PARR, Thomas

The Parrs originated from Parr in the Lancashire parish of Prescot. They were a family of merely parochial importance until the time of our MP’s grandfather, Sir William. A soldier, William made his career in the service of John of Gaunt, duke of Lancaster. Through that great retinue, he contracted a match far beyond the expectations of his modest birth. In about 1382 his friendship with another ducal retainer, Peter Roos, enabled him to marry Peter’s niece, Elizabeth (b.c.1365), grand-daughter and heiress-presumptive of Sir Thomas Roos of Kendal (the last male representative of a junior branch of the Lords Roos of Helmsley).3 VCH Lancs. iii. 379; Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. lvi. 93; S.K. Walker, Lancastrian Affinity, 32, 113-14, 277. Sir Thomas’s death in 1390 brought Elizabeth a quarter of the valuable barony of Kendal, worth about 100 marks p.a., and the Parrs were immediately elevated to the forefront of the Westmorland gentry.4 CIPM, xvi. 1023-6. In the 1530s an imperfect remembrance of this seminal event in the family’s history was preserved: our MP’s grandson, another Sir William Parr†, told the antiquary, John Leland, that ‘his aunciters were men of xx. marks by the yere in the marches of Wales [until] one of them beinge clarke of the kechyn with one of the Lorde Rosses fell in love with a dowghtar of his, and maried hir agayne hir father’s wille, by whome the castell of Kendalle, and 300 marks by yere of land cam to this parre’.5 J. Leland, Itin. ed. Toulmin Smith, v. 223. There is no evidence to show that the family’s origins lay in the Welsh marches, but if they did have interests there it would help to explain the marriage of our MP’s father to another substantial heiress, with manors in Herefordshire and the Midlands. This offered the promise of further social advance, albeit one contingent on the failure of her issue by her first husband, Devereux. This contingency did not arise, at least not in time to benefit the Parrs; none the less, at his birth our MP was heir to a valuable inheritance and the potential heir to a yet greater one.6 On her death in 1436, his mother’s inheritance descended to her gds. Walter Devereux I*: CIPM, xxiv. 424.

Thomas did not have to wait long to inherit his father’s lands. John Parr died while still a young man, leaving the Crown with a valuable wardship as our MP was yet a mere infant.7 There is some confusion over the precise date of John’s death. A writ of diem clausit extremum was issued on 7 Nov. 1407, but this anticipated his demise. The supposed dead man was named as sheriff of Warws. and Leics. 16 days later (an appointment he owed to his wife’s lands in the latter county) and the writ was not acted upon until 6 Oct. 1408. The jurors then gave his date of death as the previous 25 July and this is confirmed by his replacement as sheriff: CFR, xiii. 87, 116-17, 120; CIPM, xix. 446. No time was wasted in bestowing it: on 4 Aug. 1408, only ten days after John’s death and two months before the formality of an inquisition, the child was committed to the care of his mother and two prominent courtiers, Sir Thomas Beaufort (the King’s half-brother) and Sir Thomas Brounflete, treasurer of the royal household, for a sum to be negotiated.8 CFR, xiii. 111. This grant, however, only endured for a few years, for on 9 July 1413, soon after Henry IV’s death, the keeping of the Parr lands was granted to Sir Thomas Tunstall for the payment of 200 marks, a significant bargain even allowing for the jointure interest of the heir’s mother. No mention is made of the marriage, and it is thus a reasonable speculation that Parr’s betrothal to Tunstall’s daughter preceded rather than followed Tunstall’s purchase of the wardship.9 CPR, 1413-16, p. 57.

