WESTLAKE, Thomas (d. 1666), of All Hallows, Goldsmith St., Exeter, Devon.

Before the 1640s, the life of Thomas Westlake is very difficult to trace. He was certainly not an Exonian either by birth or ancestry, and neither he nor any of his ancestors were ever made free of the city. There were Westlakes living in Exbourne, in mid-Devon, who sent sons to Exeter College and New Inn Hall, Oxford, but no link can be traced between them and Thomas Westlake.11Al. Ox. Another grouping bearing that name was to be found in Newton Abbot, and this seems to have been the place of Westlake’s birth. Many years later his own memorial recorded in Latin how ‘he was born and died in the struggle and tumult of the courts’; a literal interpretation of this might suggest he was the son of a lawyer.12Cresswell, Exeter Churches, 10. He was probably the lawyer of that name living in Newton Abbot in 1639, and his house was the scene of a confrontation between a captain of a trained band and a local man which ended up in the court of chivalry in London.13Cases in the High Ct. of Chivalry (Harl Soc. n.s. xviii), 223. Yeomen Westlakes lived in Newton Abbot in 1659, as did Thomas Westlake’s brother, described by him as a gentleman, and Thomas Westlake himself held lands in that town when he drew up his will in 1665.14PROB11/294/623; PROB11/320/219. The family was unrecognized by the heralds of the College of Arms.

Westlake evidently trained for the law, but no record can be traced of his enrolment at any of the inns of court. He was certainly not an Exeter taxpayer in 1640, nor can he be traced during the civil war. He seems to have been plucked by the common council in September 1648 from the pool of attorneys who provided legal services to the city (Thomas Gibbons* was a comparable figure) to be town clerk. His predecessor was Samuel Izacke, a notable memorialist of Exeter, who was sequestered for his adherence to the king’s party in the city during the civil war. Izacke’s immediate successor, John Furlong, refused office apparently on grounds of conscience (and was in 1655 included among Major-general John Disbrowe’s ‘suspects’), so Westlake was the council’s second choice.15Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. ff. 20v, 21; Bk. C1/53, f. 53v; Add. 34012. Among his duties was attendance in the higher courts on the city’s behalf, and in 1649 he appeared in chancery and what after the execution of Charles I the council still called king’s bench.16Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. ff. 31v, 32. After his appointment to office in Exeter, his name began to appear on the commissions for the militia and for taxes, but he never achieved a place in the Devon commission of the peace. The regicide evidently posed no problems of loyalty or legitimacy for him, and he worked at the exchequer in January 1651 to convey the Exeter bishop’s palace to the corporation. He and the Presbyterian minister John Bond were asked a year later to draft a petition to Parliament on behalf of the Exeter poor, forced from their homes by fire and other misfortunes during the civil wars.17Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. ix. f. 87. In these activities, Westlake was but a servant of the corporation, on a negligible salary of £7 4s, but his post gave him extensive opportunities to take fees. By the mid-1650s and the time of his election to Parliament he was an important Exeter solicitor, with many clients at Exeter assizes, and a number of lesser attorneys appearing on his behalf.18ASSI24/36; ASSI22/1.

A number of Westlake’s civic duties were marked by a distinctly political tinge. He was required in October 1653 to pursue a chancery case against Hugh Crocker, a prominent royalist who had helped form the backbone of administration in the city when it was under the king’s control. The case Westlake was pursuing rested on the common council’s repudiation of Crocker’s claim to hold a mortgage on city property.19Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. f. 34. Westlake was not always comfortable in his role, and early in January 1655 tried to resign. His unhappiness seems unlikely to have arisen from dislike of the Cromwellian protectorate. Two local issues may well have precipitated his wish to surrender the town clerkship. One was over the chamber’s slowness to reimburse him for money he laid out in bringing an exchequer case on the city’s behalf, and the other was the rehabilitation of the former town clerk, Samuel Izacke, who was by October 1654 acting as the city’s agent in promoting a case in chancery on Exeter’s behalf. Westlake may well have regarded Izacke as a rival.20Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 34, 52v, 57, 58v, 70v. In the event, Westlake withdrew his threat to resign, and replaced Thomas Gibbons*, a rather ineffective lawyer, in the second Parliament of the protectorate in 1656. His political enemies noted that he was chosen to sit ‘by very few persons’ as part of a deliberate and determined plan to drive on the business of puritanizing and municipalizing the churches of Exeter.21Bodl. Walker c.4, f. 274.

