Thomas Tresham (died 1605)

Sir Thomas Tresham (1543 – 11 September 1605) was a prominent recusant Catholic landowner in Elizabethan Northamptonshire. He died two years after the accession of James VI and I.

Tresham was brought up in the Throckmorton household. He inherited large estates at the age of 15, from his grandfather and namesake Thomas Tresham I, establishing him as a member of the Catholic elite. He was widely regarded as clever and well-educated, a correspondent of William Cecil, the Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, and Sir Christopher Hatton, the Lord Chancellor.

Well-read, Tresham dedicated much of his life to collecting books. He was much disliked, however, for an enclosure policy towards common land: he was referred to as the most odious man in Britain, after executing 50 people for rioting and levelling hedges in the Midland Revolt.

Tresham was pricked as sheriff for Northamptonshire in 1573 and was knighted at the Queen's Royal Progress at Kenilworth in 1575. He frequently entertained large numbers of friends and acquaintances but also pursued an aggressively conservative estate policy. His recusancy, Jesuit connections and arguments for the state's lack of jurisdiction in matters of conscience made him the subject of official attention, and he was imprisoned several times and fined heavily. At a time when Queen Elizabeth was anxious about the Catholic threat posed by Spain and by her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, Catholics were made targets for persecution by their spiritual loyalty to another temporal power (the Pope, and by extension, the Catholic King of Spain). Between 1581 and 1605, Tresham paid penalties totalling just under £8,000. (equivalent to £1,610,000 in 2015). These heavy financial demands were, in reality, overshadowed by the expense of his building projects and his insistence on making advantageous marriages for his six daughters, bringing with them sizeable dowries (£12,200). His credit was thus impaired, and the ill-advised involvement of his son, Francis, in the Earl of Essex's rebellion, cost him over £3,000. As a Catholic who had Jesuit links, and who argued for an individual's right to act according to his conscience unmolested, he was tarred with the brush of disloyalty, a mark he fiercely rejected. Ultimately, his son Lewis successfully ate through what little family money was left.

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