The Gentry: Stories of the English

Still nothing, but then, months later, out of the blue, Joan wrote to Lucy Audley, Maria’s mother. Her letter is the central document in this story, fusing a powerful consciousness of rank with ‘discomforting grief’

at her betrayal, all the while taking refuge in her own individual pride. ‘I confess your daughter’s birth far above my son’s deserts or degree,’ she began, ‘but since you were pleased not to scorn my son to be yours, methinks you should not have scorned to have acknowledged me to be his mother.’ There was a dignity that went beyond rank. The rights and privileges of rank did not allow the mistreatment of an individual. This was a question not of the law but of the honourable regard for the humanity of others. Lucy Audley had accused her of feeding her husband’s mind with slanderous tales about the Audleys and Joan replied to that accusation with the same mixture of acute social consciousness and an irreducible sense of her own moral position.

Now for Mr Thynne’s calling of your honour in question, I cannot deny but I have heard it, but that myself was either author or demonstrator of any such reports I utterly deny. I am not so ready to wrong inferior persons, much less an honourable Lady of your place and reputation, and so conceive of me for so you shall ever find me.

Joan Thynne placed these two codes – social hierarchy and the rules of dealing well with other individuals – face to face. She believed in both but recognized that they did not always acknowledge the value in the other. Thomas had broken one code in favour of the other: ‘He hath hazarded for your love, and yours, the loss of theirs that he was born to honour perpetually.’ It was a gamble he had lost. ‘But this I confess,’ she went on, ‘I have more reason to respect your honour than your friendship towards me.’ Lady Audley was her acknowledged social superior but there was no trusting her goodness.

For two years the situation remained unchanged. Joan repeatedly refused to engage with Maria or Thomas. Maria repeatedly wrote asking her for love. Joan was confined to her remote and difficult, windy and leaky castle at Caus in Shropshire; Maria was pining away either at Fonthill or in the beautiful timber-framed Mervyn manor house at Compton Bassett in the thick-cream-and-butter country of north Wiltshire.

Something of these geographical differences emerged in the letters. Maria, the daughter of a baron, was, despite her proclaimed grief over Joan’s indifference, luxuriating in the lap of her father’s and grandfather’s various manors, distributed across England’s richest and most luxurious county. Joan Thynne meanwhile was a little desperately defending and maintaining her remote property against rival claimants to it.

Her husband was busy in London; these Shropshire lands were part of the dowry she had brought to the marriage, and so it fell to her to defend and maintain them. Not that he was indifferent to their wellbeing. Joan was struggling to get the farm accounts in good order for her husband’s approval; she found that no one in Shropshire would sell beef or sheep to her at reasonable prices and so asked for some ‘very forward in fat’

to be sent over from Wiltshire; corn and malt were equally pricy; malt and hops had to come from Wiltshire;

she asked for salad oil and sturgeon from London;

lute strings and copper wires for the virginals were posted to her along with ‘cambric thread, silver and spangles’ or sequins.

She worried from her distance that her husband, whom she scarcely ever saw from one month to the next, was not well. His eyes were troubling him. She sent him ‘physic’ for them along with her letters.

I hope you will have more care of yourself for the good of me and your poor children, humbly desiring you above all things to have respect unto your health, and not to defer the time of taking physic, and let your greatest care be for the preservation of your health, in whose welldoing consist my only joy and comfort. And therefore sweet Mr Thynne, if you love or make account of me have a special regard of it.

Nearly every other letter in this correspondence, or at least those that have been preserved, was to some extent in public. But Joan’s letters to her husband had the affection and directness of intimate conversation. She hardly ever heard from him, let alone saw him, but struggled to maintain her world alone. The woman Maria imagined her to be was scarcely connected with the woman these loving, careful, generous-hearted letters revealed.

Then came the catastrophe which Maria, Thomas, Lucy Audley and the Mervyns had all been waiting for and which Joan Thynne had been dreading: on 21 November 1604, John Thynne died. Thomas had not been disinherited and so he and Maria took possession of Longleat, the heart of the Thynne estates. Thomas himself seems to have remained in London, leaving Maria in Wiltshire but not apparently trusting her to run his affairs at Longleat. This lack of respect for a woman’s ability to run an estate, as his mother was doing so competently in the wilds of Shropshire, produced an excoriating letter from Maria. She was still at one of her father’s houses, not allowed yet to be mistress of the Thynne properties: ‘Well Mr Thynne, believe I am both sorry and ashamed that any creature should see that you hold such a contempt of my poor wits, that being your wife, you should not think me of discretion to order your affairs in your absence.’

