CHEKE, Sir Thomas (1570-1659), of St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster, and Pyrgo, Havering, Essex.

Earlier generations of the Cheke family had used academic success, marriage into the Cecil family and court office to further themselves. Sir John Cheke† (this MP’s grandfather) had a distinguished academic career, serving as the first regius professor of Greek at Cambridge and as tutor to Edward VI, while his sister, Mary, had been the first wife of William Cecil†, the future Lord Burghley. This kinship with the Cecils allowed Sir John’s son Henry† to enter government service, first as one of the clerks of the privy council and later as secretary to the council of the north at York. Thomas was aged only 16 when his father died in 1586, and his wardship was purchased by Peter Osborne†, the former keeper of the privy purse to Edward VI and the husband of one of Henry Cheke’s cousins.26WARD9/316, f. 64. This seems to have been an amicable arrangement and eight years later Cheke married Osborne’s daughter, Katherine. As both his father and his grandfather had failed to put down strong local roots, the estates Cheke inherited were scattered in counties as various as Yorkshire, Bedfordshire, Somerset and Devon. In time, most of these manors were sold off (although Cheke did retain some land in Somerset) and he instead settled at Westminster. His acquisition of lands in Hertfordshire and Bedfordshire proved to be short-lived.27STAC8/86/23; C66/1660; C2/Jas.I/C10/74; Clutterbuck, Herts. iii. 579. With a knighthood but no court office, Cecil connections of declining usefulness and no male heir, Cheke had achieved little by the time he reached middle age.

It was his second marriage which was to be the making of him. His bride was one of the daughters of the 1st earl of Warwick and Cheke’s decision to settle in Essex, his standing within his adopted county, most of his elections to Parliament and many of his political actions over the next 40 years all followed from this alliance with one of the most powerful families in the kingdom. Time and time again Cheke’s immediate relatives married relatives of the Richs, creating a formidable and undivided family interest. Cheke’s acquisition of estates in Essex in 1621 was largely made possible by the decision of the 2nd earl of Warwick (Sir Robert Rich†) to sell to him several manors in the south west corner of the county, although it was another manor in that part of the county at Pyrgo, bought at about the same time from another of his relatives, Lord Grey of Groby (Henry Grey*, 1st earl of Stamford), which became his principal country seat.28VCH Essex iv. 287-8, vii. 16. (Grey was married to Lady Anne Cecil, a cousin once removed to Cheke.) Sir Thomas was immediately added to the Essex commission of the peace and four years later Warwick took the opportunity to appoint him as one of his deputy lieutenants.29Maynard Lieut. Bk. 93, 369. His interest in colonial ventures, as represented by his investments in the Virginia Company, the Amazon River Company, the Somers Island Company and later the Providence Island Company, was a further direct result of his association with the 2nd earl.30Recs. of the Virginia Co. i. 211, 227; iv. 80; APC, 1619-21, p. 204; Rabb, Enterprise and Empire, 264; Newton, Colonising Activities of the English Puritans, 126; Kupperman, Providence Island, 357.

It was also as the earl’s nominee that Cheke was elected as MP for Harwich in 1621, for Essex in 1624, for Maldon in 1626 and for Colchester in 1628. (This meant that within seven years of his arrival in the county he had sat for all four Essex constituencies.) He did not figure at all prominently in the proceedings of any of those Parliaments. However, his links with Warwick did not always work to his advantage. His dismissal as a deputy lieutenant in 1626 can be seen as a punishment directed at Warwick for his opposition to the 1st duke of Buckingham and by the early 1630s he was being omitted from the commissions for composition of knighthood, from the commissions of the peace and from the commissions of oyer and terminer.31HP Commons 1604-1629. This exclusion from local office ended only after he had been elected to Parliament again in 1640. All the indications are that, like his brother-in-law, Cheke disapproved of much that was done during Charles I’s personal rule, although it cannot be said that he distinguished himself by obviously opposing the policies of the king during that period. It was to Warwick, not the king, that he owed favours in 1640.

