WHITMORE, Thomas I (1612-53), of Apley Park, Stockton, Salop.

The Whitmores were freeholders at Claverley, five miles east of Bridgnorth, as early as 1377, but it was Thomas Whitmore’s grandfather, William Whitmore, a London haberdasher, who founded the fortunes of the family and bought Apley Park, in the area where the Whitmores had for so long been resident. Whitmore’s father, who was knighted in 1621 and sat for Bridgnorth in three Parliaments in the 1620s, was through the reign of James I a contractor for crown lands. In partnership with John Eldred and the exchequer auditor Sir Edmund Sawyer†, Sir William Whitmore bought estates in various parts of the country, including London, Yorkshire, Berkshire and Hertfordshire.10VCH Berks. iii. 171, VCH Yorks. E. Riding, vii. 11, 18, 33, 44, 53, 61-2, 67, 79, 88, 121, 138, 178, 314, 364; Survey of London, xxix, 27; VCH Durham, iii. 250, 301; VCH Hants, v. 213; VCH Herts. ii. 160, 227; iii. 193, 202; VCH Beds. iii. 331; VCH Northants. v. 67, 159, 187, 264, 355, 393. Many of these were speculative purchases, however, and the estates were sometimes sold on.11VCH Worcs. iii. 464; VCH Mdx. x. 83; NLW, Badminton Manorial 2446, no. 21; Carreglwyd 1154; Estates of the English Crown, 1558-1640 ed. R. Hoyle (Cambridge, 1992), 23, 25, 258. Sir William threw open his land speculating syndicate to members of his family. Among those whose names are often associated with his in title deeds are members of the Bond family of London, his mother’s kin, and his own brother, Sir George Whitmore, lord mayor of London in 1631-2, proprietor of Balmes, in Hoxton.12Coventry Docquets, 572, 583, 635, 719. Sir William Whitmore’s sister married Sir William Craven (d. 1618), an immensely wealthy financier of James I’s government. Thomas Whitmore’s first cousin was thus William, 1st earl of Craven, who inherited a vast estate in 1624, and was among the dozen richest peers in England.13‘William Craven, earl of Craven’, Oxford DNB. Craven’s estates were extensive in Shropshire, so that the Craven-Whitmore bloc was a significant presence in that county. Sir William Whitmore was an executor and beneficiary under the terms of the will of Lady Elizabeth Craven, who died in 1624.14PROB11/143/806. Another family link by marriage was with the Herberts of Chirbury; in 1622 the Whitmores were trustees of the estates entailed by the marriage of Percy Herbert and Elizabeth Craven.15NLW, Powis Castle D1/1/6.

Thomas Whitmore graduated from Oxford apparently little more than a year after matriculating at Trinity College. When he was admitted to the Middle Temple in May 1630, he was bound not with his kinsman Thomas Whitmore II* of Ludstone, a figure of some consequence at that inn, but with John Verney and John Middlemore.16MTR ii. 766. In 1634, both the Thomas Whitmores took as pupil one of the Weld family, kin of Thomas Whitmore I’s mother, and the apogee of Whitmore I’s time at the Middle Temple came in 1639, when he was called to the bar. He is unlikely to have contemplated a serious legal career. In 1635 he married the daughter of Sir William Acton, only daughter and heiress of a London alderman and Merchant Taylor, a match which guaranteed Whitmore an inheritance to be added to his already very substantial patrimony. While Acton and Sir William Whitmore still lived, however, Thomas Whitmore enjoyed only the standing of an heir. He joined with his father in property transactions in the late 1630s, such as the sale of land in Bringwood Chase, Herefordshire, to Sampson Eure*, but he was named to no local commissions out of chancery or to the commission of the peace.17Herefs. RO, F76/II/352.

Whitmore fined off readings at the Middle Temple regularly in 1640 and 1641, but by this time he had taken his father’s former seat at Bridgnorth, where he was elected on the family’s considerable interest in the borough. Both he and his fellow burgess, Edward Acton, were described on the return as heirs to their fathers, doubtless reflecting the perception of the corporation that they were representatives of important gentry patron families.18Salop Archives, BB/B/6/4/1/1. Whitmore played no discernible role in the Short Parliament of 1640, but this was no obstacle to his being returned again to Westminster on 12 October to the second Parliament of that year. He sat on his first committee on 21 December, on the oppressions of customs officers and on monopolies of a range of manufactured goods. Not until had three months had elapsed was he named to another committee (18 Mar.), this time to draft a bill to grant tonnage and poundage to the king so that the navy could be supplied. The following day, Whitmore was included in a committee for a bill on usury.19CJ ii. 55a, 107a, 108a. All these committees were on topics connected with trade and industry, suggesting perhaps that Whitmore was responding to the concerns of Bridgnorth corporation.

On 27 May, later than the majority of Members, Whitmore and Edward Acton took the Protestation.20CJ ii. 159b. The following month, at Whitehall, Whitmore was both knighted and received a baronetcy on the same day. Why he was honoured in this way is not known for certain, but it may have been intended as an encouragement to a family which had long been associated with financial help to the crown. As recently as the summer of 1640, Whitmore’s father had been one of a customs farming syndicate that had lent the crown £250,000.21Brenner, Merchants and Revolution, 311. His elevation certainly had nothing to do with his work in Parliament. No mention of Whitmore can be traced in the Journal until March 1642, when he was named to a committee for reducing the rebels in Ireland. Like his earlier committee appointments, this one may have been a response to anxieties felt in Bridgnorth. On 9 November 1641, a special night-long vigil had been kept in expectation of ‘a sudden insurrection and rising of the papists that night in this kingdom’, to which the Irish revolt provided a lurid backdrop.22CJ ii. 468b; Salop Archives, BB/D/1/2/1/51. On 30 April 1642, with either Richard Browne I or Samuel Browne, Whitmore was added to a committee on church reform. His father had been a supporter of the feoffees for impropriations, so it is possible that this was an extension of a family interest in improving the maintenance of the clergy, without necessarily implying a puritan outlook on the Whitmores’ part.23CJ ii. 549b; PC2/45 p. 383; CSP Dom. 1633-4, p. 287; E.W. Kirby, ‘The Lay Feoffees: a Study in Militant Puritanism’, Jnl. Mod. Hist. xiv. 10.

