BAYLES, Thomas (d.?1685), of the Middle Temple, London.

Apparently a younger son, by the 1610s Bayles’s father was established not just in his native East Anglia, but also in Yorkshire, where his partnership with James Moyser to improve land provoked litigation with, among others, Sir Thomas Wentworth† and members of the Fairfax family.23Vis. Suff. (Harl. Soc. xiv), 638; Vis. Suff. (Harl. Soc. lxi), 53; STAC8/83/19; DL4/66/8; DL4/69/38. The connections glimpsed here, with a network of recusants encompassing the future MP’s mother’s Worcestershire and his grandmother Elizabeth More’s Oxfordshire, as well as Suffolk and Yorkshire, were to underlay Thomas Bayles junior’s legal career, although neither he nor his elder brother John appear to have been accused of being Catholics.24Vis. Suff. (Harl. Soc. lxi), 53; H. Aveling, ‘The Catholic Recusancy of the Yorkshire Fairfaxes’, Recusant Hist. iv. 61-101. In February 1622 Thomas junior was admitted to the Middle Temple, and to the chambers of the Kentish lawyer, Richard Parker, master of the utter bench.25MTR ii. 679, 681. He stood bound for Parker’s son in 1631, the year in which he himself was called to the bar.26MTR ii. 775. It is possible that this may have given him other early Kentish connections, but at some point, perhaps following his father’s death in 1639, he acquired a residence at Witham in Essex.27Vis. Suff. (Harl. Soc. xiv), 638; Add. 32483, ff. 19-20; Walter, Understanding Popular Violence, 215. There in the later 1630s he was valuer, for the purposes of probate, of the estate of recusant John Southcott, lord of the manor.28Essex RO, D/DU 465/1; PROB11/176/73 (John Southcott).

By March 1641 Bayles was of sufficient standing in the area to be added to the Essex commission of the peace, of which he became an active member.29C231/5, p. 433; Essex RO, T/A418/120/41. It is not clear whether political, religious or personal reasons were behind his decision in May 1642 to surrender his chamber at the Middle Temple.30MTR ii. 923. In July he signed the petition of the Essex gentry which, while it expressed opposition to papists and support for parliamentary privileges, was clearly indicative of support for the king’s ‘royal person and posterity’, which the subscribers pledged themselves to defend ‘with our persons, lives and fortunes’.31SP16/491, f. 185; Eg. 2651, ff. 118-19. That Bayles was perceived to have been disaffected to the parliamentarian and even protestant cause is apparent from the fact that he was one of those targeted on St Bartholomew’s day (24 Aug.) by the ‘Colchester plunderers’; he later claimed to have lost property worth as much as £1,600.32SP16/491, f. 281; SP29/295, f. 100; CSP Dom. 1671-2, p. 58. In December he secured an order from the House of Commons which, noting that ‘divers ill-disposed persons’ had attacked his house and taken his property, gave him power to search for and seize his goods.33CJ ii. 808a. Thereafter, Bayles appears to have withdrawn from public life, his appearance at the quarter sessions in October apparently being his last.34Essex RO, Q/SR 318/150. Since he was not sequestered as a delinquent, it is likely that he eschewed active royalist service.

Bayles returned to London after the end of the first civil war, when he obtained a new chamber in the Middle Temple (26 Nov. 1647) and began to participate again in the life of the legal community; he was to become a bencher in November 1652, and in this capacity sponsored the admission of his nephew and namesake, son of his elder brother John, in November 1654.35MTR ii. 956, 973, 1071; iii. 1040. From this base he made what look like concerted efforts to protect the estates and fortunes of a number of Catholic and royalist families, often in association with a London Merchant Taylor called Thomas Spence.36W. Suss. RO, Lytton 144-7; Wiston 4862. Already in May 1646 he had been appointed a trustee for the estates of Thomas Howard, 21st earl of Arundel.37Arundel Castle, MS G1/10. Three years later Bayles had what was perhaps the first of his many dealings with the committee for compounding when he asked to compound for the estate in Somerset which he had bought from John Southcott’s heir Edward (d.1652), a recusant like the rest of his family. In the next few years he endeavoured to secure the Southcott estates in Surrey, Berkshire and Essex, much of which he appears to have been assigned, in lieu of debts, before the war began. In the process he was to affirm that in June 1654 Edward’s son Sir John Southcott attended protestant worship to stand as godfather to Bayles’s own son.38CCC 463, 1935-6; SP23/66, pp. 733, 735; SP23/118, pp. 609, 612, 629, 633; C6/134/123; P. Knell, ‘Essex Recusants Sequestered’, Essex Recusant xii. 16-19. Meanwhile, Bayles was a trustee for the widow of the Catholic royalist Sir Richard Weston of Surrey, a creditor of another Catholic exile, William Howard, 1st Viscount Stafford, and looked after the interests of Catholic delinquents like his kinsmen the Mores, William Fromonds of Cheam in Surrey, and Sir Thomas Metham of Yorkshire; only in the last case did the committee for compounding record the observation that, in taking on his property, Bayles ought to have noticed that the estate had been sequestered for recusancy.39SP46/108, f. 450; SP23/66, pp. 719, 723, 725, 727, 730, 738, 748, 749, 765; SP28/210/195; CCC 1680, 2040. Alongside this Bayles and Spence assisted John Bayles to acquire an estate in Warwickshire, and had dealings with the prominent royalist Geoffrey Palmer*.40Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, DR18/10/54/14, 17; W. Suss. RO, Lytton 148-50, 153, 158-9, 161-3.

