WODEHOUSE (WODEHOWSE), Sir Thomas, 2nd bt. (c.1585-1658), of Kimberley, Norf.

A seventeenth-century history in verse of the Wodehouse family, probably written by Philip Wodehouse*, traced them back to Sir Bertram de Wodehouse in the time of William the Conqueror, while admitting that this was ‘unevidenc’d, tho’ in the pedigree’.37Blomefield, Norf. ii. 540-1. In fact, the entire ancestry before the fifteenth century was spurious. Their earliest documented ancestor was instead John Wodehouse† (d.1431), who held a succession of royal offices, including constable of Castle Rising, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster, chamberlain of the exchequer and chancellor to Queen Katherine de Valois. He also sat as MP for Norfolk and later Suffolk in six of the Parliaments between 1410 and 1422.38HP Commons 1386-1421. Under Elizabeth I, his descendant, Sir Roger Woodhouse† (d.1588), sat for several East Anglian constituencies, while his son, Sir Philip† (d.1623), father of this MP, sat for Castle Rising in 1586.39HP Commons 1558-1603. Sir Philip was granted a baronetcy in 1611.40CB i. 51. A decade later he was described as having ‘a great estate in lands’ and being ‘very rich in money’.41W. Hudson, ‘Assessment of the hundred of Forehoe, Norf. in 1621’, Norf. Arch. xxi., 288. His wife, this MP’s mother, was a Roman Catholic and Sir Philip may briefly have been one as well.42Kimberley, Wodehouses, 40-1; HP Commons 1558-1603. But their eldest son was only ever firmly Protestant.

According to an addendum to the family history, added in the 1650s when he was an old man, Sir Thomas Woodhouse had been a ‘gallant youth, /Bred gallantly’.43Blomefield, Norf. ii. 555. In his widely-read book, The Compleat Gentleman, Henry Peacham (who had been a schoolmaster at Wymondham) praised Wodehouse and his brother, Roger, as ‘not only learned, but accomplished in whatever may lend lustre to worth and gentility.’44H. Peacham, The Compleat Gentleman (1622), 165. Aged just 18, Wodehouse was knighted by the newly-arrived James I in 1603.45Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 111. By 1610 he had already secured a court office as one of the gentlemen of the privy chamber in the household of the prince of Wales.46Harl. 7009, f. 5; T. Birch, Life of Henry, Prince of Wales (1760), 450. The following year, as preparation for a career in royal service, he was sent abroad to learn ‘languages, and documents of state’, but the prince’s death in 1612 put an end to hopes of a court career and so he retired to the country to take pleasure from his ‘hounds and horses’, as well as ‘music and a book’.47CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 100; Ketton-Cremer, ‘Rhyming Wodehouses’, 36.

For the time being, his public career was entirely local. First, he was appointed as a justice of the peace. Then, in 1624 he served as sheriff of Norfolk.48List of Sheriffs, 89. Other local offices soon followed. By 1626 he was a captain in the county trained bands and in 1627 he was appointed as a deputy lieutenant by the lord lieutenant, the 21st earl of Arundel.49Rye, State Pprs. 6, 31, 78, 130, 165; Add. 27447, ff. 276, 278. He was also one of the commissioners for the Forced Loan.50Rye, State Pprs. 48; CSP Dom. 1627-8, p. 320.

The best indication of Wodehouse’s political views during the 1630s is provided by an undated manuscript poem, ‘Nocab and Calydon’, that he wrote for Sir Edmund Bacon†.51Ketton-Cremer, Norf. in Civil War, 36-8; Ketton-Cremer, ‘Rhyming Wodehouses’, 36-7. In it, Calydon, a Scottish shepherd, criticises the state of England. His targets include the Laudian clergy

Then add they quibbles to our books of prayer
With oaths and articles of Romish air.
They als’ erect courts of commission high
Where magpie prelates set in surquedry,
And as them list, cite, silence, censure, sway
Our presbyteries and elders of the lay...52Ketton-Cremer, Norf. in Civil War, 37.

Moreover, for Calydon, the English were now too soft to be much of a threat:

For their good swains and kirkmen bid adieu
Unto Old England, and flee’n to a New.
The people-commons, als’ may give good-night
To Parliament petitions of right;
They mun give ear now to a new-taught lecture
Of getting money by a good projecture.
The servile law-men too feign law for clipping

Poor shepherds’ fleeces, to pay royal shipping.53Ketton-Cremer, Norf. in Civil War, 37-8.

