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

Published in The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1604-1629, ed. Andrew Thrush and John P. Ferris, 2010
Available from Cambridge University Press

Constituency

Dates

9 Mar. 1624

Family and Education

bap. 11 Apr. 1580,1 5th but 3rd surv. s. of Sir George Bond (d.1592), Haberdasher, of London, ld. mayor 1588-9, and Winifred, da. of Sir Thomas Leigh, Mercer, of London, ld. mayor 1558-9.2 educ. Corpus, Oxf. 1596; travelled abroad (France, Italy) c.1597; M. Temple 1604.3 m. c.Feb. 1635, Frances, da. of Edmund Bale of Saddington, Leics., 1s. 1da.4 d. c.1652.5

Offices Held

Sec. to Sir Thomas Egerton† (later ld. chan. Ellesmere) 1602-17.6

Member, Virg. Co. 1620.7

Recvr.-gen. fines, alienations office 1620-d.;8 recvr. (jt.), duchy of Lancaster, for lands in Berks., Bucks., Dorset, Glos., Hants, Herefs., Oxon., Som., and Wilts. 1625-c.43;9 commr. sewers, Wilts. 1635;10 j.p. Wilts. 1644-6;11 sheriff, Wilts. 1649-50.12

Biography

The younger son of a London alderman, Bond inherited a legacy of 1,000 marks from his father.13 In between studying at Oxford and the Middle Temple, he toured France and Italy in company with (Sir) John Danvers*.14 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.15 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*.16 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 £6,000.17 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.18

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).19 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.20 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. 1624.21 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’.22 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.23 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.24 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.25 ‘Now in his old age’ (but actually in his middle 50s), he was married to ‘a very handsome young woman’ in 1635.26 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.27 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.28 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.29 His only son George died unmarried and without parliamentary experience.

Ref Volumes: 1604-1629

Authors: Virginia C.D. Moseley / Rosemary Sgroi

Notes

Bodl. Tanner 314, f. 214; CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 261.

  • 1. St. Stephen Walbrook (Harl. Soc. Reg. xlix), 6.
  • 2. Misc. Gen. et Her. (ser. 5), ii. 274; Soc. Gen. ‘Boyd’s Inhabitants of London’, 3107; PROB 11/137, f. 476v; C142/782/132.
  • 3. Al. Ox.; J. Aubrey, Nat. Hist. Wilts. 93; MTR, 447.
  • 4. Burke, Extinct and Dormant Baronetcies, 70; Strafforde Letters (1739) ed. W. Knowler, i. 373.
  • 5. PROB 11/229, f. 19v.
  • 6. Chamberlain Letters ed. N.E. McClure, ii. 193; HMC Downshire, vi. 313.
  • 7. A. Brown, Genesis of US, 831.
  • 8. CSP Dom. 1619-23, pp. 122, 164; 1627-8, p. 357; 1640, p. 349; E401/2459; PROB 11/229, f. 19v.
  • 9. Duchy of Lancaster Office-Holders ed. R. Somerville, 224.
  • 10. C181/5, f. 21v.
  • 11. CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 67; Docquets of Letters Patent 1642-6 ed. W.H. Black, 142.
  • 12. List of Sheriffs comp. A. Hughes (PRO, L. and I. ix), 154.
  • 13. PROB 11/79, f. 228v.
  • 14. Aubrey, 93.
  • 15. Vis. Warws. (Harl. Soc. xii), 81; R.C. Bald, John Donne, 126.
  • 16. APC, 1616-17, p. 330; HMC Downshire, vi. 313-4, 328.
  • 17. Life and Letters of Sir Henry Wotton ed. L. Pearsall Smith, ii. 86; Chamberlain Letters, ii. 193.
  • 18. CSP Dom. 1619-23, pp. 122, 164; 1627-8, p. 357.
  • 19. CJ, i. 570b; P.M. Hunneyball, ‘Prince Charles’s Council as Electoral Agent, 1620-24’, PH, xxiii. 319.
  • 20. CJ, i. 562a; Kyle thesis, 182-9.
  • 21. J. Nichols, Progs. of Jas. I, iv. 966.
  • 22. CJ, i. 678a, 679a.
  • 23. CSP Dom. 1625-6, p. 67.
  • 24. VCH Wilts. xii. 72; Wilts. Arch. Mag. xlii. 577, 579.
  • 25. SP16/192/33; CSP Dom. 1629-31, pp. 191, 218, 318.
  • 26. Strafforde Letters, i. 373.
  • 27. CSP Dom. 1640-1, p. 503; M.F. Keeler, Long Parl. 38.
  • 28. Alnwick, ms 547, ff. 38v, 89v; CCAM, 1048.
  • 29. PROB 11/229, f. 19v.