THYNNE, Sir James (c.1605-70), of Longleat and Longbridge Deverill, Wilts.

The Thynnes had a long record of local officeholding and service in Parliament.23HP Commons 1559-1603; HP Commons 1604-1629. However, dissension within the family postponed the entry of this MP into public life and dominated his short parliamentary career in this period. Years after he had been excluded from the House, his affairs generated petitions to it and debate within it. Only after the Restoration did he attain the prominence in Wiltshire and Westminster politics which seemed to follow naturally from his great wealth.

Sir Thomas Thynne†, who had achieved political prominence, had ample means to provide for all his surviving sons from two marriages.24HP Commons 1604-1629. But, as was later alleged, during his lifetime the sons of his first wife – John (who died in young adulthood), James and Thomas Thynne† – felt obliged to quit the family home owing to the antagonism of their stepmother, Dame Katherine Thynne.25HMC 6th Rep. 175; Longleat, Thynne pprs. viii, f. 43. Having graduated from Oxford in company with John, James went abroad. He may have gone on the military expedition to assist the Huguenots of La Rochelle in 1627-8 and he has been credited with education at Padua, although he does not immediately appear as a student of the university.26Al. Ox.; HP Commons 1660-1690. In May 1628 he was certainly among gentlemen serving with English forces under Horatio Vere, 1st Baron Vere, encamped before ʼs-Hertogenbosch in Brabant; writing to his father, he referred to his ‘soldierlike profession’.27Longleat, Thynne pprs. viii, f. 43; H. Hexham, Historicall Relation of the Famous Siege of the Busse (Delft, 1630), p. C.5v. Despite the equivocation implied here, it is likely that he followed this path for many years. He had reached his mid-thirties apparently unmarried and without visible preferment in England when on 23 June 1639, attendant on or serving with the army taken by Charles I to Berwick, he was among those knighted by the king.28SP16/425, f. 99v; SP16/427/38/ii, iv.

The death of his father only five weeks later exacerbated family tensions. Sir Thomas left to his James ‘a very fair estate’ in lands reported to be worth about £6,000 a year, but this seems to have represented at most a half of his wealth and perhaps significantly less. In a will drawn up on 31 July Sir Thomas bequeathed £20,000 to Elizabeth, daughter of his second marriage, while she was rumoured to have been given a further £6,000 worth of plate and jewels at various times. The elder of her full brothers, Henry Frederick Thynne, was said to have inherited £4,000 a year and some observers thought £10,000 a year had gone to the junior line. Furthermore, the schedule heralded in the will as enabling Dame Katherine, as executrix and legatee of all Sir Thomas’s personal estate, to discharge Sir Thomas’s intentions did not materialize.29PROB11/183/753 (Sir Thomas Thynne); HMC Var. Coll. viii. 51-2; Add. 11045, f. 44v. Problems emerged immediately. By 13 August Sir James had obtained an order for perusal of relevant documents by lawyers; before 2 September he had petitioned the king for its enforcement.30SP16/403, f. 51. In the complex litigation in the court of wards and star chamber which ensued, Dame Katherine enjoyed the support of the will’s overseers, and Henry Frederick’s father- and brother-in-law, Lord Keeper Thomas Coventry†, 1st Baron Coventry, and his son and namesake.31Longleat, Thynne pprs. lxii, lxxxv-xci ‘the Long suit’; Wilts. RO, 413/302.

The operation of competing personal and political alliances may have led to both the half-brothers acting briefly as gentlemen of the privy chamber around this time, although they do not appear in specific listings of 1639 or 1641. While Henry Frederick probably adhered to the interest of his mother’s kin the Howards, Sir James may have inclined from the outset towards the more militantly Protestant peers at court. Over the winter of 1639-40 both brothers responded to the royal request for loans from courtiers, Sir James paying in £3,000.32SP16/453/74, f. 115v; SP16/447/36; W. Prynne, Hidden Workes of Darkenes (1645), 182; cf. E179/70/146; N. Carlisle, Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber (1829).

Sir James was not elected to the Short Parliament, and is not clear whether he sought a seat. However, his marriage at Acton, Middlesex, in June 1640 to Lady Isabella Rich, daughter of Henry Rich, 1st earl of Holland – itself testament to his still very considerable wealth – brought him into the fold of two leading ‘puritan’ oppositional peers, Holland and his brother Robert Rich, 2nd earl of Warwick.33St Mary, Acton, Ealing par. reg. Lady Isabella, whose sister Lady Susanna (soon after married to James Howard, 3rd earl of Suffolk) was to enjoy a reputation for exceptional piety, may have been the driving force behind the Thynnes’ acquisition on 20 August of permission to have an oratory in their chapel at Longleat, provided they took the sacrament at the parish church.34HMC 3rd Rep. Marquess of Bath, 201; ‘Susanna Howard [née Rich]’, Oxford DNB. None the less, the language and tone of Sir James’s will 30 years later suggests that he shared the Calvinist mind-set of the Rich circle.35PROB11/334/513.

