ROUS, Sir Thomas (1608-76), of Rous Lench, Worcs.

The Rous family was one of the most ancient settled in west Warwickshire and east Worcestershire. They were first associated with Ragley, near Alcester, in the thirteenth century. Rous Lench manor and advowson had come into their possession in 1382, and Sir Thomas Rous was able to trace his descent directly from the ancestor who had bought the estate and founded the patrimony. The first of their name to sit in Parliament did so in 1485.20Dugdale, Warws. ii. 853. The first baptisms, marriages and burials of the family recorded in the Rous Lench parish register took place from 1514, and must have been written retrospectively by a rector keen to record the rites of passage of his patrons. His clerical successor of the early seventeenth century, in the same spirit, recorded the names of godparents of the children of Sir John Rous† and his wife, Lady Hester. They were a mix of representatives of the Temple family (one of the Rous children was born at Stowe) and gentry from east Worcestershire. When their first child, Thomas, was born in 1608 the parents chose Sir Thomas Temple, Edward Rous (his uncle) and the mother of William Sandys* of Fladbury for this duty.21Rous Lench par. reg.

Sir John Rous was sheriff at the time of the Ship Money writs, and in 1636 managed to raise £3,000 of the £3,500 required of him. In 1639 a complaint by him against a negligent tax-collecting constable was considered by the privy council.22CSP Dom. 1637, p. 543; 1639, p. 198. He was a deputy lieutenant, and raised militia for war against the Scots in 1640.23Diary and Pprs.of Henry Townshend ed. Porter, Roberts, Roy, 60. His apparent willingness to support the government in these ventures did not extend to the area of religious policy, where he was the subject of orders in the court of high commission. The court called for articles against him to be produced, and Rous made one appearance before the court, but the case never came to anything, and fizzled out in May 1640.24CSP Dom. 1640, pp. 380, 383, 385, 405, 416. Thomas Rous, his eldest son, was created baronet on 23 July 1641, proof that the family had not forfeited the favour of the king.25CB ii. 108.

When civil war broke out, Sir John Rous seems to have been courted by the royalists. He was added to the Worcestershire commission of array on 23 July 1642, was named to the commission to meet in Worcester and safeguard the county in March 1643, and attended at least one meeting of the Worcester royalist commissioners, on 18 March.26Northants RO, FH133, unfol.; Bodl. Dugdale 19, f. 7v.; Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 116; Bodl. Rawl. D.918, f. 145, D.924, f. 152v. On the other hand Sir John’s name was among the 17 Worcestershire gentry who on 8 October 1642 formed themselves into an association at the disposal of the 3rd earl of Essex (Robert Devereux), determined to resist the ‘outrages, rapine and barbarous cruelties’ of royalist forces raised without the consent of Parliament.27HMC Portland, ii. 100. Rous’s apparent dual loyalties are probably explained by the proceedings of the Worcestershire royalist commissioners he attended in March 1643. This meeting was by no means conducted in a spirit of militancy, as the commissioners wrote to the king to explain why they had not put the commission of array into effect: above all, Rous seems to have wanted the keep the fighting out of Worcestershire.

After mid-April 1643, Sir John Rous took no further part in the cause of royalism in the county.28Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 118. His attempts to keep in with both sides probably account for the apparent quiescence of the family until September 1644, when Edward, Sir Thomas Rous’s younger brother, was the only family member named to the first parliamentarian committee for Worcestershire.29A. and O.; Rous Lench par. reg. The committee was unable to meet in Worcestershire, still under royalist control, and had as its base Warwick Castle, then garrisoned for Parliament and under the command of Colonel John Bridges*. It was from here on 3 March that Edward Rous issued a call to the minister and constables of Stoke and Bradley to repudiate the ‘specious pretences being chiefly carried on by papists and known enemies to the state’ and arm themselves ‘for the defence of ... religion and liberties’.30Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 184. By 7 April 1645 Sir Thomas had become one of the committee, and joined with his brother and other committeemen to forbid Worcestershire constables from obeying royalist orders.31Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 186. On 16 April they issued an address to Worcestershire people to repudiate Prince Rupert and his ‘regal power over the consciences, lives and liberties of you the free born subjects of England’.32Webb, Memorials, ii. 163. Sir John Rous was with his sons at Warwick, too, because after his death on 10 April 1645 he was buried there; his body was re-interred at Rous Lench as late as February 1654.33Rous Lench par. reg.

