BOONE, Thomas (c.1610-80), of Mount Boone, Townstall, Devon.

According to the eighteenth-century antiquary, Mark Noble, Thomas Boone claimed descent from the de Bohun family, hereditary constables of England and earls of Hereford between 1200 and 1373.20M. Noble, The Lives of the English Regicides (2 vols. 1798), i. 106; CP vi. 458. The more prosaic but substantiable history of his family is that he was the son of a Dartmouth butcher, who left movable property worth £210 when he died in 1638.21Som. Wills ed. M. Siraut (Som. Rec. Soc. lxxxix), 273; Dartmouth St Saviour par. reg.; Devon RO, Moger transcript of will of Henry Boone, archdeaconry of Totnes. Henry Boone was living in Dartmouth in 1592 and 1618, so the family was rooted there before the civil war.22Devon RO, DD 61943. He was substantial enough to leave bequests to the poor of the town and to own silver utensils. Henry Boone’s branch of the family was junior that of another, which had migrated from Nottingham to Somerset. From these Boones descended Christopher Boone, a London merchant whom Thomas Boone was at the end of his life to describe as his ‘worthy and intimate kinsman’.23London Vis. Pedigrees 1664 (Harl. Soc. xcii), 26; PROB11/363/112. It was probably this man, rather than Thomas Boone’s son, who purchased an estate at Lee, in the hundred of Blackheath, Kent, and whose family were active in and around London during the civil war period.24Hist. Blackheath Hundred ed. Hasted, rev. Drake (1886), 222; PROB11/283/443; Inhabs. of London, 1638, 18, 25, 171, 194.

There seems nothing to support the surmise by the historian of Dartmouth that Henry Boone ‘had made money as a London merchant’, but nor is it likely that Thomas Boone’s contemporary detractors were accurate in describing him as once a tapster.25P. Russell, Dartmouth (1950), 108; The Mystery of the Good Old Cause (1660), 6 (E.1923.2). His enemies do seem to have been correct in noting that he had only one eye, however, as a portrait of him in later life depicted him as one-eyed.26Mystery of the Good Old Cause, 6; Eliott-Drake, Fam. and Heirs, ii. 31, 33. Boone is not known to have fought in the civil war, so this disability is more likely to have been congenital or the result of illness rather than injury. Details of his upbringing and education are lacking, but he probably enjoyed the status of minor gentleman in and around Dartmouth, on the basis of his father’s wealth acquired through trade in a prosperous maritime town. He inherited his father’s property in 1638, and by that year was paying rates in Dartmouth on his own property.27Devon RO, DD 62678. Only a few years earlier, he had married Dorothy Upton. Dorothy’s father, John Upton I, was of a family more unchallengeably armigerous than Boone’s, but Boone and Upton were successful business partners, and through Upton, Boone was drawn into the world of the Providence Island Company and overseas colonization.

Boone’s movements during the civil war are somewhat shadowy, but he committed himself to the cause of Parliament, doubtless following the lead of his father-in-law and business partner, Upton. On the eve of the war he was still living in Dartmouth, where he took the Protestation circulated by Parliament.28Devon Protestation Returns, i. 178. After war broke out, he contributed to the parliamentarian war effort by providing meat to the regiments raised in the county.29SP28/128 (Devon), pt. 27, accts. 14 May 1647. He was named regularly to committees in Devon from January 1643, and in March was in Exeter, where he joined the protest by Thomas Gewen* and Charles Vaghan* against the treaty negotiated by Sir John Northcote*, Sir John Bampfylde* and others with the Cornish royalists. The objections by Boone and his colleagues included the absence of any mention in the treaty of the privileges of Parliament and the need for reformation of religion. They pleaded to Parliament

in a great fear and strait, which makes us thus to cry out confusedly in a sudden and strange amazement to this high and honourable assembly who will far sooner espy what aileth us than ourselves.30Bodl. Nalson II, f. 332.

Boone probably slipped away from Dartmouth when the royalists captured and garrisoned it in October 1643: he does not figure in lists of those neglecting or refusing payment of military rates.31Devon RO, 1392/L1644/6. There were two probable destinations for an escapee from royalist Devon: Plymouth and London. Boone’s brother-in-law, Arthur Upton*, must have spent time in the capital before returning by ship to Plymouth as governor. It is quite possible that Boone accompanied Upton to London, and then remained there for the duration of the war.

