HUNT, Thomas (1599-1669), of Shrewsbury.

Thomas Hunt was the son of a Shrewsbury draper, Richard Hunt, who was active in Shrewsbury corporation, and who held advanced Protestant views at least as early as 1618. That year, Richard Hunt was authorised to visit Cambridge and consult with Dr Laurence Chadderton about an appropriate minister for Shrewsbury, so long as he was Shrewsbury-born.18Salop Archives, Shrewsbury Corporation orders, C479. Chadderton was master of Emmanuel College, regarded as the most puritan of the Cambridge houses, and so the choice of Hunt as emissary is revealing both of his own views and of the respect he enjoyed among the townsmen. Richard Hunt married Eleanor Heylyn, daughter of another Shrewsbury merchant, David Heylyn, who like many Shrewsbury people was of Welsh descent. Eleanor’s brother was Rowland Heylyn, who moved to London to become free of the Ironmongers Company, and later a City alderman.19Oxford DNB. Heylyn was responsible for a reprinting of the Bible in Welsh in a format more manageable than Bishop Morgan’s of 1588, and from 1626 was one of the feoffees for impropriations. The feoffees were a group of puritan laymen who bought up church livings in order to place godly ministers in them. Rowland Heylyn thought well enough of his nephew to bestow on him the manor of Mayfield (Mathfield), Staffordshire, when he drew up his will in 1632.20Salop Archives, 2922/12/8/1.

Richard Hunt was a controversial figure in Shrewsbury by the mid-1630s, as the political and religious climate swung away from Calvinist, orthodox Protestantism. The vicar of St Alkmunds parish in Shrewsbury complained about Hunt’s financial support for two ministers living remotely from the town, describing both the ministers and Hunt disparagingly as puritans.21CSP Dom. 1634-5, p. 377. Not that his ideological views marginalised him economically. He held a licence from the government to retail wine, and held freehold lands in Staffordshire and Shrewsbury, with various leases of property in the centre of the town. In January 1640, Hunt drew up his will, leaving £100 to the poor of the town which was to be disbursed according to the advice of the leading Shrewsbury puritan, Humphrey Mackworth I*. No mention was made of any of the Shrewsbury ministers, who might have been expected to figure either as beneficiaries or advisers.22PROB11/184/318.

Richard Hunt’s son, Thomas, inherited an estate of 16 separate parcels of land in Staffordshire and Shropshire from his father, scattered over a wide area and evidently the result of piecemeal accumulation over many years. Among the plums in the inventory were four new buildings in Shrewsbury High Street, a testimonial to the centrality of Richard Hunt to Shrewsbury’s commercial life.23PROB11/184/318. Thomas Hunt inherited at the age of 40, and had until that time had enjoyed the upbringing more akin to that of a gentleman than of a merchant. He had been educated at Shrewsbury school, and had proceeded to Cambridge in 1617, the year before his father had held discussions with Laurence Chadderton at Emmanuel. Thomas Hunt went to Queens’, pursuing his studies not only to graduation but beyond, to take a higher degree, and then rounded off his education with a stay at Gray’s Inn. He was never called to the bar, underlining further that his was a gentleman’s education rather than professional training. He was preceded at the inn by Humphrey Mackworth I, who unlike Hunt was a practising barrister. Mackworth was four years younger than Hunt, but the Mackworth and Hunt families were evidently close, bound by religious affinities as well as local ties. Hunt married Elizabeth Owen the same year as he enrolled at Gray’s Inn.