Nothing is known of the young Thomas Parr’s upbringing. Most probably he lived at Tunstall’s castle at Thurland until his father-in-law’s death in 1415 and then with his mother and her third husband, John Merbury*, at either Kendal or Weobley. However this may be, on 29 Oct. 1427 a writ was issued for the taking of his proof of age. It was acted upon with speed: the relevant inquisition was held at Kendal on the following 3 Nov., hardly allowing time enough for the writ to have arrived there. Only six days later the escheator of Cumberland and Westmorland was ordered to give him seisin of his inheritance.10 CIPM, xxiii. 144; CPR, 1422-9, p. 355. At his majority his wardship was still formerly vested in the grantees of 1408 for (as a mere formality) the executors of Thomas Beaufort, duke of Exeter, were summoned to the inq. This was burdened only by his mother’s dower, for his great-grandmother Katherine, widow of Sir Thomas Roos’s son John, had died in 1422. In any event, she had held just the manor of Cargo in Cumberland, the only part of the Roos inheritance that lay in that county and one that had suffered badly from Scottish raids.11 CIPM, xxiii. 11.

Parr was quick to begin his career in local politics. On 16 May 1428 he offered mainprise when John Broughton* was granted a royal lease, and on 20 Aug. 1429 he acted as a juror when the justices of gaol delivery came to Appleby.12 CFR, xv. 227; JUST3/70/4, m. 3d. His next appearance in the records is more controversial. On the following 13 Sept., nine days before Parliament was due to assemble at Westminster, the sheriff of Cumberland, Sir Christopher Moresby†, presided over the hustings at Carlisle at which Parr and Thomas de la More* were elected. The attestors to their return were an impressive group, headed by four knights.13 C219/14/1. There is nothing to suggest any irregularity, although it is curious that Parr, assuming he was anxious to attend Parliament, had not secured election for Westmorland (where nearly all his lands lay) at the hustings held at Appleby on 1 Sept. The Cumberland return was quickly challenged. On 28 Sept., six days after the beginning of the assembly, the Crown issued a commission to investigate the complaint that Sir William Leigh* and de la More had been elected at the county court held on 30 Aug. in response to the writ of summons issued on 12 July. This election, so it was claimed, had then been confirmed ‘on another occasion’ in response to further writs issued on 3 Aug. advancing the date of the Parliament’s meeting from 13 Oct. to 22 Sept.; but, even though no county court was held after the receipt of the second writ ‘and no day for holding such court intervened’ before Parliament met, Moresby had set aside Leigh’s election in favour of that of Parr.

No doubt this inquiry was ordered on Leigh’s complaint, the accuracy of which, with no resulting inquiry surviving, is hard to judge. There are, however, considerable problems with accepting it at face value. The day on which Leigh’s election allegedly took place, namely 30 Aug., was not a county court day in Cumberland. Between the issue of the first writ of summons and the assembly of Parliament there were two such days, 2 Aug. and 13 Sept., and thus Leigh cannot have been elected at such a court on 30 Aug. nor, unless we assume that the second writ took six weeks to arrive in Cumberland, was it true to say that no county court day fell between the receipt of this writ and the meeting of Parliament. The most likely chain of events is that Leigh and de la More were elected at the county court held on 19 Aug., but that Moresby, in response to the arrival of the second writ, then held another election at the next county court, at which the electors favoured Parr over Leigh. Whatever the truth of the matter, Parr’s election was not set aside. The commissioners named on 28 Sept. appear not to have acted, and it was not until 10 July 1430, nearly five months after the dissolution, that the justices of assize were commissioned to hold their own inquiry. Their findings, if any, are lost.14 Parliamentarians at Law ed. Kleineke, 158-63. Further, the supposed irregularity of his election did not prevent Parr’s nomination as escheator in Cumberland and Westmorland on 12 Feb. 1430, while Parliament was still in session.15 CFR, xv. 305. There is no further reference to the matter in the contemporary record.

