WISE, Thomas (c.1605-41), of Sydenham, Marystow and Mount Wise, Stoke Damerel, Devon.

The family of Wise supplied a member to five Parliaments between 1411 and 1450, on three occasions as knight of the shire for Devon.11HP Commons 1386-1421. The Wise estates lay on the Devon-Cornwall border, and the family married into the Cornish gentry as regularly as they maintained kinship with armigerous families in Devon. The grandfather of Thomas Wise, also named Thomas, enjoyed possession of nine manors, mostly in the Tavistock-Plymouth district of west Devon. It was Thomas’s father, Sir Thomas, Member for Bere Alston in 1621, who built Sydenham House, in Marystow, in the early years of the seventeenth century, and the house known as Mount Wise, in the parish of Stoke Damerel.12Risdon, Devon, 208, 219. His son Thomas Wise, this Member, followed his father to Cambridge rather than to the usual path beaten by the Devon gentry to Oxford. He graduated in 1622 and immediately made his way to the Middle Temple. There, he was bound with Alexander Maynard of Tavistock and his son, John Maynard*. On the same day the Maynards also took on Francis Buller I*.13MTR ii. 678. Wise’s grandmother was the daughter of Richard Buller of Shillingham, and he was evidently close to Francis, his cousin, consistently describing him as his ‘best friend’.14Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/26/18/10; PROB11/185/421. In February 1624, Wise was one of those who provided the feast for the reader at one of the inn’s ceremonies.15MTR ii. 688.

Not long before his father’s death in 1630, Wise married Mary Chichester, daughter of Edward, 1st Viscount Chichester. The marriage brought with it membership of an important landowning family in Ireland. Though of Devon origins, the Chichesters had made the family’s fortune during first the military service and then the lord deputyship of Mary Chichester’s uncle, Arthur, Baron Chichester. Arthur made his brother, Mary’s father, his heir. Wise’s brother-in-law, also Arthur Chichester, later 1st earl of Donegal [I], sat in the Irish Parliament for Co. Antrim in 1634 and 1640.16Oxford DNB. Wise’s father was named to many important commissions during his lifetime, acting as a magistrate for over 25 years and as a subsidy-man for nearly as long. Thomas, by contrast, was slow to take on tasks in public service. Other than in serving as sheriff in 1637-8, his participation in Devon local government was modest. He was involved in a survey of Cattewater harbour, Plymouth, at the behest of the privy council, and in 1640 was required by the circuit judges to inspect bridges in his part of west Devon.17Western Circuit Assize Orders ed. Cockburn, 193-4. Wise began his term as sheriff of Devon just as his uncle, Sir Richard Buller*, was ending his as sheriff of Cornwall. Wise confided to Francis Buller I that he intended to limit his retinue at assizes to 50, a number of men partly settled on to wear the liveries given him by some of his ‘noble friends’, and partly because if he allowed all his tenantry to attend him, the numbers would reach at least 160. His aim during the year of shrievalty was to rein in expenditure, ‘to go in a low way’, avoiding ‘the high soaring flights of others’ and by doing so, ‘revive an old fashion’.18Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/26/18/3.

Any ambitions Wise entertained with regard to the reputation of the office of sheriff were in fact pushed aside by political exigencies. As sheriff it was his duty to collect Ship Money on a writ he received in October 1637 from the government. By early in February 1638 he was able to report that he had collected £5,000, with £2,720 outstanding, but the collection slowed down after that.19CSP Dom. 1637, p. 500; 1637-8, p. 235; M. Wolffe, Gentry Leaders in Peace and War (Exeter, 1994), 210-11. Resistance to Ship Money was growing, and the legality of the tax was challenged in the courts in the case of John Hampden*. In January 1639, after his shrieval year was over, the privy council turned its fire on his successor, Sir John Pole, after Wise had reported Pole’s failure to issue warrants to enable him to collect arrears left uncollected after he had left office.20CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 394; Antony House, Carew-Pole PO/33/24. In May Wise was working on a list of those who had refused to pay the tax, and as late as December 1639 he was still being pursued for the arrears. He suggested to the privy council that it should harness the support of the new sheriff, Sir Nicholas Martyn*, to help recover the shortfall.21Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/26/18/11; CSP Dom. 1639-40, p. 147. From his time as sheriff dates the story that when Judge John Finch†, already notorious for his judgement in favour of the king in Hampden’s case, came on the western circuit, he joked that ‘Wise was a man and so was a fool; Mr Wise retorted Finch was a bird and so was an owl’.22Harl. 6861, f. 9. The story is revealing of both Finch’s acerbic character, and probably of Wise’s scepticism towards the government of Charles I, since traditionally an owl was regarded as a harbinger of disaster, rather than an embodiment of wisdom.23M. Cocker, R. Mabey, Birds Britannica (2005), 281-4.

