In 1624, King James I granted Houghton House, near Ampthill, Bedfordshire, to Thomas Bruce. The house was built by architects John Thorpe and Inigo Jones in the Jacobean and Classical styles for Mary Herbert, Dowager Countess of Pembroke.[3] It was reverted to the King by Mary's brother two years after the Countess' death in 1621 and became the principal residence for the Bruce family for over a century.[4][5] King Charles I of England later granted him nearby Houghton Park to preserve game for the royal hunt, but persistent hunting and hawking by the local Conquest family forced the King's subsequent intervention.[4][6]
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During King Charles I's period of Personal Rule, Thomas Bruce maintained close relations with the court. He attended the King for his coronation in Scotland in 1633 and was created Earl of Elgin on 21 June 1633.
Thomas Bruce continued in royal favour. He was created Baron Bruce of Whorlton, in the Peerage of England, on 29 July 1641.[8][9] In 1643, he was appointed "Keeper of the King's Park" at Byfleet, a role he held until 1647.[10]
Shortly before the 1648 outbreak of the Second English Civil War, fellow scot, William Murray, 1st Earl of Dysart, whipping boy of Charles I and husband of his relative, Catherine Bruce, appointed Bruce as principal trustee of Ham House to act on behalf of his wife, Catherine, and their daughters. The move was successful in helping protect Murray's ownership of the estate by making sequestration by the Parliamentarians both more difficult and, given Elgin's influential position with the Scottish Presbyterians, politically undesirable.[11]
Bruce was later described by Sir Philip Warwick as 'a Gentleman of a very good understanding, and of a pious, but timorous and cautious mind'. He recounted how Bruce expressed some uneasy regret for his actions, that he had tried to avoid parliament when he could and denied having been one of the handful of lords that condemned Archbishop Laud to death.[12]
Diana Cecil, 2nd wife of Thomas Bruce and widow of Henry de Vere, 18th Earl of Oxford. Portrait by van DyckThe Ailesbury Mausoleum, Maulden Churchyard, Bedfordshire, built by Thomas Bruce, 1st Earl of Elgin, in memory of his 2nd wife Diana Cecil. One of the earliest free-standing mausoluems built in England[14]
Secondly, on 12 November 1629, he married Lady Diana Cecil (d.26 February 1658), daughter of William Cecil, 2nd Earl of Exeter by his second wife, Elizabeth Drury, and widow of Henry de Vere, 18th Earl of Oxford. The marriage was childless. Diana had married de Vere in 1624, just a year before his death, and thus brought with her considerable estates at West Tanfield and Manfield, near Bruce's existing Yorkshire estates, as well as property in Lincolnshire and Middlesex, including Clerkenwell Priory.[1] Thomas built in her memory, the Ailesbury Mausoleum, in the churchyard of St. Mary's Church, Maulden, in Bedfordshire, an octagonal building built over an already existing crypt. Inside the Mausoleum survives the monument to Diana, and marble busts of her husband Thomas and of his grandson Edward Bruce.[15] Sir Howard Colvin identified it as one of the first two freestanding mausoleums in England, the other being the Cabell Mausoleum in Buckfastleigh, Devon.[14]
^Vivian, Lt.Col. J.L., (Ed.) The Visitations of the County of Devon: Comprising the Heralds' Visitations of 1531, 1564 & 1620, Exeter, 1895, p.174, pedigree of Chichester
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