The setting aside of the election of Leigh, a retainer of Henry Percy, earl of Northumberland, has been interpreted as a manifestation of the rivalry between Percy and Neville.16 H. Summerson, Med. Carlisle, ii. 409. This is very doubtful. There is no evidence to suggest rivalry at the hustings between the two families at this date, and there is no unequivocal evidence connecting Parr with the junior branch of the Nevilles until later in his career. As far as the available evidence goes, this connexion did not become close until the late 1440s. Moreover, Parr’s actions in the disputes which divided his native county in the 1430s were in opposition to men connected with (although not necessarily actively supported by) Richard Neville, earl of Salisbury. None the less, Parr must certainly have come into contact with the earl: the earl’s own landholdings in Westmorland were slight, but at various dates in the 1430s and thereafter he held office as warden of the west march and as steward of the King’s part of the barony of Kendal.17 The stewardship was first granted to Salisbury by John, duke of Bedford, who held the barony by royal grant. After Bedford’s death the King confirmed the appointment, and the earl seems to have continued in office until his attainder in 1459: CPR, 1429-36, p. 540; 1452-61, p. 544. There are also indications of an early association between the two men, the one direct, the other inferential. On 3 Jan. 1430, during the prorogation of Parr’s first Parliament, he joined the earl in witnessing a quitclaim by Thomas Haryngton I*, a prominent Neville retainer, to the abbot of Coverham (Yorkshire).18 CCR, 1429-35, pp. 38-39. More interesting is the possibility that Parr accompanied the earl on the King’s coronation expedition. On 26 June 1431 he sued out a royal licence for a major reordering of his affairs: first, his mother and her third husband, John Merbury, were licensed to commute their interest in her dower share of the barony of Kendal in return for an annual rent of 40 marks; and, second, Parr was allowed to grant his reunited share of the barony to feoffees for the resettlement of part of it on himself and his wife and their issue on the condition that his wife never claimed dower in the other unsettled part.19 CPR, 1429-36, pp. 144-5. This arrangement had one obvious purpose beyond provision for his wife, namely to protect his lands from wardship in the event of his premature death. When added to the fact that he assumed the rank of knighthood at about this time, it is tempting to conclude that his participation in the coronation expedition was the occasion of his dubbing. Further, it is a fair speculation that, like another Westmorland knight, Sir Henry Threlkeld*, he did so in Salisbury’s retinue.

On this interpretation, Parr’s addition to the Westmorland bench as a knight in July 1432 came within a few months of his return to England. As a j.p. he was drawn, albeit peripherally, into the dispute which seriously disturbed the peace of the county in the early 1430s. This ranged the lawyer, Robert Crackenthorpe*, against a faction headed by Threlkeld, William Thornburgh* and the Lancasters. At a session of the peace held at Appleby on 23 Mar. 1433 this faction allegedly intimidated the jurors to prevent the laying of indictments against them, and then unsuccessfully attempted to ambush Crackenthorpe, who had sat as one of the j.p.s, as he made his way home. The lawyer sent a petition to the chancellor relating these events, appending a schedule in which Parr and Ralph Neville, earl of Westmorland (who was no friend of the earl of Salisbury), supported his version.20 C1/12/192-4. Parr also had his own dispute with Thornburgh: in 1435 a plea of trespass pending between them over rights of common pasture in the parish of Strickland Ketel was put out nisi prius to the justices of assize at Appleby.21 CP40/696, rot. 215d; 698, rot. 448. Later, our MP again acted in Crackenthorpe’s support. On 12 Feb. 1438 the lawyer sued out a royal commission of inquiry to him (in his capacity as deputy sheriff of Westmorland) concerning the lands in dispute between himself and the Lancasters, and on the following 25 June our MP presided over an inquiry which awarded damages of £116 against Thornburgh and the Lancasters.22 C260/145/23. Clearly, if Parr was part of Salisbury’s connexion, he was capable of acting independently of other members of it, for both Threlkeld and Thornburgh were attached to the earl.

