Sir Thomas Cheek, Cheeke or Cheke (died March 1659) was an English politician who sat in the House of Commons in every parliament between 1614 and 1653.[1]
Life
Cheek was the son of Henry Cheke and his wife Frances Radclyffe (daughter of Sir Humphrey Radclyffe of Elstow and sister of Edward Radclyffe, 6th Earl of Sussex), and grandson of Sir John Cheke, royal preceptor and classical scholar. He was educated at St Peter's School, York where his school fellows included Thomas Morton, afterwards Bishop of Durham, and Guy Fawkes. He lost his father while a minor: he wrote a Greek letter and Latin verses to the Lord Treasurer in 1586 in which he called himself an orphan, and spoke of his father being gone to the joys of heaven. In it, he prays to his Lordship, that as he was always a help and a sanctuary unto his father, so he would be to him.[2] Cheek was knighted by King James I on 11 May 1603.[3]
In 1614, Cheek was elected Member of Parliament for Newport, and MP for Harwich Harwich in 1621. In 1624 he was elected MP for both Bere Alston and Essex, and chose to sit for Essex. He was MP for Bere Alston again in 1625 and was elected MP for Maldon in 1626. In 1628 he was elected MP for Colchester where he sat until 1629 when King Charles decided to rule without parliament for eleven years.[4] He was awarded MA from Cambridge University in 1629.[5]
Cheek purchased Pirgo Park in Havering, Essex from the Grey family. He died at "a great age", and was buried on 25 March 1659 in St Alban, Wood Street in the north chapel near his grandfather Sir John Cheke.[7]
Family
The Cheeke girls, Essex and Anne, painted by van Dyck
Thomas Cheek's first wife was Katharine, a daughter of Peter Osborne and his wife Anne Blyth. Osborne was a very loyal friend of Cheek's grandfather, and had given him a home in his last months following his release from the Tower of London in 1556. Anne Osborne was the daughter of John Blyth, first Regius Professor of Physick in the University of Cambridge (1540), who had married Sir John Cheke's sister. Thomas Cheek therefore married his own second cousin: they were married for nearly twenty years, and had a son Anthony in Virginia [citation needed].
Katharine Cheek died on 11 February 1615 of sepsis or gangrene after being bled by the queen's surgeon for a minor complaint.[8][9]
Essex Cheeke, later Dame Essex Bevil and then Countess of Manchester; she married:
(1) Sir Robert Bevil, KB,
(2) Edward Montagu, 2nd Earl of Manchester (1602-1671), as his third wife, on 30 December 1642. Montagu was previously married to her cousin Lady Anne Rich (d. 1641/2), daughter of Robert Rich, 2nd Earl of Warwick.[11] (Lady Anne Rich was Manchester's second wife, and the mother of his heir.) Of their children,
Lady Anne Montagu (d. circa 1689) married her second cousin (as his 2nd wife) Robert Rich, 5th Earl of Warwick, the son of Henry Rich, 1st Earl of Holland (a younger son of the 1st Earl of Warwick).
^A. Thrush, 'Cheke, Sir Thomas (1570-1659), of St. Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster and Pyrgo, Havering, Essex', in A. Thrush and J.P. Ferris (eds), The History of Parliament: the House of Commons 1604-1629 (from Cambridge University Press, 2010), History of Parliament Online.
^J. Strype, The life of the learned Sir John Cheke, kt., first Instructer [sic], afterwards Secretary of State, to King Edward VI (John Wyat, London 1705), p. 189.
^Strype, Life of the Learned Sir John Cheke, p. 190.
^H.W. Forsyth Harwood, 'Ingram, Viscount Irvine', in J. Balfour Paul, The Scots Peerage: Founded on Wood's Edition of Sir Robert Douglas's Peerage of Scotland (David Douglas, Edinburgh 1908), V (1908), pp. 9-20, at p. 13.