Even when voiced by a fictional character in an unpublished work, this was dangerous stuff.

The calling of a new Parliament in the spring of 1640 raised the possibility that these concerns could finally be addressed. Wodehouse’s hopes for it were revealed in the letter he wrote to his kinsman, John Potts*, encouraging him to seek election as knight of the shire for Norfolk. In it he argued that, ‘In these bad times all good men ought to seek such means as might enable them to enterprise good matters’.54Bodl. Tanner 67, f. 176; W. Vaughan-Lewis and M. Vaughan-Lewis, See You in Court (Lavenham, 2009), 227. Despite Wodehouse’s strenuous efforts on his behalf, Potts was unsuccessful.55Bodl. Tanner 67, f. 189; Vaughan-Lewis, See You in Court, 228-9. Wodehouse, on the other hand, was elected at Thetford, where he had substantial property interests. He then left no mark on the records of the Short Parliament.

Wodehouse was re-elected as the MP for Thetford later that year. The verse history of the Wodehouses would, with the benefit of hindsight, present his role in the Long Parliament as that of a moderate who initially supported reform but who later opposed fanaticism.

At length is called that fatal Parliament,
To king and kingdom. Thither is he sent
A Member, where he stoutly acts for right
Of laws of kings and subjects, ‘gainst the might
Of court-Leviathans who would pull down
The pale between the people and the crown,
Thus far went he. But other bigot fools
Ran into extremes, and pull’d up all the dools
Of government. They brought in anarchy,

In kirk and lay. That brought in tyranny.56Ketton-Cremer, ‘Rhyming Wodehouses’, 37.

Given that his attendance in Parliament would be so patchy, the idea that he had distanced himself from much that his colleagues had done had a certain plausibility. But this may also have been an attempt to play down the strength of Wodehouse’s support for Parliament, written by a son who, at the time, may have been more hostile.

Sir Thomas’s immediate concern on arriving at Westminster seems to have to block a court case which had been brought against him. On 20 November the Commons apparently agreed to halt the case on the grounds of privilege, although this was unrecorded in the Journal.57Procs. LP, i. 209. His only other known activity during opening months of the Long Parliament was that he was added to the committee to investigate the complaints of the parishioners of St Gregory by St Paul’s on 4 December.58CJ ii. 44b.

Returning to Kimberley, Wodehouse kept in touch with events in Parliament by correspondence from Potts, whose ‘kind affection’, he wrote in 13 April 1641

makes me understand how much you differ in disposition from these present times, wherein there be so few which will descend to love their lame and decrepit friends; the skill being only now to comply with greatness, and to be still on Fortune’s side.

He exhorted Potts, on behalf of the county to ‘persevere faithfully in the defence of church and commonwealth affairs, especially in this heretical age wherein there lives so many sublapsarians’. The slow progress in the attempts to prosecute the 1st earl of Strafford (Sir Thomas Wentworth†) worried him, causing him to express doubts, ‘at such indulgence used in stay of axe and execution upon that insolent earl and artificer of mischief unto the public good and government of three kingdoms’. He also regretted that the militia bill

should be debated with despair of passage, for surely if that service must remain in arbitrary power and sole discretion of a few dependents, the people now they know their rights and liberties, without a law, will hardly yield obedience.

In his postscript he indicated that he would soon be back at Westminster.59Bodl. Tanner 66, f. 65.

He kept his word and so was able to take the Protestation in the Commons on 6 May 1641.60CJ ii. 136b. That he was named to the committees on the bills on sheriffs’ fees (6 July) and to settle the estate of Sir Francis Popham* (29 July) suggests that he then remained at Westminster for the next few months.61CJ ii. 200a, 228a. But that August he and Potts, together with Sir Edmund Moundeford*, were named by Parliament as its commissioners to disarm recusants in Norfolk.62LJ iv. 385b. Wodehouse presumably then returned to Norfolk and he may not have returned to London until the following spring.

