John Clopton (died 1497)

[4] He was sheriff of Suffolk and Norfolk (1451-2), a justice of the peace in the eastern counties through four successive reigns, and a member of many royal commissions dealing with subjects as varied as the raising or armies and fleets, combating piracy, investigating felonies, murders and treason, and the taxing of aliens.

[5] In 1461 he was arrested along with his close friend and neighbour John de Vere, 12th Earl of Oxford on charges of conspiring with the exiled Margaret of Anjou to restore her husband Henry VI to the throne.

It is likely the group were plotting to help Henry Beaufort, 3rd Duke of Somerset, then in Bruges, to land with an army in Essex; they seem to have been betrayed by a messenger carrying a letter from De Vere to the exiled queen.

[8] Returning to Long Melford, Clopton set about organising the reconstruction of Holy Trinity Church, adding a new north and south aisle and rebuilding the chancel and nave.

These survived the widespread destruction of religious images in the Reformation and Civil War, representing what Simon Jenkins in his book England's Thousand Best Churches calls "a rollcall of kneeling donors and associated saints and heraldry, God and mammon in magnificent unison".