FELL, Thomas (1600-58), of Swarthmoor Hall, Ulverston, Lancs.

Fell’s immediate family background is obscure. There were numerous branches of the Fell family in the Furness area of Lancashire in the early seventeenth century, some of ancient lineage, although most were of sub-gentry status. Fell’s grandfather, Lawrence Fell, was a ‘substantial yeoman’ and his father, George Fell, an attorney with what seems to have been a thriving local practice.39Ulverston Par. Regs. ed. Bardsley, Ayre, xliv; M. Webb, The Fells of Swarthmoor Hall (1865), 423; H. Barber, Swarthmoor Hall and its Associations (1872), 11-12. Fell inherited a sizeable estate that included former monastic property purchased after the Dissolution, and Swarthmoor Hall, which the family had acquired in the late sixteenth century.40Barber, Swarthmoor Hall, 12; R.S. Boumphrey, C.R. Hudleston, J. Hughes, Armorial for Westmorland and Lonsdale (Cumb. and Westmld. Antiquarian and Arch. Soc. extra ser. xxi), 114; VCH Lancs. viii. 354. Fell may have been the ‘Thomas Fell’ of Lancashire who matriculated at University College, Oxford in 1621, ‘aged 19’ – although the future MP would actually have been 21 at the time.41Al. Ox. Admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1623, Fell was called to the bar in 1631 and became an Ancient on the same day as his friend, the future regicide John Bradshawe*.42PBG Inn, i. 308, 354.

Fell and his wife Margaret regularly went to hear ‘lecturing-ministers’ in Furness during the two decades between their marriage in 1632 and her conversion to Quakerism in the early 1650s. They also entertained ‘serious and godly men’ at Swarthmoor Hall.43Fell, Brief Colln. 2. Fell was evidently regarded as well affected to Parliament, for on 24 October 1642 the two Houses ordered the chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster to add him and other parliamentarian gentry to the Lancashire commission of peace. However, the next commission, issued on 17 November, did not recognise this order, and Fell was not formally appointed to the bench until August 1646.44CJ ii. 821a; LJ v. 421a; Lancs. RO, QSC/38, 42. His reasons for siding with Parliament were presumably linked to his godly religious convictions. He was active on several Lancashire parliamentary committees during the mid-1640s and served as a lieutenant-colonel in Parliament’s forces in the county.45Add. 59661, ff. 14, 16; PRO30/26/21, p. 13; SP28/211, f. 667; Bodl. Tanner 60, f. 111v; Brereton Lttr. Bks. ii. 328, 340, 374, 484; Gratton, Lancs. 7-8, 104, 110, 118.

Fell was returned as a ‘recruiter’ for Lancaster on 6 January 1646.46Supra, ‘Lancashire’. He does not seem to have enjoyed any proprietorial interest in the borough, and it is therefore likely that he owed his return to his standing as one of Lancashire’s most prominent parliamentarians and lawyers. Granted leave of absence on 29 June 1646 and 26 February 1647 and declared absent at the call of the House in 1647 and 1648, he was apparently not assiduous in attending his seat.47CJ iv. 590b; v. 98b, 330a, 543b, He was named to only 12 committees between March 1646 and Pride’s Purge in December 1648 – most of them relating either to the promotion of a godly preaching ministry or to the administration of affairs in the north west.48CJ iv. 481b, 502a, 512a, 574b, 586b, 595b, 601b; v. 167a, 397b, 471a, 593b, 620b. One of these committees – set up on 12 June 1646 to bring in an ordinance for holding assizes in the county palatine of Lancaster – he reported from and may have chaired.49CJ iv. 575b.

Although Fell would later show considerable sympathy towards George Fox and other early Quaker leaders, he seems to have favoured a publicly-funded national church. He took the Solemn League and Covenant in March 1646, was appointed an elder in the Lancashire Presbyterian classis that autumn and received appointment to several committees under the Rump for the maintenance of a godly parish ministry.50CJ iv. 489a; vi. 275b, 437a; LJ viii. 512; Lancs. and Cheshire Church Surveys ed. Fishwick, i. 1. The purchase in 1651 by Fell, on behalf of himself and the leading Lancashire parliamentarians Colonel Thomas Birche*, Robert Cunliffe*, Gilbert Irelande*, John Sawrey* and William West*, of forfeited tithes and rents belonging to half a dozen or so of the county’s parish churches was probably with a view to augmenting the stipends of their respective ministers.51SP46/108, f. 387. In 1654, Fell was appointed to the Lancashire commission for ejecting scandalous ministers.52A. and O.

