SMITH, Thomas II (d. 1658), of Wanstead, Essex, and Covent Garden, Westminster.

Smith’s will indicates that he was born in the parish of St Margaret, Leicester, and his career required a man of education and some social status, but beyond that his family and early life are obscure.23PROB11/279/247. It cannot be entirely excluded that he was the second son of Sir Francis Smith, seated 11 miles away at Ashby Folville, who was admitted to Gray’s Inn in 1618, but the Smiths of Ashby were notorious Catholics, and Sir Francis’s eldest son, Charles (later 1st Viscount Carrington), was a royalist who would be exempted from the Newcastle Propositions in 1646, and fined for recusancy.24Vis. Leics. ed. J. Fetherston (1870),131-2; VCH Leics. ii. 65-6; G. Inn Admiss. 150; CCC 1913. This might be considered an unlikely background for someone who would later be remembered as ‘highly infected with Presbyterian principles’.25Warwick, Mems. Charles I, 120. Perhaps he was somewhat older than Thomas Smith of Ashby, and possibly one of the two men of that name who matriculated at Oxford in the early seventeenth century without their backgrounds being recorded: if so, he would have been in the right milieu to encounter future diplomats.26Al. Ox.

Smith is known to have served under Edward, Lord Herbert of Chirbury, during his embassy to Paris in 1619, and under Sir Isaac Wake† in both Venice (1626), and Paris (1631).27Autobiog. of Edward Lord Herbert, 198; CSP Ven. 1625-6, pp. 500, 515, 522, 529, 540; APC 1630-1, p. 280. The testimony of Lord Herbert, together with Smith’s correspondence with Wake, Sir Thomas Rowe* and Viscount Dorchester (Sir Dudley Carleton†) in 1631, indicates that Smith then became secretary to the earl of Northumberland.28Autobiog. of Edward Lord Herbert, 198; SP78/88, ff. 385, 408; SP78/89, f. 376; SP78/90, ff. 1-2. Given his periods abroad there is room for doubt that he was the Thomas Smith who was listed as a servant of Northumberland’s father in 1620 – this could have been a kinsman, for instance – but he was certainly working for Northumberland from the latter’s London base, Dorset House, by March 1636.29Household Pprs of Henry Percy, 168; CSP Dom. 1635-6, p. 307; SP16/316, f. 131.

Smith’s service in the late 1630s for Northumberland, who was lord high admiral, fostered an association with naval and mercantile shipping which would dominate the remainder of his life. He is to be distinguished from a namesake, Thomas Smith of Corsham, who was receiver-general of the duchy of Cornwall, and who held a patent for ballasting ships from the mid-1630s until the anti-monopoly initiatives of the Long Parliament.30G.G. Harris, Trinity House of Deptford, 1514-1660 (1969), 34, 37-9, 144-7, 151; CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 324-5, 384, 280; 1637, pp. 333, 450; 1637-8, pp. 110-11; 1638-9, pp. 262, 426, 536; HMC Cowper, ii. 125, 151, 187-8, 189, 139, 147, 166, 169, 185; REQ1/81, p. 549; REQ1/82, pp. 41, 147; HMC Lords, n.s. xi. 229; LJ vi. 151; PA, 11 Aug. 1643; D’Ewes (N), 527-8. However, our MP certainly developed business interests of his own, and by the late 1630s, and correspondence between William Hawkins and the 2nd earl of Leicester (Robert Sidney†) confirms that it was Northumberland’s secretary who began to acquire shares in ships such as the Unity, which was seized by French forces, and about which Smith sought Leicester’s help in his capacity as ambassador to France.31HMC De L’Isle and Dudley, vi. 272-3, 278, 282, 286, 289, 291, 320.

