BRISTOWE, Thomas (1620-80), of Elston and Beesthorpe Hall, Caunton, Notts.

Bristowe was able to trace his lineage back to his great-great-grandfather – the younger son of a Hertfordshire gentry family who had settled at Beesthorpe, near Newark-upon-Trent, by the mid-sixteenth century.20Notts. RO, DD/BB/1/2; Vis. Notts. 46-7; Vis. Herts. (Harl. Soc. xxii), 42. However, the grant of property in Maplebeck – the neighbouring village to Caunton – to one Ralph Bristow in 1450 suggests that the family’s association with the area had been of longer duration.21Nottingham Univ. Lib. Ne D 2342. Indeed, according to one source, the Bristows were of Norman descent and had once been seated in Surrey, Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire.22Thoroton, Notts. iii. 140, 142-3.

Little is known about Bristowe’s upbringing or education, and there is no evidence that he played an active part in the civil war. His marriage to a niece of one of the nation’s foremost puritans, the Lincolnshire parliamentarian grandee Sir William Armyne*, and his appointment in 1654 as an ejector for Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire suggest that he was a man of godly sympathies.23A. and O. ii. 969. However, there are signs that he had difficulty accommodating himself to the rule of the Rump. His name is absent from all local commissions between 1649 and 1653, and he refused to serve when appointed a sequestration commissioner for Nottinghamshire in 1652.24CCC 557, 564. On the other hand, he was an enthusiastic supporter of the rule of the major-generals. In 1655 and 1656, he was a signatory to letters from the Nottinghamshire commissioners for securing the peace of the commonwealth, defending the decimation tax as a thing ‘absolutely necessary’ and praising Major-general Edward Whalley* for his ‘singular justice, ability and piety’.25TSP iv. 156, 468-9.

Bristowe’s return for Nottinghamshire in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659 is also something of a puzzle. His estates were evidently not extensive – he was certainly not a county grandee. Indeed, he was not even a member of the Nottinghamshire commission of the peace. It can only be assumed that he was returned on the basis of his connection with Whalley, from whom – by 1661 at the latest – he leased part of his estate.26Notts. RO, DD.4P/22/318. He received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate.

Bristowe continued to be named to several of the region’s sewers commissions during the 1660s.27C181/7, pp. 22, 78, 280, 488; SR. But these appointments aside, he was an insignificant figure in county affairs during the Restoration period. He died in the autumn of 1680 and was buried at Elston on 10 November.28Elston par. reg. No will is recorded. He was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.