Matthew Thomlinson
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Matthew Thomlinson was a soldier and regicide, 1617-81. He was the second son of John Thomlinson of York, England, and his wife Eleanor, daughter of Matthew Dodsworth.[1]
He enlisted in the lifeguard of the Earl of Essex in 1642 and worked his way up the ranks to become a colonel in the New Model Army in 1647. Thomlinson was appointed to the High Court of Justice for the trial of King Charles I, but he declined to sit. However, he commanded the escort that brought the King from Windsor to Westminster on the way to his trial, and attended the King on the scaffold. On the expulsion of the Long Parliament he was chosen as one of the members of the Council of State that succeeded it, and of the Barebones Parliament. Sent to Ireland to join the government there, he was knighted by Henry Cromwell who, nevertheless, distrusted him; in 1658 he was recalled to London as one of Ireland's representatives in Oliver Cromwell's new House of Peers.
Arrested at the Restoration, Thomlinson was pardoned because he had treated the King with courtesy and because he gave evidence against Daniel Axtell and Francis Hacker.
[edit] References
- This article contains text under a Creative Commons License by David Plant, the British Civil Wars and Commonwealth website http://www.british-civil-wars.co.uk/biog/index_t.htm
- Concise Dictionary of National Biography (1930)
- Cobbett's Parliamentary history of England, from the Norman Conquest in 1066 to the year 1803 (London: Thomas Hansard, 1808) [1]
