REYNELL, Thomas (1625-98), of East Ogwell, Devon.

The Reynells were established at East Ogwell by the mid-sixteenth century. They were, however, an important Devon gentry family long before that, and also had Cambridgeshire antecedents. The first to be recorded in Devon was Richard Reinell, sheriff 1191-4. A number of them had sat in medieval Parliaments. John Reinell† was knight for Cambridgeshire in 1351, and John Reinell† and Walter Reinell† were brother knights for Devon in 1404 and 1455.19Vivian, Vis. Devon, 643; HP Commons, 1386-1421. More recently, no fewer than three of Thomas Reynell’s relatives sat in the House between 1558 and 1603, all of them for Cornish boroughs or places further afield. Richard Reynell† of Creedy Widger, Thomas Reynell’s grandfather, who sat for Mitchell in 1593, was a senior figure at the Middle Temple and held office in the exchequer.20HP Commons, 1558-1603 Two more close older relatives, Sir George Reynell† and Sir Thomas Reynell†, the latter being Thomas Reynell’s father’s brother, entered the House in 1614 and 1624. Sir Thomas not only held government office but was a cupbearer and then sewer in the royal household. He was knighted in 1625, at the same time as Thomas Reynell’s father, when Charles I visited Forde, near Teignbridge. Forde had recently been rebuilt by Thomas Reynell’s great-uncle, Richard Reynell, a lawyer. A third recipient of the honour of knighthood on that occasion was Sir John Yonge*.21Diary of Walter Yonge ed. Roberts (Cam. Soc. 1848), 86-7.

While one of Thomas Reynell’s grandfathers distinguished himself at his inn of court, the other was a notable figure at the Devon quarter sessions before 1631. The signature of Richard Reynell of Creedy Widger ‘occurs more frequently than any other JP on the many recognizances and examinations which survive’.22M. Wolffe, Gentry Leaders in Peace and War (Exeter, 1997), 165. It was altogether a very impressive family history of service to the country both at local and national level. Hand-in-hand with their prominence in service to king and community was the puritanism of the Reynells. Those at East Ogwell were puritans from the Elizabethan period. In 1619, the vicar of East Ogwell, John Preston, (not to be confused with his namesake, chaplain to Prince Charles and master of Emmanuel College, Cambridge) published his funeral sermon for Reynell’s grandfather, Sir Thomas, who died in 1618, leaving cash bequests of over £1,700.23PROB11/132/528. His Old Testament virtues were said to include ‘wisdom, meekness, the fear of God, hatred of Mammon, love of the truth, love of ... fellow creatures’, all of which informed the ‘managing the affairs of the commonwealth whereunto he was called’.24J. Preston, The Patriarch’s Portion (1619), 59. Before the civil war, Thomas Reynell’s father was among those gentry ‘most noticeably carrying on an earlier family tradition’ of appointing puritan ministers to livings.25I.W. Gowers, ‘Puritanism in the County of Devon between 1570 and 1641’ (Exeter Univ. MA thesis, 1970), 217. The household Reynell was brought up in was therefore a godly one, as was the household at Forde. The great-aunt of his who lived there, Lucy Reynell, was memorialised in 1654 by another of the family in terms of her godly virtues.26E. Reynell, The Life and Death of the Religious and Virtuous Lady, the Lady Lucie Reynell (1654).

Reynell himself was educated at Oxford and then saw out the civil war years at the Middle Temple; he was called to the bar there a few months after the trial and execution of the king. The civil war experiences of his family were mixed. His father attended quarter sessions normally during 1641, but made his last appearance there on 5 October that year.27Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8. Sir Richard seems to have avoided playing any part in the war, and to have escaped even being nominated for inclusion in local committees on the side of either king or Parliament. His ownership of the building which housed the Newton Abbot house of correction was acknowledged when the parliamentarian magistrates assembled in October 1647 to take control of justice in Devon.28Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8. Sir Richard was not troubled by the county committee, or by any of the agencies of penal taxation. His brother, Sir Thomas, officer in the king’s household, stuck with his royal master. In 1660 he claimed to have lost £1,100 for his loyalty to the king, and described how he had waited on Charles at his court in Oxford.29CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 93. To counter-balance this royalist example from Thomas Reynell’s family, his father’s first cousin, Jane Reynell, married Sir William Waller*, the parliamentarian general.30Devon Household Accounts Part 1 ed. T. Gray (Devon and Cornw. Record Soc. n.s. xxxviii), lvi.

