In 1471, Sir William Vaux and Sir Thomas Tresham, courtiers to Queen Margaret of Anjou, were killed within days of one another. Vaux was killed in the Battle of Tewkesbury; shortly thereafter, Yorkist forces executed Tresham along with several other men. The two gentlemen, cousins through their mothers, were buried in the Tewkesbury Abbey church in Gloucestershire. Their sons, Sir Nicholas and Sir John, worked together in Northamptonshire government in the first two decades of the sixteenth century. The men were bound by ties of kinship and friendship; in 1520, Sir John named Sir Nicholas as supervisor of his will, a role assigned to someone deeply trusted by a testator. As decades passed, the two families and their cousins, the Catesbys and Throckmortons, strengthened earlier connections through additional marriages, godparentage, and friendship. In the late sixteenth century, William, third Baron Vaux, and Sir Thomas Tresham were close friends and brothers-in-law. Tresham's sister Mary was Vaux's wife, and his favorite niece, Muriel Vaux, was named for Tresham's wife. These families inhabited a network built upon ancient family connections, made up of the descendants of some of the most esteemed families in fifteenth-century England. As Catholics in Protestant England, Lord William and Sir Thomas relied on their kinship connections and the wider social networks to which they belonged for protection, promotion, and moral support.

The Vaux–Tresham example highlights patterns of continuity and change in kinship and social networks between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries.