CAREW, Thomas (1624-81), of the Inner Temple and Barley, St Thomas, Exeter, Devon.

Thomas Carew was the younger brother of the regicide John Carew*, and half-brother of Alexander (later Sir Alexander) Carew*, who was executed as a traitor by Parliament in 1644. Thomas, who was only 18 at the beginning of the first civil war, did not follow the political course of either of his siblings, and seems to have spent the 1640s as an anonymous student at the Inner Temple. He had been admitted there in April 1642, and was called to the bar in February 1651.1I. Temple database; CITR ii. 296. In August 1657 Carew was appointed trustee of the settlement made under the will of John Cupper of Barley, a prosperous Exeter merchant who had just disinherited his eldest son for ‘vicious living’, including marrying without his parents’ consent.2Cornw. RO, CF/4137. This reinforced Carew’s connection with the west country, but the reasons for his election for the Cornish borough of Callington in Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament are uncertain. He played little part in the business of the Commons, and is mentioned only as one of the Members who moved ‘that the orders be preserved’ when Thomas Waller* addressed the House without the necessary ceremony on 1 February 1659.3Burton’s Diary, iii. 21.

In the months before the Restoration, Carew was quick to renew his kinship ties with George Monck*, and reportedly attended the general in London, where he was allowed a private meeting with ‘some discourse and drinking of a bottle of sack’.4HMC Leyborne-Popham, 212-3. Perhaps benefiting from Monck’s favour, Carew was unaffected by the political changes of 1660. He was appointed as a militia commissioner in Cornwall in March 1660, and was elected as MP for the borough of Mitchell in May.5A. and O. He later admitted that he had not opposed the bill of attainder against his elder brother, John Carew, during the Convention.6CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 604. It was not until the summer of 1661 that Carew received his reward, however. In or around May of that year he petitioned Charles II for the confirmation of the manor of Bowhill in Devon, which had been mortgaged to him by his brother, and this request was immediately granted.7CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 604. In August 1661 Carew married Elizabeth, the daughter of the late John Cupper, who had been left £500 and a share in the family estate, and, as a result, the lands in Barley and St Thomas’s parish in Exeter passed into Carew’s possession.8Cornw. RO, CF/2524-39; PROB11/277/447. Carew went on to serve as recorder of Exeter from 1676, and as MP for the city in 1681. He died in the latter year, and was succeeded by his son, Thomas†, who sat for Saltash in the early eighteenth century.9HP Commons 1660-1690.