Trevor, the youngest of five brothers, was born at Salisbury Court in 1573, and seems to have been registered at Shrewsbury School (as son and heir!) at the unusually early age of eight. His father bequeathed him £50 at his death, and urged his eldest brother, Richard†, to ‘maintain him at school’, which suggests that the future MP was the Thomas Trevor admitted to Shrewsbury a few months later. He entered the Inner Temple in 1593 and was called to the bar ten years later.
Trevor undoubtedly owed his first parliamentary seat, at Tregony in 1601, to the local influence of Charles Trevanion† of Caerhayes, whose sister Margaret had married his brother (Sir) John in 1592. Trevanion died a few weeks after the election, leaving an under-age heir who was in no position to influence the borough’s choice in 1604, and Trevor only found a seat at the newly enfranchised constituency of Harwich in April 1604. His patron on this occasion was either Howard, by now 1st earl of Nottingham, who had obliged the town’s request for an autonomous admiralty jurisdiction, or lord chancellor Ellesmere (Thomas Egerton†), who had been the key proponent of the charter under which the town was enfranchised.
Although the records of the sessions of 1604-10 are incomplete, Trevor was clearly not a prominent Member. Many of his efforts can be connected with the interests of the Howard family, including a conspicuously unsuccessful speech that he delivered at the first reading of a bill for the prevention of fraudulent conveyances:
many cried ‘away with it’; then Mr. Trevor of the Inner Temple, being a follower of the lord admiral, spake in favour of the bill only this far, that it might be vouchsafed a second reading and to be considered of by a committee; but the House without further question threw out the bill, fearing lest it would breed a new office which they thought some great man aimed at.
Trevor’s efforts were not always so ill-starred. He took his seat just in time to be named to the committee for Lord William Howard’s restitution bill (15 May 1604), and was later involved with moves to enable Nottingham’s daughter Lady Kildare to mitigate the impact of the attainder of her husband, the 11th Lord Cobham (Henry Brooke alias Cobham†), who had forfeited his estates for his part in the Main Plot of 1603. Named to the committee for the bill to confirm Lady Kildare’s jointure rights on 30 May 1604, at the end of the following session he added a proviso concerning these rights to Cobham’s restitution bill (26 May 1606).
At the next election Harwich returned another of Nottingham’s clients, Sir Robert Mansell, the Navy treasurer, and Trevor transferred to Newport, Cornwall. The constituency lay at the eastern end of the county, well outside the Trevanion sphere of influence, and Trevor’s most likely patron was Sir Robert Killigrew, who represented the borough himself in 1604 and 1621; as a gentleman of the Privy Chamber Killigrew would have been acquainted with Trevor’s brother Sir John. Trevor was named to two committees, one for a bill to establish a grammar school in Monmouth (16 May), the other the estate bill for Sir Robert Wroth II* (25 May). On 26 May, towards the end of a long and angry debate about Bishop Neile’s criticism of the Commons’ debates about impositions, Trevor interrupted calls for a cessation of business to remind Members that ‘the Lords sit not tomorrow’. If this was an attempt to avert the looming crisis, it failed, as the House went on to agree to a cessation.
Like many younger sons, Trevor did not marry until he had established himself within his profession, and when he did so his spouses were well-endowed widows whose jointure estates could compensate for his own lack of an inheritance. His first wife, married in about 1611, brought him a dowry of £2,167 and a jointure interest in lands worth £215 a year which lay adjacent to the Trevors’ own Welsh estates. Moreover, after she and two of her three daughters died young, Trevor unsuccessfully sought to obtain a reversion of the lands for his own son Thomas†.
Trevor’s position as the prince’s solicitor gave him access to the duchy of Cornwall’s political patronage, and in December 1620 he was initially nominated for West Looe; he was ultimately returned for Saltash, both then and again in 1624.
In the early 1620s, Trevor also played a modest role in furthering Welsh parliamentary interests. During the 1621 subsidy debates he twice attempted to secure a reprieve for the principality, first on the grounds that Wales was still liable for the mise due to Prince Charles for seven years after his accession in 1616, and secondly because the 1610 subsidy, which had been deferred during the payment of Prince Henry’s mise, had still not been collected; not surprisingly, English MPs turned a deaf ear to such arguments. In 1621 Trevor took charge of the bill to repeal the prerogative clause of the Welsh Union Act of 1536, and although the order was not repeated in 1624, he was named to the same bill committee (6 Mar.) and to attend a conference on the subject with the Lords (14 April). Trevor also supported another measure of considerable significance to the Welsh economy, the 1621 bill to allow free trade in Welsh cottons, which aimed to break the Shrewsbury drapers’ monopoly of the trade. To the dismay of Francis Berkeley of Shrewsbury, Trevor successfully moved for a committal at the bill’s second reading on 2 March.
