KING, Thomas (d.1688), of Harwich, Essex, and London

In 1662, when he wrote to the 1st earl of Clarendon (Edward Hyde*) with his proposal for a royal-sponsored fishing company, Thomas King was at pains to stress that he was not the brother of Colonel Edward King†, nor Captain John King, the former commander of the Harwich garrison, nor the Mr King who worked for the excise.12CCSP v. 217, 219. Establishing who he was is more difficult. King first surfaces at Great Yarmouth in 1647 when he married the daughter of a local alderman and was admitted as a freeman of the town, possibly sponsored by Edward Owner*, the town’s MP and current bailiff.13Cal. of the Freemen of Gt. Yarmouth, 78. Perhaps his grandfather was Thomas King, the religious radical who had resigned as town clerk of Norwich in 1638 in order to seek sanctuary at Rotterdam, but returned to settle at Great Yarmouth shortly before his death in 1642. This man’s heir was his eldest grandson, also called Thomas (son of his predeceased eldest son of the same name), while his younger son Henry King* was an MP for Norfolk in the Nominated Parliament.14Vis. Norf. 1664 (Norf. Rec. Soc. iv.-v.), 115; An Index to Norwich City Officers 1453-1835 ed. T. Hawes (Norf. Rec. Soc. lii), 92; Transcript of Three Regs. of Passengers from Gt. Yarmouth ed. C.B. Jewson (Norf. Rec. Soc. xxv), 83 and n.; C.B. Jewson, ‘The English church at Rotterdam and its Norf. connections’, Norf. Arch. xxx. 334. For some years following our MP’s marriage in 1647, a Thomas King and his wife, Mary, presented their children to be baptised in the Independent church at Great Yarmouth, a church of which Thomas King senior is known to have been a member.15‘Baptisms and some deaths recorded in the Gt. Yarmouth Independent Church bk.’, ed. A.S. Brown, in Misc. (Norf. Rec. Soc. xxii), 11, 15, 17, 19, 22. However, none of the children can be identified with the MP’s known offspring. Indeed, there is evidence that the MP soon settled in Harwich, and it may have been there that his family origins actually lie – King was a common Harwich surname and a Thomas King had been one of the town’s inhabitants who had petitioned the privy council in 1625 asking that it be fortified.16Maynard Lieut. Bk. 111-12.

King’s commercial career seems from the outset to have centred on the shipping of goods in and out of the East Anglian ports. He would later tell Clarendon that he had sent supplies to the prince of Wales’s fleet when it lay off Great Yarmouth between July and September 1648, claiming that the groom of the bedchamber, Edward Progers†, could verify this.17CCSP v. 217. If true, King nevertheless had no scruples about supplying the parliamentarian fleets as well. From as early as the summer of 1649 it appears that King was regularly shipping provisions out to naval ships stationed off the East Anglian coast.18CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 223, 280, 298, 383, 408. By April 1650 the council of state informed the navy commissioners that, although based at Great Yarmouth, King preferred to supply the navy from Harwich; King soon duly moved his operations to the more southerly port.19CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 79, 82, 478. This was the beginning of his association with the town which he would twice represent in Parliament.

Over the next two years King supplied the navy regularly from his base at Harwich with provisions, including biscuit, fish and tallow.20CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 495, 498, 603, 604, 608; 1651, pp. 84, 547, 557, 564; 1651-2, p. 517. It is not clear if this continued after 1651. He had other commercial avenues to pursue (in 1653 he was involved in a court case concerning a consignment of salt) and it was no doubt for business reasons that he travelled to Holland in the summer of 1655.21Harwich bor. recs. 89/2, 89/4-5; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 589. At some stage King seems to have built a house and warehouse at Harwich which was requisitioned when the navy expanded its presence in the town during the late 1650s.22CTB i. 368-9; VCH Essex, ii. 286-7; E367/2827. It is likely that his naval contracts helped King prosper during the 1650s and that by the end of that decade he had established himself as one of the leading citizens of his adopted home town.

In choosing King to be their representative in the 1659 Parliament, the corporation of Harwich no doubt expected that he would help defend their commercial interests at Westminster. This may indirectly explain his nomination (albeit the last-named among many) to the committee on Scottish affairs (1 Apr. 1659), Harwich being one of the more important ports on the east coast route to Scotland.23CJ vii. 623b. His only other committee appointment was of more minor significance, being to decide where the records of the various committees occupying Worcester House should be moved to after the building was returned to the dowager countess of Worcester (14 Apr.).24CJ vii. 639a.

The superior connections of Capel Luckyn* and Henry Wright† probably dissuaded King from standing again for the Harwich seat in 1660. He was luckier in 1661 when his partner in 1659, John Sicklemor*, was elected at Ipswich and Luckyn declined to stand for re-election. This time, King was rather more conspicuous at Westminster, using the early sessions of the Cavalier Parliament to good effect in promoting his scheme to increase the efficiency of the fishing industry by creating a joint-stock company which would operate its own fishing fleet.25CCSP v. 217, 219, 234; CTB i. 338. This eventually took shape as the Royal Fishery Company, under the chairmanship of the 5th earl of Pembroke (Philip Herbert*). The identification by Samuel Pepys† in 1664 of financial irregularities in the sums of money passing through the hands of King or Pembroke may have damaged King’s standing with the Company, but seems not to have stood in the way of his subsequent friendship with Pepys.26J.R. Elder, The Royal Fishery Companies of the Seventeenth Cent. (Glasgow, 1912), 103-4; Pepys’s Diary, v. 293-4, 304; viii. 523; ix. 474. Meanwhile King continued to operate his shipping business – in 1663 he was importing sugar from Hamburg – although he seems not to have prospered.27CTB i. 517. By the early 1670s his willingness to vote with the government was reinforced by appointment to an honorific court office to help evade his creditors and later by the grant of a regular royal pension to alleviate his financial difficulties.28Carlisle, Privy Chamber, 188; Secret Services, ed. Akerman, 11-207; Eg. 3338, ff. 82, 103. Although it may be unfair to suggest that he had no political principles whatsoever, much of King’s parliamentary service was in some way linked to his business interests. The ultimate effectiveness of this activity must be doubted, as the absence of a will suggests that by the time he died during the third quarter of 1688 he was effectively bankrupt. His eldest son, Thomas King† junior, a professional soldier who rose to become a lieutenant-general in the Guards, sat for Queenborough in nine of the Parliaments between 1696 and 1722, while another son, John, went on to become master of the Charterhouse in London.29Alumni Carthusiani ed. B. Marsh and F.A. Crisp (1913), 39; HP Commons 1690-1715.