A Taunton merchant, Pope was described by an adversary in a Chancery suit as ‘a man of very mean estate, and only raised, as it is thought’, by his second marriage. His parentage has not been ascertained, but he was respectable enough to be appointed as overseer or executor of the wills of two close kinsmen in Taunton, Thomas Pope senior and junior, in 1597 and 1602. The latter bequeathed him five burgages in the town, at least some of which were commercial properties.
Pope was elected to sit for Taunton in the 1621 Parliament, but contributed little to its proceedings. On 19 Apr. he described how his stepson had been obliged to bribe Sir John Bennet* in order to obtain an administration grant from the Prerogative Court of Canterbury. He expressed concern on 7 May that if the Merchant Staplers were allowed greater privileges in the cloth export trade, their Company should not be obliged to admit ‘every mean person’. Appointed five days later to scrutinize the bill to improve the manufacture of perpetuanas, he was also nominated to the legislative committee concerned with tenants’ privileges on two Gloucestershire manors (20 April).
Pope was already ill when he drew up his will on 22 June 1623. He left £3 to the poor of Taunton, and ordered a funeral ‘in decent manner without any pomp’, with only his widow and his daughter Joan in mourning. The overseers were his stepson Thomas Moore and Roger Prowse*. The will was proved in the following December by his daughter. No other member of the family sat in Parliament.