SCOTT, Thomas IV (c.1627-88), of Newbay, co. Wexford.

Thomas Scott IV was the second son of the republican and regicide, Thomas Scot I, whose domineering personality overshadowed his early career. In October 1646, as forces were raised for viscount Lisle’s (Philip Sidney*) expedition to Munster, the Commons told the Star Chamber Committee of Irish Affairs* that Thomas Scot I was to be given a major’s commission, and his son was made captain of an unregimented troop of horse to be reduced from the Buckinghamshire regiment.13CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 525. Although his father did not take up his own command, Thomas Scott IV had crossed to Ireland by the summer of 1647. In March 1647 he was paid £150 to help complete his troop in the west country, and in May the Derby House Committee of Irish affairs ordered that Scott’s troop, along other units gathered at Bristol, was to go to Ireland.14CSP Ire. 1633-47, p. 609; 1647-60, p. 747. Nothing is known of Scott’s activities in the later 1640s, although it is possible that he served in Ireland under Parliament’s governor of Dublin, Colonel Michael Jones, and (from Aug. 1649) under Oliver Cromwell*. His troop remained unregimented in September 1650.15SP28/70, f. 683. During this period Scott seems to have fallen in with with the Old Protestant community, and before 1651 he married a younger daughter of a prominent co. Westmeath landowner, Sir William Peirce of Tristernagh.16HMC Leyborne-Popham, 83. Scott’s absence in Ireland did not separate him from his father’s immediate influence, however. Thomas Scot I sat on the Derby House Committee from January 1648, and on the council of state’s Irish sub-committee in the early 1650s.17CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 1-27; Ire. under the Commonwealth, i. 109n. The secretary of the committee and the sub-committee was his son-in-law, William Rowe.18TSP vi. 405. Among the elder Scott’s closest allies at Westminster was John Jones*, who was in Ireland as parliamentary commissioner from 1650 onwards.19Inedited Letters ed. Mayer, 188-9, 194-5, 197-9.

Despite (or perhaps because of) his father’s involvement in the commonwealth regime, Thomas Scott IV grew closer to his wife and her relatives in Ireland in the early 1650s. In April 1651, after he had left Ireland to join the Cromwellian army in Scotland, he asked William Rowe to get permission for his wife to follow him, as ‘they are so passionate in their affections each to other that he desires and she is willing to go by sea to Scotland’.20HMC Leyborne-Popham, 83. At first, Scott seems to have commanded an independent troop, but in June he was promoted to the rank of major in the regiment of Sir Arthur Hesilrige.21SP28/76, ff. 132-3; SP28/78, f. 21. In September he was involved in the defeat of a Scottish force near Dumfries, and in March 1652 he and his troop were stationed at Stirling.22Scot. And Commonwealth ed. Firth, 320-2; Cromwellian Union ed. Terry, 79. Scott did not remain with Hesilrige’s regiment for long. In May 1653 he was back in Ireland, serving as lieutenant-colonel in the regiment of Edmund Ludlowe II. There he strengthened his connections with the wider Old Protestant community, defending the 2nd earl of Cork (Sir Richard Boyle*) from accusations of involvement in royalist plots.23Chatsworth, CM/29, unfol.: 5 and 7 May 1653. In January 1654 he was appointed to a commission to set out lands for disbanded soldiers in co. Longford, which may have increased his contacts with his wife’s family, who owned land in the county.24Ire. under the Commonwealth, ii. 398. His election as MP for Westmeath, Longford and King’s Counties in August 1654 was almost certainly on the interest of his brother-in-law Sir Henry Peirce*: Scott’s fellow MP, Sir Theophilus Jones*, was also related to the Peirces.25C219/44, unfol.; Mercurius Politicus no. 219 (17-24 Aug. 1654), 3170 (E.809.5). There is no evidence that Scott took his seat in this Parliament.

