KNOLLYS, Thomas (c.1612-79), of Grove Place, Nursling, Hants

Although settled in Hampshire a century earlier, Knollys’s family became established in the local gentry community only in the lifetime of his father, Sir Henry Knollys, who was clerk of the green cloth and receiver of the first fruits and tenths.25Misc. Gen. et Herald. ii. 19-20; Vis. Hants and I.o.W. 46-7. As a younger son, Thomas Knollys pursued an academic career, becoming a fellow of Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he had been a student under John Francis, the only college fellow not removed by the parliamentary visitation of the 1640s.26Admiss. to Peterhouse ed. Walker, 37. Knollys was admitted to the Inner Temple in March 1636, but never called to the bar. By the terms of his father’s will, proved in 1638, he was to receive £1,200 to be ‘laid out in purchasing and obtaining of some office’, although this does not seem to have materialised. Most of Sir Henry’s estate, for whom the trustees and overseers included Sir William Uvedale*, Henry Jermyn*, and Sir John Mill*, was left to his widow Dame Katherine, who was to live for another 45 years.27PROB11/178/419; Hants RO, 23M58/154-5.

Thomas Knollys’s allegiance during the civil wars is unclear. His sister Philadelphia, a practising Catholic, married Mill’s son and namesake, who died fighting for the king.28Vis. Hants and I.o.W. 43; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 102; P. R. Newman, Royalist Officers (New York, 1981), 256; PROB11/206/14 (Sir John Mill). His elder brother Henry, also receiver of first fruits and tenths, was created baronet in May 1642, served as a royalist officer, and compounded for his delinquency in December 1645.29Coventry Docquets, 186; CB; CCC 1065. Proceedings were incomplete when in May 1648 Henry made his will, vesting in local executors the manor of Bowcombe (in which he had only a life interest) and other lands on the Isle of Wight which he had recently purchased, all mainly for the benefit of Margaret, wife of Sir George Stonhouse*. Following his death shortly afterwards, on 29 July Thomas, the heir by remainder to Bowcombe, obtained the administration of his estate over the heads of the executors, but did not succeed to the baronetcy, which lapsed owing to the circumstances of its creation.30PROB11/205/192; CB.

Only part of Sir Henry’s fine having been paid, Knollys then spent several years attempting to rescue his inheritance from sequestration. Negotiation was complicated by the terms of the will, by Sir Henry’s indebtedness (estimated by Thomas at £6,000), by the seemingly inconsistent actions by parliamentary commissioners on the Isle of Wight, and by the Catholicism of some of his family.31SP19/110, ff. 152, 167, 169; Hants. RO, 23M58/156; CCAM 758-9; CCC 1065; SP23/97, pp. 45-6. Notably, in 1651 his mother Dame Katherine, who held his (more substantial) prospective inheritance, was sequestered for recusancy.32CCC 530-2, 2875. Notwithstanding this, however, the family retained some social standing and political credibility. In July 1652 Knollys was added to the Hampshire bench, and in 1657 he was nominated as a commissioner for assessment.33A. and O. In or before May 1654 his sister Frances, widow of Sir Edward Manfield of Cliveden, married the financially-embarrassed but well-connected Charles Kerr*, Lord Kerr, a former Presbyterian MP with a taste for theological scholarship, who a few months later succeeded his father as 2nd earl of Ancram.34s.v. ‘Charles Kerr’.

On 24 December 1658 Knollys was made a burgess of Southampton, five miles from the family home at Grove Place, Nursling.35Southampton RO, SC3/1/1, f. 222v. This seems to have been simply the formal prelude to his election to the third protectorate Parliament as MP for a borough which traditionally chose representatives with local connections, and which a couple of years earlier had been reported to house a significant constituency hostile to the stance of its then sole MP, the regicide John Lisle*.36TSP iv. 764-5; v. 287. The return of Knollys might have been principally intended to keep out a candidate closer to the government. He made no recorded impression on the proceedings of the Commons, but acquitted himself sufficiently inoffensively to be restored to the commission of the peace on 23 April 1659.37C231/6, p. 431.

While not returned to Parliament again until a by-election in 1670 saw him once more Member for Southampton, after the Restoration Knollys was active in local administration.38Southampton RO, SC2/1/8, f. 113. Despite assistance from his brother-in-law, Sir John Duncombe†, a 1662 bill to enable Knollys to sell Bowcombe to help settle his brother’s debts, was unsuccessful.39LJ xi. 391b, 394a, 396a, 400b. Financial problems persisted, although the death of his mother in the winter of 1673-4 should have provided some alleviation.40CSP Dom. 1665-6, p. 481; Hants. RO, 2M31; PROB11/347/87. Once back at Westminster, Knollys was regarded as a court supporter, and even a creature of Lord Treasurer Danby. He held his seat at Southampton in the first Parliament of 1679, but played no part in the proceedings on the Exclusion bill, perhaps owing to illness.41HP Commons 1660-1690. He died in the early summer and was buried in Westminster Abbey on 3 June.42West. Abbey Reg. (Harl. Soc. x), 197. Since he also only had a life interest in much of the property descended from his father, his disposable estate appears to have been small. By the terms of his will, Grove Place and leases of adjoining lands from the dean and chapter of Windsor were to be sold, as were Oxfordshire leases from New College, Oxford. The chief agent in this – and the recipient of his ‘study of books’ – was his trustee, Dr John Speed, a former fellow of St John’s College, Oxford, who belonged to a dynasty of Southampton physicians. In 1680 Speed, later the town’s mayor, married Knollys’s favourite daughter Philadelphia.43PROB11/360/185; Hants. RO, 9M52/23; Biographical Reg. of St John’s College, Oxford ed. A. Hegarty (2011), 139. Meanwhile, Knollys’s heir was his only son Robert, whose son Henry Knollys* sat in Parliament for St Ives between 1722 and 1734.44VCH Hants. iii. 435-6; HP Commons 1715-1754.