It was, she said, her right to ‘be mistress there’ – at Longleat – but if he wanted to leave her ‘like an innocent fool here [in her father’s house], I will the more contentedly bear the disgrace.’ It is the angriest letter in the collection, which she signed, furiously, ‘Your loving wife howsoever, Maria Thynne’.

He soft-soaped her (but his letters don’t survive) and allowed her to take charge at Longleat. Mervyn servants were brought in and old Thynne servants sidelined. She became as she told him ‘a careful officer’ in his absence. His letters from London flirted with her and ‘made her modest blood flush up into [her] bashful cheek’

so that she wrote back to him as her ‘best and sweetest Thomken, and many thousand times more than these 1000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 for thy kind and wanton letters Thine and only thine Maria’.

She managed all the men and the complexities of rent and tenancies at Longleat with aplomb. They were happy, in possession of his inheritance, with her now settled in the chatelaine’s saddle.

From that position Maria could abandon the mask of deference. Her mother-in-law, silently or not, had abused her for so long. Now, as the next generation in possession, her loathing and contempt could be allowed to emerge. In a letter that is undated but was probably written not long after Maria’s and Thomas’s arrival at Longleat, the young woman in the comfort of Wiltshire wrote to the old woman in despair and isolation in Shropshire. They were openly at war, engaged on a bitter lawsuit over the Thynne estates and possessions. ‘yf you or yr heyers haue an exspectation in revertion of Longleate howse or garden,’ Maria told Joan, she might as well give up. ‘The case beinge as ytt ys, meethinkes you Should not vnkindlye intermedle, more then mr Thynne doth wth all yr lande of inherytance’ – a phrase meaning those lands Shropshire which Joan had brought to her marriage as a dowry and now formed her own sustenance or jointure.

As she went on, Maria warmed to her task:

I confes (wthowt Sham) ytt ys true my garden ys to ruinous, & yett to make you more merrye I wyll make you shall be of my Cowncell, that my intente ys before ytt be better, to make ytt worse; for findinge that greate exspence Coulde never alter ytt from being lyke a poridg pote, nor never by reporte was lyke other I intend to plowe ytt up & Sowe all varitye of frute att a fytt Seazon, I beseech you laughe, & So wyll I att yr Captiousnes.

Joan may have been captious and intent on finding fault but this is as bitter as a perry pear. For a class whose identity was bound so closely to the nature of land and to the shaping and moulding of that land, it would be difficult to find a more explicit form of hate. It is the voice of victory. The previous generation may have done its best to make the land around the house at Longleat into an elegant garden but it had failed and Maria now was planning to erase everything Joan and John had done. Often enough you see in old English houses a new wing added, a garden transformed or an old one demolished; how rarely, though, can you see through a window like this to the vengeance and rage which lay behind the change.

In her anger, and not immediately intelligibly, Maria went on at Joan in language deliberately vile:

now wheras you wryghte yr grownd putt to Bassest vses ys better then manurde then my garden, Surelye yf ytt wer a gandmoother [sic] of my owne Should & equall to my Selfe by bearth, I Should answare that oddious Comparison wth tellinge you I beleeve So Corpulent a La: Cannot butt doo much yr selfe towards the Soyllinge of lande, & I thinke that hath binn, & wyll be all the good you intend to leaue behinde you att Corslye.

What does this clotted set of insults actually mean? Joan had clearly said in a letter now lost that she was managing her lands in Shropshire better than Maria was capable of doing at Longleat. Even Joan’s roughest ground was more richly fertilized, she had said, than Maria’s best garden. Maria turned dirty in response: first reminding Joan quite how old she was, ‘a grandmother’, when in fact she was in her mid-forties and only twenty years older than Maria; then emphasizing her own noble and Joan’s mercantile origins (‘equal to myself in birth’); then telling her how fat she was (‘so corpulent a Lady’) and then implying, in a brutal and brilliant image of scatological contempt, that, given her size, Joan would clearly be effective at manuring the land herself (‘cannot but do much towards the soiling of land’).

