Adam Nicolson
The Gentry

Stories of the English

For my daughters

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Dedication

Map

Introduction: Ungentle Gentles

Part I: The Inherited World 1410–1520

1410s–1520s

Survival

The Plumptons, Plumpton, Yorkshire

Part II: In the Renaissance State 1520–1610

1520s–1580s

Discretion

The Throckmortons, Coughton, Warwickshire

1580s–1610s

Control

The Thynnes, Oxford, Beaconsfield, Wiltshire, Shropshire and London

Part III: The Great Century 1610–1710

1610s–1650s

Steadiness

The Oglanders, Nunwell, Isle of Wight

1630s–1660s

Withdrawal

The Oxindens, Denton, Kent

1660s–1710s

Honour

The le Neves, Great Witchingham, Norfolk

Part IV: Atlantic Domains 1710–1790

1710s–1750s

Dominance

The Lascelles, Yorkshire, Barbados, Richmond and London

1730s–1790s

Courage

The Pinckneys, Wappoo and Charleston, South Carolina, and Richmond, Surrey

Part V: The Failing Vision 1790–1910

1790s–1840s

Fecklessness

The Capels, London, Brussels and Lausanne

1780s–1910s

Fantasy

The Hugheses, Kinmel, Denbighshire and Grosvenor Square, London

Part VI: The After-Life 1910–2010

1890s–1950s

Renunciation

The Aclands, Killerton, Devon and Holnicote, Somerset

1950s–2010s

Continuity

The Cliffords, Frampton on Severn, Gloucestershire

Conclusion: Return of the Native

Notes

Acknowledgements

Searchable Terms

Other books by Adam Nicolson

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

Ungentle Gentles

No country has described itself so intimately and for so long as this one. The English have been the great self-recorders and England has preserved more of what its people have written about themselves than anywhere else on earth.¹ Inevitably, millions of English men and women have lived with no record of their existence but the writings of the self-recordists – the literate, the scholarly and the litigious, lovers and haters, accountants, manipulators, the worried and the triumphant, the gossips, the distant friends, people separated by business or ambition – have often been kept by their descendants. That is why the English gentry are such an intriguing world to explore: they both wrote and kept, and because of what they kept they are the most knowable English there have ever been. They may well be the most knowable people that have ever lived. Only governments and navies have been so careful about their own past.

Over the six centuries this book covers, the gentry wrote their lives down. Most of their documents, it is true, have disappeared. Often only one side of a correspondence remains. Sometimes a sequence breaks off without explanation. Sometimes there is nothing but the recording, yet again, of the properties owned, the debts incurred, the credit given. Individual families take up tens of shelf-yards with their title deeds. But alongside that, quantities of letters and journals have also found their way to the great public repositories with which this country is blessed: not only the National Archives in Kew and the British Library in St Pancras, but the strings of County Record Offices, all of which are stuffed with heartstoppingly vivid and unregarded treasures.

The people who appear in this book wrote in private and the experience of their words on the written page remains mysteriously private. When you sit at a desk in Exeter or Newport, in Norwich or Bangor, with their words in front of you, there is no discreet mulberry-coloured rope holding you away from them. There is no glass over the pictures, no Please Don’t Touch. The young men and women, the paterfamilias and the desperate nephew, the estate steward and the indigent younger brother, are all there with you in the room. Each letter or journal entry articulates its moment, not only in its words but in its physical form, the hurry or care with which it is written, the sense of politeness or intimacy, or rage. The unfolding of a letter from an envelope always seems to me like the opening of time itself. Nearly always they wrote on beautiful, handmade paper, in now fading brown ink, occasionally in blood, sometimes with a lock of hair folded up in a twist of the paper, once in these stories with the hair glued to the paper with a blob of sealing wax, sometimes in tears, when big blurring puddles have fallen on the ink. In one passage in this book, a grieving father wrote with his own tears, his silvery grey words now scarcely legible on the page.

In part, this book is a journey around that manuscript England, poking about in the national attic, but twinned to paper is another substance just as central to the life of the gentry and in constant dialogue with it: earth. This is a book about land, or at least about the meeting of land and paper. There is nothing mysterious or mystical about this. For most of English history, land was the principal means of production. Land was the national industry. Even as late as 1730,² three-quarters of the population derived their livelihood from it and half was directly engaged in farming. By 1800 that proportion had dropped to a third, by 1850 to a fifth, by 1900 a tenth, by 1970 a fortieth and by 2000 a hundredth. Our distance from the realities of land is the biggest obstacle we have in empathizing with the past. We no longer have an intuitive understanding of the centrality of the cultivated earth to the life systems of England, land not only as a way of growing food but for the gentry a source of income, in the form of rent, or the sale of produce grown and sold; and as a supremely secure asset, safer than houses. For the seventeenth-century political theorist James Harrington, ‘the Foundation of Property be in Land: but if in Money, lightly come, lightly go’.³

Land was also more than money. On the frontispiece of The English Gentlewoman, Richard Brathwait’s 1631 etiquette book for ladies, his ideal pupil is depicted with a motto floating beside her, saying, ‘Grace my guide, Glory my goale.’ But in The English Gentleman, published the year before, his touchstones are ‘Pes in terris, spes in caelis’ (Feet on the lands, hope in the heavens). Land was the foundation for this life and in some ways a foreshadowing of the life to come. It was the realm through which landowners could extend their presence into a seductive display, a theatre in which they could perform, a playground on which they could take their exercise and a visible, tangible and mouldable anchor in the world of men. Much of this book describes the hyphenated reality of a family-in-a-place, a genetic enterprise based on land which over generations (if you were lucky) was owned, loved, used, made, re-made and, if need be, defended against others. Gentry priorities – for order, settlement and continuity, for visible wellbeing and a hierarchical community of which they were the local summit – could all be read in the landscape, in the field systems, manor houses, gardens, orchards, churches and villages of rural England. These settlements were not arranged on purely ergonomic or financial grounds. They were self-portraits of the families that owned them. Gentry landscape was autobiography in earth.

England is covered with these deeply symbolic gentry places and they form the counterpart to the privacy of the manuscripts. Landscape was the gentry face; archives the gentry heart. Many houses do survive, often with the parish churches next to them, with the gentry tombs in their own chapels at the east end, often beautiful and highly articulate memorials to a forgotten ideology. But gentry existence was less well funded and more vulnerable to change and failure than that of the great aristocrats and so their houses and the surrounding skirts of landscape do not always survive intact. I have walked the lands of all the families in this book⁴ and it is a poignant pleasure to beat your way through an overgrown wood, or to walk across the stubble of a just-harvested wheatfield to find nothing but a soggy hollow, or a single ivy-bearded wall, while knowing in the most intimate detail from their papers the events that occurred there three, four or five centuries before. Whole destinies unfolded where now there are only a few crabbed trees or the lingering aftersmell of fox.

Reality is intimate and rather than attempt a heroic and Olympian survey of the whole gentry world, I have taken a sequence of twelve individual gentry families, each at a particular crisis in their lives. I have chosen them only if they were richly articulate about themselves, and if their archives have somehow survived. Although there are oceans of ordinariness here, each family is not quite ordinary; each throws a slightly different sidelight on to the gentry phenomenon. Their lives are highly individual but I have lined them up, like a series of organ pipes, to make a history of England over the last six hundred years, variations on the same tune played across six centuries.

Each family has fifty-odd years in the spotlight, usually an arc of three generations: parents, the protagonists and their children. Some of the histories overlap with others, some cover longer time-spans, but nearly all are lessons in survival: how to keep going when the world wants to do you down; how to make the best of the opportunities that are on offer; how to manipulate others; how to make government and the law work in your favour; how to resist or destroy your enemies. One or two are lessons in defeat: how to get it wrong, what happens when resolution fails, or more importantly, when a family loses its grip on the nature of reality. Together, they are, in effect, a self-portrait of England, or at least of its central and culture-forming class. The people in this book are neither the poor nor the great grandees of the country, but the responsive and continuous middle of Englishness.

I have often thought that the twelve leading gents described here could have sat down to dinner together and not felt they were in alien company. Some would have been charming or gawky, some a little graceless and domineering, one or two quite garrulous, but none would have felt that the other people around the table would not have understood them. The gentry as they first appear in their letters in the late Middle Ages are astonishingly like the gentry as they slide on into the twenty-first century. Each would have known the same places and have been able to discuss the ever-reliable standbys of hunting, shooting, fishing, farming, cattle, politics, money, God and dogs. All of these run through this book as the background music, the noise you hear in gentry life when nothing else is going on. And although I did not choose them for this reason, but gathered them as a set of emblematic figures, it turns out, needless to say, that through family connections they would all have known each other, even if a little remotely.

I have scattered them quite deliberately all over England and parts of the English-speaking world, and so this connectedness is not about a local cousinage or a county community. Every one of these families had important London – or usually Westminster – connections. And although their own local countries mattered to them, none from the very beginning was constrained by the boundaries of the places they owned. Even as they emerged in the late Middle Ages, this was a class with local roots but a national perspective. And if this all sounds like the introductory chat at an upper-middle-class dinner party – how did you get here, who do you know, how is Aletheia? – that is probably a true impression. At one level, this book is about networking.

But who were they? The gentry net spreads across space and time but what defined them as gentry? That is an unavoidable question but definition and the gentry have stalked each other a little warily for at least six hundred years. What was the frame in which these families were trying to make their way in the world? What was their role in the making of England? And what made them what they were?

Those questions interlock but at the core of the gentry story is a subtle and particular ripple in the status of the English nobility which from the fourteenth century onwards distinguished England from the rest of Europe. The idea of gentility, of a particular class of propertied and cultivated people, distinct from what the unashamed Richard Brathwait in the seventeenth century would call ‘the bleere-ey’d Vulgar’, was not exclusively English. It was common to most parts of western and southern Europe in the Middle Ages. France and Burgundy were the heart of it and the arbiters of its standards of behaviour. Elegance, courtliness, poetry and architecture all came from there.

Gentleness, in that sense, was French and England was part of this French culture-province, but an English difference emerged towards the end of the fourteenth century, when a powerful English crown established the ability to appoint peers by writ or summons to Parliament. The peers were part of the government of England not by right but by royal invitation or instruction. Those barons and other peers constituted the tiniest possible minority, about sixty men out of a total of about three million in the late fourteenth century. This crown-imposed distinction between the noble and non-noble had profound effects on those people whose social and economic standing came just below them. Those ‘gentry’ – the word is related to ‘gene’ and means essentially ‘people of good breeding’ – were not considered noble. They were gentlemen and gentlewomen, were often related to and intermarried with the nobility, but were not noble themselves. They were members of the Commons.

The House of Commons was where they gathered, openly distinct from their cousins, uncles and fathers who were in the House of Lords next door. And so the gentry occupied a richly ambivalent position, as members of the governing class but with no visible boundary between them and the people immediately below them, socially and economically. They were continuous with both the yeomen – independent, freeholding farmers – and the merchants and traders of the late medieval cities. Neither merchant nor yeoman had claim to much education, lineage, a coat of arms or a part in government, local or national, but they were not in any way distinct from the gentry in terms of the law.

This deep structure meant that the English gentry were open at both ends: sharing a French culture of courtesy, chivalry and knightliness with the nobility above them; entirely accessible to the English world of the yeomen and the growing urban middle class below them. Both the upper and lower boundaries of the gentry were, as the modern historians Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes have said, ‘permeable membranes’.⁵

The openness was surprisingly radical. The English gentry did not, for example, need to own land. From the fourteenth century onwards, merchants from the City of London were given knighthoods, the ultimate signal of high gentry status. Medieval lawyers were considered gentry, as were the upper clergy. High royal officials were gentry by virtue of their office. You could marry into the gentry and become a member, become a city alderman and be considered gentry, thrive in the law, inherit money, become a university don or medical doctor: all qualified the individual to be considered a member of this class. In 1434, the military theorist Nicholas Upton calmly accepted that ‘in thys days openly we se how many poor men by theyr grace, favour, labour or deserving’ had become gentlemen.⁶ Engaging in business or in entrepreneurial developments of docks, harbours, roads, canals and markets, opening mines and quarries, developing land, investing in overseas trade, becoming a partner in any kind of business from sheep transport to hansom cabs: none of this disqualified a man or woman from the gentry. Sir John Fastolf, the fifteenth-century Norfolk gentleman whose name Shakespeare borrowed for his fat, drunk, cowardly and mendacious knight, was in fact an ex-soldier who bought himself a pub in Southwark (the Boar’s Head, which may be why Shakespeare chose him) and ran a shipping line taking Norfolk pork to European markets. As the central organ of the English body politic, the gentry from its origins was flexible, founded on the principle that its members were adapting and adjusting to changing circumstances. No revolution was required for this to happen. This flexible class lay at the foundations of English culture and its long history of liberty and independence.

Younger children of the nobility sank into the gentry and younger children of the gentry sank into the urban middle class. This threat of failure, of losing the status into which you had been born, recurs in this book as one of the central motivators of the gentry class. A gentleman whose status was not guaranteed was necessarily active, engaged with the world, adaptive and open to change. Any exaggerated respect for the past and your lineage was an inflexibility that would threaten your fortunes.⁷

This is the mirror image of the modern English idea of a gentleman as someone to whom dignity and a ramrod morality were the foundations of his life. But the long career of the English in the world is not explicable if stiffness was their governing characteristic. One member of the gentry after another in this book recognized that openness was the key and when travelling abroad they noticed the difference in social structure. The situation in France and Italy, Thomas Fuller, the church historian, wrote in the mid-seventeenth century, was ‘like a die which hath no points between cinque and ace – nobility and peasantry’. In England, he went on, ‘the temple of honour is bolted against none who have passed through the temple of virtue’.⁸ England was a place which could congratulate itself on allowing high social standing to anyone who qualified for it through his achievements or education, and through his qualities as a person, not what his ancestry said he was.

This distinction became a cliché and by the nineteenth century antiquaries had begun to establish just how much better the English system was. Sir James Lawrence, writing his paper On the Nobility of the British Gentry Compared with Those on the Continent in 1824,⁹ told his appreciative audience that in Germany, Hungary, Russia, Sweden and Denmark the children of all members of the nobility had titles. In France, Spain and Portugal only the eldest male heir was officially titled but all descendants were nevertheless considered noble. In England, the gentry were, as everyone knew, ‘the nursery garden from which the peers are usually transplanted’¹⁰ but they were not nobles themselves. Hence the nature of English society. Lawrence computed that in 1798 9,458 families in England were entitled to bear arms, adding the aristocracy and the gentry together, compared with Russia where there were 580,000 nobles, Austria 290,000 (men only), Spain 479,000 and France (in 1789) 365,000 noble families.

The English gentry, in this light, were the great exchange medium of the culture, where high ideals could interact with the harder and more demanding pressures of a fierce and competitive world. And this turns another easy assumption on its head. The gentry are largely associated with land and landed estates, which is where they invested most of their wealth. In fact, at the gentry’s late medieval origins, it was the growing dominance of London that was the key engine in their creation. Between 1420 and 1470, it was a version of London English that became the language of cultivated people. The connectivity which London provided – a market in marriageable girls, among many other commodities – was the means of getting on. London and Westminster were the centres of power, the law and money, in whose combined gravitational fields all future wellbeing lay. Every family in this book gravitated there in the end and gentry that could not thrive in London were unlikely to thrive at all.

The American historian Ellis Wasson has analysed the source of wealth of new entrants to the English gentry, defining that elite as those families which had three members or more elected as MPs, or went on to gain a peerage.¹¹ The pattern he has uncovered reveals that those entering the governing class from a background of land represented about 50 per cent of the new entrants in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, but they were on a dropping trend, declining to less than a fifth in Georgian and Victorian England. Very few indeed at any time entered on the proceeds of office, on money picked up around the skirts of government. A steady supply of lawyers always fed the gentry, varying between about a fifth and a quarter. Business was there from the beginning, and remained on a nearly consistent upward trend, from a quarter of all new entrants in the late Middle Ages and rising to nearly 70 per cent in Victorian England. This was a confirmation of both the original and the growing openness of the English gentry. It was never a closed landowners’ club. As Wasson says, ‘founders of parliamentary families came from almost every conceivable type of background’.

Grocers, fishmongers, merchant tailors, privateers, shipbuilders, tanners, wine merchants, drapers, goldsmiths, coal fitters, ironmasters, army victuallers, mercers, silk merchants and gunpowder manufacturers all succeeded in entering the elite.¹²

But there are paradoxes, arguments and irresolutions here because, despite all this talk of openness, it was also a class obsessed with blood, honour and lineage. In large parts of its mind, but not consistently, the gentry was anxious about the respectability of trade. For the early eighteenth-century etiquette specialist Geoffrey Hickes, the key distinction gentry had to learn was the ‘Difference between Prudence and Trading’.¹³ One was all right – gentry should attend to the management of their estates – the other certainly was not. Three hundred years earlier, in July 1433, William Packington Esquire – esquire being a gentry title, the rank just below knight, significant at least until the end of the nineteenth century – who was then Controller of the English garrison at Bayeux, was having a drink in a Bayeux pub with another Englishman he knew called Thomas Souderne. After plenty of wine, and quite a lot of chat, Souderne told Packington that he ‘was no sort of gentleman’ but had been a haberdasher in England where he had ‘porté le pennier’. Packington murdered him on the spot, lunging across the pub table with his dagger and killing Souderne with ‘un seul cop’ in the chest.¹⁴ There were limits to what one could put up with.

So was gentrydom a question of blood or of qualities? There was an everlasting blurring of these categories and the anonymous author of The Institucon of a Gentleman, published in 1555, saw around him examples of both ‘Ungentle Gentles’ – people who had the qualifications to be gentry but did not come from a gentry background – and ‘Gentle Ungentles’, the bad sons of old families. How to categorize them? The ungentle gentle of 1555 was

he which is born of a low degree, [but] by his virtue, wyt, pollicie, industry, knowledge in lawes, valiancy in armes, or such like honest meanes becometh a welbeloved and high esteemed manne, preferred then to a great office … euersomuch as he becommeth a post or stay of the commune wealth and so growing rich, doth thereby auance the rest of his poore line of kindred: then are the children of suche one commonly called gentleman, of which sorts of gentlemen we have nowe in Inglande very many, wherby it should appeare that vertue florisheth among us. These gentlemen are now called upstarters, a term lately invented by such as pondered not the groundes of honest meanes of rising or coming to promocion.¹⁵

Acreages of the gentry story are contained within that paragraph. No one should deny a hardworking person of ‘virtue and wit’ the chance to rise in the esteem of the world. But plenty of people looked down on them and despised them for the poverty of their origins. Teams of novelists were still mining this theme in the twentieth century. But the sixteenth-century author was no democrat before his time. His understanding of the gentry world was fuelled by a powerful vision of it as a moral community. There were people who had risen into the gentry of whose means of ascent he did not approve:

The new sorte of menne which are runne oute of theyre order and from the sonnes of handycraftmen have obteigned the name of gentlemen, the degree of Esquiers, or title of Knightes, [who] get landes neyther by their lerning nor worthines achiued, but purchased by certeyn dark augmentacion practices, by menes whereof, they be called gentlemen … These be the right upstartes.¹⁶

Just as constantly, though, over the passing centuries, other warnings were doled out by the old to the young. Lineage was not enough: you had to earn your place in the class. The superbly obnoxious Lord Chesterfield, in his advice to his nephew, maintained that line. ‘Never be proud of your rank or birth’, he told Philip Stanhope, the nephew, ‘but be as proud as you please of your character.’¹⁷ Education was all, ‘a smattering constitutes a coxcomb’,¹⁸ and ‘A drayman is probably born with as good organs as Milton, Locke or Newton; but, by culture, they are much more above him than he is above his horse.’¹⁹

For Geoffrey Hickes in the early eighteenth century ‘Peasantry [was] a Disease (like the Plague) easily caught by Conversation’,²⁰ but he nevertheless thought it vulgar to talk of your family or to ‘fling the Register of your Genealogy on the Table before all Company’.²¹ ‘Whoever rakes in the Ashes of the Dead, may fall upon the Stench instead of Perfumes.’²²

This radical uncertainty at the core of English class consciousness was its principal virtue. As a result, this book is in part about money and struggle, and also about blood and family, but essentially about the fusion of those categories, the blood-and-money struggle for survival. The gentry depended above all on the coherence and efficiency of the family, the genetic corporation, as the most reliable form of keeping going in a rival-thick world. The varying power-relationships of father, mother, siblings, step and half siblings, stepmothers, mothers-in-law, brothers-in-law, uncles, nephews, cousins and nieces take up many of these chapters. This was where the questions of enterprise and lineage, inherited virtue and self-generated virtue all intersected. There is much more here than a simple picture of the patriarchal family, in which the father ordained and the family obeyed. Even at the medieval beginning, or at the height of Victorian patriarchalism, the children did not always do what they were told. In several of these families, the father failed and the mother sustained the business. Women are ever-present in the archives, as writers and recipients of the letters, as managers and entrepreneurs, plotters and shapers, signing themselves ‘your bedfellow’, ‘your owne lover’ and ‘deare hart’. When looking at these connections between individuals, so alive in the manuscripts they left, and the subtle power-balances they represent, it is difficult to think that much has changed in 600 years. Family histories cannot be generalized but almost any one of them could be transferred without difficulty to another point in time. That is one of the purposes of this book: to make the experience of individual moments, with all their contingencies, the substance of the story.

PART I
The Inherited World

1410–1520

The high Middle Ages, from about 1100 until about 1300, had been blessed with golden summers and mild winters.¹ That beautiful warmth in the northern hemisphere had created both the great cathedrals of Europe and the contemporary surge far to the east in the population of the Mongol steppes. By the early fifteenth century, though, bleaker conditions prevailed, so that the growing season was at least three weeks shorter than it had been 150 years before. Winters were sharper and summers wretched. One winter in the 1430s a frost lay over London unbroken from the middle of November until the middle of February. The Thames froze solid and the French and Gascon wines usually delivered by ship to the Vintners’ wharves in the centre of the city had to be brought in by wagon through Kent. Frost in May, when flowers on vines are at their most vulnerable, had been unheard of in England in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. By 1400 it was common, even usual, and the vineyards disappeared from England. The Norwegians and Icelanders were finding ever more summer icebergs on their route to Vinland, while the English and other northern Europeans suffered from wetter summers, low productivity in their difficult and heavy lands, a shortage in seed corn, a deficit in calories, a dimming in the spark of life and a shrinkage in rents.

Walk over the Plumpton lands in Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire now in the early spring and the clay thickens around your boots: England was never the easiest of land to work. Even though the fourteenth-century epidemics of plague had savagely reduced the number of Europeans, a century later villages, particularly those on north-facing slopes or at some altitude, were still being deserted. The continent was short of money and the general crisis of authority which spread across the whole of Europe, the bitter squabbling over lands and lordships which marked the end of Middle Ages, may have been simply the reaction of a human population to the most difficult of planetary changes: global cooling. The story of William Plumpton and his family may be a private reflection of a world in bio-climatic decline.

The governors were still for the time being the crown, the church and the great lords. Between them they owned over half the country. Gentry like the Plumptons were dependent on them, feudally attached, and owning no more than 20 per cent of the land themselves, the same as the yeomen farmers in the social stratum below.

It was a legalized and commercial world – lawyers appear at every turn – but at the same time one heavily dependent on personal prestige and power. Law, for all its complexity and expense, was chronically vulnerable to the corruptions and distortions of big men’s threats. A glowing Arthurian vision of nobility and gentleness may have floated over these people but more as a longed-for world than a reflection of their own reality. Members of the medieval gentry can seem at times like little more than armed businessmen, gangsters on horseback, cannily in tune with the ways of the law but usually prepared to assert their will through their own and their gangs’ physical violence.

Of all the great medieval letter collections that survive, those of the Plumptons reveal these desperate conditions, a frontier existence in which personal extinction and the possibility of an entire family being extinguished did not seem like a distant prospect. As the authority of the English crown, weakened by the personal unworldliness of Henry VI, collapsed around them, and the great magnates fought themselves to a standstill, gentry families were caught in the backwash of chaos. Different branches of the Plumptons ended up facing each other in a pair of long, growling and destructive court cases, which is why most of these documents survive, gathered in evidence by the teams of opposing lawyers. That is also why little of the sweetness and elegance of life is apparent here. Not all of England was like this – typicality cannot be read from any of these families – and there are alternative visions. Englishmen, according to the Tuscan historian Polydore Vergil, writing at the very beginning of the next century, were

tall, with handsome open faces, grey-eyed for the most part. Their women are snow-white and handsome, and graced with the most decent apparel. And just as they are very similar to the Italians in the sound of their language, so the build of their bodies and their manners do not greatly differ from theirs. They have fine manners, they take counsel with deliberation (since they know that nothing is as inimical to counsel as haste), they are gentle and inclined by nature to every act of kindness.²

That is not what it seemed like in the world of the Plumptons.

1410s–1520s

Survival

The Plumptons

Plumpton, Yorkshire

In early May, under the narrow footbridge at Brafferton, a few miles north of York, the river Swale flows over the shallow bed of what was once Brafferton Ford. The water is dirty, a thick, chocolatey brown, its silty fertility drawn from the rich country of the Vale of York through which it has run. A giant fresh-leaved beech tree shades the churchyard of St Peter. Pollarded ashes and grey-green willows stand on the river banks. It doesn’t take much to imagine these broad wet acres in the Middle Ages: the oxen from the plough teams grazing on the spring fallow, the boys with their goads, the open fields with the new wheat up and growing, the crows scattered across the ridge-and-furrow and beside the river the long meadows thick with the first of the summer grass, the corncrakes hidden there and the skylarks above them.

Here, just at this crossing, deep in the middle of comfortable, unremarkable England, one morning in May 1441, this first story of a gentry family and its own particular catastrophe begins.¹ Sir William Plumpton was thirty-seven years old. He was a strong man, a soldier, knighted in the French wars, energetic, violent and assertive but also canny, a manipulator and deceiver, endlessly weaving webs of connection and influence, knowing how to court the great and suppress the weak, consciously looking to sustain the fortunes of his ancient and dignified name, happy to receive the hatred and contempt of those he had crossed or betrayed, confident that in the turmoil of this chaotic and desperate century he would emerge a winner.

He was approaching the peak of his powers and had come here this morning, Friday 5 May, with his tenants and followers, the twenty-four men of his own household and many others, perhaps a hundred or more, with the idea of having a fight. His men were armed with bows, swords and pole arms, the semi-agricultural instruments with which a man could slash at an enemy as he would at a hedge.²

Plumpton had seen chivalry and heroism in action and had heard of it from his father and grandfather. That grandfather, in defence of ancient honour, had rebelled against the usurper Henry IV and been executed, his boiled head displayed for months on York’s Micklegate Bar.³ His father, Sir Robert Plumpton, had been a knight at Agincourt, a retainer of Henry V’s brother, the beautiful and cultivated 25-year-old Duke of Bedford. Robert went to France, with his squire, two valets and eight Yorkshire archers, each paid five shillings a month, horsed, clothed and fed by him on condition that they ‘pay unto him halfe the gude that they win by war’.⁴ Money was never far from these chivalric arrangements. But this Robert was to die in the war, at the mud-drenched siege of Meaux on 8 December 1421, at which an English army, debilitated and made squalid by dysentery, subsided in its flooded trenches outside that city on the banks of the Marne.⁵

William was eighteen when his father died. Within five years he too had gone to France, as a squire, also with the great Duke of Bedford, and William was knighted there as his father had been. But English fortunes were on the wane. The siege of Meaux had been an early portent of English failure abroad. Joan of Arc soon swept them out of the country and the Plantagenet empire was reduced to the stump of the Pas de Calais. The Hundred Years War ended in English failure, and as it ended the English turned their appetite and genius for violence on themselves. The English civil wars, known since the sixteenth century as the Wars of the Roses, were, at least in part, the behaviour of a military class with no one left to fight.

The plague had become endemic in England since its first devastating eruptions a century before, and it struck again in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1438 and again in 1439.⁶ Harvests had failed, people were starving, their immune systems weakened. By the spring of 1441, something desperate was in the air. Since 1438 William Plumpton had been steward of the big royal forest of Knaresborough, 4,500 acres, much of it the wild and moory waste stretching up into the Pennines to the west of where Harrogate now stands. This royal appointment made him lord over hundreds of tenants, who were under no obligation to pay tolls levied by other authorities – on bridges, fairs, roads, quays and markets. In 1440, William and 700 of these Knaresborough men had ridden over in a frightening posse ‘arrayed in manner of war, and in ryotous wise assembled’ to the market town at Otley, where the Cardinal Archbishop of York had been trying to enforce the payment of his market dues.⁷

He was no innocent in this and from the mid-1430s onwards had been aggressively attempting to widen his influence and enlarge his income.⁸ He hired mercenaries from the Scottish border, battle-hardened and well-armed men from the valley of the Tyne and near Hexham on the Northumberland moors, and on Thursday 4 May, decided to send them on a raid out into the Knaresborough country, south-east of Ripon towards York. In the twin villages of Brafferton and Helperby, Plumpton’s men put up a road block to meet them, ‘with stoks, thorns, and otherwise, to thintent that when the said officers, tenants and servants came thither, they should be stopped their and incumbred’.⁹

The crisis came early on Friday 5 May and moved fast. Before sunrise, ‘on the morne, by the spring of the day’,¹⁰ William and his gang came up the road ‘with all the diligence that they could, makeing a great and horrible shoute upon the said officers, servants, and tenants.’ The archbishop’s men, attempting to get away, made for the ford over the Swale at Brafferton, crossed the river, where the footbridge now is, and rode up past the church into the main street of Brafferton-Helperby.

Here they met Plumpton’s roadblock. Desperately the Archbishop’s gang looked for ways of escape, some finding ‘a long straite lane’ along the back of the village; others got out ‘by breaking of an hedge into a feild’.¹¹ But Plumpton and his men were not happy with frightening their enemies. They pursued them out of the village on to the dark wet boglands of Helperby Moor, riding after them for more than half a mile, shouting at them, as they had all morning: ‘Sley the Archbishop’s Carles’ – an Old Norse word meaning ‘men’ – and ‘Would God that we had the Archbishop here.’¹² The brutality was unforgiving. The Plumpton mob killed Thomas Hunter, a gentleman, and Thomas Hooper, a yeoman, even after they had given themselves up to their pursuers. They were killing prisoners in cold blood. A man called Christopher Bee, one of the Archbishop’s affinity,

was maymed, that is to say, smitten in the mouth and so through the mouth into the throat, by the which he hath lost his cheeke bone and three of his fore teeth, and his speech blemished and hurt, that it is not easy to understand what he speaks or saies, and may not use therefore the remnant of his teeth and jawes to th’use of eating, as he might before.¹³

Others were maimed and left for dead out on the moor.¹⁴ Those not beaten, stabbed and cut by the Plumpton men were robbed and terrorized, their horses, harness, gold and silver all taken from them, gentlemen, yeomen, artisans and labourers alike. Plumpton was left in possession of the field, his war transferred from the wet fields of France to the springtime green of the Vale of York, his status enhanced and his future good.

When people think of the English gentry, this may not be the picture that comes to mind: the unforgiving assertion of violent authority in a disintegrating world; the application of the habits of war to a legalistic, economic and almost domestic dispute; the gathering of one’s people, ‘the affinity’, as a form of self-promotion; the crude gang identity of those shouted taunts. But there can be little doubt that this triumph stood William Plumpton in good stead. Within two years his feudal superior, the young Harry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, had put him in charge of all the Percy estates and castles in Yorkshire. The crown had rewarded him with a gift of twenty mature oak trees, felled and trimmed, delivered to Plumpton Hall. He was now steward of the castle at Knaresborough and a Justice of the Peace, and was to become Sheriff or chief law officer of Yorkshire and a few years later of both Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, each appointment for a separate year. The violence at Brafferton was a mark of Plumpton’s willingness to impose his authority, even if it was at the cost of murdering gentleman and yeoman prisoners. That entrepreneurial virility, in the unravelling word of mid-fifteenth-century England, was the most valuable quality a man could have.¹⁵

The Plumptons were loyal followers and tenants of the Percy Earls of Northumberland. They had even imitated the Percy coat of arms (yellow lozenges on a blue background), merely differencing it, as the heralds said, with five red scallop shells. Visually and heraldically the Plumptons bound themselves to their feudal overlords. They were gentry; they had no claim on nobility, but were part of the same knightly world inhabited by the truly great.

But as gentry they were heavily involved in the dirty details of local government. They had held and ruled the manor at Plumpton since the twelfth century, and others higher in the Pennines, including the beautiful limestone woods and meadows at Grassington in Upper Wharfedale, and the Airedale manors of Steeton and Idle. William’s father had married an heiress who brought still more and richer lands in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire. Like many of the medieval gentry families, the Plumptons had their place, their centre, but were attached to others across the country. They were lords in their own country but tied to their feudal superiors. They could be summoned at will by the earls or by the King. They travelled, as Justices of the Peace, and as Sheriffs of all the counties in which they held their lands and as Members of Parliament in Westminster. They were local grandees but with a national perspective. They pursued without hesitation their inferiors. And they were fuelled by ambition, a desire not only to preserve the name of Plumpton but to enhance it and enlarge it, to insulate it from the shocks of mortality and the failure to breed.¹⁶

The Brafferton affray was symptomatic of this gentry life: it borrowed from the world of martial glory; it asserted lay and royal authority in the face of the church; it required competence in command; it played fast and loose with legal niceties; it relied on a sense of local loyalty; and it did not hesitate to do dreadful deeds. It may also have looked at the time like the beginning of Plumpton’s ascent to greatness.

From the 1440s onwards William’s public career could not have been clearer. He stayed loyal to the Northumberlands and to the Lancastrian crown which he and his father had both served with such honour in France. He acquired local office and with it influence and riches. And at least to begin with, his policy for his family and its name followed the same well-defined path. He had been married when he was twelve in 1416 to a local gentry girl, Elizabeth Stapleton, and on his return from the French wars in 1430, a son, Robert, had been conceived, born the following year. A younger brother, William, was born four years later. With this male inheritance, the future of the Plumptons seemed secure and Sir William took a mistress to whom a further two sons were born. So powerful was the patriarchal mandate in this class that they too were called William and Robert.¹⁷

This phenomenon, which was common to the gentry throughout the centuries, was especially marked in the Plumptons: William Plumpton’s father was called Robert, his grandfather William, his younger brother Robert and his eldest son William, his younger son Robert, his elder bastard son William, his younger bastard son Robert, yet another son Robert – of whom much more below – and his grandson William. It is as if these people’s genes did not belong to them. They were no more individualized than pieces on a chess board, all Plumptons but there to play a role. In an age both obsessed with the transmission of value from one generation to the next and struggling with the erosion of knightly values, each successive Robert and William must have felt that burden more acutely than the last.

Elizabeth Stapleton, the boys’ mother, died in the early 1440s and in 1446 Sir William embarked on elevating the prospects of the next generation. His eldest son, Robert, now fifteen, was married to Elizabeth, the six-year-old daughter of a great Yorkshire and Westmorland magnate, Lord Clifford. They were ‘wedded at the chappell within the castell at Skypton’.¹⁸ The Cliffords’ castle remains complete, a muscled, stony northern fortress at the head of Skipton market, but the chapel in which these children were married is now a bruised and broken wreck, the mouldings on its roof timbers still there but with later windows and doors crudely knocked through its walls. In the 1440s, it was glorious, a family shrine to northern warlords. Here, a Clifford retainer ‘John Garthe bare [Elizabeth Clifford] in his armes to the said chappell’, where her young Plumpton husband was standing waiting for her. It is the most poignant image in this story: a small girl carried into her marriage and her destiny, no choice, little understanding, the men of the cloth, a blessing, a party, smiles, drinks, toasts in the great hall of the castle, the stranger of a boy, a young man, her husband, smiling down at her. It was agreed, as usual, that they were not to ‘ligg togedder till she came to the age of xvi yeres’.¹⁹

Sir William Plumpton settled wonderful lands on the pair: manors and estates in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, including among many others Edensor, where Chatsworth now stands. For the privilege, he also paid Lord Clifford a fee of £40, two-thirds of a year’s income from his manor at Plumpton.²⁰ For William, this was an elevation: the knight’s dream of transition to the nobility was made more likely by such an alliance. The descendants of young Robert and Elizabeth might at least have the money to support the status and dignity of a barony. For old Lord Clifford, his daughter’s marriage to such a boy was not only profitable but politically useful. The marriage of a peer’s daughter to a knight’s son required less of a dowry than would be asked for by a peer, as the increase in status made up for the lack of cash. And Plumpton, with his undoubted vigour, and a connection which Clifford valued with the Lancastrian Earls of Northumberland and the Percy family, was a form of mutual insurance, an element in the power grouping set against the other great northern family, the Yorkist Nevilles, with their power base in the north-west, hated by the Cliffords and with whom the Percys were on the point of a long and brutal feud. Political, martial, personal, dynastic, financial, status conscious, courtly, handsome and splendid: the Clifford marriage can only have warmed Sir William Plumpton’s heart.

The bridegroom was dead within three years, aged eighteen, from an unknown illness, and the marriage of course was unconsummated. But too much was riding on the alliance with the Cliffords for the boy’s death to alter the arrangements. The young Elizabeth Clifford, now aged twelve, was married again in 1453 to Robert’s younger brother, William Plumpton, now aged seventeen, the same terms applying. That is how it had to be: girls did not walk to their weddings; boys stepped up when their brothers died; Williams followed Roberts; and girls complied.

All apparently remained well with the Plumpton enterprise. England was drifting into civil war, but civil war might be an opportunity for a man of his stamp. Sir William was pursuing his personal enemies through the courts both in Yorkshire and in Westminster with unparalleled toughness, crushing his victims with teams of expensive and effective lawyers. He took part in 1459 in the English battles on the Scottish border and emerged from them with martial credit. In the same year a granddaughter, Margaret, was born to Elizabeth and two years later another granddaughter, another Elizabeth, joined her. Daughters and granddaughters were poor currency compared with a male heir, but they were at least a sign of fertility. All might yet be well. There was no reason the Plumpton name would not continue happily into the future.

At Plumpton itself, the towered sandstone hall, with its own chapel of the Holy Trinity, was richly decorated and furnished.²¹ Some twenty servants worked and lived there. Silver-chased hunting horns and salt cellars were part of the furnishings. The family chapel, where they worshopped with their own full-time priest, had rich silk dressings for the altar and for the priest himself. The Plumptons had beautiful clothes: cloaks ‘furred with martyns’,²² a coverlet of red satin and a canopy of white silk. Men and women wore silvered belts and girdles, amber beads and gold, sapphire and emerald rings. They had books and psalters covered in red satin and red velvet. The little children learned French and could speak it by the time they were four.²³ In the great fishponds which are still at Plumpton, bream, tench and pike were raised for the table.²⁴ Rabbits, hares and pheasants came from the Plumptons’ beautiful manor at Grassington in Upper Wharfedale. Game, including venison, came from the wide open stretches of Knaresborough forest. The house was well armed with stocks of bows, swords, shields, armour and the pole arms with which the retained men were fitted out. The hall itself, the heart of the manor, was decorated with those coats of arms which reflected the dynastic and land-gathering enterprise on which the family was embarked: Plumpton quartered with Foljambe (his mother’s family from Nottinghamshire), Plumpton with Stapleton (his own wife’s), Plumpton with Clifford (his son’s).²⁵

In the cold and frozen spring of 1461, catastrophe overtook them all. A letter from the Lancastrian king, Henry VI, on the run at York, was brought by messenger to Plumpton. Edward IV, known to Lancastrians as the Earl of March, had been declared King in London on 3 March and was now on his way north to destroy his rival. Henry and the whole Lancastrian affinity to which Plumpton had pinned his hopes and loyalty were now to fight for their lives. The letter was endorsed on its outer sheet: ‘To our trusty and welbeloued knight, Sir William Plompton.’ Unfolding it, he read:

By the King. R[ex]H[enricus]

Trusty and webeloued, we greete you well, and for as much as we haue very knowledg that our great trator the late Earle of March hath made great assemblies of riotouse and mischeously disposed people; and to stirr and prouocke them to draw vnto him he hath cried in his proclamations hauok vpon all our trew liege people and subjects, thaire wiues, children, and goods, and is now coming towards vs, we therefore pray you and also straitely charge you that anon vpon sight herof, ye, with all such people as ye may make defensible arrayed, come to vs in all hast possible, wheresoeuer we shall bee within this our Realme, for to resist the malitious entent and purpose of our said trator, and faile not herof as ye loue the seurity of our person, the weale of yourselfe, and of all our trew and faithfull subjects.

Geuen under our signet at our cyty of York, the thirteenth day of March.²⁶

Another of the same kind required him to gather the royal tenants from Knaresborough forest. The world of a fifteenth-century court, even in terminal crisis, shines out of these urgent, affecting, courteous and explanatory letters: no fear of violence; an exquisite care in dealing with men of Plumpton’s sort; an underlying brute reality; a dream of Arthurian perfection, already in its fading hours; the prospect of a final battle, a Camlann for real; reliance on the formal, feudal love of a king and dread of his kingdom disintegrating; recognition that ‘the weale of yourselfe’ relied on the bonds of loyalty which, in a kingdom now with two embattled kings, were already broken.

The letters mark the beginning of the crisis in William Plumpton’s life. He gathered the men of his household and those of Knaresborough forest and armed them. The young Lord Clifford, Elizabeth’s brother, and the Earl of Northumberland were doing the same across the whole of the north of England. Young William Plumpton joined his father, and the entire Lancastrian affinity marched south to meet the Yorkists. The huge armies, 40,000 on each side, met in the lanes, on the open fields and in the sharp stream valleys between the villages of Towton and Saxton just south-west of York. It was Palm Sunday, 29 March, and desperately cold. Heavy snow showers blustered between the armies all day. ‘This deadlie conflict’, according to Holinshed, ‘continued ten houres in doubtfull state of victorie, uncertainlie heaving and setting on both sides’.²⁷ Heaving and setting: the seismic movements of a mass of armed men. The dead choked the streams, making dams and bridges in the water, and the river Wharfe ran red with their blood. Fighting men had to drag the bodies out of the way to clear a space so that others could be killed. About 28,000 men died, ‘all Englishmen and of one nation’,²⁸ as Holinshed wrote mournfully, more than the number of British dead on the first day of the Somme, the bloodiest day in English history.

Archaeologists have excavated a mass grave on the edge of the battlefield. It was hastily dug, only eighteen inches deep, and held 43 bodies tightly packed into a space six feet by twenty. In the words of the archaeological report, they were the ‘casualties of an extremely violent encounter’.²⁹ Most of the Towton dead had been hit over and over again, suffering ‘multiple injuries that are far in excess of those necessary to cause disability and death’. The cuts, chops, incisions and punctures all clustered around the men’s heads and faces.

Ears had been sliced away, eye sockets enlarged and noses deliberately cut off. Very few of the wounds were below the neck, on parts of the body protected by armour. The archaeologists thought that the wounds had probably been delivered when the victims were already on the ground, helpless, dead or dying ‘in a position that did not allow them to defend themselves’. It was savage and enraged mutilation. ‘Many were left in a state that would have made identification difficult.’³⁰ Nor were these men – who as usual had been stripped of their armour after they were killed but before they were thrown in the grave – a crude peasant horde. Analysis of their skeletons has shown that they were stronger than the medieval norm, ‘appearing similar to modern professional athletes’.³¹ Many had clearly trained in lifting, thrusting and throwing. Several had old, healed wounds. Their upper bodies were developed symmetrically, the result of having been trained from childhood in the longbow, which requires strength in both the string-pulling and the bow-holding arms. The trace elements in their bones have also revealed that they had been fed on the best medieval diet: plenty of protein, much of it from fish. These were the best young men the country had. But there was nothing polite, graceful or chivalric about their dying. The Towton mass grave is a monument to brutality, terror and rage, a frenzy of killing and destruction, a dirty desecration of defenceless victims, among the elite warriors of late medieval England. It is a world in which Sir William Plumpton would have been entirely at home.