With or without the patronage of his putative lord, Parr’s influence increased markedly in the late 1430s. On 22 Sept. 1435 he was elected to Parliament, on this occasion, and more appropriately, for Westmorland.23 C219/14/5. Among the electors was Robert Lorde, who had been a juror at our MP’s proof of age and whose wife, Alice, had, according to his testimony, carried the baby Thomas to the church of Holy Trinity in Kendal for baptism: CIPM, xxiii. 144. Significantly, during the course of the assembly he succeeded Henry Wharton as deputy to the hereditary sheriff of the county, Thomas, Lord Clifford. His appointment coincided with Lord Clifford’s coming of age, but, in contrast to his predecessors in the office, there is nothing to connect him with the Cliffords. Very soon after he won this influential office, his finances were improved when his mother’s death extinguished the annual rent of 40 marks due to her.24 PRO List ‘Sheriffs’, 151; CIPM, xxiii. 144. According to a declaration of his income made in the Exchequer in Easter term 1436, as part of the assessments for the subsidy granted by the Parliament of which he had been a Member, his lands were now worth £67 p.a.25 E159/212, recorda Easter rot. 22. He chose to declare his income by attorney in the Exchequer, even though he had been named as one of the assessors in Westmld.: CFR, xvi. 259. His declaration corresponds closely to the annual valuations in his inq. post mortem, where his manor of Kendal was valued at 100 marks and his manor of Cargo at seven marks: C140/12/3. This income was soon to be enhanced by an important royal grant made to him on 21 May 1438. The death of the duke of Bedford in 1435 had brought back into royal hands a moiety of the barony of Kendal, save the dower interest of the duke’s widow. Sir Thomas was granted the keeping of a part of these lands, namely two-thirds of the lands formerly held by the duke in Crosthwaite, Hutton, Strickland Ketel, Frosethwaite and Helsington in Westmorland and Whittington in Lancashire, together with two-thirds of the fishery in the river Kent. He was to hold this extensive property for the term of ten years from the previous Easter at an annual rent of £25 12s. 8d. The grant was confirmed in the following February when his friend Thomas Haryngton offered mainprise for him, and Parr was now at the height of his influence. Not only are the lands farmed likely to have been worth comfortably more than the annual rent, but they increased, albeit temporarily, his share of the barony of Kendal.26 CFR, xvii. 37-38, 74.

This makes the apparent decline of Parr’s fortunes over the next few years all the more striking. His removal from the Westmorland bench in November 1439 may have been no more than a function of his appointment as deputy sheriff (the two offices were only occasionally held together), but there are other signs that all was not well with him.27 An additional or alternative explanation for his removal is his quarrel with Thornburgh, who was dismissed from the bench at the same time: CPR, 1436-41, p. 592. At the Westmorland assizes in the following summer, he lost to the prior of Conishead (Lancashire) the property belonging to the hospital of St. Leonard at Kendal, namely two messuages and over 200 acres of land in Scalthwaite Rigg.28 Recs. Kendale ed. Farrer and Curwen, i. 181; VCH Lancs. ii. 142. More significantly, his hopes of extending his keepership of the lands entrusted to him in 1438 were damaged in June 1441, when the Crown committed to William Ayscough, j.c.p., the rent due from Parr, and, on the expiry of the term, the lands themselves for life. Two years later, in the summer of 1443, his hopes receded yet further when the King granted (saving the rights of the existing grantees) all that Bedford had held in the barony of Kendal in tail-male to John Beaufort, earl of Somerset, who was also given the title of earl of Kendal.29 CPR, 1436-41, p. 543; 1441-6, pp. 223-4; G.L. Harriss, Cardinal Beaufort, 354. The future political geography of Westmorland was coming to look far less attractive from Parr’s point of view than it had done only a few years earlier.

