ADAMS, Thomas (1586-1668), of Gracechurch St. London and Sprowston, Norf.

Adams came from a Shropshire yeoman family of modest means, which had been settled in Wem since the mid-sixteenth century. He may have been intended for the ministry when he matriculated at Cambridge, but he was apprenticed to a London draper two years before taking his degree.31Garbet, Wem, 174. He subsequently became an active member of the Drapers’ Company, setting up a woollen business in Gracechurch Street, and on his marriage acquired lands in Essex. In 1629 he was appointed an assistant of the Massachusetts Bay Company, to which he had subscribed £50 in the previous year, and he was also involved in money lending, including £410 to his brother, John Adams of Wem, by October 1630.32Winthrop Pprs. ii. 160; F. Rose-Troup, The Mass. Bay Co. and its Predecessors (New York, 1930), 20, 61, 131; PROB11/160/346. He succeeded to the family estate on his brother’s death in 1631, and in the mid-1630s invested the profits of his business in the purchase of two manors in Essex.33Morant, Essex, i. 390; ii. 570.

Adams was not a hard-nosed money-man, however. He retained a sentimental attachment to his roots. In the early 1630s he organised the ‘Shropshire feast’ for all gentlemen of the county resident in London, and in 1633 he planned to visit ‘my native soil, and the habitation of my aged mother, in some measure to testify to my filial duty, the great debt ever to be paid and never to be repaid, and to give increase as I shall be able to our mutual consolation’.34Harl. 7041, ff. 53-v, 56-v. He also took great care of the upbringing of his children, fretting over his daughter’s illness in 1632, and bemoaning, the following year, the lack of progress of his sons at the godly Felsted School in Essex: ‘their increase in learning doth slowly proceed, but I hope it will be more for the time to come, and they will prove honest men by the grace of the Almighty if not good scholars’.35Harl. 7041, ff. 53, 56. The most promising of his sons was later sent to study in the Huguenot academy at Saumur.36Harl. 7041, f. 58. Education was religious duty for Adams. In the early 1630s he was instrumental in founding a chair of Arabic at Cambridge, offering £40 a year of his own money, and encouraging aristocratic patrons, including the earl of Holland, to provide books.37Add. 5810, ff. 172-3; Harl. 7041, f. 49-53. He declined all thanks for efforts, however, preferring to ‘let my poor endeavour … fall like oil, without noise or sound in the ears of man, and let my God accept it through my blessed saviour, and it is to me abundantly sufficient’.38Harl. 7041, ff. 50v-51.

During the later 1630s, Adams continued to prosper. He had climbed the ranks of the Drapers’ Company, becoming assistant in 1639 and master in 1640.39Johnson, Drapers iv. 132. His business had also grown, and by the end of the decade he had become the wealthiest inhabitant of Dowgate Ward, with properties in Eastcheap and Aldgate.40Dale, 88, 211; Principal Inhabitants of London, ed. Harvey, 14, 16. It may have been a sense of duty towards the City that prompted him to serve as sheriff in September 1639 - a time of great tension between the king and the City – even though 16 others had refused.41CSP Dom. 1639, p. 534. On receiving news of his appointment, it was said that Adams ‘immediately dismissed the particular business about which he was, and never after personally followed his trade, but gave himself up to City concerns’.42[N. Hardy], The Royal Commonwealthsman, or King David’s Picture (1668), 35. This is supported by evidence from the Drapers’ Company, which shows that he took only two apprentices after 1639, although he still retained 21 others as late as 1641.43J.E. Farnell, ‘The Politics of the City of London, 1640-1646’ (Chicago Univ. Ph.D thesis, 1953), 40. One of his sons apologised to a family friend in Cambridge that his father ‘by reason of his place, his business is so great, his occasion of hindrances are so many, that he cannot command himself as before to answer to your letters’.44Harl. 7041, f. 57. Soon afterwards Adams was elected alderman of Portsoken Ward, and in October 1641 he was made a freeman of the East India Company.45Cal. Ct. Mins. E.I. Co. 1640-3, p. 198.

