The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson

James. All of them died in the course of their desperate rebellions, most of them a violent and humiliating traitor’s death. Five of those descendants were central figures in the Gunpowder Treason of 1605. This inheritance flowed on through the generations at least as much in the female as the male line. Francis Throckmorton was executed for his part in the plot that bore his name in 1583, but it was his aunt Catherine and his cousins Mary, Anne and Muriel who mothered traitor after traitor, martyr after martyr, in the Catholic cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

      1580s–1610s

      Control

      The Thynnes

       Oxford, Beaconsfield, Wiltshire, Shropshire and London

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

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

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

      The hostility between the Thynnes and the Mervyns had first come to a head in the 1570s.⁸ Each family was almost but not quite alike in dignity. Both were new gentry, on the up, emerging in the early sixteenth century from medieval obscurity into the vicious Tudor world of opportunity and riches. But they were far from satisfied and by the 1570s both still wanted more in the way of land, money and power. The Thynnes