Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence 9789048552887

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Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England

Gendering the Late Medieval and Early Modern World Series editors: James Daybell (Chair), Victoria E. Burke, Svante Norrhem, and Merry Wiesner-Hanks This series provides a forum for studies that investigate women, gender, and/ or sexuality in the late medieval and early modern world. The editors invite proposals for book-length studies of an interdisciplinary nature, including, but not exclusively, from the fields of history, literature, art and architectural history, and visual and material culture. Consideration will be given to both monographs and collections of essays. Chronologically, we welcome studies that look at the period between 1400 and 1700, with a focus on any part of the world, as well as comparative and global works. We invite proposals including, but not limited to, the following broad themes: methodologies, theories and meanings of gender; gender, power and political culture; monarchs, courts and power; constructions of femininity and masculinity; gift-giving, diplomacy and the politics of exchange; gender and the politics of early modern archives; gender and architectural spaces (courts, salons, household); consumption and material culture; objects and gendered power; women’s writing; gendered patronage and power; gendered activities, behaviours, rituals and fashions.

Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence

Susan M. Cogan

Amsterdam University Press

Cover illustration: The Holy Kinship, Geertgen tot Sint Jans (workshop of), c. 1495. Oil on panel, h 137.2cm × w 105.8cm. Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam Cover design: Coördesign, Leiden Lay-out: Crius Group, Hulshout isbn 978 94 6372 694 8 e-isbn 978 90 4855 288 7 doi 10.5117/9789463726948 nur 685 © S.M. Cogan / Amsterdam University Press B.V., Amsterdam 2021 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort has been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the publisher.

For Katherine and Hannah



Table of Contents

Abbreviations

9

Acknowledgements

11

1. Introduction

15

2. Late Medieval Origins of Early Modern Networks

39

3. Post-Reformation Kinship and Social Networks

69

4. Architecture, Gardens, and Cultural Networks

129

5. Catholics, Political Life, and Citizenship

157

6. Catholic Networks, Patronage, and Clientage

199

7. Conclusion

247

Appendix

253

Bibliography

263

Index

291

Abbreviations APC BL CSPD HEHL HH HMCB

HMCS

HMCV

LPL LLRRO NRO ODNB SBT TNA WRO

Acts of the Privy Council of England: New Series. Edited by John Roche Dascent et al., 46 vols. London: Printed for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office by Eyre and Spottiswode, 1890–1964 British Library, London, UK Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, CA Hatfield House, Hatfield, Hertfordshire, UK Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Buccleuch and Queensbury at Montagu House, 3 vols. (London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationary Office by Mackie & Co., 1899–1926). Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable The Marquess of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, 24 vols. (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1883–1976). Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, Vol. III: The Manuscripts of T.B. ClarkeThornhill, Esq., Sir T. Barrett-Lennard, Bart., Pelham R. Papillon, Esq., and W. Cleverly Alexander, Esq. (London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationary Office by Mackie & Co., 1904) Lambeth Palace Library, London, UK Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland Record Office, Wigston Magna, Leicestershire, UK Northamptonshire Record Office, Northampton, Northamptonshire, UK Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, Stratford-on-Avon, Warwickshire, UK The National Archives, Public Record Office, Kew, London, UK Warwickshire Record Office, Warwick, Warwickshire, UK

Acknowledgements This book is the result of questions I began asking as an undergraduate student of Prof. Stanford Lehmberg at the University of Minnesota: how did Catholics who could not accept the Protestant English church navigate the new world they faced? Who helped them? How did they survive? Over time, those questions grew into a series of complex questions that interrogated the role of the family, Renaissance culture, political culture, and how deep into the medieval past were the origins of the family networks visible in the late-sixteenth and early-seventeenth centuries. The answers, like the people and families who lived them, are complex. It would not have been possible to write this book without the encouragement and insights of people in my own networks and the generous financial and intellectual support of several institutions. To begin with, I had the good fortune to have two excellent mentors in the early stages of this project, Marjorie K. McIntosh and Paul E. J. Hammer. Marjorie instilled in me a sense of rigor and meticulous attention to detail and equipped me with the methodological training and strong paleography skills this project required. When Marjorie retired, Paul stepped in to oversee my writing up and pushed me to sharpen my acumen with political history. I balked at his insistence that I include military work as a category of analysis, but he was right to insist on it. Research for this book was only possible through the generosity of several institutions and foundations. A Monsignor Francis J. Weber Fellowship through the Henry E. Huntington Library underwrote a month of close investigation of the Hastings Papers in the Huntington’s collections. I was fortunate to join two cohorts of the Warwick-Newberry Residential Fellowship, funded by the Mellon Foundation: ‘Culture, Space, and Power: Peopling the Built Environment in Renaissance England, c. 1450-1700,’ directed by Steve Hindle and Beat Kümin and ‘Belief and Unbelief in the Early Modern World,’ directed by Ingrid DeSmet. Both of these workshops provided a collegial atmosphere in which to interrogate specific themes of this project. Participation in a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, ‘Persecution, Toleration, and Coexistence: Religious Pluralism in Early Modern Europe’ in 2013, led by Karin Maag and Amy Nelson Burnett, helped me to understand the larger context of this study and awakened me to scholarly conversations I did not realize I was part of. Karin and Amy were delightful and rigorous seminar directors; I owe

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them both a debt of gratitude for their encouragement and their insights. In the project’s early stages, the University of Colorado at Boulder generously supported research through a number of awards, including the J.D.A. Ogilvy Travel Fellowship through the Center for British and Irish Studies, the Beverly Sears Grant through the Graduate School, and departmental awards including the Thomas G. Corlett Endowed Award for Research, the Joan L. Coffey Memorial Fellowship, the Gloria and Jackson Main Fellowship, the Lefforge Research Fellowship, and the Pile Research Fellowship. At Utah State University, research and travel grants from the College of Humanities and Social Sciences, the Department of History, and the Center for Women and Gender supported the development of this book in its final stages. This project would have been impossible without the knowledge and generosity of archivists at several repositories. I owe a debt of gratitude to archivists at the British Library and the county record offices in Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and Warwickshire, and especially those at the Huntington Library and the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust. Mary Robertson and Vanessa Wilkie at the Huntington Library and Bob Bearman and Mairi Macdonald at the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust were exemplars of generosity and knowledge. I am deeply grateful to Jennifer Duncan, the Department Head of Special Collections and Archives at USU, for facilitating the purchase of several items that were crucial to the revision of this monograph, especially digital reproductions of the Tresham Papers from the British Library. Many friends and colleagues have helped me transform this study into a book. Norm Jones, Rosemary O’Day, Peter Marshall, Danielle Ross, and Deborah Simonton generously read part or all of the text and offered invaluable feedback. Margaret Ball, Lawrence Culver, Janet Dickinson, J. Stephan Edwards, Cathryn Enis, Emily Fisher Grey, Susan Guinn-Chipman, Sabine Hiebsch, Mary Kovel, Ute Lotz-Heumann, Eliza Rosenberg, and Jonathan Willis have been generous with their friendship and in helping me work through ideas. Matthew Milner has been an exemplary sounding board and friend whose feedback and encouragement was crucial during some difficult times. I am so grateful to Susan Amussen, Katherine French, Susan Wabuda, and Merry Wiesner Hanks for their wisdom and guidance as I herded this book toward completion, and to Tammy Proctor for her guidance and mentoring over the past several years. I am also grateful for Marjorie McIntosh’s continued interest in and support of my work. My thanks, too, to fellow Tresham scholars Francis Young and Katie McKeogh; Francis sent an article I needed within minutes of my request via Twitter and Katie caught an error I had overlooked in Chapter Three. Amsterdam University Press

Acknowledgements

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has been fantastic to work with. Erika Gaffney has been an outstanding editor, and Chantal Nicolaes has steered the book through production with admirable finesse. My thanks to the series editors and the two peer reviewers for sharpening my focus and refining my argument. Finally, my thanks to Jamie Whyte for producing beautiful genealogy tables, and to James Daybell for referring me to him. Any errors or omissions that remain are, of course, my own. As it was with many of the people in this book, the core of my network is my family. My brother, Ben, and my parents, especially my dad, have been among my biggest cheerleaders. Dr. John J. Cogan devoted his career to studying citizenship formation in elementary education. It is fitting that when I least expected it, his work showed me how and where citizenship was visible in my work, too. Kyle Bulthuis has listened to ideas, commented on drafts, dried tears, and read proofs with me, all of which I appreciate more than words can express. Our daughters, Katherine and Hannah, have grown up with this book and probably know more about these families than their own. They have been patient while I disappeared into my office to write and cheered me on as the book acquired a press, a cover, and a release date. I could not have done this without them. In gratitude for their support and in hopes that they will find the same kind of joy in their work that I do in mine, I dedicate this to them.

1. Introduction Abstract The Introduction articulates the argument of the book and provides the reader an introduction to the themes, methodology, and structure of the book. Keywords: kinship, gender, networks, patronage, coexistence

During the century following the English Reformation, English church officials, government officers, and laity negotiated new forms of English society and culture that reflected new forms of English identity. Five decades after Pope Leo X granted Henry VIII the title Fidei defensor, ‘Defender of the Faith,’ Pope Pius V excommunicated Henry’s youngest daughter, Elizabeth I, for her adherence to and support of Protestant religion. Officially, after 1559, to be English was to be Protestant. In theory, conformity to the English Church signaled an individual’s or family’s loyalty to the state. In practice, however, conformity and loyalty were complex, and most of the people who continued to practice Catholicism demonstrated loyalty to the monarch and government. Gentry and noble families relied on the crown for patronage that brought employment, favors, prestige, and socio-economic advancement. Many of the late sixteenth century’s powerful families had been in service to the monarch and state since the fifteenth century. Their wealth, power, and prestige grew as successive generations enjoyed the benefits of royal patronage and high state offices. These families knew how destabilizing war, demographic shifts, and religious change could be for their own economic well-being and the state’s, and for general social order. They were intent to maintain their own authority and prestige and claim their right to religious practice in accordance with their conscience, not the monarch’s. To do so, individuals and the families to which they belonged had to display their honor, loyalty to the state, and their legitimacy as members of the gentry and nobility.

Cogan, S.M., Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463726948_ch01

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The European Reformations ushered in a century of religious and social changes that drove conflict within and between communities, regions, and states. In England, religious tumult was not as severe as in many regions of the European continent; indeed, when England erupted into Civil War in 1642, it was not a religious war. This book explains how central families were to encouraging social harmony and to valuing coexistence over persecution. Post-Reformation English Catholics relied on their social worlds to mitigate tensions with Protestant neighbors and the Protestant state. Both as individuals and families, English people who did not follow the Protestant state religion relied on their social networks to provide protection from anti-Catholic legislation and governmental persecution. These networks were important for post-Reformation English Catholics and particularly so for Catholic recusants – people who refused to attend Protestant church services – since they faced the harshest sanctions and the greatest danger to their well-being, economic livelihood, and lives. Through analysis of the different networks Catholics created and inhabited, this study reveals how Catholics built, maintained, and used bonds of patronage and clientage. More importantly the study illuminates larger strategies that encouraged social concord in early modern England, including the strengthening of social and intellectual bonds through culturally valued activities such as gardening and architectural design. Under Elizabeth I and James I, the English government implemented a series of increasingly stringent laws designed to drive Catholics into conformity with the English church and to punish those who refused. Financial penalties for refusal to attend Protestant church services became devastating even for wealthy families. Administration of political oaths did not allow for the separation of religous and political loyalties and led to removal of many Catholic men from administrative offices. Catholics faced restrictions on the education of their children, on their mobility, on their support of missionary priests, and endured confiscation of their weapons and armor. English Catholics lived in an atmosphere of potential persecution throughout the Elizabethan and early Stuart periods. Although the extent of persecution leveled against lay Catholics was not as severe as Jesuit contemporaries or Catholic polemicists suggested, it was nevertheless present, and recusants regularly felt its sting. The Privy Council used recurrent imprisonment and grants of liberty as a tool by which to manage and observe the realm’s most prominent recusants, especially the patriarchs of families who wielded the most influence in their local communities. Although upper-status recusants usually did not have difficulty in obtaining liberty when they or their patron requested it, decades of intermittent imprisonments took

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their toll on health, families, and finances. Recusant Catholics lived with an ever-present threat. They needed patrons to shield them from harassment by local officials or neighbors, to mitigate the punishments they incurred for their recusancy, or who could promote them into local office and support them once they were there. At the same time that religious reforms prompted a reordering of hierarchy based on ideas of religious truth, England was in the midst of deep social change. In urban areas, market towns, and villages throughout the realm, there was a general increase in concern about wrongdoing from the fifteenth through the late sixteenth centuries and a strong societal impulse to maintain concord within communities. The core values of early modern English society were to ‘preserv[e] harmonious and tranquil relationships within a community [and to] enforc[e] good order, control, and discipline.’1 Early modern ideas about honor and virtue meant that individuals were also aware of the social and economic concerns of credit and reputation. People closely monitored the behavior of individuals and groups they believed threatened the well-being of their community. In some communities, this increased vigilance drove a decline in neighborliness.2 That decline, paired with religious and social change, surely seemed to some people permission to persecute neighbors with whom they disagreed or simply disliked. Thus, while polemicists saw society as torn asunder, divided between right and wrong, or truth versus heresy, English communities valued concord and self-determination at the same time they sometimes lapsed into discord. People in the Midlands communities that form the basis of this study were simultaneously concerned about wrongdoing and apprehensive about social and religious changes they faced. They were also committed to resolving disputes and preserving concord as much as was feasible in an era of instability and religious persecution. Catholics, whether they conformed to the state church or recused themselves from it, worried about escalating anti-Catholic laws. Patron-client relationships offered Catholics some protection from those laws and reassured Protestants that their Catholic kin, friends, and neighbors would remain loyal to the state. The strategies that elite families developed to ensure their survival through periods of significant dynastic, social, and religious change were 1 Marjorie K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 209–210. 2 Tim Stretton, ‘Written Obligations, Litigation and Neighbourliness, 1580–1680,’ in Remaking English Society: Social Relations and Social Change in Early Modern England, ed. Steve Hindle, Alexandra Shepard, and John Walter (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, N.Y.: Boydell and Brewer, 2013), 192–193.

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honed over multiple generations that spanned at least two centuries. To understand how kinship networks functioned in the post-Reformation period, we need to understand how they were formed, how long they operated, and how they had functioned during earlier periods. Thus, the book begins with an examination of England’s late medieval kinship and social networks, which became the foundations of later, post-Reformation networks. The heart of the book focuses on the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, c. 1570–1630, roughly the period between Elizabeth I’s excommunication and the onset of the English Civil Wars. The social mechanisms that supported social and religious coexistence in the century following the Reformation were durable structures established over a century earlier. This study articulates a new model for understanding how elite English society worked through the myriad pressures of the post-Reformation period. Through kinship, friendship, and the performance of elite values, multiple generations of upper-status families navigated the social, political, and religious changes that threatened their very existence. English Catholic gentry and nobility negotiated the challenging boundary between political loyalty and religious faith and helped to forge a reality that allowed for both the expression of religious dissidence and its containment. Although many of these people professed strict adherence to Catholic doctrine and worship, they made clear that their elite social status and their relationship to the crown were as important as their religion, and sometimes more so. This book focuses on the upper-status groups of the nobility and gentry. Nobility and gentry were a demographic minority in early modern England, but controlled most of the wealth, land, and people on the land. These groups were divided by hierarchy and for the nobility those distinctions are most apparent through titles. Dukes were at the top of the noble hierarchy, followed by marquesses, earls, viscounts, and barons. Individual circumstances varied widely, however, and during this period, dukedoms were rare, and some viscounts and barons were among the wealthiest and most powerful members of the nobility. Hierarchical distinctions within the gentry were more fluid than the nobility, which contributed to what Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes called ‘a lack of identity between the various ranks of the gentry.’3 At the top of the hierarchy were knights, followed by esquires and gentlemen. Knights and some esquires were members of the upper gentry, while most esquires were considered middling gentry, and gentlemen made up the lesser gentry. Income, landholdings, and political authority 3 Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 15.

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varied widely between the upper and lesser gentry. Altogether, there were only sixty-two nobles in 1560, and the queen’s reticence for elevating many more families to the peerage meant that the number remained fairly stable throughout her reign.4 By contrast, the numbers of gentry rose exponentially during the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; in some counties their numbers quadrupled.5 The rising population of gentry drove social and political tensions as existing families sought to protect their status and new families sought to establish their standing. Inevitably, these tensions both shaped and were shaped by the religious reforms that occurred during this same period. Kinship, gender, and coexistence played a significant role in the process by which elite Catholic families reintegrated themselves into a Protestant state. Kinship and social networks created social groups that valued concord over tumult and thereby encouraged communal harmony during a tumultuous period. Gendered roles also underwent change during this period, and Catholic women and men both shaped and were shaped by those alterations. Women, less engaged in formal service, could continue to practice pre-Reformation forms of sociability and status-building activities. As recusancy and governmental suspicions of Catholics sent gentlemen and noblemen to prison, into exile, or removed them from administrative office, wives, mothers, and sisters sometimes enjoyed new forms of power and responsibility. For men, by contrast, recusancy or affiliation with Catholicism could lead to exclusion from the main activity upon which masculine reputations were constructed: service to patron, county, and crown. This situation created a fundamental crisis of masculinity for upper-status Catholic men and forced them to adapt their strategies for establishing and maintaining their personal and family honor. Such strategies included working through familial and patron–client networks to gain administrative appointments, investing increased time and financial resources in cultural forms of status building, such as gardening and architecture, and, for a few, becoming entangled in plots against the Protestant state. The struggle of elite Catholic men to prove their manhood without sacrificing their families’ honor and social status fueled their transformation from medieval subjects of the English king into citizens of the nascent early modern state. They became architects of a society in which exemplary service counted for more than religious affiliation. 4 Janet Dickinson, ‘Nobility and Gentry,’ in The Elizabethan World, ed. Susan Doran and Norman Jones (Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 285. 5 Heal and Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 11–12.

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Themes of the Book Kinship and Networks Kinship groups and the larger social networks they inhabited were the most significant means by which post-Reformation England encouraged social concord and avoided religious war. Multiple kinship groups, distributed over multiple counties, created networks that supported continued access to patron–client transactions for members of a demographic that could easily have become marginalized. Kinship and family networks formed the foundation of early modern English social networks. Catholics in Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and Warwickshire constructed and inhabited social networks comprised primarily of biological and marital relations. While many scholars have regarded the function of kinship in England as both narrow and shallow, with connections and favor extending to aunts and uncles at the most, this study demonstrates that extensive affective and effective ties existed and were employed to the benef it of kinsmen.6 This pattern displays broad and deep kinship relationships within local and regional communities, in keeping with David Cressy’s observation that kinship had broad biological and geographical reach.7 Such ties kept people bound to one another even during periods when they did not need to utilize those relationships for patronage and helped to revivify the patronage connection at moments when it became necessary. 8 That sense of obligation was a key factor in creating communities of relatively harmonious coexistence in the post-Reformation century. 6 Alan Macfarlane, The Family Life of Ralph Josselin, a Seventeenth-Century Clergyman: An Essay in Historical Anthropology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970); Keith Wrightson and David Levine, Poverty and Piety in an English Village: Terling, 1525–1700 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 85–92; Keith Wrightson, ‘Kinship in an English Village: Terling, Essex, 1550–1700,’ in Land, Kinship and Life-cycle, ed. Richard M. Smith (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984), 318–324; Keith Wrightson, ‘Household and Kinship in Early Modern England,’ History Workshop Journal 12 (1981): 153; Rab Houston and Richard M. Smith, ‘A New Approach to Family History?’ History Workshop Journal 14 (1982): 127. 7 David Cressy, ‘Kinship and Kin Interaction in Early Modern England,’ Past & Present 113 (1986): 46–47. 8 Miranda Chaytor, ‘Household and Kinship: Ryton in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,’ History Workshop Journal 10 (1980): 25–60; Naomi Tadmor, ‘Early Modern English Kinship in the Long Run: Reflections on Continuity and Change,’ Continuity and Change 25, no. 1 (2010): 25; James E. Kelly, ‘Kinship and Religious Politics among Catholic Families in England, 1570–1640,’ History 94, no. 3 (2009): 328–343.

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Kinship connections, social networks, and the performance of elite values ensured that elite families remained integrated in the patron–client exchange regardless of which religion they practiced. Although patronage was almost a birthright for individuals with high rank and status, access to the kinds of relationships that provided patronage required careful maintenance of social credit, displayed through one’s virtue and honor. Patronage fostered ties that resulted in employment, office holding, marriage, wardship, and for many upper-status Catholics, mitigation of the punishments mandated by the anti-recusancy statutes of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Elite social networks originated within the kinship group and expanded to include friends, neighbors, and tenants. In early modern England, ‘friend’ denoted relationships of emotional attachment, trust, and support.9 Friendship was one component of sociability, which was important to maintaining order within both the household and society at large.10 Friendships were a source of mutual support and a significant factor in the accumulation and maintenance of patrons and clients.11 Indeed, friendship and clientage became so intertwined in the early modern period that ‘friend’ was also often used to mean ‘patron’ or ‘client,’ especially in England and France.12 Friendships were typically considered horizontal relationships in contrast to clientage as a vertical arrangement, but relationships were not always so tidily defined. Catholics drew their patrons from their social networks: from a group of people with whom they shared a connection, whether ties of kinship, ties of friendship, or the bonds of one’s neighborhood and county. The term ‘network’ is used throughout this work to signify a social group that included not only a family’s affinity, but also the wider network of which a family or individual was a part. Affinities were defined in the late medieval and early modern period as a group of people with whom one was 9 Lawrence Stone, The Family, Sex and Marriage in England, 1500–1800 (New York: Harper and Row, 1977), 97; Barbara J. Harris, ‘Sisterhood, Friendship and the Power of English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550,’ in Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 21–50. 10 Karl E. Westhauser, ‘Friendship and Family in Early Modern England: The Sociability of Adam Eyre and Samuel Pepys,’ Journal of Social History 27, no. 3 (1994): 518. Westhauser defines sociability as the sum of all interpersonal interactions within the space of a day, of which friendship is one part. See also Susan D. Amussen, An Ordered Society: Gender and Class in Early Modern England (Oxford; New York: Blackwell, 1988). 11 Paul D. McLean, The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (London; Durham: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 12 Sharon Kettering, ‘Friendship and Clientage in Early Modern France,’ French History 6, no. 2 (1992): 141–142.

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connected by blood, marriage, spiritual kinship (godparentage), a sense of mutual dependence, or retinue. The term does not allow for connections beyond the affinity, nor for patronage relationships with social or political superiors. ‘Network’ encompasses a wider group and is used here to indicate specific connections which could be used for ‘preferment, information […] [or] professional advantage.’13 This differs from the ‘entourage’ Michael Questier analyzes in his study of the Browne family. Questier’s entourage was focused on kinship, patronage, and ideological affinity and was more flexible than traditional conceptions of patronage structures, affinities, or John Bossy’s idea of ‘Catholic community’ would allow.14 This definition of networks expands on Questier’s entourage to include overlapping types of social relationships among multiple families, which functioned over multiple counties and through multiple centuries. Networks of affinity and support were central to late medieval and early modern daily life. In the fifteenth century, kinship networks and social networks helped families to rise or sometimes simply to survive during a turbulent period of dynastic war. In the post-Reformation century, such networks could soften the consequences of religious nonconformity and encourage societal unity during a period of tumult. As England navigated religious reforms, episodes of persecution were a reality, but the goal, if not the norm, for many English communities was social harmony, or ‘getting along.’15 This is where social and religious experiences interact: most people valued getting along even when it meant allowing for religious plurality. Persecution destroyed community bonds and generated an atmosphere of intolerance and conflict that many English laypeople sought to avoid.16 As John Coffey and Alexandra Walsham have observed, persecution and

13 ‘network, n. and adj.,’ Oxford English Dictionary Online, accessed 26 December 2018, http:// www.oed.com; ‘Network’ was in use during the sixteenth century, but referred to material objects of manufacture. 14 Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 2–3; Bossy, The English Catholic Community. 15 W.J. Sheils, ‘“Getting On” and “Getting Along” in Parish and Town: Catholics and Their Neighbours in England,’ in Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570–1720, ed. Benjamin Kaplan, Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop, and Judith Pollman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 67–83. 16 Benjamin Kaplan, Divided by Faith: Religious Conflict and the Practice of Toleration in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007); David Nirenberg, Communities of Violence: Persecution of Minorities in the Middle Ages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

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toleration exist in tandem, not independently from one another.17 Persecution–toleration is also incredibly complex, a tangle of political, economic, and social relations ‘tied to competing conceptions of legitimacy and order.’18 Catholics themselves sought accommodation above toleration, although they would have made do with the latter if that was all they could get. But careful and skillful employment of the networks that reflected friendship, kinship, and neighborliness could help to forge social and religious concord and demonstrate one’s gentle and noble virtues. Networks of kin, friends, and other supporters speak to the question of how the various communities of Catholics were made. Rather than one overarching Catholic community, as John Bossy proposed, recent scholarship demonstrates the multiple and overlapping communities of post-Reformation English Catholics. Michael Questier’s account of the Catholic Browne family, the f irst and second Viscounts Montague in Sussex illustrates the enduring influence of the entourage of an aristocratic family and their network of clients.19 James Kelly’s analysis of marriage patterns of the Petre family in southeast England reveals how political considerations shaped marriage arrangements between some Catholic families. The alliances expose how powerful were political loyalties and lay factionalism to Catholic community formation in southeast England.20 Even if all English Catholics adhered to identical post-Tridentine doctrine and practice (which they did not) and were therefore doctrinally or ideologically unified (which they were not), their unequal social, economic, and political status prevents def ining them as a singular community.21 English Catholics held divergent ideas about political matters ranging from the royal succession to alliance with Spain; they disagreed about 17 Alexandra Walsham, Charitable Hatred: Tolerance and Intolerance in England, 1500–1700 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2006); John Coffey, Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England, 1558–1689, Studies in Modern History (Harlow: Longman, 2000). 18 Randolph C. Head, ‘Religious Coexistence and Confessional Conflict in the Vier Dorfer: Practices of Toleration in Eastern Switzerland,’ in Beyond the Persecuting Society: Religious Toleration before the Enlightenment, ed. John Christian Laursen and Cary J. Nederman (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 147. 19 Questier, Catholicism and Community. 20 James E. Kelly, ‘Counties without Borders? Religious Politics, Kinship Networks and the Formation of Catholic Communities,’ Historical Research 91, no. 251 (2018): 35. 21 Although John Bossy referred to post-Reformation English Catholics as a community, Benedict Anderson’s ideas of an ‘imagined community’ are predicated on greater horizontal structure than existed in early modern England. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London; New York: Verso, 1993); Bossy, English Catholic Community.

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militant revolt against the monarch; they were riven from within, the Archpriest Controversy being one example. Inconsistent application of anti-Catholic legislation in different geographic areas further complicates the narrative, as local and county governments carried out enforcement in different ways. Furthermore, English Catholics lacked the geographic boundaries that are central to the idea of a community.22 Rather, Catholics were found throughout the realm and in widely varying environments: urban, rural, open-field (or ‘champion’), and wood-pasture. The breadth of their connections to other Catholics was related to the breadth of their connections generally; the greater an individual’s or family’s status, the more likely they were to have an extensive network that covered a large geographic area and included a wealth of diverse personalities and viewpoints.23 Indeed, rather than a single Catholic community, English Catholics made up a collection of what Michael Braddick calls ‘dissident oppositional expressions of religious motive, linked by a common reliance on Rome.’24 Regardless of which networks or communities English Catholics belonged to, they had to rely on patronage networks for advancement, and for recusants, sometimes for their survival. Patronage was one of the principal social processes of early modern Europe. It helped to articulate social hierarchy, to define a person’s position in that hierarchy, and was a key feature of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English politics and aristocratic culture.25 In the early Tudor period, the monarch used royal and court patronage as a means to motivate the gentry and nobility to devote their loyalty and service to the crown and to integrate local and regional political elites into the state – an especially important consideration during the reigns of the first two Tudor monarchs, who had to remain vigilant not to allow the realm to collapse back into the kind of dynastic wars that 22 Beat Kümin, The Shaping of a Community: The Rise and Reformation of the English Parish, c. 1400–1560, St. Andrew’s Studies in Reformation History (Brookfield, VT: Scolar Press, 1996). 23 For further discussion of why these dynamics make ‘community’ a fraught term, see Christine Carpenter, ‘Gentry and Community in Medieval England,’ Journal of British Studies 33, no. 4 (1994): 340–380. 24 Michael Braddick, State Formation in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1700 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 300–301. 25 Werner Gundersheimer, ‘Patronage in the Renaissance: An Exploratory Approach,’ in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 4; Linda Levy Peck has called patronage the ‘basis of English politics in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.’ Peck, ‘Court Patronage and Government Policy: The Jacobean Dilemma,’ in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 28.

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had plagued the late fifteenth century.26 By the early seventeenth century, however, the structure of patronage was changing. King James employed court patronage not for the assurances of loyalty and service that the Tudors sought, but with the purpose of introducing experts into government as advisors and administrators.27 Under James and even more so under the direction of his favorite, the Duke of Buckingham, court patronage became increasingly corrupt during the f irst three decades of the seventeenth century. Still, James and his advisors continued to rely on patron–client relationships to bind Catholics to the crown and state. Early modern patronage and clientage were built on a system of individual ties and networks that relied on connections of friendship, kinship, and credit. These relationships, which were deliberately constructed and nurtured by both client and patron, yielded favor and advancement to the client and accrued power to the patron; they were ‘an essential part of the functioning social machinery’ and central to the function of government.28 Regardless of the type of patronage a patron dispensed – social, political, cultural or ecclesiastical – patrons assembled a network of clients (or followers), to whom they granted favors and resources in exchange for the client’s loyalty, service, and, perhaps most important, the ‘reinforcement of power and prestige.’29 The instability of the sixteenth and early seventeenth 26 Peck, ‘Court Patronage and Government Policy,’ 31; Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave, 2000), 12. For the role of Henry VII in establishing England’s first court to offer ‘widespread and systematic’ cultural patronage to artists and scholars, on which he consciously ‘emulat[ed] the dukes of Burgundy,’ see Gordon Kipling, ‘The Origins of Tudor Patronage,’ in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 118. Stuart Carroll observed a similar dynamic in late-sixteenth-century France, where the function of the state required ‘judicious distribution of patronage and the manipulation of networks of personal influence.’ Stuart Carroll, Noble Power during the French Wars of Religion: The Guise Affinity and the Catholic Cause in Normandy (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 3. 27 Peck, ‘Court Patronage and Government Policy,’ 28. 28 Wallace MacCaffrey, ‘Patronage and Politics under the Tudors,’ in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 22. See also Wallace MacCaffrey, ‘Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics,’ in Elizabethan Government and Society: Essays Presented to Sir John Neale, ed. S.T. Bindoff, J. Hurstfield, and C.H. Williams (London: University of London, Athlone Press, 1961), 95–126; Sharon Kettering, ‘Patronage in Early Modern France,’ French Historical Studies 17, no. 4 (1992): 839; Kristin Neuschel, Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 1989); Catherine F. Patterson, Urban Patronage in Early Modern England: Corporate Boroughs, the Landed Elite, and the Crown, 1580–1640 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 2. 29 Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 48.

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centuries meant that order and power were constantly being negotiated, and increasingly in ways that granted power to local elites.30 That power included the distribution of patronage and the accumulation of clients for local and regional elites with goods and favor to dispense. Although there were many different kinds of patronage in early modern England, from royal and crown patronage to political, artistic, or ecclesiastical, this book def ines patronage as an action by one person or entity that dispensed favor, reward, employment, or protection to another individual. Brokers, as Sharon Kettering has argued, occupied a middle ground: they transacted patronage for their clients by working with their own patrons, and made themselves more powerful in the process.31 Brokers functioned as a type of patron and are treated as such in this analysis, although their role as a broker is acknowledged. As the evidence will show, friends and relations could be patrons or brokers when they were in the right position to dispense favor, reward, or protection. Gender Gender played a significant role in the networks analyzed here, as it did in recusancy as a whole. Men and women forged their networks differently. Family networks were masculine in orientation, defined by the patrilineal descent of the family, and headed by the paterfamilias of the kinship group. Women created networks that overlapped but did not replicate the family network. Based on necessity those networks could operate independently from or in tandem with the larger family network. Usually, a woman’s networks vertically linked two or three generations (mother, daughter, granddaughter, for example); their principal arrangement was horizontal, with a web of connections concentrated on her friends, siblings, cousins, members of the local or county community, patrons, and clients. When a woman died, her network could be absorbed into the larger kinship network, which helped to fortify that group. In contrast to women’s networks, the focus of family networks was vertical, following the descent of the family from its progenitors and the expansion of the kinship group resulting from 30 Hindle, The State and Social Change, 233. 31 Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 33–36; Malcolm Walsby, The Counts of Laval: Culture, Patronage and Religion in Fifteenth- and Sixteenth-Century France (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007).

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intermarriage with other families. Family networks also displayed horizontal reach through new kinship connections forged through marriages, friendships, and patronage and clientage. Their main function was to support the overall vitality of the kinship group and thereby to secure the successful future of the family.32 Modern scholars have attested that recusancy was particularly attractive to women, but the inverse was also true: recusancy was unattractive to many male heads of household because of the risks to property and position. Alexandra Walsham has argued that Catholic men preferred strategic conformity to recusancy, since the latter imperiled a man’s political authority and his family’s assets. Activist recusant women are easier to spot in the archives than are the majority of Catholic women since they appear most frequently in legal and government records, whether in recusant rolls, interrogatories, and in Jesuit writings, such as the reports English Jesuits sent to their superiors in Rome. Consequently, the source material has emphasized the significance of atypical women.33 Women such as Anne Line, Margaret Clitherow, Jane Wiseman, Eleanor Vaux Brokesby, her sister, Anne Vaux, and Elizabeth Roper Vaux dominate the narrative of the female relationship to Catholicism because of their roles as activists. Most of the recusant women and conformist women are hard to find in extant documentation. Their letters often have not survived and even their obstinate recusancy meant that they infrequently appeared in legal or government records. Nevertheless, it is possible to see into the lives of Catholic and recusant women through family papers, including correspondence, commonplace books, account books, contracts, and wills. Examination of the Throckmorton Papers in the Warwickshire Record Office, for example, made possible Jan Broadway’s reconstruction of a young Catholic widow’s life.34 Family papers contain information about a woman’s role within her family; her efforts to construct and maintain her own network; her practice of piety; and her political 32 John Bossy was among the first to note recusancy’s appeal for women in his The English Catholic Community, 1570–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 157. For strategic conformity, see Alexandra Walsham, Church Papists: Catholicism, Conformity and Confessional Polemic in Early Modern England (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 1993), 80; Andrew Muldoon, ‘Recusants, Church-Papists, and “Comfortable” Missionaries: Assessing the Post-Reformation English Catholic Community,’ The Catholic Historical Review 86, no. 2 (2000): 252. 33 Marie B. Rowlands, ‘Recusant Women, 1560–1640,’ in Women in English Society, 1500–1800, ed. Mary Prior (London: Methuen, 1985), 49. 34 Jan Broadway, ‘Agnes Throckmorton: A Jacobean Recusant Widow,’ in Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation, ed. Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 123–142.

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engagement, mainly in the form of petitions she wrote on behalf of other members of her family or network. This study addresses the gap between patriarchal manhood, or normative manhood, and the ‘competing sources of male identity claimed by early modern men’ by articulating some of the ways in which post-Reformation Catholic and recusant men redefined their own manliness.35 For recusant men, that manliness was found in part through the suffering they experienced at the hands of the state. For example, recusant men responded to imprisonment as a matter of duty connected to their honor, albeit not a duty they appreciated, rather than a source of shame.36 Their imprisonment represented their piety and their political loyalty, especially when they reported to prison as ordered, even securing travel licenses to do so before setting out on their journey. They justified their requests for liberty from imprisonment by invoking economic imperatives tied to the locus of masculine authority, the household and estate. In acknowledgement of these gender imperatives, it was women, not men, who invoked the detriment to the household in the absence of patriarchal care and direction. As James Daybell and Svante Norrhem have argued, the household was ‘the crucible of patriarchy,’ thus the family and kinship group was a theater of gender construction, performance, and negotiation.37 The ‘well-ordered household’ that signified successful patriarchal manhood was orderly, prioritized social harmony, and had ‘families that produced stability through dynastic tenacity, [with] leaders who produced authority through self-control and moderation.’38 It was within the context of these expectations, which saturated every part of early modern society, that recusant men and their families worked to produce social and religious coexistence within their networks and communities. The myriad penalties for recusancy could have eroded manliness because it placed men in situations of greater dependency on other men, sometimes even men who were their social or economic inferiors. But as Alexandra 35 Alexandra Shepard, ‘Manhood, Credit, and Patriarchy in Early Modern England, c. 1580–1640,’ Past & Present 167 (2000): 102. 36 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), esp. chs. 7 and 16; Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999). 37 James Daybell and Svante Norrhem, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Gender and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe,’ in Gender and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800 (London; New York: Routledge, 2016), 9. 38 Cynthia Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 70.

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Shepard has so effectively demonstrated, dependency prompted men to ‘seek alternative forms of manliness’ rather than to cease being men. For recusant men, whose frequent imprisonments required reliance on wives and patronage to gain liberty and be able to perform their duties as patriarchal heads of household, alternate forms of manliness ensured their continued authority within the household and community.39 Since gender was contested and negotiated, Catholics could restyle it to suit their requirements. Recusant men, rather than representing failed patriarchy, demonstrate its flexible and negotiated qualities and the contradictions within it. Just as the state needed gentry and nobility – even Catholic ones – to govern the provinces, so too did husbands need their wives to run their households.40 Recusant and Catholic wives responded to this by redefining femininity, part of which included supporting the patriarchal authority of their husbands. In trying to have their husbands released from prison, recusant wives argued that their households were adrift without the patriarch to guide them. This in turn reinforced patriarchy as a social formation that shaped and was shaped by the other systems with which it interacted. 41 It is important to remember that the period of the greatest tension between Catholics and Protestants was also the period during which political, economic, and social tensions precipitously increased in response to demographic rebound after the Black Death. At the same time, English society exhibited heightened interest in controlling multiple types of misbehavior, especially the infractions that led to breakdowns in social harmony and inversions of order, including inversions of gender roles. 42 Coexistence This monograph moves analysis of the relationship between networks and coexistence to a broader geographic capture than what previous studies have offered. Keith Luria and Mark Greengrass have argued that boundaries between religious and social groups were fluid and contested as people 39 Shepard, ‘Manhood, Credit, and Patriarchy,’ 102; Daybell and Norrhem, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Gender,’ 3. 40 Susan D. Amussen, ‘The Contradictions of Patriarchy in Early Modern England,’ Gender and History 30, no. 2 (2018): 347. 41 Amussen, ‘The Contradictions of Patriarchy in Early Modern England,’ 344. 42 Marjorie K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, David Cressy, ‘Cross-Dressing in the Birth Room: Gender Trouble and Cultural Boundaries,’ in Travesties and Transgressions in Tudor and Stuart England: Tales of Discord and Dissension (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 92–115.

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negotiated the Reformations, literally ‘living religious diversity.’ 43 Coexistence was tension and concord; anxiety and harmony; dislike and friendship; and constantly negotiated. It included instances of ‘charitable hatred,’ often propelled by polemicists and popular fear of divine retribution for superstition and wrong belief.44 Yet in many cases people of differing faiths did not hate each other, and when acrimony erupted it was often for causes distinct from religion: economic factors, social enmity, or political ambition. The terms ‘coexistence’ and ‘concord’ are useful in this study because they reflect the lived experience of the historical actors. English Catholics expressed their desire to live in harmony with their Protestant neighbors. If official toleration was impossible, then they sought at least concord, wherein people of different faiths might live together harmoniously, with honor and social order intact. Coexistence included a range of human interactions, bad and good, or what William Sheils has called ‘getting on’ and ‘getting along.’45 Neighborliness was an important ingredient, since it encouraged harmony and good order; its spiritual and social value was transmitted through the Bible and also via late medieval behavioral codes. Benjamin Kaplan has illustrated the power of neighborliness to shape coexistence within communities, despite concerns about spiritual purity. 46 Granted, some people, especially those on the more radical sides of Catholicism or Protestantism, felt that individuals of other faiths were a threat to entire communities, a contaminant in the midst of a pure society, neighborhood, or household, who required eradication. But within this broader range, harmonious coexistence meant that individuals worked toward concord more often than they did toward intolerance or persecution, especially within settings where they knew one another or when they could agree on common interests. Religious coexistence, like family and social networks, had a durable history in sixteenth-century England. Late medieval reform movements such as Lollardy and localized practices that included both Catholic and pagan customs gave English society experience with religious plurality and with individuals who adhered to prohibited doctrine and practice for over a 43 Keith Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early Modern France (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 147–148. Mark Greengrass, ‘Afterword: Living Religious Diversity,’ in Living with Religious Diversity in Early Modern Europe, ed. C. Scott Dixon, Dagmar Friest, and Mark Greengrass (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 294. 44 Walsham, Charitable Hatred. 45 Sheils, ‘“Getting On” and “Getting Along” in Parish and Town.’ 46 Kaplan, Divided by Faith, 251.

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century prior to the Reformation. Many late medieval gentry families knew reform-minded Lollards, and thus the sixteenth-century reforms did not present an entirely new way of engaging with dissenters in a community or family group. Margaret Aston, Andrew Hope, and Richard Rex are among those who have established that the geographic distribution of Lollardy as a durable reform movement included sections of the east and west Midlands.47 These reformers were a distinct minority, but their family, friends, and neighbors knew who they were and engaged in neighborliness with them. The medieval heritage provided models of coexistence regarding both religious differences and cultural values pertaining to proper behavior for gentry and noble families. Authority as a birthright, reflecting medieval ideas of hierarchy such as the Great Chain of Being and the Body Politic and behavior predicated on chivalry and enhanced by Renaissance-era expectations of restraint are but two examples of this heritage. In the sixteenth century, many elites – especially those of ancient standing in their region – believed gentle and noble status was hereditary, transmitted through bloodlines and evident in individual virtue and behavior: courage and loyalty for men and modesty and obedience for women. 48 Reputations were carefully guarded, and an assault on one family member could endanger the kinship group as a whole. After the Reformation, protecting the interests of the family group meant supporting family members regardless of their religious position, since the esteem of the kinship group was more important than the reputation of any of its individual members. The sixteenth century’s shifting political landscape fostered both acrimonious and harmonious coexistence. The volatility of ‘true’ religion in England’s early Reformation, with the brief reigns of Edward VI and Mary I swinging the pendulum between Reformed Protestantism and Roman Catholicism within the span of a few years, meant that the nature of true religion was elastic and unstable. In some cases the instability propelled anxiety over political status or social standing, which drove episodes of harassment or persecution of minority religions. Yet it also encouraged 47 For Lollards in the Midlands, including Northamptonshire, see Andrew Hope, ‘The Lady and the Bailiff,’ in Lollardy and the Gentry in the Later Middle Ages, ed. Margaret Aston and Colin Richmond (New York: St. Martin’s, 1997), 252–255; Richard Rex, The Lollards, Social History in Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 70–71; R.M. Serjeantson and W. Ryland D. Adkins, eds., The Victoria History of the County of Northampton, Volume Two (London: [Constable], 1906), 28–30. 48 Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 9–10; Richard Cust, ‘Catholicism, Antiquarianism, and Gentry Honour: The Writings of Sir Thomas Shirley,’ Midland History 23 (1998): 54.

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cooperation and concord since people were acutely aware that the wheel of fortune could shift, once again disrupting the current power structure. Previous studies of religious and social coexistence in early modern England have established communities’ preferences for concord over tumult. Muriel McClendon and Joseph Ward have demonstrated how in urban settings people with opposing religious beliefs set aside theological disagreement and prioritized civic or corporate harmony, in part to retain self-governance and to experience as little interference as possible from state authorities. 49 Among northern Catholics, William Sheils argued that communities prized coexistence because it preserved social order.50 Melissa Franklin Harkrider has noted the same dynamic among Lincolnshire elites, as has Michael Questier in his analysis of the Sussex-based entourage of the Browne family and the Viscounts Montague.51 This book extends those local studies to analysis of multiple families and networks, arranged over several counties, to demonstrate how long-standing kinship and social relationships encouraged coexistence against a backdrop of social, economic, demographic, and political change.

Sources This study relies on social, legal, and economic materials to illuminate the processes of religious and social change. Through correspondence, wills, contracts, account books, parish records, and maps, we see a different story emerge than the ones reproduced by reliance on sermons, polemic, or Jesuit accounts of persecution. Correspondence reveals thoughts, emotions, conflict, and harmony. Wills highlight relationships and proximity of those relationships through bequests and the value of those bequests. Sometimes they reveal godparentage, which parish registers do not record, or the existence of a child or sibling that does not appear in other documentation. Contracts and account books are useful because they reveal the parties to different legal and economic relationships and the contours of those 49 Muriel C. McClendon, The Quiet Reformation: Magistrates and the Emergence of Protestantism in Tudor Norwich (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999); Joseph P. Ward, Metropolitan Communities: Trade Guilds, Identity, and Change in Early Modern London (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997). 50 Sheils, ‘“Getting On” and “Getting Along” in Parish and Town.’ 51 Melissa Franklin Harkrider, Women, Reform, and Community: Katherine Willoughby, Duchess of Suffolk, and Lincolnshire’s Godly Aristocracy, 1519–1580 (Woodbridge: Boydell, 2008); Questier, Catholicism and Community.

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agreements, whether for marriage, land, labor, or socializing. Parish records allow us to trace movements between estates and to trace possible godparent relationships through naming patterns. Of course, every source presents unique challenges. For letters, we have to remain alert to the inherent bias of the writer, not only that they often sought to present themselves and their situations in a positive light, but also that at least some of the time they wrote for a wider audience than the addressee. Recusant Catholics, and especially those in prison for religious disobedience, expected their mail to be read by government officials. Occasionally, their letters seem more for the gaoler or government officials than for the declared recipient. Account books are rich economic and social documents but are often difficult to read because of challenging orthography, incredibly detailed recordkeeping, and accounting systems unfamiliar to most modern readers. Wills are challenging because of the multiple factors that shaped them. Testators’ voices could be altered by the clerk writing the document, for example, and while wills signal positive relationships through bequests, absences of those gifts do not necessarily indicate a lack of affection. Contracts and other legal documents suggest affinity through the presence of signatories and witnesses, telling us who was making agreements with whom. But those on their own cannot be taken as evidence of friendship or affinity without support from other documents, unless the same cohort of names appears with such frequency that a pattern can be detected. Parish records, when they survive, are as detailed as the cleric or churchwarden decided to make them. A span of richly detailed entries can be bookended by stark entries that supply only basic information, as was the case with the parish registers at Rushton All Saints in Northamptonshire.

Methodology This book examines the kinship and social networks of multiple families who held lands in Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and Warwickshire between 1400 and 1630. In contrast to most existing studies, which offer either a broad national view or a discrete portrait of one family or county, the book reveals the regional landscape of several kinship networks that operated over multiple counties, how they functioned, and the effect of those networks on post-Reformation English society. They include some of the most notorious recusant families alongside less well known ones, and still other families that were Catholic but not recusant. Nearly all of

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the kinship groups included a blend of Catholic and Protestant religious adherence; a purely Catholic or Protestant kinship group was uncommon during this period. Most of the families included in this study controlled land in multiple counties, as was common in the late medieval period, and that diversified land holding meant wide distribution of the kinship network. Each of the counties examined here possessed the usual county-level and local-level personnel such as justices of the peace, sheriff, muster masters, and borough, corporation, and forest officials. For most of the period between 1585 and 1630 each county also had a crown-appointed lord lieutenant who in turn had several deputies. In all three counties, ecclesiastical boundaries crossed county lines; each county was divided among multiple bishoprics. However, as this book emphasizes, the status of individual noble and gentry families, the relationships between those families, and the ways in which families divided or delegated administrative responsibilities was much more important for making sense of county politics than was the formal administrative structure. In Northamptonshire, with its abundance of ‘new men’ recently risen into the ranks of the nobility and gentry, individuals and families had to be quick and clever enough to stay a step ahead of their rivals, collegial enough to work with other elites, and in possession of a strong network of friends and relations upon whom one could rely for help, favors, or protection. Leicestershire and Warwickshire, by contrast, were each dominated by one noble family, the Hastings earls of Huntingdon and the Dudley earls of Leicester and Warwick, respectively. That noble hegemony meant that in many ways, the counties functioned on late medieval models of the noble affinity and the affinity’s allocation of patronage to ensure its own continued power. The varied social and political structures of these three counties resulted in differences in the attitudes toward and treatment of their Catholic residents and shaped those residents’ patronage needs. This regional, multicounty approach allows for a more detailed examination than is possible in a top-down national study, of the ways in which Catholics operated in their local communities and across multiple counties, in the areas where they wielded social, cultural, and political authority. Periodization Although, as mentioned above, the heart of the book focuses on the years between c. 1570 and 1630, the fifteenth century supplies the foundation of this analysis. Moving beyond conventional date spans illuminates the longevity and significance of kinship and social networks. Rather than bookending the study by dynastic period, such as ‘Tudor–Stuart’ or by traditional date

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spans (for example, 1485–1603), this book takes a different approach. The beginning is determined by the dates of these families’ earliest detectable affiliation with each other. For many of these families that means a starting point in the first half of the fifteenth century. The study terminates c. 1630, before the disruption of the Civil Wars and as many of the children who had grown up in these Catholic and recusant families reached the ends of their lives. Although the book does not engage with the English Civil Wars, it helps to explain why those wars were not religious wars between Catholics and Protestants. Religious Identity and Terminology In an effort to meet the historical actors on their own terms I endeavor whenever possible not to assign people religious labels, since these labels so often tend to encourage artificial categories. That said, sometimes those labels are necessary to avoid confusion. Although there were a variety of reasons for which someone might be recusant, including debt, illness, and apathy, by the 1580s the term ‘recusant’ was usually used to indicate a Catholic who refused to attend parish worship services or to take communion. In this study I use ‘recusant’ to mean Catholic and recusant; I use ‘conformist’ to denote Catholics who outwardly conformed to the English Church. Rather than adhering to one religious position such as ‘conformist’ or nonconformist’, ‘recusant’ or ‘Puritan’, people tended to move along a wide continuum of belief and practice. Religious conformity, regardless of a believer’s doctrinal affiliation, was contested, negotiated, and flexible.52 As recent work on Elizabeth Isham has illustrated, Puritan belief and practice had a wide scope. ‘Puritanism’ did not fit tidily into a confessional box, but was shaped by individual believers.53 The same was true for Catholics. Catholic strategies for adapting to and coping with enforced Protestantism included degrees of conformity that ranged from partial to full (yet

52 Peter Lake, ‘Moving the Goal Posts? Modified Subscription and the Construction of Conformity in the Early Stuart Church,’ in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2000), 179–205; Michael Questier, ‘Conformity, Catholicism and the Law,’ in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2000), 237–261. 53 Isaac Stephens, ‘Confessional Identity in Early Stuart England: The “Prayer Book Puritanism” of Elizabeth Isham,’ Journal of British Studies 50, no. 1 (2011): 24–47.

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qualified) conformity.54 Indeed, a number of Catholic families in the Midlands conformed to the state church – not because of ‘spineless apathy or ethical surrender’ but of positive action that expressed an individual’s moral principles.55 Conformity signaled a desire to remain a full participant in the conflicting fields of one’s personal faith convictions, in one’s loyalty to the monarch and state, and in their local parish community. This book examines conformist Catholics and recusant Catholics: those who conformed, either regularly or occasionally, to the English Church, and those who refused to do so. As the evidence will show, conformist Catholics were themselves sometimes a difficult group to define since the degree of conformity varied by individual and changed across the life span.

Structure This study is organized into six thematic chapters that present the primary network types that defined elite life. This approach allows us to focus on specific types of networks that built on one another over time, moving from kinship and social networks to cultural, political, and finally patronage networks. Chapter Two traces the medieval origins of what would become the post-Reformation networks of the principal Catholic families in the English Midlands and establishes the foundations of network analysis for this study. Chapter Three explains how those networks developed over the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and distinguishes between the different types of family networks: masculine-oriented kinship networks and women’s networks, which operated separately from but overlapped the larger family network. Keeping track of so many families over a long period of time is challenging, especially when names repeat across kinship groups in successive generations. Thus, to supplement these chapters, kinship tables of the main families in this study are offered as an Appendix. These tables are constructed from primary sources (e.g. wills, parish registers, marriage contracts, and state papers) to ensure accuracy. Chapter Four introduces Renaissance forms of architecture and gardening, two of many cultural activities that gentry and nobility engaged in as part of the display and 54 Alexandra Walsham, ‘Yielding to the Extremity of the Time: Conformity, Orthodoxy and the Post-Reformation Catholic Community,’ in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2000), 212. See also Walsham, Church Papists. 55 Walsham, ‘Yielding to the Extremity of the Time,’ 213.

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assertion of their elite status. For Catholics, this cultural practice had the added benefit of forging new relationships and maintaining established ones, both of which led to the creation of a distinct cultural network and encouraged coexistence based on common interests. Chapter Five examines Catholic political engagement and identities. Catholics, and especially recusants, created alternative means of political engagement in response to their progressive exclusion from positions of traditional political authority. Some Catholics remained in local, county, and state administrative roles, and more of them moved back into those roles under the early Stuarts. Others used military work and petitioning to articulate their membership in the polity and to make claims on citizenship in the emerging early modern nation-state. Chapter Six draws on the networks discussed in the previous chapters to explain how those networks contributed to discrete patronage networks. Gender is centered within each chapter, as all of these networks were predicated on the normative gender roles of the period under consideration. As a whole, the book demonstrates how various networks created relationships based on social harmony and religious coexistence and ensured that Catholic gentry and nobility would continue to participate in elite patronage and clientage, access to which was not assured, but contingent and negotiated for all elites.

Conclusion Patronage and clientage advanced the difficult process of establishing religious coexistence and social concord during a period of governmentmandated worship practices. Deep social relationships, particularly networks of kinship and patronage and patterns of everyday life, were ways in which individuals and families found paths toward greater stability. These connections predated the Reformation but also extended through it, illustrating that despite religious controversy, neighbors and kin and the social groups, or networks, of which they were part, strove for concord. These strategies resulted in some unexpected outcomes, chief among them the significant role Catholics played in shaping early forms of English citizenship. Despite the state’s efforts to marginalize most Catholics from positions of political influence, that marginalization drove Catholic women and men to expand their political worlds and to form their identity as citizens in the emerging nation-state. The ways in which early modern English people of all faiths worked out how to get along despite deep differences of conviction regarding salvation

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and truth emphasizes the power of the family, household, and community to heal societal rifts. Religious polemicists and some government officers, in theological and polemical works, emphasized religious difference and advocated persecution of religious nonconformists. In contrast to such literature, family papers reveal that the lived experience of most Catholic and Protestant individuals and their family, friends, and neighbors, indicate a different reality. This book argues that Catholic elites nurtured and successfully employed social relationships at their disposal to receive and dispense patronage, to remain connected to the state, and relevant across a number of different fields: socially, culturally, politically, and economically.

2.

Late Medieval Origins of Early Modern Networks Abstract This chapter establishes the medieval origins of the post-Reformation kinship networks that are the focus of the book. It establishes the long-term qualities of networks, the strategies families used to build and maintain networks of support, and the role of gender in medieval network formation. Through crown and government service, and through sociability within local and county communities, social bonds developed that resulted in intermarriage between families. Aff inity groups grew over time into large multidimensional networks with varying levels of connection. Late medieval networks helped gentry families to navigate fifteenth-century political upheaval and established the foundations that fostered postReformation kinship and social networks. Keywords: medieval, family, networks, war, affinity

In 1471, Sir William Vaux and Sir Thomas Tresham, courtiers to Queen Margaret of Anjou, were killed within days of one another. Vaux was killed in the Battle of Tewkesbury; shortly thereafter, Yorkist forces executed Tresham along with several other men. The two gentlemen, cousins through their mothers, were buried in the Tewkesbury Abbey church in Gloucestershire.1 Their sons, Sir Nicholas and Sir John, worked together in Northamptonshire government in the first two decades of the sixteenth century. The men were bound by ties of kinship and friendship; in 1520, Sir John named Sir Nicholas as supervisor of his will, a role assigned to someone deeply trusted by a testator. As decades passed, the two families and their cousins, the 1 Lucy Toulmin Smith, ed., The Itinerary of John Leland in or about the Years 1535–1543, Parts 7 and 8, with Appendices Including Extracts from Leland’s Collectanea (London: George Bell and Sons, 1909), 162; also cited in Godfrey Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden: A Recusant Family (Newport, Monmouthshire: R.H. Johns, 1953), 6–7.

Cogan, S.M., Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463726948_ch02

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Catesbys and Throckmortons, strengthened earlier connections through additional marriages, godparentage, and friendship. In the late sixteenth century, William, third Baron Vaux, and Sir Thomas Tresham were close friends and brothers-in-law. Tresham’s sister Mary was Vaux’s wife, and his favorite niece, Muriel Vaux, was named for Tresham’s wife. These families inhabited a network built upon ancient family connections, made up of the descendants of some of the most esteemed families in fifteenth-century England. As Catholics in Protestant England, Lord William and Sir Thomas relied on their kinship connections and the wider social networks to which they belonged for protection, promotion, and moral support. The Vaux–Tresham example highlights patterns of continuity and change in kinship and social networks between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. Families of upper status understood what kinship meant and how best to use it. These families knew that ‘relatedness entailed important expectations of consideration, duty, and reciprocity among kin.’2 As a result, families possessed detailed knowledge of relatedness across generations and worked hard to maintain those relationships over time. Durable kinship and social connections that originated in the fifteenth century provided strong ties of relatedness and affinity in the two centuries that followed, the result of deliberate effort between the parties to nurture mutually beneficial ties. A family’s web of connections changed over time, too, as new relationships were formed and others failed. In successive generations, new friendships and marriages introduced additional individuals and families into a kinship group. Also in successive generations, some ties weakened or severed, whether through personal dislike, distance, or death. As gentry and nobles, the families in this study possessed wealth, authority, and honor that positioned them as economic, political, and social powers in their home counties and in the region of the Midlands. By the first half of the sixteenth century, most of these families could claim ancient status as landowners and power brokers in the region, a claim they used to highlight their honor, reputation, and, for men, their right to govern through various offices. During the long period of the Reformation, state prosecutions of religious nonconformity threatened familial honor and threw into question a subject’s (or family’s) loyalty and trustworthiness. The Reformation thus endangered Catholic families’ social and economic standing and their political authority, which if allowed to proceed unchecked undermined their very existence. Recusants faced an especially serious risk. Many recusant 2 Naomi Tadmor, ‘Early Modern English Kinship in the Long Run: Reflections on Continuity and Change,’ Continuity and Change 25, no. 1 (2010): 25.

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men were excluded from the political roles that were their birthright as members of the upper gentry, which threatened their social status and that of their families. Kinship networks and larger social networks of friendship, acquaintance, and neighborhood were the foundations of early modern patronage and clientage. Social relationships propelled acceptance into cultural and political circles wherein new connections were formed and existing ones were maintained. Those relationships led to the patrons, brokers, and clients that connected people to channels of power and helped to shield Catholics and recusants from the full brunt of the English government’s anti-Catholic laws. Many of the relationships that formed during the f ifteenth century established the foundations of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century kinship and social networks. Before and after the Reformation, individuals and families created networks through kinship, friendship, careers, and marriage. Relationships formed while in service to the crown or, for men, in military work, resulted in friendships between adults and, sometimes, marriages between their children. Those marriages brought their families into a kinship relationship with one another, which in theory enhanced their sense of reciprocal duty to each other. Throughout the period examined here, individuals and families exchanged patronage and clientage and became enmeshed in one another’s affinities and wider networks. Gender dynamics and gender roles shaped network formation. In their careers and in the formation of good reputation and honor, men required constant displays of manhood if they were to build and maintain strong kinship and social networks. For fifteenth-century gentry and noblemen, service to the monarch or in an affinity, offering one’s body and resources for war, and governing the countryside were key aspects of normative manhood. Men also demonstrated their manliness through loyalty to the monarch, state, and patrons, and through trustworthiness with other men. Similarly, women required displays of appropriate womanhood to construct and maintain their networks. Women’s careers, their piety, and their sexual honor influenced their reputations and their ability to assemble a network beneficial to a woman and her family. Barbara Harris has found that in the fifteenth century, a woman’s ‘natal kin were the most important members of their extended networks.’3 In the late medieval period, men’s networks included family members but were constructed through connections outside of the household, through relationships in service, battle, governance, or 3 Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (London: Oxford University Press, 2002), 175.

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neighborhood. Reflecting their roles within the domestic sphere, women’s networks were formed primarily within the family and focused within the household. 4

Midlands Families in the Fifteenth Century Late medieval kinship networks are fundamental to understanding the formation, maintenance, and function of post-Reformation family networks, and especially how those networks could be used to discourage persecution, enhance the likelihood of concord, and to allow for the reintegration of Catholics into social and political life. Social bonds were formed in three distinct ways: through political careers including service as a soldier or courtier and office holding; through the exchange of sociability in the counties; and through marriage between families or kinship groups. The networks that resulted from these social bonds were dynamic organisms that changed as individuals died, lost power, adjusted clientage priorities, or squandered their credit. Consequently, family groups reconstructed their networks throughout the centuries examined in this study, but even reconstructed networks reveal the powerful influence of medieval affinities on early modern networks. Network construction was a long-term process that required patience and strategy by the paterfamilias and the wider family group. The Beaumonts, Brokesbys, Shirleys, and Hastingses, for example, began to bond with one another in the fifteenth century through county and state-level political appointments, royal service, military service, and marriage. By the middle of the century, the Beaumonts, Brokesbys, and Hastingses were part of the same larger kinship network, although the Beaumonts did not join the Hastings clientage until the late fifteenth century.5 The branch of the Beaumonts seated at Grace Dieu remained part of the Hastings clientage through the mid-sixteenth century, due to the marriage in 1539 of Elizabeth Hastings to Sir John Beaumont.6 The Brokesbys of Shoby married into the Hastings family in 1453 and were in service by 1513, if not earlier. Similarly, 4 For discussion of gender-influenced networks within the Lollard community, see Shannon McSheffrey, Gender and Heresy: Women and Men in Lollard Communities, 1420–1530 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1995), 48. 5 Eric Acheson, A Gentry Community: Leicestershire in the Fifteenth Century, c. 1422–c. 1485 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 234–235. 6 For the marriage date, see Stanley T. Bindoff, ed., The House of Commons, 1509–1558, vol. 1. (London: Published for the History of Parliament Trust by Secker & Warburg, 1982), 405–406.

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the Vaux and Tresham families were connected through relationships of service, friendship, and marriage beginning in the early fifteenth century. Fifteenth-century dynastic conflict, popularly known as the Wars of the Roses, fueled both upheaval and alliances. Families were central to the conflict at the highest levels of power and within the social hierarchy that made up Lancastrian and Yorkist supporters. With political power and the long-term fate of either dynasty uncertain, noble and gentry families attached themselves to one another in relationships of reciprocity and duty. Affinities – groups that shared biological, marital, or spiritual kinship – were bound by duty and honor in relationships of mutual support. They depended on each other for advancement, protection, and survival, and given the swift shifts in power that occurred at certain points during the fifteenth century, that mutual dependence was significant in creating tight bonds within and between certain families.

Leicestershire In Leicestershire, the Hastings family’s service and clientage to the Yorkist side in the Wars of the Roses resulted in increased wealth and status for the family following the Yorkist victories in the 1460s and 1470s. William, first Baron Hastings, was in Edward IV’s inner circle and accompanied the king into exile in 1470. Following the king’s death in 1483, Hastings’s actions to block the influence of the queen’s Woodville kinship group and his allegiance to Richard, Duke of Gloucester, initially ensured Hastings’s political survival. Within months, however, the new king had Hastings executed on charges of treason. The family rebounded from what could have been the start of a devastating diminution of their status through demonstrations of loyalty to Henry VII two years later and through service at the county level. Under Henry VIII the family was once again in the inner circle of royal favor. Despite political upheaval in the late fifteenth century, the Hastingses and their clients, the Shirleys, were the two wealthiest gentry families in early-sixteenth century-Leicestershire.7 By the end of the fifteenth century, the Hastings affinity included several of the most powerful gentry families in their county and the wider region. 7 Acheson, A Gentry Community, 40–41, 249. Acheson’s calculations include the Erdyngtons as a third family at the pinnacle of the county economic hierarchy. Bartholomew Brokesby’s wealth was derived from positions, not land, so it did not situate him or his heirs in this elite economic group.

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Whether through desire or necessity, gentry families seated in Leicestershire, like the Beaumonts of Grace Dieu and Cole Orton, the Brokesbys of Shoby, the Shirleys of Staunton Harold, and the Ferrerses of Tamworth on the border of Staffordshire and Warwickshire, sought protection, favor, and advancement as Hastings clients. Those relationships provided gentry families with access to county political appointments, advantageous marriages, and connections to a wider network of powerful Midlands noble families in the Hastings kinship group: the barons Berkeley, the barons Hungerford, the Stanley earls of Derby, the Talbot earls of Shrewsbury, and the Stafford dukes of Buckingham. Hastings clients were dispersed throughout the hundreds of fifteenthcentury Leicestershire, which enhanced Hastings authority throughout the county. Beaumont estates were spread across the north and west sides of the county, in Framland, East and West Goscote, and Sparkenhoe hundreds. The Brokesbys, an esquire family, held the manors of Frisby, Dalby Parva, and Shoby in the hundreds of East Goscote and Framland, in the northeast quadrant of the county.8 The Shirleys controlled lands on the northwestern half of the county, in the hundreds of East Goscote, West Goscote, and Guthlaxton. On the marriage of Sir Ralph Shirley and Margaret Staunton in 1423 the Shirleys established their seat at Staunton Harold, in West Goscote hundred, which made the family neighbors with the Hastingses at Ashbyde-la-Zouche.9 Land revenues provided the wealth that conveyed status and power to these families; service and clientage to the Hastingses further amplified that standing. These families, and chiefly the male heads of household, formed their networks through relationships and activities throughout the life-cycle. As the ward of the Lancastrian King Henry V, John, Viscount Beaumont (c. 1409–1460), grew up in the royal household and benefited from connections to leading men at court, including the king’s officers in the Duchy of Lancaster and the prince who would become Henry VI. In adulthood he remained part of the royal household and clientage and he served the realm in various high-ranking offices, including stewardship of Duchy of Lancaster holdings in Leicestershire in 1437, Lord Great Chamberlain three years later, and constable of England in 1445.10 Given the family’s Lancastrian ancestry and John’s upbringing in the royal household, it is 8 Shoby was part of Launde Abbey. Acheson, A Gentry Community, 17, 47. 9 Staunton Harold was fewer than four miles from the Hastings seat at Ashby-de-la-Zouche. 10 John Watts, ‘Beaumont, John, First Viscount Beaumont (1409?–1460),’ ODNB, accessed 9 March 2021, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/50239.

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unsurprising that he and his younger brother, Henry, had strong ties to service and perhaps also friendship with Henry VI.11 Sir John’s position allowed him to dominate the East Midlands as one of the most significant landowners, especially after he was made a viscount in 1440. He constructed his networks through relationships with family and other members of the Beaumont clientage, with other men he served with in office and military, and through marriage.12 The Beaumont’s close relationship with the Lancastrian royal house resulted in their fall from power under the Yorkist kings, their subsequent clientage to the Hastingses, and their membership in the wider Hastings network. After Beaumont was killed in battle in 1460 Sir Richard Hastings used the power of his Yorkist connections to take possession of the Beaumont estates and absorbed the family into the Hastings affinity. The ability for the Hastingses, who were still gentry, to subsume one of the region’s most powerful noble families into their clientage was a clear indication of the ascendant power of the family and also reflected obligations of kinship. The families had been connected by marriage since the union of Sir Richard Hastings with Elizabeth Beaumont, daughter of Henry, Lord Beaumont, in 1427.13 That same year, Sir Richard Hastings and Bartholomew Brokesby held lands in trust for Lord Beaumont’s minor heir, Sir John.14 Twenty years later, John Beaumont’s nephew, Thomas, became a Hastings retainer; Thomas’s son later refortified his family’s bond with the Hastingses by marrying Elizabeth Hastings. John spent his career in service to the Hastings family, as a lawyer and retainer of the first Earl of Huntingdon.15 Although there were severe breaches between the Beaumonts and Hastingses in the early 11 Watts, ‘Beaumont, John, First Viscount Beaumont (1409?–1460),’ ODNB. 12 His prestige and networks were extended by marriage into two of the top courtier families, the Phelips and Nevilles. Acheson, A Gentry Community, 18–21, 217. 13 Acheson, A Gentry Community, 234. 14 J.S. Roskell and L.S. Woodger, ‘Brokesby, Bartholomew (d. 1448) of Frisby-on-the-Wreake, Leics.,’ in The History of Parliament: The House of Commons 1386–1421, ed. J.S. Roskell, L. Clark, and C. Rawcliffe, vol. 1 (London: Boydell & Brewer, 1993), 470–471; Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland Record Office (hereafter LLRRO) 10D34/892. 15 The Beaumonts’ cousins, the Beaumonts of Cole Orton, Leics., were Puritans; they, too, were related to the Hastingses. Hasler positions them in the Hastings network, and they might have been in the late sixteenth century. P.W. Hasler, ed., The House of Commons, 1558–1603, vol. 1 (London: History of Parliament Trust, 1981), 416. By 1611, however, Thomas Beaumont of Stoughton, Leics., a younger son of Nicholas of Cole Orton, was a follower of Henry Grey, Baron Grey of Groby, as were by this time Brian, William, and Alexander Cave (Henry E. Huntington Library [hereafter HEHL] HA 4331; HEHL HA 4328). N.G. Jones, ‘Beaumont, John (d. in or after 1556),’ ODNB, accessed 30 December 2018, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1873.

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seventeenth century, part of the Beaumont kinship group remained members of the Hastings clientage.16 Like the Hastingses and Beaumonts, the Brokesby family built their networks through service, sociability, and intermarriage with other prominent families. Landed wealth and service to the crown ensured the Brokesby family’s prominence in late medieval Leicestershire. Brokesby men made their careers through military service, county offices such as the commission of the peace, and major offices such as Members of Parliament. Brokesby men served as feoffees, or trustees, to members of the Hastings family from 1427, nearly three decades prior to the first marriage between the families in 1453.17 Service and clientage to the Hastingses continued into the sixteenth century: Thomas Brokesby (1483–c. 1544) was deputy steward for the family from 1508 to 1544 and Robert Brokesby was a legal vouchee for Sir George Hastings in 1513.18 That reciprocal relationship, with multiple strands of connection – kinship, service, patronage, and clientage – tethered the families more than any one strand would have accomplished. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Brokesbys, like their Hastings patrons and other prominent Midlands families, were courtiers to the new Tudor regime.19 In the fifteenth century, the Brokesbys used marriage to create kinship ties with the Shirleys of Staunton Harold and the Hastingses of Ashbyde-la-Zouche.20 These alliances were instrumental to both the short- and long-term health of the Brokesby kinship group. The immediate benefit was the family’s connection to the highest levels of power in their region, which in turn strengthened their status and their economic well-being. In the long term, durable kinship connections into the sixteenth century resulted in political patronage, continued service and employment with the Hastings family, and a kinship tie to Sir Christopher Hatton, whose position as a top Elizabethan courtier made him an influential family patron.21 The Brokesbys’ kin, the Shirleys of Staunton Harold, were the secondwealthiest family in Leicestershire in the fifteenth century, despite their position as esquire members of the gentry. The family’s prominence in the 16 Richard Cust, ‘Honour and Politics in Early Stuart England: The Case of Beaumont v. Hastings,’ Past & Present 149 (1995): 57–94. 17 Acheson, A Gentry Community, 162, 222. 18 London Metropolitan Archives ACC/0351/139; Bindoff, The House of Commons, vol. 1, 507. 19 Bartholomew Brokesby, for instance, was Knight of the Body (a personal servant) to Henry VIII in the early sixteenth century. 20 Acheson, A Gentry Community, 234. 21 Robert Brokesby’s (d. 1615) first cousin was Alice Brokesby Saunders, Sir Christopher Hatton’s mother.

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late medieval Midlands derived from long-term service to the Lancastrian monarchs. This included masculine roles such as war, possession of local offices in counties throughout the Midlands, and participation in noble affinities. Sir Hugh, for instance, fought for Henry IV in the Battle of Shrewsbury; his son, Sir Ralph (d. 1443) fought with Henry V at Agincourt and held county offices such as sheriff and keeper of royal parks in the first half of the fifteenth century.22 Sir Ralph’s grandson, John, belonged to the Hastings affinity and, according to Dugdale, also the powerful noble affinity of the Beauchamp earls of Warwick. Shirley men and women also had careers in the Lancastrian royal household. Roles as courtiers were not gendered in the same way military service or office holding was and could offer both women and men prized access to the interior of the royal court. Through service at court, women built their own networks, augmented the family’s network, and established their own authority through gifts and patronage. The Shirleys drew on their connections at court and within the powerful Beauchamp affinity to contract marriages that built and fortified their networks. In the f ifteenth century, Shirley marriages remained in the middle-gentry rank, usually to the children of esquires, many of whom were among the prominent gentry of their region. In the first half of the century, Sir Ralph married his daughter Beatrice to the Bromes of Baddesley Clinton in Warwickshire. That connection linked the Shirleys with that county’s leading families, all members of the Beauchamp aff inity: the Bromes, Ferrerses, Middlemores, and Throckmortons.23 The marriage in 1423 of Sir Ralph’s heir and namesake to Margaret Staunton brought to the family extensive lands in the Midlands, including the new family seat at Staunton Harold, Leicestershire.24 By 1486, the marriage between Sir Ralph and Margaret’s granddaughter, Alice, to Robert Brokesby linked the family with the Brokesbys and Hastingses.25 When it came time for Robert and Alice Brokesby to contract marriages for their children, Robert arranged a match with his fellow justice of the peace, Edward Saunders: Brokesby’s daughter, Alice, wed Saunders’s son, Laurence. This connection, made through the familiarity and perhaps also friendship between the two county officers, 22 Evelyn Philip Shirley, Stemmata Shirleiana; or the Annals of the Shirley Family, Lords of Nether Etindon in the County of Warwick and of Shirley in the County of Derby (Westminster: Nichols and Sons, 1873), 40–43. 23 Christine Carpenter, Locality and Polity: A Study of Warwickshire Landed Society, 1401–1499 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 684–690. 24 Shirley, Stemmata Shirleiana, 46–47, citing British Library (hereafter BL) Harleian MS 4028, ff. 105, 255. 25 Shirley, Stemmata Shirleiana, 55.