When the Dartmouth burgesses chose Boone as their Member in the ‘recruiter’ election there in April 1646, they were choosing one of their own. He was doubtless better known in the borough than in the county of Devon. He had taken his seat by 24 June, when he took the Covenant.32CJ iv. 586a. He involved himself in committees concerned with trade in his first year in the House. Among these were the dispute between the Turkey merchants of the Levant Company and their former agent, Sir Sackville Crowe (17 Sept.), the petition of planters and adventurers in Barbados (4 Mar. 1647) and the interests in alum works on the estates of Edmund Sheffield, 2nd earl of Mulgrave (13 May).33CJ iv. 671a; v. 106a, 170b. On 5 October 1646, Boone’s own mercantile case was referred to the Committee of the West. He and his late father-in-law, John Upton I, had incurred losses through the seizure by royalists of a ship of theirs in the Scillies. Boone had to wait a long time for satisfaction. The case was still before the Committee of the West in May 1649, by which time Upton’s interest had passed to his son, Arthur Upton*. An order was at that time made that they should be compensated from the customs, but the following month the Rump ordered that the sum owing to them should be a charge on the revenue from sales of church lands.34CJ iv. 683b, vi. 193a, 198b, 223b.

Before Boone was given leave on 19 June 1647, he sat on a range of other committees, usually in the company of other Devon men. In total he was named to nine committee in the first six months of 1647, hardly a great number. Several of these were concerned with relations between City and Parliament, including the topic of loans by the London mercantile community to fund the parliamentarian army (20 Apr., 12 May).35CJ v. 132b, 147b, 168b. He escaped the notice of the Journal clerk until October, but was apparently in London on 4 August, when he signed the declaration of the Members who had taken refuge with the army following the Presbyterian ‘riots’ at Westminster of late July.36LJ ix. 385b; HMC Egmont, i. 440. There had been little in Boone’s parliamentary activity up to this point to associate him positively with the Independents, but his siding with the army on this occasion set him apart from the majority of the Presbyterian county gentry who typically represented Devon constituencies.

The grounds for his leave in June had been his own ill-health, but he was well enough to join the Devon county committee at Exeter on 4 September, when the committeemen were jostled by discontented soldiers. Boone’s flight to the army the previous month seems to have counted for nothing in this stand-off. Dartmouth garrison had by this time already been dismantled through lack of money, and it is not clear whether Boone played any part in the disbanding.37CJ v. 217a; Bodl. Tanner 57, f. 507. He was back in the Commons by 6 October, however, when he was named to a committee which was evidently attempting to keep alive the spirit of the Newcastle Propositions with the king, which Charles had rebuffed. The brief of this committee was to draft a proposal to the king on a Presbyterian church settlement.38CJ v. 327b. Boone was appointed to the Committee for Plundered Ministers on 27 December, but there is little in the pattern of his committee appointments as a whole to suggest that religion was a topic in which he was particularly interested.39CJ v. 407a.

During the whole of 1648 he was named only to seven committees, continuing the pattern of modest participation in the work of the House. On 4 January he was included in a committee to receive grievances from the people, including on matters of law and trade, and on the 15th in one aimed at making the taxation burden more equal between the counties. John Maynard took the lead on this, and there was strong representation from Devon.40CJ v. 417a, 434a. Boone’s appearance on a committee on the accounts of customs commissioners (4 Mar.) was a nod to his mercantile background and associations. On 20 May he was given further leave, and had returned by 27 June. He was then added to a committee investigating ways to redress libel, particularly that suffered by Philip Skippon*.41CJ v. 480a, 566b, 614b. No further committee appointments ensued until December. Boone’s profile in 1648 is in marked contrast to the majority of Devon Members that year. Most withdrew from Parliament during the summer, to involve themselves in reorganizing the Devon militia, on the basis of the ordinance of 7 June 1648. Boone seems to have joined this exodus, because on 7 June 1648 he signed a commission for a Devon militia colonel, but unlike the others, returned to Westminster.42Add. 44058, f. 35. Whether he made the long journey back to London before or after Pride’s purge (6 Dec.) is not known. He took the dissent to the vote of 5 December to continue addresses to the king, the event which precipitated the purge, on 1 Feb. 1649.43A Full Declaration (1660), 23 (E.1013.22). He was in the House late in December, to be named to a committee on public accounts (21 Dec.), one investigating bribe-taking and another on a petition from the City (23 Dec.).44CJ vi. 102a, 103a, 103b.