Nevertheless, during this period, Smith was probably preoccupied with the workload generated by Northumberland as lord high admiral.32CSP Dom. 1636-7, p. 512; 1637-8, p. 428. Indeed, Smith effectively became secretary to the admiralty, and was sometimes referred to by this title.33Add. 33512, f. 72. Such work brought Smith into regular correspondence with (Sir) Edward Nicholas†, both from Dorset House and the fleet, and later with Robert Reade*, secretary to Sir Francis Windebanke*.34CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 516, 555, 556; 1637, pp. 36, 310; 1639, p. 315; 1640, p. 623; 1639-40, p. 19. More interesting, however, was Smith’s regular correspondence with naval commander Sir John Penington, not least because of Smith’s tendency to convey news and comment on political developments.35CSP Dom. 1637-8, pp. 321, 361, 608; 1638-9, pp. 59, 92, 112; 1639, pp. 292, 451, 511, 538; 1639-40, pp. 26, 46, 48, 50, 62, 128, 146, 348; 1641-3, pp. 61, 75-7; SP16/482, f. 165; SP16/483, ff. 29-34. Smith remarked upon the number of Frenchmen who ‘daily run hither, so that if the court be not Frenchified now, it will never be’.36CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 64. He also cast a cold rational eye upon providential fears and prophetic warnings. In January 1639, for example, he claimed that ‘the last great lightning has done a world of mischief all over England, and the people are generally so molested with predictions, and rumours of supposed visions as if they were all struck with a panic fear. For my part I never regard any of these things’.37CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 361. He took little notice of the predictions of Lady Eleanor Davis, ‘though the foolish people began to be a little afraid’.38CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 619.

More important were Smith’s comments regarding Scotland during 1638, and concerning the ‘obstinate’ and ‘insolent’ Covenanters.39CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 356; 1638-9, pp. 3, 21, 103. From late 1638 he reported discussions of ‘how to curb them’, in military preparations and secretive meetings of the council of war.40CSP Dom. 1638-9, pp. 103, 130, 151. An astute observer of such developments, Smith recognised divisions within the Scots, but also realised that the ‘violent’ policies of the Covenanters meant that the English needed to be careful about their plans for war.41CSP Dom. 1638-9, pp. 159, 491. As war approached in February 1639, Smith reported the refusal by leading puritan peers to lend the king money, and their desire for a Parliament.42CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 465. Once conflict had broken out, Smith was obliged to report the success of the Covenanters, and the king’s disappointment at having been misled about the strength of his party north of the border.43CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 13, 29. Indeed, Smith evidently began to recognise the problematic nature of the king’s counsellors, if not the monarch himself. As negotiations with the Scots progressed, Smith worried that ‘there be so many knaves between us and honest dealing, harpies that love to fish in troubled waters. I beseech God to open His Majesty’s eyes to know his friends from his foes’.44CSP Dom. 1639, pp. 214, 434. Moreover, Smith came to agree with those who detected a ‘popish plot’. In the face of the plan of the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) for bringing Irish forces into the field of battle with the Scots, therefore, Smith wrote of the danger posed by the Catholic faction at court, hoped that the king would break with France and Spain, and baulked at the ‘malice of those profane knaves who hate honest Protestants, whom they now term puritans’.45CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 36, 97. In a letter of October 1639, Smith complained that ‘the miscreant papists go about to sow the tares of contention amongst us’.46CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 41. He also recognised growing political dissent within England, and particularly the way that people began to ‘murmur’ about Ship Money, although ‘I could say much but I must not commit it to paper’.47CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 97.

Amid news of a forthcoming Parliament in December 1639, Smith was initially sceptical that it would be allowed to meet in April 1640.48CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 159. However, as Northumberland’s secretary he was involved in the earl’s attempts to nominate candidates for port towns, for example by asking Penington to use his influence for Sir John Hippisley at Dover.49CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 400. Once writs were issued, Smith provided Penington with news of the elections and of plans to exclude certain peers from the Lords.50CSP Dom. 1639-40, pp. 474, 520.