Thomas Hunt’s activities before 1640 are obscure, but he must have lived the life of a pious gentleman in Shrewsbury. There is no suggestion that he was involved actively in trade, and although he must have been a freeman of Shrewsbury, his admission to the corporation would have been by patrimony as the son of a draper rather than as a member of a guild by completed apprenticeship. In 1634 Hunt and Mackworth were involved in a property transaction as co-purchasers, and in 1638 Hunt stood trustee for Mackworth as the latter prepared to settle his property on the eve of his second marriage.24Coventry Docquets, 667, 724. On the eve of the civil war, Hunt signed title deeds involving property in Montgomeryshire with Humphrey Mackworth and Hunt’s brother, which may in effect have been an adjustment by the Hunt brothers of their respective inheritances from their father.25NLW, BRA 878/3. Soon afterwards, Hunt lent his support to a campaign by Shrewsbury puritan activists to harness the influence of the sympathetic Sir Robert Harley* to attract back Julines Hering to the town living of St Alkmund. Hering had been lecturer at St Alkmund in the early 1630s, but had been driven away ‘by the violence of bishops’ for ignoring ceremonies in his liturgical practices. 26Add. 70106, f. 92; Add. 70108 misc. 37 (Salop ministers), misc. 37g; J. Eales, Puritans and Roundheads: the Harleys of Brampton Bryan and the outbreak of the English Civil War (Cambridge, 1990), 59-60.

The civil war crisis hit Shrewsbury in July 1642. Hunt began to train the militia there, with the approval of the Commons, and after ensuring that a petition in favour of these activities was delivered to the Commons by William Spurstowe*, was guaranteed indemnity for actions he undertook during these manoeuvres.27PJ iii. 221; CJ ii. 675a; PA, Main Pprs. 16 July 1642; Trans Salop Arch Soc. li. 15-16, lxxiv, 33, 35. For his pains, he was singled out by the royalist leaders in the county as a delinquent, and was ejected from Shrewsbury corporation.28Salop Archives, 6000/13300; Trans. Salop Arch Soc. ser. 4, xii. 98. Hunt managed to remain in Shropshire, and his early efforts with the militia were recognized with a military commission as a captain of horse, which he held initially in the Shropshire county regiment. In tandem with his military rank, Hunt acted as a committeeman. The March 1643 appointment as a Shropshire sequestration commissioner could not be acted on while the royalists controlled the county, but the following month saw the establishment of a west midlands association which allowed the commitment of the Shropshire men to be harnessed effectively. By October 1643, Sir William Brereton* and Sir Thomas Myddelton* were able to write to Speaker Lenthall about ‘our friends in Wem’, the nucleus of the Shropshire committee installed in that small town, which included Thomas Mytton*, Mackworth and Hunt.29HMC Portland, i. 142. To their number might be added Andrew Lloyd* to complete the roll of the leading Shropshire committeemen.30CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 503.

At Wem garrison, Hunt, Mackworth and Mytton approached the Shropshire-born minister, Richard Baxter, to act as their chaplain. The idea appealed to Baxter, who wanted to be nearer his elderly father and was in any case happy for an excuse to leave Coventry where a dispute between Basil Feilding, 2nd earl of Denbigh and the committee there showed no sign of any resolution. Baxter later memorialized Hunt as ‘a plain hearted honest godly man entirely beloved and trusted by the soldiers for his honesty’.31Reliquiae, 45. In October 1643, Hunt was left to defend Wem with a small force after Brereton’s men were drawn away in pursuit of Lord Capell’s (Arthur Capell’s*) army, which had been attracted away from Wem towards Cheshire, intent on attacking Nantwich. Suffering a repulse there, Capell fell back suddenly on Wem, but Hunt kept him at bay for long enough for Mytton’s larger force to return and prevent disaster.32Reliquiae, 45; R. Hutton, Royalist War Effort (1982), 66. In March 1644, Hunt was reported to be at Stourton castle, where Morton Brigges, cousin of Sir Humphrey Brigges* was killed fighting for the king.33HMC 4th Rep. 265. In Hunt’s military excursions in 1643 and the first part of 1644, he must be distinguished from another Captain Thomas Hunt, a Warwickshire committeeman and captain in Staffordshire, who later became governor of Tamworth and whose alleged abusive language was reported in the royalist press.34A, Hughes, Politics and Society in Civil War Warwickshire (Cambridge, 1987), 196, 208; Staffs. Co. Cttee. pp. lxiii, lxxi, 23, 27, 31, 36-7, 42, 86, 143, 185, 338; Mercurius Aulicus (12-19 Jan. 1645), 1345-6 (E.269.5).

