BAKER, Thomas (1606-75), of Sweeney Hall, Oswestry, Salop.

When the heralds produced a pedigree for Thomas Baker in 1649, they linked his family with an ancient family of Kent, but it is clear that the Bakers were Shropshire yeomen around Oswestry for some generations before they were considered gentry. One alleged ancestor was party to a recognizance at Shrewsbury in 1476.11CSP Dom. 1649-50, pp. 372-3; Salop Archives, 2868/273. The celebrated Shropshire chronicler, Richard Gough, provides an invaluable biography of the otherwise obscure Baker. When it comes to the fine detail, Gough inevitably misremembered, or had been misinformed on, a few minutiae, writing as he was in or around 1700, but his general account of the family is accurate and convincing. Thomas Baker’s grandfather was of Weston Lullingfields, between Shrewsbury and Oswestry, but the MP’s father was brought up in Newton-on-the-Hill, near Myddle, Richard Gough’s home parish.12Gough, Hist. Myddle, 157. According to Gough, the family was elevated through service at Sweeney. Baker’s father as a youth was ‘wholly addicted to dice and ... gaming’, and became a servant through financial necessity. The owner of Sweeney, Arthur Chambers (not Andrew, as Gough has it) ‘a sleepy drone of a man’, was persuaded to sell the tithes of the hamlet of Maesbury to Baker senior for money lent by one of Richard Gough’s ancestors.13Gough, Hist. Myddle, 157. Baker was tithe farmer of Sweeney itself by 1620.14NLW, Sweeney Hall 104. The bargain was profitable, as Baker was within two years able to repay the loan from the profits of the tithes. A number of leases and conveyances from Chambers to Baker’s father are dated between 1613 and 1623, and culminate in the lease to Baker of Sweeney Hall itself, with 380 acres of land.15Salop Archives, 2868/249-50; NLW, Sweeney Hall 61-4, 101-3; Gough, Hist. Myddle, 158. These transactions broadly confirm Gough’s depiction of Baker senior as a shrewd, opportunist businessman. Baker senior married Chambers’ housekeeper, and Gough presents the marriage as a product of Baker’s rise in status; but the future MP was born in 1609, suggesting this alliance was the prelude to the family’s elevation, not a consequence of it.

The future MP’s elder brother benefited fully from his father’s new wealth, and Gough commented on the quality of the education that was lavished on him. But he died young, and Thomas Baker junior, perceived to be ‘no comely person of body, nor of great parts, and little education’, was redeemed in the chronicler’s eyes only by his marriage.16Gough, Hist. Myddle, 158-9. Gough has confused historians by asserting that Elizabeth Fenwick was the sister of Humphrey Mackworth I’s* wife. Baker himself unwittingly corrects that in a letter of 1653 by describing Mackworth as his cousin.17Gough, Hist. Myddle, 159; Mont. Colls. viii. 303-4. In fact, Mackworth’s second wife, Mary Venables, was first cousin to Elizabeth Fenwick, their common grandfather being Sir Cotton Gargrave of Nostel, South Yorkshire.18Ormerod, Cheshire, iii. 200; Hunter, S. Yorks. ii. 214; Hodgson, Northumb. pt. 2, ii. 113. Gough was uncertain as to which of the many north country Fenwick families Elizabeth belonged, but she was the daughter of William Fenwick of Stanton, Northumberland, who was appointed as a tax commissioner in the parliamentarian northern association in 1645.19A. and O. i. 705. Lieutenant-Colonel Roger Fenwick, ‘a comely proper gentleman’, who raised a regiment of foot for service in Ireland in July 1646, was not Elizabeth Baker’s brother, but her nephew. He was killed at the battle of Scarrifhollis, co. Donegal on 21 June 1650, and the Bakers were left to try to recover the pay owing to him.20Gough, Hist. Myddle, 159; Hodgson, Northumb. pt. 2, ii. 113; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 637-8; CSP Dom. 1650, pp. 445, 606; 1651-2, 39; 1654, pp. 223, 335.

Baker rebuilt Sweeney Hall, according to his own boast, in sixteen weeks, but only from 1647 did he play any part in public life. He was a Shropshire magistrate by 1650, but Gough was sceptical as to whether Baker took any interest in his duties, and wondered ‘whether he knew where the bench was where the sessions was kept, for I never saw him there’.21Gough, Hist. Myddle, 160. During his year of office as sheriff, he acquired a coat of arms. It was Baker’s religious commitment, rather than any involvement in politics on his part, that led to his place in Parliament. To judge from his will of 1639, Baker’s father was comfortable with the established state religion, and left money for the repair of Oswestry church.22PROB11/181/330. At some point after he inherited Sweeney in 1639, Baker junior became a patron of Independent ministers at the rebuilt hall. In 1647, his name appears among the elders of the second Shropshire classis, but his Presbyterianism could hardly have been more than superficial, as a few short years later he had become a patron of the millenarian minister, Vavasor Powell. Gough provides a memorable picture of Baker’s bounty at Sweeney on the occasions when Powell came to preach:

I have heard him pray and preach four hours together in the dining room at Sweeney, where many persons came to hear him; and when the people departed they had every one a quarter of a two-penny bun or cake, and everyone a glass of beer, of about half a pint.23Gough, Hist. Myddle, 160.

