THOROWGOOD (THOROUGHGOOD), Sir John (1594-1675), of Kensington, Mdx. and Chivers Hall, High Ongar, Essex.

Sir John Thorowgood has been called ‘one of the forgotten worthies of the seventeenth century’.29Aylmer, State’s Servants, 267. His forebears had lived in Hertfordshire and one of them, Nicholas Thurgood, had been granted a 40-year lease of the manor of Temple Chelsin at Bengeo by the hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem in 1524.30Vis. Herts. 1572 and 1634 (Harl. Soc. xxii.), 117-18; VCH Herts. iii. 425. A branch of the family continued to reside there, but this MP’s grandfather, John, a second son, crossed the border into Essex and settled at Felstead. Thorowgood’s father, William, a clergyman, was presented to the living of Grimston, some six miles east of King’s Lynn, by Sir Henry Bedingfield† in 1585 and two years later he became the commissary of Norfolk.31Registrum Vagum of Anthony Harison, ed. T.F. Barton (Norf. Rec. Soc. xxxii-xxxiii.), 32, 65, 88, 194, 301. Thorowgood’s date of birth can be determined by his own statement that 1 May 1664 was ‘the day of my nativity’ and that he was then in ‘the seventieth year of my age’.32Thorowgood, King of Terrors Silenced, 160. His younger brothers included Thomas, who became rector of Grimston on their father’s death in 1625.33B. Cozens-Hardy, ‘A puritan moderate. Dr. Thomas Thorowgood’, Norf. Arch. xxii. 311-37. Another brother, Adam, emigrated to Virginia.34Vis. Mdx. 1663, 35.

Nothing is known of Thorowgood’s early adulthood. As the younger son of a clergyman, he inherited little from his father. Yet by his thirties Thorowgood seems to have acquired some wealth through an advantageous marriage. His wife, Frances, was the sister of Thomas Meautys*, one of the clerks of the privy council.35St Clement Danes par. reg.; Vis. Essex 1552, 1558, 1570, 1612 and 1634, i. 247. This led almost immediately to his first court appointment as a member of the band of gentlemen pensioners.36Badminton, Beaufort archives, Fm H2/4/1, f. 17; Vis. Mdx. 1663, 34. In that capacity, he travelled to Edinburgh with the king for his Scottish coronation in 1633 and he was one of the 17 gentlemen pensioners knighted by Charles at Innerwick on 16 July during that trip.37Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 201. The following year he also became a gentleman in extraordinary of the privy chamber.38LC5/134, p. 10; LC3/1, unf. He was not, however, among the royal servants who accompanied the king on campaign against the Scottish Covenanters in 1639.39SP16/427, no. 38 VII.

Marriage and his court positions encouraged him to acquire a substantial residence to the west of London. From 1635 he leased a house on the south side of Kensington High Street on land that would later be developed as Kensington Square.40Survey of London, xlii. 5. Lady Thorowgood’s widowed mother, Elizabeth Meautys, was living with them there when she died in 1641.41Par. Reg. of Kensington, ed. F.N. MacNamara and A. Story-Maskelyne (Harl. Soc. xvi.), 116. Confusingly, Sir John had a distant relative, Sir John Thorowgood† of Billingbear and Clerkenwell. Contemporaries therefore tended to refer to the 1656 MP as ‘Sir John Thorowgood of Kensington’.

The existence of that namesake complicates evidence for this MP’s activities during the early stages of the civil war. On 1 August 1642 the Commons gave permission for ‘Sir John Thoroughgood’ to travel to York, presumably in order to attend on the king.42CJ ii. 699a. This was more probably the future MP. Less clear is which of them was given permission by Parliament in April 1643 to travel abroad for ‘the recovery of his health’.43CJ iii. 64b. If this was Sir John of Kensington, his absence abroad was probably only temporary. Following the death later that year of Elizabeth, Viscountess Campden, widow of 1st Viscount Campden (Sir Baptist Hicks†), Thorowgood headed the list of feoffees appointed under the terms of her will to manage her charitable bequests for the poor of Kensington. One tradition, most likely spurious, is that Oliver Cromwell* was one of their early donors.44Faulkner. Kensington, 322-3. On Christmas Day 1644 Thorowgood’s brother, Thomas, who was one of the Norfolk representatives in the Westminster Assembly, preached before the House of Commons.45CJ iii. 707a, iv. 1a; T. Thorowgood, Moderation Justified (1645, E.23.6).

