DACRES, Thomas (c.1609-68), of Cheshunt, Herts.

Thomas Dacres, the son of Sir Thomas Dacres, was born around 1609, and matriculated from Exeter College, Oxford, at the advanced age of 20.14Al. Ox. According to Anthony Wood, he was graduated master of arts within a month of matriculation, ‘being then about to go with his majesty’s ambassador into foreign parts’, but it is almost certain that Wood was confusing Thomas Dacres with Edward Dacres (probably his uncle) who was despatched to Turin and then Savoy and Lorraine in the same year, as an envoy to the residents there.15Wood, Fasti, i. 453; CSP Ven. 1628-9, pp. 556, 563, 573; 1629-32, p. 21; Sir Dudley Carleton’s Letters (1775), p. xxvi. It therefore seems likely that Thomas Dacres remained at Oxford for a full 15 months until he was admitted to Lincoln’s Inn on 25 January 1631.16LI Admiss. i. 212. He was incorporated as MA of his father’s old university at Cambridge, on the strength of his Oxford degree, in 1632.17Al. Cant.

Little is known of Dacres’ activities during the 1630s or the early years of the civil war. His father was a moderate opponent of the crown, who gradually sided with the Presbyterian interest in the mid-1640s, but Thomas evidently flirted with royalism. The details of his service of the crown, whether military or otherwise, are unknown, although he may have fought alongside his uncle, Sir Richard Dacres, who was killed at Marston Moor in July 1644.18Newman, Royalist Officers, 98. It may be significant that Thomas Dacres’ own involvement with the royalists came to an end immediately afterwards. In August 1644 the Committee for Advance of Money ordered that his assessment of £300, payable as a known royalist, was to be discharged, as he was living with his father and had no house of his own. Despite this they went on to stipulate that Dacres should still pay a fifth of the yearly revenues on his own lands.19CCAM i. 36.

A blind eye was turned to Dacres’ earlier indiscretions when he was elected, either late in 1646 or early in 1647, as recruiter MP for the Cornish constituency of Callington, as a carpet-bagger inserted by the Presbyterian interest. Dacres took the Covenant on 1 February 1647, and on 4 March he and his father were added on an ad hoc basis to the Committee for Foreign Plantations.20CJ v. 69a, 106a. On 12 May they were named together to the committee considering an ordinance to raise money to send the bulk of the New Model army to Ireland, and thus ensure that the Presbyterian-dominated Parliament would remain free from military coercion.21CJ v. 168b. In retaliation, the Independents disinterred Dacres’ royalist past, and on 15 July he was among those ordered to produce evidence to prove their loyalty and avoid being disabled from sitting.22CJ v. 245a. It was a low blow, but an effective one. Dacres absented himself from the Commons, and repeated calls of the House (on 9 Oct. 1647, 24 Apr. and 26 Sept. 1648) failed to get him to return.23CJ v. 330a, 543b; vi. 34b. Finally, when Colonel Thomas Pride* and his fellow officers purged the Commons on 6 December 1648, both Thomas and Sir Thomas Dacres were secluded.24Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 371.

Dacres’ brief parliamentary career coincided with his first involvement in local politics: he was added to the commission of the peace in September 1646, and in June 1657 and February 1648 he was appointed as an assessment commissioner for Hertfordshire and neighbouring Bedfordshire.25C231/6, p. 56; A. and O. His last appointment came on 2 December 1648, when he became a militia commissioner for Hertfordshire, four days before being secluded from Parliament.26A. and O. During the 1650s, Dacres retired to his father’s estates at Cheshunt, but he took little part in local affairs. The sole mention of Dacres’ activities during the interregnum came on 1 October 1655, when the surveyor of the highways for Cheshunt parish complained to the quarter sessions that Dacres, with two others, had refused to deliver up the money left in the hands of the previous surveyor. It is unclear whether Dacres was acting as a private gentleman concerned with the affairs of his parish or in some official capacity, nor is there any evidence that his obstruction of the surveyor was politically motivated.27Herts. Sessions Rolls, 1581-1698 ed. W.J. Hardy (Hertford, 1905), 113; Herts. Sessions Bks. 1619-57 ed. W.J. Hardy (Hertford, 1928), 471-2.

Dacres was among the secluded MPs returned to the Rump Parliament in February 1660. His only recorded participation in the Commons was on 24 February, when he and his father were named to the committee on the bill to make George Monck* captain-general and commander-in-chief of the armed forces.28CJ vii. 850b. Dacres’ return to Parliament also brought his appointment as militia commissioner in Hertfordshire and Huntingdonshire in March 1660.29A. and O. After the Restoration he returned to the commission of the peace; and in the same period he was allegedly nominated as one of the knights of the Royal Oak, although this is uncertain.30C231/7, p. 40; Al. Cant.; Burke’s Commoners, i. 689. Although Sir Thomas sat in the Convention, Thomas did not return to national politics, and little is known of his activities during the 1660s. He drew up his will in June 1668, ‘being very sick and weak in body’, and stipulated that his lands were to be sold to provide an inheritance for his younger son and a marriage portion for his eldest daughter. His second daughter was to receive a bond for money owed by his brother-in-law, John Brownell, and the youngest daughters were to be farmed out to relatives ‘for that I was disappointed in raising of moneys for their portions’. Dacres had died by September of the same year, and his father survived him by only three months, leaving Thomas’s eldest son, Robert Dacres, to succeed to the family estates.31PROB11/328/48. Neither Robert nor his brothers sat in Parliament.