The other identifiable interest which Trevor promoted in the Commons during the early 1620s was the farm of sea coal imposts, in which his brother Sir John held a quarter share. On 21 Mar. 1621 Trevor unsuccessfully raised a lone voice against a proviso in the concealments’ bill protecting a long-disused levy of 2d. a chaldron on coal. This charge had recently been revived by the patentee William Typper, to the irritation of the farmers.
Trevor also contributed to the debates over several disputed elections. On 7 Feb. 1621 the election at Gatton, Surrey came before the Commons: one of the candidates was Sir Thomas Bludder, son of one of the sea coal farmers, which makes it surprising that Trevor moved for Sir Henry Britton, a rival candidate, to be allowed to address the House. Eight days later, when the House considered the return of Sir Dudley Digges and Maurice Abbot, then abroad on an embassy, Trevor reminded Members of the precedent agreed in November 1606, when several MPs sent abroad as ambassadors had been allowed to retain their seats. Appointed to the privileges’ committee in the next Parliament (23 Feb. 1624), Trevor moved a month later to confirm the return of Sir Thomas Holland and Sir John Corbet in the disputed Norfolk election.
The duchy of Cornwall’s patronage lapsed at Charles’s accession, and one of Trevor’s first actions in the new reign was to apply to (Sir) Humphrey May*, chancellor of the duchy of Lancaster for a nomination for a parliamentary seat at Clitheroe, Lancashire. However, his intentions were swiftly overtaken by events, as Charles quickly promoted him to the offices of king’s serjeant, serjeant-at-law and Exchequer baron; the latter appointment required his attendance in the Lords as a legal assistant.
As a judge, Trevor was required to rule upon some of the most contentious constitutional issues of the period, none more so than that of Ship Money. The defendant, John Hampden*, was related to Trevor’s nephew Sir John Trevor II*, but this consideration was outweighed by the official pressure put upon the judges to return a verdict favourable to the Crown. In February 1637, before the case came to trial, the judges issued a provisional ruling stating that the king was entitled to raise extraordinary revenue whenever he considered the kingdom to be in danger. Several of the judges, including Hutton and Davenport, who ruled in Hampden’s favour, and (Sir) William Jones I*, whose verdict upheld the Crown’s case on the narrowest of technicalities, examined the case forensically in the light of both constitutional and legal precedents. However, Trevor’s verdict for the Crown was apparently designed to avoid controversy by doing little more than reiterating the general arguments advanced in the earlier interim ruling. He conceded that ‘the laying of a charge upon the people by Parliament is a safe way, if time and occasion will permit’, but quoted the maxim ‘necessity knows no law’ in justification of his decision that ‘when the kingdom is in danger, the king may command a supply for prevention thereof, and who can tell better than the king how to prevent the danger?’ Concluding with a ringing endorsement of the prerogative, he asserted that the levy should be paid
cheerfully, for it is for a general good, for the safety of the whole kingdom: the subjects are not prejudiced by it either in their dignities or properties in their goods; the king’s prerogatives protect the people’s liberties, and the subject’s liberty the king’s prerogative; it is proper for kings to command and subjects to obey.
CSP Dom. 1636-7, pp. 416-18; State Trials ed. T. Howell, ii. 1125-7; C. Russell, ‘Ship Money judgments of Bramston and Davenport’, EHR, lxxvii. 314-8.
When questioned about his conduct in the Long Parliament, Trevor tried to evade all responsibility, protesting ‘that [Chief Justice Sir John] Finch II* came and would have him subscribe’. Suspended in July 1641 after the impeachment charges against him were submitted to the Lords, he was one of the few judges willing to serve Parliament during the Civil War, as a result of which he was allowed to resume his place in the autumn of 1643 upon payment of a fine of £6,000; he eventually resigned in protest at the regicide.
Trevor drafted a brief will on 14 Aug. 1648, providing for his burial at his parish church of St. Bride’s, Fleet Street if he died in London, and leaving his entire estate to his only son Sir Thomas Trevor, bt. In a codicil made a few weeks before his death, he gave £40 to the poor of each of the five parishes where he held property and provided other modest legacies for various relatives including the lawyer Arthur Trevor of Brynkinallt, Denbighshire, to whom he bequeathed ‘such of my year law books as he shall require’. He also asked to be buried in the family vault which he had recently constructed at Leamington Hastings, Warwickshire. He died on 21 Dec. 1656; his son, who had sat in the Long Parliament until Pride’s Purge, died without male heirs in 1676.