TUDDENHAM, Sir Thomas

It is Tuddenham’s misfortune that he is most widely known through the medium of the famous Paston letters, since these have forever blackened his reputation: an enemy of the Pastons’ friend and patron, Sir John Fastolf, he is one of the principal villains of their correspondence. There is no doubt that he misused his powerful connexions and office in the Lancastrian Court for personal gain, even if he was not a lawbreaker on the scale of some of his contemporaries in East Anglia. Yet in the end the same, previously advantageous Court associations and his identification with the Lancastrian cause ensured his downfall following the accession of Edward IV.

A younger son from an important gentry family long resident in west Suffolk, Tuddenham was still several years short of his majority when he succeeded his elder brother Robert in 1415, and in the summer of 1417 Sir John Rothenale, treasurer of the Household, and John Wodehouse acquired his wardship from the Crown. While still a minor he was married to Wodehouse’s daughter Alice. While significant – his father-in-law was both an influential servant of the Lancastrian Crown and an important figure in East Anglia – the match ended in failure. For a time Tuddenham and Alice resided at Marham in west Norfolk with John Shuldham and his wife (probably family connexions of the bride) but by the mid 1420s they were living apart. After giving birth to a short-lived illegitimate child (the result of a liaison with her father’s chamberlain), Alice was formally separated from her husband and entered Crabhouse priory, a nunnery in west Norfolk. An ecclesiastical court annulled the marriage on the grounds of non-consummation in 1436, but Tuddenham never remarried, even though he received permission to do so from the Church. He was capable of having children, since he fathered at least one son by another woman, so his failure to find a new wife in an age when producing a legitimate heir was all important is puzzling. C140/18/34; CIPM, xx. 128, 780-2; CFR, xiv. 205-6; Virgoe, 117-31. Virgoe, 120, speculated that Henry Tuddenham was a far more distant relative and, on the basis of Virgoe’s article, Richmond suggested that the MP was homosexual, but Exchequer records identify Henry 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. In spite of the breakdown of his marriage, Tuddenham owed much to his late guardian for his early advancement and he remained on good terms with the Wodehouse family. As a result, he supported his erstwhile brother-in-law, Henry Wodehouse, against the ruthless Thomas Daniell*, after the latter had defrauded the hapless Henry of his estates in the mid 1440s. In turn, the Wodehouse-Daniell dispute was the genesis of the well-known enmity between Tuddenham and the Pastons, then Daniell’s associates, having ill-advisedly aligned themselves with him in the hope of benefitting from his patronage. Castor, 122; eadem, Blood and Roses, 46-47.

Tuddenham came of age in May 1422, before the collapse of his marriage, and he received livery of his considerable inheritance in the following year. At that date its centre was Eriswell, one of eight or more manors belonging to his family in Suffolk. Outside Suffolk, he inherited others at Wisbech and Little Abington in Cambridgeshire and Heyford in Northamptonshire, as well as property in the East Riding of Yorkshire and a share of the barony of Bedford. He did not come fully into his own immediately because his mother Margaret and her second husband, Thomas Misterton, retained possession of the manors of Heyford, Little Abington and Dagworth in Suffolk, all of which she held in dower. It is not known exactly when these properties reverted to her son, although Margaret was still alive when Misterton made his will in 1433. CIPM, xxii. 227, 260; xx. 782; CCR, 1405-9, p. 218; 1422-9, p. 27; VCH Cambs. iv. 234; vi. 7; VCH Beds. iii. 15, 329; Feudal Aids, i. 45; Norwich consist. ct., Reg. Surflete, ff. 156-8. By then Tuddenham had acquired the manor of Oxborough in south-west Norfolk which, like the Suffolk manors of Charsfield, Brandeston and Westerfield, had once belonged to the Weylands, the family of his paternal grandmother, Margery. All four properties had descended to Margery’s great-niece, Joan, daughter of the Warwickshire esquire, John Harewell†. The widow of John Stretch†, Joan had not borne her late husband any surviving children and she conveyed Oxborough to Tuddenham in 1427. Following her death in 1434, Sir John Knyvet†, the son of Margery Tuddenham’s niece Joan Botetourt, made a formal quitclaim of Oxborough and the three Suffolk manors to Tuddenham and his feoffees. Tuddenham and the Knyvets also agreed that he should have an estate for life in another Weyland manor, Roadwell in Somerset, with reversion to them after his death. Another manor, Mendlesham in Suffolk, fell to their share but a few years later they leased it out to him for life for a rent of £20 p.a. Blomefield, vi. 172, 174, 175; W.A. Copinger, Suff. Manors, ii. 369; The Commons 1386-1421, iv. 509-10; CCR, 1429-35, pp. 361-2; CP25(1)/224/117/24. By 1437 Tuddenham had taken up residence at Oxborough, thereby shifting his interests away from his native county to that of Norfolk, where he acquired other lordships and manors over the years. Blomefield, vi. 2, 47; viii. 543; CP25(1)/169/188/137. He was pardoned as ‘of Oxborough’ that year: C67/38, m. 7. His acquisitions were at least partly offset by his disposal of some of the outlying parts of his estate. In the late 1440s he conveyed his manor of Elstronwick in the East Riding of Yorkshire to Edward Grimston and his wife, and it would appear that it was during his lifetime that the Mauntell family acquired the Tuddenham manors in Northamptonshire. CP25(1)/280/159/57; 293/71/312; CIPM Hen. VII, i. 372.