In October 1644, Hunt was commissioned colonel of a regiment of horse in Shropshire under the earl of Essex. It is not clear whether this appointment superseded his commission as a captain of arquebusiers under Denbigh, or whether they ran concurrently. It may not have been clear to contemporaries either, adding to the various strained relationships that prevailed among the officers and committeemen of the west midlands counties. In February 1645, Hunt helped Mytton take Shrewsbury relatively peacefully, and from that base spent months harassing garrisons of the king.35HMC 7th Rep. 453. Shrawardine was one of these, a community that suffered greatly over many months, as its castle and church were first pulled down by the defenders in February, and then in June the village was fired. The royalists there surrendered to Hunt, Lloyd and Robert Charlton* after a five-day siege. Caus castle was taken at around the same time.36Salop Archives, 366/155; Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. ser. 2, vii. 140. Hunt was in the spring of 1645 also a core member of the Shropshire committee, providing Brereton with military intelligence of royalist movements.37Bodl. Tanner 60A, ff. 11, 52; Brereton Letter Bks. i. 209, 217, 225, 231, 238-9, 241-2, 243, 282-3, 290-1, 443. A corporal of Hunt’s regiment was killed at Bridgnorth in September, and it seems likely that he stayed in Shropshire throughout.38St Mary Shrewsbury par. reg.

On 12 September 1645 the Commons ordered that a writ be issued to replace Francis Newport as burgess for Shrewsbury, and Hunt was elected to the Commons relatively soon after that.39CJ iv. 272a. He was in the House on 31 December, when he took the Covenant. He soon revealed an interest in religious policy, and served on a committee on 21 January 1646 which was to consider details of the scheme to impose a Presbyterian system of church government on London.40CJ iv. 393a, 413b. Later in the year he was to serve again on this topic in response to a petition from the inhabitants of what was intended as the 11th London classis.41CJ iv. 526a. In February, he formed part of a group that provided support for Thomas Mytton in his campaign to reduce north Wales. Politically, this was a mixed group, which found room for the Independent-leaning Sir John Trevor I, but the majority of Hunt’s colleagues from a Welsh or west midlands background were fellow Presbyterians such as John Swynfen, Sir Thomas Myddelton, Sir Robert Harley and Humphrey Salwey.42CJ iv. 429a. On 11 June, others were recruited to this committee, including Andrew Lloyd and Samuel More. Their brief was to oversee the setting up of county committees in north Wales, as Mytton negotiated the surrender of each of the fortresses there, with an additional minor task of determining the fate of those captured in the revolt of February 1646 in Cardiff against Parliament.43CJ iv. 572b.

On 28 April, Hunt and John Corbett drafted the letter, sent under the seal of Speaker Lenthall, congratulating his former colleagues on the Shropshire committee for taking Bridgnorth. In July he was a natural choice as joint-treasurer for the funds mulcted from the estates of his royalist predecessor in the Shrewsbury seat, Francis Newport, which were to be deployed in disbanding the Shropshire forces. This was an indication of his wish to see the army run down, and he was doubtless in sympathy with the corresponding order of that month which brought the forces in Shropshire under the control of the governor of Shrewsbury, his old friend Mackworth.44CJ iv. 614b, 628a. On 25 September, he was granted leave to go to the country, but was back again by mid-December when he was named to the committee of privileges. His likely interest here was the Shropshire election of 27 August, when Humphrey Edwardes had been elected instead of Hunt’s former colleague on the Shropshire committee, Andrew Lloyd, in what on anyone’s reckoning were highly irregular circumstances. The Shropshire and Newcastle-upon-Tyne elections were hived off to a separate committee in April 1647.45CJ iv. 676a, v. 14b, 134a.