As might have been expected from an alderman with godly leanings, Adams sided with the opponents of the Caroline regime, and proceedings were initiated against him for hindering the collection of Ship Money in London.46Bodl. MS Bankes 5/41; LJ vii. 468a. That he was not, however, an enemy of the king is suggested by his involvement in a scheme to raise money in London during the second bishops’ war of 1640, and his appointment to the committee to arrange a banquet for the king on his return from the north in November 1641.47CSP Dom. 1640, p. 170; Pearl, London, 126. In January 1642, as tensions between king and Parliament came to a head, Adams was involved in measures to double the watch and ward at the gates and lading places of the City.48CSP Dom. 1641-3, p. 238. The same alarm may have contributed to the death of his wife on 11 January, the day after the king’s departure from London.49Lansd. 255, f. 358; Farnell, ‘City of London’, 38-9; Pearl, London, 142. In the following weeks, Adams subscribed the aldermen’s petition to the Lords complaining about proposals for giving control of the London militia to the City’s new committee of safety, and with the doubling of the size of the trained bands he was appointed colonel of the Blue Regiment by the new militia committee - a purely honorific post, and he did not campaign with the regiment in later years.50Pearl, London, 144, 149; List of the Names of the Several Colonels; Bodl. Rawl. B.48, f. 23v; CSP Dom. 1644, p. 404; L.C. Nagel, ‘The Militia of London, 1641-9’ (London Univ. Ph.D thesis, 1982), 55. Adams subscribed the relatively large sum of £600 in the Irish Adventure in April.51Bottigheimer, English Money and Irish Land, 175. Yet still he had doubts. In July Adams was one of the aldermen who refused to obey Parliament’s order to appoint a locum tenens in place of the deposed lord mayor, his friend and neighbour Sir Richard Gurney.52Pearl, London, 157. Despite this defiance, Parliament valued his business acumen and in April 1643 he was ordered to attend the Committee for Advance of Money to suggest ways of raising money for the parliamentarian forces.53CJ iii. 46b. Alarmed by the growing power of the radical sub-committee at Salters’ Hall associated with Isaac Penington*, on 18 July 1643 Adams presented a City petition to the Commons calling for the sole command of the trained bands to be vested in the more moderate militia committee. The petition was approved, and orders were issued for an ordinance to be drawn up.54CJ iii. 171b; Farnell, ‘City of London’, 40; Pearl, London, 267. In the following months, Adams seems to have played little part in public affairs. At the trial of Archbishop William Laud in March 1644 he gave evidence that Laud had ‘pressed him to take distress for Ship Money’ when sheriff, and had threatened to prosecute him in Star Chamber if he failed to carry out orders.55LJ vii. 468a. In February 1645 he was included in the list of London commissioners under the New Model ordinance, and the next month he was appointed as one of the eight treasurers-at-war chosen to administer £80,000 raised for the new army.56LJ vii. 293b; CSP Dom. 1644-5, p. 377; A. and O.

Adams reached the pinnacle of his civic career in October 1645, when he was elected lord mayor of London.57LJ vii. 643b. Yet his year of office was marred by accusations of dishonesty, disloyalty and bad faith. In the spring of 1646 he was brought before the Committee for Compounding to account for a shortfall of more than £13,000 in the collection for the Scottish army.58CCC 34-5, 39-40. Adams was also suspected of involvement in plans to bring the defeated king to London.59CSP Ven. 1643-7, p. 256. In April he was questioned by parliamentary commissioners and his house was searched, leading to protests from the City that their leader had been subjected ‘to examination on empty suspicions’.60CSP Ven. 1643-7, p. 257. After the king fled from Oxford in May, there were further rumours that he had sought refuge in the capital, and was ‘ready to disclose himself through the favour of the mayor’.61CSP Ven. 1643-7, p. 259. In September Adams also came under attack from religious non-conformists, who accused him in print of a ‘breach of promise’ for failing to arrange a ‘public disputation between Anabaptists and Presbyterians’ to dispute infant baptism, which had originally been scheduled for the previous December. In a further sign of his perfidy, Adams was accused of being behind an ‘unjust remonstrance’, presented to Parliament on 26 May, ‘for the suppression of all such opinions and practices as were not of a Presbyterian mould’.62The Lord Mayor’s Farewell (1646), 1-4.

Adams’s response to such brickbats was to draw closer to the Presbyterian interest in the City. When confronted with allegations that he was working for the king’s return to London in April 1646, he greeted a delegation from the militia committee

with much cheerfulness, [and] assured them how unlikely he was for such an engagement and, in fine, gave them good satisfaction. But withal told them he wondered how they should find him in such a business, and could not believe it any other than a design, which might be therefore done because he lately showed himself forward, according to the Covenant, for settlement of discipline.

This front of assurance did not fool one of the delegates, Thomas Juxon*, who noted that ‘the lord mayor, though he seemed satisfied, yet since is extremely nettled at it, at which all that party cry it up for a design to take him off’.63Juxon Jnl. 113-4. Once he was free of the office, Adams played a fuller role in City politics. He was appointed as one of the trustees for the sale of bishops’ lands in October, and reported to the Lords on various matters concerning the City in November and December.64A. and O.; LJ viii. 574a, 617b. In December he was involved in drafting, and subsequently presented to the Lords, a petition of the Covenant-engaged citizens calling for redress of grievances, particularly the disbandment of the army and the suppression of heresy. This was seen by its opponents as the work of a small cabal within the common council, including John Langham*, Samuel Avery* and Thomas Vyner, as well as Adams.65Juxon Jnl. 142. On 4 March 1647 a petition ‘from many well-affected Presbyters’ asking for the king to return to London once he had taken the Covenant, was referred by the common council to Adams and Thomas Skinner, described by one critic as ‘both sound for the king’.66Juxon Jnl. 151; Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 482-3. The next day Adams joined Langham and John Jones II* in resigning as a trustee for the sale of bishops’ lands, ostensibly because ‘other necessary occasions’ prevented him from his discharging his duties.67LJ ix. 59b; A. and O.

