Thomas was the son of William Cawarden, a cloth-fuller and citizen of London. In 1528, he was apprenticed to a mercer in London, Owen Hawkins. By 1542 Cawarden had married. His wife's first name was Elizabeth; her surname is unknown.
Career
In 1542 and 1547 he was elected Member of Parliament for Bletchingley which did not have town status and had a smaller forty shilling freeholder electorate than the average of the time, poor enough to be challenged in the courts in 1614. In 1544 Sir Thomas Cawarden received a patent as Master of Revels and Tents, becoming the first head of an independent office and was knighted at Boulogne in September of that year. Tents were provided for festivals, royal progresses, and in military expeditions. In July and August 1547, Cawarden provided 'hales', 'roundhouses', and a kitchen tent for the mission to Scotland during the war of the Rough Wooing which culminated in the Battle of Pinkie. Cawarden paid for the tents which had been 'wetted in the shippe' to be dried and put away on their return. Lady Jane Grey as queen requested tents on 19 July 1553. On 1 January 1559 Mary I ordered her officers to collect arms and armour from Cawarden's house to counter Wyatt's rebellion. Seventeen wagon loads were taken. The patent also allowed him to keep 40 armed and liveried servants at Bletchingley Castle or Palace. Soon after his appointment, the revels office and its stores were transferred to a dissolved Dominicanmonastery at Blackfriars, having previously been housed at Warwick Inn in the city, the London Charterhouse, and then at the priory of St. John of Jerusalem in Clerkenwell, to which a return was made after Cawarden's death. He was appointed High Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex for 1547–48, keeper of Hampton Court in 1550 and joint Lieutenant of the Tower of London in Nov-Dec 1558. Cawarden formally obtained Bletchingley, which had been the home of Anne of Cleves, on 7 April 1547. He was also keeper of the house and gardens of Nonsuch Palace from 1543 to November 1556. Between 1547 and 1559 he was four times elected knight of the shire for Surrey. In 1551 Cawarden built a banqueting house in Hyde Park with Lawrence Bradshaw, surveyor of works. Cawarden was in charge of the interior decoration by the painters Antony Toto and John Leades. This by 1556 had been largely superseded by his own Banqueting House at Nonsuch Park close to the original Nonsuch Palace, at the foot of the North Downs which he had been granted in 1547 by King Edward to hold for 21 years for a rent of £5 5s. 8d. Cawarden died at East Horsley on 25 August 1559. His body was taken to Bletchingley. A brass plate intended for Thomas Cawarden's monument was found at Loseley Park, the home of his executor, Sir William More, in the 19th century. Cawarden was succeeded as Master of the Revels by Sir Thomas Benger.
Thomas Cawarden's official papers survived at his executor's descendants' house at Loseley. These were moved into public collections. A catalogue of the papers in the Folger Shakespeare Library collection is available on-line. Other revels papers are available to study at the National Archives, Kew, and the Surrey Record Office, Woking. Extracts from the papers were first published by Alfred Kempe in 1836, and by the Historical Manuscripts Commission in 1879.
