Giles Thorndon

Giles Thorndon ( 1388 – August 1477) was a senior official of the English Crown in the fifteenth century, who was noted for his long and loyal service to the House of Lancaster and for his troubled and unsuccessful career as Lord Treasurer of Ireland.

Early career He was born in Newcastle upon Tyne shortly before 1390. Little is known of his family; there is no evidence that he was related to Roger Thornton, the long-serving mayor of Newcastle, who died in 1430.

By his own account, he entered the household of the future King Henry V in 1404, when he must still have been in his teens. and for a time was also entrusted with the wardenship of Cardigan Castle.

Thorndon, in his early years in Ireland, sought to act as a mediator between the rival factions. In 1442 he produced a memorandum on the state of Irish affairs, based, as he noted, on his thirty-eight years' experience of Crown service. At this time he was making every effort to be impartial, stressing that there were faults on both sides. What really mattered, as he pointed out, were the dire results of the feud. In particular, impartial justice could not be obtained from the Courts where the interests of one faction or the other were involved, Irish Exchequer officials were not collecting Crown debts, and lavish grants of land to the supporters of whichever faction was in the ascendant had greatly depleted the Crown revenues.

In 1443 the Butler–Talbot feud seemed to be dying down, but in 1444 it flared up again.

Thorndon and Prior FitzGerald fled to England, where they charged Ormonde with treason and (rather curiously) with necromancy, but the Privy Council, which was only concerned to end the feud, was unsympathetic to their complaints. No action was taken against Ormonde, and the Prior was permanently deprived of office in 1447: the Council's proposal that the Earl and the Prior settle their differences through trial by combat was vetoed personally by King Henry VI, who persuaded them to agree to a truce.

Thorndon, as far as is known, did not return to Ireland, although his later marriage to Jane d'Artois, widow of Lord Gormanston, suggests that he remained in contact with some of his former colleagues there.