THOMAS, Edmund (1633-77), of Wenvoe, Glam.

Thomas succeeded his grandfather to the substantial estate at Wenvoe in the autumn of 1638, while still a small child. His widowed mother Jane and her brother Sir Edward Stradling* were granted his wardship in November 1639, but sometime between then and July 1641 Jane married Michael Oldisworth*, former secretary and long-term coadjutor to Philip Herbert*, 4th earl of Pembroke, and Oldisworth replaced Stradling as joint guardian.22Coventry Docquets, 486; Bodl. Add. B.109, f. 18; CJ iv. 525a. The Thomases leased land from the earl and Edmund Thomas senior, Edmund's grandfather, may once have served his predecessor.23PROB11/178/165; PROB11/178/165; C99/34/2. The match and transfer of wardship cemented important south Wales alliances and provided the context which nurtured others in the principality, in Oldisworth’s heartland at Westminster, and beyond, even when civil war induced divided political loyalties.

In August 1649 Edmund was probably at Windsor, hunting in company with Oldisworth and his fellow Rumpers Bulstrode Whitelocke* and Edmund Ludlowe II*; the last married Edmund’s sister Elizabeth about this time.24Whitelocke’s Diary, 245–6. He may then – or previously – have travelled to the Netherlands. In January 1652 Dutch visitor Lodewijck Huygens met him and his mother in London in company with Edmund’s German-born tutor, Georg Horn (or Hornius, 1620-70), a graduate of Leiden who from 1648 was professor of history, politics and geography at the University of Hardervijk in Gelderland.25Huygens: English Journal, 63; Deutsche Biographische Enzyclopädie. The hosts on that occasion were another leading Rumper, Walter Strickland*, and his wife Anne, daughter of Sir Charles Morgan of Monmouthshire (governor of Bergen-op-Zoom at his death in 1643), and previously wife of Lewis Morgan† of Rhiwperra, who had maintained her Dutch links and was deploying them to political effect.26‘Morgan, Sir Charles’, ‘Strickland, Walter’, Oxford DNB; ‘Lewis Morgan’, HP Commons 1604-1629. On 3 February 1652 at the House of Commons’ church, (St) Margaret, Westminster, Edmund Thomas married Anne’s daughter Elizabeth Morgan. The alliance, doubtless engineered by Oldisworth and Strickland with the approval of Philip Herbert*, 5th earl of Pembroke, brought together colleagues in the commonwealth establishment, but also, through the Stradlings and Morgans, involved former royalists.27St Margaret, Westminster, par. reg.

Despite his youth, Thomas soon entered public life. Added in July 1653 to the Glamorgan commission of the peace, he became in February 1654 a member of the Mineral and Battery works, of which Oldisworth was deputy governor under Pembroke.28Justices of the Peace, ed. Phillips, 302; BL Loan 16, pt. 2, f. 110. In July, Thomas followed in the footsteps of Sir Edward Stradling and was elected to Parliament as a knight of the shire for Glamorgan. He was chosen alongside Colonel Philip Jones*, the controversial rising star of county administration who was a protectorate insider. Given the fragility of the parliamentarian hold over the area, Thomas may have been the candidate of those who hoped to express or placate more traditional local interests, including Pembroke’s. Oldisworth, under investigation for his activities as a former member of the royal household, and perhaps sharing with his stepson-in-law Ludlowe a distrust of Oliver Cromwell*, did not sit in any protectorate Parliaments, but may have regarded the placing of his stepson Thomas as retaining a toehold on the national stage.

