On 26 Feb. 1549 a private bill ‘to dis[in]herit William West, [for] attempting to poison’ his uncle Thomas West, 9th Lord De La Warr, received a first reading in the House of Lords. The De La Warr estates were entailed on the male line and, as the 9th Lord had no children, his heirs were his half-brother, Sir Owen West, who had no sons, and then William West, the son of his next half-brother Sir George West. It was also assumed that William would inherit the De La Warr barony, although the peerage was a barony by writ and consequently not tied to the heirs male (indeed it had passed to the West family in the fifteenth century through the female line).

Sir George West had died in 1538, when William was still a child. De La Warr had then taken his nephew ‘into his keeping and service … tendering him as his natural son to his great cost’, employing him to serve him at his table. However, the baron alleged that, on reaching the age of 18, William had grown impatient of waiting for his inheritance and plotted to kill his uncle, though in the first instance this would have benefited Sir Owen, who survived until 1551. William procured poison, which he mixed with the drink he was to serve to De La Warr. However, one of the other servants, ‘perceiving certain powder about the brim of the … cup otherwise than was accustomed’, alerted the 9th Lord who, ‘having suspicion thereof and of nature somewhat abhorring the same, refrained to drink thereof’.

William was imprisoned in the Tower of London and evidently signed a confession. Surprisingly however, attempted murder was not in itself a felony at this date, and consequently De La Warr decided to proceed against his nephew via private legislation. The bill passed rapidly through the upper House, but, for reasons unknown, the Commons redrafted it. The new bill was given a first reading on 14 Mar. 1549, but proceeded no further because the session ended that same day. De La Warr tried again when a new session began in the following November; once more his bill quickly passed the Lords, but the Commons again insisted on redrafting it. Moreover, the lower House wanted to hear William’s side of the story. Consequently he was brought from the Tower on 23 Jan. 1550, when he insisted that he was not guilty and had only signed the confession out of fear. However, three witnesses (possibly servants of De La Warr) testified against him. This appears to have convinced the Commons of his guilt and they passed the bill, which was duly enacted. William was then released from the Tower the following June.

The 1550 act did not break the entail. Instead it empowered De La Warr to appoint trustees to hold the estates during William’s lifetime, after which they would pass to the next male heir. It also banned William himself from inheriting the barony, but without disbarring his heirs. Despite William’s attempt to murder him, De La Warr felt bound to make provision ‘towards the maintenance of’ his nephew’s ‘living and degree’. Consequently, when the baron made his will in 1554 he provided for William ‘of my charity and nothing of his desert’. He granted his nephew a £350 annuity and the use of three houses, two in Sussex and one in London. He also referred obscurely to William’s other ‘vices and evil demeanours’ which, ‘for that he is of my blood’, he had ‘passed over in silence’.

De La Warr died shortly after making his will, and William subsequently persuaded his uncle’s trustees to surrender their interest to him. In February 1556 Mary I formally granted William possession of his uncle’s lands, describing him as ‘Lord La Warr’. Nevertheless, he was not summoned to Parliament. The following summer, having been indicted for plotting against Mary, William tried to claim the privilege of a peer to be tried by his fellow noblemen. However, the heralds ruled that he was a commoner, not because of the 1550 act, but because, as a barony by writ, the De La Warr title had descended de jure to the heir general, the 9th Lord’s niece. William withdrew his claim in order to enter a ‘not guilty’ plea, but was convicted of treason regardless. He was pardoned in April 1557.

Shortly after being pardoned, William crossed the Channel as part of the English forces sent by Mary to aid her husband, Philip II of Spain, against the French. William took the opportunity to present a petition to Philip containing ‘such matter … as is neither true nor justifiable’, which suggests that he had renewed his claim to the De La Warr peerage. He was imprisoned on his return to England, but released in March 1558. A year later, following the accession of Elizabeth I, William signed himself merely ‘Wyllyam West’, when he wrote to the secretary of state, Sir William Cecil, lobbying for an act to reverse his conviction for treason. He was also described merely as William West in the subsequent statute, which was passed in 1563. However, this was presumably a legal necessity, as he had been convicted of treason as a commoner. Elsewhere William called himself De La Warr in the 1560s, indicating that he had not abandoned his claim to the peerage.

