing Henry Wodehouse who could no longer bear to see it in his hated enemy’s hands. William of Worcestre, Itins. ed. Harvey, 252. At that date Tuddenham was closely involved with the affairs of Scales, to whom he is likely to have provided legal counsel. In Michaelmas term 1454 he attended a session of the common pleas, evidently on behalf of his patron who was pursuing various suits in that court. During the session he informed the justices that a defendant in one of these suits was present elsewhere in Westminster Hall. They responded by ordering William Watson, a crier in the common pleas, to investigate. Accompanying Watson on his errand, Tuddenham pointed out to the crier the defendant in question, who happened to be William Wayte, the clerk of Judge William Yelverton* of the court of King’s bench. In response to the request that he appear in the common pleas, Wayte obtained a writ of habeas corpus with Yelverton’s assistance, claiming privilege as an attorney of King’s bench and a clerk of one of its justices. Faced with the quandary of which court to obey, Watson permitted Wayte to remain at large, leaving it to the justices of common pleas to debate the matter. Norf. Archaeology, xxvi. 18-19. It is unlikely that Tuddenham’s role in this affair was purely disinterested, since Yelverton and Wayte were opponents of his father in the factional politics of East Anglia.

Even though the battle of St. Albans in the following year represented a setback to the likes of Scales and the de la Pole affinity, Sir Thomas Tuddenham’s enemies feared that either he or another member of the affinity might gain election as a knight of the shire for Norfolk to the Parliament called in the wake of this Yorkist victory. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 120-1. As it happened, all of those returned as the MPs for that county and Suffolk were associated with the duke of York’s ally, John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk, although Henry Tuddenham was able to secure a seat. It is possible that he had originally hoped to represent Ipswich, where he and Gilbert Debenham II* were admitted freemen on 27 June 1455, just four days before the borough returned its representatives to the Commons. Ipswich bor. recs., C/2/10/1/1, rot. 9d. In the event, Debenham was elected, but alongside John Timperley (either John I* or John II*) rather than Tuddenham, who ended up representing a constituency on the other side of the country from his native East Anglia. He was not the only lawyer or complete outsider to sit for the Cornish borough of Truro in this period – his fellow burgess, Robert Clay*, was probably another member of the legal profession – but the circumstances in which he gained election are unknown. The Parliament met at Westminster and during its final session Tuddenham took the opportunity to pursue a matter for his own profit. On 31 Jan. 1456 he appeared in person in King’s bench, to bring a bill against John Dory, until recently under sheriff of Norfolk under John Wingfield†. He claimed that Dory had corruptly breached a statute of 1445. According to his bill, the then under sheriff had arrested one John Neyburgh on suspicion of felony at Bishop’s Lynn, only releasing his prisoner when the latter paid him a bribe of 20s. Tuddenham sued on behalf of the King as well as himself, claiming that Dory should by reason of the statute forfeit £40, of which the King should receive half and he, the informer, the other half. KB27/779, rot. 73d; PROME, xi. 110. Just before the Parliament dissolved, Tuddenham stood surety at the Exchequer for Henry Bourgchier (son of the treasurer of England, Henry, Viscount Bourgchier) and Thomas Sharneburne*, to whom the Crown had granted a joint lease of the Norfolk lordship of Castle Rising. His connexion with Lord Scales probably explains how he came to act for the grantees, since Bourgchier had married Scales’s daughter and heir. CFR, xix. 152; CP, xi. 507.

By the time the Parliament dissolved, the duke of York and his allies had again lost the political initiative, with a Court faction centred on the queen, who took a hard-line stance towards York and his allies, gaining control of the government. In 1457 Tuddenham was appointed escheator of Norfolk and Suffolk, an office he relinquished just two days before his father became treasurer of the King’s household. Later in the decade, he ran errands to the Exchequer for Sir Thomas, in relation to the knight’s expenses. E403/817, mm. 7-9, 11; 819, mm. 2, 4. The position of escheator was not Henry’s only office of the later 1450s, for he was serving Katherine, dowager duchess of Norfolk, as her chief steward in Essex by mid 1457. He had succeeded his father in that role, which Sir Thomas had exercised for some years previously. Ct. roll of Harwich, D/B 4/38/8. Although she was the mother of the then Mowbray duke, Katherine may have remained aloof from regional rivalries between the Mowbray and de la Pole followers in East Anglia; in any case she was in this period the wife of a courtier, John, Viscount Beaumont. Oxf. DNB, ‘Neville, Katherine’. Like his father, in this period Tuddenham was firmly identified with the Court, as a dramatic incident testifies. In early November 1458, the duke of York’s ally, Richard Neville, earl of Warwick, was caught up in a disturbance at Westminster Hall, perhaps while leaving a meeting of the Council. During the fracas, members of his retinue exchanged blows with a group of Household men and others allied to the Court. Matters got so out of hand that the earl was forced to make a hurried escape by his barge on the Thames. Neville, who named the two Tuddenhams among his assailants, viewed the fracas as an attempt on his life. M. Hicks, Warwick, 152-3; CP40/799, rot. 490. A further indication of Tuddenham’s political allegiances is his clutch of ad hoc commissions. Three in all and issued in February and March 1460, they related to the lands and goods of the duke of York’s chamberlain, Sir William Oldhall, one of those attainted in the notoriously partisan Coventry Parliament of 1459.

