WHITE, Thomas (c.1630-70), of Wells, Som.

When he was elected as MP in 1659, Thomas White, a barrister probably still only in his twenties, was one of the rising stars of Wells civic politics. Although he had been born and brought up at West Lavington in Wiltshire, his family quite possibly had connections with Wells dating back several generations. Daniel White of London, who died in 1602-3, may well have been the MP’s grandfather; if so, he left lands at Shepton Mallet, only a few miles from Wells, to his younger son, Daniel, who would thus have been Thomas’s father.13Brown, Abstracts of Som. Wills, i. 31. Rather more speculatively, it has also been suggested that they might have been related to Edmund White, a barber surgeon in Wells who had a troubled relationship with the city’s corporation in the early years of the seventeenth century.14‘Thomas White’, HP Commons 1660-1690; Wells Convocation Acts Bks. ii. 1021. Thomas’s father later moved to Wichenford in Worcestershire.15PROB11/292/720.

Thomas White had trained as a lawyer, attending the Inner Temple in London from 1648 and being called to the bar in 1654.16I. Temple database; CITR ii. 313. He probably then settled in Wells with a view to building up a local legal practice. One line of work available to him was appearing as an attorney before the Somerset assizes.17Som. Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, p. xxii. In 1656 he married into the local gentry by taking as his wife one of the Bulls of Shapwick.18Jewers, Wells Cathedral, 49. At about the same time, the recorder of Wells, Christopher Doddington, died and, although White had only recently qualified as a barrister, the Wells corporation appointed him as Doddington’s successor.19Wells Convocation Acts Bks. ii. 1021. The rather more obvious candidate would have been Lislebone Long*, the city’s former MP who had gone on to become the recorder of London. Perhaps Long was consulted over the appointment and it is conceivable that he recommended White, although, as Long was a Lincoln’s Inn man, a formal professional link between the two seems unlikely. One major consequence of White’s appointment was that three years later the corporation paired him with Long to become their MPs in the 1659 Parliament. All references in the Journal and in the diary of Thomas Burton* referring to ‘Colonel White’ in that Parliament clearly relate to William White*. Given this, nothing is known about Thomas White’s activities at Westminster. White served again as the Wells MP in 1660, when he was elected with his brother-in-law, Henry Bull†.

Doubtless because he was an MP, in the immediate aftermath of the Restoration White was appointed to some of the county offices – in 1660 he became a justice of the peace, a commissioner for sewers and an assessment commissioner.20SR. This was not to last. In 1662 the commissioners appointed to enforce the Corporation Act removed him from office as recorder of Wells. He was then either removed from or not re-appointed to his other public offices and he was unable to resume any sort of public career before his early death in 1670.21C231/7, p. 162. He seems instead to have used his legal knowledge to act in various property transactions on behalf of clients.22Som. RO, DD/FS/48/5/2-3. By the time of his death his own holdings in and around Wells had grown.23PROB11/334/542. Some were properties leased from the corporation; others from the cathedral chapter.24Wells Convocation Acts Bks. ii. 887, 895; Wells Cathedral Chapter Act Bk. ed. Bailey, 7. His principal residence was probably a house within the precincts of the cathedral, which had previously been occupied by Arthur Ducke* and which had been sub-let to White in the years after 1661 by Ducke’s nephew. White’s widow, Jane, lived there until her own death over half a century later.25D.S. Bailey, The Canonical Houses of Wells (Gloucester, 1982), 57.