Thomas Tresham II
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- see also Thomas Tresham I, his grandfather
Sir Thomas Tresham was a Catholic politician at the end of the Tudor dynasty and the start of the Stuart dynasty in England.
Inheriting large estates at the age of 15 from his grandfather, he had the most privileged of starts to adult life. In addition to this he was widely regarded as a clever and well educated man, moving in the highest social circles.
He was acquainted with William Cecil who was Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth and Sir Christopher Hatton, the Lord Chancellor.
In 1566, he married into the Throckmorton family, a wealthy Catholic family from Coughton Court in Warwickshire. Thomas Tresham was knighted at the Queen's Progress at Kenilworth in 1575.
Sir Thomas enjoyed a lavish lifestyle, frequently entertaining vast numbers of friends and acquaintances. But it was his Catholic religion that burdened him most frequently with debt. At a time when Queen Elizabeth was anxious about the Catholic threat posed by Spain and by her cousin Mary Queen of Scots, nonconformists were targets for persecution. As a result between 1581 and 1605, Tresham paid penalties totalling just under £8,000. These heavy financial demands created spiraling debts, with borrowing as his only resource. Tresham's credit never fully recovered.
For a landowner who sought personally to direct all matters of estate management, his effective status as a hostage, seized by the government whenever the machinations of Catholics abroad sought to menace the safety of the realm was a severe imposition.
He has left two buildings as part of Northamptonshire's heritage:
- Rushton Triangular Lodge, a folly
- and the unfinished Lyveden New Bield
as well as the Market house in Rothwell, Northamptonshire which he started in 1577 and was not completed for some three centuries.
Sir Thomas died on September 11, 1605. He was still a considerable landowner, but he left £11,000 of debt. His elder son, Francis, inherited the estate as well as the debt, and then became embroiled in the Gunpowder Plot later that year along with his cousins Robert Catesby and Thomas Wintour. Imprisoned for his actions he met an early death in December, 1605.
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