By then relations between the king and Parliament had reached crisis point. Control of the militia had thus become more important than ever. Sir Thomas’s name was one of the eight submitted to Parliament by the lord lieutenant, the 2nd earl of Warwick (Sir Robert Rich†), on 17 March 1642 for appointment or re-appointment as deputy lieutenants for Norfolk.63PJ i. 54; CJ ii. 483b. Wodehouse may have been back at Westminster in early May, as he was then included on the committee on the bill to confirm the patent for the draining of the Hatfield Level in Lincolnshire (4 May).64CJ ii. 557b. Several weeks later he evidently sent a copy of Parliament’s declaration of 19 May to Moundeford.65Vaughan-Lewis, See You in Court, 238. On 3 June Miles Corbett* presented a petition from the inhabitants of Wymondham asking that the town’s lecturer should preach on Sundays and on a weekday. This was agreed. According to Sir Simonds D’Ewes*, after the Speaker had left the chamber, Wodehouse attempted to persuade the clerk to change the wording of the order, so that it specified that the second sermon should be preached on the Saturday, as that was the town’s market day. The wording was however left unaltered.66PJ iii. 10; CJ ii. 604a. A week later Wodehouse pledged two horses and £200 for the defence of Parliament.67PJ iii. 469.

On 1 August he was one of those appointed by both Houses to raise money and arms on the Propositions and to suppress the king’s commission of array in Norfolk.68LJ v. 251b-253a. At some point over the following weeks Wodehouse travelled back to Norfolk and he was soon assisting Parliament’s other prominent supporters in preparing the county for war.69Holmes, Eastern Assoc. 58-9. That December he and some of the other deputy lieutenants summoned a meeting at Norwich to discuss the state of the Norfolk trained bands.70Vaughan-Lewis, See You in Court, 267; King’s Lynn Borough Archives, KL/C7/10, f. 105v. Several days later some of them, including Wodehouse, were appointed as deputy lieutenants for Norwich.71CJ ii. 884a.

From the autumn of 1642 until the summer of 1644 Wodehouse was based in Norfolk, where he plausibly considered he could be of most use to Parliament. On 23 August 1643 he was one of six Norfolk assessment commissioners whom the Commons ordered should ensure that their colleagues collected all the taxes due from the county.72CJ iii. 216a. Earlier that year the earl of Arundel had gone into exile on the continent. Parliamentarian officials had since seized plate and jewel from the earl’s Norfolk residences, the Duke’s Palace, Norwich, and Kenninghall Place.73M.F.S. Hervey, Life, Corresp. and Collections of Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel (Cambridge, 1921), 442. Those valuables had then been handed over to Wodehouse. On 6 September the Commons ordered that he should retain them until the Committee for Sequestrations was able to establish who exactly owned them.74CJ iii. 230b-231a. It was not until 19 March 1644 that the Commons instructed Sir Thomas to send the jewels up to London.75CJ iii. 432a.

By June 1644 Wodehouse was back at Westminster. On 6 June he was included on the committee on the bill to clarify the powers of the Accounts Committee.76CJ iii. 519b. On 28 June he and three of the other Norfolk MPs wrote to the mayor of Norwich, John Tolye*, to assure him that the city’s dismissed recorder, Francis Cory, would behave himself.77Vaughan-Lewis, See You in Court, 296.

What may have prompted his return was that several of his acquaintances who had supported the king were due to appear before the Committee for Sequestrations. One of them was Thomas Knyvett of Ashwellthorpe. On 8 June Knyvett turned up at the committee to find that several of his friends were present, but in his letter to his wife on the subject, he implied that, of them, Wodehouse, ‘who came in unlooked for of me’, had been the most use. In particular, ‘He very kindly, whilst other business was agitating, went aside with me and perused all my business’.78Knyvett Lttrs. 155-6. Wodehouse subsequently advised Knyvett that it would probably be best if Knyvett’s case was referred back to the county committee.79Knyvett Lttrs. 166. In the meantime, Sir Thomas Cotton*, whose daughter was married to Wodehouse’s eldest son, also turned to him for assistance. Wodehouse persuaded the 4th earl of Pembroke (Philip Herbert*) to attend the key meeting of the Sequestration Committee, which helped ensure that the case against Cotton was dismissed.80Cotton appendix XLIX, ff. 144v, 148, 151. In early August the Commons added Wodehouse to this committee and he attended its meetings fairly regularly for a year or so.81SP20/1, ff. 190v, 196v, 256, 409, 428v, 440, 462, 477, 500; CJ iii. 581b; LJ vi. 663a. During this visit to London, Wodehouse stayed in Cotton House, immediately adjacent to St. Stephen’s Chapel, which, as he pointed out to Cotton, was ‘convenient’ and ‘so fit for my attendance’.82Cotton appendix XLIX, f. 151.

