BOND, Thomas (1580-c.1652), of Durham House, The Strand, Westminster; later of Ogbourne St. George, Wilts.

The younger son of a London alderman, Bond inherited a legacy of 1,000 marks from his father.PROB 11/79, f. 228v. In between studying at Oxford and the Middle Temple, he toured France and Italy in company with (Sir) John Danvers*.Aubrey, 93. On his return he was introduced, via his first cousin, Sir Francis Leigh I*, to the latter’s father-in-law, lord keeper Egerton, and in 1602 succeeded John Donne* as Egerton’s ‘less sufficient, though ... more modest’ secretary.Vis. Warws. (Harl. Soc. xii), 81; R.C. Bald, John Donne, 126. He presumably remained in post until his master’s death in 1617, shortly after which Bond obtained licence to go abroad for a year, whence he brought news from Paris and Brussels to William Trumbull*.APC, 1616-17, p. 330; HMC Downshire, vi. 313-4, 328. Sometime before 1611 he bought a reversion to become one of the six clerks in Chancery from Lord Bruce of Kinloss, then master of the Rolls, but in December 1618 when it fell in, Bond sold it for £6,000.Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton ed. L. Pearsall Smith, ii. 86; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 193. With the proceeds he invested in the Virginia Company, and with Danvers as surety purchased the receivership of alienation fines, an office that could be performed by deputy.CSP Dom. 1619-23, pp. 122, 164; 1627-8, p. 357.

Bond, who claimed kinship with a Cornish gentry family, was nominated by Prince Charles’s Council of the duchy of Cornwall for a seat at Launceston in the 1621 Parliament. His only committee appointment was for a bill to naturalize a Scottish courtier, Sir Robert Ayton (22 March).CJ, i. 570b; P.M. Hunneyball, ‘Prince Charles’s Council as Electoral Agent, 1620-24’, PH, xxiii. 319. His exclusion from the committee for a bill to limit fees upon alienations (19 Mar.), a matter that closely concerned his office in the Exchequer, was presumably deliberate.CJ, i. 562a; Kyle thesis, 182-9. It is not known whether Bond stood at the next general election, but he was subsequently returned for Southampton, where he may have been nominated either by the 3rd earl of Southampton, governor of the Virginia Company, or by Sir Edward Conway I*, whom he had helped to extricate from a traffic accident outside Durham House on 29 Feb. 1624.J. Nichols, Progs. of Jas. I, iv. 966. By the time he took up his seat Bond had already missed the first two readings of the revived alienations bill, which was committed on 5 Mar. 1624, and thrown open three days later to all comers ‘except Exchequer-men’.CJ, i. 678a, 679a. The bill passed both Houses in this Parliament, only to be vetoed by James. Bond seems to have played no recorded part in the Commons’ proceedings - the six committee appointments relating to ‘Mr. Bond’ are probably attributable to his cousin Martin.

In November 1625, on the resignation of Sir Jerome Horsey*, Bond became joint receiver for the duchy of Lancaster in seven southern counties, including Wiltshire.CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 67. He leased a Wiltshire estate, Ogbourne St. George, from King’s College, Cambridge, and in 1632 purchased the reversion of the adjacent manor, Aldbourne, for £1,906, reserving a rent to the Crown of £77 3s. 4½d.VCH Wilts. xii. 72; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xlii. 577, 579. During the early 1630s he initiated several Star Chamber suits, taking on the patentees for saltpetre, who had destroyed his pigeon-house, and also suing poachers caught in Aldbourne Chase.SP16/192/33; CSP Dom. 1629-31, pp. 191, 218, 318. ‘Now in his old age’ (but actually in his middle 50s), he was married to ‘a very handsome young woman’ in 1635.Strafforde Letters, i. 373. He stood for Bossiney in the elections to the Long Parliament of 1640, but there was a double return and he eventually had to yield the seat to the courtier Sir Ralph Sydenham.CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 503; M.F. Keeler, Long Parl. 38. During the Civil War he was nominated a royalist magistrate in Wiltshire; he nevertheless remained on excellent terms with his great-nephew John Fitzjames†, a colonel in the parliamentary army, and seems to have evaded a charge of delinquency.Alnwick, ms 547, ff. 38v, 89v; CCAM, 1048. After the king’s execution he acted as sheriff of Wiltshire. He drew up his will on 6 Mar. 1650, leaving his wife £320 a year and all her personal property, deploring in passing the need for a specific bequest, and his daughter £3,000 if she married with her mother’s consent. He added a codicil on 1 Feb. 1652, and died some time before 13 May 1653 when the will was proved.PROB 11/229, f. 19v. His only son George died unmarried and without parliamentary experience.