Parr’s declining fortunes might also be reflected in the feoffment he made on 2 Apr. 1444: he granted all his lands to (Sir) Thomas Haryngton, Robert Ingleton* and other lesser men.30 C140/12/3. The choice of Haryngton and Ingleton is further evidence identifying him with their master, the earl of Salisbury, but clearly it was not this association that was damaging him. Rather it was his violent dispute with his neighbours the Bellinghams, who were kinsmen of his wife. The origins of this quarrel are unclear, but it appears to have concerned rival claims to property and common pasture in Strickland Ketel and Strickland Roger.31 Add. 38133, f. 151; CP40/755, rot. 634. Henry Bellingham complained to the chancellor that Parr ‘with grete multitude of people’ had come to his house at Burneside, two miles north of Kendal, and had only been deterred from destroying it, ‘through tretyce of gode Gentilmen’ of the said ‘cuntrie’. Sir Thomas had then allegedly embarked on a campaign of oppression and extortion against Bellingham’s tenants and servants, exploiting his position as deputy sheriff and the fact that the county coroners were his ‘meynyall men’ to prevent Bellingham securing redress at common law.32 C1/10/83. One of the coroners, Robert Duckett, was certainly a friend or servant of Parr: JUST1/1544, m. 50; CP25(1)/249/8/33. The petition mentions no dates but Bellingham claimed that his oppressor Parr had held office as deputy sheriff for more than six years. Since Parr had been appointed late in 1435 the petition probably dates from 1442, in other words, at a time when Bellingham’s star was in the ascendant and our MP’s was waning.33 This dating is supported by mutual actions of debt pending in the ct. of c.p. in 1443 between Parr and the Bellinghams: CP40/728, rot. 174; 729, rots. 205d, 399. In November 1442 Henry was named as escheator of Cumberland and Westmorland, and, more significantly, he was added to the county bench in the latter county a few months later.34 CFR, xvii. 241; CPR, 1441-6, p. 480. Clearly he was a formidable rival, even if he was not yet, as he was later to be, a member of the Percy affinity.

It was against this background that Parr was again elected to Parliament. Unfortunately no returns survive and the other MPs for Cumberland and Westmorland are not known. It may, however, be significant, that Parr took a Cumberland rather than a Westmorland seat, where he would as deputy sheriff and contrary to statute, have had to return himself. The Parliament marked an upturn in his fortunes, to which his success in winning election may have been vital. On 15 Mar. 1445, the day of the first prorogation, he secured a royal grant of the keeping of two-thirds of the tolls of the market and fair of Kendal for 12 years at 60s. p.a. and of the herbage of Weryholme (part of the demesnes of Carlisle castle) at 20s. p.a.35 CFR, xvii. 316-17.

More importantly, Parr also gained the upper hand in his dispute with Henry Bellingham. When seeking election he had probably intended to use his time at Westminster to forward the quarrel. Perhaps fearing Parr’s success in this regard, Bellingham took the law into his own hands and in doing so put himself decisively on its wrong side. On 14 Mar. 1446, as Parr was making his way from his lodgings to take a boat to Parliament, Henry’s brothers, Thomas* and Robert, assaulted him and his servants, including Robert Duckett, one of the Westmorland coroners, at ‘Cornewalesse grounde, besyde the Crane in the Warde of the Vyntrye’. This provided Parr with an excellent opportunity as he could rely on the Commons to act adversely to an attack on one of its Members. He petitioned the King for special process against the assailants of the type often requested in such petitions. The Crown granted his request that a writ of proclamation be directed to the sheriffs of London for the appearance of the accused in King’s bench at a month after Easter; if the assailants appeared, they were to be imprisoned without bail pending the trial of the matter at common law; if they did not, they were to be attainted of felony without the benefit of royal protection or pardon.36 KB27/740, rot. 82; SC8/27/1347; RP, v. 168-9 (cf. PROME, xii. 69). The Commons added their voice by asking, albeit unsuccessfully, that this process be given the endorsement of statute as a general remedy for members of Lords and Commons who suffered assault.37 PROME, xi. 490; C49/26/4. Predictably, the assailants failed to appear – as they later claimed ‘for feir and drede of the seyd Acte and proces therupon dependyng’ – and there is no further reference to the dispute until the Parliament of February 1449. Then, with Thomas Bellingham, despite his attainder for felony, sitting as a burgess, his family secured the partial revocation of the Act on the grounds that they were now reconciled with the Parrs.38 KB27/782, rot. 82d; SC8/27/1348; RP, v. 168-70. There were, however, still points at issue between the two families. At the assizes held at Appleby on 22 Aug. 1452 Robert Bellingham won damages, albeit in small sums, against Parr for draining his mill pond at Burneside and for diverting a sewer at nearby Patton; and three years later our MP was still pursuing actions of debt against the Bellinghams.39 CP40/754, rot. 254d; 755, rot. 625; 776, rot. 141d. Although there seems to have been no further outbreak of open hostility, continuing ill-feeling between them may have done something to determine their political loyalties in the civil war of 1459-61.