On 27 September Holland wrote to the corporation of Reading, of which he was high steward, nominating Sir James as a burgess to serve for the town in Parliament. This may only have been an insurance policy, however. Thynne did not even appear among the five candidates considered on 19 October.36Reading Recs. iii. 505, 507. Instead he was successful in what was probably his preferred candidature as a knight of the shire for Wiltshire. This could be viewed as an acknowledgement of his wealth and the tradition of his forebears occupying the seat, but it may have helped that those elected in the spring, Sir Francis Seymour* and Philip Herbert*, Lord Herbert, readily obtained seats elsewhere, and that Charles Howard*, Viscount Andover, announced he would not stand.37CCSP i. 209.

Thynne seems to have entered the House on the expectation that, like his father-in-law Holland, he would be critical of the abuses of Charles I’s personal rule. His three committee appointments before the new year suggest as much. Named first among additions to the committee investigating monopolists (19 Nov.), he was among 60 MPs who conferred with the Lords on the accusations against Thomas Wentworth, 1st earl of Strafford, regarding his activities as lord deputy of Ireland (30 Nov.), and among a group of mainly local Members who considered petitions from Somerset against the activities of the bishop of Bath and Wells, William Piers.38CJ ii. 31a, 39b, 50a.

Thereafter, however, his nominations were few and references to him in the Journal came in time to be dominated by his personal business. Recognition of his interest as a litigant was perhaps behind his appointment to the committee preparing an act for reducing the length of the Michaelmas law term (27 Jan. 1641), while his function as a courtier may explain his inclusion on the delegation to the king to seek his assent to a bill for the relief of the army in the north (15 Feb.).39CJ ii. 73b, 85b. That there was then no mention of him until 10 May, when a week after most of his colleagues he made the Protestation, is one hint of fitful attendance.40CJ ii. 141a. Yet his opinion was evidently regarded as carrying weight in important matters – especially those promoted by the ‘opposition’ peers – since he was among MPs who conferred with the Lords on the propositions advanced by John Pym* (his next appearance, 28 June) and included on the committee discussing the act to facilitate free speech by Members (3 July).41CJ ii. 190b, 198b.

Meanwhile, Thynne had evidently made the most of his status in Parliament to cultivate support for his case against his stepmother and half-brother. In petitioning Lord Cottington (Sir Francis Cottington†), master of the court of wards (1 Jan.), he had invoked parliamentary privilege to request the release of his tenants’ rents from the clutches of Frederick Henry and, backed up by representations from workmen thwarted in obtaining payment from the latter as administrator of Sir Thomas’s personal estate (estimated to be worth £30,000), had received a favourable response from the attorney-general.42SP16/476/5. But a resolution of the issue was needed from Parliament itself. In moving on 22 May that Sir James’s petition be reconsidered, another member of the Rich circle, Oliver Cromwell*, noted that the case had been ‘laid aside’ pending Thynne’s appearance in the House (another indication of tendency to absence).43Procs. LP iv. 525. This action did prompt orders in the Lords and Commons for the case between the Thynne brothers to be heard (26 May; 1, 10, 28 June; 3, 6, 14, 17 July), but it took further prompting by Cromwell to keep it on course and Sir James’s invocation of privilege attracted significant adverse comment.44CJ ii. 191b, 200a, 210b, 215b; Procs. LP iv. 670, 675, 681; LJ iv. 257a, 270b, 315. Simonds D’Ewes* was among those who, during a lengthy debate on 20 July, was persuaded that Sir James had been selective in his compliance with court orders in the case and interpreted some of them ‘unjustly’, and that he ‘should not lay down the suit when he pleased for his own advantage, and so abuse the privilege of the House to his own advantage’. He delivered his verdict somewhat pointedly, as he ‘looked towards Sir James Thynne, who sat a little beneath me on the same form’, and voted with Bulstrode Whitelocke* and John Maynard* to dismiss the appeal to privilege. By this time, however, Sir James had ‘made divers friends in the House’: Edward Hyde* and Lucius Cary*, 2nd viscount Falkland, secured a majority vote for referring the whole matter to committee.45Procs. LP vi. 20-1; CJ ii. 217a.