As in 1621, Cheke almost certainly owed his election at Harwich in the spring of 1640 to Warwick’s influence. His estates were at the opposite end of the county, giving him no interest of his own in the town. In the event he probably spent much of this Parliament away from Westminster. On 22 April, nine days into the session, John Pym* obtained permission from the Commons for Cheke to be absent for the next ten days ‘upon a sad occasion’.32CJ ii. 8b; Aston’s Diary, 25. By the time that period of leave was over, the Short Parliament was almost at an end.

That autumn Cheke found himself with a choice of seats after being elected both at Bere Alston, a constituency for which he had twice been elected in the 1620s on the nomination of his brother-in-law, Mountjoy Blount, 1st earl of Newport (then Lord Mountjoy), and again at Harwich. On 9 November he informed the Commons that he wished to sit for the latter.33CJ ii. 22b. Over the next 18 months he seems to have given as much support as he could to those critical of the king and his recent policies. Thus, with regard to religion, there are indications that he backed the idea of a preaching ministry, that he was sympathetic to those Protestants who had fallen foul of the recusancy laws, and that he supported the attacks on Archbishop William Laud.34CJ ii. 54b, 139a, 448b. In March 1641 he was among those appointed as commissioners to perform the important task of handing over to the Scots the payments which had been promised to them.35CJ ii. 182b; Harl. 478, f. 99v. As for Ireland, although he did not himself subscribe to the Irish Adventure (an interesting omission in view of his undoubted wealth), he was prominent among those appointed in March 1642 to decide how to allocate the money gathered under the terms of the Act to raise contributions towards the relief of Ireland.36CJ ii. 486a. On some issues, it is true, he had a direct personal interest – the reason he was one of those ordered to handle the case of Lady Lake (21 Apr. 1642) was simply that he was related to her through his son-in-law, Lancelot Lake†.37CJ ii. 535b. Similarly, his inclusion on the committee that heard the petition from the planters of Virginia (18 Dec. 1640) reflected his links with the Virginia Company.38CJ ii. 54a. The leave granted to him in July 1641 to appear before the House of Lords probably arose in connection with the dispute over the FitzWalter barony, which (as we shall see) was a subject of considerable personal importance to him.39CJ ii. 221a; LJ iv. 354a. There is no clear evidence of Cheke acting simply as an agent for Warwick, although he can plausibly be considered as someone who was happy to work with the earl and his allies.

When the political crisis developed into a military one in the summer of 1642, Cheke undoubtedly sided with Parliament. Prevented by age from fighting himself, he instead proved himself useful by encouraging others to do so. In June 1642 he was among those MPs sent to Essex to ensure that the Militia Ordinance was fully implemented.40CJ ii. 605b, 628b; PJ iii. 92. Warwick had taken over as lord lieutenant of Essex the previous March and it was probably at about this time that he reinstated Cheke as one of the deputy lieutenants. However, Cheke would have been able to do more had he not been recalled to London almost immediately to attend the proceedings against the lord mayor of London, Sir Richard Gurney. The accusation Gurney faced was that he had tried to block the London petition organised by John Fowke* against the bishops and the popish lords by threatening with imprisonment of a number of apprentices who had been gathering signatures. As it happened, Cheke had been with Gurney when this incident supposedly occurred and so he appeared before the Lords on 29 July to testify that ‘he did not hear any menace from the lord mayor, nor any word of commitment’.41CJ ii. 694a; LJ v. 248a-b. This distraction over, Cheke was to resume what assistance he could provide to Parliament.

