TOLHURST, Jeremiah (1615-71), of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Northumb.

Tolhurst emerged from the ranks of Sussex’s ‘middling sort of people’. His father styled himself a yeoman and, if his will is any indication, was a man of relatively modest wealth. His bequest of £100 to Jeremiah was the largest he made – most of his other legatees received £10 or less.28E. Suss. RO, Lewes Archdeaconry wills, B5/127. Tolhurst became a tailor, probably serving his apprenticeship in Rye, and married the daughter and heir of a fellow Rye tailor, Robert Soule, who may have been his master.29Cal. Suss. Mar. Lics. (Suss. Rec. Soc. i.), 232. Beyond these meagre facts, nothing is known about his early life or his reasons for siding with Parliament in the civil war.

Tolhurst was a captain by April 1645 in the Kentish regiment of Ralph Weldon*, who had raised this force for the county’s defence the previous year.30Infra, ‘Ralph Weldon’; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 451; R.K.G. Temple, ‘The original officer list of the New Model Army’, HR lix. 59. This regiment was among those incorporated in the New Model army in the spring of 1645, and as an officer in Weldon’s brigade Tolhurst would have seen extensive military service in the west country during the last year of the war.31Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 452-3; Temple, ‘Original officer list’, 59; Having retained his captaincy when Robert Lilburne* replaced Weldon in 1646, he was among those officers who sided with their new colonel in rejecting the parliamentary Presbyterians’ offer of serving in Ireland in 1647.32Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 453-6. When Leveller agitators instigated a mutiny in the regiment late in October, Tolhurst was wounded and briefly imprisoned by the mutineers after he had killed at least one of their number while trying to defend the regimental paychest.33Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 457; Woolrych, Soldiers and Statesmen, 282-3. A few weeks after the mutiny was quelled at Corkbush Field in mid-November, Tolhurst and the rest of Lilburne’s officers published a remonstrance declaring their loyalty to Sir Thomas Fairfax* and the army’s official declarations.34Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 458; A Remonstrance sent from Colonell Lilburne’s Regiment (1647, E.417.15).

In the winter of 1647-8, Lilburne’s regiment was assigned to Sir Arthur Hesilrige*, the governor of Newcastle-upon-Tyne, and marched north to bolster Parliament’s grip upon the four northern counties.35Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 459. Tolhurst had been promoted to major by August 1648, and late in 1651 he replaced Colonel Thomas Fitch* as deputy governor of Carlisle under Hesilrige.36Infra, ‘Thomas Fitch’; SP28/125, pt. 3; TSP iii. 300; Firth and Davies, Regimental Hist. ii. 461. Tolhurst would retain his place as major and deputy governor of Carlisle after the fall of the Rump in 1653 and Hesilrige’s replacement as commander-in-chief of the four northern counties by Charles Howard*. Relations between Tolhurst and Carlisle’s municipal governors were evidently cordial.37Cumb. RO (Carlisle), CA/4/3, unfol. (entries Dec. 1653, May 1655). Nevertheless, the corporation chose to return Fitch for the city in 1654, even though their former deputy governor was by then serving in Scotland. Tolhurst, on the other hand, who never held any command in Scotland, was returned for the Scottish constituency of Dumfries burghs.38OPH xx. 307. Dumfries lay just over the border from Carlisle, and Tolhurst almost certainly owed his election to the power and influence he wielded in the area as commander of its largest garrison.39Supra, ‘Dumfries Burghs’. He was named to only one committee in the first protectoral Parliament – the committee for Scottish affairs – and on 9 January 1655 he reported a bill concerning voting qualifications in Scotland.40CJ vii. 414a.

Although apparently assiduous in his duties as deputy governor of Carlisle, Tolhurst spent much of the 1650s on the other side of the Pennines, chiefly in and around Newcastle, where he was involved both in naval administration (he wrote to Richard Salwey* in April 1653 concerning the pressing of Northumberland seamen) and in the coal trade.41SP28/114, ff. 217, 218; SP46/114, ff. 76, 77; SP46/115, ff. 73, 75; Belvoir, QZ.33, unfol.; CSP Dom. 1652-3, pp. 246, 271; TSP iii. 300-1; Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. Welford, 287-8. By September 1651, he and several other officers were leasing from Sir Arthur Hesilrige a highly profitable colliery in Harraton, County Durham. The former owner of the property, John Hedworth, accused Hesilrige of having sequestered it without colour or pretence of law in order to enrich himself and his confederates, among whom Hedworth numbered his ‘busy and late upstart major’.42Hedworth, The Oppressed Man’s Out-Cry, 3, 7, 12, 14, 15. Tolhurst quickly developed a taste for the profits to be made from coalmining, and by May 1652 he was one of the tenants of another sequestered colliery in County Durham.43Harl. 5176, f. 145; CCC 1805; Royalist Composition Pprs. ed. Welford, 287-8. In 1655, he petitioned Newcastle corporation asking to be made a freeman ‘in respect of some colliery he hath, which by reason of his not being free [he] hath been forced to sell his coals to free Hostmen to his great loss’. The corporation granted his request in the hope that he would prove ‘a fit and useful person for the good of this corporation in many concernments abroad’.44Tyne and Wear Archives, MD.NC/1/2, f. 259. A few days later, he joined Hesilrige in securing membership of the Newcastle Hostmen – the cartel that controlled much of the region’s coal trade.45Recs. of the Co. of Hostmen of Newcastle ed. Dendy, 270; Howell, Newcastle, 215, 313. The company laid aside its ruling against admitting non-residents of Newcastle on the grounds that Tolhurst was ‘a gentleman willing and able to be useful and serviceable to this town and company’.46Tyne and Wear Archives, GU.HO/1/1, pp. 26-7.