At the outbreak of the second civil war, the Commons ordered Fell into Lancashire to help secure the county for Parliament; and his last appointment before Pride’s Purge was on 1 July 1648, when he was named first to a committee for supplying Lancashire’s parliamentarian forces.53CJ v. 562b, 620b; Add. 59661, f. 21. He was apparently absent from the House for the next year or so, and although he was not among those secluded at Pride’s Purge, his failure to attend his seat during the winter of 1648-9 aroused suspicion in some quarters. According to a correspondent of the regicide John Moore*, writing in February 1649, ‘that cunning fox Fell’ had ‘deserted the Parliament and was none of those [MPs] that were secluded, but ran into the country because he would not join with you that took this great work upon you, but lurks in the country to see the event of things, that so he may come in smoothly when the coast is clear’. However, these words must be treated with caution, for their author was locked at the time in what was apparently a bitter property dispute with Fell, whom he accused of colluding with Henry Porter I* to defraud Moore and the state and of shielding his father-in-law from sequestration.54SP19/118, ff. 281-2; CCAM 890-1. And it is significant that Fell not only retained his place on the Lancashire bench after the regicide, but was also highly active in local government under the Rump.55CCAM 105; CSP Dom. 1651, p. 194; Gratton, Lancs. 125; Craven, ‘Lancs.’, 31, 71. Moreover, he seems to have been on close terms with Colonel Thomas Birche, who was one of Lancashire’s most committed republicans.56CCC 478, 481. At least six of his purchases of former crown and church property in Lancashire during the early 1650s were in partnership with Birche.57SP28/288, ff. 56, 58, 61, 62, 63; C54/3674/1; C54/3774/15; Lancs. RO, QDD/50/19; PR/51; Gentles, ‘Debentures Market’, 254, 280; Blackwood, ‘Lancs. Gentry’, 362. In their eagerness to enrich themselves the two men may, knowingly or not, have overstepped the law, for they were both accused of purchasing forfeited property using forged debentures – in Fell’s case to the tune of £4,738.58SP29/390/14ix, f. 40; Blackwood, Lancs. 94.

That Fell was well regarded by the Rump is evident from its order of 20 July 1649 that he be appointed second justice, under Bradshawe, of Chester and north Wales, with a salary of £333 a year.59CJ vi. 266a, 277b; SP18/38/72, f. 139v. Three days later (23 July), it voted that Fell be re-admitted to the House, presumably after he had taken the dissent to the 5 December 1648 vote that the king’s answers to the Newport propositions were an acceptable basis for settlement.60CJ vi. 268a. In short order, Fell was added to the committees for the relief of prisoners for debt and on a bill for conferring the chancellorship of the duchy of Lancaster upon Bradshawe, who had been the presiding judge at the king’s trial.61CJ vi. 268b, 269b. On 27 July, the task of re-drafting bills concerning the relief of poor debtors and the rights of creditors was specially referred to Fell and the republican grandee Henry Marten.62CJ vi. 270b. Similarly, on 8 August, Fell was named to a committee for preparing the form of a commission for releasing poor prisoners who could not pay their debts.63CJ vi. 276a. And in October 1653, it was his name that headed the Lancashire commission for the relief of poor prisoners.64A. and O. ii. 758. These appointments, and his efforts to protect poor tenants in Lancashire, suggest that Fell had a well-developed sense of social justice.65CCC, 635. Another of his political priorities may have been a concern to ensure probity in public office, for on 3 August 1649, the House entrusted the task of drafting a bill for taking the accounts of customs officials and naval administrators specially to the care of Fell and Denis Bond.66CJ vi. 274a. Five days later (8 Aug.), Fell reported the amendments to this bill.67CJ vi. 276b.

After the summer of 1649, Fell seems to have attended his seat in the Rump only occasionally. In all, he was named to 16 committees in the Rump – seven of them in July and August 1649 and all but three of them between July 1649 and November 1650.68CJ vi. 268b, 269b, 270a, 273b, 274a, 275b, 276a, 369b, 427b, 437a, 441a, 441b, 502a, 595a, 598b; vii. 215a. His only mention in the Journal between November 1651 and the fall of the Rump in April 1653 came on 12 November 1652, when he was appointed to a committee for settling a competent salary on the judges, thereby relieving the people from having to pay them fees.69CJ vii. 41b, 215a.

