same sum when he sold it three years later, minus the building stone, which he kept for himself. As lessee at Cartmel, he tripled the rents and made £250 from rents alone. As an increasingly powerful landowner, Holcroft was a natural candidate to become High Sheriff of Lancashire in 1546. He was Custos Rotulorum of Cheshire between 1548 and 1558, a singular honour as it was the senior post in the county's civil administration. Later years and death Although not prepared to stand up for Protestantism in parliament, there is considerable evidence that Holcroft used his position as knight marshal to aid Protestants during the Marian Counter-Reformation. John Strype, an important 17th-century biographer of Thomas Cranmer, wrote that: "The knight-marshal, Sir Thomas Holcroft, the under-marshal, the knight-marshal's secretary, were secret friends of the Protestants: and, when designs were laid to take any of them, some signification was often privately brought them, that search would within some few hours be made for them; and therefore that they should depart from their lodgings, and conceal themselves. And when any good men were under their hands in prison, they would take all occasions to shew them kindness, as far as safely they might." Strype also recorded the testimony of Sir John Bourne, a principal secretary to Mary, about Edwin Sandys, the Protestant Bishop of Worcester, escape from the Marshalsea: "That corrupt labour was made for his deliverance under queen Mary, to which he (Bourne, then secretary) assented not; and when he was discharged he knew not, but sure he was there was no plain order for it; and that he had heard, he conveyed himself away by breaking prison with the aid of sir Thomas Holcroft or his man." Sandys continued to feud with Bourne long after Elizabeth restored Protestantism. In 1563 he made a sworn statement that Holcroft and others had sued for his release, but he did not confirm Bourne's account that Holcroft actually engineered his escape. However, Thomas Mountain, a London Protestant minister did testify that he was warned by Holcroft's secretary to leave the city. Holcroft's own religious views are not clear. His expressed attitudes and behaviour to this point suggested that he shared "the contempt with which the new gentry and officials regarded spiritual dignities". Whether anti-clerical or actually Protestant, Holcroft certainly fell foul of Mary's regime in his final months. He was replaced as knight marshal early