Family and Education

b. by 1515, s. of Thomas Trentham of Shrewsbury by Elizabeth, da. of Sir Richard Corbet of Moreton Corbet, Salop. m. by 1537, Mary, da. of David Ireland of Shrewsbury, 1s. Thomas^† 5da.2

Offices Held

Esquire of the Household by Nov. 1537; cupbearer, household of Prince Edward by 1544.3

Biography

The evidence for the return of a ‘Mr. Trentham’ as one of the knights for Shropshire in 1536 is contained in the letter in which Lady Catherine Blount complained to Cromwell that her son George Blount had been tricked out of election. In view of the King’s request that on this occasion the previous Members should be returned, the contest between Blount and Trentham presumably means that whoever had sat with Sir Thomas Cornwall in the later sessions of the Parliament of 1529 was either dead or incapacitated and thus a vacancy arose. Of members of the Trentham family the one most likely to have filled it was Richard Trentham. A son of Thomas Trentham, the Member for Shrewsbury in 1512 and 1515, Richard Trentham entered the royal household (as did his brother Robert) and may have enjoyed government support at an election held in the shire with which he was identified both through his forbears and through his marriage; his kinship with the Corbet family, of whom his cousin Roger Corbet was almost certainly re-elected for Truro in 1536, would in any case have gone far towards ensuring his election.4

Trentham was not re-selected in 1539 and is unlikely to have been three years later, when the Shropshire names are unknown, for by then he had established himself in Staffordshire; he did not, however, part with all his Shropshire lands, as John Leland implies. In November 1537 he was granted a lease of the lands of Trentham priory, and two years later he received the reversion of Rochester abbey, also in Staffordshire, partim emptione partim largitione regis. It was as of Trentham that in 1544 he arranged a marriage between his sister and Edmund Foxe, a leading figure at Ludlow; in the same year he was in the vanguard of the army in France. He died on I Jan. 1547, leaving as heir his nine year-old son Thomas whose wardship was acquired in the following November by Sir Philip Draycott. By his will made on 20 Dec. 1546 he had provided for his wife and children and named among the executors his ‘cousins’ Andrew Corbet and Richard Corbet, and his brothers-in-law Edmund Foxe and Edward Hosier.5

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: Alan Harding

Notes

• 1. LP Hen. VIII, x. 1063.
• 2. Presumed to be of age at election. Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. iii(2), 140-1; Staffs. Peds. (Harl. Soc. lxiii), 224; Add. 6276, f. 22v; C142/85/47; PCC 29 Alen.
• 3. LP Hen. VIII, xiii; Wm. Salt Arch. Soc. iii(2), 140; E179/69/31.
• 4. LP Hen. VIII, x; Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. (ser. 3), iii. 380.
• 5. LP Hen. VIII, xiii, xiv, xix; VCH Staffs. iii. 250; Leland, Itin. ed. Smith, iii. 66; PCC 29 Alen; C142/85/47; CPR, 1547-8, p. 65.