HODGES, Thomas I (c.1611-75), of Shipton Moyne, Glos.

In Elizabethan times, the Hodges family were parish gentry, mostly described as ‘gentlemen’, occasionally meriting the title ‘esquire’. They came from the Wiltshire-Gloucestershire border area, and in 1544 John Hodges of Malmesbury bought the manor of Shipton Moyne. Thomas Hodges’s great-grandfather was farmer of the rectory of Shipton in the 1570s, and was prosecuted by the rector for non-payment of his rent for the tithes.35VCH Glos. xi. 250, 251, 255; Glos. RO, D1571/E303, F7, L5. John Hodges, Thomas’s grandfather, was consistently described as ‘gent.’ by the minister who baptised his 11 children at Shipton, and one of the children so recorded was Luke Hodges*.36Shipton Moyne par. reg. The marriage of Thomas Hodges’s father with Joyce, the daughter of George Snigge†, recorder of Bristol, MP for Cricklade in 1589 and for Bristol in three subsequent Parliaments, transformed the fortunes of his branch of the family. Thomas went to school in Bristol, remarking years later how in those days the castle walls were decayed, and became the heir to some choice Bristol properties after his father died in 1637.37Prynne, Walker, True and Full Relation, ‘A catalogue of witnesses’, 1. He later repaired his grandfather’s impressive tomb.38Trans. Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. xxvii. 113. Hodges’s period at one of the inns of court provided appropriate training for him to become an effective country justice when he succeeded his father, who had served as sheriff of Gloucestershire in 1622, in the commission of the peace.39List of Sheriffs (L. and I. ix), 51.

As patrons of the living of Shipton Moyne, Hodges and his father were involved in proceedings at the court of high commission over the standing of John Oldham, the minister there, in 1637, but no firm reasons for the dispute, which seems not to have proceeded, can be adduced. The Hodges family were not in conflict with the government of Charles I, and Thomas Hodges was active on the bench of magistrates in the late 1630s, being party to the decision to move quarter sessions twice yearly from Gloucester to Cirencester.40CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 142; Glos. RO, GBR/H2/3, f. 3. Returned for Cricklade on his own interest in the first Parliament of 1640, Hodges left no impression at all on that assembly. Back in the House when the new Parliament met in November 1640, however, he was named to the committee investigating the alleged monopoly of the Thames conservancy by John George*.41CJ ii. 51b; Procs. LP i. 618 The following week, Hodges was appointed to the committee pursuing the Laudian innovations of Bishop Matthew Wren of Norwich. He was the only representative of his part of the country on this committee, which examined many witnesses through the early part of 1641, which may suggest that he had a strong personal antipathy towards Laudianism.42CJ ii. 56a; Procs. LP i. 17, 20, 30, 68, 113, 145, 153, 176, 182, 185, 194, 231, 250, 277, 533, 567. The activities of this committee, which culminated an the impeachment of Wren in July 1641, may have occupied some of Hodges’s time, but for whatever reason, he was unrecorded by the clerks of the House between December 1640 and May 1642, except for his being listed among those taking the Protestation, on 3 May 1641.43CJ ii. 133b. With Sir Robert Cooke* (his brother-in-law), Henry Stephens* and Henry Brett*, however, he was named in August 1641 as a commissioner for disarming recusants.44LJ iv. 385a; Northants. RO, FH133, unfol.

