THOMAS, Edward (1589-1656), of Gray’s Inn, Mdx.

It is accepted that the Edward Thomas who sat in three Parliaments during the 1620s and for Okehampton in the Long Parliament was the same individual.8HP Commons 1604-29. It is also clear that Edward Thomas of Claines studied at Gray’s Inn, practised law and died in 1656, leaving a bequest to the poor of Claines. Absolute proof has not been found that this was Edward Thomas the MP, not least because this Member played a minimal part in the Long Parliament. However, the only Commons committee to which Edward Thomas was named before 1642 concerned the parish affairs of St Andrew Holborn, where Gray’s Inn was situated; in 1638 a Mr Thomas paid rent on property in that parish; and in 1656 Edward Thomas was buried there.9CJ ii. 203b; Inhabs. of London, 1638, 188. The only Edward Thomas known to have been named to a parliamentary assessment commission in England throughout the 1640s and 1650s was appointed to two in Worcestershire, and no-one of that name has been found to have been active in Devon public life during that period, as was the case in Thomas’s earlier period of parliamentary service. The cumulative circumstantial evidence seems therefore to confirm the deduction long ago made that Thomas was the Gray’s Inn lawyer from Worcestershire.10Keeler, Long Parl., 360.

The Thomas family was settled at Claines, to the north of Worcester, by some time in the 1580s. Margaret Thomas of Claines was married there in 1587, the same year that Edward Thomas’s elder brother, Walter, was baptised. Theirs was a family of yeomen bordering on minor gentry. Evidently, they had come to Worcestershire from Tredynog (Tredunnock), Monmouthshire, where in the first half of the seventeenth century, a Thomas family of yeomen remained.11Vis. Worcs. 1634 (Harl. Soc. xc), 80; NLW, Llandaff wills, Margaret Thomas, 1626, John Thomas, 1650. Edward Thomas’s mother may have been Jane Davis of Clent, who married an Edward Thomas there on 15 May 1583.12Clent par. reg. At Claines, the Thomases married into local families whose gentility, though modest, was uncontested. Through these alliances, including with the families of Twitty and Porter, Edward Thomas could claim as cousins both burgesses for Worcester in the Long Parliament, John Cowcher* and John Nashe*.13Vis. Worcs. 1682, 1683 ed. Metcalfe (Exeter, 1883), 94-5; PROB11/260/196. Thomas’s father died in 1607, leaving his son Henry, probably the eldest son, as executor. Edward’s brother Walter remained in Claines to farm, describing himself when he died in 1655 as a yeoman. Edward somehow found the means to enrol at Gray’s Inn, giving his address as Astwood, a settlement in Claines. At the age of 28 on admission, he was very much a late entrant.

There is no direct evidence to account for how Thomas found a seat in three Parliaments of the 1620s, though it is thought likely it was by means of the Mohun family, for which he may have been an agent or man-of-business. He contributed little or nothing to those Parliaments, and left more of a trace on records of property transactions in the 1620s and 30s, in which he was usually a legal intermediary rather than a beneficiary.14C54/2754/15, 3216/24, 2758/13, 3215/27. In November 1624 he helped set up a trust in a case where two gentlemen of Shropshire and Worcester were principals.15Salop Archives, 1037/15/21-25. His apparent purchase of the manor and advowson of Blaisdon, on the edge of the Forest of Dean, in 1628, may well have been a collusive mortgage by the lord of the manor, but it is a further example of Thomas’s involvement in transactions in a district near to his birthplace.16Coventry Docquets, 578; VCH Glos. x. 7-8. In 1634 he and his brothers surrendered the family’s holding at Claines to the lord of the manor, the bishop of Worcester. A fresh lease, for the lives of Thomas’s brother Walter, William his son and another, who was either John Cowcher* or his son, was granted in 1635, and in this Edward Thomas held a reversionary interest at the time of his death 20 years later.17Birmingham City Archives, MS 3197/Acc 1919-025/280996; PROB11/260/196. He may have been the Mr Thomas wealthy enough by 1638 to pay a substantial rent of £12 on property in the parish of St Andrew Holborn, but the absence from the list of contributions to church rebuilding there, 1640-2, of anyone with that surname, suggests that his own residence remained at Gray’s Inn.18Inhabs. of London, 1638, 188; LMA, P82/AND/B/017/MS04248.

