How to Become the Member from Thirsk

Under the subject of “Eighteenth-century British aristocrats are not like us,” I’ve been looking into the life of Thomas Gascoigne (1745-1810).

Gascoigne was born not in Britain but in a convent at Cambrai in northern France. He was the third son of Sir Edward Gascoigne, baronet, and his wife. The Gascoignes were Catholic and had long ties to that convent, which was part of the English Benedictine Congregation.

Thomas grew up in France, educated by monks at Douai. In 1762, when he was sixteen years old, his older brother died, and he succeeded to the baronetcy. From then on he was Sir Thomas Gascoigne, baronet.

To prepare for his responsibilities as an estate owner, the teenager was sent to Paris for more schooling, visited Britain for the first time, and in 1764 embarked on a Grand Tour of southern Europe.

That travel ended abruptly in March 1765 when, it appears, a traveling companion killed a coachman in Rome and young Sir Thomas was peripherally involved. He had to hurry back to England, though his connections secured a papal pardon later in the year.

For the next decade Sir Thomas Gascoigne settled into life as a British gentleman. He developed his estates, including the usual improvements: scientific gardening, breeding race horses, funding coal mines, founding a spa. He had a romance with Barbara Montgomery (1757-1788), one of the three sisters Joshua Reynolds painted as “Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen” in 1773.

By 1774 it was safe to visit Europe again, and Sir Thomas spent the rest of the decade outside Britain. He traveled with the author Henry Swinburne, paying most of the bills. During those years Britain declared war on France and Spain, but that doesn’t appear to have greatly affected Sir Thomas’s movements because he was traveling in Catholic circles. His faith kept him out of the British government, after all.

That all changed soon after Sir Thomas Gascoigne returned to his seat in the middle of 1779. He decided to get involved in politics. As a baronet, he had inherited a title but not a peerage, so he wasn’t in the House of Lords and could run for the House of Commons. However, the law barred him from Parliament as a Catholic.

On the king’s birthday in June 1780, therefore, Sir Thomas Gascoigne renounced his Catholicism before the Archbishop of Canterbury. (He never stopped supporting Catholic missions.) Three months later, he entered Parliament as the member from Thirsk, a seat recently purchased by the Marquess of Rockingham for his faction of Whigs. Later he represented Malton and Arundel.

As a Rockinghamite, Sir Thomas opposed continuing the war in America and supported some electoral reforms. Within the larger Whig faction he favored Charles James Fox over the younger William Pitt, which left him once again excluded from power after 1784.

TOMORROW: Sir Thomas Gascoigne’s mark on history.