The site chosen by Maria for this performance was the beautiful stone manor house at Corsley, three miles from Longleat. It and the lands around it formed the Thynnes’ dower manor, set aside for the use of the widow of the previous head of the family. Maria was imagining a future in which her vulgar, old, fat, widowed mother-in-law was ensconced at Corsley, squatting on the pastures for the good of the ground. It is as cruel an image as anything in these gentry stories, of a broken woman whose life was good for nothing but some droppings on her dead husband’s ancestral lands.

That takes some coming back from, but as time went by, Joan attempted to mend the breach. She arranged for a marriage of one of Thomas’s sisters to a Mr Whitney, who was remotely connected with the Audleys, ‘a gentleman of a very ancient and worshipful house, and an aliesman [a relative, allied by kinship] to your Lady’.

If the marriage came off, she told Thomas, ‘it might renew a mutual love in every side to the comfort of many and besides his estate so great and his proffers so reasonable and well.’

The old sense of class anxiety is never absent:

I credibly understand that all the lands whereof Mr Whitney is now seised was Whitney’s lands before the conquest of England; and that ever sithence it hath and doth continue in the name and blood of the Whitneys, but although himself be but an esquire, yet there were eighteen knights of his name before the Conquest which were lords and owners of the same lands which are now his.

That can only have been received at Longleat with derision. Quite consistently Thomas Thynne refused to release lands or money for his sisters’ dowries, even though he had previously agreed to give them £1,000 each, engaging in endless correspondence with his mother on the subject and no doubt encouraged in his meanness towards them by his wife. Although Thomas was a Member of Parliament and had been knighted in 1603 in the great rush of honours that accompanied James I’s arrival on the throne, the romantic young man had by now turned into a slightly weak thirty-year-old. Maria’s family had him where they wanted him, telling him how to manage his timber in the park at Longleat

and selling him their neighbouring manor of Warminster for a sum (£3,650) and on terms – the full amount payable within the year – which as Thynne said was ‘so unreasonably high a rate as no man would come near it’.

The Mervyn–Audley gang were cashing in on the trick they had played so many years before at the Bell in Beaconsfield.

Maria’s mother, Lucy Audley, wrote her a letter about the deal in phrases which stink even 400 years later: ‘Well Mall’, she began, using the family nickname for her daughter,

I am exceeding glad that the iron is stricken being hot, for there is a time for all things, and sorry should I have been in both your behalfs, if it had now been omitted; and truth is I know it so great a grace to Longleat as if another had enjoyed it I should have rained tears upon Warminster whenever I had looked upon it. I was more confident that you would have dealt in it, as supposing that you know me a loving mother, and not a cunning shifter, to put a trick upon my son Thynne and yourself for serving any turn, and the truth is enough on that.

The precise meaning of that last sentence may be a little clouded, but the intended import and the subtext are both radiantly clear: Would I ever cheat you, my darling girl, or your lovely husband? I only have your and Longleat’s best interests at heart. And underneath that, the inadvertently conveyed message: I am indeed a cunning shifter, which is why you are where you are, and I am now squeezing money out of you and Thomas in the way that I have always done to others.

And the fate of these families?

The Mervyns soon disappeared from history entirely. It was important to Sir James, the architect of much of the grief in this story, as to many gentry families, that his land and name should remain attached. He had no sons but he got round that by ensuring that his granddaughter Christine, Maria’s younger sister, was married to her cousin Sir Henry Mervyn. Connected to her by both genes and name, Sir James could leave her his beautiful Fonthill estate and other manors elsewhere in Wiltshire. But he was thwarted. As soon as Sir James died, Sir Henry starting selling off the inheritance, a large chunk of it including Fonthill to Christine’s brother Mervyn Touchet, Lord Audley and Earl of Castlehaven. In him the lunacy of the Touchets flowered expansively and he was beheaded in 1631 for sodomizing his servants and participating in the rape by those servants of both his wife and his twelve-year-old stepdaughter.

After this hiccup, things were soon restored to something approaching normality and that family also persisted, if on a declining path, selling off Compton Bassett in the 1660s, until the last and 25th Lord Audley died in 1997. Fonthill ended up in the hands of the Beckfords and became the site of the eighteenth century’s most extravagant folly. In none of the Audleys did any attachment to Wiltshire land remain.

