The Gentry Read online

  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 murderou
s 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 gentr
y, 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.