ARCHER, Thomas (1619-85), of Umberslade, Tanworth-in-Arden, Warws.

Thomas Archer's adolescence and early manhood was typical of a second son, rather than of the heir that he unexpectedly became before the publication of Dugdale’s Warwickshire in 1656, a volume which carried a note of his brother’s death.14Vis. Warws. 1619 (Harl. Soc. xii), 309; Dugdale, Warws. ii, 781. Archer was, to judge from letters he sent his father around 1639-40, apprenticed to a London wine merchant. In March 1639 he was shipping goods to Madeira, declaring himself unable to comment on the course of the bishops' war, and in December 1640 provided his father with news of the market for claret, rather than comment on political developments.15Shakespeare Birthplace Trust RO, DR 37/box 87/ 98, 101. His associations with City merchants and his father's own parliamentarian sympathies were probably the key factors propelling him towards service in the army of Parliament. Sir Simon Archer was one of the moderate Warwickshire gentry regarded with suspicion by the Warwickshire committee sitting at Coventry, and by September 1645 was refusing to go to Coventry, fearing for his personal safety.16SP28/246, letter of 12 Sept. 1645. Thomas Archer, too, was one of those on the parliamentarian side in the county who supported the traditional social order and structure of authority. He was a loyal colonel to the 2nd earl of Denbigh (Basil Feilding), and courted the dislike of the committee for heeding the orders of Denbigh, rather than following the line of John Bridges*, governor of Warwick. Archer was based on the Worcestershire-Warwickshire borders in the summer of 1644, and with the help of Thomas Boughton*, managed to pay his troops enough to motivate them to attack the royalists around Alcester. He engaged a force of Sir Gilbert Gerard, who governed Worcester for the king, but was unable to consolidate his position because no support was forthcoming from Bridges, who had repudiated Denbigh's authority at Warwick.17Warws. RO, CR 2017/ C10/ 21.

At the end of July 1644, the Committee of Both Kingdoms ordered that Edward Massie*, governor of Gloucester, should supervise an attack by Archer on Evesham, strategically important on the Oxford-Worcester main road, and a bridgehead into Worcestershire, a county held for the king.18CSP Dom. 1644, p. 383. Massie was to provide musketeers for Archer, and once the town was taken, was to help Archer hold it until new forces could be raised to maintain a garrison there.19CSP Dom. 1644, p. 386. Massie was reluctant to spare the resources, however, and Archer was gloomy about the prospects for independent action against Evesham, complaining to Denbigh that not only Massie's unhelpfulness but also the continuing verbal sniping from the Coventry committee undermined his position. The committeemen queried the authority by which he had quartered in Alcester, evidence that the conflict between Denbigh and themselves continued to infect Warwickshire politics. 20Warws. RO, CR 2017/C10/25, 26. In the 1645 Warwickshire recruiter election, Archer signed the indenture for Sir John Burgoyne* and Thomas Boughton, evidence of his continuing loyalty to Denbigh's camp.21C219/43/3/58.

After the disbanding of Denbigh's Association force, Archer was named to a number of county assessment commissions, but not to the commission of the peace, and he played only the minor role in public life cast for him by these responsibilities. He may have returned to an active interest in overseas trade, receiving £300 in stock in the East India Company in 1658 from Thomas Leigh, his London merchant brother-in-law.22Shakespeare Birthplace Trust RO, DR 37/box 91/29. His candidacy in the 1659 election for Warwick, where by this time he probably had a house and thus doubtless an electoral interest, was probably more a statement by a representative of the old Warwickshire order of gentry than an enthusiastic entry into active politics.23Shakespeare Birthplace Trust RO, DR 37/box 90/32. Warwick, as the seat of traditional county government, was throughout the 1650s contrasted with Coventry, home of the radical county committee which Sir Simon Archer had found so rebarbative. Returned on the old franchise, Thomas Archer made no mark at all on the records of Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament. When he stood again for Parliament, in the very different circumstances of 1660, there was widespread support for him across all the hundreds of Warwickshire, except in the far east of the county, furthest from Tanworth-in-Arden. He worked with leading aristocratic figures like Edward Conway, 3rd Viscount Conway, of Ragley, to ensure that by the date of the poll, he was unopposed.24Shakespeare Birthplace Trust RO, DR 37/box 87/114, 115. Among his papers remains a petition from Warwickshire of 1660, calling for a free Parliament and attributing the ills of public affairs to ‘the many revolutions through maladministration of government and want of the right constitution of parliaments.’25Shakespeare Birthplace Trust RO, DR 37/box 85/7. Archer evidently retained some of his parliamentarian outlook of the civil war period, and was no simple royalist. This was his only venture into national politics, and even his attendance at quarter sessions was modest and fitful.26Warwick County Records, iv, p. xxv. His business interests took priority, and he added iron-working near Stratford-upon-Avon to his overseas investments. His will showed how he had built alliances even with die-hard cavaliers like Thomas Windsor alias Hickman, 1st earl of Plymouth, in spite of his parliamentarian army past.27PROB11/383, f. 60.