Early in his career, probably through the influence of his father-in-law and perhaps before he had reached his majority, Tuddenham entered the service of Henry IV’s half-brother, Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, a magnate with landed interests in East Anglia. Castor, Duchy, 80. He probably went abroad with the duke, for in May 1426 the Crown licensed a Lombard banker based in London to issue him with letters of exchange for £60 payable in foreign parts, CCR, 1429-35, p. 373. and it is possible that he won his knighthood in France. Following Exeter’s death at the end of 1426, Tuddenham maintained contact with others of the late duke’s followers, among them Sir William Phelip† (created Lord Bardolf in 1437), Thomas Hoo I*, Gilbert Debenham I* and Sir Richard Carbonell (the son of Sir John Carbonell*). One of Phelip’s feoffees, he afterwards helped to oversee the will of his widow, Joan, Lady Bardolf. CCR, 1441-7, p. 22; De Antiquis Legibus Liber (Cam. Soc. xxxiv), pp. clxxxiii, clxxxviii. He was also a trustee for Hoo (later created Lord Hoo), with whom he acquired the wardship of Richard Walderne, the heir to lands in Hertfordshire, from the Crown in the autumn of 1432, only to lose it several years later for failing to confirm their grant in the Exchequer. C1/26/117; CFR, xvi. 121; xvii. 38. Gilbert Debenham was a feoffee for Tuddenham, who in turn stood bail for him when he was accused of murder in the court of King’s bench in the late 1430s. CCR, 1429-35, pp. 295; KB27/710, rot. 70d. As for Carbonell, he conveyed his manors at Caston and elsewhere in Norfolk to Tuddenham in 1427, perhaps prior to going abroad. He died in 1430, having named Tuddenham as an overseer of his will. CIPM, xxiii. 469-70; Reg. Surflete, ff. 66-67.

In the years following their patron’s death, Tuddenham and other former members of Exeter’s household joined the following of William de la Pole, earl of Suffolk, and he had become close to de la Pole, whom he served as a counsellor and feoffee, by the mid 1430s. In 1435-6 he and other de la Pole counsellors attended manorial courts held on Suffolk’s manor of Costessy near Norwich, and in 1436 he was associated with the earl in entering into a bond for 500 marks with John Cornwall, Lord Fanhope. Castor, Duchy, 87; CCR, 1435-41, p. 62; 1441-7, p. 443; 1447-54, pp. 38-39; C.F. Richmond, Paston Fam.: First Phase, 235n. In the following year he acquired the keeping of the alien priory of Docking, Norfolk, from the Crown with the support of two fellow de la Pole retainers, John Heydon and Reynold Rous*, his sureties for this grant. CFR, xvi. 337. During the late 1430s he, Heydon and Rous supported Robert Lyston, another de Pole follower, in his property dispute with Sir Robert Wingfield*, an unruly retainer of John Mowbray, duke of Norfolk. KB27/715, rot. 61; Castor, Duchy, 108-9. In the mid 1440s Tuddenham was associated with Suffolk and Thomas Brewes* in obtaining the custody of a mentally incapacitated landowner’s estates in Norfolk and Northamptonshire from the Crown, CPR, 1441-6, p. 427. and served John Arundell, a Cornish esquire related to the de la Pole family, as a feoffee. Cornw. RO, Arundell mss, AR 19/4-5, 17/1; Cornish Lands of the Arundells (Devon and Cornw. Rec. Soc. n.s. xli), p. clvi. In spite of his strong attachment to de la Pole, Tuddenham served the dowager duchess of Norfolk as her steward in Essex; presumably she remained aloof from the rivalry which existed in East Anglia between Suffolk and her son, the third Mowbray duke. He was also associated with Humphrey, duke of Buckingham, for whom he appears to have become a feoffee. CCR, 1447-54, pp. 95-96, 136; CP40/780, rot. 336; KB27/788, rot. 83; Blomefield, vii. 186.

Tuddenham was appointed to his first public office, the stewardship of the duchy of Lancaster in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, during the lifetime of his first patron, the duke of Exeter. He was granted the office (which came with a fee of £10 p.a.) for life, with reversion to the previous holder, his father-in-law, John Wodehouse, who had relinquished it in his favour. DL29/310/4993; Castor, Duchy, 80. His parliamentary career began with his election to the Commons of 1431 as a knight of the shire for Suffolk. He was re-elected in the following year, although this time for Norfolk, the county he would represent in all of his subsequent Parliaments. Several months after the dissolution of the Parliament of 1432, he was pricked as sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk and as such he presided over the elections of the MPs for those counties to the Commons of the following year. Not long after relinquishing the shrievalty, he was appointed a j.p. in Norfolk and later in the decade he was returned to the Parliaments of 1435 and 1439.

