LITTLETON (later LITTLETON alias POYNTZ), Thomas (c.1620-1681), of Stoke St Milborough, Salop and North Ockenden, Essex.

The Littletons were long-established in Shropshire. Audrey, Thomas Littleton’s mother, was the daughter of Thomas Poyntz of North Ockenden, an estate in Essex that had been in the hands of that family since the fourteenth century. The Poyntz family of Essex were ancestrally a branch of the family of the same name from Gloucestershire. The last heir of North Ockenden to bear the name Poyntz by birth was Catherine Poyntz, who in the sixteenth century brought the estate to her husband Sir John Morice of Chipping Ongar. Their son, John, took the name Poyntz alias Morice. Two generations later, the male line again petered out with the death in 1643 of Richard Poyntz alias Morice, who died unmarried at Montauban in the south of France.19Morant, Essex, i. 102-3. North Ockenden and its subsidiary estates then came by marriage to the Littletons, but not without dispute and controversy which was to involve this Member directly and profoundly.

Thomas Littleton received an education at Oxford and a London inn of court typical for the first son of a county gentry family. The only slightly odd thing about Littleton’s education was that he proceeded to Oxford after enrolment at the Inner Temple, rather than the other way around, which would have been more common. The explanation may lie with his marriage to his cousin Anne Littleton, daughter of the solicitor-general, Sir Edward Littleton†, which brought together two branches of a major Shropshire family. The marriage was certainly planned with a deliberation that suggests a dynastic match.20London Mar. Lics. ed. Foster, 850; CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 32; PROB11/367/52. Indeed, Thomas’s premature admission to Sir Edward’s inn, took place barely three months before his marriage licence was obtained, suggesting that negotiations were already at an advanced stage in July 1637.

Littleton’s father-in-law was also a major influence on his political career. In 1640, when he was barely 21 if he had reached majority age at all, Thomas Littleton stood in the election at Bridgnorth for the Short Parliament. Sir Edward was recorder there, and all three candidates were the heirs apparent of local county gentry. Littleton was pushed into third place at the poll by Thomas Whitmore I and Edward Acton, but there seem to have been no hard feelings towards the Littletons.21Salop Archives, BB/B/6/4/1/1. When later that year, Sir Edward Littleton resigned the recordership on becoming serjeant-at-law and chief justice of common pleas, he was able to recommend Sir Adam, Thomas’s father, as his successor, and his advice was accepted by the grateful corporation.22Salop Archives, BB/C 1/1/1 f. 35v. Thomas Littleton had evidently been keen to find a seat and had also stood at Much Wenlock, a smaller borough. There, his credentials carried even more weight than at Bridgnorth: his father had been made recorder for life at Much Wenlock by the corporation in 1636.23Salop Archives, B3/1/1 p. 667. Littleton was successful at Much Wenlock, and his treatment at Bridgnorth may have been conditioned by local knowledge of his intentions elsewhere.

Littleton made no recorded impact on the Short Parliament of 1640, but was returned again for Much Wenlock to the second Parliament of that year. He was slow to make his mark on the Long Parliament. The first occasion on which his presence was noted by the clerk was 7 June 1641, when he took the Protestation. In July he was asked on two occasions to accompany another Member with a message to Lord Keeper Littleton. His family relationship with the lord keeper, as by this time his father-in-law had become, was the obvious and probably only qualification that recommended him for the task. Both messages were requests for the lord keeper’s intervention in technical legal matters, as Parliament sought his assistance in preventing judges from travelling on Sundays and in speeding up payments authorised from chancery.24CJ ii. 169a, 197b, 199a. More politically controversial was his next message for the lord keeper, delivered on 16 December 1641, calling for commissions for mayors in northern towns to administer the oaths of supremacy to Roman Catholics. Littleton was accompanied on this occasion by Sir Robert Harley, a zealous anti-papist, a senior Parliament-man and doubtless the driving force behind the message.25CJ ii. 346a.

