PAGE, Thomas (c.1530-58/59), of Shorne, Kent.

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1509-1558, ed. S.T. Bindoff, 1982
Available from Boydell and Brewer

Constituency

Dates

Family and Education

b. c.1530, 1st s. of Edmund Page of Shorne by Eleanor, da. and h. of John Herenden. prob. unm. suc. fa. Jan./Feb. 1551.1

Offices Held

Biography

Thomas Page must have been a young man when his father died in 1551, his brothers and sisters all being under 20 at the time. He was to be head of the family for less than eight years and as he died before his mother he never succeeded to the whole inheritance. His father had played a minimal part in local administration and he himself is not known to have taken any at all. His election to the last Marian Parliament thus presupposes influential patronage, and the most likely source of this was George Brooke, 9th Lord Cobham, a local magnate from whom Page held his manor of Beckley, especially as the sheriff, George Vane, came of a family closely linked with Cobham’s own.

Page survived this Parliament, and the Queen who had summoned it, by only a few weeks; he may well have been a victim of the prevailing epidemic. By a will of 2 Dec. 1558 he left the gold ring which he wore on his finger to his mother, and other gold rings, worth 20s., to her, to her second husband John Allen, and to friends and relations. His cousin Bartholomew Page was to have the house and land lately bought from him, in return for specified payments to the testator’s brother George, who was named sole executor and given £5 a year for life and all lands and goods not otherwise bestowed. The overseers of the will, which was proved on 13 Jan.1559, were Page’s cousin Walter Herenden and his stepfather Allen. Page was buried in the church at Shorne, where a brass plate commemorated him.2

Ref Volumes: 1509-1558

Author: Helen Miller

Notes

  • 1. Date of birth estimated from father’s will, Rochester prob. reg. 11, f. 117v.
  • 2. Ibid. 12, f. 279v; Hasted, Kent, iii. 452.