In 1651 Bayles married, perhaps not for the first time. His bride, a daughter of William Wiffin (d.1636/7), a London Brewer, brought property in London and Kent.41All Hallows the Less and St Bride’s, Fleet Street, London, par. regs.; PROB11/173/101; W. Suss. RO, Wiston 4857-61; Canterbury Cathedral Lib. U101/II/R2/7-8; GL, MS 6537. However, Bayles retained his interest in Essex. Notably, in October 1658 he endorsed the institution to the vicarage of Bulmer one Thomas Bernard: if, as seems likely, this man was a recent graduate of the godly Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, it reveals Bayles’s readiness to countenance those of a completely different religious complexion from that of his many legal clients.42Al. Cant.; LPL, COMMII/123. In similar vein, John Bayles engaged with his parish church, appearing as churchwarden at Wilby in 1657-8.43Suff. RO (Ipswich), FC88/E2/2.

Nonetheless, it was on a more familiar platform that Bayles appeared to stand when he was elected to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament. His return as one of the burgesses for Queenborough on 12 January 1659, the day on which he was made free of the borough, seems attributable to his landed interest in the county, although it might also have owed something to earlier connections.44Cent. Kent. Stud. QB/RPr8; QB/JMS4, f. 208v. He was named to just four committees, but it is nevertheless possible to detect the conservatism, and perhaps even royalism, of his outlook.45CJ vii. 622b, 627b, 632a, 638a. He opposed harsh treatment for tax officials, while seeking an investigation into financial impropriety within the army, and, in a division which exposed political tensions within the House, he was a teller in favour of accepting the report regarding the Malton election, which favoured the return of Philip Howard* (a Catholic with an estate in Kent) and George Marwood* rather than commonwealthsmen and republicans Robert Lilburne* and Luke Robinson* (7 Mar.).46Burton’s Diary, iii. 313; iv. 219; CJ vii. 611a. His role as a trustee probably explains his nomination to the committee to consider the fate of the mentally-incapacitated Thomas Howard, 23rd earl of Arundel (8 April).47CJ vii. 632a.

Bayles’s constitutional conservatism was manifest in opposition to the presence of Scottish and Irish members, and in support for Cromwell’s reintroduction of a quasi-monarchical element to the government. Bayles also supported the revival of the second chamber, and supported ‘transacting’ with the ‘Other House’.48Burton’s Diary, iv. 9, 105, 214, 292, 344 His most obvious contribution to debates, however, reflected his frustration with their fractious nature. As early as 11 February he defended those who opted to curtail them, declaring ‘I would not have it thought that those gentlemen that do not speak, cannot speak. They reserve themselves for a yea or no’.49Burton’s Diary, iii. 222. During debates on the Other House in early March, Bayles remarked that the daily reflections before proceedings began were of little avail.

I see little fruit of what the minister prays for every morning, and what the minister told us. There is no unity amongst us. What one moves, another crosses presently. Let us come to a question by a side-wind, rather than by no wind. I am sure a contrary wind will never bring it about.50Burton’s Diary, iv. 9.

Subsequently Bayles regretted that the ‘great noise’ in debate meant that ‘we cannot hear one another’, objected to lengthy debates, and expressed his opposition to the way in which the slightest slip of the tongue resulted in Members being questioned and upbraided.51Burton’s Diary, iv. 147, 283, 348. Bayles blamed the republicans for such trends, and during debates on the militia complained that Sir Henry Vane II* and Sir Arthur Hesilrige* ‘moved that which will bring you into a maze for ten days, till the nation and the House be about your ears’ (21 Apr.).52Burton’s Diary, iv. 472.

After the Restoration Bayles’s possession of an estate worth nearly £1,000 a year enabled him to retire from the bar in order to ‘despatch his majesty’s service for the public good’.53CSP Dom. 1666-7, p. 447; 1670, pp. 298, 472; 1671-2, p. 58; SP29/188, f. 97; SP29/295, f. 100. The Fire of London, however, destroyed his property in All Hallows the Less, and prompted him to seek the position of king’s counsel. Bayles claimed to have lost £5-6,000 as a result of the fire, and reminded the authorities of his losses in 1642.54W. Suss. RO, Wiston 4864; CSP Dom. 1671-2, p. 58; SP29/295, f. 100. Bayles was not successful in his attempt to become king’s counsel, although he may have returned to the bar. Having settled in Westminster, he again served as a justice of the peace, although he was removed from office in April 1679, perhaps in connection with allegations of the Popish plot.55C231/8, p. 5. His financial troubles appear to have persisted, and when he came to make his will in September 1683 he had debts of £1,000, although he was in possession of property in London, Essex, Berkshire and Kent. He was apparently living in St Margaret’s Lane, Westminster, at the time of his death, which occurred some time before 27 February 1685.56PROB11/379/342. He left no children, and no other member of the family sat at Westminster.