Sir Thomas Crooke, 1st Baronet

Sir Thomas Crooke, 1st Baronet, of Baltimore (1574–1630) was an English-born politician, lawyer and landowner in seventeenth-century Ireland. He is chiefly remembered as the founder of the town of Baltimore, County Cork, which he built into a flourishing port, but which was largely destroyed shortly after his death during the Sack of Baltimore. He sat in the Irish House of Commons as member for Baltimore in the Parliament of 1613–1615. He was the first of the Crooke baronets of Baltimore.

He was born in Cransley, Northamptonshire, the eldest son of the Reverend Thomas Crooke; his mother was a Miss Samuel. His father was a Calvinist clergyman whose strong religious views often brought him into conflict with the English Crown, but who escaped serious censure, due to his position of preacher at Gray's Inn. Helkiah Crooke, Court physician to James I, was one of Sir Thomas's brothers, and Samuel Crooke, a preacher of some note, was another brother. Stephen Egerton, another leading Puritan preacher, married Thomas's sister Sarah. Egerton's niece, Margaret Tyndal Winthrop, was the third wife of John Winthrop, who became a coloniser with a much wider vision than Crooke's, being several times Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Crooke and Winthrop, although they must have been acquainted, are not known to have been intimate, but Crooke's sister Sarah was a close friend of Margaret Winthrop and left her a substantial legacy at her death in 1624.

Thomas spent much of his childhood in Suffolk, where his father served for some years as vicar of Great Waldingfield. The younger Thomas, on his father's petition, was admitted to Gray's Inn in 1597. He is said to have acquired a successful practice at the English Bar, but after his father's death he turned his mind towards colonisation. His motives appear to have been twofold: to establish a thriving commercial centre, and to create a safe haven for those who shared his strong Calvinist views.

...
Wikipedia