The Lancastrian cause was broken at Towton and Plumpton’s world collapsed with it. Each side knew this was a fight whose victors would not spare the defeated – ‘This battle was sore fought,’ the chronicler Edward Hall wrote, ‘for hope of life was set on side on every part’³² – and that alone explains the scale of destruction. Plumpton’s son William, aged twenty-four, was killed, lying anonymous among the thousands of Lancastrian dead, drowned or mutilated in his grave. The young Lord Clifford, his brother-in-law, aged twenty-six, a brutal warrior and murderer of prisoners, known as the Butcher, lay there with him, thrown like others into some anonymous body pit, stripped and unrecognized, after he had been killed by an arrow in the throat. The Earl of Northumberland, their feudal lord, mortally wounded, staggered off the field and made his way to York, where he died too. An affinity was destroyed that day, between sons and brothers, cousins and brothers-in-law, the whole spreading set of connections that made up a political-social-familial world. It was a community, as Gawain says in the Morte Darthur, which had ‘gone full colde at the harte-roote’.³³ The Lancastrian peers were attainted, their heirs deprived of lands and titles. This was revolution by butchery, no less traumatic than the events of the 1640s and just as deep a cut into the body of England.

Sir William himself, who at fifty-seven was certainly too old to have been in the thick of battle, fled from Towton field, down the roads of the frozen north, escaping the frenzy of the Yorkist killing machine, and remained on the run for some weeks. But the levers of power were in other hands now. By the middle of May he was up before the new régime, being interrogated by a judge in York, who as a means of maintaining law and order demanded of him a bond guaranteeing his acceptable behaviour for £2,000, more than thirty years’ income from his manor at Plumpton, equivalent perhaps to £5 million today. The bond was set at a level Plumpton could not meet and by July he was a prisoner in the Tower of London, held there as an enemy of the Yorkist state. His decade of suffering had begun.³⁴

All offices were taken from him. The Cliffords and Northumberlands, in whom he had invested every penny of his political capital, were dead meat. A world that had been running in Plumpton’s favour was now a bed of shards set against him and he had to wriggle for his life. He managed to get himself released from the Tower but was confined to London and prevented from returning to the north. Large pockets of Lancastrian resistance were still holding out against the Yorkists, even then being suppressed by Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, the ‘proud setter-up and puller-down of kings’,³⁵ as Shakespeare called him. Warwick was at the height of his powers, in his mid-thirties, arrogant, ruthless, by far the richest member of the nobility England has ever seen, personally responsible for killing the old Lord Clifford in 1455 and so tied by blood-hatred to destruction of the Lancastrian cause. He mopped up all the rewards: Great Chamberlain of England, Master of the King’s Horse, Warden of the Cinque Ports and Constable of Dover Castle. Government of the whole of the north of the country was given to him and his brother. Those great estates which had belonged to his enemies were now handed over, including most of the Percy lands in Yorkshire and the Clifford lordship of Skipton. Yorkshire became Warwick’s fiefdom. A Frenchman joked about the country under Edward IV: ‘They have but two rulers: M de Warwick and another whose name I have forgotten.’³⁶ Plumpton could have found no refuge in that unforgiving, Warwick-dominated world.

Deprived of his offices and their income, kept away from his own lands in the north, Plumpton found himself exposed to his enemies. Arms were stolen from his house at Plumpton, precious household goods and even a surplice from his chapel was taken. The monks of a monastery sieved his fishponds for bream, tench, roach, perch and ‘dentrices’. His timber trees and underwoods were cut down and taken away. Oxen were stolen from his lands at Spofforth and stones already cut for houses were carted off. In his manors up in the limestone dales of the Pennines, his hay was mown and stolen in the early summer, and rabbits and hares were taken from his warren at Grassington.

From his lodgings near Hounslow outside London, he was conducting secret negotiations with his co-Lancastrians in the north but was caught by Yorkist informers and denounced to the authorities. They had been watching him, the way he ‘had receyved, red, and understaud false, damnable, diffamatory, and slaunderous writing, traiterously by pen and other forged and ymagined against the honor and welfare of our said soveraigne, and the same sent to other suspicious persons to corage and comfort them by the same’.³⁷ There had been comings and goings, agents had arrived at his house and Plumpton had ‘secretly cherished them, succored, forbored, and their secrets concealed’.³⁸ Foolishly, he had not concealed his true feelings. ‘When any turble or enterprise was leke to fall hurt or scaythe to the Kings people, the said Sir William Plumpton, with oder suspected, rejoyced, and were glad in chere and countenance.’³⁹

The pressure did not let up. In a world where legal standing was so dependent on personal strength and status, everything in William Plumpton’s life in the early 1460s was vulnerable. His property was being continually raided. Money to fight for legal redress was desperately short. The letters preserved by the Plumptons describe a world in dissolution, full of the difficulties of dealing with people who were ‘right hard and strange’ and shot through with murderous arguments. His men were being ‘dayly threatened’⁴⁰ with beatings or worse. All involved had to navigate the tangled and expensive jungle of late medieval law. Those with something to get out of Plumpton addressed him with imploring and self-abasing humility. Others wanted only ‘a remedy as shall accord with reason’.⁴¹ His lawyers prayed that God would give him ‘good speed against all your enemies’.⁴² He seems to have been surrounded by them. His tenants asked him to show ‘good lordshipp and mastership’,⁴³ their only hope in a world where their own newly increased vulnerability was exposed to the competitiveness and thieving of those in power.

On top of all this, with his status crumbling, Plumpton was faced with the most intractable of gentry problems: daughters. He had seven of them, most of them coming into marriageable age in the 1460s. To maintain the dignity of the family, daughters had to be provided with dowries. The class average was something near £100 per girl and the deal was usually quite straightforward. The girl’s father would provide the lump of cash (usually payable in instalments over five years or so) and the boy’s father would settle lands on the young couple that would provide an annual income of about 10 per cent of that sum, called a jointure. If the husband died first, his widow enjoyed the jointure for the rest of her life. After her death, the lands would descend to her and her husband’s heirs. It was a civilized and humane arrangement, the equivalent signal in law to the co-presence in every parish church of the knight and his lady laid out side by side in equal honour and with equal dignity. Women were important: they ran estates, they mothered the all-important heirs, they stood as trustees in legal agreements and as widows they became powers in the land. Their arms were quartered equally with their husband’s. It was a given that every father would provide every daughter with an old age that fitted her ‘worship’, her honour. A proper dowry would get a proper husband. The Plumpton coat of arms would continue to be associated with others of equal or better standing. The family corporation would be allied in blood with those who could support it.

But seven daughters! Figures for the dowries provided by Plumpton have survived for three of his girls: £123 for Elizabeth at some time before 1460, £146 for Agnes in 1463 and £100 for Jane in 1468.⁴⁴ Catherine, Alice, Isabel and Margaret Plumpton were all married in the 1460s, and all to equally distinguished members of the gentry, most of them knights, who would certainly not have accepted girls with less to offer. Somewhere or other William had to find some £900 to give away with his daughters. It was a necessary investment in new plant. The poor man was caught between his catastrophic political circumstances and the demands which the family business required.

He was no lamb. Beneath the surface, he had plans. Among the many lawyers he was using to fight his legal battles, he employed two from Yorkshire: Brian Rocliffe and Henry Sotehill. Both were rising and brilliant men, making their names and fortunes in the Westminster courts. Both, significantly, were supporters of the great Earl of Warwick. They were Yorkists, Plumpton’s natural enemies, and to each of them, plotting carefully, he sold a granddaughter.

Lying in bed in Plumpton Hall in 1463, William considers the situation. Daughters need dowries, a drain on resources. Both sons are dead, but William, the younger, slaughtered at Towton, has left Margaret (born in 1459) and Elizabeth (born in 1460). Two tiny girls, the joint co-heirs of the entire Plumpton inheritance. On them would descend all the beautiful manors in the Vale of York and up in the Pennine dales, in the Vale of Belvoir and the limestone uplands of the Derbyshire Peak District. Their hands in marriage are worth money. The two Yorkist lawyers Rocliffe and Sotehill would glow at the prospect of their heirs acquiring the Plumpton riches. And more than that, their connections to the great Earl of Warwick might surely ease some of William’s other pressures. And so in November 1463, Margaret, aged four, was sold to Rocliffe for his son John to marry. The tiny bride went to live with the Rocliffes, where she embarked on her education. ‘Your daughter & myn’, Brian Rocliffe wrote about her to Plumpton that December, ‘desireth your blessing and speaketh prattely and French, and hath near hand learned her sawter.’⁴⁵ Her sister Elizabeth, aged three, was consigned to Sotehill’s son John the following February and went to live with them in Leicestershire. Elizabeth, the poor young widowed mother of these tiny girls, can have had no say in their fate. Too much hinged on it.

Brian Rocliffe was to pay for Margaret’s wedding and the young Rocliffes were, to start with, to get the poor little hillside manor of Nesfield in Wharfedale, a beautiful place but scarcely of any value. Rocliffe was to give Plumpton £313, more than the annual income from all of his lands. It was agreed ‘that all these couenants are to be performed without fraud or bad faith’.⁴⁶ At the same time Plumpton made a deal for almost £350 with Henry Sotehill for the other granddaughter ‘the which Elizabeth the said Sir William hath deliuered to the said Henry’.⁴⁷ The price for Elizabeth was a little higher because Plumpton also agreed with Sotehill that if, by any chance, Plumpton should have another son by another wife, he would also deliver this son to Sotehill so that he could be married to one of Sotehill’s daughters.

Hanging behind all this was the knowledge that these little girls would one day each inherit land worth at least £150 a year. Measuring past worth is not easy, but it is relevant to these figures that in fifteenth-century England you could get a spade and shovel for 3d., a spinning wheel for 10d., a sword for 3s. 6d., a bow for the same, a draught horse, an ox or a good linen surplice for £1, a knight’s war horse for £6 and twenty acres of grass, on which twenty cows and their calves could graze for the year, for £10. Land of that kind might cost £80,000 today. The girls were worth over £1 million each in today’s terms.

Everything was tied up. The little girls were securely established as the Plumpton heirs. Sotehill got William to promise he wasn’t lying or committing fraud. He required him to agree in writing not to persuade the tiny Elizabeth or her mother that this marriage was a bad idea. And to pay everything back if it went wrong. Here were the Sotehills, lawyers, small fry, riding high on the Yorkist wave, making their claim on gentry wellbeing. None of it would have been possible unless every single person involved accepted the power of the patriarch to dictate and deal in his family’s lives.

But there was a problem. Plumpton had sold his granddaughters to two up-and-coming lawyers on the understanding that the girls were the joint heirs of all his property. He had taken large amounts of money from those lawyers on the basis of that promise. If those two girls became his heiresses, the name of Plumpton and the great Plumpton inheritance would disappear into other families’ maws. But Sir William wanted to keep his own name and line going and so had embarked on a grand deceit. Since 1452 he had been secretly married to another woman. Very early one summer morning that year, before sunrise, between Easter and Whitsun, a Friday, Sir William and a gentlewoman of Knaresborough called Joan Wintringham came to the parish church of Knaresborough and stood at the door of the chancel. William was wearing ‘a garment of green checkery’, Joan was in a red dress with a grey hood.⁴⁸ The parish priest came in his vestments and solemnized the marriage between them in the presence of witnesses,

the said Sir William taking the said Joan with his right hand and repeating after the vicar, Here I take thee Jhennett to my wedded wife to hold and to have, att bed and att bord, for farer or lather, for better for warse, in sicknesse and in hele, to dede us depart, and thereto I plight thee my trouth, and the said Joan, making like response incessantly to the said Sir William that the vicar, having concluded the ceremony in the usual form, said the mass of the Holy Trinity in a low voice.⁴⁹

Immediately afterwards Sir William ‘earnestly entreated those present to keep the matter secret, until he chose to have it made known’.⁵⁰ The reasons were of vital importance. It is likely that Joan was pregnant at the Maytime wedding because the next year, 1453, she bore a son, Robert Plumpton; and after the death of young William at the battle of Towton in 1461, it was this Robert Plumpton, as the court official in York pronounced in 1472, who ‘was taught to consider himself as the heir apparent of his father’s house, and the future owner of his property’.⁵¹

This was the heart of Sir William Plumpton’s deceit: he had been secretly nurturing his own son in the idea that everything the name of Plumpton stood for was to be his. After 1452, every minute of his negotiations with the Cliffords, the Rocliffes and the Sotehills had been a lie. His wife he had forced to live in what the orthodoxy would have viewed as whoredom, their son a bastard. And worse than any of that he left as a legacy to the next generation the prospect of rage and destruction. Everything he had was now to be left, in its entirety, to two separate, competing families.

He seems to have entered his last decade preparing bullishly for death. With legal instruments, he disinherited his granddaughters, leaving the way clear, as he intended, for young Robert to inherit everything. Against the law and without permission, he crenellated Plumpton Hall, perhaps to make it more defensible in the battles to come, perhaps as an assertion of a status that seemed under threat.⁵² He stole timbers from the royal forest with which to beautify and strengthen the family house and the great barn that stood outside its gates. Illegally he made a private park around the house from the forest grounds. Rich textiles were bought in London to adorn the family chapel and tens of law cases were pursued against his enemies. When William Plumpton finally died in October 1480, it was at the end of a rampaging, brutal and desperate career. A man who had begun his life in the afterglow of Henry V’s triumph at Agincourt ended it with his inheritance mired in the prospect of a long and bitter legal dispute entirely of his own making. His two sets of heirs each felt obliged to defend their name and lands against their own family. Their cousins were their enemies.

Sir William might have hoped that his gamble would pay off. From his own archive he stripped out any evidence that he had once left his patrimony to his two granddaughters. He had lined up a string of gentry connections across the county on which his son and heir could rely. He had strengthened and fortified Plumpton Hall itself. He had loyal retainers supervising his tenants and business arrangements in Nottingham, Staffordshire and Derbyshire. And he had given enough to the church to consider that Providence might be on his side.

But his son Robert, now about twenty-seven, was a softer, gentler man, a recipient of his fate not a maker of it, and perhaps not up to the challenge his father had left him. Gradually over the next thirty-five years, for the whole of his adult life, the effects of Sir William’s machinations slowly and inexorably destroyed the fortunes of that son and his family.

On Sir William’s death, the legal wheels were already turning but Robert’s tenure began well enough. His mother, Joan, had been maltreated by his father, kept as a secret wife for sixteen years while the old man pursued his schemes. Robert did better, immediately giving her the proceeds of the manor of Idle in Airedale, on top of those from Grassington and Steeton, which his father had left her in his will.⁵³ But this sense of ownership was not to last. In 1483, after a dogged pursuit by the two granddaughters and their lawyers, a decision and a division were made. Margaret and Elizabeth were to get Nesfield, Grassington and Steeton and everything in Derbyshire. Robert was to get only Plumpton, Idle and the Nottinghamshire manors. They were the best lands but out of them he was to pay £40 a year to old Elizabeth Clifford, the granddaughter’s mother. His own mother was deprived of those very lands which Robert had designated for her maintenance.⁵⁴

This might have been the final arrangement. Even as the Wars of the Roses came to an end, and Henry Tudor claimed the throne as Henry VII, this distribution of lands amongst the Plumptons lasted for the next fourteen years, relatively untroubled. Robert, half the man his father was, both in property and resolution, nevertheless pursued the ideal of the knightly squire. He was short of money but he did his best to look after his people. He took on the local government of Knaresborough and its forest. He was a little dilatory, but he kept his correspondence carefully (which is how we know any of this), he served the new Percy Earls of Northumberland in battle against the Scots and was knighted. Tenants and land agents wrote to him, thanking him for the ‘tender mastership shewed me in all causes’.⁵⁵ He did his best to address his declining financial position, claiming the fees due from the release of bondmen – there were still bound serfs in late fifteenth-century England and their release provided a steady income for landlords feeling short.⁵⁶ Like his father, Robert was embroiled in long, expensive cases in Chancery, but going to the courts was not cheap and the threat of impoverishment was never far away.

Then, in February 1497, a letter arrived at Plumpton Hall which must have hollowed out a cavity in Robert Plumpton’s heart. It was from his lawyer and cousin Edward Plumpton, writing from the Inns of Court in London.

To my singuler good master, Sir Robart Plompton, kt.

In my right humble wyse I recomend me unto your good mastership, acertaynyng you that ther is in thes partes a great talking of those that belong & medle with Mr Hemson, that he intendeth to attempte matters agaynst you …⁵⁷

By ‘Mr Hemson’, the lawyer meant Sir Richard Empson, ‘the great man E.’,⁵⁸ as others referred to him, the most dangerous predator in the tangled wood of late fifteenth-century England. Empson, a lawyer, sophisticated, as slick as a slug, and his colleague Edmund Dudley were employed as debt-collectors-in-chief for the new Tudor crown. As Francis Bacon wrote a century later, they were Henry VII’s ‘horse-leeches and shearers: bold men and careless of fame’. Money was all, for them or their master, and to gain their ends, as Bacon went on, ‘they would also ruffle with jurors and inforce them to find as they would direct, and (if they did not) convent them, imprison them, and fine them … [Empson and Dudley] preyed upon the people; both like tame hawks for their master, and like wild hawks for themselves; insomuch as they grew to great riches and substance’.⁵⁹ This was the enemy to whom Sir William Plumpton had exposed his son.

Empson, whose method was the detailed acquisition, by any means he could manage, of one property after another, however slight, sniffed an opportunity. He allied himself with the interests of the two granddaughters, Margaret Rocliffe and Elizabeth Sotehill, eventually marrying his own daughter to Elizabeth’s son Henry. The ways of the law moved slowly and it wasn’t until May 1501 that Empson began to close in on Robert. The predatory minister began first in Nottinghamshire, where he bought, packed and threatened the juries, and then went on to Derbyshire to do the same. Efficient, connected and businesslike, he took all the best rooms in Derby to house the jury members. Plumpton failed and probably could not afford to match this smooth manipulation of justice, despite the urgings of his lawyers. The result was inevitable. On behalf of his party, Empson got hold of Kinoulton and Mansfield Woodhouse in Nottinghamshire and the Staffordshire manors. Robert was now left with nothing but Plumpton and Idle in Airedale. ‘Thus’, as a Plumpton lawyer wrote of Empson’s methods, ‘he under myneth you.’⁶⁰

The Plumptons’ world was dissolving; a queasy dread begins to fill the letters they preserved. The following year, in September 1502, Empson moved on to their heartland:

The procuringe & stirrings of Sir Richard Empson, Kt, by corrupt & vnlawful meanes obteyned the fauour & goodwills of the Sheriffe of the said county of York by giuinge of fes & rewards vnto him, & soe caused the panels to bee made after his owne mynd.⁶¹

After ‘diverse great gentlemen of the country’ had letters from the King himself, asking them to look kindly on his minister’s plans, Empson came to York. He brought a cavalcade with him of knights and squires, with two hundred of the King’s Yeomen ‘arayed in the most honnorable liverie of his said garde’.⁶² Empson himself rode through the streets of York with ‘his footemen wayteing on his stir-reps, more liker the degree of a duke then a batchelor knight’.⁶³ This was justice entirely subservient to the facts and display of power. He was accompanied among all the others by Sir William Pierpoint, Plumpton’s old Nottinghamshire enemy, relishing ‘the vtter confusion & destruction’⁶⁴ of his family’s ancient rivals. The Plumptons were trapped in a web not of kinship but of loathing.

Robert was lucky in the woman he married. Agnes Gascoigne was an educated and powerful Yorkshire gentrywoman. There can be no doubt he loved her, addressing her in his letters as ‘my entirely and most hartily beloued wife Agnes Plumpton’ and signing them ‘By your owne louer Rob:’.⁶⁵ He was to need her in the years to come.

For the hearings at York that September, Robert had left Agnes and their son William, who was about seventeen, at home in Plumpton. Waiting for the court process to begin, with his retainers, the men of the forest and his cousinage around him, sixty-three men in all, he wrote to her:

To my entyrely and right hartily beloved wife, Dame Agnes Plumpton, be this Letter delivered.

My deare hart, in my most hartily wyse, I recommend mee unto you, hartily prayinge you, all things laid apart, that you see that the manor and the place of Plumpton bee surely and stedfastly kept;

and alsoe that I have this Tuesday at even 6 muttons slene, to bee ordained for the supper the said Tuesday at night: and alsoe that yee cause this said Tuesday a beast to be killed, that if neede bee, that I may have it right shortly.

And thus I betake you to the keepinge of the Holy Trinity, who preserve you evermore to his pleasure. From Yorke

By your owne lover Robert Plompton Kt.⁶⁶

In court, Empson produced a document showing that old Sir William had left the manors of Plumpton and Idle to his granddaughters. Given the confusion of Sir William’s affairs, it is perfectly possible that the document was real but Robert refused to accept it as anything but a forgery. His advisers urged him to make a compromise – there were negotiations with Empson’s lawyers held in St William’s Chapel on the bridge over the Ouse⁶⁷ – but Plumpton would not move ‘and said that he would not departe with noo party of his land’.⁶⁸ The negotiations were broken off and the bought and frightened jury awarded everything Plumpton owned to his cousin-enemies. It was then that open war began.

Agnes and her son William had fortified the house and its yards ‘with guns, bowes, crossebowes, bills, speares and other weapons &c. as if it were in of warr’.⁶⁹ The Plumpton men squeezed in there, taking in beasts and other supplies, bolting the gates, storing the water.

The attack on the hall occurred at some time that October, a ferocious fight in which at least one man of Plumpton’s, Geffrey Towneley, who was probably a cousin, was killed, but the assailants were beaten off and the Plumptons remained in physical possession of the place.⁷⁰ The bravest of their cousins, Sir John Townley, offered to support them, assuring them that ‘if ther be any thinge that I may doe for you, yt shalbe redy to you, as ever was any of my ansistors to yours, which, I enderstand, they wold have bene glad to do any pleasure to’.⁷¹

Other cousins and sons-in-law, scattered across the northern counties, found themselves besieged by the Empson gangs, writing anxious letters to Robert Plumpton, asking for ‘knowledg by the bringer herof how that ye do in your great matters’,⁷² fending off threats and visits from men demanding money, their goods and lands.