In the mid 1430s, probably after the dissolution of his second Parliament, Tuddenham was a member of a delegation which the earl of Suffolk sent to Norwich. The earl, acting on behalf of the Crown, was trying to resolve the quarrels then raging within the city’s oligarchy, as well as jurisdictional disputes taking place between the citizens and several religious houses. While in Norwich, Tuddenham and his associates viewed the city’s new water-mills, a particular bone of contention between it and the abbot of Hulme. Norf. RO, Norwich city recs., chamberlains’ accts. 1384-1448, NCR 18a, f. 212. Tuddenham had many subsequent dealings in Norwich, both on his own account and on behalf of de la Pole. He employed two former masters of the city’s hospital of St. Giles to act for him in his divorce case, C. Rawcliffe, Medicine for the Soul, 142. and he was admitted to the city’s guild of St. George in 1436 or early 1437. Norwich city recs., guild of St. George acct. NCR 8e. In the summer of 1441 he was among those appointed to investigate accusations of misgovernment levelled against the corporation of Norwich, KB9/240/27d. and he was also one of the gentry who helped to put down the riots, subsequently known as ‘Gladman’s Insurrection’, which broke out there in early 1443. PPC, v. 235. Following these disturbances the city’s liberties were confiscated and the wealthy East Anglian knight, Sir John Clifton, appointed its governor. Norwich assembly bk. 1434-91, NCR 16d, f. 25. In March 1446 the Crown granted to Clifton and Tuddenham in survivorship 100 marks p.a. from the city’s fee farm, an annuity which Clifton had previously received in association with the late Sir Simon Felbrigg. CPR, 1441-6, p. 403. Tuddenham was soon the sole recipient, since Clifton (who had chosen him and William de la Pole, among others, to act as overseers of his will) died in the following year. Norwich consist. ct., Reg. Wylbey, ff. 103-4; Virgoe, 137. Over time Tuddenham’s involvement in Norwich’s affairs made him extremely unpopular with the citizens, who levelled many charges of oppression and extortion against him after the death of de la Pole.

The earl of Suffolk, who had come to occupy the role of the King’s chief minister, had begun his rise to power in the late 1430s, shortly after Henry VI had reached his majority. His associate, John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, was another lord to gain the young King’s ear, and in July 1440 Beaufort (a nephew of the late duke of Exeter) was granted licence to convey six Welsh manors to de la Pole, Tuddenham and other feoffees. CCR, 1436-41, p. 433. As Suffolk advanced in power and influence, so did Tuddenham. Already the duchy of Lancaster’s steward in East Anglia, by the autumn of 1443 Sir Thomas had also become the particular steward of the duchy manor at Gimmingham in Norfolk. In the same autumn he was appointed de la Pole’s associate as steward of the duchy north of the Trent and chief steward of Lancashire, and in 1446 he was rewarded with the reversion (after the death of Joan, widow of Richard Wydeville*) of an annuity of 80 marks from duchy resources. Somerville, 421. Tuddenham’s duchy stewardships in East Anglia gave him substantial authority in the region. They also brought him into a close working relationship with John Heydon, one of de la Pole’s legal counsellors. After November 1443 Heydon, an influential figure in the administration of the duchy’s lands in East Anglia, A.R. Smith, ‘Sir John Fastolf’ (Oxf. Univ. D.Phil. thesis, 1982), 164. was associated with him as steward of its lands in Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire and in arbitrating in disputes involving the duchy’s tenants in those counties. Castor, Duchy, 96; DL37/12/100; 13/18, 55, 76, 83, 106, 134. The two men became closely linked on a more personal basis, with each appointing the other his feoffee, CP25(1)/169/188/137; 189/163; 170/190/211, 215; 191/266; 224/117/24. and the fact that both were cuckolds (Heydon’s wife had also produced an illegitimate child) must have made for a sense of aggrieved fellow feeling.

During the 1440s Tuddenham also achieved substantial advancement at the centre of power. It is likely that he was already a Household man when elected to the Commons of 1442, since he was described as a ‘King’s knight’ when the Crown granted him the keeping of certain properties in Pembrokeshire on 20 Mar., a week before Parliament was dissolved. CFR, xvii. 212. The only member of de la Pole’s East Anglian affinity to attain high office in the Household, R.A. Griffiths, Hen. VI, 585. he was appointed keeper of the great wardrobe in the autumn of 1446. He held the office during pleasure, although in February 1448 he was granted an annual livery of robes for the rest of his life. The position of keeper was one of no little responsibility. On two separate occasions he was assigned £3,700 from the customs and subsidies of London and seven other ports for his necessary expenses, and at the beginning of 1449 he was granted £300 p.a. from the customs of Boston for the same purpose. These were large sums but his expenditure as keeper was considerable. By the spring of 1450, for example, the King owed a single merchant of Lucca £620 for silks and other fabrics which Tuddenham had bought on his behalf. CPR, 1446-52, pp. 67-68, 183, 233, 375.

That spring proved a difficult time for Tuddenham because it witnessed the fall of William de la Pole, by then duke of Suffolk. Impeached by Parliament for his failures in government, Suffolk was murdered in May, while on his way into exile. Like other followers and associates of the duke, Tuddenham also became a target for opponents of the Court and during Cade’s rebellion he was among those courtiers condemned in a satirical song. Three 15th Cent. Chrons. (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xxviii), 103. In the following October he was dropped as a j.p. and in early December mobs attacked houses and lodgings in London belonging to him and others associated with the Court. Historical Collns. Citizen London (Cam. Soc. ser. 2, xvii), 196. (In 1453, John Farman, a yeoman from Norfolk, would be indicted for his part in breaking into Tuddenham’s houses at Shoreditch, from which he and others were said to have stolen horses and other goods belonging to both the MP and his bastard son, Henry.) KB9/270A/42. Before 1450 was out Tuddenham was forced to relinquish the position of keeper of the great wardrobe, and in the spring of 1451 he lost the offices of chief steward of the duchy of Lancaster north of the Trent and chief steward of Lancashire. Such was his sense of insecurity in the months following Suffolk’s downfall that he sought the protection of Richard, duke of York, the leader of the opposition to the Court faction associated with his dead master. In October 1450 he and John Heydon, assisted by the lawyers, William Burley I* and Thomas Young II*, approached York’s servant, Sir William Oldhall*. According to one hostile contemporary they were prepared to pay the knight more than £2,000 for his ‘good lordship’ although it is likely that this large sum was intended for York himself. Their efforts to ingratiate themselves with Oldhall were short lived if one is to believe their enemy, William Yelverton*, who in the following month claimed that their servants were spreading ‘the falsest tales’ about both Oldhall and himself. Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 175; Griffiths, 305; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 524. A justice of the King’s bench, Yelverton was one of the leading opponents of the two men and their associates.