Aside from Parr’s quarrel with the Bellinghams, his career in the late 1440s and early 1450s is largely unremarkable. Late in 1446 he was replaced as deputy sheriff by John Dacre, a younger son of Thomas, Lord Dacre. This may have been a consequence of the dispute: Henry Bellingham had asked for his removal in his earlier Chancery petition. It may, on the other hand, have been the result of either an act of self-assertion on the part of the powerful Dacres or a perception that Parr had already held the office too long: he had served for the exceptionally long term of 11 years, when his predecessors had generally served for terms of only three of four years.40 PRO List ‘Sheriffs’, 150-1. Bellingham had argued for his removal on the grounds that he had served more than the statutory year, but the statute did not hold for shrievalties held in fee nor, by extension, for the deputies in those shrievalties. In other respects he continued to play the role in local affairs expected of a man of his rank (although, curiously, his loss of the deputy shrievalty did not lead to his restoration to the Westmorland bench). Late in 1447 he was one of four prominent gentry who witnessed the sealing of an award returned by (Sir) Thomas Haryngton in a dispute between two former allies, Threlkeld and William Thornburgh.41 Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xxiii. 198-9. A year later he was named to a commission of array in Westmorland, and although there is no evidence that he was active in the border warfare of these years it is very likely that he was. Like Haryngton, he may even have been present at the English defeat on the river Sark a few weeks earlier.42 CPR, 1446-52, p. 238

Another development of these years was to have great significance for the second part of Parr’s career, foreshadowing those strong Neville loyalties that were to determine its course. He drew much closer to that great family. By 1447 he was acting as steward of two north Westmorland manors for the earl of Salisbury’s brother, Lord Latimer. Since Latimer was mentally incapacitated, it is likely that he was the earl’s appointee.43 Booth, 60. On 11 June 1451 the Crown committed to the earl the keeping of Latimer’s estates in what was probably merely formal confirmation of the existing situation: CPR, 1446-52, p. 430. Later, probably in the summer of 1450, he witnessed a jointure settlement made on the marriage of his neighbour Sir Edward Bethom and a niece of the earl, Joan, daughter of William Neville, Lord Fauconberg.44 This is dated to Aug. 1446 in a transcript made by the antiquarian, Roger Dodsworth (d.1654): Recs. Kendale, ii. 227-8. This must be in error, for the match was not made until June 1450: CP, v. 285n.

On 29 Oct. 1450 Parr was elected for Westmorland to his fourth Parliament at hustings well attended by the leading gentry. He had an obvious motive for seeking election in that he had lost his sole remaining lease – the toll of the Kendal market and fair and the herbage of Weryholme – in the Act of Resumption passed in the previous assembly.45 C219/16/1. His important lease of Crosthwaite and other lands of the barony of Kendal had ended, and the resumption had taken it from the reversioner, William Ayscough. On 14 June 1450 it had been granted to Parr’s wife’s kinsman, Richard Tunstall: CPR, 1446-52, p. 335. The attestors were no doubt glad to elect him for the county’s seats seem to have been becoming increasingly difficult to fill: this, at least, is the implication to be drawn from the obscurity of Parr’s colleague, John Strete II*, and that of William Malett*, who had been elected to the second Parliament of 1449. He appears to have put his time at Westminster to good use. On 7 July 1451, five weeks after the end of the Parliament, he was re-granted for the term of 12 years from the previous Easter the custody of the market tolls and herbage at the only slightly increased rent of £4 3s. 4d.46 William Watyr*, MP for Appleby in the same Parliament, offered mainprise for him: CFR, xviii. 209-10. Later, on 10 Nov. 1452, he had another minor mark of royal favour, securing a pardon for an acquisition of some property (in Helsington near Kendal) held in chief.47 CPR, 1452-61, p. 18.

