MORE, Thomas (1601-68), of Larden and Ludlow, Salop, and Bewdley, Worcs.

As a second son, Thomas More was overshadowed by his elder brother, but seems to have lived a more comfortable and much less troubled life than Samuel, beset as the latter was with matrimonial turmoil and civil war trauma. Indeed, Thomas More benefited more straightforwardly from the marriage settlement of October 1610 which brought together Samuel and Katherine More of Larden for their disastrous marriage: he and his younger brothers were each allowed accommodation at Larden or a pension of £40 a year.7Salop Archives, 1037/10/3. Thomas More’s own first marriage, in 1629, was soon ended, but by death rather than divorce. His bride was the daughter of a prominent antiquary, Sir Henry Spelman†. Spelman’s estate at Congham, Norfolk, was less important to him than the opportunities for antiquarian research afforded by the capital, to which he had removed by the time that Ann Spelman married More. Intellectual endeavour may well have been the link between these two geographically remote families, as More’s father, Richard*, was himself a noted independent scholar. The marriage consolidated Thomas More’s hold on Larden, which was put into the settlement against his wife’s modest portion of £400.8Salop Archives, 1037/10/16; Reliquiae Spelmannianae (Oxford, 1696), Life, sig. b2. No children were born of the marriage. Larden again figured in the settlement at More’s second marriage, to Margaret Lygon, daughter of Sir William Lygon† of Madresfield, Worcestershire, but theirs was a life tenancy, never a freehold.9Salop Archives 1037/2/50; 1037/10/20, 22.

There is nothing to suggest that More lived any life other than that of a comfortably-off country gentleman, even after the outbreak of civil war, in which he was slow to play any part. Only from 1644 did he find himself named to any parliamentarian commissions – he was never in the commission of the peace – and it is clear that he was in the 1640s, if not earlier, a kind of adjutant to his elder brother. On 19 February 1646, Samuel proposed his brother for one of the Bishop’s Castle seats, assuring the corporation that ‘wherever he is, he will serve you the best he can’, but the burgesses accepted only one of his nominations, that of John Corbett*.10Bishop’s Castle Town Hall, corporation order bk. f. 209. More proved more attractive to the electors of Ludlow, but Samuel More was a more immediate presence there than at Bishop’s Castle, as military governor.

More was slow to make any impact on the Commons. He was named to no committees until 31 December 1646, and is in any case difficult to disentangle from Thomas Moore of Heytesbury. It must have been he who was included in the committee to hear the evidence against the knight for Montgomeryshire, Edward Vaughan (17 Feb. 1647) and as a burgess for a provincial corporation is more likely to have been on the committee for the parliamentary representation of Newcastle-upon-Tyne (6 Apr.) than on the committee for the militia of London (2 Apr.).11CJ v. 35a, 90a, 134a, 329a. But he was certainly the ‘Mr Moore’ who on 19 July was allowed to return to Shropshire, along with Thomas Mackworth I*.12CJ v. 35a, 250a. On 9 October, one ‘Mr Thomas Moore’ was absent at a call of the House; another, hardly likely to have been the same one, was on the same day named to the committee to investigate Members’ absences.13CJ v. 329a, 330a. No further certain identification of his presence in the House can be made until 10 June 1648, when with other MPs of the Welsh marches, including Sir Robert Harley and Edward Harley, he was asked to investigate the forcing of the lodgings of Robert Charlton* while he was occupied in parliamentary business. He was in similar company, with Sir Robert Harley and another elderly figure from the same area, Humphrey Salwey, on the committee for abolishing deans and chapters (16 June).14CJ v. 593b, 602a. Like them he was at this stage in sympathy with conservative puritanism, and it was more likely he, not Samuel More’s 19-year old son, who in 1647 was named an elder in the sixth Shropshire classis.15Shaw, Hist. Eng. Church, ii. 411-2; Salop Par. Regs. More, 18; C. Condren, George Lawson’s Politica and the English Revolution (Cambridge, 1989), 19.

These activities in June 1648 may suggest a late burst of interest in parliamentary business on More’s part. Against the background of the abortive risings by royalists and fellow-travellers in 1648, sequestration again became a topic of great moment, especially when it would be necessary to enforce mass sequestration against the Welsh rebels. On 20 July More was named to a committee working on an ordinance for regulating estates under sequestration, and on 14 October to another body specifically concerned with sequestering north Wales royalists. Given this interest, it was probably he and not the Heytesbury man who on 25 November 1648 was included in the committee reviewing which garrisons to disband. He would doubtless have been apprised of the views of his brother Samuel, until a few months earlier himself a garrison governor.16CJ v. 641b; vi. 52a, 87a. By December 1648, after a slow start, More appeared to be making some contribution to parliamentary business, but nevertheless he was purged from the Commons by Pride’s soldiers on the 6th. His offence was almost certainly his strong association with the Harley interest. His brother had been identified by the army as a ‘creature’ of Sir Robert’s, but was not in the House; Thomas More was, and duly paid the penalty.17Clarke Pprs. ii. 159. The names of two men called ‘Thomas Moor’ figure in a somewhat unreliable list of secluded Members published in December 1648, the other being the Heytesbury MP. Neither man ever returned to the House after the purge.18A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62).

Unlike the Harleys, More proved willing to co-operate with the commonwealth government after the trial and execution of the king, albeit in a modest and local way. He continued to be named to commissions for the assessment throughout the Rump, but that was the extent of his involvement. In 1660 he was named in a pamphlet by a critic of Parliament as an ‘officer in the custom house’, by which was presumably meant the London custom house, but this probably rests on a misidentification by that author.19The Mystery of the Good Old Cause (1660), 20 (E.1923.2). There is no note of anyone with his name among the surviving sketchy records of the customs establishment; he is unlikely, either, to have been the excise commissioner named by an ordinance of 6 June 1645, as there is nothing to suggest that More had any interest in trade or public finance.20E351/658, 1296; A. and O. More seems rather to have stayed in Shropshire. We find him helping his brother Samuel in various property transactions, and he contributed his signature to the marriage settlement between Samuel’s son, Richard More†, and Bridget Penington, daughter of Isaac Penington*, which was to maintain a family tradition of bad luck in matrimony.21Salop Archives, 1037/6/121; 1037/8/7; 1037/10/23.

As the 1650s wore on, More had to leave Larden to make way for his brother’s children. He seems never to have entertained any ambitions to return to public life, and by the 1660s he and his wife had left his native area and moved to Bewdley, on the Severn and the Worcestershire-Shropshire border. He drew up his will in Bewdley in November 1666, leaving modest property to his younger brother and to the three sons of his brother Samuel by his second marriage. More also left £5 to Thomas Froysell, the minister who had supported Sir Robert Harley, Humphrey Walcot and More’s father in the glory days of Shropshire puritanism before 1649. He died in 1668, leaving goods valued at £334.22Salop Archives, 1037/10/43, 45; Bewdley Hist. Research Group, Bewdley in its Golden Age (Bewdley, 1991), 67. By the end of the 1670s his widow had moved to St Nicholas parish, Worcester, and she made her own will there in 1685, favouring her Lygon relatives. Thomas and Margaret More had no children.23Worcester Hearth Tax Collectors’ Book, 67; PROB11/384/76.