The Newports, who traced their ancestry back to the thirteenth century, were already a significant local family when Thomas Newport alias Goch was returned as MP for Shropshire in 1380. By the end of the Tudor period, most of their 10,000-acre estate lay across the middle of the shire, between Shrewsbury and the Wrekin, although in 1558 they purchased the manor of Cressage in Wenlock liberty, which presumably explains why Newport’s father married into the Catholic Lacon family, who lived nearby.
Newport was among a delegation sent to the king during the quarrel over Bishop Neile’s insult to the Commons (28 May) and was named to three bill committees, but otherwise left little mark on the Addled Parliament.
Shrewsbury’s MPs were expected to earn their keep, particularly in 1621 when the town’s role in the finishing of Welsh cloth came under attack in the form of a bill to break its semi-official monopoly of the trade. This industry provided a livelihood for nearly half the town’s population, and was stoutly defended by the Shrewsbury Drapers’ Company, which co-ordinated resistance between the town’s MPs and the shire knights. When the Shrewsbury MP Francis Berkeley spoke against the clause to allow the export of undressed cloth from Wales on 2 Mar., he was seconded by Newport, who moved to allow both sides to be represented by counsel at the bill’s committal, a motion guaranteed to lengthen proceedings, if nothing else. At the report stage on 20 Mar. Sir William Strode and Sir Walter Earle insisted that the committee was content to allow the export clause to stand, whereupon Newport retorted ‘that he was of the committee and yet not satisfied’. He also reminded the House of the economic damage the clause would do, not only to Shrewsbury but also to carriers, innkeepers, and Christ’s Hospital, London, which received a fee for each cloth sold at the Blackwell Hall. These objections apparently hit their mark, as the bill returned to the floor of the House six days later shorn of the export clause.
With one of their key aims achieved, Shrewsbury’s MPs approached the bill’s third reading on 24 Apr. hoping to reinstate the town’s monopoly of the inland trade. Newport led off, speaking generally of the ways in which ‘this bill crosses corporations by charter erected and overthrows them, gives way to forestallers, lets every man sell by retail to sell where they will, crosses former Acts of Parliament’. Berkeley filled in the legal technicalities, and the debate looked to be going well until Sir Edward Coke weighed in with a ringing endorsement of free trade, which carried the day. The Shrewsbury Drapers continued their resistance in the Lords, but their MPs played no part in this process.
As head of his family from 1623, Newport acquired a much stronger claim to one of the shire seats, although the fact that he became a burgess of Much Wenlock at round the time of the 1624 election suggests that he was not entirely confident of his chances at the county court. The shire elections were usually agreed in advance by a gentry caucus, which made for a regularly rotating slate of knights, but the abrupt termination of the 1624 Parliament on the death of the king apparently moved the county to allow the re-election of Newport and Sir Andrew Corbet the following year. The pair stood aside without demur in 1626, signing the indenture for those returned in their stead, and were re-elected as the result of a similar consensus in 1628.
The county electorate had little in the way of a political agenda, and Newport was consequently much less active as a shire knight than he had been in 1621. Named to a committee for scrutinizing payments of local military expenses drawn upon the account of 1624 subsidies (10 Aug. 1625), he twice reported on recusants holding public office in Shropshire, among them his cousin Sir Francis Lacon*, but in 1624 he tactfully declined to name lord president Northampton for his absence from Easter communion.
In November 1627 Newport married one of his daughters to the heir of Sir Thomas Bromley*, offering a large dowry of £5,000 payable by instalments, on condition that Bromley’s manor of Shrawardine, Shropshire, worth £600 a year, would be cleared of debt and entailed upon the couple in present possession. Any hopes for an amicable settlement vanished as Bromley’s long-term creditors vied with each other to lay their hands on the cash, and once Bromley’s son came of age in 1630, Newport found himself mired in a prolonged legal battle which dominated the next decade of his life. Several claimants secured writs for the seizure of Shrawardine and other properties, but Newport and his son-in-law trumped them by having Shrawardine extended for debt and then leasing it back from the Crown. Bromley was thus technically unable to entail the estate upon his son, and Newport therefore had no legal obligation to meet the instalments upon his daughter’s dowry, leaving the creditors with nothing until they jointly agreed to accept whatever percentage of their debts the Bromleys decided to offer them. After many lawsuits and at least two appeals to the Privy Council, the creditors appear to have come to a composition at the end of the 1630s.
With much to occupy his mind, Newport kept a relatively low public profile during the Personal Rule, although in 1637 he was sent to knock some sense into the Shrewsbury corporation, then engaged in internecine disputes over the renewal of its charter.