With the Presbyterian resurgence at Westminster later in the same month, Adams was again involved in City politics. On 26 March he was appointed to the pro-Presbyterian committee of the common council for the City’s defence, and a month later he was also appointed to the committee to direct the City militia and defend London and Parliament, if need be, against an attack by the New Model.68Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 482-3. At the beginning of May he was made a member of the new, Presbyterian-dominated militia committee.69Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 472; A. and O. In the next few weeks Adams became one of the most active members of the new committee, and took a lead in purging the City commands of Independents, thereby incurring such animosity among the army’s supporters that he was ‘like to have been seized’.70Farnell, ‘City of London’, 40; Clarke Pprs. i. 25. He was not, however, an obvious crypto-royalist during this period. He was active in distributing money to the parliamentarian forces at Newcastle, for which he received the Lords’ thanks on 13 April; and on 12 June he informed Parliament of a royalist plot to seize the town.71LJ ix. 135a, 136a; HMC 6th Rep., 169; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 159; Rushworth, Hist. Collns. vi. 559-60. Under pressure from the army, Parliament brought an end to the militia committee, putting the trained bands under the control of a parliamentary committee instead. Adams was among those who reacted strongly to this infringement of the City’s rights, and he became a leading figure in events of 26 July, when a crowd forced both Houses to revoke the militia ordinance and return control of the militia to the City’s hands. The next day, the drafting of ‘a declaration against the army and for the justifying of their defence’ of the City was referred to Adams and Skinner, who ‘without reporting it to the committee to be read and considered… they brought it in, and being once read passed in a lump’.72Juxon Jnl. 164.

After the army’s march on London and the establishment of Independent hegemony, the Commons ordered that Adams should be impeached for attempting to compel Parliament ‘with open force and violence’ to alter established laws, and of levying forces against the New Model, and he was sent to the Tower on 25 September.73CJ v. 315b; Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 213-4; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 600; A Charge of High Treason (25 Sept. 1647), 3-4; LJ x. 213a-215b. His imprisonment, along with other accused aldermen, caused widespread indignation in the City, with some aldermen threatening to resign while others refused to allow money to be lent to the army that oppressed them.74HMC 5th Rep., 173. The prisoners joined the protests, declaring that although they were ‘servants to the Parliament’, they remained bound to the king ‘by nature, equity and religion, by oath, covenant, conscience, in all loyalty and allegiance’. The Commons pressed for the accused to be questioned on 13 March 1648, and on 21 March articles of impeachment were sent to the Lords.75CJ v. 494b, 495a, 507b; LJ x. 125a-b. When finally summoned to appear before the Lords, by order of 21 April, Adams initially challenged the authority of Robert Tichborne*, the lieutenant of the Tower, to force him to attend, as he had not produced a legal warrant.76LJ x. 213a-215b, 217b-219b; HMC 7th Rep., 239. On 25 April, when he appeared before the Lords, Adams remained defiant. He refused to kneel ‘as a delinquent’, demanded his right to be tried by common law, and cited the 29th article of Magna Carta, by which ‘all commoners are to be tried by their equals’.77Whitelocke, Mems. ii. 303; The Humble Petition of the Worshipful Thomas Adams (1648), 6 (E437.6). He was fined £500 for contempt and sent back to the Tower.78LJ x. 231a-b. The City remained constant in its support, and in May petitioned Parliament for his release. The recent royalist rising in Kent made Parliament anxious to conciliate the London authorities. The lord mayor, aldermen and common council petitioned the Commons for the discharge of the prisoners on 23 May; on 3 June the Commons declared their intention not proceed with the impeachment charges; and three days later Adams was discharged by order of the Lords.79CJ v. 570b, 578a, 583b; LJ x. 307b, 308a.