Robert, as a last hope, rode to Westminster to implore protection from the King. Agnes and her son William were left anxiously at Plumpton: not exactly under siege but expecting at any moment a renewed attack. Money was short and, as they had all agreed before Robert rode south, William went out with his men, armed, to collect the rents from their tenants due at Martinmas, 11 November. Some paid up, some refused, ordered by the Rocliffes to do so as the Plumptons were no longer their legal landlords. Those who wouldn’t pay William evicted from their houses and lands, seizing their cattle and goods. The Empsons, Rocliffes and Sotehills hovered, waiting to pick up the pieces. Desperate letters from Agnes went south, looking for an answer to their predicament.⁷³

In the middle of that winter, she went down to join him, perhaps to urge him on, perhaps to comfort him. The seventeen-year-old William was left alone in Plumpton. The forces of the establishment, including the Archbishop of York, currying favour with Empson, threatened William but he stood firm, upholding what was left of his family’s honour and summoning ‘divers other husbands, labourers, yeomen, shermen, a webster, and a smith’⁷⁴ to court for trespass on land where they did not acknowledge him as landlord. If they attempted to plough the strips in Plumpton’s open fields to the east of the hall, he said he would attack them.

That winter, probably to raise some money when the sap was down, he had timber trees felled in the Plumpton woods, ashes and others, valuable property which Sir John Rocliffe claimed was his. The Archbishop wrote again, warning William of the consequences of this ‘senestor’ behaviour. The Archbishop was prepared to let him take boughs for fuel but not the whole tree. ‘Sir, I wold advise you to doo otherwise. If ye will not be reformed, I acertaine you that the said Sir John shall be for me at liberty to take his most avantage.’⁷⁵

In these circumstances, threat and legality become indistinguishable. In March 1503, William finally wrote to his parents in London, from where for weeks they had not bothered to tell him their news. Spring was around the corner and William was faced with the prospect of his Rocliffe enemies ploughing up the land they claimed they owned for spring wheat. ‘Sir, I marvell greatly that I haue no word from you vnder what condition I shalld behaue me & my servants. Sir, it is sayd that Sir John Roclife will ploue, but we are not certayne.’⁷⁶

With help from his Gascoyne cousins, William was re-arming. Ten longbows were delivered to the hall. He was ready for the next stage of the battle and suspected that his father might be guilty of wishful thinking or a lack of resolution. Any talk of royal protection, he told his father, seemed like little more than ‘fayr words’.⁷⁷ His mother had returned to Plumpton and just before Valentine’s day Robert for once wrote to her from London. Cash was short again:

To my right hartily and mine entyrely beloved wife, Dame Agnes Plompton, bee this delivered.

Best beloved, in my most harty wyse I recommend mee unto you. Soe it is, I mervaile greatly, that yee send mee not the money that yee promised mee to send with John Waukar within 8 dayes after you and I departed, for I am put to a great lacke for it. Therefore, I hartily pray you, as my especiall trust is in you, to send me the said money in all hast possible, and alsoe to send me money, for my cost is very sore and chargeable at this tyme: for I have spent of the money that I brought from you.

Therefore, deare hart, I pray you to remember mee. And as for my matter, there is noe mooveinge of it as yet. And for diverse consideracions and greate hurts might falle to you and mee and our children hereafter, I heartily pray you to remember to hast the money unto mee, as my especiall trust and love is in you,

From London in hast, the Tuesday next afore St. Valentines day, by your lovinge husband, Robert Plompton, kt.⁷⁸

Hurried, repetitive and emotional as this was, less coherent than she was to him, Agnes can have been left in no doubt.

Through the spring of 1504, the sense of an impending disaster grew more insistent, as did Agnes’s realization that Robert was incapable of saving them. In mid-March she sent him the money he needed, which she had somehow scraped together, and asked him that he ‘be not miscontent that I sent it no sooner, for I have made the hast that I could that was possible for me to do’.⁷⁹ She was managing the tricky situation with the tenants, evicting some, squeezing money out of others. In mid-April, her patience was breaking. He hadn’t written; he had let the whole business go on too long. Word had reached her of his hopelessness and their adversaries’ persistence and ingenuity: ‘Sir, I marvell greatly that ye let the matter rest so long, and labors no better for your selfe, and ye wold labor it deligently. But it is sayd that ye be lesse forward, and they underworketh falsly and it is sene and known by them.’⁸⁰

The rent that was due at Whitsun in early May would be a valuable prize for whoever gained the right to the manor by then. There was talk all over the county that Robert was allowing his enemies to win. ‘Sir, I besech you to remember your great cost and charges, and myne, and labor the matter that it myght have anend.’⁸¹ The Rocliffes had taken to arresting select individuals. They had got the machinery of the law on their side. And what was he doing? ‘Ye dow none to them, but lett them haue there mynd fullfilled in every case.’⁸²

The Rocliffes and Sotehills were tightening their grip on the county, by threat and persuasion excluding the Plumptons from the world they had once called their own. Plumpton loyalists were being charged and held. No one would buy the wood the family had felled over the winter, or anything else they were trying to sell. Robert needed to bring the whole question to an end, and soon.

For without ye get some comaundement, I wott not how your house shalbe kept, for I know not wherof to levy one peny worth. No more at this tyme, but the Trenietie keepe you. From Plompton in hast, the xij day of Aprill.

By your wyfe, Dame AGNES PLOMPTON⁸³

Two weeks later she was writing again. She was holding the fort, telling him their news. They were all well, the children, their servants, herself. He had been anxious to know if the Rocliffes had received any of the rents (‘the farm’) from the Yorkshire manors, but as far as she knew all they had done was sell some of the timber trees, at way below the market price: ashes and oaks worth 40 pence had been sold for 12 pence, and some holly wood sold at Idle. But that was all, ‘Scrybled in hast, the fryday next after St. Marke day. By your wyffe, Dame AGNES PLOMPTON.’⁸⁴

Then at last a piece of good news. Against all expectations, Henry VII made Robert a ‘Knight of the Body’, an honorary member of the royal bodyguard, and as such screened him and his servants from all arrest. It was the trump card in any court. The Plumptons could keep hold of the manors at Plumpton and Idle, where they had been for 300 years, with impunity. The Rocliffes, at least legally, could do nothing.

A success but no victory. That summer Agnes Plumpton died, perhaps exhausted by the strain of maintaining the dignity of this ragged and tattered family. And despite the legal protection conveyed by Robert’s new status, the facts on the ground, the fear cast into gentry and yeoman alike by the power nexus of Richard Empson and his lawyer friends the Rocliffes and Sotehills, were enough to keep the country almost entirely shut against them.

Symptomatic is an angry letter to Robert Plumpton, from a Yorkshire lawyer, delivered to Plumpton Hall by the lawyer’s man, in November 1506. It was the second time of asking and a promise had been broken:

I pray you that I may have my money now at this tyme, for I must occupy much money within thes iiij dayes, as this bearer can shew you.

If ye will not delyver it at this tyme, I will send no more to you for it, but the berer shall goe to the Shereff and have from him a warrant to leve the sayd money, or els to take your body, the which I wold be as sory for, as any man in Yorkshire, if I myght other wayes doe, as knowes Our Lord, who keepe you in worship. At Staynley, this St. Martyn even. Yours to his litle power,

ROBART CHALONER.⁸⁵

Chaloner was in fact Rocliffe’s man, helping him to increase the pressure on Robert Plumpton. Friends who had stood surety for Plumpton on loans of up to £100 found bailiffs at their doors, seizing their lands and goods, with Plumpton unable to pay or do anything about this spreading disaster. Month after month, Plumpton can have been aware only of the closing of doors. He had married again, Isabel, the daughter of a peer, Lord Neville. She too was soon at her wits’ end. No one would pay him what they owed him. No one would buy what the Plumptons could offer in the way of either underwood or timber trees.

No one would buy any land from the Plumptons as their title to it was so insecure. The Rocliffe-Empson band had shut them out of any timber or wood market. Isabel was reduced to sending Plumpton a few shillings through the post. Her mother, Lady Nevill, sent her £4 13s. 4d. in a letter, saying it was all she could afford and advising her that ‘God is where he was, and his grace can and will pooruey euery thing for the best, & help his servant at their most needes, and so I trust his Hynes, he wil do you.’⁸⁶

At the death of Henry VII in 1509, Robert ceased to be a Knight of the Body, as the office died with the King. Both Plumpton and Isabel his wife, still guilty of occupying Plumpton Hall illegally and owing money at all points, were thrown into the Counter, the debtors’ gaol in London. The Rocliffe and Sotehill cousins took possession of the manors of Idle and Plumpton itself. But the same turn of the wheel brought Plumpton release. Richard Empson and Edmund Dudey, the saw and razor of Henry VII’s oppression, were also arrested on the old king’s death and after conviction on false charges of treason were executed on Tower Hill to general delight, a sop to the masses from the new young King. Empson’s death released the Yorkshire gentry from a reign of terror and the way was opened for yet another attempt at arbitration between the Plumptons on the one side and the Rocliffes and Sotehills on the other.

The final award was made in March 1515. Plumpton was indeed to have Plumpton. The others were to have everything else. If the Rocliffes and Sotehills didn’t let the Plumptons back into Plumpton, they were to give them £40 a year, which was in effect Plumpton’s net worth. Seventy years before, the family had been en route to glory; now they had sunk to this, an annual income below which almost no family could call itself gentry.⁸⁷

Robert was broken. In 1516, he was sixty-three, his ‘grand climateric’, the moment at which, according to classical medical theory, a man’s life turned down towards death. In that year he made a deal with his son William, by which, in a sad and haunted act of resignation, a Lear-like transition from this world to the next, the father surrendered all say over his own life and lands and allowed William to dictate the conditions in which he and Isabel would now live. Will was to ‘have ordering and charge of all the household and goods therto longing’. Robert and Isabel were ‘to take their ease and reast, and to be at board with the said William at the proper costs and charges of the said Will’. Will was to have all the income from the lands and rents and was to pay all the costs, ‘that is to say, meate, drinke, and wages’. He was also to pay for his brothers and sisters and to be in charge of employing the servants, except that ‘the said Sir Robert his fader shal have thre at his owne pleasure, such as he will apointe’. Robert was to have an allowance of £10 a year and Will was to listen to his advice on farms, woods and debts.⁸⁸

It is a broken conclusion. Robert’s legacies at death were a few shillings to a church here and there, a pound or two to his younger sons and daughters ‘which sums William Plompton his son and heir was to pay’.⁸⁹ To Isabel Plumpton, his wife, all the goods in his chamber after his death, and the half of all his other goods. Witnesses to his will were his chaplain, a Plumpton cousin, and his servants Ralph Knowle and Oliver Dickenson, who had been with him at the siege of the hall and in prison in London.

The lands Robert had lost slid on in the hands of the Cliffords, soon to be the high-glamour Earls of Cumberland. None of those old Plumpton lands is more beautiful than Grassington in upper Wharfedale, none more unrecognizable than Idle, now buried in Bradford, none more poignant than Plumpton, where moss grows on the abandoned road and the stone walls on the edge of the wood have been allowed to collapse and crumble.

Is there a moral to this story? Perhaps only that there is no safety. The world of the gentry, even in its medieval beginnings, was not only endlessly negotiable but constantly in need of negotiation. If you happened to get caught in a tough political struggle or a tangle of deceit, it was perfectly likely for the entire family enterprise to be fatally damaged.

The Plumptons remained Roman Catholic at the Reformation, fell increasingly into debt and ended up on the wrong side in the Civil War. John, the last Plumpton of any substance, was wounded at Marston Moor and died after languishing for several days in Knaresborough, where he is buried, owing £6,393. The last of the line was another Robert Plumpton, who died at Cambrai in France unmarried in 1749. He had gone there to confer with his aunt Anne, a Benedictine nun. After his death, the manor of Plumpton was sold to Daniel Lascelles, the son and part-heir of one of the great and most brutal slave-financiers of the eighteenth century. Daniel intended to make it his seat. He pulled down Plumpton Hall and, as Thomas Stapleton, the nineteenth-century editor of the Plumpton letters, described, ‘formed about its site extensive pleasure-grounds; but, after having begun the erection of a new building, he desisted and went to live at Goldsborough Hall, another of his purchases and which, like Plumpton, had once been the residence of a knightly family’.⁹⁰

Everything medieval at Plumpton has gone, erased in the eighteenth century, no more than one or two bits of broken sandstone now surviving among the brambles and the bracken.

PART II
In the Renaissance State

1520–1610

The Tudors were the most successful gentry family in English history. Owen Tudor, an obscure and impoverished North Wales squire, working as a servant in the royal household, managed in about 1428 to catch the eye of Henry V’s widow, Catherine of Valois, a few years after her warrior husband had died. It is not quite certain how he did it but Owen either fell into her lap when dancing drunk or went swimming in front of her and her ladies. It was a Mr Darcy moment. One chronicler, who knew Catherine well, said she was ‘unable fully to curb her carnal passions’¹ when confronted with the magnificent sight of Tudor in the water – she was about twenty-five, he a year to two older – and English history changed. Their sons became power-players in the Wars of the Roses and from that long violent crisis their grandson Henry Tudor emerged the victor at Bosworth Field in 1485. On 30 October that year he was crowned King of England as Henry VII. In this way, the smallest of vicissitudes can change whole worlds.

The civil wars of the fifteenth century which had brought the Tudors to power had destroyed the world of the great medieval magnates. Under the Tudors, overwhelmingly aware of the vulnerability of a crown weaker than its greatest subjects, the great magnates were excluded from influence. After the 1530s, and Henry VIII’s raid on church property and independent power, the church went too. That should have left the crown itself dominating the field, buttressed by the imposing and often terrifying authority of the Tudor state, but in an era before comprehensive taxation, the crown was chronically underfunded, inherently extravagant and forced to spend capital as income. Between the 1530s and the 1630s, it lost what it should have gained.

Statistics can only be the roughest of informed guesses. Nevertheless, through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there is no doubt that the economic and social structures of England underwent the deepest of transformations and the great beneficiaries of this double revolution – the failure of the magnates and then the failure of the crown – were the gentry. Their landholding rose from 20 per cent in the Middle Ages to something like half the country by the middle of the seventeenth century. The result was that where the crown, the church and the great lords had ruled medieval England, the great lords and the gentry came to rule early modern England.

This is the fluid and difficult environment in which the Throckmortons found themselves in the 1530s and where the Thynnes rode to riches and significance. Any number of sixteenth-century ‘new men’ understood the lesson promulgated by the old and cynical Tudor statesman William Paulet, Marquess of Winchester. When asked at the end of his career how he had managed to survive for thirty years at the centre of power, through so many reigns and changes, he said, ‘Ortus sum ex salice, non ex quercu, I was made of the plyable Willow, not of the stubborn Oak.’² The heart of survival: pliancy.

It would be a mistake to make the focus of this history only the pain and struggle of survival in a challenging world. Tudor England was beautiful. Nowhere else in Europe was as green as England and every foreign visitor remarked on it – the thickness of the overhanging trees, the day-long spread of pasture as you rode across country. It was a world of beef and sheep. To keep the fertility up, advisers on Tudor agriculture recommended sowing the meadows with a mixture of clovers, yarrow, tormentil and English plantain. The ‘whole country is well wooded and shady’, a Frenchman, Estienne Perlin, wrote in 1558, ‘for the fields are all enclosed with hedges, oak trees and several other sorts of trees, to such an extent that in travelling you think you are in a continuous wood’.³ English pigs amazed strangers with their size and fatness. The best chickens Polydore Vergil ever ate came from Kent. The horses were strong and handsome and were exported abroad. It was a thickened country, dense with locality. This was the wild thyme, oxlip and honeysuckle landscape that would form the remembered and dreamed-of background to a century of violent political and religious change. That is the definition of sixteenth-century England: government bordering on tyranny in a country filled with sweet musk roses and eglantine.

The sixteenth century was a time to be in land. The weather was improving and more children were surviving into adulthood. The number of people in England was rising faster than the amount of food that could be grown for them. With a mismatch of supply and demand, food prices rose, tripling between 1508 and 1551, and rents rose with them. Agricultural land in the sixteenth century was the most reliable source of cash there was. But the ability to deliver the increased yields depended on returning fertility to the ground. A mixed country, in which there was plenty of grazing, much of it already enclosed, was a recipe for financial success. Meadows were money in Tudor England and both these families were blessed with them. Much of the story that follows here – of ideological courage and daring in the face of power; of families squabbling to get their hands on an inheritance – would not have been possible without that pasture-rich background. Tudor gentry floated on grass.

1520s–1580s

Discretion

The Throckmortons

Coughton, Warwickshire

The Throckmortons’ story is the life-track of a family attempting to ride the traumatic cultural uproar of the Reformation. Over four generations spanning the sixteenth century, they played in and out of honesty and duplicity, loyalty and betrayal, integrity and opportunism. They were both a barometer of their time and the clearest possible demonstration that to be a member of the gentry was no feather bed to lie on. Thomas Fuller, the seventeenth-century church historian, would describe yeomen, the farmers who had no claim to gentility or any part in the government of the country, as ‘living in the temperate zone between greatness and want, an estate of people almost peculiar to England’.¹ That shady, calm country between significance and poverty was a kind of Arcadia that was unavailable to the gentry. Their duty, broadly expressed, was to govern, and in doing so to run the risk of want, or worse.

For at least three hundred years, the Throckmortons had been a Worcestershire family, who in the fifteenth century, partly by marriage, partly by purchase, had acquired lovely Warwickshire estates around Coughton in the damp grassy valley of the river Arrow, as well as others in Buckinghamshire and Gloucestershire. The Throckmortons had been astute managers of land for generations, enclosing pastures and woods, running a Worcestershire salt pit in the fifteenth century and heavily involved in both sheep and cattle, consolidating holdings, looking to maximize revenues from their farms. They had navigated the chaos and challenges of the Wars of the Roses, shifting from one aristocratic patron and protector to the next, deploying the key tactic of gentry survival: the hedging of bets.

Coughton, as suited the Throckmortons’ nature, is just on the border of two different worlds: to the north, the small fields and dispersed farms and hamlets of the forest of Arden, ‘much enclosyd, plentifull of gres, but no great plenty of corne’;² to the south, beyond the river Avon, the wide open ploughlands of ‘fielden’ Warwickshire. Neither was entirely specialized – there were corn fields in Arden and animals were bred and fattened on the barley and peas grown in the fielden country – but Coughton lay happily in the hazy boundary between them and as a result was a good and rich place to be.

Within yards of the part-timber, part-stone buildings of Coughton Court, so close that the modern garden of the house completely encircles it, Sir Robert Throckmorton rebuilt St Peter’s Church in the first years of the sixteenth century. Everything there was mutually confirming. The Throckmortons’ house, the beginnings of its new freestone, battlemented gateway, the dignified church, their tombs within it, the productive lands surrounding them, their own piety, their charitable gifts to local monasteries, their place as the local enforcers of royal justice, as magistrates and sheriffs of the county: this was an entirely continuous vision. Everything connected, from cows to God, from periphery to centre, from the poor to the King, from the Throckmortons’ own self-conception and self-display to the nature of the universe. Go to Coughton today, and very faintly, beyond the ruptures of the intervening centuries, the notes of that harmonic integrity can still be heard.

They were a pious family.³ Sir Robert’s sister Elizabeth was an abbess, and two of his daughters were nuns. In 1491, his eldest son, the infant George, had been admitted to the abbey at Evesham, as a kind of amateur member, for whose soul the monks would pray. The family was chief benefactor of the guild of the Holy Cross at Stratford. In 1518 Sir Robert Throckmorton, now in his late sixties, decided to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land. He wrote a will before leaving, which is thick with late medieval piety. Masses were to be sung for his soul at Evesham to the south and by the Augustinian canons at Studley to the north. Dominicans in Oxford and Cambridge and the poor in the almshouse he had set up in Worcester were all to receive money to pray for his soul in purgatory. A priest in the chantry at Coughton was ‘to teache grammer freely to all my tenantes children’.⁴ The church itself was to be glorified with beautiful stained glass and gilded and painted saints. There was to be no shortage of Throckmorton heraldry. An altar tomb made of Purbeck marble was built in the nave for Robert’s own body to lie in one day, surrounded by this evidence of his piety and works. He had rebuilt the church as a reliquary for Throckmortonism. The whole building was a Throckmorton shrine. There was no gap between social standing and goodness or between the metaphysical and the physical. It was all part of a single fabric, like Christ’s coat at the crucifixion, ‘without seame, woven from the top thorowout’. If the Plumpton story was about disjunction and failure, this Throckmorton vision was of integration and wholeness.

Robert was never to occupy the tomb he built for himself. When in Rome, en route to the Holy Land, he died and was buried there, and his son George, born in 1489, came into the inheritance.

George had been married since he was twelve to Kathryn Vaux, and from about 1510 they began producing an extraordinary number of children, 19 in 23 years, most of whom lived until adulthood. Lands, localism, children, a household, local politics and the law: all of that was a dominant reality in George’s life. But the Throckmortons were far from parochial. Both George’s and Kathryn’s fathers had been close allies and courtiers to Henry VII. George would have considered Westminster and Whitehall his own to conquer. After some years learning the law in Middle Temple, he had entered the court of Henry VIII in 1511, fought alongside the King in France and was knighted in 1516. Royal favours began to trickle down: he became steward of royal estates and keeper of royal parks in Warwickshire and Worcestershire.

There is one minor incident which stands out from this steady progress. In the winter of 1517–18, he killed a mugger called William Porter who had come at him ‘maliciously’ in Foster Lane, the Bond Street of its day, off Cheapside, full of goldsmiths’ shops. It is possible George had been buying jewellery and his attacker was trying to rob him. George had slashed out at the man ‘for fear of death and for the salvation of his own life’ and killed him. A royal pardon followed.⁵

This was all entirely conventional: it was what people like George Throckmorton did with their lives. Legal competence, marriage and children, effective violence at home and abroad, minor functions at court and in Warwickshire, the management of the lands: this was the gentry in action, as it had been throughout the Middle Ages, the central, universal joint of English culture.

George Throckmorton could look forward to a life of unremitting and blissful normality. He was his father’s son, pious, efficient, forthright, courteous, sociable, capable both of performing duties for his social and political superiors and of attending to Throckmorton wellbeing.