Westlake must have been busy in the 1656 Parliament if he was active in the 23 committees to which he was named, all of them in the first sitting of the assembly. His legal background doubtless accounted for his inclusion in the majority of these, as they tended to turn on points of law, the regulation of legal practice or on the drafting of legislation. Among the first category were his appointments to the committee on prisoners accused of treason (4 Oct.), the pardon of John Deane (27 Oct.) and the committee of stating the public faith, that is, for assessing the extent of the national debt.22CJ vii. 434a, 446a, 477b. Among committees on regulating the conduct of legal business were those on abuses among stewards and attorneys (13 Oct.), the committee for probate of wills (27 Oct.), reform of the treatment of debtors (29 Oct.) – fated inevitably to grapple with the legislative framework established in the Nominated Assembly – and the reform of chancery (30 Apr. 1657).23CJ vii. 438a, 446a, 447a, 528a. The bills Westlake worked on included those with a strong flavour of social regulation, such as those for artificers’ wages and the regulation of the market for grain (7 Oct. 1656), for abolishing purveyance (abolished in all but name by this time anyway) and for intervening in the rebuilding of the London suburbs (9 May 1657).24CJ vii. 435a, 435b, 449b, 532a. As befitted a parliamentary tyro and one with only a regional standing in the law, Westlake did not take a leading part in any of these activities.

Religion was a notable interest of Westlake’s in this Parliament. He was appointed on 31 October 1656 to a committee to investigate the maintenance of the Welsh ministry to address the continuing reports of embezzlement during the regime of ‘propagating the gospel’ under the Rump Parliament, and the same day (31 Oct.) was named to the committee charged with considering the case of the Quaker emissary, James Naylor*, whose allegedly blasphemous ride into Bristol was to dominate proceedings for the remainder of the year.25CJ vii. 448a, b. Westlake was hostile to Quakers and was doubtless unsympathetic towards millenarian itinerant preachers of the type who flourished under the propagation scheme. On 18 December, he produced the second letter from Exeter expressing alarm at the rise of the Quakers. When five days later, a small group of London ministers tried to petition Parliament in order to remit or modify the full rigours of the punishment which the House had determined for Naylor, Westlake first of all tried to postpone their admittance, and then spoke dismissively of their mission, insisting that Naylor remained unrepentant.26Burton’s Diary, i. 169, 216, 220. More importantly, he was among the first half dozen names called to progress the bill for preaching in Exeter and uniting parishes there, a scheme pursued by the common council of the city, whose servant he was.27CJ vii. 488a. In due course this produced an act which Westlake was prominent in implementing.

Westlake’s interventions on the floor of the House were not always well received. The contentious case of Rodney and Cole turned on whether judges had ruled on it lawfully. When in the course of a debate on 5 January 1657, Westlake asked whether the judges’ decision had been through error or through prejudice, William Purefoy I insisted on correcting the Exeter town clerk’s Latin in front of the assembled House. A few months later, when doubts were being aired about the duration of appointments of commissioners for the approval of public preachers, Westlake delivered himself of the view that Parliament could indeed remove them. He was ‘hooted’ for his pains.28Burton’s Diary, i. 302; ii. 56. Perhaps he was the victim of snobbery: not only was he a newcomer to Parliament, but also he was unlikely to have appeared as a polished performer. Generally he spoke in support of west country interests, as might have been expected: he was sympathetic to the interests of the city of Gloucester in Ireland and seems to have moved a settlement in this matter, although no further details are forthcoming. With Edmund Fowell and Robert Shapcote he spoke on 4 June 1657 for Parliament to intervene to stop a civil trial in one of the London courts: it was evidently a west country case, but their lobbying was unsuccessful.29CJ vii. 452a, Burton’s Diary, ii. 110, 174-5. He supported his fellow MP for Exeter, Thomas Bampfylde, in arguing that the proposed act on marriages should be reviewed after six months because of its inevitable conflicts with other legislation since 1640 on the subject.30Burton’s Diary, ii. 71.

