MATHEW, Thomas (c.1600-78), of Barnstaple.

The family of Thomas Mathew migrated around southern England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Thomas Mathew’s father, also Thomas, was the son of a husbandman from Nuffield, in Oxfordshire. He was apprenticed in the Skinners’ Company in 1573.12GL, MS 30719/1, f. 155v. In 1599 he married Joan Curtice of Basildon, in Berkshire to the west of Reading, and Thomas, their eldest son, was probably born within a year or two of the marriage.13Basildon par. reg. By 1611, the family was settled in St Dunstan-in-the-East, in the City of London, where a number of other children were baptised.14Reg. St Dunstan in the East, 36, 39, 42, 47. Thomas Mathew senior rose to be an assistant of the Skinners’ Company, and attended meetings several times a year between 1618 and 1633, regularly but not punctiliously. He seems not have progressed further in the Company before his death in 1638.15GL, MS 30708/3, ff. 15-146. The nephew of the elder Thomas Mathew, a third Thomas, was apprenticed as a Skinner in 1617.16GL, MS 30719/2, f. 57v. At the time of this man’s premature death in 1628, his first cousin, the future Member, was living in the City at Bear Quay, near the Custom House.17PROB11/153/495. Mathew (as he spelled his name) was doubtless working as a merchant in overseas trade, and so was probably the man who joined the East India Company in 1631.18CSP Col. E.I. 1630-4, p. 238; C219/46, Barnstaple indenture, 1659. It is quite likely that he served an apprenticeship with his father, and would have acquired the freedom of the Skinners’ Company and of the City by virtue of patrimony, although he played no part in the Company and was always described a merchant, never as a skinner.

Mathew’s career changed in direction in 1630, when he married Martha Ayres. She was the daughter of a Barnstaple merchant, John Ayres, who had died in 1622. At the time of her marriage, as was recorded in the Barnstaple parish register, she was in the care of her grandfather, John Delbridge†.19Barnstaple Par. Reg. 23. Delbridge had served in six Parliaments by this time, and was the most powerful figure in his home town. His patronage must have eased the passage into Barnstaple of his son-in-law. By virtue of the custom of the town, Mathew became a freeman himself on his marriage to the daughter of one who was already free.20N. Devon RO, B1/4026. By September 1633, he was sufficiently established in the town to be able to offer to buy in grain to supply the local markets when an unexpected provisioning of ships for America left local suppliers short.21N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, p. 19. Within a few years of his arrival at Barnstaple, Mathew began to hold office in the corporation, albeit not the most prestigious ones, and he subscribed, like Delbridge, to the Fisheries Company, which invested in ships fishing for herring. Like Delbridge and his son, Richard Delbridge, Mathew was in arrears with his subscriptions by 1637.22CUL, Ms Dd.XI.71, ff. 30v, 31v, 34v, 35v. By a further economic benefit of his marriage, Mathew acquired – in the form of leases from the corporation – significant property holdings in Barnstaple, on the quay, the centre of economic life in the town.23N. Devon RO, B1/3971, 1565. Mathew’s marriage also brought him into a family relationship with other important figures in Barnstaple, including the minister, Martin Blake, who was Mathew’s brother-in-law, and the family of John Downe, the learned rector of Instow.24J.F. Chanter, Life and Times of Martin Blake (1910), 22-4; ‘John Downe’, Oxford DNB.

Mathew was a credible candidate for a seat in the first Parliament of 1640 because of his family ties with Delbridge and because of his knowledge of the London mercantile world. His colleague in the Short Parliament, George Peard, was an altogether weightier figure in terms of previous service to the town. Peard and Mathew were returned ‘on a compact’, unopposed.25Gribble, Memorials, 349. Mathew made no known impact at Westminster during the brief duration of his parliamentary career, but he evidently sought and expected a further nomination when a second Parliament was summoned in the autumn of 1640. At an initial general calling of voices, Mathew seemed to be elected, but instead, the returning officer, the mayor, insisted on the election of Richard Ferris, himself a former mayor, for the second seat after Peard had again been returned. Mathew petitioned the Commons, alleging that the mayor had rejected him as not being one of the common council. The mayor insisted that Mathew had been happy not to have had to compete against Peard for election, and that he had in fact thanked him for putting the choice of either Mathew or Ferris before the electors.26Gribble, Memorials, 349. On Mathew’s petition, Ferris’s election was declared by the Commons to be void, and a new writ was ordered to be made out for a by-election, but there is no firm record of any further election taking place until 1646.

By October 1642, Mathew appears to have been admitted to the common council, membership of which would have overcome the mayor’s objection to him at the election in 1640.27Cotton, Barnstaple and the Civil War, 83. He has been described as ‘the leading royalist’ in Barnstaple during the civil war.28Chanter, Life and Times, 74. Until its surrender to Prince Maurice in September 1643, the town was emphatically parliamentarian in its allegiance, and even after that it never became enthusiastically royalist. It is therefore likely that that if Mathew was the man of that name who recruited soldiers to the king’s army in east Devon, he must have left Barnstaple late in 1642.29CCAM 1353; CCC 2766. He returned to the town when it surrendered, and probably gave up his military commission. In December 1644, he was one of the town’s delegates to the governor of Exeter, Sir John Berkeley*, to assert the town’s liberties under its charter, and to complain against unspecified ‘great usurpations and intrusions’ put upon the inhabitants.30N. Devon RO, B1/2002. The following year, he was part of another delegation to see Berkeley, this time to complain about the governor, Sir Allen Apsley†, and his brother.31N. Devon RO, B1/2539.

After Apsley surrendered to Sir Thomas Fairfax* in April 1646, Mathew faced no obvious reprisals or retributive penal taxation, suggesting that there had been strict limits to his royalist enthusiasm. He remained on the common council of the town, and served a term as mayor in 1652-3, further evidence of a willingness to respond pragmatically to political change. The execution of the king had not driven him from public life, and neither did the change from commonwealth to protectorate. He contributed to the overhaul and codification of Barnstaple’s ordinances (by-laws) in 1656, and when Major-general John Disbrowe* scrutinized the membership of the corporation that year, Mathew was not required to resign.32N. Devon RO, B1/1601, 4026. One of Mathew’s sons was apprenticed in 1654 to a London Skinner involved in the East India, Muscovy, Eastland and Levant trades.33GL, MS 30719/2, f. 186v. In a further sign that Mathew was a conformist, he voted for Sir John Copleston* and George Walter* in the 1659 Barnstaple election.34C219/46. He supported the petition to Parliament against the excise farmers sent from the town in March that year.35N. Devon RO, B1/620.

Mathew accepted the restoration of the monarchy as easily as other national political changes. He signed the order removing the Cromwellian ‘John Copleston esquire, otherwise called Sir John Copleston’ from office as Barnstaple’s recorder (8 Sept. 1660); a scrap of negative evidence about Mathew’s politics lies in the fact that he was not among the 18 who had appointed Copleston recorder in 1656. Mathew happily accepted the restoring of a junior alderman and capital burgess to his office in July 1663, after a judgment in king’s bench.36N. Devon Athenaeum, HRD-HO54, pp. 86, 87; N. Devon RO, B1/4026. He himself achieved the title of alderman that year, but there is no evidence that he harboured any further interest in politics beyond Barnstaple. He lived until 1678, dying in late October or early November that year. None of his descendants is known to have sat in Parliament.