SCLATER, Thomas (1615-84), of Cambridge, Cambs.

Born in Halifax in 1615, Thomas Sclater was a younger son of William Sclater, a Yorkshire attorney from a family of no great pedigree.24Metcalfe, ‘Cambs. families’, 309. Sclater senior died less than five years after Thomas’s birth, leaving his young family to be brought up by his widow. His elder brother, Edward, born in about 1607, followed their father in the law.25Borthwick, prerogative court of archbp. of York, wills reg. 35, f. 595v; London Vis. Peds. 1664 (Harl. Soc. xcii), 127. Thomas, whose inheritance was limited to a house and some land at Ilkley, entered Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1631, but was lured to Trinity three years later by the offer of a scholarship. His election to a college fellowship there in 1637 appeared to provide him with a measure of financial security. For a brief time he served as one of the college’s tutors, although only one student is known to have been committed to his charge.26Al. Cant.; Admissions to Trinity Coll. ii. 346, 376; Trinity Coll. Camb. senior bursar’s audit bk. 1637-59, ff. 7, 21, 27, 28, 39, 42, 53v, 56v, 69v, 85, 91; Cambs. RO, Camb. corp. archives, box X/17. In early 1642 he was among Trinity fellows who took the Protestation.27Protestation Returns for Cambs. ed. P. Palgrave (Cambridge, 2004), 34. At this stage his goal was probably ordination, if only to comply with the regulations governing Trinity fellowships, but during the regulation of the college by the visitors sent by Parliament in 1644, Sclater was one of 44 fellows ejected from their places for leading scandalous lives or for opposing Parliament.28Walker, Sufferings of the Clergy, pt. ii. 160. The nature of Sclater’s offence is not known, although probably he was thought to have royalist or episcopalian sympathies and had refused to take the Covenant.

Unemployed at about the age of 30, Sclater seems to have retrained as a physician and so was able to obtain a doctorate in physic from Oxford University in June 1649. The grant of this degree was made on the advice of the chancellor, Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, to whom Sclater had been recommended by the Rumper MP, Sir Thomas Widdrington*. That Widdrington had strong connections with Yorkshire (he was the recorder of York and son-in-law to the 2nd Baron Fairfax (Sir Ferdinando Fairfax*) is hardly sufficient to explain why Sclater was favoured in this way. Possibly he managed to overcome the previous doubts about his political loyalties. A summons by the council of state in September 1651 to appear before its committee of examinations regarding letters which had been intercepted at Exeter might indicate some useful service to the authorities.29CSP Dom. 1651, p. 410. His appointments to local office, particularly that as a justice of the peace for Cambridgeshire and for the university in July 1652, confirm that the government had concluded that he was now a person to be trusted.30C231/6, p. 241; C181/6, p. 34.

By the early 1650s Sclater was living in Cambridge in the house of the most prominent victim of the Trinity purge, the former master, Thomas Comber. In his will, drawn up in November 1651, Comber specified that his medical books should pass to his ‘loving friend’ and Sclater subsequently witnessed the codicil added in December 1652.31A.R. Bax, ‘The plundered ministers of Surr.’, Surr. Arch. Coll. ix. 314n. Comber’s death in 1653 proved to be particularly important for Sclater, because, now that he was free from the constraints of his Trinity fellowship, he was able to marry Comber’s widow, Susanna. Presumably Sclater was practising professionally as a physician in Cambridge during this period; his subsequent wealth indicates that this was particularly profitable. By 1654 his former colleagues at Trinity were leasing to him some of the college lands at Monks Kirby in Warwickshire.32Trinity Coll. Camb. senior bursar’s audit bk. 1637-59, ff. 251, 259. Four years later he was assisting Trinity in one of its legal cases and in 1658-9 he supplied them with ‘several writings concerning the college’.33Trinity Coll. Camb. senior bursar’s audit bk. 1637-59, ff. 332, 347v.