Thorowgood had briefly served as an assessment commissioner for Middlesex in 1642 before the war had begun.46SR. However, he was not reappointed to that commission until many years later. Moreover, only as the war progressed did Parliament begin to appoint him to other local offices. He was named as a militia commissioner for Middlesex in October 1644 and was added to the commission of the peace a year later.47A. and O.; C231/6, p. 26. His next public appointment, although arising from his earlier career at court, indicated that Parliament had some faith in his loyalty. On 12 January 1647 he was one of the nine former royal servants nominated by Parliament to attend on the king during his journey from Newcastle-upon-Tyne to Holdenby House three weeks later.48CJ v. 50b; HMC 4th Rep. 274. In July 1648, at the height of the second civil war, Thorowgood was involved in the capture of some royalist plotters at Kensington.49CSP Dom. 1648-9, pp. 162, 185, 186.

Thorowgood played an even greater public role under the Rump than he had previously. On 3 February 1649 Parliament passed an Act creating a high court of justice to try the leaders of the royalist uprising the previous summer.50CJ vi. 131a. A bill passed on 9 February added eight additional names, including Thorowgood’s, to the list of commissioners to hear those cases.51CJ vi. 132a, 136b. Sir John was later said to have been among those who sat in judgement on Lord Capell (Arthur Capell*).52Whitelocke, Diary, 610. In 1650 and 1655 he was also one of the commissioners through whom the arrears due to the court’s officials were paid.53CSP Dom. 1651-2, pp. 84, 199; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 218. He was equally active at a local level. In 1649 he helped carry out the parliamentary survey of the Kensington vicarage and he now began to be more visible as a Middlesex justice of the peace.54Faulkner, Kensington, 199; Mdx. Co. Recs. ed. J.C. Jeaffreson (1886-92), iii. 196.

His most important role during these years, however, was as one of the original trustees for the maintenance of ministers. Created in June 1649, this trust was tasked with using the revenues from the former dean and chapter lands to supplement the incomes of poor clergymen and schoolmasters. Other trustees included William Steele*, Henry Danvers* and George Cooper*.55A. and O. Matters related to the work of the trustees would be one of the recurring themes of Thorowgood’s activities in the 1656 Parliament.

By the summer of 1654 Thorowgood was part of the group of former royal servants led by Michael Oldisworth* who were lobbying for an investigation into the accounts of the trustees for the sale of the late king’s goods, a matter in which they had a vested interest as the proceeds from that sale had been allocated to the payment of the servants’ arrears.56SP18/73, f. 81. In Thorowgood’s case, this had an immediate effect, as the council of state quickly ordered that he was to be paid £240 for his arrears. They also promised that Parliament would be asked to find a job for him.57CSP Dom. 1654, pp. 275, 276.

Thorowgood’s record of faithful public service may have encouraged him to write in March 1653 to Sir Henry Vane II*, one of the admiralty commissioners, seeking a naval position for one of his relatives, a veteran of the parliamentarian army.58CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 549. When in May 1656 Charles Fleetwood* wrote to Henry Cromwell* proposing one of Thorowgood’s Meautys nephews for a military position in Jamaica, he mentioned the connection with Thorowgood, clearly regarding this as an additional recommendation.59Henry Cromwell Corresp. 129. Others thought him worth cultivating. In 1654 the medical writer, Robert Turner, dedicated his guide to medicine and astrology, Mikrokosmographa (or Mikrokosmos), to Lady Thorowgood.60R. T[urner], Mikrokosmographa (1654), sig. A3; R. Turner, Mikrokosmos (1654), sig. A3.

Thorowgood was elected for King’s Lynn where he had been a freeman of the borough since 1645, at a by-election on 19 December 1656 to fill the vacancy created when John Disbrowe* chose to sit for Somerset.61King’s Lynn Borough Archives, KL/C7/10, f. 505; HMC 11th Rep. iii. 183. One of two candidates, he undoubtedly owed his success to the influence of his younger half-brother, Robert, who was the mayor.62Vis. Mdx. 1663, 35. He took his seat in Parliament on 5 January 1657.63Burton’s Diary, i. 299.