The 1530s ensured that would not happen. For two or three years, Henry VIII had come to think that his marriage to his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, was cursed. Leviticus said as much. The King had offended God by marrying her and God had ensured she would bring him no son. Catherine was now too old to bear children and, anyway, since the spring of 1526 the King had been entranced by one of Catherine’s ladies in waiting, the young Kentish gentlewoman Anne Boleyn, with whose family Henry had long been familiar. He thirsted for divorce, to bed Anne Boleyn and to continue his dynasty. But a divorce was impossible. When his chief minister, the brilliant and deeply loathed Cardinal Wolsey, proved himself incapable of bringing it about, Henry’s desire for Anne, for freedom of action and for legitimacy all fused into one, overlapping, multi-headed crisis.

George Throckmorton, who was forty in 1529, found himself embroiled in every part of this crisis. Before Wolsey’s disgrace he had been working for him at Hampton Court, acting as the Cardinal’s agent in confiscating the monastic lands Wolsey needed at this stage to endow his new college at Oxford (which later would become Christ Church). When the King dismissed Wolsey for his inadequacies over the divorce in November 1529, tides of loathing swept over the fallen man. All the arrogance, regal style, vaingloriousness and independence of mind that he had shown in office were thrown back at him. Throckmorton might have been tainted with these connections but he managed to slip out from under them. At Hampton Court he had made friends with Wolsey’s rising assistant, the brewer’s son Thomas Cromwell, sending him gifts of £20 and a greyhound, asking for some sturgeon and quails in return, with the assurance that he was his friend and ‘hoping you wyll see me no loser’.⁶ Now, as Cromwell moved towards the centre of power, that connection came good. George’s son Kenelm went into service as a member of Cromwell’s household and George himself was made a member of the commission looking into the possessions Wolsey had claimed in Warwickshire.

It looked as if Throckmorton was calmly doing what his forefathers had done, easily sliding from one power-allegiance to the next, the traditional method by which successful gentry families survived from generation to generation. But the Reformation was more than just another power shift. As liberating juices ran into the crannies of English minds, the bound-together world of inheritance, piety and service, which his father, dead in Rome, had left to him twelve years before, came under threat. Lutheran ideas; Thomas Cromwell’s ambitions for a new and reformed relationship of church and state; the King’s desire for a new and possibly unholy divorce and marriage: this was not only a crisis for England. It was a life crisis for George Throckmorton himself.

In 1529 he had been elected to the Reformation Parliament, which met from time to time, without re-election, until 1536. That parliament was the instrument, deftly steered by Thomas Cromwell, through which the Reformation was brought to England. In one Act after another, church independence was eroded and the authority of the crown enhanced. Cromwell made the English state watertight: church money and lands were channelled towards the crown; no appeals were allowed to any authority outside England, especially not to the Pope; and increasingly repressive laws were passed against anyone who disagreed with royal policy, culminating in the 1534 Act of Supremacy and the Treasons Act, by which the King was acknowledged as supreme in church and state. Any disagreement was punishable by death. The cumulative effect of the parliament was to destroy the role of the Pope, the inheritance of St Peter, and put secular terror in its place.

From his actions and words, it is clear that George Throckmorton was agonized by the conflict of allegiances. Crown or family, his past or his future? His father’s church or the King’s? To which should he be more loyal? Half secretly, he began to oppose Henry’s reformation of church and state. But the whisper system of Thomas Cromwell’s listening network heard much of it, and although the chronology is often confused, in Cromwell’s papers you can hear and see this Warwickshire gentleman a little clumsily and a little foolishly navigating the shoals and tides of the Tudor seas.

A mass of business passed through the 1530s House of Commons, the regulation of towns, the tanning of leather and the dyeing of wool, the sowing of flax and hemp, the duties on wines, laws against eating veal (to preserve the stock of cattle) and for the destruction of choughs, crows and rooks (to preserve corn crops), for paving the Strand and ‘for the saving of young spring of woods’, against ‘excess in apparel’, and, amidst all this ordinary business, the cataclysmic ‘Appeals to Rome forbidden’.⁷

All England was talking of the changes confronting them. Throckmorton liked to meet a group of Parliament friends for dinner or supper in an inn called the Queen’s Head in Fleet Street. Others met and talked to him in private places around the City: the garden of the Hospital of St John, just north of the walls; or in a private room in the Serjeants’ Inn near the Temple; or at other inns in Cheapside, the shopping hub of the City where he had been mugged years before. London was full of these evening conversations between like-minded conservative gentry. ‘Every man showed his mynde and divers others of the parliament house wolde come thither to dyner & soup and comun with us.’ Usually, ‘we wolde bidde the servaunts of the house go out and in lik maner our owne servaunts because we thought it not convenient that they shulde here us speke of such mattiers’.⁸ But conversations were reported and to Cromwell this joint and repeated privacy looked conspiratorial.

George’s distinguished cousin and priest William Peto, a Franciscan friar and Catherine of Aragon’s confessor, summoned him for a private and urgent conversation. He told George it was his duty to defend the old church in Parliament, and ‘advised me if I were in the parliament house to stick to that matter as I would have my soul saved’.⁹ Death, and with it a sense of martyrdom, was in the air. But Peto also had some more intriguing information. He had just preached a sermon to the king at Placentia, the Tudor pleasure palace in Greenwich, violently denouncing anyone who repudiated his wife, lambasting the courtly flatterers in the stalls beneath him and warning Henry that Anne Boleyn was a Jezebel, the harlot-queen who had worshipped Baal, and that one day, dogs would be licking Henry’s blood, as they had her husband Ahab’s.

A tumultuously angry king left the chapel and summoned the friar to come out into the palace garden. In this atmosphere of alarm and terror, Peto took his life in his hands and addressed the King directly. Henry could have no other wife while Catherine of Aragon was alive; and he could never marry Queen Anne ‘for that it was said he had medled with the mother and the daughter’.¹⁰ To have slept with one Boleyn, let alone two, would in the eyes of the church make marriage to any other Boleyn girl illegal.

Peto fled for the Continent but left Throckmorton in London with his injunctions to martyrdom. How far was this from the comforts of Coughton, fishing in the Arrow or improving his house, completing his father’s new gateway! Throckmorton was swimming beyond his ken. Sir Thomas More, probably just on the point of resigning as Lord Chancellor,

then sent saye [word] for me to come speke with hym in the parliament chamber. And when I cam to hym he was in a little chamber within the parliament chamber, where as I do remember me, stode an aulter or a thing like unto an aulter, wherupon he did leane. And than he said this to me, I am viry gladde to here the good reporte that goeth of you and that ye be so a good a catholique man as ye be; and if ye doo continue in the same weye that ye begynne and be not afrayed to seye yor conscience, ye shall deserve greate reward of god and thanks of the kings grace at lingth and moche woorship to yourself: or woordes moche lik to thies.¹¹

Throckmorton was flattered that these great men should be considering him as their advocate in Parliament. He was as vulnerable as anyone to the vanity of the martyr and prided himself on his courage and forthrightness as a man who was not frightened by princes or power. He wanted to be known, he wrote, as ‘a man that durst speake for the comen wilth’.¹² He was not only a Catholic; he was a Warwickshire knight, whose tradition was to speak for the Commons of England. Peto had told Henry himself that his policies would lose him his kingdom, precisely because the commonwealth could not follow them. But for Throckmorton how could that position play out in the high-talent bear garden of the Tudor court? How could he survive if he were to defend the ancient Catholic truths?

In search of guidance, Throckmorton visited John Fisher, the Bishop of Rochester, soon like More to be martyred (when his headless body was left, as a lesson to others, stripped and naked on the scaffold all day until evening came), as well as the monk Richard Reynolds at Syon in Middlesex. He too would soon be dragged on a hurdle from the Tower to Tyburn, where with four others he would be hanged in his habit for resistance to Henry’s supremacy laws. Everyone Throckmorton consulted, to various degrees, advised him ‘to stick to the same to the death’. And everyone knew that word was no figure of speech. ‘And if I did not, I shulde surely be damned. And also if I did speke or doo any thing in the parliament house contrarie to my conscience for feare of any erthly power or punyshment, I shulde stande in a very havie case at the daye of Judgement.’¹³

The choice they put to him was to suffer now or suffer in eternity, suicide or spiritual suicide. This advice ‘entered so in my heart’ that it set George Throckmorton on a path of courage. God had to come before man, whatever the consequence for him or his family. He was remaining loyal to the inheritance his father had left him and in doing so was endangering his children’s future.

Then, quite suddenly, he was sent for by the King. When they met, Cromwell was standing at the King’s shoulder. Confronted with this, Throckmorton bore himself with a directness and integrity of which his mentors would have been proud. He repeated to the King what his cousin Peto had told him:

I feared if ye did marye quene Anne yor conscience wolde be more troubled at length, for that it is thoughte ye have meddled bothe with the mother and the sister. And his grace said never with the mother and my lorde privey seale [Cromwell] standing by said nor never with the sister nethir, and therfor putt that out of yor mynde.¹⁴

It must have been one of the most terrifying tellings of truth to power in English history. Henry had admitted his affair with Anne Boleyn’s elder sister but this candour and apparent intimacy did Throckmorton little good. He appeared in Cromwell’s papers as one of those Members of Parliament to be watched and not to be trusted. Cromwell was not replying to letters from George himself but instead wrote to him, advising him ‘to lyve at home, serve God, and medyll little’.¹⁵ Sewn in amongst Tudor tyranny and threat were these repeated moments of forgiveness and advice, like sequins of grace, anti-sweets, sugar coated in bile.

But ‘meddle little’? Cromwell’s language might have been tolerant; it was scarcely forgiving. There is a plaintive recognition of that in Throckmorton’s letter to him: ‘Ye shall see I wyll performe all promesys made with you.’

From other places around the country, off-colour notes arrived on Cromwell’s desk. From Anthony Cope, a Protestant Oxfordshire squire and Cromwell loyalist: ‘It grieves me to find [the King] has so fewe frendes in either Warwick or Northamptonshire. Mr. Throkmerton promised he would assist me to the best he cold. Nevertheless, secretly he workith the contrary.’ From Sir Thomas Audley, one of Henry’s hatchet men, who presided over a sequence of show trials and executions in the mid-1530s: ‘Mr. Throgmorton is not so hearty in Warwickshire as he might be.’¹⁶

Not to be hearty in mid-1530s England, at least after the passing of the Treasons Act in 1534, one of the ‘sanguinolent thirstie Lawes’ by which men and women ‘for Wordes only’¹⁷ were condemned to death, was a dangerous position to be in. Thomas More and John Fisher would both be executed the following year on the basis of words alone. Anne Boleyn and her so-called lovers (which included her brother) were beheaded on the same grounds. Many monks were executed in the 1530s for doing no more. And George had been firmly identified with them as part of this verbal opposition. In January 1535, he wrote from Coughton to the worldly diplomat and trimmer Sir Francis Bryan: ‘I hear that the kynges grace shuld be in displeasure wythe me. And that I shuld be greatly hyndred to hym, by whom I know not.’¹⁸

Throckmorton was a marked man, if not yet a condemned one, and as an escape from that predicament, he attended to his lands in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, retreating to the comforts of Coughton, consolidating estates, negotiating with his neighbours and with Cromwell for advantages and openings for himself and his children. Life had to go on. Acting as the King’s servant, Throckmorton continued with his normalities, sending in accounts of the royal woods at Haseley, where he was the bailiff, and serving as a commissioner in collecting tax from clergy in Warwickshire, guiding church money towards the royal coffers. On his new gateway at Coughton, he put up two coats of arms: his own and Henry Tudor’s.

But in October 1536, as the first of the monasteries was being dissolved, his life deepened into something much more dangerous. Large-scale rebellions, which broke out first in Lincolnshire and then in Yorkshire and the north-west, turned those months into the most threatening of Henry’s reign. Known to history as the Pilgrimage of Grace, they were deeply conservative uprisings, driven partly by poor harvests, partly by anger and despair at the first suppressions of the smaller monasteries, partly by the sense that Cromwell’s new religious and political policies were betraying old England and partly by the fear that the old aristocratic leaders of the country were no longer in charge. Wolsey had been a butcher’s son, Cromwell a brewer’s, and even Thomas More was the grandson of a baker. That was not how conservative England liked the world to work.

A longing for past certainty hung over the Pilgrimage of Grace as it did over everything George and his allies had been talking about for years. The rebels demanded that the Catholic princess, Mary Tudor, the daughter of Catherine of Aragon, should be reinstated as the heir to the throne. Cromwell’s centralizing state was eroding the localities: ‘And the profites of thies abbeys yerley goith out of the contrey to the Kinges highness.’ This was the cause shared between the rebels in the north and the group of Catholic gentlemen around Throckmorton: protest and despair against the dismantling of the past.

To demonstrate his loyalty at this most fearsome test, Throckmorton raised 300 men from his Midlands estates for the royal army gathered to suppress the rebels. They marched down to Bedfordshire, with Throckmorton’s sons appointed captains of the different bands. But his own soldiers let him down, claiming that if the great Catholic lords joined the rebellion, Throckmorton would turn rebel too.

This was dangerous talk – it is impossible to tell if it was true – and Cromwell got to hear of it. He also heard that two of Throckmortons’ soldiers ‘were with the rebels’ – again probably untrue, but in the age of ‘Wordes only’, adding yet more dissonant notes to what was already a frightening reputation.

George came down to London, met his friends again in the Queen’s Head and the perilous chat started up:

I do well remember sitting at a supper but I do not so well remember where, won at the boorde did axe what were the demawnds that ye rebels of the northe requirid, and everi man lokkid upon other & no man wolde make awnser. & then I said that it no matter for yt was in every man’s mouth, and we were all true men there, so we mai talke of yt; and said the false knave Aske would rule the King and all his realms. & so rehearsid his demawnds, as far as I remembered them … amongst others that to have my ladie Mary made legittymate, not approving that more than other. Who were at the boorde I do not well remember.¹⁹

It was convenient not to remember much. Fear was in the air. When the Duke of Norfolk had warned Thomas More that the wrath of the King meant death, More replied, ‘Is that all, my Lord? Then in good faith is there no more differens betweene your grace and me, but that I shall dye today and yow tomorowe.’²⁰ Few could manage that level of calm. Thomas Wyatt’s poem, written in May 1536, when imprisoned in the Bell Tower of the Tower of London, expresses what no one else dared say. From his barred window he witnessed the executions of Anne Boleyn’s brother and the other four young men accused of sleeping with her. ‘These blodye dayes haue brokyn my hart,’ Wyatt wrote, as if he were the only voice of conscience in this terrible decade. ‘The bell towre showed me such syght/That in my hed stekys day and nyght.’²¹ That in my head sticks day and night: it is a literal truth that these people were living with their nightmares.

On Sunday 19 November, when the first Lincolnshire phase of the Pilgrimage of Grace was over and the trouble had spread north into Yorkshire, Throckmorton heard the sermon preached in St Paul’s in London. After it he went with an old friend, Sir John Clarke, ‘to dine att ye Horse Hedde, yn Chepe, … with the goodman off ye howse yn a littill lowe parler’,²² another of those small dark London rooms in which the key conversations of the age occurred.

After we had dinid & ye goodman & his goodwife had left the boorde he & I fell yn to comunion of the rebellions off ye Northe, & he axid of me what I hard of yem yn ye cuntre as I came upp. He said it a saying yn London that thei be upp in Holderness [in Yorkshire]. I axid him, ‘I prai yow, do yow know what be their demawnds & he said, Have yow not sene them I awnserid no but I said I had sene the bokke yn printe, the awnser to the Lincolneshere men’s demawnds. He said so fairly I will send them yow them sone to lokke upon.²³

Nothing too suspect there, the natural conversation of two men engaged with politics. They hadn’t spoken in front of the proprietor of the Horse’s Head nor his wife, but that was only necessary caution. Clarke’s servant delivered the printed papers to Throckmorton that evening ‘and after I had read them I threw them yn mi chamber window’.²⁴ The papers were explosive material: they described Cromwell as a ‘simple and evil disposed person’, who had ‘spoiled and robbed, and further intending utterly to spoil and rob the whole body of this realm’. His policies were ‘contrary [to] the faith of God and honour to the king’s majesty and the commonwealth of this realm’. The oath the rebels took in Yorkshire swore ‘to expulse all villain blood and evil councilors against the commonwealth from his grace and his privy council of the same’.²⁵

Anyone who could be suspected of disseminating these words would clearly die. Throckmorton kept them in his room, lying in the window, until another old friend, Sir William Essex, came to London.

the same nyght he and I mette met att supper at the queins hedde betwixte the tempull gates. And afterwards, when we two remained alone, we fell in communion of the rebells off the northe and then he axid me if their demawnds and those of the Lincolne shere men were all won. & I said they were much the same, as yt apperith bi the bokke yn printe, which he had seen. Then I sent mi servant to my chamber for them, and lent them to Sir William, who put them yn his purse and so departid.²⁶

Sir George had said, ‘Your servant may copy it if you will’: now the seditious words were out and spreading in London and beyond, with Throckmorton and Essex perceived as the source. Essex’s clearly literate chamber boy, Geoffrey Gunter, made another, secret copy for himself. When he accompanied Sir William down to his house at Lambourn in the Berkshire Downs, he gave it to a friend of his en route at Reading, where it rapidly travelled around the community of priests, innkeepers and no doubt their customers, copied at every turn. This was viral rebellion, first in print, then word of mouth, then by manuscript.

Essex discovered what had happened, knew how catastrophic it was and ‘had but little rest all night’. Throckmorton made his way down to Berkshire, ignorant of what was happening, only to find a posse of Berkshire officials riding to court, with copies of the papers Throckmorton had shown to Essex only days before. When Throckmorton reached Essex’s house the next day, he found Sir William in bed, having not been able to sleep the night before, but he got up and first in the parlour and then in the privacy of the garden, the repeated setting for secret and intimate Tudor conversations, they discussed the crisis.

They decided, quickly enough, to tell everything and to hurry to London, where they could divest themselves of the truth. Essex was to send his servant first and then to follow himself, and Throckmorton to follow only ‘if the matter were not well taken. He should send me word, and I would come up myself.’ No word came and Throckmorton, in early December, returned to London. On the road, his own servant met him and told him that Sir William Essex had been put in the Tower. When Throckmorton arrived in London, he too was arrested and by 11 December had joined him there, in the place of torture, terror and death.

We only know these intimate and concrete details of George Throckmorton’s movements in the autumn of 1536 – his toings and froings, his dinners and suppers – because the interrogation in the Tower dragged it out of him. His confession is still in Cromwell’s papers. No fact was too small to convince the Lord Privy Seal that the truth was being told: the papers lying in the window, the dinner with the landlord of the Horse’s Head in Cheapside, the chamber boy, the rebellious servants, Sir William’s exhaustion after his night of worry.

Yet Throckmorton was not entirely open in this confession. He said he couldn’t quite remember where or with whom he had been sitting at supper when he talked the dangerous rebel talk. It was only six or eight weeks earlier; he must have been lying. To lie to the King and Cromwell in the Tower in the murderous police state of mid-1530s England showed some mettle. He signed his confession with ‘the heaviest heart that ever had living man’ and he told the King that ‘yt makith mi harte blede withyn mi bodie’²⁷ to imagine that he thought him disloyal, but there is no doubt that, to some extent, he was. It seems clear that at Christmas 1536, Throckmorton thought he could get away with his double game a little longer. He and Essex were held in confinement on into January 1537. Those in the know at court ‘doubted of their lives’ but they were wrong. Before the end of the month both men were released and Throckmorton was restored as a Justice in Warwickshire.

It was, as Peter Marshall has said, ‘a close shave’,²⁸ but far more desperate events were to unfold the following September. A high-glamour Knight of St John, Sir Thomas Dingley, an international warrior on behalf of all the deep-rooted, crusading and Turk-fighting traditions of the Catholic church, had been heard abusing the King and talking about rebellion. He was betrayed, arrested and sent to the Tower, where among much else he described to Cromwell’s interrogators all the subversive remarks George Throckmorton had made to him in the early 1530s: how Throckmorton had talked so loosely in St John’s Hospital in Clerkenwell, in the garden there, about the King’s dabbling with all three Boleyn women, the frighteners which Cromwell put on Members of Parliament, all this in front of ‘light’ people, people of no substance, people who were bound to spread the rumours.

Dingley would be axed on Tower Hill in July 1539. For now, his garrulous confessions put George Throckmorton in the most dangerous place he had ever been. Kathryn Throckmorton, his wife and the mother of his many children, now wrote from Coughton in desperation to her half-brother William Parr. Parr was a ferocious Protestant ideologue, Cromwell’s eyes and ears in Northamptonshire, with all the right connections to the new regime. Kathryn could be sure that her blood relationship – they had the same mother – even with a man who espoused everything her husband most loathed, would trump any difference in religion. Sixteenth-century blood, as Patrick Collinson has said, was thicker than bile. ‘Good brother’, she wrote on 20 October 1537, ‘Mr. Throkmerton ys yn trobull, as I thinke yow knowe.’ She begged him to come to her ‘incontinent’, without delay, ‘upon the cuming off mi son’s to yow’.

Not that I will desire yow to speke to mi lorde prive Seale [Cromwell] for him, but that yow will come to giffe me yor best cownsill and advice … for the helpe off him and myselfe and mi childerns. I dowghte not but for all his trobull & bissines the King will²⁹

The letter is torn off there – it certainly went on, as the tops of the letters in the next line can be seen – but there is no doubting these are the hurried words of a desperate woman.

In the Tower, Throckmorton himself knew how serious this was. He abandoned the lack of candour from January and now poured out everything he had held back then: the meetings with Dingley, his boastfulness as someone who ‘durst speak for the common wealth’, his suppers at the Queen’s Head, his friends there, their real names, their secrecy in front of the servants, the encounters with More, Fisher and Reynolds, the challenges thrown to him by those ideologues of the Catholic church, his own agonized conscience, his wavering between the idealism of the martyr and the need to survive, not only as an individual but as the person who held the future of the Throckmortons in his hand.