In the months before the outbreak of the civil war, Hodges committed himself in the Commons to bring in two horses or one horse and £50 to defend Parliament.45PJ iii. 475. On 12 August 1642, he was named as one of Parliament’s nominees for the office of deputy lieutenant of Gloucestershire, and by the end of September was with Nathaniel Stephens* working in Gloucester to win over significant county figures such as John Smyth, steward of George, 8th Baron Berkeley, to the defensive cause of Parliament.46Glos. RO, D7115: Stephens and Hodges to Smyth, 26 Sept. 1642. His friendship with Nathaniel Stephens lasted until the death of the latter, in whose will of 1658 Hodges was described as ‘faithful friend’; and the friendship with the Stephens family extended to John Stephens*, to whom Hodges’s son was later bound at the Middle Temple. His marriage connection with the Cookes of Highnam brought him into the inner circle of parliamentarian opposition in Gloucestershire, and Hodges had family ties in Gloucester, where his younger brother was a mercer, making him a useful link between county and city.47Gloucester Appr. Regs. ed. Barlow (Bristol and Glos. Arch. Soc. Rec. Ser. xiv), 67. With Stephens and others, Hodges in February 1643 advanced nearly £5,000 for the use of the army of Sir William Waller in the west – Sir Robert Cooke was a colonel in that Association – and was promised repayment at 8 per cent.48CJ ii. 964b, 971b, 985a, 987b; LJ v. 606b, 611a; CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 413.

In the early months of 1643, Hodges reported to the House the plot by two prominent Bristol citizens to betray the city to Prince Rupert (13 Mar.), and was entrusted with the task of publicising it. He was named to committees a few weeks later to address a petition of the Merchant Adventurers about trade (14 Apr.) and for raising forces in Dorset (28 Apr.).49Harl. 164, f. 325; CJ ii. 1001a; iii. 44a, 63a. But financing and supplying Waller’s army was his main interest. The recovery of sums he himself had helped advance, perhaps on the credit of the Gloucester merchant community, was a constant anxiety. Relief seemed possible when Nathaniel Fiennes I*, the new governor of Bristol, received over £1,700 from the customs collector of the port. The advances of Hodges and Nathaniel Stephens were to be met from this source, and the arrangement may have predisposed Hodges to look favourably on Fiennes, after an initial coolness. In April, John Fiennes* reported the resistance of Hodges, Nathaniel Stephens and William Strode II* to Nathaniel’s inclusion in local county committees. Yet when the governor was court-martialled at St Albans in December 1643 for having surrendered the city to Rupert the previous July, Hodges incurred the displeasure of William Prynne* for finding reasons to exculpate him.50CJ iii. 159b, 161a; CCSP i. 242; Prynne, Walker, True and Full Relation, ‘A catalogue of witnesses’, 1. With two other Members, Hodges was selected to attend the court-martial to speak in Fiennes’s defence. Laurence Whitaker* noted that the despatch of the MPs overrode objections to the breach of parliamentary privilege: ‘it was alleged that this was a special case, wherein the whole kingdom expected that ways should be given to the course of justice to proceed, and that there should be no interruption of it by the Parliament’.51Add. 31116, p. 203. Less nobly, Thomas Erle, who moved that Hodges and his colleague should go to St Albans, was trying to protect Fiennes, his brother-in-law, from censure. As far as Hodges’s role is concerned, too much should not be read into his compliance with an adversarial legal process.52Harl. 165, f. 245v.

At the time of Waller’s disaster at Roundway Down (13 July), Hodges was effectively a joint-treasurer of his army, but after the destruction of that force gave his full attention to Gloucester. He may have been the Mr Hodges noted as ‘marshal’ of one of the Gloucester regiments that month, because his responsibilities deepened and widened that summer to include joint oversight of the finances of Gloucester garrison.53CJ iii. 163b, 190b; SP28/299. Muskets were sent to him from the Tower of London for the garrison’s use, and in various expedients in the early part of 1644 and the same time the following year to send money there from London, Hodges was centrally involved.54CJ iii. 295a, 309a, 325a, 401b, 435a, 492a; iv. 32b, 37b; Harl. 166, f. 61; LJ vi. 431b, 552a, vii. 338a. The most enduring expedient to support Gloucester came with what began in January 1644 as a levy on top of usual customs duties on currants imported in a particular ship. This was extended in March as a general concession to the Levant Company, whereby their privilege of importing was paid for by duties for Gloucester garrison. Between February 1645 and July 1649, nearly £6,000 was raised in this way, although it took the managing triumvirate of Hodges, Nathaniel Stephens and Thomas Pury I until the summer of 1658 to have their accounts audited, despite their best efforts at petitioning.55CJ iii. 369b, 417a, 432b, 492a; LJ vi. 383; vii. 275b; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 23, 59, 302; E351/300; SP46/98, f. 107. During the process of reorganisation of Parliament’s armies in the spring of 1644, Hodges was included in the finance committee under Pury’s chairmanship which met at Grocers’ Hall (11 Apr.), and was named to the large committee chaired by Robert Scawen to fund the new army raised by Waller to fight the king in the west.56CJ iii. 457a, 544b.

