suc. bro. Aug. 1613 as 3rd Bar. Bruce of Kinloss [S]; cr. 21 June 1633 earl of Elgin [S]; cr. 30 July 1641 Bar. BRUCE of Whorlton.
First sat 5 Aug. 1641; first sat after 1660, 1 May 1660; last sat 10 May 1661
b. 2 Dec. 1599, 3rd but 2nd surv. s. of Edward Bruce, Ld. Kinloss [S], and Bar. Bruce of Kinloss [S], and Magdalen (d. aft. 1638),1 da. of Sir Alexander Clerk, of Balbirnie, co. Fife, Scotland. educ. MA, Oxf. 31 Aug. 1636. m. (1) 4 July 1622 Anne (c.1604-27), da. of Sir Robert Chichester, KB, of Raleigh, Devon. 1s.; (2) 12 Nov. 1629 Diana (c.1601-54), da. and coh. of William Cecil†, 2nd earl of Exeter, wid. of Henry de Vere†, 18th earl of Oxford, s.p. KB 20 May 1638. d. 21 Dec. 1663; will 6 Apr. 1647-1 Nov. 1663, pr. 11 Jan. 1664.2
Steward, royal honour of Ampthill, Beds. 1613-d.,3 forest of Gillingham, Dorset 1631-d.,4 park of Byfleet, Surr. 1631-d.;5 commr., Dorset cttee. 1644, Western Association 1644, levying money Yorks. 1645, militia Beds. 1660.6
Commr., regulating excise 1645, foreign plantations 1646, exclusion from sacrament 1646, bishops’ lands 1646, Oxford appeals 1647, indemnity 1647, Navy and customs 1647.7
Associated with: Houghton House, Ampthill, Beds; Elgin House, St. John’s, Clerkenwell, Mdx.; Whorlton and East Witton, Yorks., North Riding.8
Likenesses: line engraving, W. Faithorne, 1664 (NPG D22720)
Thomas Bruce’s father, Edward Bruce, was a Scottish lawyer who was rewarded in 1603-4 for helping to smooth the accession of James VI of Scotland to the English throne by being given land (Whorlton and the site of Jervaulx Abbey in the North Riding of Yorkshire) and a title (Baron Bruce of Kinloss [S]). In 1613 the 3rd Baron was made steward of the royal honour of Ampthill in Bedfordshire. Thereafter he and his descendants were based in that county and particularly in the large residence of Houghton House.9 His mother’s second husband, Sir James Fullarton‡, first gentleman of the bedchamber, was granted the stewardship of the forest of Gillingham in Dorset, and of the park of Byfleet in Surrey in 1625. After Fullarton’s death in January 1631 these offices were conferred on Baron Bruce and his mother, Lady Magdalen.10 Throughout the 1630s Bruce remained a favourite of the king. He accompanied Charles I on his trip to Scotland for which, in 1633, he was created earl of Elgin in the Scottish peerage.
In July 1641 he was created Baron Bruce of Whorlton in the English peerage, and was introduced into the English House of Lords on 5 Aug. 1641. He will be referred to as Elgin, even though he sat in the House as Baron Bruce, in order to avoid confusion with his son Robert Bruce, later earl of Ailesbury, who was known by the courtesy title of Lord Bruce throughout his father’s lifetime. Elgin was undoubtedly created an English peer to serve the king’s cause in the House, but he never joined Charles at Oxford and only intermittently attended the House of Lords throughout the 1640s until its proscription in 1649. He was most in attendance between early 1645 and summer 1647, during which time he voted consistently with the group of ‘Presbyterian’ peers centred around Robert Devereux†, 3rd earl of Essex, who supported a negotiated settlement with the king and opposed the army and the Independents in Parliament.11
Many years later, sometime in 1726, Elgin’s grandson Thomas Bruce, 2nd earl of Ailesbury, penned a letter to his own son Charles Bruce, styled Baron Bruce (later 3rd earl of Ailesbury), in which he recounted many of the family anecdotes about Elgin, and particularly the shame his failure to attend the royalist Parliament in Oxford (1644) had brought to the (later) ultra-loyalist Bruce family. He placed the blame on Elgin’s second wife, Diana, the widow of Henry de Vere†, 18th earl of Oxford:
My worthy grandmother-in-law’s [i.e. step-grandmother’s], memory ought to be respected by us and she showed her goodness by her dispositions. Else she had no good inclinations to the crown. She was beautiful and rich and gave an answer to a poor prince on the Rhine that made court to her, I think a Palatine, that it was too much honour for her but that she had rather be a great lady in England then a poor princess in Germany. And preferring my grandfather before all other pretenders, it so endeared him as to occasion his false step. I have been told he was putting on his boots to go to Oxford where the nobles were convoked and she fell on her knees weeping, ‘My dear’, said she ‘will you reduce me to milk a cow?’