Smith’s correspondence with Penington does not survive from the spring of 1640 to the early summer of 1641, although thereafter Smith wrote regularly until the king’s departure from London in early 1642. In observing the abolition of star chamber and high commission, and plans for ‘root and branch’ reform of the church, Smith claimed that Parliament was proceeding ‘courageously for the good of the commonwealth’.51CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 29. Later that summer he reported the king’s plans to go to Scotland, demands for the appointment of a viceroy, or custos regni, in his absence, the fate of those involved in the army plot, and debates regarding the Protestation, as well as manoeuvrings at court.52CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 76, 81. After the king’s departure, Smith expressed low expectations for his mission, and provided information on parliamentary affairs in his absence.53CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 86, 93. After the parliamentary recess, he also reported continuing attempts to reform the church, amid news of the second army plot, plans for the disarming of recusants, and the growth of political divisions within England, not least as manifested by libels.54CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 146. The outbreak of the Irish rebellion, and the plot ‘to cut the throats of all the Protestants’ there merely confirmed Smith’s fears of the results of ‘favouring those popish hellhounds. This we may thank Strafford for in Ireland, and here our lukewarm Protestants in England may do us as much mischief by conniving at them’. Smith admitted to anxiety about ‘plots here too, but it shall go well with God’s servants, that you may not rail on the poor puritans as you used to do’.55CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 156. His animus against the Irish rebels may have been exacerbated by the fact that he held estates in Ireland, and by the fact that his sister’s family was displaced by the rising.56CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 460.

After the king’s return from Scotland in November 1641, Smith’s letters related news and gossip regarding court faction, and he continued to fear that legislation was being blocked in the lords by bishops and Catholics.57CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 171, 194, 206. By December 1641, Smith’s proto-parliamentarian sympathies were increasingly evident. He claimed that jealousies were being ‘daily fomented’ by the ‘wicked party’, bemoaned Thomas Lunsford’s appointment as lieutenant of the Tower, and claimed that the Grand Remonstrance was ‘full of modesty and truth’, even though the ‘popish adherents traduce it’.58CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 211. Like most people who held such views, however, Smith feared the prospect of civil war. Writing in late December, he told Penington of his fears regarding ‘uproar and disorder’, not least within London’s community of apprentices, and said that ‘we talk now of nothing but drawing of swords, and a war between the Protestants and papists, which God forbid, for though we may know the beginning, no man can foretell the end and consequence of an intestine war’. He once again blamed divisions upon malignants at court, whom he held responsible for abusing the king with lies. Smith wrote of a ‘Jesuitical faction’, singling out for criticism the 1st earl of Bristol (Sir John Digby†) and Lord Digby (George Digby*), not least because he blamed them for blocking measures for the relief of Irish Protestants, and other worthy legislation.59CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 215, 216. Smith almost certainly supported plans to exclude and impeach the bishops, and attributed the attempted arrest of the Five Members to the king’s evil counsellors.60CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 239, 245, 257, 278, 282.

There is no evidence that Smith remained secretary to Northumberland beyond April 1642, although he remained close to at least one of Northumberland’s other servants, Robert Scawen*, for many years.61Add. 33512, f. 72; Add. 22654, f. 158. After Northumberland’s removal as high admiral in the following June, Smith was appointed secretary of the admiralty, by an ordinance of 15 September, with a salary of £200 a year.62A. and O., i. 29-30; HMC 5th Rep., 48; LJ v. 357. Naval affairs would dominate the remainder of Smith’s life, as they would the lives of his brothers William, vice-admiral of the Irish Seas, and Solomon, marshal of the admiralty.63CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 168; 1649-50, pp. 39-40. During 1642-3, Smith transacted with the navy commissioners from his base at York House, and he may subsequently have become secretary to Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick, following the latter’s appointment as lord admiral in December 1643.64CSP Dom. 1641-3, pp. 429, 430, 554, 556, 557, 560, 561; SP16/494, f. 3; NMM, MS 82/097, p. 2. In February 1644, Smith was also appointed one of the receivers of money from the sale of ships and goods taken by reprisal.65A. and O.; CSP Dom. 1644, pp. 209, 449, 453; 1644-5, p. 454; 1645-7, pp. 240, 285; SP16/502, ff. 10, 161, 165-6, 173; SP16/507, ff. 67r-v; SP46/122b, ff. 66, 82.

