JUXON, Thomas (1614-72), of East Sheen, Mortlake, Surr.

Juxon is notable not for his parliamentary career, which was brief and unremarkable, but for the survival of his ‘diary’ – a journal of metropolitan, national and international affairs between 1644 and 1647, and an important source for understanding civil-war politics, particularly in London.26DWL, Ms 24.50; The Jnl. of Thomas Juxon, 1644-7 ed. K. Lindley, D. Scott (Cam. Soc. ser. 5, xiii).

The diarist and future MP was the scion of a prosperous and godly London family. His mother was a woman of exceptional piety – an avid sermon-goer who seems to have identified strongly with those stigmatised as ‘puritans and precisians’. His father, John Juxon, was a freeman and liveryman of the Merchant Taylors’ Company of London but earned his living as a sugar baker/refiner. John Juxon was descended from genteel stock; his mother was the daughter of a Warwickshire gentleman and a cousin of William Juxon, the future bishop of London and lord treasurer. The death of Thomas’s mother in 1619 probably explains his admission to the Merchant Taylors’ School in that year at the remarkably young age of five.27GL, Merchant Taylors’ Sch. probation bk. 1, f. 88; Juxon Jnl. 1, 5-6. He remained at the school until his father’s re-marriage in 1621 to a daughter of a London alderman – a match that underlines the Juxon family’s wealth and standing within the civic community.28Juxon Jnl. 2.

At his death in 1626, John Juxon had accumulated a considerable amount of property in London and in Surrey (notably, the manor of East Sheen, in the parish of Mortlake), as well as stock in the East India Company. His will reveals that he was also a man of strongly godly convictions. He left bequests for mourning gowns for 11 ‘godly ministers’, among them the celebrated preacher Richard Sibbes, and towards the maintenance of lectures in seven London parishes.29PROB11/150, ff. 22-26v; Juxon Jnl. 6, 171-86. That Juxon inherited his father’s puritan sympathies became clear in 1641, when he helped to pull down and burn the Laudian altar rails in his home parish of St Thomas the Apostle.30PA, Main Pprs. 30 June 1641; K. Lindley, Popular Politics and Religion in Civil War London (Aldershot, 1997), 39-40.

By arrangement of his uncle and guardian Arthur Juxon, the orphaned Thomas was apprenticed in 1630 to William Allott, a liveryman of the Merchant Taylors’ Company.31GL, Merchant Taylors’ Co. appr. binding bk. 1629-35, f. 120; Juxon Jnl. 1-2. Juxon gained his freedom of the company seven years later by patrimony, and soon afterwards he entered into partnership with his half-uncle, another wealthy London sugar baker.32GL, Merchant Taylors’ Co. presentment bk. 2, unfol.; Juxon Jnl. 3. He had prospered sufficiently by April 1642 to secure the place of an ensign in the green regiment of the London trained bands under the command of Alderman John Warner.33The Names, Dignities and Places of All the Collonels [etc.] of the City of London; Juxon Jnl. 3. Juxon took the side of Parliament in the summer of 1642, pledging in mid-July to supply the commissary of Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex’s parliamentarian army with a horse and armed rider worth £25. He was described on this occasion as a sugar baker residing in College Hill – a street in the London parish of St Martin Vintry.34SP28/131, pt. 3, f. 19. In December, he was appointed an assessor for parliamentary levies in Vintry ward.35SP19/1, p. 42. He and his elder brother John, who was also an officer in the London militia, saw action at the first battle of Newbury in September 1643, in which John Juxon was mortally wounded.36Harl. 986, f. 19; LPL, VH 96/1508 (John Juxon of Mortlake); J.S. Burn, Registrum Ecclesiae Parochialis (1829), 107; Juxon Jnl. 8. In May 1645, Juxon, the earl of Warwick’s ‘sea chaplain’ Moses Wall, and two other men obtained a pass from the Committee for the Admiralty and Cinque Ports* to travel over to Flanders ‘and to return again in a short time to this city of London’.37Bodl. Rawl. C.416, unfol.; N. Malcolm, ‘Moses Wall: millenarian, tolerationist, and friend of Milton’, Seventeenth Century, xxvii. 29-30. Whether this was a business trip or a political or intelligence-gathering mission of some kind is not known.