In the first protectorate Parliament Thomas was nominated to only three committees – to investigate abuses in printing (22 Sept. 1654); to prepare the bill for ejecting scandalous ministers (25 Sept.); and to review the legislation enacted by its predecessor, the Nominated Parliament (10 Oct.).29CJ vii. 369b, 370a, 375b. The first and the third perhaps reflected the concerns of Thomas’s wider circle. The second seems to have stemmed from a personal interest. In August he had been made an ‘ejector’ of scandalous ministers and a commissioner for investigating proceedings under the act for propagation of the gospel in Wales (1650), causes in which he proceeded to take an active part.30A. and O. While he was still a minor, his mother and stepfather had used his right of patronage of the rectory at Wenvoe in 1648 to appoint Timothy Woodroffe, a Wiltshire-born man who soon moved on to Herefordshire.31LJ ix. 471a; Al. Ox. Some time thereafter Thomas himself appointed Cardiff-born John French, ‘a Presbyterian, to supply that vacancy, and ordered him to preach occasionally in several churches of this neighbourhood as being a gifted person’, but he was also said to have had as his ‘chaplain’ Thomas Quarr or Quarrell, usher at Montgomery school in 1653, who was later licensed as a Congregationalist; French, who conformed in 1662, was alleged to have persecuted Baptists and Quakers and both men to have upheld tithes.32F. Gawler, A Record of Some Persecutions (1659), 28-30; Al. Ox.; Calamy Revised, 401; Jnl. Welsh Eccles. Hist. iv. 22n. Apparently, therefore, a relative moderate in terms of theology and ecclesiology, Thomas was nevertheless inextricably associated with the ruthless programme of confiscation of church property and ejection of ‘malignant’ clergy of the commissioners (‘the rulers’), led by Jones.33Gawler, A Record of Some Persecutions, 21-2, 31.

The links to Jones, or to Strickland, or to both, may best explain Thomas’s appointment in May 1656 to the committee of trade; once again he was no cypher.34CSP Dom. 1655-6, p. 327. That June he was added to the commission of the peace for Monmouthshire, where he had acquired or expanded his landed interest.35C231/6, p. 381. Re-elected for Glamorgan to the second protectorate Parliament, this time he was more conspicuous. His connections secured him membership of the delegation to present the protector with the House’s declaration on the public fast (22 Sept.) and of the committee on the safety of the protector and the commonwealth (26 Sept.), and six months later to attend Cromwell over the Petition and Advice (27 Mar. 1657), having demonstrated his involvement by acting as a teller with Sir William Strickland* in a division over the wording of the proposed political settlement (17 Mar.).36CJ vii. 426b, 429a, 506b, 514a. Added to the committee on public debts (1 Jan.), he was a teller with Edward Peyto* for the minority in what may have been a confrontation between civilians and army officers over authorisation of money-raising for war with Spain (10 Feb.).37CJ vii. 477b, 489b. He was also nominated to the committee on the bill for the attainder of rebels in Ireland (30 Mar.).38CJ vii. 515a.

In contrast to Philip Jones, Thomas supported the swift passage of the Presbyterian-sponsored bill for catechising, for which he was a teller with Sir John Thorowgood* (9 June).39CJ vii. 551b; Burton’s Diary ii. 202-3. On 18 and 23 December 1656, with an agenda that is less clear, he was a champion of the Clothworkers against the Merchant Adventurers when their dispute was debated by the Committee of Trade.40Burton’s Diary, i. 175, 221. But that he held or reflected views on economic and social ills is suggested by his nominations to committees considering excessive prices and adulteration of wine (9 Oct.), the relief of creditors and debtors (29 Oct.), the abolition of purveyance (3 Nov.) and the curtailment of building around London (9 May 1657).41CJ vii. 436b, 447a, 449b, 531b. He was also appointed to committees discussing abuses in the legal system and their reform (22 Nov. 1656; 30 Apr. 1657).42CJ vii. 457b, 528a, 538a.

Thomas’s profile was obviously rising. In June 1657 he was chosen for the county committee of Glamorgan and other local commissions.43Glam. Co. Hist. iv. 303; A. and O. All the same, he was still young. His selection on 9 December, in anticipation of the second session of the Parliament, as a member of the Other House must have surprised many.44HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 504; TSP vi. 668. A critique of the new body noted that he was ‘of considerable means’ but had not ‘been long in play’, and explained his appointment as ‘a friend of Philip Jones’s and allied to Walter Strickland, both of the [protectorate] council, and brought in on their account’. Since he was ‘none of the great zealots or high sectaries, so called, in Wales’, he might

doubtless be counted wise and good enough to make a simple lord of the Other House, and to be called Lord Thomas and to have a negative voice over all the good people of Wales ... and over all the people of these lands besides.45G. Wharton, A Second Narrative of the Parliament (1658), 17.

