Thomas Weston (merchant adventurer)

Thomas Weston was baptized on December 21, 1584, at Rugeley, Staffordshire England. He was the son of Ralph Weston and Anne Smith. He was admitted to the Ironmongers Company of London in 1609

In 1615, he persuaded Edward Pickering to become his agent in Holland and together they began to import a variety of nonconformist religious tracts that were seditious. In 1619, he and his agent Philomen Powell began importing tons of alum for which they did not pay custom duties. He and some of his associate Merchant Adventurers had been brought before the Privy Council and ordered to cease unlimited trade in the Netherlands. Soon after, he left England and travelled to Leiden, Holland, where his agent Pickering had married a woman belonging to a Puritan sect called Separatists, consisting of English men and women in exile due to their religious views who were hoping to gain passage to America.

Thomas Weston was the London merchant who first became involved with the Leiden Separatists who settled Plymouth colony in 1620. The colony was financed and begun under his direction, but he quit the enterprise in 1622.

As agent for the merchant adventurers' investment in the Mayflower voyage, Thomas Weston played an instrumental part in the incident of the More children of Shropshire, who had been taken from their mother’s home in 1616 in a dispute centreing on her supposed adultery. The children had been held incommunicado in Shropshire for four years and then taken to Weston and held at his home in Aldgate, London, for some weeks until the Mayflower was to sail. They were then given over to the custody of three senior Pilgrim officials for the voyage to the New World. Three of the four children died the first bitter winter in Plymouth. Only Richard More survived.

Thomas Weston married Elizabeth Weaver by October 17, 1623. She was a daughter of Christopher Weaver and Anne Green. He had one child, Elizabeth Weston, born about 1630. She married Roger Conant before January 22, 1661/2, and had two children. He died in June 1672. Child of Thomas and Elizabeth Weston:

In early 1622, he began the colony of Wessagusset (Weymouth) which failed by March 1623. He left New England for Virginia, and by 1640, Maryland. Weston’s activities in regard to the Plymouth colony are detailed in William Bradford’s history - “So, Mr. Weston had come hither again, and afterward shaped his course for Virginia, and so for the present I shall leave him.”

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