On 16 July, Whitmore was given leave to go the country. He never returned to Westminster, and on the outbreak of war committed himself to the king’s cause. Once back in Shropshire, he signed the ‘Ingagement and Resolution’ of the leading county gentry there, by which they undertook to raise by mid-December a regiment of dragoons under Sir Vincent Corbett. Their purpose was proclaimed to be the defence of their ‘fortunes and families’.24The Ingagement and Resolution (Oxford, 1642). Whitmore never took a military command, but was supportive of the Shropshire regiment as a committeeman.25Salop Archives, 5460/8/2/2. His father turned over Apley Park to the royalists as a garrison. Sir Thomas Whitmore made his way to Oxford, and was there as the royalist Parliament convened. On 27 January 1644, he signed the letter to Robert Devereux, 3rd earl of Essex suing for peace.26The Names of the Lords and Commons Assembled (1646), 2; A Copy of a Letter from the Members (1644), 5 (E.32.3). The only effect of this was to draw to the attention of the Westminster Parliament his political position, and on 5 February he and other Shropshire Members were disabled from sitting for having joined the king’s quarters.27CJ iii. 389b. The following July, Whitmore’s estate was assessed by the Committee for Advance of Money* to be worth £2,500.28CCAM 435. The assessment must have been based on educated guesswork, since Whitmore had not yet inherited, and the county was not yet under parliamentarian authority.

By February 1645, the royalist garrisons in Shropshire had become vulnerable to raids by forces under the supervision of the parliamentarian county committee. In one such attack that month, both Thomas Whitmore and his father were at Apley Park, and were taken prisoner there by a troop of Sir William Brereton*, and taken subsequently to Wem, the committee headquarters.29J. Vicars, Magnalia Dei Anglicana (1646), 115 (E.348.1). The committee leaders, Humphrey Mackworth I*, Robert Clive* and Robert Charlton*, regarded Whitmore junior as a fine catch, who could be released in return for a substantial ransom that would defray some of the maintenance costs of the Shropshire force.30HMC Portland, i. 236. Whitmore’s fate as an object of ransom echoed in ironical fashion his own earlier enthusiasm for a prisoner exchange involving the captured parliamentarian, Samuel More*.31Salop Archives, 5460/8/2/2. Nothing came of the ransom proposal, because the parliamentarians were unable to retain Apley Park, but Whitmore later claimed to have paid the committee £500.32Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. ser. 4, iv. 270. For the rest of his life, Whitmore was subject to the attention of the parliamentarian bureaucracy for penal taxation. In September 1646, in London, he submitted to the Committee for Compounding, after having taken the Covenant and the Negative Oath. He returned to Shrewsbury, as the Shropshire committee commissioned an inventory of his estate, and was detained there.33Trans. Salop Arch. Soc. ser. 2, vi. 63. In January 1649, Whitmore had still not made his composition, but the delay must have owed something to the survival of Sir William Whitmore until December 1648. Until then, the plums of the Whitmore estate were not legally Sir Thomas Whitmore’s, but soon after his father’s death he was fined £5315 5s.34CCC 1484. He managed to avoid sequestration, but his case was complicated by debts he inherited from his father. In May 1650 he was allowed to pay a reduced fine of £5,000 because houses he owned in Bridgnorth had been destroyed by fire during the civil war, but his case dragged on before both the Compounding Commissioners and the Committee for Advance of Money until December 1652, when it was acknowledged that he had indeed paid off his fiscal liabilities.35CCC 1142, 1484; CCAM 69, 278, 298, 435, 756, 757.

Thereafter, Whitmore must have lived in retirement at Apley Park. In May 1651, he attended the christening in London of Charles Kemys†, son of Sir Charles Kemys, a royalist who had defended Pembroke Castle until it fell to Oliver Cromwell* in 1648, and who had not long returned from exile. The third marriage of Kemys senior had been to a daughter of Sir George Whitmore, Sir Thomas Whitmore’s uncle.36Lysons, Environs of London, ii. 319; G.T. Clark, Limbus Patrum Morganiae et Glamorganiae (1888), 414. The event was an indication of the survival of royalist social circles in private life after the king’s death. Sir William Whitmore died in December 1648, leaving an estate that remained unadministered until 1659. In 1650, Lady Elizabeth Whitmore had inherited the estates of her father, Sir William Acton, despite his considering himself ‘much impoverished by the troubles of these times’, and in November 1652 Whitmore drew up his own will.37Salop Archives, 2089/9/2/3-4; PROB11/237/374. Despite the continuing attentions of the agents for penal taxation and the inauspicious times for social gatherings by royalist gentry, he was able to augment portions to four of his children to £5,000 each, and to hope that his heir would use the furniture at Apley Park ‘for the better entertaining of his mother and friends’.38PROB11/237/374. Whitmore died in May 1653 and was buried in Stockton church. The next generation of the Whitmores continued to seek parliamentary seats. Sir Thomas’s son-in-law, Sir Francis Lawley*, sat in three Parliaments, the first being Richard Cromwell’s* assembly; his eldest son, Sir William Whitmore†, sat in ten from 1660; his second son, Sir Thomas, in four. Bridgnorth remained the core of their political interest.