His association with Thomas Pury I in local and national army finance continued into another, related, field: that of personal taxation. In January 1644, both men were named to a committee for legislation to audit accounts of the Committee for Advance of Money, and later (15 Apr.), Hodges was added as a member of that important agency for mulcting both the friends and enemies of Parliament. There is evidence from 1647, by which time it had become more a penal body, that he played some part in the committee’s work.57CJ iii. 363b, 460b; v. 32a; CCC 202. His involvement in legislation for auditing military accounts was another related topic. He played a leading role in drafting an ordinance (1 July 1644) that clarified the original that had set up the Committee for Taking the Accounts of the Kingdom, and required military units to make muster rolls, but here Hodges as a draftsman must be distinguished from his namesake, a London merchant with an interest in medicine, who sat on the executive body itself.58CJ iii. 408b, 519b, 547a; A. and O. i. 468-70; Sl. 2239.

Hodges supported the appointment of Walter Long*, who became a leading Presbyterian, for the post of registrar of chancery.59Harl. 166, f. 67v. He seems not to have shared the dislike of Thomas Pury I for Edward Massie*, the garrison commander of Gloucester. He and Nathaniel Stephens prepared the Commons’ letter of thanks to Massie after the siege of Gloucester was lifted (15 Sept. 1643) and with the Presbyterians Sir Robert Harley and Denzil Holles wrote to thank him after his exploits on the western side of the Severn estuary (21 Oct. 1644). Hodges was asked to mediate with Massie in an attempt to secure a prisoner exchange involving one of the Gloucestershire Stephens family.60CJ iii. 525a, 671a-b, 708b. His sympathy with Massie cannot be taken as evidence of a nascent distaste for the army reorganisation led by the Independents, however. Hodges made a transition from leading promoter of Gloucester’s interests to stalwart of the committee for the New Model army. Appointed late in March 1645 to the New Model’s finanancial executive, the Committee for the Army, he attended this body on a regular basis and worked with Scawen and Pury on a number of select committees for supplying Sir Thomas Fiarfax’s forces.61Supra, ‘Committee for the Army’; SP28/29-33; CJ iv. 79a, 117a. Even so, he was still a safe pair of hands when Massie finally left Gloucester, and was nominated temporary joint governor of the city (4 June 1645). This appointment allowed him to avoid service as part of Parliament’s delegation that accompanied the Scots army in the west midlands. That he was nominated at all suggests a degree of residual support for Presbyterianism absent from his leading Army Committee colleagues but nurtured among the Stephens family.62CJ iv. 159b, 161a, 162b, 234a. It was probably because of his recognized losses in Parliament’s service, as well as his executive work in Gloucester, that Hodges was paid an allowance by Parliament of £4 per week between March 1645 and March 1646.63SC6/Chas I/1662, m. 10; 1663, m. 8; 1664, mm. 14, 15.