The issue of William’s status came to a head when he was appointed joint lord lieutenant of Sussex in November 1569, alongside Anthony Browne, 1st Viscount Montagu and Thomas Sackville, 1st Lord Buckhurst. In the commission William was named as a commoner and was ranked last; but if he had indeed inherited the De La Warr peerage (which dated back to 1299), he should have been placed above Buckhurst, whose barony had been created in 1567. Queen Elizabeth probably did not want her kinsman Buckhurst to be relegated to third place in the commission. The problem was solved in February 1570, when William was prevailed upon to accept the De La Warr title as a new creation, which positioned him below Buckhurst in the hierarchy.

Following William’s death in 1595 his son, Thomas West, 2nd Lord De La Warr, claimed the precedence of the old De La Warr barony. This question was referred to the Lords in 1597, when the upper House found in his favour, a verdict which effectively set aside the rights of the heir general. The 1550 act was thereafter almost forgotten until it achieved contemporary relevance in the twentieth century. In 1955, Tony Benn cited it as a precedent when he sought to introduce a bill enabling him to renounce the inheritance of the Stansgate peerage – and even facetiously offered to attempt to poison his father.

BC

Further reading:

Sessional Papers. Printed by Order of the House of Lords (1955), iii. 31-2

K.J. Kesselring, Making Murder Public (2019)

L.O Pike, Constitutional Hist. of the House of Lords (1894)

Chronicle. of England … by Charles Wriothesley, II ed. W.D. Hamilton (Camden Society new series xx)

J. H. Round, Peerage and Pedigree (1910)

J. Adams, Tony Benn (1992)

When the succession of Charles III to the throne was formally proclaimed on 10 September 2022, it marked the first appearance on television of an accession council. This body dates back to 24 March 1603, when a meeting of the lord mayor of London, assorted English peers and bishops, and those commoners who had served as privy councillors to the recently deceased monarch, Elizabeth I, proclaimed the accession of James VI of Scotland as James I of England. Forty-four years earlier Elizabeth had issued the proclamation of her accession in her own name, but a new procedure was now necessary because James was still in Scotland. As it took several days for the news of his accession to reach him, and rather longer for his authorization of a new privy council to arrive in London, for several weeks the accession council effectively ran the country.

The secretary of state, Sir Robert Cecil, had established contact with James before Elizabeth’s death, and they had agreed the wording of the accession proclamation, but Cecil was obliged to act in secret because Elizabeth refused to allow any discussion of the succession. Cecil therefore could do nothing formally until after the queen had died, nor could James issue a proclamation as king of England until he had been informed of the queen’s death, leaving a potentially dangerous hiatus in which England had no legitimate authority. Accordingly, on 20 March 1603 the privy council convened a meeting of the peers and bishops who were then in and around London. They informed this assembly that, on the death of the queen, the powers of the councillors and other royal officers would cease. Only those such as the lord mayor of London who held offices in urban corporations would retain their places. However, those present were reminded that the peers and bishops constituted the great council (whose membership was the same as the upper house of Parliament) and were told that it would fall to them to preserve the peace of the realm.

The queen died at Richmond in the early hours of 24 March, whereupon those members of the council who had attended her deathbed returned to Whitehall, where another meeting of the peers and bishops was convened. According to one widely circulated account of these events, the lord admiral, Charles Howard, 1st earl of Nottingham announced that the queen had finally been induced to name James as her successor. The accession council then agreed to proclaim James as the new king of England, which they promptly did outside the palace. The proclamation was signed by 21 peers and four bishops, together with the lord mayor of London, seven of the former commoner privy councillors and one Irish peer. However, the names of three further peers were added to later printed editions of the document.

