Sir Thomas Neville ( 1429 – 1460) was a medieval English politician and soldier. The second son of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, a major nobleman and magnate in the north of England, Sir Thomas played an active role in the violent disorder that wracked the north during the 1450s. He also took his father's side in the early years of the Wars of the Roses. Thomas was a younger brother of the more famous Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the 'Kingmaker'.
Thomas worked closely with them both in administering the region for the Crown and became a leading player in the turbulent regional politics of northern England in the early 1450s, especially in the Neville family's growing local rivalry with the House of Percy. In the armed feud between both houses, which broke out in 1453 and lasted two years, Thomas and his brother John launched a series of raids, ambushes and skirmishes across Yorkshire against the Percy family. Historians describe the feud as setting the stage for the Wars of the Roses, the dynastic struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York for the English throne, and Thomas played a large role in the Neville family's alliance with his uncle, Richard, Duke of York.
Thomas took part in his father's battles, being present at the Battle of Blore Heath in September 1459, where he was captured with his younger brother John by the Lancastrians. As a result, he was imprisoned and later attainted along with his father, brothers, and the Yorkists at the 1459 Parliament of Devils. Being imprisoned, he did not share Salisbury's and Warwick's exile in Calais. On their return the following year, he was released when Warwick and the future Edward IV together won the Battle of Northampton. When the Duke of York also returned from his exile and claimed the throne from Henry VI, it appears that it was Thomas who was personally responsible for informing the Duke of the Nevilles' collective disapproval of his plans.
Thomas joined his father Salisbury's and York's army, and travelled to Yorkshire in December 1460 with the purpose of suppressing Lancastrian-inspired disorder. There he fought in the disastrous Battle of Wakefield, where the Yorkists went down to a crushing defeat. Thomas was killed in the fighting, and his head, alongside those of his father and uncle, was impaled above one of the gates of the city of York.
Early career, knighthood and marriage Thomas Neville was the second son of Richard Neville and his wife Alice Montagu, 5th Countess of Salisbury. He was probably born soon after his elder brother Richard in 1428, and certainly before 1432, by when his parents had had two more sons, John and George. Richard was to become Earl of Warwick, and, as one of the most important politicians in the kingdom, earned himself the soubriquet "Kingmaker"; John became Marquess of Montagu and defender of the North; George, the youngest, had a career in the Church, becoming Archbishop of York. The historian Michael Hicks suggests that seeing how closely the brothers cooperated as adults, they were probably close as children.
In 1439, Maud, Countess of Cambridge, reported Thomas to the royal council for attacking her house in Danby, near Eskdale, along with Sir Thomas Lumley. Maud complained that they and their men had hunted and shot deer in her park, but she was unable to do anything herself because the Nevilles and Lumleys were both powerful local families. Six years later, he was appointed joint steward of the Lancastrian Honour of Pontefract with his father and John. His first independent mention in government records came in 1448 when he was made steward of the Bishopric of Durham by his uncle, Robert, the Bishop. For this, he received wages of £20 per annum from diocesan revenues. His father appointed him his Steward of Bolton in 1450, and he became Sheriff of Glamorgan the same year, in which capacity he witnessed a charter of Warwick's on 12 March 1451. Warwick also appointed him to assist in the management of his Warwickshire estates, for which Thomas received an annuity. Alongside the King's two half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor, he was knighted by King Henry VI on 5 January 1453. With increasing tension between the Percys and Nevilles in the north, relations between the latter and the crown had come under strain, and his knighting may have been an attempt to ameliorate this.
The king licensed Thomas Neville on 1 May 1453 to marry Maud Stanhope, the widow of Robert, Lord Willoughby and a wealthy heiress. She was also the niece and joint-heiress of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, one of the richest men in the kingdom, Cromwell was involved in feuds with two powerful men at this time; Friedrichs suggests that, while a man such as Cromwell could always expect to attract his share of enemies, previously he had been able to confront them in courts of law, mostly successfully. She continues though that "the political enemies he acquired in his later years... proved to be a very different story". In 1449, Sir William Tailboys violently assaulted Cromwell outside the Star Chamber in Westminster Palace in an attempted kidnapping, while three years later ("another and more powerful enemy") Henry Holland, Duke of Exeter disputed Cromwell's rights to Ampthill Manor and seized it by force. Exeter also engineered the dismissal of Cromwell from the royal council with accusations of treason.
Cromwell saw connecting his family to the Nevilles as a way of counterbalancing his enemies. The marriage cost him the massive sum of nearly £2,000 in loans to Salisbury: "the price the Nevilles could extract was a measure of Cromwell's desperation", argues the medievalist Rhoda Friedrichs. This money was divided between the earl, Thomas and his brothers. The marriage was designed by Salisbury to provide Thomas with an estate "of genuinely comital proportions", says Hicks. As a marriage settlement from the Earl and Countess of Salisbury in Easter 1454, Thomas and Maud received two-thirds of the Yorkshire manors of Catterick, Danby Wiske and Aldborough. He and Maud shared similar literary interests. Friedrichs has suggested that his "political and military adventures had included his wife, even to the point of battle", and he is known to have owned an early copy of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. They both inscribed as marginalia, "T. Nevyll" and "Mawd Wyllwghby".