In the summer of 1655 Scott lost his command when Ludlowe’s regiment was disbanded, and although he was granted lands in co. Wexford in compensation for his pay arrears, in September he was arrested as the ‘ringleader’ of a group of ‘officers ... late of Lieutenant General Ludlowe’s regiment’ accused of fomenting dissent in co. Wexford and of ‘seditious reviling expressions against the government’.26TSP iv. 73-4; Henry Cromwell Corresp. 70; J. P. Prendergast, Cromwellian Settlement of Ireland (1865), 104. This was a temporary aberration, however. In 1657 Scott was of sufficiently good standing to be nominated by the Irish council as one of the assessment commissioners for co. Wexford, and in 1659 he rejected army radicalism in favour of the moderate political agenda of the Old Protestants, who opposed the restored Rump Parliament.27An Assessment for Ire. In August 1659, Ludlowe reported an encounter with the young man in Dublin, in which Scott attacked the new regime, justified his support for the ‘late powers’ (in other words, the protectorate), and threatened to resign his command.28CCSP iv. 349.

When Ludlowe tried to take up his post as commander-in-chief of the Irish army in December 1659, he was refused entry to Dublin by the Old Protestant officers, and sailed instead to Duncannon Fort in co. Wexford. There he was besieged by a force commanded by Scott, who ‘used many arguments’ to persuade his old commander to leave Ireland. Relations between the two men were initially conducted with ‘civility’, but as the debate continued, Scott and his friends

endeavoured to justify the attempt of Sir George Boothe*, reviling Sir Arthur Hesilrige and divers others who were members of the Parliament: and being asked whether they would fight against Charles Stuart, if he should appear at the head of an army, they refused to explain themselves in that particular: and yet these gentlemen would be thought to be only champions for the Parliament.29Ludlow, Mems. ii. 196, 200; Clarke, Prelude to Restoration, 137.

Ludlowe’s account may be exaggerated, but the surviving correspondence between the two strongly suggests that Scott was now a committed opponent of the republicans. He accused Ludlowe of favouring only religious and political radicals, and of dismissing ‘persons of known integrity and faithfulness’. Ludlowe replied by accusing the Irish officers of being ‘cavalierish’, and asserting that Scott’s father strongly opposed their actions.30CSP Ire. 1647-60, pp. 712-5.

Scott supported the General Convention, which took control of Irish affairs in the spring of 1660, and was appointed poll money commissioner for co. Wexford. In return, the Convention was careful to protect his interests: when a motion was passed excluding the sons of the regicides from bearing office, a proviso excepted Scott.31Ludlow, Voyce, 280. On the return of the king, Scott’s father was arrested and, after a show trial, executed in October 1660. The son was more fortunate. Initially retained as a field officer, he received a general pardon on the intercession of the earl of Mountrath (Sir Charles Coote*) in 1661.32CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 289; 1660-2, p. 188. Although he had avoided his father’s fate, after the Restoration Scott’s position was not secure. The royalists still saw him as an untrustworthy regicide’s son; and Scott became increasingly opposed to an administration which reneged on its promises over the land settlement. In May 1663, for example, Scott and others from co. Wexford complained bitterly that some of their estates would be returned to their previous owners.33HMC 8th Rep. 510, 518-9. This injustice probably encouraged him to join the ‘great plot’, to seize Dublin Castle and overthrow the government, which was foiled in the same month.34Pepys’s Diary, iv. 168. Arrested by James Butler, 1st duke of Ormond, Scott immediately turned king’s evidence, and in 1666 he was formally pardoned for his part in the plot.35CSP Ire. 1663-5, pp. 157, 691; NAI, Lodge’s MSS 1.A.53.55, f. 64. Thereafter, he regularly came under suspicion. In 1679 he was accused of involvement in the Popish plot, and of slandering Samuel Pepys† as a papist who had sold naval secrets to the French.36HMC Ormonde, n.s. iv. 515. In 1681 Ormond again suspected Scott, along with ‘the fanatics, which are Oliver’s old breed’, of plotting against the Irish government.37HMC Ormonde, n.s. v. 576. In 1685, shortly after the accession of James II, Scott, with his two sons, was arrested at Wexford ‘for words spoken against the king’, and he was imprisoned for a year and fined £500.38Tanner Lttrs. 479. Scott died in or before 1688; his daughter, Elizabeth, married her cousin Thomas, son of Sir Henry Peirce.39Eustace, ‘Index of Will Abstracts’, 322; NLI, MS 2563, unfol.