The Thynnes are one of the great success stories of the English gentry. Like the Cavendishes, the Spencers and the Cecils, the family escaped the vulnerabilities of a gentry existence and entered the realms of the higher – and richer – aristocracy. Longleat became the headquarters of an enormous and ever-growing estate, comprising thousands of acres in addition to the Shropshire lands brought to them by Joan Hayward and the Wiltshire manors they had bought from the Audleys. As Barons, Viscounts and finally Marquesses of Bath they persisted across the centuries in a way that few gentry families have ever managed.

One of the ironies of this encounter between Mervyn greed and Thynne gullibility is that the Thynnes were the victors. But that is not the salient point: the key aspect of this story is the way in which its women – Lucy Audley, Joan Thynne and Maria Touchet – are its principal players. The entire dynamic of the three families is inexplicable without their sense of honour, ambition, propriety and threat. They are not merely – as women at this stage are so often portrayed – the default administrators of estates when their men are away. They are the setters, creators and maintainers of the family cultures which governed the internal relationships of the class. They are subtle and powerful, passionate and impassioned. No child could have been uninfluenced by these women, their mothers and their wives, and no history of the gentry can make sense without them.

PART III

The Great Century

1610–1710

The seventeenth century was the heartland of gentry culture. The sense of looming threat from grandees or the crown, or from people not admitted to the gentry’s own charmed circle, was – at least outside the great crisis of the 1640s and ’50s – surprisingly and wonderfully absent from their lives. England was constitutional and their own place in that constitution as Members of Parliament, Justices of the Peace and sheriffs of their counties, upholders of what seemed like an ancient tradition, was deeply self-confirming. Their letters and journals, the houses they built, the landscapes they created and the portraits they had painted all exude an atmosphere of arrival, of this being the great century in which to have been alive.

Many of the gentry were obsessively retrospective and this was one of the glory periods for false genealogies. The Cecils at Hatfield (Welsh sheep men in 1500) had a beautiful, illustrated pedigree drawn up that traced them back to Jesus and from there to Noah and Adam. But the time glittered with the kaleidoscope of modernity, a world we would all begin to recognize: fast food in London streets; shopping centres; newspapers; town squares; terraced houses; suburban villas; experimental science; botany; archaeology; the Stock Exchange; commercially available finance; mortgages; wood screws; microscopes and telescopes; the country house as a centre of culture and art; a professional navy; a private but coherent postal system; most of the hedged landscape; floated meadows; estate maps; landscape paintings; a national market in agricultural products and the end of self-sufficiency; a consciousness of England as the emporium of the world; the pervasive presence, at least in gentry houses, of global commodities, especially sugar; garden exotics (tulips, Persian fritillaries); the empire – Ireland as a trial run, the West Indies, Virginia, the Carolinas; eventually a constitutional monarchy; political parties; and liberty as the essence of Englishness.

‘Felicity’ was the word Edward Hyde, Lord Clarendon, the great Royalist politician-historian, used to describe this moment, when

this Kingdom, and all his Majesty’s Dominions enjoy’d the greatest Calm, and the fullest measure of Felicity, that any People in any Age, for so long time together, have been bless’d with; to the wonder and envy of all the other parts of Christendom.

But this was no effortless glide into a pre-chewed future. It was not as if the usual constraints on existence were somehow suspended: the demands of family life, the inadequacy of pre-modern medicine, the unkindness of others. These, needless to say, impinged on all lives. Added to them was the larger context of ferocious political and religious argument, which coloured the entire century. England underwent two revolutions, two civil wars, and had two kings deposed. Right in the middle of the century it became a republic for the only time in its history, run by a politburo of military-religious men, with an all-pervasive informer network. Individuals lived in fear and private diaries from the time were slashed and razored by their authors to cut out any incriminating passages. That experience explains much of the following century, characterized by a hunger not for the fierce statement of metaphysical truths but for a kind of easy civility in which order and freedom could sit side by side.

The Civil War of the seventeenth century was fought by the gentry against the gentry. On one side were those who felt a conservative if at times reluctant loyalty to the king; on the other those who felt that the autocratic manner of the King’s government and its quasi-Catholic beliefs had betrayed them and the country which they owned and of which they were the bedrock. It was a war between the gentry’s belief in inherited order and its belief in its own significance as a governing class.