Tolhurst was an active member of the Hostmen’s Company and played a leading role in managing its affairs in London during the 1650s and 1660s.47Recs. of the Co. of Hostmen of Newcastle ed. Dendy, 109, 114, 117, 133. He was particularly concerned to ensure that laxity and inconsistencies in the collection of customs duties did not hand a commercial advantage to the Hostmens’ rivals – notably the Sunderland colliery owners and the importers of Scottish coal.48PRO30/24/7/480; CSP Dom. 1667-8, p. 247; CTB ii. 264, 281, 398, 631. Like his fellow Hostman James Clavering*, he was also involved in the company’s efforts to undermine Ralph Gardiner’s campaign against the Hostmen’s monopoly over the Tyne coal trade.49Tyne and Wear Archives, GU.HO/1/1, pp. 40-1, 55, 65, 109, 111, 115. Tolhurst may have had at least some sympathy with Gardiner’s aims, however, for in September 1659 he signed a petition from the Tyne sewers commissioners attacking the restrictive commercial practices of Newcastle corporation.50Tyne and Wear Archives, GU.HO/1/1, p. 65; IC.TS/1, pp. 2, 4, 5-6, 8, 11-13.

Tolhurst’s involvement in the coal trade seems to have quickened more than just his desire for profit and interest in local politics. Samuel Hartlib made note of Tolhurst in 1655 as ‘a very ingenious mechanical man’ who had invented a perpetual motion machine ‘that did really go till the body of it was broke, though he had observed no rules of art about it … being no scholar… He hath also found out devices for facilitating the works in the mines at Newcastle’. The following year, Tolhurst brought Anthony Pearson – Hesilrige’s former secretary and, from 1653, County Durham’s most prominent Quaker – to Hartlib’s house, where he ‘discoursed of a certain compost to be made out of the most barren earth for an universal compost of enriching all manner of ground’.51Hartlib Pprs. Online, 29/5/14A; 29/5/103B; ‘Anthony Pearson’, Oxford DNB.

In the elections to Richard Cromwell’s* Parliament of 1659, Tolhurst was again returned for Dumfries burghs. He received no committee appointments in this Parliament and made no recorded contribution to debate, and it is far from certain that he ever took his seat. Yet the very fact of his election for a Scottish constituency may be evidence that he supported the protectoral settlement. This would perhaps explain why the restored Rump, on returning Hesilrige to the command of his old regiment in July 1659, demoted Tolhurst from major to captain.52CSP Dom. 1658-9, p. 394. Despite this mark of the Rump’s disfavour, Tolhurst was active as a militia commissioner in response to Sir George Boothe’s* royalist-Presbyterian rising that August.53SP18/220/71, f. 116.

Tolhurst regained his former rank as major following General George Monck’s* invasion of 1659-60 and late in February, after the re-admission to the House of the secluded Members, declared his willingness to serve the Long Parliament against ‘Anabaptists, Quakers and Independents’, although he professed a ‘special respect’ for some of ‘that party’.54HMC Leyborne-Popham, 165. Like the royalists, Monck judged him ‘not much enamoured’ of the now defunct commonwealth and in about March appointed him governor of Newcastle.55TSP vii. 861. In the elections to the 1660 Convention, Tolhurst was returned for Carlisle, where he probably enjoyed the support of Howard, the town’s governor. In fact it is possible that Tolhurst was still serving as Howard’s deputy there. He was listed by Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton as a likely supporter of a Presbyterian church settlement, and, in debate, he spoke against exempting his old patron Hesilrige from the Act of Indemnity.56OPH xxii. 444; G.F.T. Jones, ‘The composition and leadership of the Presbyterian party in the Convention’, EHR lxxix. 335.

Tolhurst fared reasonably well at the Restoration. Although he lost his offices in the army and his place on the Cumberland and Northumberland benches, he was appointed a sub-commissioner of excise for Cumberland and Westmorland and was employed at Newcastle in customs administration.57PRO30/24/7/480; CTB i. 178, 467; ii. 264, 281, 398, 631; CSP Dom. 1663-4, p. 649; HP Commons 1660-1690, ‘Jeremiah Tolhurst’. He continued to represent the interests of the town’s Hostmen, and to that end he cultivated the patronage of Sir Anthony Ashley Cooper*.58PRO30/24/7/480. He also kept on good terms with his old acquaintance from the Cromwellian era, Samuel Pepys†.59Pepys’s Diary, iv. 10.

At some point in the late 1660s or early 1670s, Tolhurst emigrated to the West Indies, probably in some official capacity, for it was reported in August 1671 that he had sent for a younger brother of the under-secretary of state Joseph Williamson† to serve as his secretary.60CSP Col. 1669-74, p. 252. Ashley Cooper regretted Tolhurst’s decision to settle in Jamaica, regarding him as the ideal man to help oversee a new colony in Florida.61F.G. Brown, The First Earl of Shaftesbury (New York, 1933), 165. Tolhurst died in Jamaica in about October 1671.62CSP Col. 1669-74, p. 264. No will is recorded and his exact place of burial is unknown. He was the first and last of his line to sit in Parliament.