Thomas Buckner Esq (abt. 1623 - aft. 1703)

Born about 1623 in Sonning Parish, Berkshire, England

Ancestors

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Biography

Thomas was christened in Sonning Parish, Berks. in 1623, the son of John Buckner. He eventually became an extremely wealthy man through marriage to an heiress, speculation in confiscated real estate during the Commonwealth, and as a tax farmer. He is commonly given the title "Captain" though it is not clear why. Thomas was clearly a merchant as well, so this may have been as a ship's captain, though it's also possible he had a military rank during the Civil War. The first time the title appears is when he was mentioned in the 1652 will of his wife Katherine's uncle, Nathaniel Craddock.^[1]

As a wealthy and influential man, he was named in wills of his friends and relatives no less than 5 times, which may seem somewhat paradoxical, but in this period, it was fairly common to include token legacies such as rings and funeral gloves as a sign of affection or respect. These seem to have sometimes functioned to ingratiate the testator to wealthy and powerful relations, no doubt in the hope that they would turn some benevolent attention to the testator's orphans. Given the overwhelming importance of patronage and family connections in English society in this period, this is entirely understandable. Thomas' very first testamentary appearance in 1644 though is entirely innocent of such suspicions, when his unmarried, childless uncle and namesake, Oxford don Thomas Buckner, named him as a godson with a respectable £30 legacy (over $5,000 relative to modern currency).^[2]

A more typical example is the 1653 will of William Buckner of St Sepulchre parish, who could not have been any closer than a 2nd cousin of Thomas, but who nevertheless spared 5 rather dearly needed shillings to respect his distant "cousin Captain Thomas Buckner and his wife".^[3] Thomas' next will appearance is the 1665 will of his friend Sir Martin Noell^[4] (a fellow merchant and tax farmer, with whom he was a partner in a wood farm^[5]). And finally, he shows up again as a cousin, Thomas Buckner, Esq. in Dublin in the 1671 will of Leonard Bucknor (Jr.).^[6] In Leonard's case, we can firmly establish that they were 2nd cousins. Leonard's will also mentions Thomas' unnamed children, though we have to resort to other documents to find their names. Thomas moved to Dublin probably in the late 1660s after becoming a partner in the Irish revenue farm; he was certainly there by 1671 when, with partner Matthew Roydon, he constructed a new annex to Cork House for the purpose, which become known as "the Cork Exchange".^[7]

Capt. Thomas Buckner was admitted to the freedom of Belfast as a Merchant Stapler in 1676^[8] and then of Dublin (as "Thos. Bucknor"; he seems to have alternated the Buckner and Bucknor spellings like many of his merchant cousins of the period) on Easter 1677.

The names of his children come to light from 1684 documents involving the sale of property in Greater and Lesser Shelford in Cambridgeshire, which came to them from their mother Katherine Craddock.^[9] They were:

• Ralph Bucknor
• Mary Bucknor
• Elizabeth Bucknor
• Jane (Bucknor) Chamberlen

Ralph died at sea north of the Cape of Good Hope on 8 May 1679.^[10] Jane married Paul Chamberlen, a "Doctor of Physick," who seems to be related to a prominent family of London physicians, though it has been difficult to identify which one. These also show that Thomas was alive at least to 1684.

Perhaps the most interesting biographical detail of his life is not certainly his, but circumstantial evidence supports the conclusion that he was identical with the Thomas Buckner who sailed to India as an assistant to East India Company factor Edward Knipe in 1644.^[11] Knipe was charged by the Company with having taken £100 from "one Buckner" to take his son Thomas on as his assistant (presumably in the manner of an apprenticeship). Knipe replied that such had been promised, though he had not in fact been paid in full.

Thomas got a far more interesting experience than was bargained for, when the ship's master John Mucknell, after a falling out with the abrasive and rapacious Knipe, seized their ship, the John, and stranded them on the island of Johanna (now called Anjouan), about halfway between the northern tip Madagascar and the African Coast. Knipe and most of the merchants, Thomas Buckner probably among them, along with several of the ship’s officers were lured away from the ship on the pretext of a dinner invitation on land for the evening, probably a welcome change after months at sea. After arriving on shore, Mucknell found a pretext to depart from the company and secretly returned to the ship, where he and a number of conspirators cajoled and threatened the crew into abandoning the India Company merchants, stealing the John, and undertaking a rather harebrained journey of attempted pillage and piracy back to England. There Mucknell intended to turn the ship over to Royalist forces for a bounty.