Despite this obscurity, it is at least clear that Edward Thomas owed his parliamentary seat in 1641 to John Mohun†, 1st Baron Mohun of Okehampton, who procured a writ for the borough of Okehampton to be restored to representation in Parliament.19W.B. Bridges, Some Account of the Barony and Town of Okehampton ed. W.H.K. Wright (Tiverton, 1889), 92. Thomas was accorded the title ‘esquire’ in his election indenture, from which it may be inferred that he had been called to the bar at Gray’s Inn, although there is no record of that. His contribution to the Parliament turned out to be negligible. Thomas first came to the notice of the clerk when he took the Protestation (3 May 1641) and was added to the committee for St Andrew Holborn on 9 July.20CJ ii. 133a, 203b. A Mr Thomas supplied Framlingham Gawdy* with material for his diary on 24 March and 23 April 1642. The only other man of that name in the House at that time was William Thomas, Member for Caernarvon Boroughs. Although William Thomas was more active than Edward, the latter, by virtue of his role as a man-of-business, may have been better placed to gather news of Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick and of the expulsion of the attorney-general, Sir Edward Herbert I*.21PJ ii. 82, 211.

On the eve of the civil war, Thomas offered to lend £50 to the parliamentary cause (10 June 1642) and once war had broken out he remained at Westminster, like his fellow-burgess, Laurence Whitaker.22PJ iii. 473. On 6 June 1643, he took the new vow and covenant, devised after the plot associated with Edmund Waller*, and three months later was added to the committee for Gloucester garrison, a nod in the direction of his origins.23CJ ii. 118a, 254a. On 26 January 1644, he was named to a committee on the office of the warden of the Fleet prison, the only occasion on which he shared a committee appointment with Whitaker.24CJ iii. 378b. He was called to work on an ordinance (23 Mar.) for the reimbursement of Nathaniel Stephens*, Edward Stephens* and Sir Giles Overbury, who had advanced money towards the maintenance of the vital garrison of Gloucester, which turned out to be his last appointment noted in the Journal until August 1648.25CJ iii. 435a. Permission was given by the House for Thomas to be examined in chancery (21 Nov.), a waiving of parliamentary privilege that suggests the case in which he was to give evidence was in his own interests.26CJ iii. 701a; C24/684-687.

On 21 August 1646, Thomas was given leave to go to the country.27CJ iv. 650a. He played no known part in politics in Devon, but his nomination as an assessment commissioner in Worcestershire suggests some renewed interest in his native county. Throughout 1647 he was given leave or noted as absent, but a ‘Mr Thomas’ was included in a committee revived to examine commitments on the 1641 subsidy.28CJ v. 286b, 330a, 669b. As Edward Thomas was the only man of that surname in the House in 1648 who had also served in 1641, it seems likely that he was the one called on this occasion. This was the last notice of Thomas, who was secluded at Pride’s Purge on 6 December 1648, when he was described in one source (with a degree of irony, given his record of complete uninvolvement with the county) as ‘Thomas of Devon’.29A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62).

This marked the end of Edward Thomas’s public career, such as it was. He was probably the man who gave information to the Committee for Advance of Money on the recent descent of property in Middlesex belonging to the Villiers family, but if he was the Edward Thomas with property interests in co. Waterford he did not mention them when he drew up his will on 21 April 1656.30CCAM 530; CSP Ire. 1647-60, p. 512. He left £50 to the poor of Claines, with cash bequests to individuals amounting to more than £1,600; it is clear from his will that he had sustained an active involvement in property transactions in his native county. Not only was he entitled to a reversionary interest in Claines, held since the 1630s; he had also acquired property there from the trustees for sale of dean and chapter lands, improved his entitlement in the former bishops’ lands at Claines, had acquired a farm at Martley and had lent money on behalf of his niece, including to a Worcester alderman, Thomas Hackett, a colleague of his cousin, John Cowcher. Thomas had never married, and made William Thomas, son of his brother, Walter, his principal heir. Edward Thomas died in 1656, and was buried at St Andrew Holborn on 1 November. At the time of his death he was renting a property in that parish from William Jackson, who witnessed Thomas’s will.31PROB11/260/196; Chamber Order Bk. of Worcester 1602-1650 ed. Bond (Worcs. Hist. Soc. n.s. viii), 401; St. Andrew Holborn par. reg. No other member of the family sat in Parliament.