From an early stage of the conflict he seems to have found a role as a sifter through the vast quantities of information flooding into Westminster. On 20 August 1642 he was second on the list of those added to the Committee for Examinations and two months later headed the names of those appointed to its new iteration, which was tasked with examining and, if necessary, imprisoning all ‘suspected persons’.42CJ ii. 728b, 825b; Add. 18777, f. 89. It was presumably as a member of the Committee for Examinations that he was subsequently added to the committee entrusted with deciding the fate of prisoners, after that committee was granted powers to release those prisoners who promised not to serve against Parliament (21 Jan. 1643).43CJ ii. 937a. When a boy carrying a suspicious package was intercepted in Kent, Cheke was the obvious person to send to warn Warwick, who was busy organising the London defences.44CJ ii. 889b.

More directly, Cheke assisted the war effort by giving three horses and £200.45CJ ii. 774b; Add. 18777, f. 5. What can also be deduced is that he had little sympathy with anyone suspected of royalism. There was no real doubt that the former comptroller of the household, Sir Thomas Jermyn*, did support the king, but nothing specific could be proved against him and his imprisonment had gained him much sympathy. In the crucial division on 26 December 1642 that paved the way for Jermyn’s release, Cheke and Henry Marten* acted as tellers for those hard-liners who wanted him kept in custody.46CJ ii. 902b; Harl. 164, f. 274v. It may be significant that it had been Cheke’s fellow MP for Harwich, Sir Harbottle Grimston, who had acted as Jermyn’s spokesman in the debate. More generally, it seems reasonable to assume that Cheke was more enthusiastic than most in his support for firm military action to make the king see sense.

Although never a regular speaker, Cheke’s views may have carried weight behind the scenes as those of a veteran MP sitting in his eighth Parliament. His importance was enhanced by the remarriage on 20 December 1642 of his daughter Essex, widow of Sir Robert Bevill†, to the 2nd earl of Manchester (Edward Montagu†). Manchester, who had only just succeeded to his earldom, was rapidly emerging as the key military figure on the parliamentarian side throughout the whole of East Anglia. That earlier in the year there had been rumours that, as part of the negotiations, Cheke had offered £3,000 to his daughter to augment what she had been left by her late husband indicates that he was especially keen to promote this very prestigious match.47HMC Montagu, 150. The new countess and her husband would later be described as ‘great precisioners’ in matters of religion.48HMC 5th Rep. 146. It may well be that the greatest service Cheke was now able to provide was as a useful link between the earls of Warwick, Manchester and Essex.

Cheke spent 1643 doing his best to promote the war effort in Essex. That February, well in advance of the campaigning season, he and Grimston travelled to Harwich to oversee the repairs to the town’s fortifications.49CJ ii. 975a-b. It is true that the corporation of Harwich later had cause to complain that Cheke had failed to reply to their letters asking that more men be sent to reinforce the town.50HMC 7th Rep. 562. This probably had more to do with his commitments elsewhere. That summer he was one of the five Essex MPs sent to the county to organise the recruitment of troops for the earl of Essex.51CJ iii. 129b. He took this duty seriously, spending the next couple of months in Essex doing just that.52HMC 7th Rep. 556, 559, 560; Eg. 2651, f. 146v. This helps explain why that autumn, on his return to Westminster, he was named to several committees set up to ensure that the armed forces were properly financed. In the case of the request from the earl of Essex in early November 1643 that the pay of the garrison at Newport Pagnall be settled, the matter was particularly referred to him.53CJ iii. 274a, 300a, 309a. Cheke also played a leading part in the investigation into the accusations made by Lord Murray and Sir Henry Mildmay* to the effect that Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton, had made his peace with the king. In this he may have been seen as someone who would be sympathetic to Mildmay, although the investigation soon fizzled out through lack of evidence against Wharton.54CJ iii. 300b, 301a-b, 333a. It was a matter of tact on the part of the Commons in February 1644 that they sent Cheke to inform his relative, Henry Grey, 1st earl of Stamford, that he was not entitled to attend the meetings of Commons’ committees.55CJ iii. 408a. The distant family connection between Cheke and the Greys is no doubt part of the reason why Sir Thomas would take an interest in the growing tensions between Stamford’s son, Lord Grey of Groby (Thomas Grey*), and some of the other Leicestershire parliamentarians.56CJ iii. 372b, 507b, 618a.