George said he intended no harm to the King. He had behaved ‘lewdly and noughtly’.³⁰ He begged the King to ‘have pitie on me, my wife and poore children for the service that I and all my blood hath doon to you and yor progenitors in tyme past’.³¹ Now he could only ask pardon, having perceived his error by reading the New Testament and The Institution of a Christian Man, the bishops’ guidebook to an acceptable form of religion.³²

George Throckmorton was abasing himself before power. This was the moment in which he broke, when his allegiance to his inheritance could no longer survive the assault of modernity. He was no Thomas More. John Guy has said of More that ‘his morality was his executioner’.³³ Throckmorton’s frailty was his saviour.

He gave in. By agreeing not to oppose the King and the reformation of the church, he ensured that his family would survive. He had chosen to suffer in eternity. His wife’s half-brother William Parr, who may have intervened with Cromwell, probably put the deal to him. Throckmorton was released in April 1538. For the remaining fourteen years of his life, he became the conformist squire and the family thrived. Like most of the gentry, Catholic or not, he did well out of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. He had developed a close relationship with the poisonous Richard Rich, whose lying evidence had condemned both Thomas More and John Fisher at their treason trials, but who was Throckmorton’s second cousin. It was another blood-trump. Rich was in charge of the court that dealt in confiscated monastic property and he ensured that quantities of it came Throckmorton’s way. This was a bitter place for Throckmorton’s career to have reached – plotting with the mortal enemy of his Catholic mentors – but he would have calculated profit and loss. Better to gain monastic property than not to engage at all; and the only potent form of engagement was with those who had access to power. Throckmorton already had since Wolsey’s day a lease on the former priory at Ravenstone in Buckinghamshire. Now, from Bordesley Abbey in Worcestershire he received a load of stone, glass and iron. Leases on previously monastic manors in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire all steered towards the Throckmorton estates. In the fluid mid-sixteenth-century land market, everyone, of all religious persuasions, was trying to bolster his land holdings from the flood of ex-monastic property.

The situation of the Throckmortons in the 1540s and in the following decades became an extraordinary diagram of what happened to a family when faced with the questions posed by the Reformation. First, there was the problem of George’s aunt Elizabeth. She was abbess of the small and ancient community of holy sisters at Denny, north of Cambridge, a beautiful, richly endowed place, on a gravelly island in the fens, with the lantern of Ely Cathedral presiding over the marshes to the north of it. Denny was finally surrendered to the crown at some time before October 1539 and Elizabeth came to live with her nephew at Coughton. She brought with her two or three of her nuns, who may have been George’s two sisters Margaret and Joyce, and his cousin, Joanna Peto, the niece of the William Peto who at the beginning of the decade had urged him to stick with his faith to the death.

According to eighteenth-century antiquary William Cole, who heard the story at Coughton, these Catholic ladies lived in an upper room, wearing their proper habits, their days devoted to ‘attendance in the oratory and work at their needle’.³⁴ Their room was connected to the rest of the house by a passage which opened into the hall. With them they had also brought the dole-gate from the abbey, a door in which there was a pair of small hatches, through which the nuns had spoken to strangers and given bread or money to the poor. This dole-gate is still at Coughton, with Elizabeth’s name carved on it, and it may be that it was fixed on the door to that upper, private corridor, so that in effect the abbess continued to preside over a tiny, shrunken, secret nunnery concealed inside Coughton itself.

This little capsule of an earlier treasured world operating hidden in the middle of a post-Reformation house might be thought of as a model of George Thockmorton’s heart: a private, buried Catholicism, still complete, encased in a conforming, outwardly proper, worldly shell, the only possible means of survival. If you had walked down the inner corridors of George Throckmorton in the 1540s, perhaps you would have found his Catholic inheritance sheltering there concealed but unchanged.

But the geometry of Throckmorton belief and behaviour was more complex than a simple division between inner Catholicism and outer Protestant conformity. The whole family came to embody the conflict and crisis of the Reformation. George and Kathryn had seven sons who lived to adulthood. Three of them became fiercely committed Roman Catholics, the other four equally committed Protestants. In his will George remembered them all equally well, instructing his son and heir Robert ‘to permytt and suffer every of my younger sonnes quyetlie and without vexacion, trouble or interruption’³⁵ to have all the properties he had already given them. He would not betray a son on the basis of ideas he had been unable to reconcile himself.

There was nothing middle-of-the-road about any of the Throckmortons. The Protestant side, most of whom had come under the wing of their mother’s relations the Parrs, were relatively straightforward. Once they had survived the suspicions of the Catholic regime under Mary Tudor (when Nicholas Throckmorton was imprisoned and tried for treason but was acquitted), they led, on the whole, good serviceable lives as loyal gentry to the Elizabethan state. Only Job, the author of the vituperative anti-bishop Puritan pamphlets called the Marprelate Tracts, embraced some of the ferocious religious fervour of his Catholic cousins.

It was on the Catholic side that the extraordinary inheritance of suffering and rage emerged in generation after generation of the family. Two of George’s sons were imprisoned by the state for their Catholicism, as were a grandson and a granddaughter’s husband, repeatedly, over many years, while subject to huge, repetitive fines of £20 a month for non-attendance at church.

Three of his grandsons lived and died in exile, plotting for the restoration of a Catholic England. One of his grandsons and the husband of a granddaughter, as well as four of his great-grandsons and two husbands of his great-granddaughters, were involved in murderous Catholic plots against Queen Elizabeth and her cousin James. All of them died in the course of their desperate rebellions, most of them a violent and humiliating traitor’s death. Five of those descendants were central figures in the Gunpowder Treason of 1605. This inheritance flowed on through the generations at least as much in the female as the male line. Francis Throckmorton was executed for his part in the plot that bore his name in 1583, but it was his aunt Catherine and his cousins Mary, Anne and Muriel who mothered traitor after traitor, martyr after martyr, in the Catholic cause.

This division of a family is what Peter Marshall has called ‘a crisp microcosm’³⁶ of the religious divide of Reformation Europe. But that is not the whole story. Loyalty and a sense of shared family enterprise lived alongside the deepest possible divisions of the age. Religious and ideological differences, which in the country at large were leading men and women to their deaths, were accommodated within the corporate body of the Throckmortons as less important than family love. As the structures of the outer world lost coherence, as loyalty to state, loyalty to God and loyalty to the past came into conflict with each other, it was the family identity which remained whole. Despite the ferocity of the positions they adopted, and the uncompromising attitudes of government to religious dissent, these cousins, uncles, nephews and friends remained, on the whole, on wonderfully good terms with each other.

Privately, Catholic John gave Protestant Arthur legal advice. Protestant Nicholas asked Catholic John if he could get hold of a rare Anglo-Saxon New Testament for an archbishop who was a client. Catholic Antony went on hunting expeditions with Protestant Arthur. Both of them stayed the night with Catholic Thomas and with rabidly Protestant Job. Catholic Robert left Protestant Kenelm his best clothes in his will, as did Protestant Nicholas to Catholic Antony. Protestant Arthur wrote friendly letters to his fiercely Catholic cousin and plotter Francis, even on the same day that he wrote to his fiercely Protestant cousin Job. They witnessed each other’s wills and stayed in each other’s houses if they happened to be near by.

In the cool dark church at Coughton, there is one poignant memorial to this ambivalent Throckmorton legacy. In the chancel, right up at the east end, as near to salvation as they could possibly be, George Throckmorton’s son John and his wife Margery Puttenham lie side by side under a marble canopy. John’s moustache droops across a solid, Noah-like beard. She holds up her left hand, whose fingers are broken, as if in wary salutation. In his right, he has a staff of office but in the other, his fingers and hers (also now broken) just touch, her sleeve ruckled as she moves it towards him. It is no full-blooded grasping of the hand, just the lightest of signals, a private demonstration, unnoticed by others.

The gesture is invisible from the body of the church. You have to lean into the shelter of their tomb to see it. But what does it mean? There are clues. Under Queen Mary, John had been a distinguished and important judge. He had witnessed the Queen’s will in 1558, and was clearly identifiable as a Catholic. But under Elizabeth he had, outwardly at least, conformed to the new religion and the new Queen knighted him, appointing him Vice President of the Council in Wales. He remained a loyal and outward Protestant until he died in 1580, when he was about fifty-six. Margery died about eleven years later.

All that time, in private, hidden from the world, his household and his wife remained as deeply Catholic as any in the kingdom. Margery brought up four fiercely Catholic sons. Francis plotted to murder the Queen and was horribly executed as a Catholic martyr in 1583. Their three other sons became Catholic exiles abroad, one, Edward, dying as a twenty-year-old Jesuit in Rome. A memoir of the boy was written by the English Jesuit Robert Southwell, praising his saintliness and attributing to his mother ‘an invincible constancy to the Catholic faith, whence she never swerved in the least from the moment that heresy invaded the kingdom’.

John Throckmorton, for all his outward conformity, never abandoned the Catholicism of the heart, and in that deceitful devotion was sustained by Margery’s private and invincible constancy. That is what her touch on his hand surely means: she was his guide, leading him towards a shared salvation.

Their wide-open eyes now stare at the marble ceiling above them and they have become their attributes: the gravity-defying pleats of her dress and cowl, his buttoned doublet and chain of office, her twisted girdle, the knightly helm beneath his head, the cushion under hers, travelling together into eternity. Only that secret and everlasting meeting of their fingers indicates the agony which, even then, their family was passing through.

The Throckmortons had a long and eventful history after the sixteenth century and are still living at Coughton today, proudly nurturing the Catholic inheritance for which their Tudor forebears suffered so much. It was only their attachment to their lands in the English Midlands that meant they stayed and dissembled until England turned more liberal and tolerant. If the Throckmortons had been equally committed Separatists or radical Protestants, they might well have gone to America to re-establish their family culture there. In that way, the inner corridors at Coughton, with their priest’s holes and their secret vestments and altars, might also be seen as that most modern of things: a private settlement, away from the world, where conscience could be free, hidden from the prying and violence of the all-intervening state.

1580s–1610s

Control

The Thynnes

Oxford, Beaconsfield, Wiltshire, Shropshire and London

One morning in May 1594, three years after the death of Margaret Puttenham, Thomas Thynne was in his rooms in the quiet, pale-cider-yellow quad of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.¹ He was handsome, rich, dark haired, witty, a flirtatious sixteen-year-old undergraduate, no great scholar,² but a man of his moment. He owned copies of Sidney’s Arcadia, perhaps the version published by Sidney’s sister the Countess of Pembroke the year before, and a new English translation of Orlando Furioso, the great romance of the Italian Renaissance.³ They were the two dream books of the age, designed to fill the minds of young men with erotic and heroic adventures in which their fantasy selves could star. Thomas was a musician, with a pair of citterns in his rooms, like flat-backed mandolins, and a big-bellied lute,⁴ an emblem for the Elizabethans of the melancholy music that lived, as Sidney had written, in ‘the mute timber when it hath the life lost.’⁵

A visitor called on him that morning, a man called Edward Tennant. He was the servant of one of the Thynnes’ Wiltshire neighbours, Sir James Mervyn. Thomas would have known that all Mervyns hated all Thynnes. But Tennant brought a letter from John Mervyn, the forty-year-old nephew of Sir James and the great exception to that enmity. Unlike every other Mervyn in England, John Mervyn could be trusted. He was an old friend of Thomas’s own father, John. But even here, at the very beginning of the story, there is treachery and deceit, because Tennant’s mission, under John Mervyn’s instructions, was to entrap young Thynne into the greatest mistake of his life.

Over the previous twenty years the two families had been conducting a vicious and at times murderous feud, a power struggle to control the county of Wiltshire in which they were both rich and powerful landowners.⁶ There was nothing aberrational about this: all over Elizabethan England, particularly in those counties where there was no single great, controlling aristocratic or courtly family, the gentry battled for reputation, influence and office. Bribery, deceit, slander, threats, street fights, woundings and murders: all were part of the struggle between leading English families in the sixteenth century. Friends were appointed to juries and to the magistrates’ bench; enemies had their reputations destroyed by whispers at court and in the local gentry community. Marriage alliances were made in the old way between families whose interests seemed aligned; provocations, insults and violence were thrown at rivals. The world of the Montagues and Capulets would have been entirely familiar to its audience.⁷

The hostility between the Thynnes and the Mervyns had first come to a head in the 1570s.⁸ Each family was almost but not quite alike in dignity. Both were new gentry, on the up, emerging in the early sixteenth century from medieval obscurity into the vicious Tudor world of opportunity and riches. But they were far from satisfied and by the 1570s both still wanted more in the way of land, money and power. The Thynnes were originally modest Shropshire people.⁹ The founder of their family greatness, John Thynne, born in about 1513, had become steward to Edward Seymour, the great servant of Henry VIII. Seymour had risen as high as a commoner ever could, eventually becoming Duke of Somerset and effective ruler of England as the Lord Protector of Edward VI. John Thynne, a man of purpose, culture and discernment, a loyal servant, had risen on Seymour’s tails, acquiring large amounts of land in Wiltshire, including the old Priory at Longleat, where between 1540 and 1580 he built and then rebuilt the most perfect Renaissance house in England.¹⁰ He was a deeply cultivated man, urging his sons to learn Greek, sending from London remedies for his children’s afflictions in cold weather.¹¹ Much of his expensive life was paid for with the money that came flowing into the Thynne coffers from his marriage to Christian Gresham, the daughter and heiress of Sir Richard, one of the wealthiest men in England, an import–export merchant in the City, dealing in grain and fine textiles, supplying Henry VIII with the tapestries, satins and velvets that embellished his palaces.¹² Thynne had made use of the two key sources of modern gentry wellbeing – office and trade – and was busy pouring them into a provincial power base.

The story of the Mervyns – or Marvins, as their name was also spelled – had begun slightly earlier and a little more murkily.¹³ In the 1470s, in ways that are not entirely clear, they somehow acquired the manor of Fonthill Gifford, the far side of a beautiful high chalk ridge from Longleat. By the 1560s, successive Mervyns had built up their landholdings enough to put them among the leading Wiltshire gentry. They lived in style: a stone house with the usual ranks of big glazed windows on three floors, surrounded by a large park containing a newly enlarged lake, with a turreted gatehouse, woods, a heronry, a hop yard, a dairy and pasture for herds of sheep and cattle. There was a vineyard here in 1633, which may well have been planted a century before. It sounds like a gentleman’s paradise, but as so often in these stories, the physical description, the view you would get if you turned up at sixteenth-century Fonthill Gifford as a tourist, belied the realities of tension and struggle behind it.¹⁴

They were approaching from slightly different places in the gentry universe: both knightly families but the Mervyns three or four generations deep as Wiltshire gentlemen; the Thynnes richer, more explicitly Protestant, less provincial, sharper, riskier, with the currents of court politics, noble service and City money all running through them. Each family had something to offer the other. But one further status-colouring element may have been in play: in 1549 and again in 1551, as the rivalries surrounding the Tudor crown reached their mid-century crisis, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, was arrested and sent to the Tower.¹⁵ His loyal servant John Thynne was sent there with him. The Privy Council’s warrant to conduct Thynne to the Tower was addressed to ‘Mr Mervyn, sheriff of Wiltshire’.¹⁶ It was a moment of humiliation: Thynne, the parvenu steward, being conducted to prison by Mervyn, the ancient county gentleman. Status, to say the least, was nuanced here.

By the 1570s, the head of the Mervyn family was Sir James, a wily practitioner of gentry arts, and in 1574, the memory of the arrest a quarter of a century earlier was set aside. Negotiations were opened between him and Sir John Thynne for a marriage between Mervyn’s daughter Lucy and Thynne’s son, also called John. Lucy Mervyn and young John Thynne were betrothed and it seems as if John fell in love with the girl.¹⁷ Family agents discussed terms and, as usual, Sir James Mervyn offered his daughter along with a set of Wiltshire manors as her dowry, land that by convention would then descend to the heirs of the marriage. But Sir James was cheating: the manors he was offering were entailed, designated by law to be heritable only by male members of the Mervyn family. Sir John Thynne was in danger of making a contract with his neighbour (Fonthill is about fourteen miles from Longleat) which would fail to enrich his own family at all. His son’s hand in marriage, the most valuable property a member of the gentry possessed, would have been sold for a pup.

Enraged at this insult, perhaps at the assumption of his gullibility, perhaps at the lack of respect it implied, Sir John broke off the negotiations.¹⁸ But love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs and young John was so in love with Lucy that he would not give her up. Only the threat of disinheritance from his father persuaded him that Longleat was preferable to Lucy and instead he was married to Joan Hayward, the daughter of another wonderfully rich City merchant and Lord Mayor of London.¹⁹ It was no brutal marrying of money to power. A letter to Sir John survives from his agent and fixer Richard Young, written halfway through the negotiations. It was important to all parties that the bride and groom to be should approve of each other. Richard Young had agreed with Joan’s father that ‘Unless the two parties could the one so like of the other and they themeselves to be as joyful as the father, there should be no displeasure but to part in great friendship on both sides.’²⁰ Young asked Joan, who was not quite seventeen, what she thought of John.

She said she would not nor could say nothing, for she had not spoken with him and at our speaking, she said, it is possible he shall not like me, and in the other side I may say the same of him, but I do put my trust in God and in my good father that God will put into my father’s heart to choose me such a one as God will direct my heart not to dislike.²¹

Lucy Mervyn was consigned to an impoverished military lord, the 11th Baron Audley, an ally of the Mervyns in their great feud, his immensely ancient Wiltshire family larded with a history of lunacy and incompetence. One of their daughters, Eleanour, would eventually claim she was the Bishop of Lichfield, sprinkling tar, which she called holy water, on the hangings in the cathedral there, after which she was committed to Bedlam.²² Their son and heir was beheaded for sodomizing his servants and holding down his wife while their servants raped her.²³ The benefits of an Audley marriage were not entirely unequivocal.

Here is one way of understanding the Thynne–Mervyn difficulty: relatively small-time gentry family (the Mervyns) aim to hitch their star to high-rolling, ambitious professionals (the Thynnes) but imagine that their higher county status can allow them to cheat. It doesn’t and so each party in the encounter withdraws to a safer place – the Mervyns to old hopeless aristocracy, for status enhancement, the Thynnes to City money, for further enrichment.

Thynnes allied to Mervyns would have been an entirely satisfactory marriage of money with status. As it was, the marriage of Thynnes with Haywards was money allying itself to money. Mervyns joining with Audleys was status joining with status. For each family the second marriage left them lacking something: the Mervyns wanted cash and the Thynnes wanted rooted county standing. Sir James Mervyn’s greed, and his inability to play by the rules, had wrecked the deal and he had made the wrong choice. The Thynnes had done better: alliance to money would guarantee their future.

Ever since that moment of betrayal, the Thynnes and the Mervyns had been at each other’s throats. A more general struggle for control of the Wiltshire courts and political structures lay behind it and there had been bloody street fighting between followers of the two parties at the Marlborough quarter sessions and the Salisbury Assizes in 1589, endless status struggles and mutual humiliations, sending each others’ servants to jail at successive court hearings, raids on stock, destruction of hedges, the killing of deer in parks, a self-sustaining mutual antipathy.²⁴

Teenagers do not always know their family histories but a miasma of half-remembered enmities and loyalties must have hung over the May morning encounter in Thomas Thynne’s set of rooms in Oxford. Thomas was the son and heir of the marriage between John Thynne and Joan Hayward, the London merchant’s daughter. Edward Tennant brought him a letter from John Mervyn, nephew of the hated and duplicitous Sir James.

But here there is a complexity: John Mervyn, despite the history and although he was of an older generation, was Thomas’s ‘very familiar friend’.²⁵ It is not known how the friendship had evolved or what it consisted of, but it was real enough because Thomas responded instantly to John’s invitation to ride thirty miles or so down the London road to High Wycombe, where, John Mervyn said, they would ‘make merry’.²⁶ Thynne, bored with his work – it was a Monday – and ‘desirous of some Liberty and recreacon from his booke and study’,²⁷ set off with Edward Tennant, taking about three hours to reach High Wycombe. Thomas Mosely, another Mervyn servant, met them there, with the message that they should ride on another six miles to Beaconsfield, where at the Bell Inn they would find John Mervyn waiting. There is no telling if this part of the plan was deliberate – John Thynne might have thought Wycombe easily reached from Oxford, Beaconsfield perhaps a little too far – but in retrospect, we can see the hand of Sir James Mervyn slowly and gently closing in on his intended victim.

At the Bell, Sir James himself was not there, but his nephew John was and so was Sir James’s favourite daughter, Lucy, Lady Audley, with her two daughters, Amy Touchet and the brilliantly red-haired sixteen-year-old Maria Touchet, a superbly well-educated and fiery girl, one of the Queen’s four or five maids of honour. With their mother, Maria and Amy had travelled the twenty-five miles or so from Westminster in a coach that afternoon. There were numerous other Mervyns there, and their retainers: it was to be a party.²⁸

The Mervyns ordered sweetmeats and ‘a great store of wine’.²⁹ Everyone sat and drank, toasted and talked, laughing and joking around a table. The evening ran on and at some time, as the wine flowed, and as the Mervyns intended, the young, handsome, adventurous, romantic Thomas Thynne found himself sitting next to the beautiful Maria Touchet. They had ‘frendly and familiar speache’ together.³⁰ Then, unlikely as this sounds, unless the teenagers were very drunk, as they probably were, or Maria’s mother had a supremely tight control over the unfolding of events, as she probably did, the two of them, at least according to the deposition of one Edmund Mervyn at the later court case, ‘grew into such good liking of each other as that they seemed desirous to be married presently’,³¹ meaning, in sixteenth-century English, ‘straight away’.

