Thomas Staveley

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Thomas Staveley
New Walk Museum)
Born
East Langton, Leicestershire, England
Baptised26 November 1626
Died2 January 1684 (aged 57)
Leicester, Leicestershire, England
Signature

Thomas Staveley (bapt. 26 November 1626 – 2 January 1684) was a

Church historian. He spent most of his life researching the antiquities of his home county, Leicestershire
.

Born in

Cambridge University from 1644 to 1654. Here he studied law, that being the profession he would later take on, serving as a Lancashire Justice of the peace. He was described by contemporaries as a just and even-tempered magistrate, but was most renowned for his manuscripts of Leicestershire history, which were instrumental in the later histories of John Nichols. Staveley published only one work in his lifetime, The Romish Horseleech (1674), a political tract protesting James II's Catholicism, later held up as a "no-Popery classic". Staveley died on 8 January 1684 in Friar Lane. Posthumously, two lesser-known historical treatises of Staveley were published, on the English monarchy
and Church history, respectively.

Early life and education

Thomas Staveley was born to William Staveley (1596–1652),

called to the bar on 12 June 1654.[1][2]

Legal career, antiquarianism and works

Professionally, Staveley practised law, serving as part of the Leicester

Leicester Corporation. Samuel Carte favourably records his jurisprudence, recalling he "was strictly just, abhorring all manner of fraud or bribery in his practice of the law, was very rarely observed to be in a passion".[2][3]

Staveley's main interest was the antiquarian research of the

Plantagenet, alongside the Wars of the Roses; and (3) the successive unifications of Britain under Henry VII, James VI and I, and Charles II.[3]

Despite these interests, during his lifetime, Staveley's only published work was a religious tract: The Romish Horseleech: or an Impartial Account of the Intolerable Charge of Popery to this Nation (1674), the work "for which he is best known" according to the

The Monthly Review, in order to have the maximum impact on the public.[5][6] The assured review referred to the book as "calculated to excite, in the minds of men, a just abhorrence of the tyrannical usurpations and gross impositions of that church".[7] The book was one of only two books Thomas Jefferson owned on the subject of Catholicism.[8]

Personal life

In 1656, Thomas Staveley married Mary (d. 1669), the youngest daughter of John Onebye of Hinckley, in Belgrave, Leicester. Thomas and Mary had seven children, three sons: Thomas (d. 1676), William (1662–1723) and George (1665–1709); and four daughters: Mary (d. 1729), Anne (1663–1694), Christiana (b. 1667) and Jane (1669–1705). William became an army captain, and converted to Catholicism, indifferent to his father's anti-Romanist legacy, and George became the rector of Medbourne.[3] Staveley lived in Belgrave for nearly all his adult life, residing in the parsonage there, excluding the six or seven years before his death when he lived in Friar Lane, Leicester. In the later part of his life, he "acquired a melancholy habit", according to Nichols, and suffered from "the greatest pains which very severe fits of the gout exercised him", according to Carte.[3]

Staveley's wife, Mary, died in Belgrave, and was buried in St Peter's Church on the 12 October 1669. On 2 January 1684, Staveley died at his house in Friar Lane, buried soon after in the

bequests of £400.[2]

References

  1. ^ a b c d Fletcher 1898.
  2. ^ a b c d e Jenkins 2004.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h Nichols 1798, p. 677.
  4. S2CID 162291388
    .
  5. ISBN 9780719028595
    .
  6. JSTOR 1923592
    .
  7. ^ Anonymous (1770). "Art. VI. The Romish Horseleech". The Monthly Review. 42: 34.
  8. ISBN 9780208016294
    .

Sources

External links

Works by Thomas Staveley

Nichols' works, composed using Staveley's manuscripts

Others

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