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linked the Shirleys to the Saunderses, the maternal family of Sir Christopher Hatton. Thus, the Shirleys, Brokesbys, Hastingses, and Saunderses were part of the same wider kinship group, connections which they solidified through sociability, patronage, and clientage, and which lasted until at least the mid-seventeenth century. As the next chapter will show, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century unions with noble families like the Berkeleys and Devereaux confirmed the Shirleys’ durable and increasing status despite the family’s Catholic connections and recusancy.26 The Hastings family dominated Leicestershire from the late f ifteenth through the early seventeenth centuries. As the county’s wealthiest family, the Hastingses were also among the county’s most politically powerful, aided through extensive and ecumenical kinship and social networks to other powerful families such as the Nevilles. The leading families of the county noted above were all members of the Hastings clientele, as were other families both inside and outside of the county. A series of land exchanges in the f ifteenth century aggregated the majority of Hastings land to Leicestershire and relocated the seats of other prominent families out of the county. These exchanges had the twin benef its of consolidating Hastings authority in the East Midlands while simultaneously removing their chief rivals in the county power structure. 27 In addition, the family’s position as off icers of the Duchy of Lancaster meant that royal power flowed to the family through duchy lands in Leicestershire. The Hastings aff inity grew into a vast web of networks by the mid-sixteenth century, yet some families remained at or near the core of those networks for more than two centuries. That proximity provided employment, patronage, and protection in the postReformation century. The most notable Catholic families in Leicestershire were connected to and benef ited from the patronage of the Hastingses from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries, chief among them the Brokesbys, Beaumonts, and Shirleys. 26 Sir George wed Frances Berkeley, daughter of Henry, Baron Berkeley and his wife, Catherine Howard Berkeley, in 1583. In 1615 their son Henry married Lady Dorothy Devereux, a daughter of the second Earl of Essex. Marquis of Ruvigny and Raineval, The Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal: Mortimer–Percy Volume (1911; rep. Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 2001), 434. After Frances’s death in 1595, Sir George married Dorothy Wroughton. See John Gough Nichols, The Unton Inventories: Relating to Wadley and Faringdon, Co. Berks, in the Years 1596 and 1620, from the Originals in the Possession of Earl Ferrers (Reading: Berkshire Ashmolean Society, 1841), 31–36. 27 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Late Reginald Rowdon Hastings of the Manor House, Ashby de la Zouche, ed. Francis Bickley, vol. 1 (London: His Majesty’s Stationary Office by the Royal Historical Manuscripts Commission, 1928–1947), 296; Acheson, A Gentry Community, 22–25.

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Northamptonshire Northamptonshire’s leading families were connected through relationships of service, friendship, and marriage from the early to mid-fifteenth century through the mid-seventeenth century. Despite an abundance of prominent families in late medieval Northamptonshire, no chief magnate family grew to dominate the county as the Hastingses did in Leicestershire. The Treshams and Vauxes were among the most prominent gentry families in late medieval Northamptonshire, along with the Catesbys, Greens, and Parrs. The Treshams and Vauxes were active in each other’s affinities and wider networks from at least the early fifteenth century. By the early sixteenth century, the affinity included the Catesbys, Greens, Throckmortons, and the Parrs of Horton and Kendal, the latter of which ensured continued royal favor and county status through the mid-sixteenth century, with the marriage of Catherine Parr to Henry VIII. Other families, like the Brudenells, entered the network in the last quarter of the sixteenth century, through the spiritual kinship that accompanied the shared reality of living on the knife-edge of religious persecution. The families who made up the primary post-Reformation Catholic network in this county were drawn mainly from the hundreds in the northern division of the county: Corby and Rothwell in the Rockingham Forest, Huxloe and Orlingbury south and east of the forest boundary, and Fawsley along the Warwickshire border. The Vauxes of Harrowden was one of the most notable county families in fifteenth-century Northamptonshire, due to the family’s history of royal service and their smooth transition into service with the early Tudors after decades spent in support of the Lancastrians in the Wars of the Roses. Vaux political and military support of the royal house and Catherine Peniston Vaux’s position in the household of the last Lancastrian queen, Margaret of Anjou, led to careers at court and county prominence for Catherine and William Vaux’s children. Their daughter, Jane, was a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon.28 Their eldest son, Nicholas, was raised in the household of Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond, the mother of Henry VII and grandmother of Henry VIII; Nicholas remained her client until her death in 1509. Nicholas’s status as Lady Beaufort’s protégé and client made him one of the top early Tudor courtiers, a position he used to demonstrate his elite manhood through advancement of his family, promotion of the careers of his children and his stepson, Sir William Parr, and to leverage his authority in his home county of Northamptonshire. 28 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 40.

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Service and marriage ensured that the Vauxes moved in royal circles and that their networks included the leading families of the Midlands. William Vaux’s daughter Jane (Joan) wed Sir Richard Guildford, a Lancastrian courtier; she and her husband had careers at court. Jane’s position as a ladyin-waiting to Lady Margaret Beaufort and, later, as governess to Henry VII’s daughters, Margaret and Mary, placed her in the inner circles of Beaufort and the princesses.29 Jane’s brother, Sir Nicholas, was elevated to a barony in 1523.30 Within a few years his heir, Thomas, second Baron Vaux, was a courtier in the retinue of Cardinal Wolsey.31 Sir Nicholas married into the Fitzhugh and Green families, both of which connected him to the Parr affinity and to Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr. Of his three daughters with Elizabeth Fitzhugh, he married one to George Throckmorton of Coughton, Warwickshire; Maud, one of his three daughters with Anne Green, married Sir John Fermor of Easton Neston, Northamptonshire; he married his ward, Elizabeth Cheyne, daughter of his niece Anne Parr, to his heir Thomas.32 Although there were other siblings in this generation, those three remained the most firmly attached to the affinity; the Vaux and Fermor cousins remained close through at least the late sixteenth century. Thomas Vaux’s status and connections at court resulted in marriages with the children of other courtier families, specifically the Brays (another Beaufort client), Beaumonts, and Treshams. When Thomas’s conservative religious views prompted his retirement from court in 1536, the family’s Parr relatives were instrumental in maintaining the family’s connections with the monarch. Like the Vauxes, landed wealth and royal service ensured the social and economic significance of the Treshams of Rushton. The Treshams were an ancient family in Northamptonshire with a landholding presence at Rushton and its surrounding environment since 1438.33 Through careful estate management that consolidated holdings within the Forest of Rockingham on the northwest border of the county, various branches of the family controlled lands within a substantial parcel of the Kettering district. Intermarriage with 29 Michael K. Jones and Malcolm G. Underwood, The King’s Mother: Lady Margaret Beaufort, Countess of Richmond and Derby (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). 30 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 35–36. 31 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 39–40; H.R. Woudhuysen, ‘Vaux, Thomas, Second Baron Vaux (1509–1556),’ ODNB, accessed 28 October 2018, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28163. 32 L.L. Ford, ‘Vaux, Nicholas, First Baron Vaux (c. 1460–1523),’ ODNB, accessed 28 October 2018, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/28162; Woudhuysen, ‘Vaux, Thomas’; Bindoff, The House of Commons, vol. 3, 521–522. 33 Glenn Foard, David Hall, and Tracey Partida, Rockingham Forest: An Atlas of the Medieval and Early Modern Landscape (Northampton: Northamptonshire Record Society, 2009), 266.

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local families and within the kinship group deepened the family’s expansive reach in the region, so that in addition to the main branches of the family, seated at Rushton and Newton, an abundance of smaller kinship units populated settlements at Geddington, Pilton, and other holdings between Rothwell and Oundle – a reach of nearly seventeen miles. There were so many subdivisions of the family and so many individuals with identical names, that even the chorographers and antiquarians were sometimes confused about the lineage patterns.34 The family’s naming patterns feature an abundance of the names John, Thomas, and William; in the Newton line this expands to include (and repeat) Maurice. Repetition of female names like Anne, Isabel, and, later, Muriel suggests strong kinship bonds across the branches of the kinship group. The combination of royal and military service, local and crown appointments, land holdings, and advantageous marriages made the Treshams of Rushton one of the most influential families in late medieval Northamptonshire and the Midlands. William (d. 1450) and Sir Thomas (d. c. 1471) served the Lancastrian kings Henry V and Henry VI; Thomas as Henry VI’s Comptroller of the Household. Predictably, Tresham men fought for their Lancastrian patrons during the Wars of the Roses, but the family’s status as gentry rather than nobility, their demonstrations of loyalty to the new regime, and perhaps their kinship with the Vauxes, eased their transition into service under the early Tudors.35 Sir Thomas’s son John (d. 1521) served in local and county offices under Henry VII and Henry VIII, where he worked with other Northamptonshire gentry and major courtiers such as Sir Robert Brudenell (d. 1531), Sir Richard Knightley, William Lane, William Gascoigne, and his kinsman, Sir Nicholas Vaux.36 John’s son, Thomas, was in royal service in his adolescence, as 34 Two such examples are William Harvey and Augustine Vincent, The Visitations of Northamptonshire Made in 1564 and 1618–19, with Northamptonshire Pedigrees from Various Harleian Manuscripts, ed. Walter C. Metcalfe (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1887), and Thomas Fuller, History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662; Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership), accessed 10 March 2021, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A40672.0001.001. 35 Mary E. Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 1540–1640, with a Preface by H.J. Habakkuk, Publications of the Northamptonshire Record Society, vol. 19 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 67. In 1460 a Yorkist purge of Lancastrian supporters attainted, among scores of others, William, the father of the first Baron Vaux, his kinsman Thomas Tresham, and his neighbors William Catesby, Richard Harrowden, and Thomas Green. The attainder was reversed in November 1485 by the newly crowned Henry VII. Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 4–8. 36 Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, Henry VIII vol. 2, ed. J.S. Brewer and James Gairdner (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1864), 184, 318.

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an esquire of the body to Henry VIII, and participated in some military campaigns, but he focused his energies on county governance. In so doing, he protected his family’s status during a period of rapid social change. The Tresham networks grew from the relationships family members forged during their careers in royal service and county administration. The Tresham–Vaux marriage in the early f ifteenth century probably resulted from the families’ familiarity with each other through royal service. A century later, despite John Tresham (d. 1521) serving in Northamptonshire’s administration instead of at court, marriages with other courtier families indicate a durable attachment to the early Tudor court. His son Thomas’s (d. 1559) service in the intimate spaces of Henry VIII’s household illustrates how easily aff inities forged through one’s career could lead to marriage or other types of network connections. Thomas was an Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII, along with Robert Lee (d. 1539), Knight of the Body; both would have known Robert Knollys, as Chief Usher of the Privy Chamber. The men might have been friends; that their families knew each other is evident from their marriage patterns. When Lettice Peniston Knollys’s husband died in 1521, she married Robert Lee; after he died in 1539, she wed Sir Thomas Tresham, whose wife, Anne Parr, had recently died. A similar pattern appears a century later. In the 1620s, William Tresham and Henry Gage of Firle, Sussex, served together in a military regiment in Brussels; in 1633 William married Gage’s kinswoman, Frances.37 The Treshams established an esteemed kinship network from the fifteenth century through the mid-seventeenth century, spanning eight generations. Fifteenth-century marriages brought the family into the affinities of some of the most notable late medieval family groups, including Vaux and Zouche. In the early sixteenth century, marriages with the de Vere, Parr, Peniston, and Lee families confirmed the Treshams’ status as major gentry with political connections. The Parr marriage connected the Treshams to the Catesbys and a kinship network with greater status than any to which they had previously belonged, and which might have resulted in political patronage in the 1530s.38 Sir Thomas’s (d. 1559) marriage to Lettice Lee, a widow whose own networks included strong ties to Sir Thomas and Margaret Bryan and to the Tudor household, placed the Treshams among some of the 37 This Henry Gage might have been Frances’s brother or her kinsman Col. Henry Gage. 38 Bindoff speculates that Tresham’s father-in-law, Sir William Parr, helped to secure Tresham’s election to Parliament in 1539; Bindoff, The House of Commons, vol. 3, 482.

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most powerful gentry courtier families.39 In the mid-sixteenth century, the Treshams were still engaging in marriage contracts with the powerful families of the previous century. Unions with the Catesbys and Lees came in the early 1540s; the next generation connected the Treshams with the Throckmortons and renewed marital ties with the Vauxes. That pattern began to change in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, as power shifted to new families. However, the importance of cousins to the larger family network is evident in how often the Rushton branch of the Treshams relied on kinship connections forged by their Newton cousins, even into the early seventeenth century. Families commonly joined already-established networks as friendships and bonds of neighborhood developed. The Brudenells and Catesbys entered the Vaux–Tresham network in the early to mid-sixteenth century, first through professional connections, then through marriage. Like the Vauxes and Treshams, the Brudenells and Catesbys owed their social and economic status to royal service: the Brudenells as lawyers and administrators and the Catesbys as soldiers and courtiers. Edmund Brudenell (d. c. 1425) was Clerk of the Court under Richard II and later served Henry IV. His increasing status and connections led to offices in county administration, two turns as Member of Parliament for Buckinghamshire, and substantial royal favor.40 Edmund’s great-nephew, Robert, continued the family’s connection to royal service and county administration; his legal clients included Lady Margaret Beaufort, Henry VII’s mother, and, arguably, the most powerful woman in the kingdom. 41 Although the family had been seated at other estates, including Stonton Wyville, Leicestershire, since the late fifteenth century, Robert Brudenell purchased the family’s new seat at Deene in the Rockingham Forest in 1514; by the time of his death in 1531 the family was well-established in Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, along with one estate in Warwickshire and the ancient family holdings in Buckinghamshire. The relocation of the Brudenell family seat to Deene, in Corby hundred in the northwest of the county, situated the family in proximity to several of the period’s leading gentry families and enlarged the family’s network. 39 It seems that Lettice’s husbands knew one another from their posts close to the king’s person. Lettice’s first husband, Robert Knollys, was Gentleman Usher of the Privy Chamber to Henry VIII. Her second husband, Robert Lee, was Knight of the Body to Henry VIII at the same time Thomas Tresham served the king as Esquire of the Body. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 3–5; John Gough Nichols, The Herald and Genealogist, vol. 8 (London: R.C. Nichols and J.B. Nichols, 1863–1874), 290–291. 40 Joan Wake, The Brudenells of Deene (London: Cassell, 1953), 3–6. 41 Jones and Underwood, The King’s Mother, 107.

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Brudenell’s new neighbors at Deene included the Watsons of Lyddington; the Elmses of Lilford; the Mordaunts of Drayton; the Treshams of Rushton; the Vauxes of Harrowden; the Fitzwilliams of Milton; the Johnsons of Glapthorne, successful wool-merchants who would become Brudenell’s agents in the wool trade; and, from 1528, the Montagus of Boughton. 42 Of course, not all network connections were equal, but for the Brudenells, many of these families became friends, kinsmen, and in some cases fellow recusants. Sir Robert’s friends included Guy Palmes, the Teller of the Exchequer; William Smyth, bishop of Lincoln; Thomas Pigott; Brudenell’s cousins Edward and William Bulstrode; his brother-in-law John Cheney, and the Fitzwilliams of Milton.43 His son Sir Thomas’s (d. 1549) friends included Sir Edward Montague of Boughton and the noted antiquarian John Leland; Leland stayed at Deene several times and spent his days sightseeing throughout the countryside with Sir Thomas. 44 For the Brudenells, an individual’s career at court was a critical factor in shaping the affinities and networks which his or her family joined. Brudenell men served in some of the highest legal positions in the realm and they befriended other lawyers rather than the soldiers and political officers that populated the Leicestershire networks and the Vaux–Tresham–Catesby network in Northamptonshire. Even men in Lady Margaret Beaufort’s household – an ideal meeting ground for forging relationships that led to marriage of offspring – seem not to have formed the bonds that encouraged further social connections. Perhaps the scale of Beaufort’s household was too large or her role in marriages between courtier families discouraged unions she did not initiate or support, or maybe affinities did not easily grow between men of different careers. Regardless of the career, however, Brudenell men displayed attributes of manhood, especially as careers in law grew to equal other courtier positions as acceptable demonstrations of masculine authority and honor. In the fifteenth century, friendships with other Midlands gentry families fortified the Brudenells’ kinship group. Friendships with the Entwistles of Stonton Wyville, Leicestershire, and the Cheyneys of Buckinghamshire led to marriages between Edmund (d. 1461) and Philippa’s children and the children of those families. Those marriages linked the Brudenells to 42 Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 31–32. 43 Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 13–18, 31. Sir Robert settled the manor of Stonton Wyville on his second son, Anthony, and his daughter-in-law Jane Elkington. 44 The National Archives (hereafter TNA) PROB 11/32/482; Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 46–47.

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an even larger kinship network that included the Vauxes of Harrowden, Northamptonshire, although extant evidence does not indicate engagement between the Brudenells and members of the wider network.45 The network expanded further when Edmund and Philippa’s son, Robert, married his heir to a daughter of his friend, Sir William Fitzwilliam. The Brudenells and Fitzwilliams remained friends until at least the early seventeenth century. Forty-five miles northwest of the Tresham and Brudenell seats in the Rockingham Forest, the main branch of the Catesbys was seated at Ashby St. Ledgers. The Catesby family was a large kinship network with extensive estates along the border of Warwickshire and Northamptonshire, and Lapworth and Bedsworth in western Warwickshire. An ancient family, the Catesbys had ties to royal service and other prominent families from at least the fourteenth century. In the early fifteenth century, John Catesby acquired Lapworth through marriage to Rose Mountford, coheiress of one of the most significant Warwickshire families. He established Ashby St. Ledgers in Northamptonshire as the family seat and distributed more distant (and therefore difficult to manage) estates to younger brothers. 46 In the late fifteenth century, John’s grandsons established various branches of the wider Catesby affinity: Sir William established a seat at Lapworth, in Kineton hundred, Warwickshire; Edmund founded the Catesbys at Whiston, south of Kettering in Northamptonshire; and his brother John was the progenitor of the Hinton line, near Daventry. 47 Along with the Hastingses, Treshams, and Throckmortons, the family was one of the major kinship groups in the Midlands. The Catesbys were clients of powerful families such as the earls of Warwick in the early fifteenth century and the earls of Shrewsbury by the middle of the century, the latter of which was probably the result of William Catesby’s (d. 1478) royal service. William was a contentious figure: heavily involved in county governance in both Warwickshire and Northamptonshire, he was prepared to change his loyalties to county patrons and royal ones in pursuit of the greatest benefit to himself and his family. His son William, as readers of Shakespeare will know, was no less contentious, and, perhaps more ambitious, than his father. He moved from the clientage of the Hastings family to Richard III’s inner circle. His role as a key advisor to Richard III 45 Philippa Brudenell’s will suggests that she remained close to her son-in-law John Cheyney, her brother-in-law Anthony Brudenell, and the Johnsons. TNA PROB 11/24/222. 46 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 117. 47 ‘Parishes: Lapworth,’ in A History of the County of Warwick, Volume 5: Kington Hundred, ed. L.F. Salzman (London: Victoria County History, 1949), 108–116, British History Online, accessed 25 March 2019, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/warks/vol5/pp108-116.

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resulted in his attainder and execution three days after the king’s defeat at Bosworth. 48 The family’s proximity to the highest echelons of power resulted in a series of marriages through which the Catesbys were related to prominent fifteenth-century Midlands families. In addition to John’s union with the Mountfords, there were marriages with established families like the Zouches and Throckmortons, with ascendant families such as the Spencers, and with other courtier families like the Empsons. These alliances and the wide network of cousins and other relations on whom individuals could rely during times of crisis proved vital in the aftermath of the Wars of the Roses. After Richard III’s defeat and William Catesby’s execution, Empson kinship connections probably contributed to the royal favor shown to William’s heir, George. The branch of the family settled at Whiston intermarried with some of the chief families of early-sixteenth-century Northamptonshire. The union with the Treshams would prove the most significant over the following century: in one generation of siblings were two marriages with the Treshams, one with the Dormers, and one with the Yelvertons. The Treshams, Dormers, and Catesbys were bound by kinship and status, and by the late sixteenth century, by their common recusancy.

Warwickshire In Warwickshire, late medieval networks were shaped by affinity, royal service, or county office, as were the networks in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire. Warwickshire was dominated by the affinities of the earls of Warwick, the Beauchamps and Nevilles, respectively. Richard Neville, as Earl of Warwick, was regarded as a kingmaker for his influence in fifteenthcentury politics, but the larger affinity from which he descended could be equally recognized as having created the leading gentry of the county. Even a cursory perusal of the genealogy charts of the Warwickshire landed classes indicates how powerful the Beauchamp and Neville affinities were in shaping the kinship networks of the following century. The family networks of the Throckmortons of Coughton, for example, include representatives of the Olney, Knightley, Middlemore, Berkley, Beaufou, and Vaux families in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries. During that same period, the 48 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 118; Rosemary Horrox, Richard III: A Study of Service (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 222; Christine Carpenter, ‘Catesby Family (per. c. 1340–1505),’ ODNB, accessed 9 March 2021, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/52779.

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networks of the Middlemores of Edgbaston, near Birmingham, included the Arden, Throckmorton, and Willington families. Geography had a greater influence on network formation in Warwickshire than it did in the other two counties. As Christine Carpenter has argued, Warwickshire networks were shaped by environmental and economic factors. 49 Families in the northeast part of the county were allied with Leicestershire families, and some Leicestershire families, such as the Catesbys, held estates on the vast pasture lands that straddled the county borders. In the northern part of Hemlingford hundred, a network of traversable roads, including thoroughfares like Watling Street, provided access into heavily wooded areas in the Forest of Arden and through less dense woodlands to the east, toward Newton Regis and Atherstone. Travel was easier moving eastward than it was further south into the Forest of Arden, which is reflected in the composition of networks here. Carpenter points out that the major landowners in this area paid more attention to their estates elsewhere, which resulted in weaker network ties in the northern part of the county than might otherwise have happened.50 This explains the lack of substantial or durable ties between the Middlemores of Edgbaston and wealthier families like the Shirleys and Ardens. In Barlichway hundred, the southwestern portion of the county, networks tended to orient westward into Worcestershire, in part because of the region’s position at the southern end of the Arden and in part a consequence of the local landowners’ clientage to the Beauchamps, whose influence was strongest to the west and south of Warwick and into Worcestershire.51 The Middlemores formed networks throughout the Arden because their estates – Edgbaston in the north and Studley near the south – required regular travel through the area.52 As the discussions of Leicestershire and Northamptonshire make clear, it was typical that Warwickshire gentry held lands in other counties, which for some diluted their participation in Warwickshire governance and influence. The Catesbys, for instance, played larger political roles in Northamptonshire than they did in Warwickshire, although their properties in Warwickshire were substantial. In contrast, the Throckmortons were highly involved with Warwickshire governance, with multiple members of the family serving as justices of the peace and sheriff. In the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Throckmortons were one of Warwickshire’s 49 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 307. 50 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 297–298. 51 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 308–309. 52 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 297.

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leading gentry families and had already amassed extensive kin and social networks. Others in their network included some of the fifteenth century’s most prominent county and regional families: the Spineys, Knightleys, Olneys, and Middlemores in Warwickshire, and the Vauxes and Greens in Northamptonshire. By the mid-sixteenth century, the family had levels of authority and influence similar to what the Hastingses did in Leicestershire. The Throckmortons originated at Throckmorton, near Fladbury, Worcestershire. Throckmorton men were active in local and central government from the late fourteenth century and were part of several noble affinities that served the Lancastrian kings. Members of the family appear in the affinities of the earls of Warwick (Beauchamp and then Neville) from 1396 through at least 1469, and were witnesses, feoffees, and executors in the affinities of the Boteller barons of Sudeley (1439–1468), Lord Bergavenny, and the Ferrerses of Chartley.53 Sir John’s (d. 1445) legal and administrative skill made him a valuable part of the region’s noble affinities. He was attached to at least three affinities (Beauchamp, Boteller, and Ferrers), which helped to launch his family into the esquire ranks of the middle gentry.54 The family’s star continued to rise through the tenure of Sir John’s son, Sir Thomas, and grandson, Sir Robert; by the early sixteenth century the latter’s heir, Sir George, was at the head of one of Warwickshire’s most powerful kinship groups. For the Throckmortons, service within the affinity, at court, and in county offices created opportunities for friendship and for the familiarity that led to marriage. Sir John Throckmorton, John Olney, and Richard Middlemore probably met through their common roles as officers and retainers in the Beauchamp affinity, since their roles and time of service in the affinity overlapped: Throckmorton’s service spanned from 1416 to 1439, Olney’s from 1402 to 1427, and Middlemore’s the late 1420s.55 Marriages between the families probably resulted from those affinity-based relationships.56 Mar53 L.S. Woodger, ‘Throckmorton, Thomas (d. 1411), of Throckmorton in Fladbury, Worcs.,’ History of Parliament, accessed 15 February 2021, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/ volume/1386-1421/member/throckmorton-thomas-1411; L.S. Woodger, ‘Throckmorton, John (d. 1445), of Throckmorton in Fladbury, Worcs. and Coughton, Warws.,’ History of Parliament, accessed 15 February 2021, https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1386-1421/ member/throckmorton-john-1445. 54 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 676, 680, 683–704. 55 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 688–690. 56 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 688–690; William Camden, The Visitation of the County of Warwick in the Year 1619, ed. John Fetherston (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1877), 113. Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica notes that Olney and Onley were interchangeable and referred to the same family; the name was also sometimes spelled ‘Oldeney.’ John Gough

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riages within the Beauchamp affinity connected the Throckmortons with other powerful gentry families and greatly expanded their land holdings. Sir John’s marriage to Eleanor Spiney in 1409 brought the Warwickshire manor of Coughton into the family while the union of his eldest son, Sir Thomas, with Margaret Olney expanded Throckmorton land tenure to the Buckinghamshire estates of Weston Underwood. In the last half of the fifteenth century, Sir Thomas’s heir, Sir Robert, relocated the family seat to Coughton. The family’s fecundity resulted in large sibling cohorts in successive generations, and the family’s network quickly expanded to include the Midlands’ chief families. Throughout the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the Throckmortons married almost exclusively with other families of esquire rank. By 1527, with the family’s position secure and the current patriarch, Sir George, having risen to the status of knight, the family pursued marriages primarily with knightly and noble families. In the 1530s and 1540s, Sir George and his wife, Katherine Vaux, married their heir, Sir Robert, to Muriel Berkeley, daughter of Thomas, fifth Baron Berkeley; their son Clement to Katherine Neville, granddaughter of George, Baron Bergavenny; their son George to Frances Brydges, daughter of John, first Baron Chandos; their daughter Catherine to Robert Wintour, or Winter, who through his sister’s marriage was related to the Talbots of Grafton and the earls of Shrewsbury. The marriage of their daughter Mary to Sir John Hubaud, Constable of Kenilworth and High Steward to Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, linked the Throckmortons with the core of the Dudley clientele.57 Continuity in kinship and social networks was not inevitable; to ensure durability, networks required constant work. Despite the rapid growth of the Throckmortons’ kinship network, aided by multiple large sibling groups, there appear to be only a few durable connections that lasted from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Kinship connections with the Middlemores originating in the late fifteenth century and the Vauxes of Harrowden in 1501 remained durable into the post-Reformation period. Nichols, et. al., Collectanea Topographica et Genealogica vol. 8 (London: J.B. Nichols and Son, 1843), 300, 306. 57 ‘Parishes: Ipsley,’ in A History of the County of Warwick, Volume 3: Barlichway Hundred, ed. Philip Styles (London, 1945), 123–126, British History Online, accessed 17 December 2018, https:// www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/warks/vol3/pp123-126. Mary was born c. 1530 so the wedding must have occurred c. 1550. Simon Adams, Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Palgrave, 2002), 154–155, 244; Glyn Parry and Cathryn Enis, Shakespeare before Shakespeare: Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and the Elizabethan State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 43.

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Naming patterns, especially with unusual names like Goditha, and data from wills, such as that of Margaret Middlemore in 1530 and Dr. William Throckmorton in 1537, suggest sociability and the exchange of godparentage between the Middlemore and Throckmorton families through at least the early sixteenth century.58 Following that, the Middlemores provided patronage at court while the Vauxes and their wider network brought the family into kinship with the Parrs and Treshams. Although the Throckmorton networks displayed more change than continuity between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries, their ties with these families were instrumental in confirming the family’s authority in Warwickshire and to providing access to patronage after the Reformation. In the fifteenth century, the Middlemores of Edgbaston were a middle gentry family with lands throughout the Forest of Arden. The family held lands in Studley, Solihull, and Tamworth from the early fourteenth century; by the end of that century the Middlemores acquired Edgbaston through marriage, similar to how the Throckmortons acquired Coughton in the first decade of the fifteenth century.59 The family held esquire status from at least 1436 and, like the Throckmortons, were part of the Beauchamp affinity.60 Like so many of the gentry at this time, the family rose on the legal acumen of the men; the contribution of women in the kinship group is rarely mentioned other than to note their role in land acquisition or religion. Joyce Middlemore was prioress of the Benedictine nunnery at Henwood, near Solihull, between 1439 and 1460; although the house was small and poor her position as prioress indicates the family’s status in the area.61 Joyce’s performance of one aspect of normative womanhood, in particular, never-married womanhood through her role as prioress, both reflected her family’s status and amplified that status. From at least the mid-fourteenth century Middlemore men served in local administration. John and Richard Middlemore were justices of the peace for Warwickshire in 1367 and 1368, respectively.62 Two centuries later, their descendant Robert Middlemore (b. 1509) was sheriff of Warwickshire

58 W.P.W. Phillimore, Some Account of the Family of Middlemore (London, 1901), 32–33, 47, 173. 59 Phillimore, Some Account of the Family of Middlemore, 13. 60 Carpenter, Locality and Polity, 683–704. 61 ‘Houses of Benedictine Nuns: Priory of Henwood,’ in A History of the County of Warwick, Volume 2, ed. William Page (London, 1908), 65–66, British History Online, accessed 8 March 2021, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/warks/vol2/pp65-66. 62 Phillimore, Some Account of the Family of Middlemore, 17, citing Assize Rolls, 40 Edw. III, no. 1472.

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in 1567–1568.63 Yet no Middlemore served in Parliament or seems to have distinguished himself as a soldier in the fifteenth or sixteenth centuries. The family’s role in the Beauchamp affinity seems fairly limited, too. Richard Middlemore was a Beauchamp retainer in 1428 but any further role is unclear. The family might have intended to remain safely in the esquire ranks to avoid drawing attention during a century marked by social movement and dynastic war. Aspirations to higher rank do not appear through their careers or marriages. The Middlemores formed their networks through bonds of neighborhood, service within the Beauchamp affinity, and marriages that connected the family to other elite families in Warwickshire and Staffordshire. In the fifteenth century, marriages were chiefly with other gentry families in their locales: the Edgbastons, Waldives, Ardens, and Throckmortons. In the early sixteenth century the network included the Littletons, Willingtons, and Underhills. As was also true in the networks examined above, women played a significant role in connecting the natal family to larger social and political networks. In the mid-sixteenth century, Anne Middlemore Willington’s daughters married esquires and knights, one of whom, Sir Ambrose Cave, was a Privy Councillor and Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster who also held a number of county offices.64 Social and legal transactions highlight long-term continuity in relationships between the Middlemores and other members of their network. In 1503, Richard Middlemore conveyed land in trust for his son and daughter-in-law to Robert Throckmorton.65 Two of Robert’s sisters were married to Middlemore cousins: Margaret to Richard Middlemore and Eleanor to Thomas Middlemore. Margaret Throckmorton Middlemore’s will reflected family networks in 1530: she named her grandson Robert Middlemore as executor, and her brother William Throckmorton and brother-in-law, William Willington, as overseers.66 Nineteen years later, William Middlemore named his cousins Robert Throckmorton and Robert Middlemore as overseers to his will. That seems to be the last time Middlemores and Throckmortons appeared in each other’s wills, although recusant members of the families moved in the same circles in the late sixteenth century. The difference between the network-formation practices of the Middlemores and the Throckmortons aligns with Naomi Tadmor’s observations about the nature 63 Phillimore, Some Account of the Family of Middlemore, 47. 64 Phillimore, Some Account of the Family of Middlemore, 37. 65 Phillimore, Some Account of the Family of Middlemore, 29–30. 66 Will of Dame Mary Middlemore, TNA PROB 11/24/14.

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of kinship ties, namely that they could be ‘narrow and restricted’ and yet also ‘wide, open, or diverse.’67 In contrast to many of the post-Reformation Catholic families in Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, the Throckmortons did not have the scale of durable kinship connections exhibited by other families. Their networkbuilding strategy seems to have been similar to their marriage strategy: to sweep as many advantageous connections as possible into the affinity, since connections could translate into power.68 They erred by not nurturing those connections over successive generations, in a larger strategy of maintaining important bonds. That was perhaps one of the causes of the family’s failure to continue to increase their status in the late sixteenth century, but it was in keeping with the larger strategies of ambitious families in the fifteenth century. Marriage to heiresses and shrewd estate management performed ‘with the assiduity of parvenus’ moved the Throckmortons into the knightly ranks.69 Service to the crown, as soldiers and administrators, helped as well. Durable ties were not necessarily the norm within kinship groups, which is why they merit close attention when those relationships lasted over multiple generations or centuries. Recurrent connections between families strengthened bonds within kinship groups by renewing ties and reminding the families of their common bloodlines. Relatedness could foster important connections outside of the kinship group: to a noble affinity, to patrons, and to clients. While some relationships thrived, others did not feature as an aspect of continuity within the network. For example, in the early 1520s, the widowed Isabel Harrington Tresham sued her son-in-law in the Court of Chancery for breaking his promise to pay the charges for his wife’s medical care and funeral.70 The lawsuit might have been indicative of a failure of the two families to bond, since they do not appear to have had any lasting kinship or social connections after that initial union. The Throckmortons provide another example, but not necessarily based on acrimony. The Throckmorton kinship and social networks reveal their connections with the principal families of Warwickshire and the West

67 Tadmor, ‘Early Modern English Kinship in the Long Run,’ 25. 68 This aligns with Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert’s theory of the coexistence of power law and preferential attachment. That is, that new connections tend to be made with organisms that are already well-connected. In simpler terms, that power seeks out other sources of power. Albert-László Barabási and Réka Albert, ‘Emergence of Scaling in Random Networks,’ Science 286, no. 5439 (1999): 510–511. 69 Carpenter offers a thorough examination of this in Locality and Polity, 151. 70 TNA C 1/583/67

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Midlands but suggest that they were building a medieval affinity rather than an early modern network.

Network Arrangement The networks explored in this study were established through social connections that linked individuals and families into larger social structures. The types of connections are as abundant as the human actions that produce them, but fall into some general categories: friendship, marriage, siblinghood, careers, and neighborhood. To prevent overwhelming density of the material, this study blends the ‘whole network’ and ‘egocentric analysis’ approaches of historical social network analysis.71 Rather than examining all of the ties between families or individuals, the analysis here focuses on the ties that illuminate strategies of post-Reformation religious and social coexistence. This method concentrates on the social groups and social positions of post-Reformation Catholic families: the groups of people connected to one another and who are connected to the overall social and political structure in similar ways.72 A family could be a social group, while gentry could be considered under the rubric of social positions since they were connected to the hierarchy of social elites and to the political state in similar ways. Post-Reformation Catholics in a particular locale could be both a social group and a social position, since they shared, overall, a common relationship to the state. In the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, nearly all of the families examined here were part of the gentry and, as such, they held similar social positions. Fifteenth-century gentry were not identical in their relationship to the state since status as a knight entailed different responsibilities than did status as esquire or gentleman, for both the individual and the family. But their rank and their relationship to the state was something they held in common despite differences in the particulars of that relationship. Shared social position (gentry status) encouraged both competition and cooperation, and a desire to stabilize or amplify one’s position required that families align with appropriate counterparts. Those relationships 71 Charles Wetherell, ‘Historical Social Network Analysis,’ International Review of Social History 43, no. S6 (1998): 127–129. 72 For more on social groups and social positions, see Linton C. Freeman, ‘Visualizing Social Networks,’ Journal of Social Structure 1, no. 1 (2000), accessed 10 March 2021, https://www.cmu. edu/joss/content/articles/volume1/Freeman.html.

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remained stable over time only with substantial investment of emotional, social, and economic resources and a willingness to endure contentious individuals or kinship ties, as was the case with the Hastingses and John Beaumont described above. These fifteenth-century families of course had no idea that sixteenthcentury religious reforms would challenge their social groups or their social positions, but they knew that kinship and social connections could stabilize or augment their social status, economic health, and political influence and that those connections could protect individuals and families from political tumult. The selection of relationships with other gentry of similar status or with similar interests, what sociologists call homophily, helped families not only to expand their networks but also to strengthen bonds within the network, thereby ensuring the durability of the network over time.73 In the late medieval and early modern periods, networks were intentional constructions that required work to build and maintain. Analysis of premodern kinship and social networks reveals what modern social scientists and data scientists have observed in modern social groups, namely that multiple ties between individuals strengthen the bonds between those individuals.74 Common occupation or service between individuals, such as a justice of the peace or colleague in an affinity, is one tie; a friendship that subsequently develops is a second tie; marriage between those individuals’ relatives creates another tie; standing as godparent forges an additional tie. When those bonds were nourished over generations, subsequent marriages within the network could occur, as described above with the Treshams and Vauxes. Those marriages reflect the robust nature of the extant ties and further strengthen the bond between families, preventing the kinship distance that could erode network ties. The most robust ties often produced the strongest relationships, or what the evolutionary anthropologist Robin Dunbar calls the ‘support clique’: a group of people (kin and friends) upon whom one can call in an emergency.75 Bonds like these could also draw from multiple fields wherein power was displayed, such as at court, on 73 Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook, ‘Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,’ Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 428–429. 74 One group of data scientists calls this ‘affinity’ in social networks. Rina Panigraphy, Mark Najork, and Yinglian Xie, ‘How User Behavior Is Related to Social Affinity,’ in WSDM ’12: Proceedings of the Fifth ACM International Conference on Web Search and Data, 713–722, accessed 15 February 2021, https://doi.org/10.1145/2124295.2124379. 75 Robin Dunbar and M. Spoors, ‘Social Networks, Support Cliques, and Kinship,’ Human Nature 6, no. 3 (1995): 275.

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a battlef ield, in Parliament, in county administrative off ices, through cultural activities like architecture and gardening, and the exchange of gifts and hospitality.76 Therefore, networks are constructed in two interrelated ways. First, the ties (edges) between individuals (nodes). Second, the series of concentric circles moving outward from the individual, with each band representing increased distance from the individual’s inner circle, or support clique. The families in this study reveal that most post-Reformation networks simultaneously took two forms. They moved out in concentric circles from an individual or the core of a family group and also existed as multiple and overlapping circles. For example, a person might have an inner circle of a few individuals they most trusted and with whom they shared affective bonds, and beyond that another circle of trusted (albeit slightly less than the innermost group) individuals.77 Those circles were made up of individuals from different fields within a person’s life.78 An inner circle often included a mixture of siblings, cousins, a parent or child, selected friends, and maybe a highly trusted servant. Although they tended to assume similar characteristics across different family groups, networks were also highly variable since they reflected the social relationships that existed between specific people. Many of the family networks in this study were durable across multiple generations, especially with relationships founded on kinship and service. Networks and patronage relationships were intergenerational. Noble and gentry heirs inherited not only title, land, and moveable property, but also the clientage networks cultivated and maintained by their predecessors. The Brokesbys of Shoby were clients of the Hastings family and the Earls of Huntingdon from c. 1500 until at least 1615, from the tenure of the second baron through that of the fifth earl.79 The Treshams of Rushton had members of the Vavasour family in service for at least half a century, from the 1560s to the first decade of the seventeenth century.

76 Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). 77 Dunbar and Spoors, ‘Social Networks, Support Cliques, and Kinship,’ 273-290. 78 This definition draws on Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas about fields, articulated in Outline of a Theory of Practice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977) and in The Field of Cultural Production. 79 The Brokesbys were probably in service to the Hastings from the mid-fifteenth century, from at least the time of the Brokesby–Hastings marriage, given the Hastings family’s prominence in the county and their status as chief patrons.

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Family Networks in the Midlands Kinship and social networks offered a range of connections for people in the late medieval and early modern period. The social worlds of the gentry and nobility provided the patrons and clients people needed for protection and advancement, thus patrons and clients often had a social or geographical connection. They were kinsmen, neighbors, tenants, or prominent members of the county elite. Social networks were critical to the formation and maintenance of patron–client relationships for members of the gentry and nobility generally, including Catholics.80 Patrons were found in the kinship group, through marriage, friends, neighbors, or other members of the gentry and nobility in one’s county or region. Clients also found patrons through their cultural networks, for instance, through common interests in building and gardening. Family members and extended kin relations helped to bind Catholic families to the monarch and government and were rich sources of patronage. A family member in the inner circle of the central government or in close proximity to the monarch provided vital connections between their families or clients and higher avenues of power.81 Family members could provide proximity to that favor, but clientage was not automatic within a kinship group – one could not count on being a client just because they were a kinsman. Rather, a potential client had to be an active participant in the establishment of the patron–client relationship; a kinsman seeking patronage had to enter the family patron’s clientage rather than simply relying on the family connection for favor or protection.82 For instance, George Shirley of Staunton Harold, Leicestershire, was an active member of the clientele of 80 Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes have argued that kinship groups benefited their members in a variety of ways, including patronage: ‘the opportunity for advancement, marriage brokerage, arbitration in disputes, loans and bonds, protection of dependent orphans, help to the newly married, entertainment, accommodation, and sociability.’ Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 94. 81 Simon Adams has noted that family members ‘formed the core’ of one’s affinity in the sixteenth century. Simon Adams, Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Palgrave, 2002), 155. This was especially so after the location of patronage shifted in the early Tudor period away from great magnates and to the monarch and top ministers of state. See Wallace MacCaffrey, ‘Patronage and Politics under the Tudors,’ in The Mental World of the Jacobean Court, ed. Linda Levy Peck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23–24. 82 Sharon Kettering, ‘Patronage and Kinship in Early Modern France,’ French Historical Studies 16, no. 2 (1989): 434–435.

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his father-in-law, Henry, Lord Berkeley.83 In the early seventeenth century, Mary Parker Habington and her husband, Thomas Habington of Hindlip, Worcestershire, were part of the clientage of Mary’s brother, William Parker, Lord Monteagle, a rising figure at the early Jacobean court. Lady Muriel Tresham, widowed shortly after her daughter’s marriage to Sir Thomas Brudenell of Deene, sought the patronage of her new son-in-law even while she retained the Earl of Salisbury as her principal patron.84 Brudenell, for his part, invoked an ancient family connection when he hoped to join the clientage of the Earl of Salisbury. He reminded Salisbury in January 1609/1610 that by birth he was ‘not far off descended from the same stem that your Lordship is happily issued.’85 Patronage was more crucial for Catholics than it was for the general population of elites because it helped Catholics to remain connected to channels of power and acknowledged that Catholics were still part of elite culture. Perhaps even more significant, patronage relationships helped to shield Catholics, especially recusant Catholics, from the full brunt of the state’s anti-Catholic penalties. Connections between the principal Catholic families of the region with each other and with prominent Protestant families embedded Catholics in a network of patronage and clientage that extended from manor tenants to the chambers of power in central government and personal servants of the monarch. The networks to which Catholics belonged were porous, religiously diverse, and reflected the strength of friendships that had existed across generations. Sir Francis Hastings remarked in a letter to his brother, the third Earl of Huntingdon, that the security and longevity of a gentle or noble house depended on an extensive kinship network and on the family patriarch recognizing the many branches of his lineage group.86 After the Reformation, despite disagreements about religious matters, bonds of kinship and friendship often endured. Many post-Reformation Catholic families had kinship and social networks with deep roots in the medieval period, yet despite that durability, the networks were porous and flexible. After the Reformation, these networks 83 Sir George was coexecutor of Berkeley’s will (d. 1612), LLRRO 26D53/1959. The connection with the Berkeleys went back at least to Henry VIII’s reign; Francis Shirley and Lady Berkeley were partners in a land transaction/lease in 1538. LLRRO 26D53/441. 84 Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 104–105 85 Hatfield House, CP 126/167r (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable The Marquess of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, vol. 21 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1883–1976), 198. 86 HEHL, HA 5094 r.

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were interconfessional, populated by family members, friends, patrons, and clients from across the doctrinal spectrum. The experience of living inside of such networks encouraged concord over tumult. People were eager to get along, or to appear as though they were getting along. They remembered the connections they shared, rooted deep in the past, and invoked them decades later. The networks they created help us to understand how English people navigated the post-Reformation period and challenge modern conceptions of a widespread atmosphere of persecution.

3.

Post-Reformation Kinship and Social Networks Abstract This chapter introduces the families in the study and details the gendered qualities of network formation for family networks and women’s networks. Family networks were masculine in orientation, formed throughout the life-cycle, and reflected the goals of the paterfamilias. Women’s networks were formed throughout the life-cycle from ties within the household or connected to women’s roles and careers. These matriarchal networks reflected the position of powerful noblewomen and gentlewomen and the hierarchical organization of their patrons and their clients. The two types of networks overlapped, since both family networks and women’s networks shared some of the same people, but had different patterns of vertical and horizontal arrangements. Both types of networks were central to patron–client relationships and patronage networks. Keywords: Reformation, network, gender, recusant, gentry, Catholic

Family networks and women’s networks were coordinated strategies for the survival and advancement of the family. Constructed over the life-cycle, these networks originated with the work of parents, godparents, siblings, and other family members as they sought to strategically position the child for advantageous marriage, career, increased status, and wealth. As a child aged and was increasingly able to form their own networks, their connections expanded beyond the household, to bonds of neighborhood and the wider family group. In adolescence these networks began to reveal a gendered aspect that reflected activities and roles that girls and boys performed in adolescence and young adulthood. Ultimately, networks aligned with patriarchal norms: a family’s network was usually masculine in orientation and was augmented and maintained in relationships formed in public, as a courtier, soldier, lawyer, or officeholder. All members of the family group participated in cultivating

Cogan, S.M., Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463726948_ch03

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and maintaining their larger kinship and social networks, but ultimately those networks were determined by the male head of a family or kinship group. Women’s networks were matriarchal in orientation and were formed mainly from ties within the household or connected to women’s roles and careers. These matriarchal networks reflected the position of powerful noblewomen and gentlewomen at the center of the group and the hierarchical organization of their patrons and their clients. The two types of networks overlapped but did not replicate each other; some of the same people appear in both family networks and women’s networks but the two formed and operated in their own distinct ways. In both types of networks, relationships were maintained independently and jointly through the exchange of letters, gifts, and sociability, and often continued through generations. These networks allowed Catholics in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to survive within the framework of a persecutory state and to emphasize their membership in elite society rather than their religious views. Robust family networks, women’s networks, and the larger kinship and social networks to which they belonged ensured continued access to patronage and clientage, even for some of the most notorious recusant families. Networks of kin, friends, and neighbors that originated in the late medieval period provided support for families through the social, economic, and religious changes of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. These social groups, forged in the crucible of fifteenth-century dynastic war, were strong enough to withstand rapid population growth, a new cohort of gentry and nobility, economic inflation, and religious reforms throughout the sixteenth century. For men at the head of a kinship group, maintaining the networks that had operated over generations was as much a matter of honor as it was survival. No one sought to be the patriarch on whose watch the family’s support system fell apart. Despite their durability, networks were porous and flexible, as some connections ended and others began. Family networks were also interconfessional, populated by family members, friends, patrons, and clients from across the doctrinal spectrum. For many English gentry and nobility, the experience of living inside of such networks encouraged concord over tumult. People were eager to get along or to appear as though they were getting along. As a result, these networks reveal that despite the circulation of early modern polemic, societal fears about invasion by or war with Spain, and episodes of religious persecution, English people lived the Reformation by working out how to coexist more than they did strategizing how to extinguish those with whom they disagreed. This chapter outlines the connections between families from the midsixteenth through early seventeenth centuries and reconstructs as much

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as is possible how different connections fit into the larger structure of the network. Of course, not all connections are equal and many ties remain hidden either by the efforts of the people themselves or because of document loss over the past four or five centuries. The core of a network is usually easy to recognize because those relationships are detailed in wills, contracts, and correspondence. The outer margins of a network are often also easily identifiable because of the formal language, sometimes rigidly so, used in communications between individuals. The outer edges of a network are also often where the greatest disparity existed between individuals, whether in social status or in proximity to power. For example, Sir Thomas Tresham’s style was self-consciously formal in letters to William Cecil, Baron Burghley, whereas it was quite casual in his communications with his brother-in-law William, Baron Vaux, who was at the core of Tresham’s network, and in letters to Sir Edward Watson, who occupied a position between Vaux and Burghley within Tresham’s network.1

Leicestershire The most prominent kinship and social network in post-Reformation Leicestershire included several of the county’s highest-ranking gentry families in the fifteenth-century: the Beaumonts, Brokesbys, Hastingses, and Shirleys. Astute alliances during the fifteenth century, and especially in the last quarter of the century, meant that the Hastingses held the most power and wealth in Leicestershire at the start of the sixteenth century, a position the family retained through the first third of the seventeenth century. Powerful as the Beaumonts and Shirleys had once been, they spent the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries rebuilding their wealth and status. Thus, the Hastings family, led by the successive earls of Huntingdon, dominated Leicestershire politics and society throughout the sixteenth century, to the point that little was done in the county without the assent of the earl or one of his brothers. The vast Hastings clientage, built in the century prior to Elizabeth’s accession, ensured the family’s status. Following the Reformation, the family shaped religious persecution and accommodation in Leicestershire, since the earl, as the dominant lord, determined enforcement 1 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, Vol. III: The Manuscripts of T.B. Clarke-Thornhill, Esq., Sir T. Barrett-Lennard, Bart., Pelham R. Papillon, Esq., and W. Cleverly Alexander, Esq. (London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationary Office by Mackie & Co., 1904) (hereafter HMCV), 16, 24, 27, 77, 80.

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of policies and to whom leniency would be offered. Most of Leicestershire’s leading Catholic families were clients of the Hastingses and had been since the fifteenth century, well before Henry VIII’s Reformation. The family balanced their duty to the crown with their duty to their clients and the exchange of protection and loyalty was reciprocal. With frequent threats to their power from the Grey family, the Hastingses could not afford to sacrifice clients or to endanger their relationship with the state. The leading Catholic families in the county, the Beaumonts, Brokesbys, and Shirleys, relied on their positions within the Hastings network for protection and advancement in the century following the Henrician Reformation. Family members made up the core of the Hastings network. In the late sixteenth century, Henry, third Earl of Huntingdon, and his brothers, George and Francis, were at the center of the network. The brothers formed a tightknit unit of mutual support and obligation that protected the economic interests of the family group, discussed patronage and clientage strategy, and decided political appointments. The core remained stable through the tenure of George, fourth Earl of Huntingdon. Francis was one of George’s closest advisors and did much to protect the family’s wider interests during the fourth earl’s tenure and even more so during the tenure of Henry, fifth Earl of Huntingdon. Beyond the family, the next layer of the network included old, established connections with extended kin, such as the Beaumonts, Brokesbys, and Shirleys, and newer kinship connections such as the Vauxes of Harrowden, Northamptonshire. In the mid-sixteenth century, strategic marriages connected the Hastingses with the noble houses of the dukes of Northumberland, earls of Worcester, Clinton earls of Lincoln, and the barons Compton. Each of these marriages augmented the status of the respective families and thereby underscored manhood for the men who forged these ties. For example, the Brokesbys, although of inferior rank to the Hastings, provided service and clientage that strengthened the Hastingses networks throughout the sixteenth century. Thomas Brokesby’s legal expertise and his connections at the Inns of Court helped the Hastingses maintain dominance over their rivals, the Greys. In return the Hastingses offered their support and protection to the Brokesby family. This exchange of service and favors satisfied expectations of manhood for both of the men, especially in regard to protection of a household’s wealth and status.2 In the 1560s and 1570s, Thomas’s cousin, Robert Brokesby of Shoby, another Hastings client, missed 2 Alexandra Shepard, ‘From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in Britain circa 1500–1700,’ Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 282–283; Alexandra Shepard,

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church often enough to attract notice of the churchwardens and the bishop.3 In 1577 Brokesby was reported to the Privy Council as an absentee; by 1581 the bishop was concerned that Brokesby had been swept into the wave of popery rampant in his diocese.4 Still, the Hastingses remained loyal patrons. Until his death in 1615 Robert Brokesby was one of a core of retainers of successive earls of Huntingdon and a client of the Hastings family.5 Despite religious differences, the Hastings–Brokesby relationship was durable. This mutually beneficial relationship between the two families, forged during the late fifteenth century and fortified by kinship and service, created a bond that lasted into the seventeenth century. Like the family’s network, the Hastings family itself reflected an array of religious beliefs, displaying the religious plurality that existed among many families in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. After the Reformation, the hot Protestantism of Henry, third Earl of Huntingdon, marked the family as protectors of reformed religion in the East Midlands, but there were a number of Catholics and some recusants in the family group. Henry’s mother, Katherine Pole (the niece of Cardinal Pole), George, the second brother (later the fourth earl), and his wife, Dorothy Porte, and Walter, the youngest brother, were Catholics.6 Dorothy Porte Hastings, fourth Countess of Huntingdon, was a practicing Catholic raised in a Catholic gentry family. One of her nephews, John Gerard, was a Jesuit leader on the ‘Manhood, Credit, and Patriarchy in Early Modern England, c. 1580–1640,’ Past & Present 167 (2000): 82–83, 95. 3 P.W. Hasler, ed., The House of Commons, 1558–1603, vol. 1 (London: History of Parliament Trust, 1981), 488. Hasler does not identify the bishop but whether he was at his Leicestershire estates or his Rutland estates Brokesby would have been under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Peterborough. Prior to the Henrician Reformation in the early sixteenth century, Leicestershire was part of the Diocese of Lincoln. In 1541, however, the Diocese of Lincoln was redefined and many of its holdings allocated to other dioceses. Leicestershire then fell under the jurisdiction of the Diocese of Peterborough. W.J. Sheils, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough (Northampton: Northamptonshire Record Society, 1979), 5–6; ‘Peterborough: Introduction,’ in Fasti Ecclesiae Anglicanae 1541–1857, Volume 8: Bristol, Gloucester, Oxford and Peterborough Dioceses, ed. Joyce M. Horn (London, 1996), 111–112, British History Online, accessed 12 July 2018, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/fasti-ecclesiae/1541-1847/vol8/pp111-112. 4 Hasler, The House of Commons, vol. 1, 488. The Brokesbys’ cousins, the Brokesbys of Frisby on the Wreak (Leices.), were also professing Catholics. During the late sixteenth century they lived primarily in Surrey but relocated to their estate at Frisby c. 1596. To what extent they might have benefited from or been part of the Hastings network is unclear. 5 Henry E. Huntington Library (hereafter HEHL) HA 5437r. Other of the Hastings’ clients were the Protestant Caves of Northamptonshire, who sought favor from Huntingdon through at least 1609. HEHL HA 1283r. 6 Claire Cross, ed., Letters of Sir Francis Hastings, 1574–1609, Somerset Record Society, vol. 69 (Frome: Butler & Tanner, 1969), xviii.

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English Mission.7 During his nine years as the Hastings patriarch, George behaved more like a conservative conformist than a Catholic and continued to perform duties required by conventions of kinship, such as protecting the Protestant preachers who had been clients of his brother, the third earl.8 George’s grandson Henry, the fifth earl, was a Protestant and like his uncle and grandfather, he protected relatives and friends whose religious views differed from his own, as long as they did not threaten his political standing or his monopoly on authority in the county. Early in his tenure, he needed as many allies as possible to repel the Greys’ recurrent bids for power in the county, bids which began shortly after the young lord succeeded his grandfather in 1604, only eighteen years of age. Throughout wide swings in religious reforms between the mid-sixteenth and mid-seventeenth centuries, the Hastings clientage included men and women widely divergent in religious practice, most of whom were also part of the family’s affinity and social network. The Catholic Brokesbys had been connected by marriage since 1453 and remained part of the Hastings clientage through at least 1615. The Beaumonts of Grace Dieu and Cole Orton were Hastings clients from the fifteenth century through the 1590s.9 Catholic members of the Hastings family protected their coreligionists. In 1586 John Palmer, a Leicestershire gentleman connected to the Babington Plot, received refuge at Sir George Hastings’s house at Loughborough.10 A shift in the family’s stance on coexistence came during the tenure of the fifth earl, perhaps in an effort to demonstrate his authority and noble manhood, which was undermined by the royal favorite, George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, and the Villiers family. In the 1610s–1620s, the Hastingses displayed less tolerance for Catholics in their networks than they had in the past. As one example, in 1625 Henry, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, raided Sir John’s Beaumont’s house at Grace Dieu.11 The raid was an opportunity for Huntingdon to perform his noble masculinity through twin displays of authority and power: the authority he had to raid a gentleman’s house and 7 Norman L. Jones, The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 45. 8 Claire Cross, The Puritan Earl: The Life of Henry Hastings, Third Earl of Huntingdon, 1536–1595 (London: Macmillan, 1966), 31. 9 HEHL HAP Box 14 (10). 10 The National Archives (hereafter TNA) SP 12/93, f. 119r; TNA SP 12/193, f. 50r. 11 Thomas Cogswell, Home Divisions: Aristocracy, the State, and Provincial Conflict (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 97–99; Richard Cust, ‘Honour and Politics in Early Stuart England: The Case of Beaumont v. Hastings,’ Past & Present 149 (1995): 57–94.

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the power he wielded by invading another man’s home, thereby undermining that man’s masculinity by threatening the security of the household.12 In this regard, the fifth earl could have taken a lesson from his ancestors: that threats to Hastings authority were best defeated by keeping potential enemies close. The fifth earl’s tendency toward persecution rather than toleration or accommodation further weakened his family’s position, which in turn undermined the manhood he sought to defend. The Beaumonts built and maintained their networks through service and marriage. Through these connections, the family was embedded in post-Reformation Catholic kinship and social networks. As mentioned in the previous chapter, John Beaumont’s union with Elizabeth Hastings linked the once-ascendant Beaumonts with the newly ascendant Hastingses. In the sixteenth century, the Catholic branch of the family seated at Grace Dieu forged new kinship connections by marrying their children into other Catholic families, such as the Pierrepoints, Brokesbys, and Vauxes. These mid-sixteenth-century marriages meant that the Beaumonts’ kinship network was primarily populated by other powerful Catholic families. Sir Francis Beaumont (c. 1540–1598) of Grace Dieu was deeply embedded in recusant circles through his relationships with his Vaux and Brokesby cousins in Northamptonshire and his wife’s Pierrepoint relatives in Nottinghamshire. Anne Vaux and Eleanor Vaux Brokesby relied on Sir Francis’s legal expertise and used him as their solicitor in legal disputes with other Catholics, particularly Anne’s dispute with her uncle, Sir Thomas Tresham, over her marriage portion.13 The two main branches of the Beaumonts, the Catholics seated at Grace Dieu and the Protestants at Cole Orton, were allied with each other despite their religious differences. The larger Beaumont kinship network was maintained through ties of kinship and neighborhood, and both remained in the Hastings clientage. Over the second half of the sixteenth century, the Catholic Sir Francis’s network grew increasingly insular, but not exclusively Catholic. His closest friends were his Protestant cousin Henry Beaumont of Cole Orton, his Catholic kinsmen, Gervaise and Henry Pierrepoint, George Shirley of Staunton Harold, and Robert Brokesby of Shoby.14 The Shirleys were close to the Cole Orton Beaumonts, too; Francis Shirley left Nicholas 12 Shepard, ‘From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen?,’ 282–283. 13 British Library (hereafter BL) Add. MS 39828, ff. 27r,v–272r (HMCV, 85). 14 Roger D. Sell, ‘Sir John Beaumont and His Three Audiences,’ in Writing and Religion in England, 1558–1689: Studies in Community-Making and Cultural Memory, ed. Roger D. Sell and Anthony W. Johnson (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 196.

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Beaumont and ‘my sister Beaumont’ each rings worth twenty shillings, a signifier of close friendship between a testator and a legatee.15 Between the 1590s and 1610, the Beaumonts expanded their clientage ties in response to changes in the Hastingses authority in the region. Despite the recusancy of his household and the increasing radicalism of his wider family network, particularly his Brokesby and Vaux kinswomen, Sir Francis remained part of the Hastings clientage. His successful law career attracted additional patrons, men who were willing to support his promotion to serjeant-at-law in 1589 despite his abundant recusant connections, or for whom his recusant household and kinship network did not matter. One of these men was the aged sixth Earl of Shrewsbury. By 1593, Sir Francis and his brother Henry had joined the clientage of Shrewsbury’s successor, Gilbert Talbot, while remaining part of the Hastings kinship network and clientage.16 The Beaumonts of Cole Orton transitioned to another clientage during the same period. This branch of the family received Hastings political patronage perhaps as late as 1604 but by 1611 had joined the clientage of the Greys of Groby. In September and December 1611, Thomas Beaumont of Cole Orton was among eleven signatories to Henry Grey’s petitions to Lord Ellesmere, objecting to one of Huntingdon’s clients as justice of the peace.17 Beaumont’s position in support of the Hastings’s chief rival, the Greys, marks his departure from the Hastings clientage. After Francis’s death in 1598, his sons remained part of the kinship and social network that included the Brokesbys, Vauxes, and Hastingses. The younger Beaumonts received literary patronage from Henry, fifth Earl of Huntington, and political patronage from their cousins, Mary Beaumont Villiers, Countess of Buckingham, and her son, the Stuart royal favorite George, Duke of Buckingham.18 Yet the Beaumont–Hastings relationship had a current of unease running through it since the Hastings’s ascendancy in the mid-fifteenth century, an unease that permeated the families’ relationships with each other even in the seventeenth century and culminated in the raid mentioned above.19 The literary careers of Sir John and Francis Beaumont introduced new figures into their social networks. Sir John’s literary interests and recusancy 15 Will of Francis Shirley, TNA PROB 11/53/405. 16 Hasler, The House of Commons, vol. 1, 414–415; J.H. Baker, ‘Beaumont, Francis (d. 1598),’ ODNB, accessed 6 August 2019, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/1870. 17 Hasler, The House of Commons, vol. 1, 415–416; HEHL HA 4328r; HEHL HA 4331 r. 18 Richard Cust, ‘Skipwith, Sir William (c. 1564–1610),’ ODNB, accessed 2 January 2019, http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/40550; TNA SP 16/112, f. 58r. 19 Cogswell, Home Divisions, 97–99; Cust, ‘Honour and Politics in Early Stuart England,’ 57–94.

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encouraged friendships with like-minded individuals. His network included literary figures like Michael Drayton and Edmund Bolton and prominent recusant families such as the Fortescues (the family of his wife, Elizabeth); the Earl and Countess of Rutland; and his Beaumont cousins, including his Protestant cousins of Cole Orton. Ben Jonson and John Fletcher were significant figures in Francis’s network: Jonson as a mentor and Fletcher as a collaborator. In contrast to the Beaumonts, the networks of the Brokesbys of Shoby were durable through at least the first third of the seventeenth century. In the mid-sixteenth century, the Brokesbys could claim gentry status and connections to Leicestershire’s leading families for well over a century. Many of the connections they formed in the fifteenth century were still intact at Queen Elizabeth’s accession and were also strengthened by more recent alliances within the Hastings networks. Robert Brokesby’s marriage to Jane Beaumont placed him within a sibling cohort with some of the region’s strongest Catholic families: through his wife’s sister he was brother-in-law to William, Lord Vaux, and through his wife’s brother he was brother-in-law to Anne Pierrepoint. The death of his sister-in-law Elizabeth, Baroness Vaux, in 1562 and Lord Vaux’s remarriage to Mary Tresham the following year led to a fracture in the Brokesby–Vaux alliance. Between 1540 and 1630, the Brokesby family network was made up of extended kin and friends that reflect the family’s fifteenth-century networks and a growing insularity of this family’s connections. During the forty-five years of Queen Elizabeth’s reign, the frequency of activity between men in the Shirley, Beaumont, and Brokesby families indicates that they were at the core of each other’s networks. As John Shirley set his affairs in order prior to his death in September 1570, he appointed Robert Brokesby as a trustee for his lands, to be held until Shirley’s sons achieved their majority, and entrusted Brokesby to settle all of his debts.20 Ten years later, Brokesby and Francis and Henry Beaumont were trustees in a land transaction between Sir George Shirley and his younger brother, Ralph.21 These patterns repeated through generations into the early years of the seventeenth century. Some of the women in these families had a share in these networks, too. In 1571, the widowed Dorothy Shirley entered into leases with her Brokesby and Beaumont kinsmen; several decades later, one of the early Jacobean transactions included Robert Brokesby’s kinswoman, the recusant singlewoman 20 Leicestershire, Leicester and Rutland Record Office (hereafter LLRRO) 26D53/206r; LLRRO 26D53/2564 r. 21 LLRRO 26D53/209r.

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Anne Vaux.22 The insularity of the core is suggested by the marriage of first cousins: the 1577 union between Edward Brokesby and Eleanor Vaux, whose mothers were Jane Beaumont Brokesby and Elizabeth Beaumont Vaux. As with many of the families profiled here, the sibling group was a substantial part of the inner circle of the Brokesbys’ network. In the absence of extant letters that indicate affection, wills can suggest an individual’s proximity to the core of a network, both in terms of executorship and bequests. Executorship signaled high degrees of trust between individuals, since an executor’s responsibilities included settling a testator’s financial affairs and communicating with beneficiaries. First cousins, who were effectively siblings once removed, were often part of this inner circle. In 1559 Robert Brokesby was executor of his cousin Bartholomew’s will; he received a bequest of a ‘yong bay gelding’ and in compensation for his executorship, three pounds plus any expenses related to administration of the will.23 The gift of a horse signaled a relationship deeper than legal convenience or friendship. Friends of low to middling gentry rank did not typically leave each other extravagant gifts. For example, Robert’s ‘faithfull frende’ Sebastian Bruskett named him as executor of his will and left him twenty nobles for a mourning ring, but no other goods.24 Bruskett was probably part of Robert’s circle of trusted friends, but not as close to the core of his network as were his siblings and cousins. The Brokesbys’ kinship network continued to narrow in the early seventeenth century as family members’ recusancy hardened into activism. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Brokesbys were still enmeshed with the Hastingses, Beaumonts, Shirleys, and some of the Vauxes. When William, Lord Vaux, remarried after the death of his first wife, Elizabeth Beaumont, he sent their children to the household of their grandmother, Elizabeth Hastings Beaumont.25 Throughout their lives, these children remained part of their mother’s networks, a connection that resulted in the Brokesby–Vaux marriage mentioned above. Edward Brokesby, a key operative in the Catholic resistance to English religious reforms and an ally to the Jesuit Mission in England, died after a few years of marriage, leaving Eleanor Vaux Brokesby with two young children. By the time of his death, Eleanor, her sister Anne, and their sister-in-law Elizabeth Roper Vaux 22 LLRRO 26D53/509r; TNA C 2/JasI/S7/9; TNA C 2/JasI/B27/17; TNA C 2/JasI/B27/17. 23 Will of Bartholomew Brokesby, TNA PROB 11/42B/214. 24 Will of Sebastian Bruskett, TNA PROB 11/80/195. 25 Lord Vaux severed his ties with this network upon his remarriage and was absorbed into the kinship network of his second wife, Mary Tresham, granddaughter of one of Northamptonshire’s most influential men, Sir Thomas Tresham, Prior of St. John of Jerusalem.

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were deeply embedded in the Jesuit Mission. Their common cause created bonds between some of their male relations which introduced new families into the Brokesbys’ network while also maintaining the insularity among other Catholic families that was needed for secrecy and protection. Robert Brokesby’s and Sir William Roper’s role as attorneys for the Vaux women led to affinity between the Brokesbys and Ropers. In 1603, Sir William Roper held in trust a portion of Bartholomew Brokesby’s lands which were intended for Brokesby’s children.26 Their animosity toward Sir Thomas Tresham, whose network Lord Vaux had joined on his second marriage, might in itself have been a source of bonding between the parties. Edward and Eleanor Brokesby’s role within the Jesuit English Mission both expanded and restricted the couple’s connections. Individually and as a couple, they sheltered priests, helped transport priests between locales, and produced literature from an underground printing press. As part of the inner circle of organized resistance to the state’s anti-Catholic policies, the Brokesby network soon included other members of that community. At the same time, the secretive nature of their work required that their connections outside of that community would not be as robust as they otherwise would have been. Neighbors, friends, and perhaps some family members would have to be moved further away from the core of their networks to protect themselves from discovery. After Edward’s death in 1581, Eleanor continued the work they had begun together and remained at the heart of the resistance community in London and the Midlands. Her network included her siblings, especially her never-married sister, Anne; two of her half siblings, Ambrose and Muriel Vaux; other priest-harboring recusant women such as Agnes Fermor Wenman and Dorothy Huddleston; and her Brokesby relatives. Hastings ties progressively weakened. Similar to the Brokesbys, sibling relationships also formed the nucleus of the Shirley family network. Prior to his marriage, Sir George Shirley relied on his sister Elizabeth’s help in running his household and educating the children in service in his household, such as the children of their kinsman, Thomas Fermor.27 In the next generation, Sir Henry Shirley and his younger 26 TNA SP 14/17, f. 63r. 27 Thomas Fermor, an aged kinsman of Sir George Shirley, stipulated in his will of 1580 that Sir George should oversee his children’s education and marriage. Evelyn Philip Shirley, ‘Extracts from the Fermor Accounts, A.D. 1580,’ in Memoirs Chiefly Illustrative of the History and Antiquities of the County and City of Oxford, Communicated to the Annual Meeting of the Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland […] (London: Archaeological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 1854), 83–84; Stanley T. Bindoff, ed., The House of Commons, 1509–1558, vol. 2 (London: Published for the History of Parliament Trust by Secker & Warburg, 1982), 126; TNA PCC 30 Arundel.

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brother Thomas shared a group of friends and an affinity for one another. Naming patterns and evidence from wills suggest that Sir Henry stood as godfather to Thomas’s son, Henry, especially since Sir Henry bequeathed his nephew the astonishing sum of £500 to be paid when the child reached his majority.28 During the late sixteenth century, select friendships with members of esteemed families were close to the core of the Shirley network. Sir George Shirley was friends with both Thomas Cecil, Earl of Exeter, and his younger brother Robert, Earl of Salisbury.29 Sir George’s sons, Sir Henry (d. 1632) and Sir Thomas, were friends with the Beaumonts, Brudenells, and Vauxes. At his death, Sir Henry left bequests to several friends, including Robert Hewett and Thomas, Lord Brudenell. Brudenell received the largest bequest of all of Shirley’s friends: a horse worth £30.30 Friendships derived from careers continued to shape the family’s network in the seventeenth century as they had 200 years earlier. Sir Thomas Shirley was one of an ecumenical group of local gentlemen antiquarians along with Sir Thomas Habington, Sir Simon Archer, Sir Edward Dering, Christopher Hatton, William Burton, William Dugdale and, in its early years, Henry Ferrers.31 Habington was a Catholic recusant, Ferrers and Shirley were cryptoCatholics, Burton was a religious conservative, and the others were varying degrees of Protestant. Sir George Shirley’s reputation as a loyal subject under King James meant that despite his Catholicism and his position as head of a Catholic household, he was trusted to serve in political offices, a key aspect of early modern masculinity. He was high sheriff of Berkshire in 1603, sat as justice of the peace for Leicestershire, and in the administration of the Oath of Allegiance was ‘as forward and diligent to do this seruice as other of his fellowe Justices of the said Countie.’32 Shirley usually conformed enough to satisfy the state’s legal requirements and his colleagues in county administration, although in 1585 the state knew he was a recusant.33 In 1611 he was one of the first 28 Will of Sir Henry Shirley, TNA PROB 11/163/342. 29 Pauline Croft, ‘The Catholic Gentry, the Earl of Salisbury and the Baronets of 1611,’ in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2000), 272–273, 280–281. 30 Will of Sir Henry Shirley, TNA PROB 11/163/342. 31 Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 48–49; Elizabeth K. Berry, Henry Ferrers: An Early Warwickshire Antiquary, 1550–1633, Dugdale Society Occasional Papers, no. 16 (Oxford: Printed for the Dugdale Society by Vivian Ridler, 1965), 20–28. 32 HEHL HAP Box 14 (10) 33 TNA SP 12/183, f. 76r.