Lucy Audley, according to her own testimony, then displayed the wares and

caused her said daughter to be turned about, to the end the same Mr Thyn might see that she was no way deformed, but that if he liked her outwardly she wowld assure him that for the disposicon of her minde it showld appeare to him to be much more perfecte.³²

Thynne liked what he saw, and imagined the higher, hidden qualities as even better. An old man called Welles, whose eyesight was failing but who was said to be an ordained minister, was then spirited into position and a Book of Common Prayer was found. The party migrated to a candlelit upper room in the inn and there Edward Tennant, the man who had inveigled Thomas Thynne that morning to leave Oxford for a party, read out the words of the service because the Reverend Welles could not see properly in the flickering candlelight. Welles repeated Tennant’s words and Thomas and Maria made the solemn vows. According to sixteenth-century law, these vows spoken voluntarily in front of a minister constituted a valid and legal marriage.³³

The Mervyns, in a spectacular coup, had captured the heir of the Thynnes. No dowry had been promised with Maria’s hand and so the deceitful deal which Sir James had tried to make with Thomas’s father twenty years earlier had now come good for him the next generation down. All that humiliation, Sir John Thynne’s rejection of Lucy in favour of a London merchant’s daughter, all those years of whispered contempt in the gentry houses, parks and hunting fields of Wiltshire, all had now been revenged.

A bed was made up in the inn and, as usual in Elizabethan marriages, the newly-weds went to bed together in front of the company. Edward Tennant was later clear that neither of them took their clothes off. They certainly didn’t have sex but the Mervyn witnesses were adamant that the two did ‘imbrace and kisse each other being in bed very lovingly’.³⁴ Maria gave Thomas a beautiful pair of gloves. Eventually, as dawn approached, everyone else went to bed too, happy at the triumphant outcome of the evening.

Even when the newly married Thomas Thynne woke the next morning, he was said to be ‘joyful’.³⁵ His beautiful bride, the daughter of a peer, whose godmother was the Queen, was surely the most wonderful catch. He wanted to go back with her to the court at Westminster, but the canny seriousness of the Mervyn clan intervened. Everyone who had witnessed the events of the last twelve hours was sworn to secrecy. Maria gave Thomas a needleworked waistcoat with which he was to return to Oxford.³⁶ She went back to court, from which the Mervyns had arranged no more than two days’ leave, and where the Queen was to hear nothing of the marriage. The Thynne parents were to be kept in the dark, as were any Thynne retainers.

It was a dream of Elizabethan teenage happiness. The word ‘secret’ appears forty-eight times in Orlando Furioso³⁷ and here now, for real, Romeo had at least kissed and slept in the same bed as his Juliet.

One can only imagine Thynne’s levels of anxiety that autumn when the feud between the two families turned bloody. Two allies of the Mervyns, the Danvers brothers, both distinguished and powerful soldiers, burst into a house at Corsham in Wiltshire, accompanied by seventeen or eighteen armed men, all carrying swords and pistols. Henry Long, John Thynne’s brother-in-law and Thomas’s uncle, was dining there with his fellow JPs. Between the Danvers and the Long families, there was a long-running subset of the Thynne–Mervyn feud. Charles Danvers began insulting and then cudgelling Henry Long but he was caught in a corner and injured. His brother Henry then took out his pistol and shot Long dead with a single bullet in the chest. It was murder. The Danverses fled abroad to France and renewed bitterness spread through the feuding Wiltshire families.³⁸

In this heightened and dangerous atmosphere, Thomas Thynne managed to keep his marriage secret until the following spring. In April 1595 it somehow erupted into the public world of court and gentry gossip – perhaps at the hands of the Mervyns, who would have wanted to regularize the situation – and the Thynne parents exploded in grief and rage. Thomas’s mother, Joan, was in the Thynnes’ castle at Caus in deepest Shropshire, his father, John, in their house in Cannon Row in Westminster. Both were hard at work, Joan defending their castle and Shropshire lands from another family who claimed it, John attempting at court to promote his family interests and get himself a knighthood. The kidnapping of their son and heir was one disaster too many, one that combined treachery, humiliation, disobedience and financial disaster.

On 15 April 1595 Joan wrote to a cousin:

How hard is my hap to see my chiefest hope and joy my greatest grief and sorrow, for you know how much I have always disliked my son to match in this sort, but alas I fear it is too late. Alas the boy was betrayed by the Mervyns which I have often told Mr Thynne what they would do, and now it is too sure. But I trust they may be divorced for it is no good marriage in law for that he is under age.³⁹

She was wrong. Properly witnessed marriages, as this had been, were binding contracts, even if the partners were under age. John Thynne was enraged and refused to see and talk to his son. Joan attempted to find intermediaries who might excuse ‘the deceits that hath been used to deceive a silly child’.⁴⁰ But John Thynne was suffering more than humiliation. The essential calculations, the necessary money flows for a continuing gentry existence, had been disrupted by Thomas’s precipitate behaviour. Because there was nothing coming into the family account from Thomas’s wife, there would be no money for the Thynne daughters’ own dowries. No one would touch them without a dowry. The system was interlocked and if one part failed, all was in danger. The disobedience of one, as Joan wrote, would be the overthrow of the others. In the light of this, the dowry was the most important of social bonds. As a shared practice, dowries constituted the exchange medium of gentry life. A dowry allowed one family to accept a new member without any diminution of its own estate; and allowed that family to pass assets on to others. If the flow was dammed, the network dried up. Gentry society was tied to itself through the dowry system.

Letters ran between them. John wrote to say that Sir James Mervyn had approached him, attempting a negotiation. Joan was furious and could not ‘but marvel to hear with what face Sir James Marven can come to you, considering what traitorous abuses he and his have offered unto you and me’.⁴¹ The code had been broken and, as she wrote, ‘I will never think well of him nor any of his.’⁴² The Thynnes could not quite believe how carefully the Mervyns and Lucy Audley had arranged their deceit.

They have used all the policy and cunning to make it so sure that you nor I shall not break it. For after the contract she caused a pair of sheets to be laid on a bed and her daughter to lie down in her clothes and the boy by her side booted and spurred⁴³ for a little while that it might be said they were abed together, herself and Edmund Mervyn in the chamber a pretty way off, and hath caused her daughter to write divers letters unto him, in the last naming herself Maria Thynne which name I trust she shall not long enjoy.⁴⁴

Thomas Thynne was made to beg for forgiveness from his enraged father.⁴⁵ His mother stood up for him, reporting Thomas’s account that he had asked whether his father approved of the marriage and the Mervyns had all assured him they did. He was ‘heartily sorry, and hath vowed to me to be ruled by us hereafter’. Discipline and obedience were the essential companions of inheritance and the future welfare of the family business. As John Thynne had in his time been threatened by his father, Thomas was threatened with disinheritance. ‘I have told him’, Joan told his father, ‘what your determination is if he will not be ruled. Otherwise let him never [have] you for his father nor me for his mother if he consent to them.’⁴⁶

But the boy was under siege. He was buttonholed by Sir James Mervyn in the gossip shop of St Paul’s in London.⁴⁷ He was promised letters from Maria, who had been hidden from him since that first Beaconsfield night. He was threatened by his own father and clucked over by his mother, who longed to protect him. The correspondence is almost entirely warm and loving. This was a family disaster but the love between man and wife, mother and son, boy and girl are all palpable on the page. Joan Thynne in particular knew that love and family welfare were not separable. She wrote to her husband at court that he was to look after himself, not only for his sake but for hers. ‘I trust your troubles will turn all for best,’ she wrote to him in May 1595, ‘and to both our comforts, although the strain be great for the present.’⁴⁸ Of the erring Thomas, she begged his father ‘to accept of his true repentances which I hope you will receive him into your favour again, and to have that fatherly care which heretofore you have had of him, although he hath justly deserved your displeasure’.⁴⁹

She followed those phrases with a sentence of great psychological acuity and a sense of moral equality with her husband. ‘Yet consider of him by yourself when time was.’ Judge your son, in other words, by the man you were when you were his age. John Thynne at that age had been in love with Lucy Mervyn, the very woman who had now hijacked the Thynne family enterprise. He had probably remained in love with her even as his parents introduced him to Joan Hayward, the young merchant’s daughter from London. A touching letter from her survives at Longleat from that early period in their lives, soon after their first meeting in 1575. ‘Good Mr Thynne,’ Joan wrote to him,

I give you most humble thanks for your letter, but that will not suffice me from letting you to understand of my heavy heart and my pensive [i.e. sorrowful] mind, hoping that when you understand the cause you will do your endeavour to release me of some part of it, which if I could speak with you it should not be long unknown to you. For as the distance is short, so I think your absence long.

By your pensive friend in heart and mind

J.H.⁵⁰

The subject of this letter is not clear, but could it be that she was urging him to relinquish his love for Lucy Mervyn, to obey his own father and turn to loving the twice-pensive Joan herself? Perhaps. And this favouring of love over obedience was perhaps what Joan was reminding him of twenty years later.

But their son Thomas wasn’t playing entirely straight. He had lied to his parents, by saying that he thought his father had given permission for the marriage, and even while submitting to his mother’s pleadings and father’s ferocity, he was sending letters to the ever-more desirable Maria, one including a gold ring, another signed ‘your loving husband’.⁵¹ Lies were the only way Thomas could find to creep through the labyrinth of fear, love and guilt in which he found himself.

The patriarchs of the two families now took their battle to the courts, first to the Star Chamber, where Mervyn had Thynne demoted from the most prominent magistrate in Wiltshire to the bottom of the list; then to the great church court held in St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside, where Thynne wanted to prove the illegality of the marriage. There, in the Court of Arches (named after the huge arches of the Norman church), all the principal players were summoned and asked to give witness statements. Those long hearings, which dragged on for four years, are the reason we know so much about this story.

Everybody lied in court. Witnesses were suborned and patience-sapping speeches by lawyers explored the precedents. Aspersions were cast on the character and validity of the man called Welles who had appeared in the pub that evening as an ordained minister. Slurs were laid on the character of the Mervyn witnesses as adulterers and fornicators. Threats of violence were made or alleged. Both sides lobbied the Queen herself. John Thynne attempted to exhaust the Mervyns’ money and courage with expensive and vastly irrelevant legal delaying tactics.⁵²

Not until the early spring of 1601 was there any sign of an end to the fight. Maria Touchet had consistently appeared in the various courts defending the propriety and reality of her marriage. Thomas Thynne had been kept by his parents in hiding somewhere in England, although it seems he may from time to time have managed to see his wife. But then, perhaps at the moment everyone was bored and frustrated by the long legal struggle, the Thynnes seem to have given in. John Thynne’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Knyvett, wrote to him to say that he and Joan in their anger should not forget to love their son. He had made a mistake, as sixteen-year-olds do, and they should forgive him, and take it as a mistake rather than ‘bitterly in displeasure condemne [it] as an unpardonable offence’. She was a wise woman. Thomas and Maria were now twenty-three. ‘It resteth nowe seeing it is fallen out thus that it be followed advisedly for a fynall end thereof.’⁵³

Only then, extraordinarily, as all appeared to be moving to a kind of resolution and the Knyvetts looked as if they might be organizing some kind of agreement between the parties, did Thomas finally appear in court. It seemed as if he had finally submitted to his father’s will. First, he told the court everything his parents would like to have heard. When Edward Tennant came to his Oxford rooms, Thomas said, he had no idea that the man worked for Sir James Mervyn. He thought this was just an invitation to a party from John Mervyn, his father’s old friend. Nor did he have any idea that John Mervyn had ‘turned Judas’, betraying the Thynnes to the Mervyns. That he should have done so is not in itself surprising: Mervyn family loyalty out-trumped mere friendship. At Beaconsfield, Thomas went on, Lucy Audley and her daughters and all the other Mervyns had plied him with drink and he was ‘so much distempered therewith that he did not, neither doth, knowe or remember in any particular what was further said, done, or practized by him nor them that night’. Crucially, then, he had not been conscious of getting married to Maria and if that was true the marriage was invalid and the Thynnes were free.⁵⁴

How could the dignity of a man be preserved in this world so dense with manipulation if he did not manipulate things himself? And Thomas, it seems, had learned the arts of survival. Maria, his wife, had with immense self-possession declared the reality of the marriage in hearing after hearing and deposition after deposition. Thomas had been tucked away in the country, effectively imprisoned by his father. Now, it seems, he had got himself to court by agreeing to say what his father wanted him to say. But once that was said, he could then declare his love for Maria. Now at last evidence was produced in the Court of Arches which showed that the marriage was real. When back at Oxford Thomas had written to Maria, signed the letter ‘your loving husband’, sent her a pair of gloves, instructing they should be delivered ‘to his wife’ and another letter with a gold ring in it, on which he had the words ‘a frendes guifte’ engraved.⁵⁵

This was evidence that Thomas had not been quite so much of a drunken victim on the evening in Beaconsfield. The letters had been asked for earlier in court proceedings but had never appeared. The Oxford historian Dr Alison Wall, who has studied this case in great depth over many years, thinks they may not have existed before 1601 ‘and Thomas may have written them now [in 1601] to prove a marriage his father had forced him to deny’.⁵⁶ Certainly the judge was impressed by Maria’s lawyers’ claim that ‘the letters this day exhibited in the Court are wholly written with the hand of the said Thomas, and the said letters and ring this day exhibited are the same Thomas sent’.⁵⁷

Having heard his son’s new evidence, John Thynne’s rage returned at full force. The escape that seemed to be within his grasp had been snatched away. He wrote to Joan, still in Shropshire, from London, where he had been enmeshed in dealings over property disputes. Now he was confronted again with the everlasting crisis over Thomas, his

proud undutiful son … [who] hath to me most undutifully demeaned himself to my no small grief, and for which cause I will also especially stay to see the same either settled or no longer dissembled, and you and myself no more abused, for to my face he used me undutifully, and is such cause of contempt of me as I neither can nor will endure, but will put him to the point either of having of her or utterly leaving of her, to the end I may no more spend in that suit my time and charges in vain.⁵⁸

This was a gentry cry from the heart: the most important family asset, the son and heir, was not conforming to the managing director’s vision but instead was asserting his own short-term interests over those of the family corporation. These financial-cum-strategic problems were emerging in terms of private family emotions. Thomas was failing to tell the truth, was proud, knew nothing of duty and was abusive and inconsistent in his actions. He could have been sacked (or disinherited) but that in itself would have been shameful. The paterfamilias, so often portrayed by modern historians as a source of grief for his imposed-on children, had in reality few places to turn. No one was more vulnerable than a father to his children.

The great contrast between this overburdening sense of frustration in his relations with Thomas was John’s real love and affection for his wife, Joan, still struggling with their affairs in the wilds of Shropshire. ‘I have sent you a keg of sturgeon and vinegar and Rhenish wine’, he wrote to her on 26 July 1601

And ever live to love thee more and more, I protest I now only desire to live and be with thee. And so good Pug farewell and God bless you and all my children, and send me peace, with all the world

Your ever loving husband during life

John Thynne.⁵⁹

Soon after this, perhaps in early August, the judge examined Thomas Thynne on oath again and in private, when he ‘confessed the marriage’. The judge then pronounced it valid, the Mervyns the victors and John Thynne defeated. Sir James Mervyn, meeting the judge at a court gathering a little later, ‘told him that in regard of his kind and judicial dealing in that cause, that if he could find any reason to go from the Court, that he should come to me [at Fonthill] and kill a buck, and that from henceforth I would be his guide to Longleat’.⁶⁰ That was the victorious fixer talking, the courteous and high-status reward – only grandees with parks could offer the killing of a deer as an entertainment – to a public servant who had done the right thing by them.

Usually in this sort of story, that is where it ends: the court case is over and the documentation disappears. Not here, though, because in September 1601 a correspondence opened between Thomas Thynne’s newly acknowledged wife, Maria, and his mother, Joan. These are letters between Romeo’s mother and an unwelcome Juliet. Both sides of the correspondence are preserved in the archives at Longleat and almost nothing in sixteenth-century letters reveals quite so clearly the multiple tensions between generations, between women of subtly different classes, between conformity and individuality, and between the dignity of the self and the requirements of family order.

The first letter that survives from Maria to her mother-in-law is in convoluted and Latinate sentences which read as if they were being spoken from the lowest possible of ground-scraping bows. Maria had written to Joan before (in a letter that has not survived) but had received no answer. Why was that? Was she suspected of duplicity, of not telling her mother-in-law the truth of what she felt? Her manner now was pure obeisance, but the bow was somehow complicated. Her tone implied both family inferiority – a daughter to a mother – and moral equality. She felt no grounds for shame. In fact, she felt so little shame that a sense of irony hangs in curtains around her words. Could the proud, court-holding, seductive and beautiful Maria, maid of honour to the Queen herself, have meant to abase herself quite so much to the daughter of a City merchant, whose title to her lands in Shropshire was suspect, who may have been her mother-in-law but had little else in her favour?

If I dyd knowe that my thoughtes had ever intertayned any unreuerent conseyte of you (my (good mother) I shoulde be much ashamed so Impudintlye to Importune yr good oppinion as I haue done by manye intreatinge lynes, but haveinge binne euer Imboldened wth the knowledg of my unspotted Innocencye, I coulde not be so great an enimye to my owne hapynes, as to wante [i.e. lack] yr fauor for wante of desyeringe ytt.⁶¹

Thick with educated paradoxes, this is a form of supplication which is more than halfway to an insult. Its tone might have been calculated to receive no answer. It was Mervyn-speak, driven by rivalry and ambition, and in signing and sealing it, Maria slapped down another pair of challenges. She ended the letter with the phrase ‘Yr very loueng and obedyent daughter Marya Thine’. That encapsulated the whole point: the fact that she had plotted to call herself ‘Maria Thynne’ was the essence of her disobedience. Then, as a final flourish, she enclosed what is either a lock of her red hair, or a now frayed silk ribbon, fixed to the paper with sealing wax, into which she pressed the ancient and noble cross-hatching of the Audley coat of arms. Every one of these signals was made to have its effect: Maria had stolen the son; she had little interest in obeying Joan Thynne; she was glamorous and sexy as Joan could no longer hope to be; and she was the daughter of a peer – one of only sixty titled men in England, a social universe away from the grubby deal-making and warehouses of Joan’s own commercial family.

No answer was forthcoming from the older Mrs Thynne, even though further letters were sent to her at Caus in Shropshire. Maria was living with her own mother Lucy at the Audley manor of Stalbridge in Dorset. The following summer in June 1602, Maria asked her mother to write imploringly to Joan Thynne. All kinds of hazards hung around this letter too: not only had Lucy Audley arranged the kidnapping of Joan’s treasured son; she was the first deep love of Joan’s husband, John, who had given her up only when threatened with disinheritance. Lucy Audley met all of this face on: ‘Notwithstanding the doubt long since conceived how any letters of mine might find a grateful acceptation of yourself (many reasons inducing a distrust) …’⁶² She spared no eloquence and even through the fog of complexity and Latinity, the idea emerges that Lucy Audley wanted in her heart to see these families united.

Good Mrs Thynne, let me not be wronged in these lines by a hard construction, for I protest that servile fear and base flattery my heart is not acquainted withal. If I desire your love or seek to embrace your friendship (as unfeignedly in all truth I do and wished it long since) believe it to proceed from such a mind as willingly makes offer of the owner for performance of the friendliest effect that her kindness and ability may discharge.⁶³

This was stiff and awkward, a halting statement of love and warmth, which scarcely survives the frost of formality and distance. But the reason is not far to seek: Lucy Audley was trying proclaim her affection and honesty from a history which spoke only of deceit and exploitation.

Lastly since your son is mine, and so beloved as my dearest own, let me obtain this request, my daughter may be yours, but accordingly as to her merits.⁶⁴

Could you believe her? Perhaps you could, if you read only her imploring words. Maybe not, if you knew both what had come before and where her interests lay. It was entirely within the Thynnes’ power either to acknowledge the validity of the Thomas–Maria marriage or to disinherit him. There were plenty of other sons. Only if Joan and John Thynne accepted Maria as a full member of their family could Lucy Audley and Sir James Mervyn be sure that their plot had worked and that the Mervyns had established their beachhead in Thynne territory. All kinds of access to power would stem from that connection and in pre-modern societies access to power meant access to wealth and wellbeing. No one had any conception of what a gene was in 1602, but here these people were acting to genetic dictates. The individuals writing these letters would scarcely benefit or suffer from these arrangements, however they turned out. Even if the language they used was of honour and honesty, of proclaimed integrity and persistent doubt, it was the genes themselves that were struggling for victory.

Still nothing from Joan. Thomas went to visit her and still she resisted. Maria wrote again into the silence: ‘All that I desire is but to be blessed with your better conceit’⁶⁵ – a better conception of who she was as a person. But then, at the end of July 1602, Maria tired of her wooing of the mother.

I am determined henceforth to cease troubling you, believing that my letters do but urge the memory of one who is nothing pleasing unto you, but yet not despairing in God’s goodness, I will betake me to my prayers to Him, with this hope, that He who hath wrought some as great miracles as this, will in time incline your heart to pity and pardon your son, and me for his sake.⁶⁶

Still nothing, but then, months later, out of the blue, Joan wrote to Lucy Audley, Maria’s mother. Her letter is the central document in this story, fusing a powerful consciousness of rank with ‘discomforting grief’⁶⁷ at her betrayal, all the while taking refuge in her own individual pride. ‘I confess your daughter’s birth far above my son’s deserts or degree,’ she began, ‘but since you were pleased not to scorn my son to be yours, methinks you should not have scorned to have acknowledged me to be his mother.’ There was a dignity that went beyond rank. The rights and privileges of rank did not allow the mistreatment of an individual. This was a question not of the law but of the honourable regard for the humanity of others. Lucy Audley had accused her of feeding her husband’s mind with slanderous tales about the Audleys and Joan replied to that accusation with the same mixture of acute social consciousness and an irreducible sense of her own moral position.

Now for Mr Thynne’s calling of your honour in question, I cannot deny but I have heard it, but that myself was either author or demonstrator of any such reports I utterly deny. I am not so ready to wrong inferior persons, much less an honourable Lady of your place and reputation, and so conceive of me for so you shall ever find me.⁶⁸

Joan Thynne placed these two codes – social hierarchy and the rules of dealing well with other individuals – face to face. She believed in both but recognized that they did not always acknowledge the value in the other. Thomas had broken one code in favour of the other: ‘He hath hazarded for your love, and yours, the loss of theirs that he was born to honour perpetually.’ It was a gamble he had lost. ‘But this I confess,’ she went on, ‘I have more reason to respect your honour than your friendship towards me.’ Lady Audley was her acknowledged social superior but there was no trusting her goodness.