Some of the committee appointments that subsequently came Boone’s way were doubtless the consequence of the post-purge reductions in the size of the House, and the need for each member to take on more work. Among his most important committees in January and February 1649 were his nominations to the Goldsmiths’ Hall Committee (Parliament’s most important committee of penal taxation on royalists), the committee to regulate the commission of the peace (8 Feb.) and committees for the excise (10 Feb.) and the mint (13 Feb.).45CJ vi. 107b, 113b, 134a, 137b, 138b. On this last-named topic, Boone was considered sufficiently knowledgeable by the year’s end that he was asked to appear before the council of state to advise.46CSP Dom. 1649-50, p. 438. He was named to the high court of justice to try the king, but played no part at all in the proceedings of the court. He was given responsibility for ‘bringing in’ the ordinance restricting preaching to ministers (17 Jan.): probably not fresh legislation but a review of the law of April 1645.47A. and O.; CJ vi. 120b. As in earlier years, some of Boone’s appointments in 1649 suggested his interest in trade matters. Among these were committees to hear the petitions of London needle-makers (13 June) and Norwich worsted weavers (14 July). He and the millenarian Thomas Harrison I were given charge of a review of timber supplies (7 July) and he was named to a committee to work on a bill for colonising the Eleutherian Islands (Bahamas) (25 July).48CJ vi. 232a, 254a, 260a, 270a.

To a Restoration commentator, Boone was ‘a cruel committee-man, that licked his fingers, and...got a vast estate’.49Mystery of the Good Old Cause, 6. A later historian found evidence that he made £6,000 from being a sequestrator.50Noble, Lives of the English Regicides, 105. In fact, he was a commissioner at Goldsmiths’ Hall for only a year, before the powers of the committee were vested in a new commission. More significantly, as a potential source of Boone’s income was his involvement in the excise committee, where a number of surviving warrants and orders show him to have been active.51Bodl. Rawl. C.386. The committee for obstructions in the sales of bishops’ lands, and the committee for trade, were other arenas in which Boone became involved during the Rump Parliament. Taken together, his work on these executive committees opened up opportunities for him to acquire property of his own, by virtue of contacts and inside knowledge. He and others bought the manor of Membury in 1651, and from 1650 he began to acquire the confiscated fee farm rents of the crown.52C54/3587/4. He bought the fee farm rent of Exeter, and so in April 1653 was able to demand arrears from Exeter corporation.53E315/139, ff. 57v, 58; Devon RO, Exeter City Archive, act bk. x. ff. 23, 30v. Arrears of such rents in Devon and Cornwall that Boone acquired amounted to £334 at one point.54CRES6/2, f. 287. He bought fee farm rents elsewhere, too, in Somerset and Yorkshire. Arrears in this latter county reached £234, which Boone set about recovering from whose who owed them.55E315/140, ff. 45; CRES6/1, f. 236. He was almost certainly the Thomas Boone who acquired the customs post of tideman in the port of Exeter in 1652, a comparatively lowly appointment, but one which he could let to another person.

Boone’s activities in these executive committees help explain why his nominations to legislative committees remained modest in number. In 1650-1, once again trade and commerce were the dominant theme in his appointments. Committees for regulating trade and the excise, to prevent the export of coin (22 Aug.) and to prepare a patent for smelting iron (22 Jan. 1651) were among these.56CJ vi. 383b, 427a, 451a, 458a, 527a. He seems to have had a particular interest in the Iberian Peninsula. On 14 November 1650 he was given £110 by the council of state in recompense for money he had paid to the Rump’s ambassador in Spain.57CSP Dom. 1650, p. 600. The following month he was involved in discussions on restoring ambassadorial links with Portugal (27 Dec.) and on English attitudes to Spain (31 Dec.). In April 1651 he was named to the committee to count votes on a treaty with Portugal, and in March 1653 the council of state referred to him the case of an Exeter merchant plundered apparently in error off Lisbon by Robert Blake*.58CJ vi. 516b, 517a, 560a; CSP Dom. 1652-3, p. 205. These interests suggest that Boone himself may have been trading with Spain or Portugal. Certainly, in January 1653 he was thought to have goods, including coin and tobacco, detained by the Portuguese in Madeira.59CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 101, 154. And in 1649 Boone was a partner in a business venture at Assada (today Nosy Be) off Madagascar, east Africa. Among his colleagues were Samuel Moyer* and Maurice Thomson, brother of George Thomson*.60Cal. Ct. Mins. E I. Co. 1644-49, 360. Between December 1648 and September 1651, Boone was named to 12 committees with the Member for Fowey and fellow merchant, Gregory Clement. In May 1652, Clement was expelled from the House for committing adultery with his maidservant, and his fate seems to have made an impact on Boone, who was named only to three committees between Clement’s fall and the expulsion of the Parliament itself in April 1653.61CJ vii. 222b, 227b, 263b. This apparent show of sympathy for a fellow south westerner conceals a pattern of slow but steady decline in Boone’s activity in Parliament, however. On a year-by-year basis, Boone was named to 22 committees in 1649, 11 in 1650, 8 in 1651 and 6 in 1652.