The next Parliament met in very different circumstances, since it was called after the Yorkists had won the battle of Northampton on 10 July 1460 and recovered control of the government and King. Such a turn of events left the Tuddenhams and their associates exposed to possible retribution from their enemies and they quickly sought letters of pardon. Fortunately for them, on 23 July the Yorkist lords sent a proclamation to Norfolk, ordering the authorities there to ensure that no harm should come to them and that any accusations against them should be referred to the due processes of the law. Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 221-2. Shortly before the Parliament of 1460 opened in the following autumn, John Brackley, a Franciscan friar at Norwich, advised one of their opponents, John Paston*, to seek a commission for their arrest from the chancellor. At that time the holder of the office was the earl of Warwick’s brother, George Neville, bishop of Exeter, and Brackley also suggested that the earl should be reminded of the fracas at Westminster two years earlier, and of the oppressive way that the Tuddenhams and their associates had threatened the prior of Walsingham. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 212-14.

Notwithstanding the circumstances in which it was summoned, Henry Tuddenham sat in the Parliament of 1460 as a burgess for Farnham. Considering his affiliations, there is little doubt that he owed his seat to the lord of that Surrey borough, William Waynflete, bishop of Winchester, a cleric of strong Lancastrian sympathies whom George Neville had replaced as chancellor after Northampton.

Apart from their shared political links, Tuddenham probably supported the bishop in East Anglia, where there were growing tensions over the disposition of the estates of Sir John Fastolf. As the knight’s most important executor, Waynflete opposed the designs on those valuable lands of his co-executor, John Paston, who also happened to be a long-running opponent of the Tuddenhams and their associates in the region. Shortly before Fastolf’s death in the autumn of 1459, Friar Brackley had written Paston a typically convoluted letter in which he stated that ‘Henricus Todynham continue aspirat post mortem magistri [Fastolf] cum mille habeat oculos nocendi, &c. Si quorum duos deperderet, nullus ceteros timeret, &c.’. Ibid. 186. Tuddenham must have welcomed Membership of the Parliament of 1460 and the privilege of freedom from arrest or imprisonment that it afforded him, since it coincided with efforts by the earl of Warwick to seek redress at law for the fracas at Westminster Hall two years earlier. In the autumn of the same year Neville began a suit in the common pleas against Tuddenham, his father and the others (including Humphrey Stafford III*, John Heydon, John Throckmorton II*, Bartholomew Halley*, William Grimsby* and the Tuddenhams’ erstwhile enemy, Thomas Daniell) whom he blamed for the alleged assault on him and his servants, claiming that they had lain in wait to kill him and that they had wounded four of his servants. The matter was still pending when Henry VI was ousted a few months later. CP40/799, rot. 490; 800, rots. 87d, 94d.

Edward IV’s seizure of the throne placed both Tuddenhams in serious jeopardy. Henry was among those whom the new government specifically excluded from the general pardon offered on 6 Mar. 1461 to all those who would forsake the service of the deposed Lancastrian King Henry VI. It also put a price on his head, by promising £100 to anyone who would put him to death. As for Sir Thomas, it issued a commission for his arrest just over a month later. CCR, 1461-8, pp. 55-56; CPR, 1461-7, p. 28. In the event, both father and son survived these early weeks of the new reign unscathed although Sir Thomas would meet his end at the executioner’s block in February 1462, having become implicated in a supposed plot against Edward IV. He was not, however, attainted, allowing his sister and heir, Margaret Bedingfield, to succeed to his estates in 1465. C140/18/34. Last heard of participating in a conveyance of holdings at Hilborough, a neighbouring parish of Oxborough, in February 1463, Henry Tuddenham vanishes thereafter. Norf. RO, Mills of Hilborough deeds, HIL/1/52,870X1.