It was not long after the first battle of Newbury that Juxon began gathering material for his journal. From internal evidence it would appear that this work was written some time after the events it describes – probably from a combination of notes taken at the time and information gleaned subsequently.38Juxon Jnl. 16-17. The only personal item in the journal is a reference to Juxon’s marriage in March 1647 to a Somerset gentlewoman, Elizabeth Carent – a grand-daughter of Sir James Ley, 1st earl of Marlborough, who had served as lord treasurer in the 1620s.39Juxon Jnl. 3, 150. By contrast, the diary of Juxon’s friend and kinsman by marriage, the Somerset recruiter John Harington, contains a wealth of private material.40Harington’s Diary, passim. Yet though largely confined to public affairs, Juxon’s journal sheds considerable light on its author’s political and religious outlook. What emerges most clearly from the work is Juxon’s hostility not only to Charles I and his leading advisers but also to princes and lords in general. Surveying the troubled state of Europe’s and Asia’s ruling houses, Juxon observed ‘’Tis a miracle to see how the kings and lords are haunted with a malignity against Jesus Christ, as if his kingdom were incompatible with their tyranny, as indeed it is. Both cannot mutually flourish’.41Juxon Jnl. 29-30, 51. Similarly, after noting the Prince of Orange’s ‘designs towards sovereignty’ in Holland, Juxon warned against ‘the great danger and snare in giving so much power and so absolute into one hand; withal that ’tis not safe to let the same man long in that charge, much less suffer it to be hereditary’.42Juxon Jnl. 92. He had a particularly low opinion of Charles – ‘no prince ever used more dissimulation’ – and regarded the aristocracy, both parliamentarian and royalist, as ‘sure’ to the king ‘upon the interest of their peerage’.43Juxon Jnl. 8-9, 30, 47, 68-9, 72, 75, 133. Juxon’s antipathy towards kings and lords was heightened by a millenarian conviction that God had marked their cause for destruction in anticipation of Christ’s second coming: ‘When He destroys the old He will set up a new monarchy and bring in the desire of nations’.44Juxon Jnl. 31, 49, 71-2, 89, 98, 138, 145. Juxon consistently linked the Lords with the Scots and the City and parliamentary Presbyterians and generally depicted all these groups as factious and self-interested.45Juxon Jnl. 30, 61-2, 68-9, 72, 74, 75-6, 79, 84.

Although Juxon denounced partisan politics under any label, singling out for praise those individuals or groups who put the public good before their own factional interests, he was clearly sympathetic to the objectives of the parliamentary war party and its successor, the Independents, and he may have been on at least nodding terms with three leading figures within this faction – Oliver St John*, Sir Henry Vane II* and Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton.46Juxon Jnl. 9-10, 24-7, 61, 70, 76, 86, 94, 103, 104-5, 116. The heroes of the journal are the ‘honest’ or ‘godly party’ in the Commons and its friends in the army – notably, Philip Skippon* and Oliver Cromwell*. Juxon occasionally applied these terms to the parliamentarian interest as a whole. But more often than not he associated them with the war party, the Independents and other opponents of the earl of Essex and his Presbyterian and Scottish allies.47Juxon Jnl. 25-8, 56, 58, 63, 76, 80, 86, 103, 104-5, 114, 151, 157-8. Juxon’s reverence for the Commons, which he seems to have regarded as the supreme authority in the kingdom, did not result in any Leveller-like sympathy for enhancing the role of the people in national politics. On the contrary, he declaimed against ‘the unhappiness of a popularity, where things are transacted by multitudes’, and opined that ‘the common people never were fit for government’.48Juxon Jnl. 9, 31-2, 102, 158.

The journal is also revealing of Juxon’s religious views. When it came to settling church government he was a thoroughgoing Erastian and an implacable opponent of jure divino Presbyterianism. He applauded Parliament’s refusal to be pushed by the Westminster Assembly or the Scots into giving any ‘coercive power’ to the clergy.49Juxon Jnl. 7, 28-9, 85-6, 87, 89-90, 95, 106. At the same time, he regarded religious toleration by statute as ‘opposite and destructive to any settlement of discipline’.50Juxon Jnl. 7, 29, 95-6. ‘God in His Providence’, he claimed, had denied the religious Independents statutory liberty of conscience ‘and suffered authority to set up Presbytery’.51Juxon Jnl. 128. Juxon evidently regarded a church settlement in which ultimate authority in ecclesiastical affairs rested with Parliament, and gathered churches were accorded a pragmatic toleration, as a godly middle course between the evils of ‘coercion’ and ‘confusion’.52Juxon Jnl. 29. He numbered among his friends and relations both Independents and Presbyterians, and he cannot be linked to any particular church faction within London’s godly community.53Juxon Jnl. 7-8. The minister who officiated at his wedding in March 1647 was his brother-in-law, Richard Byfield – a firm Presbyterian who lamented Parliament’s failure to establish ‘the wholesome food of sound doctrine’ and to suppress the advocates of heretical ideas and toleration.54Juxon Jnl. 7; ‘Richard Byfield’, Oxford DNB.

