Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 57.djvu/447

 Glamorgan and Morgannock, he was sent to Guisnes, certainly no place for trimmers.

Henry VII, however, took him into favour, or at all events employed him. He lost the post of chamberlain of the exchequer and his Welsh offices, but on 19 Feb. 1485–6 he was made sheriff of Glamorgan and Morgannock, with all it involved, including the constableship of Cardiff Castle, for life, at a salary of 100l. a year. He received a general pardon on 16 June 1486, another on 16 July following. These two pardons are important, as Sir Clements Markham considers that it was between their dates that the murder of the princes took place.

On 15 Dec. 1486 Tyrell is mentioned as lieutenant of the castle of Guisnes in a commission appointing ambassadors to treat with those of Maximilian, and on 30 Aug. 1487 he received the stewardship of the lordship of Ogmore in South Wales. A curious commission of 23 Feb. 1487–8 recites that for his services he is to be recompensed of the issues of Guisnes for property he had held in Wales at the beginning of the reign, and a schedule is annexed showing what that property had been. He is also here mentioned as a knight of the body. Tyrell was present at the battle of Dixmude in 1489 and took a prominent part in the ceremonial attending the making of the peace of Etaples in 1492; he was also present at the creation of Prince Henry as Duke of York in 1494.

In the summer of 1499 Edmund de la Pole, earl of Suffolk [q. v.], fled from England, and, on his way to the Netherlands, he stayed some time with Tyrell at Guisnes. Henry was merciful or politic, and sent in September 1499 Sir Richard Guildford [q. v.] and Richard Hatton to persuade the earl to return, and, though he had left Guisnes, he did so; Tyrell was ordered to come with him. He may have been regarded with suspicion, but nevertheless he was one of those prominent in 1501 at the reception of Catherine of Aragon. About July or August 1501 Suffolk fled again, and Tyrell was induced to surrender Guisnes by a trick, which is alluded to in a letter of Suffolk written just after Tyrell's death, and long afterwards in a letter from Sandys to Cromwell of 19 Jan. 1536–7 (cf. Letters and Papers of Henry VIII, i. 151). With his son he was imprisoned in the Tower. He had helped in the first flight, and doubtless through his agents Henry had certain knowledge of his treason. He was beheaded on Tower Hill on 6 May 1502, and attainted 1503–4.

Knowing that he was to die, Tyrell made, it is said while in the Tower, a confession of his guilt as to the princes; Dighton, his accomplice, was also examined and confessed. It is the substance of this confession that forms the history of the murder as we know it, though the text has not been preserved. He had by his wife Anne, daughter of Sir John Arundel of Cornwall, three sons; Thomas, his heir, who was restored in blood; James, and William. One pedigree given by Davy mentions a daughter Anne and does not give William (cf. Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 5509, f. 41).

[For genealogy see Davy's Suffolk Pedigrees (Brit. Mus. Addit. MS. 19152); Visitations of Essex, Harl. Soc. pp. 100–11; Gairdner's Richard III, Ramsay's Lancaster and York (vol. ii.), Bacon's Henry VII, and Busch's England under the Tudors, supply the historical part of Tyrell's life. On the murder in the Tower, the articles in the English Historical Review, Archæologia (i. 361 &c.), Kennett's History of England (i. 552, notes on Sir George Buc, one of the early apologists for Richard III), the History of Richard III's reign (attributed to Sir Thomas More), the Continuator of Croyland in Gale's Hist. Angl. Script. (i. 568), Polydore Vergil, Rous, and the French evidence in Commines, and the Proceedings of the States-General at Tours in 1484 are the most important. The grants in Richard III's reign are to be found in App. ii. 9th Rep. Deputy-keeper of Public Records. See also Return of Members of Parliament, i. 363 (no returns have been preserved for the reigns of Richard III and Henry VII); Metcalfe's Knights, pp. 3, 6; Rolls of Parliament, vol. vi.; Letters and Papers of Richard III and Henry VII, and Campbell's Materials for the Reign of Henry VII, both in Rolls Ser.; information furnished by A. P. J. Archbold, esq.] 

TYRRELL, JAMES (1642–1718), historical writer, born on 5 May 1642 in Great Queen Street in the parish of St. Giles-in-the-Fields, Middlesex, was the eldest son of Sir Timothy Tyrrell of Shotover, near Oxford, by his wife Elizabeth, sole daughter and heiress of James Usher (1580–1656) [q. v.], archbishop of Armagh. James Tyrrell was educated in the free school at Camberwell, Surrey, and was admitted a student at Gray's Inn on 7 Jan. 1655–6. On 15 Jan. 1657 he matriculated from Queen's College, Oxford, and was created M.A. on 28 Sept. 1663. In 1666 he was called to the bar by the society of the Inner Temple, but, says Wood, ‘made no profession of the common law.’ He subsequently retired to his estate at Oakley, near Brill in Buckinghamshire, and became a deputy lieutenant and justice of the peace of that county, in which offices he continued until deprived by James II in 1687 for refusing to support the ‘declaration of indulgence.’ 