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gentlemen to purchase a baronetcy from King James.34 That promotion elevated him, and his sons who inherited the title and the family’s enhanced prestige, above the other gentry in the county.35 The patronage of the Shirleys’ friends, the Cecils and, later, the Villiers, combined with church papism on the part of Shirley men, helped the family to remain politically relevant in the first half of the seventeenth century. The chief Catholic and recusant families in Leicestershire in the period under examination here were connected to one another through ties of kinship, friendship, service, and neighborhood from the fifteenth through the seventeenth centuries. Until the 1610s, when Hastings patronage weakened, only one of these families appears among the clientage of the Greys of Groby, who tried unsuccessfully throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries to reestablish a power base in Leicestershire.36 The Hastingses offered protection and patronage to Catholic families because they needed a robust clientage of other powerful families if they were to remain in power. The Greys and, later, the Villiers, offered an alternative patronage network, and the Hastingses could not afford to lose clients if they hoped to protect their hegemony in the county. By the second decade of the seventeenth century, the Villiers family replaced the Hastingses as the chief power brokers in Leicestershire. With their Cecil patrons dead and the Villiers star in the ascendant, the Hastings family lost the hold they had maintained in the county for nearly two centuries. Their nobility still mattered in county power structures but it was quickly being subsumed by the Villiers.

Northamptonshire Many of the principal gentry families in late medieval Northamptonshire retained or advanced their status during the late sixteenth and early 34 Croft, ‘The Catholic Gentry,’ 270; Marquis of Ruvigny and Raineval, The Plantagenet Roll of the Blood Royal: Mortimer–Percy Volume (1911; reprint, Bowie, MD: Heritage Books, 2001), 434. 35 For the effect of this promotion on Sir Henry Shirley’s interactions with other gentry and county officers, see Cogswell, Home Divisions, 99–103. 36 The Hastingses and the Greys struggled for dominance of the county in the early part of the century, and for a brief period early in Henry VIII’s reign the Greys prevailed. By mid-century, however, and certainly throughout the reign of Elizabeth, the Hastingses enjoyed unmatched authority in Leicestershire. Mary L. Robertson, ‘Court Careers and County Quarrels: George Lord Hastings and Leicestershire Unrest, 1509–1529,’ in State, Sovereigns & Society in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of A.J. Slavin, ed. Charles Carlton with Robert L. Woods, Mary L. Robertson, and Joseph S. Block (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton; New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), 153–169; Hasler, The House of Commons, vol. 1, 192–194.

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seventeenth centuries. Of the three counties in this study, Northamptonshire experienced the greatest social upheaval in terms of the effects of new and rising gentry. The Cecils, Spencers, and Montagus enjoyed dramatic increases to their fortune and status, and subsequently to their influence, while the Treshams and Vauxes struggled to maintain the position they held. Other families, like the Greens of Greens Norton, became extinct through their failure to produce male heirs. The leading Catholic families in the county descended from some of the most powerful late medieval families: the Treshams, Vauxes, and Catesbys. Other established families like the Fermors and rising families like the Brudenells of Deene increased their status despite their Catholicism. Sir George Fermor was a significant presence in county administration and the Brudenells rose into the peerage in the seventeenth century. In post-Reformation Northamptonshire, families nurtured long-established network ties and established new ones through a combination of kinship, friendship, service, neighborhood, and spiritual affinity. Although the Vauxes were close to the heart of the early Tudor court, the family’s status considerably diminished in the latter half of the sixteenth century. After Henry VIII’s reign the Vauxes ceased to be courtiers, but were active in county administration, Parliament, and military service. William, third Baron Vaux, served in numerous positions in Northamptonshire government until his arrest in 1581 for allowing the Jesuit Edmund Campion into his home.37 The family’s open recusancy and relationships with families associated with Jesuits and plots in the 1580s, especially the Babingtons, Brokesbys, and Treshams, resulted in their exclusion from office and undermined the masculinity of the third baron. His heir, Edward, fourth Baron Vaux, spent part of his adulthood in the English military, which served vital functions of reestablishing the claims to manhood of the Vaux patriarch and widening his network through connections with other military families.

37 Vaux was on commissions to deal with vagrants, beggars, and poachers; he served on the commission for musters in 1569–1570 and on the commission for gaol delivery from 1578 to 1579. The Campion relationship was more complex than simply harboring a Jesuit. Prior to Campion taking orders he had been a tutor for Vaux’s children and enjoyed a close relationship with the family. After Campion left the family’s employ, young Henry Vaux continued to correspond with him. When Campion returned to England in 1580, Henry, his brother-in-law Edward Brokesby, and his cousin William Tresham were the welcoming party. Evelyn Waugh, Edmund Campion: A Life (London: Longmans, 1935), 212; Godfrey Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden: A Recusant Family (Newport, Monmouthshire: R.H. Johns, 1953), 100–103, 111.

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In the century following the Reformation, the Vauxes maintained existing ties, such as those they shared with the Treshams, and formed new ones through marriage, mostly to other Midlands Catholic families. As discussed above, Sir Nicholas married into the Fitzhugh and Green families, both of which connected him to the Parr affinity and to Henry VIII’s sixth wife, Catherine Parr. His Fitzhugh daughters married into the Sapcote, Lestrange, and Throckmorton families; his daughters by Anne Green married into the Poultney, Fermor, and Walsh families. In the next generation, William, third Baron Vaux, married daughters of the Beaumont and Tresham families, respectively. Those unions reflect how deeply the family valued alliances with other families of ancient standing and how little they recognized the realities of changing gentry demographics. Vaux’s second marriage marks a dramatic shift in the family’s alliances, as William turned away from the larger Hastings network to which his first wife was related and became entirely consumed within the Tresham networks of his second wife. The shift also reflects a new geography to Vaux’s networks: whereas those of his first wife and their children were oriented northward into Leicestershire, with the Tresham marriage Lord Vaux focused his attention and his affinities almost entirely in Northamptonshire. This appears in the marriage arrangements for his children, too. Vaux’s eldest daughter, Eleanor, married the son of an ancient Leicestershire family, one to whom her mother’s Hastings family connected her: Edward Brokesby of Shoby.38 Three of the five children from Vaux’s second marriage wed: George to Elizabeth Roper; Muriel to George Fulshurst, a servant of her uncle Tresham; and Ambrose to Elizabeth Wyborne. George and Elizabeth’s daughter, Catherine, married Henry Nevill, Lord Abergavenny, in 1614, marking the family’s first marriage with another noble family in over a century, yet one that still acknowledged families of ancient status. While Eleanor’s marriage to Brokesby was probably heavily influenced by her Hastings grandmother, who raised her after Lord Vaux’s second marriage, Sir Thomas Tresham attempted to exert his influence over her half-siblings’ marriages.39 During the tenure of William, third Baron Vaux, the family network split into two separate affinities. Following the death of his first wife, Elizabeth 38 Eleanor’s siblings, Henry, Elizabeth, and Anne, pursued religious lives and refused marriage. 39 Tresham’s efforts miserably failed. In the midst of his negotiations for a suitable match for his favorite niece, Muriel, she eloped with one of Tresham’s servants, George Fulshurst. Muriel’s brother George Vaux eloped with Elizabeth Roper, and her brother Ambrose seems to have married Elizabeth Wyborne without parental consent. Mary E. Blackstone and Cameron Lewis, ‘Towards “A Full and Understanding Auditory”: New Evidence of Playgoers at the First Globe Theatre,’ Modern Language Review 90, no. 3 (1995): 559–564.

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Beaumont, Vaux sent the children of that union into the household of their maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Hastings Beaumont, at Grace Dieu in Leicestershire. As adults, William and Elizabeth’s son Henry and daughters Eleanor, Elizabeth, and Anne were distant from their father and his second wife, Mary Tresham Vaux, and from the networks their father established with their stepmother and her extended family. Instead, Henry and his sisters created their own networks based on the kinship and social networks of their maternal relatives, the Hastingses and Beaumonts, and the families into which they married, the Brokesbys and Ropers. Vaux and Mary Tresham were connected to the Tresham networks through kinship and friendship. They were godparents to one another’s children, exchanged sociability, and offered one another protection and advice. Family made up the core of the Vaux network. William, Lord Vaux, and his wife, Mary Tresham, were especially close to her family, especially her brother, Sir Thomas and his wife, Muriel Throckmorton. Vaux’s sons spent time in their aunt and uncle’s house, at least for visits, and perhaps also for some of their education. 40 Lord Vaux named three of his ‘especyall good kinsman’ executors to his will in 1595: Lord Mordaunt of Drayton, his son Sir Lewis Mordaunt, kt., and Sir Thomas Tresham. Tresham and his son Francis were two of the executors of Mary, Baroness Vaux, when she died two years later. 41 Extended family and friends made up the next layer of the Vaux network. William, Lord Vaux, and Lady Mary’s circle of friends included outwardly conforming Catholics, recusants, and Protestants. Lord Vaux’s cousin, Sir George Fermor of Easton Neston, Northamptonshire, was a friend and legal advisor. 42 The Babingtons of Dethick, Derbyshire, were friends in the early 1580s; it is unclear whether that friendship survived the Babington Plot in 1586. 43 The friends Vaux made through his work in county administration occupied a more distant layer of the network. His friendship with Sir Edward 40 TNA SP 12/179, f. 19r. 41 Will of William, Lord Vaux, TNA PROB 11/88/344; Will of Mary, Baroness Vaux, TNA PROB 11/92/52. 42 When William’s heir, Henry, surrendered his inheritance for a career in the church, Fermor helped Vaux and his brother-in-law, Tresham, to determine the structure of Henry’s compensation and his younger brother George’s inheritance. BL Add. MS 39828, f. 83r (HMCV, 28). 43 TNA SP 12/179, f. 1 r. In 1585 Babington of Derbyshire gave Lady Vaux a silver and gilt basin and ewer ‘for her frendshipp.’ The gift was given while Babington was in the Vauxes’ house in Hackney, discussing his purchase of some land from Lord Vaux. Therefore it might have been a gift intended to quicken Vaux’s patronage more than one between true friends, but it might also have been indicative of a bond incurred through spiritual affinity as both families increasingly suffered as the result of their religious practice.

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Montagu of Boughton probably stemmed from their work together on the county bench, but the link between the families did not survive into the next generation, perhaps because the Vauxes became more militantly recusant while the Montagus grew more Puritan. 44 For the next generation, as the family’s recusancy hardened into subversive activities, their network became increasingly insular and reflective of the spiritual kinship they shared with other recusants of their generation. Again, kin made up the core of the Vaux networks. When Maud Vaux Burroughs died in 1581, her daughter Frances moved into Eleanor Vaux Brokesby’s household.45 Henry, Eleanor, and Anne Vaux were friends with their Tresham cousins despite the breach with the Tresham parents; Henry and Anne were friendly with their brother-in-law Edward Brokesby; and Anne and Eleanor were close to their sister-in-law, Elizabeth Roper Vaux. 46 After Edward Brokesby’s death in 1581, Eleanor and Anne became more involved in supporting the English Mission. Following their brother Henry’s death in 1587, the sisters, their stepbrother George, and his wife, Elizabeth Roper Vaux, were fully immersed in the operations of the mission, including sheltering the Jesuit superior of the English Mission, Fr. Garnet, establishing safe houses for priests, moving priests around the realm, and running boarding schools for high-born Catholic boys. Relationships with the Brokesbys, Beaumonts, and Shirleys endured into the seventeenth century, as did the connection with Elizabeth Vaux and her natal family, the Ropers. 47 By the time of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605 Elizabeth, Anne, and Eleanor, and probably also young Edward, Lord Vaux, were part of a tight-knit group of the most radical Catholics, including their cousins the Catesbys and their friends the Digbys, Wintours, and Huddlestones. Although the strict recusant Catholicism of some families weakened in the seventeenth century as later generations sought to recover land and fortune from the crown, the Vauxes remained committed to militant Catholicism until the demise of the male line in the mid-seventeenth century. Throughout this period, most of their friends and some of their tenants were recusant, or at least religiously conservative. Matthew Kellison, the son of 44 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 104–108. 45 Dom Adam Hamilton, O.S.B., ed., The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses […] at St. Monica’s in Louvain […] a Continuation 1625–1644 (Edinburgh; London: Sands and Co., 1906), 165. Frances and Eleanor were first cousins. 46 Francis Tresham frequently visited Anne Vaux to see priests in her household and to exchange sociability with her. Henry Foley, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus, vol. 4 (London: Burns and Oates, 1878), 162–164; Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 355–356. 47 BL Add. MS 39828, ff. 269r,v–270r (HMCV, 83).

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one of the Vauxes’ tenants, became a priest and eventually the president of Douai Abbey in France. 48 By the mid-seventeenth century the family was cocooned in an overwhelmingly Catholic environment; the bulk of their social interactions were with members of their extended kin network. For instance, in 1629 Lord Edward’s household priest was the son of Edward Bentley of Little Oakley, near the Treshams’ Lyveden estate, and a cousin of his Roper kinsmen, connected to Vaux through kinship, affinity, and neighborhood. 49 The Treshams’ reputation in Northamptonshire allowed the family to maintain robust open networks through the end of Queen Elizabeth’s reign. Sir Thomas Tresham’s (d. 1559) role in the early Tudor royal household, in county administrative positions during the reigns of Edward VI and Mary I, and as prior of the Order of Saint John of Jerusalem under Mary, ensured the reputation and status of the Treshams in Northamptonshire.50 It was a legacy upon which his grandson and namesake, Sir Thomas (d. 1605), expected to build his own career. The younger Thomas was sheriff of Northamptonshire in 1573 and received a knighthood from the queen during her progress at Kenilworth in 1575. He served as a forest official under his kinsman, the Earl of Bedford, Guardian of the Forest of Rockingham and one of Elizabeth’s Privy Councilors.51 His younger brother William was a courtier to Elizabeth I and provided his family significant connections to central levers of power, especially after the death of their grandfather, Sir Thomas the Prior. The younger Sir Thomas’s arrest in 1581, on charges that he had allowed the Jesuit Edmund Campion to say Mass in his home, put an end to his aspirations to government office. Several months after Sir Thomas’s arrest, William fled court for the continent without the queen’s 48 Rev. Wilfred Kelly, ed., Liber ruber venerabilis collegii Anglorum de Urbe. Annales Collegii. Pars prima: nomina alumnorum, 1579–1630, Catholic Record Society Records Series, vol. 37 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1940), 37; Henry Foley, Records of the English College of the Society of Jesus (London, 1877), 156. 49 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 456. 50 Tresham’s positions included Esquire of the Body to Henry VIII, sheriff of Northampton, justice of the peace, lieutenant of the forest of Rockingham, and a number of local commissions. Mary E. Finch, The Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 1540–1640, with a Preface by H.J. Habakkuk, Publications of the Northamptonshire Record Society, vol. 19 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1956), 68; BL Cotton Titus B ii, f. 336r; S.M. Thorpe, ‘Tresham, Sir Thomas (by 1500–1559), of Rushton, Northants.,’ History of Parliament, accessed 1 September 2017, http:// www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509-1558/member/tresham-sir-thomas-1500-59; P.R.N. Carter, ‘Tresham, Sir Thomas (c. 1500–1559),’ ODNB, accessed 9 March 2021, http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/27711. 51 TNA PC 2/12, f. 119r.

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permission, later claiming he was forced to do so after arguing with the queen’s favorite, the Earl of Leicester. It seems that the tensions caused by religious reform combined with the politics of the royal court and Sir Thomas’s arrest prompted William’s hasty flight. It marked the end of courtier service for the Treshams. By the mid-sixteenth century, the Treshams had prestige and authority that came from 150 years in royal service, Parliamentary office, and local administration. At the Dissolution of the Monasteries, the Treshams, like other high-ranking courtier families, profited from the demise of the religious houses, whether or not they agreed with Protestant doctrine. In fact, the same dissolution policies that displaced John and Isabel’s daughter, Clemence, from Syon Abbey also enabled the consolidation of a group of manors at and near Rushton into a package of land that allowed the Treshams to amass significant wealth.52 By the mid-sixteenth century, the Treshams of Rushton held land at Pipewell, adjacent to Rushton; east of Rushton at Lyveden, near Oundle; west of Rushton, at Orton and, by 1595, at Rothwell. Members of the larger Tresham affinity had estates east of Rushton, at Newton and Geddington, and slightly further east at Benefield, near Lyveden. Consequently, the Tresham kinship group commanded a substantial band through the heart of the Rockingham Forest. In the century after the Reformation, the Treshams maintained kinship ties and friendships forged over the previous century and established new ties through marriage with families who shared their conservative religious outlook. In the 1530s and 1540s, Sir Thomas (d. 1559) and Anne Parr Tresham married their daughter Isabel to Thomas Pigott. After Pigott’s death a few years later Isabel married Thomas Catesby of Whiston, thus drawing on the connections to her mother’s Parr networks discussed in the previous chapter. Her brother John, the heir, married Thomas’s sister, Eleanor Catesby. Their younger brother William, who established the Treshams at Benefield, wed Elizabeth Lee, the daughter of William’s stepmother, Lettice. In subsequent generations, the family intermarried with noble families: new connections like the Monteagles and Stourtons and in at least one instance, a return to older ties through another marriage with the Vauxes. Late-sixteenth-century marriages also included major gentry families in the Treshams’ larger kinship network, like the Throckmortons, to whom the Treshams were connected 52 TNA SP 12/251, f. 146r; Finch, Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 68–69; Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 95. Sir Thomas’s (d. 1605) shrewd and sometimes ruthless estate management strategies sometimes came at the expense of good relationships with his tenants. TNA E 163/16/19; Finch, Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 73–75.

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through the Vauxes. In addition, the family formed ties through marriage with the Brudenells, who lived just northeast of the Tresham estates, at Deene; the Webbs, neighbors of the Stourtons in Wiltshire, and the Parhams. Throughout the sixteenth century, the family adhered to the late medieval practice of marrying daughters into the highest-status families possible, which increased the Treshams’ status and connected them to kinship and social networks more powerful than their own.53 Thus, despite political marginalization, economic hardship that resulted from religious practice, and the eventual failure of the male line, the family retained social power into the seventeenth century. While the Rushton branch of the family were ardent Catholics, their cousins, the Treshams of Newton, Northamptonshire, were either Protestants or careful outward conformists who avoided the attention of the state. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the families remained close, both geographically and personally. The Newton and Rushton estates were near neighbors, situated on adjacent manors. The two branches of the family visited one another and corresponded regularly in the Elizabethan and Jacobean years; sometime in 1595 or 1596 Sir Thomas’s heir, Francis, acted as a mediator in a dispute that his cousin, Thomas of Newton, had with John Brudenell of Deene and William Montagu of Stanion.54 In the early seventeenth century the Newton branch became more politically significant than the Rushton branch and acted as protector and patron to their recusant cousins. Friendships between kin formed the core of the Tresham networks. After his son and daughter-in-law died in 1546, Sir Thomas (d. 1559) arranged for the wardship and marriage of their children.55 Their young heir, Thomas, would be raised by the son of the elder Tresham’s friend and fellow Esquire of the Body, Sir George Throckmorton.56 Young Thomas became the ward of Sir Robert Throckmorton of Coughton; he was raised in Throckmorton’s household along with William Catesby of Lapworth, another of Throckmorton’s wards, and maybe also Robert Throckmorton’s son, Thomas. Tresham and Catesby married Throckmorton sisters: Muriel and Anne, respectively. These marriages, in addition to Mary Tresham’s marriage to William, Lord Vaux, in 1563 connected the Throckmorton, Catesby, Tresham, and Vaux 53 Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550: Marriage and Family, Property and Careers (London: Oxford University Press, 2002), 44. 54 Northamptonshire Record Office (hereafter NRO) D (F) 143. 55 Will of Sir Thomas Tresham, TNA PROB 11/42B/149. 56 Bindoff, The House of Commons, vol. 3, 450–454.

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families to one another and to a vast network of kinship and clientage connections throughout the Midlands.57 Tresham and his brothers-in-law remained good friends for the rest of their lives. Account books indicate frequent traffic between the Vaux and Tresham estates, even when letters have not survived, and in 1594 Lord Vaux sent his tutor to Rushton to be a tutor to the Tresham children.58 These tight bonds of kinship and friendship fortified the kinship network and extended the social networks to which the families belonged. That the family remembered and valued these connections is evident in their recitation of the relationship decades later, as William Tresham did when in 1598 he invoked his kinship with William Parr, Marquess of Northampton, remembering a tie that originated nearly a century in the past.59 Beyond their inner circle, late-sixteenth-century Treshams cultivated and maintained friendships that ensured reciprocity of trust and that connected them to significant networks. Steady messenger traffic between Rushton and the Mordaunts’ seat at Drayton indicates a strong connection between those families.60 Edward Watson of Rockingham Castle, six miles from Rushton, visited Rushton for sociability and business matters.61 Some neighbors were extended kin to whom the family still had a connection, such as Jerome Lee, a descendant of the Lee affinity in the early sixteenth century.62 The network included selected highly trusted servants. Sir Thomas’s relationship with his servant Thomas Vavasour was underpinned by deep trust and friendship. Tresham had other trusted servants, including John Syser and George Levens, but Vavasour was one his closest confidantes and friends, and the servant closest to the core of the family’s network. Sir Thomas and Muriel were godparents to at least two of Vavasour’s children and Vavasour, a fellow Catholic, was privy to some of the family’s chief secrets. John Flamsted, a recusant and tenant, frequently witnessed Tresham legal documents as either a bondholder or a trustee. His social status was below that of the Treshams, but he was among the wealthier of their tenants and 57 The patron–client exchanges that resulted from these relationships are explored in Chapter Six. 58 BL Add. MS 39832, ff. 13r, 31 r. Since the older children were in their early twenties by this time, the tutor was probably for younger children, including Lewis and Mary (age sixteen) and any children Lady Muriel had in service. 59 TNA SP 15/33, f. 202r. 60 BL Add. MS 39832, f. 30r. Tresham’s friendship with Mordaunt might have been encouraged by Lord Vaux’s close friendship with Lewis, Lord Mordaunt. 61 BL Add. MS 39832, f. 13v. 62 HMCV, 33, 75–76, 89, 110, 115; NRO Th 1697 25/1/1604[/5].

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was trusted enough by both the Treshams and the Vauxes to be part of the family network. Tresham networks remained fairly stable into the mid-seventeenth century. The next two generations maintained relationships with ancient ties like the Catesbys and Vauxes, with more recent ties like the Mordaunts, and with new in-laws such as the Brudenells, Stourtons, and Parkers (Lord Monteagle). Sir Thomas and Muriel’s two older sons, Francis and Lewis, were part of a circle of young Catholic radicals and were friends with many of the men in the Earl of Essex’s circle and, later, with Gunpowder Plot conspirators and extended kin such as Wintour and Percy.63 Francis kept up a steady traffic of visits to his Vaux cousins and the Jesuits they sheltered, and Anne Vaux paid a social visit to her cousin at least once. In 1605, shortly after Sir Thomas Tresham’s death, Vaux and the superior of the English Mission, Henry Garnet, S.J., visited Francis at either Rushton or Lyveden on their way to Warwickshire. They received hospitality and continued their journey to Warwickshire the following day.64 Eleven miles northeast of Rushton, the Brudenells of Deene developed their networks through kinship, friendships, neighborhood, and spiritual affinity. Similar to the Hastingses in Leicestershire and the Throckmortons in Warwickshire, the Brudenells of Deene were a religiously diverse family.65 During the long period of Reformations, family members were varying degrees of Protestant and Catholic; for example, at least four of Sir Thomas and Elizabeth Fitzwilliam Brudenell’s children were Catholics (Elizabeth, Sir Edmund, John, and Robert) while the others seem to have been Protestants. The core of the Brudenell network was the sibling group, which was perhaps encouraged by the frequent failure of the direct male line of descent. Nephews inheriting, rather than sons, was common from the fifteenth through the late sixteenth centuries. That pattern might have encouraged an amplified attachment to the sibling group. In the mid-sixteenth century, Anthony Brudenell’s sons were educated in the household of Sir Thomas Brudenell at Deene. By 1549, Edmund and George had left for university 63 TNA SP 12/244, f. 219r; Paul E. J. Hammer, The Polarisation of Elizabethan Politics: The Political Career of Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex, 1585–1597, Cambridge Studies in Early Modern British History (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 175 n. 139. 64 TNA SP 14/216/2, 154v. Lady Tresham, still in mourning, kept to her chamber for the duration of their visit. 65 Joan Wake speculated that Edmund’s (d. 1469) ownership of two Bibles might indicate that he was a Lollard or had Lollard sympathies. Joan Wake, The Brudenells of Deene (London: Cassell, 1953), 10.

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in Oxford; Edmund at King’s College and George at ‘seynt Maudelyns.’ Their brother Robert was ‘in my [Sir Thomas’s] howse at scole’ while ‘lyttel Tom Brudenell not received yett from hys mother.’66 Sir Thomas’s language suggests that he had affection for his sibling’s children; he took charge of his nephews’ education and stipulated in his will that they should receive additional funds for ‘other necessaries’ at university.67 In the next generation, Sir Edmund (d. 1585) demonstrated the effect a failed patriarch could have on a family. Sir Edmund attempted to exclude his siblings from their inheritances, he fought incessantly with his wife and was embroiled in a land dispute with her cousins, he philandered, and he restricted his wife’s allowance to the point she could not adequately manage a household without turning to her natal family for loans.68 After his death in 1585, his brothers Thomas, John, and Robert reinstated the masculine honor of the sibling group and wider family by settling Sir Edmund’s disputes and reestablishing harmony within the kinship network.69 Between 1585 and 1600, the core of the family’s network remained focused on the sibling group. John, who inherited from his brother in 1587, headed an overwhelmingly Catholic household. His wife, Mary Everard; his aged sister Lucy, a former Maid of Honor to Anne of Cleves; Mistress Anne Fletcher; a Brudenell cousin and his wife; and all of the servants were openly Catholic if not recusants. Through their steward, Christopher Blunson, the Brudenells were acquainted with the Jesuit John Percy, Blunson’s cousin.70 Given his Catholic household, John was probably privately Catholic although publicly a conformist to the Elizabethan church.71 The layers immediately beyond the core of the family’s network were populated by other family members and Catholic friends. Spiritual affinity encouraged intermarriage, which allied the family with some of the most prominent recusants in the Midlands. John’s sister Elizabeth Brudenell married Rice Griffin; the Griffin’s daughter married Thomas Markham of Kirby Bellars and was herself the mother of the noted recusant and 66 Will of Sir Thomas Brudenell, TNA PROB 11/32/482. 67 Will of Sir Thomas Brudenell, TNA PROB 11/32/482. 68 The Bussy land dispute was not settled until 1589, at the intervention and arbitration of Hatton and Burghley. Finch, Wealth of Five Northamptonshire Families, 143; Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 71, 93, 142. 69 Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 89–93. Edmund’s brother Thomas inherited prior to John but his tenure lasted only two years before he died. His main contribution to the family narrative was to work toward resolution of the Bussy dispute. 70 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 379–380. 71 TNA SP 14/20, f. 94 r; Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 94.

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soldier Sir Griffin Markham.72 John’s friends, the Treshams of Rushton, the Mordaunts of Drayton, and the Catesbys of Ashby St. Ledgers, were three of the most staunchly Catholic families in Northamptonshire. The Treshams and Mordaunts lived nearby in the Rockingham Forest while the Catesbys were further west, near the Warwickshire border. When John died in 1606 his wife, Mary, moved to her property at Glapthorne, near Oundle, and lived there until her death in 1636. Her new neighbors included Muriel Tresham, whose dower house was the family’s Lyveden estate and Lady Tresham’s uncle, Gilbert Hussey, who lived near Oundle. Mary and John’s nephew Sir Thomas, who had one year earlier wed Mary Tresham of Rushton, was the new lord of Deene. His wife had lost her father and eldest brother within months of each other, one to old age and the other in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot; their deaths left Lady Tresham a vulnerable widow. Sir Thomas Brudenell’s attentiveness to his widowed mother-in-law and his assistance with her legal affairs enhanced the families’ bonds.73 His actions also established his assumption of patriarchal authority over not only the Brudenell family network, but also as a substitute for his brother-in-law, Lewis Tresham, who seems to have had little interest in helping his widowed mother. Until the late sixteenth century, marriage does not seem to have been a strategy the Brudenells employed to expand their influence or connections in the ways other families demonstrated. Connections were not durable across multiple generations as they were in family groups like the Beaumonts or Brokesbys. Unlike most of the other family networks in this study, which displayed linkages to one another and to larger social and political systems, the Brudenells appear to have focused their strategies narrowly on the family group, thereby limiting their overall social position and connection to the wider landscape of power.74 In the first half of the seventeenth century, however, the Brudenells’ status rose. Perhaps this was the result of generations of careful strategy or the result of recent marriages with leading ancient families like the Treshams. Most likely, it was a combination of multiple factors. 72 Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 97 n. 38, 98. 73 Francis Tresham’s attainder placed in jeopardy Tresham property and finances; Brudenell audited Muriel’s books and helped her with her case in the Court of Exchequer in 1607. Sir Thomas was Lady Tresham’s sole executor when she died in 1616. Her letter to Sir Thomas about this work is presumably in the Brudenell archives at Deene. Wake quoted from it but did not provide a full citation for the document. Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 104–105; TNA PROB 11/127/1. 74 Linton C. Freeman, ‘Visualizing Social Networks,’ Journal of Social Structure, vol. 1, no. 1 (2000), accessed 10 March 2021, https://www.cmu.edu/joss/content/articles/volume1/Freeman. html.

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By the late sixteenth century, the Treshams’ cousins, the Catesbys, had amassed signif icant lands along the border of Northamptonshire and Warwickshire. Like other ancient families with successful male lines, the Catesbys had several branches in addition to the main patrilineal branch of the family settled at the main estate. In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Ashby St. Ledgers and Lapworth estates were controlled by the main branch of the family, and Sir William (d. 1598) was variously referred to as ‘of Ashby’ and ‘of Lapworth.’ The family’s networks during this period reflect connections established in the fifteenth century, extended in the sixteenth century through wardship and marriage, and in the seventeenth century fused through common interest in recusancy. As was the case with many families, the Catesbys were diverse in religion, even after the Reformation. While some of the family embraced Protestantism, most of the Catesbys of Ashby St. Ledgers and Lapworth and their cousins based at Whiston were Catholics.75 In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Ashby and Whiston cousins were connected through wardship and marriage, bonds which were further strengthened by their attachment to Catholicism and for many, their shared commitment to recusancy. The Ashby and Whiston lines diverged in the mid-fifteenth century, with two sons of John Catesby and Rose de Montfort: Edmund, the elder by two years, settled at Whiston while his younger brother, Sir William, established the family at Ashby St. Ledgers. Five generations later, their descendants fused the two lines through kinship and recusancy. Eleanor Catesby and her brother Thomas, both of Whiston, married Tresham siblings, John and Isabelle, respectively. Their cousins Sir Richard Catesby of Lapworth and his son William died in 1554, after which Queen Mary awarded the wardship and marriage of the young heir, William, to Sir Robert Throckmorton.76 This arrangement might have been the result of Catesby’s widow, Catherine Willington, remarrying to Anthony Throckmorton, a younger brother of Sir Robert.77 The Throckmorton household was a decisive factor in shaping Catesby networks over the next two generations, for it was as part of this kinship group that the family’s connections to other militantly recusant families began. Robert Wintour and John Digby were young Sir William Catesby’s new uncles. After his marriage 75 For example, the branch of the family at Seaton, Rutland and Castle Headingham, Essex, descended from Michael Catesby and Anna Odim. Mark Catesby (b. 1682), the naturalist of early North America, is their descendant. 76 Warwickshire Record Office (hereafter WRO) CR 1998/EB/43. 77 TNA SP 15/7, f. 109r.

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to his guardian’s daughter, Anne Throckmorton, Sir William’s sibling cohort included major Catholic gentry families like the Whorwoods, Sheldons, Ardens, and Treshams; he and Anne married their daughter Elizabeth to her cousin, Thomas Wintour. The kinship network that resulted from these relationships was the one from which the Gunpowder Plot was born. Sir William and Anne’s son Robert, his brother-in-law Thomas Wintour and Thomas’s brother Robert, the Wintour’s cousins Eleanor Vaux Brokesby, Anne Vaux, and Elizabeth Roper Vaux, and both Catesby and Vaux’s cousin Francis Tresham, made up at least half of the plot’s conspirators. Correspondence and records of Sir William Catesby’s legal and financial interactions with these siblings and their families make clear that they were part of one another’s inner circles. Early in Elizabeth’s reign, Sir William, resident at Ashby St. Ledgers, and his uncle Edmund Catesby, resident at Lapworth, corresponded about estate matters, including servants and poachers.78 A high degree of cooperation and affection is suggested by the overall tone of the letter, wherein Edmund provides detail and analysis of estate matters and offers suggestions as a ‘loving uncle’ to Sir William, the patriarch of the family group. In 1582 the Privy Council released Sir William from the Fleet Prison so that he could tend to ‘certen causes depending between him and one Somervile,’ Robert Arden’s son-in-law.79 An indenture of 1582 provides a snapshot of the family’s network of friends and relations. Sir William Catesby appointed as trustees ‘his loving friends Sir Thomas Tresham, Kt., Thomas Morgan, Anthony Tirringham, George Catesbie, Edwarde Catesbie, John Catesbie, [and] William Baldwin.’80 Financial transactions offer insight into layers of Sir William Catesby’s network. In 1576, he leased land at Rodburn, the old Arden estates, from his stepfather, Anthony Throckmorton.81 Sir William borrowed a great deal of money, most of which came from men close to the core of his network, such as his brother-in-law Randall Brereton, his cousin and brother-in-law Sir Thomas Tresham, his kinsmen Thomas and Robert Wilford, and his servant, Morris Miles.82 Other transactions seem to have been further from the core of Sir William’s network, since the only interactions are related to business matters. For instance, in 1580 Catesby rented Shottery meadow, one mile 78 TNA SP 46/162, f. 194 r. 79 TNA PC 2/13, f. 693. 80 NRO ASL/1173r 2 June 1582. 81 TNA SP 15/24, f. 250r; Thomas Cox, Magda Britannia Antiqua & Nova: or, A New, Exact, and Comprehensive Survey of the Ancient and Present State of Great Britain […], vol. 5 (London: Caesar Ward and Richard Chandler, 1738), 854–855. 82 TNA SP 15/25, f. 32r; TNA SP 15/27/2, f. 149r; TNA SP 15/27/2, f. 156r.

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west of Stratford-upon-Avon from Thomas Reynolds and Willicot pastures four miles southwest of Stratford from Richard Bartlett, but paying rent on those properties seems to have been their only exchange.83 The Catesby networks also included loyal servants, some of whom were close to the core of the network. Based on their financial relationships with their master, certain servants must have been trusted members of Sir William’s inner circle, similar to the relationship between the Treshams and Vavasours. The servants William Chibnall and William Askew were fixtures in the Catesby networks through much of the late sixteenth century. The two men were highly trusted by the family and frequently handled deliveries of goods and money. Chibnall was Catesby’s courier in financial transactions and transmitted to his master news he learned on his errands.84 Morris Miles stood surety for his master, Sir William, in the latter’s £400 debt to his kinsman John Catesby.85 The presence of Thomas Browne, a servant of Roper (probably John Roper, Baron Teynham) at Lady Catesby’s house at Lambeth in April 1588 indicates connection between the Catesby and Roper families, although what exactly that connection entailed is unclear.86 In the early seventeenth century, the close relationship between Lord Mordaunt’s servants and Robert Catesby’s household suggests that Mordaunt and Catesby themselves were close.87 As was so with the Treshams, a crisis event exposed the heart of the Catesby network in the early seventeenth century. Government investigation after the Gunpowder Plot, especially the eyewitness accounts of servants, revealed both connection and affinity. William Ellis, a servant of Sir Everard Digby, reported that Robert Catesby, Thomas Wintour, and Sir Oliver Manners were ‘intimate’ friends of his master.88 A cutler said that when he met with Ambrose Rookwood and Christopher Wright, for whom he made swords, ‘Catesby and Tyrwhitt were often with them.’89 Another witness, William Patrick, stated that a group of men ‘supped’ at his house with Robert Catesby. The group included Lord Mordaunt, Sir Jaslin Percy, kt., Francis Tresham, Thomas Wintour, John Ashfield, Benjamin Johnson, and another man whom Patrick did not know. Two weeks later, Catesby again dined at Patrick’s, 83 TNA SP 15/27/2, f. 60r. 84 TNA SP 15/23, f. 136r; TNA SP 46/57, ff. 9r, 18r–22v, 28r, 40r, 49r, TNA SP 12/150, f. 86r. 85 Miles’s role in this transaction is clear from the counter-bond he received from Catesby, which protected Miles. TNA SP 15/27/2, f. 156r. 86 TNA SP 77/3, f. 32r. 87 TNA SP 14/216/2, f. 191 r. 88 TNA SP 14/216/1, f. 161 r. 89 TNA SP 14/16, f. 27r.

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this time with Percy, Wintour, Edward Bushnell, kt., Sir John Graunte, and Christopher Wright.90 Although Robert Catesby died shortly after the failed plot, his brother Richard remained connected to his cousins from the Whiston line through the 1620s. In 1625 he stood surety for Henry Parker, Lord Morley and Monteagle, the heir of his cousin Elizabeth Tresham Parker, Baroness Morley and Monteagle, which indicates the ties between the Catesbys and Treshams lasted at least through the first quarter of the seventeenth century.91 The outer layers of the Catesby network included their patrons. The Cecils, particularly William, Lord Burghley, and his son, Sir Robert, were the family’s principal patrons.92 Sir William Catesby (d. 1598) might also have had patronage through his uncle, John Catesby, Marshall of Her Majesty’s Bench.93 That is probably the John to whom Sir William and Morris Miles gave bonds to pay £400, but further evidence of patron–client exchange between Sir William and John is lacking. Although the Catesbys are often affiliated with recusancy, the religious trajectory of this family deviates from that of most other recusant Catholic families. Far from being a religious conservative in the mid-Tudor period, as were Sir George Throckmorton, Sir Edward Ferrers, and Sir Thomas Tresham, Sir Richard Catesby dabbled in evangelical ideas that exceeded the crown’s boundaries for reform. In the late 1540s Catesby sued for a pardon for heresy, Lollardy, and various other offenses.94 While his preferences apparently lay with Protestant theology, his son William was a Catholic. In turn, William’s son Robert, although a Catholic, might have tried to conform to the English Church for a short time in the 1590s. Robert’s marriage to Catherine Leigh of Stoneleigh, a Protestant, deviated from the typical marriage patterns of Catholic and recusant families, but is probably explained by Catherine’s large dowry. Robert and Catherine’s children, William and Robert, were baptized Protestants in the mid-1590s, yet the timing of these baptisms, in 1593 and 1595, respectively, was concurrent with Catesby harboring the Jesuits Fr. Garnet and Fr. Gerard. Catesby probably conformed to Protestantism in the interest of marital harmony and preservation of his finances, but he was at the same time becoming more deeply involved in the Jesuit Mission and in the militant wing of English Catholicism.95 90 TNA SP 14/216/2, f. 44 r. 91 TNA SP 17/A, f. 4 r. 92 TNA SP 15/29, f. 114 r. 93 TNA PC 2/14, f. 434 r. 94 Bindoff, The House of Commons, vol. 1, 592. 95 John Gerard, S.J., The Condition of Catholics under James I: Father Gerard’s Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, ed. John Morris, S.J., 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, 1872); Mark Nicholls, ‘Catesby,

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Warwickshire The majority of Warwickshire recusants lived on the west side of the county, in Hemlingford and Barlichway hundreds and overwhelmingly in the Forest of Arden. Most of these families clustered in southern Hemlingford hundred, the northern half of Barlichway hundred, and the extreme southwest of Barlichway hundred, near the Worcestershire border. Post-Reformation kinship and social networks were shaped by geography in similar ways to their late medieval predecessors. The Throckmortons of Coughton were at the center of recusant networks in the county. Even when the family was in residence at Weston Underwood in Buckinghamshire, Coughton Court and the surrounding Throckmorton estates were at the heart of Warwickshire recusancy. Probably because they used Weston Underwood as their primary residence in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Throckmortons’ networks expanded beyond the Warwickshire–Worcestershire borders and the last vestiges of the noble affinities seated at Warwick Castle. As noted above, Catesby landholdings in Warwickshire straddled the border with Northamptonshire but also included estates in the Arden, the adjacent properties of Lapworth and Bushwood. By the early sixteenth century, the Throckmortons of Coughton were one of the most prominent and influential families in Warwickshire and the West Midlands.96 By mid-century Sir George (1489–1552) and his sons had established a veritable empire of office holding in Warwickshire and Worcestershire, assisted by the family’s connection to the Parrs and positions as clients of the Dudleys. In 1550, the Earl of Warwick appointed the sixty-one-year-old Sir George as one of Warwickshire’s deputy lieutenants. Sir George and his fellow deputies, Sir Richard Catesby and Sir Fulke Greville, were chiefly responsible for holding musters and for ensuring the county militia was prepared for immediate response to a crisis.97 A few years later, under Queen Mary, Throckmorton’s son and heir, Sir Robert, was also named deputy lieutenant, along with the substantial gift of the offices of constable of Warwick Castle and constable and steward of the Robert (b. in or after 1572, d. 1605),’ ODNB, accessed 8 March 2019, http://www.oxforddnb.com/ view/article/4883. 96 For a thorough discussion of Sir George Throckmorton’s career in the governing structure of the West Midlands and as a Member of Parliament, see Peter Marshall, ‘Crisis of Allegiance: George Throckmorton and Henry Tudor,’ in Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation, ed. Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 31–67. 97 WRO CR 1998/72/15.

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manor, town, and borough of Warwick.98 By the late 1560s, the senior (and Catholic) branch of the family seated at Coughton was no longer serving in local political office, which left Throckmorton representation in county and borough administration to the Protestant Throckmortons of Haseley, four miles northwest of Warwick. During King James’s reign, around 1610, the Catholic Throckmortons moved back into local office holding. Still, the family did not recapture the mandate they had in county government during the lifetime of Sir George. The Throckmortons of Coughton remained one of the chief families in the Warwickshire social hierarchy despite the weakening of their political authority after Elizabeth I’s accession. The earlier marriage between Sir George and Katherine Vaux introduced the Throckmortons into the kinship network of two of the most powerful courtier families of the early sixteenth century: the Vauxes of Harrowden and the Parrs of Kendal.99 Although the Throckmorton family’s rise into coveted positions at court was related to the ascendancy of their Parr relatives, their Vaux grandfather’s high status at court was probably also a crucial factor in securing position and favor in the first half of the sixteenth century. In fact, it was probably through his stepfather, Sir Nicholas Vaux, that Sir William Parr got his start at court in 1506. By 1532 Parr, as steward to Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond, was in a position to facilitate young Sir Nicholas Throckmorton’s entry into Fitzroy’s household.100 In the 1530s and 1540s Sir Nicholas and Kenelm served in the Parr retinue; when their cousin Catherine Parr wed Henry VIII both Sir Nicholas and Clement served in her royal household. Queen Katherine’s patronage helped to start and maintain Throckmorton sons – particularly those who shared the queen’s Protestant inclinations – in their Parliamentary careers.101 Late in the century, the family’s political authority weakened as Robert and Ambrose Dudley, the Earl of Leicester and the Earl of Warwick, 98 WRO CR 1998/72/16; WRO CR 1998/72/14. 99 Katherine Vaux’s mother, Elizabeth Fitzhugh, first married Sir William Parr of Kendal with whom she had four children. After Parr died in 1483 Elizabeth wed Nicholas, first Baron Vaux, with whom she also had children. Thus, her children with Lord Vaux were half-siblings with her children by Parr. Three of Elizabeth’s grandchildren were Queen Catherine Parr; William, first Marquess of Northampton; and Anne Parr, Countess of Pembroke. The Vaux inheritance, however, descended through a son borne by Lord Vaux’s second wife, Anne Green. Thus, some descendants, such as the Throckmortons, shared a blood relationship with the Parrs, while their Vaux half-siblings by Anne Green were related to the Parrs by marriage. 100 Stanford Lehmberg, ‘Throckmorton, Sir Nicholas (1515/16–1571),’ ODNB, accessed 7 June 2018, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27394; Bindoff, The House of Commons, vol. 3, 60–61, 459. 101 Catherine Parr influenced Sir Nicholas’s return for Maldon, Essex, in 1545, Clement’s election for Devizes, Wiltshire, in Henry VIII’s last Parliament, and Kenelm’s for Westbury, Wiltshire,

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respectively, asserted their dominance over Warwickshire’s power structure. As Cathryn Enis and Glyn Parry have demonstrated, the Dudleys’ ascendancy was built on the destruction of existing political structures. Families with the esteem of the Throckmortons and Ardens posed a threat to the Dudleys’ plans to establish themselves at the center of a resurrected West Midlands affinity reminiscent of the Beauchamp affinity. The Dudleys would have them as clients, but not as competition.102 From the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries, the Throckmortons established networks through marriage, but rarely returned to previous kinship connections that would have maintained the family’s wider kinship and social network. As they had for over a century, the main branch of the family in the sixteenth century sought out the most advantageous marriages and wardships, which led to the exclusion of previous ties. The marriage of Sir Robert’s son Thomas to Margaret Whorwood in 1555 provided a direct kinship connection to the household of the Earl of Warwick, since Margaret’s brother-in-law was Lord Ambrose Dudley, the future Earl of Warwick.103 That tie, in addition to the Hubaud marriage in the previous generations, ensured a bond with the Dudleys that protected the Throckmortons from the worst of the Dudleys’ instincts. As the Dudleys’ kin and clients, the Throckmortons’ political authority was blunted, subsumed into the Dudley clientage and controlled by the Dudley brothers. Sir Robert Throckmorton’s presentment of Hubaud’s uncle Thomas to the parish of Spernall sometime prior to 1588 suggests an ongoing relationship between the families, but does not indicate amicability since it is impossible to know whether that gift came through the bonds of kinship between the Hubauds and Throckmortons or through pressure from the Dudleys.104 Membership in the Dudley kinship network might have buttressed the Throckmortons’ social prominence in Warwickshire

in Edward VI’s first Parliament. Lehmberg, ‘Throckmorton, Sir Nicholas’; Bindoff, The House of Commons, vol. 3, 457–460. 102 Glyn Parry and Cathryn Enis, Shakespeare before Shakespeare: Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and the Elizabethan State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 103 Anne Whorwood Dudley died in 1552, three years before her sister, Margaret, married Thomas Throckmorton. Cathryn Enis, Two Warwickshire Women of Character: Margaret Sheldon (c. 1510–1590) and Margaret Knollys (c. 1549–1606), Dugdale Society Occasional Papers, no. 54 (Stratford-upon-Avon, Warickshire: The Dugdale Society in association with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 2018), 10–12. Ambrose Dudley became Earl of Warwick in 1561. 104 ‘Parishes: Ipsley,’ in A History of the County of Warwick, Volume 3: Barlichway Hundred, ed. Philip Styles (London, 1945), 123–126, British History Online, accessed 17 December 2018, https:// www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/warks/vol3/pp123-126.

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despite the weakening of their political authority, but it did not result in Dudley patronage for political office.105 In the century following the Reformation the Coughton Throckmortons simultaneously broadened and narrowed the scope of their network by expanding ties to additional families, but mainly other Catholic ones. Intermarriages of the Throckmortons with Catholic families throughout the Midlands situated the family in the midst of a powerful Catholic network that extended to the Dacres of Gillesland and the Greystokes in the north and to the Brownes, the Viscounts Montague of Sussex, and the Howard Earls of Arundel in the south.106 These connections offer a glimpse into the geographic scale of the family’s kinship networks. In the mid-sixteenth century kinship ties connected the Throckmortons to two major Warwickshire families, the Catesbys and the Ardens, the latter an ancient Warwickshire family with durable claims to hegemony in the region; the Treshams, whose status in Northamptonshire is discussed above; the Sheldons of Beoley in Worcestershire; and the Whorwoods of Staffordshire and Surrey, who in turn had ties to the Dudley and Grey affinities.107 The marriage of Elizabeth Throckmorton to Sir Thomas Tirringham might have supplied the family with court patronage in the early seventeenth century, since Tirringham was a courtier in personal attendance on King James.108 In the next generation, the family established ties with the Jerninghams, a leading Marian courtier family in Suffolk, the Wilfords, and repeated a tie with the Berkeleys. Thomas and Margaret’s grandson Robert wed Dorothy Fortescue, whose father and grandfather held prominent positions at court and administration despite suspicions about the Fortescue’s religious stance.109 Both men were in the clientage of the Cecil family, which offered the Throckmortons a connection 105 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 3, f. 3r; Lambeth Palace Library (hereafter LPL) Fairhurst Papers 2004, f. 41 r; Adams, Leicester and the Court, 154–164. 106 Henry Jerningham’s mother, Eleanor Dacre Jerningham, was a sister of Magdalen Dacre Browne, Viscountess Montague. Anne Dacre Howard, Countess of Arundel, was Eleanor Dacre’s sister and thus Henry Jerningham’s aunt. For Anne Throckmorton’s marriage to John Digby of Solihull, see WRO CR 1998/Box 72/4. 107 John Dudley, Earl of Northumberland, had the wardships for both of William Whorwood’s heiresses. After Dudley’s death Margaret’s wardship passed to Sir Henry Sidney and subsequently to Sir Robert Throckmorton. Enis, ‘Two Warwickshire Women of Character,’ 11–12. 108 BL Lansdowne MS, vol. 90, f. 163r. 109 Dorothy Fortescue’s father, Sir Francis, was a Knight of the Bath and Member of Parliament for Buckingham in 1592 and 1597 and went as Knight of the Shire in 1600. Her grandfather, Sir John Fortescue, was Chancellor of the Exchequer in the 1590s. Thomas (Fortescue) Lord Clermont, A History of the Family of Fortescue in All Its Branches, 2nd ed. (London: Ellis and White, 1880), 417.

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to another patron. Some of these ties remained in place over generations: in 1654 there was still a steady traffic of messengers between the Throckmorton and Sheldon households, indicating a durable relationship between the families across at least four generations.110 The strategy in these marriages was unmistakable, especially when it linked families through both kinship and geography. Between 1555 and 1557, Anthony Throckmorton married the recently widowed Catherine Willington Catesby. Catherine’s sister, Anne Willington Sheldon, died in 1553. In November 1555, Sheldon’s widower, William, married Margaret Whorwood, who had been widowed for a decade. A few weeks later her daughter, Margaret, around sixteen years of age, married Thomas Throckmorton. Two years later, Ralph Sheldon, William’s heir, married Thomas Throckmorton’s sister, Anne. Cathryn Enis has argued that these marriages were strategic alliances ‘that linked Warwickshire’s richest family with its most influential.’111 The Throckmorton seat at Coughton, the junior branch of the family at Feckenham, Worcestershire, and the Sheldon seat at Beoley, Worcestershire, were all within seven or eight miles of one another, which provided bonds of neighborhood and support and allowed for convenient sociability. Through connections like these, successive generations of Throckmorton patriarchs displayed their normative manhood. Forging ties with the leading families of the Midlands and with families in royal service was a public declaration of a man’s authority over his household and within his community.112 High status marriages of heirs communicated the high status of the family patriarch and affirmed the honor and good reputation of the family, which in turn affirmed the ability of the male head of household to uphold patriarchal norms through sound management of his family and his ability to proclaim his status to others.113 Those marriages also forged significant political ties, which in turn amplified a man’s patriarchal authority and his claim to manhood. Beyond the household, Throckmorton men asserted their manhood through friendships which conveyed their commitment to sociability. Many 110 WRO CR 1998/Carved Box/39/f. 3v. 111 Enis, ‘Two Warwickshire Women of Character,’ 12. 112 As Anthony Fletcher points out, masculinity was focused on ‘marriage and patriarchal control of a household.’ Fletcher, Gender, Sex, and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 88. 113 Elizabeth A. Foyster discusses the role of honor and reputation and the importance of displaying manhood in Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (London: Longman, 1999), 5, 31–32.

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of the Throckmortons’ friendships endured through multiple generations. Interactions with the Parrs continued through at least the late sixteenth century: a Thomas Parr served in Thomas Throckmorton’s household in the 1590s, almost a century after the first connection between the families.114 The family’s papers reveal that in the first half of the seventeenth century the Throckmorton men’s friends included religious conservatives such as the Brudenells of Deene, the Salways of Wellingborough, the Mordaunts of Drayton, the Habingtons of Hindlip (Worcestershire), the Packingtons of Harvington Hall and the Huddlestons of Sawston (Cambridgeshire), and families who were inclined to reform, like the Temples of Burton Dassett, Warwickshire, and Stowe, Buckinghamshire.115 In the early seventeenth century the Throckmortons conveyed land to the Digbys and leased houses to the Wintours, the extended family of Sir George’s daughter Catherine.116 They were embedded enough with the families and networks of radical Catholic antigovernment plotters that their seat at Coughton became a focal point in the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. Similar to other families, the Throckmorton networks grew from careers, common interests, and neighborhood. An unnamed Throckmorton was solicitor to Sir Henry Parker after the latter’s involvement in the Essex Rebellion.117 The men were part of the Throckmorton–Tresham kinship network that blanketed the Midlands; whether both were Catholics is impossible to determine without further identification of which Throckmorton this was, but it confirms a connection between the Throckmortons and Parker Lords Morley and Monteagle. William Willington’s trustees for the lands he would bequeath to his daughter Catherine and her heirs were her father-in-law Sir Robert Throckmorton and Throckmorton’s kinsmen Robert Middlemore and Humphrey Underhill.118 The marriage of John Throckmorton to Agnes Wilford was negotiated while their fathers were in prison following the 114 WRO CR 1998/Box 86, f. 11 r. 115 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 2, f. 16r; WRO CR 1998/LWB, f. 4 r; WRO CR 1998/Carved Box/39/ ff. 3r –6r. The account books of the Packingtons of Harvington Hall, Worcs., probably landed among the Throckmorton Papers after the marriage between the two families in the early eighteenth century; WRO CR 1998/LCB/43r, 44 r; HEHL STT 1938r; HEHL STT 1946r. My thanks to Rosemary O’Day for calling my attention to this document in the Temple Papers in the Henry E. Huntington Library, and to the friendship that existed between the Throckmorton and Temple families. 116 Birmingham City Archives MS 3888/A 1012r & 1013r. 117 Acts of the Privy Council of England: New Series, ed. John Roche Dascent et al., vol. 31 (London: Printed for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office by Eyre and Spottiswode, 1890–1964) (hereafter APC), 210. 118 TNA SP 15/7, f. 109r.

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Armada.119 Female relatives might have been involved in the discussions but it appears that in this case the imprisoned men, keen to make a match with other notable recusant families, passed the time in prison with some of the same kinds of work they would have done from their domiciles. These relationships were augmented through wardship and education. As noted above, Sir Thomas Tresham and Sir William Catesby were raised in the Throckmorton household in the mid-sixteenth century as wards of Sir Robert Throckmorton. Sir Robert sent his daughter Muriel to the second Countess of Huntingdon, Katherine Pole Hastings, in the 1550s. In the early seventeenth century Thomas Throckmorton’s grandchildren Thomas and Margaret were raised in the household of their maternal grandparents, the Wilfords, while their brother Robert lived with his in-laws, the Fortescues at Salden.120 The Throckmorton network in the early sixteenth century benefited the family’s wards as well as their own children. After Henry Ferrers of Baddesley Clinton died in 1526, Elizabeth, Lady Englefield, purchased the wardship of his young son, Edward.121 Lady Englef ield, the sister of Sir George Throckmorton and the sister-in-law of Katherine Vaux, would have had her family’s networks available for the promotion of her young ward as well as for her own children. S.T. Bindoff speculates that young Edward might have followed the same educational trajectory as did Throckmorton sons, including studies at the Middle Temple, but it is equally probable that Edward was privately educated with Lady Englefield’s son, Francis, especially since the two young men were nearly the same age.122 The recent royal marriage of the Throckmortons’ kinswoman, Catherine Parr, might have helped Ferrers to begin his career at court, but Lady Englefield could just as easily have facilitated her ward’s entrée at court using her Vaux or Englefield connections. In any event, Edward, along with George Throckmorton, was 119 Jan Broadway, ‘Agnes Throckmorton: A Jacobean Recusant Widow,’ in Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation, ed. Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 128. 120 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 3, f. 26v. 121 Sir Edward Ferrers acquired Baddesley Clinton from Nicholas Brome in the early sixteenth century as part of a marriage settlement between Ferrers and Brome’s daughter, Constance. Constance was coheir with her sister, Isabel, who married one Morrow. Isabel’s daughter, Dorothy, married Francis Cokayne. The Cokaynes and Ferrers appear on one another’s legal documents into the seventeenth century. ‘Parishes: Baddesley Clinton,’ in A History of the County of Warwick, Volume 4: Hemlingford Hundred, ed. L.F. Salzman (London, 1947), 13–19, British History Online, accessed 11 March 2021, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/warks/vol4/pp13-19. 122 Bindoff, The House of Commons, vol. 2, 128; A.J. Loomie, ‘Englefield, Sir Francis (1522–1596),’ ODNB, 19 March 2017, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/8811.

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at court briefly around the age of twenty, as steward of the chamber by 1545 and as a gentleman pensioner by 1549.123 He went to Parliament for Warwick in 1553 and sat as justice of the peace for Warwickshire in 1555, after which he did not hold even minor local offices.124 The last appearance he made on the national stage was as a gentleman pensioner at Mary I’s funeral. The Ferrerses’ network was formed through service, wardship, friendship, and marriage and was not as narrow as were many Catholic kinship and social networks. In addition to the powerful connections Ferrers had through his relationships with the Throckmortons and Englefields, the marriage of his aunt Anne to Valentine Knightley connected him to the Puritan Knightleys of Fawsley, Northamptonshire, and by extension to their friends, the Puritan Montagus of Boughton and the Hastingses of Leicestershire, family of the earls of Huntingdon.125 Edward Ferrers’s marriage in 1548 to Bridget Windsor, daughter of William, second Baron Windsor, introduced him to the social networks of his wife’s noble family. After Ferrers died in 1564 his widow Bridget wed a family friend, Andrew Ognall, who subsequently purchased the wardship of Ferrers’s heir, Henry (b. 1550).126 The Ognalls were supportive members of Henry Ferrers’s network throughout his life. Even with robust supportive kinship and social ties, Sir Edward Ferrers’s financial problems prevented further advancement and undermined his manhood. Despite his connections and his landholdings, Sir Edward remained plagued by financial difficulties throughout his life, perhaps an indication that he was not as skilled in the art of estate consolidation and estate management as were some of his contemporaries, such as the Treshams or the Brudenells. As Alexandra Shepard has observed, economic independence and financial responsibility were critical aspects of early modern manhood.127 Whether his poor estate mismanagement, religious conservatism, or his ties to the domestic and exile Catholic communities, including the recusant Throckmortons and Englefields, Ferrers’s multiple difficulties prevented a successful political career. 123 According to Bindoff, Ferrers’s title as gentleman pensioner lasted from 1549 until his death in 1564. He was not, however, in attendance at court throughout that period. His chief duties were as a mourner at the funerals of both Edward VI and Mary I. Bindoff, The House of Commons, vol. 2, 128. 124 TNA SP 11/5, ff. 53r, 53v. 125 Cross, Letters of Sir Francis Hastings, xviii; W.J. Sheils, ‘Knightley, Sir Richard (1533–1615),’ ODNB, accessed 22 March 2017, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/15744. 126 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (hereafter SBT) DR 3/316r. Ognall must have been a family friend prior to Sir Edward’s death; he witnessed Ferrers’s agreements as late as December 1563, several months prior to Sir Edward’s death in 1564. 127 Shepard, ‘Manhood, Credit, and Patriarchy,’ 96.

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Sir Edward’s son, Henry, created alternate forms of manhood both in his careers and in his networks. Alongside a career in local administration, Henry used his legal training to develop expertise as an antiquarian and local historian. After studying law at the Middle Temple, Henry built a reputation as an authority on the history of his home county, Warwickshire.128 The core of his network was made up of his friends and fellow antiquarians, including William Dugdale.129 Ferrers was so well regarded as an authority on Warwickshire history that Dugdale once accepted Ferrers’s report of an event rather than researching it for himself.130 Dugdale’s trust of Ferrers’s knowledge testif ied to the latter’s skill and good name. It represented a rare deviation from Dugdale’s otherwise strict adherence to a rigorous methodology of building his historical accounts from documented sources he could cite, which led to his good reputation as an antiquarian. Although Ferrers was never presented for recusancy, recusants featured prominently in his networks and could have endangered both his reputation and his claim to manliness. On at least two occasions Henry Ferrers rented his properties to Catholics inclined to sedition: in the early 1590s he leased the family seat at Baddesley Clinton to Anne Vaux and Eleanor Vaux Brokesby and in 1604 he rented his London house situated next door to the Houses of Parliament to Thomas Percy, one of the architects of the Gunpowder Plot the following year. Baddesley Clinton was subject to a raid at least once, in 1591 during the Vaux–Brokesby tenancy, due to local reports of Jesuit activity in the household.131 Jan Broadway has argued that Henry’s diary indicates that he was religiously conservative yet it is not clear whether he was a practicing Catholic.132 He held public offices late into Elizabeth’s reign. In 1582 Henry wed Jane White. Jane died four years later but the couple had

128 Jan Broadway, ‘Ferrers, Henry (1550–1633),’ ODNB, accessed 22 March 2017, http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/9362. 129 Broadway, ‘Ferrers, Henry’; Jan Broadway, ‘Aberrant Accounts: William Dugdale’s Handling of Two Tudor Murders in The Antiquities of Warwickshire,’ Midland History 33, no. 1 (2008): 5. Dugdale’s willingness to deviate from his usual method underscores the excellent reputation and store of credit that Ferrers had built in the community of antiquarians. 130 Broadway, ‘Aberrant Accounts,’ 5. Dugdale’s willingness to deviate from his usual method underscores the excellent reputation and store of credit that Ferrers had built in the community of antiquarians. 131 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 186–192; Stonyhurst College, Anglia MS I, f. 73r,v; John Gerard, S.J., The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, trans. Philip Caraman (London: Longmans, 1955), 108. 132 Broadway, ‘Ferrers, Henry’; Henry Ferrers’s diary, along with other personal papers, is included in BL Add. MS 4102.

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at least two surviving children, Edward and Mary. The family still held the advowson of the Baddesley Clinton parish living in 1643, despite suspicions over their religion.133 The Ferrerses’ connection with the Bromes of Brome Court, Warwickshire, began with the marriage of Henry’s great-grandparents, Sir Edward Ferrers and Constance Brome, very early in the sixteenth century. It was a durable relationship. Well past Constance Brome Ferrers’s death in 1551 the families continued to lease land to one another, stood surety for one another, and witnessed each other’s legal documents. In fact, it seems that the Bromes and their descendants, the Cokaynes, regularly rescued the Ferrerses from financial collapse into the early seventeenth century.134 Henry Ferrers’s circle of friends and supporters included his brothers-in-law John Wilkinson and John Ferrers of Fiddington; the family of his stepfather, Andrew Ognall; the Catholic Throckmortons of Coughton; and antiquarians such as William Dugdale.135 Although the Baddesley Clinton Ferrerses were cousins to the Ferrerses of Tamworth (on the Warwickshire–Staffordshire border), extant evidence does not reveal much contact between the two branches of the family. They do not appear as witnesses for each other’s wills or other legal documents, nor in correspondence. The two branches of the family had some friends and relations in common, such as Edward Oldnall and their cousins Francis, Dorothy, and Edward Cokayne; these names appear as mortgage holders and as witnesses to various legal documents for both branches of the family, suggesting that the two branches of the family were part of each other’s networks. Without more detail, however, the nature of their relationships is unclear.136 The Tamworth Ferrerses 133 SBT DR 3/757r. 134 The Bromes and Cokaynes held mortgages and stood surety for the Ferrerses into the second decade of the seventeenth century. In 1595 George Brome and Walter Gifford stood surety for their cousin, Henry Ferrers; Walter Gifford did the same f ifteen years later. In 1609 Stephan Brome witnessed one of Henry Ferrers’s leases. SBT DR 3/554; SBT DR 3/340; SBT DR 3/337; SBT DR 3/360; SBT DR 3/361. John Fox, ‘The Bromes of Holton Hall: A Forgotten Recusant Family,’ Oxoniensia 68 (2003): 69–88. 135 John Wilkinson witnessed several of Henry’s legal documents in the early years of the seventeenth century, SBT DR 3/572. John Ferrers of Fiddington paid an annuity to Henry and his son Edward (b. 1585) in 1616, and made them a loan that same year, SBT DR 3/377 at 333; SBT DR 3/378. For the Throckmortons, see WRO CR/2981/Dining Room/Wooden Chest/Box 7/Box 22, f. 15r,v. 136 SBT DR 3/367; SBT DR 3/613; SBT DR 3/466; NRO C 2063. In 1578 Humphrey Ferrers of ­Tamworth and Thomas Cokayne were cofeoffees of the Warwickshire manor of Stivichall, SBT DR 10/2549.

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shared a closer connection with the Throckmortons of Haseley than they did with their Baddesley Clinton cousins, perhaps a reflection of the shared religious sensibilities between the Ferrerses of Tamworth and the Throckmortons of Haseley, who were both Protestant. The lack of a relationship between the Tamworth and Baddesley Clinton Ferrerses might have been a product of divergent religious beliefs but it just as equally could have been related to other factors. The marriage between the Baddesley Clinton and Fiddington lines indicates connection within the kinship group, and there might have been similar degrees of affinity between those family members and the Tamworth line as well. If the two main branches of this family did not remain connected, that is an exception among the other families in this study, even those whose members disagreed on doctrinal matters.

Women’s Networks Women formed networks that were distinct from the networks of their natal families, but that augmented those family networks and supported the family’s patronage activities as patrons and clients. These networks, although largely formed independently from the masculine family networks, were part of a family’s coordinated strategy to maintain or grow their wealth and status, and to provide women their own networks of power.137 Networks provided women with friendship, emotional support, and material support. Women’s networks were arranged horizontally in the same generation, although with some vertical structure that joined generations. These networks integrated other women in a local community, across social levels, for distinct purposes; local women skilled at delivering babies, for example, would have been part of every woman’s network, although the strength of individual ties would have varied. Women’s networks reveal formation and maintenance horizontally: across the sibling group, including cousins and the extended sibling group created by marriages; through friendships; and with women and men in the local community. The vertical structure of women’s networks tied generations to one another through bonds of kinship, godparentage, and local affinity. This vertical arrangement was strongest within the living generations; as time passed strong bonds were 137 Fabian Persson discusses these dynamics in women’s networks in Swedish courts. Fabian Persson, Women at the Early Modern Swedish Court: Power, Risk, and Opportunity (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021), 36–37.

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acknowledged by being absorbed into the larger family group, which in turn enhanced the compass of the kinship group. Catholic women relied on networks for companionship, protection, and survival. Nuns displaced from their convents in the early Reformation period or conspirators’ widows following the Gunpowder Plot, for instance, depended on the hospitality and care of the women and men in their networks. When Syon Abbey was dissolved, Clemence Tresham and two other nuns probably set up a fledgling community under the direction of Richard Whytford, in the home of the fourth Lord Mountjoy. On Whytford’s death, Tresham retired to the family estate at Rushton to live with her recently widowed brother, Sir Thomas Tresham, Prior of St. John of Jerusalem.138 Female networks also contributed to the protection of Catholic priests and the ability of the women who protected them to create a secure household and safe networks of support. Catholic women relied on the networks they created to foster and maintain relationships with other women (and sometimes men) whose social status, influence, and connections could help a woman to protect family members, property, and livelihood. It was to those patrons, who were usually drawn from within a woman’s network, that she directed her petitions. A woman’s parents began the important work of formal network formation during her infancy and girlhood, with the selection of her godparents. Her network expanded as she grew older, as she made connections with peers her own age and with older women who acted as mentors and patronesses as she grew into adulthood. Never-married women primarily relied on their parents and a lateral network of siblings and cousins.139 Married women constructed new and emotionally powerful ties with the husband’s family, thereby further enlarging a woman’s network. Such networks helped women in their daily work as keepers of grand households: in activities that ranged from mundane tasks such as securing provisions for the household to highly sensitive and charged political situations such as petitioning a male relative out of prison or securing his pardon for a capital crime. All women, regardless of status, had networks that afforded them friendship and both moral and material support. The friendships that women formed with one another were laden with emotional importance and with material and political 138 Audrey Butler, ‘Clemence Tresham, of Rushton and Syon,’ Northamptonshire Past and Present 5, no. 2 (1974): 92. Either Clemence’s brother or her great-nephew built a house for her next to Rushton St. Peter church. That house, later used as a parsonage, was destroyed along with the church in 1799. 139 Amy Froide, Never Married: Singlewomen in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 45–52.

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significance.140 For Catholic women these networks were vital, since they risked social marginalization in their local communities as a result of their religious affiliation, particularly in times of political crisis. Women inhabited networks of friends, relatives, and patrons that overlapped but did not replicate the networks of their natal families. Therefore, female networks augmented the connections of a woman’s family and provided additional resources for the administration of daily life and during times of crisis. These relationships were more than patronage connections or relationships of convenience. Female networks provided English gentlewomen and noblewomen with the same kinds of mutual support and protection that Bernard Capp has observed in the networks formed by women of middling and lesser status.141 The friendships that comprised significant components of an aristocratic woman’s network were important social and political connections for themselves and for their wider family groups.142 The populations within women’s networks can be divided into five main categories: godparents; the women with whom a woman was raised; the girls a woman raised; a woman’s natal and marital relatives; and her friends. The women who surrounded a mother during her lying-in and who continued to offer support to the new parents were the first step in a young girl’s network formation. These informal ties joined with the formal ties created by the godparents her parents selected. An invitation to stand as godparent was a sign of honor, an indication that the parents considered an individual honorable enough to take on the serious responsibility of spiritual guardianship of their child.143 The selection of godparents indicated ample social credit between a child’s parents and the individuals they asked to stand as their child’s spiritual guardians and therefore 140 Barbara J. Harris, ‘Sisterhood, Friendship and the Power of English Aristocratic Women, 1450–1550,’ in Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 22; Amanda Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014). 141 Bernard S. Capp, When Gossips Meet: Women, Family and Neighborhood in Early Modern England (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 284. 142 Harris, ‘Sisterhood, Friendship and the Power of English Aristocratic Women,’ 22. 143 Rosemary O’Day, The Family and Family Relationships, 1500–1900: England, France, and the United States of America (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1994), 73; Rosemary O’Day, Cassandra Brydges, Duchess of Chandos, 1670–1735: Life and Letters (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2007), 60; Rosemary O’Day, An Elite Family in Early Modern England: The Temples of Stowe and Burton Dassett, 1570–1656 (Woodbridge, Suffolk: Boydell Press, 2018), 149, 271; David Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death: Ritual, Religion and the Life-cycle in Tudor and Stuart England (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 157.

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illuminates both family and female network ties.144 English gentry and noble babies traditionally had three (or occasionally, four) godparents; two were the same sex as the child. One of those same-sex godparents, often a grandparent, decided the child’s name and commonly gave the child the godparent’s own name.145 This explains the abundance of young Muriels in the larger network inhabited by Muriel Tresham. Between 1562 and 1572, five female infants were christened Muriel in the parishes of Rushton St. Peter and Rushton All Saints.146 At least three of the infants’ families (Russell, Alderman, and Vaux) were related to the Treshams; two others, Booll and Vavasour, were servants of the family. Within the immediate family group, Lady Tresham was godmother to at least two nieces, Muriel Throckmorton (b. 1560) and Muriel Vaux (b. 1570).147 Within the larger family group that lived on manors east of Rushton, from Newton to Benefield, other young girls named Muriel were either Lady Tresham’s namesakes or goddaughters, or perhaps both.148 Godparenting fortified the bonds between families and the bonds within a woman’s network. Naming patterns suggest strong vertical ties, especially across multiple generations of women. For example, within the Tresham family, five generations of Isabels between the early fifteenth century and the mid-sixteenth century indicate strong intergenerational ties. Those connections are also visible between nonbiological, or step-parents such as Sir Thomas (d. 1559) and Lettice Tresham’s godparentage of their grandchildren by William Tresham and Elizabeth Lee; the infants were christened Thomas

144 O’Day, Cassandra Brydges, 60; Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, 157–158. 145 Harris, ‘Sisterhood, Friendship and the Power of English Aristocratic Women,’ 23; Heal and Holmes, The Gentry, 95; Cressy, Birth, Marriage and Death, 150. Cressy noted that in the Stuart period a child sometimes had four godparents, two of each sex. 146 Rushton St. Peter was the parish attached to the manor of Rushton, the Treshams’ seat. Rushton All Saints was the village church. The parishes and their records were officially combined in the late eighteenth century. 147 The baptismal records for the parishes of Rushton All Saints and Rushton St. Peter indicate that infant girls were named by or for Muriel approximately every two years between 1562 and 1572, with the exception of 1566. The twelve-year gap between 1572 and 1584 could indicate that the Treshams spent most of their time away from the manor during that period. After 1605, when Sir Thomas had died and Lady Tresham had moved to her dower house, the name Muriel ceases to appear in baptismal records. Muriel Tresham might not have been godmother to all of them, but the frequency of the name suggests that naming and/or godparentage was used as a means to strengthen patron–client relationships between the Treshams and their tenants. P.A.F. Stephenson, ed., The Parish Register of Rushton (Northamptonshire), 1538–1837 (Leeds: John Whitehead and Son, 1929). 148 Will of Thomas Tresham of Newton, TNA PROB 11/128/555.

