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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.