Thomas was present at most of the meetings of that House, missing only three days towards the end of the session and received two committee appointments: to the bill for naturalising the wife of leading London merchant Nicholas Corsellis (28 Jan. 1658) and to the preparation of more effective penalties for the profanation of the sabbath (29 Jan.).46HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 506-25.

During the third protectorate Parliament Thomas was less in evidence in the Other House. Having missed the first three weeks of proceedings, he attended each day from 21 to 26 February 1659 only to be absent again until 14 March. He then attended about two-thirds of the remainder of the session. His sole committee appointment was to consider the bill from the Commons for the limitation of privileges of Members sitting in that House (15 Mar.).47HMC Lords, n.s. iv. 526-65.

In July 1659 Thomas replaced Philip Jones’s protégé Evan Lewis* in command of the militia in Glamorgan, Brecon and Radnor, but on 1 September he was named as a captain of south Wales militia under Bussy Mansel*.48CSP Dom. 1659-60, p. 24; CJ vii. 772b; Glam. Co. Hist. iv. 306. In mid-February 1660 Thomas wrote to his brother-in-law Ludlowe that he was ‘very much troubled to see the [restored Rump] Parliament have such a jealousy of their friends in Monmouthshire’ that they had selected as assessment commissioners men who were ‘either cavaliers or at best neuters, who I dare pawn my life will never engage against their enemies if occasion were’. However, he was himself appointed to the commission, as well as to the militia in March, and despite his misplaced confidence that Ludlowe’s ‘integrity will stop the mouths of’ the latter’s ‘adversaries, although they are full of malice’, Thomas survived unscathed the Restoration and Ludlowe’s attainder.49SP63/303, f. 38.

In September 1660 Thomas’s name was among 19 submitted from Glamorgan as potential deputy lieutenants, but he was not chosen.50Glam. Co. Hist. iv. 378. On the other hand, he served as sheriff in 1664-5.51High Sheriffs of Glam, 22. Early in 1668 he was a signatory to the warrant for the arrest of Vavasor Powell for unlicensed preaching in Merthyr Tydfil churchyard, but he may have countenanced some manifestations of religious dissent on his own doorstep.52Glam. Co. Hist. iv. 472, 479. There is no surviving evidence that he aspired to sitting again in Parliament, and his political connections were mixed. In December 1675 his daughter Elizabeth (bur. 10 Aug. 1677), who was living with her grandmother ‘Lady Morgan’ [Strickland] in Chelsea, married the son and heir of Charles Cheyne†, generally accounted among supporters of the royal court in Parliament, but his only son William married Mary, daughter of whig peer Philip Wharton, 4th Baron Wharton.53Par. reg. St Luke, Chelsea, Mdx.; Clark, Limbus Patrum, 538. William died on 28 April 1677, leaving an infant son, Edmund, who was knighted at an early age. Within a month the former MP was also dead; intestate, he was buried at on 22 May, the day after his name was fixed on as co-surety for the new receiver-general of south Wales, and the administration of his estate was granted to his widow and second wife, Mary.54CTB v. pt. 1, p. 617; Clark, Limbus Patrum, 445, 538. By 1696 all the MP’s descendants had died, leaving Elizabeth Ludlowe as his eventual heiress.55Clark, Limbus Patrum, 538–9; PROB11/414/144 (Sir Edmond Thomas); PROB11/424/430 (Anne Thomas); PROB11/450/359 (Dame Mary Kemeys [née Wharton]). Elizabeth, who had returned as a widow from exile in Switzerland, remarried a putative kinsman, the much younger John Thomas, who was created a baronet. She died childless in 1702, leaving Wenvoe to the Thomas collateral line, of whom Sir Edmund Thomas†, 3rd baronet, sat in two mid-eighteenth century Parliaments.56Clark, Limbus Patrum, 538-9; Ludlow, Mems. i. pp. xvii, liv, appendix i; CB; HP Commons 1715-1754; HP Commons 1754-1790.