Littleton could only benefit from the rise of his illustrious father-in-law, and in May 1642 he was called to the bar at the Inner Temple. The record made it clear that this distinction was at the request of Baron Littleton, keeper of the great seal.26CITR ii. 266. There were no correspondingly auspicious occasions awaiting him in the Commons, where he played no further recorded part until 2 November, when he announced that he would support the army of Parliament’s lord general, Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex.27CJ ii. 831a. By this time the civil war had broken out, and the battle of Edgehill had been fought, and while others in his family and neighbouring Shropshire gentry had become committed royalists, Littleton was offering support, if somewhat belated, to Parliament. It was not to last. No further appearances by Littleton were recorded in the Commons Journal, and he must have slipped out of London, probably back to the midlands. Although he may have acted as a commissioner of array, he was not among the leading royalist wartime administrators. He attended the Oxford Parliament, however, and in January 1644 signed the letter to the earl of Essex calling for peace.28The Names of the Lords and Commons assembled in the Pretended Parliament (1646), 3; A Copy of a Letter from the members of Both Houses (1644), 6 (E.32.3). The publication of this letter made Littleton persona non grata at Westminster, and on 5 February 1644 he was disabled from sitting in the Commons for having attended the king.29CJ iii. 389b.

In August 1645, Littleton was named as a commissioner for a new royalist association of the west midlands counties.30CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 80. Three months later, his father appeared before the Committee for Compounding*, and threw himself on the mercy of Parliament.31CCC 944. Thomas Littleton’s parents had been assessed by the Committee for Advance of Money while he had been at the Oxford Parliament. Sir Adam’s estate had been valued at £1,000 while his wife’s had been estimated to be worth £800, but she protested that her Essex lands had already been sequestered and were encumbered even prior to sequestration.32CCAM 316. Sir Adam mortgaged Stoke St Milborough in June 1647, perhaps to meet the fiscal demands of Parliament but more probably to be able to ward off a threat to the Essex estates from a Poyntz relative.33Salop Archives, 6683/1/10/4.

The will of Sir Gabriel Poyntz had in 1607 devised North Ockenden to Sir John Morice alias Poyntz and his heirs’ male but with a reversion clause in favour of Audrey Littleton. With the death without a male heir in 1643 of the last of the family of Morice alias Poyntz, the lands would seem to have reverted to Dame Audrey, but John Morice alias Poyntz, nephew of Sir John Morice alias Poyntz, launched an attempt to retain the lands by force majeure. Sir Adam had begun a case against John at the Chelmsford assizes in 1646, and it was probably during this hearing that Morice alias Poyntz produced a document that he declared to be an act of Parliament from 1601 in favour of the title he claimed to Chipping Ongar, North Ockenden and other Essex lands. Presumably Sir Adam must have appealed to Parliament for the matter to have been brought to the attention of the Lords, but on 25 June 1647 John Browne, clerk of the Parliament, exhibited charges in the Lords against Morice alias Poyntz for forging an act. The Lords fined Morice alias Poyntz £1,000 and levied lesser penalties on a number of accessories, tenants of the lands in question. They declared the act to be a forgery, and a search of common pleas brought into question a number of title deeds that had appeared during the Chelmsford hearings.34Two Judgements of the Lords assembled in Parliament against John Morris alias Poyntz (1647).

Both Sir Adam and Audrey, Lady Littleton died in 1648.35PROB11/204/194; PROB11/205/503. Thomas Littleton then found himself a principal in the case of John Morice alias Poyntz, who did not accept his punishment without recourse to the London press. The purge of the Parliament by the army in December 1648 allowed Morice alias Poyntz an opportunity to appeal to Sir Thomas Fairfax*, Lord Fairfax, against his treatment by Browne. He alleged collusion between Sir Adam and Browne and described a night-time raid on his house when papers were seized and Morice alias Poyntz taken into custody by Black Rod. According to Morice alias Poyntz, in December 1648 his appeal against his sentence was due to be heard by a committee chaired by William Prynne*, a ‘special friend’ of Browne’s, and only the purge saved him from another prejudiced verdict. In his account of events, Morice alias Poyntz described Browne’s accomplice in the case as William Littleton, but it must have been Thomas, next heir to the estates in question after Audrey, that he had in mind.36An Appeal to each individual Member of the present Parliament and Army (1648, Wing P3131C).

The close personal association between Browne and the Littletons, alleged by Morice alias Poyntz, was probably exaggerated by him and was in any case likely to have been created by the invocation of a supposed act of Parliament. Nevertheless, this branch of the Littleton family was far from being hard-line cavalier. The civil war baronetcy notwithstanding, Sir Adam was inclined towards puritanism, expressing concern that his children should be brought up ‘especially in the ways of godliness’. In his will of 1631 he appointed Humphrey Walcot, one of the most godly of the Shropshire gentry, to be their guardian.37PROB11/204/194. In 1647, Sir Adam was named an elder in the 5th Shropshire classis of the projected Presbyterian church.38The Severall Divisions and Persons for Classicall Presbyteries (1647), 7. Personal sympathies between Browne and the Littletons were thus quite feasible, but protection by Browne does not have to be invoked to explain Littleton’s relaxed treatment by the agencies of penal taxation.