On 5 August Wodehouse was appointed to the committee to consider the petition from Sir Walter Erle* as lieutenant of the ordnance.83CJ iii. 580b. Later that same month, he sat on the committee on the bill to raise £80,000 for the planned campaign in Ireland.84CJ iii. 609a. After the 3rd earl of Essex’s defeat in the west, Wodehouse was one of those appointed on 13 September to confer with the common council about raising forces.85CJ iii. 626a. The next day he was one of the five men sent to demand from the Spanish ambassador that he hand over Hugh MacMahon and Lord Maguire, the two leaders of the 1641 Irish rebellion who had recently managed to escape from the Tower.86CJ iii. 628a. Two days later he was appointed to the joint committee to discuss the latest letter from the king.87CJ iii. 629a. On 8 October he presented the Commons with the petition from the Norfolk county standing committee protested against the decision to remove troops from Norfolk. Those troops were among those under the 2nd earl of Manchester (Edward Montagu†) that had been sent to join up with Sir William Waller* in order to block the king’s advance on London from the west. The Commons however reiterated Manchester’s orders.88Harl. 166, f. 128v; CJ iii. 655b. Among the troops being sent westwards (although not from Norfolk) were those under the command of Oliver Cromwell*. On 12 October the Commons granted £580 for the arming of Cromwell’s regiment. It was ordered that £150 should come from the Norfolk assessments and that this should be paid via Wodehouse.89CJ iii. 661b-662a, 664a-b; LJ vii. 24a-b; A. and O. When the bill to release and banish Edmund Waller* was referred to a committee on 21 October, Wodehouse was named as one of its members.90CJ iii. 671a. He also sat on the committee on the bill to appoint Michael Oldisworth* as registrar of the prerogative court of Canterbury (6 Nov.).91CJ iii. 688a. On 7 December he was among those added to the committee to consider whether the privilege of the House had been broken earlier that week when Denzil Holles* had reported on the charges which had brought by Manchester in the Lords against Cromwell.92CJ iii. 717b. Complaints made against one of Manchester’s officers, Lawrence Crawford, were part of this feud between the earl and Cromwell. The following month Wodehouse was included on the committee to consider the Bedfordshire petition against Crawford (24 Jan. 1645).93CJ iv. 28b. Meanwhile, on 16 December, Wodehouse had been appointed to the joint committee to consider how to receive the king’s messengers, the 1st duke of Richmond and the 4th earl of Southampton.94CJ iii. 724b.

In late 1644 when the inhabitants of Thorpe next Norwich wanted to present a petition to Parliament, they did so via Wodehouse, although Wodehouse immediately passed it on to Potts.95Add. 22619, f. 235. The issue involved was whether Thorpe should count as part of Norwich for the purpose of tax collection. In March 1644 Wodehouse was one of the assessment commissioners who wrote to the Norwich corporation warning them that they were being unreasonable in insisting that the city limits did include Thorpe.96Add. 19398, f. 167.

Wodehouse was granted leave of absence on health grounds on 27 February 1645.97CJ iv. 64a. He was next recorded at Westminster on 13 June when he was named to the committee on the bill for the better regulation of sequestered estates.98CJ iv. 178b. Two weeks later he and Sir Thomas Widdrington* were added to the committee on the sale of such estates after it was ordered that two merchants, Richard Hill and William Pennoyer, should be reimbursed from the revenues raised by those sales.99CJ iv. 186a. On 1 July he was named to the joint committee to examine the royal letters that had been seized at Naseby.100CJ iv. 191b. On 10 July he was among those MPs sent to confer with the London militia committee about raising additional horse and dragoons.101CJ iv. 203a. He acted as teller with Robert Wallop* on 21 July in the minority in favour of the House rising for an hour after the report by Samuel Browne* on the allegations by 2nd Baron Savile (Sir Thomas Savile†) against two of the leading Presbyterian MPs, Denzil Holles and Bulstrode Whitelocke*. The Commons then proceeded to exonerate Holles and Whitelocke.102CJ iv. 214b. That may have been the outcome that Wodehouse and his friends had been seeking to avoid. During August and September he was named to several committees, including those on sequestration abuses (16 Aug.), to prepare bills for the drainage of the Bedford Level (4 Aug.) and for the sale of bishops’ lands (16 Sept.), and on the allowance to be granted to the elector palatine (22 Sept.).103CJ iv. 229a, 244b, 275b, 281a.