In the last year of the Rump before Oliver Cromwell* turned it out, Boone’s involvement was focused on his personal interests. As a great speculator in fee farm rents, he was bound to participate in the drafting of a bill to sell the remaining ones (11 Mar. 1652), and as commissioner for removing obstructions to selling dean and chapter lands, he was naturally interested in a petition to Parliament from the contractors for sales (6 Apr.).62CJ vii. 104a, 115a. Two further bills, for selling specific royal properties such as Windsor Castle and Hampton Court, and for selling forfeited lands (26 Nov. 1652, 1 Mar. 1653) evidently attracted him.63CJ vii. 222b, 263a. In April 1652, he sat as one of a trio of Members (with the much more distinguished Sir Henry Vane II and Thomas Chaloner) on the decay of clothing manufacture, after complaints from Hamburg about the quality of English cloth. He may also have taken an interest in the admiralty, being noted as a late entrant to the House just after a vote on this topic had been taken (26 Nov. 1652); he was named to the follow-up committee on a bill to re-organize it (9 Dec.).64CJ vii. 119a, 221b, 227b. These appointments offer little insight into Boone’s political beliefs, except a suggestion that he was pragmatic and somewhat self-interested. His single tellership (5 May 1652), when he was paired with the radical Sir Henry Mildmay on a motion involving whether to appoint Col. John White to a committee on indemnity, is equally uninformative about Boone’s views.65CJ vii. 129b.

During his time as an MP, Boone was able to develop a house and estate in Townstall, on the hill to the west of Dartmouth, he called Mount Boone. After the dismissal of the Rump, he must have retired there. As a Rumper with no connections with the millenarian godly figures in favour with Cromwell, he lost his place on the commission of the peace for Devon during the period of the Nominated Assembly. When disillusionment with godly rule set in, and the protectorate was inaugurated, Boone was quickly restored, and attended quarter sessions for the first time in 1654. Thereafter he came to at least one meeting a year of the magistrates at Exeter.66Devon RO, Devon QS order bk. 1/9. In November 1654, with his brother-in-law, Arthur Upton, and John Blackmore*, he examined a Protestant convert and former Catholic priest, James Carey, in prison in Exeter.67CSP Dom. 1654, p. 400. It has often been claimed that Boone was an ambassador to Russia under Cromwell.68Hist. Blackheath Hundred, 222; Eliott-Drake, Fam. and Heirs, ii. 31, 33. It is hard to see when this visit could have taken place or that the lord protector would have identified Boone as an appropriate envoy. In fact, the protectorate was a period of eclipse for Boone, who seems to have confined himself to the life of a Devon magistrate. This is suggested by his apparent aloofness from the 1654 Parliament, to which he was returned again for Dartmouth. He left no trace at all on the records of this assembly, not like others named to it, because he was a Presbyterian, but because he was still a commonwealthsman at heart.

After the fall of Richard Cromwell* and the restoration of the Rump Parliament, Boone took his seat again, and played a significant part in its proceedings. In May 1659, he was involved in the process of reviewing where the Parliament stood in relation to earlier regimes: examining the Journal, reviewing laws made since Cromwell expelled the House in 1653, investigating what furniture in the palaces belonged to the state, and what Richard Cromwell needed for a comfortable future life as a former head of state.69CJ vii. 656b, 661b, 663a, 665a. Boone’s background in maritime trade qualified him to contribute to framing an act for managing the admiralty and navy (18 May 1659), and when the bill emerged from committee on 30 May, he was named as a navy commissioner. The following day, with Nicholas Lechmere and Thomas Pury I, he was required to reconsider the bill in the light of critical debate.70CJ vii. 656b, 669b. He retained his former interests in managing the excise, being named to committees on bringing in arrears (25 May) and reviewing the legislation for continuing both customs and excise (18 June).71CJ vii. 665b, 689a, He was nominated to committees on related topics, such as the inquiry into the level of public debt (21 May) and the bill for recovering arrears of monies owed to the state (20 June).72CJ vii. 662a, 690a.

