THOMAS, Esay (1598-1657), of Bishop’s Castle, Salop.

The forename Esay is the Welsh equivalent of Isaiah, and it is reasonable to suppose that Esay Thomas’s family was of Welsh descent. They lived near the Welsh border, in an area where Welsh was spoken by many of the people, and in 1629, Thomas bought lands in Montgomery, an illustration of the fluidity of borders and cultural identity.8R. More, A True Relation (1641), 27; Salop Archives, 2589/I/14; The Welsh Language before the Industrial Revolution ed. G.H. Jenkins (Cardiff, 1997), 19. He also had a connection with the powerful Herbert family, describing Margaret Herbert, wife of Mathew Herbert of Dolguog, as his ‘dear aunt’.9Herbert Corresp. 120. But his immediate forebears were prominent burgesses of Bishop’s Castle. John Thomas, Esay’s grandfather, was sworn a burgess in 1563, was bailiff when the new charter was granted a decade later, and with his own father was among the first members of the corporation to be sworn under its terms.10Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. ff. 2, 7. Esay’s father, Edward, in turn became a head burgess upon the death of his father in 1593, and enjoyed a distinguished civic career: three times bailiff (the equivalent of mayor) and from 1623 until his death in 1632, town clerk.11Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. ff. 8v, 16v, 17v, 19, 130v, 178v. Edward Thomas had at least ten children, of whom at least six died in childhood or as young adults, and by the time the last of these burials was recorded, he was accorded the dignity of the prefix ‘Mr’ in the register.12Bishop’s Castle par. reg. There was no family more involved in the government of the town than the Thomases, and so it was unsurprising that Esay, probably the sixth son but seventh child of Edward Thomas, continued in this dynastic tradition. He was more than likely educated in Bishop’s Castle, where there was a school, and he became a mercer by trade.13More, A True Relation, 16; Salop Archives, 2589/I/14. In 1631 he was the third highest rated in the borough in a collection to help relieve plague in Shrewsbury.14Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk., reverse of vol., f. 30.

Esay Thomas followed the usual civic cursus honorum, rising through the ranks of the burgesses to become bailiff in 1629. During his time as bailiff, he took the charter to Ludlow, submitting to arbitration in a case between the corporation and the lord of Bishop’s Castle manor, Sir Robert Howard*. At issue were the fines and amercements on ‘foreign’ or country burgesses, claimed by both parties. The country burgesses were summoned to the town to declare whether they wished to be sworn as full burgesses or discharged.15Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. f. 172. Once he was succeeded as bailiff, Thomas became a justice and a rater of the borough, serving with two notable puritans, Richard More* of Linley and Humphrey Walcot, in this latter role. It was later declared by a minister that More, Walcot and Sir Robert Harley* were ‘the triangles’ of godliness and good government in that district of south-west Shropshire and north-west Herefordshire.16Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. f. 174; T. Froysell, The Beloved Disciple (1658), 120. Thomas’s own inclinations may have been towards Calvinist godly Protestantism. In 1633, the region was convulsed in the wake of a notorious axe-murder within a family of Clun, near Bishop’s Castle. A motive attributed to the perpetrator, Enoch ap Evan, was a nonconformist’s hatred of the kneeling at communion, which he observed in his victims, who happened to be his nearest relatives. Peter Studley, an Arminian vicar in Shrewsbury, wrote up the case as demonstrating not only the evil of schism in the church, but also the lurid consequences of departing from religious orthodoxy. His book provoked Richard More to take up his pen to defend his neighbours against the slur that they were puritans; Esay Thomas was among those who lent his name to refutations of Studley’s account. Recent commentators have been persuaded that More and his sympathisers protested too much: in his fleeting appearance in print, Thomas was certainly part of a group that included the eminent puritan ministers Samuel Hildersham and George Lawson, together with Humphrey Walcot.17P. Studley, The Looking-glass of Schism (2nd ed. 1635); More, A True Relation, 132; ‘Enoch ap Evan’, ‘Samuel Hildersham’, ‘George Lawson’, ‘Humphrey Walcot’, Oxford DNB; P. Lake, ‘Puritanism, Arminianism and a Shropshire Axe-murder’, Midland Hist. xv. 37-64.

Thomas succeeded to the town clerkship in 1632 on the death of his father, his predecessor in office.18Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. f. 178v. Edward Thomas’s vacant place among the head burgesses was taken by Richard More, a further suggestion that there was a puritan caucus in the corporation. This was the start of More’s progression to be selected as burgess for the borough in the first and second Parliaments of 1640. With his fellow-burgesses, Thomas signed the order recording the election in March, but seems to have confined himself only to drafting the record in that of October.19Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. ff. 197v, 199v. At the outbreak of civil war, he must have shared the anxiety among the townspeople that led to orders in support of an association to guard against plundering by the troops visiting Shropshire in the armies of king and Parliament, but Thomas seems never to have left the town in order to play a more active part in the conflict.20Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. ff. 202v, 203. Against a background of repeated measures for the defence of the town against marauding outsiders, Thomas is prominent in the borough order book, in March 1644 in support of a new rating system, for example, and in April 1645 putting in place a fresh regime of watches and wards.21Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. ff. 205v, 207v. Thomas was also able to use his wider influence to preserve his private property against the local royalists. In February 1645 he wrote to his cousin, Francis Herbert of Dolguog, expressing concern at plundering in the locality, and reminding him that he enjoyed ‘protections at large, both from the king and Prince Rupert, for his person and estate of every kind’.22Herbert Corresp. 120.