On 22 September 1645 Wodehouse was granted permission to go to the country for a month with instructions ‘to employ his best care and endeavours for speeding up the recruits and monies’ for the New Model army.104CJ iv. 282a. This was something of a watershed moment for Wodehouse, as there is no evidence that he played any direct role in parliamentary proceedings after this point. The following years were probably spent mostly in Norfolk. These were years during which some other MPs stopped attending the House because they disapproved of the direction in which events were heading. What is not clear is whether the same was true in Wodehouse’s case. He may now have been in his early sixties. His withdrawal could just as easily have been due to ill-health.

But he and his wife made at least one journey back to London. On 7 July 1647 they entertained the other Thetford MP, Framlingham Gawdy*, at their lodgings near the Fleet Bridge.105Add. 27396, f. 180. Two months later he and Miles Corbett wrote from London to the mayor of Norwich advising that he organise charitable assistance for Chester following an outbreak of the plague.106Add. 19399, f. 31. He may therefore have been around in late July and early August when the Independent MPs had been forced to leave Westminster and when the army had entered the capital. But he was absent when the House was called on 9 October 1647 and on 24 April 1648.107CJ v. 330a, 543b. Still absent in Norfolk in late April 1648, he was summoned to attend the meeting of the Norfolk assessment commissioners to discuss how to implement the latest assessment ordinance.108CUL, Buxton pprs. 96/26; HMC Var. ii. 266. In May 1648 he was appointed by Parliament as one of the commissioners to investigate the rioting at Norwich the previous month.109CJ v. 559b; LJ x. 261a. He was again listed as absent at the call of the House on 26 September.110CJ vi. 34a.

The verse history of the Wodehouses would claim that the execution of Charles I in January 1649 was so distressing for Sir Thomas that it ‘So smote his soul, that he ne’er joyed good day/Here-hence’.111Ketton-Cremer, ‘Rhyming Wodehouses’, 38. Now ‘the ancientest knight this part of England has’, he nevertheless conformed to the new regime, becoming custos rotulorum of Norfolk in 1650.112Blomefield, Norf. ii. 555; C231/6, p. 201. By the autumn of 1651 he had indicated his willingness to resume his seat in Parliament. The committee for the re-admission of MPs was therefore revived on 10 October to consider Wodehouse’s case and that of Thomas Westrowe*. Both men were re-admitted a week later, but he nevertheless took no recorded part in the proceedings of the Rump. 113CJ vii. 27b, 29b.

Physical infirmity (‘fetter’d by arthritic pains’) seems to have limited his activities during the final years of his life.114Blomefield, Norf. ii. 555. By the mid-1650s he was no longer performing his duties as custos.115Norf. QSOB, 5. It was therefore his eldest son, Philip, not Sir Thomas, who was elected to serve in the 1654 Parliament. However, in 1656 an army officer, John Balleston, acting on behalf of the local deputy major-general, Hezekiah Haynes*, consulted Sir Thomas about the forthcoming parliamentary elections. Wodehouse told Balleston that he thought some might encourage Philip to stand and so he asked Balleston to dissuade him.116TSP v. 370. Philip stood anyway.

Wodehouse made his will on 2 March 1658.117PROB11/278/252. He died 16 days later.118Blomefield, Norf. ii. 555. In his will he bequeathed funds to be distributed to the poorest of the parish of Kimberley ‘without favour or partiality’ and charged his son with the repair of the chancel roof of the parish church. He also bequeathed former dean and chapter lands at Coston and Carleton Forehoe to be employed for ‘charitable and pious uses’. Among his possessions were several musical instruments, including an organ, harpsichord and chest of viols. He also left music books, as well as two herbals by John Parkinson.119PROB11/278/252. His son, Philip, succeeded him as the third baronet. Sir Thomas’s epitaph, placed over his grave in the chancel of the church at Kimberley, recorded his dying words which, in rhyme, had expressed the hope that, ‘God’s mercy and Christ’s merits make me trust,/To rise from sleeping in my sinful dust,/ For aid to praise Jehovah with the just.’120Blomefield, Norf. ii. 555.