Adams had been released from the Tower, but he was not free from suspicion. In April 1649, when the lord mayor refused to declare the abolition of the monarchy, Parliament purged the court of aldermen as it had already purged the common council, and Adams was removed from the bench. He remained an influential figure, however. In August he was called upon to attend discussions at the attorney-general’s house about reforming the court of chancery.80Whitelocke, Mems. iii. 89. He also continued his charitable works, and in March 1650 founded a free school at Wem, with statutes that provided for daily prayer and weekly catechism, with teachers ‘orthodox in religion and pious and sober in conversation’.81VCH Salop. ii. 158; Garbet, Wem, 177, 186. Rumours persisted about his royalist sympathies, however, and in April 1651 he was suspected of joining Langham, Vyner and other citizens in financing a royalist plot.82HMC 13th Rep., 585. The protectoral authorities were deeply suspicious of Adams. In July 1654, when he was elected for the first protectorate Parliament as MP for London, coming third in the poll, his election was challenged by Tichborne, who claimed he was incapable of sitting under the terms of the Instrument of Government because of his activities in 1647.83Harl. 6810, f. 164v; HMC 6th Rep., 437. Adams was summoned before the council’s committee for elections, and on 6 September the new Parliament upheld its decision to exclude him.84CSP Dom. 1654, p. 335; Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 82. In August 1656 Adams was again elected for London, on a slate of ‘very good religious men’.85TSP v. 337. He was still considered ‘by no means well-disposed to the state’, however, and failed to obtain a ticket of approval from the protector’s council, thus giving him the dubious distinction of being the only Member excluded from both parliaments.86Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 303. On 26 September, Adams signed the Remonstrance prepared by the excluded MPs, but when they were re-admitted in January 1658 he did not take his seat. The following month Thomas Foote* told the House that Adams and the other excluded London MPs were willing to attend the House, but he did not explain their failure to do so.87Burton’s Diary ii. 405.

Even before the fall of the protectorate, Adams was in contact with the royalist underground, and was considered by them ‘a very honest man’, who would provide financial backing for any attempt to restore Charles Stuart.88TSP vii. 66. It was later said that in the late 1650s he sent ‘considerable sums of money beyond sea’ to the court in exile.89[Hardy], Royal Commonwealthsman, 35. Adams joined Langham as one of the commissioners sent to present the City’s address to the king at The Hague, where he was knighted on 26 May 1660.90Rugg Diurnal, ed. W.L. Sachse (Camden Soc. 3rd ser. xci.), 78, 81; HMC 5th Rep., 167; Shaw, Knights of Eng. ii. 225. When the king made his formal entry into London on 29 May, Adams rode in the procession at the head of his militia troop.91Rugg Diurnal, ed. Sachse, 89. The king’s promise to grant him a baronet, made at The Hague, was fulfilled in June.92Eg. 2551, f. 5v. As a further reward for his loyalty, Adams was restored to the aldermanic bench, and soon became one of the ‘fathers of the City’. In October 1660 Adams reported to the common council his success in securing from the king a confirmation of the City’s plantation lands in Co. Londonderry, and year later he was one of the aldermen chosen to attend the king to thank him for renewing the charter of the City.93CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 309; CCSP v. 149. At the London elections for the Cavalier Parliament in March 1661 there was ‘great labouring by letters’ from the court party on Adams’s behalf, but he was not elected.94CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 538, 540. Instead, Adams busied himself with adjudicating disputes at Gresham College, and fulfilling his duties as a ‘vigilant’ president of St Thomas’s Hospital and governor of the Society for the new plantation of Ulster.95CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 581; 1661-2, p. 150; [Hardy], Royal Commonwealthsman, 36-7; CSP Ire. 1663-5, p. 546.

‘The old comely alderman’ died on 24 February 1668, after several weeks ‘miserable torture’ occasioned by a coach accident that dislodged a massive kidney stone. Samuel Pepys, who later saw the stone on display at the Royal Society, described it as ‘bigger than my fist’, weighing at least 25 ounces, and he marvelled that Adams had ‘never in his life had any fit of it, but lived to a great age without pain’.96Pepys’s Diary ix. 136. Having already settled his estates in Essex, Norfolk and Shropshire, Adams made only small gifts to his relatives and charitable bequests to, among others, the Drapers’ Company, St Thomas’s Hospital and his school at Wem.97PROB11/326/488. His wish to be ‘decently buried’ was fulfilled on 10 March, when his funeral sermon, by his old friend, Dr Nathaniel Hardy, was preached to a congregation numbering more than 1,000 at St Katherine Cree.98PROB11/326/488; Add. 38855, f. 144. In it he was described as ‘the darling of the City’, ‘a benign star having a pleasing influence upon all that looked upon him’, and as a loyal member of the established church, which ‘he faithfully adhered to, cordially owning her doctrine and discipline, hierarchy and liturgy, though he lived in an inconstant age’.99[Hardy], Royal Commonwealthsman, 28, 30, 33-4. Adams was buried at his recently acquired house at Sprowston in Norfolk, where his monumental inscription listed his ‘meritorious actions’ as ‘the best of men in the worst of times’, which ensured that ‘he had not ceased to live, but only to tarry upon Earth’.100J. Wilford, Mems. and Characters… of Divers Eminent and Worthy Persons (1741), app., 27-8. He was succeeded by his fifth and only surviving son, Sir William Adams.101CB; Add. 38855, f. 144.