A Welsh family, claiming descent from a thirteenth-century chieftain of Penllyn commote in the upper Dee valley, the Myddeltons adopted their English surname a century later on the occasion of a marriage to a Shropshire heiress. The MP’s grandfather and father, both younger sons, served as constables of Denbigh castle, a post the family was to hold throughout the early modern period.
Myddelton’s return to England may have been motivated as much by personal as political considerations, as in February 1584 he married a daughter of the wealthy London Skinner, Richard Saltonstall†, whose wife was related to his former master. The two men were business partners by 1583, and Myddelton undoubtedly found the support of a wealthy backer invaluable during his early years in trade. Even after his wife died in 1586, Myddelton retained links with Saltonstall, who gave him a lump sum of £400 to invest on behalf of his two infant sons. Saltonstall probably also took a hand in introducing Myddelton to his second wife, whose first husband hailed from Ockendon, Essex, where Saltonstall had his country estate.
Myddelton’s business interests multiplied rapidly during the war with Spain: he exported cloth to Germany in conjunction with his brother Robert* and the latter’s partner Robert Bateman*, importing haberdashery and dyestuffs in return; he also traded illicitly with Spain via a factor at Hamburg. He invested in numerous (mostly successful) privateering ventures in 1588-95 and 1602, and joined with both his brother Robert and Bateman to invest £500 at the foundation of the East India Company in 1599.
The risks involved in both foreign trade and privateering encouraged Myddelton to seek other forms of investment. From 1590 he ran a cattle-fattening business in the Lincolnshire Fens, and in 1596 he bought a 20 per cent share of a copper works at Neath, Glamorgan, near which he began exploring for ore. When that venture failed to yield a profit he sold up and invested in a brass foundry at Lambeth, Surrey, which is unlikely to have prospered. This did not prevent him from exploring for other mineral deposits in Caernarvonshire in 1607.
Commercial and administrative interests left Myddelton with little time to devote to his native Wales. His estates within the principality were managed first by one of his brothers and then by his son, Sir Thomas Myddelton II*, and he probably spent more time on another property at Stansted, in Essex. His return as knight of the shire for Merioneth in 1597 was engineered by a local faction, three of whose members he nominated for the shrievalty in 1602. He was custos rotulorum of the shire for nearly 20 years, but he can rarely have discharged the office in person, and he relinquished it to William Salesbury* in 1617.
Myddelton avoided any serious involvement in London’s politics under Elizabeth, but his decision to concentrate on banking from 1603 allowed him more time to devote to non-commercial activities. Chosen as alderman of Queenhithe Ward in May 1603, he attempted to decline the honour, but the corporation refused to allow him to pay a fine to resign the office, employing their traditional method of persuasion, a spell in Newgate gaol. Notwithstanding a plea from the new king for his release, he soon capitulated, whereupon he was also elected one of the City’s two sheriffs for the coming year, and made an assistant of the Grocers’ Company.
Myddelton’s wealth and position as an alderman led to his involvement in the royal finances. He lent £3,000 to the Crown in 1608, and a similar sum in 1617, while in 1609 he was included in one of the syndicates organized by Arthur Ingram* to purchase Crown chantry lands and rectories. During 1611-12 he and Sir Thomas Vavasour* briefly leased the Yorkshire alnage receipts from the 3rd duke of Lennox.
As mayor, Myddelton focused on social and moral issues. He set professional beggars to work in the Bridewell, of which he was appointed president, opposed a new patent to keep a register of vagrants and lodgers in London and Westminster, mounted an undercover investigation of brothels, called for measures to curb the handling of stolen goods, and reduced the strength and amount of beer brewed within the metropolis. A report drawn up towards the end of his mayoralty noted his endeavours ‘to keep the Sabbath day holy, for which he hath been much maligned’.
As he gained seniority on the aldermanic bench, Myddelton became well placed to influence the City’s parliamentary elections. During his mayoralty in 1614 he secured the return of his brother Robert Myddelton (d.1616) as one of the London burgesses, and over the course of the next four parliaments his business partner Robert Bateman also represented London. Myddelton himself appeared before the Lords in 1621 as a witness to the bribes given to lord chancellor St. Alban (Sir Francis Bacon*) by the Grocers’ Company during the Apothecaries’ attempts to secede and form their own guild.
Although not an important figure within the Commons, Myddelton played an active role in the sessions to which he was returned. His financial acumen led to his appointment as one of the eight treasurers of the 1624 subsidies (24 Apr.), despite his plea to be spared ‘because of his special occasions’. At the beginning of the 1625 Parliament he delivered to the Commons the account for the £251,000 raised by this means, noting that sums allowed to various counties for coat and conduct money had been allowed without due authority because the treasurers feared they ‘could not withhold the money but with much clamour’. He was also an obvious choice for the committee appointed to investigate the shortcomings of the supplies these subsidies had provided for Count Mansfeld’s disastrous 1624-5 expedition to the Low Countries (22 Mar. 1626).
As a knight of the shire, Myddelton was required to list all recusants holding local office in London on 27 Apr. 1624. Although there were none, he clearly endorsed the project with enthusiasm, exceeding his brief by offering the House a list of recusants resident in each ward of the City two days later. Although he had long since ceased to trade in cloth, on 30 Apr. 1624, during an investigation into duties imposed on cloth exports, the House deputed him to advise the Merchant Adventurers’ Company ‘how ill this House shall take it if they by any sullenness shall forbear to buy up the white cloths’.
High politics aside, Myddelton was also named to several dozen committees during his sojourn in the Commons. A substantial number of these scrutinized items of metropolitan legislation, such as those for the Charterhouse Hospital (13 Mar. 1624; 11 Feb. 1626), fees of customs officials (24 Mar. 1624), artisan clothworkers (15 Apr. 1624), Feltmakers’ Company (30 Apr. 1624), and the York House land exchange bill (19 May 1624). Three more committees examined the provenance of controversial new impositions on imports (9 Apr. 1624; 18 and 20 Feb. 1626).
Myddelton continued to be named to local commissions until the end of his life, but his level of business and political activity diminished with age, and his only major land purchase during his final years was the acquisition of Arwystli and Cyfeiliog lordships in Montgomeryshire as his share of the Crown land sale of 1628. On this occasion he paid only £1,000 for lands his son was to sell for £4,200 in 1635, but the difference may represent a belated repayment of the £3,000 he had loaned the Crown in 1617.