WHITMORE, Thomas II (1599-1677), of Ludstone Hall, Claverley, Salop and the Middle Temple, London.

The Whitmore family of Claverley divided into a senior branch, made wealthy through a move to London by the grandfather of Thomas Whitmore I*, and a stay-at-home branch, from which Thomas Whitmore II was descended.16Vis. Salop 1623, i. (Harl. Soc. xxix), 499. The London-based Whitmores married into the Craven family and returned to Shropshire to set themselves up at Apley Park, but the consequences of remaining in Claverley were not without rewards. Thomas Whitmore II’s father, John, built the imposing Ludstone Hall in 1607.17Pevsner, Salop, 190. However impressive the residence, Ludstone Hall was not a symbol of enormous landed wealth, however, and after Oxford, Thomas Whitmore took up the law as a profession, studying in London first at New Inn, and then at the Middle Temple, of which New Inn was a dependency.18MTR ii. 646. After being called to the bar in 1626, Whitmore took pupils at his chambers, notably John Craven, the future Baron Craven of Ruyton, a relative of his, whose supervision he shared with Bulstrode Whitelocke*. Interestingly, he did not take another relative of his, his namesake Thomas Whitmore I*, into his chambers when the latter arrived at the Middle Temple in 1630.19MTR ii. 740.

Whitmore acted for the Craven family in cases before the civil war, including in a prosecution of Dr Ralph Clayton, whose misbehaviour in 1638 had merited a period of detention in Ludlow Castle. At the heart of this case were mutual accusations by Clayton and a parishioner who seemed to be denouncing Protestantism. Whitmore seems simply to have been acting as a prosecuting attorney, and nothing can be gleaned from the case about his own commitments, other than to the Cravens.20CSP Dom. 1637-8, pp. 326, 338-9, 473, 505. During the civil war, Whitmore stayed neutral, and was named to no local committees for either side. In June 1646 he was assessed by the Committee for Advance of Money*, and paid £60 of the levy on him of £300, but orders of the committee made in 1648 that Whitmore should be pursued for delinquency came to nothing.21CCAM 709. He probably spent much of his time in London during the 1640s, continuing to take on pupils, as in November 1646, and thus being available to be made a bencher of the Middle Temple in 1648.22MTR ii. 942, 971.

After the Shropshire parliamentarian committee had gained control of Bridgnorth in 1646, Humphrey Mackworth I* became recorder until his death in 1654. Afterwards, the Whitmore interest, dominant there before the civil war, began to recover. Thomas Whitmore’s acquisition of the recordership should probably be viewed as a sign of the tentative re-emergence of the family after the death in 1653 of (Sir) Thomas Whitmore I, the most active royalist of the Whitmores, in whose will Thomas Whitmore II was named as an overseer.23PROB11/237/374. He was made a justice of the peace in 1656, which given the contemporary emergency measures being implemented by the major-generals, seems to betoken a sanguine view in government of his political orientation. Among other newcomers to the Shropshire bench at the same time was Job Charlton*, another lawyer with a vaguely royalist background evidently judged harmless by the government’s reliable agents such as Edmund Wareing*, William Crowne* and Humphrey Mackworth II.

Whitmore’s election to the 1659 Parliament for Much Wenlock was an acknowledgement that the Whitmore/Craven interest still had ground to make before it could reclaim Bridgnorth electorally. There, the Cromwellian interest of Edmund Wareing and John Humfrey retained control, but the Wenlock voters proved more inclined to welcome a representative of an old local family. Whitmore made no impression on this Parliament at all. He sat on no committees, and no speeches were attributed to him by the diarists. His low profile seems not to have disappointed the electors at Much Wenlock, who returned him again to the Convention of 1660, where he sat on three committees. He retained some involvement with the Middle Temple after 1660, but in 1661 was excused reading on the grounds of ‘great age and infirmity’.24MTR iii. 1175, 1149, 1150, 1161, 1187. After the spring of 1662 he sat on no more commissions of oyer and terminer. He was evidently seeking to retire. His name was included as a member of the projected order of the Royal Oak, doubtless because of his associations with the Whitmores and Cravens rather than because of any conspicuous show of loyalty to the monarchy.25HP Commons, 1660-90, ‘Thomas Whitmore’. Whitmore drew up his will in December 1676. For one who had been a successful legal practitioner, the bequests of £50 or £100 here and there seem relatively modest, and the will gave no hint of any large landed estate. Whitmore died childless in May 1677, and was buried in Claverley, the parish of his birth.26Trans. Salop Arch. and Nat. Hist. Soc. ser.4, v. 57.