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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.