Parr was not, however, to hold the market tolls for long. On 6 Mar. 1453, in contradiction of his own grant, the tolls were part of the large share of the barony of Kendal with which the King endowed his half-brother Edmund Tudor, earl of Richmond. Even more alarmingly from his point of view, his local rival, Henry Bellingham, was quick to win the patronage of this new influence in local affairs, securing life appointment as the earl’s surveyor in Westmorland and Lancaster.48 DL29/644/10444; CPR, 1452-61, p. 342. This new dispensation in local politics was no doubt a factor in committing Parr in his support for the earl of Salisbury at a time when the earl was allying himself with the cause of the duke of York. Indeed, open support for the earl may explain why, on 15 Mar. 1453, for the only recorded occasion in his career, he attested a parliamentary election. He was at Appleby to witness the return of his wife’s kinsman and the earl’s servant, John Tunstall*, who appears to have had no lands in the county to qualify him for election.49 C219/16/2.

The surviving evidence more clearly defines Parr’s political loyalties over the next few years. Significantly, his belated restoration to the bench in Westmorland came in July 1454 in place of Henry Bellingham and when the duke of York was Protector and the earl of Salisbury was chancellor; and a few months later his eldest son, William, was appointed escheator in Cumberland and Westmorland.50 CPR, 1452-61, p. 680; CFR, xix. 102. His active support for the Neville cause is also expressed by his election for Westmorland on 3 July 1455 to the Parliament summoned in the wake of the Yorkist victory at the first battle of St. Albans. His support secured some modest reward. On the following 20 Oct., during the prorogation, he secured a pardon for all alienations, clearly as a protection against penalty for his unlicensed feoffment of 1444.51 C219/16/3; C67/41, m. 20. The duke of York’s loss of the protectorate early in 1456 and the militant Lancastrian regime which followed must have been unwelcome to Parr. So too was Henry Bellingham’s nomination on 8 Mar. 1457 as receiver of the lordship of Kendal after the death of the earl of Richmond. None the less, Parr continued to play a part in local affairs during these uneasy years: he remained on the Westmorland bench and was twice nominated to ad hoc commissions of local government.52 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 335, 409, 435, 680. In January 1458 he successfully sued out a general pardon, and in the following summer he was among those named to treat with Scottish commissioners over border infractions (although here he was probably a nominee of the earl of Salisbury, who headed the commission).53 C67/42, m. 32; Rot. Scot. ii. 387. His family connexions with prominent Lancastrians were no doubt helpful to him here. His wife’s nephew, Sir Richard Tunstall†, was one of the King’s carvers, and his own kinsman, Gilbert Parr, was one of the ushers of the chamber; interestingly, in 1457 he had appeared alongside both men in a feoffment made by John Troutbeck*, chamberlain of Cheshire.54 CHES3/45/9.