The journal ends with the army’s march into London in August 1647 and the flight of the Eleven Members. In the subsequent remodelling of the City trained bands, Juxon was promoted to lieutenant-colonel of the green regiment in place of the Presbyterian activist John Lane – an appointment that suggests that he was well regarded by the Independents.55A Paire of Spectacles for the Citie, 9. Despite evidence in the journal that he did not approve of army interference in parliamentary politics, he probably accepted Pride’s Purge and the regicide as God’s judgement upon ‘tyranny and monarchia’.56Juxon Jnl. 10-11, 48, 157. Nevertheless, he apparently played little part in politics and government under the commonwealth or succeeding regimes – possibly because he may have spent most of his time during the 1650s in Ireland, where he had acquired substantial property interests.

In March 1642, Thomas, his elder brother John and his uncle Arthur had all invested money as Irish Adventurers. From an original investment of £200, Juxon had built up a substantial portfolio in Irish land, acquiring almost 3,500 acres in Leinster for subscriptions amounting to more than £2,000.57Bottigheimer, Eng. Money and Irish Land, 185, 205; Juxon Jnl. 4-5. Between 1654 and 1659, he purchased property in Ireland from other original investors, and by the end of his life he had added ‘castles, houses and lands’ in Munster to his holdings further north.58C54/3829/39, 40, 45; C54/3918/4, 6; C54/3921/17; C54/4038/7; Juxon Jnl. 187-9. Through his Irish investments he established close ties with several leading New English families. His second marriage was to a daughter of the Irish privy councillor Sir Robert Meredith. In his will, Juxon referred to his ‘dear sister[-in-law]’ the countess of Mountrath (wife of Sir Charles Coote, 2nd earl of Mountrath) and to a loan of £1,000 he had made to Sir Charles Coote’s uncle, Colonel Thomas Coote*.59Juxon Jnl. 188-9. In addition to his purchases in Ireland, Juxon spent thousands buying former church and crown property in the early 1650s.60C54/3547/31; SP28/288, ff. 31, 47, 48, 52, 56, 57, 59. Under the protectorate, he speculated in land belonging to the Company of the Bedford Level Adventurers, of which he served as treasurer during the late 1650s.61S. Wells, Drainage of the Bedford Level (1830), i. 304; Wilmoth, Stazicker, Jonas Moore’s Mapp, 89.

Juxon was returned for the Cornish borough of Helston on 12 January 1659 in the elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament. Clearly a carpetbagger, he probably owed his election to the borough’s dominant political figure Colonel Anthony Rous*.62Supra, ‘Helston’. Juxon did have some west country connections through his in-laws, the Carents, but it has not been possible to link him with any important family in Cornwall. His appointment on 26 January 1659 as a commissioner to administer the oath to be taken by MPs recognising Richard’s government suggests that he was sympathetic to the protectorate.63CJ vii. 593a. He was named to seven committees, including those for settling a godly ministry in Wales (5 Feb.) and for Irish affairs (1 Apr.).64CJ vii. 595a, 600b, 609a, 622b, 623a, 634b, 637b. He made no recorded contribution to debate.

Very little is heard of Juxon after the collapse of the protectorate, and it is likely that he weathered the political storms of the next few years by retiring to his properties in Ireland.65Juxon Jnl. 5, 11. Residing mostly in Dublin, it seems, he corresponded during the 1660s with the Irish privy councillor Sir George Lane, chiefly on matters relating to the Restoration land settlement in Ireland.66Bodl. Carte 34, ff. 1, 91-2; Carte 215, f. 421. He ended one of his letters to Lane by observing that

I have lived so long as to see three flourishing kingdoms, from an universal peace and tranquility, changed into war and desolation by reason of small errors and rash undertakings (to say no worse) to rectify them. When particular interests and the welfare of the kingdom come into competition, I will always resolve myself into obedience.67Bodl. Carte 215, f. 421v.

He seems to have returned to London in the late 1660s, for he was active on the governing body of the Merchant Taylors’ Company from 1669 until the spring of 1672.68GL, Merchant Taylors’ Co. ct. min. bk. 10, pp. 245, 248, 321, 445, 446, 447.

Juxon died on 2 October 1672 and was buried in St James’s church, Dublin, on 14 October.69NLI, Genealogical Office ms 67, f. 178; ms 74, f. 8. In his will, which features an unusually long and pious preface, he left the bulk of his estate to his son and daughter and made bequests in money, bonds and plate worth nearly £2,000. He also charged his Irish lands with annuities of £320.70PROB11/340, ff. 309-10v; Juxon Jnl. 187-91. None of his immediate descendants sat in Parliament.