As a former officer, who continued to be known as Colonel Hunt, he was naturally interested in the plans to disband the army. In December 1646, he was added to the committee chaired by the Presbyterian John Birch to consider the petition of the officers from the regiment of another Presbyterian, Colonel Edward Massie*, and with Robert Clive and Robert Charlton from Shropshire was named on 27 March 1647 to a committee to deal with a petition from the army, which elicited noises from the House that were intended to be reassuring to the disaffected New Model regiments.46CJ v. 28b, 127b. Another potentially difficult issue which occupied Hunt’s time in the spring of 1647 was the dispute within the Coventry committee, which had never been resolved since Baxter’s rather relieved departure from that city in 1643.47CJ v. 122b. Hunt made no further impact on the Commons during the remainder of 1647, being granted leave of absence in September and noted as still away the following month, but was back at Westminster by 20 November.

Hunt was named an elder in the Shropshire arrangements for a Presbyterian church, published in 1647.48The Severall Divisions and Persons for Classicall Presbyteries (1647), 4. Unlike some in Shropshire who also enjoyed that distinction, there seems little doubt that he was of genuinely Presbyterian outlook. In the Commons in the first half of 1648, he was involved with a number of committees that had a strong Presbyterian flavour. These included an ordinance for stricter sabbath observance (23 Feb.), chaired by John Doddridge; an ordinance on reimbursing the surviving feoffees for impropriations (28 Mar.), which must have given particular pleasure to Hunt, as the nephew and legatee of one of the deceased feoffees; and one for settling the militia of the kingdom (4 May). The nurturing of the militia at the expense of the New Model was a project that Presbyterians, especially in London, were keen on; by 13 June Sir Robert Harley was taking the chair at this committee.49CJ v. 471a, 519a, 551a, 597b. This enthusiasm for the militia and association with the outlook of the Harley family, perhaps with the added ingredient of involvement with the Coventry dispute, which was something of a shibboleth for New Model supporters such as William Purefoy I*, are enough to indicate that Hunt was out of sympathy with the Independents and the radicalized pace in politics that was quickened by the second civil war in 1648. On 23 September, Hunt and Sir John Corbet* were asked to sign instructions to the Shropshire committee to speed up the collection of taxes in the county, but it was another two months before Hunt can be identified as active in any other parliamentary business. On 25 November, he was named to a committee for reviewing the establishment of military garrisons, another attempt to rationalise the army, and one which was bound to be seen as provocative by the standing army.50CJ vi. 30b, 87a. With a political profile like his, Hunt was the kind of man who would have been secluded when the army purged Parliament on 6 December, but he had probably left London before then, and did not return to Parliament.

Hunt did not quit public life altogether at the execution of the king, but continued to appear in Shropshire committee lists. Whether he acted is not certain, but he was at least regarded as well-affected by the Rump. He enjoyed considerable influence locally. Hunt was a Shrewsbury alderman, and acted as a trustee for his wife’s Owen relatives when in 1651 an estate of 800 acres in Montgomeryshire was settled in a marriage.51NLW, Vaynor Park Estate 103; Salop Archives, 3890/2/1/124. He remained in the commission of the peace until after Oliver Cromwell* had dismissed the Rump. His omission from the liber pacis in October 1653 may have been of his own volition, but he remained on the assessment commission and in August 1654 he was named as an ‘ejector’ under the new state church arrangements of the Cromwellian protectorate.52A. and O.; An Act for an Assessment. During the emergency of 1655, when Major-general James Berry* was seeking active support in the Welsh marcher counties, Hunt was identified as one who had recently been ‘a little dissatisfied’ or ‘off the hooks’ (out of good humour) in his view of public affairs.53TSP iv. 272, 394. Despite this rather unpromising background, however, Hunt was judged to be the best candidate for sheriff, and Berry had no reason to doubt that he was essentially reliable. The major-general must have been disappointed when after being approached to take on the office, Hunt declined. Berry was sympathetic, and asked for Hunt to be restored to the commission of the peace instead. It may have been Berry’s realistic assessment of both Hunt’s character and his attitude towards the protectorate that enabled him eventually to secure Hunt’s agreement not only to act as a magistrate but also to serve as sheriff.54TSP iv. 359, 394.

