The manor of Aylesbury, held by the Butler earls of Ormond, was inherited in the early 16th century by Margaret, widow of Sir William Boleyn. In 1538 her son Thomas, 1st Earl of Wiltshire, sold the manor to (Sir) John Baldwin, who already held of the King a manor there called Otters Fee. On Baldwin’s death in 1545 the property passed to his grandson Thomas Pakington, son of his daughter Agnes by Robert Pakington. In the following year, at the age of 24, Pakington had livery of his inheritance, including the fee-farm of the town, and married Dorothy, daughter of the wealthy Merchant Adventurer Sir Thomas Kitson. Although closely associated with the London mercantile community, Pakington does not appear to have belonged to a Company, nor did he hold any office at court or in government. As a ward of Sir John Baldwin he had probably received some training in the law; in later life he was once appointed steward for Christmas at the Inner Temple, but made default.2

As a proprietary borough Aylesbury was governed by two bodies known as the Twelve and the Twenty-Two. These figures were retained when on 14 Jan. 1554 the borough was incorporated by a charter which created a governing body consisting of a bailiff, ten aldermen and 12 capital burgesses. The charter also gave the borough the right to send two Members to Parliament: they were to be elected by the bailiff, aldermen and burgesses, although in practice the last category was probably restricted to the 12 capital burgesses. Like the one granted to Buckingham three days later, Aylesbury’s charter was ostensibly a reward for the town’s support of the Queen in the previous summer, but it is not clear who was instrumental in the matter. If Pakington took the lead, his influence was hardly as evident in the resulting elections as might have been expected, although this situation was to change under the regime of his widow; the other local magnate most likely to have been involved was Sir Edmund Peckham.3

The two surviving election indentures, for the two Parliaments of 1554, are uninformative as to the procedure. Of the five men known to have been returned at three elections (the names for 1558 being lost) the first two, Humphrey Moseley and Thomas Smith, can be presumed to have owed their places to Pakington, with whom they shared a London background, although Moseley was probably a replacement for Henry Peckham, who appears to have been elected at both Aylesbury and Chipping Wycombe and to have chosen the second. Of their two successors in the following autumn, William Rice was a Household officer while John Walwyn was the first bailiff of Aylesbury under the charter; neither need have looked to Pakington for a nomination. When Rice was re-elected in 1555 it was with Anthony Restwold, a local gentleman who probably followed Sir Edmund Peckham; like Henry Peckham, Restwold voted against a government bill.4