HANMER, Sir Thomas, 2nd bt. (1612-1678), of Bettisfield Park, Hanmer, Flint.

The Hanmers had settled in north Wales following the Edwardian conquest of the late thirteenth century and had adopted the name of their new place of residence in south-east Flintshire, close to the borders with Cheshire and Shropshire.32Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 14-17; DWB, ‘Hanmer of Hanmer’. Successive heads of the family had represented the county or Flint Boroughs in Parliament since the mid-sixteenth century, their extensive estate in and around southern Flintshire ensuring them a powerful interest in the region’s affairs. Before his death at 33, Hanmer’s father was appointed a deputy lieutenant and sheriff of Flintshire, and a member of the Council of the Marches; he represented the county in the Parliament of 1624.33HP Commons 1509-1558, ‘Sir Thomas Hanmer [Handmere]’; HP Commons 1558-1603, ‘John Hanmer’; ‘Thomas Hanmer’; HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Sir John Hanmer’. Soon after his father’s death, Hanmer is said to have been made a page of honour at the court of Charles I.34Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 63. In 1626, at the tender age of 13, he stood as a candidate for Flintshire – probably on the initiative of one of his guardians, Sir John Trevor*, who had represented the county in the 1625 Parliament – but was defeated on a poll.35HP Commons 1604-1629, ‘Flintshire’; Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 60. In 1631, he obtained the queen’s permission to marry one of her maids of honour – a Suffolk heiress who had been the object of much rivalry among the young blades at court.36C115/106/8387; Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 63, 76-7.

In 1638, Hanmer and his brother were granted a pass to travel on the continent for three years, but Hanmer had returned to England by the spring of 1640, when he was elected for Flint Boroughs to the Short Parliament.37Supra, ‘Flint Boroughs’; CSP Dom. 1638-9, p. 39. He had evidently entertained hopes of sitting for the county, but had settled for a borough seat in what seems to have been a complicated electoral compromise among the Flintshire gentry. Hanmer was among the parties named on the indenture returning John Mostyn as knight of the shire.38Supra, ‘Flintshire’. In the event, Hanmer made no recorded impression upon the Short Parliament’s proceedings.

At the outbreak of the civil war in the summer of 1642, the crown was apparently optimistic of Hanmer’s support. He and three other gentlemen, among them Sir Thomas Salusbury*, received a royal commission on 3 August to raise a company of Welsh archers for the king; on 5 August, Hanmer was appointed custos rotulorum for Flintshire; and on 7 September, the king commissioned him as a captain of dragoons.39Harl. 6852, f. 1v; NLW, Bettisfield Ms 111, 588; Justices of the Peace ed. Phillips, 110; Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 65. He attended the meeting of the Cheshire, Denbighshire, Flintshire and Shropshire commissioners of array at Whitchurch, in Shropshire, early in September and signed several of their orders.40Staffs. RO, D868/2/41; HMC 5th Rep. 141, 142. And by the time Charles moved his headquarters to Shrewsbury in mid-September, Hanmer was waiting upon him as a cupbearer in ordinary and was regarded by the Flintshire commissioners of array as an influential man at court.41SP23/227, p. 559; CCC 943; Flint RO, D/DM271, f. 8.