Even so, when the crisis came in 1459, Parr lost no time in declaring himself for the Nevilles. On about 2 Sept. of that year he was among those who left Middleham castle in company with the earl of Salisbury, and he was present at both the battle of Blore Heath on 23 Sept. and at the rout of the Yorkists at Ludford Bridge on 12 Oct. He was duly attainted with other leading Yorkists at the Coventry Parliament, and on 21 Dec., the day after the assembly’s conclusion, his messuage in Prescot was granted by the Crown to one of its yeomen, Thomas Harper, for life. All his other property remained in the King’s hands to finance the Lancastrian regime.55 PROME, xii. 457-62; CPR, 1452-61, pp. 536, 572, 597. Parr’s whereabouts in these difficult months is unknown, but it may be that he took refuge in Calais with the earls of Salisbury and Warwick. If so, he must have been part of the Yorkist force which landed at Sandwich in June 1460, then either proceeding with Warwick to Northampton, where the Lancastrians were defeated on 10 July, or staying with Salisbury in London. Parr may then have returned to his native county: on 12 Nov. he and two of his sons, William and John, were among those commissioned to arrest and imprison men guilty of unlawful assemblies in Cumberland and Westmorland. Seven weeks later, on 30 Dec., he was part of the Yorkist army at the battle of Wakefield: this at least is the implication to be drawn from the mistaken report of a contemporary chronicler that he met his death there.56 CPR, 1452-61, pp. 651-2; Letters and Pprs. Illust. Wars of English ed. Stevenson, ii (2), 775; Yorks. Arch. Jnl. ix. 122. A later family tradition attributed to him a central role in what followed. According to Leland, presumably relying on information provided him by our MP’s grandson, Sir William Parr, ‘The Duke of Yorke sunne caullyd Edward nevar tooke greatar name at the begininge of his warres agayne Kynge Henry the 6. but the name of the Erle of Marche; untyll that one Parre brought hym a 15 C. men to go with hym to … felde, and proclaimed as he went for kynge.’57 Leland, v. 4. The loss of the crucial word is unfortunate, but the story is probably a confusion with a later event, when, according to The Arrivall, Parr’s eldest son, William, brought some 600 men to Edward on the King’s return from exile in 1471.58 Arrivall of Edw. IV (Cam. Soc. i), 7. None the less, it is likely that Sir Thomas, probably in company with his sons, fought in Edward’s decisive victory at the battle of Towton on 29 Mar. 1461. His services were certainly seen as worthy of reward by the new King. On 29 July, described as ‘King’s knight’, he was given the wardship and marriage of the grandson and heir of Sir John Hotham of Scorborough (Yorkshire), who had been killed at Towton in the service of Percy. This was an extremely valuable grant: not only did the Hothams hold several manors, including one at Staveley in Westmorland, but the heir was yet an infant.59 CPR, 1461-7, p. 27. The grant was made only four days after the issue of writs of diem clausit extremum and more than two months before the relevant inqs. were held: C140/2/20.

Had Sir Thomas lived he may have come to enjoy the prominence at the Yorkist court that was later fall to his eldest son. Unfortunately, however, he did not long survive Edward IV’s accession, for he died, at his castle of Kendal, on the following 24 Nov. For an unknown reason there was a considerable delay in the taking of his inquisitions post mortem. Although the relevant writs were promptly issued, it was nearly three years before they were acted upon. Jurors sitting at Carlisle on 9 Oct. 1464 and at Kendal three days later returned that all his lands had been held by feoffees since 1444 and that, on 20 Oct. 1455, he had secured pardon for all unlicensed alienations.60 CFR, xx. 3; C140/12/3. Ingleton, the last surviving feoffee, remained seised until 1469 when a settlement was made on the marriage of William Parr to the wid. of Thomas Colt*: CPR, 1467-77, pp. 106, 177. Parr’s actions in 1459-61 did much to determine the careers of his sons. His active support for York and the Nevilles had laid the foundations of future prosperity, and both these sons flourished mightily under Edward IV. William, who abandoned the Neville earl of Warwick at the opportune moment in 1470-1, served as controller of the royal household during the King’s second reign, and John, whose principal loyalty was to King Edward from the outset of the reign, long served as a knight of the body.61 For their careers: Cumb. and Westmld. Antiq. and Arch. Soc. n.s. xciii. 99-114; xciv. 105-20; xcvi. 71-86. They were rewarded accordingly, but no grant would have pleased their late father more than that made to them on 10 Feb. 1463. For ‘their charges in conflicts against the King’s enemies’, they were granted in joint tail-male the lands of Sir Henry Bellingham, who had suffered forfeiture in the Parliament of 1461.62 CPR, 1461-7, p. 224.