of Oliver St John, through whose interest he was appointed a secretary to the parliamentary commissioners at Uxbridge in January 1645. He was admitted to Lincoln's Inn in 1647, and in March 1648 he received the appointment of receiver of the cursitor's fines, worth £350 a year. He took no part in the subsequent historical events or in the king's death. In March 1651 he attended St John and Sir Walter Strickland as secretary in their mission to Holland, and on the 29th of March 1652 he was appointed secretary to the council of state, being apparently also elected a member thereof about the same time. His duties included the control of the intelligence department and of the posts, and his perfect system of collecting information and success in discovering the plans of the enemies of the administration astonished his contemporaries. By his means, it was said, "Cromwell carried the secrets of all the princes of Europe at his girdle." On the 10th of February 1654 he was made a bencher of Lincoln's Inn. In the parliaments of 1654 and of 1656 he represented Ely; he was appointed a member of Cromwell's second council in 1657; was elected a governor of the Charterhouse in the same year; and in 1658 became chancellor of Glasgow University. Thurloe was attached to Cromwell as a man and admired him as a ruler, and Cromwell probably placed more confidence in the secretary than in any one of those who surrounded him. Thurloe, however, by no means directed Cromwell's policy. He was in favour of the protector's assumption of the royal title, and was opposed to the military party who obtained the ascendancy. After Oliver's death he supported Richard Cromwell's succession and took a prominent part in the administration, sitting in the parliament of January 1659 as member for Cambridge University. Attacked by the republicans on the ground of arbitrary imprisonments and transportations during the Protectorate, he succeeded in vindicating his conduct; but the breach between the army and the parliament, and the ascendancy obtained by the former, caused his own as well as Richard's downfall. Nevertheless, being indispensable, he was reappointed secretary of state on the 27th of February 1660. He appears to have steadily resisted the Restoration, and his promises of support to Hyde in April inspired little confidence. On the 15th of May 1660 he was arrested on the charge of high treason, but was set free on the 29th of June, subject to the obligation of attending the secretaries of state " for the service of the state whenever they should require." He subsequently wrote several papers on the subject of foreign affairs for Clarendon's information. He died on the 21st of February 1668 at his chambers in Lincoln's Inn, and is buried 'under the chapel there. Thurloe was twice married, and by his second wife Anne, daughter of Sir John Lytcote of East Moulsey in Surrey, he had four sons and two daughters.
His extensive correspondence, the originals of which are in the Bodleian Library at Oxford and the British Museum (Add. MSS. 4156, 4157, 4158), is one of the chief sources of information for the period. A portion was published with a memoir by T. Birch in 1742, and other correspondence is printed in R. Vaughan's Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell (1836). See also Die Politik des Protectors Oliver Cromwell in der Auffassung und_ Thatigkeit . . . des Staatssecretars John Thurloe, by Sigismund, Freiherr von Bishoffshausen (1899); Eng. Hist. Review, xiii. 527 (Thurloe and the post office); Notes and Queries, 11th series, vol. viii. p. 83 (account of his death); A Letter to a Friend . . . on the Publication of Thurloe's State Papers (1742); Clarendon's History of the Rebellion; Gardiner's History of the Commonwealth.
THURLOW, EDWARD THURLOW, 1st Baron (1731-1806), English lord chancellor, was born at Bracon Ash, in the county of Norfolk, on the 9th of December 1731. He was the eldest son of the Rev. Thomas Thurlow. He was educated at a private school and at the grammar school of .Canterbury, where he was considered a bold, refractory, clever boy. In 1748 Thurlow entered Caius College, Cambridge, but an act of insubordination necessitated his leaving Cambridge without a degree (1751). He was for some time articled to. a solicitor in Lincoln's Inn
along with the poet Cowper, but in 1754 was called to the bar at the Inner Temple, and subsequently went on the western circuit—at first with little success. But in the case of Luke Robinson v. The Earl of Winchelsea (1758) Thurlow came into collision with Sir Fletcher Norton, afterwards ist Baron Grantley (1716-1789), then the terror of solicitors and the tyrant of the bar, and put down his arrogance with dignity and success. From this time his practice increased rapidly. In 1761 he was made a king's counsel, through the influence of the duchess of Queensberry. In 1762 he was elected a bencher of the Inner Temple.
