HUSSEY, Thomas I (1613-41), of Gonerby, Lincs.

Thomas Hussey was the eldest son of Sir Edward Hussey, who represented Lincolnshire in the Short Parliament. Little is known about Thomas before his marriage in December 1633 to Rhoda Chapman, the daughter and coheiress of a London draper.10Cole, Doddington, 99-100. The value of his wife’s marriage portion is not known, but it was probably considerable, for Hussey was heir apparent to an estate worth almost £3,000 a year by the 1630s.11SP23/184, pp. 413-14. Moreover, as part of the marriage settlement, Sir Edward settled property worth £600 a year upon him, including the manor of Gonerby, about a mile and a half north of Grantham, which became Hussey’s principal residence.12SP23/184, pp. 414, 421.

Hussey’s brief career in crown and parliamentary service owed much to his family’s prominence in and around two of Lincolnshire’s principal towns – Grantham, in the south of the county, and Gainsborough, in the north. In 1635, a year after coming of age, Hussey was appointed to a sewers commission established in relation to a scheme by Sir John Monson to drain the Ancholme Level, north of Gainsborough.13C181/5, f. 27; K. Lindley, Fenland Riots and the English Revolution, 44-6. In the elections to the Long Parliament in the autumn of 1640, he was returned for Grantham, securing the second place behind the town’s deputy recorder Henry Pelham.14Supra, ‘Grantham’; Lincs. RO, Grantham borough min. bk. 1, f. 71. Hussey probably owed his return to the strength of his own and his father’s interest as prominent local landowners. He was named to eight committees during his brief parliamentary career – all of them set up during the first three months of 1641. The majority of these appointments suggest a concern on his part for the reform of Caroline ‘abuses’.15CJ ii. 61b, 75a, 84b, 87b, 91a, 101a, 105b. Thus he was named to committees for the abolition of the prerogative court of star chamber, for eradicating superstition and idolatry, abolishing pluralism, and to examine the crown’s perceived breach of parliamentary privilege in imprisoning Sir John Eliot†, Denzil Holles* and other Commons-men following the dissolution of the third Caroline Parliament in 1629.16CJ ii. 75a, 84b, 91a, 101a. However, within ten days of his addition on 16 March to a committee for investigating the Catholic church hierarchy in England, he had died.17CJ ii. 105b, 112b. His place of burial is not known. The administration of his estate was granted to his widow.

Although Hussey’s father and most of his family went on to support the king in the civil war, his widow remarried to the Yorkshire parliamentarian general 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*), the father (with his first wife) of the commander of the New Model army, Sir Thomas Fairfax*.18Cole, Doddington, 99. Hussey’s son Thomas sat for Lincoln in the third Exclusion Parliament in 1681 and represented Lincolnshire between 1685 and 1695.19HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir Thomas Hussey’.