As a ship owner himself, Smith also retained his private interest in naval matters. During the period 1643-5 he was involved in a delicate political and diplomatic wrangle over attempts by himself and his associates to seek restitution for the loss of The Unity to the French in 1638, involving legal proceedings against those whom they held responsible.66HMC 5th Rep. 91; LJ vi. 100; PA, 17 June 1643; HMC 6th Rep. 41, 43, 44, 46, 47; Add. 4191, f. 41. By June 1645, however, he also had a share in The Angel, and this vessel, along with at least six others in which he was a partner, were leased to the parliamentarian navy during the 1640s, at a total cost to the state of over £30,000.67CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 590; SP16/507, f. 173; HCA24/108/62-5. Indeed, throughout the 1640s Smith was associated with a group of radical shipowners, including London merchants like Maurice Thomson. Smith was involved in a project for settling Eleuthera (Bahamas) in 1647, and three years later was named as one of its proprietors, alongside Cornelius Holland* and Gregory Clement*.68F. Mood, ‘A broadside advertising Eleuthera and the Bahama islands, London, 1647’, Massachusetts Col. Soc. Trans. xxxi. 78-85; J.T. Hassam, Bahama Islands: Notes on an Early Attempt at Colonisation (Cambridge, Mass. 1899), 5, 12-13; CJ v. 247; vi. 270, 283, 284, 288. In October 1647, Smith also joined a cosortium led by Thomson, Thomas Andrews, Stephen Estwick and Richard Shute which proposed to overhaul and then farm the customs, in return for an advance of £30,000.69CJ v. 331a. In March 1648, Smith formed part of another consortium which signed a contract with the Derby House Committee of Irish Affairs to provide money for Parliament’s Irish campaign.70CJ v. 513a.

Smith almost certainly lost his secretarial position when the admiralty was placed in commission in April 1645, but he was proposed by the Lords as a navy commissioner in December 1646. This may have been a controversial proposal, given the potential for conflict between his public and private interests, but Smith was eventually appointed in August 1647.71LJ viii. 605a, 609b; ix. 90b, 410b; PA, Braye 47/18; HMC 6th Rep. 194. Sometime before June 1648, Smith also became one of the elder brethren of Trinity House.72LJ x. 339-40. Just as his interests as a ship owner may have conflicted with his responsibilities as a navy commissioner, so this position created the potential for corruption, particularly when Smith was ordered by the Commons to examine the accounts of Trinity House, in February 1649.73CJ vi. 150, 160.