Thurlow now with some hesitation entered himself into the ranks of the Tory party. In 1768 he became member for Tamworth. In 1769 the Douglas peerage case came on for hearing in the House of Lords, and Thurlow, who had drawn the pleadings some years before (Notes and Queries, 3rd series, vol. iii. p. 122), led for the appellant in a speech of great analytic power. In 1770, as a recognition of his defence in the previous January of the expulsion of Wilkes, Thurlow was made solicitor-general on the resignation of Dunning, and in the following year, after he had enhanced his reputation with the government by attacking the rights of juries in cases of libel (Rex v. Miller, 20 St. Tr. 870-896) and the liberty of the press (16 Parly. Hist. 1144), was raised to the attorney-generalship. Thurlow's public life was as factious as his youth had been daring. His hatred of the American colonists, and his imprudent assertion that as attorney-general he might set aside by scire facias as forfeited every charter in America (debate on the American Prohibitory Bill, 18 P.H. 999); his speech in aggravation of punishment in the case of Home Tooke (20 Si. Tr. 777-783), when he argued that the prisoner ought to be pilloried, because imprisonment was no penalty to a man of sedentary habits and a fine would be paid by seditious subscription; and his opposition to all interference with the slave trade—are characteristic. In 1778 Thurlow became lord chancellor and Baron Thurlow of Ashfield, and took his seat in the House of Lords, where he soon acquired an almost dictatorial power. He opposed the economical and constitutional reforms proposed
by Burke and Dunning. Under Rockingham he clung to the chancellorship, while conducting himself like a leader of the opposition. To the short-lived ministry of Shelburne he gave consistent support. Under the coalition of Fox and North (April to December 1783) the great seal was placed in commission, and Lord Loughborough was made first commissioner. But Thurlow, acting as the king's adviser, and in acccordance with his wishes, harassed the new ministry, and ultimately secured the rejection of Fox's India Bill (24 P.H. 226). The coalition
was at once dissolved. Pitt accepted office, and Thurlow again became lord chancellor (Dec. 23, 1783). At first he supported the government, but soon his overbearing temper asserted itself. Imprudently relying on the friendship of the king, and actuated by scarcely disguised enmity to Pitt, Thurlow passed rapidly from occasional acts of hostility to secret disaffection, and finally to open revolt. He delivered himself strongly against a bill, introduced without his privity, for the restoration to the heirs of attainted owners of estates forfeited in the Jacobite rebellion of 1745. Partly to please the king and queen, partly from dislike to Burke, and partly perhaps from a real belief in the groundlessness of the accusation, he supported Warren Hastings on every occasion " with indecorous violence." His negotiations with the Whigs during the discussion of the Regency Bill (1788-Feb. 19, 1789) were designed to secure his seat on the woolsack in the event of Fox being called to power. The climax was reached in 1792, when he attacked Pitt's bill " to establish a sinking fund for the redemption of the national debt," not on account of the economic objections to which it was liable, but on the trivial ground that it was an unconstitutional attempt to bind further parliaments. The bill was carried, but only by
a narrow majority, and Pitt, feeling that co-operation with such a colleague was impossible, insisted successfully on his dismissal (June 15, 1792). The ex-chancellor, who had a few days before been created Baron Thurlow of Thurlow, with remainder to his brothers and their male descendants, now retired into private life, and, with the exception of a futile intrigue, under the auspices of the prince of Wales, for the formation of a ministry from which Pitt and Fox should be excluded, and in which the earl of Moira should be premier and Thurlow chancellor (1797), finally
