LOWER, Thomas (1615-61), of St Winnow, Cornw.

Thomas Lower was the posthumous son of the Cornish gentleman and astronomer, Sir William Lower, who died around six months before his son’s birth. Thomas Lower’s widowed mother, who was related to the Devereux earls of Essex, was granted administration of her husband’s extensive estates in Cornwall and south Wales, as well as the wardship of her son. She remarried, in 1619, Sir Robert Naunton†, secretary of state to James I.5HP Commons 1604-29, under ‘Sir William Lower’. It is likely that Thomas Lower benefited from the contacts of his parents and step-father, and that he grew up at court.6Keeler, Long Parliament, 258. Others in his family were certainly in positions of influence around the king: his elder sister, Dorothy, married Sir Maurice Drummond, gentleman usher to Charles I; a cousin, Sir William Lower of Tremere, was a playwright, courtier and royalist soldier, who dedicated his first play, The Phoenix in her Flames (1639), to Thomas; an uncle, Sir Nicholas Lower, was brother-in-law to Henry Killigrew*.7Vivian, Vis. Cornw. 300; PROB11/304/11; Oxford DNB; Keeler, Long Parliament, 258. This courtly background no doubt explains Lower’s election for the Long Parliament in October 1640, as MP for East Looe, although he was not the official candidate of the duchy interest.8DCO, Letters and warrants, 1639-43, ff. 66-7.

Lower played only a modest role in the early months of the Long Parliament. On 19 December 1640 he was named to a committee to consider a petition from Buckinghamshire concerning the maintenance of a preaching ministry there, and on 4 January 1641 he was added to the committee for Mr Borlase and Mr Hoby.9CJ ii. 54b, 62b. Lower took the Protestation on 3 May, and later in the same month he was named to the committee to examine corruption by those involved in the impropriations on wine.10CJ ii. 133a, 157a. The latter, and his appointment to committees to debate a bill to restrain bargemen and others from working on Sundays (3 June), and to alleviate poverty in London by banning trading by papists (16 Aug.), suggest that Lower’s main focus was metropolitan, rather than Cornish.11CJ ii. 165b, 258a. After the summer of 1641, Lower disappears from the parliamentary record, and he may also have vanished from Parliament itself. On the outbreak of civil war in the autumn of 1642 he joined the king, and was at Oxford in 1643, when he was awarded an honorary MA at the university.12Al. Ox. On taking his seat in the Oxford Parliament in January 1644 he was disabled from sitting at Westminster ‘being in the king’s quarters’.13CJ iii. 374a; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 573. In July of that year he was listed as a delinquent by the Committee for Advance of Money, and his estates assessed at the yearly value of £2,500.14CCAM 423.

Lower seems to have returned to Cornwall later in the civil war, but in January 1646 he submitted to Parliament and took the negative oath, although he refused to sign the Covenant until he had considered it carefully.15CCC 1082. Permission for this delay was allowed in March. In May, he was again assessed, but this time his estate was valued at the lesser sum of £600 per annum, and this was not implemented until Parliament could make a decision.16CCAM 423. The result was a favourable one, perhaps reflecting the influence of his friends in Cornwall. On 15 February 1647 the Commons resolved that Lower was to be one of those delinquents allowed to compound at two years’ value, on the recommendation of the Committee of the West.17CJ v. 88b. He was also exempted from assessment for the fifth and twentieth values of his estate, and on 2 April the Committee for Advance of Money respited any payments of assessment until Parliament had made a further ruling.18CCAM 423. In the meantime, Lower’s case was brought before the Committee for Compounding, where it was considered alongside those of other Cornish royalists, including Piers Edgcumbe* and William Scawen*. On 27 February 1647, just a week after the Commons’ decision in his favour, Lower petitioned to be allowed to compound, and in January 1648 he was included in the Truro articles, and fined at two years’ value, or £1,174. In August 1649 he asked to be remitted the second half of his fine, as Edgcumbe and Scawen had been, and this was accepted.19CCC 1083.

During the 1650s Lower was left in peace except for a few tense weeks in the summer of 1651, when Charles Stuart invaded England at the head of a Scottish army. As recently as 12 February 1651 the Commons had ordered that their earlier resolution, discharging Lower from paying an assessment, was to be continued, but in August there were moves to have him rated at the higher level of £2,500 a year.20CCAM 423, 1486. This was the only indication that Lower was considered a security risk by the interregnum authorities. Indeed, during the protectorate he was treated with surprising leniency. While other royalists were forced to leave London in the summer of 1655, by an order of 11 July Lower was allowed to remain.21CSP Dom. 1655, p. 592. When Piers Edgcumbe contemplated making a visit to the capital in February 1656, he asked his brother, Philip, to ‘enquire of Mr Lower, Mr [Robert?] Scawen* and other your friends what is usual in this case, and whether they suppose it be convenient’; and he was disappointed when Philip Edgcumbe reported that he had been ‘several times as Mr Lower’s lodging’ without meeting him.22Cornw. RO, ME/3026-7. Lower’s charmed life also extended to his attempts to recover lands in Holland and Zealand, left to him by his uncle, Sir Francis Lower.23PROB11/304/11; Oxford DNB. On 31 July 1654 Thomas Lower joined his cousin, Sir William Lower, in petitioning the council for a pass to allow Sir William and Thomas’s attorney, John Clark, to travel to the Low Countries, and this was readily granted.24CSP Dom. 1654, p. 275. In October 1655 it was reported by the Cornish royalist in exile Joseph Jane* that Sir William returned to The Hague ‘having been in England to complain of injury received here [i.e. in Holland] in a suit’, and, according to Jane, ‘Cromwell hath written a letter to the States on his and his cousin’s behalf, whom the suit concerns’.25Nicholas Pprs. iii. 83-4. Despite this high-level intervention, Lower did not secure his Dutch estates, and they were still regarded as lands that he was merely ‘entitled to’ after the Restoration.26PROB11/304/11.

As well as the Dutch lands from Sir Francis, Thomas Lower had also inherited extensive estates in Cornwall from another uncle, Sir Nicholas Lower, who died in 1653, and the death of his mother in 1655 presumably released her jointure lands as well.27PROB11/244/599. This gave him a considerable estate, but he had never married and had no direct heirs. As a result, when he came to draw up his will in February 1661, Lower was left to disperse his estates as he wished. The lands in Carmarthenshire went to his sister, Dorothy Drummond; his interest in the disputed Dutch estate was given to his cousin, Sir William; and the lands at St Winnow and elsewhere in Cornwall, derived from his uncles and his father, were also left to Sir William, ‘to continue the same in the name and family of the Lowers’.28PROB11/304/11. Thomas Lower died on 5 February 1661, and was buried at St Clement Danes Church, London.29Vivian, Vis. Cornw. 300.