The accession council then went to the city of London, where they were admitted after promising to proclaim James, the lord mayor taking as security the Garter insignia of the lord treasurer, Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst, before allowing them to enter. They again proclaimed the new king at Cheapside and then dined at the house of one of the sheriffs of London, from where they sent three heralds and a trumpeter to proclaim James on Tower Hill. At 10 at night they wrote to James to notify him of the death of the queen, although they acknowledged that he might have already heard the news from Sir Robert Carey, who had departed for Scotland without their authorization as soon as the queen died.

Cecil probably intended that the accession council would confine itself to proclaiming the new monarch, after which it should be brought to an end as soon as possible and the normal processes of government by the privy council be resumed. In the short term this would require the former members of the Elizabethan privy council to continue meeting as though the queen was still alive, but this met with objections from the nobles. According to one report, Henry Percy, 3rd earl of Northumberland asserted that nothing should be done without the participation of the nobility, who were councillors by birth but had been neglected for too long, and that their exclusion would set a bad example to the king.

James was probably also keen to quickly dissolve the accession council, as its members did not owe their place to royal appointment, implying that there existed in England an alternative source of authority to the crown. On 27 March he authorized the former members of Elizabeth’s privy council to act in his name, which would have rendered the accession council redundant. However, the following day he felt obliged to order the nobility to continue to meet together, and consequently the accession council continued until the middle of April. In addition to those whose names appear on the accession proclamation, at least four further peers, three bishops and another Irish lord also took part in the council’s proceedings. Cecil complained to his brother, Thomas Cecil, 2nd Lord Burghley, about having to deal with what he called ‘our Parliament council’, stating that he dared not act without its consent and that business which had previously been done in a day now took a week.

On 25 March the accession council wrote to the magistrates of the various counties of England ordering them to proclaim James in their localities. The accession of the new king passed off peacefully, which in practice left the council with little more to do. Aside from facilitating communications with James, they issued warrants to the lord treasurer for the payment of money, and sent advice to English commissioners negotiating a commercial treaty in Bremen. They also authorized local magistrates to continue impressing men for service in the Netherlands in the war against Spain. On 10 Apr. James wrote to the council from Newcastle ordering the privy council (to whom he had added Northumberland and three other noblemen), to resume normal meeting. The other peers were instructed to remain in the vicinity of London to assist the privy council if needed, but implicitly were no longer to meet together. By 17 April James’s new privy council was operational, and the accession council had been dissolved.

BC

Further reading:

Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata ed. W.P. Baildon (1894)

E. Howes, Annales … Begun by John Stow (1631)

M. Nicholls, Investigating Gunpowder Plot (c.1991)

A. Nelson, Monstrous Adversary (2003)

Biographies of Robert Cecil (as 1st earl of Salisbury), the 1st earl of Nottingham, Lord Buckhurst, Robert Carey (as 1st earl of Monmouth), the 3rd earl of Northumberland and the 2nd Lord Burghley may also be found in The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (2021).

On 9 August 1561 Lady Katherine Grey, one of Elizabeth I’s maids of honour, confided to her colleague, Elizabeth St Loe, that she was pregnant, and that she had secretly married the father, Edward Seymour, 1st earl of Hertford, currently travelling in France to complete his education. Elizabeth promptly burst into tears, lamenting that Katherine had married without the queen’s knowledge.

Elizabeth St Loe’s dismay was understandable. Katherine was the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Mary, and arguably next in line to the throne should the unmarried Elizabeth I die childless, so her marriage was a politically sensitive subject. As ultimately determined by Henry, the royal succession ran through his three children, the future Edward VI, Mary I and Elizabeth. If none of them had children, then Henry intended the crown to pass next to the descendants of his younger sister, Mary, who were given precedence over those of his elder sister, Margaret. In 1553 Edward had attempted to set aside the claims of his half-sisters, instead naming as his heir Katherine’s elder sister Lady Jane Grey, whose father-in-law was the king’s dominant chief minister, John Dudley, duke of Northumberland. However, Jane famously reigned for only nine days, before being overthrown by Mary and later executed. Elizabeth had succeeded Mary in 1558, but was still single and childless. Accordingly, Katherine’s marriage, and the prospect of her having legitimate children, revived the question of her position in the succession. Elizabeth discouraged all discussion of that subject, fearful that any acknowledged successor would become a rival centre of power. Moreover, she disliked Katherine, possibly because the events of 1553 still rankled.