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and Lettice.149 The close relationship between Muriel Tresham and her sisterin-law, Mary, Baroness Vaux, is evident through their godparentage of each other’s children. Tresham’s daughter Mary (b. 1578) was Vaux’s goddaughter and namesake, and Vaux’s daughter Muriel was Tresham’s goddaughter.150 Vaux must have been godmother to her son George’s daughter, Mary; her bequest to Mary was the largest of any bequests to her grandchildren.151 The singlewoman Mary Throckmorton of Feckenham was godmother to her niece, Mary Wigmore.152 Margaret Sheldon was godmother to at least one namesake, Margaret Anderson, the daughter of Sheldon’s servant Richard Anderson.153 Lettice Shirley, the daughter of Dorothy Devereux Shirley and Sir Henry Shirley, was undoubtedly named for her maternal grandmother, Lettice Devereux Dudley, Countess of Essex.154 Even when godmothers did not christen a same-sex child with their name, evidence of the relationship is often visible in wills. Barbara Harris found that goddaughters were ‘among the most common legatees outside the circle of close relatives who received the great majority of women’s benefactions.’155 The legacies Catholic women left in their wills provide further evidence of their networks. Women usually left legacies to their natal sisters, children, goddaughters, servants, and sometimes to their nieces or grandchildren. Mary Throckmorton, whose brother Francis masterminded the Throckmorton Plot, left legacies to her mother, her sister Ann Wigmore, her sister-in-law Anne (Francis’s widow), and her brothers Thomas and George.156 Margaret Sheldon (d. 1589) left bequests to nearly all of her Throckmorton granddaughters. Her largest bequests were to the two eldest, Muriel Berkeley and Elizabeth Griff ith. Their younger sisters received combinations of money and goods – even her grandson’s wife Agnes received a kirtle. The only granddaughter explicitly excluded was Margaret Griffin, which could 149 The female prenom Lettice continued down the Tresham of Benef ield and Tresham of Newton lines, but did not cross into the Rushton line. 150 Will of Mary, Baroness Vaux, TNA PROB 11/92/52. 151 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 231. 152 Will of Mary Throckmorton, TNA PROB 11/70/92. 153 WRO CR 1998/Box 73/5r. 154 Arthur Collins, The Peerage of England: Containing a Genealogical and Historical Account of All the Peers of That Kingdom […], vol. 4, 5th ed. (London: Strahan, 1779), 273. 155 Harris, ‘Sisterhood, Friendship and the Power of English Aristocratic Women,’ 23–24. Martha Howell, writing about women’s alliances in France, argues that women’s networks or alliances can be traced through their wills. Martha Howell, ‘Fixing Moveables: Gifts by Testament in Late Medieval Douai,’ Past & Present 150 (1996): 3–45. 156 Arthur Crisp, Abstracts of Somersetshire Wills, Copied from the Manuscript Collection of the Late Rev. Frederick Brown, vol. 4 (privately printed for F.A. Crisp, 1889), 41.

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have been the result of an ongoing dispute between Griffin’s husband and natal family over property attached to her marriage portion – a dispute in which Margaret Griffin sided with her husband over her natural kin.157 Mary, Baroness Vaux (d. 1597), left £300 to her granddaughter and goddaughter Mary; £200 to her grandson William; £100 to each of her three younger grandchildren; 500 marks to two of her own children, Ambrose and Muriel; and her coach, coach horses, and their furniture to her friend and sister-in-law Muriel Tresham.158 Margaret Throckmorton (d. 1607) left bequests to her daughters and two of her servants.159 Muriel Tresham (d. 1611) named only one grandchild in her will, although by the time she died she had at least four granddaughters and one grandson.160 She bequeathed £200, her ‘Cabinet’ and its contents to her six-year-old granddaughter Catherine Parker, whom she affectionately called Cate.161 Bequests of this nature emphasize the connections that existed across generations in female networks. Susan James has demonstrated that bequests like these were not a symptom of duty, but an intentional means by which women ‘achieve[d] personal goals.’162 A gentry or noble girl inhabited a network populated by aunts, sisters, cousins, sisters-in-law, other girls raised in her natal household, and the girls she met during her education. A girl’s experience in the household to which she was sent for education or service was a critical factor in the construction of female networks, in part because the relationships she formed could, with proper attention, sustain her throughout her life.163 A girl’s parents decided on the household in which their daughter would be educated, but once she arrived in that household much of the work 157 WRO CR 1998/CD/Folder 52, f. 7r; WRO CR 1998/CD/Folder 52, f. 9r; Will of Margaret Sheldon, TNA PROB 11/75/190. 158 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 231. Vaux’s son Ambrose was a spendthrift and in general a disappointment; her daughter Muriel, who had once been the favorite of her aunt and uncle, Muriel and Sir Thomas Tresham, secretly married a Tresham servant in 1597, then spent several years attempting to defraud Tresham into a double-payment of her marriage portion. Judging from Vaux’s bequest to her daughter the two still had a strained relationship. 159 WRO CR 1998/46EB. 160 Elizabeth and Lucy Tresham were born between 1594 and 1598. Frances Parker, Cate’s physically disabled sister, was born in 1606. See Hamilton, The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses, 29. 161 Will of Muriel Tresham, TNA PROB 11/127/1 (1611). Catherine Parker was probably Muriel’s goddaughter, since she is the only grandchild to whom Muriel left a bequest. 162 Susan E. James, Women’s Voices in Tudor Wills, 1485–1603: Authority, Influence and Material Culture (Aldershot, Hampshire, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2015), 8. 163 Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 1550–1720 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 232.

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involved with making attachments was up to her. In the mid-sixteenth century Muriel Throckmorton Tresham was raised in the household of the second Earl of Huntingdon, under the supervision of the Catholic second Countess of Huntingdon, Katherine Pole Hastings. She spent her formative years with the other girls in the Huntingdon household: the Countess’s daughter Elizabeth Hastings (and perhaps also her sisters Frances, Anne, and Mary), and Elizabeth, Lady Herbert, a cousin of the Hastingses.164 These relationships were valuable to Tresham throughout her adulthood. Elizabeth Hastings’s marriage made her the Countess of Worcester; both she and Lady Herbert were sources of patronage when Tresham’s husband was in prison.165 Years later, Tresham had girls in service in her own household. In the 1580s, Mistress Katherine Dymocke was part of Tresham’s household and her continually expanding network.166 Henry, Eleanor, Elizabeth, and Anne Vaux were raised and educated in the household of their maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Hastings Beaumont, from 1571 to 1581.167 While there they may have come into contact with children in the household of the Beaumonts’ cousins at Cole Orton, including their young cousin Mary, later the Countess of Buckingham, and also with the extended Hastings network, of which their grandmother was a part.168 Although these early experiences were instrumental in network formation for young women, Catholic families that had endured regular prosecution for recusancy or feared a resurgence of that prosecution either chose not to send their daughters into other households at all or placed them into households with whom they had an intimate and, usually, a natal connection. Persecution encouraged families to turn inward, to family members and fellow Catholics in their networks, rather than outward to the most advantageous placement they could secure. The Treshams of Rushton, for instance, kept their girls at home in the 1580s and 1590s. This might have been due to some financial retrenchment, but it might have also reflected a desire to keep the family together while Sir Thomas was imprisoned and 164 BL Add. MS 39828, ff. 75r, 87r,v (HMCV, 26–27, 30–32). The Countesses of Huntington reared many young aristocrats. The third countess, Katherine Dudley Hastings, for example, raised Margaret Dakins (later Lady Margaret Hoby) and three of the Devereux children: Walter, Penelope, and Dorothy. Cross, The Puritan Earl, 60. 165 BL Add. MS 39828, f. 75r, 87r,v, 88r (HMCV, 26–27, 30–32). 166 TNA SP 12/172/113, f. 169r. Dymock might have been Lady Tresham’s cousin, the daughter of Mary Hussey and Humphrey Dymock. She might also have been the Katherine Dymock who married Thomas Tresham of Newton, a cousin of Lady Tresham’s husband. 167 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 108. 168 David L. Smith, ‘Villiers [née Beaumont], Mary suo jure Countess of Buckingham (c. 1570–1632),’ ODNB, accessed 24 March 2017, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/92425.

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to maintain as much control as possible over their children’s upbringing. The Treshams placed their heir, Francis, in the household of the Catholic Earl and Countess of Worcester. Even if the Treshams could have secured a place for their daughters with Lady Tresham’s aunt, the Countess of Bedford, Bedford’s Puritan leanings would have been a significant impediment. That arrangement would have virtually ensured that the Tresham girls would have become Protestants. Regardless of their reasons for keeping most of their children at home, the Treshams reflect a growing trend among late-sixteenth-century elite families: the decline of ‘fostering’ one’s children out to other households.169 A family’s preference for placing their children with other members of the family network might also have been a condition of their social status. The status of the Throckmortons of Coughton was by the early seventeenth century considerably weakened from its zenith in the middle third of the sixteenth century. In the early seventeenth century, the young widow Agnes Wilford Throckmorton of Moor Hall sent one of her daughters to her in-laws, Thomas and Margaret Throckmorton, and another, Margaret, to her cousins Sir William and Margaret Roper.170 The family’s decline in status meant that by the early seventeenth century they were probably roughly equivalent to the status of the Protestant Newdigates of Arbury Hall, Warwickshire. The Newdigates moved their children between the various households of their family network. Their daughters were at as many as five households prior to their mother’s death in 1618: an aunt’s household at Perton, an uncle’s household at Gawsworth, and in the households of the Brereton, Fitton, and Holcroft families.171 These kinds of placements would have strengthened the bonds of family in a woman’s network, but they would not have done much to introduce a young woman to the kinds of connections she would need in adulthood, particularly the kinds of relationships Muriel Tresham had the opportunity to form with future patronesses. Consequently, diminished status resulted in diminished access to and power in a patron–client network. Women further expanded their networks when, as mistresses of their own households, they took into service children of other families, thereby 169 Susan Bridgen, New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485–1603 (London; New York: Penguin, 2000), 75. Bridgen notes that this practice endured in Ireland during the sixteenth century even as it declined in England. 170 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 1, f. 2r; Broadway, ‘Agnes Throckmorton,’ 138. 171 Vivienne Larminie, ‘The Lifestyle and Attitudes of the Seventeenth-Century Gentleman, with Special Reference to the Newdigates of Arbury Hall, Warwickshire’ (PhD diss., University of Birmingham, 1980), 302.

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reinforcing relationships with families both lower and higher on the social scale. In the 1580s and 1590s Lady Muriel Tresham had in service the daughters of the Vavasours and the Parkers. The Vavasours were a recusant family and the Treshams’ most trusted servants. Muriel Vavasour, daughter of Sir Thomas Tresham’s agent Thomas Vavasour, was a friend and companion of Tresham’s daughter Elizabeth, Lady Monteagle, and by 1589 was in service as her gentlewoman.172 A few years later, despite ongoing squabbles with Sir Thomas Tresham over the young Lady Monteagle’s jointure, Edward Parker, twelfth Baron Morley, and his wife, Elizabeth Stanley, Baroness Monteagle, sent their eldest daughter ‘to the Lady Tresame to remayne ther with her.’173 In 1607 Margaret Throckmorton had in service at Weston Underwood Mistress Catherine Bickerson, a relation of a former Throckmorton servant; one of her granddaughters; and William Jerningham, her daughter Eleanor’s young brother-in-law.174 After Margaret’s death in May of that year, their instruction probably continued under the direction of Margaret’s singlewoman daughter Mary, the new mistress of the house. This manner of network formation was not tied to religion, but to status; the Newdigates of Arbury Hall displayed similar placement habits: when Anne Newdigate died in 1618, her three daughters went to live with the family of her former servants, the Salters, at Daventry.175 When women took into service the offspring of long-term trusted and loyal servants, such as the Treshams did with the Vavasours, the bonds between the families strengthened and thereby augmented the networks of both the employer and the servant. Catherine Bickerson, who was with the Throckmortons at Weston Underwood in 1607 was probably a relation of Margaret Sheldon’s servant Elizabeth Bickerson and Thomas and Margaret’s servant Thomas Bickerson, who was in service in the early 1590s.176 Sheldon’s will indicates that she had been especially fond of Elizabeth; when the woman married another of Sheldon’s servants in 1589, Sheldon amended her will to provide both Elizabeth and her husband, Robert Large, enough 172 BL Add. MS 39828, f. 133v (HMCV, 50). 173 BL Add. MS 39828, f. 286v (HMCV, 89); Mark Nicholls, ‘Parker, William, Thirteenth Baron Morley and Fifth or First Baron Monteagle (1574/5–1622),’ ODNB, accessed 24 March 2017, http:// www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21345. 174 WRO CR 1998/Box 82/a note of servants kept at Weston, 9 January 1607 (not foliated). Bickerson was identified only as ‘Mistress Bickerson’ in this document but is named in full in Thomas Throckmorton’s will. WRO CR 1998/Box 73/3b, 12 January 1611. 175 Larminie, ‘The Lifestyle and Attitudes of the Seventeenth-Century Gentleman,’ 184. 176 TNA SP 12/243, f. 212r. Elizabeth Bickerson was still living at Coughton when she died in 1620. E.A. Fry, ed., Calendar of Wills and Administrations in the Consistory Court of the Bishop of Worcester, vol. 2 (Nendeln: Kraus Reprint, 1968), 97.

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material goods and property to give them a f irm foundation on which to build their married life.177 Both Margaret and Thomas Throckmorton left legacies to Catherine Bickerson in the early seventeenth century. For Sara Mendelson and Patricia Crawford, such bequests indicate that a true friendship had developed between mistress and servant.178 The presence of Bickerson women in service to members of the Throckmorton network in the 1580s and again two decades later indicates that the Throckmorton and Bickerson women were friendly and part of one another’s networks despite the different places each occupied on the social scale. In households of mixed religious confessionalization the fostering-in of extended family members could simultaneously provide a woman the support of her network and exacerbate strained family relationships. Throughout her difficult marriage, the Puritan-leaning Agnes Brudenell received her Topcliffe relatives at her marital home at Deene Park, the Brudenell family seat and favorite home of her husband, the Catholic Sir Edmund. The most notorious of the Topcliffes was Agnes’s cousin Richard, who in the 1580s and 1590s was a ruthless persecutor of Catholic laity and priests. Agnes had raised Topcliffe; she oversaw his education in the 1540s and provided him with an annuity throughout his adulthood.179 Both of them disliked Agnes’s husband. That common bond, in addition to Topcliffe’s desire to lay claim to some of Agnes’s lands, kept him firmly situated in her network.180 Topcliffe might have relished the opportunity to have Brudenell convicted for recusancy or priest-harboring and weaken his hold on Agnes’s lands, but he could not risk a raid on the Brudenell household at Deene, which would embarrass his aunt and perhaps endanger his annuity and any possibility that he might benefit from her will.181 The Topcliffes had been part of Agnes’s network since she was a young woman; her cousins Anne and Catherine Topcliffe had been educated in the household of their kinswoman, Agnes’s mother, Lady Neville, and Anne Topcliffe had married Thomas Brudenell, Agnes’s brother-in-law.182 Religious affiliation did not dissuade kinswomen from being part of one another’s networks. Mothers, natal sisters, sisters-in-law, daughters, aunts, nieces, and grandmothers appear in all of the networks for which extant 177 WRO CR 1998/Box 73/5r. 178 Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 105. 179 Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 71–72. 180 Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 71–82. 181 Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 72. 182 Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion, and Education in Early Modern England (London; New York: Routledge, 1999), 127.

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evidence allows reconstruction. Agnes Brudenell’s mother, Lady Neville, lived with Agnes and her husband after Anthony Neville’s death. Agnes and her sister-in-law and cousin, Anne Topcliffe Brudenell, visited one another regularly; Anne spent long stretches of time as Agnes’s houseguest each year.183 Margaret Throckmorton and her mother, Margaret Whorwood Sheldon, both Catholics, remained close especially after Sheldon was widowed in 1570. Throckmorton cosigned (with her husband, Thomas, and son, Sir John) land transactions that benefited her mother in her widowhood and was one of the executors named in her will, both of which are a clear indication that Margaret, and not simply the male members of her marital family, was an active participant in caring for her aging mother.184 Muriel Tresham remained close with her natal sisters, her own daughters, and her daughter-in-law Anne Tufton Tresham. At least one kinswoman lay in and delivered her baby in Muriel’s household: her daughter Mary Brudenell lay in and delivered her eldest son, Robert, at Lyveden in 1607.185 Recusant women carried out regular visits with other women in their networks, even after the legislation of 1593 restricted their movements by requiring them to secure licenses to travel. Tresham’s daughters visited one another in adulthood, even when their marriages geographically separated them. Tresham’s daughters Elizabeth, Lady Monteagle, and Catherine Webb visited their sister, Frances, Lady Stourton, in the summer of 1601.186 Monteagle’s seat at Great Hallingbury, Essex, was nearly 150 miles distant from Stourton’s seat at Stourton, Wiltshire. Lady Tresham was especially close to her husband’s sister, Mary, Baroness Vaux, whom she counted among her closest friends. The close geographical proximity of around ten miles between the Tresham and Vaux households would have allowed for frequent sociability between the women.187 Eleanor Brokesby and Anne Vaux developed a close relationship with their sister-in-law, Elizabeth Roper Vaux, especially as the three women became involved in the Jesuit Mission. In the early seventeenth century Agnes Wilford Throckmorton had visits from her 183 Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 71. 184 Notation of one land transaction undertaken by Margaret and Thomas Throckmorton and their son Sir John is kept at the Shropshire Record Office, Kinlet Collection SRO 1045/357, n.f. 185 Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 105. 186 BL Add. MS 39829, f. 55r (HMCV, 110–111). The visit probably occurred at the Stourtons’ seat in Wiltshire, but it could also have occurred at their London residence. Lady Monteagle and Lady Webb had residences in the country and in London; it is not clear from the evidence how far they traveled to visit their sister. 187 The distance between the Vaux seat at Harrowden and the Tresham seat at Rushton was about ten miles. From the Vauxes’ smaller residence at Irthlingborough, Northamptonshire, to Rushton was about thirteen miles.

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Wilford relatives, including one from her mother or her sister-in-law Anne Newman Wilford, the wife of Agnes’s brother James.188 Lady Tresham also maintained a connection with her maternal aunt, Bridget Hussey Russell, Countess of Bedford, although the formal tone of her correspondence with Russell suggests that their relationship was less familiar than the ones she shared with her childhood friends or immediate family.189 Mistress Whorwood, Margaret Throckmorton’s cousin, lived with the Throckmortons at Coughton long enough to be presented there for recusancy. She may have been in service with them prior to her marriage or she may have simply been a houseguest. In any event, by 1592 the Throckmortons had left for their estate at Weston Underwood, Worcestershire, and Whorwood had left as well, at which point she disappears from the record.190 For Catholics, the hospitality or protection a kinswoman offered could be critical to survival. The cluster of long-term or permanent houseguests who lived with Mary Everard Brudenell and her husband, Sir John, has already been mentioned. In addition, Sir Thomas Tresham’s great-aunt Clemence, a nun displaced from Syon Abbey, retired to the Tresham seat at Rushton and remained as part of the household until her death in 1567.191 Nearly two decades later, Mary Arden moved back to her natal family’s seat at Coughton following her husband’s execution in connection with the Somerville Plot.192

188 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 1, f. 4 r. The letter from Mary Wilford to her mother would have been sent either by Agnes’s sister Mary or, more likely, by her niece, who was probably in service at Stafford Castle at this time. See also Walter C. Metcalfe, ed., The Visitations of Essex by Hawley, 1552; Hervey, 1558; Cooke, 1570; Raven, 1612; and Owen and Lilly, 1634. To Which Are Added Miscellaneous Essex Pedigrees from Various Harleian Manuscripts: And An Appendix Containing Berry’s Essex Pedigrees, The Publications of the Harleian Society, vol. 13 (London: Mitchell and Hughes, 1878), 322–323; Michael C. Questier, ed., Newsletters from the Caroline Court 1631–1638: Catholicism and the Politics of Personal Rule, Camden Fifth Series, vol. 26 (Cambridge: Royal Historical Society, 2005), 193; Broadway, ‘Agnes Throckmorton,’ 128. 189 BL Add. MS 39828, ff. 84 r–85r (HMCV, 28–29). 190 TNA SP 12/243, f. 212r. Mistress Whorwood would have been a descendant of Margaret’s elder half-sister, Ann (d. 1552), the first wife of Ambrose Dudley. When she died her share of the Whorwood estates descended to her father’s great-nephew, Thomas Whorwood. Margaret Whorwood Throckmorton and her half-sister were their father’s coheirs; Margaret’s mother, another Margaret, survived her husband. Her second husband was William Sheldon. For additional detail on this female network, see Enis, ‘Two Warwickshire Women of Character,’ 1–49. 191 Butler, ‘Clemence Tresham of Rushton and Syon,’ 91–93; Virginia R. Bainbridge, ‘Syon Abbey: Women and Learning, c. 1415–1600,’ in Syon Abbey and Its Books: Reading, Writing and Religion, c. 1400–1700, ed. E.A. Jones and Alexandra Walsham (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2010), 102. 192 TNA SP 12/243, f. 207 v; APC, vol. 24, 148.

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Eleanor Vaux Brokesby and Anne Vaux and their sister-in-law Elizabeth Roper Vaux constructed networks that relied heavily on kin connections and a close group of other recusant Catholics. Starting in the mid-1580s Eleanor and her singlewoman sister Anne were at the center of a network of Jesuits and their lay protectors. The sisters made careers of harboring priests and providing space for Catholic worship in their various homes and, later, ran an illicit school for Catholic boys from their household. Together, Eleanor and Anne sheltered the superiors of the English Mission (John Gerard and Henry Garnet in succession) for nearly twenty years, which made their household a hub of Jesuit activity and the sisters themselves central figures in the Jesuit mission.193 The Vaux sisters created a network that was far more insular than Muriel Tresham’s, probably out of necessity since there was a constant Jesuit presence in their household. In addition to the Jesuits, the household included Fr. Gerard’s infirm mother, Eleanor’s two children, and her cousin Frances Burroughs. In the early seventeenth century Eleanor’s grandsons William and Edward Thimelby and, later, Lord Abergavenny’s grandchild were educated by the Vauxes’ Jesuit schoolmasters.194 Their network included their sister-in-law Elizabeth Roper Vaux and, from the mid-1590s, their half-sister Muriel Vaux, and Anne’s friend Lady Digby, with whom she went on pilgrimage to St. Winifred’s Well in 1605.195 Women’s friendships provided them significant emotional attachments that were different from their other relationships, even when those friendships were with women in their kinship group. A close friend was someone a woman could trust as a confidante, someone who helped with activities such as childbirth, and who offered support (material and emotional) in the raising of children or the maintenance of a household. Muriel Tresham and Mary, Baroness Vaux, shared a close friendship throughout their adulthood. They corresponded and visited one another, and Muriel referred to her as her ‘sister’ – while this was a common expression at the time, in this case it aligns with a high degree of affection between the women. Lady Tresham’s alliance with her sister-in-law set her against the other Vaux women, Vaux’s stepdaughters Eleanor and Anne, and her stepson’s wife, Elizabeth Roper Vaux. Despite the overwhelming insularity of Elizabeth Vaux’s network, she had a few friendships, such as one with the Earl of 193 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 186; Fr. Gerard’s letter containing this reference is printed in full in Stonyhurst College, Anglia MS I, f. 73r. 194 TNA SP 16/299, f. 80r ; Anthony Kenny, ed., The Responsa Scholarum of the English College, Rome, Part Two: 1622–1695, Publications of the Catholic Record Society, vol. 55 (Newport, Monmouthshire: R.H. Johns, 1963), 373–374, 448–450. 195 TNA SP 14/216/2, f. 139r.

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Northampton, that allowed her to cultivate connections beyond the family, and therefore assembled a network with slightly more breadth than had her Vaux sisters-in-law.196 One of her closest friends, Agnes Fermor Wenman, relied on Elizabeth for support in her spiritual life; Wenman’s husband opposed and at times forbade his wife’s Catholicism. With Vaux’s help Wenman arranged a schedule whereby the Jesuit John Gerard could visit her when her husband was away.197 Like family networks, women’s networks most clearly come into view at points of crisis. In January 1583/1584, shortly after the discovery of the Throckmorton Plot, searchers interrupted a Catholic Mass at Throckmorton House in London. Margery Throckmorton of Feckenham was present, along with her daughters Mary and Anne, her daughter-in-law, and Francis Throckmorton.198 Similarly, in the aftermath of the Essex Rising in 1600/1601 the core of the Tresham women’s networks are visible, as Francis Tresham’s sisters, wife, mother, father, and uncle scrambled to find a sympathetic patron who could mitigate the damage and, ideally, save Francis’s life. Elizabeth Roper Vaux’s network appears in detail in the abundance of official correspondence following the Gunpowder Plot. Vaux’s network included Dorothy Huddleston, wife of her cousin Henry; her cousin Agnes Fermor Wenman and Agnes’s parents, Sir George and Mary Fermor; Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton; Mary, Lady Digby; Sir Robert Catesby; Sir Everard Digby; and possibly the brothers of Sir Griffin Markham.199 In the spring of 1605 a letter Vaux sent to Wenman was intercepted by Wenman’s mother-in-law, who gave it to Wenman’s husband. Vaux’s comment to her friend that ‘Tottenham would soon turn French’ convinced many, including Wenman’s Protestant (or at least conformist) husband and mother-in-law and Vaux’s own father, that Vaux knew about and supported the plot. Vaux, of course, insisted she had no knowledge of the event until Sir George and Lady Fermor happened ‘by accident’ to stop 196 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 290, 321, 400. 197 Gerard, The Autobiography of an Elizabethan, 169–170. 198 TNA SP 12/167, f. 144 r. 199 Agnes Fermor Wenman was a granddaughter of Maud Vaux (d. 1569/1571) and Sir John Fermor. Wenman was raised in a Catholic household by her Catholic mother, Mary Curzon Fermor. Her father, Sir George, conformed enough to remain on the Northamptonshire bench. Still, Wenman’s enthusiasm for Catholic practices might have cooled during the early part of her marriage, only to be rekindled by Elizabeth Vaux’s proselytizing. When Mr. Wenman returned home from service in the Low Countries to find his wife running afoul of recusancy statutes he was extremely displeased, and he blamed his wife’s ‘conversion’ on Vaux. TNA SP 14/216, f. 141 r. Vaux’s friendship with Wenman is also discussed in Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 247, 287, 292, 312, 318. See also TNA SP 14/216/2, ff. 176r, 178r.

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by Harrowden on 6 November and tell her what had happened in London.200 The previous day, 5 November, Henry Huddleston and his very pregnant wife, Dorothy, had called; Huddleston departed on Thursday morning (7 November) but Dorothy remained with Vaux. Other visitors to Harrowden in the early days of November 1605 were Catesby, Digby, and a servant of one of Sir Griffin Markham’s brothers.201 The government’s interrogations of her sister-in-law, Anne Vaux, revealed her wider network that included plot conspirators and also her friendship with the singlewoman Dorothy Habington, sister of the recusant antiquary Thomas Habington of Hindlip, Worcestershire.202 Vaux’s network covered a wide geographical area; it included militant recusants from Worcestershire, such as the Wintours, the Catesbys of Warwickshire and Northamptonshire, the Digbys of Rutland, the Brokesbys and Beaumonts of Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire neighbors such as her cousins, the Treshams. Recusant men figured more prominently in Anne Vaux’s network than they did in the visible networks of other Catholic women, but she maintained friendships with women as well – some were the wives of men who sought out the Jesuits in her household while others were friendships she cultivated independently. Still, all were Catholics and most were recusant Catholics. The unusual nature of her household as a Jesuit headquarters meant that Vaux moved frequently – at least three times in the 1590s alone – and that she was by necessity more guarded with her neighbors than other women had to be. Her activities marked her as an unruly woman who challenged gender expectations, sometimes assuming patriarchal roles in her work protecting priests and Jesuits.203 Regardless of their status, most women had friendships with other women in their neighborhood, those with whom they shared a geographic connection.204 Barbara Harris has argued that these local relationships ‘often drew their members into the affinities of noblemen who dominated the region.’205 That was true in the relationship between Muriel Tresham, her daughter Lady Monteagle, and Alice, the youngest daughter of Sir John Spencer of Althorp and by 1596 the Countess of Derby. In summer 1596, the countess invited Lady Tresham and her daughter Elizabeth, Baroness 200 TNA SP 14/216/1 f. 154 r. 201 TNA SP 14/216/1 f. 154 r. 202 TNA SP 14/216/2 f. 139r,v. 203 Lisa McClain, Divided Loyalties? Pushing the Boundaries of Gender and Lay Roles in the Catholic Church, 1534–1829 (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). 204 Mendelson and Crawford, Women in Early Modern England, 238–239. 205 Harris, ‘Sisterhood, Friendship and the Power of English Aristocratic Women,’ 41.

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Monteagle, to join her hunting party in Brigstock Park.206 In addition to the connection via neighborhood, Alice, Countess of Derby, and Elizabeth, Baroness Monteagle, were linked through their husbands’ kin networks. In another example, the close physical proximity between the Throckmorton estates at Coughton in Warwickshire and Feckenham in Worcestershire helped to reinforce their kin networks because the women were both near neighbors and kinswomen. Women’s speech and women’s networks enforced moral boundaries of the neighborhood, which resulted in some anxiety for Catholic women in predominantly Protestant or conformist neighborhoods.207 Agnes Wilford Throckmorton was upset by local gossip in 1625 that two of her adult sons, Robert (the heir), and his younger brother, Tom, were racing horses and gambling. She was indignant and perhaps embarrassed that she had heard about their games through local gossip and also for the negative image of her family that such gossip fostered. She complained to Robert that ‘all the Contrye tallketh of It that Papist hath so much monis that thaye run It a Waye.’208 Agnes worried that a perception by neighbors or local authorities that Catholics had money to fritter away might induce the government to enact more severe policies against Catholics. Agnes’s reaction also suggests that despite English society’s habit of dismissing young men’s misrule as sport, this did not apply to Catholic youth.209 As both matriarch and mother, she could not excuse their behavior; her reaction indicates that she feared her community would not either. Gambling on horse races was not a new pastime for young Throckmorton men. Agnes’s son Tom and his cousin Henry had a wager for ‘x quarter of oates’ in 1612.210 The high level of anxiety that Agnes Wilford Throckmorton displayed in response to her adult sons’ gambling on horse racing suggests that her relationships with other women in her local networks were precarious – or that she feared that they were – or that her status in her neighborhood had weakened.211 206 BL Add. MS 39828, f. 290r (HMCV, 89–90). 207 Bernard Capp has noted how women’s speech shaped moral boundaries for middling-status and lesser-status women, but it applied to elite women, too. Capp, When Gossips Meet, 60. 208 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 1, f. 6. The dating of this letter is uncertain. Its location in the collection, between other letters dated 1612 and 1633, suggests that it was written during Robert’s early adulthood. Other events mentioned in f. 6, namely an agreement Robert reached with Sir Robert Gorges in 1625, suggest that the document dates from that year. 209 Shepard, ‘From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen?,’ 293. 210 WRO CR 1998/Box 61/Folder 3, f. 1r. 211 Bernard Capp argues that a woman’s standing in her neighborhood and the support she could marshal from friends and neighbors was a crucial factor in determining her response to

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That anxiety was undoubtedly intensified by her religious position. The gossip that so worried Throckmorton seems to have been the result of women in her local network working to enforce the moral boundaries of the neighborhood, and more related to that concern than to the Throckmortons’ Catholicism. Women’s networks included male relatives and friends who could provide legal advice and assistance when a woman needed to navigate the legal system. In the case of kinsmen, this probably reflected both emotional and practical reasons: women had affective, familial attachments to male kin such as their fathers, brothers, uncles, and grandfathers and, in a practical sense, those men had greater access to and expertise with legal channels than did women – access that women found useful. Katherine Catesby Throckmorton and Anne Throckmorton Catesby relied on male relations, marital and natal, respectively, when they faced the unpleasant task of suing their sons in Chancery to recover their jointure lands.212 Elizabeth, Lady St. John, must have acquired an extensive network of kinfolk and friends over the course of her four marriages. Her friends offered support when she was publicly humiliated by her fourth husband, Oliver St. John, Lord St. John of Bletsoe. After St. John confiscated the fortune his wife had skimmed from the estate of her previous husband, Edward Griffin, he scorned her at a dinner party c. 1580 by announcing that ‘your ladyship hath truly paid for your place. Wherefore if any can now make a penny more of you I would he had you.’213 Her friend Sir Thomas Tresham recalled how ‘the tears stood in his lady’s eyes’ after Lord St. John’s speech. In her widowhood Lady St. John relied on her friends Thomas and Margaret Throckmorton of Coughton, Sir Robert Dormer, and Sir Thomas Tresham for advice when her son, Rice Griffin, sued her regarding the diminished Griffin estates.214 The network formation methods outlined above resulted in two distinct types of female networks: outward-facing, open networks and inward-facing, a particular event. Capp, When Gossips Meet, 284. 212 NRO ASL/1173 2 June 1582; NRO ASL/1178; Katherine Willington Catesby married as her second husband Anthony Throckmorton, Anne Throckmorton Catesby’s uncle. Katherine was therefore both mother-in-law and aunt to Anne Catesby. 213 BL Add. MS 39828, f. 281 r (HMCV, 88); Bindoff, The House of Commons, vol. 3, 258. 214 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 3, f. 7r. Rice Griffin was her son by her third husband, Edward Griffin of Dingley. Elizabeth, Lady St. John, was the daughter of Geoffrey Chamber of Stanmore, Middlesex; she married Walter Stoner (d. 1550), Reginald Conyers (d. 1561), Edward Griffin (d. 1569), and Oliver St. John (d. 1582). Following St. John’s death she moved to Warwickshire, where she was still living in 1602.

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closed networks. Both open and closed networks provided personal benefits such as friendship, emotional support, and the exchange of news; open networks offered additional connections with individuals in a position to offer patronage and protection. Open networks were inclined to work toward coexistence since they attempted to be part of a mixed community, while closed networks were more likely to reflect the persecution/toleration binary because of the isolated nature of the network. Outward-facing or ‘open’ networks were favored by women with regular need of protective patronage. Mary, third Baroness Vaux, maintained an open network in the 1580s and 1590s. In her efforts to mitigate the damage to the family fortune caused by recusancy and lawsuits, Vaux corresponded with patrons and appeared before the Privy Council to petition in person. Lady Muriel Tresham’s network is the most open of any of the female networks examined here. Tresham maintained relationships with women and men outside of her extended family group; hers was also the most ecumenical of the visible female networks in this study. The strong outward orientation of the Vaux and Tresham networks were the products of their families’ unique situations in the 1580s and 1590s. Their husbands were among the most prominent and outspoken male recusants of the late sixteenth century, which meant their families frequently attracted the attention of the authorities and that their families were often in need of a patron’s protection and assistance. The generation of Catholic women born in the 1530s and 1540s exhibited more willingness to maintain diverse connections than did the generation that followed, and also a tendency to maintain open networks. These patterns were not unique to the Midlands. Prominent upper-status Catholic women in other counties maintained open networks, namely Magdalen Browne, Viscountess Montague of Sussex. The Catholicism of the Brownes, like the Treshams, was well-known in the communities of Battle and Cowdray in Sussex and in their London neighborhood, St. Mary Overys. Displays of conformity assured the state of the family’s loyalty and allowed them to construct a large network that included most of the south coast Catholic population and a healthy proportion of Anglicans and Puritans.215 The Viscountess’s network included courtiers such as her godson Sir Julius Caesar and many of the Protestant local officials in Sussex.216 The Brownes did not face anywhere near the level of prosecution endured by the Treshams or 215 Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 84. 216 Questier, Catholicism and Community, 227.

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the Vauxes, probably due to a combination of the first viscount’s occasional conformity, the high number of connections the family maintained with their expansive entourage, and the first viscount’s record of loyal service to the crown.217 The majority of female networks were closed networks or became closed networks over time, especially for the generations born during or after the 1560s and 1570s. Closed networks reflect a winnowing of contacts and narrowing of focus on the kinship group. When external contacts were maintained they were usually other Catholic families. In the 1590s and into the seventeenth century, Elizabeth, fourth Baroness Vaux, constructed a network made up mostly of close family and extended kin: other members of the Vaux family, the Brokesbys, Wenmans, and Digbys. Members of her network with whom she did not share a kin connection, such as the Earl of Northampton, were almost exclusively Catholic.218 The networks of Vaux’s sisters-in-law, Anne Vaux and Eleanor Vaux Brokesby, were even more insular than her own, probably due to the hotbed of Jesuit activity in their household and the consequent risk of exposure and punishment, for themselves and the priests they sheltered, if they were too open. Anne and Eleanor’s network was made up entirely of Catholics, most of whom were recusants. The Throckmortons turned increasingly inward over the span of three generations. Agnes Throckmorton, widowed and raising her young family in the first decade of the seventeenth century, inhabited a network that was overwhelmingly Catholic and driven almost entirely by kinship ties. The types of patronage Catholic women sought depended on the patron’s place in the woman’s network. Elizabeth Roper Vaux’s patrons were her kinsman Robert Brokesby, her coreligionist Henry Howard, Earl of Northampton, and Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury. She asked for Brokesby’s help with personal and legal matters; she might have relied on Northampton for a marriage negotiation with his niece.219 It was not until the aftermath of the Gunpowder Plot, in a time of crisis for her household, that Lady Vaux solicited the assistance of patrons outside of her network: Sir Richard Verney 217 Michael C. Questier’s work on the Browne family traces their expansive network, or entourage, in detail. See Questier, Catholicism and Community. 218 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 290, 321, 400. One exception was Sir Richard Verney, a Protestant and deputy lieutenant of Warwickshire, who had expressed his interest in doing her service and whose niece was in Lady Vaux’s household. Verney might have been a friend, but it seems more likely that he sought to create a bond with a household he wanted to monitor. TNA SP 14/216/2, f. 178v; Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 290, 321–327, 400. 219 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 290.

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and the Earl of Salisbury. The requests she made to them were connected to mobility and liberty: from Verney she requested safe passage to another household for two of her servants and from Salisbury she requested and received liberty from house arrest in London.220 The sociological practice of homophily shaped networks regardless of gender or status. As was elaborated above and is echoed in later chapters, the tendency to align with people who shared one’s values, habits, preferences, status, and so on (homophily) was common among men. It was common among women, too. An upper-status woman’s network was based on status, kinship, values and, for many Catholics, her religion and the religion of her family. Such network-formation practices existed regardless of status. Bernard Capp has demonstrated that the networks of poor and middlingstatus women were based on qualities the women held in common such as ‘occupation, kinship, status, age and values.’221 English Catholic women relied on their family networks and their own networks in nearly every aspect of their lives, maternal, sororal, managerial, or political.

Conclusion All of the significant post-Reformation Catholic families were the descendants of powerful fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century kinship groups, most of whom were courtiers. Military, legal, administrative, and political careers drove the foundations of these families’ status and shaped the affinities and networks to which they belonged. Families constructed networks through biological and marital relationships, service, and friendship, and drew their patrons from those networks. The Catholic families examined here relied on ancient kinship connections to enhance their legitimacy and to expand their respective networks. Through those connections and the relationships that derived from them families created webs of mutual support and obligation that were beneficial in land transactions, marriage and wardship, social prominence (especially in their home county), and in the pursuit of both patronage relationships and the accumulation of their own clientages. The families in this study were domiciled in Leicestershire, Northamptonshire, and Warwickshire, either as their seat or as a principal residence, but spent a good deal of their time at residences in neighboring counties, 220 TNA SP 14/216/2, f. 178v. 221 Capp, When Gossips Meet, 185.

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especially Worcestershire and Buckinghamshire, and in London. Although each of the families formed and maintained relationships within their local communities, their wider networks from which they drew the bulk of their support and patronage reached beyond their county’s borders. These families relied on their natal and marital kin for advancement, protection, friendship, and loyalty. Their relationships were of particular importance when the religious disobedience of entire families or their individual members endangered a family’s land, goods, revenues, or a family member’s life. Through the variety of relationships a family had in their respective networks, especially with those with whom they disagreed about religion, Catholic families remained integrated in gentry and noble culture, retained social authority in their counties, and remained bound to the state and the monarch through relationships of service, patronage, and clientage.

4. Architecture, Gardens, and Cultural Networks Abstract This chapter examines the role of Renaissance cultural activity in the formation and maintenance of English Catholic social networks and the articulation of gender. This interdisciplinary chapter draws source material from history, material culture, and archaeology to compare the built environments created by Catholics and Protestants. It then traces the networks that developed through common interest in specific cultural activities like architecture and gardening. This focus on common interests encouraged social ties that helped post-Reformation English people to overcome the divisions caused by religious change, reinforced other networks, and enhanced ties within the patronage network. Keywords: architecture, garden, network, Tresham, Renaissance, symbolism

Catholics used cultural work and cultural networks as means to emphasize their status as gentry or nobility and to emphasize their wealth and position rather than their religion. By building new houses, renovating existing ones, and designing and planting elaborate gardens, gentry and nobility asserted their claims to elite status and their right to pride. During the period of great rebuilding in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, English gentry and nobility displayed their wealth, status, and power over both people and the environment through renovations to their houses, construction of new buildings such as garden lodges and banqueting houses, and the installation of elaborate landscape gardens. Domestic buildings and landscape architecture were ways in which the wealthy fashioned their religious and political identities and demonstrated that

Cogan, S.M., Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463726948_ch04

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they possessed aristocratic virtues and honor.1 For rising families such as the Cecils, Fitzwilliams, Hattons, and Spencers, such displays helped to accentuate their legitimacy, both in terms of their social standing and their political authority. For established families like the Treshams and Throckmortons, cultural displays underscored their long-term status at the top of the county social and political hierarchy. Catholic gentlemen who faced exclusion from the political office to which they were entitled by their high birth found building projects an ideal means to showcase their virtue, honor, and their membership in the local body of the upper sort. Religion was not a critical variable in cultural activities like architecture and gardening. That reality allowed for the creation of new network ties based on similar status, common interest, and the esteem one could accrue through cultural work. Builders and gardeners of different denominations shared common interests that emphasized their status rather than their religion. Catholics who participated in cultural activities like architecture and gardening were active participants in the elite culture of their respective counties. They behaved as gentry and nobility were expected to, by constructing buildings and landscapes that resonated with meaning and that sometimes offered political commentary. Catholics formed friendships with other aristocratic builders and gardeners whose religious sympathies ranged across the doctrinal continuum. Although there were some women builders, most notably Bess of Hardwick, the majority of these projects were constructed by men. If Catholic women in these counties were involved, either as partners to their husbands or overseeing projects of their own, the records have not survived.2 The gentlemen and noblemen who populated the architectural networks discussed here shared similar concerns to those of other gentlemen, regardless of their religion: the desire to demonstrate virtue and honor; to secure the descent of their family line through the begetting and raising of a male heir; to make good marriages for their children; and to ensure their family’s financial survival through sound management of their lands and 1 In keeping with early modern English practice, I treat gardens and landscape as part of architecture because of the similarities in methodologies of design, planning, and construction and the architectural elements inherent in landscape features such as terraces, garden lodges, steps and stairways, and water features, as a few examples. Contemporary architects such as John Thorpe, Sebastiano Serlio and the brothers Solomon and Isaac de Caus, for instance, designed both domestic dwellings and landscapes, both of which were understood as components of a larger practice of architectural design. 2 Catholic women were involved in the construction of priest holes, which are not part of this analysis.

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offices – in other words, the performance of elite manhood. For Catholics, cultural activities such as those described here provided an important pathway to the demonstration of virtue and the accumulation of honor, which their religious dissidence could place at risk. Continued membership in the wider body of the elite and the relationships formed within cultural networks helped Catholics to strengthen ties with patrons, to assert their patriarchal status, and to remain participants in the exchange of patronage and clientage. While most aspects of the imagery Catholics used in their building projects were similar to those used by non-Catholics, some Catholic builders embedded religious or political messages in their architectural projects, through which they defended their faith or criticized the state’s religious policies. Those images were so carefully crafted and so infused with multiple layers of meaning that even an educated observer would have a difficult time proving that a Catholic intended to include a subversive message in his designs. Observers would usually have been drawn from the builder’s network of family, friends, neighbors, and tenants. Thus, a Catholic builder’s audience would have been social and intellectual equals who would have recognized and appreciated the culturally valued traits of wit and individualism that they had been invited to view. In addition, tenants on the manor would have seen these features and probably understood certain aspects of meaning, depending on their level of fluency with visual culture. As Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson have demonstrated, people of all ranks were exposed to decorations in homes and churches and understood the meanings encoded in material and visual culture.3 Renovating a house or constructing a new one broadcasted individual and family honor. Construction highlighted the wealth, status, and education of the builder more overtly than did strictly intellectual pursuits. 4 Done properly, a building project demonstrated that one was a member of the highest echelon of the social, economic, and cultural elite. Architectural projects communicated individual and family legitimacy in the social hierarchy of early modern England in two significant ways. First, by identifying a person as culturally aware and engaged with the latest trends. Second, to remodel a home, build a new house or lodge, or to install extensive gardens, 3 Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500–1700 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017). 4 Linda Levy Peck discusses this with respect to the seventeenth century in Consuming Splendor: Society and Culture in Seventeenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 188.

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distinguished a builder as a wealthy member of elite society. Estates with grand gardens identified the owner as someone with sufficient means and land to remove a portion of that land from production and convert it to an economically unproductive parcel. In the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, architectural projects like banqueting lodges and landscape gardens and the symbolism encoded on them became powerful status symbols. The design and construction of buildings and landscapes could be fiercely competitive; the more elaborate one could make a banqueting house, a lodge, or a garden, the more effectively one could emphasize their status and membership in the cultural elite and, for men, their patriarchal authority.5 This competitive atmosphere encouraged originality and imitation, both of which signified the education and wit of the builder and affirmed his manhood. By replicating an architectural form or landscape feature from someone else’s estate, a builder openly acknowledged the clever mind, and therefore the virtue, of the designer or builder of the original form. After dining with Sir William Sharington at Lacock Abbey sometime in the 1560s, Sir John Thynne was so impressed with the rooftop banqueting rooms Sir William had installed that Thynne erected at least four of the same at Longleat.6 Around 1580, Sir Christopher Hatton wrote to Lord Burghley to say that he had designed the gardens at Holdenby ‘in direct observation of your house and plot at Tyballs.’7 Hatton paid Burghley the highest compliment one gardener could give another by aff irming Burghley’s aesthetic taste and good judgment. Hatton, already a favorite at court and a powerful political figure in his own right, was anxious to remain in Burghley’s favor. In December 1579, Hatton wrote to Burghley to declare his loyalty, saying ‘I loue you accordynge too your worthynes & will serve you for your goodness towardes me soo longe as I live.’8 Sir 5 This aligns with Susan D. Amussen’s and Alexandra Shepard’s observations that patriarchy and masculinity inhabit multiple forms and are constantly negotiated. Susan D. Amussen, ‘The Contradictions of Patriarchy in Early Modern England,’ Gender and History 30, no. 2 (2018): 343–353; Alexandra Shepard, ‘From Anxious Patriarchs to Refined Gentlemen? Manhood in Britain circa 1500–1700,’ Journal of British Studies 44, no. 2 (2005): 281–295. 6 Mark Girouard, Life in the English Country House: A Social and Architectural History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 106. 7 David Jacques, ‘The Compartiment System in Tudor England,’ Garden History 27, no. 1 (1999): 39; Eric St. John Brooks, Sir Christopher Hatton: Queen Elizabeth’s Favourite (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946), 158. Theobalds (‘Tyballs’) was located in Hertfordshire and frequently housed the royal court. 8 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable The Marquess of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, vol. 2 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1883–1976) (hereafter HMCS), 280.

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Thomas Tresham incorporated elements of Theobalds in his new gardens at Lyveden in the 1590s, particularly the water course, labyrinth, and mounts.9 Tresham acknowledged another patron, his friend Bishop Wickham, when he replicated at Lyveden a walkway at the bishop’s house at Buckden, where Tresham was imprisoned for seven months in 1588–1589.10 For both Hatton and Tresham, mimicry was a calculated attempt to compliment a patron. The Catholic Treshams, virtually barred from political service in the 1580s and 1590s, worked hard to demonstrate their gentry virtues. Through his building and gardening activities and tasteful imitation of designs, Sir Thomas Tresham demonstrated that he was still part of gentry society, but more importantly, that he was embedded in aristocratic patronage networks.

Architecture Whether Catholic or Protestant, the gentry were invested in Renaissance building culture. Many Catholics had building and gardening projects in progress in the years between 1560 and 1640, at the same time and often in close proximity to the projects of their non-Catholic neighbors. In Northamptonshire alone, Sir Edward Griff in built Dingley Hall in the 1560s and 1570s; Sir Edmund Brudenell carried out renovations at Deene in the 1570s and 1580s; at the same time, Edward Watson renovated Rockingham Castle; Sir Christopher Hatton built and installed gardens at Holdenby; Sir Humphrey Stafford, and later, Hatton, was at work on Kirby Hall; Sir William Fitzwilliam built at Dogsthorpe and perhaps also at Milton, and Tresham was busy renovating his seat at Rushton and erecting the Market Cross at Rothwell.11 Not far from the county’s northern border and in close proximity to Kirby Hall, Deene Park, and Rockingham Castle, William Wickam, bishop of Lincoln, built an octagonal garden house and raised garden walks at Lyddington Bede House, Rutland. Lord 9 Hatfield House (hereafter HH), CP 161/128r, 14 December 1579 (pr. HMCS, vol. 2, 280). 10 British Library (hereafter BL) Add. MS 39831, f. 66r,v (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, Vol. III: The Manuscripts of T.B. Clarke-Thornhill, Esq., Sir T. Barrett-Lennard, Bart., Pelham R. Papillon, Esq., and W. Cleverly Alexander, Esq. [London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationary Office by Mackie & Co., 1904] [hereafter HMCV], ii, liii). 11 Charles Wise, Rockingham Castle and the Watsons (London: Elliot Stock, 1891), 28; Northamptonshire Record Office (NRO) F(M) Miscellaneous Volumes/432; J.A. Gotch, Architecture of the Renaissance in England, vol. 1 (London: B.T. Batsford, 1894), 42.

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Burghley and his son Sir Thomas Cecil had projects underway at their Northamptonshire estates during these same decades.12 In the 1590s, as Tresham’s rabbit warrener’s lodge and Hawkf ield Lodge at Rushton and the banqueting house at Lyveden were in progress, John Brudenell (Sir Edmund’s younger brother) built a new house at the family’s Glapthorne estate just a few miles from Lyveden; from 1606 to 1636 it was Mary Everard Brudenell’s dower house.13 In 1604 Edward Watson’s son, another Edward, commissioned a banqueting house at his lodge in Rockingham Park, purpose-built for King James’s visit the following summer.14 Sir Thomas Brudenell, the antiquary, added a battlemented tower and an extension on the northern end of the house at Deene in the f irst two decades of the seventeenth century.15 Building was a way for gentry anxious to solidify their reputation to advertise their wealth, position, and status. Although most of the Catholic gentlemen who participated in the building culture occasionally conformed to the state church, there were a few recusants who took part in the architectural fervor. Sir Thomas Tresham was the most prominent recusant to engage in building projects, undoubtedly as part of his effort to highlight his family’s social status rather than their religious status. Thirty miles to the south of Tresham’s estates, just over the Buckinghamshire border, Tresham’s father-in-law, Robert Throckmorton of Coughton, rebuilt his house at Weston Underwood in the 1560s and 1570s.16 It was probably no coincidence that he embarked on his building projects at the same time that his office-holding career ended. Perhaps he wished to leave a rebuilt estate as a legacy; he died in 1581. In 1599, Throckmorton’s granddaughter Elizabeth and her husband, Sir Henry Griffith, abandoned the building of their new house at Wichnor, Staffordshire, when he was appointed to the Council of the North. Instead, they concentrated on the construction of a

12 In the sixteenth century, Burghley House was situated within the Soke of Peterborough, which was considered part of Northamptonshire. Today, due to shifts in boundaries over the centuries, Burghley House is in Lincolnshire. 13 Joan Wake, The Brudenells of Deene (London: Cassell, 1953), 98. Mary Everard Brudenell was aunt to Sir Thomas Brudenell, the antiquary. 14 Wise, Rockingham Castle and the Watsons, 41. Watson’s Rockingham Castle was c. nine miles northwest of his friend Tresham’s Lyveden estate, six miles due west of the Brudenells at Deene Park, and less than five miles due west of Kirby Hall. 15 Nicolas Barker and David Quentin, The Library of Thomas Tresham and Thomas Brudenell, with an Introduction by John Martin Robinson (privately printed for the Roxburgh Club, 2006), 143. 16 Michael Hodgetts, ‘A Topographical Index of Hiding-Places,’ Recusant History 16 (1982): 152.

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lavish new house at Burton Agnes, Yorkshire, that was designed to convey their status and authority in the region.17 Still extant, it is one of the finest examples of early Jacobean architecture.18 Construction usually extended over several years, during which a project would have provided an extended performance of manhood and ample fodder for lively conversation within families’ networks and among other county elites. Designing a project, hiring laborers, and competing for the best masons, gardeners, and materials displayed the most important ingredients of early modern elite manhood: financial independence, authority over the people on and landscape of a manor, and education. Joan Wake has posited that men regularly discussed building practices and their individual projects during the course of their work day – on the county bench, for instance, or over a meal afterwards – and that they enjoyed visiting one another’s estates to inspect and discuss works in progress.19 Given the close relationship of the families, Throckmorton must have spoken with his son-in-law, Tresham, about his project at Weston Underwood, and Tresham and his wife undoubtedly saw some of the work in progress during visits to her family home. The gift of a horticultural book from the Vauxes (Tresham’s sister, Lady Vaux and her husband William) to Tresham indicates that they shared an interest in gardens. With this in mind, they probably discussed Tresham’s projects.20 Given the proximity of many of these projects to one another – some close enough to hear construction noise from neighboring estates – neighbors must have paid regular visits to admire and discuss the evolution of a particular building or garden. Some of these friends and neighbors checked in on the progress of other works even when the owner was not at home. In 1579 Lord Burghley visited Hatton’s Holdenby, in Hatton’s absence. Before he left he wrote a letter to Hatton, full of praise for the work Hatton had done there. Of a new staircase, Burghley said that he had ‘found no other thing of greater grace than your stately ascent from 17 The house at Burton Agnes might have already been underway by the time of this appointment. Rev. Carus Vale Collier, An Account of the Boynton Family and the Family Seat of Burton Agnes (Middlesbrough: William Appleyard, 1914), 74. Griffith’s wife was Elizabeth Throckmorton, daughter of Thomas and Margaret Throckmorton of Coughton. It is unclear to what extent their household adhered to Catholicism, but there is a suggestion that his cousin, Lady Constable, converted Griffith to Catholicism by July 1605, and that as a result ‘Sir Henry and all his had cause continually to curse hir in regard of his alteration of religion.’ Norlin Library, MS 407r. 18 Nikolaus Pevsner and David Neave, Yorkshire: York and the East Riding, Buildings of England series, 2nd ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002), 62–63, 367–368. 19 Wake, The Brudenells of Deene, 64. 20 Barker and Quentin, The Library of Thomas Tresham and Thomas Brudenell, 85.

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your hall to your great chamber.’21 Hatton and Tresham were in conversation about Tresham’s work on the Market Cross at Rothwell, two miles south of Tresham’s seat at Rushton; as the project neared completion in the early 1580s Hatton gave his friend and client freestone from the quarry he owned at Weldon for the finishing work on the structure.22 A generation later, in 1605, Sir Fulke Greville wrote to Burghley’s son, the Earl of Salisbury, to say that he had visited Theobalds, as Salisbury had invited him to do. Greville complimented Salisbury on the building and garden works; the two men were close enough that Greville felt he could be honest about features that could be improved, such as the ‘little quarrel’ he had about the position of the windows in ‘your new old gallery.’23 Building a house or installing gardens, particularly in accordance with Renaissance trends, was enough to remind others of one’s status, but to highlight masculine virtue or honor the architecture and design of those spaces had to be infused with displays of wit in the form of clever devices. Often, buildings themselves were employed as devices in their own right, conceits that expressed an individual builder’s specific taste, what John Summerson refers to as ‘intellectual whim and emotional caprice.’24 In the Elizabethan period the ‘E’ plan became fashionable both for the symmetry of the design and because it honored the queen. Geometrical conceits were popular because they symbolized geometric and mathematical perfection, they signaled a connection to the natural world or to religious symbolism, and, perhaps most of all, because they offered the symmetry of which builders in this period were so fond.25 John Jewel, bishop of Salisbury, appended a seven-sided porch based on a ‘faceted plan’ to a church in Berkshire; it was probably designed both as a play on the bishop’s name and in recognition of the spiritual importance of the number seven. Seven, as a Biblical number of perfection, was significant for Protestants and Catholics alike.26 By the late sixteenth century, gentry anxiety about their status in their county hierarchy inspired an increase in heraldry as a common feature 21 BL Add. MS 15891, f. 32. It is unclear from where Burghley traveled to see Holdenby. If he made the trip from Burghley House near Peterborough he would have had a journey of approximately forty miles. 22 HMCV, 33. 23 HH CP 110/168r (pr. HMCS, vol. 17, 214) 24 John Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830, 9th ed. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 74. 25 Paula Henderson, The Tudor House and Garden: Architecture and Landscape in the Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 19–25; Nicholas Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, 1480–1680 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 30. 26 Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, 33.

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of exterior ornamentation. Heraldry communicated membership in the community of honor; Anthony Fletcher has observed that its use was so widespread as a ‘physical expression of manhood’ that one family in Yorkshire ‘painted trees for each wapentake with the arms of the gentry as they were listed in the 1584 visitation.’27 The expense of grand building projects broadcasted wealth and status, but a display of heraldry emphasized the ancient lineage of the family and marked the household as one of superior virtue and honor to those with less to display. Catholics relied on heraldic displays to buttress their weakening positions in the political structure of their respective counties. On his new gatehouse tower at Coughton Court, Sir George Throckmorton installed armorial glass that included arms going back over a century, to his Olney ancestors of the early fifteenth century.28 Throckmorton was a religious conservative in the reigns of Henry VIII and Edward VI, and although he and his many sons retained office and influence into the 1560s, he was anxious to remind fellow Warwickshire gentry and nobility of his family’s continued prominence in the social hierarchy of their home county. Edward Griffin, building in the 1560s, and Edmund Brudenell, building in the 1560s and 1570s, included the shields of their ancestors on fairly typical Renaissance exteriors; in the early seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Brudenell added the armorial bearings of his wife, Mary Tresham, and their ancestors, to the new armorial glass in the Great Hall at Deene, and on portions of the building’s exterior.29 From 1575 to 1605, Mary Tresham Brudenell’s father, Sir Thomas, included heraldry on the exteriors of all of his known building projects, including Rothwell Market Cross, the triangular Warrener’s Lodge and the hexagonal Hawkfield Lodge at Rushton, and on the garden lodge at Lyveden.30 27 Anthony Fletcher, Gender, Sex and Subordination in England, 1500–1800 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 126–128. 28 Warwickshire Record Office (hereafter WRO), CR 1998/Box 61/Folder 1, f. 2r. 29 Barker and Quentin, The Library of Thomas Tresham and Thomas Brudenell, 143. 30 For the Hawkfield Lodge, see Kristen Fairey, ‘Tres testimonivm dant: Resurrecting the Hawkfield Lodge at Rushton as Part of Sir Thomas Tresham’s Architectural Testament,’ Architectural History 58 (2015): 75. The heraldry at Lyveden New Bield was to be done following completion of the religious texts and symbols, but Tresham’s death in September 1605 ended the project and the shields were not completed. In 1577, Tresham also added a brightly colored wall painting to a small chamber inside Rushton Hall. Richard Williams has posited that this could have been part of a ‘larger display, acting as a reredos behind an altar table.’ Richard Williams, ‘A Catholic Sculpture in Elizabethan England: Sir Thomas Tresham’s Reredos at Rushton Hall,’ Architectural History 44 (2001): 221–227; Richard Williams, ‘Forbidden Sacred Spaces in Reformation England,’ in Defining the Holy: Sacred Space in Medieval and Early Modern Europe, ed. Andrew Spicer and Sarah Hamilton (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2005), 107. Richard Williams, ‘English Catholics and the Visual Arts,’ in Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain

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In the roughly eighty years between the Elizabethan Religious Settlement and the Civil Wars, and particularly during the Elizabethan period, Catholic gentry families relied on exterior heraldic displays to emphasize the lineage that contributed to their honor and also to remind viewers of their continued membership in the social and political hierarchy of the county. The abundance of heraldry that appears on the domestic exteriors of Catholic homes reveals an anxiety to demonstrate a family’s virtue and honor by underscoring their longevity in the county, intermarriage with other prominent families of high status, and extensive records of service to the crown.31 The example of John, Lord Lumley, indicates that similar anxiety existed among at least some Catholic nobles. Coterminous with his departure from the royal court after the Ridolfi Plot, Lumley added heraldic ornament to the exterior of Lumley Castle in Durham and began the elaborate gardens discussed later in this chapter. Lumley had left the court in disgrace, accused of participating in intrigue against the queen. He escaped with his life, but his honor was in tatters. The addition of heraldic ornamentation to Lumley Castle was his attempt to remind English society (and perhaps also himself) of his family’s lineage and noble status and to advertise his masculine attributes of virtue and honor based on his lineage rather than his actions. Inscribing religious texts and devices on building exteriors was one way in which aristocratic builders of various doctrinal views expressed their religious virtue and demonstrated their honor. The symbolism that a particular builder used reflected his religious views in ways that resonated with that individual. Protestant religious imagery sometimes related to significant secular themes such as hospitality: Sir Humphrey Stafford’s porch at Kirby Hall (c. 1570) invoked Proverbs chapter nine, the ‘Word of Wisdom,’ as an allegory for the hospitality offered within the house.32 In the second decade of the seventeenth century, John Strode used the E-shaped building design so popular in the Elizabethan period, but to make a religious statement rather than a political one. Strode engraved Emmanuel, meaning ‘it is God who is with us for Eternity’ over the primary entrance to the house, and the Netherlands c. 1570–1720, ed. Benjamin Kaplan, Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop, and Judith Pollman (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009). 31 The example of John, Lord Lumley, indicates that similar anxiety existed among at least some Catholic nobles. Coterminous with his departure from the royal court in the 1570s, Lumley added heraldic ornament to the exterior of Lumley Castle in Durham and began the elaborate gardens discussed earlier in this chapter. For further discussion of Lumley’s building projects, see Henderson, Tudor House and Garden, 67. 32 Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, 88.

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and thereby broadcast his religious identity to all who entered his home.33 In 1631 the Protestant Henry Oxinden built a circular banqueting lodge of his own design, conceived to imitate God’s creation of Heaven and Earth (in itself a popular Renaissance conceit). If Oxinden intended it for hospitality, he soon changed his mind and preferred it for intimate family retreats. He told his brother only five years after the lodge’s construction that he had tired of guests who overstayed their welcome and that ‘I do not desire any more company in my house than my wife, children and servants.’34 Engagement in the building culture was a significant component of honor for members of the gentry, whatever their religious preference. In Northamptonshire two Catholics, Edward Griffin and Sir Thomas Tresham, used extensive textual inscriptions to impart political and religious messages, perhaps out of frustration at being marginalized in political life. These projects revealed a departure from Protestant builders since they were pointedly critical of the state’s religious policy and of Protestants as a whole. However, the messages remained ambiguous and thus were also in keeping with aristocratic expectations of wit and coded meaning in visual culture. Griffin had held the office of attorney general under Queen Mary but lost his position early in Queen Elizabeth’s reign. He retired to his country estates and occupied himself with building projects. The texts his workmen engraved on the exterior of his seat at Dingley – two in English and six in Latin – revealed his frustration at his displacement and his disagreement with the religious policies of the new regime while they also demonstrated his desire to appear honorable in his defeat. What thing so fair but Time will pare Anno 1560, he mused, and continued: Be content with what you have. The cobbler should not go beyond his last. Having lived disgracefully, he may thereafter acquire virtue. That that thou doest do it wisely and mark the end and so forth. Be wary of men that loiter about in silence/They disappear at the pleasant song and at the changing of the season. If God is with us then who shall be against us. God save the King 1560.35 33 Malcolm Airs, The Tudor and Jacobean Country House: A Building History (Godalming, Surrey: Bramley, 1998), 13. 34 Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, 271. 35 J.A. Gotch’s architectural renderings from the late nineteenth century include these inscriptions. Gotch, Architecture of the Renaissance in England, vol. 1, 41. The original presentation of these texts was in both English and Latin and are as follows: ‘What thing so fair but time will pare. Anno 1560. Sorte tua contenus abi. Ne sutor ultra crepidam. Emeri pro virtutem proesta quam per dedus vivere. That that thou doest do it wisely and mark the end and so forth. Invigilate

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One should ‘be content with what you have’ and not go beyond his own knowledge for a virtuous life is better than a dishonorable one. He warned against Nicodemites and reminded himself, if not also other Catholics, that since God was on their side, no earthly being could truly oppose them. Nikolaus Pevsner and, more recently, Paula Henderson have argued that the last text, God save the King 1560, reflected Griffin’s hope for a marriage between Elizabeth and Philip of Spain. Although the queen had dismissed the possibility of marriage to Philip by 1560, Griffin might have held out hope for it regardless. Nevertheless, that was probably his most overtly political comment inscribed on Dingley. The texts were subtly political and even more subtly religious, but not seditious, which would have compromised the honor he sought to protect. The seven texts that Sir Thomas Tresham inscribed on Lyveden New Bield in the late 1590s and very early 1600s bore some similarity to Griffin’s, including that their ambiguity would have made it difficult to accuse the builders of seditious intent. Like Griffin, Tresham commented on the superiority of the Catholic faith to the new Protestant one, and of the spiritual superiority of Catholics, as custodians of an ancient faith, to the spiritual condition of those who practiced a new, upstart religion. But Tresham also used his texts to convey significant tenets of the Counter-Reformation, namely the need for unity among God’s people, the importance of the Virgin Mary, and the centrality of Christ’s sacrifice (or Passion) for all humanity, rather than a focus on God’s grace for all believers. For example, a section of verse he drew from I Corinthians 1:18, Verbum autem crucis pereuntibus quidem (‘But the Word of His Cross is indeed […] perishing’), probably served as a signifier of the longer verse (‘But the Word of His Cross is indeed foolishness to those perishing’); it suggests that Protestants risked spiritual death due to an inability to understand Christ’s true message and therefore forcing division rather than Christian unity on the realm. Yet as Tresham presented the shortened verse, it also indicates his worry at the detrimental effect of Protestantism on society and religious life. The Word of God was at risk of its own death as kingdoms and states embraced Protestant theology and practice. Tresham also employed this verse to argue for unity among English Catholics. The English Catholic laity grew divided in the 1590s as some of the secular clergy and Jesuits fought for control over the Catholic

viri, tacito nam tempora grassu/Diffugiunt, melloque sono convertitur annus. Si Deus nobiscum quis contra nos. God save the King 1560.’

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body.36 This division drove factions within some families and prevented Catholic missionary efforts from strengthening, and thus interfered with one of the chief aims of the Counter-Reformation. The verse was a clever, witty, and subtle way to maintain a sense of superiority over Protestants, in a sense calling Protestants fools, but without serious consequences since Tresham could insist that this was an argument for toleration or for social unity among all Englishmen. Tresham used the texts on Lyveden to communicate a desire for religious concord, in keeping with the Council of Trent’s plea for unity among Christians. With a selection from Galatians 6:14 Tresham warned of the dangers of following Protestants who promised worldly comforts, fame, or fortune, if only Catholics would convert to the heretical religion. This verse, Mihi autem absit gloriari nisi in cruce Domini nostri XP (‘God forbid that I should glory save in the cross of our Lord Christ’), Tresham drew from Paul’s letter to the Galatians, wherein Paul cautioned early Christians to beware of false prophets and of those who urged conversion to Judaism more for appearance’s sake than for true spiritual conviction. Paul concluded his letter by exhorting members of the Galatian church to stand firm against people who tried to tempt them to renounce the true faith in order to avoid persecution. These people, said Paul, sought glory in earthly things rather than offering absolute obedience and glory to God. Galatians echoes the situation in which English Catholics regarded themselves: that they were forced to endure persecution on all fronts and the temptations of false prophets for the sake of the true religion. The late Elizabethan state regularly promised recusant Catholics release from prison, cancellation of fines, and even the possibility of appointment to office if only they would convert to Protestantism and maintain regular attendance at their parish church. With this verse, Tresham reiterated to fellow Catholics the dangers of the disunity that stemmed from the dispute between the Appelants and Jesuits. If English Catholics were to survive among the heretics who surrounded them, they had to be unified among themselves to a single purpose under the spiritual direction of a single leader. Yet unity and concord was not a concern of English Catholics alone; it was in the best interests of all English subjects. 36 Michael Questier’s work on the Viscounts Montague treats this subject in great detail. Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. See also P. Renold, ed. The Wisbech Stirs (1595–1598), Publications of the Catholic Record Society, vol. 51 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1958).

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Tresham incorporated layers of meaning throughout the texts and images he inscribed on Lyveden New Bield, which allowed him to convey multiple meanings to multiple consumers and to portray himself as both a faithful Catholic and a loyal subject. The texts that offered praise to the Virgin Mary also implied praise of Elizabeth as England’s Virgin Mother, a role in which the queen had cast herself. With inscriptions such as Gavde Mater Virgo Maria (‘Rejoice O Mary Virgin Mother’), Maria Virgo Sponsa Innuptat (‘Mary, Virgin, Maiden Spouse’) and Benedixit te Deus in Aeternum Maria (‘God blessed thee forever, O Mary’), Tresham exhibited the depth of his wit or cleverness by simultaneously paying homage to the Virgin Mary and to Queen Elizabeth, who herself appropriated Marian imagery to promote loyalty to herself and her regime.37 In this way, Tresham emphasized his loyalty to religious and secular authorities, and could have defended himself against anyone who objected to his Marian veneration by claiming that he had actually paid homage to his queen. He would thus have underscored the claims of loyalty to Elizabeth that he made in his numerous petitions to the crown at the same time he transmitted post-Tridentine doctrine.38 His patriotic claims of loyalty were recognized and accepted by at least some officials in Elizabeth’s government. John Snowden, a former priest working as an English spy in continental Europe, reported to Sir Robert Cecil in June 1591 that he had heard that Tresham, his brother-in-law Lord 37 Gavde Mater Virgo Maria and Benedixit te Deus in Aeternum Maria are reminiscent of the angel Gabriel’s greeting to Mary in Luke 1:26–33 and would have been a reminder to focus on Mary as the queen of Heaven. The former, Gavde Mater Virgo Maria, may also have been drawn from a Responsory at Matins and echoed in a motet, ‘Gaude Virgo, Mater Christi’ written in the early sixteenth century by Josquin des Prez. Maria Virgo Sponsa Innuptat is drawn from an Antiphon for the Virgin Mary’s Saturday Office. The latter two invoke Mary’s mystical marriage to God and her obedience and devotion to Him, and seem to have been used as well in devotional poetry, Marian hymns, and Rosary manuals printed in the late sixteenth century – many of which Tresham had in his personal library. See Anon., The Rosary with the articles of the lyfe & deth of Iesu Chryst and peticio[n]s directe to our lady ([London]: Imprynted at London in Fauster lane, by Iohn Skot dwellyng in Saynt Leonardes parysshe, M.CCCCCxxxvij [1537]), STC (2nd ed.) 17545.5; also The National Archives (hereafter TNA) SP 12/172, f. 16 r. For Elizabeth’s use of Marian imagery, see Carole Levin, The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 26–27, and Helen Hackett, Virgin Mother, Maiden Queen: Elizabeth I and the Cult of the Virgin Mary (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1995). 38 The Marian texts closely resemble ejaculatory prayers, which might have been an additional use of these texts. In July 1587, Pope Sixtus V granted an indulgence of fifty days to ejaculatory prayers that venerated Christ or the Virgin Mary. The potential for the wealth of indulgences that may have come from ejaculatory prayers written in stone might have been another factor in Tresham’s choice of texts.

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Vaux, and three other men were ‘accounted very good subiectes,’ for their opposition to Spanish plots against the queen, their obedience to the state, and their loyalty to the monarch.39 Since not all officials shared Snowden’s appreciation of the loyalty and good behavior of Catholics like Tresham and Vaux, Tresham determined that to ensure the survival of his work and prevent it being defaced or destroyed, he had to encode the devices and emblems so cleverly that they would be accessible not to the ‘vulgar sorte’ but only to his social and cultural equals, ‘men of skyll, especially yf skylled in that wherin the imprese or […] scene reacheth unto.’ 40 Tresham’s intent here echoes the advice in Paolo Giovio’s Dialogo della Imprese militare e amorose (1555), that an emblem ‘should not be so obscure as to need a Sybil for its interpreter, nor so transparent that every mean mechanic might understand it.’ 41 In his design practice, Tresham agreed with Sir William Skipwith’s habit of creating devices and imprese that would be accessible only to his peers. 42 Tresham’s social and cultural equals would appreciate his wit even if they disagreed with the meaning and intent of the devices. But since even that disagreement could be dangerous, he created conceits with multiple and complex layers of meaning, similar to the kinds of multiple messages for multiple audiences that Anthony Browne, Viscount Montague, encoded in his entertainments for Elizabeth at Cowdray, Sussex, in 1591.43 For instance, some of the religious devices Tresham used to symbolize the Passion had political connotations: the Jesuit badge for its connection to a clerical force closely allied with the military strength of Spain and the heraldic image of the Five Wounds of Christ, also called the Arma Christi, for its connection to the Northern Rising in 1569 and to earlier Tudor uprisings. 44 Architecture and gardens in the Elizabethan and Jacobean period were infused with political statements. The architecture of Lyveden New Bield and the gardens that surrounded it simultaneously transmitted CounterReformation doctrine, venerated Christ’s sacrifice, and honored the Virgin 39 TNA SP 12/239, f. 36r. 40 BL Add. MS 39831, f. 5r,v; BL Add. MS 39828, ff. 22–23r,v (HMCV, 91). 41 Elisabeth Woodhouse, ‘Propaganda in Paradise: The Symbolic Garden Created by the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth, Warwickshire,’ Garden History 36, no. 1 (2008): 95; Mark Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Architecture of the Elizabethan Era (London: Country Life, 1966), 40. 42 Thomas Fuller, History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662; Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership), accessed 10 March 2021, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A40672.0001.001. 43 Curtis Breight, ‘Caressing the Great: Viscount Montague’s Entertainment of Elizabeth at Cowdray, 1591,’ Sussex Archaeological Collections 127 (1989): 147–166. 44 K.J. Kesselring, ‘“A Cold Pye for the Papistes”: Constructing and Containing the Northern Rising of 1569,’ Journal of British Studies 43, no. 4 (2004): 426–427.