Sclater’s election to the 1659 Parliament entirely depended on his position as a resident member of the university. The decision to ask the secretary of state, John Thurloe*, to accept the senior seat was obvious and uncontroversial, but, as the provost of King’s, Benjamin Whichcot, explained in a letter to the chancellor, Oliver St John*, the prevailing view was that the prestigious but largely nominal return of Thurloe should be balanced with the appointment of someone ‘who knows all our affairs’.34TSP vii. 574. Writing to Thurloe the day after the election, the master of Christ’s College, Ralph Cudworth, made the same point. According to Cudworth, the main consideration in deciding who should get the junior place had been that the candidate should be ‘well acquainted with the state of things here, and one that would be vacant to attend our concernments, as occasion might be offered’.35TSP vii. 587. Sclater’s was apparently the first name that came to mind for this purpose, although some of the dons felt that Nathaniel Bacon* would be a far more suitable alternative. Bacon, a former chairman of the Eastern Association* committee, who had been recruited to the Long Parliament as MP for the university in 1645 and who had gone on to become one of Cromwell’s masters of requests, was a figure who combined inside knowledge of the university’s affairs with the experience and public standing Sclater clearly lacked. Had it not been that Sclater’s name was canvassed first and that Bacon was assured of a seat at Ipswich, Sclater would surely have stood no chance whatsoever against him. However, Cudworth, who assumed that Thurloe would not have heard of his new colleague, paid tribute to Sclater as someone who was ‘well known by many of us to be a very ingenious person, of very good abilities, and one, that we doubt not but will concur with such resolutions, as tend to the settlement and establishment of the commonwealth, as well as mind the interest of the university’.36TSP vii. 587. In arranging for Sclater to be introduced to Thurloe before the Parliament met, Cudworth again assured Thurloe that he would be ‘well satisfied in his ingenuity’.37TSP vii. 595. Sclater may well have fulfilled these high expectations, although the evidence of his participation in this Parliament is so slight as to preclude any certainty. All that is known is that he was named to two committees – those for elections and for the enfranchisement of the palatinate of Durham – and that he seems never to have spoken in debate.38CJ vii. 594b, 622b.

Sclater’s willingness to accept the Restoration allowed him to retain his local offices following the return of the king and in the years after 1660 he established a reputation as one of the most active members of the bench in Cambridgeshire. The notebooks he kept of his work as a justice of the peace between 1660 and 1684 are an exceptional record of their type. Much of the work of maintaining law and order in Cambridge fell on his shoulders.39Bodl. Rawl. C.948; Rawl. D.1137; W.M. Palmer, ‘The reformation of the corp. of Cambridge, July 1662’, Procs. Camb. Antiq. Soc. xvii. 75-136. One of his occasional duties was the suppression of meetings in the town by Quakers and other nonconformists, a task he may have performed with considerable reluctance.40Bodl. Rawl. C.948, 2nd pag. pp. 5, 43, 45; Palmer, ‘Reformation’, 93-4; ‘Commitments at Cambridge, 1660-61’, Jnl. of the Friends Hist. Soc. xx. 32. In the early 1670s Stephen Perry, a well-known informant against dissenters, complained that Sclater was too lax in his enforcement of the Conventicle Act.41Bodl. Rawl. D.1137, pp. 39-40, 43; CSP Dom. 1671, pp. 106, 107; Add. 1660-85, pp. 402-3. According to the eighteenth-century antiquary, William Cole, Sclater had been ‘a favourer of the fanatical party’ during the reign of Charles II.42Add. 5822, f. 6v.