In May 1645, Sir Edward Massie* took Evesham on a raid from Gloucester, and the town was immediately garrisoned for Parliament. Col. Edward Rous was given command of it, and it provided a home for the Worcestershire county committee until July 1646. There is no evidence that Col. Rous’s brother, Sir Thomas, ever had a military commission, but he was certainly active in the civilian administration of the garrison and in the county committee.34SP28/138/pt. 16, passim for Col. Edward Rous, p.74 for Sir Thomas. With Nicholas Lechmere*, the committee treasurer until June 1646, Sir Thomas was prominent in negotiations over the surrender of Worcester. On 20 May, Col. Edward Whalley’s* regiment arrived at Worcester, and on the 24th, Rous headed the list of commissioners who issued the summons to surrender. A protracted dialogue ensued between those inside the city and the parliamentarians camped outside, in which Whalley and Rous were the leading representatives for the besiegers. They were joined by Lechmere on 23 June, and four days later Rous and Lechmere spoke for the last time for the gentry in the discussions. A stalemate had now been reached, broken only by the arrival on 8 July of Col. Thomas Rainborowe*, who replaced Whalley and conducted the negotiations apparently without reference to Rous or any of the civilian committeemen.35Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 213, 214, 216, 217, 226, 234.

Rainborowe’s preference for one-to-one parleying and evident disinclination to involve the county committee would itself explain why its members were said to favour Whalley and were apparently cool towards Rainborowe. The explanation given the royalist garrison for Whalley’s removal was that he had exceeded his military authority by bombarding the city and by organising the treating between the sides, in which the committee had been so active.36Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 255. That Rous personally was sympathetic to Whalley seems highly likely, because for three months or so between March and June 1647 Rous Lench provided a retreat for Richard Baxter, Whalley’s chaplain. Baxter left the army in February of that year, when his health collapsed, and Lady Rous sought him out to offer him a place of convalescence. There Baxter wrote his most enduring work, The Saints’ Everlasting Rest, and recorded later his appreciation of the welcome he had been given, especially by Lady Rous, ‘a godly, grave, understanding woman’ who treated the minister ‘not as a soldier but as a friend’.37Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696), i. 58; Cal. Baxter Corresp. i. 42-3. In October, Rous headed the list of the Worcestershire committee which appointed Baxter to be minister of Kidderminster, with all the profits of the vicarage, subject to the approval of the Westminster Assembly.38DWL, MS 59, Treatises iv. 122A. On 20 November 1647, Rous was appointed by the Lords and Commons to the shrievalty of his county, but did not take up his duties until April 1648. The burden of office must have limited his effectiveness on the county committee.39LJ ix. 536a; List of Sheriffs (List and Index ix), 159.

Rous’s attitude towards the regicide is not known. He continued to be named to local offices throughout the 1640s and 50s, and appeared in the commission of the peace for the first time around 1650, suggesting at least that the republican government trusted him. Richard Baxter continued to find favour at Rous Lench through the 1650s, providing stern moral advice to Rous’s rather wild adolescent son in 1657.40Cal. Baxter Corresp. i. 266. Rous had as his chaplain in 1656 John Freeston, son of one of Baxter’s lay supporters in Kidderminster, and a member of his circle of sympathetic ministers in the Worcestershire Association.41G. F. Nuttall, ‘The Worcs. Association: its Membership’, JEH i. 200-1. Even though he must have taken the Engagement, it is probable that Rous found the commonwealth a disappointment, given the family’s sympathies with the puritanism of the sort promoted by Baxter, which was orthodox in theology, and, in its organization, rooted in notions of federalism and the involvement of the magistrate. The protectorate, with its commitment to confirming and clarifying the role of the national church and its relationship with the state, would have been more to his taste. On 12 July 1654, he was among the five MPs for the county elected to the first Parliament under the Instrument of Government, and was easily of the most distinguished Worcestershire family returned. The following month he accepted office as a commissioner for ejecting scandalous ministers in the county, another indication of his conservative religious outlook.42Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 270; A. and O.

At Westminster for the first protectorate Parliament, Rous had no difficulty surmounting the hurdle of the Recognition on 12 September, and indeed was named to the committee to draw up another version of the Recognition in the form of a bill.43CJ vii. 370a, 373b. That he regarded the House as perfectly legitimate after the departure of those Members excluded by the executive may be inferred from his appointment to the committee of privileges on 5 October. 44CJ vii. 373b, His other committee appointments in this Parliament – five in number – included work on bills to improve the distribution of corn (6 Oct.), to remove the imposition of purveyance and to safeguard the practice of civil law (22 Dec.). He was also appointed to a large committee of a hundred Members to regulate the court of chancery (5 Oct.).45CJ vii. 374b, 407b, 374a. On the committee for printing, which was delegated the task of examining two books by the Socinian John Biddle (12 Oct.), he would have demonstrated scant sympathy for someone so far removed from his conservative godly outlook.46CJ vii. 400a.