After the first sitting of this Parliament had been concluded in June 1657, Westlake returned to Exeter to be appointed treasurer of the money collected in the city for maintenance of ministers, authorised by the act which he had helped steer through the House. Some of this fund was to be used for repairing and even enlarging the cathedral – ‘Peter’s’ to the puritan common council – and the redundant churches were to be vested in the corporation.31Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 93, 93v. The contentious nature of the scheme provoked resistance from some of the affected parishioners, and by February 1658 Westlake was faced with the task of prosecuting those who withheld their rates to try to hold things up. Parishioners complained that they were not allowed to see the act of Parliament which authorized the project.32Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. ff. 96v, 104, 106v, 107; Bodl. Walker c.4, ff. 250, 265, 273-6. Their petition to Parliament, which has not survived, was denounced by Westlake as inspired by Catholics and cavaliers and ‘only put in to disturb the blessed work of reformation’.33Bodl. Walker c.4 f. 274. The very scale of the whole endeavour was such that he was judged to be too busy to carry on with the routine work of the town clerkship, which was passed over to a newly-appointed deputy.34Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. f. 96v. It also accounts for Westlake’s apparent absence from the January-February 1658 sitting of the Parliament.

A year later, Westlake was once again occupied in the usual work of the Exeter town clerk, which included managing prosecutions of those who had transgressed against the corporation in affairs of property.35Devion RO, Exeter City Archives, Act Bk. x. f. 116v. But 1659 proved to be his last year in office. The restoration of the monarchy rendered his appointment as town clerk invalid, and Samuel Izacke was restored to the post.36Devon RO, Exeter City Archives, Bk. C1/53, f. 53v. Similarly, the scheme for Exeter church reform was deemed unlawful as the episcopal Church of England was brought back into being. Nevertheless, Westlake’s standing and reputation survived his close association with the local legislation of the Cromwellian protectorate. For one thing, he had by this time acquired a house in All Hallows, Goldsmith Street in Exeter, and was able to bequeath property in various other places in Devon. He was also considered loyal enough to the monarchy to become an exchequer commissioner in pursuit of those thought to owe public money to the crown as a result of handling revenues during the interregnum. Between April 1662 and January 1664, in Exeter and places nearby, Westlake took down the answers to exchequer bills against a number of sequestrators, soldiers and treasurers who had once like him been members of the infrastructure of successive republican and Cromwellian regimes. Among those to appear before him was Christopher Ceely, MP for Plymouth in 1654 and 1659.37E113/6, answer of Christopher Ceely, 19 Jan. 1663.

In December 1665, Westlake drew up his will, a cautious catalogue of property and bequests with no clues as to his religious or political views, and he died the following month. An eloquent memorial inscription in Latin was erected in his memory in the church of All Hallows, Goldsmith Street. It recorded his life-long dedication to the law, his role as ‘patron and lord’ (presumably a reference to his ownership of manors) and compared him to Zenas, the lawyer upon whom St Paul depended: a reticent allusion to Westlake’s career in Exeter in the 1650s. The assertion that ‘everyone knew him as one of their own’ was a gloss on his relatively humble origins, and the closing lines of the epitaph were unapologetic, even bold: ‘Now depart, you who read this, and from now on think favourably of lawyers’.38Cresswell, Exeter Churches, 10; Titus 3:13. After his death, Westlake’s elder son was admitted to Queen’s College, Oxford, and the other to the Middle Temple, but none of his descendants is known to have sat in Parliament.39Al. Ox.; M. Temple Admiss. i. 202.