In 1645, Knipe and Buckner were ordered to return to England by the Company, as Knipe's handling of the affair was blamed by some for the enormous loss incurred. Knipe, though, had by then settled in as the chief factor at Agra in India and proved rather unresponsive, but in a letter of early 1646 he assured them that Buckner, who was then on the ship Supply, would return in the next year. Thomas Buckner finally returned to England aboard the Dolphin in 1647.^[12][13]

Curiously, when Capt. Thomas Buckner's eldest son Ralph died at sea off the Cape of Good Hope in 1679, it was on an East India Company ship called the Johanna, the same name as the island upon which Thomas was stranded, which seems too peculiar a coincidence to be random. Martin Noell, Thomas' old friend, was also an East India Company member from 1647, so the case for this being the future merchant Captain Thomas Buckner is fairly strong. We should also note that Thomas was a partner with Noell at least as early as 1652, when Thomas Buckner of London, Esq. signed a covenant with Noell and a number of other merchants.^[14] That he was styled both "captain" and "esquire" by this date suggests that whatever he did of note must have happened between his return to England in 1647 and 1652, so it most likely involved the Second or Third Civil War. It is clear that he was on the side of Parliment, since in 1650 he was one of the "creditors of the state" who was sold the former royal manor of Deptford with a group of other investors after the execution of Charles I. The manor was restored to the Crown after the Restoration in 1660, and it's unclear what happened to his investment.^[15]

The latest known possible reference to him is of surprisingly late date, so it is somewhat uncertain whether it is actually him, but at some point a Capt. Thomas Bucknor petitioned the Lord Lieut. of Ireland, the (2nd) Duke of Ormond, regarding a debt owed to him by a Capt. C. Talbot.^[16] Since Ormond held this position during the periods 1703-1707 and 1710-1713, the (unspecified) date is certainly 1703 or later. A Thomas Bucknor had also written a petition to the first Duke of Ormond^[17] from Dublin on behalf of Dr. Robert Gorges in 1667 regarding a tax assessment (which seems a natural undertaking for a professional tax farmer).^[18] This also places him in Dublin by 1667, so he might be another prominent Londoner who had had enough of fires and plagues after the catastrophic year of 1666. If the later Ormond petition is indeed the same Capt. Thomas Bucknor, this must have been a wise decision health-wise, as he must have lived to see his eighth decade. Strangely, no record of his demise has turned up, burial, will, or administration.

Sources

1. ↑ Extracts from the Parish Registers of Glaston, Co. Rutland," The Reliquary and illustrated archaeologist,: a quarterly journal, v. 25, p 257
2. ↑ Will of Thomas Buckner D.D., rector of Chevening (1644), UK National Archives Prob/11/192 transcription
3. ↑ "Virginia Gleanings in England," The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography, Volume 27, 1919, p. 296 Google Books
4. ↑ Staffordshire Record Society,Collections for a history of Staffordshire, London: Harrison and Sons, 1920, p. 102 Internet Archive
5. ↑ UK National Archives C6/36/77 f. 2, see [1]
6. ↑ Will of Leonard Bucknor of London (UK Public Record Office Catalogue Reference: Prob 11/337) (codicil 30 Sep 1671)
7. ↑ Sir John Thomas Gilbert, A History of the City of Dublin, volume 2, McGlashan & Gill, 1859, p. 8 Hathi Trust
8. ↑ Belfast (Northern Ireland). Corporation; Young, Robert Magill, The Town book of the Corporation of Belfast, 1613-1816, Belfast ; New York : M. Ward, 1892, p. 278.- 21 Apr 1676
9. ↑ Cambridgeshire County Council Archives KAR57/24/3/10
10. ↑ Cambridgeshire County Council Archives KAR57/24/3/9
11. ↑ William Foster, The English factories in India, 1618-1669: a calendar of documents in the India Office, British Museum and Public Record Office, Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1906, v. 7 p. 301 Google Books
12. ↑ Ethel Bruce Sainsbury, A Calendar Of The Court Minutes, Etc. Of The East India Company, Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1907, v. 3 p. 66
13. ↑ William Foster, The English factories in India, 1618-1669: a calendar of documents in the India Office, British Museum and Public Record Office, Oxford, Clarendon Press: 1906, v. 8
14. ↑ Cambridgeshire County Council Archives CON 3/6/2/5
15. ↑ Daniel Lysons. "Deptford, St Nicholas," in The Environs of London: Volume 4, Counties of Herts, Essex and Kent, (London: T Cadell and W Davies, 1796), 359-385. British History Online, accessed October 19, 2018, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/london-environs/vol4/pp359-385.
16. ↑ Seventh Report of the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts Part II, London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1879, p. 827
17. ↑ It is perhaps worth noting that the 1st Duke of Ormond was partly raised by Archbishop George Abbot, who was a patron of Thomas' uncle and godfather, Thomas Buckner. His uncle Thomas was actually Abbot's household chaplain at some point, quite possibly while Ormond was under Abbot's wing.
18. ↑ MS. Carte 154, fol(s). 144 [circa 2 October] 1667, Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, [2]

• Sonning Parish, Berkshire registers