TOMKINS, Thomas (c.1605-74), of Garnstone, Weobley and Monnington-on-Wye, Herefs.

Both Tomkins brothers were returned for Weobley to the first Parliament of 1640, but it is impossible to distinguish one from the other in assessing their slight contribution to that body. One or other of them was interested in a bill to exempt the four English border counties from the jurisdiction of the council in the marches of Wales, a popular cause among the gentry of the region.13Aston’s Diary, 78, 87. Tomkins inherited the estate of his brother, who died little more than a month after the opening of the Long Parliament.14PROB11/185/371. He also inherited William Tomkins’s seat, a borough which had only been re-enfranchised in 1628 through the efforts of their father. Elected on 15 January 1641 by 15 men of Weobley, Tomkins had taken his seat by the 29th of that month. Against the background of investigations into the alleged misdeeds of Thomas Wentworth†, 1st earl of Strafford, Tomkins was named to the committee on Strafford’s business, but only to enquire into rumours of military commissions in the marches of Wales to known Catholics of the stamp of Henry Somerset, 5th earl of Worcester.15CJ ii. 75b. A week later (5 Feb.), he was added to another committee on finding out further suspects in Strafford’s plotting. Evidently entering fully into the climate for impeaching the enemies of the state, Tomkins moved that judges facing impeachment should not go on circuit (17 Feb.), but was put in his place by Speaker William Lenthall, who pointed out that it had already been decided they should not go.16CJ ii. 79b; Procs. LP ii. 470. He made a bungled and pedantic intervention the following day, the effect of which was to prevent visits to Strafford in the Tower, but seems not to have carried the House with him.17Procs. LP i. 164; D’Ewes (N), 374.

Tomkins seems to have been given to repeating without reflection titbits of news he had picked up. On 23 February 1641, when Bishop Roger Mainwaring’s impeachment was referred to a committee, Tomkins declared that the bishop had for three months gone from alehouse to alehouse in disguise, presumably meaning that he had been instigating a subversive plot of some kind. In May, when facets of the army plots were trickling out in lurid detail, Tomkins told the House that many papists had recently been descending on the capital, and he moved that all cellars and hiding places near the palace of Westminster should be searched (10 May). He was named to the committee charged with supervising this operation.18Procs. LP iv. 295, 303; CJ ii. 141a. He brought into question the fitness of John Egerton†, 1st earl of Bridgewater to continue as lord lieutenant of Herefordshire, because of his association with the Catholic earl of Worcester.19Procs. LP iv. 274-5. On 12 May, John Pym read to the House an intercepted letter to Lady Shelley, which contained blood-curdling allusions to slaying the many-headed beast and destroying the hellish brood. These were naturally taken to imply a popish plot in the making; Tomkins and four other Members were despatched to search the lady’s house in pursuit of more evidence.20Procs. LP iv. 339-40, 348; CJ ii. 144a. On 20 May, Tomkins promised to reveal to the House a treason as enormous as any ever disclosed, but then, Lear-like, had to admit that what it was yet he knew not. His absurd outburst reduced the House to laughter, and the Speaker revealed that the matter to which he was alluding was already before a committee.21Procs. LP iv. 486-7, 493.

Apart from his enthusiastic if often ill-judged contributions to rooting out popery, in 1641 Tomkins sat on a committee for Emmanuel College, Cambridge, a notably puritan foundation, one to prevent the clergy from holding temporal office, and one for a bill to enable the gospel to be better preached.22CJ ii. 95a, 99a, 119a. These appointments suggest that Tomkins supported efforts at building a crusading English Protestantism. He seemed to be happy with the pace of progress towards a treaty with the Covenanted Scots, acting as a teller in a division against those like Denzil Holles, who sought to speed things up.23CJ ii. 118a; Procs. LP iii. 478, 481. Tomkins took the Protestation on 3 May, and at the end of the that month served on the committee to establish the hospital in Hereford endowed by the father of Fitzwilliam Coningsby*. On 9 June, he acted on behalf of John Mordaunt, 1st earl of Peterborough, who wanted leave to examine elderly witnesses in a suit of his pending in the court of wards; again, Tomkins misread the mood of the House and earned the disapproval of his colleagues for what some saw as an abuse of privilege.24CJ ii. 132b, 160a; Procs. LP v. 64. Unabashed, the following day he moved against a Member who had been absent from the House for two months, demanding a new writ. When it was discovered he meant Sir Thomas Jermyn, an elderly courtier whose son was implicated in the army plot, no-one supported him.25Procs. LP v. 95-7.

Tomkins continued to take a hard line on the king’s enemies during June 1641. He queried whether the king would intervene on a clause in the proposed act of oblivion to exclude named persons from its provisions, and wanted the queen mother, as well as the royal household’s attendant priests, sent abroad. Here again he was out of step with the majority, who rejected his motion.26Procs. LP v. 237, 316. He was able to pursue an enthusiasm from the previous Parliament, on a committee to steer through a bill exempting the English shires from the council in the marches (29 June), and was named to a bill against the financial impositions of sheriffs. On 12 July he was given leave because of his wife’s illness, and thereafter made fewer appearances in the House.27CJ ii. 191b, 200a, 207b; Procs. LP v. 604. With Sir Robert Harley he was there at the end of August to consider a number of petitions, but no further mention of him in the Journal is made until 6 November, when rather oddly in someone of his former zeal against popery, he requested that a Catholic psalter be returned to a woman from whom it had been seized.28CJ ii. 276a, 279b; D’Ewes (C), 96n. Six weeks passed before Tomkins made any further impression on the Commons. Then, on 23 December, it was his motion that led to a committee being appointed to enquire in whose hands the Tower of London had been placed. Tomkins had heard that a brutal mercenary, Sir Thomas Lunsford, had been appointed as governor by the king.29CJ ii. 354a; D’Ewes (C), 336.