Hanmer seems to have enjoyed court attendance more than he did soldiering, for he would claim after the war that he had resigned his command as a captain of dragoons before the end of 1642 and had kept his involvement in the proceedings of the commissioners of array to a minimum.42SP23/227, p. 559; CCC 943. His governorship of Chirk Castle, Wrexham, which was captured by the royalists early in 1643, also seems to have been of short duration.43Tucker, ‘Richard Griffith at the siege of Chester’, 57; ‘Ottley pprs.’ ed. Phillips, 275. However, he attended the royalist council of war at Shrewsbury in July 1643 that sought to impose an oath of loyalty to the king and the Church of England upon the people of north Wales.44A Declaration Published by Sir Thomas Middleton (1644), 1-2. Early in 1644, Secretary Edward Nicholas wrote to Prince Rupert from the king, recommending Hanmer as ‘a very fit man’ for the office of vice-president of north Wales, ‘being a person very well affected to his Majesty and of very good esteem in Wales’.45William Salt Lib. S.MS.478/14/51; Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 67, 69. As vice-president designate, Hanmer met with the commissioners of array for the region that spring to agree new taxes to fund the prince’s military preparations for the new campaign season.46Mems. of Prince Rupert, ii. 402-3; R. Hutton, The Royalist War Effort 1642-6 (1984), 133. But his commission as vice-president was not confirmed, and with the parliamentarian commander Sir Thomas Myddelton* threatening to invade Flintshire, Hanmer obtained a pass from the king in May 1644 to return to the continent for three years.47NLW, Bettisfield Ms 430; Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 75-6; A.H. Dodd, ‘Flint politics in the seventeenth century’, NLWJ xiv., 36.

Hanmer returned to London and submitted to Parliament in May 1645 – the first royalist in Flintshire to do so, he would later claim – although for part of that summer he was in Paris, where his wife fell ill and died.48SP23/227, pp. 549, 559, 561, 565, 567; NLW, Bettisfield Ms 1683; Robinson, ‘New light on Sir Thomas Hanmer’, 5. Back in England by October, he petitioned to compound, and his fine was set at two years’ revenue for his estate in possession and one year for that in reversion – a sum calculated at £984.49SP23/227, p. 563; CJ iv. 347a; CCC 943. There is no sign that the Committee for Compounding (CC) gave much credence to allegations by one of Hanmer’s parliamentarian neighbours that he had been ‘one of the chief complotters and promoters of this war’ and that he had drawn ‘most of the gentry to York [in 1642] to kiss the king’s hand and to engage themselves ... against the Parliament’.50SP23/227, pp. 549, 556, 558; Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 72-3.

Having obtained permission from the CC to stay in London during his composition proceedings, he seems to have lodged in the capital during the first half of 1646 and used his contacts with the Scots commissioners and in Paris to gather information on Presbyterian plans to restore the king by means of Scottish and French force of arms – a design that Hanmer privately considered ‘not only infinitely prejudicial to himself [Charles] and this kingdom, but dishonourable to the English nation’.51SP23/227, p. 569; Cary, Memorials, i. 95-8. Early in June, he revealed what he knew of this design to the Independent grandee Oliver St John* and his allies on the Committee for the Army, who promptly forwarded it to the Commons. Summoned before the House on 18 June to confirm what he had testified to the Army Committee, Hanmer averred ‘that he would justify the truth thereof’.52CJ iv. 581a; Cary, Memorials, i. 95-8; TSP iv. 277, 319.

Besides providing the Independents with valuable propaganda material against the Scots and their Presbyterian allies at Westminster, Hanmer’s disclosure would prove very useful in securing his exemption from some of the financial penalties usually imposed on leading royalists. This, in fact, was precisely his objective according to the Scots, who denounced him as a liar and ‘silly fool, who has lost his reputation, thinking to gain his sequestration’.53HMC 4th Rep. 522. And in May 1648, the Committee for Advance of Money did indeed discharge him from payment of £1,000 assessed for his twentieth part, ‘it appearing to this committee that he has lately done very good service to Parliament’.54CCAM 271. Similarly, he escaped having to pay the decimation tax in 1655 after St John and Sir John Trevor reminded the Cromwellian authorities of his services to Parliament in 1646. One of Hanmer’s friends, writing on his behalf, insisted that the information he had given to the Army Committee had been ‘of great use both for the security of the English army and for the undeceiving of a great part of the Parliament and the nation’, and that he had acted ‘to the hazard of his life and estate, for some of the Scots threatened to kill him, and some of their party in the Parliament House moved earnestly to have had him committed to the Tower and proceeded against as an incendiary’.55TSP iv. 277, 294, 319; CCC 943; Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 95.

