EYRE, Thomas (1617-?aft. 1665), of Hurst Castle, Hants, and Bromham, Wilts.

Although they had been established in the parish of Bromham since at least the thirteenth century, no-one from this branch of a family otherwise prominent in the county had held major public office locally before Thomas Eyre himself in the mid-seventeenth century.13VCH Wilts. vii. 182. His father and namesake, who died at 25 years old the autumn before Eyre’s birth, left goods valued at £139 13s; that wool formed a significant proportion of this suggests that the older Thomas was associated in trade with the local family of clothiers into which he had recently married, the Webbs.14Wilts. RO, 518/3; P3/E/24 i-iii. It seems likely that, as eldest grandson, young Eyre was brought up in the household of his pious grandfather, yet another Thomas. There is no record of him having attended a university or inn of court. In April 1636, aged only 19, he married Elizabeth Yerbury, daughter of a Bromham yeoman.15Wilts. RO, 518/3; Ramsay, Wilts. Woollen Industry (1965), 40-2, 83. Within a month his grandfather died, expressing at length assurance of salvation and leaving him his estate in trust.16Wilts. RO, 518/3, P3/E/60 iic. Following the death of his wife in August 1637, our MP married another Elizabeth, possibly from the Isle of Wight, since according to the Bromham register, their first child was baptized there in July 1640.17Wilts. RO, 518/3. However, he remained close to the Yerburys, being made an overseer of the will of William Yerbury of Bromham, clothier, in 1647.18PROB11/210/66.

In the 1620s Bromham, situated three miles north-west of Devizes in the cloth-making area of north-west Wiltshire, suffered badly from the trade depression, and in the next decade it offered resistance to the government inspectors sent to investigate continuing difficulties.19Ramsay, Wilts. Woollen Industry, 59, 61, 76, 77, 92. In May 1636 Eyre’s grandfather left sheep worth over £30 and goods totalling over £600, but three years previously he had sold an estate in Maddington.20Wilts. RO, P3/E/60 iic; VCH Wilts. xv. 207. Local economic grievances, together with an inherited puritanism, may well have influenced young Thomas’s allegiance on the outbreak of hostilities in 1642. Opposition to the inspectors had been led by Sir Edward Bayntun* of Bromham, who was initially named parliamentarian commander in the county, while Sir Edward Hungerford* of nearby Corsham also raised a regiment. It seems probable that Eyre joined up at the outset.

As a captain in the regiment of Nathaniel Fiennes I*, Eyre signed the letter from its council of war at Bristol to Parliament on 28 March 1643.21The Copy of a Letter sent from Bristoll (1643), [8] (E.94.30). Following the city’s surrender to the royalists, he was captured on 13 July at Roundway Down, and taken prisoner to Oxford. He was still there two months later.22Wilts. RO, A1/110/A, ff. 9, 36; IHR, Cromwell Assoc. database. However, by September 1645 he had accumulated sufficient further military experience to be installed as governor of Devizes when Oliver Cromwell* took the town, but four months later it fell to Sir John Campsfield in the course of a sally into Wiltshire from Oxford. Eyre was again captured, not in the town but to the north east at Marlborough, where he was apparently attending to by-election business, and was taken, with committee-man Francis Goddard and others, to the royalist garrison at Faringdon.23Mercurius Academicus no. 6 (19-24 Jan. 1646), 57 (E.316.25); R. Norton, A letter concerning the storming and delivering up of the castle of the Devizes (1645) (E.303.2); Vicars, Burning Bush, 276-7; The Kingdomes Weekly Intelligencer no. 136 (20-27 Jan. 1646), 1091-2, 1094 (E.319.4); The final defeat of the royalists meant that this reverse was shortlived, however. According to the Bromham register, by 16 June 1646 Eyre was back in Devizes, where his son James was baptized; in what capacity he was serving at that date is unknown.24Wilts. RO, 518/3. In November the Committee of the West* responded to his petition for arrears both as a captain of foot and of horse by awarding him an immediate £100, in addition to £50 already received, ‘in regard of his sufferings and imprisonments by the enemy’; further back pay followed in May 1647.25Waylen, ‘Falstone Day Bk.’ 380, 384.