The historian Ralph A. Griffiths has suggested that the announcement of Thomas's marriage was the immediate cause of the feud with the Percys. Not only, says Griffiths, was any further Neville aggrandisement an anathema to the Percys, but the new Cromwell connection gave the Nevilles access to the ex-Percy manors of Wressle and Burwell. These had been granted to Cromwell in 1440 but the Percys still hoped to reclaim then.
Feud with the Percy family
The Nevilles were one of four major landowners in the north, along with Richard, 3rd Duke of York, the Crown (as Duke of Lancaster), and the Percy family, who were the earls of Northumberland. York and the King, however, were effectively absentee landlords; the two main families were the Nevilles and Percys. Although the families had cooperated in defence of the border with Scotland for 30 years, relations were often tense. The medievalist Bertie Wilkinson has described the environment of the period. Not only was it "seriously divided" politically, but "the area was remote, exposed to Scottish attack, and impossible to control, at least by the government of Henry VI".
By 1453, tension had turned to violence. It was not the two earls, as heads of their families, who were the cause, but their younger sons, who were responsible for its escalation. To what extent Salisbury may have been directing affairs from afar is unknown, but the historian A. J. Pollard has argued that Thomas was his father's "direct representative" in the struggle. Friedrichs has called Thomas "combatative and landless", while the historian Simon Payling believes him to have been "vigorous and youthful". Thomas's opponent Thomas Percy, Lord Egremont was similarly described by R. L. Storey as "quarrelsome, violent and contemptuous of all authority" and by Pollard as "wild and belligerent". With his younger brother Sir Richard Percy and their retainers, they launched an opening assault on the Nevilles on 24 August 1453. They were returning to Yorkshire with Thomas's new bride after the wedding at Cromwell's Tattershall Castle, Lincolnshire. The Nevilles were ambushed at Heworth, York by a Percy force of possibly 5,000 men. This—effectively an assassination attempt—was the most violent incident between the families for many years. Although the respective sizes of the opposing forces are unknown, the Nevilles would have had a substantial retinue with them. This encounter was the first in a series of skirmishes, assaults and numerous destructive episodes "of breaking and entering", which saw Thomas "in the thick of the fighting".
In response, he and his brother John began actively seeking out Percy retainers and their property. They inflicted severe damage to the estates of Sir William Plumpton, a Percy loyalist, in Knaresborough as part of an aggressive Neville demonstration of power in January 1454. With his brothers, John and Richard, as well as Salisbury, they faced the Earl of Northumberland and his sons at Topcliffe, North Yorkshire on 20 October 1453, although a negotiated peace averted battle. The Crown tried to settle the feud, but Griffiths has described its response as "futile". Rather than take decisive action, it relied on writing letters to both the earls and their younger sons, regardless of how willing—or able—the former were to control the latter. In the event, the feud continued for much of the next year with further violent encounters and only came to a halt with another battle at Salisbury's manor of Stamford Bridge, near York on 31 October 1454. Thomas and John confronted and decisively beat Egremont and Richard Percy, Thomas capturing the latter as they attempted to escape.
Later career
Death of Cromwell Maud's mother, Margaret had died in September 1454. Thomas's uncle-in-law, Lord Cromwell, had written his first will in 1451, but, probably unknown to his nieces or their husbands, he had re-written it three years later. The first will was extremely favourable to Maud; the second not nearly so, leaving them only 500 marks each and limited manors. Cromwell died on 4 January 1457, "richer than Fastolf and with even more claims against his estate". It is unknown where Thomas was at the time, but he attended Cromwell's funeral. The complexity of Cromwell's affairs led to many legal machinations, and as husband to one of his only heirs, Thomas was extensively involved in negotiations. Cromwell had already made a will in 1451, which was mostly concerned with bequests for servants and several charitable institutions. The main difference between that and the superseding will in 1454 was that—while they appeared superficially similar—the second will directed that the executors have discretion as to what institutions precisely benefitted. Friedrichs sums up the main provisions of the second will:
She also argues that husband and wife "expected more and clearly felt justly entitled to more". She suggests that Thomas−following the "assumption that possession was nine-tenths of the law"—deliberately filed the 1451 will for probate. While the later will was known about, it was possible that if the earlier will could be proved first, it would be harder for the manors gained from it to be legally repossessed, regardless of the later will. He also took paralegal action and took physical possession, backed by arms, of all he could. He and his fellow heir jure uxoris, Humphrey Bourchier, illegally expelled Cromwell's feoffees from several manors in Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire in December 1457, and Thomas was still holding 35 manors—taken "by strong hand"—in September 1459.