With these competing models of loyalty before him, on reaching his majority Reynell seems to have fashioned one for himself, of initially following his father in remaining aloof from politics, but eventually expressing assent to the government of the commonwealth by participating in local government. Having been nominated to the commission of the peace in 1647, he made his first appearance at Devon quarter sessions only at Easter 1651.31Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8. Reynell had evidently been circumspect before committing himself publicly to the republic. Thereafter, however, he was a regular attender, appearing at the majority of the court’s meetings between 1651 and 1660.32Devon RO, QS order bk. 1/8, 9. He was unusual among the Devon justices s in enforcing the punitive legislation brought in by the Rump Parliament against fornicators.33S.K. Roberts, Recovery and Restoration in an English County: Devon Local Administration, 1646-1670 (Exeter, 1985), 205-6. He did not repudiate his metropolitan links altogether, however. From April 1650 been active in buying the fee-farm rents of the crown which arose from properties of his or which were near Ogwell, and so could not be said to have a principled objection to dealing with the vendors, the trustees on behalf of the government. He employed an agent to make these purchases in a series of transactions during 1650. Among the rents secured were those of West Ogwell manor and church, West Teignmouth and East Ogwell, all Reynell properties.34E315/139, f. 5v, 103v; E315/140, f. 17v; E315/141, f. 3; E315/144, unpag.

As the commonwealth gave way to the protectorate in 1653/4, Reynell transferred his loyalty readily enough. On 11 July 1654 his name appeared on a printed quarter sessions order authorising Devon parishes to raise money for the church of the Exeter suburb of St Thomas, ruined in the civil war.35Bodl. Walker c.5, f. 352. The following day, he was elected to Parliament, suggesting that the county election for the first protectorate Parliament was organised by the leading justices at quarter sessions. Reynell’s name was third on the indenture, after Robert Rolle* and Arthur Upton*. Later that summer, he was named as one of the ‘ejectors’ in the ordinance of the protector’s council on scandalous ministers, which is more than suggestive of confidence in his loyalty by the government. His contribution to his first Parliament was hardly considerable, but his willingness to attend it revealed him as one who had overcome whatever objections he had harboured formerly to alternatives to the monarchy. He was elected to the important committee on privileges (5 Sept.), but this was his only known involvement.36CJ vii. 366b.

By November, Reynell was back in Exeter, having ‘deserted’ the Parliament. There, he was reported to have had discussions with the republican kinsman of his wife’s, the army officer and agitator, William Allen. Having attempted unsuccessfully to square service in Parliament with his conscience, Reynell told Allen, he was ‘ready to act in the country as a justice of the peace, though he could not as a Parliament-man’.37TSP iii. 140. Reynell believed that the best way to achieve security against ‘the common enemies’ was to submit to the prevailing government of the protectorate. The enemies that Reynell had in mind were without doubt the royalist plotters. In January 1655, John Copleston* and Unton Croke II* reported this conversation to Secretary of State John Thurloe*, as part of their monitoring of Allen, rather than of Reynell; but by reporting his words in this way, the protectorians left Thurloe in no doubt that in their eyes Reynell was a suspect figure too.

In his attitude towards attending the 1654-5 Parliament, Reynell may have been influenced by the discussions held by Thomas Gewen* and Thomas Bampfylde* with Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell* over the legitimacy of the Instrument of Government. If so, then Reynell would have shared the Presbyterian scruples of the other two west countrymen. Despite his withdrawing from the Parliament and his being the subject of critical comment by John Copleston, head of security in Devon under John Disbrowe*, Reynell remained sufficiently trusted by Thurloe for his name to appear in March 1655 on the commission of oyer and terminer for trying the Penruddock rebels. He was elected once again for Devon to the second protectorate Parliament in 1656, survived the weeding-out by the protector’s council of those thought to be hostile to the regime, and took his seat, this time to make a significant contribution to proceedings. On 7 October, he was named to his first committee, reviewing the statutes on the wages and condition of skilled tradesmen, servants and labourers.38CJ vii. 366b, 435b. With Thomas Bampfylde and Edmund Fowell, he was named to the committee reviewing legal incumbrances, and with four other Devon MPs considered the heterodox publication, Thunder from the Throne of God, by the radical pamphleteer, Samuel Chidley (20 Oct.).39CJ vii. 441b, 442b.