The activities of de la Pole’s followers had caused great resentment among many people unattached to Suffolk, and after the duke’s fall those with grievances against him and his affinity clamoured for redress. The Paston letters, which provide much of the evidence against de la Pole’s men, are far from an objective source, but there is no doubt that members of the duke’s affinity had exploited their links, both with Suffolk and the duchy of Lancaster, for their own personal gain. Their foremost local opponent was the wealthy knight, Sir John Fastolf, who had suffered humiliating losses at the hands of Suffolk’s followers in connexion with the Bardolf inheritance. This had fallen to Joan and Anne, the daughters and heirs of Thomas, Lord Bardolf, and during the 1440s Fastolf had rented their manor at Caister near Great Yarmouth, a property which in due course he had probably hoped to buy. His problems appear to have begun in 1447, following the death of Joan, who had married Tuddenham’s old associate Sir William Phelip. The details of the quarrel are now obscure, but it seems that Tuddenham (involved in Joan’s affairs as one of the overseers of her will), Heydon (one of her executors) and other de la Pole men used the inquests on her properties to challenge Fastolf’s possession of the rented manor and possibly other Bardolf properties as well. By September 1450 Fastolf was determined that Tuddenham, Heydon, John Wymondham* and others should not receive any acquittal for their part in the dispute. By the beginning of the following December, he relented in so far as he was ready to come to terms with Wymondham, although he still refused to negotiate with Tuddenham and Heydon. Smith, 156-7, 160-1; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 252 (misdated ‘Sept. 1451’ by Gairdner). A few weeks later, he expressed his frustration at the apparent reluctance of some of the counsellors of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, to defend that peer’s interests in East Anglia against the pair. Paston Letters ed. Davis, Beadle and Richmond, 112. Among others with grievances against Tuddenham were the inhabitants of Swaffham, near Oxborough. Sir Thomas had held the stewardship and farm of that lordship, part of the royal honour of Richmond, by grant of William de la Pole since the 1430s, and in a petition they apparently intended to present to Parliament, the inhabitants of Swaffham claimed that they had suffered more than 16 years of oppression at the hands of him and his servants. Castor, Duchy, 97; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 192; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 528-30.

Whatever the plausibility of the argument that Fastolf and Yelverton headed an ‘East Anglian movement’ against the followers of the late duke of Suffolk, Posited by Smith, 168. they and their allies made determined efforts to break the power and influence of the de la Pole affinity in the region. In the latter part of 1450 and in early 1451 Yelverton was active in East Anglia as a member of a commission of oyer and terminer appointed to investigate wrongdoings committed there. Norwich city recs., complaint of city against Tuddenham, Heydon and others, 1434-5, NCR 9c/2; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 525-7; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 216-17. During sessions held at Norwich in late 1450 the citizens took the opportunity to vent their grievances against the late duke and his affinity. According to the presenting juries, Tuddenham, Heydon, John Ulveston*, John Belley and others had confederated together at Norwich as far back as the mid 1430s in order to corrupt justice for their own profit, both in the city and in the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk. They were also charged with having extorted money from the citizens on many occasions, by threatening them with de la Pole’s displeasure and the loss of their liberties. It was alleged, for example, that Tuddenham had used such threats to take over £80 from them in September 1441. The juries also laid more general and far-fetched charges which had nothing to do with the citizens’ affairs. One was the accusation – previously made in the Parliament of November 1449 – that Suffolk had conspired with the duke of Orléans to wage war against Henry VI; another accused Tuddenham and his associates of having counselled Suffolk to put the duke of Gloucester to death. In addition, the corporation drew up a memorandum detailing wrongdoings which Suffolk’s men had allegedly committed against the city. This included a bizarre story about a visit which de la Pole’s wife, Alice, made to Norwich, probably in the early 1440s. According to the memorandum, the then countess of Suffolk had gone to the city dressed as a ‘huswife of the countre’, accompanied by Tuddenham and others in similar disguise. One evening during their stay they went to ‘take their disportes’ in nearby Lakenham wood, where they encountered Thomas Aylmer, a keeper of the city’s ditches. Not realizing who they were, he tried to bar their way and he and Tuddenham quarrelled and exchanged blows. The mayor of Norwich afterwards arrested and imprisoned the ditcher and his associates at the behest of the countess and Tuddenham, but they and John Heydon, whom the corporation had dismissed from the office of recorder of the city some years earlier, complained to Suffolk that the city was misgoverned. The memorandum further alleged that these complaints, and not ‘Gladman’s Insurrection’ (which it tried to pass off as a boisterous street pageant), had led the city to lose its liberties. KB9/267/23-24; 272/4-5; Recs. Norwich ed. Hudson and Tingey, i. 346-7; Norf. Archaeology, i. 295-9; R.L. Storey, End of House of Lancaster, 218. The incident at Lakenham wood is discussed by R.E. Archer, ‘Women as Landholders and Administrators’, in Women in English Soc. ed. Goldberg, 154-5, but she accepts the citizens’ claim that the loss of their liberties was due to Alice and her associates. She also mistakenly states that it was Tuddenham who was arrested after the fracas in the wood. Of course this was complete nonsense, a blatant attempt by the citizens to blame Suffolk and his men for the misfortune they had brought upon themselves, but the charges they levelled against the duke and his followers demonstrate their resentment about de la Pole’s activities in the city. At least some of the alleged instances of extortion levelled referred to occasions when Suffolk’s men had collected fines the King had imposed on the corporation and individual citizens, and it is possible that Tuddenham and his associates had taken the opportunity to peculate.

