MARBURY, Thomas (1611-68), of Marbury, Great Budworth, Cheshire.

Marbury belonged to an ancient Cheshire family that had settled at Marbury, near Northwich in the north west of the county, by the early thirteenth century.21Ormerod, Cheshire, i. pt. 2, pp. 633, 636. His attainment of a BA and MA while at Oxford, and his subsequent admission to Gray’s Inn, suggest that he was a bookish type and, as with many a younger son, may have been destined for a career in the law. If that was the intention it was probably thwarted by the outbreak of civil war. He was among the Cheshire gentry – both future royalists and future parliamentarians – who signed the ‘neutralist’ Remonstrance that circulated in the county during the late summer of 1642, urging joint action by king and Parliament to prevent the ‘dissolution of the fabric of this blessed government’.22Harl. 2107, f. 83; Morrill, Cheshire, 58-9. According to one authority, he raised troops for Parliament in the early stages of the fighting.23N. Dore, The Civil Wars in Cheshire (Chester, 1966), 26, 60. However, the Captain Marbury who helped to defend Nantwich early in 1643, and whose troop was mentioned in May 1645, was probably his younger brother John, who rose to the rank of major under Marbury’s brother-in-law Colonel Henry Brooke*.24Cheshire RO, ZP/Cowper/2, f. 29; Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 411; ii. 225; BHO, Cromwell Assoc. database.

All that can be established with any certainty regarding Marbury’s wartime conduct is that in the space of two months in the spring of 1645 he sent a cordial letter to the commander of Parliament’s forces in Cheshire, Sir William Brereton*, and then joined his elder half-brother William Marbury, Brooke, (Sir) George Boothe* and other prominent parliamentarian gentry in a petition to the Committee of Both Kingdoms* that was implicitly critical of Brereton’s influence over the county’s affairs.25Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 236, 350-2; Morrill, Cheshire, 154-5. It is perhaps significant that Marbury’s appointment as a deputy lieutenant for Cheshire in February 1647 – effectively replacing William Marbury, who had died without issue late in 1645, leaving Thomas heir to the extensive family estates – occurred at a time when the Presbyterian interest was in the ascendant at Westminster.26CJ v. 47b; LJ ix. 31a; Cheshire IPM ed. Stewart-Brown, 180-3.

Why Marbury sided with Parliament in the civil war is not clear. His mother had been a woman of puritan, or at least anti-Laudian, sensibilities, for she was cited by the church authorities in 1633 for refusing to kneel at communion.27Richardson, Puritanism, 108-9. But his own religious convictions are difficult to establish. In the summer of 1654, he was one of several Cheshire gentlemen (another was Henry Brooke) who recommended the minister John Holme to Oliver Cromwell* for one of the county’s livings.28Mins. of the Cttee. for Plundered Ministers rel. to Lancs. and Cheshire ed. Shaw, 47. If this was the ‘J. Hulme’ of Great Budworth (Marbury’s own parish) who signed the 1648 Cheshire Presbyterian ‘Attestation’, it suggests that Marbury was a man of puritan sympathies.29Calamy Revised, 554. Yet if he, too, was a Presbyterian, he had little difficulty adjusting to public life under the Rump. Indeed, he attended almost every meeting of the Cheshire quarter sessions between early 1648 and late 1650 and was active as a county committeeman, a member of the Cheshire sub-committee of accounts and as a militia commissioner throughout the late 1640s and early 1650s.30SP28/224, ff. 295, 300, 318, 323, 327, 330; Cheshire RO, QJB 1/6, ff. 146, 246; CCC 377, 629; CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 192, 500; P.J. Pinckney, ‘The Cheshire election of 1656’, BJRL xlix. 388.

Marbury remained at the heart of Cheshire’s political community under the protectorate and was one of the ‘caucus of gentlemen’ that agreed on the four candidates who were subsequently returned for the county in the elections to the first protectoral Parliament in 1654.31Cheshire RO, DDX/384/1, p. 173; Morrill, Cheshire, 287. He also maintained his impressive record in local government, serving on the Cheshire militia commission set up in the wake of Penruddock’s rising of early 1655 and signing a declaration of the county’s justices of the peace that spring against ‘that dangerous design of late transacted by the old and grand enemies to the freedom and peace of this nation’.32CHES21/4, f. 327; TSP iii. 304, 338. An active member of the Cheshire commission to assist Major-general Charles Worsley*, he lamented Worsley’s death in June 1656 as a sad loss to the nation.33Cheshire RO, DLT/B38, p. 10; DSS/1/7/66/54, 55, 61; TSP v. 22, 128-9.