As the Quaker James Naylor had been notorious to the magistrates of Devon and Exeter before the episode outside Bristol that led to his arrest, it was unremarkable that four Members from Devon constituencies, including Reynell, should have been on the committee investigating his blasphemies.40CJ vii. 448a. On the question of Naylor’s punishment, Reynell was a hawk. On 5 December, he made a speech calling for his immediate bringing to the bar of the House, and after the Quaker had appeared, called for no further consideration of the committee report on him, since he had by his own admission pretended to the ‘honour and attributes’ of Christ. Reynell insisted that ‘this blasphemy of James Naylor wounds Christ through every side’. Unsatisfied with the resolution that Naylor should be subjected to corporal punishment, Reynell argued strenuously that he should instead be put to death. Thomas Burton*, the diarist, evidently found Reynell’s speech on 16 December, in which he drew upon St Paul and the theologians John Calvin and Samuel Rutherford to argue for the death penalty, a little distasteful. Burton noted how Reynell ‘ran over all the texts formerly urged in this case, pretended to great skill in the original’, to prove that a blasphemer should be executed. Nothing less would suffice, as mere corporal punishment ‘will come to nothing’. The sceptical Burton duly recorded in his diary that Reynell ‘inclined to the higher punishment, but none could guess by his argument’.41Burton’s Diary, i. 34, 78, 147, 150-1.

Some of Reynell’s committee appointments in this Parliament were natural nominations for a barrister from the south west. Among these might be included the bill for recovery of small debts in county courts (1 Nov.), a bill to settle rent-charges from a west country benefactor on 16 Cambridge scholars (22 Nov.) and another to enable Richard Carter, probably a Devon sequestration official, to sell lands for debt (9 Dec.).42CJ vii. 449a, 457a, 466a; Roberts, Recovery and Restoration, 42. Among the petitions before committees to which he was called were those from William Cecil, 2nd earl of Salisbury, Charles Stanley, 8th earl of Derby and from Edmund Lister and his wife (22 Dec.), the last-named one that occupied much time of the Devon Members.43CJ vii. 466b, 472a. On 25 December, the Speaker invited Members to move whether or not to continue the decimation tax on cavaliers. Reynell called for a day of debate on the subject, and spoke in the interests of what the lord protector called ‘healing and settling’. ‘If the cavaliers be never so wicked, let us be just to them, and keep our faith’, he argued, and urged Parliament to keep faith with the act of oblivion which the Rump had passed.44Burton’s Diary, i. 236.

In January 1657, Reynell was named to committees on the public debt (1 Jan.), the counter-petitions of Sir Sackville Crowe and the Levant Company (27 Jan.) and the committee seeking the assent of the lord protector to a proposed day of thanksgiving, which was to include prayers by beneficed ministers for the lord protector himself (31 Jan).45CJ vii. 477b, 483a, 484b, 485b. In most of these committees, Reynell was accompanied by Thomas Bampfylde, with whom he shared natural affinities of region and religious outlook. On 5 January, Reynell offered a suggestion of wording on a case then before the House, but the Speaker rejected it. The following month, he was given leave to go to the country, and it was not until 30 March that he was noted in the House again, being then named to a committee on a man from New England, and another for the attainder of rebels in Ireland, again in the company of Bampfylde.46Burton’s Diary, i. 303; CJ vii. 514b, 515a. Reynell seemed to be slipping back into absenteeism, and there is no evidence he was present for any of the proceedings between April and June 1657.

He had returned to the House in time for the last sittings of the Parliament, in January and February 1658. On 22 January, he was named to committees on the bill for marriages and another to counter absenteeism among university heads of houses.47CJ vii. 581a, 581b. That day, he also spoke on the question of acknowledging the existence of the Other House. When a message came in the name of the ‘Lords’ asking the House to join with them in a day of humiliation, Reynell identified that it raised the issue as to whether they were a House of Lords. Rather unhelpfully to the government, he argued that no answer to the message were possible because it had come not in the name of the Other House, but sententiously called for the help of the wise men of the House who would determine matters.48Burton’s Diary, ii. 342-3. On 26 January, he was one of those called to peruse the inventory of the records of the House, was named again on 3 February to the committee on marriages, along with three other Devonians, including John Copleston, who three years earlier had informed Thurloe of Reynell’s conversation with the radical, William Allen, and the following day, the day when Parliament was dissolved, he sat on a committee on highway repairs.49CJ vii. 588a, 591a, 592a.