Katherine’s news now rapidly reached the queen, who became convinced that there were ‘great practices and purposes’ behind her marriage involving several ‘lords and gentlemen’ of the court. It was indeed easy to see why prominent members of the regime might support Katherine’s claims as Elizabeth’s heir, and her marriage to Hertford. The leading alternative candidate for the succession was Mary Queen of Scots, the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister Margaret. However, Mary was a Catholic, and her accession would threaten the Reformation. By contrast Hertford was a firm Protestant, and his marriage to Katherine could be interpreted as a means of guaranteeing a Protestant heir if Elizabeth failed to marry and have children. In addition, Hertford was the son of Edward Seymour, 1st duke of Somerset, lord protector in the early part of Edward VI’s reign. A number of Elizabeth’s advisers had belonged to Somerset’s circle, not least secretary of state Sir William Cecil (later 1st Lord Burghley), who started his career in the duke’s household.

Elizabeth duly sent Katherine to the Tower for questioning. She was soon joined by Hertford, who had been hastily summoned home, and their son was born there on 24 September. The couple, whose relationship dated from the reign of Mary Tudor, insisted that no one had known of their marriage except Hertford’s sister Jane, who had since died, and the minister who had performed the ceremony; he had been supplied by Jane, and they didn’t know his name. Shortly after Elizabeth’s accession, Katherine’s mother had agreed to write to the queen on their behalf, but died before doing so. With Katherine increasingly unhappy at court gossip linking Hertford with other ladies, the earl promised to marry her at the earliest opportunity, which presented itself in November 1560. The ceremony was conducted in Hertford’s bedroom at his Westminster residence. The couple produced witnesses who testified that Katherine’s mother had intended to obtain the queen’s consent to their matrimony, and that Katherine and Jane had entered Hertford’s house on the day in question. Their story exonerated anyone else from complicity in the match, but crucially Katherine and Hertford could not find a witness to the ceremony itself. This lack of evidence allowed the queen to deny that the marriage had ever taken place, and she secured a ruling to that effect from a commission headed by the archbishop of Canterbury on 12 May 1562.

The couple remained in the Tower, incarcerated separately. However, in May 1562 Hertford bribed the warders to let him visit Katherine, and she again became pregnant. On 10 Feb. 1563, the day before she gave birth for a second time in prison, Hertford was prosecuted in Star Chamber, fined £15,000, and sentenced to remain in custody during the queen’s pleasure. In the following summer confinement in the Tower was commuted to house arrest, Katherine being sent to her uncle’s house in Essex while Hertford was moved to his mother’s house in Middlesex. They never met again. Katherine died, still under constraint, on 27 January 1567. Her deathbed pleas for Hertford’s release were ignored, and he was not freed until June 1571. He promptly tried to persuade Elizabeth to reopen the question of the validity of his marriage, but was rebuffed. In November 1595 the earl was briefly returned to the Tower for initiating legal proceedings to overturn the 1562 verdict.

Following the death of Elizabeth in March 1603, Hertford was quick to assure James I – Mary Queen of Scots’ son – of his loyalty. In 1605 he headed up a ceremonial embassy to Brussels, which may have cost him £12,000. Probably in return, the king agreed to the legality of Hertford’s marriage being tried before a jury in February 1606. However, James then had second thoughts, presumably fearing that a decision in Hertford’s favour could undermine his own title to the crown. With the jury on the point of delivering its verdict, the attorney general, Sir Edward Coke, intervened to halt proceedings. According to a later account, the minister who performed the ceremony had finally come forward, and the jury intended to find in favour of the marriage. Instead, that verdict was never formally delivered. Nevertheless twenty years later, James’s son Charles I evidently felt that the Stuart dynasty’s hold on the throne was now secure, and, hoping to rally support for his beleaguered favourite George Villiers, 1st duke of Buckingham, tacitly accepted that Katherine and Hertford had indeed been legally married. Consequently in 1626 William Seymour, the son of the boy born in the Tower in 1561, was allowed to take his place in the House of Lords as Hertford’s heir.

