WENMAN, Sir Thomas (c.1596-1665), of Thame Park, Oxon. and Twyford, Bucks.

Wenman has to be distinguished from his uncle, who lived in Ireland and was certainly dead before 1640. CPR Ire. Chas. I, 330, 393; Browne Willis, 329. Though seated in Oxfordshire and Buckinghamshire, he was returned to four of the five parliaments of the 1620s for the Northamptonshire borough of Brackley, where his family had acquired the Tithe House. Baker, Northants. i. 574. In the remaining Parliament, that of 1626, he served as knight of the shire for Oxfordshire in place of his father.

Despite the regularity with which he secured election, he left little trace in the records of Parliament. On 1 May 1621 he urged that the papers of the Catholic lawyer Edward Floyd should be examined after he had been whipped, trusting to ‘find cause to hang him’. CD 1621, iii. 125; CJ, i. 601b. One week later, in a committee of the whole House, he may have been the ‘Sir Thomas Heyman’ who urged the recall of the Speaker so that Sir Charles Morrison* and Clement Coke* might give evidence at the bar about their unseemly public quarrel. CD 1621, iii. 202 He made no impression on the records of either the 1624 or 1625 assemblies, and in 1626 was named to only one committee, to consider a bill for sheriffs’ accounts (14 March). Procs. 1626, ii. 281. In the third Caroline Parliament the ‘Sir Edward Wenman’ whose servant was granted privilege on 20 Feb. 1629 was either Wenman or his kinsman Sir Francis Wenman*. CJ, i. 931b.

Wenman succeeded his father shortly before the outbreak of the Civil War, during which he was a moderate parliamentarian and a supporter of peace. M.F. Keeler, Long Parl. 383. Having made his will on 6 Jan. 1665, he died three weeks later and was buried in the family vault at Twyford. PROB 11/316, ff. 147-148v; VCH Bucks. iv. 259.