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Queen. The viewer’s religious and political views shaped their interpretation of that queen as the Virgin Mary, Queen of Heaven, or as Elizabeth, England’s Virgin Queen. The gardens of John, Lord Lumley, at Nonsuch depicted similar themes of political loyalty and Catholicism to what Tresham designed at Lyveden New Bield and, like Tresham’s efforts at Lyveden and Montague’s pageantry at Cowdray, spoke to multiple audiences. Lumley’s use of the phoenix rising from ashes, for instance, was imagery that Queen Elizabeth had used for herself, but it also represented the hope of English Catholics that their faith would recover from near-destruction. The political dynamic of each county was reflected in its building culture. In the Midlands counties of Warwickshire, Leicestershire, and Northamptonshire, the latter stands out as a particular focus of building activity during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. This might reflect the oligarchical nature of Northamptonshire governance; with no one ‘great man’ dominating the county, a constant tension existed in the Northamptonshire power structure that was played out in the building culture. Families scrambled to gain and keep their position and status within the county hierarchy. Even the Cecils, as an ascendant family, exhibited some anxiety to display the ancestry that would support the legitimacy of their rising status. 45 In Leicestershire, building projects were dominated by the Hastings family, perhaps a reflection of the political and social hegemony of that family in that particular county. They erected banqueting houses at Ashby-de-la-Zouche in the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, but, as Nikolaus Pevsner has observed, Leicestershire, in contrast to its neighboring counties, has ‘no Elizabethan house of major importance.’46 Warwickshire’s building culture in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries reflected the political uncertainty of the county. Similar to Leicestershire, building activity in Warwickshire was limited. Major projects were carried out by the Earl of Leicester at Kenilworth Castle in the 1570s, Sir Thomas Lucy at Charlecote, and Sir Fulke Greville’s renovations at Warwick Castle in the early seventeenth century. Other than those projects, for the latter half of the sixteenth century, many gentlemen in Warwickshire (regardless of their religious preferences) built gatehouses – a very medieval building scheme – while their contemporaries one county to the east built gardening lodges and banquet houses. The gatehouses were 45 Henderson, Tudor House and Garden, 67. 46 Nikolaus Pevsner, Leicestershire and Rutland, Buildings of England series, 2nd ed., revised by Elizabeth Williamson (London; New York: Penguin Group, 1977), 31.

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often infused with the same kinds of heraldic messages that builders used in Northamptonshire and Leicestershire, which indicates that builders in Warwickshire adopted some of the new Renaissance forms being employed elsewhere. These gatehouses, such as the one Sir George Throckmorton built at Coughton Court, were symbolically defensive or protective spaces designed to separate the household from the outside world. Warwickshire’s building culture in the late sixteenth century resembles Leicestershire’s building culture at the same time: dominated by one noble family and reflective of the dominance of that family. Patterns of elite building culture in Warwickshire support arguments about the Dudley ascendancy in the late sixteenth century. 47 Robert, Earl of Leicester, and Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, dominated the county’s building culture in the 1570s and 1580s. Following their deaths in 1588 and 1590, respectively, Warwickshire’s building culture began to show signs of growth as families sought to reorder the county’s political and social hierarchy. Sir Robert Digby might have renovated or entirely rebuilt his house at Coleshill, near Birmingham. The extensive gardens at Coleshill spanned at least 300 meters (c. 1,000 feet) and, with the house, were encompassed by an octagonal moat. 48 The recent discovery of the gardens at Coleshill calls into question what we know about elite gardens in Warwickshire. Extant evidence suggests that most of the gentlemen of the county, whether Protestant, Puritan, or Catholic, did not embark on the kinds of large-scale projects as did gentlemen in Northamptonshire. Yet, as the discovery at Coleshill reveals, there are certainly more sites like this in the county. 49 The frenetic display of building and rebuilding in the Midlands slowed by the early 1630s, as the gentry and nobility shifted their focus to the capital. As Linda Levy Peck has pointed out, by the waning years of King James’s reign and into the first decade of Charles I’s, gentry and noble builders increasingly devoted their resources to building in Westminster and London, where they could enjoy close access to the king and court.50 The extent to 47 Glyn Parry and Cathryn Enis, Shakespeare before Shakespeare: Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and the Elizabethan State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 48 Livia Gershon, ‘Stunningly Well-Preserved Elizabethan Garden Discovered in England,’ Smithsonian Magazine, 28 January 2021, accessed 28 January 2021, https://www.smithsonianmag. com/smart-news/remains-elaborate-elizabethan-garden-found-180976873/. The Coleshill discovery was announced shortly before this book went into production, so further investigation of the Digby building projects was not possible. 49 The site at Coleshill was discovered during preparations for construction of the High Speed 2 (HS2), a high-speed railway. The find amplifies the need for the kind of aerial and land surveys in Warwickshire that have been performed in Northamptonshire. 50 Peck, Consuming Splendor, 206–209.

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which patronage also changed in this period, due in part to the Duke of Buckingham’s monopoly on royal favor in the 1620s, is explored in Chapter Six.

Gardens and Gardening Gardens were common features of early modern life across social levels. As Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson have noted, kitchen gardens were ubiquitous among the middling sort, who relied on those spaces for sustenance and for the articulation of patriarchal identity. In the garden, men could be ‘imagined as a complex blend of Christ and Adam,’ the nexus point for power granted by the Almighty.51 Gardens, albeit larger ones, had similar significance for the upper sort. Among the gentry and nobility, gardens were simultaneously spaces of recreation, renewal, food production, identity, religious practice, and political discourse. Whether Protestant or Catholic, early modern elites valued gardens not only for the solitude they provided, but also for the opportunity for social display, reputation building, and the performance of gendered attributes. Landscape gardens were devices through which men demonstrated their power not only over the household and the estate, but also over the environment itself. Through a display of wealth, education, and good taste, elite men rearranged the landscape by flattening hills, creating new ones through mounts, fashioning water courses that were simultaneously artistic and utilitarian, selecting plants that resonated with messages of political loyalty or religious identity, all of which communicated elite manhood. Like other architectural spaces, gardens were expressions of power infused with symbolic meanings. Garden architects and their patrons recognized the landscape as a canvas on which one could inscribe a variety of complex messages via the garden’s design, symbolic elements, and plant selection. Aristocratic gardeners used devices in planted landscapes just as they did on their buildings; plants were part of a symbolic vocabulary similar to that of building designs and embellishments. While orchards and gardens had utilitarian purposes such as provision of produce for a household and the aesthetic purpose of beautifying an estate, they were also laden with messages that could be personal, political, religious, or a combination thereof.

51 Hamling and Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England, 85.

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Gardens were a strategy through which gentry and nobility claimed social and political prominence. As such, gardening was highly competitive during this period as both established and ascendant families displayed their status and fought for dominance in the social and political hierarchy. Aerial surveys and the interdisciplinary efforts of historians with archaeologists, botanists, and soil scientists have revealed that large-scale gardens were a common feature in the landscape in the last half of the sixteenth century. Christopher Taylor established that there were at least fifty significant gardens in Northamptonshire prior to 1650, including Sir Christopher Hatton’s at Holdenby and Kirby and Sir Thomas Tresham’s at Lyveden and Rushton.52 The presence of orchards and garden-related earthworks suggest that there were probably gardens at Edward Griffin’s house at Dingley, Sir Edward Montagu’s Barnwell estate, and Sir William Fitzwilliam’s Dogsthorpe estate.53 Gardens in this period functioned as more than aesthetically pleasing spaces. They served as an extension of interior domestic space, as a sequence of outdoor rooms. People used gardens for hospitality, as spaces for meditation and study, and, particularly in urban areas, as a respite from noise and odor. Gardens were sites for display of one’s social, political, and religious identities. Sir Nicholas Bacon’s gardens at Gorhambury reflected his neo-Stoic approach to life, while Lord Lumley’s gardens at Nonsuch and 52 Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the County of Northampton, Vol. 1: Archaeological Sites in North-east Northamptonshire (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1975); Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the County of Northampton, Vol. 2: Archaeological Sites in Central Northamptonshire (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1979); Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, An Inventory of the Historical Monuments in the County of Northampton, Vol. 3: Archaeological Sites in North-west Northamptonshire (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1981); Marcus Binney, ‘Northamptonshire’s Lost Gardens,’ Country Life (December 1979): 2142–2144; A.E. Brown, Garden Archaeology, Council for British Archaeology Research Report (Dorchester: Dorset Press, 1991); Brian Dix, Iain Soden, and Tora Hylton, ‘Kirby Hall and Its Gardens: Excavation in 1987–94,’ Archaeological Journal 152 (1995): 331; Roy Strong, ‘Foreword: The Renaissance Garden in England Reconsidered: A Survey of Two Decades of Research on the Period,’ Garden History 27, no. 1 (1999): 3; See also Lorna McRobie, ‘Garden Archaeology,’ [English Heritage] Conservation Bulletin 28 (March 1996): 14–16, accessed 15 February 2021, https://historicengland. org.uk/images-books/publications/conservation-bulletin-28/conservationbulletin28/. 53 The earthworks at Barnwell, for instance, were mounts and water courses, which would indicate a garden rather than earthworks connected to an earlier defensive purpose. Henderson, Tudor House and Garden, 231–232. Montagu’s Barnwell was two miles south of Oundle and a near neighbor to Tresham’s estate at Lyveden. For Sir William Fitzwilliam’s Dogsthorpe estate, see Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Lord Montagu of Beaulieu (London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationary Office by Mackie & Co., 1900), 23.

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Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel’s gardens in London advertised their extensive travels.54 Lumley’s gardens at Nonsuch and Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester’s gardens at Kenilworth wove political statements of loyalty to Elizabeth; Leicester also used these planted spaces to proclaim his devotion and affection to the queen in what Elisabeth Woodhouse has accurately identified as Leicester’s propaganda.55 Sir Thomas Tresham’s gardens at Lyveden expressed his social and religious identities, first as a gentleman and secondly as a Catholic. Construction of landscape gardens such as those at Theobalds, Holdenby, and Lyveden communicated a gardener’s virtue and power by demonstrating his dominance over nature and the natural world. The ability to dominate the natural world amplified a man’s masculinity through the performance of economic independence, control of labor on an estate, and specialized knowledge of botany and gardening practices. In 1595, after visiting Sir Christopher Hatton’s gardens at Holdenby, John Norden wrote that above all one should note the ‘industrye and toyle of man’ that had transformed ‘a most craggye and unfitable lande’ into a civilized environment filled with pleasant scents, paths for walking among orchards and arbors, and water features fed by conduit pipes.56 For Norden, these features demonstrated the ultimate triumph of man over nature. He did not use the term ‘manhood’ but that was what he was talking about: Hatton’s display of manhood through the gardens at Holdenby was a potent one, and emphasized his power, virtue, and ability to impose order on uncivilized landscapes. Hatton also had gardens at his Kirby estate in the Elizabethan period, including a rectangular-shaped prospect mount.57 Nearly two decades later, around 1610, Hatton’s descendant, another Christopher Hatton, installed the Great Garden at Kirby in anticipation of a visit from James I.58 As magnificent as 54 For Bacon and Lumley, see Alexandra Walsham, The Reformation of the Landscape: Religion, Identity and Memory in Early Modern Britain and Ireland (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 312; Hassell Smith, ‘The Gardens of Sir Nicholas and Sir Francis Bacon: An Enigma Resolved and a Mind Explored,’ in Religion, Culture and Society in Early Modern Britain: Essays in Honour of Patrick Collinson, ed. Anthony Fletcher and Peter Roberts (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 125–160; Charles Waldstein, The Diary of Baron Waldstein: A Traveller in Elizabethan England, ed. G.W. Groos (London: Thames and Hudson, 1981), 155–161. 55 Woodhouse, ‘Propaganda in Paradise.’ 56 John Norden, Speculi Britanniae pars altera; or A Deliniation of Northamptonshire (1595; London, 1720), 49–50. A longer version of Norden’s quote appears in Henderson, Tudor House and Garden, 89. 57 Dix, Soden, and Hylton, ‘Kirby Hall and Its Gardens,’ 331. 58 Dix, Soden, and Hylton, ‘Kirby Hall and Its Gardens,’ 324. This Christopher Hatton (to whom the History of Parliament Online refers as Christopher Hatton II to reduce confusion)

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the original gardens at Kirby might have been, the early-seventeenth-century garden was renowned as one of the finest in England. Gardens could be political spaces. Gentry and nobility conveyed messages of loyalty or fealty to the monarch in hopes of gaining or retaining the monarch’s favor. The Earl of Leicester’s garden at Kenilworth, commissioned in anticipation of Queen Elizabeth’s visit on summer progress in 1575, asserted the earl’s status as royal favorite and his position as the senior noble and dominant lord in Warwickshire.59 While the plants and herbs in Leicester’s garden are not known, at least one observer noted that fruit trees included apples, pears, and the queen’s favorite, cherries.60 In the early 1580s, John, Lord Lumley’s, gardens at Nonsuch advanced a plea for the queen’s forgiveness for a political error ten years earlier. Sir Thomas Tresham’s gardens conveyed multiple political messages: loyalty to the queen, opposition to religious policy, and his commitment to Catholic doctrine. The Catholic Lord Lumley’s gardens included an elaborate apology for the role he had played in the Ridolfi Plot in the early 1570s. Although he had been pardoned, earning his way back into both the queen’s favor and elite society’s approval was a long and fraught process that required him to demonstrate loyalty, virtue, humility, and strength. In one part of his garden, the Grove of Diana, Lumley included imagery and texts by which he pledged his loyalty to the queen and cast himself as a fool who had been too easily led astray, ‘the smitten fisher [who] at length grows wise.’61 The centerpiece of the grove was the Fountain of Diana, in which Lumley depicted the goddess as a lactating mother. Elizabeth herself sometimes invoked Diana in creating her own image, so Lumley’s imagery was clear: the chaste Diana was the Virgin Queen, who cared for her people as a mother cared for her children, and whose mercy flowed as freely to those children as would the nourishment of a mother’s milk – mercy which had saved Lumley’s life.62 was the son of John Hatton, a cousin of Sir Christopher Hatton (d. 1591). Hatton II’s son, another Christopher, was the antiquary and later became Baron Hatton of Kirby. 59 Woodhouse, ‘Propaganda in Paradise,’ 98. 60 Janette Dillon, ‘Pageants and Propaganda: Robert Langham’s and George Gascoigne’s Princely Pleasures at Kenilworth,’ in The Oxford Handbook of Tudor Literature: 1485–1603, ed. Mike Pincombe and Cathy Shrank (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 623–636. 61 Martin Biddle, ‘The Gardens of Nonsuch: Sources and Dating,’ Garden History 27, no. 1 (1999): 166; Henderson, Tudor House and Garden, 93. See also Kathryn Barron, ‘The Collecting and Patronage of John, Lord Lumley (c. 1535–1609),’ in The Evolution of English Collecting, ed. E. Chaney (New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press, 2003), 147. 62 John Gerard, in his Herball, also depicted Elizabeth as a nursing mother. See Rebecca Laroche, Medical Authority and Englishwomen’s Herbal Texts, 1550–1650 (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 60.

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In the Privy Garden, also devoted to imagery of Diana, Lumley erected a caryatid fountain with an imperial crown made of porphyry, around which was cast a gilded coronet, at the top of which was the goddess’s crescent moon.63 The features in the Privy Garden were part of Lumley’s flattery of the queen, but they might also have represented a subtle message of disagreement with her religious policy which, if not carefully concealed, would have ruined any gains he had made in reestablishing his good name. Lumley’s choice of porphyry for the Privy Garden might have symbolized the Neoplatonist Porphyry’s intellectual attack on early Christians, the equivalent of which, for Lumley, might have been criticism of Protestant doctrine.64 Other Catholic builders used a similar strategy of passive resistance to off icial policy. Sir Thomas Tresham’s building projects at Rushton and Lyveden were layered with symbolic meaning that articulated his disagreement with Elizabethan religious policy while also using imagery, like the Virgin Mary, that reflected both his faith and his queen’s self-fashioning.65 Gardens were religious spaces for both Protestants and Catholics, where people could seek out solitude for contemplation and prayer. Contemporary garden writers like Gervase Markham noted how important gardens were as places of spiritual renewal.66 Mary Rich, Countess of Warwick, and Lady Anne Clifford both used the gardens around their homes as sites for private prayer.67 The performance of piety through prayer was a central feature of early modern femininity for all women. Piety was one of many means of women’s religious self-expression enshrined in gender codes and sustained through social and religious structures.68 For Catholics, it is reasonable 63 Biddle, ‘The Gardens of Nonsuch,’ 153–154, 177. 64 Eusebius, ‘Church History,’ in A Select Library of Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers of the Christian Church, Second Series, Vol. 1: Eusebius: Church History, Life of Constantine the Great, and Oration in Praise of Constantine. Translated into English with Prolegomena and explanatory notes under the editorial supervision of Philip Schaff and Henry Wace (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1955), 265–266. 65 Sandeep Kaushik, ‘Resistance, Loyalty, and Recusant Politics: Sir Thomas Tresham and the Elizabethan State,’ Midland History 21 (1996): 47–51; Susan M. Cogan, ‘Building the Badge of God: Architectural Representations of Persecution and Coexistence in Post-Reformation England,’ Archiv für Reformationsgeschichte/Archive for Reformation History 107, no. 1 (2016): 165–192. 66 Jill Francis, Gardens and Gardening in Early Modern England and Wales (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2018), 48–50. 67 Walsham, Reformation of the Landscape, 249. 68 The literature on female piety is vast. See, for example, Patricia Crawford, Women and Religion in England, 1500–1720 (London: Routledge, 1993), 73–75; Barbara J. Harris, English Aristocratic Women and the Fabric of Piety, 1450–1550 (Leiden: Amsterdam University Press, 2018), 19. For

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to conclude that gardens took on additional religious significance, since most Catholics lacked access to traditional spaces of worship. Tresham’s Lyveden was replete with religious symbolism in the landscape. In the lower orchard, his workmen planted two principal walks, one of walnuts and another of cherries.69 In the moated garden, pollen analysis has indicated the presence at the site of several plants connected to the veneration of the Virgin Mary: woodbine, wormwood, marigold, pinks, rock cress, campion, saxifrage, meadowsweet, willow, and hawthorn.70 These plants were typically Elizabethan, and as such could serve as simultaneous symbols of religious, gentry, and English identities. The moated garden contained a pattern of concentric circles that recent research has revealed to be a labyrinth. Such designs were not unusual in early-seventeenth-century England; they were features of the gardens at Nonsuch, Theobalds, and Boughton Green, the latter two of which Tresham was definitely aware.71 Regardless of one’s religious convictions a labyrinth could serve as a substitute pilgrimage to a holy site. For Catholics, however, such spaces must have had particularly strong sacred meanings since pilgrimage and worship services were denied them by the Protestant state. It is difficult to determine exactly which plants early modern gardeners planted, and even when we do know, it is difficult to establish their motives beyond a personal fondness for a particular tree or plant, or an objective to produce a specific fruit for the estate’s consumption or output. Scant sources exist and, even then, the laypeople who left extensive notes about gardens, wrote instructions to their overseers, or noted garden-related expenditures in their account books did not provide the fine-grained detail that would allow us to know where specific plants were placed or the rationale behind that placement. Tresham occasionally mentioned these details. In his moated garden he directed for roses to be planted among raspberry bushes since fallen rose petals would provide ground cover and deter weed growth.72 If there was a spiritual element to the intermingling of roses and raspberries, Tresham did not say. Walter Hastings’s account books for the early seventeenth century indicate the planting of orchards at his Donnington estate between 1614 and 1616 and regular traffic to Leicester for at least one piety of nonelite women, see Katherine L. French, The Good Women of the Parish: Gender and Religion After the Black Death (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008). 69 Andrew Eburne, ‘The Passion of Sir Thomas Tresham: New Light on the Gardens and Lodge at Lyveden,’ Garden History 36, vol. 1 (2008): 122. 70 Eburne, ‘The Passion of Sir Thomas Tresham,’ 126. 71 Eburne, ‘The Passion of Sir Thomas Tresham,’ 125–126. 72 BL Add. MS. 39829, f. 165r; BL Add. MS. 39831, f. 69r.

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servant to buy trees and plants. During that period, Hastings bought ten sycamore trees from one ‘Baker of Lester,’ plum trees from the gardener at Avstrye, and planted ‘Lyntree settes.’73 Clearly, Hastings was invested in his orchards and gardens, but any spiritual connection he might have intended is not evident from the financial accounts.

Cultural Networks Catholic gardeners used architecture and landscapes for four distinct purposes: to affirm their status as members of the upper sort, to emphasize that status over their religious affiliation, to augment their kinship and social networks, and to demonstrate their manhood. Architectural networks are visible through personal letters, account books, and sometimes by following the movements of the craftsmen hired by the gentleman builders. Communication between Lord Burghley and Sir Christopher Hatton, for example, makes clear that they talked about their projects and that whenever possible they checked on them in person. During Burghley’s visit to Holdenby mentioned above, he reported that he found ‘a great magnificence in the front or front pieces of the house, and so every part answerable to [the] other, to allure liking. […] I visited all your rooms, high and low, and only the contentation of mine eyes made me forget the infirmity of my legs.’74 In May 1605, the Earl of Salisbury asked his friend and client Sir Fulke Greville to examine the water features and ongoing construction at Theobalds. Greville, who had undertaken the herculean task of building and landscape improvements at Warwick Castle, had a good eye for both the aesthetics and the mechanics of a large project.75 He acknowledged that the ‘5 islands as they are show pleasantly one in proportion to another. Notwithstanding, if they were taken out your judgment is true, that you should have the more water; but because it is so well already I dare not counsel a change.’76 He advised removal of the ‘banks that lie all along under the water’ and expressed reservations about the design of

73 HEHL HAF Box 7 (22), leaf 14 r (not paginated). 74 BL Add. MS 15891, f. 32r; printed in Sir Harris Nicholas, Memoirs of the Life and Times of Sir Christopher Hatton, K.G. (London: Richard Bentley, 1847), 125–126. See also Mark Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1983), 19. 75 Joan Rees, Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, 1554–1628: A Critical Biography (Berkeley; Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971), 14–15. 76 HH CP 110/168r (pr. HMCS, vol. 17, 214)

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some windows, but overall conveyed his admiration and approval of what his patron had constructed.77 Network ties are also visible in the craftsmen and gardeners people shared, through the other aristocratic builders and gardeners with whom they exchanged ideas and building materials, and can also be inferred through similarities in design among people who were part of the same social or kinship network. While still imprisoned at Ely in 1597, Sir Thomas Tresham directed his steward at Lyveden to contact the Dean of Ely Cathedral’s man, probably his gardener, from whom he could procure a specific variety of pear.78 Tresham’s knowledge of the various plants and varieties of fruit trees in the Dean’s orchard at Ely and the ease with which he was able to procure grafts from those trees suggests that Tresham and the dean, Humphrey Tyndall, had become friendly enough to consider one another part of a wider network of horticultural enthusiasts, a network that, two decades previously, had included Tresham’s patrons, Lord Burghley and Sir Christopher Hatton. Tresham also shared an interest in building and gardening with the earls of Worcester, in whose household at Raglan Castle Tresham’s eldest son Francis was raised and educated. William Somerset, third Earl of Worcester (d. 1588), and his son Edward, the fourth earl, built lavish landscape gardens at Raglan Castle, complete with a series of knot gardens, a ‘stately Tower’ as a summer or banqueting house, water features and a fountain that ran throughout the day and night.79 Although both William and Edward were avid gardeners, the latter was ‘in the forefront of garden-making in his day,’ along with Lord Burghley at Theobalds and Hatfield and Sir Nicholas Bacon at Gorhambury. Tresham must have been aware of the garden projects at Raglan and at Worcester’s London house, Worcester Lodge, or must have been in contact with the earls about their shared interest, since some of the designs at the Worcester properties and Lyveden bear strong similarities. Robert Smythson’s description of the 77 Greville’s clientage to Salisbury began late in Elizabeth’s reign. Correspondence between the two men indicates that, while friendly and perhaps even based on friendship, their relationship was also one of patron and client. See, for example, HH CP 54/99r (pr. HMCS, vol. 7, 370); HH CP 177/104 (pr. HMCS, vol. 8, 367); HH CP 88/147r,v (pr. HMCS, vol. 11, 433); HH CP 88/169r (pr. HMCS, vol. 11, 442); HH CP 101/73r (pr. HMCS, vol. 15, 202). 78 BL Add. MS 39831, ff. 72 r -74 r. The Dean of Ely in 1593 was Humphrey Tyndall, William Stevenson, A Supplement to the Second Edition of Mr. Bentham’s History & Antiquities of the Cathedral & Conventual Church of Ely (Norwich: Stevenson, Matchett, and Stevenson, 1817), 33; A. Gibbons, ed., Ely Episcopal Records: A Calendar and Concise View of the Episcopal Records Preserved in the Muniment Room at the Palace of Ely (Lincoln: James Williamson, 1891), 450. 79 Cooper, Houses of the Gentry, 65; Elisabeth H. Whittle, ‘The Renaissance Gardens of Raglan Castle,’ Garden History 17, no. 1 (1989): 83–84. William, third Earl of Worcester, died in 1588.

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terraces, bowling green, and one of the water gardens at Raglan sounds similar to what Tresham built at Lyveden.80 In his garden planning, Tresham drew ideas and inspiration from the landscape designs his patrons employed over the two decades prior to the construction of Lyveden New Bield. The gardens that the Earl of Worcester, Sir Christopher Hatton, and Lord Burghley built in the 1570s and 1580s incorporated the most fashionable Renaissance features drawn from Italian, French, and English influences and probably stimulated the imagination of many other Elizabethan and Jacobean gardeners.81 Still, Tresham applied his own stamp to his gardens, thereby adopting typical Renaissance designs but adapting them to suit his own symbolic requirements. His water garden, for instance, was a moated orchard set in the design of a labyrinth while the similar feature at Raglan appears to have been a moated set of flower gardens.82 Sir Nicholas Bacon, who installed gardens at Gorhambury three decades prior to the establishment of the gardens at Lyveden, also adapted conventional Renaissance designs. He based his designs on Italian models but intended the landscape as a reflection of his stoic philosophy and as a space for solitude, reflection, and intimate conversations with friends, a far different set of intentions than those his brother-in-law, William Cecil, had for his gardens at Theobalds.83 If we trace networks through influences, then it appears that some networks of builders reflect networks of kinship, clientage, and patronage, as seems to have been the case with Tresham, Bacon, and Greville.84 Kinship, clientage, and patronage were significant factors in the employment of skilled craftsmen or workmen and help to illuminate the connective tissue in building and gardening networks. Hugh Hall, a Catholic priest and a gardener, worked extensively in Warwickshire, Worcestershire, and Northamptonshire, although his work was not restricted to Catholic families. Priests frequently concealed themselves in Catholic households by adopting roles that would make them appear as natural members of the household, 80 Whittle, ‘The Renaissance Gardens of Raglan Castle,’ 87, 91. 81 Whittle, ‘The Renaissance Gardens of Raglan Castle,’ 87, 91; Peck, Consuming Splendor, 226–228. 82 Whittle, ‘The Renaissance Gardens of Raglan Castle,’ 90. 83 Smith, ‘The Gardens of Sir Nicholas and Sir Francis Bacon,’ 150–151. 84 Paul Arblaster makes a similar point using evidence of books and clerical censors in the Netherlands, namely that ‘which censor a book was submitted to, and how fulsome they were in their approval of it, can be one indication of networks of alliance and support.’ Paul Arblaster, ‘The Southern Netherlands Connection: Networks of Support and Patronage,’ in Catholic Communities in Protestant States: Britain and the Netherlands c. 1570–1720, ed. Benjamin Kaplan, Bob Moore, Henk van Nierop, and Judith Pollmann (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), 127.

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but Hall actually worked as a gardener and earned a reputation as one who was both highly skilled and trustworthy.85 He worked for the Talbots at Grafton Hall, Worcestershire, in 1568–1569, worked on Hatton’s gardens at Holdenby in the early 1580s, and was resident with both the Ardens and the Throckmortons in the late 1570s and early 1580s.86 A gardener trained by him worked for Tresham’s sister, Mary, Baroness Vaux, at Harrowden in the 1590s, and Tresham sought to hire one of the gardeners Hall trained to help his foreman, John Slynne, and another servant, John Andrews, ‘manage the arbours’ at Lyveden in 1597.87 Hall and his protégés earned excellent reputations and steady work throughout the Midlands in the late sixteenth century because they circulated among a network of building and gardening families, many of whom were known Catholics, but some, including Sir Christopher Hatton, who were vague about their religious beliefs.88 The close relationships formed by those who shared an aff inity for similar cultural pursuits might have helped to keep a skilled craftsman or laborer working within the confines of a specific group and prevented the poaching of talented labor by other gentry or noble builders. Talented gardeners, masons, craftsmen, and laborers were not always easy to secure, and once employed they required steady work to prevent them going to work for someone else. Tresham wrote from prison to ask his steward, George Levens, to be sure to speak to his masons about the work remaining to do at Lyveden before they left for ‘Cissiter’ (Chichester) lest Sir John Stanhope persuade them to go to work for him at Harrington, sixteen miles to the west. If that happened, fretted Tresham, ‘then know not I wher to have so good workmen.’89 Gardening, like architecture, provided an area in which knowledge and skill were more important than religion. Religious affinity did not determine the craftsmen or laborers that builders hired, nor the suppliers or other gardeners from whom they purchased or exchanged materials. Rather, builders hired the best talent and labor they could find, and sought out building materials, trees, and plants that they thought best suited their requirements. While directing his projects from confinement at Ely, Tresham 85 HMCV, liii. 86 TNA SP 12/164, f. 141 r,v; Strong, ‘Foreword,’ 5–6. 87 HMCV, liii; Henderson, Tudor House and Garden, 115; Strong, ‘Foreword,’ 5–6. 88 Hatton was suspected of Catholic leanings and offered patronage, in the form of protection and favor, to a number of Midlands Catholics, but for official purposes conformed to the Elizabethan church. Neil Younger’s forthcoming study of Hatton might offer some clarity on Hatton’s religious position. 89 HMCV, lv.

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wrote about a mason’s or gardener’s particular skills, but not once mentioned a workman’s religion: a free mason who was a ‘good workman and very paynfull [painstaking],’ a ‘ditcher’ who was ‘greatly experienced in the setting of birches […] and is to be sent for to Lyveden’ to direct the planting of the birch arbor, and the gardener, who besides his skill ‘is accounted a very honest man.’90 The Catholicism of Hugh Hall and the other gardeners he trained appealed to Catholic gentry and nobility, but his popularity was not based exclusively on his religion. Rather, Hall’s good name and honor accrued through exemplary work and deep knowledge of horticulture.

Conclusion Catholic gentry and nobility who engaged in typical aristocratic cultural pursuits such as architecture and gardening highlighted their social, economic, and cultural similarity to non-Catholic gentry and nobility. Architectural taste and expertise transcended religious differences among gentlemen and created opportunities for concord within an atmosphere of religious and social tension. Shared interests encouraged the exchange of ideas, materials, and expert craftsmen as well as the mutual appreciation and affirmation of one another’s cleverness, wit, and status. The networks that were developed and reinforced as a result of common cultural interests helped to fortify patronage ties because these common interests drew people closer to one another and helped to bind them to patrons and to the state. In some cases, patronage relationships were strengthened because clients could use their designs, especially their garden designs, to pay tribute to their patrons through imitation of the patron’s design. Imitation was in these cases indeed a form of flattery. For a patron intent on enhancing his own prestige, imitation was one of the best gifts a client could offer.

90 HMCV, liii–lv.

5.

Catholics, Political Life, and Citizenship Abstract This chapter demonstrates that English Catholic women and men remained politically integrated to the state through a range of activities, some of which allowed for the articulation of citizenship rights. Drawing on government documents, family papers and correspondence, and nearcontemporary accounts by Thomas Fuller, this chapter focuses on three discrete political roles: office holding, military service, and petitioning. This chapter offers a sustained scholarly treatment of post-Reformation Catholic military networks, and both men’s and women’s involvement in those networks. Furthermore, petitioning allowed Catholic women to invert traditional gender roles and assume masculine roles of protector of a family; in the end, both women and men used petitions to make specific claims to citizenship in the polity. Keywords: gender, citizenship, petitions, military, politics

In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the English state sought to politically marginalize powerful families that did not adhere to the Protestant state religion. Through their religious dissidence and refusals to swear the Oath of Allegiance, Catholics and recusants implied disloyalty to the state. Beginning in the 1560s, Catholic men were removed from county political offices such as sheriff or justice of the peace and many Catholics were not elected to Parliament. Some Catholic men and women remained as courtiers, even in positions close to the monarch’s body, which makes clear the complicated nature of assessing an individual’s loyalty based solely on their religion. The musician William Byrd was known at court as a recusant Catholic yet suffered no detriment to his career because of it. For Catholics like Byrd, whose talents and otherwise loyal, honorable behavior offset their religion, rich participation in political life was possible. Yet for most

Cogan, S.M., Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463726948_ch05

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Catholics, traditional pathways to power and articulations of citizenship were narrowing, if not closing. Despite being disenfranchised from traditional positions of political authority, Catholics participated in political life in ways that revealed not only their sense of agency and civic consciousness, but also of nascent citizenship formation. Catholics remained politically integrated to the state through activities such as office holding, military service, and petitioning. The metrics of individual political allegiance, the relationship between an individual and a polity, and exercise of rights, indicate that citizenship formation was evident in the late medieval period.1 In sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England, citizenship formation occurred through a range of activities that laid claim to individual rights and obligations. For example, office holding was a powerful way for early modern Englishmen to display authority, but it was only one of many pathways to power and the ability to shape policy of the early modern state. Catholic kinship, social, and cultural networks provided both women and men access to political spaces through the multiple ties in those networks. The bonds of family, of friendship and neighborhood, and of common interest, or homophily, offered Catholics connections to political roles and influence. Political life and citizenship were gendered. Women’s political activities and citizenship were different from men’s, just as women’s roles and social networks were different from men’s. Men, especially gentlemen and noblemen, leveraged power through careers in office holding, at court, military service, and petitioning. These careers were central to the construction and maintenance of gentry and noble manhood because they provided opportunities for men to demonstrate their loyalty, authority, physical strength, and esteemed connections. Women articulated their political power through service as a courtier but most commonly and most powerfully through petitioning. These careers were central aspects of elite femininity because of their connection to power and care of the home and the family. Men and women alike drew on their kinship networks and social networks in their engagements with the political sphere. Political engagement was

1 Philippa Maddern, ‘Origins of the Normative Citizen,’ in Women as Australian Citizens: Underlying Histories, ed. Patricia Crawford and Philippa Maddern (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 13–47; Patricia Crawford, ‘Women and Citizenship in Britain 1500–1800,’ in Women as Australian Citizens: Underlying Histories, ed. Patricia Crawford and Philippa Maddern (Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 2001), 48–82; Merry Wiesner-Hanks, ‘Women and Citizenship in Early Modern Europe,’ in Las Mujeres y la Ciudad de Granada en el Siglo XVI (Granada: Ayuntamiento de Granada Concejalía de la Mujer, 2000), 23–24.

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part of a gentle or noble birthright that Catholics continued to exercise in the post-Reformation century, even in periods of persecution. In late medieval and early modern England, citizenship was a bond between an individual and the state, a claim to membership in a certain polity. As a term, ‘citizen’ was used to denote a subject of a country or commonwealth from at least 1425.2 Beyond subjecthood, however, postReformation gentry and nobility displayed the key attributes of citizenship as it was developing in the early modern period: a sense of identity; the possession of certain rights; the performance of those rights through specific duties and actions; interest and involvement in the affairs of state at the national, regional, or local level; and the acknowledgement of certain societal values.3 In the period under examination here, those values were connected to Renaissance conceptions of honor and virtue. Although commonly understood as a modern concept, citizenship among elite Europeans has a history that originates in the late medieval period, if not earlier. In his influential essay on citizenship and social class, T.H. Marshall acknowledged that forms of citizenship were in place prior to the development of modern citizenship from the eighteenth century onward. 4 Political life, the application of the franchise, and what it meant to be a citizen were in transition during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as is evident in the ways the English gentry responded to and valued political opportunities. Citizenship was about the relationship between the individual and the state, but the Reformation called into question that relationship. In the late medieval and early modern periods, membership in the polity occurred under the umbrella of the universal church. Individuals were subjects of the monarch, citizens of the emerging nation, and members of the universal body of Christendom. Reformations threatened that tripartite membership as society debated whether a divided religious body could also be part of a universal political body. Was it possible for individuals to be loyal to a monarch if they adhered to a religion to which the monarch did not subscribe? Division of the polity along religious lines threatened to undermine national citizenship since membership in the English polity also 2 OED definition 2.a. 3 I am grateful for the discussion of social citizenship which directed me to this point, in John J. Cogan and Ray Derricott, Citizenship for the 21st Century: An International Perspective on Education (London: Kogan Page, 1998), 2–5. 4 T.H. Marshall, Citizenship and Social Class and Other Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1950), 10.

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meant membership in the English Church.5 The importance of emerging ideas of citizenship is evident in how urgently English people fought to protect it from the populations they perceived as a threat to it. Catholics, for example, maintained in petitions to the monarch and government that they could be loyal to the crown and state as both subjects and citizens, and also subject to the religious authority of a Catholic pope. The state’s response reveals its own anxiety, and the struggles over political right and authority reveal how important this was to people, especially elites, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Those in power articulate citizenship in part by who is allowed access to it and by who is allowed to possess it. Therefore, ‘exclusion and disadvantaging’ has been central to citizenship since at least the late medieval period, especially for women. In late medieval England (c. 1350–1500), religious nonconformity, including Lollardy, could exclude a man from full citizenship that came through service as a soldier, justice, or councilor.6 The sixteenth century displays a shift away from that exclusion. Religious nonconformists served the monarch and state in the military, in the courts, and in a variety of local, regional, and national offices. Those who did not serve found alternative means by which to display their membership in the polity. Thus, during the sixteenth century what it meant to be a citizen was in flux. Catholic gentry and nobility claimed the rights and obligations, or duties, that signaled full citizenship in the polity despite Catholic men and the family groups they represented, having been largely disenfranchised from traditional methods of participation in that polity. Consequently, Catholic men and women exercised those rights and obligations in other ways. Throughout this period, an active political life was indicative of an individual’s power and of their performance of the responsibilities and privileges conferred by their socioeconomic status. Service to the crown and state came through multiple channels. Office holding was a significant one since it acknowledged a man’s standing in a county, but for men who were disqualified from holding office or who had no interest in doing so, there were other means of political engagement. In January 1624, Sir William Spencer preferred not to be nominated for the upcoming Parliamentary election, ‘hoping they would excuse him for this time, and lay the burthen

5 Derek Heater, Citizenship in Britain: A History (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 22. 6 Maddern, ‘Origins of the Normative Citizen,’ 46.

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upon some other.’7 Sometimes, Catholics felt that an office or honor was not worth the potential difficulty of working with men with whom they disagreed on religion. In 1636, Thomas, Baron Brudenell declined Queen Henrietta Maria’s offer to make him her chancellor in part because he would have been the only Catholic ‘of the Queen’s board’; he feared that interpersonal tensions with her other servants might endanger his honor and good reputation and preferred to avoid the ‘weight of the office.’8 The historian Eric Acheson has argued that office holding was not the norm among the elite, but that men who served in this capacity made up a subset of their socioeconomic class, that ‘even substantial gentlemen might not have played a consistently active role in local government.’9 Therefore, we have to be careful with our assumptions about to what degree disenfranchisement from office or service was a loss to an individual.

Office Holding and Political Authority The Reformations, or more accurately the religious nonconformity of some of the ruling class, presented a conundrum for the state. The monarch and government wanted to eliminate opponents to religious reform from positions of political authority but also needed those individuals to maintain order in the counties. The result was a practice – not necessarily an official policy – that at the same time persecution took place in the form of removing some Catholics from regional or national offices, the state also wanted certain Catholics in those offices. Individuals who retained the state’s trust and who had influence with Catholics helped to tether Catholics to the central government. After the 1560s, Catholic presence in both national and local political office had diminished from the earliest years of Elizabeth’s reign. Some men remained in office through displays of conformity with the English Church, but by the 1580s Catholics were a minority in official political roles. Catholic men who desired a career in government office, both for the access to power and because it was a status symbol, usually made a show of conforming to the state church by attending Protestant services in 7 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Buccleuch and Queensbury at Montagu House, vol. 1 (London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationary Office by Mackie & Co., 1899–1926), 259. 8 TNA SP 16/319, f. 224r. 9 Eric Acheson, A Gentry Community: Leicestershire in the Fifteenth Century, c. 1422–c. 1485 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 36.

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their home parish, even if they attended Catholic Mass in their household chapel once they got home. In so doing, men like Sir Edmund Brudenell and his grandnephew, Sir Thomas Brudenell, and their friends Sir George Fermor and Sir John Throckmorton, were able to exert some influence in the making and application of policies, including religious policies. The more militant Catholics, the recusants, had difficulty persuading the state that they were trustworthy enough to hold office. For men from historically powerful families such as the Treshams and Vauxes in Northamptonshire, the Ardens and Throckmortons in Warwickshire, and the Beaumonts in Leicestershire, the crown was happy for the opportunity to curtail their power, both locally and on the national stage.10 Sir Thomas Tresham, the descendant of high-ranking fifteenth-century soldiers, courtiers, and diplomats, and the grandson of the most powerful man in early-sixteenthcentury Northamptonshire, mourned the loss of the political role into which he was born. After his arrest on charges of harboring Edmund Campion in 1581, Sir Thomas was imprisoned and deprived of political office for most of the rest of his life. In 1601 he lamented the loss of office and opportunity ‘in the flourishing time of my years […] and in the prime time of my credit both in city, county and court.’11 Religion was only one consideration in a complex set of objectives that established the structure of authority. By the early 1570s some Catholic men had been removed from the Commission of the Peace, not because of their religion but because of bad behavior; these purges occurred for political, social, and religious reasons.12 In the 1560s and again in 1587–1588, as the Spanish Armada advanced, the Privy Council hoped to identify potentially troublesome individuals and to limit their ability to exert authority over the local populace. In Leicestershire in 1587, six justices of the peace were removed: one because he was dead, two because they were Catholics, and three because they were ‘cold,’ or apathetic justices (who also had recusant family or friends).13 In Buckinghamshire, two JPs were removed for not being resident in the shire, another requested his own removal, yet another was removed for ‘many causes,’ one was removed because both he and his 10 Chapter Six elaborates the delicate balance the state had to strike in reducing the power of these families while also not alienating them to the point they rebelled into civil war. 11 British Library (hereafter BL) Add. MS 39829, f. 16r. 12 Alison Wall, ‘“The Greatest Disgrace”: The Making and Unmaking of JPs in Elizabethan and Jacobean England,’ English Historical Review 119, no. 481 (2004): 312–332; For Devon and Cornwall, see Norman L. Jones, Governing by Virtue: Lord Burghley and the Management of Elizabethan England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 88. 13 BL Lansdowne MS, vol. 53, f. 190r.

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family were recusants, and one although ‘him self of good repute […] his wief is verie backwarde’ and his household known to receive unknown persons suspected to be Catholic priests.14 Yet George Throckmorton, the conforming son of Sir George and uncle to the recusant Thomas, was allowed to remain as JP despite his close relationship with his Catholic relatives within the county and suspicions that he ‘favoured Papistes.’15 Officials were also removed or suspended when they endangered the public good or discredited themselves through their own dishonorable behavior. These episodes sometimes combined religious concerns with local power struggles or personal enmity or had nothing to do with religion. In 1592, Sir George Fermor and John Wake were suspended from the Commission of the Peace in Northamptonshire for fighting. Fermor and Wake got into a heated argument during ‘Open Sessions helde for that countie’ and followed that with ‘open violence at dynner tyme in the companie of all the said Justices.’16 Their fellow justices bound them both to keep the peace and reported the event to the Privy Council. Although Fermor was a conformist who headed a Catholic household, the matter had nothing to do with the religion of either man. Rather, the other justices and the Privy Councilors were concerned that such behavior, ‘especialie in men of their callinge and of the Comission,’ set a dangerous precedent for other men in the county. Part of a justice’s job was to keep the peace and discourage faction and division in his county and Fermor and Wake had endangered that peace. Fermor and Wake’s failure to maintain peace tarnished their own honor and could have undermined their manhood if it amplif ied division or discord in the county. Men in general and officeholders especially were expected to demonstrate restraint and to offer an example of moderation and self-control to other men at the county sessions. This incident also reveals contradictions within normative manhood, namely that behavior was conditional upon circumstances. Physical strength in a fight within this setting was not equivalent to society’s value of physical strength of a soldier or a dispute in a less public environment. It must have been embarrassing for the two men when the Privy Council stepped in as a father would to settle a dispute between his sons. The Privy Council suspended both men 14 BL Lansdowne MS, vol. 53, f. 189v. 15 BL Lansdowne MS, vol. 53, f. 186r. 16 Acts of the Privy Council of England: New Series, ed. John Roche Dascent et al., vol. 23 (London: Printed for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office by Eyre and Spottiswode, 1890–1964) (hereafter APC), 286.

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from the county bench and called them before the council for a hearing.17 By the end of March 1593 the council reinstated both men on the condition that they ‘remitt all unkyndnes fallen out aboute this occasion and to be good freinds hereafter and to forbeare to give any cause of offence eche to other.’18 The veneer of friendship allowed Fermor and Wake to reestablish their claims to honor and by extension, their elite manhood. Even after most recusants were removed from office in the 1560s and 1570s, other Catholics and religious conservatives, particularly those with strong ties to powerful patrons, retained their positions and saw further opportunities develop. Robert Brokesby, a Hastings client and recusant, was a JP from 1559 until his death in 1615.19 Francis Beaumont went to Parliament for Aldeburgh, Leicestershire, in 1572 and served on a committee for legal reforms in 1588. By 1593 he was made a justice of the Court of Common Pleas; the recusancy of his family, his own occasional recusancy, and rumors of priests lodging in his house at Grace Dieu notwithstanding. He served in Leicestershire and Rutland and as legal counsel (and as advocate for the Catholic noblewoman Anne Vaux) until his death in 1598.20 Sir George Shirley of Staunton Harold, Leicestershire, and Astwell, Northamptonshire, was a JP for Leicestershire in the early seventeenth century and served as sheriff of Berkshire in 1603 despite some suspicions about his involvement in the Throckmorton Plot in the 1580s.21 His duties on the county bench kept him in close contact with Sir Robert Cecil; Cecil sent requests to Shirley that he wanted carried out in the county and in return, offered Shirley his patronage. 22 His heir Sir Henry, second Baronet, served in various offices for Leicestershire, including a turn as sheriff in 1624–1625.23 The social prominence of Shirley’s family overcame their Catholicism, and Sir 17 APC, vol. 24, 85–86. 18 APC, vol. 24, 137–138. 19 P.W. Hasler, ed., The House of Commons, 1558–1603, vol. 1 (London: History of Parliament Trust, 1981), 488. 20 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, Vol. III: The Manuscripts of T.B. Clarke-Thornhill, Esq., Sir T. Barrett-Lennard, Bart., Pelham R. Papillon, Esq., and W. Cleverly Alexander, Esq. (London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationary Office by Mackie & Co., 1904) (hereafter HMCV), 79, 82, 85–86, 100, 102; Hasler, The House of Commons, vol. 1, 414–415. 21 Roger D. Sell, ‘Sir John Beaumont and His Three Audiences,’ in Writing and Religion in England, 1558–1689: Studies in Community-Making and Cultural Memory, ed. Roger D. Sell and Anthony W. Johnson (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 196. 22 HH CP 89/109r (pr. Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable The Marquess of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, vol. 11 [London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1883–1976] [hereafter HMCS], 495). 23 The National Archives (hereafter TNA) SP 16/10, f. 98r.

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Henry’s friendship with Buckingham protected him in his feuds with the chief patron of the county, the Earl of Huntingdon.24 Indeed, in the mid1620s, Buckingham, intent on curtailing Huntingdon’s power in the county, ensured that his client, the Catholic Sir Henry Shirley, was in a position that commanded deference from other Leicestershire magistrates.25 In Northamptonshire, Sir Edmund Brudenell served as JP and on various local commissions, including one to investigate the reported theft of Mary Stuart’s jewels from Rockingham Castle in 1576. His coreligionist Sir Thomas Tresham was Ranger of Rockingham Forest in 1578 under the direction of his patron and kinsman, his wife’s uncle, the Earl of Bedford, who was Guardian of the Forest at the same time.26 Brudenell’s brother, Thomas, held at least minor posts in Northamptonshire into the 1580s; Thomas and his kinsman, William Fitzwilliam, were the commissioners charged with sequestering the profits of Lord Vaux’s rectory at Irthlingborough in 1586, although they quickly handed the responsibility to a different set of commissioners.27 Another brother, Sir Robert Brudenell, was sheriff of Huntingdonshire in 1596.28 At least two of the brothers, Sir Edmund and Sir Robert, were Catholics at the head of Catholic households, as was Sir George Fermor of Easton Neston. Fermor, whose father had been displaced in the 1560s, was a JP, sheriff of Northamptonshire in 1590, and a commissioner to search out Jesuits and seminary priests in 1591, despite the known Catholicism of his wife and household and his own religious conservatism.29 Fermor also served as a commissioner for musters under both Elizabeth and James and on 24 Robin P. Jenkins, ‘Shirley, Sir Henry, Second Baronet (1589–1633),’ ODNB, accessed 9 March 2021, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/70620. 25 Thomas Cogswell, Home Divisions: Aristocracy, the State, and Provincial Conflict (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), 99. 26 APC, vol. 4, 157. Tresham’s arrest three years later on suspicion of harboring the Jesuit Edmund Campion and his subsequent emergence as a vocal advocate of Catholic toleration essentially ended further opportunities for his own office holding, but for a brief stint as forest warden in the last two years of his life. 27 In July 1586 Brudenell and Fitzwilliam asked that the commission be taken over by John and Gilbert Pickering, Thomas Mulsho, and John Fosbrooke. TNA SP 46/34, f. 75r. 28 APC, vol. 26, 250. 29 W.J. Sheils, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough (Northampton: Northamptonshire Record Society, 1979), 113, 143; HMCV, 61. It is probable that Sir George was a conforming Catholic; through his mother, Maud Vaux, he was connected with the Vauxes of Harrowden, and his father, at least, was fairly close with William, Lord Vaux. One of his daughters, Agnes, remained Catholic throughout her life and in 1605 was suspected of involvement with the Gunpowder Plot. King James visited Fermor at Easton Neston while on progress in summer 1603. John Nichols, The Progresses, Processions, and Magnificent Festivities of King James the First, His Royal Consort, Family, and Court, vol. 1 (London: Society of Antiquaries, 1828), 167.

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various local commissions, including one to search the house of a prominent Puritan, Peter Wentworth, for evidence of any ‘matter that hath bene or may be intended to be moved in Parliament,’ particularly anything related to the royal succession.30 Fermor’s standing in the county and his authority among the local populace was sufficient for him to act as an arbitrator in disputes, as he did in 1608 between John Cocke and Francis Morgan.31 Neither his religion, the religion of his household, nor his friendships with recusant families such as the Vauxes of Harrowden were an impediment to his office-holding career. Some Warwickshire Catholics retained office and successfully pursued political advancement, but that depended where their efforts fell in relation to the Dudleys’ efforts to advance their own clientage. As Cathryn Enis and Glyn Parry have demonstrated, Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, and Robert, Earl of Leicester, remade the Warwickshire commission of the peace to reflect Dudley authority networks in the county, not specifically to purge Catholics. Their efforts resulted in Dudley clients forming a ‘tight-knit unit on the commission’ by the early 1570s, a group which carried out the mandates of their patrons.32 The Dudley ascendancy also disenfranchised most of the county power brokers of the previous generations, such as the Throckmorton and Arden families. A few of the old guard remained, perhaps through the patronage of Sir Christopher Hatton, who for a time was able to push back on the Dudley hegemony.33 Sir John Throckmorton, a conformist head of a Catholic recusant household was a justice of the peace until his death in 1580.34 Sir John had been a client of the Dudleys earlier in his adulthood but by the end of his life that relationship had soured, and he ended up blaming them for his ruin. His kinsman Robert Middlemore of Edgbaston served as sheriff of Warwickshire in 1568–1569 and as a JP until his death in 1576 despite repeatedly avoiding the Oath of Supremacy; his son Richard was a JP from 1582 until 1591, when he was removed due to the recusancy of his wife and heir.35 Edward Arden of Park Hall, who harbored the gardener-priest Fr. 30 APC, vol. 32, 249; APC, vol. 21, 392–393. 31 George French, ed., The Equity Reports 1854–1855: Reports of Cases Argued and Determined in the Court of Chancery […] (London: Spottiswoode, 1855), 69–70. 32 Glyn Parry and Cathryn Enis, Shakespeare before Shakespeare: Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and the Elizabethan State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 72. 33 Cathryn Enis, ‘The Dudleys, Sir Christopher Hatton and the Justices of Elizabethan Warwickshire,’ Midland History 39, no. 1 (2014): 13. 34 TNA SP 12/93, f. 29v; TNA SP 12/121, f. 33v; TNA SP 12/145, f. 44r; BL Lansdowne MS, vol. 35, f. 137v. 35 TNA SP 12/93, f. 29v; TNA SP 12/206, f. 177r; BL Lansdowne MS, vol. 35, f. 137 v. The extent to which the career of the courtier Henry Middlemore resulted in patronage for his Warwickshire cousins is unclear.

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Hugh Hall, was a JP from 1577 until his son-in-law’s plot against the queen landed Arden and most of his family in prison in 1583.36 Henry Ferrers of Baddesley Clinton held office not in Warwickshire, but in Rutland: he was sheriff of Rutland in 1598.37 The deaths of the earls created a power vacuum in Warwickshire that sparked a renegotiation of county power relations, but the lingering effects of the Dudleys shaped county offices through the early seventeenth century.38 Recusants gradually moved back into administrative positions. Sir Thomas Compton, a recusant, was a JP in the 1620s, due to the twin advantages of family status and court patronage. His brother William, Baron Compton (and from 1618 Earl of Northampton), was Warwickshire’s lord lieutenant between 1603 and 1630 and was married to Mary Beaumont Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham’s mother, who was herself a conduit of court patronage.39 The continuities described above were not limited to the Midlands. William Sheils has demonstrated that in both Yorkshire and Sussex there was a high degree of continuity of Catholics in local office. These men were not a minority, but included upwards of one hundred officeholders who were recusant or with recusant relatives. 40 In Yorkshire, the high density of Catholics meant that it would have been difficult to find a candidate for office holding who did not have Catholic kin. The Midlands region lacked Yorkshire’s density of Catholics, but even so families were accustomed to Catholics within their kin networks and communities. Despite the removal of many recusant Catholics from positions of authority, there was a high degree of continuity in office holding throughout the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; fluctuations in membership of the commission of the peace and the shrievalty appear as a natural function of the off ice and a reflection of the social structure of a given county. Leicestershire displayed stability in the family names that appeared in the Libri Pacis from 1573 to 1608 and in the county factions or alliances those families represented. The Hastings family and members 36 TNA SP 12/121, f. 33v. 37 Thomas Fuller, History of the Worthies of England (London, 1662; Ann Arbor: Text Creation Partnership), accessed 10 March 2021, http://name.umdl.umich.edu/A40672.0001.001, vol. 3, 46; Jan Broadway speculates that Henry Ferrers of Baddesley Clinton might have been the Henry Ferrers who was Cirencester’s MP in 1593; it could have been a namesake. 38 Parry and Enis, Shakespeare before Shakespeare, 170. 39 ‘House of Lords Journal Volume 3: 20 May 1624,’ in Journal of the House of Lords: Volume 3, 1620–1628 (London: His Majesty’s Stationery Off ice, 1802), 392–396, British History Online, accessed 25 September 2019, https://www.british-history.ac.uk/lords-jrnl/vol3/pp392-396. 40 W.J. Sheils, ‘Catholics and Recusants,’ in A Companion to Tudor Britain, ed. Robert Tittler and Norman Jones (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 264–265.

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of their network dominated positions on the county bench throughout this period. Some semblance of a balance of power in the county was assured by the inclusion on the county bench of the Hastings’s rivals, the Greys, and members of the Grey aff inity. 41 This is a good reminder that the Privy Council, which determined composition of the commission of the peace, used county off ices to check the power of mighty noble families and their networks. 42 In 1608, there were twice as many JPs from the Hastings entourage as there were from the Grey entourage, a clear indicator of which kinship group commanded the most authority in the county, but whose authority had its limits. 43 From 1573 to 1582 the bench was occupied by Hastings, Turpin, Skipwith, Berkeley, Harrington, Beaumont of Cole Orton, three members of the Cave family, Dannett, Skevington, Purvey, Stokes, Browne, Ashby, Smith and Poole. By 1608 Hastings, Turpin, Skipwith, Harrington, Beaumont, Cave, Turville and Smith remained; the others were replaced by Humfrey, Dixie, Fleming, Layton, Chippingdale, Saunders, Rowell, and Lord Grey’s son. By 1632 Harrington and the Caves had disappeared, and another crop of new names appeared: Merry, Roberte, Bale, Hartopp, Gerard, Sheldon, Halford, and Lacy. The Skevingtons and Ashbys appear on every list but one (1608) during the entire period; the Skipwiths and Smiths appeared on every list between 1573 and 1632. Northamptonshire, by contrast, exhibits a pattern in keeping with the enduring oligarchical structure of its government. Here, the JP lists reveal greater consistency in office-holding families. To be sure, a number of new families were in the ascendancy, such as Spencer, Watson, Montagu, Isham, Hatton, Olney, Lane, Knightley, and from 1608 the Treshams of Newton. Men from those families appear consistently in the Libri Pacis for the period from 1573 to 1632 while ancient families such as Tresham of Rushton disappear after Mary’s reign and established families such as Wyndham, Harecourt, and Bray trail off after 1582. In the main, however, the degree of turnover over the entire period from 1573 to 1632 is less pronounced than in Leicestershire. This kind of consistency in Northamptonshire’s commission of the peace 41 Henry E. Huntington Library (hereafter HEHL) HA 4331, 22 December 1611. 42 Norman Jones, Governing by Virtue: Lord Burghley and the Management of Elizabethan England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 84–86. 43 The Hastings family’s entourage included the Earl of Huntingdon, Walter Hastings, Henry Hastings, William Faunt, Thomas Humphrey, Thomas Compton, Robert Brookesby, Samuel Fleming, Bartholomew Laxton, William Smyth, and Henry Smyth. The Grey entourage included Lord Grey, John Grey, Thomas Beaumont, William Cave, Wolstan Dixie, and Matthew Sanders. TNA. SP 14/33, ff. 36r,v.

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and, furthermore, the domination of the offices by Puritan-inclined family groups such as Montagu and Isham helped to foster an atmosphere of tacit toleration of Catholics. So long as the Puritans and their friends maintained hegemony in county offices and that hegemony was not challenged by Catholics with greater social status, such as a Tresham, most of the JPs were willing to tolerate their Catholic neighbors. 44 Like Northamptonshire, the Warwickshire commission of the peace was stable between 1573 and 1582. Of the twenty-five family groups who appeared in the Libri Pacis during that period, seventeen of those appear on every list for that nine-year span. By 1608, eleven had disappeared: Anderson, Hubaud, Knowles, Willoughby, Egleamby, Shuckburge (2), Petoe, Dannett, Dabridgecourt, and Higford. These men were replaced by fourteen new JPs; by 1632 Newdigate, Beaufou, Verney, and Burgoyne remained on the bench. They were joined by nine new men: Archer, Overbury, Lisle, Puckering, Browne, Lee, Ward, Dilke, and Stapleton. Despite these shifts, however, a number of families remained constant, including some ancient houses: Lucy, Arden, Boughton, Fielding, Fisher, Devereux, Ferrers, Lee, and Throckmorton. Ann Hughes has demonstrated that Warwickshire offices often went to families long-established in the county and less frequently to newcomers. Of the forty-five men on the commission of the peace between 1620 and 1640, for example, nearly half – twenty-one – descended from families who had been resident in the county prior to 1500; a mere eight were newcomers. 45 This trend is also evident in the decades prior to 1620. Since most of the gentlemen who served as JPs throughout this period had Catholic relations or friends, the potential of these relationships to enhance personal ties to the state was unavoidable. The Protestant Throckmortons had ties of sociability to their Catholic kinsmen in spite of their ideological disagreements; other families did as well, such as the Digbys, Ferrerses, and Dymocks. 46 The activities in which some of these officials were engaged, such as antiquarian work, provided additional network ties through shared interests and sociability. Sir Simon Archer, for instance, was part of an 44 This model of coexistence aligns with Keith Luria’s analysis of Huguenots and Catholics in Reformation France. Keith Luria, Sacred Boundaries: Religious Coexistence and Conflict in Early Modern France (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 2; Philip Benedict, The Huguenot Population of France, 1600–1685: The Demographic Fate and Customs of a Religious Minority, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 81, pt. 5 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1991), 84–85. 45 Ann Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 1620–1660 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 52–55. 46 HH CP 101/89r (HMCS, vol. 15, 207).

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antiquarian group that connected him by intellectual affinity and friendship with Catholics in his county. The Libri Pacis are imperfect records but display enough information for us to detect patterns in administrative personnel. Some lists were far more complete than others; the 1608 and 1632 rolls were meticulous and lengthy, for example, while the 1582 list reads like an addendum to a list already in place since the usual ordering of court officials, nobility and bishops is absent. 47 In some cases, individuals do not appear on the lists at all, yet other sources, such as Privy Council communications, identify them as JPs. Sir Thomas Brudenell was absent from the 1608 and 1632 lists, yet was identified as a JP by both the House of Commons and the House of Lords. 48 As Alison Wall’s study of JPs has demonstrated, the lists make the office of JP look like a capricious and constantly changing organism.49 Despite these difficulties, the lists are complete enough to offer an indication of the shifts in governing families that took place in the early seventeenth century and again early in Charles I’s reign. The sheriff lists indicate that turnover of families was a regular and natural occurrence unconnected to religious identity, and that overall the office was marked by stability and continuity within family groups. Over time, and sometimes within only a few decades, the dominance of certain families gave way to the dominance of other families. This was not restricted to a specific religious confession, nor to religious nonconformity, but to the reality that political power was highly changeable in the late medieval and early modern periods. From the 1540s to the 1560s in Leicestershire the Digbys, Catesbys, Caves, Grevilles, Hastingses, Nevilles, Throckmortons, and Wigstons appear on the sheriff lists at least twice. From 1565 to 1603 the Caves served seven terms, the Turpins four, the Hastings brothers of the earls of Huntingdon only three times, while the other mid-century families were replaced by newcomers, including the Beaumonts, clients of the Hastings family. In the first three decades of the seventeenth century, the Caves, Hastingses, Nevilles, and Beaumonts continued to serve, along with another batch of newcomers, among them the Catholic Basil Brooke.50 Warwickshire and Leicestershire shared a sheriff prior to 1567, thus the dominant figures on the sheriff’s lists in Warwickshire mirror those 47 For the 1608 and 1632 lists, see TNA SP 14/33 and SP 16/212, respectively; for 1582, see BL Lansdowne MS, vol. 35r. 48 ‘House of Lords Journal Volume 3: 20 May 1624.’ 49 Wall, ‘“The Greatest Disgrace.”’ 50 Fuller, History of the Worthies of England, vol. 2, 527–531.

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of Leicestershire until that year. For the remainder of Elizabeth’s reign, Edward Arden was sheriff in 1574, probably through Hatton’s patronage, and the Digbys and Catesbys held the office once more, in 1577–1578 and 1580–1581, respectively.51 The Grevilles occupied the office three further times, the last being in 1594–1595. The Shuckburghs, Fieldings, and Leighs served under Elizabeth and into the mid-Jacobean period, at which point new families began to emerge such as the Underhills, Archers, Newdigates, Lees, and Combes. Alongside this natural turnover of families is a strong pattern of consistency, wherein families served from the Elizabethan years through the outbreak of the Civil Wars: the Boughton, Lucy, Ferrers, Verney, and Devereux families served at least three times during this period while the Burgoynes and Fishers each served twice. In 1619, a Throckmorton appeared again when Clement, the son of the suspected Puritan author of the seditious Martin Marprelate tracts, was pricked as sheriff.52 In Northamptonshire the dominance of the Catesbys, Sir Thomas Tresham, John Spencer, and Thomas Andrews from 1539 through 1558 shifted to William Tate, John Freeman, William Fitzwilliam, John Isham, Thomas Brooke, Simon Norwich, and Erasmus Dryden, in the Elizabethan period. Protestant members of the Throckmorton and Tresham clans served once (in 1606 and 1611, respectively); the only family who appeared on lists from the Marian years through the reign of Charles I were the Fermors of Easton Neston, most of whom were Catholics with extensive Catholic connections.53 In three Midlands counties, change and continuity in office holding were due to a natural cycle of turnover and a durable core of office-holding families. In Warwickshire, in contrast to Leicestershire and Northamptonshire, none of the sheriffs after James’s accession were Catholics, which might be a product of the developing oligarchical nature of the county in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean years. Catholics were a minority on county lieutenancies from the 1580s through the 1620s, but their presence signaled that Catholics possessed political clout and that some were able to exercise political power. The offices of lord lieutenant and deputy lieutenant allowed penetration into the counties by a military arm of the central government, an agency whose personnel were ‘the eyes and ears of the Privy Council in the county.’54 During the early 51 Enis, ‘The Dudleys,’ 13–14. 52 Fuller, History of the Worthies of England, vol. 3, 293–295, 381–382. 53 Fuller, History of the Worthies of England, vol. 3, 292–296. 54 John S. Nolan, ‘The Militarization of the Elizabethan State,’ Journal of Military History 58, no. 3 (1994): 412; Roger Manning, Religion and Society in Elizabethan Sussex (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1969), 9.

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seventeenth century, Francis Manners, the Catholic Earl of Rutland, was lord lieutenant of Lincolnshire from 1612 through 1629. Another Catholic, Lord Scrope, was lord lieutenant of Yorkshire from 1619 to 1628. By the 1620s, there were eleven deputy lieutenants throughout the realm who were either Catholics or conforming heads of otherwise recusant households.55 Eleven among all of the deputy lieutenants of the realm is not many, but their appointments indicate that the status of these men was powerful enough that they commanded authority regardless of their religion. Catholic men with reputations as loyalists continued to be appointed into the 1630s. Robert Dormer, Earl of Caernavon, was commissioned as lord lieutenant of Buckinghamshire in February 1632/1633; Peter Temple was one of his deputies.56 The men who served in the lieutenancies, like many of the JPs and sheriffs, had local influence and the support of powerful patrons in the central government, Catholic or not. Continuities in office holding were sometimes the result of a conscious effort to safeguard the balance of social and political power in a particular area. Late in her reign, Queen Elizabeth was unlikely to appoint Privy Councilors to the lieutenancy, in part because the council was so preoccupied with war. That shift, along with the queen’s habit of allowing a number of vacancies in the lieutenancies, helped to protect the balance of power on her Privy Council and also allowed it greater authority over the deputy lieutenants in their capacities as muster commissioners than it would have had over a lord lieutenant.57 In Leicestershire, the third Earl of Huntingdon remained lord lieutenant despite being resident in York most of the time in connection with his duties as president of the Council of the North. His lieutenancy duties in the Midlands were carried out by his deputy lieutenants, his Catholic brother Sir George, later the fourth Earl of Huntingdon, and his Puritan brother Francis.58 The fifth Earl of 55 The list includes the Earl of Rutland as lord lieutenant for Lincolnshire; Lord Scrope as lord lieutenant for Yorkshire; and the deputy lieutenants Sir William Courtney (Devonshire); Sir Thomas Brudenell (Northamptonshire); Sir Francis Stonor (Oxfordshire); Sir Thomas Russell (Worcestershire); and Sir Henry Bedingfield (Norfolk); Sir William Wrey (Cornwall); John Conway (Flintshire); Sir Charles Jones and William Jones (Monmouthshire); Ralph Conyers (bishopric of Durham); Thomas Savage (Cheshire). ‘House of Lords Journal Volume 3: 20 May 1624.’ 56 HEHL STT Box 9, ff. 3, 4. 57 Paul E.J. Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars: War, Government, and Society in Tudor England, 1544–1604 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 251. 58 ‘The City of Leicester: Political and Administrative History, 1509–1660,’ in A History of the County of Leicester, Volume 4: The City of Leicester, ed. R.A. McKinley (London: Victoria County History, 1958), 55–75, British History Online, accessed 8 March 2021, http://www.british-history. ac.uk/vch/leics/vol4/pp55-75, 57.

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Huntingdon also appointed Hastings men as deputy lieutenants: his Catholic uncle Walter, Henry Hastings, and a long-time family friend and retainer, William Turpin.59 William Compton, Earl of Northampton, was absent from the county throughout much of his lieutenancy in Warwickshire, leaving the administration of duties to the same men who had managed the lieutenancy during its thirteen-year abeyance: Thomas Spencer, Sir Thomas Lucy, Sir Richard Verney, and Sir Thomas Puckering, who served as his deputies.60 All of the Warwickshire deputy lieutenants were good friends and two, Spencer and Lucy, were connected by marriage. Deputy lieutenants, especially those in counties without a resident lord lieutenant or no lord lieutenant at all, commanded a great deal of authority over their jurisdictions, since they carried out most of the duties of the lieutenancy in the stead of the lord lieutenant. The men on the lieutenancy reflect the political structure of the county: in Leicestershire the hegemony of the Hastings family and in Northamptonshire the oligarchical nature of county governance. Even during Sir Christopher Hatton’s tenure as lord lieutenant of Northamptonshire from 1585 to 1591, the duties of that county’s lieutenancy were carried out by the deputy lieutenants. After Hatton’s death in 1591 Elizabeth left the lieutenancy vacant. From the early 1590s until 1603 the county’s military affairs were left to the supervision of Sir Thomas Cecil (who after 1598 was second Lord Burghley), Sir John Spencer, Sir Richard Knightley, Sir Edward Montagu, and, from 1590, Sir George Fermor, the only religious conservative and suspected Catholic in a cohort of Puritan-inclined colleagues.61 In 1603 James I appointed Thomas Cecil, second Lord Burghley, as the new lord lieutenant, perhaps in recognition of the Cecil family’s status as Northamptonshire’s most powerful kinship group. Burghley retained as his deputies the same men with whom he had served during the waning years of Elizabeth’s reign.62 Warwickshire also had a tendency toward continuity in the lord lieutenancy. During the lieutenancy of Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, between 1585 and 1590, the county was overseen by a ‘great man’ and his chosen deputies.63 Following Warwick’s death in 1590 Elizabeth 59 HEHL HA 5428; HEHL HA 8531. 60 Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 59. 61 Sheils, Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough, 107. Spencer served only one year before his death in 1586, after which Sir Thomas Cecil replaced him as deputy lieutenant. 62 Two years later, in 1605, Cecil became the Earl of Exeter. From 1623 to 1640 Thomas’s son William, second Earl of Exeter, was Northamptonshire’s lord lieutenant. 63 The Earl of Warwick held the lieutenancy from 1569 to 1570 and again from the mid-1580s to 1590.

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did not appoint another lieutenant for Warwickshire, but allowed the former deputy lieutenants to manage affairs under the title of muster commissioners. King James appointed William, second Baron Compton, to the lieutenancy in 1603.64 But neither Compton nor his son, who followed him in the lieutenancy, were often resident in Warwickshire. In a situation similar to that in Northamptonshire, Warwickshire’s deputy lieutenants continued in their accustomed role throughout Compton’s tenure (1603–1630) and that of his son, Spencer Compton, second Earl of Northampton (1630–1642).65 Although many Catholic men were politically marginalized, the state needed loyal, trustworthy Catholics in county leadership. Conversely, Catholic families needed representatives from their kinship group in positions of authority if they were to retain their claim to status in their county – a need that was especially acute during a period that saw significant additions to elite populations. Most of the men in the county lieutenancies were nobles or major gentry and therefore were exceptions to the norm, but they were important connections between the state and the localities and instrumental in ensuring peace. Similarly, the state depended on loyal Catholics to maintain order among their coreligionists. Indeed, the role of those officials in the counties probably prevented episodes of violent Catholic resistance by small groups of militants from escalating into full-blown rebellion.

Political Life and Citizenship Formation The English state’s attempts to curtail the power of recusant Catholics prompted recusants to develop alternative ways to articulate their citizenship. In the process, the state allowed Catholics greater power than they previously held. Persecuted Catholics forged the shape of early English citizenship and defined how broadly that citizenship applied to different demographics. Catholic gentlemen who were denied the political office they craved remained politically engaged throughout their adulthood. While resident in London in the early 1590s Sir Thomas Tresham remained politically active by observing Parliament in session from the visitors’ gallery or through an agent who kept him informed of proceedings there on a 64 Compton was made first Earl of Northampton in 1618. 65 Hughes, Politics, Society and Civil War in Warwickshire, 60; Martyn Bennett, ‘Compton, Spencer, Second Earl of Northampton (1601–1643),’ ODNB, accessed 12 March 2017, http://www. oxforddnb.com/view/article/6035.