Hanmer spent most of the period 1647-51 with his second wife and their family at Angers, in the Loire Valley, and in 1648 he wrote a detailed and perceptive account of France and its people.56Corresp. of Sir Thomas Hanmer ed. H. Bunbury, 245-319. In this work, which would remain unpublished during his lifetime, he argued that

too much felicity, too great immunities of subjects, puff them [the people] up to their own ruin, and, by contesting for supreme power, [they] justly forfeit their own freedoms and riches ... By this time, the English feel how dangerous innovations are and what are the consequences of opposing and contemning majesty.57Corresp. of Sir Thomas Hanmer ed. H. Bunbury, 260.

Although it was said that his collaboration with the Independents had earned him the enmity of the king’s friends, he seems to have remained on good terms with Secretary Nicholas and other royalist exiles.58Add. 15858, f. 13; Add. 78198, f. 86; TSP iv. 319; Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 82-5.

He returned to England in about 1651 and took up residence at his property in Halghton, having leased Hanmer in order to raise money to pay his debts and raise a portion for his daughter with his first wife.59Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 85-6. His son William, who had been born at Angers, was included in the Rump’s naturalisation bill of May 1651, but it was left to the protectoral council to pass the necessary legislation in 1654.60CJ vi. 575b; Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 91-2. Hanmer devoted considerable time after his return to England to his great passion, gardening, establishing a well-earned reputation as one of the nation’s most innovative and influential horticulturalists. He traded on his expertise as a plantsman to add that other enthusiastic gardener Major-general John Lambert* to his list of powerful allies at the Cromwellian court.61Oxford DNB, ‘Sir Thomas Hanmer’. In June 1655 he made Lambert a gift of his most celebrated tulip, the ‘Agate Hanmer’, and it was Lambert who, the following month, procured him a pass from the protectoral council to travel to Flanders, for what was very probably a bulb-buying expedition to the Low Countries.62Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 90; The Garden Bk. of Sir Thomas Hanmer ed. E. S. Rohde, pp. ix, xx; CSP Dom. 1655, p. 592. Hanmer also sent a gift of tulip bulbs to the wife of Secretary John Thurloe*.63Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 90. Although Hanmer was included by Roger Whitley† on his 1658 list of potential leaders of a projected uprising in England, there is no evidence that he was involved in royalist plotting during the 1650s.64Bodl. Eng. Hist. E.309, p. 26. His son and heir John Hanmer was returned for Flint Boroughs to Richard Cromwell’s Parliament of 1659, but made little impact upon the Commons’ proceedings.

At the Restoration, John was knighted and included on the list of knights of the proposed order of the royal oak.65Jenkins, ‘Wales and the Order of the Royal Oak’, 345. Restored to the Flintshire bench in 1660 and appointed a deputy lieutenant, Hanmer took a hard line against the county’s dissenters and any clerical initiatives not prescribed in the Book of Common Prayer.66Diaries and Letters of Philip Henry ed. Lee, 82, 88, 95, 149, 175-6, 191; Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 103. He did not resume his parliamentary career, such as it had been, until 1669, when he returned in a by-election for Flintshire to the Cavalier Parliament. He was a firm adherent of the court faction at Westminster and was marked ‘doubly vile’ by the leader of the ‘country’ interest the earl of Shaftesbury (Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*) in 1677.67HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir Thomas Hanmer’.

Hanmer died on 6 October 1678 and was buried at Hanmer on 9 October.68Hanmer, Par. and Fam. of Hanmer, 111-12. It is not clear that his will, in which he left a large part of his estate in Flintshire to his eldest son from his second marriage, was ever entered in probate.69NLW, Chester Probate Recs. 1521-1858, will of Sir Thomas Hanmer, 1678. His heir Sir John Hanmer, who was also a court supporter, represented Evesham in the Cavalier Parliament, Flintshire in the third Exclusion Parliament in 1681 and Flint Boroughs in 1685 and 1689.70HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Sir John Hanmer’.