Boone’s most important task in 1659, indeed the most significant commission during his entire career, began on 9 June, when he was named plenipotentiary ambassador to Sweden and Denmark, on the recommendation of the council of state.73CJ vii. 677a,b, 695b, 700a. The purpose of the mission was with the help of the Dutch to pacify the two Scandinavian countries (at war with each other since the collapse of the peace of Roskilde) in the interests of securing trade in the Baltic. Boone’s colleagues were Edward Montagu II*, Algernon Sydney* and Sir Robert Honywood*. Sydney, Honywood and Boone were in the Baltic Sound by 16 July, meeting up with Montagu’s fleet which was already there.74TSP vii. 699; Handlist of British Diplomatic Representatives, 23-4. On 10 August, the ambassadors sent back a long report of their meetings with Charles X of Sweden and Frederick III of Denmark.75TSP vii. 708-10 Officially, the mission was not wound up until June 1660, but Boone and Vane were waiting to come home on 23 November 1659, doubtless anxious about the uncertainties of the political scene in England.76CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 270. Boone was evidently back in London by 30 December 1659, when he was named to a committee in the Rump, which since his departure for the Baltic had been closed down by the army and then re-convened for the second time.77Handlist of British Diplomatic Representatives, 24; CJ vii. 800a. On 2 January 1660, Boone was called upon to provide the House with an account of the embassy, to gloss the letter received from Charles X.78CJ vii. 801a. Before Boone left for home, the Swedish king gave him a gold chain studded with diamonds, on which hung a miniature of his revered predecessor, Gustavus Adolphus. Boone treasured this keepsake, which reminded him of the ‘many preservations of ... gracious God in delivering [him] from many and great dangers sustained in the said voyage’.79PROB11/363/112. In the painting he later had executed of himself, Boone is wearing the chain. A historian who knew the painting, accepting that Boone had been to Russia at Cromwell’s behest, erroneously took Gustavus’s image to be that of the English lord protector.80Eliott-Drake, Fam. and Heirs, ii. 33.

In January 1660, Boone was very busy attempting to save the republic, working in a completely different direction from that of the Devon Presbyterians such as William Morice*, Sir John Northcote* and Sir Coplestone Bampfylde*. He served on a committee to select new commissioners of the great seal, and worked on bills to revive the Engagement (the Rump’s loyalty test) and to secure the foundations of the Parliament for the future.81CJ vii. 806a,b, 807a. Arthur Upton was asked by the Parliament to consult Boone (his brother-in-law) about securing Plymouth, evidence of how a reversal in the public importance of the two men had occurred since the civil war.82CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 322. Boone was appointed once more a commissioner for the admiralty, and on 6 February was part of a small group of senior politicians who had to decide how to allocate financial resources between army and navy.83CJ vii. 825b; CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 517. On 18 February Boone was able to recommend two Dartmouth men, Robert Plumleigh and Samuel Barnes, to be captain and lieutenant of a frigate.84CJ vii. 825b, 846b This turned out to be his last intervention in the House.

There was no place for Boone in public life after the Restoration, not even in the commission of the peace. He was outside the group of Presbyterian Devon county gentry who, through their relationships with George Monck*, kept a grip on public life in their county. His refusal to participate in the trial of Charles I saved him from being exempted from the act of oblivion, and in December 1660 a debt due to him on the excise of £193 was listed by John Birch* as still unpaid.85CJ viii. 239a. Generally, however, he lost his fee farm rents and the manor of Membury. He was in effect for the rest of his life confined to Mount Boone. In 1664 he was named as one of a group of conspirators in the west of England, but is unlikely to have been interested in overthrowing the monarchy.86SP29/99/169. He drew up his will in March 1678. The document reveals how much of his wealth Boone managed to retain. He left cash bequests to his daughters of £15,000, and held lands at Taunton Deane and Wilton, Somerset. He sought to support the children of the deceased Presbyterian ministers, Anthony Harford and William Bayly, the latter a relative by marriage of Francis Rous* and John Upton I. He had also helped James Burdwood, the ejected curate of St Petrock’s, confirming that while he had been an Independent in politics, in religion he was in sympathy with Presbyterianism as well as Independency. Boone died in January 1680, and was buried at Townstall. His son opposed the court interest in the election at Dartmouth in 1685, but when he was elected himself in 1689, died before he could make any impression on the Commons. The Boones of Devon died out with him.87HP Commons, 1660-1690. Among Dartmouth seafarers, a legend that Thomas Boone’s voice could be heard calling for ‘more rope, more rope’ on stormy nights persisted into the twentieth century.88Eliott-Drake, Fam. and Heirs, 31.