By early December 1450 Judge Yelverton and his fellow commissioners of oyer and terminer had moved on to Beccles in Suffolk, where they took further indictments against Tuddenham, Heydon, Ulveston, Belley and others. As at Norwich, the indicted men were accused of forming a conspiracy for their own profit. The jury also laid further charges at their door. They found that in the mid 1430s Ulveston, along with his late stepfather, William Mekylffyld, and William’s brother, Robert, had unjustly disseised the three young daughters and heirs of Roger Chestan of their father’s manor at Westleton in east Suffolk. The Chestans had recovered possession but in July 1440 Ulveston and the Mekelffylds, supported by Tuddenham, Heydon and Belley, had again ejected the coheiresses from Westleton. The jury added that they had seized the children (all infants less than five years of age) and thrown them violently onto a dungpit (‘sterquilium’) lying outside the gates of the manor. The Beccles jurors also accused Tuddenham and his associates of having pursued false actions in Suffolk’s name against the Chestans’ lawyers, John Jenney and his sons, William* and John*, and of maintaining a suit which the abbot of Leiston had brought against the Jenneys. Both the Norwich and Beccles indictments led to further legal proceedings, but in the end these came to nothing. KB27/766, rex rot. 6; 767, rex rot. 7; 793, rex rot. 6; 798, rex rot. 9.

In early 1451 Yelverton’s clerk, William Wayte, wrote to John Paston*, Fastolf’s legal adviser and Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 60-62. It was at this time that Yelverton and the earl of Oxford, one of the other oyer and terminer commissioners, sat at Bishop’s Lynn. While in west Norfolk, they met with a third commissioner, Thomas, Lord Scales. Scales’s presence in the commission was greatly to the advantage of Tuddenham and Heydon. Sir Thomas was one of Scales’s feoffees, CPR, 1446-52, p. 111; CFR, xviii. 183-4. and the peer had provided him, Heydon and other members of the de la Pole affinity with protection after the death of their patron. In another letter Wayte claimed Scales was trying to neutralize some of the opposition to Tuddenham by bringing about a settlement between the MP and Swaffham, although he doubted that this would happen, since the peer had used ‘grette langage’ at a meeting with the men of the town. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 62-63. By March 1451 the opponents of Tuddenham and Heydon despairingly concluded that the pair enjoyed ‘as grett rewill as euer they hadde’ in Norfolk. It was observed that their servants were openly boasting that their masters, then absent from the county, would soon return home ‘and be als well att ese as euer they were’. Ibid. i. 238-9. It seems that Tuddenham was in London at the beginning of 1451. On 2 Jan. that year it was reported that he had lost his ‘primer’ at Tower Hill: Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 206. Such fears were realized when another session of oyer and terminer was held at Norwich on 29 Apr. This time John Prysote*, c.j.c.p., presided and, according to Sir John Fastolf’s servant, Thomas Howes, he was so biased in favour of Tuddenham and Heydon that he provoked protests from Yelverton, sitting alongside him as his fellow justice. Prysote adjourned proceedings to Walsingham, where the resilient de la Pole affinity enjoyed particularly strong support, and when the session reopened there in May, no one except John Paston dared complain about Tuddenham and his associates. Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 233, 238-9.

In July 1451 the King pardoned Tuddenham of all but £200 of an enormous fine of £1,396 he had incurred as a result of the indictments taken against him. CPR, 1446-52, p. 455; Griffiths, 589, 693. By the following November Sir Thomas was trying to recover nearly £406 which he claimed was owed to him from his time as keeper of the great wardrobe. In a suit heard in the Exchequer he alleged that John Brecknock*, receiver-general of the duchy of Cornwall, had failed to pay him the sum, which the King had assigned to him from the duchy’s revenues. E13/145A, rot. 15d. At the end of the same year it was reported in East Anglia that Lord Scales was attempting to bring about an accord between Tuddenham and Heydon on the one hand and Thomas Daniell, then an opponent of the de la Pole affinity in the region, on the other. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 76-77. Whatever the truth of this rumour and in spite of the recent enmity between him and Tuddenham, Daniell was certainly associating with the two men and other de la Pole followers later in the decade. Castor, Duchy, 183-4. At the end of 1456, for example, Tuddenham, Heydon, Scales and others accompanied Daniell when he seized the manor of Stanhoe in north-west Norfolk from a namesake, Thomas Daniell of Walsoken, and by about 1460 some believed that Tuddenham and Heydon had become that former MP’s ‘counsellors’. Ibid. 184n; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 205-6.