Thomas took the second seat at the recruiter election of February 1646.23Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. f. 208v. There had developed a tradition of returning a prominent gentry figure for the first seat, and a man closer to the common council for the second. John Corbett* was perhaps not as socially eminent a gentleman as his predecessors, but Thomas perfectly accorded with the norm. His record in Parliament was fitful. He first came to the attention of the clerks in September, seven months after his election, and then it was only to record the granting to him of leave of absence.24CJ iv. 671b. In December he was cited by Lord Herbert of Chirbury in his rebuttle of accusations that he had remained an active royalist after his submission to Parliament, in which Herbert protested that his houses and estates had been destroyed during the wars, adding that Thomas, ‘a Member and his next neighbour’, could attest to his reduced circumstances. Thomas was also listed as one of the MPs likely to assist Herbert of Chirbury’s case in Goldsmiths’ Hall.25Herbert Corresp. 122-4. Thomas was in the House in February 1647, when he was named to the committee to examine the case of Edward Vaughan, recently returned for Montgomeryshire. This was in response to information brought before the Commons by Sir Thomas Myddelton*, who had taken Montgomery, not far from Bishop’s Castle, in 1644. A month later (24 Mar.), Thomas was involved in the political reverberations at Westminster from the dispute in Warwickshire between the county committee and the soldiers in Coventry, probably simply because he was a burgess for a west midlands’ town. It is hard to see what interest he would have had in the petition from Newcastle-upon-Tyne, another committee appointment (in April), and he was not the Mr Thomas who helped draft a letter to Major-general Rowland Laugharne† in June, to try to help the beleaguered parliamentary cause in Glamorgan: this was probably Edmund Thomas*.26CJ iv. 90a, 122b, 134a, 222b.

Thomas was noted as absent from the Commons in October 1647. He had been given permission to return to Bishop’s Castle, where that autumn he put his hand to various decisions of the corporation, and witnessed the election of Samuel More* as bailiff for the succeeding year.27CJ iv. 306b, 330a; Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. ff. 211, 211v. On 23 December, he was asked to visit Shropshire to bring in the arrears of the assessments, but he was still in Bishop’s Castle the following September it may have been nearly a year before he returned to Westminster. On 18 October 1648, the House accepted the excuse he had offered them for his absence; the previous month, the time he had spent away from the Commons had been noted but not excused, and a fine of £20 imposed.28CJ vi. 34a, 55a; Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. f. 213. There is no doubt that Thomas’s sympathies lay with the Presbyterian faction in the House; his earlier associations with conservative puritan figures such as Richard More, not to mention his upbringing in the Calvinist milieu of south Shropshire, the natural environment of figures like Sir Robert Harley*, must have inclined him in that direction, as did his closer affinity to the borough than to the Parliament.

In August 1648, Thomas was appointed by Edward, Lord Herbert of Chirbury, as an executor of his will. Herbert misremembered Thomas’s forename as Evan, a mistake that was perpetuated by the clerk who in October the same year recorded the subsequent grant of probate.29PROB11/205/405. Only the papers of Herbert’s grandson, another executor, help correct the error by revealing Esay Thomas to have been the third executor, after Edward Herbert and John Selden*.30NLW, Powis Castle Deeds (2), 11159-80. The trio were important figures in Herbert of Chirbury’s life. In his grandson, the peer acknowledged his ultimate heir; in Selden, he had selected one of the most noted lawyers of the age, and in Thomas, a serving Member of Parliament with business interests in the town of Montgomery, a Herbert stronghold, a friend and neighbour who had aided him in 1646, and (albeit distantly) a cousin through the Herberts of Dolguog. Neither Lord Herbert’s unorthodox religious views, tending to deism, nor his tepid royalist sympathies in the civil war, need be imputed to Esay Thomas, but it is surely significant that in his last testament Herbert described Thomas as one of his ‘very loving friends’.31‘Edward Herbert’, Oxford DNB; Herbert Corresp. 120, 122-3.

Herbert’s will was proved in London early in October, when Thomas is known to have been in town. On 24 October 1648, he was named to his first committee for eighteen months, on compensation for one of the puritans persecuted alongside William Prynne* by Charles I, John Bastwick, and on 22 November, to a committee that was to prove his final involvement in the working life of the House. This was a committee on the management of the army, and Thomas served with Presbyterians such as John Birch, Thomas Gewen, Prynne and Edward Massie.32CJ vi. 60a, 83b. Even before this marked him as hostile to the interests of the New Model, he was probably associated with the conservatives. In this respect, he stood in sharp contrast to his fellow burgess, John Corbett, whose name did not appear in any of the recorded pronouncements of the Bishop’s Castle corporation, but who from his first appearance in the Commons had sided with the Independents. On 6 December, Thomas was secluded from the House by the army, and the following day, with others, signed a letter of protest to the Speaker to complain of his treatment.33A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); CJ vi. 94b. He never returned to Parliament.

Thomas’s seclusion was not a prelude to any complete withdrawal from public life on his part. He was bailiff of his town during the difficult year of the regicide, 1649-50, and put his own hand to an order of 30 September 1650, which acknowledged his work in securing a quietus out of exchequer on the borough’s behalf. In recompense for his personal outlay, the grateful burgesses awarded him the exchequer fines of the green wax due in future to the corporation.34Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. ff. 217v, 219v. Further periods of borough office have been attributed to Thomas: the chamberlainship in 1655 and what would have been a third term as bailiff, in 1657, but it is clear from the order book that this was service by another of the same name.35Salop Arch. Soc. Trans. ser. 2, x. 47; Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. f. 223. Thomas died in 1657, and was probably buried in Bishop’s Castle, but the parish register is deficient for the period of the interregnum, and his interment is not recorded. He left no will, and no letters of administration appear to have been granted. His place among the head burgesses was taken by Richard More†, son of Samuel More* and grandson of the Richard More who had enlisted Thomas’s help in vindicating the south Shopshire puritans.36Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk f. 223.