Fell had plenty to occupy him back in Lancashire by the summer of 1652, with the conversion of his wife, his daughters and most of his household to Quakerism.70‘Margaret Fell’, Oxford DNB. Fell himself was clearly impressed by George Fox and succeeded – with the help of his fellow Lancashire magistrate William West – in frustrating the attempts of the county’s Presbyterian ministers and their friends on the bench (who included John Sawrey) to prosecute the Quaker evangelist at both the quarter sessions and assizes.71Infra, ‘John Sawrey’; Jnl. of George Fox, i. 47, 55, 61-8, 71; Woolrych, Commonwealth to Protectorate, 230. Many leading Quakers acknowledged that Fell was ‘very instrumental to keep off much persecution in this county and in other places where he had any power’. As well as protecting the Quakers, he allowed them to hold meetings at Swarthmoor Hall, and he himself attended part of a general meeting of Friends in London in 1655.72Fell, Brief Colln. 3; George Fox’s Short Jnl. ed. N. Penney (Cambridge, 1925), 26, 27; Ross, Margaret Fell, 115, 116-18, 120, 121. Yet although one Quaker writer claimed that ‘Judge Fell and Colonel West are much convinced of the truth [i.e. the Quaker message]’, Fell never followed his wife into the Society of Friends, and he apparently disapproved of some of her Quaker publications. Margaret Fell would later describe him as ‘one that sought after God in the best way that was made known to him’.73S. Buttivant, A Brief Discovery of a Threshold Estate of Antichrist (1653), 12; Fell, Brief Colln. 2; Ross, Margaret Fell, 96-7.

Fell’s strong Quaker connections did not deter the Nominated Parliament from pairing him with Bradshawe as the duchy of Lancaster’s senior legal officers.74CJ vii. 320a. With Bradshawe persona non grata under the protectorate, Fell was considered – along with Serjeant-at-law Peter Warburton – for the office of chancellor of the duchy, having served as vice-chancellor under Bradshawe in the early 1650s.75Supra, ‘John Bradshawe’; Add. 4184, f. 97; E351/1959; PRO30/26/21, pp. 63-4; Duchy of Lancaster Office-Holders ed. R. Somerville, 2; CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 53, 168; Whitelocke, Mems. iii. 70. In January 1656, however, Major-general Charles Worsley* informed Secretary of state John Thurloe* that Fell entirely disowned the protectorate and should be removed from office.76TSP iv. 423-4. Fell was indeed unenthusiastic about taking charge of the duchy’s legal administration, pleading old age (he was in his mid-fifties) – although his apparent distaste for the protectorate, and his friendship with Bradshawe, were probably the real reasons for his reluctance. Nevertheless, with the duchy court close to overload by early 1656, he agreed to perform the duties consonant with the office of chancellor, which came with a salary of £215 a year.77PRO30/26/21, p. 63; SP18/38/72, f. 139v; CSP Dom. 1655-6, pp. 53, 140, 168; TSP iv. 423-4.

Fell died on 8 October 1658 and was buried in Ulverston church two days later.78Ulverston Par. Regs. ed. Bardsley, Ayre, 154. His death was noted by his fellow legal grandee Bulstrode Whitelocke*, who referred to him as ‘his kind friend … a good lawyer and a good man’.79Whitelock, Diary, 499. In his will, Fell left the bulk of what Margaret Fell described as ‘a good and competent estate’ to his only son George, bequeathing Swarthmoor Hall to Margaret for life or as long as she remained unmarried. Among his legatees was his ‘very honourable and noble friend’ John Bradshawe, who was given ten pound to buy a mourning ring ‘as all the acknowledgement I can make and thankfulness for his ancient and continued favours and kindness undeservedly vouchsafed unto me since our first acquaintance’. Fell also left £30 towards the maintenance of a schoolmaster for the poor children of Ulverston.80PROB11/285, ff. 62v-63; Ross, Margaret Fell, 398-400; Braithwaite, ‘Mystery of Swarthmoor Hall’, 22-4. After the Restoration, his estate became the object of an acrimonious dispute between his widow Margaret and their son George, who vehemently rejected his family’s Quakerism and was particularly angered, it seems, by his mother’s marriage in 1669 to George Fox.81Braithwaite, ‘Mystery of Swarthmoor Hall’, 24-7; ‘Margaret Fell’, ‘Thomas Fell’, Oxford DNB. Fell was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.