The next day Thorowgood was added to the committee on alehouses, labourers and county registers.64CJ vii. 479b; Burton’s Diary, i. 308. However, it took him a couple of months to leave a mark in the records. By then, the major issue under discussion in Parliament was the Remonstrance that would become the Humble Petition and Advice. On 12 March Thorowgood was included on the committee to consider the judicial powers of the proposed Other House.65CJ vii. 502a. Then, on 18 March, after it had been agreed that the Remonstrance should call on the lord protector and Parliament to compile a statement of religious principles, Thorowgood acted as teller for those who wanted this ‘confession of faith’ to be specifically ‘recommended’ to the people.66CJ vii. 507a. The next day he was named to the committee to prepare an additional clause to allow ministers who accepted the confession but who had scruples over ‘discipline and worship’ to receive public maintenance.67CJ vii. 507b. On 20 March he was appointed to the committee to consider what the Remonstrance should say about former royalists.68CJ vii. 508b. After Cromwell’s first rejection of the Humble Petition and Advice, Thorowgood was appointed to the committee on 6 April to draw up a statement of the reasons why Parliament felt bound to adhere to it.69CJ vii. 520b.

He must have performed the duties of teller in the division on 18 March competently, for this was the first of seven occasions during this Parliament when he discharged that role. The next was on 29 April, when he and Denis Bond* were the tellers against agreeing with the recommendation of the committee confirming past legislation that the Civil Marriages Act should be continued for only six months.70CJ vii. 526b. The following day he made his first recorded speech, when the House debated whether to declare that there was no need to confirm the legislation passed by the Long Parliament as that legislation had been inherently valid. Thorowgood was not so sure. He warned that without such confirmation, the actions of those who, like himself, had acted as commissioners for the high court of justice might be called into question. He therefore wanted explicit confirmation.71Burton’s Diary, ii. 91. Two days later he also spoke in the debate on the bill to settle Worcester House on Margaret Somerset, countess or marchioness of Worcester. Two months earlier he had been named to the committee on the petition from the countess.72CJ vii. 504a. Now he was one of several MPs who hoped that the building could still be used by the various official committees that had been occupying it.73Burton’s Diary, ii, 102. He was then named to the committee to which this bill was committed.74CJ vii. 529b. He was also included on the committee on the bill to restrict building around London (8 May).75CJ vii. 531b.

The fate of the Humble Petition was then still unresolved. Faced with Cromwell’s refusal to take the title of king, Parliament accepted on 19 May that it would instead have to refer to him only as lord protector. Thorowgood was then among those MPs appointed as a committee to decide how his authority as such ought to be defined.76CJ vii. 535a. Once the necessary revisions had been made, a committee of which Thorowgood was a member, waited on Cromwell to set a time for them to re-present the Humble Petition.77CJ vii. 538b. Cromwell accepted the revised Petition on 25 May. Two days later Thorowgood was named to the committee created to discuss what further measures might be required.78CJ vii. 540b.

During the debate on the bill against popish recusants on 29 May, Thorowgood raised the case of a number of Catholics who had recently been prosecuted by John Barkstead* at the Middlesex assizes but who had been acquitted by the jury. As he believed that the number of Catholics ‘increase daily’ and were ‘still contriving mischief against you’, Thorowgood judged that the proposed oath against transubstantiation was the only sure way of securing the necessary convictions.79Burton’s Diary, ii. 152. He was named to the committee on that bill the following week.80CJ vii. 543b. On 9 June he and Lambarde Godfrey* ‘made a very earnest motion’ to send up the catechizing bill for the protector’s assent at the end of the session. ‘They despaired of ever doing anything upon it after this, and hoped that such a bill as this, which was worth them all, should not stop’.81Burton’s Diary, ii. 203. The motion came to a division in which Thorowgood acted as teller in the majority.82CJ vii. 551b.

On 17 June Thorowgood was second on the list of those MPs named to the committee on the bill to punish immoderate living.83CJ vii. 559b. That same day, in the debate on the bill to protect incumbents of sequestered parsonages, he acted as teller against including any income received by the wife of such a minister in calculating eligibility for charitable relief.84CJ vii. 560a. Meanwhile, the outcome of the discussions about measures supplementary to the Humble Petition had been the drafting of the Additional Humble Petition. On 24 June Thorowgood failed to persuade the House to amend its new oath for councillors to include something about ‘property and liberty’.85Burton’s Diary, ii. 290. He was equally unsuccessful later in that debate when he moved against putting the question that the words ‘without further approbation’ be added to the clause about nominations to the Other House.86Burton’s Diary, ii. 301. In other words, he probably hoped that the Commons would be allowed to veto those nominations. But the question was then put and the amendment accepted.87CJ vii. 573a. On the last day of the session, Thorowgood acted as the teller with Sir William Strickland against stipulating that Parliament should reassemble on 20 January 1658 in the adjournment bill. They lost that vote and so that date was fixed.88CJ vii. 575b.

