MURDERED 1682.
Tawny-coloured dress. Wig and ruffles. Holding a cane.
THE son of Sir Thomas Thynne of Richmond, Surrey, by Stuart, daughter and co-heir of Dr. Walter Balquanhill, Dean of Durham and Master of the Savoy. On the death of his uncle Sir James, Thomas Thynne inherited Longleat and other large estates, and was thenceforward known by the nickname of ‘Tom o’ Ten Thousand.’ He enlarged and improved the house of his inheritance, built stabling, made good roads, which were a benefit to the country round, and was proverbial for generosity and hospitality.
Indeed, his hospitable treats are immortalised in Dryden’s poem of ‘Absalom and Achitophel,’ for Absalom (the Duke of Monmouth) and the Master of Longleat were sincerely attached to each other. And on the Duke’s return from banishment to Holland, in 1680, his staunch friend Thynne gave him so enthusiastic a welcome at his house, that he was in consequence deprived of the command of a regiment of militia in the county.
Thomas Thynne now turned his thoughts to matrimony, and resolved to take a wife whose birth and fortune qualified her to reign as mistress of his lordly mansion. He therefore selected the first match in the United Kingdom, and engaged himself to a widow lady of the mature age of thirteen years, Lady Elizabeth Percy, daughter and heir of the eleventh Earl of Northumberland. She had been removed from her mother’s guardianship on that lady’s second marriage, and committed to the care of her grandmother, the Dowager Lady Northumberland, by whom she was betrothed to Lord Ogle, son of the Duke of Newcastle, 1679. But the bridegroom dying the next year, the heiress was once more free to bestow her hand, and the Duke of Monmouth interested himself to further the suit of his friend, ‘Tom o’ Ten Thousand,’ but it was whispered that the grandmother favoured the idea more than the granddaughter. However, in June 1681 they were contracted, and in July Mr. Thynne gained the young lady’s consent that the marriage should be solemnised, on condition that it was kept secret until her year of mourning should be over. In the Marriage Service, when they came to the passage ‘with all my worldly goods I thee endow,’ the husband placed on the open Prayer-Book one hundred pieces of golden guineas, mixed with silver, ‘which the lady put into her handkerchief, and then pocketed.’ No sooner was the ceremony concluded than the bride announced her intention of going abroad to spend a year with Lady Temple, the wife of the celebrated Sir William Temple, in Holland, a proceeding which was the cause of much gossip, some saying that she disliked her husband, and preferred another, and hoped to procure a dissolution of the marriage, etc. Be this as it may, there is no doubt that Count Königsmark, a handsome and distinguished officer, the head of one of Sweden’s noblest families, then residing in London, was Thynne’s rival. It is said he followed the young bride to the Continent, at all events he laid a deep scheme to rid himself of the obnoxious husband, by whom, he affirmed, he had been insulted. He accordingly secured the services of a German officer, who on his part hired two men, to one of whom (a Pole) was intrusted the actual murder. Königsmark kept out of the way, while his three creatures watched Thynne’s proceedings, and lay in wait for him.
On the night of February the 12th, 1682, as the unfortunate gentleman was returning from a visit to the Countess of Northumberland, his coach was stopped, one villain riding up to the horses’ heads, another alongside pointing to the occupant of the carriage, when the Pole fired, lodging several shots in the body of Thomas Thynne. On hearing the sad news, his faithful friend, the Duke of Monmouth, from whom he had just parted, hastened to the sufferer’s bedside, tending him through the night with the utmost care, and taking the most energetic measures for the detection of the murderers. Indeed, it was at first supposed that the shot was intended for the Duke himself, but this Königsmark strenuously denied. Thomas Thynne lingered till the next morning.
The instigator of this foul deed was acquitted; the three men in his employ suffered death, the Duke of Monmouth witnessing the execution. The German officer behaved with gallantry worthy a better cause, his accomplice protested against the hardness of his fate, seeing he was about to die for two men, and a woman, on not one of whom he had ever set his eyes; and the Pole pleaded that he had only obeyed orders, as a soldier should do.
The Count, so unjustly acquitted, found, however, that his reputation had suffered by the dastardly and cruel deed, and confessing that it was a stain on his name, he entered the Venetian service, went to the wars, was sent to Greece as second in command, and fell at the siege of Argos, August 1686. The well-known marble monument erected by Thomas Thynne’s family to his memory, in Westminster Abbey, has an elaborate bas-relief representing the murder.
Dying without children, he was succeeded by his second cousin and namesake, afterwards first Viscount Weymouth.