While it deliberated under the chairmanship of veteran lawyer John Whistler*, Sir James managed to secure favourable rulings on other aspects of the case from the Lords (28, 29 July) and to forward discussion of an act to disafforest his lands in Selwood Forest, Somerset (6 Aug.).46LJ iv. 331a, 333b; CJ ii. 226b, 232a, 239b. However, Whistler’s report on 17 August tended to support the views of D’Ewes. Sir James had been inconsistent, sometimes accepting court orders and sometimes appealing to parliamentary immunity to avoid them. The upshot was a resolution that, especially because he was himself the plaintiff in the suit in the court of wards, he could not claim privilege in the case.47 Procs. LP vi. 458; CJ ii. 261a.

The quarrel between the Thynne brothers was to resurface in the Commons and was to become something of a benchmark on the specific question of privilege, recalled for example when Nathaniel Fiennes I* came to face court martial in December 1643.48Add. 31116, p. 203. But the failure of his appeal more or less marked the end of Sir James’s visible contribution to parliamentary proceedings. In an apparently rare intervention on 10 June he had defended the non-appearance of Robert Digby, 1st Baron Digby, in response to a summons to answer to the Commons in connection with the alleged ‘army plot’, declaring that the peer ‘would willingly wait upon this House so it might be no breach of privilege to the Lords House’.49Procs. LP v. 83. While this may have been simply an opportunity to remind MPs of his own case, it may also be an indication that his sympathies for opposition to the crown were in retreat. Ambition may also have been at work. On 3 July Secretary-of-state Edward Nicholas wrote that (in a transparent bid for cash and support) the king had sought to make many peers, naming Thynne first, but that ‘their market is marred by Parliament, who intend to pass an act or order that no honours or dignities shall be sold’.50SP16/482, f. 18. Disappointment in this may have encouraged resentment.

More than three months after Whistler’s report, Thynne’s next appearance in the Journal was on another delegation to attend the king, this time at Hampton Court with the Grand Remonstrance.51CJ ii. 327a. In a party which included several future royalists, he may have been among those who hoped for a speedy resolution of grievances and end to confrontation. If this was the case, disillusionment and disempowerment followed swiftly; there were certainly no more nominations to committees or recorded activity in the chamber. On 15 February 1642, following a motion by Whistler, who was evidently still involved in the litigation, Sir James was given leave to go into the country to muster documents in his case.52PJ i. 385; CJ ii. 433a. Granted leave again on 2 July, he perhaps went straight to Wiltshire to implement the commission of array given him by the king.53CJ ii. 648b; Northants. RO, FH133.

Summoned on 12 November to be brought in custody to Westminster, he failed to appear.54CJ ii. 845b. Information was laid against him, but on 16 January 1643, perhaps as part of an attempt to placate the earl of Holland, whose loyalties to Parliament were beginning to waver, Pym and others in the Rich-Devereux circle argued successfully for a respite.55Harl. 164, f. 276a. It was only temporary, however. By 15 February a majority had evidently concluded that Thynne’s defection was permanent: on that day a resolution disabled him from sitting on the ground of contempt in not answering the summons.56CJ ii. 966a.

Evidence of Thynne’s involvement in the early stages of the war is lacking, but against the possible reluctance of Holland’s son-in-law to have engaged wholeheartedly in the royalist cause must be set his probably lengthy military experience, which could have been useful to the king. Notwithstanding the initially contrary loyalties of her father, Lady Thynne threw herself into court life at Oxford. Casting aside her pious upbringing and vaunting her beauty, she scandalised some elderly dons by light-hearted and scantily-clad activities in college quadrangles and captivated the poet and former MP Edmund Waller*, who celebrated in verse ‘My Lady Isabella playing on the lute’.57J. Aubrey, Brief Lives ed. O. Lawson Dick (1949), 186; E. Waller, The Workes (1645), 78. Sir James may have been occupied elsewhere and not joined her until he was called to the Oxford Parliament; he was among those issued with a blank pardon by the king on 30 March 1644 as a consequence of their attendance.58Rushworth, Hist. Collns. v. 559-603; Docquets of Letters Patent ed. Black, 179.