Marbury was apparently on good terms with Worsley’s successor, Major-general Tobias Bridge*, who supported his candidacy for one of the four Cheshire seats in the elections to the second protectoral Parliament in August 1656.34Supra, ‘Cheshire’; Cheshire RO, DSS/1/7/66/61; TSP v. 313. Marbury also enjoyed the support of his fellow Cheshire commissioners for securing the peace of the commonwealth and the backing of the leading gentry of his neighbourhood – notably, Henry Brooke, Peter Brooke* and Richard Legh*.35Cheshire RO, DDX/384/1, pp. 255, 257, 258; TSP v. 313; Pinckney, ‘Cheshire election of 1656’, 400-1, 404-5, 412-13. On election day, Boothe, Marbury, Legh and Peter Brooke were returned for the county in that order, beating off a challenge from the regicide John Bradshawe* and his electoral ally Brereton.36Supra, ‘Cheshire’. Marbury’s popularity with the voters probably rested largely on his record of service in local government and his extensive estates and influence in the north west of the county.37Cheshire IPM ed. Stewart-Brown, 180-3. None of the four men returned for Cheshire were among the 100 or so Members who were excluded from the House by the protectoral council as opponents of the government. However, Marbury and Brooke were among the 29 MPs who voted against a motion on 22 September 1656 that the excluded Members apply to the council for ‘approbation’ to sit – which was interpreted as support for ‘the bringing in of the excluded Members into the House’ and was comprehensively defeated.38Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 166; CJ vii. 426b. Most of these 29 MPs have been accounted Presbyterians.39M.J. Tibbetts, ‘Parliamentary Parties under Oliver Cromwell’ (Bryn Mawr Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 1944), 127-9.

Marbury made no great impression upon the proceedings of the House, receiving only five committee appointments and making no recorded contribution to debate.40CJ vii. 446a, 462b, 469a, 472b, 507b. He briefly emerged into the limelight on 18 December, when he presented a petition from Cheshire against the Quakers, in what was apparently a nationwide Presbyterian campaign to exploit feeling in the House against the Quaker evangelist and alleged blasphemer James Naylor.41Burton’s Diary, i. 168-9. That Marbury was hostile to the Quakers is confirmed by their own records, where he is listed among those Cheshire magistrates who were as ‘cursed persecutors as are in the nation’.42Extracts from State Pprs. rel. to Friends ed. N. Penney (1913), 110; Pinckney, ‘Cheshire election of 1656’, 407. If he supported the projected new protectoral constitution, the Remonstrance – which was introduced into the House in February 1657 – it was perhaps on condition that it narrowed the limits of toleration for the godly in such as way as to proscribe the radical sects. Thus his only committee appointment of 1657 was to a body set up on 19 March to consider a clause in the Remonstrance to the effect that those ministers who agreed in matters of faith with the true Reformed Protestant religion but who preferred the Congregational way to Presbyterianism should be tolerated so long as they did not revile the ‘confession of faith’ – a document intended to set down the terms of a scripture-based, Trinitarian orthodoxy, but which, in the event, was never written.43CJ vii. 507b. Unlike his fellow Cheshire MPs Peter Brooke and Richard Legh, he was not listed among the ‘kinglings’ – the supporters at Westminster of a monarchical settlement.44[G. Wharton], A Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 22 (E.935.5); But he found the new constitution agreeable to the extent that he remained at Westminster after its introduction, serving as a minority teller on 22 June in favour of levying a £3 windfall on wine-retailers.45CJ vii. 568b.

It is very likely that Marbury backed his kinsman Peter Brooke against John Bradshawe in the bitterly contested Cheshire elections to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659.46Supra, ‘Cheshire’. However, his name does not appear among the lists of supporters and opponents drawn up by Bradshawe’s party.47Bodl. Top. Cheshire e.3, f. 22v; Morrill, Cheshire, 295-6. He was certainly among those Cheshire gentlemen who appeared in support of Sir George Boothe’s Presbyterian-royalist rising that summer, and he was fortunate that after the rebellion was suppressed his punishment was apparently confined to removal from the bench.48C231/6, p. 442; Cheshire RO, QJF/88/3, nos. 149-50; Ormerod, Cheshire, i. pt. 1, p. lxv. In the indictment presented against the rebels at the Cheshire quarter sessions in October 1659, Marbury is described as ‘of Mere’ – which was Peter Brooke’s main residence.49SP18/205/7, f. 9. Precisely what drove Marbury to rebellion is not known. He was persona grata again by the spring of 1660, when he was restored to the bench; and he remained popular after the Restoration, retaining his place as a justice of the peace and securing appointment in October 1661 as a Cheshire deputy lieutenant – in both of which offices he was very active.50Cheshire RO, QJB 3/1, ff. 3, 135; DLT/B11, pp. 108, 110, 122, 123, 124, 127.

Marbury died on 27 January 1668 and was buried at Great Budworth on 3 February.51Great Budworth par. reg. In his will, he charged his estate with annuities worth £200 a year and bequests of £3,000; his personal estate was inventoried at £845. His executors included Henry Brooke’s son Richard.52Cheshire RO, WS 1668, will of Thomas Marbury. Marbury was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.