Hunt’s year as sheriff was notable for his acting as returning officer for the parliamentary elections of July 1656.55Salop Archives, 215/68. The following month, he attracted his former comrade-in-arms Richard Baxter to Shrewsbury, to preach the assize sermon. The noted minister used the occasion to dilate on public morality, including on the sin of drunkenness. At least one other Presbyterian minister came from a distance to hear Baxter: Samuel Jones from Coytrahen, Glamorgan, who was asked by Baxter for details of the notorious case of the apparition of the living Lieutenant-colonel Henry Bowen of the Gower peninsula.56Cal. Baxter Corresp. i. 226n, 234, 255n. By this time, Hunt’s son, Rowland, was playing a significant part in Shrewsbury life, joining with his parents and with Baxter in attempting to attract the Presbyterian Henry Newcome to be minister at St Julian’s. However, despite petitions from the parishioners, and Baxter’s cogent arguments that the Shrewsbury living was ‘as convenient a seat as almost any in England … a place of public consequence’, Newcome was not to be tempted, and remained in the north west of England.57Cal. Baxter Corresp. i. 226-8, 232-3; Oxford DNB, ‘Henry Newcome’.

In the later 1650s, Hunt played a full part in local government in Shropshire, acting as a county magistrate and as treasurer for maimed soldiers. He weathered the political turbulence after the death of Oliver Cromwell, but regarded himself as one of the secluded Members of the Long Parliament. When those secluded in 1648 returned to the Commons in February 1660, Hunt was appointed governor of Shrewsbury, and by 3 March had journeyed to London to be named to a committee for reviving the jurisdiction of the counties palatine of Lancashire and Cheshire.58CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 379; CJ vii. 860b. The council of state had to write to him to restrain what they suspected as excessive zeal on Hunt’s part, on a report that he had imprisoned suspects in Shrewsbury castle without good cause. A similar allegation of arbitrary government, this time involving the Newport family, among the county’s most prominent cavaliers, was used against Hunt in August, after the king had returned.59CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 379; LJ xi. 79b, 131b. Inevitably, once Shropshire and Shrewsbury had been remodelled by supporters of the restored Charles II, Hunt lost all his local offices.

After the imposition of the Clarendon Code, Hunt was seen as the backbone of the dissenting interest in Shrewsbury. He was prominent among both the clerical and lay Presbyterian community. When in 1664, the godly aunt of the minister Philip Henry needed to make arrangements for the guardianship of her children, it was to Hunt, through Henry, that she turned for help.60Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry ed. Lee, 160. However high the esteem in which Hunt was held by dissenters, he remained fair game for government informers. Around 1664-5, he was described as ‘an active and subtle zealot’, who met with other disaffected individuals every week in a Shrewsbury eating house to plot insurrection.61SP29/109, f. 72. Hunt was supposed to boast that he had a possible 50,000 men at his disposal for a rising in London. The allegations were ridiculous, but they kept Hunt on the list of government suspects. He seems to have continued to attend public worship, despite his Presbyterian sympathies. It was after attending two services the previous day that he died suddenly in the early hours of 12 April 1669. Philip Henry described Hunt as ‘a true Nathaniel, in whom there was no guile, a Caleb that followed the Lord fully, abounding in good works, and his memory is blessed’.62Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry, 214; Salop Archives, 366/184. His widow, Elizabeth, opened her house for Presbyterian worship from 1673 probably until her death in 1690.63Baxter Corresp. ii. 96n. Two of the sons of Thomas and Elizabeth Hunt acted as executors of Richard Baxter.64Baxter Corresp. i. 227n., quoting Calamy, Abridgement, 404. None of the family is known to have sat in any other Parliaments.