Warwick’s appointment as lord high admiral in December 1643 associated Cheke ever more closely with those who were leading the war effort on behalf of Parliament. Whatever some might have thought of aristocratic commanders like Warwick and Manchester, Cheke gave them his full backing. He did this by continuing to support the conduct of the war throughout 1644. It was for precisely that reason that he was among those MPs proposed by the Lords for membership of the Committee of Both Kingdoms in their unsuccessful attempt on 6 May 1644 to expand the size of that committee.57LJ vi. 542b. Cheke was still keen to ensure that money was raised for the army and was probably suspicious of attempts to foment discontent in the ranks.58CJ iii. 434a, 457a, 669b. In being named to the committee set up in November 1644 to investigate the value of those offices which had been granted by Parliament, Cheke was no doubt viewed as someone who would represent the interests of Manchester and Warwick. His son-in-law and brother-in-law were after all among those peers who had most to lose if that investigation gathered momentum. For the same reason, Cheke can be assumed to have been wary of the proposals embodied within the Self-Denying Ordinance, under which Manchester and Warwick were deprived of all their military offices. Cheke played no part in its passage or in that of New Model army proposals, although he was included on the committee created on 10 April 1645 to advance money to those officers who lost their commissions as a result. He also seems to have taken an interest in the subsequent efforts to raise money for the army.59CJ iv. 106a, 146a, 164a. A number of his committee appointments involved the policies of sequestration and composition, which presumably enjoyed his support, and he seems to have backed the moves to lease out the estates confiscated from the bishops.60CJ iv. 178b, 273b, 276a. In November 1645 he was reported to have been favourably disposed towards granting permission to Prince Rupert to leave the country, thereby removing him as a potential influence on the king.61Mems. of Prince Rupert, iii. 209.

From the autumn of 1645 onwards Cheke clearly scaled down his involvement in the day-to-day business of the Commons. He was, after all, by now in his mid-seventies and so could not be expected to be as assiduous as some of his younger colleagues. In the 22 months from October 1645 the grant of leave of absence to him in May 1646 was the only occasion on which his name figured in the Commons’ Journals.62CJ iv. 546a. He was not much more active in Essex, although he did make a rare appearance at the county sub-committee at Romford in October 1646.63Add. 37491, f. 145v. It would, however, be a mistake to assume that he had lost all interest in Parliament, for it is clear that his attention was focused instead on the House of Lords.

The death of his uncle, the 6th earl of Sussex (Sir Edward Radcliffe†), in 1643 had reopened the convoluted question of who was entitled to claim the barony of FitzWalter. Uncertainty over this had first arisen in 1629 with the death of the 5th earl of Sussex and 14th Lord FitzWalter. The barony had then been claimed by Sir Henry Mildmay of Moulsham, Essex, as the 5th earl’s first cousin, albeit through his mother, and a petition to that effect had been presented by him to Parliament in 1641.64LJ iv. 354a; HMC 6th Rep. 65. Cheke, as another great-grandson of the 1st earl and heir to the 6th earl, now set out to challenge that claim. His grounds for doing so were probably very weak, for they seem to have rested mainly on the irrelevant fact that Mildmay was only the son of a second wife and on the disputed contention that the peerage was a barony by tenure linked to land which the Chekes had inherited from the 6th earl.65HMC 7th Rep. 127; CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 589; CP. This did not prevent Sir Thomas pursuing his counter-claim to the House of Lords. A petition to that effect was presented by him on 3 December 1646, but submissions on the case were not heard until May 1647 and the hearings dragged on intermittently until early the following year. No decision was reached.66LJ viii. 588a, 599a, 677b, 680a, ix. 20b, 152b, 176b, 186b, 189a, 228b, 268a, 329b, 477b, 556a, 573a, 616b, 640a; HMC 6th Rep. 65, 187. The abolition of the House of Lords in 1649 made more litigation both impractical and pointless, and the matter was never pursued further during Cheke’s lifetime. All that Cheke had managed to achieve was to have ruled out any chance that Mildmay might have had of taking his seat as a peer in the Long Parliament.