Despite, or perhaps even because of, the difficulties of his time as sheriff, Wise was keen to find a seat in Parliament when it became known that writs were to be issued for elections. At an encounter with the mayor of Bere Alston in December 1639, he declared he would ‘willingly serve’ the borough. ‘I fear opposition’, he confided to Francis Buller I, identifying Sir Nicholas Slanning* as a competitor for one of the two seats there. Wise appealed to Buller to mobilise his interest in his favour, but made it clear that he was looking elsewhere for alternative opportunities to secure a place. In Devon, he visited Tavistock, but intended to cede to John Maynard, his former sponsor at the Middle Temple, if the lawyer decided to stand. He took a more promiscuous approach to the Cornish boroughs: ‘I have given my desire to divers in Cornwall and promised a personal service in any town so as I may be the more certain’. He wanted to know whether his kinsman, George Kekewich*, was standing at Liskeard, and was evidently touched by election fever: ‘let all put their helping hands at present to this work’.24Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/26/18/10.

The mayor and burgesses of Bere Alston proved less straightforward in their dealings at the election in March 1640 than they had appeared to Wise to be in December. At the first day of the election, on 16 March, both Wise and Slanning gave undertakings that if either was elected knight of the shire in Devon or Cornwall, one of the seats at Bere Alston should be taken by William Strode I*.25CJ ii. 14b. In the event, Wise was returned for Devon, despite his apparent focus a few months earlier on the boroughs of the two counties. It may be that he was regarded in the county as an opposition figure on the strength of his conduct while sheriff. The vicar of Ilsington, on the other side of Dartmoor from Wise’s home, considered him ‘a factious man’, unworthy to be knight of the shire, because he ‘did not levy the Ship Money’.26Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/24/2/66. Wise’s correspondence makes it clear that he did not seek to subvert the collection of Ship Money, but rather tried his best to fulfil his obligations; and the Ilsington vicar – Robert Dove, brother of the very different John Dove* – was a Laudian, locked in conflict with his parishioners over the liturgy and the location of the communion table.27Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/24/2/66. Even so, this denunciation of Wise suggests that he was regarded as a critic of the government.

In the Short Parliament, Wise was elected to the important committee for privileges (16 Apr.), and to the committee on apparel (21 Apr.), a scrutiny of sumptuary laws. At the committee on the Bere Alston election, Wise testified that he had indeed made a ‘general declaration’ to promise a seat to Strode if he were elected knight.28CJ ii. 4a, 8a, 14b; Aston’s Diary, 151 The wording may suggest that his promise at the hustings was couched in general, or vague terms. Nothing about the Bere Alston election in any case affected his standing as a parliamentary candidate for Devon. Wise was returned again to sit for the county in the second elections held in 1640. He made no impact on proceedings when the Parliament met in November, making no known speeches and being called to no committees. Between 9 November and 16 December, however, he kept a diary of proceedings in the House.29Antony House, Carew-Pole BO/23/59. He paid particular attention to the speeches of critics of the government, and seems not to have been noticeably interested in the views of Members from the south west. In the week beginning Monday 16 November he recorded a speech by Edward Seymour critical of the stannary courts which is not found elsewhere.30Antony House, Carew-Pole BO/23/59, p. 177.

Wise’s diary peters out in mid-December. On 2 January 1641, in ‘perfect memory and health’ he made his will, and the only further report of him in the Commons dates from 6 March, when ‘Mr Vise’ was one of a group willing to stand sureties for a loan from the City.31Procs. LP ii. 655. He died on 18 March 1641, and was buried in St Margaret’s, Westminster, the following day.32C142/607/103; Al Cant.; Mems. of St Margaret’s Church, Westminster ed. A.M. Burke (1914), 595. Doubt has been cast on whether he died of smallpox, but a contemporary letter explicitly states that he did.33Radford, ‘Wyses and Tremaynes of Sydenham’, 136; R. Granville, Hist. Granville Fam. (Exeter, 1895), 242. He left Francis Buller I to deal with his affairs as executor, having decided that his wife ‘hath not experience to manage such affairs and a woman cannot be for this purpose so fit, she no longer continuing master of herself then [?recte while] she remains unmarried’.34PROB11/185/421. Sorting out Wise’s affairs proved so burdensome that Buller was given leave by the House to attend to his executive duties. Wise himself calculated that he was over £3,000 in debt when he died. During the civil war, members of the family of Warwick, 2nd Baron Mohun plundered Sydenham, which exacerbated the problems of setting Wise’s affairs in order.35Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/26/18/14, BC/26/18/16-19. Correspondence in the late 1640s between Buller and Wise’s widow, Mary, who quickly married again, to John Harris II*, shows how far relations between them had been strained by Wise’s extravagance. She drew to Buller’s attention the disappearance of the family plate: ‘my late husband Mr Wise gave away three or four pieces of my children’s plate to his gossips at several times’. Mary Wise’s criticisms stung Buller into a heated defence of his plan for a settlement that would

tend to the high reputation and benefit of all, and God and man will testify my most earnest desire to preserve the trust and reputation of the house of Sydenham and to keep the relations even, and let heaven grant to those that would blow the coal a breath of repentance and amendment speedily for they are flatterers if not fools and enemies to both.36Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/26/18/16-19.

Buller became the guardian of Edward Wise*, who continued the family’s record of service in Parliament. A petition to Parliament in the name of Edward Wise around 1647 dwelt on Thomas Wise’s ‘zeal and constant endeavours for religion and the welfare of the public’, which ‘impaired his health and shortened his days’.37Antony House, Carew-Pole BC/26/18/28.