A long-term commission came when Eyre was made governor of Hurst Castle, Hampshire, overlooking the Isle of Wight and commanding the approaches to Southampton; he was in this strategic post some time before 25 August 1647, when staffing of garrisons was reviewed, and was to retain the position until early in 1660.26Worcester Coll. Clarke MS II, 11. Temporarily absent when Colonel Ewer or Eure first brought Charles I to Hurst from Carisbrooke Castle on 2 December 1648, he soon after returned to receive the king – courteously according to The Moderate.27The Moderate no. 23 (12-19 Dec. 1648), 203 (E.477.4). Those in authority expressed relief that Charles was now in the hands of ‘our dear friend and true patriot Colonel Ayers of Wiltshire … whose fidelity can never be poisoned as H[Robert Hammond] was’.28Clarke Pprs. ii. 60. Such confidence soon brought office, and further absences, in his native county. While Hurst remained his family home – he had two daughters and a son baptised there between 1650 and 1652 – he was a regular attender at quarter sessions from April 1649 and first named as an assessment commissioner the following December.29Corsham par. reg.; Wilts. RO, A1/160/1 and 2; Waylen, ‘Notes from the diary of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper’, 27; The Names of the Justices, 62; C193/13/3, f. 69v, C193/13/4, f. 110, C193/13/6, f. 97, C193/13/5, f. 116v; Stowe, 577, f. 58v.

Eyre’s reputation for loyalty and his solid record in Wiltshire was clearly behind his selection in 1653 with Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper* and Nicholas Greene* for a county seat in the Nominated Parliament. On 15 June he and Greene were assigned the lodgings which had been occupied by the former Member for Salisbury John Dove.30CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 412. Eyre was a member of only one committee, that for prisons and poor prisoners, but in so far as those included were mostly of a radical persuasion and the act they produced ‘probably the most progressive work of legislation of the Barebones Parliament’, which ‘manifested a deep concern for the execution of justice in a Christian commonwealth’, his participation is a strong indicator of commitment to reform.31CJ vii. 287b; T. Liu, Discord in Zion: the Puritan Divines and the Puritan Revolution (The Hague, 1973), 93. Unlike Cooper, but like Greene, Eyre was not retrospectively designated among those more traditionally-minded MPs who had been in favour of ‘godly learned ministry and universities’.32A Catalogue of the Names of the Members of the last Parliament (1654, 669.f.19.3). Whatever his stance, however, his service was limited: on 6 September he obtained leave to go into the country.33CJ vii. 315b.

It is not clear whether Eyre sought to stand again for Parliament. In the 1650s he, his kinsman William Eyre II*, a Rumper who was to be an MP for Wiltshire in 1655, and William Eyre the Leveller (who appears to have fought in the county in the 1640s) held the same military rank, and confusion as to the identity of Colonel Eyre arose among contemporaries as well as among historians. It seems reasonable to assume that the prospective candidate Eyre who with Edmund Ludlowe II* was allegedly branded by John Strickland, Adoniram Byfield and other Wiltshire ministers ‘with the names of Anabaptists, Levellers to render them odious to the generality of the injudicious people, by these false and malicious imputations’, while actually being ‘honest public spirited men’, was not in fact the Leveller, but it could have been either Thomas or William II.34A Copy of a Letter sent out of Wilts. (1654), 1-2 (E.809.18). While repudiating the claim that they had so labelled the candidates, the ministers did not, in their reply, exonerate them from the charge: although they did not ‘put them into this dress until we found them so in the letter’, they admitted that it was commonly called ‘the Anabaptists list’.35H. Chambers, A. Bifield, J. Strickland, P. Ince, An Apology for the Ministers of the County of Wilts. (1654, E.808.9).

Eyre was active as a magistrate under the protectorate, and officiated in that capacity in marriages at Bromham between 1654 and 1657.36Wilts. RO, 518/3. By late 1655 he had been appointed with Dove, Greene, James Hely* and other Cromwellians to the Wiltshire commission to assist John Disbrowe* as major-general for south-west England.37TSP iv. 295. Eyre’s governorship of Hurst Castle was confirmed on 26 September 1659 and again on 8 and 10 February 1660, but within a few weeks apparent confusion about his identity had deprived him of the post.38CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 226; CJ vii. 836b, 839b. A letter of 9 March to Edward Hyde reveals that, in his keenness to prove himself to the royalists, Sir William Waller* drew attention to the fact that ‘he prevented Col. Ayres from being governor of Hurst Castle because he had been a barbarous villain to the last king’; in his haste he, like others, had almost certainly mistaken Eyre for Ewer.39CCSP iv. 590; Gardiner, Hist. Civil War, iv. 260, n. 1.

This seems to have marked the end of Eyre’s public life. Unlike William Eyre II and Dove he apparently lost his place on the commission of the peace early in 1660.40A Perfect List (1660). If the ‘Thomas Eyer son of Mr Thomas Eyer’ buried at Bromham on 2 May 1666 was, as looks plausible, his son baptized in 1642, then the MP was probably still alive; his death date and will have not been found.41Bromham par. reg. None of his descendants in the male line sat in Parliament.