In 1648, Littleton came into his inheritance, which included the Essex estates and the baronetcy. After March 1649 he appeared before the Committee for Compounding of his own volition, admitting that he had raised forces for the late king as a commissioner of array. His fine was set at £220, shortly afterwards adjusted upwards to a final £307.39SP23/217 f. 13; CCC 2030. It was in Littleton’s interest to make this confession, in order to put himself in good standing with Parliament, as his Essex property was still under threat, this time from soldiers of the New Model army. John Morice alias Poyntz had pursued the possibility of military help in alarming new directions. Seemingly acting in the interests of Morice alias Poyntz, William Thompson, a former corporal cashiered for threatening good order in the army, had launched a nocturnal armed attack on the manor house at North Ockenden. According to Fairfax’s report of the incident to Speaker Lenthall, Thompson had threatened the household and taken away Littleton’s goods. The episode was an echo, if a more violent one, of John Browne’s earlier visit to the house of Morice alias Poyntz. Fairfax assumed that Littleton himself would have provided Lenthall with a narrative, a further suggestion that Littleton was no longer in bad odour with leading Parliamentarians.40Clarke Pprs. ii. 199. For Fairfax the incident was alarming evidence of infiltration of the army by disaffected elements. Two months later, Thompson led the Levellers when at bay in Burford, and was subsequently executed in the churchyard there.41Oxford DNB. Even after this disaster, Morice alias Poyntz persisted in seeking help from Levellers in pursuing his claim to North Ockenden. In November 1650 he informed Lord Chief Justice Rolle that John Lilburne and John Wildman were among the counsel he intended to rely upon to plead his case.42To the Supreme Authority, the Parliament of the Commonwealth of England: the Humble Petition of John Poyntz alias Morris (669.f.15.66).

As for Littleton, he continued to mortgage his Shropshire estate through the 1650s and never recovered Stoke St Milborough.43Salop Archives, 6683/1/10/7, 8, 9, 14, 15, 16. In 1658 the property passed to Thomas Chamberlain, a London merchant.44Salop Archives, 6683/1/10/30. He enjoyed cordial relations with Bulstrode Whitelocke*, who in 1645 inherited the books and papers of Littleton’s father-in-law. Whitelocke convinced himself that he was preserving them in order to be able to return them to the Littleton family on some occasion in the future. He stayed at Stoke St Milborough while on circuit in 1648, but whether he took the papers with him is not recorded.45Whitelocke, Mems. i. 513; Whitelocke, Diary, 208. Littleton resumed a role at the Inner Temple, regularly acting as an officer at the Christmas feast there.46CITR ii. 294, 299, 303, 307, 310, 316, 335. When he confessed his own delinquency in 1649 he signed himself Thomas Littleton, but adopted the name Littleton alias Poyntz after finally beating off the rival claimant to North Ockenden. Littleton did not involve himself with royalist conspiracy during the interregnum, but his sons were reported by Edmund Waring* to be active for Charles Stuart during the rising of Sir George Boothe* in the summer of 1659.47CCSP iv. 309.

Technically, as one who had confessed to having been a commissioner of array, Littleton was not eligible to stand for the Convention of 1660. He was returned to the Cavalier Parliament for his old seat of Much Wenlock, but was a critic of the government of Edward Hyde*, 1st earl of Clarendon, because he thought it too authoritarian. He became a leader of the country interest in the House, and as such was apotheosised by Andrew Marvell* as ‘great Littleton’.48A. Marvell, ‘Last Instructions to a Painter’, Complete Poems ed. E. Story Donno (Harmondsworth, 1972), 165. His career after 1661 has been described as that of a ‘full-time politician’, who lived in London and made money from speculative deals in property.49Oxford DNB. Under the patronage of Henry Bennet, 1st Baron Arlington, in 1668 he acquired the important office of treasurer of the navy and a salary of £1,250 a year. He was forced out of office because of misconduct by his brother, and was on the payroll of the French government in the downfall of Sir Thomas Osborne, 1st earl of Danby. While he believed in securing the Protestant succession to the throne, he was against exclusion, and sat in the 1681 Parliament at Oxford as a government placeman. He put the finishing touches to his will in April 1681, on the day before he died, noting his ‘many debts’.