Even if the followers of the late duke of Suffolk were greatly assisted by the likes of Scales and friends at Court, it says much for the strength of the de la Pole affinity, which had rallied round the duchess of Suffolk, that it was able to weather the storms of 1450-1. Tuddenham’s service to the widowed Alice de la Pole was not confined to East Anglia, since he supported her in her quarrel with (Sir) John Wenlock* and Drew Barantyn* over the manor of Nuneham Courtenay, Oxfordshire. He, Edmund Hampden* and other de la Pole feoffees sued the pair on her behalf, resulting in an extremely disorderly assize of novel disseisin at Henley-on-Thames in September 1451. CCR, 1447-54, p. 339; KB27/766, rot. 96; 767, rot. 13d; KB27/772, rex rot. 7. (Tuddenham would also turn out for Alice in Suffolk just under three years later, when he and other gentry gathered at Eye to assist her in a dispute between her and Thomas Cornwallis*.) Egerton Roll 8779. In February 1452 Tuddenham was placed on an ad hoc commission in Norfolk, his first such appointment since the crisis of 1450-1, but he could not yet feel completely secure. In April the duke of Norfolk proclaimed his intention to inquire into the ‘gret riotts, extorcyons, oryble wrongis and hurts’ committed in Norfolk by him, other de la Pole men and Lord Scales, Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 258-9. and on the following 22 Nov. it was alleged that there had been a plot to kill him. The allegation was made in King’s bench by William Provynder of Kent, a spurrier turned King’s approver. He asserted that at the beginning of the same month Robert Stokker, a merchant from London, had met Thomas Metsharp, a shipwright from Southwold in Suffolk, and others at a house in Cromer on the north Norfolk coast. There they had planned the deaths of Henry VI and his counsellors, among them Edmund Beaufort, duke of Somerset, and Tuddenham, agreeing to emulate previous rebellions by congregating with an armed following on Blackheath on 30 Nov. Whether true or not, the court found Provynder’s accusations insufficient in law and did not pursue them. KB27/770, rex rot. 47d.

In early 1453 the justices of King’s bench were ordered to act upon the indictments taken against the de la Pole men at Norwich, KB27/767, rex rot. 7. but by now events were running strongly in Tuddenham’s favour, since the Court, widely criticised in 1450, had regained the initiative in national politics. He and Sir Andrew Ogard*, by then also associated with the de la Poles and the Court, were returned as knights of the shire for Norfolk to the Parliament which opened in March 1453, an assembly with a strong Household interest. It was perhaps during the Parliament that Tuddenham sued his old enemy Sir John Fastolf in Chancery. He accused Fastolf of having gone to law against him with a bond, even though this had been discharged. The bond was connected with the wardship of Anne Harling, both a cousin of Tuddenham and a relative of Fastolf’s and the daughter and heir of Sir John’s late comrade-in-arms, Sir Robert Harling. Following Harling’s death in 1435, the Crown had granted the wardship to William de la Pole, then earl of Suffolk, but it had afterwards passed to Fastolf, who had agreed to pay the earl 500 marks for it. C1/15/335; 22/6; Blomefield, i. 319. It was in connexion with Suffolk’s acquisition of the same wardship that Tuddenham and John Harleston II* entered into a recognizance with the earl of Stafford in Nov. 1436: CCR, 1435-41, p. 102. The Parliament of 1453 sat until April 1454, by which date Richard, duke of York, held the office of Protector of England. Although the duke was the leading opponent of the Court faction, he made it his business to eschew partisanship and Tuddenham continued to serve as a commissioner in East Anglia. During the protectorate, the duke of Norfolk, who had aligned himself with York, enjoyed a greatly enhanced role in the affairs of the region, but Mowbray was an inept lord who was often unable to control his retainers. Castor, Duchy, 170-2, 177-8. It was about this time that Tuddenham and opponents like John Paston were temporarily united in their condemnation of the lawless activities of Mowbray’s servant, Robert Lethum, and both he and Paston were members of a jury which indicted Lethum for his misdeeds. Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 307-14. Tuddenham was nevertheless associated with the duke of Norfolk in 1455, when they and others conveyed the Norfolk manor of Lynford (a property which had once belonged to Sir John Clifton) to Thetford priory, a religious house of which Mowbray was patron. C143/451/26; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 239-40; Blomefield, ii. 263-4.

