Sir Thomas Le Strange

Sir Thomas Le Strange (1494–1545) of Hunstanton, Norfolk, born in 1494, son of Robert le Strange (d. 1511), sixth in descent from Hamo le Strange, brother of John le Strange, 6th Baron of Knockyn, was Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII, and attended the King when he went to the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520; he was knighted by Henry at Whitehall in 1529, and served as High Sheriff of Norfolk in 1532.^[1]

Extracts from the Household Accounts kept at Hunstanton in the time of Sir Thomas and his successor, from 1519 to 1578, were published in the Archæologia in 1833. Sir Thomas was in attendance on Anne Boleyn at her coronation in 1533, her father, Sir Thomas Boleyn, being a Norfolk neighbour, who is mentioned repeatedly in the above accounts as a visitor at Hunstanton. In 1536 Sir Thomas Le Strange was appointed to attend on the King's person during the Pilgrimage of Grace, and to bring fifty men with him; in July of that year, he was placed on the commission to inquire into the revenues of the wealthy abbey of Walsingham, near his own Norfolk estate. It is to his credit that, though a personal friend of the King, and employed on business connected with the Dissolution of the Monasteries, Sir Thomas does not appear to have used his influence at court to secure for himself any church lands whatever. His picture, by Holbein, hung at Hunstanton Hall in 1893, according to his descendant Hamon le Strange, and a pencil sketch of him is among the Holbein drawings at Windsor;^[2] both these were exhibited at the Tudor Exhibition in 1890.^[1]

In the 1530s he retired to his native Norfolk, where he earned a prosperous living from sheep farming.^[2]

Sir Thomas Le Strange died on 16 January 1545, and was buried at Hunstanton.^[1]