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regular, perhaps daily, basis. In February 1592/1593 Tresham relayed to his sister, Baroness Vaux, that ‘Mr. Cooke was this day presented Speaker of the Nether House. Her Majesty this day was at the Parliament; it is adjourned till Saturday.’66 Furthermore, the numerous petitions he drafted on behalf of his coreligionists engaged him in political arguments from the 1580s through his death in 1605. Even when banned from London during periods of heightened political tension, Catholics kept up with developments in Parliament through servants and friends. This was not a practice unique to Catholics, but a reflection of the larger development of a news culture in the 1620s and 1630s, one in which personal communication and oral transmission remained rich sources in addition to the news sheets in circulation.67 In the late 1630s and early 1640s, as England drew close to Civil War, Sir Robert Throckmorton, restricted to his estate at Weston Underwood in Buckinghamshire, remained informed and engaged with political news and developments at the capitol via three of his agents: Francis Waters, Charles Welford, and Richard Betham sent news to Throckmorton at Weston Underwood in 1639 and 1640 as frequently as twice a week. The men supplied news on important political matters, such as the proceedings against the Earl of Strafford and Archbishop Laud, information on the subsidies and the Triennial Act, rumors about the Scots and the Bishops’ Wars, gossip about Catholics in London, news on the religious wars on the continent, and updates on legislation that personally affected Throckmorton, such as compositions.68 In December 1640 Richard Betham sent copies of speeches, information on the meeting schedule and activities of the Committee for Religion, and news of an imminent Parliamentary election in Warwickshire. Throckmorton must have been particularly interested in Betham’s report that Secretary Windebank had ordered sheriffs of various counties to ‘restore the goodes backe unto the Recusants.’69 He was eager to be kept informed of developments and to remain politically engaged despite his failure to hold office himself.70 66 BL Add. MS, 39828, f. 192r (HMCV, 69). 67 Richard Cust, ‘News and Politics in Early Seventeenth Century England,’ Past & Present 112 (1986): 60–90. 68 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 2, ff. 20r–22v, 34 r, 37r. 69 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 2, f. 40r. 70 Malcolm Wanklyn discusses these letters in the context of the advent of the Civil Wars in his essay, ‘Stratagems for Survival: Sir Robert and Sir Francis Throckmorton, 1640–1660,’ in Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation, ed. Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 143–146.

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Military Service Some English Catholic men performed their citizenship through voluntary military service in Elizabethan and early Stuart armies. Military careers were attractive for a number of reasons, including the display of masculine honor, as an alternative or a precursor to political office, the potential economic gain, and the potential for upward social mobility. Military service was one of the ways in which a man could express his honor, his loyalty and his engagement in political affairs. In the early seventeenth century, certain military regiments reflected Catholic kinship and social networks. The shared military experiences of those men reinforced social bonds and maintained kinship and social networks. Between 1570 and 1630, the English were heavily invested in European wars and conflicts in Ireland.71 Benjamin Schmidt argues that by the late sixteenth century, military service on the continent had become a ‘fashionable finishing school for young Protestant Englishmen.’72 Service in continental armies provided upper-status soldiers with an education in military skills, foreign language training beyond what they acquired during childhood, patronage connections, and honor.73 Perhaps most importantly, service in the Low Countries amounted to a school of war in this period, first in the Spanish army and later also in Dutch service. In the 1560s, the queen allowed English gentlemen to serve in the Spanish army or to fight as volunteers for the Huguenots in France. After the Dutch Revolt broke out in 1568, however, service in Spanish armies became problematic since English diplomatic policy aligned with Dutch Protestants over Spanish Catholics. In the 1570s and 1580s Englishmen served as volunteers with the Dutch army, although some gentlemen went to Hungary to fight the Ottomans. After 1585, English soldiers were expected to fight for England. Men who fought for Spain, such as Sir William Stanley and his regiment, were considered traitors. In 1604, the Treaty of London brokered peace 71 Roger Manning, Swordsmen: The Martial Ethos in the Three Kingdoms (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 17–19. Barbara Donagan, ‘The Web of Honour: Soldiers, Christians, and Gentlemen in the English Civil War,’ The Historical Journal 44, no. 2 (2001): 365–389. For a discussion on the opportunities Englishmen had to serve in county militias during this period, see Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995), 172. 72 Benjamin Schmidt, ‘Reading Ralegh’s America: Texts, Books and Readers in the Early Modern Atlantic World,’ in The Atlantic World and Virginia, 1550–1624, ed. Peter C. Mancall (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute, 2007), 458. 73 Schmidt, ‘Reading Ralegh’s America,’ 458. Schmidt argues that Sir Walter Ralegh became fluent in spoken and written French while fighting in continental armies.

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between England and Spain and provided that both the Spanish and the Dutch would be able to recruit English troops for the war that continued in the Low Countries until 1609. Thereafter, there was a fixed force of English soldiers under Dutch pay. When the Thirty Years’ War began in 1618, English volunteers went to Germany for the wars there; war against Spain returned from 1625 to 1630 and war with France revived briefly from 1628 to 1630. As the political life of English Catholics became more restricted in the 1580s and 1590s military service was an ideal means by which to remain politically active. Young men usually went into service as gentlemen volunteers attached to a senior officer, while gentlemen with military experience sought a captaincy, which reflected their experience and conveyed prestige. Volunteers fought at their own expense. Officers were paid, although payments from the crown were often in arrears. Catholic men were accepted into military service at the same time other Catholic men were removed from office-holding positions in the counties in the 1580s and 1590s. Sir Christopher Blount of Kidderminster, Worcestershire, served in the Netherlands from 1585 to 1589, first under the Earl of Leicester and then under Lord Willoughby.74 Sir Griffin Markham, the son of Mary Griffin and grandson of Ryce Griffin of Braybrooke and Dingley, Northamptonshire, volunteered for service in English forces in the Low Countries and France in the 1580s and went to Ireland with the Earl of Essex in 1599.75 William Parker, Lord Monteagle, also served under Essex in Ireland, along with Sir Christopher Blount, who by that time was Essex’s stepfather.76 William Tresham, a younger son of Sir Thomas Tresham and Monteagle’s brother-in-law, fought in the Low Countries in the last several years of Elizabeth’s reign, in the regiment of John Blunt.77 Military service gave the state an opportunity to remove Catholics from the realm, whether to enhance English armies or to destabilize other armies. In 1586 the Privy Council suggested that some recusant men be pressed into service in the Low Countries to prevent them from continuing to ‘pervert’ by their ‘evill example and obstinacie divers of the comon and inferior sorte 74 Blount conformed in the 1580s and most of the 1590s; when he moved toward recusancy in 1599 he did so cautiously and was not overtly recusant. Paul E.J. Hammer, ‘Blount, Sir Christopher (1555/6–1601),’ ODNB, accessed 12 March 2017, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/2685. 75 Mark Nicholls, ‘Treason’s Reward: The Punishment of Conspirators in the Bye Plot of 1603,’ Historical Journal 38, no. 4 (1995): 828; Mark Nicholls, ‘Markham, Sir Griffin (b. c. 1565, d. in or after 1644),’ ODNB, accessed 9 March 2021, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/18066. 76 Mark Nicholls, ‘Parker, William, Thirteenth Baron Morley and Fifth or First Baron Monteagle (1574/5–1622),’ ODNB, accessed 9 March 2021, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/21345. 77 TNA SP 14/17, f. 36r; CSPD Elizabeth, vol. 17, 269.

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[…] and others incouraged to continew obstinate.’78 Whether by royal grant or pressing into service, placing Catholics into armies abroad allowed the state to channel the energies of certain men, sometimes quarrelsome men, into activities outside of the realm, thus redirecting their energies toward a common enemy rather than allowing their resentments or anger to mount toward the state, as it did with some young Catholic radicals in the 1580s. For most of Elizabeth’s reign, military service in Spanish armies was out of the question unless a soldier was working as an informant for the English government. Still, some Catholics joined Spanish forces throughout the queen’s reign.79 Those who did, especially during the years between 1585 and 1603, might not have intended to return to England. Even so, the military careers of these men contributed to their identity as gentlemen and their esteem among other Catholics, since they proved their honor and courage on the battlefields of Europe and fought on the side where their consciences led them. Service to the Spanish king did not mean one supported the Jesuits, although that connection was worrisome to Elizabeth I and some of her Privy Councilors. For example, Charles Brown, a kinsman of the Viscount Montague, served honorably enough to draw a pension from Philip III but also refused to sign a petition in support of the Jesuits in 1596.80 In the early seventeenth century, at least twenty-three Englishmen received a pension from the Spanish treasury in recognition of their military service, which might suggest they intended to remain in exile abroad rather than return to an England they found oppressive, at least until the Spanish pension reforms in 1609 forced them to find new sources of support.81 After the Treaty of London in 1604, King James granted licenses to English men to fight in foreign armies, as long as the men swore an oath of loyalty to the English king. From then on, both the Protestant Dutch and the Catholic Spanish were permitted to recruit English volunteers.82 Under 78 TNA PC 2/14, f. 105r Privy Council to the Earl of Leicester, 15 May 1586. 79 This is a rich avenue for further inquiry. A full study of English Catholic participation in Spanish military forces needs to be done before we can quantify how many Englishmen fought for the Spanish during this period. 80 Michael C. Questier, Catholicism and Community in Early Modern England: Politics, Aristocratic Patronage and Religion, c. 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 259. Despite his refusal to support the Jesuits, Brown remained on the Spanish king’s pension rolls after the 1609 reforms. See Albert J. Loomie, ed., Spain and the Jacobean Catholics, vol. 1, Publications of the Catholic Record Society, vols. 64 and 68 (London: Catholic Record Society, 1973–1978), 140. 81 Loomie, ed., Spain and the Jacobean Catholics vol. 1, 129–141. 82 Hammer, Elizabeth’s Wars, 234–235; A.J. Loomie, ‘Toleration and Diplomacy: The Religious Issue in Anglo-Spanish Relations, 1603–1605,’ Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, n.s., 53, pt. 6 (1963): 5–51.

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this arrangement, many Catholic men sought military careers. Ambrose Vaux fought for the Spanish in 1605 and unsuccessfully attempted to reclaim Bergen-ap-Zoom from Dutch Protestants.83 His nephew Edward, fourth Lord Vaux, had a brief career as a soldier, perhaps in an attempt to revivify his decimated noble house. In the early 1620s he was colonel of a regiment serving the Spanish Infanta in Brussels; among his subordinates were a web of cousins and brothers-in-law: Vaux’s cousin Sir William Tresham, Tresham’s brother-in-law Sir Edward Parham, Sir Robert Huddlestone (the son of the recusant Henry Huddlestone), and the Sussex recusant Henry Gage.84 When Vaux retired from his brief military career in 1625, Parham inherited the regiment. In 1631 Parham was still active and in command of a regiment King Charles had licensed to fight overseas.85 Among the chief officers in Parham’s command were his brothers-in-law Sir William Tresham and William Webb, and Lord Vaux’s younger brother Henry.86 By 1625 a Brudenell kinsman was also in the regiment.87 While greater numbers of Englishmen served in the Dutch army than in the Spanish one, King James considered the Spanish army a good training ground for English soldiers. By the second decade of the seventeenth century Spain had been at war in Flanders for nearly half a century.88 Still, royal permission to fight for Spain was conditional since it depended on the current relationship between the English and Spanish monarchs. English Catholic soldiers were aware of those conditions. In September 1614, Parham stated that he would ‘only resume my military duties if I am commanded to do so by my own King’; he went on to say that he had refused maintenance 83 Godfrey Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden: A Recusant Family (Newport, Monmouthshire: R.H. Johns, 1953), 433. 84 APC, vol. 38, 191, 213; Calendar of State Papers Relating to English Affairs in the Archives of Venice, ed. Rawdon Brown, G. Cavendish Bentinck, Horatio Brown, Allen B. Hinds, vol. 18 (London: H.M.S.O., 1864–1947), 354; Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 431–436; Michael Questier, ed., Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 1621–1625 (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 28. 85 APC, vol. 46, 501; Nicholls, ‘Treason’s Reward,’ 838; Questier, Stuart Dynastic Policy and Religious Politics, 52. 86 TNA SP 16/183, f. 70r. Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 436. The rest of the principal officers of Parham’s regiment were Henry Lucy (a descendant of the hot Protestant Lucys of Charlecote, Warwickshire), Herculie Meade, Thomas Windsor, William Ireland, Lewis Lewkner, John Welford, Richard Scrope, Jeffrey Redroch, George Owyne, James Morgan, and George Lawe. Henry Vaux had been a soldier since 1618, when he entered the English regiment under the archduke. Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 378. 87 TNA SP 77/18, f. 259r. 88 Roger Manning, ‘Styles of Command in Seventeenth-Century English Armies,’ Journal of Military History 71, no. 3 (2007): 676.

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from a prince, ‘preferring to remain a free man in order to serve my country if I can.’89 The numbers of English soldiers in Spanish armies were highly variable since licenses were directly related to the health of the Anglo-Spanish diplomatic relationship, especially during the early Stuart period.90 Furthermore, King James was not averse to sending Englishmen into direct combat with one another, as the terms of the Treaty of London allowed. When in 1621 war broke out again between Spain and the Low Countries James gave licenses to the leaders of regiments to fight on both the Spanish Catholic and Flemish Protestant sides.91 The negotiations for Prince Charles’s marriage to a French princess, however, prompted a shift in policy. In June 1625 Vaux’s license was revoked as part of the crown’s effort to assure France that England would restrict their favor toward Spain, although shortly thereafter the commission was granted to Parham, under whom the regiment continued.92 Through military service, or at least a willingness to serve, Catholic men demonstrated their identity as Englishmen through fidelity to the state and the performance of duty on behalf of the state, both of which signified their claim to citizenship. For some Catholic men, military service led to knighthoods, which affirmed a man’s loyalty and honor and increased his social status. George Digby of Coleshill, Warwickshire, and George Fermor of Easton Neston, Northamptonshire, were two of fourteen men knighted by the Earl of Leicester in Holland after the battle of Zutphen in October 1586.93 Fermor’s son-in-law, Richard Wenman, was knighted at Cadiz in June 1596.94 Catholics who did not serve abroad but demonstrated readiness to protect the realm with their own men, horses, arms, and other 89 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable The Marquess of Downshire, Vol. V: Papers of William Trumbull the Elder, September 1614–August 1616, ed. G. Dyfnallt Owen (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1988), 14. Despite Parham’s claims of political loyalty to England and his king, when James I recalled him from the Low Countries the following spring, he refused to leave. HMC Downshire, vol. V, 228. 90 David R. Lawrence, The Complete Soldier: Military Books and Military Culture in Early Stuart England, 1603–1645 (Leiden: Brill, 2009), 213–214. 91 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 432. 92 Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 434–436. 93 Arthur F. Kinney and Jane A. Lawson, eds., Titled Elizabethans: A Directory of Elizabethan Court, State, and Church Officers, 1558–1603, 2nd ed. (New York: Palgrave, 2014), 208. Through his mother, Anne, Digby was related to the Throckmortons of Coughton and the family’s vast kinship group. 94 Kinney and Lawson, Titled Elizabethans, 218. Wenman was ostensibly a Protestant, but his marriage to Agnes Fermor raises questions about his confessional stance. Agnes was a recusant so deeply embedded in recusant networks that it is possible her husband might have been, too, and conformed for the benefit of his advancement.

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equipment, made claims to membership in the polity through their loyalty and preparedness. When Anthony Browne, Viscount Montague of Sussex, learned in July 1588 that the beacon had been fired on Portsdown, signaling the approach of the Spanish Armada, he immediately sent word to the Privy Council of the number of servants he had ready to serve queen and country, but declined to assemble them without permission from the council. Montague’s caution was wise. It allowed him to emphasize not only his eagerness and his readiness to join in the effort to fight the Spanish but also to avoid having his actions misunderstood as rebellion or support of Spanish efforts to invade England.95 In keeping with his status, Montague was well-equipped with the furniture of war: his weapons and materials inventory included ‘20 demilances, 60 light horses, 30 bows and “shafes” of arrows, 24 halberdes, and 12 partisans.’96 Montague’s cache was all the more impressive considering the recent disarming of Catholics throughout the realm and suggests that in practice, the extent to which a recusant was disarmed depended on local considerations including a recusant’s authority in his area, who was responsible for actually collecting recusants’ weapons, and the current status of state security. For some Catholic men, however, attempts at underscoring loyalty or patriotism backfired. As Montague must have done, Sir Thomas Tresham required tenants to serve in battle if called upon to do so, but Tresham’s requirement of tenant service clearly made the Privy Council more anxious than they were about Montague.97 As late as 1594 Tresham had approximately one hundred tenants whose leases stipulated that they provide ‘a man fytt for service’ if either Tresham or his heir, Francis, ‘shalbe ymployed in her majestes warres beyonde the seas.’98 Although Tresham insisted that his intentions were to support the queen, his reputation as a leading figure among English Catholics and his relationships with Catholic prisoners at Ely amplified the government’s concerns about his trustworthiness. Ultimately, despite his attempts to demonstrate his fidelity, he lacked the kind of credit with the monarch and Privy Council that allowed the Viscount Montague to remain part of military life. Military service offered men the opportunity to display their masculine virtue and honor, which were culturally valued traits connected to Renaissance conceptions of masculinity. Not all statesmen agreed on the 95 96 97 98

TNA SP 12/213/11, f. 25r. TNA SP 12/213/11.I, 27r. CSPD Elizabeth, vol. 3, 470. TNA SP 12/248/45, f. 89r.

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honor and virtue inherent in military exploits, however. William Cecil, first Lord Burghley, refused to let his son Robert enter into military service, in part because of his skepticism about the honesty and virtue of soldiers.99 Burghley’s attitude reveals a shift in masculine identity as expressed through service; increasingly in the sixteenth century, a man like Burghley could work his way into the highest echelons of government office without military experience or a background in law. In addition to granting esteem, military service augmented networks, created patronage ties, and helped to secure the mutual loyalty of patron and client. Sir Griffin Markham’s service earned him a knighthood from the Earl of Essex in 1591; he remained part of Essex’s regiment and accompanied him to Ireland in 1599. After Markham was exiled for his participation in the Bye and Main plots, he spent the rest of his life in service in the Low Countries, where he was part of a network of military families and kin from the Midlands. Among his closest friends were Sir John Throckmorton, governor-general of Flushing, who was an executor to his will, and Sir Edward Parham and Bridget Tresham Parham, to whom Markham bequeathed 200 philips.100 Sir Christopher Blount’s service under the Earl of Leicester resulted in a knighthood, marriage to Leicester’s widow, and access to the circle of the second Earl of Essex. He continued to serve in a military capacity until shortly before his death in 1601.101 Just as military service could contribute to network formation, the inverse was also true: kinship and social networks were reflected in military settings. In 1614, Sir Edward Parham and two of the Blount brothers joined Sir Griffin Markham’s regiment in Spain.102 Sir John Throckmorton, Lieutenant-Governor of Flushing, and his cousin, Bridget Tresham Parham, must have visited one another in the Low Countries when it was possible. In August 1615 Throckmorton expressed disappointment at not seeing her while he was in town, since she was en route to Dunkirk.103 Several kinsmen served in the fourth Lord Vaux’s regiment, including his cousins Frederick Bentley and William Tresham; John Brudenell and Edward Parham, cousins by marriage; and Vaux’s wife’s cousins, Thomas and Charles Howard.104 Lady Parham’s brother, Sir William Tresham, and their brother-in-law Sir John Webb were licensed by 99 Lawrence, The Complete Soldier, 68. 100 HMC Downshire, 464. 101 Hammer, ‘Blount, Sir Christopher (1555/6–1601).’ 102 HMC Downshire, 1. 103 HMC Downshire, 318–319. 104 Alfred Loomie, ‘Gondomar’s Selection of English Officers in 1622,’ English Historical Review 88, no. 348 (1973): 576–578.

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King Charles to fight for Spain in the Low Countries, and by 1634 Tresham’s regiment included at least two kinsmen: Webb and a Wilford cousin.105 By 1635, Tresham was a colonel and Webb a captain.106 Women who traveled with their husbands to miliary postings developed their own military roles ranging from sociability to carrying communications between officials. Sociability and the exchange of hospitality forged bonds between English Catholic families and created ties that built and strengthened their networks. Bridget Tresham Parham lived in the Low Countries while her husband, Sir Edward Parham was in service there. In September 1614, while Parham was working near Wesel, Lady Parham visited Dr. Matthew Lister and his wife. She must have been there for at least a few days, since she asked for any letters from her husband to be sent to her at Lister’s house.107 Earlier that month, Mrs. Lister had been the houseguest of Deborah Trumbull and her husband, William, head of the English embassy at Brussels.108 Women sometimes traveled with their husbands, as Lady Digby did when her husband moved from the Spanish Netherlands to Spain, and as Lady Parham did when she accompanied Sir Edward to Mecklen in May 1615 and to Zichem, near Scherpenheuvel in northeast Brabant, later that summer.109 As their husbands did, military wives participated in epistolary networks specific to the military and diplomatic networks of which they were part. As two examples, Lady Parham carried letters between William Trumbull and Sir Thomas Leedes, and she received letters from the Earl of Southampton, via Trumbull.110 When soldiers behaved badly the public and officials feared the disorder their misbehavior could cause, especially when Catholic soldiers were the root of the disorder. In December 1623 John Chamberlain reported to his friend Dudley Carleton that at least 160 Catholic men had ‘under colour of good fellowship […] made an association’ wherein they took oaths, kept one another’s secrets, spoke in code, and wore ‘blew or yellow ribans in their hatts or elswhere’ as distinguishing signifiers. Worse yet, these men – mostly young men – frequented taverns in groups of thirty or forty, ‘what mischeife may lurke under this maske God knowes.’111 Chamberlain’s letters reveal his apprehension about Catholics. He was perhaps biased in 105 TNA SP 77/24, f. 518r. 106 TNA SP 16/300, f. 95r; TNA SP 16/537, f. 117r. 107 HMC Downshire, 14. 108 HMC Downshire, 22. 109 HMC Downshire, 228, 255. 110 HMC Downshire, 31, 211. 111 N.E. McClure, ed., The Letters of John Chamberlain, vol. 2 (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), 530.

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claiming that this Catholic association originated in Lord Vaux’s regiment in the Low Countries, and subsequently spread to England, sparking enough concern at court that the gentlemen pensioners were armed with pistols when they rode out with the king. The secret society coupled with overt displays of questionable behavior undermined the masculine honor many soldiers hoped to cultivate through their military service. Not only were these behaviors violations of early modern codes of honor, their brashness might also have propelled fears among the populace and government that a militant Catholic conspiracy was imminent.112 Chamberlain, a Protestant, certainly voiced unease at the mass assembly of young Catholic men with military experience, and perhaps the power or propensity to violence that experience implied. Military service and the patronage that might accrue from it could undermine a man’s upward mobility or candidacy for official appointments if he supported the wrong side in a conflict. Sir Griffin Markham’s attachment to Essex, his involvement in the Bye Plot in 1603 and his disagreeable personality ruined his attempts to secure a patron after Essex’s death. Worse still, Markham proved to be untrustworthy.113 After he was banished from England following the Bye Plot, he served in continental armies without King James’s permission, which was further evidence of his lack of fidelity to the English crown. He was effectively a soldier-for-hire for England’s enemies while he simultaneously lobbied would-be patrons with appeals for permission to return to England. Under Elizabeth, military service was a means by which a Catholic, even one from a prominent recusant family, could make a career, display his honor and manliness, form relationships with potential patrons, and make a claim to English citizenship through the performance of duty to the state. If a Catholic fought in foreign forces with his monarch’s permission it was also a way to demonstrate his loyalty, a culturally valued trait that helped to amplify his honor and could result in social and economic reward, as it did for Sir Christopher Blount in the 1580s. Under James I Catholic military service grew exponentially, especially during periods when James licensed his military leaders and noblemen to lead regiments on both sides of a conflict. In the case of Lord Vaux’s regiment, military service provided Catholics, 112 Roger B. Manning, An Apprenticeship in Arms: The Origins of the British Army 1585–1702 (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006), 74–75. 113 Mark Nicholls has argued that by the last few years of Elizabeth’s reign Markham had ‘alienated’ the chief magnates in his county and his most likely patrons, the Earls of Rutland and Shrewsbury. Nicholls, ‘Markham, Sir Griffin (b. c. 1565, d. in or after 1644)’; Nicholls, ‘Treason’s Reward,’ 822, 828–829.

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many of whom came from recusant families, opportunities to accrue honor through the fulfillment of military service, to engage in political life more actively than they were able to in their home counties, and to do so within a network of similarly minded men, many of whom shared their religious affinity. Lord Vaux’s regiment reflected the Midlands family networks, especially the Tresham and Vaux networks. Further studies of Catholic military life might include an analysis of how family networks helped to facilitate recruitment, promotion, and patronage within military regiments.

Petitioning, Gender, and Citizenship Through petitioning, individuals articulated claims to citizenship and remained connected to channels of power. Far from being a practice reserved to the upper sort, petitioning was a common early modern practice for women and men across social groups. Thus, petitioning was part of the fabric of everyday life for early modern English people regardless of religious identity or practice. Midlands Catholics relied on petitions for many of the same reasons non-Catholics did: to seek employment or office, to appeal for favors, or to place a complaint or concern before government officials. Upper-status Catholics also used petitions as strategic tools to influence the state’s religious policies, to argue for religious accommodation, to influence a prisoner’s physical environment, and to save a loved one’s life. Many of the petitions advanced by Catholics and their patrons argued that English Catholic religious practice did not indicate a lack of political loyalty or membership in the polity. Rather, their identity was English and Catholic; their loyalty to the state was held in tandem with their fidelity to the Catholic Church. As instruments that conveyed deference, loyalty, and honor from a client to a patron, petitions were an essential part of patron–client relationships. Petitions advanced a position or argument of the petitioner(s) or appealed for patronage in the form of mercy or favor.114 Petitioning and patronage-seeking were not identical processes, however. Petitioning was an attempt to secure redress of a grievance or an oversight and did not necessarily require the same kinds of reciprocal behaviors as did patron–client exchanges. Patronage was based on the exchange of favor and duty. One could direct a petition to a patron, and often did, to seek redress in the form of a patron–client

114 The patronage qualities of petitions are discussed in Chapter Six.

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exchange, yet not all petitions were appeals for patronage, and plenty of patronage was distributed without a petition. Petitions reveal how early modern English elites understood gender prescriptions. Women emphasized their honor, obedience, subjection to patriarchal norms, and vulnerability in petitions to high-ranking patrons. Adherence to gender norms was important in a setting where power was constantly negotiated, unstable, and rarely assured.115 In some instances women petitioned through letters to members of their networks, in what constituted a ‘soft’ petition designed to persuade a family member in a superior position of power to either resolve the petitioner’s issue or to forward the request to someone who could. These petitions were similar to the kinds of soft political power women practiced at the time and demonstrate women’s fluency in the political culture of early modern England. Men, too, invoked gender in their petitions when they stressed themes of loyalty, honor, good reputation, authority, and the high status that came through ancient lineage. Elite Catholic men used petitions to communicate their loyalty, to debate a specific government policy, to appeal for advancement, and to seek toleration or accommodation of their religious practice. Through their petitions, men asserted their adherence to normative manhood while subordinating themselves to an individual with greater power than they possessed. This required a delicate balance wherein a man acknowledged the limits of his own power without sacrificing his honor, his manliness, or his own claims to authority. To do so, men emphasized loyalty, deference to authority, and their own high status. Women across social classes were frequent, practiced, and assertive petitioners. Women’s petitions fused the social world of the household with the political world of the royal court, the Privy Council, Parliament, and regional officeholders, and with the legal world of the courts. Through petitions, women and other excluded citizens challenged their exclusion, created alternative means of citizenship formation, and developed alternative models of citizenship. As James Daybell has argued, letter writing and petitioning provided Catholic gentlewomen a political voice, since most of their petitions were related to political matters even if rooted in the social framework of the household or family.116 For example, Lady Tresham’s 115 James Daybell and Svante Norrhem, eds., Gender and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800 (London; New York: Routledge, 2016), 10. 116 James Daybell, ‘Introduction: Rethinking Women and Politics in Early Modern England,’ in Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 1–20.

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continual efforts to change the locale of her husband’s imprisonments were also an attempt to exert some of her own influence over the judicial and administrative authorities who determined where her husband would live. In 1590 Margaret Throckmorton and Lady Anne Catesby successfully petitioned the Privy Council regarding economic matters that affected their families. Throckmorton hoped her husband would be released from confinement at Banbury so that he could attend to lawsuits in London related to the family’s estates.117 Lady Catesby wanted access to her imprisoned husband so that they could discuss legal matters.118 Only a month later, however, the Privy Council revoked the access they had granted, presumably because her voice had become too potent.119 These patterns continued among Catholic women into the early seventeenth century. In August 1612, Lord Vaux’s sister, Catherine, petitioned the Earl of Northampton, a member of the family’s extended network and a former patron, for the release from prison of her brother and her mother, who had just begun serving a life sentence for their refusal to take the Oath of Allegiance to King James I.120 Gentlewomen and noblewomen in the late Elizabethan and early Stuart periods exhibited the same kinds of political engagement as Barbara Harris observed in the early Tudor period and that Susan Wiseman noted in the late Stuart years.121 During the intervening decades, which spanned the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, upper-status women engaged with the political realm as wives, mothers, and widows through their roles as petitioners and land claimants. Although female political roles differed from male ones, women were nonetheless an integral part of sixteenth-century politics, in part because an elite woman’s social status allowed her to wield power and to make specific claims to her rights to membership in a polity.122 117 APC, vol. 19, 102–103. 118 APC, vol. 19, 267. The marital cooperation exhibited in these cases aligns with what James Daybell found in Women Letter Writers in Tudor England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), see especially Chapter 8. 119 APC, vol. 19, 360. 120 TNA SP 14/70, ff. 54 r,v. The sister, who is referred to as ‘Mistresse Vaux’ in the document, must be Catherine, who did not wed until 1614. Lord Vaux’s elder sister, Mary, was married in 1604 to Sir George Simeon of Baldwin Brightwell, Oxfordshire. See Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 491. For rich detail of petitioning in the seventeenth century, see Brodie Waddell’s Power of Petitioning project at https://petitioning.history.ac.uk/. 121 Barbara J. Harris, ‘Women and Politics in Early Tudor England,’ The Historical Journal 33, no. 2 (1990): 260; Susan Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue: Women, Writing and Politics in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 49, 80. 122 High-born women were not hesitant to criticize, counsel, and direct the actions of others in their letters. See Lynne Magnusson, ‘Widowhood and Linguistic Capital: The Rhetoric and Reception of Anne Bacon’s Epistolary Advice,’ English Literary Renaissance 31, no. 1 (2008): 5.

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Through petitions, Catholic women presented themselves as critical of the state, obedient to it, and, most importantly, members of it with claims to specific rights, all of which connected to key attributes of citizenship. In May 1583, Lady Tresham wrote to her cousin, Master Horseman, a server in Queen Elizabeth’s household and part of the Tresham family’s network, to express her frustration at the government’s inconsistent application of punishments of Catholics. Despite a recent announcement that all Catholics would be required to post a bond and depart from London, Tresham said she was certain the penalty would apply only to her husband and brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Tresham and Lord Vaux. She fumed, It is said that all Catholics are to be bound from London, and give such condition of good behaviour as is intended to Mr. Tresame, but I am persuaded that it shall be never offered any else by my Lord Vaux and my husband, for I see many allowed to go into the country and others bound to London and some circuit about it, and not from London.123

Tresham suspected that her husband and brother-in-law would be ejected from the capital while other Catholic men would not, a move which would impugn the honor of both families and the masculine honor of her husband and brother-in-law if her suspicions were correct. Tresham was certain that a request for her husband’s full liberty would be futile, but she remained hopeful to secure an ‘exchange of imprisonment’ whereby Sir Thomas would serve house arrest in their house at Hogsden near London. Lady Tresham’s petitions to the Privy Council and her letters to family members at court, a form of soft petitioning, were successful: within two weeks her husband was allowed liberty of the Treshams’ house at Hogsden and permission to go anywhere within the parishes of Hogsden and Shoreditch, rather than being ordered out of London as a matter of state security.124 Susan Wiseman has argued that in the Civil Wars period, women’s petitioning constituted a nascent form of citizenship precisely because it provided women an avenue of influence in formal political structures.125 As the Tresham example 123 BL Add. MS 39828, f. 85r (HMCV, 30). The meaning of ‘bound’ here is in the context of ‘banned’; in other words, that Catholics would be required to post a bond designed to ensure that they would not return to London until the Privy Council gave them permission to do on, on penalty of forfeiture of the bond. 124 BL Add. MS 39828, f. 91 r (HMCV, 32). For a rich discussion of soft power in multiple contexts, see James Daybell and Svante Norrham, eds., Gender and Political Culture in Early Modern Europe, 1400–1800 (London; New York: Routledge, 2016). 125 Wiseman, Conspiracy and Virtue, 49.

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illustrates, women had a role in shaping formal political structures well before the mid-seventeenth century. Petitioning was part of a woman’s career regardless of status or religion. Officials were accustomed to high-born women acting in political capacities, whether as petitioners or as messengers of a husband’s petition.126 Women’s letters and petitions indicate that they were familiar with the language of patronage and ‘political friendship’ and that they were confident in their authority.127 When Sir William Fitzwilliam’s declining health and family circumstances forced him to give up his position as Lord Deputy in Ireland in 1575, Lady Fitzwilliam, a Protestant, petitioned the queen in person to allow his recall to England.128 The couple resided at their Milton estate in Northamptonshire until he was reappointed Lord Deputy of Ireland in 1592. Lady Tresham, too, acted as an agent for her husband and family. On Lady Day, 1590, Lady Tresham delivered a lengthy petition of her husband’s to the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Lords of the Privy Council.129 She was experienced with speaking directly to Privy Councilors and high officers of the realm on behalf of her husband since she appeared in person before the council numerous times.130 The claims that gentlewomen and noblewomen, including Catholic women, made on land and property further engaged them with the political sphere. Even unmarried aristocratic women made claims related to real property, as did Mary Throckmorton when she acted as her father’s deputy in a horse-stealing dispute with the Throckmortons’ neighbors and kinsmen, the Tirringhams.131 Single, married, and widowed Catholic women were as invested as their male relatives were in protecting the family’s 126 Caroline Bowden, ‘Women as Intermediaries: An Example of the Use of Literacy in the Late Sixteenth and Early Seventeenth Centuries,’ History of Education 22, no. 3 (1993): 215–223, and especially 220–221. 127 James Daybell, ‘Scripting a Female Voice: Women’s Epistolary Rhetoric in Sixteenth-Century Letters of Petition,’ Women’s Writing 13, no. 1 (2006): 3–4; James Daybell, ‘Gender, Obedience, and Authority in Sixteenth-Century Women’s Letters,’ Sixteenth Century Journal 41, no. 1 (2010): 49–67. 128 Mary Ann Lyons, ‘Fitzwilliam, Sir William (1526–1599),’ ODNB, accessed 27 March 2017, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/9664. 129 In the closing lines, Tresham mentions using his wife ‘as my faithful messenger in this behalf.’ BL Add. MS 39828, ff. 139r–142v (HMCV, 58). 130 BL Add. MS 39829, f. 35r,v (HMCV, 105). Appearing before the Privy Council was a privilege allowed to people with financial means. It was unlikely that middling-status or lesser-status women would have the access Tresham did. For more on access to the Privy Council, see Susan M. Cogan, ‘Catholic Englishwomen’s Mobilities in an Age of Persecution,’ Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal 14, no. 1 (2019): 112–113. 131 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 3, f. 11 r.

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material interests and property. After all, the family lands were the next generation’s inheritance, and some of those lands were probably part of a singlewoman’s livelihood or a widow’s jointure. Thus, women retained vested interests in the use and disposal of family land. In 1584, when Sir Thomas Tresham was battling the state’s accusations of harboring the Jesuit Edmund Campion, he conveyed his Lyveden estate to his wife, Muriel, and their son, Francis.132 This was a legal strategy designed to protect the Lyveden property from confiscation by the state and also a means to safeguard property designated as Lady Tresham’s jointure. It was more than a device by which Sir Thomas exploited his wife’s legal status in order to protect patriarchal lands; throughout her husband’s periods of imprisonment Lady Tresham was an active participant in the protection and management of the family’s assets. Couples like the Treshams and the Vauxes maintained regular communication with one another regarding estate and legal matters and in some cases ensured that other women in their families, such as sisters or daughters, were knowledgeable about and participants in the family’s economic activities. The Treshams and Vauxes were deeply embedded in each other’s finances, even given the men’s frequent residence in prison cells. Men were eager to keep wives and singlewomen daughters informed of estate and legal details, indicating that women had a great deal to do with the day-to-day management of the family’s lands and economies. Women commonly stood as deputies in the administration of family estates; sometimes they sought buyers for land that had to be liquidated to resolve recusancy fines or to offset other financial hardships.133 The control women wielded over the resources on their lands and the disposition of those resources was an expression of political authority. When in 1587 Queen Elizabeth granted the reversion of the Royal Park at Feckenham to Thomas Leighton, Margery Throckmorton perceived it as an attack on her rights.134 Throckmorton and her husband, Sir John, had received the manor and park of Feckenham in fee farm from Queen Mary

132 ‘Parishes: Aldwinkle St. Peter,’ in A History of the County of Northampton, Volume 3, ed. William Page (London, 1930), 168–173, British History Online, accessed 8 March 2021, http:// www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/northants/vol3/pp168-173, 170. 133 BL Add. MS 39830, f. 80b. 134 Leighton was the husband of Elizabeth Knollys, one of the queen’s Maids of Honor. Cathryn Enis, Two Warwickshire Women of Character: Margaret Sheldon (c. 1510–1590) and Margaret Knollys (c. 1549–1606), Dugdale Society Occasional Papers, no. 54 (Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire: The Dugdale Society in association with the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust, 2018).

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in 1563–1564, thereby making the couple tenants of the monarch.135 In 1587 Margery, by now widowed for seven years, was accustomed to exerting her authority over the lands in her possession. Sir John’s will mentioned nothing about the manor of Feckenham but Margery clearly understood that the manor and the reversion should have gone to a Throckmorton heir.136 When it became clear that her control of the land would not include passing it to her heirs, she embarked on a campaign of deforestation designed to extract as much revenue as possible from the manor. Through this defiant political act, Throckmorton intended to build up the finances of her family and to diminish the value of the manor before it passed to Leighton.137 While fully capable of behaving like elites vested with the power conferred by their status, women knew how to deploy gendered stereotypes in their petitions to achieve their desired aims. In 1583, Lady Tresham invoked the patriarchal structure of the household and the gender codes of late-sixteenthcentury England when she claimed that her husband’s imprisonment left ‘our little children […] continually deprived of their father’s comfort and direction.’138 Mary Moore, the widow of Alderman Moore of London and mother-in-law of Lewis Tresham, emphasized her vulnerability when she petitioned King James for protection from her enemies in 1604. As a widowed Spanish immigrant with no extended kinship support, Moore appealed as a subject of a monarch, a humble supplicant seeking protection of a merciful king as a child would seek protection from a father. James responded by taking ‘hir into our Royall protexion’ and ordering that henceforth she would ‘bee noe way molested nor troubled by any Cawses or proceedinges in Lawe.’139 In 1612, Elizabeth Throckmorton employed similar themes of poverty and vulnerability when she petitioned the Archbishop of Canterbury, George Abbot, for help in securing land that although rightfully hers, was claimed by an uncle. She beseeched Abbot that she was ‘an Orphan’ without any other means to support herself after her late father’s death and was 135 S.M. Thorpe, ‘Throckmorton, John I (by 1524–80), of Feckenham, Worcs.,’ History of Parliament, accessed 12 October 2020, http://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509-1558/ member/throckmorton-john-i-1524-80. The manor and park of Feckenham, in the ancient forest of Feckenham, descended together from the twelfth through the seventeenth centuries. ‘Parishes: Feckenham,’ in A History of the County of Worcester, Volume 3 (London: Victoria County History, 1913), 111–120, British History Online, accessed 12 October 2020, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ vch/worcs/vol3/pp111-120. 136 Will of Sir John Throckmorton, TNA PROB 11/62/552. 137 TNA PC 2/15, f. 90r; APC, vol. 15, 417–418. 138 HMCV, 29. 139 HH CP Petitions 1133r.

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‘like to be utterly undone for ever’ unless the archbishop intervened.140 Throckmorton’s plea of poverty was a trope even if it was true, but it also intersected with a larger state concern over poor relief, which Throckmorton undoubtedly knew. Her petition did not advance an overt claim to citizenship but instead a desire to support herself, which as both citizen and subject she was bound by duty and honor to do. In the two latter cases especially, women positioned themselves as lacking protective kin relationships and relying on the state to fulfill the protective obligations of kin. As late as the 1630s, claims of poverty and vulnerability were still employed in petitions, indicating that at least those aspects of gender were still useful tools in appeals for relief. Lady Theodosia Tresham, whose husband Sir William was a colonel in the English regiment in Flanders, petitioned King Charles for the return of her marriage portion on the grounds that her husband had abandoned her, left her unable to pay her bills, and in ‘insufferable distress.’141 Despite the king granting her petition at least three times between 1638 and 1639, however, she claimed that Sir William refused to comply, which raises questions about shifts in conceptions of manhood under the early Stuart kings. Catholic men used petitions to make direct arguments about their political and spiritual loyalties and connected those loyalties to their status as both subjects and citizens. In their petition of 1585, Lord Vaux, Sir Thomas Tresham, Sir John Arundell, and a Mr. Shelley argued that no pope or cardinal could lawfully command a ‘native borne subiect’ to kill their anointed sovereign. To do so was ‘disloyall, wicked and unnaturall’ and that ‘whosoever he be therfore Spirituall or Temporall, that mayteyneth so apparent sacryledge, we therin do renounce him and his conclusion as false, develishe and abominable.’142 In the early seventeenth century, Sir George Shirley petitioned the Privy Council for the return of his armor, which had been seized because of his alleged recusancy. His petition focused on his loyalty: he was a justice of the peace for Leicestershire ‘and no Recusant,’ he had honorably served the crown as a soldier in the Low Countries in the 1580s, and had horses and weapons ready to serve the queen when the Spanish threatened invasion in 1588 and again in 1599. He argued that the confiscation of his arms was ‘grounded upon some misinformacion’ since his loyalty was never in question and he had performed his duty to the state with no detriment to his honor.143 Shirley was correct about the 140 BL Add. MS 29599, f.72r (Carew Manuscripts). 141 TNA SP 16/392, f. 166r; TNA SP 16/395, f. 196r; TNA SP 16/408, f. 320r; TNA SP 16/439, f. 17r. 142 BL Add. MS 39828, f. 108r. This long petition covers six folios, from 106v to 111 r (HMCV, 39). 143 HEHL HAP Box 14 (10), 1603–1622.

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misunderstanding and the charges of recusancy. He was a Catholic, but conformed to the state church enough to avoid presentation for recusancy, and the government had ordered confiscation of recusants armor, not that of conforming Catholics. Even when removed from official positions of political authority, Catholic men used petitions to participate in shaping government policies. As one example, beginning in the 1590s, the state proposed financially penalizing men whose wives refused to conform to the English Church. By 1593, Catholic women had become skilled at using their legal status as feme covert to invert accepted gender norms and act as subversive agents in opposition to religious reforms. Catholic families used this to their advantage for over a decade and many women, especially in recusant families, became the primary hosts and supporters of seminary priests and Jesuits. In effect, the state could not easily control women, so proposed to fine men for their inability to control their wives. The proposal presented a challenge to a man’s honor: he either had to admit his failing as the authority over his household and sustain both personal and financial penalties or he had to force his wife into conformity, which endangered domestic harmony and the religious practice to which the household subscribed. Either way, a man risked damage to his reputation as a failed patriarch.144 The matter came to a head in 1601, shortly after the capital was shaken by the Essex Rebellion. A group of men from the Midlands, including Sir Thomas Tresham, argued against the legality of the government’s proposal to fine husbands for a wife’s recusancy. The petition maintained that a husband could not be charged for his wife’s crimes. The petition was drafted in the rhetorical form of a deductive argument, which advertised the education and legal credibility, and therefore the manhood, of the authors. The document, ‘Whether the Innocente husbande be bounde by lawe to paye for his Wives Recusancy,’ reasoned that while husbands were legally obligated by coverture to pay a wife’s temporal debts, the law did not hold a husband responsible for the ‘sole corporall acte of his wife’ since they were different souls. Furthermore, to enact such a law made a man vulnerable to ‘anye dishoneste or frowarde wife by her owne sole offence […] mighte procure the revenge and undoynge of her Innocente husband, children, and familye, which god forbid.’145 The law was enacted but proved difficult to enforce until at least the 1690s: in 1691 John Southcote was out of the country when he and his wife were 144 For a discussion of failed patriarchy, see Susan D. Amussen, ‘The Contradictions of Patriarchy in Early Modern England,’ Gender and History 30, no. 2 (2018): 343–353. 145 TNA SP 12/281, f. 76r.

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presented for recusancy at the Devon Assizes. On hearing that Southcote’s wife was recusant but he was abroad, Queen Mary ordered that a grant of ‘Noli Proseque’ be entered.146 A man absent from the kingdom would not be held accountable for the spiritual disobedience of his wife, nor the implication that he was a failed patriarch. Catholic men also relied on petitions to make claims for social advancement, in itself a key aspect of elite manhood. Social changes in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries and the rise of new families into positions of social and political authority heightened status anxiety among the gentry and lesser nobility. In 1609 Sir Thomas Brudenell petitioned the Earl of Salisbury to explain why he had not yet sought an elevation in rank. It would have been ‘an abuse of his princely bounty’ to have asked for more than he already had from the king, but as new men rose in rank past Brudenell and ‘lately thought their grace and priority farr to exceede myne because I stand still in ye same degree yt my birth bestowed upon me’ the time had come to ask for advancement.147 Petitions for a baronetage were not unique to Catholic men; Protestants made similar requests for promotion. But as members of a suspect community whose loyalty periodically came into question, Catholic men used these petitions to demonstrate their fidelity to the state, headed by the crown, and their claim to membership in the governing class of early modern England. Of the various themes that directed Catholic men’s petitioning energies, one of the most consistent was an assurance of loyalty to the crown, which was itself a precursor for requests of religious toleration or accommodation. Sir Thomas Tresham was one of the leading voices for this. Beginning in the autumn of 1581, shortly after his arrest on suspicion of harboring the Jesuit Edmund Campion, Tresham argued that all of his actions displayed ‘duty, zeal, and faith towards her Majesty.’ His early petitions, written in the year after his arrest, focused on his loyalty and the loyalty of his friends.148 In January 1582/1583, roughly seventeen months into his imprisonment, he began petitioning for a return to the queen’s favor, pleading that ‘her Majesties favoure […] is of more price with me than else all worldlie treasure whatsoever.’149 Although those requests were unsuccessful, he kept petitioning. By 1584 Tresham was drafting preliminary arguments for how to proceed with petitions for toleration. Early the following year, Tresham 146 TNA SP 44/341, f. 127r. 147 HH CP 126/167r (pr. HMCS, vol. 21, 198). 148 BL Add. MS 39828, ff. 42r–48r (HMCV, 16–19). 149 BL Add. MS 39828, f. 78r (HMCV, 27).

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and a few other leading Catholics submitted a petition that declared their loyalty, obedience, and supplication to the queen, voiced their ‘detestation’ of traitors, and asked that all of England’s Catholics be brought under the ‘mercyfull protection of your sacred sceptre’ who by God’s providence ‘afforde reliefe and comforte to us afflicted, who otherwise shall remayne the most remedyles and miserable outcastes of the worlde.’150 In March 1590, Tresham petitioned the Privy Council, again detailing the loyalty of English Catholics and their frustration at not being allowed to take up arms to defend their country and monarch from the threat of Spanish invasion. England’s Catholics were exemplars of religious and political loyalty who had ‘humbly endured what her Highness from time to time hath pleased to command us.’151 This eight-page missive, submitted by Tresham alone on behalf of all English Catholics, marks a shift toward requests for religious accommodation. By 1633, Tresham’s son-in-law, Sir Thomas Brudenell (now Baron Brudenell), and grandson, Robert Brudenell, had received the king’s protection from prosecution for recusancy: under ‘Royal Comand […] no future Indictment or presentment should be had against him for or concerning his Recusancie.’152 English Catholics did not secure legal toleration during the reign of Charles I, but some received his personal protection, secured through long-term demonstrations of loyalty and duty to the crown. Recusant manhood suggests change over time from the Elizabethan period through the early reign of Charles I. In the Elizabethan period, Catholic men petitioned under a different set of circumstances than did their Protestant peers, because although they had the same status as Protestant gentlemen, they were under greater strain than were Protestants to prove their loyalty and display their honor. There were differences between Catholic men who conformed to the Church of England and recusant men. Conformist men performed their loyalty to the crown and state by going to church, even if just enough to satisfy the statute, and even if they practiced Catholicism at home. Along with other normative behaviors, that could be enough to prevent attacks on one’s manhood. Recusant men performed their loyalty in other ways but their manhood was more easily contested and their reputations more vulnerable than other men. Within the domestic sphere, this degradation of a Catholic man’s power before the state resulted in increasing a Catholic woman’s power vis-à-vis her husband. Catholic women’s work to relieve imprisoned 150 BL Add. MS 39828, 106v–111 r (HMCV, 37–43). 151 BL Add. MS 39828, ff. 139r–142v (HMCV, 57). 152 TNA SP 16/255, f. 82r.

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husbands and to protect the family lands altered the gendered dynamic of the household by granting women more power than they might otherwise have had. These circumstances might not have fully inverted gendered power in the household, but they fundamentally changed it. Ironically enough this arrangement in Catholic households reflects the condition of the English state under female rule. By early in the second decade of King James’s reign, however, recusant manhood seems to have become more stable than it was in the late Elizabethan period. This was perhaps a product of recusant men constructing manhood in ways similar to their Protestant counterparts in the early Stuart period, moving back into positions of political authority at the county and state level and, for many of the sons of Elizabethan recusants, careers as soldiers. Sir William Tresham, a colonel in the English regiment in Flanders, exhibited no concern about his manhood in his petition for more troops in 1638 despite his wife’s simultaneous accusations that he had failed in his duty as a householder.153 Lady Theodosia Tresham’s invocation of key terminology of manhood – obedience to the king – and her request that the king deny Sir William’s career and the performance of manhood that accompanied it by withdrawing him from Flanders and imprisoning him in the Fleet Prison until he repaid her portion, indicates that she understood masculine gender codes and how to best communicate her husband’s failure to satisfy them. Sir William in turn demonstrated his fluency with gender codes. In his response to her petitions, he assured the king of his obedience and the efforts of his kinsmen to satisfy the king’s command. He then claimed that Lady Tresham, as part of her ‘light lewde & fowle course of life’ that included time as a ‘Gaole bird at Newgate’ persisted in ‘proffering […] wrongfull & uniust informacions to your Majestie.’154

Conclusion Although the number of Catholics in local and regional administration decreased under Elizabeth, and at times precipitously so, Catholics remained in office and in military service. Under James I and Charles I their numbers increased. Catholics in office were not only conformists nor necessarily zealous supporters of the regime, but they demonstrated enough loyalty and trustworthiness to qualify as supporters. Catholic men in military service 153 TNA SP 16/537, f. 117r. 154 TNA SP 16/439, f. 18r.

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displayed their loyalty through bodily performance in theaters of war. The kinship and social networks in which these men were embedded generated connections that allowed the state to extend its reach into those networks. Thus, the state was not only managing the landscape of power in the counties, but also monitoring the temperament of the landed population that could, if unduly antagonized, potentially threaten the peace of the realm. Petitions from women and men allowed the state a view directly into the concerns and the general mood of the Catholic populace and, conversely, allowed and even acted upon the citizenship claims of these sometimes marginalized subjects. Through the exchange of petitioners seeking redress or relief and the monarch or Privy Council offering leniency, mercy, or succor in response, the state was able to broker a form of coexistence with English Catholics. That coexistence was not toleration, but neither was it the kind of persecution that drove religious warfare.

6. Catholic Networks, Patronage, and Clientage Abstract The discussions of kinship and social networks and the resulting cultural and political networks that fortified them made possible Catholic participation in patronage networks. Thus, Catholic women and men underscored their membership in an elite status group and argued that political loyalty was distinct from one’s confessional stance. Local communities and the English state relied on patron–client transactions to bind individuals to each other and ensure the proper function of society. For the state, patronage connected Catholics to the monarch and Privy Council, which enhanced obligations of duty to the monarch and the state and encouraged most Catholics to be loyal during a potentially turbulent period. Keywords: patronage, clientage, gender, recusant, Catholic, gifts

The networks created and maintained by post-Reformation English Catholics allowed them to participate in patronage and clientage, one of the most dominant systems of late medieval and early modern Europe. Multiple ties across overlapping networks provided individuals and families with numerous connections that fulfilled diverse purposes. Friendships and new and renewed kinship ties made up a family’s social network; some members of that social network collaborated on projects that resulted in additional bonds of a person’s cultural network; connections made in the previous two fields could amplify political position and authority, which in turn buttressed social standing and power. All of these networks created additional ties with new individuals and thus provided new opportunities for affinity. Cultural networks in particular created space for people with conflicting ideologies to find common ground, or what social scientists

Cogan, S.M., Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463726948_ch06

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call homophily.1 As a result, people developed relationships based on their similarities rather than focusing on their differences. These multiple, overlapping connections in turn generated another network: the patronage network. For all elites, the patronage network was a tool of social, cultural, economic, and political commerce. For Catholics the patronage network was also a matter of survival: not only of their religion, but also their bodies, their families, and their livelihoods. Access to patronage was not guaranteed for anyone, even for elites. Patrons could not risk their own reputations or honor on unworthy clients, and Catholic recusants could be high-risk clients. Regardless of religious identity, one had to have a good name and display the right qualities – self-restraint, honor, and trustworthiness – in order to accumulate the social credit necessary to be a client or to assemble a clientele. Attributes and social ties ensured access to political and social authority and to other individuals in similar or higher positions of power. Individuals and families needed multiple ties in multiple settings if they were to demonstrate their authority, status, and worth. Those multiple settings included the networks upper-status people inhabited. Social, political, and cultural networks created opportunities for post-Reformation English people to find ways to get along, to practice social and religious coexistence in an atmosphere that often teetered on the edge of persecution. The relationships that formed these networks were often durable, originating deep in a family’s past, while others were recently formed. The more ties one had, the more robust were their networks, and the more likely those networks were to offer multiple strands of patronage, clientage, friendship, and sociability. Regardless of a network’s origin or the religious identity of the people within the networks, these relationships required work. Overall, patronage connections benefited English society. Exchanges of sociability and hospitality, strengthened by bonds of common interest, provided the social apparatus on which patronage and clientage functioned and in so doing, produced an additional network made up of patrons, brokers, and clients. Patronage was so deeply embedded in the fabric of elite social and political life that a refusal to participate in such relationships of exchange could result in the denial of office or advancement regardless of a man’s religion. Edward Montagu of Boughton, Northamptonshire, was denied a commission in the Rockingham Forest in 1612 in part because of a failure of patronage. The Montagus took pride in ‘living of ourselves’ rather than 1 Miller McPherson, Lynn Smith-Lovin, and James M. Cook, ‘Birds of a Feather: Homophily in Social Networks,’ Annual Review of Sociology 27 (2001): 428–429.

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seeking promotion through the support of a patron.2 Even worse for their ambitions, they were opponents of the Cecils, who controlled the Rockingham Forest commissions and who by the early seventeenth century were a veritable fountain of patronage for loyal clients. In the end, the commission went to a neighbor, the sometimes-conformist, sometimesrecusant Catholic, Sir Thomas Brudenell.3 The loss of political authority to a neighbor, and a recusant neighbor at that, was a humiliating defeat for Montagu. Patronage covered a range of applications (political, artistic, and ecclesiastical, for example) but at its core was the social commerce that fueled social standing, political appointment, military and religious employment, economic gain, and artistic commissions. In its simplest terms, patronage was a reciprocal system of exchange wherein the patron provided protection and promotion and received in return the client’s service and loyalty. Patron–client ties included ‘an individual relationship, multiple relationships organized into networks, and an overall system based on these ties and networks.’4 Patronage and clientage are typically considered a vertical relationship wherein a person of superior social, economic, or political status offered protection and favors to one of inferior status in exchange for the subordinate’s loyalty and service. Patronage also existed on a horizontal axis, when friends or family members extended favor to one another.5 Both the vertical and horizontal arrangements included patronage brokers, where an individual acted as an intermediary between a client and the patron who could bring about the desired result.6 Patron–client networks and gender inflected each other. Both were based on a relationship to power: clients needed power, patrons had it and needed to keep it, and satisfactory performance of socially valued gender roles allowed women and men to access those levers of power. Patronage and clientage was an essential part of elite women’s and men’s careers and 2 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Buccleuch and Queensbury at Montagu House, vol. 1 (London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationary Office by Mackie & Co., 1899–1926) (hereafter HMCB), 244. 3 Esther S. Cope, The Life of a Public Man: Edward, First Baron Montagu of Boughton, 1562–1644 (Philadelphia: The American Philosophical Society, 1981), 58–59. 4 Sharon Kettering, ‘Patronage in Early Modern France,’ French Historical Studies 17, no. 4 (1992): 839–862. 5 Paul D. McLean discusses the role of friendship in patron–client relationships in The Art of the Network: Strategic Interaction and Patronage in Renaissance Florence (Durham, N.C.; London: Duke University Press, 2007), see especially 150–169. 6 Sharon Kettering, Patrons, Brokers, and Clients in Seventeenth-Century France (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).

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by extension their constructions of gender roles. For men, being a patron and a client expressed manliness; as a patron he exhibited the power and authority that was the hallmark of early modern manhood while as a client he demonstrated his loyalty, trustworthiness, and obedience to authority, which were also key aspects of normative manhood.7 For women, offering patronage was a marker of her status and her duty as an elite woman to fulfill obligations of kinship and neighborhood; all told, patronage made up a significant portion of an elite woman’s career. As a client, a woman expressed her submission to authority and her reliance on patriarchal structures to accomplish the duties she could not. In post-Reformation England, Catholic gentry and nobility relied on patronage for two main purposes. First, for benefits related to their standing as members of the ruling class, such as an award of off ice or the accumulation of property: things that highlighted political, social, and economic significance for any member of the upper sort. Second, for protection from religious persecution, including the full measure of the anti-Catholic statutes. Gentry and nobility possessed different types and amounts of power and were not a monolithic category, yet the ever present possibility of persecution meant that Catholic gentry and nobility relied on patronage for the survival of their family dynasty under Protestant rule. Patronage was the chief mechanism by which Catholic gentry and nobility remained integrated into the community of elites, both as clients to more powerful patrons and as patrons with clientages of their own. Those relationships also bound conformist and recusant Catholics to the early modern state in a relationship of reciprocal obligation. Upper-status Catholics remained part of the patron–client system of exchange due in part to their status and their desire to remain connected to the state, but also because the monarch, chief ministers of state, and savvy local officials understood the prudence of maintaining connections to Catholics rather than marginalizing them. The patronage activities of Midlands Catholics bound those Catholics to one another, to other members of the ruling elite in their region, and to the crown. Catholics participated in the exchange of patronage as clients and as patrons. Catholic gentry, both conformists and recusants, accumulated and maintained networks of clients. In so doing, they underscored their continued influence in the upper echelons of their respective counties. 7 Mervyn James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642 (Oxford: Past & Present Society, 1978); Richard Cust, ‘Honour and Politics in Early Stuart England: The Case of Beaumont v. Hastings,’ Past & Present 149 (1995): 59–62.

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Bonds fostered by patron–client relationships strengthened ties of kinship, neighborhood, and network. In 1605 Elizabeth, Baroness Vaux, used these terms when she assured Sir Richard Verney, whose niece Mary was in Vaux’s household, that if he could provide the assistance she needed, through patronage, then ‘you shall so farre bynd me & myne unto you that if euar it lye in my powar thowgh it be with the hassard of my estate I will requite this kindnis.’ 8 To be a patron was a mark of esteem that aff irmed one’s standing in the county, region, or network. That recusants were able to be effective patrons indicates that they retained the connections and influence commensurate with their status as members of the upper sort. This is, however, more than a question of whether patronage was ideologically rather than confessionally based. Patronage was a sociopolitical system that enjoyed nearly universal participation by early modern European elites, but access was conditional. One had to display the right behaviors that indicated one’s honor and credit. Access to patronage cannot be assumed based simply on one’s socioeconomic status nor on their religion. Patronage was not restricted to religious confession; it was a social and political structure that transcended religious boundaries. In post-Reformation England, patronage ties existed between members of the same confession and between those of different confessions. Patronage networks were distinct entities but were formed through connections made in other types of networks. Not every connection in kinship, social, cultural, or political networks resulted in a patron–client tie, but with few exceptions patron–client relationships originated and were nurtured within those networks. While the kinship, social, cultural, and political networks discussed above fostered ties that helped to soothe the social fractures of religious reform and that kept Catholics connected to patrons and clients, the patronage network existed alongside an individual’s or family’s other networks. It was populated by some of the same people that inhabited an individual’s or family’s networks, yet it is important to note that not all people in one’s network were one’s patrons or clients. Furthermore, a patronage network was focused on different types of work than the ones discussed above. A patronage network prioritized the exchange of favor, loyalty, and credit. Without kinship and social ties, one would not have cultural, political, or patronage connections.

8

The National Archives (hereafter TNA) SP 14/216/2, f. 178v.

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The Role of the Gift in Patron–Client Exchange Gifts were an essential part of patronage and clientage. The networks discussed throughout this book were formed and reinforced through repeated ties, or dyads, but also through the exchange of gifts. Similarly, patron–client relationships were maintained by the exchange of gifts, tokens, letters of gratitude and praise, and honorable behavior. Midlands Catholics repaid their patrons with a range of gifts, including tangible items like foodstuffs or trees for an orchard, and intangibles like book dedications. Sharon Kettering and Natalie Zemon Davis have demonstrated how central gifts were to the patronage system, with Davis remarking that ‘the whole patronage system was carried on under the rhetoric of gifts.’9 This was part of what Felicity Heal called a ‘gift economy’ centered on the court.10 Gifts ‘authenticated’ relationships by honoring the bond between individuals or families and enhanced the esteem of both the giver and receiver within the context of Christian charity and compassion toward others.11 In this system, gifts flowed between patrons and clients, in both directions. The perquisites patrons controlled were referred to as gifts or ‘in the gift of.’ Offices, for example benefices, were theirs to dispense; control of those means of employment, advancement, or favor added to a patron’s power and amplified their elite status and wealth but the office or favor still required acknowledgement by the recipient. Patronage was itself a form of gift within the larger framework of early modern social, political, and economic exchange. Clients requited a patron’s gift of office, favor, or protection with their own gifts. Clients used gifts to satisfy specific functions with their patrons. They nurtured the bond with patrons through small gifts, tokens, and notes, all of which reminded the patron of the client’s loyalty. After the Earl of Leicester’s patronage moved Sir Thomas Tresham from prison to house arrest in 1584, Tresham sent ‘a brace of does’ as an expression of gratitude.12 While in Spain in 1623, Endymion Porter sent 9 Natalie Zemon Davis, The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2000), 62, 95; Sharon Kettering, ‘Gift-giving and Patronage in Early Modern France,’ French History 2, no. 2 (1988): 131–151. 10 Felicity Heal, The Power of Gifts: Gift Exchange in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 29. Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, ‘Gifts and Favors: Informal Support in Early Modern England,’ Journal of Modern History 72, no. 2 (2000): 295–338. 11 Ben-Amos, ‘Gifts and Favors,’ 299. 12 British Library (hereafter BL) Add. MS 39828, f. 93r; Simon Adams, ed., Household Accounts and Disbursement Books of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, 1558–1561, 1584–1586, Camden Fifth Series, vol. 6 (London: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 191–192.

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a tobacco box for his wife to give to his patron’s mother, Mary, Countess of Buckingham – a gift intended to remind the countess and her son of their clients’ loyalty.13 Clients offered large gifts to display gratitude for an act of significant patronage or in an attempt to cultivate someone as a patron. The Earl of Lincoln, fearing that he was going to prison over a recent infraction, offered his patron, the Earl of Shrewsbury, the use of Lincoln’s house in Chelsea and offered the fruits of the gardens there, ‘full of apricots, strawberries, and cherries.’14 Gifts, as part of a system of exchange, had to be proportionate to ‘the worth, in the sense of honor, of the transacting parties.’15 Among elite women, gifts that reinforced social bonds were the product of a woman’s labor and designed to delight the senses, such as perfume, food, needlework, or art.16 Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos’s study of the relationship of gifts and informal means of support directly connects to the aspects of patronage that were related to quality of life, well-being, and protection.17 This system, like the apparatus of formal support, grew from sociocultural values of honor, duty, and obligation between kin and among members of different types of social networks. Cultural activities such as building, gardening, literary writing, and antiquarian work provided clients with opportunities to publicly advertise the honor and esteem of one’s patron throughout the period examined here, which in itself was a form of gift. Some clients honored their patrons with dedications in printed works, in a public declaration of the patron’s esteem.18 In February 1584/1585 the Leicestershire recusant Thomas Palmer offered to repay Lord Burghley’s patronage with a book dedication.19 In January 1606/1607 Justice Beaumont’s son, Francis the playwright, wrote to thank the Earl of Salisbury for his patronage even though the position Beaumont sought – the Mastership of the King’s Cocks – was given to someone else.20 13 TNA SP 14/142, f. 92r. The countess’s position as the royal favorite’s mother catapulted her into a new status as a patron, too. 14 Lambeth Palace Library (hereafter LPL) Talbot Papers 3201, f. 15r. 15 Heal, The Power of Gifts, 27. 16 Amanda Herbert, Female Alliances: Gender, Identity, and Friendship in Early Modern Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2014), 53. 17 Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos, ‘Gifts and Favors: Informal Support in Early Modern England,’ Journal of Modern History 72, no. 2 (2000): 297. 18 Heal, The Power of Gifts, 43. 19 BL Lansdowne MS, vol. 43, f. 104 20 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Honourable The Marquess of Salisbury, Preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, vol. 19 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationary Office, 1883–1976) (hereafter HMCS), 28.

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The recusant and antiquarian Thomas Habington compiled a survey of Worcestershire in which he highlighted the virtues of Protestant families with whom he enjoyed amicable relations.21 Habington’s Survey remained in manuscript during his lifetime, its publication probably disrupted by the outbreak of the English Civil Wars.22 Nonetheless, his fellow antiquarians would have known of its contents, and word probably spread about who Habington featured in his work. Clients could maintain their patrons by paying them visible compliments in cultural forms, as both Sir Christopher Hatton and Sir Thomas Tresham did when they replicated some of Lord Burghley’s landscape designs for Theobalds in the garden designs on their own estates at Holdenby and Lyveden, respectively.23 This was the ultimate form of gift, since it communicated loyalty and the recognition of one’s honor on a grand scale, prominently displayed for other gentle and noble visitors to see. Patronage networks saw a range of gifts and favors, formal and informal, exchanged between patrons and clients. Most of the time, these were offerings tied to societal obligations of duty and reciprocity, not bribes. The discussion here focuses on the gift exchange that accompanied patronage, and not the system of bribery that existed under Elizabeth I and exponentially grew under her successor.

Elite Patronage in Early Modern England Regardless of religious confession, English elites pursued and exchanged certain types of patronage and clientage connected to economic livelihood and social advancement. Requests for favors to or between friends reveals how informal forms of patronage were transacted within social networks and between relative equals. Formal patron–client relationships, the vertical arrangements usually between superior and subordinate, were marked by formulaic address and language that emphasized the worthiness of the 21 Jan Broadway, ‘“To Equall their Virtues”: Thomas Habington, Recusancy and the Gentry of Early Stuart Worcestershire,’ Midland History 29, no. 1 (2004): 9. 22 C. Don Gilbert, ‘The Composition of Thomas Habington’s “Survey of Worcestershire”,’ Recusant History 26, no. 3 (2003): 415–425. 23 See Chapter Four; see also David Jacques, ‘The Compartiment System in Tudor England,’ Garden History 27, no. 1 (1999): 39; Eric St. John Brooks, Sir Christopher Hatton: Queen Elizabeth’s Favourite (London: Jonathan Cape, 1946), 158; John Dixon Hunt, Garden and Grove: The Italian Renaissance Garden in the English Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996), 105.

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patron and the unworthiness of the suitor while it also communicated the validity of the petitioner’s request. Many of the patronage requests Catholic and recusant elites made were in keeping with those made by members of the gentry and nobility generally and had little to do with religion. These requests were the norm, or what I refer to here as normative patronage. Normative patronage includes the common forms of patronage that elites transacted, regardless of their own ideology or confession. In keeping with normative forms of patronage, Catholics sought relief in local disputes, as Sir George Shirley did in January 1620/1621 when he asked Sir Thomas Edmondes to compel the ‘Salt-Peter-men’ working at the direction of the Earl of Worcester to stop ‘digging upp my tenants howses’ and to ‘procure […] some recompense for the losses done them.’24 Catholic gentry sought elevation in rank, especially when King James began awarding baronetcies in the first decade of his reign.25 Like their non-Catholic counterparts, Catholic gentry and nobility sought court patronage, pursued and dispensed political and economic patronage, and bestowed ecclesiastical patronage. Regardless of confessional identity, gentlemen and noblemen protected the careers of their family and friends because doing so was part of the duty of kinship and a demonstration of elite honor in the larger early modern economy of obligation. That economy required reserves of trust between households and within networks, and the credit that derived from social obligation was fundamental to that trust. 26 As Alexandra Shepard’s study of labor and worth has shown, employment was part of an exchange of debt and obligation and was mutually beneficial to both the employer and the employee.27 That dyad of debt and obligation was central to conceptions of patronage and clientage in early modern England. A patron’s support of a client’s work or desire to work reflected honor back onto the patron, strengthened the bonds of the kinship and other extant networks, and ensured the robust health of the patron’s network. When in 1583 the vicar of Alcester, Warwickshire, ejected William Cave’s 24 TNA SP 14/119, f. 74 r. 25 Sir George Shirley and Sir Thomas Brudenell were among those whose financial contributions to royal coffers resulted in elevation to the baronetcy. Hatfield House (hereafter HH) CP 126/167r (HMCS, v. 21, 198); Pauline Croft, ‘The Catholic Gentry, the Earl of Salisbury and the Baronets of 1611,’ in Conformity and Orthodoxy in the English Church, c. 1560–1660, ed. Peter Lake and Michael Questier (Woodbridge, Suffolk; Rochester, NY: Boydell Press, 2000). 26 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early Modern England (London: Palgrave, 1998), 130–132. 27 Alexandra Shepard, Accounting for Oneself: Worth, Status, and the Social Order in Early Modern England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), 186–189, 310.

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brother from his ‘simple habitacion and living,’ Cave asked his friend and fellow justice of the peace, Edmund Holte, to solicit Holte’s brother-in-law, Humphrey Ferrers of Tamworth, to extend the younger Cave’s position for another year, which would give the man sufficient time to find another living.28 Although this letter employs some of the typical language of a patron–client exchange and it is evident that Cave felt the relationship was an equal one, even between friends requests like these necessitated more formal language than what the two men might have otherwise used. Cave positioned himself as Holte’s subordinate in saying he did ‘most earnestly Crave your friendly letters’ to Ferrers, for which Cave would ‘thinke my sellfe greately beholding to youe for the same’ and that Holte would find Cave ‘willing and prest [pressed/obligated] to pleasure youe or eny frend of yours to my best in what so ever.’ He promised his brother’s loyalty, service, and prayers for Holte for the duration of his life and sent his brother to present the letter to Holte in person to further emphasize the poor man’s readiness to offer service to a patron. Holte forwarded the petition to Ferrers and asked that so long as the ejected man’s credit warranted such favor, Ferrers would allow Cave’s brother to ‘Continewe styll Tenant by your Sufferance.’29 Maintaining a clientele and dispensing patronage helped gentlemen and noblemen to both perform and maintain authority in their households and localities, which were requirements of normative manhood. Good patrons protected the careers of their clients, whether they were family or long-standing members of one’s clientage, and in the process emphasized their power to influence social and economic matters. In January 1598/1599 Lewis, Lord Mordaunt, wrote to the Earl of Essex on behalf of his nephew, an experienced soldier with two years’ service in the Low Countries. Mordaunt asked that Essex take the nephew into his company and hoped, for the sake of the young man’s honor, that he would hold at least the rank of lieutenant.30 Similarly, in 1606 Sir William Lane, a Northamptonshire Protestant, petitioned the Earl of Salisbury to accept his son-in-law, Edward Waterhouse, as a liveried servant, preferably in time for King James’s imminent visit to Theobalds.31 28 BL Stowe MS 150, f. 29r. 29 BL Stowe MS 150, f. 29r. 30 HH CP 176/62r (HMCS, vol. 9, 30). 31 HH CP 116/158r (HMCS, vol. 18, 206). According to the Chronicle of St. Monica’s at Louvain, Lane was the Protestant cousin of the Catholic Copleys of Warwickshire. Dom Adam Hamilton, O.S.B., ed., The Chronicle of the English Augustinian Canonesses […] at St. Monica’s in Louvain […] a Continuation 1625–1644 (Edinburgh; London: Sands and Co., 1906), 89.