Towards the end of his life Sclater began accumulating large landed estates. In 1674 he paid £7,793 to another prominent physician, Sir Joseph Colston, for estates at Linton, ten miles south-east from Cambridge on the county border with Essex.43Cambs. RO, R.59.5.9/100-102; R.59.5.3/1, ff. 412-18, 424. Catley House, acquired in the next few years, become his principal residence.44Cambs. RO, R.59.5.9/103-104, 107-108. In 1678 he consolidated his holdings around Duxford, and, with the assistance of Sir Thomas Exton† (master of Trinity Hall and the current MP for Cambridge University).45Cambs. RO, R.59.5.9/109-110, 112-114. These acquisitions prompted Sclater to begin recording his estate business with the same thoroughness as he had his work as a justice of the peace.46Cambs. RO, R.59.5.3/1.

Sclater had retained strong links with his old college. In April 1676 he agreed to donate £800 to Trinity – with several strings attached – so that the north range of Neville’s Court could be extended as part of the scheme by Sir Christopher Wren† for a new college library.47R. Willis and J. W. Clark, The Architectural Hist. of the Univ. of Cambridge (Cambridge, 1886), ii. 519-22; The making of the Wren Lib. ed. D. McKitterick (Cambridge, 1995), 46; RCHM City of Cambridge, ii. 214, 235-6, plate 61 (40). For this he continues to be remembered annually in the college’s commemoration of its benefactors.48Admissions to Trinity Coll. i. 56. He separately paid the cost of other decorations.49Willis and Clark, Hist. ii. 545; PROB11/379/131; RCHM City of Cambridge, ii. 240; McKitterick, Wren Lib. 45; Add. 5822, f. 6v; MIs Cambs. 274, plate xliv. He also loaned money to Trinity’s neighbour, St John’s.50Bodl. Tanner 39, f. 171.

To the cynical, such as the vice-chancellor, Francis Turner, this was all a transparent attempt by Sclater to regain his old seat in Parliament. When the writs arrived in late January 1679 for the first general election since 1661, Turner complained that Sclater’s campaign had long been ready to run. Turner thought it particularly odd that ‘a man of ease, and a man perfectly at his ease in his fortune, vastly rich, and childless should in his old age put himself into this new world, and sea of business which he understands not at all’.51Bodl. Tanner 39, f. 171. Sclater’s plan seems to have been that he and Exton should stand together to win support from both sides, for Sclater, unlike Exton, was probably a supporter of the 1st earl of Shaftesbury (Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*) and the anti-court faction. Turner’s concern was that Sclater’s intervention threatened to offend the chancellor (and leading ally of Shaftesbury), the duke of Monmouth, who wished to nominate his own secretary, James Vernon†. An initial attempt by Turner to broker a deal whereby Sclater would stand instead for the borough came to nothing. (Turner calculated that Sclater could count on the nonconformist vote, although securing one of the borough seats would, he thought, still have cost ‘the old usurer’ large sums of money.)52Bodl. Tanner 39, ff. 171-172. In the end however, Sclater withdrew from the contest. His appointment as a sheriff in November 1680 may have been a ploy by the court to prevent him standing again should another Parliament be called during that year.53List of Sheriffs, 15.

Having no children of his own, in November 1679 Sclater handed over most of his estates to the master of Pembroke, Nathaniel Coga, and Thomas Bainbrigg, with the intention that they should hold them as his trustees until his great-nephew and nearest male heir, also Thomas Sclater, came of age.54Cambs. RO, R.59.5.9/115-117. His will, drawn up two years later, confirmed this arrangement, although he subsequently altered its minor details.55PROB11/379131. Sclater died on 10 December 1684 and, in accordance with his wishes, was buried in the chapel of Trinity College.56Le Neve, Mon. Angl. iii. 60; Add. 5822, f. 6v; Bernays, Inscriptions, 7; RCHM City of Cambridge, ii. 221; PROB11/379/131. The complex arrangements he had made for his estate took effect and seven years later his heir entered in to his inheritance.57PROB11/379/131. The younger Thomas Sclater† (who took the surname of Bacon on his marriage in about 1716) declined to stand for Cambridge University in 1710, but sat as a tory for Bodmin in 1713 and for Cambridge in 1715, 1722 and 1727.