FOX, Thomas (1623-66), of the Moat House, Tamworth and the Inner Temple

The Fox family has been traced to yeoman origins in the parish of Yardley, near Birmingham, where they were settled by 1490. There were Foxes at Yardley still, in the days of Thomas Fox. Thomas Fox’s grandfather, another Thomas, married into the Smallbrooks, who prospered in Birmingham as minor gentlemen through the seventeenth century, and who had been trade customers of the Willoughbys, ironmasters there in Elizabethan times.16BRL, MS 1639/1/4, p.56; VCH Warws. vii. 84, 567; Birmingham Wills and Inventories 1512-1603 ed. J.B. Geater (Dugdale Soc. xlix), 224. Thomas Fox was a younger son of a Birmingham mercer and an heiress of a minor Staffordshire gentry family. Edward Fox, his father, kept in contact with his Yardley yeoman cousins, acting in a fiduciary capacity for one of them in 1617.17BRL, 449589. Thomas Fox was still in his minority when civil war broke out in 1642. He and two older brothers served in the forces of Parliament. Edward Fox, the eldest, was commissary-general in Sir William Waller’s* army; Joseph, the second son, served in Ireland as a major.18Glover, Derbys. ii. 582. For Thomas himself, army service was closer to home. He was later described as ‘captain for the rebels’ in 1642 at Tamworth, and it is likely that he remained as a garrison officer for much of the civil war, and was able to capitalize on that connection in later years. He is often confused with Colonel John ‘Tinker’ Fox, governor of Edgbaston, and is also hard to disentangle from his brothers.19‘The gentry of Staffordshire’ ed. Kidson (Staffs. Rec. Soc. 4th ser. ii), 16. He was probably the Captain Fox mentioned by the Staffordshire Association treasurer in January 1644, but his own accounts do not survive, nor is he traceable among the lists of Warwickshire and Staffordshire field officers.20SP28/134/12. It is possible that he was the Captain Fox who was asked by Sir William Brereton* to seize a longboat at Liverpool in May 1645: this Fox had reported news from Cumberland.21Brereton Lttr. Bks. i. 359.

What is better-documented than his army career is his admission to the Inner Temple in 1648, on what must have been the disbandment of his unit at or near Shewsbury.22I. Temple Admiss. 332. After a period in London, he returned to the west midlands to take up a post as sequestration agent in Shropshire. It was the local sequestration committee that nominated him for appointment as agent, but he had to wait until January 1651 until the Compounding Commissioners in London confirmed him in post, at a salary of 5s per day shared with one other colleague.23CCC 281, 319, 390. By June 1655, he had left this employment and was petitioning for his pay. His duties had evidently been wider than merely sequestration business; he recorded how he had collected tithes and distributed them to ministers in the county in receipt of orders for their stipends to be augmented.24CCC 725. Furthermore, he retained military rank as captain of the militia at Shrewbury. During the spate of royalist risings and planned insurrections in 1655, he was ordered by Col. William Crowne* to bring in help to defend the Shewsbury garrison, and Fox organized the search for ammunition in the house of Sir Thomas Harris.25TSP iv. 289.

While he still served the Shropshire committee, Fox was building up a successful legal practice in north Warwickshire. By January 1654, he had settled in Tamworth, and was describing himself ‘gentleman’. He lived at the Moat House, an imposing residence in Lichfield St., once the home of a distinguished Catholic recusant, Humphrey Comberford. Charles, prince of Wales, was accommodated there on the royal progress of 1618.26M.B. Rowlands, ‘The Catholics in 1676 as recorded in the Compton census’, in English Catholics of Parish and Town 1558-1778 ed. M.B. Rowlands (Cath. Rec. Soc. monograph ser. v), 105; S. Erdeswick, Survey of Staffs. (1844), 442. Fox acted for his Smallbrook relatives in property transactions in Birmingham and elsewhere. By 1656, he was designated ‘esquire’ on deeds he was a party to, and his appointment as town clerk in Tamworth must have followed from his new standing as a barrister. 27BRL, ms 1098/28, 29; BRL, Norton mss 1842, 1843. In 1658, in a modest confirmation of his new social position, he became a benefactor to King Edward’s school, Birmingham - which may well have been his own alma mater - providing shelves for the library there.28Recs. of King Edward’s School, Birmingham ed. W.F. Carter (Dugdale Soc. vii), ii. 18.

In January 1658 Fox was in London, and provided an unrecorded correspondent with an account of the opening of the second session of Oliver Cromwell’s* second Parliament. His attention was captured particularly by the ceremonial of the occasion, and the appearance of the new Members of the Other House. Fox described the lord protector’s speech as containing ‘much of scripture language, showing what God had done for this nation and brought back the captivity of Judah, and withal the freedom we now enjoy respective to our religion and liberties, with a declaration of times past etc.’ He noted that Thomas Willughby*, whose family would have been well known to Fox from their common north Warwickshire origins, was made Black Rod to the new second chamber. Fox’s tone throughout this newsletter is neutral, if detached, but it does not suggest that the writer was a particular enthusiast for the protectorate.29Stowe 185, f. 123. Described by a post-restoration commentator as ‘a violent Presbyterian’, he was friend and legal advisor to Michael Biddulph, who was a conservative puritan; and he also numbered John Barker*, governor of Coventry, among his close associates.30‘Gentry of Staffs.’, 16; PROB11/326, f. 140v.

Fox’s election for Tamworth must have been on his own interest as town clerk. He made no known impact on the 1659 Parliament, either in any committees or on the floor of the House. After the restoration of the monarchy, he continued to combine his duties as town clerk with conveyancing for the north Warwickshire gentry and yeomanry until January 1663, when he fell victim to the commissioners for regulating corporations.31BRL, Duke ms 124; CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 23. In April that year, he conveyed the Moat House to his brother-in-law, but this is as likely to have been another of the trusts he was often involved with. Certainly in September 1664, he was still providing legal help to his cousin, Richard Smallbrook of Birmingham. He made his will in June 1665, and died in Dublin in 1666.32Add. 28176, f. 224; Glover, Derbys. ii. 582. The Fox line continued through his brothers Joseph, who married Thomasine, daughter of Henry Blayney, 2nd Lord Blayney [I] and Timothy, rector of Drayton Bassett, near Tamworth.33BRL, ms 1639/1/4, p. 56.