Baker’s association with Powell was probably active by February 1650, when the former was named as a commissioner for propagating the gospel in Wales. Powell was an ‘approver’ of ministers under this legislation, but the hand that sustained both the clergy and the laymen involved in this initiative was that of Colonel Thomas Harrison I*. Sweeney Hall became an enclave for the ministers that drove the propagation experiment. When Jane Mostyn, the wife of Ambrose Mostyn, an itinerant minister who like Powell had been encouraged by the Committee for Plundered Ministers, died in 1651, she was buried at Sweeney rather than in the churchyard at Oswestry. Walter Cradock, yet another leading itinerant, witnessed the burial ‘with all the saints that knew her’.24Bye-Gones, relating to Wales and the Border Countries, v (1880), 57.

Richard Gough’s dismissive view of Baker as a justice of the peace might predispose a historian to write him off in all areas of public activity, but it is clear that Baker did in fact involve himself in propagating the gospel in Wales. He is known to have attended meetings of the commissioners at Caernarfon, Conway and Wrexham on at least five dates in 1651 and 1652, and this is likely to be an indication of what was in fact a more sustained commitment to the experiment. In these meetings Baker was accompanied either by Hugh Courtney* or John Browne II*, both millenarians. Among the papers signed by Baker on these occasions were orders to re-direct tithes to support schools in the north and mid-Wales settlements of Wrexham, Abergele, Llanrwst, Llanfyllin, Holt, Amlwch, Caernarfon, Montgomery, Newtown and Llanidloes.25LPL, Comm. VIII/1. It was undoubtedly Baker’s association with Powell, Harrison, Courtney and others who were then of Harrison’s Fifth Monarchist persuasion that lay behind his selection for service in the Nominated Assembly of 1653. With Courtney and a group of other Members for Wales and the marcher counties, he was allocated lodgings in Whitehall in mid-June 1653, prior to the opening of the new Parliament the following month. But in Parliament Baker followed the pattern of his career as a magistrate rather than as a propagator of the gospel. In other words, he was inactive. He was named on 20 July to the committee on prisons, along with Wroth Rogers and John James, Members from Baker’s part of England, but his name was no longer on the list of committees when it was published in August and republished early in October.26CJ vii. 287b; A List of the Names of all the Members (1653, 669.f.17.45); A New List of all the Members of this Present Parliament (1653, 669.f.17.57). Did Baker ever attend this Parliament? The only evidence that suggests he was in Westminster during these months dates from the day that the Assembly was dissolved (12 Dec.), when Baker approved a nomination of a Shropshire minister.27Add. 36792, f. 80.

Even though Baker was undoubtedly well regarded by Harrison’s faction, there is evidence that his religious sympathies never became exclusively sectarian. His willingness to work with Presbyterians, visible in 1647, persisted. In May 1653, he sought the help of the Presbyterian-inclined Major-general Thomas Mytton* for ‘an able, painful and godly minister’, Edward Giles, assistant to James Betton of Worthen.28Mont. Colls. viii. 303-4; Calamy Revised, 556. He was also a kind of patron to Rowland Nevett, Congregational minister of Oswestry for 30 years, and in December 1653 approved the appointment of Ralph Boate as minister of Berrington in his home county.29T. Rees, Hist. Protestant Nonconformity in Wales (2nd ed. 1883), 290; Add. 36792 f. 80; Salop Archives, 2868/278. It was probably this flexibility in his godly outlook that kept him in the commission of the peace – it could not have been his hard work on the bench – and away from Vavasor Powell’s avowed hostility to the Cromwellian protectorate. Baker’s name is not to be found among the signatories of A Word for God, the petition which articulated the Welsh millenarians’ outrage at the failure of the Nominated Assembly.30A Word for God (1655, E.861.5). Baker was not listed among the triers and ejectors under the August 1654 Cromwellian ordinance for church government, but did find a place among the tax commissioners of June 1657, proving himself willing to be reconciled to the protectorate.31A. and O.

Although Baker became a militia commissioner in 1659, he was not active in Shropshire in defending the republican regimes against the rising tide of royalism. Baker lost all local offices at the Restoration of Charles II, and according to Gough saw his estate diminished too. He and Elizabeth had no children, and their attempts to settle on an heir proved difficult. Their first choice, the son of Baker’s sister, proved a spendthrift with what the Bakers considered a poor judgement when it came to a marriage partner, so was disinherited; their second, a son of Humphrey Mackworth I, died prematurely. Baker’s third and final choice was Thomas Browne, grandson of John Browne II.32Gough, Hist. Myddle, 161; PROB11/348/278. When Baker drew up his will in July 1663, he had probably already settled upon his final choice of heir, although the will does not name him, because earlier that month Baker settled his lands in a trust.33Salop Archives, 2868/273.

Baker died in March 1675. Although the Oswestry parish register recorded his burial, he appears to have been buried not in the parish churchyard but in the grounds of Sweeney, with other ‘saints’ such as Jane Mostyn.34The Shropshire Gazetteer (Wem, 1824), 651. His widow inherited the problems of Baker’s debts and dwindling estate, but maintained Sweeney as a home notable for protecting nonconformist ministers. From November 1676, she protected as chaplain James Owen, who gathered a congregation together around Oswestry.35Rees, Hist. Protestant Nonconformity in Wales, 290. Elizabeth Baker died in January 1684. News of her death came to the nonconformist minister, Philip Henry, who describes her last years

being in debt and in a too much expensive way of living it pleased God about three years since to lay upon her such a distemper of body as disfitted her for business, caused her to retire into privacy, so that by this time, I suppose her debts are near if not quite paid.36Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry ed. M.H. Lee (1882), 322.

After her death, Thomas Browne duly came into his inheritance.