In his capacity as a navy commissioner during the late 1640s, Smith was alive to the growing royalist sympathies within the navy. In late 1647 he threatened to bring charges against Sir William Batten – the latter called Smith ‘that false man’ – and he was involved in Parliament’s response to the navy revolt in 1648.74CCC 129; Declaration of Sir William Batten (1648), 2 (E.460.13); LJ x. 339-40. Nevertheless, Smith clearly supported a personal treaty with Charles I.75LJ x. 339-40. Smith then accommodated both the republic and the protectorate without apparent difficulty. However, while he survived an initial reorganisation of the prize office in March 1649, and was named as part of the new commission in the following April, he was removed in June 1649, for failing to furnish his accounts adequately.76E351/2513; CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 30, 39-40, 61, 71, 84, 100, 134, 146, 171, 187; 1655-6, p. 181; A. and O.; Bodl. Rawl. A.224, ff. 10v, 35v, 63, 75, 76, 76v. Nevertheless, Smith continued to flourish in his three main public roles. He remained active as a navy commissioner, and his zealous service was rewarded with a salary which grew from £250 to £400 a year.77CSP Dom. 1649, p. 96; 1649-50, pp. 47, 133; 1650, p. 148; 1652-3, p. 294; 1653-4, pp. 351, 463, 490, 498, 522, 513-4, 530, 532, 549, 574; 1654, pp. 420, 460, 465, 509, 531, 541, 543; 1655, pp. 129, 200, 437, 486, 487, 496, 500, 510, 533; 1655-6, pp. 410, 417, 421, 565; 1656-7, p. 555; SP18/1, f. 158; SP18/9, f. 84; SP18/35, ff. 325-v; SP18/56, f. 46; SP46/96, f. 230; SP46/114, f. 68; SP46/119, f. 157; SP46/120, f. 136; SP46/117, f. 94; CJ vi. 342; HMC Portland, i. 517; Bodl. Nalson VIII, ff. 7r-v; Bodl. Rawl. A.224, f. 93; Rawl. A.227, f. 94; AO1/1707/94; AO1/1708/95; AO1/1708/96; E351/2289; Add. 22546, f. 71; Add. 9306, f. 35; Add. 9308, f. 43v; Add. 22546, f. 177; Add. 22654, f. 177. Moreover, he continued to combine service within the naval administration with membership of Trinity House.78SP46/97, f. 42; CSP Dom. 1654, p. 316; 1655, p. 289. As part owner of ships such as The Cresent and the Anne Percy, Smith continued to lease vessels to the navy, and to lay claim to prizes.79CSP Dom. 1651, pp. 219, 507; 1651-2, p. 519; 1655, pp. 181, 214; SP18/17, f. 14; SP25/92, p. 70; Add. 32471, f. 6v; Add. 4196, f. 10. He may also have been the Thomas Smith who was made a clerk of the privy seal in May 1655.80Add. 4184, f. 107.

It was almost certainly as a ‘court’ candidate, therefore, that Smith secured election to Parliament in 1656, as Member for Portsmouth, a town where he had spent some time as a navy commissioner.81SP46/97, f. 109. Smith’s parliamentary career is difficult to distinguish from that of George Smith (Dumfriesshire) and Anthony Smith (Durham), although it can be assumed that appointments relating to Scottish affairs refer to the former, while those dealing with northern business refer to the latter.82CJ vii. 427a, 464a, 485b, 488a, 504a, 538a, 554a, 557a-b, 558a. The only committees to which Smith is known to have been named related to public faith debts (1 Jan. 1657), the sheriff’s court in Wiltshire (25 Dec. 1656), and revenue (26 June 1657).83CJ vii. 475a, 477b, 576a. However, he may also have been named to up to 13 more, on matters relating to legal and administrative reform, the regulation of trade and trading companies, and moral improvement, and especially clauses in the Humble Petition and Advice.84CJ vii. 428a, 429a, 430a, 447a, 483a, 498b, 502a, 516a, 528a, 532a, 534a, 559b. He was listed among MPs who voted for kingship on 25 March.85Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 22 (E.935.5). Indeed, he may have been one of the two Mr Smiths who acted as a teller, on different sides, in a division over sequestered parsonages (17 June 1657).86CJ vii. 560a. He was certainly named as a commissioner for the improvement of customs and excise revenue.87A. and O.

There is no evidence that Smith attended the Commons during the brief second session, even though he was pursuing financial claims against the state, to the tune of £13,000, and petitioning Parliament as a part owner of chains laid in the Thames for mooring ships.88CSP Dom. 1657-8, pp. 206, 251, 269; 1658-9, pp. 33-4, 39; PROB11/279/247. By this stage, however, Smith may have been suffering from the illness which brought about his death, sometime before 15 April 1658, when his widow petitioned for almost £3,000 owing to Smith for ships leased to the state between 1643 and 1651, some of which represented debts which Smith had purchased from others, and £2,800 due on public faith bills in relation to disbursements for the relief of Ireland.89CSP Dom. 1657-8, p. 367; 1658-9, p. 39; SP18/180, ff. 200-202; Aylmer, State’s Servants, 122. Smith’s will, which outlined ‘my grand debt owing by the state’, also named the ships in which he held a share, and left money to his native parish in Leicester, as well as to the poor of Wanstead, where he then lived, in addition to providing an unspecified sum for poor seamen and widows.90PROB11/279/247; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 56.