On 15 January 1642, Tomkins spoke in the debate following John Wylde’s report on the alleged delinquency of the attorney-general, Sir Edward Herbert (Edward Herbert I*).30PJ i. 82 Later that month, Tomkins moved for the dismissal of Robert Sidney†, 2nd earl of Leicester, as lord lieutenant of Ireland. Sidney had proved inadequate to the task of subduing Ireland, which had been in rebellion since October 1641. Tomkins’s criticism focussed on the delays in fitting out an expeditionary force.31PJ i. 154, 156. An incident on 31 January 1642 may throw some light on Tomkins’s behaviour and frame of mind. His unsuccessful attack on Sir Thomas Jermyn, in which he reported the privy councillor’s absence from his place near the Speaker’s chair, may have derived from his own habit of sitting there. A member with the initials T.T. was complained of for the practice of occupying great men’s places in the House. Apparently, when the question was put about the militia on the 31st, that Member

standing near the Speaker’s chair, cried ‘Baw!’ to the great terror and affrightment of the Speaker, and of the Members of the House of Commons, and contrary to his duty and the trust reposed in him by the country.32PJ i. 229.

It was either Tomkins or the future Navy Committee stalwart, Thomas Toll, and the touch of hysteria seems more closely to fit the erratic Tomkins. Nothing seems to have come of the bizarre episode, however. He was influential enough to move successfully that the Committee for Irish Affairs* should consider seizing the estate in England of the Catholic earl of Antrim, who had married the widow of George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham.33PJ i. 291. The same day (7 Feb.), he continued to express doubts about the governorship of the Tower, now complaining of the latest royal appointment, Sir John Byron.34PJ i. 292.

Tomkins was named only to one more committee, again in the company of Harley, and was then given leave (26 Feb. 1642). This time, his mother was apparently dying.35CJ ii. 423b, 458a; PJ i. 476-77. He was back in the House by 10 June, when he offered ‘two horses freely at his own charge’ for the cause of Parliament.36PJ iii. 221. On the 23rd, he spoke in the interests of peace after news of the treaty between Ulick Bourke, 5th earl of Clanricarde and 2nd earl of St Albans and the town of Galway had been given to the House; he spoke in effect against John Pym’s uncompromising denunciation of the treaty. This is the first positive evidence for Tomkins’s growing detachment from the ‘fiery spirits’, apart from the negative evidence suggested by his long absences and withdrawal from the committee business of the House. His reluctance in 1642 to go along with the hard line of Pym and others is also visible in his unwillingness on 15 July to confirm the Parliament’s military commission to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex before the king had had every opportunity to respond to news of it.37PJ iii. 120, 220. His interventions on the floor of the House seem to have attracted the attention of the diarists, but his activity in committee work had on the whole been meagre, which, with the ridiculous incidents he was involved in, may suggest that his judgment was not trusted by his colleagues.

Thereafter, Tomkins withdrew to Herefordshire. There is nothing to suggest that he took a commission in the king’s army, but he was named as a royalist commissioner of array in the second list of appointments in his county, in January 1643.38Northants. RO, FH133, unfol. He attended the Oxford Parliament, and signed the letter to the earl of Essex, calling on him to sue for peace. This triggered his disablement from the Westminster Parliament, on 22 January 1644, for deserting the House and joining the king’s supporters.39CJ iii. 374a. After the collapse of the royalist cause in Herefordshire, Tomkins requested to be allowed to compound for his delinquency (29 Nov. 1645). He claimed never to have been in arms, and a contributor to the royalist levies only by force majeure. Tomkins mobilised the support of the mayor of Hereford and other inhabitants of his county for his position, but nevertheless was consigned to prison in London. He was brought to the bar of the Commons (7 Jan. 1646) and then returned to gaol at the Compter, Southwark. Tomkins took the Covenant, and in May his fine was set at £2,110, one third of his estate. Thereafter, on his release, he seems to have kept aloof from plotting, and in 1650 was treated favourably by the commissioners for compounding. His fine was reduced to £1,443 in January 1651.40CJ iv. 396a, 398b, 557a; CCC 1035-7.

Tomkins’ debts were such in the 1650s that he had to sell Garnstone, and his belated marriage settlement, nine years after he had married his second wife, Lucy, daughter of Sir William Uvedale*, may have been part of the same retrenchment operation.41Herefs. RO, L57/bdle. 109. Even so, he retained enough of an interest at Weobley to challenge his cousin Herbert Perrott* in the elections for the Convention (he was returned with Perrott in a by-election after the original contest was declared void). As a cavalier in the Cavalier Parliament, he spoke to try to exempt Sir Arthur Hesilrige* from the indemnity bill. His virulent anti-popery of 1641-2 was now forgotten, but his character seems not to have improved. For Samuel Pepys†, he was a Member ‘that makes many mad motions’, and Edward Hyde*, 1st earl of Clarendon thought him ‘a man of very contemptible parts and worse manners’.42Pepys’s Diary, iv. 170; Clarendon, Life, iii. 301; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Thomas Tomkyns’. He died on 31 December 1674, and none of his family ever sat in Parliament again.