Thomas Archbold


Thomas Archbold was an Irish Crown official, lawyer and judge of the late fifteenth century.
He was born in Dublin. The Archbold family were among the earliest English settlers in Ireland; William Archbold, one of the Irish Barons of the Exchequer in the 1380s, was his ancestor. Thomas is first heard of in 1465 when he was having great difficulty collecting a debt: according to Elrington Ball he had to make forty journeys between Dublin and County Meath in pursuit of it.

The Grey controversy

He was appointed Attorney General for Ireland in 1478 and at the same time was made Master of the Royal Mint in Ireland. As Master of the Mint he was soon drawn into a major political controversy when Lord Portlester, the Lord Chancellor of Ireland, refused to hand over the Great Seal of Ireland to Lord Grey of Codnor, the newly-appointed Lord Deputy of Ireland: this was part of a comprehensive challenge by the Anglo-Irish nobility to Grey's authority, which they saw as a threat to their own power. King Edward IV tried to resolve the problem by ordering Archbold to issue a new Great Seal "as near the pattern and fabric of the other Seal as possible, with the addition of a rose", and declaring that the Seal held by Portlester was declared to be "damned, annulled and suspended", while all his acts as Lord Chancellor were "utterly repudiated". Portlester and his allies, undeterred, continued their defiance of Lord Grey, who, despairing of ever being able to establish his authority, left Ireland within the year.
Soon afterwards Archbold was appointed a Baron of the Court of Exchequer for life, but he was later superseded. He acted as Deputy Master of the Rolls in Ireland in 1479.

Simnel's Rebellion

Like most of the Anglo-Irish nobility he supported the claim of the pretender Lambert Simnel to the English Crown in 1487. Simnel's attempt to seize the throne ended with a crushing defeat at the Battle of Stoke Field. The victorious King, Henry VII, was merciful to the Irish rebels, as he was to Simnel himself: nearly all of them received a royal pardon the following year, including Archbold, who was reappointed to the Court of Exchequer at the same time. His date of death is not recorded.