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Taking a kinsman into service or asking one’s patron to do so was a common feature of aristocratic life in the late medieval and early modern periods.32 The patronage Mordaunt and Lane offered their kinsmen provided economic benefits and new ties through which the clients could further develop their own networks. For Mordaunt and Lane, these acts of patronage emphasized that they were powerful enough to accomplish this important act of benefaction for their clients through their own patrons, and thus succeeded in their masculine duty to the household and kinship network. They also succeeded in their role as clients by acknowledging the status of their patrons, Essex and Salisbury, by seeking to place their clients in the entourage of the statesmen, which in turn expanded the noblemen’s clientage and affirmed their standing. In Leicestershire, the Hastingses ensured their own advancement through their support and advancement of their clients, which in turn strengthened the Hastings patronage network and helped the family to maintain their political and social dominance through the early seventeenth century. For the Hastingses this support emphasized power beyond the local context of their home county; their influence extended to a national setting. The Hastings family’s control of Leicestershire made the county a Protestant enclave of sorts. Most of the Catholic households were subject to Hastings authority and patronage, and the Hastingses in turn were in a position to demand extraordinary favors from their clients in return for their patronage. In January 1617/1618, Sir John Beaumont, whose family had been part of the Hastings clientage for over a century, gave the fifth Earl of Huntingdon permission to extend his coal-mining operations to Beaumont’s land as recompense for Hastings patronage. ‘I acknowledge myselfe so many wayes bound to your Lordship,’ Beaumont said, ‘as that your Lordship may iustly commaund me and mine.’ Beaumont promised Hastings that any ‘Coles in my ground’ would go to the earl ‘upon such reasonable termes, agreed betweene us.’33 By invoking a negotiation, Beaumont’s manliness remained intact. The assent Beaumont granted to his patron to disturb the Beaumont lands and the assurance that any resources would go to Huntingdon were part of the duty of service that a client owed a patron. To negotiate terms of sale with his patron allowed Beaumont to protect his family’s wealth and his own manhood; to sign over economic rights to Huntingdon would have emasculated Beaumont and would not have reflected well on Huntingdon 32 Sharon Kettering, ‘Patronage and Kinship in Early Modern France,’ French Historical Studies 16, no. 2 (1989): 418. 33 HEHL HA 672.

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as a patron either, since part of his duty included the economic well-being of his clients. These kinds of enclaves were products of elite status and were visible in predominantly Catholic areas, too. In largely Catholic communities like the area around Rushton, Northamptonshire, dominated by the Treshams, recusant gentlemen exhibited authority by distributing patronage. In May 1591 the aged master of the free grammar school at Rothwell, Owen Ragsdale, sought rights of preferment so that he could name his successor. Rothwell, a market town two and a half miles southwest of the Tresham seat at Rushton, was f irmly within Tresham’s sphere of influence.34 Sir Thomas Tresham, who held the rights of preferment, agreed to lease them to Ragsdale, a long-standing Tresham tenant and client and a Catholic.35 Tresham and three servants closest to the core of his family’s networks, Thomas Vavasour, John Flamstead, and Thomas Walker, along with Ragsdale entered into an agreement with the twenty-six inhabitants of Rothwell that allowed Ragsdale rights of preferment on the condition that Ragsdale maintained the schoolhouse and school yard and paid the new schoolmaster.36 Ragsdale’s will, drawn up in mid-November of that same year, bequeathed his several cottages in Rothwell to Tresham, Sir John Spencer, and George Pulton ‘to the use of the Schoole and ScholeMaister in Rothwell.’ He bequeathed an additional £20 to the ‘Repayre of the saide Schoole,’ double the amount he left to the Rothwell parish church.37 Ragsdale died the following month.38 Tresham granted his rights to his client as a form of favor, although Tresham still f inancially benef ited from it. In addition to employment, elite patrons in the Midlands were invested in helping their clients to acquire more property and wealth and to aid in the protection of that property. Property was one of the chief concerns of landed families, no matter their confessional stance. Women and men were equally invested in safeguarding the family’s landholdings because those holdings represented the family’s status, revenue, honor, and their future. 34 Tresham was lord of the manor of Rothwell from c. 1571 to at least 1595. TNA SP 12/251, f. 145 r. 35 Ragsdale’s Catholicism is established in W.J. Sheils, The Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough (Northampton: Northamptonshire Record Society, 1979), 115. 36 Papers by Command, vol. 90 (London: House of Commons, 1906), 116; Arthur F. Leach, English Schools at the Reformation, 1546–48 (Westminster: Archibald Constable, 1896), 148; Giles Isham, ‘Two Local Biographies: Owen Ragsdale and Sir John Robinson,’ Northamptonshire Past and Present 3, no. 3 (1962): 81–86. 37 TNA PROB 11/79/26, Will of Owen Ragsdale. 38 S. Sharpe, ‘Rothwell Crypt and Bones,’ The Archaeological Journal 36 (1879): 67.

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When property was at risk, women sought the help of a patron to recover both goods and land. As Karen Robertson has demonstrated with the case of Elizabeth Throckmorton Ralegh, one of the Protestant Throckmortons, part of an elite woman’s career was to protect family assets, particularly with a view to her own support and her children’s inheritance.39 Patronage featured prominently in this role. Protecting or recovering property was both women’s and men’s work. In some circumstances, women needed the intervention of a patron with more powerful ties than their own, or that of a man who could invoke his own patriarchal duty of protection and economic relief on behalf of his clients. After John Somerville was attainted and executed in 1583, the family’s lands were forfeited to the crown. His daughters tried in vain to recover the portions of the estate that supplied their inheritance. In 1605 the women turned to their kinsman and patron, Sir Henry Goodere, a gentleman of James’s Privy Chamber, hoping that his intervention with his patrons would restore their lands. Goodere petitioned two of his patrons, Robert Cecil, Viscount Cranbourne, and the king, to help recover the lands. He repeatedly invoked the obligation he felt as a kinsman to relieve the women’s poverty and to quicken the king’s ‘tender compassion.’40 The last petition related to this case was from Anne Somerville to the newly promoted Earl of Salisbury, in May or June 1605, communicating that she understood the case had been referred to him and that she hoped that he would grant her the same relief that had been awarded to her sister, £50 per annum.41 Protracted attempts at recovering the parts of the estates that furnished the Arden daughters’ marriage portions reveal the volatility of patronage relationships and how a breach within a patronage network could have lasting ramifications. Queen Elizabeth granted the young women ‘their mother’s annuity, backdated to […] 1583 in an implicit acknowledgement of the injustice visited on their parents,’ but they had to continue their appeals to recover their father’s assets. 42 39 Karen Robertson, ‘Tracing Women’s Connections from a Letter by Elizabeth Ralegh,’ in Maids and Mistresses, Cousins and Queens: Women’s Alliances in Early Modern England, ed. Susan Frye and Karen Robertson (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 149–164; Karen Robertson, ‘Negotiating Favour: The Letters of Lady Ralegh,’ in Women and Politics in Early Modern England, 1450–1700, ed. James Daybell (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 109. 40 TNA SP 14/13, f. 165r (CSPD James I, vol. 1, 213, 221); HH CP Petitions 2349r (HMCS, vol. 24, 19). 41 HH CP Petitions 1059r, Anne Somerville to the Earl of Salisbury. 42 Glyn Parry and Cathryn Enis, Shakespeare before Shakespeare: Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and the Elizabethan State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020), 184–186.

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Following the Gunpowder Plot in 1605, patrons helped two widows to reclaim land that had been seized in contradiction to the state’s orders, which directed that confiscated goods should be returned to the families of the prisoners ‘for the relief of their wives and children.’ 43 The Earl of Salisbury intervened to help Dorothy Huddleston when the sheriff of Worcestershire refused to return the property and horses he had taken.44 Salisbury intervened for Lady Tresham, too. Her cousin, Sir Arthur Throckmorton, was one of the JPs charged with returning confiscated goods to recusants. When he wrote to Salisbury to confirm that he had returned Lady Tresham’s goods, he complained about ‘the outcries of my unkind kindred’ and the financial losses he had sustained while first confiscating and then returning recusants’ property. He had, however, kept one of Tresham’s manuscript books which he offered Salisbury as a gift to the king. 45 Male patrons reinforced patriarchy and normative manhood when they helped clients to accrue land, since that landholding was one of the principal means of constructing early modern manliness. In June 1584 Roger Cave, a Northamptonshire JP (and a Protestant) asked Burghley’s favor for his sonin-law and client, Mr. Bagott, who sought a lease of the Catholic Lord Paget’s surrendered lands.46 In 1596 Lord Mordaunt, a prominent Northamptonshire Catholic, asked Queen Elizabeth to approve a reversion of lands on behalf of his long-time servant and client, William Downall. 47 Mordaunt’s suit was supported by Lord Burghley and won the queen’s approval. 48 With this transaction, Mordaunt displayed his own power and status through his access to the queen, the queen’s favor toward him, and his success in securing a desired outcome for his client. This application of patronage was still in force when Sir Thomas Brudenell advocated on behalf of his client, Christian Ismay of Brigstock, in 1627. Ismay’s inheritance from her husband, Roland Ismay, which probably included a small parcel of land, was imperiled by suggestions that the couple were never legally married. Brudenell wrote to John Lambe, Chancellor of Peterborough, with whom he maintained an amicable relationship, to ‘entreat your favor to her’ and to ensure a ‘faire and iust proceding.’49 Brudenell’s patronage defended not only the widow’s

43 44 45 46 47 48 49

HH CP Petitions 462r (HMCS, vol. 24, 37). HH CP Petitions 462r (HMCS, vol. 24, 37). HH CP 115/1 r (HMCS, vol. 17, 644). TNA SP 12/171, f. 117r. HH CP Petitions 570r (HMCS, vol. 6, 536). HH CP Petitions 570r (HMCS, vol. 6, 536). TNA SP 16/49, f. 54 r,v.

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land, but also her sexual reputation, which was under attack through the accusations of cohabitation without marriage. Providing economic relief through loans and other financial transactions was a culturally valued trait for the gentry and nobility since it highlighted their munificence, wealth, and power. This was another common aspect of patronage for elites, regardless of their religious beliefs. Marjorie K. McIntosh has noted that voluntary relief from the wealthy ‘must have accounted for the great majority’ of financial assistance in the early modern period.50 McIntosh refers here to charity, but it was the case with loans, too, as it was part of gentry and noble obligations to their subordinates. Recusancy fines and compounding of estates under James and Charles meant that Catholic recusants were notoriously cash poor, but they still managed to fulf ill a patron’s obligation of providing f inancial relief to clients, friends, and kinsmen in their networks. This was part of elite identity, since gentry and nobility were expected to share their bounty. Sir William Catesby borrowed £100 from his brother-in-law, Randall Brereton in the 1570s; the men were married to Throckmorton sisters and part of the vast Throckmorton kinship network.51 Sir Thomas Tresham lent £10 to Hugh Erdeswick, a fellow prisoner at Ely, in 1586.52 Meanwhile, Lord Mordaunt, a Catholic noble resident in Northamptonshire, offered economic patronage to Tresham by standing surety for him on certain loans.53 All of these forms of relief, or economic patronage, were part of a larger economy of obligation in which trust and credit contributed to the maintenance of reputation and social bonds.54 Some families engaged in lending to their own detriment, which eroded trust and creditworthiness and, for Catholics, further endangered their reputation. The Vauxes of Harrowden lent money they did not have; William, Lord Vaux was in dire financial straits throughout the 1580s and 1590s, in part because of his own fiscal mismanagement and in part due to the recusancy fines he was obliged to pay, yet he still lent money to tenants 50 Marjorie K. McIntosh, ‘Poverty, Charity, and Coercion in Elizabethan England,’ Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35 (2005): 464. 51 TNA SP 15/25, f. 32r. Anne Throckmorton was Catesby’s wife; Temperance, her younger sister, was Brereton’s wife. 52 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, Vol. III: The Manuscripts of T.B. Clarke-Thornhill, Esq., Sir T. Barrett-Lennard, Bart., Pelham R. Papillon, Esq., and W. Cleverly Alexander, Esq. (London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationary Office by Mackie & Co., 1904) (hereafter HMCV), 43. 53 HMCV, 46. 54 Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation, 151.

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and clients.55 In 1592 Vaux’s finances were grim enough that he pawned his Parliament robes, a certain admission that he had failed in his patriarchal duty and his role as a nobleman.56 Men like Vaux walked a razor’s edge: their status required that they offer economic patronage to their clients but financial mismanagement undermined masculine identity because it impugned a man’s honor, trustworthiness, and his good reputation as a householder. These overlapping imperatives were undoubtedly part of Thomas Throckmorton’s motivation to urge his grandson, Robert, to live within his means even while he himself did not.57 Economic patronage, regardless of the size of a loan or the scope of a contract, reveals kinship, social, and patronage networks. The financial records of the Throckmortons of Coughton supply a snapshot of their money-lending practices and their networks. Into at least the mid-seventeenth century the Throckmortons fulfilled their social role as leading members of the gentry in their counties by lending money to clients, tenants, and kin, even when the family was in restricted financial circumstances themselves. Thomas Throckmorton lent 40s to Thomas Colwell of Bestow, Northamptonshire, in 1590.58 Colwell, a Northamptonshire recusant, was not in the inner circle of the Throckmorton network but was a client of Throckmorton’s brother-in-law, Sir Thomas Tresham.59 In this instance, the loan would have strengthened the bonds between Throckmorton and Tresham while it simultaneously reinforced the bonds of the social network that included Colwell. In 1611 or 1612 Robert Throckmorton lent £108 to Michael Bray of Coughton Park; by June 1612 Bray had repaid ‘three score and sixe poundes’ and hoped Throckmorton would extend his loan period while he raised the remaining balance.60 In 1629 Robert lent £10 to his cousin Thomas, who was at the time residing at Harrowden, Northamptonshire, the seat of the

55 Godfrey Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden: A Recusant Family (Newport, Monmouthshire: R.H. Johns, 1953), 204–219. 56 BL Lansdowne, vol. 73, f. 74 r. 57 Warwickshire Record Office (hereafter WRO) CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 3, f. 16r; Susan M. Cogan, ‘Reputation, Credit and Patronage: Throckmorton Men and Women, c. 1560–1620,’ in Catholic Gentry in English Society: The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation, ed. Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 81. 58 WRO CR 1998/Box 63/Folder 1, f. 7r. 59 Colwell had been a Tresham client since at least the 1570s; why Throckmorton, and not Tresham, extended him this loan can probably be attributed to Tresham’s financial retrenching that occurred at the same time. Anstruther, Vaux of Harrowden, 88–89; see also TNA STAC 5 7/34; BL Add. MS 39828, f. 147r, 148r (HMCV, 60); TNA SP 12/208, f. 50r. 60 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 3, f. 22r.

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Vauxes.61 In 1639, toward the end of his life, Thomas Habington of Hindlip, Worcestershire, asked Robert Throckmorton to help him satisfy a £300 debt related to his daughter-in-law’s marriage portion.62 This request of such a large sum indicates strong bonds of trust and credit between the men. In the mid-seventeenth century a Throckmorton cousin, George Piggott, asked Robert Throckmorton for a loan of 40s.63 The Piggotts had been part of the Throckmorton network since at least the 1560s and had a long history of borrowing from their patrons. In addition to their transactional nature, these loans also strengthened social bonds between individuals and within networks. Money lent and repaid on time fortified trust and standing within the network and signaled that the network was populated by honorable people.64 Even within kinship networks where trustworthiness was paramount, patrons took steps to protect themselves from a client’s lack of creditworthiness. In 1610 Thomas Throckmorton lent his kinsman George Throckmorton of Grafton £50 but required a bond of £100 as an assurance of repayment.65 Bonds as surety for repayment were common in these types of transactions, but they were less common in transactions within kin networks. Requiring a bond between members of a network called into question one’s ability to successfully manage the financial affairs of his estate and household and therefore undermined a recusant’s manliness. Of course, living beyond one’s means was not unheard of among the gentry, as individuals and families struggled to advance or even to maintain their position in the social hierarchy. The Throckmortons were more solvent than were the Vauxes but still sometimes spent more than they took in. In 1612 the ‘Charges in howskeeping’ for Thomas Throckmorton’s household at Weston Underwood, Buckinghamshire, amounted to £500 more than his receipts.66 Still, he lent money as part of his duty and his identity as a member of the gentry. Economic patronage reveals the ways in which individuals and families understood their roles in their county communities, particularly with 61 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 2, f. 1 r. 62 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 2, f. 16r. 63 WRO CR 1998/CD/Folder 48, f. 26r. The Piggotts had been part of the Throckmorton network since the 1560s at least and had a long history of borrowing from their patrons. The Piggotts remained in the Throckmorton affinity through at least the early eighteenth century. In 1719 Nathaniel Piggott was Sir Robert Throckmorton’s solicitor. WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 3, f. 2r; WRO CR 1998/Box 61/Folder 3, f. 13r. 64 Courtney Erin Thomas, ‘If I Lose Mine Honour I Lose Myself’: Honour among the Early Modern English Elite (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017), 136–138. 65 WRO CR 1998/Box 61/Folder 4, f. 5r. 66 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 3, f. 26r.

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respect to the maintenance of gentry honor. The financial constraints of the Throckmorton and Tresham families were similar – both were paying steep recusancy fines and both families had several daughters who needed marriage portions. Yet the Throckmortons were able to lend money more frequently than were the Treshams. The Throckmortons continued to act in accordance with a traditional social role: the family kept hospitality and dispensed financial support to clients and subordinates in need. The Treshams, by contrast, especially Sir Thomas, devoted much of their disposable income to the cultural aspects of the late English Renaissance, particularly the architecture and gardening trends so popular during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Both families were thus able to demonstrate their honor via social and cultural behaviors that agreed with social and cultural expectations in their respective counties. Over time, Catholics chose to borrow money from and engage in other financial transactions primarily with other Catholics in their networks. Perhaps this was part of a strategy to avoid creditors who might harass or persecute them. To be sure, it reflects the same contraction of contacts seen in the kinship networks described in Chapter Three. The economic benefits that grew from elite patronage contributed to social mobility for some nonelite clients. Clients who performed their labor well reflected positively on the patron who supported them. When those clients also worked to nurture the bond they had with a patron through the exchange of tokens and favors, the relationship could pay significant dividends, including the advancement of the client’s social status and subsequent increase in political authority. In this way, networks could function similarly to a parish: a social entity inflected by political power that was constantly negotiated and reshaped.67 George Kempson, a client of the Throckmortons of Coughton, was a butcher in the small Warwickshire market center of Alcester, near Coughton, and about seven miles northwest of the larger market town of Stratford-upon-Avon. In 1593 Kempson leased Oversley Park near Alcester from George Throckmorton, the youngest son of Sir Robert Throckmorton and brother to Thomas Throckmorton of Coughton.68 Kempson and his brother Thomas were the Throckmortons’ neighbors and by 1611, if not before, Thomas was one of their servants. Thomas Kempson 67 Keith Wrightson, ‘The Politics of the Parish in Early Modern England,’ in The Experience of Authority in Early Modern England, ed. Paul Griffiths, Adam Fox, and Steve Hindle (New York: Macmillan, 1996), 11–12. 68 Shakespeare Birthplace Trust (SBT) DR 5/940; ‘Parishes: Arrow,’ in A History of the County of Warwick, Volume 3: Barlichway Hundred, ed. Philip Styles (London, 1945), 26–31, British History Online, accessed 11 March 2021, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/warks/vol3/pp26-31.

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and his brothers Richard and George were in service to the Throckmortons through the mid-seventeenth century, despite Agnes Throckmorton’s advice to her son, Robert, to be wary of granting the Kempsons too much property, which would increase their standing in the area. She had heard, she told Robert, that George Kempson had accumulated enough wealth that ‘if he hath it confirmed as it is now he will be a lorde there as well as you.’69 Agnes was concerned that another gentleman, or manorial lord, in such proximity to Coughton would dilute the Throckmortons’ authority in the neighborhood and weaken her heir’s social prominence. Despite Agnes’s misgivings, the Kempsons continued in service to the Throckmortons and by the 1620s possessed the manor of Oversley Park, adjacent to Coughton, in their own right. By 1629 Thomas Kempson was referred to as ‘esquire’; his kinsman George was called ‘gentleman’ by 1661.70 In this instance, Kempson and his brothers, through their own commercial efforts and decades of service and clientage to a socially prominent family, acquired the wealth and local standing that elevated them to the middle gentry in the space of one generation. Patronage networks, like other network types examined here, were dynamic, highly changeable organisms. The multiple networks that fed one’s patronage network meant that it was common for clients (regardless of their religion) to seek favor from multiple patrons.71 During the 1580s and 1590s, the elder generation of Treshams – Sir Thomas and Muriel – practiced a strategy of simultaneously appealing to multiple patrons at the top of the Elizabethan state, including Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Francis Walsingham, and the Cecils. Their eldest son, Francis, was in the entourage of the Earl of Essex in the 1590s; he was probably part of the Cecil clientage 69 WRO CR 1998/Box 60, f. 3r. 70 It is unclear whether this George was Thomas’s very aged brother, which seems unlikely, or Thomas’s son, which is more probable. ‘Parishes: Haselor,’ in A History of the County of Warwick, Volume 3: Barlichway Hundred, ed. Philip Styles (London, 1945), 108–115, British History Online, accessed 11 March 2021, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/warks/vol3/pp108-115. In an agreement between George Kempson and Lord Brooke dated 1661 Kempson is referred to as ‘George Kempson of Alcester, gent.’ WRO CR 1886/Box 416/7/2r. 71 Linda Levy Peck, ‘Court Patronage and Government Policy: The Jacobean Dilemma,’ in Patronage in the Renaissance, ed. Guy Fitch Lytle and Stephen Orgel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), 30; Paul E.J. Hammer, ‘Patronage at Court, Faction and the Earl of Essex,’ in The Reign of Elizabeth I: Court and Culture in the Last Decade, ed. John Guy (Cambridge; New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 68; Robert Harding, The Anatomy of a Power Elite (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1978), 36–37, 241 n. 68. See also Kristen Neuschel, Word of Honor: Interpreting Noble Culture in Sixteenth-Century France (Ithaca, NY; London: Cornell University Press, 1989).

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at the same time, along with his parents. These relationships reflect the Treshams’ high status in Northamptonshire which in the 1580s reflect the lingering effects of the family’s domination of the county social and economic hierarchy over the previous century. One of the family’s clients, Francis Sabie, also maintained multiple patrons, indicating that this practice also existed among the middling sort. In the 1590s Sabie dedicated three distinct literary works to three patrons: Francis Tresham, Lord Mordaunt, and Richard Howland, bishop of Peterborough. Sabie, an established client of the Treshams, dedicated one of his prose works to the heir, Francis, in part to communicate his desire to remain in the family’s clientage as the patrimony passed from father to son. Sabie might also have hoped for preferment to one of the schools in the Treshams’ gift.72 Whereas the dedication to Tresham acknowledged the existence of a durable patron–client bond, Sabie’s dedications to Mordaunt and Howland indicate a desire to ingratiate himself and imply that the patron–client relationship was in its early stages.73 Neither the dedication to Mordaunt nor to the bishop reveals the sort of long-term clientage Sabie had enjoyed of the Tresham family.74 Instead, it was a gift offered in hope of cultivating a patron. This kind of plurality in the pursuit of elite patronage remained common until the 1620s, when George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham, demanded that his clients made him their ‘singular’ patron to the exclusion of all others, a means by which he ensured all honor resulting from his patronage would accrue to him alone.75

Patronage and Recusancy Beyond the types of patronage Catholics had in common with Protestants, Catholics also had specific patronage needs connected to their religious 72 Francis Sabie, Flora’s Fortune the Second Part and Finishing of the Fisher-Mans Tale. Containing, the Strange Accidentes which Chaunced to Flora, and Her Supposed Father Thirsis: Also the Happie Meeting with Her Desired Cassander (London: Richard Ihones, at the signe of the Rose and Crowne, neere to S. Andrewes Church in Holborne, 1595), STC (2nd ed.) 21536. 73 Francis Sabie, The Fissher-mans tale: of the famous Actes, Life and loue of Cassander a Grecian knight (London: Richard Iohnes, at the Rose and Crowne neere S. Andrewes Church in Holburne, 1595), STC (2nd ed.) 21535. 74 Francis Sabie, Adams Complaint. the Olde VVorldes Tragedie. Dauid and Bathsheba (London: Richard Iohnes, at the Rose and Crowne next above Saint Andrewes Church in Holborne, 1596), STC (2nd ed.) 21534. 75 Linda Levy Peck, Court Patronage and Corruption in Early Stuart England (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990), 52. The extent to which Catholic clientage lined up with political faction, such as Cecil vs. Essex, for example, requires further investigation.

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nonconformity. Recusants who faced recurrent imprisonments relied on the patronage of members of their networks for liberty from imprisonment or relocation to a different prison. Convicted recusants used their networks and patronage relationships to secure licenses to travel when their mobility was restricted after 1593. Recusants also used patronage to request mercy for a family member; to protect the family economy from depredation of estates; and to shield themselves or members of their network from local officials. The state’s precautionary imprisonment of Catholics throughout the 1580s and 1590s illustrates the delicate balance of fear and trust that permeated those decades. Especially in the summers when Spanish ships lurked off English shores, the Privy Council routinely ordered Catholic gentlemen to prisons at Ely and Banbury to ensure they would not support an invasion and overthrow the queen if Spanish forces successfully landed. Those imprisonments were followed by petitions for release to patrons and the Privy Council as a body. The petitions emphasized the political fidelity of the imprisoned men, and a prisoner’s history of trustworthy behavior was the most significant consideration in the state’s decision to grant a recusant the liberty he sought. In August 1592, the Countess of Warwick assured the queen of Thomas Throckmorton’s political loyalty, whereupon Elizabeth ordered that he ‘be not imprisoned for recusancy, being not disaffected to the state.’76 Nevertheless, Throckmorton was ordered back to confinement the following February, this time to Ely with his kinsmen Sir William Catesby and Sir Thomas Tresham, and John Talbot of Grafton, John Leeds, and Thomas Gawin.77 On this occasion, Tresham was released after five weeks, Talbot after eight weeks, and Throckmorton after eleven weeks.78 Of course, if the state truly trusted the loyalty of these men, then they wouldn’t be imprisoned at all, which reveals how fragile trust was between the parties throughout the plot-ridden, tumultuous decades of the 1580s and 1590s. From the late 1580s through the 1590s, when tensions with Spain were at their peak, imprisoned recusants were usually not released until late summer or early autumn, after the worst threat of invasion had subsided. In early September 1592, Lord Burghley informed Archbishop Whitgift that ‘the Queen respites the imprisonment’ of recusants, ‘the summer being past.’79 The dangerous summer season was over and radical Catholics – those who were still alive after the plots of the 1580s – were quiet. The Privy 76 77 78 79

LPL Fairhurst Papers 2004, f. 41 r. LPL Fairhurst Papers 2008, f. 41 r. LPL Fairhurst Papers 2008, ff. 47r–49r. LPL Fairhurst Papers 2004, f. 43r.

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Council used almost identical language in 1599 when it ordered the release of recusants at Ely and Banbury, ‘the danger of the attempts of the Spaniards being now past.’80 The Privy Council was not necessarily concerned about the ability of these prisoners to take up arms themselves, since the council acknowledged that many of the men were aged and infirm. If anything, officials were leery of the possibility that principal recusants might design a plot that other, younger, men would carry out. In December 1596, the Privy Council informed Whitgift that ‘recusants at Ely and Banbury cannot come to London owing to age and infirmity, and required their eldest sons and ill-affected persons to come in their stead.’81 Men too old or infirm to travel to the capital were certainly not up to the task of taking up arms against the state. Younger members of their family and other networks could do so, however, which was what the Privy Council feared. Violence was part of the construction and assertion of manhood. Violent youth, including men in their early to mid-twenties, both performed their masculinity and violated the norms of self-control that were central to the performance of honor.82 As they transitioned into adult manhood, they had to balance displays of violence, which were expressions of power, with the self-mastery that defined respectable manhood.83 The council may have seen their imprisonments of principal recusants as necessary national security precautions, but recusant men and their families experienced them as persecution. In at least one instance, a recusant family recorded that persecution on a painted cloth, the Tabula Eliensis that hung at the Throckmorton seat at Coughton Court.84 One of the most pressing concerns for Catholics, particularly recusants, was management of the penalties they incurred for their religious practice. 80 Acts of the Privy Council of England: New Series, ed. John Roche Dascent et al., vol. 29 (London: Printed for Her Majesty’s Stationary Office by Eyre and Spottiswode, 1890–1964) (hereafter APC), 741. 81 LPL Fairhurst Papers 3470, f. 193r. 82 Elizabeth A. Foyster, Manhood in Early Modern England: Honour, Sex, and Marriage (Harlow: Longman, 1999), 31–32; Elizabeth A. Foyster, ‘Boys Will Be Boys? Manhood and Aggression, 1660–1800,’ in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. Tim Hitchcock and Michèle Cohen (London: Longman, 1999), 151–153, 159–162. 83 Cynthia Herrup, A House in Gross Disorder: Sex, Law, and the 2nd Earl of Castlehaven (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 71. 84 Painted cloths went out of fashion between 1580 and 1640, in favor of wall paintings. Tara Hamling and Catherine Richardson, A Day at Home in Early Modern England: Material Culture and Domestic Life, 1500–1700 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), 198. That the Throckmortons chose to utilize an outdated medium underscores the family’s preference for traditional cultural forms.

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Common penalties included imprisonment, steep fines, confiscation of estates, and seizure of armor.85 Through patronage, recusants were released from prison or moved from a state prison to a (usually) more comfortable arrangement of house arrest. Through grants of the ‘benefit’ of someone’s recusancy, patrons could reduce the overall financial penalty a recusant paid and protect Catholics’ lands and property. Finally, patrons intervened to protect the manhood of recusant men by defending his rights against intrusion into his home and also against symbolic emasculation that came with the seizure of a gentleman’s or nobleman’s arms. Recusants needed help from patrons to gain release from prison. This was not a uniquely Catholic or recusant application of patronage, but the sustained need for it among recusants was so great that it merits discussion separately from conceptions of normative patronage. The substantial surviving papers of the Throckmorton and Tresham families allow us to see how this type of patronage functioned. Over a twenty-year period, Thomas Throckmorton’s releases came through the efforts of three separate patrons. In January 1587/1588 the Earl of Leicester, in whose clientage Throckmorton had been for over thirty years, secured the Privy Council’s permission for him to move from imprisonment with the bishop of London to house arrest at his own home in Holborne. 86 By this time, the Dudleys had rescinded their political support for the Throckmorton kinship group as the Earls of Leicester and Warwick reshaped Warwickshire’s political culture to reflect their power in the region. But this was an appeal for relief, not for off ice or advancement, 85 For recusant policies under Elizabeth I and King James, see John J. LaRocca, ‘Time, Death and the Next Generation: The Early Elizabethan Recusancy Policy, 1558–1574,’ Albion 14, no. 2 (1982): 103–117; John J. LaRocca, ‘Who Can’t Pray with Me, Can’t Love Me: Toleration and the Early Jacobean Recusancy Policy,’ Journal of British Studies 23, no. 2 (1984): 22–36; John J. LaRocca, ‘James I and His Catholic Subjects, 1606–1612: Some Financial Implications,’ Recusant History 18, no. 3 (1987): 251–262. An additional common penalty that does not appear in this study involved the removal of recusants’ children from their natal home to be educated in a Protestant environment. 86 WRO CR 1998/Box 60/Folder 3, f. 3. Simon Adams has said that the ‘precise reasons for appeals to Leicester for liberty’ by prominent recusant gentlemen such as Throckmorton is ‘unclear.’ Simon Adams, Leicester and the Court: Essays on Elizabethan Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press; New York: Palgrave, 2002), 372 n. 232. Yet the reason is undoubtedly due to the relationship between the individuals in question. In Throckmorton’s case, at least two of his brothers-in-law, Huband and Sheldon, were Dudley retainers and the Throckmortons had an extensive history of service and clientage with the Dudley family in their own right. APC, vol. 15, 346. Throckmorton’s liberty was short-lived. By March of the following year he and his fellow principal recusants were in confinement at Banbury and Ely, due to reports that the Spanish king was preparing for war against England. APC, vol. 18, 412–414.

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and the patronage Leicester offered came because of the kinship tie between the families in the 1550s and 1560s. 87 After Leicester’s death, Anne Russell Dudley, Countess of Warwick, was one of Throckmorton’s patrons. In 1592 she advocated for Throckmorton’s release, testifying that he was ‘not malitiouslie affected to the state’ nor proselytizing among his neighbors, but ‘a quiett man savinge for the error of his abused conscience.’ 88 As a lady-in-waiting and close friend of the queen, the countess’s authority at court made her a powerful patron. The countess brokered Throckmorton’s release a second time, in the summer of 1594, through Sir Robert Cecil. 89 Cecil himself facilitated Throckmorton’s liberty at least twice: in 1597 to attend to legal matters connected to an estate and in 1602 to remain at home rather than returning to Banbury while he was sick with smallpox.90 Between 1583 and 1599, Throckmorton’s kinsman, Sir Thomas Tresham, was released through the efforts of at least six patrons, including members of his kinship network (his cousins Mr. Horseman and Thomas Tresham of Newton) and his patronage network, including Sir Christopher Hatton, Sir Walter Mildmay, the Earl of Leicester, and Lord Burghley.91 Of these, Burghley was the ‘principal means’ by which Tresham’s liberty was granted.92 Sir William Catesby’s releases seem to have come from requests made directly to the Privy Council.93 That recusants in the Hastings clientage did not appear in prison lists suggests that membership in that clientage shielded those families from imprisonment for their recusancy. Robert Brokesby spent little if any time in prison for his religion, despite his own recusancy, his son’s role at the center of recusant underground operations, and later a widowed daughter-in-law, Eleanor Vaux Brokesby, being one of the most well-known Jesuit supporters. Similarly, Sir Henry Middlemore, a groom of Elizabeth’s Privy Chamber, must have shielded his kinsmen, the recusant Middlemores of Edgbaston, from imprisonment for their recusancy. Recusant women brokered patronage for their husbands, in keeping with gender roles and also the particular needs of recusant families. In 1583, while 87 As discussed in Chapter Three, Ambrose Dudley’s first wife, Anne Whorwood, was the older sister of Margaret Whorwood, who married Sir Thomas Throckmorton in 1555. 88 LPL Fairhurst Papers 2004, f. 41 r. 89 HH CP 27/56r (HMCS, vol. 4, 571). 90 HMCS, vol. 7, 135; HH CP 92/55r (HMCS, vol. 12, 698). 91 HMCV, 28–33, 104. 92 HMCV, 50. 93 TNA SP 12/277, f. 16r; PC 2/16, ff. 98r–99v (APC, vol. 17, 322).

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her husband appealed to his patrons, Lady Tresham wrote to patrons in her network to request his release from imprisonment, including her aunt Bridget, Countess of Bedford, and her cousin Mr. Horseman.94 In 1589, Lady Tresham wrote to Burghley and also to his son, Sir Thomas Cecil, requesting that the young man ‘further her suit to his father’ – in other words, to broker her request for patronage on behalf of her husband.95 This part of a woman’s career was especially significant when a prisoner’s health was in peril. Over time, the accumulation of age and detrimental impact of long-term imprisonment resulted in illnesses that required liberty from confinement for the recusant’s recovery, and a patron’s help was often needed to vouch for the prisoner’s ill health. Recusant wives frequently acted as patronage brokers in these situations. In early November 1580 Anne Throckmorton Sheldon petitioned the Privy Council that her husband, Ralph, be released from the Marshalsea prison for life-saving surgery. This kind of petitioning was part of Sheldon’s career as an elite woman, but it also underscored her normative femininity through her demonstration of care for her husband’s body and health. Her request was granted; the council ordered Ralph’s removal to the Dean of Westminster’s residence and allowed Anne to tend to her husband while he was there.96 Two months later, the Privy Council summoned Mr. Sheldon, whereupon he ‘promissed to yielde himself duetifull and obedient unto her Majestie, and in token therof to be contented to repaire unto the Churche, and in all other thinges to serve and obey her highnes as becommethe a duetifull subiecte.’97 While at the mercy of the Privy Council, Sheldon had little choice but to agree with the council’s expectations of elite manhood: obedience to the crown performed through adherence to religious policy. Coercive measures seldom had lasting effects, however, and any conformity Sheldon might have achieved was short-lived. A decade later, in March 1589/1590, Sir Thomas Tresham was in the custody of Mr. Arkenstall at Ely. Lady Tresham wrote to both Lord Burghley and his son, Sir Thomas Cecil, to ask that her husband be transferred from Ely to Banbury for health reasons, ‘allowing for ye difference of ye ayre.’98 Although Tresham did not say so in her petition, Banbury was preferable to other prisons because two men at the heart of the Treshams’ kinship network 94 HMCV, 28–30. 95 HMCV, 51. 96 TNA PC 2/13, f. 278r (APC, vol. 12, 254). 97 APC, vol. 12, 301–302; ‘Parishes: Beoley,’ in A History of the County of Worcester, Volume 4, ed. William Page and J.W. Willis-Bund (London, 1924), 12–19, British History Online, accessed 11 March 2021, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/worcs/vol4/pp12-19. 98 BL Add. MS 39828, f. 137r.

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were imprisoned there: Lady Tresham’s brother, Thomas Throckmorton, and Sir Thomas’s cousin, Sir William Catesby.99 Confining the brothers-in-law together, along with other leading recusants like Gervase Pierrepoint, John Thimelby, Sir Alexander Culpepper, and John Talbot of Grafton, would have allowed for the possibility of plotting intrigue, so Tresham was released to house arrest at his London residence in Hogsden, or Hoxton. He remained there until early 1592/1593, when the Privy Council allowed him to go to his seat at Rushton.100 In August 1590, five months after Tresham was released from Ely, the Privy Council grew concerned about reports of an inadequate water supply at the palace and an outbreak of ague in the prison and the town. Given the marshy environment of the area, this was perhaps an outbreak of malaria. To ensure the prisoners’ good health, the council ordered the keepers at Ely to allow recusants to walk in the palace’s gardens and orchards, on the leads, and that they could ‘take the ayre for a mile or two’ in the keeper’s company. The queen’s intent was that the recusant prisoners were to be kept ‘under safe custody, but not to be punished in suche sort wherby their health might be impaired.’101 The records of the Privy Council and the Archbishop of Canterbury reveal how common claims of ill health were and that neither the crown nor the state was prepared to make martyrs of upper-status men by allowing them to decay in prison. In 1580, Evans Fludd was so sick after more than a year’s confinement at Cambridge Castle that he was released to house arrest and allowed to ‘repaire unto the Bathes for the recovery of his healthe.’102 Richard Cleyborne was released to recover his health over the summer of 1586.103 Thomas Throckmorton was allowed to move to house arrest at his own house in Holborne to recover his health in 1587. Unlike most other prisoners, however, he was required to pay an enormous bond of £5000 to do so, perhaps because of the plot that involved members of his extended family only a few years earlier.104 John Talbot of Grafton was in such poor health that he received repeated releases and extensions of liberty.105 Health-related releases demonstrated mercy rather than persecution. Claims of illness were invoked often enough to become a trope, and some recusants used that to their advantage. William Shelley of Sutton in Hereford 99 APC, vol. 18, 412–415; vol. 20, 6. 100 TNA PC 2/18, f. 799r; TNA PC 2/17, f. 812r. 101 APC, vol. 19, 387, 409. 102 APC, vol. 12, 51–52. 103 APC, vol. 14, 75–76. 104 APC, vol. 15, 348. 105 APC, vol. 16, 389; APC, vol. 17, 198–199.

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was released from the Fleet Prison in December 1581 so that he could tend to his gravely ill wife and mother-in-law. Sick as the women might have been, however, when the Privy Council heard rumors that Shelley had devoted his energies to making ‘great preparation for the keeping of a solemne and extraordinary Christmas’ they ordered the Herefordshire JPs to investigate and if necessary to immediately take large bonds of him as a guarantee of his good behavior.106 Sir John Southworth, released in May 1586 to visit the baths for the recovery of his health, instead ‘had several conventicles and meetinges with Papistes, and that throughe his disorders divers are perverted and fallen awaie,’ which led to his swift re-incarceration at Chester Castle.107 Release to house arrest in one’s own house or the domicile of a friend was one way in which the crown transitioned high-status prisoners out of state confinement and into the surveillance of their networks and communities. The disposition of prisoners after the Essex Rebellion offers an informative case study since the accused conspirators were Protestants and Catholics. On 16 March 1600/1601, the queen’s ‘gracious inclination to mercy and favour’ and payment of a bond released ten prisoners ‘out of those loathesome prisons where they now remaine unto theire owne houses or unto the houses of their freinds.’108 Such arrangements allowed for the reintegration of elite prisoners into elite society and imposed on them significant expectations of honor and loyalty. To behave otherwise, especially while occupying a role as a guest-prisoner in a friend’s household would have violated social mores of hospitality and marked one as unworthy of the status they held.109 Recusant Catholics turned to their networks and relationships with officials not only for liberty or mobility between prisons, but also for general mobility when they were at home. The legislation of 1593 restricted the mobility of convicted recusants over the age of sixteen to a five-mile radius of home and required convicted recusants to obtain a license if they needed to travel beyond that distance. By the late 1590s, even prominent recusants in the Midlands acquired these licenses so frequently and with such apparent ease that the law was more a nuisance than a penalty. The well-preserved cache of licenses in the Throckmorton papers allows for a snapshot of this with respect to one family. Thomas Throckmorton of Coughton received at least thirteen licenses between 1593 and 1605.110 His grandson Robert received 106 APC, vol. 13, 262, 286–288. 107 APC, vol. 14, 125–126. 108 APC, vol. 31, 227–228. 109 Felicity Heal, ‘The Idea of Hospitality in Early Modern England,’ Past & Present 102 (1984): 75–76. 110 WRO CR 1998/Box 62, ff. 1 r–35v.

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at least thirty-two between 1615 and 1634.111 Most of these licenses were valid for several months at a time, therefore allowing the holder extended periods of freedom from the government’s travel restrictions. The Throckmorton example demonstrates how application of legislation depended on individual circumstances. Some recusants faced more aggravation than others did when they attempted to secure licenses, depending on their own reputations and the preferences of local officials. In 1593, shortly after the implementation of the new legislation, Sir Thomas Tresham encountered difficulty in securing all of the signatures necessary for a valid license. He turned to his friend, Edward Watson, who sat on the commission of the peace and also dashed off a letter to another friend, William Wickham, bishop of Lincoln, requesting their influence in pressuring Richard Howland, bishop of Peterborough, to sign his license.112 Patronage was crucial to protecting a recusant family’s assets when the male head of the family was in prison. Extended periods of incarceration interfered with estate administration and pending legal cases. Furthermore, recusants faced possible confiscation of property and moveable goods. The Privy Council and leading statesmen usually approved requests concerning the management and protection of a recusant’s property, in part because it was in the interest of the state that matters involving land and property were handled in a way that would protect order and stability. In 1592 the Earl of Shrewsbury successfully petitioned Lord Burghley on behalf of his Catholic kinsman and client, John Talbot of Grafton, hoping to secure Talbot’s release so that he could attend to business matters.113 In March 1596/1597 Thomas Throckmorton requested Sir Robert Cecil’s help in obtaining liberty from his imprisonment at Banbury so that he could attend to a suit he had pending with Sir Moyle Finch.114 For Throckmorton, the suit had economic and social dimensions: his manor of Ravenstone, which Finch had attempted to seize on a technicality, was part of the larger package of estates from which Throckmorton derived economic wealth and social status. Furthermore, Throckmorton was determined to protect the tenants on the manor, as his family had done off and on since 1501.115 These kinds of 111 WRO CR 1998/Box 62, f. 18r, f. 25r, f. 31 r, f. 40r; WRO CR 1998/LCB/25. 112 BL Add. MS 39828, ff. 227r,v, 231 r (HMCV, 74, 76–77). 113 LPL Fairhurst Papers 2004, f. 42r. Talbot frequently helped Shrewsbury with the earl’s legal and estate business, and it could be that was the impetus behind this appeal for the recusant’s release. 114 HH CP 49/86r (HMCS, vol. 7, 135). 115 WRO CR 1998/Box 53r. In 1588 Sir Moyle Finch acquired the reversion of Ravenstone and immediately attempted to seize the manor on the grounds that in 1564 the annual rent payment

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requests were commonplace between 1580 and 1600. Sir Thomas Tresham was frequently released on bond to deal with his estate or that of his kinsman, Lord Vaux, in the late 1580s and early 1590s.116 Through a patron’s support, recusant men were able to fulfill their obligations within their families and communities. Had the state refused the kinds of requests described above, the economic lives of these families would have been destroyed and with that, the patriarchal authority that buttressed social standing might have collapsed. Rather than eroding recusant manhood through the devastation of assets, patronage supported and reinforced the norms of gender and status. Indeed, a patron’s support was critical when a recusant’s masculine honor was in peril. In November 1592 either John or Robert Brudenell, the only Brudenell brothers with Catholic wives at the time, enlisted the help of Mr. Roger Manners, the courtier and uncle to the sixteen-year-old fifth Earl of Rutland, to forward a suit Brudenell had pending with Lord Burghley. Although Brudenell claimed to be an ‘urnest protestant’ who ‘governed his howse and famylly […] very ordely and obediently,’ he was unable to compel his wife to go to church.117 Such an appeal risked exposing a man as a failed patriarch, unable to control his wife or the religious practice in his household.118 Two months earlier, the Privy Council had ordered obstinate recusant women imprisoned on the grounds that they were seducing their households and neighborhoods away from ‘due obedience in matters of religion.’119 Brudenell sought relief from prosecution and was eager to prevent his wife going to prison for her recusancy. He counted on Manners’s was tardy. Throckmorton explained that the rent, which was paid by his father, Robert, was delayed by a negligent servant but that a ‘Quietus Est and full discharge thereof made,’ after which the Throckmortons had continued to enjoy the land and pay annual rent for twenty-two years until in 1588/1589 Finch launched a series of lawsuits in attempt to claim the manor. Throckmorton argued that since the queen held the reversion of Ravenstone at the time of the default she would have been the rightful claimant of reversion. Since the queen had determined not to reclaim it and instead issued a Quietus Est and allowed the Throckmortons over two decades of subsequent use and possession, the family rightfully possessed the manor. For the early-sixteenth-century descent of the manor, see ‘Parishes: Ravenstone,’ in A History of the County of Buckingham, Volume 4, ed. William Page (London: Victoria County History, 1927), 439–445, British History Online, accessed 29 October 2020, http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ vch/bucks/vol4/pp439-445. 116 See, for example, APC, vol. 19, 416, 429; APC, vol. 24, 350. 117 BL Lansdowne MS, vol. 72, f. 203r. Both Mary Everard, John’s wife, and Catherine Talyard, Robert’s wife, were obstinate recusants. Joan Wake, The Brudenells of Deene (London: Cassell, 1953), 94–100. 118 Susan D. Amussen, ‘The Contradictions of Patriarchy in Early Modern England,’ Gender and History 30, no. 2 (2018): 343–353. 119 APC, vol. 23, 202–203, 215–216; APC, vol. 24, 9.

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connections to Burghley to help broker the patronage Brudenell sought: Manners was a friend of Michael Hickes, one of Lord Burghley’s secretaries, and had some influence himself as a close relation of the Earl of Rutland. Brudenell hoped that, through Manners and Hickes, his plea for leniency would not only reach Burghley’s ear, but that the personal connection through a chain of patrons, brokers, friends, and clients would help to influence the queen’s chief councilor to view Brudenell’s cause with sympathy while not suffering too much for the lapse in patriarchal authority over his household. During episodes of acute danger, Catholics drew on patrons from all of their networks, including some with whom they had infrequent contact. After his participation in the Essex Rebellion, Francis Tresham faced the possibility of execution for treason. His family employed all of the patronage resources at their disposal. Francis himself sought mercy through the patronage of Sir Robert Cecil, whose family had been Tresham patrons for nearly two decades. 120 Meanwhile, Tresham’s sister, Lady Monteagle, and his wife, Anne Tufton Tresham, appealed to a patron in Monteagle’s network who was at the core of the queen’s family network: Katherine Howard, Countess of Nottingham, the queen’s cousin, close friend, and her senior gentlewoman of the bedchamber.121 Nevertheless, when Howard hesitated, doubting her ability to ‘promise any security of his life by pardon,’ Lady Monteagle and Anne Tresham asked their cousin John Throckmorton to ‘use the like means for his relief’ as he had done for his nephew, their cousin Robert Catesby. 122 At the same time, Sir Thomas Tresham worked with his cousin, John Osborne, the Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer, who had some influence with Howard. 123 Both Howard and Throckmorton claimed credit for saving Francis’s life, although it appears that the pardon indeed came through Throckmorton’s efforts. 124 Women’s and family networks provided patronage following the Gunpowder Plot, too. Through her brother, Lord Monteagle, Mary Parker Habington obtained a pardon for her husband, Thomas

120 HMCS, vol. 11, 198. 121 Howard was Lord Monteagle’s cousin (first cousin twice removed) and was therefore part of the larger kinship network of the Parker family, Lords Morley and Monteagle. 122 BL Add. MS 39829, f. 51 r (HMCV, 109). John Throckmorton, Muriel Tresham’s nephew, was the conformist head of a recusant household and a trusted officer of the queen. 123 TNA SP 13/e, f. 012r. 124 BL Add. MS 39829, ff. 47r–53v (HMCV, 108–110).

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Habington. 125 Meanwhile, Lord Monteagle made no such attempt for his brother-in-law, Francis Tresham, nor did Tresham’s wife or siblings. Instead, Tresham’s family asked to visit him in prison. With two decades of misbehavior in the countryside, his recent involvement in the Essex Rebellion, and a clear connection to the Gunpowder Plot, Tresham’s credit was exhausted.126 Conformist and recusant Catholics helped others in their networks to protect family property (and therefore status) by concealing land. Catholics who conformed to the state church faced little risk of property confiscation but for recusants the risk could be acute. Catholics often protected their land by concealing it through a series of labyrinthine transactions in which kin, patrons, and clients participated. The Exchequer struggled to keep track of the descent of land, who the current holder was, or how the current holder had come to possess it. In 1595, for example, Alex King, auditor of the Exchequer, traced the grants of the manor and hundred of Rothwell, Northamptonshire, from William, Baron Parr of Horton, who held it from c. 1523 until it passed in 1551 to Sir Nicholas Throckmorton, who held it until his death in 1571, But who is the present Tennant therof and ^for^ what nomber of yeres his lease was graunted or hath Continewance I cannot certifie. Nothwithstanding it appeareth that Sir Thomas Tresham knight doth now aunswere and paie the said Rent to her Majestie but upon what graunte I knowe not, for that the same is no tenrolled before me neither doth the same appeare by anie Record in my Office.127

To further complicate matters, the manor of Rothwell in Gloucestershire had the identical descent, ‘which Rent is nowe also aunswered by the said Sir Thomas Tresham knight,’ but how that came to be was not clear to the Exchequer’s office.128 With such confusion within the Exchequer, contracts 125 John Gerard, S.J., The Condition of Catholics under James I: Father Gerard’s Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, ed. John Morris, S.J., 2nd ed. (London: Longmans, 1872), 266–267. 126 Francis Tresham was the alleged writer of the ‘Monteagle Letter’ that informed the government of the Gunpowder Plot. It is possible, however, that as part of his effort to ingratiate himself with King James and to establish himself as steadfastly loyal to the regime, Monteagle orchestrated the writing of the letter and the delivery of that letter to himself. If that were indeed the case, then he might have preferred that Tresham was out of the picture and unable to call attention to Monteagle’s bit of political theater. 127 TNA SP 12/251, f. 145r. 128 TNA SP 12/251, f. 145r.

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between private parties could reshuffle landholdings to protect estates and thwart government interference. The subterfuge of concealed lands was not limited to transactions between Catholics; some Protestants helped Catholics in their networks to protect assets in this way. In the second decade of the seventeenth century, Sir Thomas Tresham of Newton helped Thomas Lawe of Benefield, one of his tenants and a client, to avoid the estate depredation that would result from recusancy penalties, a loss of two-thirds of his holdings. In c. 1613/1614 Lawe leased ‘in all or most part of his mannor and lande’ and made a gift of his other goods to Tresham and Thomas Vavasour, a fellow recusant and tenant of the Catholic Treshams. The government investigated whether the lease was made for the purpose of defrauding the king ‘of such profittes as by reason of the said Thomas Lawe’s recusancy should accrew unto his Majestie.’129 Lawe was originally the client of the Treshams of Rushton and part of the wider Tresham network. After Sir Thomas of Rushton died in September 1605 Lawe remained part of the kinship group’s network of clients. He appeared in legal documents connected to the family; in December 1612 Lawe, along with Muriel Tresham, her cousin Tresham of Newton, two longstanding Tresham servants (John Flamsted and Thomas Vavasour), and three of Muriel’s sons-in-law (Brudenell, Parham, and Thetcher) transferred a lease to the Earl of Exeter and two of his gentlemen.130 This could have been an instance of Exeter, one of Muriel’s patrons, helping the recusant widow to shield some of her property, in this case the estate at Pipewell, from confiscation by the king. Equally possible, however, was that Muriel leased these lands to Exeter and his men because she was still trying to satisfy the debts of her late husband. The £4300 the lease produced for her would go a long way toward clearing those debts. A patron of very high status could help to protect a client’s land using more direct means. In March 1608/1609 Lady Tresham sought relief from a long-time patron, Robert Cecil, Earl of Salisbury, in a set of lawsuits against her by John Lambe, the proctor of Northampton, lawsuits that Tresham represented as stemming from Lambe’s harassment of an aged recusant widow. Although Lady Tresham had satisf ied the legal statute and the king by forfeiting two-thirds of her property as her recusancy penalty, Lambe ‘continuallie laboreth’ to have her prosecuted in both ecclesiastical and secular courts. 131 Lambe had a 129 TNA E 134/3/29/Chas I/Mich29. 130 Nottinghamshire Archives, DD/4P/20/1 [10 Dec 1612]. 131 TNA SP 14/44, f. 100r.

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reputation as a contentious creature who would prosecute anyone out of conformity with the established church, whether Catholic or Puritan, but on this occasion, he was not interested in bringing Tresham into conformity. Instead, he hoped to enrich himself by acquiring valuable leases of land in Rothwell, which Lady Tresham held of the king. Holding land of the monarch signaled the monarch’s view that the family had the status or the right to do so. Lambe’s persecution of Tresham was not state-sanctioned, nor was it really concerned with religion. The religious overtones of Lambe’s prosecutions were a mask for his true motivation: his desire to seize land from a widow he deemed a vulnerable target. Despite Lady Tresham’s son-in-law, Brudenell, being on good terms with Lambe, Brudenell was unable to exert enough inf luence to convince Lambe to stop his harassment. Tresham’s kinship network could not help her, but her patronage network and specif ically her longstanding clientage to the Cecils did. Salisbury’s action was so valuable to the family’s parcel of estates that seven months later, Tresham repaid his efforts with an expensive horticultural gift: ‘half a hundredth’ trees from the Tresham orchards at Lyveden for the orchard ‘which I hear your Lordship intendeth at Hatfeyld.’132 Tresham’s gift not only acknowledged Salisbury’s help and his favor toward her, but also highlighted the exceptional quality of the Tresham orchard. She told Salisbury that she thought no one place can furnish your lordship with more & better trees & of a fitter growth then this grownd, ffor my late worthie husband as he did take great delight, so did he come to great experience & judgement therein. Scarce is there I thinck any fruict of note but he had itt if it could be conveniently gotten.133

Such a lavish gift advertised Lady Tresham’s gratitude, her status, and her family’s durable connection to the Cecil family. The Cecil landscape projects had, after all, provided some of Sir Thomas Tresham’s inspiration for his landscape designs at Lyveden. Lady Tresham also knew the value of this specif ic type of gift and that offering Salisbury something as rare and expensive as fifty trees from a specialized orchard expressed her thanks, her deference, and her honor.134 132 TNA SP 14/48, f. 186r. 133 TNA SP 14/48, f. 186r. 134 Heal, The Power of Gifts, 37.

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Starting in 1604, crown grants for a portion of a recusant’s fines precipitously increased. Awards of benefit of recusancy were part of court patronage under King James, who used the grants as part of his largesse to members of the royal household and to petitioners outside the court. John LaRocca identified four types of grants, ranging from partial to full awards of the fines and land of convicted recusants, to grants of lump-sum payments recusants paid to the king in lieu of confiscation of two-thirds of their properties.135 For example, in 1590 John Vacham received an annual pension of £40 ‘out of the lands of Sir Tho. Tressam, so long as Sir Tho. shall continue a recusant.’136 Many of these grants relieved the crown of the burden of collection of recusancy fines, placing it instead on the individuals who held the award. For recusants, having the benefit of their recusancy in the hands of someone outside of their networks could be fraught. Rapacious individuals could behave like bullies and collections could become episodes of persecution, which was a danger to peace and stability in the realm. In 1607, Edward Carpenter, gent., of Surrey received the benefit of recusancy for Catherine Tresham’s husband, Sir John Webb, Cressacre Moore, and John Preston.137 Webb and Moore might have been acquainted through their Gage relatives, but Carpenter’s connection to them or to Preston is not clear.138 Sometimes the awards ended up as an unwanted burden for the holder, as it was for Richard, Lord Say and Sele. In 1605 he held benefit of recusancy for eight recusants, but was unable to collect ‘unless he would join with them.’139 Some recusants offered bribes if he would ‘wink at’ (ignore) them; others he could not find; and still others were in hiding with friends who protected them. Despite his failure to collect the f ines, he still owed one-third of those f ines to the crown, so the benefit actually cost him money. Frustrated and broke, he wanted out of the arrangement. He beseeched the king to ‘resume those recusants’ and have instead what he thought was a more certain thing, the benefit of ‘a debt of 2,500l. owing by Jifford Watkyn to Francis Tresame for wool and sheep.’140 135 LaRocca, ‘James I and His Catholic Subjects, 1606–1612,’ 255. 136 CSPD Elizabeth, vol. 2, 691. 137 HH CP 115/76r (HMCS, vol. 19, 24) 138 More’s wife, Elizabeth Gage, was aunt to Frances Gage, William Tresham’s wife. Webb was Tresham’s uncle. 139 HMCS, vol. 17, 633. 140 HMCS, vol. 17, 633. As a prisoner of the crown for suspected involvement in the Gunpowder Plot, Tresham’s debts, on collection, were forfeit to the crown and thus available for disbursement as reward.

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When members of a recusant’s network held the benefit of their recusancy, whether in fees or in land, they engaged in a form of patronage because of the protective quality of the relationship. These arrangements protected an individual’s or family’s economic health by keeping land and income under the control of a trusted friend or family member near to the core of one’s network. The strategy also reinforced the bonds of patronage that bound individuals to the state by granting the favor of custodianship to those trustees. After the crown seized lands belonging to the recusant John Middlemore, esq., of King’s Norton in 1588, it leased those lands to his brother Henry, a Groom of the Privy Chamber.141 Sir Francis Stonor of Stonor Park, the conforming head of a recusant family in Oxfordshire, protected his family’s dower lands in the 1580s and 1590s when he received the benefit of his mother’s recusancy and became steward of her lands.142 Of course, Stonor had his own financial interest in these lands, which after his mother’s death would revert to him. It helped that Stonor was a prominent member of Sir Robert Cecil’s clientage, for the obligations of patronage and clientage would have encouraged Cecil to reward his client’s loyalty with these kinds of grants. In 1609 the conformist Catholic George Shirley of Staunton Harold, Leicestershire, was granted ‘two thirds of the king’s part in the lands and goods’ of Eleanor Vaux Brokesby.143 The Brokesbys and Shirleys had been part of each other’s kinship networks since the early sixteenth century; the superior rank and wealth of the Shirleys made them natural patrons to their Brokesby relatives. Sir George’s high status within his county, which derived from his family’s ancient status and which he protected with his religious conformity, allowed him to shield recusant kin and clients. The grant of the benefit of Brokesby’s recusancy penalties to Shirley helped to protect Brokesby’s interests and provided status and some residual income to Shirley. In 1625 Sir Thomas Brudenell and his brotherin-law, Sir Lewis Tresham, were awarded the ‘forfeitures for recusancy’ of their kinsman Edward, Lord Harrowden, ‘to the intent that he might sell part of his lands to pay debts.’144 In some cases, recusants successfully nominated the grantees, as Sir Thomas Brudenell did in 1626. At his request, 141 Dom Hugh Bowler and Timothy J. McCann, eds., Recusants in the Exchequer Pipe Rolls, 1581–1592, Publications of the Catholic Record Society, vol. 71 ([London]: Catholic Record Society, 1986), 121; W.P.W. Phillimore, Some Account of the Family of Middlemore (London, 1901), Key Pedigree N. 142 Norman L. Jones, The English Reformation: Religion and Cultural Adaptation (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 142. 143 CSPD James I, vol. 1, 575. Shirley sometimes styled himself ‘of Astwell’ in Northamptonshire. 144 CSPD Charles I, vol. 1, 534.

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the ‘penalties and forfeitures’ for his recusancy went to Lord Despencer and the Earls of Rutland and Westmorland.145 That Brudenell was on both sides of this kind of transaction within the space of a year reveals how essential patronage was in the state’s management of recusancy. In the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods, the crown’s grants of a recusant’s land or fines to that individual’s friends or family indicated that the government regarded stability of the social order a higher priority than thorough persecution of a religious minority. Grantees were sometimes more distant from the network core than those in the above examples. After Bartholomew Brokesby was attainted in May 1604 for his role in Watson’s Plot (the Bye Plot), the fee farm of his lands in Dorset was granted to Sir Thomas Tresham and Sir William Roper.146 Neither Tresham nor Roper were close to the heart of Brokesby’s networks. In fact, Tresham and Brokesby do not appear to be aff iliated beyond their common recusancy and extended kinship ties. It would have made more sense for this grant to go to Brokesby’s brother Robert or their Hastings patrons, both of whom were at or near the core of the Brokesby family networks. Tresham and Roper’s common interests in the f inancial affairs of Lord Vaux’s daughters might explain the award. Roper became part of the Vaux kinship group through the marriage of his daughter, Elizabeth, to the Vaux heir. Lord Vaux’s second marriage to Tresham’s sister Mary made the Treshams uncle and aunt to the Vaux children. Elizabeth Roper Vaux and her sisters-in-law, Eleanor Vaux Brokesby and the never-married Anne Vaux, were united in their enmity toward Sir Thomas Tresham, upon whom Lord Vaux relied for f inancial advice and had made trustee of Anne’s marriage portion and that of her half-sister, Muriel. The latter two arrangements resulted in contentious lawsuits between the women and their uncle Tresham and in which Roper represented them as legal counsel. Bartholomew Brokesby was Eleanor’s uncle by marriage. Perhaps he had revenue in trust for Eleanor’s children, his great-niece and nephew, and upon his attainder that income (or guardianship thereof) passed to Roper and Tresham. The exact nature of the arrangement is unclear, but the crown’s practice of awarding recusants’ grants to members of their kinship group or wider networks, even when the recipients were recusants themselves, indicates that the crown did not necessarily intend benef it of recusancy to persecute recusants. 145 CSPD Charles I, vol. 1, 581. 146 CSPD James I, vol. 1, 115.

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Patrons protected the masculinity of recusant men by protecting the central domain of the construction of manhood: the home. Recusant manhood was vulnerable to attack because raids perpetrated by the state constituted an invasion of a sphere over which a man was supposed to have complete control. In the summer of 1587 Lord Burghley ordered Leicestershire officials to stop harassing the recusant Thomas Palmer. Palmer had appealed to Burghley that because of his Catholicism, local magistrates were interfering with his efforts to assemble a personal library. Although Palmer had broken the promise of conformity he made to Burghley three years earlier, Burghley nevertheless continued as his patron, probably because Palmer, although he had lapsed back into recusancy, maintained his honor and did not attempt to convert his neighbors.147 Burghley directed the sheriff to ‘forbear to seize’ Palmer’s property, specifically his books. In Burghley’s estimation, Palmer’s devotion to learning and to assembling a library constituted ‘honest study’ and violated no laws.148 Palmer and Burghley shared an interest in cultural and intellectual pursuits, in honest study, and Burghley ‘hathe allwayes bene a ffavorer of those yt be studious.’149 Burghley’s personal convictions regarding the temperament of members of the ruling elite – that they would behave soberly, responsibly, and be possessed of just morals – and his intention to maintain England’s security meant that he would not tolerate a culture of search and seizure that could easily transform into an atmosphere of rampant disorder in the countryside, perpetuated by the very men appointed to protect order.150 The state’s practice of disarming recusants represented a sustained attack on a man’s authority in his community and his ability to defend his household. The state disarmed rebels, as it did after the Northern Rebellion in 1570, not loyal subjects, which leading recusants like Tresham, Throckmorton, and Catesby maintained they were.151 The policy to disarm recusants thus 147 Lord Burghley’s grant of liberty to Palmer in 1584 was discussed above. BL Lansdowne MS, vol. 43, f. 104 r. 148 HEHL STT 194 r. 149 HH CP 12/55r (HMCS, vol. 2, 518). 150 Lamar Hill, ‘The Privy Council and Private Morality in the Reign of Elizabeth I,’ in State, Sovereigns & Society in Early Modern England: Essays in Honour of A J. Slavin ed. Charles Carlton with Robert L. Woods, Mary L. Robertson, and Joseph S. Block (Stroud, Gloucestershire: Sutton; New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 215; Stephen Alford, ‘The Political Creed of William Cecil,’ in The Monarchical Republic of Early Modern England: Essays in Response to Patrick Collinson, ed. John F. McDiarmid, 75–90 (Aldershot, Hampshire; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2007), 78, 83; Norman L. Jones, Governing by Virtue: Lord Burghley and the Management of Elizabethan England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 151 TNA SP 52/18, f. 50r.

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treated recusants as rebels, assumed their disloyalty, and in the process cast doubt on their honor, identity, and manliness. Starting in 1585, the state carried out regular disarming of recusants of gentry status. The first step toward this policy was a ‘memoriall,’ or memo, written in September 1585 and annotated by Burghley, discussing the ‘thre sortes of Recusantes’ and ‘what order is to be taken’ with them.152 The first sort were recusants ‘able to paie the whole penaltie of the Statute’ which probably included all of the recusant nobility and some of the upper gentry. The second part were those who could pay a portion of the recusancy penalties, and the third category was those ‘able to paie none.’153 In addition to requiring bonds as assurances of good behavior, Burghley recommended valuing the estates of the second and third sorts, ‘disarminge them [and] Charginge them with contributions’ toward military causes. Things moved quickly. By mid-October, the government had compiled ‘A Catalogue of Papists refusing to come to Church’ categorized by diocese, rank, and seat.154 That same month, Sir George Shirley’s armor was in the custody of Thomas Cave in Northamptonshire and Edward Graunt’s was in the custody of Fulke Greville, Baron Brooke in Warwickshire.155 In 1596 Burghley ordered a new round of confiscation of recusants’ arms as the realm anticipated another sailing of the Spanish navy.156 Enforcement was intermittent between 1585 and 1625, which B.W. Quintrell argues was ‘closely related to troop movements in Flanders.’157 Still, these seizures occurred periodically through at least 1679.158 Patronage networks were essential for Catholics during this period because of the potential for disorder that the process of disarming presented in the counties. Quintrell has posited that uneven enforcement was the result of local officials’ subordinate status to recusant gentry and possibly also because of the queen’s unenthusiastic position on the policy.159 Indeed, it seems that even some leading recusants were not frequently disarmed. Between 1592 and 1641 at the least, recusant gentry claimed to have licenses that exempted them from confiscation.160 Tresham complained about the 152 TNA SP 12/182, f. 130r. 153 TNA SP 12/182, f. 130r. 154 TNA SP 12/183, ff. 32r–36v. 155 TNA SP 12/183, f. 74 r; TNA SP 12/183/35I, f. 97r. 156 TNA SP 12/260, f. 136r. 157 B.W. Quintrell, ‘The Practice and Problems of Recusant Disarming, 1585–1641,’ Recusant History 17, no. 2 (1984): 208. 158 TNA SP 44/41, f. 219r. 159 Quintrell, ‘Recusant Disarming,’ 209–210. 160 Quintrell, ‘Recusant Disarming,’ 210.

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disarming in a petition to the Privy Council but the correspondence and petitions among his family papers do not indicate that he, nor his brothersin-law Catesby, Throckmorton, or Vaux, were ever disarmed. Further research into recusant disarming might reveal informative patterns in the application of this policy. Some county officers seem to have welcomed their role in the disarming, even within their kinship network. The tumult that could result from these episodes ran counter to the larger societal priority of social order.161 Sir Arthur Throckmorton, Lady Tresham’s irascible cousin and a convinced Protestant, expressed his hostility toward Catholics when he complained that ‘these Spaniards,’ meaning Northamptonshire recusants, grew angry when he and other county officers had entered their homes to carry out the Privy Council’s orders. For recusants, disarming not only undermined their honor and manhood, but also imposed the insult of having to relinquish property to an officer who might then use it for their own advancement. For instance, in 1599, Throckmorton asked Sir Robert Cecil for fifty of the lances that were confiscated from the recusants in Northamptonshire, probably for use in the county musters.162 Throckmorton advocated for more thorough disarming, telling Cecil that he thought the state should disarm ‘not only […] the professed recusantes, But also the like to be done by those whose wives refuse to come to the Church, which to me are more daungerous than the knowne.’163 Animosity fueled by county politics fed this, too, as when the Puritan Sir Edward Montague disarmed Sir Thomas Brudenell in retaliation for Brudenell receiving a forest commission over him.164 Sir Charles Montague reported to his brother, Sir Edward, ‘I hear Sir Thomas Brudenell is very angry at you for taking away his armour, but it may be, when the letters come to conf ine them, as they say you will have shortly, it may be you may anger them better.’ 165 This contentious atmosphere, which Catholics would have experienced as persecution, could have quickly erupted into disorder in the counties. Patrons helped to soothe tempers and to ensure that disorder was kept to a minimum. The relationship between the security of a man’s house, his credit and reputation, and his ability to protect his household with his weapons was central to his manliness and his patriarchal authority. After another round of 161 Marjorie K. McIntosh, Controlling Misbehavior in England, 1370–1600 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 162 HH CP 72/61 r (HMCS, vol. 9, 291). 163 HH CP 72/61 r (HMCS, vol. 9, 291). 164 Sheils, Puritans in the Diocese of Peterborough, 104. 165 HMCB, 240–241.

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confiscations in the early seventeenth century, Sir George Shirley petitioned the Privy Council for the return of his armor, perhaps with the help of his Hastings patrons, since a copy of the petition ended up in the Hastings Papers. The seizure, Shirley argued, left him without any arms to defend his house, which ran counter to policy established in the 1580s and 1590s.166 Furthermore, he argued, the confiscation was without merit, since it was done while he was out of the country, with the king’s permission, and despite his being a JP for the county ‘and no recusant.’167 Shirley directly connected the confiscation of his arms to his reputation, pleading that the return of his ‘armor and weapons’ was crucial ‘for the repairinge of his creditt.’168 Patrons further supported their clients by selectively adhering to government orders. In 1625, Henry, fifth Earl of Huntingdon, under orders from the Privy Council to search the homes of all recusants in Leicestershire and Rutland and to seize their arms and munitions, opted not to search Sir Henry Shirley’s seat at Staunton Harold. His explanation to the Privy Council was an exercise in hair-splitting: Huntingdon reported that his deputies searched all the houses of such as were conuicted as other suspected except the Highe Sheriffes house Sir Henry Shirleys whoe by reason of his office and beinge niether presented nor conuicted and seing he went to the Church with the Judges and hath come unto sermon and diuine seruice twice since made me forbeare to search his howse.169

Shirley’s recusancy was known within his county but because he had not recently been convicted of it, Huntingdon reasoned, there was no cause to compromise his credit or authority by searching his home. That same year, word seems to have spread throughout networks that this round of disarming was imminent. The deputy lieutenants of Staffordshire declined to conduct the searches that the Privy Council had ordered because the orders ‘came so slowly that they were divulged before they were received.’ The search, the 166 The Privy Council stipulated in the 1592 disarmings that authorities should leave adequate arms for defense of one’s house. Shirley seems to be arguing based on that precedent. TNA SP 12/243, f. 274 r. See also B.W. Quintrell, ‘The Practice and Problems of Recusant Disarming, 1585–1641,’ Recusant History 17, no. 2 (1984): 208–222. 167 HEHL HAP Box 14 (10), 1603–1622. This was probably in response to the 1613–1614 disarming since the next disarming, in 1625, was after Shirley’s death. A Catalogue of the Harleian Manuscripts, in the British Museum: With Indexes of Persons, Places, and Matters, ed. Robert Nares, Stebbing Shaw, Joseph Planta, Francis Douce, and T.H. Horne (London: Record Commission, 1808), 420. 168 HEHL HAP Box 14 (10), 1603–1622. 169 TNA SP 16/10, f. 98r.

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deputy lieutenants said, ‘would have produced nothing but scorn.’170 The deputy lieutenants were not offering protective patronage by declining this search; rather, they acknowledged the role that recusants’ networks played in the advance warning that Staffordshire’s Catholics received. Disarming of recusant nobility appears to have happened less frequently than the disarming of recusant gentry, probably because the deeply engrained social expectations of deference according to rank meant that nobles would have to disarm fellow nobles. That dynamic could very well create hardened factions that could erupt into civil war. In 1625, Secretary Conway wrote to Charles I to ask what to do about the lords. ‘Because I have not heard of any order for disarming the Lordes Recusantes,’ he began, ‘I doubt whether the intencion hath beene pursued, and that […] it hath not beene resolved, who the Lordes shalbe that shall disarme them.’ Conway proposed that other nobles or at the least ‘the Bishopp of the Diocese with some Deputie Lieutenantes’ be put to the task. His unease is evident throughout the letter. The king replied ‘Let the names of the Noblemen be sent me & I will appoint those that shall be disarmed.’171 Unfortunately for Conway, the king only answered half of the question. There was still no clarity on who would deliver the bad news of confiscation of arms to the recusant lords, which raises the very real possibility that the king allowed recusant noblemen to keep their weapons.172 A gentleman’s attachment to a patron benefited the gentleman’s own clients. The Cecil–Tresham bond benefited not only the Tresham family, but also other individuals in the wider Tresham network, including Catholics with whom Sir Thomas was imprisoned. In the 1580s and 1590s, Tresham was one of the principal petitioners on behalf of Midlands Catholics; he wrote many of the petitions that Midlands Catholics presented to the queen and her council, including petitions for release on behalf of himself and his fellow prisoners at Ely. As such, he positioned himself as a patron to his coreligionists. In December 1588 Tresham wrote a letter of thanks to Burghley on behalf of all of the Catholic prisoners at Ely who enjoyed liberty due to Burghley’s patronage. The durability of the patron–client relationship is visible in the closing of Tresham’s letter, when he ‘most humblye beseeched’ Burghley ‘that my Innocencie, and loyalty maye be ever sheltered under your 170 CSPD Charles I, vol. 1, 143. 171 TNA SP 16/522, f. 74 r. 172 Preparations for the defense of the realm included disarming recusants from at least 1638. TNA SP 16/407, f. 78r. Three years later, Parliament ordered that ‘warlike weapons and no other’ be taken from recusants. This was perhaps in response to recusants’ loyalty to the royalist cause. TNA SP 16/483, f. 154 r.

