Cony’s parentage has not been established for certain, but he may have been a son or other relative of the John Cony who was working in London as a fletcher by 1489. Thomas himself is first recorded as a member of the Fletchers’ Company in its first quarterage list of 1519-20, but he was by this date already a member of some standing, being named fifth after the serving wardens in the list. Five years later, in 1525 he was elected one of the company’s wardens (his standing in the company may suggest that he had also held the office on an earlier occasion). By the end of his life he lived in the parish of St Benet Gracechurch, in a tenement that he rented from James Walsingham of Scadbury and his son, Sir Edmund, the lieutenant of the Tower. He did, however, also own a country estate in the Middlesex parishes of Charlton, Ashton, Sunbury and Hampton. Cony seems to have been a public-spirited man. Among the bequests detailed in his will one stands out: he instructed his executors to buy annually for six years after his death a load of coals and to distribute these among the poor householders of St Benet Gracechurch. Cony made this will on 23 April 1527, and died within the month that followed. He asked to be buried in his parish church of St Benet Gracechurch, next to his first wife, Agnes. He was survived by two under-age daughters, Margaret and Joan, a brother, William Cony, who occupied a chamber in Thomas’s dwelling-house, and his second wife, Margaret. Margaret, who was her husband’s principal heir and executrix, continued Thomas’s business until 1559, when she may have herself died.

(Sources: GL, MS 5977/1-2; TNA, PROB11/22, ff. 146-146v; CP40/907, rot. 80)