Reynell’s conduct during the second protectorate Parliament had revealed him as one who was willing to work with the government, even if his extreme views on Naylor distanced him from the Cromwellians. This participative but critical approach marked his behaviour during Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament, to which he was returned for Ashburton. He was returned for this borough, only seven miles from East Ogwell, almost certainly on his own interest, and it was a safe haven for him, given the reduction of the county representation to the traditional two seats. He was voted to the committee of privileges, amid a strong grouping of six Devonians.50CJ vii. 595a. On 1 February he moved a reading of Secretary Thurloe’s bill of recognition of the new lord protector, and on the 8th, moved an adjournment, pleading many speakers and much needing to be said about relations between Parliament and chief magistrate.51Burton’s Diary, iii. 32, 149. On the 5th, Reynell was named to his only committee in this Parliament with a brief to legislate on a major topic, on the church in Wales.52CJ vii. 600b.

His apparent lack of interest in committee work did not inhibit Reynell from speaking his mind on constitutional affairs. Any hopes that he might be supportive of Richard Cromwell’s government would have begun to recede after 11 February, when he intervened in debate to criticise the bill of recognition then before the House. He objected to the word ‘undoubted’ which appeared in the bill before the word ‘protector’, and sought clauses which limited the lord protector’s authority, not least on questions relating to the militia and the protector’s veto. He claimed to speak on behalf of the widest possible constituency: ‘I have great exceptions and desire on behalf of the people of England, of the nation, that I may be heard speak’.53Burton’s Diary, iii. 231. The recognition bill was still in debate on the 14th, when there were exchanges over the militia and the part it had played in the outbreak of the civil war. Against his fellow west countryman, Sir Walter Erle, Reynell’s senior by 40 years, he argued that control of the army had been the basis of the quarrel between king and Parliament, and proceeded to warn against the dangers of falling back on the Humble Petition and Advice, which ‘clothed, or rather armed’ the protector. The Humble Petition was no basis for the existence of the Other House, as its second article had determined only that the basis of calling Parliaments was to be determined in the future; as Reynell brutally put it, by the Humble Petition the Other House was ‘dead’.54Burton’s Diary, iii. 271.

On the question of transacting with the Other House, Reynell wanted the question put, and put simply. He offered his own analysis of what had happened in 1642, without noting that at the time he had been a 17-year old law student. From his own legalistic perspective, the House had never wavered in allegiance to the king until the breakdown into armed conflict, having always addressed the sovereign by supplication. In the early 1640s, the Commons had sought to evade the bonds of royal prerogative, but he now thought Members were ‘construing ourselves into bounds’.55Burton’s Diary, iv. 66. Reynell evidently impressed many Members, probably through his tone of criticism tempered by a wish to see the Parliament succeed if possible. On 16 March he was called to the chair to replace the sick Sir Lislebone Long, who himself had been a replacement. Reynell’s sponsor was Sir Arthur Hesilrige, proof that he was an acceptable choice of Speaker in the eyes of the commonwealthsmen. He immediately declined the call, but named Thomas Bampfylde, his ‘countryman’, one of ‘approved learning and gravity’.56Burton’s Diary, iv. 149; CJ vii. 613b. There was more to the relationship of these two men than merely their common origins in Devon. They were contemporaries in age and in their time at the Middle Temple. Indeed, they had been called to the bar there on the same day, in June 1649. They shared a hawkish kind of Presbyterianism on social questions, and had worked together on various committees in the Parliament of 1656-8. When Reynell deflected attention away from himself and on to Bampfylde, the House obliged by bringing to the chair a figure who was so like himself in many ways.