From early in 1646, Hodges was joined in the Commons by two others of his surname, his uncle, Luke Hodges, and Thomas Hodges II, of Wedmore. They are sometimes difficult to disentangle. But Thomas Hodges I was not noted in the Journal for over ten months from June 1645. He spent this time in Gloucester or the surrounding area. He supplied the newly-appointed lord general, Sir Thomas Fairfax* with intelligence about the king’s plans to form another army in the west (28 June), and was suggested as a source for advice on military tactics at Monmouth in December 1645.64LJ vii. 463b; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 250. Hodges was back in London by March 1646, and resumed his regular attendances at the Army Committee. As a senior figure in the Commons, it was probably he rather than Thomas Hodges II who was named a commissioner for determining cases where admission to the sacrament was to be denied, and he can confidently be identified as the associate of Scawen and Pury on wider army finance topics during 1646.65CJ iv. 562b, 641b, 661a, 682b, 715b, 738a. Hodges was compensated with £1,000 for his war losses in January 1647, from the estates of Henry Somerset, 1st marquess of Worcester: a source that also rewarded Thomas Pury I and Oliver Cromwell*.66CJ v. 39a; CSP Dom. 1625-49, p. 704. A more symbolic reward, of Hodges’s commitment to Gloucester, was the city’s bestowing upon him, as late as 1648, the customary gift of lamprey pies.67Glos. RO, GBR/F4/5, f. 365.

Although Hodges continued to attend the Army Committee throughout 1647, as its authority was contested by the Presbyterian grandees his profile in the Commons diminished noticeably. During that year, Hodges was named only to 10 ad hoc committees. As he attended none of the seven recorded Army Committee meetings in June or July, and was given leave of absence on 21 August, it is possible he was out of the capital during the Presbyterian-inspired disorders at Westminster (26 July) and was certainly not among those fleeing to the protection of the New Model.68SP28/49/4; CJ v. 281a. Nevertheless, he was added on 2 September to the committee examining the London disturbances, and from November, possibly after a period of illness (though Hodges II seems more likely as the grantee of absence), he resumed his role as supporter of the army: on committees to bring in arrears of taxes, to liaise with the military units to be disbanded, to codify practice on billeting. He also sat on committees investigating the army leaderships’s enemies: to discover who was writing the scurrilous newspaper, Mercurius Pragmaticus, and to probe the activities of the Levellers.69CJ v. 289a, 329b, 330a, 348b, 363a, 371a, 377b, 396a, 400a, 415a; LJ ix. 417a, 419b.

Hodges’s few new committee appointments in 1648 - only two between January and November - coincided with his prominence at the Army Committee. He attended all its 20 meetings in January 1648, a better record than even Thomas Pury I. In July, he went with the committee’s leaders to Essex to arrange supplies to forces besieging Colchester, and in September attended nearly all Army Committee meetings, so it was probably his Somerset namesake who was excused at the call of the House (26 Sept.).70CJ v. 619b, 696b; vi. 34b; LJ x. 355a, 356a; Bodl. Nalson VII, f. 146; SP28/50/1-3; SP28/51/1-2. On 28 September, Hodges was one of a group including Thomas Pury I and John Lisle who put up Nathaniel Stephens to query a tacit concurrence of three days earlier with the king’s stipulation in the Newport treaty negotiations that piecemeal agreements were all to be subject to his future acceptance of the whole.71Mercurius Pragmaticus no.27 (26 Sept.-3 Oct. 1648), sig. Nn2v (E.465.19); Gardiner, Great Civil War, iv. 214-5. The bid for a reopening of debate failed, and in this incident may lie the roots of Hodges’s sudden disenchantment with the army, as thereafter, Hodges was absent from its committee altogether, until March 1649. Perhaps Hodges and Stephens felt they had been insufficiently supported by the Independents. He and Sir John Seymour* were required to bring in tax arrears from Gloucestershire on 25 November, but it seems probable that it was he, rather than Hodges II, who was listed among those secluded at Pride’s purge of Parliament on 6 December.72CJ vi. 87b; SP28/52/1-2; W. Prynne, Vindication of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648), 29 (669.f.13.64). His associations with the Stephens family, notable among those who were secluded, may have predisposed him against the drift of political events under the dominance of the Independents and the army.