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honourable protection’ and that Tresham and his family ‘dewlie [dewtie?] bound reverence your honour, not onlie a most excellent magistrate of this common wealthe, but as a speciall Patron of me in what I esteeme dearest.’173 In the context of the early modern gift economy, thank-you letters like this one functioned as gifts. For Burghley, this was an ideal gift since it lauded Burghley’s munificence while not asking him to accept a gift that others might construe as a bribe.174

Catholics, Patronage, and the State The early modern English state used patronage as a strategy to manage both conformist and recusant Catholics through increased surveillance and the maintenance of bonds between families and the state. Patron–client relationships allowed the state to maintain close contact with the recusants it considered the most likely to incite their neighbors or tenants to insurrection. Patronage also offered access and reward that could discourage Catholics from the kind of political associations the state most feared: alliances with Spain. Patron–client bonds discouraged organized persecution of recusants because the officials closest to the monarch who would have orchestrated such persecution were also the patrons who leveraged their influence with the monarch, Privy Council, and local governments to protect their clients. Their failure to protect a client would harm their own honor and status as a patron. Some of the state’s arrangements for imprisonment created a bond between prisoner and gaoler which simultaneously enhanced state surveillance of recusants and their families and fostered a patron–client bond. In October 1589 Sir William Catesby appealed to the Privy Council to be placed on house arrest in the custody of Mr. Doctor Daye, Dean of Windsor. Daye was ‘contented to receave him into his house and to take charge of him.’175 The order specified that Catesby was not to leave the dean’s residence unless chaperoned by the dean himself, which made the dean less Catesby’s gaoler and more his custodian and guardian. Arrangements like this one sometimes resulted in friendships developing between the custodian and the recusant. As mentioned in Chapter Four, Sir Thomas Tresham and William Wickham, bishop of Lincoln, formed a friendship when Tresham was in the bishop’s 173 TNA SP 12/219, f. 138r. 174 Heal, The Power of Gifts, 46–58, 199. 175 APC, vol. 18, 172–173.

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custody in 1588; they bonded over their mutual interests in architecture and horticulture. Beyond their mutual interests, Wickham became one of Tresham’s patrons. After Wickham’s death, Tresham wrote of his love for the bishop in terms that signal a durable patron–client relationship, describing himself as ‘interminably bounden’ to Wickham and ‘second to none in loving him.’176 The development of a friendship between an officer of the state (and this includes the state church) was another avenue by which the state could strengthen its connections to recusants it perceived as a potential threat and thereby work to defuse that threat. The frequent imprisonments of leading Catholic patriarchs, such as Catesby, Throckmorton, and Tresham, undermined the status of their families as local power bases in the Midlands. This attack on their hereditary rights prevented them from maintaining the authority they needed to gather forces to rebel, yet the state also needed to ensure that the majority of these families, and especially their patriarchs, continued to feel connected to the state rather than divorced from it. One means of accomplishing this was the state’s demonstrations of mercy to recusant prisoners and their families, usually at the request of a petitioner and granted through a patron. In return for these favors, a recusant had to perform the obligations of a client to both the patron and the state. If they did not, the patronage would end. Through political patronage, statesmen and courtiers bound their subordinates to the political center and leveraged influence against other nobles in a county. As Simon Adams has demonstrated, political patronage did not equate to a patron buying the votes or controlling the policy stance of the client. Rather, it meant that a patron had a particular office or position in his or her gift and was able to dispense those gifts in exchange for a client’s loyalty, obligation, and continued presence in the patron’s clientele. The political patronage that kept recusants and conformist Catholics tethered to the state promoted stability in the counties and extended the reach of the central government into the provinces. Cathryn Enis has established how Sir Christopher Hatton’s patronage of certain Warwickshire families was effective as a counterbalance to the growth of Dudley authority in that county.177 That patronage had the benefit of making Catholics stakeholders in the successful administration of the county and creating a tie between those Catholics and the political center. Hatton’s own honor hung on this, 176 HMCV, 116. 177 Cathryn Enis, ‘The Dudleys, Sir Christopher Hatton and the Justices of Elizabethan Warwickshire,’ Midland History 39, no. 1 (2014): 13–15.

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too: if his clients caused insurrection both they and he would suffer for it. Catherine Patterson has noted that crown patronage in urban centers throughout the realm was a strategic means of extending the reach of the central government into the provinces and to overseeing enforcement of the crown’s policies there.178 For example, the earls of Huntingdon, through ongoing exchanges of patronage and clientage with borough officials, ensured the influence of the state into the borough of Leicester.179 Similarly, Steve Hindle demonstrated how deeply the center had to rely on officers in the rural administration of counties and localities to accomplish the goals of state.180 Indeed, the might of crown patronage in the hands of nobles could devastate established power structures in a county and allow for nearly wholesale reorganization of local structures of authority, destroying longestablished families while elevating new ones loyal to their clientage.181 As Glyn Parry and Cathryn Enis make clear, shifts in the patronage priorities of the Dudley brothers, Robert, Earl of Leicester, and Ambrose, Earl of Warwick, ended the ancient claims to county hegemony of the Arden family.182 The change in Dudley priorities had the same effect on the Throckmortons as it had on the Ardens. It is no wonder, then, why Northamptonshire Catholics were so eager to join and remain part of the Cecil clientage. Despite that county’s many powerful men and its oligarchical style of governance, the Cecils were throughout the Elizabethan period the most powerful officers of state seated in Northamptonshire. State officials managed the counties through acts of patronage that signified local authority. Such actions kept Catholics connected to the state and publicly acknowledged as stakeholders in the stability of the realm. If they allowed insurrection to foment or, worse yet, led it, their dishonor would be on display for peers, social inferiors, and social betters to witness. That kind of public shame could hasten the demise of an elite family, making clear that they lacked the honor required of their status, marking the male head of the family as a failed patriarch and impugning the honor (and the sexual reputation) of the women. The political offices Catholics and recusants held throughout this period were discussed in the previous chapter. Here, the focus is on the patronage 178 Catherine F. Patterson, Urban Patronage in Early Modern England: Corporate Boroughs, the Landed Elite, and the Crown, 1580–1640 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999). 179 Patterson, Urban Patronage in Early Modern England, 194–232. 180 Steve Hindle, The State and Social Change in Early Modern England, c. 1550–1640 (Basingstoke; New York: Palgrave, 2000). 181 Parry and Enis, Shakespeare before Shakespeare. 182 Parry and Enis, Shakespeare before Shakespeare.

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that helped them to gain and retain those offices. Robert Brokesby, Sir George Shirley, Anthony Faunt and his son William, and the Beaumonts all profited from the third Earl of Huntingdon’s political patronage. Huntingdon supported Faunt as sheriff in 1587.183 Through durable Hastings patronage, the recusant Brokesby remained on the Leicestershire commission of the peace throughout the purges of recusants in the 1560s and 1570s, serving until his death in 1615.184 That Brokesby’s kinsmen remained in the Hastings clientage indicates that successful maintenance of the family’s clientage was an expected patriarchal role within the Hastings family. In 1597 Justice Francis Beaumont, the conformist head of a recusant household, recommended to Sir Robert Cecil that the Catholic William Parker, Lord Monteagle, be made a justice of the peace for Lancashire. Beaumont offered that Monteagle’s ‘honourable and good disposicion,’ his authority, and his intention to establish residency there would benefit the county.185 Beaumont’s support was crucial as Monteagle created a career for himself that would ensure a future at court. It is possible that Beaumont’s support of Monteagle was brokered by Anne Vaux, who was a close friend of Monteagle’s sister, Mary Parker Habington, and a niece of Justice Beaumont. Sir Robert Cecil supported Sir George Shirley’s political career in the early seventeenth century, while Shirley’s son, Sir Henry, was a client of the Duke of Buckingham, through whose patronage he held several county offices in Leicestershire in the 1610s and 1620s.186 By the 1620s, the greatest threat to Hastings power in their home county was the recent rise of George Villiers, Duke of Buckingham. Like the Hastingses and the Greys had done over the previous century, Buckingham leveraged his own clients to undermine his political opponents. His support of Sir Henry Shirley in Leicestershire was calculated to weaken the position of the Hastings’s patronage network. Families with relatives at court provided a direct patronage link between their kinship network and the highest levels of power. The effect of Queen Catherine Parr’s and Sir Nicholas Throckmorton’s court patronage for their kinship networks is discussed above. In the late sixteenth century, Edward Parker, Lord Morley, was a courtier in good standing despite his recusancy and was probably able to help his son William, Lord Monteagle, and daughterin-law Elizabeth Tresham, Lady Monteagle, to navigate court and noble 183 HEHL HA 5437; P.W. Hasler, ed., The House of Commons, 1558–1603, vol. 1 (London: History of Parliament Trust, 1981), 488. 184 Hasler, The House of Commons, vol. 1, 488. 185 HH CP 57/53r (HMCS, vol. 7, 496). 186 HH CP 89/109r (pr. HMCS, vol. 11, 495); Robin P. Jenkins, ‘Shirley, Sir Henry, Second Baronet (1589–1633),’ ODNB, accessed 9 March 2021, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/70620.

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politics despite their recusancy. In the second decade of the seventeenth century, Mary Beaumont Villiers, the Duke of Buckingham’s mother, helped to ease the penalties of recusancy for her kinsman and client, Sir John Beaumont of Grace Dieu, Leicestershire, by acting as a broker between her client and her son. Villiers was herself a Catholic recusant, but her son’s status overcame her own recusancy in terms of her own advancement and her ability to dispense patronage.187 Patronage, and court patronage especially, succeeded only as long as a patron was in favor. Throckmorton’s fall in the late 1560s and Buckingham’s assassination in the late 1620s required rapid reconfiguration of the families’ patronage networks. The differences in how officers of state approached patronage of Catholics suggests that there were varied types of patronage at work during this period. The extensive networks of William Cecil, Lord Burghley, included some of the realm’s most committed recusants, including the Treshams. Cecil patronage was largely reactive, granted in response to requests from petitioners. Cecil family patronage was predicated on expanding the power of the family. Their nobility was fairly recent and a distinct family strategy was, over generations, to maintain positions at the apex of county and state authority. Burghley and his sons had a sizable Catholic clientage that included descendants of the dominant Midlands families of the early Tudor period, like the Treshams, which in turn augmented the Cecil family’s power. As much as possible, certainly with William, Lord Burghley, and his second son, Robert, they sought to make themselves the conduit through which the majority of court patronage would flow – a model the Duke of Buckingham used during his own meteoric rise in the 1610s and early 1620s. In contrast to the Cecil model, Sir Christopher Hatton’s patronage was often anticipatory or proactive in that he offered protection, favor, and employment more broadly and not always at the behest of a petition.188 Hatton’s friendly stance toward Catholics led to suspicions that he was one himself. From c. 1577 he had an extensive Catholic clientage drawn from the region’s principal Catholics and local Catholic laborers.189 This approach was part of what led to accusations of Hatton’s secret Catholicism and his suspect favor toward 187 Roger D. Sell, ‘Sir John Beaumont and His Three Audiences,’ in Writing and Religion in England, 1558–1689: Studies in Community-Making and Cultural Memory, ed. Roger D. Sell and Anthony W. Johnson (Farnham, Surrey; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 196. 188 The scant surviving archive of Hatton’s papers prevents a full analysis of this, but Neil Younger’s forthcoming monograph on Hatton might enhance our understanding of Hatton patronage. 189 Enis, ‘Dudleys,’ 3–4; Neil Younger, ‘How Protestant Was the Elizabethan Regime?’ English Historical Review 133, no. 564 (2018): 1068–1069.

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Catholics, although the function of his court patronage differed little from Burghley’s or, later, Salisbury’s.

Conclusion After the Reformation, patronage among the upper sort was both ideologically and confessionally based. For the most part, patronage among the post-Reformation gentry and nobility was normative and reflected the needs typical of the upper sort. It was, therefore, a product of their status, not their religious belief and practice. Yet Catholics, and especially recusants, had specific patronage needs that arose because of their religious nonconformity. In this way, patronage also assumed a confessional dimension, whether it was transacted between Catholics or between Catholics and non-Catholics. Patronage relationships and transactions reinforced gender roles for English gentry and nobility. When women sought patronage, it was often related to bodily care, the well-being of a household, and the economic health of an estate, all of which were part of an elite woman’s performance of early modern gender prescriptions. Similarly, when women dispensed patronage it was usually connected to these same expectations of normative femininity, whether it was a noblewoman helping a lesser-status man to be freed from prison or helping clients to protect their estates. For men, patronage aligned with values of patriarchal manhood. Patrons shielded clients from invasion of one’s household, from confiscation of arms, and from severe depredation of estates, and they supported clients in the pursuit of political office. Patron–client relationships strengthened bonds between individuals, between families and, perhaps more importantly, between individuals and the early modern state. For Catholic recusants, patronage relationships helped to mitigate the legal penalties incurred by their refusal to participate in the state church and worked to ease conditions of imprisonment or confinement. In some cases, patronage relationships were instrumental in saving a family member’s life or fortune, as in the case of Francis Tresham and Robert Catesby following the Essex Rebellion and in the case of Thomas Habington following the Gunpowder Plot. Patron–client relationships also helped Catholics, particularly recusants, to protect their estates and fortunes. State officials recognized the necessity of allowing imprisoned Catholics the liberty they needed to attend to lawsuits and general business matters if overall order was to be maintained. Patronage relationships within networks of kin and friends helped recusants to protect family property through

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monetary loans, standing surety, and land transactions that effectively shielded a recusant’s land from confiscation by the state. Patronage worked in important ways for members of the Catholic gentry and nobility, and in the process kept upper-status Catholics engaged with the state (particularly the monarch and Privy Council) and integrated into their local communities. Through their clientage to powerful patrons at court and in proximity to the monarch, Catholics ensured that they remained connected to the state. And by including Catholics – even recusants – in political life, the state ensured their continued integration in gentle and noble life and kept them bound close to the crown and government. Catholic gentry and nobility who maintained their own clientage continued to wield influence in their neighborhoods and their networks and thus remained prominent in a social and economic context even if their participation in political office had been curtailed. Through patronage, the state was able to closely monitor the Catholic population, to protect the social structure and to encourage gentle and noble Catholics to retain a sense of proprietary rights in early modern England.

7. Conclusion Elite Catholic families in late medieval and early modern England inhabited networks of kin, friends, and patrons that provided the social, political, and cultural connections that were integral to gentry and noble life. Those relationships, rooted in the century prior to the Reformation, helped Catholics to navigate the increasingly hostile legislation aimed at curbing their religious practice and their political influence in the century after the Reformation. Kinship and social networks built and maintained by men and women provided opportunities for sociability within and advancement of the family. Family networks and women’s networks, which overlapped at points but did not replicate the other, provided the horizontal and vertical apparatus that provided for a kinship group’s survival through generations. Family networks and women’s networks were social organisms designed to encourage ties between individuals. Yet they were also political, especially for post-Reformation Catholics whose religious practices were themselves political actions. The multiple networks to which one belonged provided individuals and their families access to a patronage network and the patron–client relationships that ensured their survival. Those patronage relationships shaped the application and enforcement of antirecusancy laws as they applied to individual Catholics or Catholic families. Through patrons, Catholics and the state related to one another and remained bound to one another. Through clientage, Catholics continued to wield influence, both in their local communities and at the national level. The networks and activities detailed throughout this book emphasize how crucial social worlds were to Catholics during the long period of Reformations. Families relied on their relationships with close and extended kin, friends, neighbors, and patrons as a network from which they drew various forms of support. Ties were strengthened by the families’ shared adversity in facing penalties levied for religious practice, and also by the families’ shared interest in preserving the patrilineal line to which they were all attached and from which they all drew wealth and prestige. Catholics relied on their networks for the usual aristocratic concerns of advancement,

Cogan, S.M., Catholic Social Networks in Early Modern England: Kinship, Gender, and Coexistence. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021 doi 10.5117/9789463726948_ch07

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promotion, wardship, and marriage, and for more pressing needs related to their religious disobedience. Catholic families relied on the networks built and maintained by men and women, rooted deep in the past and nurtured over generations, for survival. Through cultural and political activities, Catholics formed additional connections that both built and maintained their networks. Common interest in architecture and gardens sometimes allowed people who disagreed about religion and political policy to find the common ground that united them. Episodes of homophily, or common interest, allowed Catholics and Protestants to bond over their shared interests in culture, as Tresham did with bishops Tyndall and Wickham over their shared fondness for plants and gardens. People who disagreed not only about religious practice, but, more importantly, about salvation and truth, found their hostility softened by their agreements about culture. Clients at risk of losing their patron relied on cultural affinity with their patrons to maintain patron–client ties. They were all, in that context, Renaissance men and women, unified by shared symbolic language, values, and behaviors, even if not by shared religious practices. Catholic gentry and nobility remained engaged in English political life through a range of political activities that expressed their civic duty and their claims to citizenship in the early modern state. The number of Catholics in local and national political offices varied depending on the political climate. Under Elizabeth, the number of Catholic officeholders decreased, while under James the numbers began to rise around 1610. Throughout Elizabeth’s and James’s reigns, however, Catholics were never eradicated from political office. Clients with powerful patrons and patrons who needed to retain their clients, such as the Brokesbys and Hastingses, saw little if any interruption of office. Catholic men and women served the state in military roles. Whether as a soldier in battle or as a soldier’s wife delivering messages and creating social ties with other military families or political actors, military work provided significant political opportunities that enhanced claims to citizenship for men and women. As this study has demonstrated, military networks and family networks often fed one another: specific companies or regiments reflected extant kinship networks, and conversely the connections formed during military service could result in marriages that extended the family network. Catholics also made claims to citizenship through petitions. Through those petitions, Catholics influenced individual officials and state institutions such as the Privy Council. Through petitions Catholics also voiced their opposition to the state’s control of their families through imprisonment of husbands and fathers, and sometimes wives and

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mothers. Furthermore, women understood how to use to their advantage the trope of feminine weakness in their petitions, as Lady Tresham did when she argued that her family needed her husband at home to direct their daily life.1 Catholics remained integrated in political conversations and, through their clientage, navigated factional disputes between courtiers, reassured crown officials and the monarch of their fidelity, and worked to preemptively move against future policies against Catholics. While petitioning in itself was a political act, the exchange of patronage drew together political, economic, and social imperatives that reveal how complex the lived experience of the Reformation really was. Patronage and clientage reinforced gender codes and was in turn reinforced by those codes. Patronage fortified status hierarchies through the language clients used to communicate with patrons and by using patronage and clientage to limit access to power. Cultural and political life allowed Catholic gentry and nobility to emphasize that they were fully participating members of elite English society. By employing their networks and by behaving as elites, Catholic gentry were able to remain connected to and fully engage with patronage and clientage. Catholics sought patronage from men and women of superior status and power to their own and from family members and friends with connections to powerful patrons. Catholic gentry and nobility also maintained their own clientage networks, as people of their status group were expected to do. Those clientages allowed Catholics, including prominent recusants like Thomas Throckmorton and Sir Thomas Tresham, to command authority in their localities and to maintain a significant social presence. Patron–client relationships functioned as the connective tissue that linked the state to Catholic gentry and nobility in the counties, and by extension to the various groups, or small communities, of Catholics in the counties. Religious reforms and a childless female monarch could have catapulted England back into civil war long before the 1640s. This book helps us to understand the role of families and networks in preventing that, and has demonstrated why England did not experience the kind of religious war that the French suffered in the sixteenth century. Despite impulses to persecution exhibited by some government officers and Protestant theologians and clerics, and despite extremism by a minority of Catholics that could 1 British Library (hereafter BL) Add. MS 39828, ff. 84r,v, 85r (Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, Vol. III: The Manuscripts of T.B. Clarke-Thornhill, Esq., Sir T. Barrett-Lennard, Bart., Pelham R. Papillon, Esq., and W. Cleverly Alexander, Esq. [London: Printed for His Majesty’s Stationary Office by Mackie & Co., 1904], 28–29).

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have resulted in extreme violence if not a coup, England remained politically stable throughout the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Ironically, that stability was rooted in the family networks that originated during the tumult of the fifteenth-century civil wars, the Wars of the Roses. This study has explained how Catholic elites struggled with yet remained part of the transition Mervyn James has so saliently described in his work on honor.2 Throughout Elizabeth’s reign, gentry and nobility that adhered to the ‘old faith’ often also adhered to old social and cultural forms. Sir Thomas Tresham, for example, embodied the virtues of the Christian knight of the model his grandfather, the prior of St. John of Jerusalem, had been. During the first third of the seventeenth century, however, Catholic gentry and nobility were no longer the willful Christian knights of the previous generations. They became godly magistrates of a different sort to the Protestant or Puritan ones, governed by their faith, moderate in their politics (with the exception of a minority of plotters), and over time increasingly wore their religion inwardly, more private than a hair shirt or a religious suit of armor. Catholics reconceptualized honor. For most of them, by the end of King James’s reign it was not just acceptable to pledge one’s loyalty to both a secular and a spiritual monarch, it was also honorable to do so. Catholics in this study reveal how multidimensional honor was and how the definition or components of honor changed over the period examined here. Honor was more than sexual reputation, political loyalty, religious belief and practice, economic worth, trust, or lineage. As Richard Cust has said, honor was ‘the simultaneous existence of a variety of concepts, or discourses […] in early modern England.’3 Indeed, this study has revealed significant implications for gentry and Catholics, chiefly that Catholic gentry identified as gentry more than they identified as Catholics. Like their non-Catholic counterparts, Catholic gentry were invested in the honor codes appropriate to their status. They were anxious about that status, and their religious nonconformity only amplified that anxiety. Like other members of the gentry, Catholics were keen to display their status through culturally valued practices like Renaissance architecture and gardening, along with political engagement and the exchange of patronage and clientage. Most of the Catholic gentry and nobility 2 M.E. James, Family, Lineage and Civil Society: Study of Society, Politics and Mentality in the Durham Region, 1500–1640 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974); M.E. James, English Politics and the Concept of Honour, 1485–1642 (Oxford: Past & Present Society, 1978). 3 Richard Cust, ‘Honour and Politics in Early Stuart England: The Case of Beaumont v. Hastings,’ Past & Present 149 (1995): 59–60.

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during this period, in the Midlands and elsewhere, did not participate in the rebellions of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean period. One the most significant implications here is the role that Catholics played in shaping what it meant to be a citizen of the emerging nation-state, and what that status meant for their political and social status and their continued participation in the patronage system. Religion remained significant throughout this period but we need to rethink when and how it was a critical variable in post-Reformation society. As we seek to set religious history, and especially the history of recusancy into the mainstream of social history, we need to further explore how factors other than religion shaped what we have long regarded as persecution, and how, when, and why status mattered more than religion. When was an individual’s or family’s religious belief or practice not important, or less important than other variables? How did religious nonconformity, whether Catholic or Puritan, strengthen family networks and the durability of the family line rather than weaken it, as we often assume it did? No one book can accomplish everything an author desires, and at the conclusion of this one several questions remain that merit further study. A discrete study of Catholic military life is one, as I mentioned in Chapter Five. We also need to better understand how Catholics participated in the types of informal support that Ilana Krausman Ben-Amos and Marjorie K. McIntosh have discussed. For example, to what extent did Catholics continue to practice forms of charity and relief that aligned with Catholic doctrine, such as the giving of alms, versus adopting the new forms of poor relief mandated by the state? This book’s focus on networks and communities has offered a starting point to a larger integration of Catholics into analyses of neighborliness and how Catholics of varied status participated in debt litigation. We need far more work on gender and post-Reformation Catholics, too, especially on the relationship between Catholicism and manliness. As a multicounty study, this analysis occupies a middle ground between single-county or local studies that allow for fine-grained analysis of a family, network, event, or county and a national study that offers broad overviews but cannot by virtue of its methodology delve into the details of a localized study. The multicounty study allows for greater detail than a national study, although not the fine grain of the local study, and also allows for analysis of broad patterns more typical of national studies. Locally based microstudies, like Glyn Parry and Cathryn Enis’s Shakespeare before Shakespeare, allow for the rich detail that helps us to fully understand the complexities of a particular event, how political motivations reshaped social and political hierarchies, the role of personal enmity and ambition in disputes, and the

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long-term effects of what appear to be minor events. 4 We need more of these, especially for the families and networks that were important in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Microstudies of those social groups will further illuminate the role of the family, kinship groups, and networks in shaping the emerging nation and the modern period. Large national studies, like Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes’s The Gentry in England and Wales, without which this book could not have been conceptualized let alone written, remain significant for the patterns they reveal.5 There remains a need for both of these kinds of studies and for the multicounty or regional analyses that was at the heart of this book’s methodology. This work has explained how patronage worked for post-Reformation English Catholics and established the centrality of durable kinship groups to post-Reformation forms of coexistence. Catholics secured and maintained both patrons and clients despite their compromised status, mainly because of long-standing social ties, ancient status and reputation on their lands, and the economic benefit they could offer to patrons and clients. By asking how patronage functioned, this study revealed how relationships remained, for the most part, harmonious ones and how Catholics used those relationships to achieve specific ends. Conflict certainly existed, but that conflict was often not at its heart a religious issue. Men who agreed on religious matters argued. Sometimes their families feuded through multiple generations, as happened with the Hastings and Grey families in Leicestershire and the Brudenell and Bussy families in Northamptonshire. But the episodes of harmony between people diametrically opposed on religious matters suggest that by the early seventeenth century, if not in the waning years of the sixteenth century, England was moving toward acceptance of religious plurality and that many English people prized familial, social, and community harmony over an atmosphere of dispute or chaos.

4 Glyn Parry and Cathryn Enis, Shakespeare before Shakespeare: Stratford-upon-Avon, Warwickshire, and the Elizabethan State (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020). 5 Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes, The Gentry in England and Wales, 1500–1700 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1995).

Francis (Jesuit)

Thomas

Barbara

John

Sir John (1584-1627) = Elizabeth Fortescue

Henry (d. 1605) = Barbara Faunt

Francis (later Serjeant) (d. 1598) = Anne Pierrepoint

Henry

Henry (d. 1585)

Henry

George

Francis (1584/5-1616) = Ursula Isley

Jane = Robert Brookesby

Gervase

George = Joan Pauncefoot

Thomas

Sir Thomas = (1428) Philippa Marward

Katherine (nun)

Helen (nun)

Mary

Elizabeth = Thomas Seyliard

Elizabeth (d. 1562) = (1557) William, 3rd Baron Vaux

Isabel Dutton (d. by 1540) = John (d. c. 1556) = (by 1540) Elizabeth Hastings (d. 1588)

Elizabeth Phelip (i.) = John, 1st Viscount (d. 1460) = (ii.) Katherine Neville Strangeways

Henry, 5th Baron Beaumont = Elizabeth Willoughby of Eresby

Joan Stafford (i.) = William, 2nd Viscount Beaumont (d. 1507, no issue) = (ii.) Elizabeth Scrope

Margaret = Robert, 2nd Baron Hungerford

Elizabeth = William de Botreaux

John, 4th Baron Beaumont = Katherine Everingham

Appendix

Genealogy Tables

Emma = Sir Thomas Berkeley

Edward = Eleanor Vaux

Winifred = Sir Francis Englefield

William (d. 1606) =

Francis

Francis

Edward

Anthony

William (illeg.)

Robert

Sir Christopher Hatton

Alice Saunders = William Hatton (d. 1546)

William

TNA C1/1357/45 makes clear that Elizabeth Saunders was the wife of Bartholomew of Melton Mowbray.1

William

Bartholomew (of Melton Mowbray)

Bartholomew

John (d. in prison 1463)

Bartholomew of Melton Mowbray1 (d. c. 1553) = Elizabeth Saunders

Alice = Sir John Vele

Edward

Alice = Laurence Saunders (d. 1554) of Harrington, Northamptonshire

Richard

Lucy = Matthew Woodford

Bartholomew (d. 1448) = Alice Hastings

Richard = Elizabeth Hutchinson

Mary = Thomas Thimelby

Mary = Sir Thomas Bedingfield

Thomas

Henry

Anna

John = Joan Hastings

Robert

Richard (d. 1558)

Thomas

Felicia = Baldwin Bugg

Henry (d. 1460) = Edith Bracebridge

Dorothy Congreve (i.) = Robert (d. 1615) = (i.) Jane Beaumont

Anthony (1486-1552) = Anne Sapcote

Robert (d. 1531) = Alice Shirley

Emma Myles = William

William

William (d. 1416) = Joan Alderwich

John Brokesby = Agnes Frisby

254  Catholic Social Ne t work s in Early Modern Engl and

John

Thomas

Anne = William Fitzwilliam, esq.

Henry = Eleanor Preston

Joan = John At Broke

John = Mary Everard

Anthony = Jane Elkington

Mary = Thomas More, esq

Dorothy

Agatha

Catherine

Sir Thomas, 1st Earl Cardigan (1578-1663) = (1605) Mary Tresham (1578-1664)

Thomas = Anne Topcliffe

Sir Thomas (d. 1549) = Elizabeth Fitzwilliam

Elizabeth = John Cheyne

Edmund

Edward

Mary

John

William = Anne Partridge

Joan = Sir John Ewerby, kt.

Margaret = Mr. Weston

Christiana = Sir John Thorold

Robert (b. 1607)

William

Robert = Catherine Talyard

Lucy

Margaret Entwistle (m. 1494/5, d. 1502) (i.) = Sir Robert (1461-1531) = (ii.).(1505) Philippa Power Rufford.(d. 1531)

Agnes Deepden (i.) = Edmund (d. 1461) = (ii.) Philippa Englefield

William = Agnes Bulstrode

Agnes Bussy (i.) = Sir Edmund (1521-1585) = (ii.) Audrey Fernley

Robert

Drew (d. 1480) = Elenna Broughton

Etheldreda (Audrey) (b.1583) = Basil Brooke, kt.

Elizabeth = Rice Griffin

Edmund

Alice (nun)

Edmund "Antiquissimus" (1348/52-1425) = Alice

William = Agnes Atgrove

Appendix

255

Richard

2

1

Anne = Henry Browne (b. 1569)

William

Robert = Catherine Leigh (1573-1605)

Thomas Wintour’s brother, Robert, married Gertrude Talbot, daughter of Sir John Talbot. Thus, the Catesbys and Wintours were close relations of the Talbot/Shrewsbury clan and were certainly part of their network.

Joan

Margaret

William (1593-95)

Richard

Robert

Thomas (Marston)

Francis

Peregrine

Robert (b. 1595)

Anne

Dorothy = (i.) Sir William Dormer (1527-1613) (ii.) Sir William Pelham

Catherine Mary Robert Richard

Francis

Anthony = (1512) Isabella Wilburga Pigott

Edmund = Elizabeth Green (Whiston)

Thomas = (1538) Isabel Tresham (1527-71)

John (Hinton)

Wilburga

Richard

Jane Thomas Mary Isabel Francis = Jane = Christopher = Edward Norton Yelverton Onleye

Margaret was the daughter of William, 6th Baron Zouche of Harrington and his wife, Katherine, and the niece of Margaret Zouche Tresham, who was the daughter of William, 5th baron Zouche and his wife Alice, Baroness St. Maur.

George

Elizabeth

George

John

John

Alice

Eleanor = (1534) John Tresham (1521-46) (see Tresham table)

Elizabeth

Elizabeth = Thomas Wintour 2 (b. 1573) (1572-1606)

Edmond Edward

William of Ashby St. Legers = (1566) Anne Throckmorton (1547-1598)

George

Sir Richard Catesby (d. 1553) = (i.) (1524) Dorothy Spencer (ii.) Elizabeth Astell

William = Catherine Thomas of Willington Lapworth

William

Philippa (b. 1442)

George (i.) = Elizabeth Empson = (ii.) Thomas Lucy (iii.) Richard Verney

Anne Elizabeth Sir William = Margaret Zouche1 = Robert (i.) Roger Wake (1440 Whittlebury (ii.) John Grey -1485)

Philippa Bishopston (d. 1446) (1435) (i.) = Sir William (1408-1470) = (ii.) (1446) Joan Barre

John Catesby = Rose de Montfort

Catesby of Ashby St. Legers, Lapworth, and Whiston

256  Catholic Social Ne t work s in Early Modern Engl and

Henry = Katherine (c. 1478 Hampden -1526)

Edward = Elizabeth Grey

Anne = Sir Thomas Gresley

Anna = Sir Simon Archer

Sir John (d. 1582) = Barbara Cockayne

Frances = Sir John Packington

Richard (1585-1614)

Joan (d. infancy)

Jane

Edward

Elizabeth

Nicholas = Margaret ?

Henry

John

John (d. 1680) = Ann Carlton

Sir Humphrey = Anne Packington

Edward

Ursula = Richard Newport

Eleanor

William = Jane Van Lore

Katherine

Dorothy

Katherine = John Wilkinson

George = Elizabeth Kempson

Henry (1616-1682) = (1639) Bridget Willoughby of Cossel, Notts.

Mary

Alice

Griffith Hampden (1543-91)

Jane

Eleanor = (1592) John Ferrers of Fiddington

Edward (1585-1651) = Anne Peyto (d. 1618)

Henry (1550-1633) = (1582) Jane White (d. 1586)

Susan = Sir George Gresley

Sir Humphrey (1558-1608) = Anne Bradbourne

Sir John = Dorothy Puckering

Dorothy = Edward Holte

Dorothy = Thomas Cockayne

Elizabeth = John Hampden

Elizabeth

Catherine (d. unm.)

Jane = Walter Griffith

Sir Henry (c. 1443-1500) = Margaret Hexstall

Sir Edward of Baddesley Clinton = (1548) Constance Brome (c. 1473-1535) (d. 1551)

Anne = Valentine Knightley

Richard

Sir John

Sir Edward = (1548) Bridget Windsor = (ii.) Andrew Ognall (c. 1524-1564) (d. 1582)

George

Henry

Mabel (1438-1513) = Ralph Longford

Margaret Pigott (i.) = Sir Humphrey = (ii.) Dorothy Marrow Cockayne (1483-1553)

Sir John = Dorothy (1471-1515) Harpur

Sir John of Tamworth = Maud Stanley (1452-1499) (1464-1515)

Thomas (1438-1498) = Anne Hastings

Thomas Ferrers, esq. (c. 1395-1459) = Elizabeth Frevile

Ferrers of Tamworth and Baddesley Clinton

Appendix

257

1

4

3

2

1

Thomas Robert Emma (1601 = Walliston -1660) Betham = Mary Harrington

Anne = Robert Gower

Winifred (b.1598) = Thomas Waring

Frances = Matthias Maysey

Eleanor

Mary

Priscilla = John Berington

Christian

John (d. 1643)

Mary (d. 1632)

Edward

Robert

Henry (courtier)

Robert

William Thomas (d. 1643) = Margaret Middlemore of Edgbaston

Richard (Jesuit)

Mary = Richard Braybrooke

William George Robert Mary Thomas (1558 of Sussex -1633/4) = (i.) Mary Badger 4 = (ii.) Margery Middlemore Braybrooke

Jane = Holland Badger

Margaret = Edward (d. c. 1559) Underhill

Eleanor was Margaret Throckmorton's younger sister. Because she married Richard's nephew, graphs like this imply that she is in the generation following her sister, rather than part of the same sibling group.

Daughter of Richard of Edgbaston.

3

Thomas = Eleanor Throckmorton

John of Hawkeslowe = Alice Jennings

Elizabeth = (1426) Robert Arden of Park Hall

Mary = William Gower

Muriel = George Margaret = William Johnson Braybrooke

Thomas

Anne = Thomas Francis Scudamore

Humphrey

Rose

Margery (i.) = William = (ii.) Dorothy Gatacre (d. 1549)

Joan

Their children included Margery = Ambrose Cave, Dorothy and Alice who died young, Godith = Basil Fielding, Mary = William Sheldon, Elizabeth = Edward Boughton, Margery = Sir Edward Greville, Anne = Francis Mountfort, Katherine = (i.) William Kempe (ii.) Sir William Catesby (iii.) Anthony Throckmorton.

Her second husband was William Willington, widower of her sister-in-law, Anne Middlemore Willington.

Richard John Humphrey (1589 = Anne -1647) Saunders = Mary Morgan

Richard

William

Godith = Henry Birmingham

John = Amphillis Goodwyn (d. 1603)

Margery

Margery = John Anthony Shuckburgh

Eleanor = Clement Agard

Robert = Priscilla John Humphrey = Sybil Thomas (d. Brooke Betham 1631/2)

Winifred = Francis Stanley

Robert William (d. by 1573)

Alice = William Barnes

Anne = William Willington

Henry

John = Alice Sye of Haselwell

Margery = John Elizabeth = John Richard = Anne Chetwynd Hanslepp Greswold

Robert = Anne Richard (1509 Egerton -1576)

Thomas (c. 1479-1521) = Anne Littleton

2

Nicholas = Agnes Hawkeslow

Richard of Edgbaston = Margaret (Margery) Throckmorton (d. 1530)

John (d. 1446/7) = Agnes Waldive

Thomas Middlemore (i.) = Isabel Edgbaston = (ii.) Richard Clodeshale

258  Catholic Social Ne t work s in Early Modern Engl and

Dorothy = Robert Brokesby

Ursula = William Underhill

John2 = Jane Lovett Ralph

Henry = Dorothy Devereaux

George

Thomas = Mary Harpur

Frances Berkeley (d. 1595) (i.) = Sir George (b. 1559) = (ii.) Dorothy Wroughton Unton

Elizabeth = Thomas Underhill

Thomas

Robert

Hugh

Nicholas

Richard

Ralph of Wiston, Sussex = Joan Bellingham

Baldwin

John

Ralph

John

Mary

Henry

Elianor

Anne

Anne

Elizabeth = William 3rd Baron Vaux Sir Basil Brooke

Jane = Robert Brokesby

Sir Ralph's second and third wives, Anne Vernon and Anne Warner, produced no children. 1 Francis and Dorothy's second and third sons, Edward and Arthur, died as infants as are not represented here. 2

Elizabeth (nun)

Jane

Nichola

Elizabeth Hastings = John Beaumont

Alice Margaret = Robert Brokesby (see Brokesby table)

Francis = Anne Pierrepoint

Henry

Elizabeth

Isabella = Sir John Cockayne

Dorothy = George Dyer, esq.

Cassandra = Walter Powtrell Thomas

Mary

Anne Elizabeth = John = Thomas Brooke esq. Cotton

John Congreve (i.) = Dorothy Gifford Congreve Shirley = (ii.) (1535) Francis (1515-1571)

Elizabeth Walshe (i.) = Sir Ralph1 (d. 1513) = (iv.) Jane Sheffield = (ii.) Sir William Hastings

Anne = Thomas Pulteney

Joan = Robert Newmarch

Margaret Staunton (i.) = Ralph = (ii.) Elizabeth Blount = (iii.) Lucy Asheton

Elizabeth

John (1427-1486) = (m. 1456) Elianor Willoughby

Beatrice = John Brome

Joan Bassett (i.) = Ralph = (ii.) Alice Cockayne

Hugh Shirley (d. 1403) = Beatrice Braose (d. 1440)

Appendix

259

Elizabeth

Nicholas

Anthony (b. 1492)

Mary

Elizabeth (Abbess)

Agnes

Mary

Margaret

Richard

Clement (Haseley)

Sir Nicholas (Paulersbury) = Anne Carew

George = Jane Skipwith

1

George

Mary (Eleanor) = Sir Edward Golding

Mary (unm.)

Winifred = Edmund (John?) Powell

Francis

Ann = Sir William Wigmore

Thomas

Sir John (b. 1580) = Agnes Wilford

Edward

John

Anne Catherine = John = Robert Digby Winter of Solihull

Elizabeth

George

Robert (c. 1510)

Anne = Edward Guldeford

Robert Throckmorton of Coughton (1st Bt 1642) = (i.) (1612) Dorothy Fortescue (d. 1617 without issue) = (ii.) (1624) Mary Smith

Eleanor (b. 1572) = Henry Jerningham 1st Baronet

George

Elizabeth = Robert Russell

Eleanor = Thomas Catherine Middlemore

Elizabeth Mary (i.) William = John Hodges Hubaud (ii.) John Gifford

Sir Francis (2nd Bt. 1651) (1641-1680) = (m. 1659) Anne Monson

Margery (d. 1591) (nun)

Margaret (b. 1566) = Sir Rice Griffin of Brome Court, Oxon.

Great-grandparents of Queen Catherine Parr; their grandchildren included Anne Green, who married Nicholas, 1st Baron Vaux, and Maud Green, who married Sir Thomas Parr, parents of Queen Catherine.

Ambrose

Thomas

Henry Griffith, 2nd Bt.

Frances

Elizabeth (b. 1565) = Sir Henry Griffith 1st Bt. Burton Agnes co. York

Muriel (b. 1560) = Henry Berkeley

Robert

Anthony = Catherine Willington

Agnes

Michael

Goditha = Edward Peyto

Sir George (1489-1552) = Catherine Vaux (1490 -1571)

William

Matilda (Maud) = Sir Thomas Green of Green's Norton 1

Catherine (b. 1532) Sir Thomas (b. 1533) Elizabeth (b. 1535) Anne (b. 1541) Mary (b. 1543) Muriel Anne Elizabeth Temperance = Henry = Margaret = John = Ralph = Edward = Sir = Sir = Sir Anthony = Sir Randall Sheldon Arden of Thomas William Tyringham Brereton (Robert) Whorwood Goodwin Catesby Norwood (m. 1555) Park Hall Tresham of Lapworth

Kenelm (Little Easton)

Richard (Higham Ferrers) = Johanna Beaufo

= (ii.) Elizabeth Russell Catherine Marrow (i.) = Robert (1450-1503) Throckmorton (d. 1518/19)

Sir Thomas = Margaret Olney

Muriel Berkley (i.) = Sir Robert = (ii.) Elizabeth Sir John = Margaret (Coughton) Hussey (Feckenham) Puttenham Hungerford (d. 1554)

Ursula

John

Eleanor = Richard Knightley

Margaret = Richard Mary Middlemor

John

Sir John Throckmorton = (m. 1409) Eleanor de la Spiney

Throckmorton of Coughton

260  Catholic Social Ne t work s in Early Modern Engl and

Thomas (d. 1599)

Francis (b.1567) = Anne Tufton

Lucy

Elizabeth

Elizabeth (b.1573) Catherine (b.1576) = William Parker = Sir John Webb 5th Baron Monteagle/ 13th Baron Morley Frances (1604-06)

Mary (1578) = Sir Thomas Brudenell of Deene

Sir Thomas (1543-1605) = Muriel Throckmorton

Isabel = Sir George Walton

Mary (1535?-97) William (d. unm.) = (1563) Wm Vaux 3rd Baron Vaux of Harrowden

Bridget = Sir Edward Parham

Mary

Clemence (d. 1567)

William = Theodosia Reade

Lettice

Elizabeth

Elizabeth

Bridget

William, 11th Baron Stourton

George

Mary Catesby = Christopher Yelverton

Ann Catherine = William Thetcher of Priesthawes, Sussex

Thomas Catesby = Jane Norton

Frances Thomas (d. 1612) = Sir Edward Stourton 10th Baron Stourton

Lucy

Thomas Pigott (1533) (i.) = Isabel (b. 1514) = (ii.) (1538) Thomas Catesby (brother of Eleanor)

William (b. 1606) = Frances Gage of Firle, Sussex

Lewis (1578) = Maria Perez de Recalde

Thomas

William of Benefield = Elizabeth Lee

George (d. unm.)

John Tresham (1520?-1546) = Eleanor Catesby of Whiston

Isabel = Sir John Longueville

John (d. c. 1521) = Isabel Harrington (d. c. 1558)

Anne Parr of Horton (Northants) (cousin of Catherine Parr) (i.) = Sir Thomas (d. 1559) = (ii.) (m. 1540) Lettice Penniston Knollys Lee (no issue)

Isabella = Henry de Vere of Addington

Sir Thomas (d. 1471) = Margaret Zouche

William (b. c. 1404) = Isabel Vaux

Thomas = [prenom] Rempston

Appendix

261

William

Frances

Henry (d. unm. 1587)

Mary = Thomas Thimelby

Eleanor = Thomas Gifford

Catherine = Sir George (c. 1490 Throckmorton -1571) (m. bef. 1512)

Anne (1562 -c. 1637)

Mary = Sir George (c. 1587 Simeon -1624) (m. 1604)

Elizabeth (nun)

Edward 4th Baron Vaux (1588-1661)

George = Elizabeth (1564 Roper -1594) (m. 1585)

Catherine (1566 -c.1597)

Nicholas

Margaret = (i.) Sir Francis Poultney (ii.) Francis Verney

Muriel = George (b. 1570) Fulshurst

Henry (1591 -1663)

Edward (d. 1585)

Joyce (nun) (d. 1667)

Ambrose = Elizabeth (1570 Wyborne -1626)

Catherine = Henry Nevill, (c. 1593 Lord Abergavenny -1649) (m. c. 1614)

Temperance = Sir Thomas (1580 Crewe -1619) (m. 1612)

Sir George of Easton Neston

Bridget = Maurice Maud = Sir John Walsh (d. 1569 Fermor (m. bef.1538) /71)

Anne = Reginald Bray of Steane and Hinton, Warcks (d. 1619)

William

William (1590 -c. 1661)

Thomas, = Elizabeth 2nd Baron Cheyne Vaux (m. 1523) (1509-1556) (1504-1556)

Elizabeth [Fitzhugh] (widow of Sir William Parr) (m. c. 1484/5) (i.) = Nicholas Vaux, 1st Baron Vaux of Harrowden = (ii.) (m. by 1508) Anne Green of Green’s Norton (c. 1460-1523) (1490 – c. 1523)

Philippa

Sir William = (m. c. 1435) Maud Lucy

William (c. 1435-1471) = Catherine Pennison (Penyston) (b. 1440/1446, d. aft. 1509)

Isabel = William Tresham

William, 3rd Baron Vaux = (i.) Elizabeth Beaumont (1535-1595) (m. by 1557) (d. 1562) (ii.) Mary Tresham (m. 1563) (d. 1597)

Anne = Sir Thomas Lestrange (m. 1501)

Eleanor = Edward (d.1625) Brokesby (m. 1577)

Maud = Anthony Burrows (d. c. 1581)

Alice = Sir Richard (d. 1543) Sapcote (m. 1501)

Jane = Sir Richard Guildford (c. 1462 -1538

Margaret = William Harrowden

William Vaux = Eleanor Drakelow

Vaux of Harrowden

262  Catholic Social Ne t work s in Early Modern Engl and

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Index

Abergavenny, Lord see Nevill, Henry Affinity groups 21-22, 39-43, 49-50, 52, 54-56, 58, 62-64, 83, 87, 89, 126 noble 34, 43, 45, 47-48, 56, 58-62, 74, 83, 97, 99-100, 121, 168 Antiquarian 51, 54, 80, 105-106, 169-170, 205-206 Architecture 19, 36, 65, 129-146, 152, 155-156, 216, 241, 248, 250 banqueting house 129, 132, 134, 139, 144, 153 garden lodge 129, 130n1, 137 Hawkfield Lodge 134, 137 Holdenby 135-136, 152 Kirby Hall 133, 136 Lyveden New Bield 134, 137, 140-144, 147-148, 150, 153 Theobalds 136, 152 Warrener’s Lodge (Triangular Lodge) 134, 137 Archpriest Controversy 24 Arden family 57, 166-167, 169, 211, 242 Edward, of Park Hall 166, 171, 260 Mary 118 Robert 94, 258 Arden, Forest of 57, 60, 97 Arma Christi 142 Arundell, Sir John 192 Ashby family 168 Ashby-de-la-Zouche 144 Ashby St. Legers 55, 92-94 Babington family 82, 84n43 Babington Plot see plots Bacon, Sir Nicholas 147, 153-154 Baddesley Clinton 47, 103n121, 105-107, 167 Barlichway Hundred 57, 97 Barnwell 147 Beauchamp family 47, 56-58, 61 affinity 47, 56, 58-61, 99 Beaufo/Beaufou family 169, 260 Beaufort, Margaret, Countess of Richmond 40-50, 53-54 Beaumont family 42, 44-46, 48, 50, 71-72, 74-75, 77, 83, 168, 253-254, 259, 262 Elizabeth Hastings (d. 1588) 78, 84, 113, 253 Sir Francis (1540-98) 75, 164, 205, 243, 253 Francis (playwright) 76-77, 205, 253 Viscount John (1409-1460) 45, 64, 75, 253 Sir John (d. 1627) 76-77, 209, 244, 253 Berkeley family 44, 48n26, 67n83, 100 Blount, Sir Christopher 177, 182, 184 Boughton family 169, 171 Brereton, Randall 88, 207

Brokesby family 42, 44-48, 65n79, 72, 73n4, 75-79, 82, 84-85, 92, 121, 125, 233-234, 248, 254 Bartholomew (d. 1448) 43n7, 45, 46n19, 254 Bartholomew (d. 1615) 79, 234, 254 Edward of Shoby 79, 82n37, 83, 85, 254 Eleanor Vaux, his wife 27, 75, 78-79, 83, 85, 94, 105, 117, 119, 125, 222, 233-234, 254 Robert (d. 1531) 46-47, 254 Robert of Shoby (d. 1615) 72-73, 75, 77-79, 125, 164, 222, 243, 254 Brome family 47, 106n134 Browne, Anthony, Viscount Montague 143, 178, 181 Browne family 22-23, 32, 100, 124 Brudenell family 53-55, 90, 92, 116, 252, 255 Anthony 90, 255 Edmund 90-91 George 90-91 Robert 91 Tom 91 Sir Edmund 91, 116, 133, 137, 162, 165, 255 Agnes Topcliffe, his wife 116-117, 255 Elizabeth see Griffin John (brother of Sir Edmund) 88, 91-92, 134, 255 Mary Everard, his wife 91-92, 255 Lucy 91, 255 Sir Robert (d. 1531) 51, 53, 255 Robert 91, 255 Sir Thomas (d. 1549) 90-91, 255 Elizabeth Fitzwilliam, his wife 90, 255 Thomas (brother of Sir Edmund) 255 Anne Topcliffe, his wife 116-117, 255 Sir Thomas, Baron Brudenell, Earl of Cardigan 67, 92, 134, 137, 162, 170, 172n55, 194-195, 201, 207n25, 212, 233, 237, 255 as antiquary 134 as Baron 161, 195 Brudenell, Mary Tresham, his wife 88, 92, 117, 137, 255, 261 Buckingham, Countess of see Villiers, Mary Buckingham, Duke of see Villiers, George Burghley, Lord see Cecil, William Campion, Edmund, S.J. 82n37, 86, 162, 165n26, 190, 194 Catesby family 40, 49, 51n35, 52-57, 82, 85, 90, 92-93, 95-97, 100, 121, 170-171, 256 landholdings 55, 93, 97 and marriage 52, 56, 87-88, 93

292 

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networks 54-55, 88, 93, 95-96 Edmund (of Whiston) 55, 94, 256 Eleanor see Tresham John (of Hinton) 55, 93, 95-96, 256 Sir Richard (d. 1554) 93, 96-97, 256 Robert 95-96, 120-121, 228, 245, 256 Thomas, of Whiston 87, 256, 261 Isabel Tresham, his wife 87, 256, 261 William (ex. 1485) 51n35, 56, 256 William of Lapworth (d. 1554) 93, 256 Catherine Willington, his wife 93, 101, 123, 256 William, of Lapworth and Ashby St. Legers (d. 1598) 88, 93-94, 96, 103, 213, 219, 224, 235, 237, 240-241, 256 Anne Throckmorton, his wife 123, 213n51, 187, 256 Cave, William 168n43, 207-208 Cecil family 81-82, 130, 144, 173, 201, 231, 239, 244 gardens 132, 206, 231 patronage of 81, 96, 100, 205, 212, 217, 231, 239, 242, 244-245 Cecil, Robert, Earl of Salisbury 80, 125, 136, 142, 164, 211, 222, 226, 228, 230-231, 233, 237, 243 Cecil, Sir Thomas, Earl of Exeter, second Baron Burghley 80, 134, 173, 223 Cecil, William, first Baron Burghley 71, 132, 152, 154, 182, 205-206, 212, 228, 235, 239-240, 244 Citizenship 37, 157-160, 174-176, 180, 184-186, 188, 192, 197, 248 attributes 159, 188 Catholics and 37, 158, 160, 174, 180, 184, 188, 248 definition 159 formation 158, 160, 174-175, 185-186, 188 gender and 158, 180, 186, 188, 192, 248 Coexistence 16, 18-20, 28-32, 37, 62n68, 63, 74, 124, 169n44, 197, 200, 252 definition 20, 30 and networks 63, 124 Coleshill 145 Commission of the peace 46, 162-163, 166-168, 243 Leicestershire 167-168 Northamptonshire 168-169 Warwickshire 166, 169 Council of Trent 141 Counter-Reformation 140-141, 143 Cowdray 124, 143-144 Deputy lieutenant, office of 171-174 Device 136, 138, 143, 146 Digby family 85, 102, 121, 125, 169-171 Sir Everard 95, 120-121 George 180 Sir Robert 145

Dingley, Northamptonshire 139-140, 147 Dogsthorpe estate 133, 147 Dudley ascendancy 145, 166 patronage 59, 87, 98, 145, 166, 204 Robert, Earl of Leicester 59, 144-145, 166, 177, 180, 182, 221-222, 242 gardens 148-149 Ambrose, Earl of Warwick 98-99, 118n190, 145, 166, 173, 242 Dugdale, William 47, 80, 105-106 Edgbaston family 61 estate of 57, 60 Edward IV 43 Edward VI 31, 86, 104n123, 137 Elizabeth I 15-16, 18, 86, 98, 136, 138, 140, 142-143, 150, 167, 176, 181, 189, 192, 206, 212, 219, 222, 226-227n115, 228n122, 239 recusant expressions of loyalty to 149, 181, 195, 219 Englefield family 104 Lady Elizabeth Throckmorton 103 English Civil Wars 16, 18, 35, 138, 171, 175, 188, 206 Entourage 22-23, 32, 125, 168n43, 209, 217 Essex Rebellion 102, 164, 193, 225, 228-229, 245 Exeter, Earl of see Cecil, Thomas Friendship definition 21 and gifts 76 and networks 18, 21, 23, 27, 39-41, 43, 47, 49, 53, 63-64, 67, 80-82, 84, 87-90, 102, 104, 107-109, 119, 121, 124, 126, 170, 199-201 and patronage 25, 153n77, 165, 240-241 Feckenham manor (Worcs.) 101, 122, 190, 191n135 Fermor family 82-83, 171 Sir George 82, 84, 162-166, 173, 180 Sir John 50 Mary 120 Thomas 79n27 Constance Brome 103n121, 106, 257 Sir Edward 96, 103n121, 106 Ferrers family 44, 104-107, 169 Henry 80, 103-106, 167 Flamsted, John 83 Fortescue family 77, 100, 103, 253, 260 Fulshurst, George 83, 262 Fulshurst, Muriel Vaux 40, 79, 83, 110, 112n158, 119 Gage, Henry 52, 179 Gardens 129, 130n1, 132, 146-156 Gorhambury 147, 153-154 Hatfield 153, 231 Holdenby 132-133, 147-148, 155, 206

293

Index

Kirby Hall 147-149 Lyveden New Bield 133, 148, 151, 154-156, 206, 231 Nonsuch 144, 147-149, 151 Theobalds 133, 136, 148, 151-152, 154, 206 and networks 152-156 Garnet, Henry, S.J. 85, 90, 96, 119 Gender and careers 41, 70, 105, 158, 178, 201 failed patriarchy 29, 91, 193, 194, 214, 227, 242 femininity 150, 158, 223, 245 manhood 28, 41, 54, 72, 75, 82, 101, 104-105, 132, 135, 137, 148, 152, 163, 192-196, 202, 209, 220-221, 235, 237, 245 elite 49, 131, 135, 146, 164, 194, 223 noble 74, 82, 158 normative (patriarchal) 28, 41, 101, 163, 186, 202, 208, 212, 245 recusant 195-196, 227, 235 manliness 28-29, 41, 105, 184, 186, 202, 209, 212, 215, 236-237, 251 masculinity 19, 74-75, 80, 82, 101n112, 132n5, 148, 181, 220, 235 patriarchal role 92, 101, 121, 191, 202, 211, 227-228, 237, 243 patriarchy 28-29, 101, 131, 132n5, 146, 186, 191, 212 womanhood 41, 60 women’s piety 27-28, 150 women’s roles 70, 158 Gentry definition 18-19 Gerard, John, S.J. 73, 96, 119-120 Gloucester, Richard Duke of see Richard III Godparentage 60, 107, 110n147, 110-111 Godparents 33, 64, 69, 84, 89, 108-110 Grace Dieu estate (Leics.) 42, 44, 74-75, 84, 164, 244 Green family 49-50, 51n35, 83 Greville, Sir Fulke 97, 136, 144, 152, 153n77, 154 Greys of Groby 72, 100, 168, 252 Griffin family Rice 91 Elizabeth Brudenell, his wife 91 Gunpowder Plot see plots Habington, Mary Parker 67, 228, 243 Habington, Thomas 67, 80, 121, 206, 215, 245 Habington, William 228-229 Hall, Hugh 154, 156, 167 Hastings family 34, 42-49, 55, 58, 64, 71-78, 81, 84, 90, 104, 113, 170, 209, 243, 248 Francis, second Earl of Huntingdon 113 Katherine Pole, his wife 113 Sir Francis 67 George, first Earl of Huntingdon 45 George, fourth Earl of Huntingdon 72, 172 Dorothy Porte, his wife 73 Sir George 74

Henry, third Earl of Huntingdon 67, 72-73, 172, 243 Katherine Dudley, his wife 113 Henry, fifth Earl of Huntingdon 72, 74, 76, 165, 209, 238 Henry 168n43, 173 Sir Richard 45 Elizabeth Beaumont, his wife 45, 78 Walter 151, 168 William, first Baron Hastings 43 Hatton, Christopher 80, 148 Hatton, Sir Christopher (d. 1591) 46, 48, 91n68, 132-133, 135-136, 147-148, 152-155, 166, 171, 173, 206, 217, 222, 241, 244 Henry IV 47, 53 Henry V 44, 47, 51 Henry VI 44-45, 51 Henry VII 25n26, 43, 49-51, 53 Henry VIII 15, 43, 46n19, 49-53, 72, 82-83, 86n50, 98 Herbert, Lady 113 Heraldry 136-138, 143, 145 Homophily, concept of 64, 126, 158, 200, 248 Honor 15, 17, 21, 28, 30, 40, 43, 109, 130-131, 137, 139-140, 156, 159, 161, 176, 178, 184-185, 192, 195, 207, 216, 225, 235, 250 family honor 19, 40, 101, 131, 136, 138, 188, 210, 216, 231 and gender 41, 54, 70, 91, 136, 138, 163-164, 176, 181, 184, 186, 188, 193, 214, 220, 236-237, 242 and patronage 185-186, 200, 203-206, 218, 227, 240-241 Hospitality 65, 90, 108, 138-139, 147, 183, 200, 225 Howard, Henry, Earl of Northampton 114, 119 Howard, Katherine, Countess of Nottingham 222 Hubaud family 99, 169 Sir John 59, 99, 260 Mary Throckmorton 59, 99, 260 Huntingdon, Earls of see Hastings Identity 15, 146, 185, 236 and gender 28, 146, 182, 214 elite 18, 178, 213, 215 political 37, 159, 180 religious 35, 139, 146, 170, 185, 200, 207 Isham family 168-169 Elizabeth 35 James I 16, 148, 173, 180n89, 184, 187, 196 Johnsons of Glapthorne 54, 55n45 Kempson family 217 George 216-217 Thomas 216-217 Kettering 50, 55

294 

Catholic Social Ne t work s in Early Modern Engl and

Knightley family 56, 58, 104, 168 Sir Richard 51, 173 Knollys, Robert 52, 53n39 Lancaster, Duchy of 44, 48, 61 Labyrinth 133, 151, 154 Lane, Sir William (c. 1606) 208-209 Lee family 52, 89 Elizabeth see Tresham Jerome 89 Robert (d. 1539) 52, 53n39 Lettice Pennison Knollys, his wife 52 Leedes, Sir Thomas 183 Leicester, Earl of see Dudley, Robert Leland, John 54 Levens, George 89, 155 Lincoln, Bishop of 133, 226, 240 Lollardy 30-31, 96, 160 Lord Lieutenant, office of 171-174 Lyveden estate 86-87, 90, 92, 190 Margaret, Queen of Anjou 39, 49 Mary I 31, 86, 104 Middlemore family 47, 56-61, 222, 258 Sir Henry 166n35, 222, 258 John of King’s Norton 233 Joyce, Prioress of Henwood 60 Richard (d. 1503) 58, 60-61, 258 Margaret Throckmorton (d. 1530), his wife 60-61, 258 Robert (d. 1576) 60-61, 102, 166, 258 Thomas 61, 260 Eleanor Throckmorton, his wife 61, 258, 260 William 61, 258 Military service 176-185 Montague, Sir Edward 54, 173, 200, 237 Montagu/Montague of Boughton 54, 82, 85, 104, 147, 168-169, 200-201 Montague, Viscounts, of Sussex see Browne, Anthony Montagu, William 88 Mordaunt family, of Drayton 54, 89, 90, 92, 102 Henry, fourth Lord Mordaunt (d. 1608) 95 Lewis, third Lord Mordaunt (d. 1601) 84, 89n60, 208, 212-213, 218 Morley and Monteagle, Barons see Parker Networks arrangement of 63-65 definitions 21-22 theories 63 Neville family 45n12, 48, 56, 170 Henry Lord Abergavenny 83, 262 Catherine Vaux, his wife 83, 187, 262 Lady 116-117 Newdigate family 114-115, 169, 171 Nobility definitions 18-19 Norden, John 148

Oath of Allegiance 80, 157, 187 Olney family 56, 58, 137, 168 John 58 Margaret 59, 260 Oundle 51, 87, 92, 147n53 Palmer, John 74 Palmer, Thomas 205, 235 Parham family 88 Bridget Tresham 182-183, 261 Sir Edward 179, 180n89, 182-183, 230, 261 Parker family, Lords Morley and Monteagle 83-84, 87, 90, 96, 102, 228n121 Catherine 112 Edward, Baron Morley 115, 243 Elizabeth Stanley Baroness Monteagle, his wife 115 Henry, Lord Morley and Monteagle 96 William, Lord Morley and Monteagle 67, 177, 228, 229n125, 243, 261 Elizabeth Tresham, his wife 96, 115, 117, 121-122, 228, 261 Parr family 49-50, 52, 60, 87, 97, 98n99, 102 Queen Catherine 49-50, 83, 98, 103, 243 Thomas 102 Sir William 49, 98 William, Baron of Horton 229 William, Marquess of Northampton 89 Patronage 199-246 definitions 21-22, 25-26, 201 and Catholics 218-240 and gender 201-202, 208-209, 212, 215, 220-223, 227, 235-237, 245 and gifts 204-206 normative 207-218, 221 and the state 240-245 Petitioning 185-196, 223, 249 Petitions and citizenship 186-188, 248 and claims of loyalty 142, 160, 185-186, 192, 194, 196 and gender 186-191, 194-196, 249 and patronage 185-186, 189 Pigott, Thomas 54, 87 Plots Babington Plot 74, 84 Bye Plot (Watson’s Plot) 182, 184, 234 Gunpowder Plot 85, 90, 92, 94, 95, 102, 105, 108, 120, 125, 165n29, 212, 228, 229n126, 232n140, 245 Main 182 Somerville Plot 118 Throckmorton Plot 111, 120, 164 Privy Council 16, 73, 94, 124, 162-163, 168, 170-172, 177, 181, 186-187, 197, 199, 219-220, 224-227, 238, 240, 246, 248 and recusant disarming 237-238 petitions to 187-189, 192, 195, 219, 223, 237-238, 240

295

Index

Raglan Castle 153 Ralegh, Elizabeth Throckmorton 211 Religious coexistence 16, 18-20, 28-32, 37, 63, 74, 124, 169n44, 197, 200, 252 definition 30 Religious persecution 16-17, 22, 30-32, 38, 42, 68, 70-71, 75, 113, 124, 141, 159, 161, 197, 200, 202, 220, 224, 231-232, 234, 237, 240, 249, 251 definition 22-23 Religious toleration 30, 75, 124, 141, 165n26, 169, 186, 194-195 definition 23 Reputation concept of 17, 31, 40-41, 80, 86, 106, 134, 172, 213 and family 101 and gardens 146 and gender 41, 106, 161, 181, 186, 193, 195, 213-214, 237-238, 242, 250 Richard III 55-56 Rockingham Castle 133-134, 165 Rockingham Forest 49, 53, 55, 87, 92, 165, 200-201 Roper family 79, 84-86, 95 Sir William 79, 234 Rothwell 49, 51, 87, 133, 136-137, 210, 229, 231 Rushton All Saints (Northants.) 33, 110n147 Rushton, manor of 50-51, 87-90, 108, 110, 113, 117n187, 118, 133-134, 136-137, 147, 210, 224 building projects 137n30, 147, 150 Russell, Bridget Hussey, Countess of Bedford 114, 118, 223 Salisbury, Earl of see Cecil, Robert Saunders family 48, 168 Sheldon, Anne Throckmorton 223, 260 Sheldon, Margaret Whorwood 101, 111, 115, 117 Sheldon, Ralph 101, 223, 260 Sheldon, William 101, 118n190, 221n86, 258 Sheriff, office of 157, 167, 170-171 Shirley family 42-44, 46-48, 57, 66, 71-72, 75, 78-81, 85, 233, 259 Dorothy Devereaux 77, 111 Francis 75-76 Sir George 75, 77, 79n27, 80, 164, 192, 207n25, 233, 236, 238, 243, 259 Sir Henry 79-80, 111, 164-165, 238, 243, 259 Sir Ralph 44, 77 Snowden, John 142-143 Sociability 19, 21, 42, 46, 48, 60, 70, 84, 89, 101, 117, 169, 183, 200, 247 Social credit 17, 21, 25, 42, 109, 200, 203, 207-208, 215, 229, 237-238 Somerset, Edward, fourth Earl of Worcester 153-154 Elizabeth Hastings, fourth Countess of Worcester, his wife 113-114 William, third Earl of Worcester 153, 207

Spencer family 56, 82, 130, 168 Sir John 121, 171, 173, 210 Stafford, Sir Humphrey 133, 138 Staunton Harold estate (Leics.) 44, 47 Studley 57, 60 Tabula Eliensis 220 Talbot family of Grafton 59, 155 John of Grafton 219, 224, 226, 256 Throckmorton family 57-60, 62, 83, 88, 98, 101-103, 116, 166, 169, 171, 213, 216, 221, 260 Anthony 93-94, 101, 123n212, 258, 260 Sir Arthur 212, 237, 260 Clement 59, 98, 260 Elizabeth 191-192 Sir George (1489-1552) 50, 88, 96, 103, 137, 145, 260 Katherine Vaux, his wife 59, 98n99, 103, 260, 262 Sir John (d. 1445) 58-59, 260 Eleanor Spiney, his wife 59, 260 Sir John of Feckenham (d. 1580) 162, 166, 190-191, 260 Margery, his wife 120, 190 Sir John (b. 1580) 102, 190-191, 228, 260 Agnes Wilford 114, 117, 122-123, 125, 190, 217, 260 Kenelm 98, 260 Mary of Coughton 189 Mary of Feckenham 111, 260 Sir Nicholas 98n101, 229, 243, 260 Sir Robert (d. 1519) 58, 61, 260 Sir Robert (d. 1581) 59, 88, 93, 99, 100n107, 102-103, 134-135, 216, 260 Sir Robert, first Baronet 175, 214-215, 260 Sir Thomas (d. 1472) 59, 260 Margaret Olney, his wife 59, 260 Thomas 88, 99n103, 101-103, 114, 115n174, 116, 117n184, 123, 135n17, 163, 214-216, 219, 221, 222n87, 224-226, 235, 249, 260 Margaret Whorwood, his wife (d. 1607) 99n103, 101, 112, 114-118, 123, 135n17, 187, 260 Throckmorton Plot see plots Tirringham family 189 Anthony 94 Elizabeth Throckmorton 100 Sir Thomas 100 Tresham family 49-56, 60, 64-65, 82-83, 86-90, 92-96, 100, 104, 110n147, 113-115, 121, 124, 130, 133, 162, 210, 218, 223, 230, 244 of Newton 111n149, 113n166, 168, 222, 230 Bridget see Parham Catherine see Webb Clemence 87, 108n138, 118, 261 Elizabeth Lee 87, 110 Elizabeth see Parker Frances Gage 232n138, 261

296 

Catholic Social Ne t work s in Early Modern Engl and

Francis 85n46, 92n73, 94-95, 120, 153, 217-218, 228-229, 232n138, 245, 261 Anne Tufton, his wife 117, 228, 261 Elizabeth, his daughter 112n160 Lucy, his daughter 112n160 Isabel Harrington 62, 261 Sir John (d. 1521) 39, 52, 261 John (d. 1546) 87-88, 93, 256, 261 Eleanor Catesby, his wife (d. 1546) 8788, 93 Lewis 92, 191, 233 Mary see Vaux Mary (b. 1578) see Brudenell Sir Thomas (d 1471) 39, 261 Sir Thomas (d. 1559) 52, 78n25, 86, 96, 108, 110, 171, 250, 261 Anne Parr, his wife (d. c. 1539) 50, 52, 87 Lettice Penniston Knollys Lee, his wife 52, 53n39, 87, 110, 261 Sir Thomas (d. 1605) 40, 71, 75, 78, 83-84, 90, 94, 103, 111, 112n158, 115, 118, 137n30, 123, 133-136, 139-140, 142n38, 143-144, 147-151, 153, 155, 162, 165n26, 174, 177, 181, 188, 190, 192-195, 204, 206, 210, 213-214, 216-219, 222-224, 226-232, 234-235, 239-241, 249-250, 261 Muriel Throckmorton, his wife (d. 1615) 40, 84, 90n64, 92, 110-111, 113-114, 117-119, 121, 124, 186-191, 212, 217-218, 223-225, 228n122, 230-231, 234, 237, 249, 260, 261 Thomas of Newton 88, 111n149, 113n166, 222, 230 William (d. 1450) 51, 261 Sir William 52, 177, 179, 182-183, 196, 261 Theodosia, his wife 192, 196 Tyndall, Humphrey 153, 248 Underhill family 61, 171, 258-259 Vaux family 45, 49-51, 53-55, 58-60, 64, 72, 75-76, 78, 80, 82-83, 84n43, 85-88, 90, 98, 117n187, 119, 125, 135, 162, 165n29, 166, 190, 213, 215 Ambrose 79, 83n39, 112, 179, 262 Elizabeth Wyborne, his wife 83, 262 Anne 27, 75, 78, 85n46, 90, 94, 105, 113, 117, 119, 121, 125, 164, 234, 243, 262 Catherine see Neville, Lord Abergavenny Edward, fourth Baron Vaux 82, 179-180, 182, 184-185 Elizabeth Roper, his wife 27, 77-78, 85, 94, 117, 119-120, 125, 203, 234, 262 Eleanor see Brokesby George 83n39 Henry 82n37, 84n42, 262

Jane (Joan) 49-50 Katherine see Throckmorton Muriel 79, 83, 111, 112n158 Sir Nicholas, first Baron Vaux 49-50, 98n99, 260, 262 Elizabeth Fitzhugh Parr, his wife 50, 98n99, 262 Anne Green, his wife 50, 83, 98n99 Thomas, second Baron Vaux 50, 262 Elizabeth Cheyne, his wife 50, 262 Sir William 49, 51n35, 262 Catherine Peniston, his wife 49, 262 William, third Baron Vaux 40, 77, 82-83, 84n43, 89, 135, 165, 215, 234, 259, 261-262 Elizabeth Beaumont, his wife 78, 84 Mary Tresham, his wife 40, 77, 84, 111-112, 117, 119, 124, 135, 155, 175, 234, 261-262 Vavasour family 95, 115 Muriel 115 Thomas 89, 110, 115, 210, 230 Verney, Sir Richard 125n218, 126, 169, 173, 203 Villiers family George, Duke of Buckingham 25, 74, 76, 146, 218, 243-244 Mary Beaumont, Countess of Buckingham 76, 167, 244 Virgin Mary 140, 142n37-38, 144, 150-151 Virtue 17, 21, 31, 130-132, 139, 148-149, 182, 206, 250 aristocratic 23, 130, 133, 137-138 masculine 136, 138, 148, 181 religious 138 Renaissance 159 Wars of the Roses 43, 49, 51, 56, 250 Warwick, Earl of see Dudley, Robert Watson, Sir Edward 71, 89, 133-134, 226 Watson’s Plot see plots Webb, Catherine Tresham 117n186, 232 Sir John 182-183, 232, 261 Wenman, Agnes Fermor 79, 120n199, 180n94 Weston Underwood (Bucks.) 59, 97, 115, 118, 134-135, 175, 215 Wickham, William, Bishop of Lincoln 133, 226, 240-241, 248 Wilford family 100, 103 Willington family 57, 61 Anne Middlemore 61, 258 William 61, 102, 258 Wintour (Winter) family 85, 102, 121 Robert 59, 93-94, 260 Thomas 94-96, 256 Worcester, earls of see Somerset Wright, Christopher 95-96 Zouche family 52, 56, 256, 261