In March 1455 Tuddenham was restored as a j.p. in Norfolk and in the following month he and other knights who supported the Court were summoned to a great council to be held at Leicester in May. The council, which was to have provided for the King’s safety, never met because it was overtaken by the duke of York’s defeat of a royal army at the battle of St. Albans, following which a new Parliament was summoned. In spite of this change in political circumstances, Tuddenham’s enemies feared that either he or another member of the de la Pole affinity might gain election to the Commons as one of the knights of the shire for Norfolk. As it happened Tuddenham was not elected, although his bastard son, Henry, was one of the men returned for the borough of Truro. PPC, vi. 341; Storey, 160-1; Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 120-1. Shortly after Parliament opened, it was claimed that Yelverton, Paston and ‘Mayster Alyngton’ were scheming to have Tuddenham, Heydon and the bishop of Norwich accused of treason. Paston angrily dismissed the rumour as a ‘slawnderus noyse’ which had emanated from Heydon, while also acknowledging that Tuddenham had not recently given him any cause for complaint. Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 84-85. ‘Master Alyngton’ was probably either the future Speaker, William Allington†, or his elder brother, John. Soon afterwards, however, he was directly at odds with Tuddenham over the affairs of his late father, Judge William Paston. By mid 1456 he and William’s other executors were pursuing Sir Thomas in the court of common pleas over £46, the MP having allegedly entered into a bond for that amount with the testator in 1431. CP40/782, rot. 326. Having seized control of the government the Yorkist lords showed a wise moderation, and Tuddenham, who probably kept a low profile after St. Albans, retained his place on the Norfolk bench. In October 1455, during the recess between the first and second sessions of the Parliament, he received a pardon in his capacity as a feoffee of Thomas, Lord Roos, who had fought for Henry VI at the battle. C67/41, m. 14; Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 25, 29. In the second session of the Parliament of 1455 York again assumed the role of Protector of England, PROME, xii. 347-59. but during 1456 a Court faction centred on the queen, who took a hard-line stance towards York and his allies, gained control of the government.

Buoyed by this change of circumstances, Tuddenham and other de la Pole men took the opportunity to engage in lawsuits (nominally over a manor at Brampton in north-east Suffolk) against John Strange*, a member of the rival Mowbray affinity. KB27/782, rots. 88, 107. In October the same year York’s retainer, Sir William Oldhall, hedged his bets by making Tuddenham a feoffee to the use of his last will. CAD, i. B1244. As the political situation deteriorated in the late 1450s the queen took steps to tighten her hold on the country. Tuddenham was placed on several anti-Yorkist commissions in Norfolk and in November 1458 he was appointed treasurer of the Household. A few days after becoming treasurer, he was caught up in a disturbance at Westminster Hall in which York’s ally, Richard, earl of Warwick, was nearly killed. The fracas probably emanated from an exchange of words between one of the earl’s retainers and a royal servant, but Warwick chose to view it as an assassination attempt. CP40/799, rot. 490; M. Hicks, Warwick, 152. It is likely that relations between Tuddenham and Warwick, who had once approached him for a loan, Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, ii. 117. were already bad. In the same period the earl dismissed him from an office on his estates, the stewardship of Saham Tony in Norfolk, a position the MP owed to Warwick’s predecessor as earl, Richard Beauchamp. Trans. Birmingham Arch. Soc. lix. 2-8. The exact dates are unknown, and it is possible that the dismissal occurred after the fracas at Westminster. Warwick and the other Yorkist lords were attainted by the Coventry Parliament of 1459, and about this time John Paston’s correspondent, the Franciscan friar, John Brackley, reported that Tuddenham and Heydon had received a commission to arrest supporters of the duke of York. Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 184-5. It appears that the friar was misinformed, in so far as there is no evidence of their appointment to such a commission although both served on other anti-Yorkist commissions late in Hen. VI’s reign.

In the summer of the following year, however, the political situation changed yet again. The Yorkists defeated a royal army at Northampton, leaving Tuddenham, who was again dropped from the Norfolk bench a few months later, exposed to possible retribution from his enemies. Fortunately for him, the Yorkist lords ordered the authorities in Norfolk to ensure that he and his associates were not harmed and that any accusations against them were referred to the due processes of the law. Paston Letters ed. Gairdner, iii. 221-2. It was probably at about this time that Tuddenham and Heydon made approaches to Yelverton and John Paston, to see if there was any possibility of coming to terms with them. In October 1460, however, Friar Brackley advised Paston to seek a commission for the arrest of the MP and his associates from the chancellor, at that time the earl of Warwick’s brother Bishop Neville. Brackley also suggested that the earl should be reminded of the fracas at Westminster two years earlier, Paston Letters ed. Davis, ii. 200-1, 212-14. and in the same autumn Warwick sought redress at law from alleged assailants in the common pleas, claiming they had lain in wait to kill him and had wounded four of his servants. The matter was still pending when Henry VI was ousted from the throne a few months later. CP40/799, rot. 490; 800, rots. 87d, 94d. It was probably in connexion with the episode that Warwick began another action, this time in KB, against Tuddenham and some of the other alleged assailants, as well as John Wymondham who did not feature in the c.p. suit: KB27/803, rots. 4d, 35d. Yet even now Tuddenham was not totally beleaguered, since in the same autumn he was able to pursue a comparatively trivial dispute with the bishop of Norwich over the presentation to the church of Grimston in west Norfolk. KB27/798, rots. 87-88.

There is no evidence that the by now relatively elderly Tuddenham played any military part in the civil wars, although immediately after Edward IV seized the throne the new regime regarded him as a rebel and adherent of the deposed Henry VI. On 10 Apr. 1461 a commission for his arrest was issued, but less than two months later it was rumoured in Norwich that he and John Heydon would receive royal pardons and accompany the duchess of Suffolk to Edward’s coronation. At the end of the year, however, the new King ordered the recently knighted William Yelverton to accompany the new sheriff of Norfolk and Suffolk, Sir Thomas Montgomery†, to East Anglia, to help him restore law and order there. Upon arriving at Norwich, they promised protection to anyone who wished to present grievances against Tuddenham and Heydon, to whom the King had specifically referred as malefactors. CPR, 1461-7, p. 28; Paston Letters ed. Davis, i. 276-8; ii. 236-7, 262-3.