This plea apparently stopped him in his tracks. There were, however, other explanations for Elgin’s half-hearted involvement in politics. The minister who delivered his funeral sermon in 1664 explained that he was,
a person enriched with great endowments and abilities of mind … [and] a deep judgment fit for the managery of the highest affairs, had not the depressions and infirmities of a consumptive body indisposed him for the public, especially in such times of broils and confusion as were altogether unsuitable to the calmness and peaceableness of his temper. Yet even then he bore his part, and whilst others were wallowing in blood, he was wrestling in prayer and melting in tears. … He would often comfort himself … that he was free from the blood of all men.12
Sir Philip Warwick‡ wrote more pithily in his Memoirs that Elgin was ‘of very good understanding, and of a pious, but timorous and cautious mind’.13
Elgin does appear to have been renowned for his piety and his support of those churchmen who continued to use the liturgy of the Church of England. It was probably through his connections with Gillingham that he first came into contact with Robert Frampton, (later bishop of Gloucester), who served ‘the very religious and noble earl of Elgin’ as chaplain from the late 1640s until 1655.14 Elgin’s house at Ampthill also became a resort for active royalist supporters and plotters, especially during the residence there of his sister, the countess dowager of Devonshire, and his son, Robert, Lord Bruce, from about 1646.15 Elgin most likely condoned his family’s royalist sentiments, but he does not appear to have taken any active part in their intrigues himself. Later his grandson, the 2nd earl of Ailesbury, commented that ‘I am assured there never was a year that cost my grandfather less then £1,500 in charity towards sequestered bishops and to other clergy and royalists’.16
Elgin first came to the restored House on 1 May 1660, and attended only 11 meetings until 1 June, during which time he was not named to a single committee. He then appeared in the House for only the first two days of the Cavalier Parliament and stopped attending the House entirely thereafter, even though he continued to live until December 1663. Nevertheless, the House was still concerned with his privilege as a peer and on 17 June 1661 ordered the arrest of Leonard Robinson and others for illegally entering into the Yorkshire lands of the earl of Elgin, Henry Carey, 2nd earl of Monmouth and Conyers Darcy, 6th Baron Darcy.17
Elgin’s very low attendance in the House can be explained by the evident disfavour with which he was viewed by the restored king and his court, especially as it was so easy to compare his inaction to the vigorous loyalty of his son Lord Bruce. His grandson Ailesbury later recounted:
For upon the Restoration the king designing to make my father [Lord Bruce], an English earl with those made preceding the coronation, my father humbly begged that my grandfather might be [made an earl], (he fearing the consequences) and the king flatly denied him and replied he had reasons; and my father had the same for to beg of the king to suspend it during my grandfather’s life.
The ‘reasons’ that Bruce had for deferring his earldom during the life of his father arose from what Ailesbury hinted was a strong enmity between the embittered old lord and his son, so favoured at court. It was spurred on, Ailesbury suggested, by ‘flatterers’ amongst his grandfather’s servants. ‘A main reason for my father’s precaution and what was most solid [was that], my grandfather and the flatterers were bitter enemies to my mother and not much less to my father’. They threatened to cut off their allowance and impede their claim to the estate. Ailesbury claimed that Elgin’s secretary even put in a caveat against the king’s plans in 1660 to make Lord Bruce an earl, a gentleman of the bedchamber and lord lieutenant of Bedfordshire. As to the lord lieutenancy, ‘they after acquiesced and my father was joined with the earl of Cleveland [Thomas Wentworth, earl of Cleveland], almost doting with age’, in the summer of 1660. ‘But the place of the bedchamber my father never had, and happy for him, for the court was not then proper for a sober man’.18
His grandson later commented that Elgin ‘lived after that two years and a little more’ and ‘was besides hypochondriacal’ and ‘eaten up with a deep consumption’. Elgin finally succumbed to the ‘infirmities of a consumptive body’ in December 1663 at Ampthill and left behind him a pious will, though it was later mocked by Ailesbury (‘read by the will and I defy you not to laugh, and by those items you may perceive the poor man’s temper and weakness’).19 He left numerous bequests to family members, servants, and £370 to the poor of the parishes which lay within his estates in Bedfordshire, Yorkshire and Middlesex. At his death, he was succeeded as 3rd earl of Elgin [S], by his long-suffering only son Lord Bruce, who, once free from his father’s resentment, could be made an English earl by the king, as earl of Ailesbury, in April 1665.
C.G.D.L.- 1 CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 162; 1638-9, p. 144.
- 2 TNA, PROB 11/313.
- 3 VCH Beds. iii. 267-71; CSP Dom. 1660-1, p. 217.
- 4 CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 500; 1638-9, p. 144.
- 5 HMC Laing, i. 221.
- 6 A. and O. i. 460, 490, 705; ii. 1426.
- 7 Ibid. 691, 840, 853, 905, 927, 937, 1047.
- 8 VCH Beds. iii. 290; E. Wood, History of Clerkenwell, p. 224; CSP Dom. 1637-8, p. 162; VCH Yorks. NR, i. 284; ii. 313.
- 9 VCH Beds. iii. 267-71, 290.
- 10 CSP Dom. 1629-31, p. 500; 1638-9, p. 144.
- 11 J. Adamson, ‘The Peerage in Politics, 1645-9’ (Cambridge Ph.D. thesis, 1986), Appendices A-D.
- 12 R. Pearson, Enoch’s Translation, p. 27.
- 13 P. Warwick, Mems. of the Reign of King Charles I, p. 169.
- 14 Bodl. Tanner 52, f. 83.
- 15 T. Pomfret, Life of the Countess Dowager of Devonshire, pp. 65-80; CCSP, iv. 369, 579.
- 16 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 1300/831.
- 17 PA, HL/PO/DC/CP/1/1, pp. 64-65.
- 18 WSHC, Ailesbury mss 1300/831.
- 19 Ibid.