BC

Further reading:

L. De Lisle, The Sisters who Would be Queen (2008).

M. Levine, Early Elizabethan Succession Question, 1558-1568 (1966)

S. Doran and P. Kewes (eds.), Doubtful and Dangerous: the Question of Succession in Late Elizabethan England (2016)

Some records of the investigation into the marriage have been printed in T. Lewis, Lives of the Friends and Contemporaries of Lord Chancellor Clarendon (1862), iii. 183-201; for a fuller version see the British Library’s digitised manuscripts, Harley MS 249, ff. 45-94.

Biographies of the 1st and 2nd earls of Hertford, the 1st duke of Buckingham, and Charles I as prince of Wales, feature in our recent volumes, The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (2021).

Find more from our Lords 1558-1603 project at the First Elizabethan Age page on our blog.

The new American president, Joseph Robinette Biden Jr., was born in Pennsylvania, but moved as a child to Delaware, which he subsequently represented in Congress as a senator for over 30 years. The state of Delaware owes its name to an early 17th century English peer, Thomas West, 3rd Baron De La Warr, who never set foot in the territory which would later become the state, but who played an important part in the early English colonization of North America.

Although West’s title is now standardly spelt ‘De La Warr’, it is a very old one, dating back to the 13th century, and consequently there has been considerable variation in the spelling over the years. West signed himself ‘Tho[mas] Lawarre’ (see for instance TNA, SP14/64/53), but contemporaries sometimes referred to him as ‘Delaware’ (TNA, PC2/27, f. 24v). Despite the antiquity of their title, the Wests’ recent history was troubled. Thomas’ grandfather, William West, had been accused of attempting to poison his childless uncle, the 9th Lord De La Warr, and only secured the title by a new creation in 1570. Moreover, heavy debts obliged the family to sell many of their lands. As a result, when Thomas West succeeded his father in 1602 he inherited what he described as ‘a very broken estate’ (HMC Hatfield, xii. 84). Like other barons with more status than property, such as Edward Cromwell, 3rd Lord Cromwell, and George Tuchet, 11th Lord Audley, De La Warr sought to recoup his family’s fortunes in England’s expanding colonial empire. However, while Cromwell and Audley turned to Ireland for this purpose, De La Warr looked to America.

In 1607 the first permanent English settlement on the North American mainland was established by the Virginia Company at Jamestown. Two years later the Company appointed De La Warr governor of the colony, and he set sail for Virginia on 1 April 1610. His arrival in Chesapeake Bay in early June saved the nascent settlement. A recent war with the Powhatans, the local native inhabitants, had gone so badly for the English that they’d abandoned Jamestown, and were about to return to England when De La Warr, accompanied by substantial reinforcements, sailed into the bay. Jamestown was re-established and new forts constructed, while a fresh offensive was launched against the Powhatans. However, De La Warr soon fell ill. He later wrote that he was ‘welcomed by a hot and violent ague’, followed by ‘the flux …: then the cramp’, and finally an attack of gout, an ailment from which he had previously suffered (Narratives of Early Virginia ed. L. G. Tyler, 210). This led him to leave Virginia, returning to England in June 1611. Nevertheless, he remained formally the governor of the colony, and in his absence the settlers named Delaware Bay in his honour.

Back in England De La Warr and his wife introduced that celebrated Native American, Pocahontas, to the royal court in 1616. Two years later the baron set sail again to return to Virginia, but died en route, shortly after being feasted by the Iberian governor of the Azores – leading to suspicions that he’d been poisoned. Two of De La Warr’s brothers, Francis and John, later served as acting governors of Virginia, but subsequent barons De La Warr had little connection with the colonies. Nevertheless, Thomas West’s contribution to the early history of British America lives on in the names of Delaware Bay and River, from which the eponymous state derived its name.