As a further complication, the death of the 6th earl of Sussex allowed his widow, who was thus Cheke’s aunt, to become his sister-in-law by marrying the earl of Warwick. This had reinforced the link between the Riches and the Chekes, a link which had since been further strengthened when Cheke’s daughter, Anne, widow of Richard Rogers*, had married her cousin, Warwick’s son and heir, Robert, Lord Rich*.67CSP Dom. 1645-7, p. 128; HMC 7th Rep. 454.

Even if Cheke was preoccupied with this peerage case for much of 1647, he could not ignore entirely the wider political developments. Whether he was at Westminster for the dramatic events of late July and early August 1647 is not known. What can be deduced is that he was firmly on the side of the Presbyterians who staged the coup. When the Commons came to vote on 19 August on the proposal that all legislation passed between 26 July and 6 August (when the Presbyterians had held sway at Westminster) should be declared void, Cheke and Lionel Copley* acted as the tellers for those who, on this occasion, narrowly defeated the measure.68CJ v. 279a. In doing so, Cheke may have wished to distance himself from his son-in-law, for Manchester, as Speaker of the House of Lords, had been one of those peers who had fled to the army. (The victory was a short-lived one as a second vote the following day approved the bill.) This was essentially Cheke’s swan song as an MP. Apart from a single committee appointment later that year – the committee being the one which was set up to consider the legislation which had already been passed relating to indemnity, maimed soldiers, widows and orphans (21 Dec.) – he disappears from view in the records of the Commons’ proceedings.69CJ v. 396a. Though he was named in a contemporary list of those secluded in the purge of December 1648, it seems unlikely that he was present in the Commons at that time. His parliamentary career was probably already over by then.70A List of the Imprisoned and Secluded Members (1648, 669.f.13.62); Underdown, Pride’s Purge, 370. He did not seek re-admission to the Rump in the months following the king’s execution.

The regicide also marked the end of Cheke’s involvement in local government. No attempt was made to include him on any of the commissions issued for Essex during the 1650s. In any case, his advancing years, as much as his disaffection with the new regime, ruled out an active public role for him. The same was true for his private affairs. By the time he died in 1659 he had already handed control of most of his estates to his eldest son, Robert senior. Moreover, the remaining Somerset estates were granted at some stage during the 1650s to one of his grandsons, Lancelot Lake junior, the son of Lancelot Lake†. The main concern of Cheke’s will was therefore to provide for his senior grandson, Robert’s son, Robert junior. Manchester and Lake senior, as his two sons-in-law, and his friends, Carew Harvey alias Mildmay* and Joachim Matthews*, were named as trustees to protect his grandson’s interests.71PROB11/290/215. (As it happens, Manchester’s kinship with the Chekes was to be reinforced shortly after Cheke’s death when, as the final link in the complex series of intermarriages between their respective families, Manchester married Cheke’s aunt by marriage and former sister-in-law, the dowager countess of Sussex and Warwick.)

The year following his father’s death, Robert Cheke found himself drawn into the renewed dispute over the FitzWalter barony. In 1660 he had to oppose the attempt by Mildmay’s grandson, Henry Mildmay, to persuade the House of Lords to recognise his claim. In the short term, the dispute was again left unresolved, but in 1670 the privy council ruled decisively against Cheke and later that year another of Mildmay’s grandsons, Benjamin, took his seat in the Lords as the 17th Baron FitzWalter.72HMC 7th Rep. 127; HMC 8th Rep. i. 116-17; HP Lords 1660-1715. This helped ensure that Sir Thomas was the last of the Chekes to sit in Parliament and the male line of the family failed in 1713 on the death of his grandson, Edward Cheke.73Morant, Essex i. 61; Lysons, Environs of London, iv. 199.