Thereafter Sir James was part of the royalist garrison at Bristol. Accounts from April 1644 indicate expenditure for a company as well as for himself.59Longleat, Thynne pprs. lxiv, ff. 166, 167, 170, 173. In July the Committee for Advance of Money assessed him as liable to pay £5,000 as a delinquent.60CCAM 433. By early November he was seen to be in conflict with his commander, when he and others defied Prince Rupert’s call to defend outlying forts.61Lttr. Bks. of Sir Samuel Luke, 76. Later he seems to have taken refuge for a while at Longleat, where he faced confiscation of his goods by local parliamentarian commanders but secured a respite from sequestration thanks to disputes between the county committee and the central sequestration commissioners, and to the abiding difficulty of adjudicating on which Thynne property was rightly his.62Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxvi. 350; CCAM 51, 615, 616; Longleat, Thynne pprs. Bk. 125. The writ for the election of his successor in the county seat was finally issued on 30 December 1645.63CJ iv. 391.

It is possible that he had been drawn into the peace-making schemes of Holland, who had in the interim returned to the parliamentarian fold. However, it was as ‘Colonel Sir James Thynne’ that in April 1646 he was one of the hostages for royalist adherence to the Articles agreed at the surrender of Exeter to General Sir Thomas Fairfax*, indicating (if accurately reported) that he still had, or had again accepted, a military command.64Perfect Diurnall no. 141 (6-13 Apr. 1646), 1134 (E.506.29); no. 142 (13-20 Apr. 1646), 1136 (E.506.32). He petitioned to compound on 30 April, seven months after his half-brother Henry Frederick had entered the same process as a prisoner in Shropshire, causing Parliament to revisit the complicated question of the Thynne inheritance dispute. In June 1648 the House resolved on an apportionment of claims which favoured Sir James, thus making him liable for a larger fine than he might otherwise have received, but at the same time reduced that fine in exchange for an undertaking to provide increased maintenance for the ministers of Frome and Lullington, Somerset; an ordinance for granting pardon and lifting sequestration was also ordered.65CJ iv. 685a; v. 600b, 601a; CCC 86, 910, 913; CCAM 433; LJ ix. 174a, 189b; HMC 6th Rep. 175; Wilts. RO, 413/300. Nonetheless, litigation between the brothers continued and the Committee for Compounding was still addressing their cases in 1654.66CCC 910-14; CCAM 616-7, 996, 1000-1, 1004, 1486; CJ vii. 108b, 109a; C6/21/171; C6/109; 162; C6/113/123; C6/150Pt2/59.

Lady Isabella remained an attendant upon Queen Henrietta Maria in exile, attracting the occasional notice of intelligencers for the combination of her imputed piety and questionable morals. In December 1650, as ‘one of Dr [George] Morley’s elect ladies’ at the Louvre, she was described (with irony) as having ‘converted’ Lord Coventry’s son William to Presbyterianism.67Nicholas Pprs. i. 208, 306. By the mid-1650s divorce proceedings were in train between her and Sir James.68Longleat, Thynne pprs. lxii, ff. 84, 88, 106, 112, 114. He remained in England, coming to the occasional notice of the authorities for attempted tax evasion, but not visibly engaged in subversive activity.69TSP iv. 324; Longleat, Thynne pprs. lxii, ff. 210-14.

Following the Restoration, Thynne was made sheriff of Wiltshire.70Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxvii. 114-20. His office precluded him from standing at the elections for Charles II’s first Parliament, but he was returned for the county at a by-election in 1664. He then received 70 committee nominations in seven sessions, a notable record for a man of his age.71HP Commons 1660-1690. Although also at first an active deputy lieutenant, he increasingly lived either at Canon Row in Westminster or with his brother Sir Thomas Thynne in Richmond.72Longleat, Thynne pprs. x, xi passim; Bk. 174; Add. 32324, ff. 119, 125, 127; BHO, Hearth Tax Westminster. Eventually he obtained partial repayment of his loans to Charles I at Oxford, but his dispute with Henry Frederick went unresolved.73CTB i. 653; ii. 258, 617; Longleat, Thynne pprs. Bk. 174, esp. f. 55.

Thynne died at Richmond on 12 October 1670.74Wilts. Arch. Mag. xxiv. 332-4; xxvii. 114; HMC 7th Rep. 488. His will, begun on 14 October 1669 and completed on 9 October 1670, evinced an ‘unremovable assurance’ that he was among God’s elect and exhibited his persistent animosity towards his half-brother. If the full-blood line of Sir Thomas failed, his estate was to descend to more distant Thynne cousins; ‘in no ways’ was it to be altered to the advantage of the offspring of his father’s second marriage.75PROB11/334/513. Sir Thomas died shortly before Sir James, so the former’s son Thomas Thynne† was his uncle’s heir. He also succeeded Sir James as Member for Wiltshire.76HP Commons 1660-1690.