Unlike the republicans who had nominated him for the chair, and unlike some other Presbyterians, Reynell does seem to have wanted Richard Cromwell’s protectorate to succeed. On the question of relations between the nations of England and Scotland, on 21 March he declared himself content if it could be shown upon grounds of law that it was a just union, and seemed impatient with appeals by other speakers to alternative legal codes, such as natural law and embryonic notions of international law.57Burton’s Diary, iv. 214. Two days later, he was a teller for the first time and only time in the Parliaments before 1660. A report from the committee of privileges had declared that the franchise at Dartmouth lay in the mayor, bailiffs and freemen, not the inhabitants. When the report was put before the House, Reynell and Sir John Northcote, whom he had succeeded as a burgess for Ashburton, successfully led the noes into a division on the motion that the report should be adopted. Both tellers for the motion, lost by six votes, came from outside Devon.58CJ vii. 619a. Northcote and Reynell were soon afterwards both named to the committee on Irish affairs (1 April), and the following day Reynell was involved in the progress through the House of a declaration on a fast day. This was not a routine declaration, as there were hopes that if the wording was sufficiently nuanced Presbyterian ministers – especially in Scotland – would overcome their scruples and observe the fast day.59Little and Smith, Cromwellian Protectorate, 219. Thomas Burton describes a division on this declaration that the clerk of the House did not record. Reynell was a natural supporter of this declaration, which was strongly critical of heresies and blasphemies prevalent in the country, and attributable to unrestrained sects and inadequate control of them by magistrates. Reynell argued successfully in favour of retaining the clause that ministers be required to publish the declaration, which stood as a manifesto for those Erastian Presbyterians like Reynell who were strongly opposed to sectarian activity and who wanted a state church with disciplinary powers backed actively by civil magistrates, whether the head of state or in the localities.60Burton’s Diary, iv. 329, 332.

After the closure of this Parliament, Reynell returned to Devon to resume his activities on the county bench. In the winter of 1659-60, he seems to have been more cautious than Sir John Northcote or even Thomas Bampfylde in calling for the return of the Secluded Members and in flirting with the leaders of the king’s party. At the Restoration, he retained his place on the bench but seems not to have aspired to a place in either the Convention of 1660 or the Cavalier Parliament. His uncle, Sir Thomas Reynell, emerged from obscurity during the interregnum to petition the king for his civil war losses and his office under the crown.61CSP Dom. 1660-1, pp. 30, 93. Reynell’s own position seems to have worsened during the 1660s as the royalist and Anglican reaction set in. He was made a deputy lieutenant in 1660, but was quickly dropped. He must have surrendered his fee farm rent purchases to the crown. In 1671, Reynell sought a seat unsuccessfully in the Devon by-election. His Presbyterianism by this time set him apart from the majority of the conforming Devon gentry. He stood against Sir Coplestone Bampfylde*, provoking outrage from Bishop Seth Ward of Exeter, who characterised Reynell as ‘a Fifth Monarchy man ... much befriended at court’, ‘a very dangerous commonwealthsman’.62J. Simmons, ‘Some Letters from Bishop Ward of Exeter, 1662-1667’, Devon and Cornw. N and Q, xxi. 284; xxii. 48. He was in fact still a Presbyterian, but the wild allegations of the bishop must have contributed to his losing his place in 1676 as a justice. They did not prevent Reynell from finally acquiring a seat again in 1679, however, and he served in four Parliaments for Ashburton, first as an Exclusionist whig and subsequently as one who supported proposals to repeal the Test Act and the penal laws. He conformed to the government of William III, without contributing any help to secure the Revolution, standing down from his seat in 1690.63HP Commons 1660-90.

Reynell drew up his will in 1694, ‘being willing to wait for my dissolution with what freedom I may from worldly thoughts’. He had consolidated the Reynell estates of East and West Ogwell, the manor of Malston and the advowsons of East and West Ogwell, and vested his properties in trustees who included his sons-in-law. Beyond his call for a funeral ‘with no blacks or ceremony’, there was little reminder of his days as an important figure in Devon under the protectorate, except that one of his witnesses was Giles Inglett, son of the deputy clerk of the peace of that name who had served the Devon bench throughout the 1650s and 60s.64PROB11/450/37; Roberts, Recovery and Restoration, 176. Reynell was buried at East Ogwell, in fulfilment of his wishes, on 1 March 1698. From 1702, his son represented Ashburton as an independent whig.