Tuddenham might have survived the change of regime had he not soon afterwards become implicated in a supposed plot against Edward IV. The winter of 1461-2 was awash with rumours of Lancastrian conspiracies and it was said that Henry VI’s queen, Margaret of Anjou, had assumed the leadership of a great pan-national league dedicated to restoring her husband to the throne. This was certainly a wild exaggeration, but by early 1462 the government suspected a serious plot. It instituted commissions of oyer and terminer to investigate trespasses and treasons throughout the country and on 12 Feb. John de Vere, earl of Oxford, and his eldest son, Aubrey, along with Tuddenham, John Clopton, John Montgomery* and William Tyrell I*, were arrested in Essex and brought to the Tower of London. One chronicler refers to those arrested with the earl as his ‘ffeed men’, and this was certainly true of Tuddenham, who had been receiving an annual fee of £10 p.a. from Oxford’s manor of Saxton, Cambridgeshire, since at least the later 1450s. According to one account, the arrested men had sent a message to Henry VI and his queen saying that they would make a pretence of joining Edward IV on his campaign against the Lancastrian rebels in the north of England in order to get near enough to kill him when the opportunity arose, but had been betrayed by their conscience-stricken messenger. Another, perhaps more reliable, version states that Oxford had arranged with Margaret of Anjou for the duke of Somerset to land with a Lancastrian army on the Essex coast. Whatever the case, all the arrested men, save Clopton, were summarily charged and convicted of high treason before John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester, the constable of England, rather than a common law court. On 20 Feb. Aubrey de Vere was beheaded on Tower Hill, and his execution was followed by those of Tuddenham, Montgomery and Tyrell on the 23rd and Oxford three days later. Their bodies were buried in the church of the Austin friars in London, but it is likely that their heads were publicly displayed on London Bridge. The chronicler John Warkworth afterwards condemned the use of summary process (‘the law of Padua’) against the executed men, none of whom was attainted. C.L. Scofield, Edw. IV, i. 231-2; Gt. Chron. London ed. Thomas and Thornley, 198-9, 428; Three 15th Cent. Chrons. 78, 162-3; Six Town Chrons. ed. Flenley, 163; Raynham Hall, Norf., attic, box marked ‘comes Oxon.’; C.D. Ross, Edw. IV, 397.

In a brief will made the day before his execution, Tuddenham awarded his share of the barony of Bedford, along with his manors of Oxborough, Caldecote, Shingham and Sparham in Norfolk to Sir John Wenlock, by now Lord Wenlock; after Wenlock’s death they were to be sold and the money raised put to pious uses. He also assigned his manors at Wangford and Elveden in Suffolk to the peer, asking him to sell them immediately and to apply the proceeds to the same purposes. Finally, he appointed Wenlock, the one time chamberlain of Margaret of Anjou, and William Chamberlain, probably a de la Pole retainer from Oxfordshire, his executors. PCC 12 Godyn (PROB11/5, f. 381). William Chamberlain of Oxon. had been the ward of the de la Pole servant William Bedston*: CPR, 1452-61, p. 289. Although Tuddenham was not attainted, the Crown ordered John Senycle and John, Lord Berners, to seize several of his Suffolk manors after his death. Wenlock sought royal approval of the gift of lands he had received from the MP by acquiring a grant during pleasure of Oxborough and Caldecote and other rights and properties in Norfolk, and Berners obtained Brandeston, Charsfield and six other of Tuddenham’s manors on like terms. At the end of May 1462 the King made further grants, also during pleasure, of other parts of the Tuddenham estate. Anthony Wydeville, Lord Scales, and his wife (the daughter and heir of Tuddenham’s former patron) were assigned his manor of Hall Place near Bishop’s Lynn, and the Household esquire, Thomas Grey†, received Eriswell and several other manors and lordships in Suffolk, Norfolk and Cambridgeshire. All of these grants were superseded in the following August when the King granted Wenlock custody of all of Tuddenham’s lands, save the manors of Eriswell and Elveden. CPR, 1461-7, pp. 132, 142, 180, 184, 186, 188, 195.

Sir Thomas had left no legitimate issue and his heir was his sister, Margaret, the widow of the East Anglian esquire, Edmund Bedingfield. In spite of Wenlock’s claims to the Tuddenham estate, Margaret was able to recover her brother’s lands in Norfolk and Suffolk in 1465, when the inquisitions post mortem for his properties there finally took place. According to these, his holdings in the counties – including 22 manors and part of another – were worth some £170 p.a., almost certainly an underestimate. C140/18/34; CFR, xx. 163-5, 166-7. Margaret survived until early 1476. Over 70 years old when she died, she was succeeded by her grandson, another Edmund Bedingfield. C140/53/38; CPR, 1467-77, p. 595. In her will she left £20 to the Austin friars in London, to provide a marble gravestone for her dead brother. She also founded a chantry in Eriswell parish church where she requested a chaplain to sing for the souls of the MP and other relatives. Reg. Gelour, ff. 122-5. At the end of the century Tuddenham’s cousin, Anne Harling, by then the widow of John, Lord Scrope, also remembered him in her will. She left a vestment embroidered with the Tuddenham and Harling arms to the Austin friars at London, whom she asked to commemorate the MP with a dirige and mass. Test. Ebor. iv (Surtees Soc. liii), 151. Anne was the da. of Tuddenham’s uncle Sir Robert Harling.