Back in Worcestershire after the dissolution of this Parliament, Rous resumed an active involvement in matters of county government. In November 1655 he was made custos of the Worcestershire quarter sessions, where in the Epiphany sessions, 1656, his colleagues resisted his choice of a new clerk.47C231/6, p.319; Diary and Pprs. of Henry Townshend, 273. His pre-eminence at quarter sessions and influence at assizes provided him with an authority with which to invite Baxter to deliver the assize sermon at Worcester in 1654, but the minister was mistaken, when later writing his memoirs, in ascribing to him the role of sheriff at this time.48Reliquiae Baxterianae, i. 110.

Rous was returned again to the second protectorate Parliament, in which he was named to committees on the sequestration of papists’ estates, marriages, births and burials and the non-residence of masters of colleges.49CJ vii, 443b, 444a, 581ab. His most significant role in this assembly, however, was as a supporter of the new civilian constitution, the Humble Petition and Advice. He was listed as having voted to retain kingship in the first article on 25 March, and was a member of the delegation which presented the protector with the Humble Petition and Advice, on 27 March 1657.50CJ vii, 514a; Narrative of the Late Parliament (1658), 22 (E.935.5). Eight days earlier, in debate on the content of the petition, he had been a teller for the noes with Sir Francis Russell on the question whether the clause affirming that ‘the true Christian religion’ be propounded as the faith of the state should be sent to committee. He was thus presumably in favour of accepting the wording and intent of the clause as it stood.51CJ vii 508a. The noes on this occasion were victorious by 15 votes. On 9 April he joined the hundred-strong group sent to receive the Protector’s answer, and on 27 May was a member of the committee of 65 who were charged with drafting the additions to the Humble Petition.52CJ vii, 521b, 540b. On 28 January 1658, he attended the protector again, with a smaller body of 43 MPs, and the following day he was a teller for the noes on a motion that the House should be a grand committee to consider a message from the Other House.53CJ vii. 589ab. Rous had become a regular representative of the Commons in discussions with the executive, and during its brief life, with the second chamber.

Rous’s first wife had died in August 1656, having succumbed to the same illness from which he himself had recovered: according to Baxter, who claimed some significant medical knowledge, her demise was induced by her extreme anxiety at the prospects of her husband’s death.54Cal. Baxter Corresp. i. 254. His choice of a second wife in May 1659 must have been a surprise to his Worcestershire friends and family, since he married the daughter of a London tailor. The match was certainly a total shock and calamity for Charles Lyttelton, son of Sir Thomas Lyttelton* of Frankley, who until the day after the wedding thought that Frances Murray was his. His horror would surely have been compounded by the different civil war allegiances of the Rous family and the Lytteltons, who were noted plotters in Worcestershire on behalf of Charles Stuart in the 1650s, at the time that Rous was the leading figure on the county bench of magistrates.55Hatton Correspondence, 18-19; ‘Sir Thomas Lyttelton’ supra. There is no reason to suppose that his marriage to the mistress of a royalist marked any change in political orientation by Rous, but he did not stand again for election in the county, preferring instead to take his chances in Evesham in the poll for the Convention of 1660. Rous Lench was very near Evesham, and Rous stood with John Egioke, of another local gentry family. On this occasion the candidates were unexceptionable local men, but the electors were a curious collection of the mayor, eight capital burgesses, eight assistant burgesses, a Quaker who had been ejected from the corporation in 1655, and two who were plain freemen.56C219/50; status of signatories from Evesham Borough Records ed. S.K. Roberts (Worcs. Hist. Soc. n.s. xiv). The election was contested by Theophilus Andrewes*, probably on the grounds that the franchise was uncertain, but Rous’s seat in Parliament was confirmed. There he showed much less industriousness than he had in earlier assemblies, and must have been out of sympathy with the drift of events both in state and, later, the church. He did not stand again, and resumed the life of a country gentleman at Rous Lench. He had kept his place on the commission of the peace at the Restoration, and continued to be named to local offices. He died in May 1676, having married for a third time in 1670. None of his descendants sat in Parliament.