The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson
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undutiful son … [who] hath to me most undutifully demeaned himself to my no small grief, and for which cause I will also especially stay to see the same either settled or no longer dissembled, and you and myself no more abused, for to my face he used me undutifully, and is such cause of contempt of me as I neither can nor will endure, but will put him to the point either of having of her or utterly leaving of her, to the end I may no more spend in that suit my time and charges in vain.58
This was a gentry cry from the heart: the most important family asset, the son and heir, was not conforming to the managing director’s vision but instead was asserting his own short-term interests over those of the family corporation. These financial-cum-strategic problems were emerging in terms of private family emotions. Thomas was failing to tell the truth, was proud, knew nothing of duty and was abusive and inconsistent in his actions. He could have been sacked (or disinherited) but that in itself would have been shameful. The paterfamilias, so often portrayed by modern historians as a source of grief for his imposed-on children, had in reality few places to turn. No one was more vulnerable than a father to his children.
The great contrast between this overburdening sense of frustration in his relations with Thomas was John’s real love and affection for his wife, Joan, still struggling with their affairs in the wilds of Shropshire. ‘I have sent you a keg of sturgeon and vinegar and Rhenish wine’, he wrote to her on 26 July 1601
And ever live to love thee more and more, I protest I now only desire to live and be with thee. And so good Pug farewell and God bless you and all my children, and send me peace, with all the world
Your ever loving husband during life
John Thynne.59
Soon after this, perhaps in early August, the judge examined Thomas Thynne on oath again and in private, when he ‘confessed the marriage’. The judge then pronounced it valid, the Mervyns the victors and John Thynne defeated. Sir James Mervyn, meeting the judge at a court gathering a little later, ‘told him that in regard of his kind and judicial dealing in that cause, that if he could find any reason to go from the Court, that he should come to me [at Fonthill] and kill a buck, and that from henceforth I would be his guide to Longleat’.60 That was the victorious fixer talking, the courteous and high-status reward – only grandees with parks could offer the killing of a deer as an entertainment – to a public servant who had done the right thing by them.
Usually in this sort of story, that is where it ends: the court case is over and the documentation disappears. Not here, though, because in September 1601 a correspondence opened between Thomas Thynne’s newly acknowledged wife, Maria, and his mother, Joan. These are letters between Romeo’s mother and an unwelcome Juliet. Both sides of the correspondence are preserved in the archives at Longleat and almost nothing in sixteenth-century letters reveals quite so clearly the multiple tensions between generations, between women of subtly different classes, between conformity and individuality, and between the dignity of the self and the requirements of family order.
The first letter that survives from Maria to her mother-in-law is in convoluted and Latinate sentences which read as if they were being spoken from the lowest possible of ground-scraping bows. Maria had written to Joan before (in a letter that has not survived) but had received no answer. Why was that? Was she suspected of duplicity, of not telling her mother-in-law the truth of what she felt? Her manner now was pure obeisance, but the bow was somehow complicated. Her tone implied both family inferiority – a daughter to a mother – and moral equality. She felt no grounds for shame. In fact, she felt so little shame that a sense of irony hangs in curtains around her words. Could the proud, court-holding, seductive and beautiful Maria, maid of honour to the Queen herself, have meant to abase herself quite so much to the daughter of a City merchant, whose title to her lands in Shropshire was suspect, who may have been her mother-in-law but had little else in her favour?
If I dyd knowe that my thoughtes had ever intertayned any unreuerent conseyte of you (my (good mother) I shoulde be much ashamed so Impudintlye to Importune yr good oppinion as I haue done by manye intreatinge lynes, but haveinge binne euer Imboldened wth the knowledg of my unspotted Innocencye, I coulde not be so great an enimye to my owne hapynes, as to wante [i.e. lack] yr fauor for wante of desyeringe ytt.61
Thick with educated paradoxes, this is a form of supplication which is more than halfway to an insult. Its tone might have been calculated to receive no answer. It was Mervyn-speak, driven by rivalry and ambition, and in signing and sealing it, Maria slapped down another pair of challenges. She ended the letter with the phrase ‘Yr very loueng and obedyent daughter Marya Thine’. That encapsulated the whole point: the fact that she had plotted to call herself ‘Maria Thynne’ was the essence of her disobedience. Then, as a final flourish, she enclosed what is either a lock of her red hair, or a now frayed silk ribbon, fixed to the paper with sealing wax, into which she pressed the ancient and noble cross-hatching of the Audley coat of arms. Every one of these signals was made to have its effect: Maria had stolen the son; she had little interest in obeying Joan Thynne; she was glamorous and sexy as Joan could no longer hope to be; and she was the daughter of a peer – one of only sixty titled men in England, a social universe away from the grubby deal-making and warehouses of Joan’s own commercial family.
No answer was forthcoming from the older Mrs Thynne, even though further letters were sent to her at Caus in Shropshire. Maria was living with her own mother Lucy at the Audley manor of Stalbridge in Dorset. The following summer in June 1602, Maria asked her mother to write imploringly to Joan Thynne. All kinds of hazards hung around this letter too: not only had Lucy Audley arranged the kidnapping of Joan’s treasured son; she was the first deep love of Joan’s husband, John, who had given her up only when threatened with disinheritance. Lucy Audley met all of this face on: ‘Notwithstanding the doubt long since conceived how any letters of mine might find a grateful acceptation of yourself (many reasons inducing a distrust) …’62 She spared no eloquence and even through the fog of complexity and Latinity, the idea emerges that Lucy Audley wanted in her heart to see these families united.
Good Mrs Thynne, let me not be wronged in these lines by a hard construction, for I protest that servile fear and base flattery my heart is not acquainted withal. If I desire your love or seek to embrace your friendship (as unfeignedly in all truth I do and wished it long since) believe it to proceed from such a mind as willingly makes offer of the owner for performance of the friendliest effect that her kindness and ability may discharge.63
This was stiff and awkward, a halting statement of love and warmth, which scarcely survives the frost of formality and distance. But the reason is not far to seek: Lucy Audley was trying proclaim her affection and honesty from a history which spoke only of deceit and exploitation.
Lastly since your son is mine, and so beloved as my dearest own, let me obtain this request, my daughter may be yours, but accordingly as to her merits.64
Could you believe her? Perhaps you could, if you read only her imploring words. Maybe not, if you knew both what had come before and where her interests lay. It was entirely within the Thynnes’ power either to acknowledge the validity of the Thomas–Maria marriage or to disinherit him. There were plenty of other sons. Only if Joan and John Thynne accepted Maria as a full member of their family could Lucy Audley and Sir James Mervyn be sure that their plot had worked and that the Mervyns had established their beachhead in Thynne territory. All kinds of access to power would stem from that connection and in pre-modern societies access to power meant access to wealth and wellbeing. No one had any conception of what a gene was in 1602, but here these people were acting to genetic dictates. The individuals writing these letters would scarcely benefit or suffer from these arrangements, however they turned out. Even if the language they used was of honour and honesty, of proclaimed integrity and persistent doubt, it was the genes themselves that were struggling for victory.
Still nothing from Joan. Thomas went to visit her and still she resisted. Maria wrote again into the silence: ‘All that I desire is but to be blessed with your better conceit’65 – a better conception of who she was as a person. But then, at the end of July 1602, Maria tired of her wooing of the mother.
I am determined henceforth to cease troubling you, believing that my letters do