For two years the situation remained unchanged. Joan repeatedly refused to engage with Maria or Thomas. Maria repeatedly wrote asking her for love. Joan was confined to her remote and difficult, windy and leaky castle at Caus in Shropshire; Maria was pining away either at Fonthill or in the beautiful timber-framed Mervyn manor house at Compton Bassett in the thick-cream-and-butter country of north Wiltshire.

Something of these geographical differences emerged in the letters. Maria, the daughter of a baron, was, despite her proclaimed grief over Joan’s indifference, luxuriating in the lap of her father’s and grandfather’s various manors, distributed across England’s richest and most luxurious county. Joan Thynne meanwhile was a little desperately defending and maintaining her remote property against rival claimants to it.⁶⁹ Her husband was busy in London; these Shropshire lands were part of the dowry she had brought to the marriage, and so it fell to her to defend and maintain them. Not that he was indifferent to their wellbeing. Joan was struggling to get the farm accounts in good order for her husband’s approval; she found that no one in Shropshire would sell beef or sheep to her at reasonable prices and so asked for some ‘very forward in fat’⁷⁰ to be sent over from Wiltshire; corn and malt were equally pricy; malt and hops had to come from Wiltshire;⁷¹ she asked for salad oil and sturgeon from London;⁷² lute strings and copper wires for the virginals were posted to her along with ‘cambric thread, silver and spangles’ or sequins.⁷³

She worried from her distance that her husband, whom she scarcely ever saw from one month to the next, was not well. His eyes were troubling him. She sent him ‘physic’ for them along with her letters.

I hope you will have more care of yourself for the good of me and your poor children, humbly desiring you above all things to have respect unto your health, and not to defer the time of taking physic, and let your greatest care be for the preservation of your health, in whose welldoing consist my only joy and comfort. And therefore sweet Mr Thynne, if you love or make account of me have a special regard of it.⁷⁴

Nearly every other letter in this correspondence, or at least those that have been preserved, was to some extent in public. But Joan’s letters to her husband had the affection and directness of intimate conversation. She hardly ever heard from him, let alone saw him, but struggled to maintain her world alone. The woman Maria imagined her to be was scarcely connected with the woman these loving, careful, generous-hearted letters revealed.

Then came the catastrophe which Maria, Thomas, Lucy Audley and the Mervyns had all been waiting for and which Joan Thynne had been dreading: on 21 November 1604, John Thynne died. Thomas had not been disinherited and so he and Maria took possession of Longleat, the heart of the Thynne estates. Thomas himself seems to have remained in London, leaving Maria in Wiltshire but not apparently trusting her to run his affairs at Longleat. This lack of respect for a woman’s ability to run an estate, as his mother was doing so competently in the wilds of Shropshire, produced an excoriating letter from Maria. She was still at one of her father’s houses, not allowed yet to be mistress of the Thynne properties: ‘Well Mr Thynne, believe I am both sorry and ashamed that any creature should see that you hold such a contempt of my poor wits, that being your wife, you should not think me of discretion to order your affairs in your absence.’⁷⁵ It was, she said, her right to ‘be mistress there’ – at Longleat – but if he wanted to leave her ‘like an innocent fool here [in her father’s house], I will the more contentedly bear the disgrace.’ It is the angriest letter in the collection, which she signed, furiously, ‘Your loving wife howsoever, Maria Thynne’.⁷⁶

He soft-soaped her (but his letters don’t survive) and allowed her to take charge at Longleat. Mervyn servants were brought in and old Thynne servants sidelined. She became as she told him ‘a careful officer’ in his absence. His letters from London flirted with her and ‘made her modest blood flush up into [her] bashful cheek’⁷⁷ so that she wrote back to him as her ‘best and sweetest Thomken, and many thousand times more than these 1000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 for thy kind and wanton letters Thine and only thine Maria’.⁷⁸ She managed all the men and the complexities of rent and tenancies at Longleat with aplomb. They were happy, in possession of his inheritance, with her now settled in the chatelaine’s saddle.

From that position Maria could abandon the mask of deference. Her mother-in-law, silently or not, had abused her for so long. Now, as the next generation in possession, her loathing and contempt could be allowed to emerge. In a letter that is undated but was probably written not long after Maria’s and Thomas’s arrival at Longleat, the young woman in the comfort of Wiltshire wrote to the old woman in despair and isolation in Shropshire. They were openly at war, engaged on a bitter lawsuit over the Thynne estates and possessions. ‘yf you or yr heyers haue an exspectation in revertion of Longleate howse or garden,’ Maria told Joan, she might as well give up. ‘The case beinge as ytt ys, meethinkes you Should not vnkindlye intermedle, more then mr Thynne doth wth all yr lande of inherytance’ – a phrase meaning those lands Shropshire which Joan had brought to her marriage as a dowry and now formed her own sustenance or jointure.⁷⁹

As she went on, Maria warmed to her task:

I confes (wthowt Sham) ytt ys true my garden ys to ruinous, & yett to make you more merrye I wyll make you shall be of my Cowncell, that my intente ys before ytt be better, to make ytt worse; for findinge that greate exspence Coulde never alter ytt from being lyke a poridg pote, nor never by reporte was lyke other I intend to plowe ytt up & Sowe all varitye of frute att a fytt Seazon, I beseech you laughe, & So wyll I att yr Captiousnes.⁸⁰

Joan may have been captious and intent on finding fault but this is as bitter as a perry pear. For a class whose identity was bound so closely to the nature of land and to the shaping and moulding of that land, it would be difficult to find a more explicit form of hate. It is the voice of victory. The previous generation may have done its best to make the land around the house at Longleat into an elegant garden but it had failed and Maria now was planning to erase everything Joan and John had done. Often enough you see in old English houses a new wing added, a garden transformed or an old one demolished; how rarely, though, can you see through a window like this to the vengeance and rage which lay behind the change.

In her anger, and not immediately intelligibly, Maria went on at Joan in language deliberately vile:

now wheras you wryghte yr grownd putt to Bassest vses ys better then manurde then my garden, Surelye yf ytt wer a gandmoother [sic] of my owne Should & equall to my Selfe by bearth, I Should answare that oddious Comparison wth tellinge you I beleeve So Corpulent a La: Cannot butt doo much yr selfe towards the Soyllinge of lande, & I thinke that hath binn, & wyll be all the good you intend to leaue behinde you att Corslye.⁸¹

What does this clotted set of insults actually mean? Joan had clearly said in a letter now lost that she was managing her lands in Shropshire better than Maria was capable of doing at Longleat. Even Joan’s roughest ground was more richly fertilized, she had said, than Maria’s best garden. Maria turned dirty in response: first reminding Joan quite how old she was, ‘a grandmother’, when in fact she was in her mid-forties and only twenty years older than Maria; then emphasizing her own noble and Joan’s mercantile origins (‘equal to myself in birth’); then telling her how fat she was (‘so corpulent a Lady’) and then implying, in a brutal and brilliant image of scatological contempt, that, given her size, Joan would clearly be effective at manuring the land herself (‘cannot but do much towards the soiling of land’).⁸²

The site chosen by Maria for this performance was the beautiful stone manor house at Corsley, three miles from Longleat. It and the lands around it formed the Thynnes’ dower manor, set aside for the use of the widow of the previous head of the family. Maria was imagining a future in which her vulgar, old, fat, widowed mother-in-law was ensconced at Corsley, squatting on the pastures for the good of the ground. It is as cruel an image as anything in these gentry stories, of a broken woman whose life was good for nothing but some droppings on her dead husband’s ancestral lands.

That takes some coming back from, but as time went by, Joan attempted to mend the breach. She arranged for a marriage of one of Thomas’s sisters to a Mr Whitney, who was remotely connected with the Audleys, ‘a gentleman of a very ancient and worshipful house, and an aliesman [a relative, allied by kinship] to your Lady’.⁸³ If the marriage came off, she told Thomas, ‘it might renew a mutual love in every side to the comfort of many and besides his estate so great and his proffers so reasonable and well.’⁸⁴ The old sense of class anxiety is never absent:

I credibly understand that all the lands whereof Mr Whitney is now seised was Whitney’s lands before the conquest of England; and that ever sithence it hath and doth continue in the name and blood of the Whitneys, but although himself be but an esquire, yet there were eighteen knights of his name before the Conquest which were lords and owners of the same lands which are now his.⁸⁵

That can only have been received at Longleat with derision. Quite consistently Thomas Thynne refused to release lands or money for his sisters’ dowries, even though he had previously agreed to give them £1,000 each, engaging in endless correspondence with his mother on the subject and no doubt encouraged in his meanness towards them by his wife. Although Thomas was a Member of Parliament and had been knighted in 1603 in the great rush of honours that accompanied James I’s arrival on the throne, the romantic young man had by now turned into a slightly weak thirty-year-old. Maria’s family had him where they wanted him, telling him how to manage his timber in the park at Longleat⁸⁶ and selling him their neighbouring manor of Warminster for a sum (£3,650) and on terms – the full amount payable within the year – which as Thynne said was ‘so unreasonably high a rate as no man would come near it’.⁸⁷ The Mervyn–Audley gang were cashing in on the trick they had played so many years before at the Bell in Beaconsfield.

Maria’s mother, Lucy Audley, wrote her a letter about the deal in phrases which stink even 400 years later: ‘Well Mall’, she began, using the family nickname for her daughter,

I am exceeding glad that the iron is stricken being hot, for there is a time for all things, and sorry should I have been in both your behalfs, if it had now been omitted; and truth is I know it so great a grace to Longleat as if another had enjoyed it I should have rained tears upon Warminster whenever I had looked upon it. I was more confident that you would have dealt in it, as supposing that you know me a loving mother, and not a cunning shifter, to put a trick upon my son Thynne and yourself for serving any turn, and the truth is enough on that.⁸⁸

The precise meaning of that last sentence may be a little clouded, but the intended import and the subtext are both radiantly clear: Would I ever cheat you, my darling girl, or your lovely husband? I only have your and Longleat’s best interests at heart. And underneath that, the inadvertently conveyed message: I am indeed a cunning shifter, which is why you are where you are, and I am now squeezing money out of you and Thomas in the way that I have always done to others.

And the fate of these families?

The Mervyns soon disappeared from history entirely. It was important to Sir James, the architect of much of the grief in this story, as to many gentry families, that his land and name should remain attached. He had no sons but he got round that by ensuring that his granddaughter Christine, Maria’s younger sister, was married to her cousin Sir Henry Mervyn. Connected to her by both genes and name, Sir James could leave her his beautiful Fonthill estate and other manors elsewhere in Wiltshire. But he was thwarted. As soon as Sir James died, Sir Henry starting selling off the inheritance, a large chunk of it including Fonthill to Christine’s brother Mervyn Touchet, Lord Audley and Earl of Castlehaven. In him the lunacy of the Touchets flowered expansively and he was beheaded in 1631 for sodomizing his servants and participating in the rape by those servants of both his wife and his twelve-year-old stepdaughter.⁸⁹ After this hiccup, things were soon restored to something approaching normality and that family also persisted, if on a declining path, selling off Compton Bassett in the 1660s, until the last and 25th Lord Audley died in 1997. Fonthill ended up in the hands of the Beckfords and became the site of the eighteenth century’s most extravagant folly. In none of the Audleys did any attachment to Wiltshire land remain.

The Thynnes are one of the great success stories of the English gentry. Like the Cavendishes, the Spencers and the Cecils, the family escaped the vulnerabilities of a gentry existence and entered the realms of the higher – and richer – aristocracy. Longleat became the headquarters of an enormous and ever-growing estate, comprising thousands of acres in addition to the Shropshire lands brought to them by Joan Hayward and the Wiltshire manors they had bought from the Audleys. As Barons, Viscounts and finally Marquesses of Bath they persisted across the centuries in a way that few gentry families have ever managed.⁹⁰

One of the ironies of this encounter between Mervyn greed and Thynne gullibility is that the Thynnes were the victors. But that is not the salient point: the key aspect of this story is the way in which its women – Lucy Audley, Joan Thynne and Maria Touchet – are its principal players. The entire dynamic of the three families is inexplicable without their sense of honour, ambition, propriety and threat. They are not merely – as women at this stage are so often portrayed – the default administrators of estates when their men are away. They are the setters, creators and maintainers of the family cultures which governed the internal relationships of the class. They are subtle and powerful, passionate and impassioned. No child could have been uninfluenced by these women, their mothers and their wives, and no history of the gentry can make sense without them.

PART III
The Great Century

1610–1710

The seventeenth century was the heartland of gentry culture. The sense of looming threat from grandees or the crown, or from people not admitted to the gentry’s own charmed circle, was – at least outside the great crisis of the 1640s and ’50s – surprisingly and wonderfully absent from their lives. England was constitutional and their own place in that constitution as Members of Parliament, Justices of the Peace and sheriffs of their counties, upholders of what seemed like an ancient tradition, was deeply self-confirming. Their letters and journals, the houses they built, the landscapes they created and the portraits they had painted all exude an atmosphere of arrival, of this being the great century in which to have been alive.

Many of the gentry were obsessively retrospective and this was one of the glory periods for false genealogies. The Cecils at Hatfield (Welsh sheep men in 1500) had a beautiful, illustrated pedigree drawn up that traced them back to Jesus and from there to Noah and Adam. But the time glittered with the kaleidoscope of modernity, a world we would all begin to recognize: fast food in London streets; shopping centres; newspapers; town squares; terraced houses; suburban villas; experimental science; botany; archaeology; the Stock Exchange; commercially available finance; mortgages; wood screws; microscopes and telescopes; the country house as a centre of culture and art; a professional navy; a private but coherent postal system; most of the hedged landscape; floated meadows; estate maps; landscape paintings; a national market in agricultural products and the end of self-sufficiency; a consciousness of England as the emporium of the world; the pervasive presence, at least in gentry houses, of global commodities, especially sugar; garden exotics (tulips, Persian fritillaries); the empire – Ireland as a trial run, the West Indies, Virginia, the Carolinas; eventually a constitutional monarchy; political parties; and liberty as the essence of Englishness.

‘Felicity’ was the word Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, the great Royalist politician-historian, used to describe this moment, when

this Kingdom, and all his Majesty’s Dominions enjoy’d the greatest Calm, and the fullest measure of Felicity, that any People in any Age, for so long time together, have been bless’d with; to the wonder and envy of all the other parts of Christendom.¹

But this was no effortless glide into a pre-chewed future. It was not as if the usual constraints on existence were somehow suspended: the demands of family life, the inadequacy of pre-modern medicine, the unkindness of others. These, needless to say, impinged on all lives. Added to them was the larger context of ferocious political and religious argument, which coloured the entire century. England underwent two revolutions, two civil wars, and had two kings deposed. Right in the middle of the century it became a republic for the only time in its history, run by a politburo of military-religious men, with an all-pervasive informer network. Individuals lived in fear and private diaries from the time were slashed and razored by their authors to cut out any incriminating passages. That experience explains much of the following century, characterized by a hunger not for the fierce statement of metaphysical truths but for a kind of easy civility in which order and freedom could sit side by side.

The Civil War of the seventeenth century was fought by the gentry against the gentry. On one side were those who felt a conservative if at times reluctant loyalty to the king; on the other those who felt that the autocratic manner of the King’s government and its quasi-Catholic beliefs had betrayed them and the country which they owned and of which they were the bedrock. It was a war between the gentry’s belief in inherited order and its belief in its own significance as a governing class.

That war and its causes have loomed large in all modern discussions of the gentry. The brilliant and vituperative academic debate between a group of largely Oxford historians in the mid-twentieth century left the gentry itself a bruised battlefield, littered with the corpses of competing theories. Every one of those theories was hamstrung by the difficulty of identifying watertight socioeconomic groups which could be seen to be acting in singular and coherent ways. Any examined group tended to fragment into its individuals and to blur all possible definitions. In the aftermath of ‘The Storm over the Gentry’, historians have retreated from large-scale theorizing towards closer descriptions of individual families, the net of allegiances in the gentry world, the county communities, and the non-ideological and self-protective nature of much of gentry life. That is certainly the picture that emerges from the families which carry the seventeenth-century story here: one family, the Oxindens, spread across many social layers; another, the Oglanders, strongly constitutionalist but reluctantly needing to support the King; another, the le Neves, divided between its urban-mercantile connections and its rural-Tory inclinations; some, the Hobarts, Puritan-Parliamentary, in pursuit of power; others, the Gawdys, disengaged from the questions of politics, pursuing bluntly conservative lives.

It is certainly possible to be sidetracked by the glamour and tragedy of that war. Much of gentry life continued past and through it largely as if it had not happened. At the end of it, and at the Restoration of the crown in 1660, the gentry as a group were in pretty much the same economic and political position as they had been before, owning the same proportion of the country and as deeply engaged in parliamentary government as they had been a hundred years earlier. The revolution of 1688, when they expelled the last Stuart, a despised Roman Catholic, and brought in a satisfactorily Protestant Dutchman, William III, seemed like the apogee of their power. Government would be constitutional and the landowning class would control it.

But this triumph contained the seeds of its own decline. The end of the seventeenth century was difficult. The weather, which had also been atrocious in the 1640s, entered a bleak spell in the 1690s with a series of pitiably poor, starvation harvests. Revenues and rents from land began to be depressed. The growth in population slowed. On top of that, the new government that had come in with the Dutch William III was now militarizing fast. Between 1689 and 1714, the Royal Navy became the biggest in Europe. In 1692 a land tax was imposed at four shillings in the pound, a 20 per cent tax on gentry incomes. A government which had looked as if would be the embodiment of landholding England became instead the government of a combination of the Whig aristocrats, the commercial interests of the City of London and its growing Atlantic empire.

In the century to come, which would belong to the merchants and the great Whig oligarchs, the nature of the gentry began to divide into an old Tory world view and a new Whig one. If there is a hinge in gentry history, this is it. The Tory squires of the 1690s belonged to a world that was palpably continuous with the thought patterns of Sir William Plumpton and the old Throckmortons. After them, gentry culture conceived of itself, at least in part, as something that was out of kilter with modernity. That was one of the things the duel between Oliver le Neve and Sir Henry Hobart on Cawston Heath was about.

The squire was starting to become yesterday’s story. His belief in inherited virtue, in the whole idea of transmission from a semi-feudal past, was looking fragile in the face of the new ideas of educated virtue, of virtue to be acquired not by inheritance but by learning and good behaviour. ‘A man of polite imagination’, Joseph Addison wrote in the Spectator, enjoyed ‘a kind of property in everything he sees.’² That is not what the landowners of Norfolk would have thought. They knew all about property but, for these voluble and scarcely polished squires, learning was something of a foreign country. It is true that Oliver le Neve owned a copy of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding, but it was a rare flower amidst a bookshelf filled with Peppa – A Novel, Muse’s Farewell to Popery, Britain’s Glory, Ladies’ Travels into Spain and The New Art of Brewing.

The squire was becoming a slightly laughable figure. The man of honour was slipping into the lovable, old-fashioned, uneducated Tory, who could not quite keep up with the badinage of the coffee house or the London club and who remained happily unaware that everyone around him was laughing at his accent, his clothes, his wig, his ideas, his whole marinaded, antiquated roast-beef self and his obsession with hunting and shooting.

Why so much about hunting? In part, it was inherited behaviour. The hunt was gentry communality, jointness, what they did, who they were, the sort of thing they had always been. As that, it was also an act of dominance, of lordliness, ownership, nostalgia, control and removal from the world of an earned living. It was a form of play-warfare in which the enemy was absent. It was also a stimulus to the blood, a source of adrenaline, the seventeenth-century substitute for a skiing holiday, an escape from the house, from the wifely ‘bridle’ – a term le Neve’s friends use – and the stir-craziness of being too long at home. ‘I am longing much for a little libberty,’ Sir Bassingbourne Gawdy confided to his brother-in-law le Neve in February 1698, when his father had been ill, ‘for I have bin A Prisoner this thre weeks or more.’³

I wonder if there wasn’t something else in play here too. These Tory squires, knowingly or not, were on a downward trend. The focus of value in England was moving away from land and land ownership towards an increasingly dynamic and urban market. The last decade in which any part of England remained self-sufficient and did not grow crops for sale, or derive its food from elsewhere, was the 1680s. The medieval vision of integrated, rural communities, each a ‘little commonwealth’ as the great Jacobean surveyor John Norden had called a manor, was now over.⁴ Throughout the seventeenth century rural rents had been dropping; London property was increasingly valuable.

But the world of hunting was the squire’s province. You could dragoon and whip a pack of beagles in a way that the electors of Norfolk would never allow. You could live a fantasy life when out with your friends all day on horseback in a kind of toy theatre and as a nostalgic dream of significance. When your credit (financial or otherwise) was looking thin or your tenants found it difficult to pay their rents, it may have been the only consolation there was.

1610s–1650s

Steadiness

The Oglanders

Nunwell, Isle of Wight

Sir John Oglander was in love with his own life: with his vision of the past and his long line of ancestors stretching back into it; with his own role as the guardian of his family’s wellbeing in the troubled seventeenth century and on into ‘futor Adges’; and with Nunwell, the Oglander house and lands at the eastern end of the Isle of Wight, the matrix of his being, to whose health and happiness he dedicated year after year.

His deep attachment to Nunwell and the Isle of Wight is intriguing because although he was born here in 1585, the family left in 1588, after his mother had been frightened by the sight of the Spanish Armada sailing up the Channel.¹ They kept the property but went to live on the mainland, settling on land they owned in Sussex. Only in 1609, when his father died and John was twenty-four, did he return to the Isle of Wight. This late return to a place John Oglander thought of as home may be at the root of his passionate attachment to Nunwell.

He is more knowable than anyone in these stories, largely because of his extraordinary notebooks, his ‘Bookes of Accoumpts’, the surviving leather-bound volumes written between 1620 and 1648, which have been treasured by the Oglander family ever since.²

At heart they are no more than a steady calculation, quarter by quarter, of what he spent and what he owed, what he lent and what was owed to him, what income he could expect and what, in total, he was worth. But he was too active and too curious to stick merely to figures and over the years the notebooks gradually filled with all the multifarious contents of his mind. The result was a real-time depiction of a man’s life and priorities, a portrait of a member of the seventeenth-century gentry alive in that moment, jumping from one subject to another, from one pre-occupation to the next, from memories to plans, regrets to delights, enemies to friends, events to principles.

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