Sir Thomas Neville ( 1429 – 1460) was the second son of Richard Neville, 5th Earl of Salisbury, a major nobleman and magnate in the north of England during the fifteenth-century Wars of the Roses, and a younger brother to the more famous Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the 'Kingmaker'. Thomas worked closely with them both in administering the region for the Crown, and became a significant player in the turbulent regional politics of northern England in the early 1450s, especially in the Neville family's growing local rivalry with the House of Percy. His wedding in August 1453 is said to have marked the beginning of the armed feud between both houses, in which Thomas and his brother John led a series of raids, ambushes and skirmishes across Yorkshire against the Percy family. Historians describe the feud as setting the stage for the Wars of the Roses, the dynastic struggle between the houses of Lancaster and York for the English throne, and Thomas played a large role in the Neville family's alliance with his uncle, Richard, Duke of York.
Thomas took part in his father's battles, being present at the Battle of Blore Heath in September 1459, where he was captured with his younger brother John by the Lancastrians. As a result, he was imprisoned and later attainted along with his father, brothers, and the Yorkists at the 1459 Parliament of Devils. Being imprisoned, he did not share Salisbury's and Warwick's exile in Calais. On their return, however, the following year, he was released when Warwick and the future Edward IV together won the Battle of Northampton. When the Duke of York also returned from his exile and claimed the throne from Henry VI, it appears that it was Thomas who was personally responsible for informing the duke of the Neville's collective disapproval of his plans. Joining his father Salisbury, and York's army, which travelled to Yorkshire in December 1460 with the purpose of suppressing Lancastrian-inspired disorder, he took part in the disastrous Battle of Wakefield. The Yorkists went down to a crushing defeat; Thomas was killed in the fighting, and, alongside his father and uncle, his head was impaled above one of the gates of the city of York.
Early career, knighthood and marriage
Thomas Neville was the second son of Richard Neville (1400–1460) and his wife Alice Montagu, 5th Countess of Salisbury (c. 1406–1462), and was probably born soon after his elder brother Richard in 1428, and certainly by 1431. By this time, so historian Michael Hicks says, his parents had had a further two more sons after Thomas: John, and George, who was to have a career in the Church. His first mention in government records is in 1448 when he was appointed steward of the Bishopric of Durham by his uncle, Robert, the Bishop, receiving £20 per annum from diocesan revenues. He became Sheriff of Glamorgan, on 24 March 1450, in which capacity he witnessed a charter of his brother, Warwick the 'Kingmaker', 12 March the next year, during the latter's dispute over the Despenser inheritance. Warwick also appointed Thomas to assist in the management of his Warwickshire estates, for which he received an annuity. Thomas Neville was knighted by King Henry VI, alongside the King's two half-brothers, Edmund and Jasper Tudor, on 5 January 1453 in the Tower of London, an occasion that Griffiths has called "an attempt to retain a loyalty [of the Nevilles] that had recently been strained".
Thomas Neville was licensed by the King on 1 May 1453 to marry Maud Stanhope, the widow of Robert, Lord Willoughby and as such a wealthy heiress. Ralph A. Griffiths has suggested that the announcement of Neville's marriage was the immediate cause of the feud with the Percys. Maud was also niece and joint-heiress of Ralph, Lord Cromwell, one of the richest men in the kingdom, and who was involved in at least two feuds with powerful men at this time. Connecting his family to the Nevilles, it has been said, provided "a counterbalance to Cromwell's enemies". It was a marriage which cost him the massive sum of nearly £2,000 in loans to Salisbury, and "the price the Nevilles could extract was a measure of Cromwell's desperation". Not only, says Griffiths, was any further Neville aggrandisement anathema to the Percys, but the new Cromwell connection gave the Nevilles access to the ex-Percy manors of Wressle and Burwell, which doubtless they still hoped to reclaim.