Nicholas Pelham

Sir Nicholas Pelham (c. 1513 – 15 September 1560) of Laughton, Sussex was an English politician. He was the eldest son of Sir William Pelham of Laughton, Sussex, and his first wife Mary Carew, daughter of Sir Richard Carew and his wife Malyn Oxenbridge, and sister of Sir Nicholas Carew. After his mother's death, his father remarried Mary Sandys, sister of William Sandys, 1st Baron Sandys; after his death, she remarried John Palmer. Nicholas was ahalf-brother of the Irish judge Edmund Pelham and of Sir William Pelham junior, Lord Justice of Ireland. Although he married a first cousin of Anne Boleyn, in the last years of the reign of Henry VIII he was rarely at court, perhaps embittered by the execution of his uncle Sir Nicholas Carew for treason in 1538. He first came to the public's attention in 1541 when he accused Thomas Fiennes, 9th Baron Dacre, of killing Pelham's gamekeeper John Busbrig (or Busbridge), during a scuffle when Dacre and his friends were caught poaching on Pelham's estate. Pelham pursued the matter with vigour, and Dacre was arrested and charged with murder. Dacre, exercising the privilege of peerage, demanded a trial before the House of Lords, and initially pleaded not guilty. He was induced to change his plea to guilty and throw himself on the king's mercy. The king however ordered that he must die, and unusually in the case of a nobleman, did not commute the sentence to decapitation. Dacre was hanged at Tyburn "like a common murderer". Pelham sat on the Sussex bench as a Justice of the Peace from 1544 to his death and was appointed High Sheriff of Surrey and Sussex for 1549–50. He was knighted on 17 November 1549. He had some military skills and defeated a French raiding party in 1545. He was later spoken of by the Privy Council as a "man experienced in war".