While at Westminster, Thorowgood was able to assist the King’s Lynn corporation in a couple of matters of interest to it. Several of the former prebends of Norwich Cathedral claimed that the town still owed them unpaid rents. By April 1657 the corporation had raised this with Thorowgood, who recommended that they also employ an agent in London to counter those claims.89King’s Lynn Borough Archives, KL/C7/10, f. 516. In late May the corporation thanked Thorowgood for his efforts on their behalf in this.90King’s Lynn Borough Archives, KL/C7/10, f. 518v. That December they also asked him to make sure that the augmentation formerly granted to the stipend of the late Nicholas Toll (brother of Thomas Toll I*) as rector of St Nicholas’s, King’s Lynn, should be continued when they appointed his successor. At the same time, the corporation ordered plate to present as gift to Thorowgood and their other MP, Philip Skippon*.91King’s Lynn Borough Archives, KL/C7/10, unfol.

At the beginning of the second session in late January 1658, Thorowgood was one of those appointed by Cromwell to administer to their fellow MPs the oath of loyalty to the protector.92CJ vii. 578a. That task was not however straightforward. On 25 January Sir Arthur Hesilrige* presented himself at the bar of the Commons demanding to take the oaths, despite having been summoned to sit in the Other House. But Francis Bacon* and Thorowgood refused to administer them, with Thorowgood declaring that he would do so only after seeking guidance from the House. Some of the other commissioners were less fussy and swore in Hesilrige anyway.93Burton’s Diary, ii. 347.

Much of Thorowgood’s activity in this session can be explained by his position as a trustee for the maintenance of minister. On 21 January he supported the motion by the solicitor-general, William Ellys*, for a general bill on that subject, warning that the trustees no longer had the funds to meet their responsibilities.94Burton’s Diary, ii. 332. The result was that the former committee appointed to draft a bill for this was revived, with Thorowgood as one of its new members.95CJ vii. 580b. He was also named to the bill to unite the parishes in Huntingdon (26 Jan.), which had the aim of improving the financial support for the ministers serving them.96CJ vii. 588a. The two other committees on bills to which Thorowgood was named, both on 22 January, were those for the registration of births, marriages and deaths and against university non-residency.97CJ vii. 581a-b. He also acted as teller with Sir John Copleston* on 29 January in favour of considering the question of transacting with the Other House in a grand committee.98CJ vii. 589b; Burton’s Diary, ii. 394. By 3 February they had moved on to discuss what the Other House should be called. He then joined with Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper* in acting as teller for the minority in favour of also debating this in a grand committee.99CJ vii. 591b; Burton’s Diary, ii. 437. Thorowgood continued to work on behalf of King’s Lynn even after this Parliament had been dissolved. In the summer of 1658 he secured the continuation of the augmented stipend for Toll’s successor after William Falkner was appointed to the St. Nicholas’s living.100King’s Lynn Borough Archives, KL/C7/10, ff. 548, 555.

Thorowgood had proved himself as a loyal servant of first the commonwealth and then the protectorate. So in 1660 he had some reasons to be wary of the restored monarchy. Someone evidently wanted revenge against him, for in mid-July he was arrested. According to Bulstrode Whitelocke*, this was because of his role in the sentencing of Lord Capell in 1649.101Whitelocke, Diary, 610. But he had friends willing to support him. Francis Holles* submitted a written statement to the House of Lords explaining that Thorowgood had played a key role in the decision by Parliament in October 1650 to pardon Captain Henry Ashley after he had been convicted by the high court of justice.102HMC 7th Rep. 120; CJ vi. 480b. No further proceedings were taken against him and Sir John seems then to have been reappointed as one of the gentlemen of the privy chamber in extraordinary.103Vis. Mdx. 1663, 34.

In 1665, in anticipation of his death, Thorowgood published The King of Terrors Silenced, which he intended should be distributed at his funeral. Completed the previous year on his seventieth birthday, this was a collection of meditations and prayers on the themes of ill-health and death.104J. Thorowgood, The King of Terrors Silenced (1665). Thorowgood in fact had another ten years to live. On 12 November 1675 he drew up his will. In it he bequeathed £10 to be distributed in bread to the ‘most aged, indigent and best disposed people of Grimston and High Ongar’, as well as payments to the clergy of Kensington and High Ongar and £10 to the preacher of his funeral sermon. With no direct heir, Thorowgood made numerous bequests and annuities of over £1,000 to various members of his family. He died sometime before 4 December 1675 when his will was proved.105PROB11/349/301. He had asked to be buried at High Ongar next to his late wife, although there is no record of his burial in the parish registers.106Par. Regs. of Ongar, Essex (1886), 109-10.