Thomas Moyle

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Sir Thomas Moyle (before 1500, probably at Eastwell - 2 October 1560, probably at Eastwell) was a commissioner for Henry VIII in the dissolution of the monasteries, and speaker of the House of Commons in the Parliament of England from 1541 to 1544.

[edit] Life

He was the fourth son of John Moyle (died 1500, born in Cornwall, MP for Bodmin and Kentish, Cornish and Devon landowner) and Anne Darcy (his second wife, one of Sir Robert Darcy's daughters and heirs). By 1528, Thomas had followed his father's example and married an heiress, Katherine Jordeyne, one of the daughters of Edward Jordeyne (died 1514), a leading goldsmith at Cheapside with a manor at Raynham and employed at the mint in the Tower of London.

Moyle employed Richard Plantagenet to build Eastwell Place and (according to family tradition recorded around 1720 in Desiderata Curiosa) listened to his claims to be son of Richard III's son and allowed him to live in the grounds until his death in 1550.

[edit] Descendents

Moyle made his will on 1 August 1560, leaving his wife property at Clerkenwell and his grandchildren houses in Newgate. Also leaving some land and an endowment to Eastwell parish for an almshouse, he split the remainder of his estates (in Kent, Surrey, Middlesex, Devon, and Somerset) between his daughter Amy's widower Thomas Kempe and his daughter Katherine. Katherine's husband was Sir Thomas Finch, and the couple's children were the ancestors of the earls of Winchilsea and Nottingham. (He also left £6 13s. 4d. to Clement Norton, a former vicar of Faversham who had, like Moyle, joined in the 1543 anti-evangelical prebendaries' plot to overthrow Thomas Cranmer as Archbishop of Canterbury.)