Hodges was formally re-admitted to the House on 4 June 1649, but he had already returned to the Army Committee by then, attending two meetings in March.73CJ vi. 223b; SP28/59. This was not the start of a return by Hodges to army administration, however. Beyond the odd single attendance in each of the months of April, June and November 1649, he kept away permanently from this committee. By the summer of 1649, Thomas Hodges II was dead, so he must be distinguished in his service in the Rump only from his uncle, Luke Hodges. From this point onwards, he seems to have been much less active in Parliament than previously, and military administration was no longer one of his interests. He was named to the committee for the act of oblivion (5 July), which was to provide blanket indemnity for events during the ‘late troubles’, and to the committee on the related topic of Parliament’s ‘engagements’ or commitments.74CJ vi. 250b, 312b. He was named to the Navy Committee for a specific bill, on the protection of merchant ships from ships of other countries. As a Presbyterian in religion, he was named to committees for considering a revision of articles of religion (26 July 1649), and to curb antinomian excesses perpetrated under the cloak of religious liberty (14 June 1650).75CJ vi. 270a, 423b. There was little consistency of theme in Hodges’s other committee appointments, a number of which were on petitions from a range of sources.76CJ vi. 423a; vii. 80b, 86b, 280a.

After the dissolution of the Rump, Hodges played no further part in parliamentary politics during the 1650s, as Cricklade was disenfranchised during the Nominated Assembly (and he was in any case no religious radical) and the Cromwellian protectorates. Nevertheless, he continued to play a significant role in Gloucestershire local government, serving as a judge of poor prisoners (debtors) in 1653, and as a deputy to Major-general John Disbrowe* in his capacity from May 1654 as constable of St Briavels castle, a source of authority in the Forest of Dean. He was thus a natural choice as a commissioner for securing the peace of the commonwealth under Disbrowe, but declined to serve, pleading incapacity through toothache, according to the major general. Hodges continued as a stalwart at quarter sessions, however, and on a range of other local commissions; his Erastian views on the church chimed with the Cromwellian state church, in which he was an ‘ejector’ from 1654.77Badminton House, Fm E2/5/2; TSP iv. 360; A.R. Warmington, Civil War, Interregnum and Restoration in Glos. (Woodbridge, 1997), 118, 120; CSP Dom. 1654, p. 403; 1655, p. 100; 1657-8, p. 187. In 1656, the corporation of Gloucester appointed him to its committee to collect money from donors towards the repair of its cathedral.78Glos. RO, GBR/B3/3, p. 878. Although he was willing to be named as a commissioner for the public faith (the national debt) in 1657, he did not accept another post offered him in September that year, that of councillor in Ireland, on an annual salary of £1,000, ‘although’, as Lord Protector Cromwell wrote to him, ‘I believe the salary will not be the motive to you’.79Glos. RO, D1571/X193.

Hodges played no discernible part in the first revival of the Rump in 1659, although he was named as a militia commissioner on 26 July. It was only once the Members secluded in 1648 had been re-admitted that Hodges made his appearance. He had therefore chosen not to resume the identity of a Rumper. Probably the indignities suffered by Nathaniel Stephens, refused access to the Commons in December 1659, coloured Hodges’s thinking.80PROB11/304/403. On 1 March 1660 Hodges was named to committees on soldiers’ welfare and - with his old Army Committee colleague Robert Scawen - on future public revenue. A week later he was named to the retributive committee on the Welsh propagation of the gospel experiment of 1650-3, and helped draft the act to summon the next Parliament, the Convention.81CJ vii. 857a, 868a, 868b. In doing so, Hodges was ensuring the end of his own public career. He lost all offices at the inevitable Restoration that followed, and retired to private life at Shipton Moyne, where he was buried on 29 June 1675. The widow of his son was licensed to hold a Presbyterian meeting at her house in Shipton Moyne in 1672.82Calamy Revised, 270.