BC

Further reading:

A. Brown, Genesis of the United States (1964)

J.F. Fausz, ‘An “Abundance of Blood Shed on Both Sides”: England’s First Indian War’, Virginia Magazine of History and Biography xcviii. 3-56

Records of the Virginia Company of London, ed. S.M. Kingsbury (1906-35)

Narratives of Early Virginia ed. L. G. Tyler (1959)

Biographies of the 3rd Lord De La Warr, the 3rd Lord Cromwell, and the 11th Lord Audley (later 1st earl of Castlehaven) will appear in the History of Parliament’s volumes on ‘The House of Lords 1604-1629’ ed. Andrew Thrush (due out this month).

Historians of the Elizabethan and early Jacobean periods have long been familiar with the vast trove of documents at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, created during more than half a century (1558-1612) when first William Cecil, 1st Lord Burghley and then his younger son Robert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury, were at the heart of English government. These documents, in some respects richer than the surviving official government archive, were comprehensively calendared by the Royal Commission on Historical Manuscripts, and are now also available online on a subscription basis. However, there is a danger that these riches can distort our understanding of the period, leading us to underestimate other prominent political figures of the day.

One such man is Thomas Sackville, 1st Lord Buckhurst and later 1st earl of Dorset, who served as lord treasurer from Burghley’s death in 1598 until his own death in 1608, when he was succeeded by Salisbury. It’s impossible to say whether Sackville collected a similar cornucopia of documents, as his papers were largely destroyed in the Great Fire of London in 1666. Consequently historians are forced to approach his career through the official archive or those of his contemporaries, such as the Cecils – a complicated task, since Sackville worked so closely with Robert Cecil that it’s sometimes difficult to distinguish where the real initiative lay. Moreover, historians of Sackville’s Jacobean career as lord treasurer must remember that they are jumping into the middle of a story which started nearly five years before James I’s accession in 1603. Richard Hoyle, the most authoritative historian of the crown lands, has argued that it was Sackville’s appointment as lord treasurer by Elizabeth I which marked the beginning of reform of the royal estates. It is likely that this reforming zeal was also carried over into other areas of government finance.

Symptomatic of the Cecilian myopia of this period’s historiography is the assertion that Robert Cecil ‘seems to have been the only member of the privy council with any interest in trade or any contacts in the City’ (P. Croft, ‘Fresh Light on Bate’s Case’, Historical Journal, xxx. 530). In fact, Sackville was the grandson of a lord mayor of London, while his first cousin was William Garway, one of the most prominent London merchants of his day. In 1604 Sackville masterminded the creation of the great farm of the customs, whereby the vast majority of the customs receipts were paid to a syndicate of London merchants in return for a fixed rent. Over subsequent decades the customs farm became an increasingly sophisticated financial operation which served to channel credit from the London money market to the impecunious crown, in some respects foreshadowing the role of the Bank of England. Sackville encouraged his fellow councillors to sponsor rival syndicates to bid for the farm, and then granted the initial contract to Cecil’s syndicate. However, possibly by prearrangement, that group quickly amalgamated with one led by Sackville’s cousin Garway (almost certainly Sackville’s own group), this outcome enabling him to gratify both Cecil and, covertly, himself.

Sackville, like most politicians of the period, was not averse to using his public office for his own enrichment (although the nickname ‘Sackfill’ appears to have been attached to his father, not himself). Indeed, this trait drew the opprobrium of Sir Julius Caesar, who was appointed chancellor of the exchequer in July 1606. Nevertheless, Caesar was wrong to believe that Sackville was sanguine about the massive deterioration in the public finances in the Jacobean period. In late 1603 the lord treasurer proposed a significant austerity drive, only to be opposed by Robert Cecil, who feared that the cuts would impair the kingdom’s defences. The principal obstacle to retrenchment was the king’s persistent and unbounded generosity. However, Sackville probably believed that little would be served by confronting James directly in such a way as to antagonise him. Sackville’s thinking was profoundly influenced by Baldassare Castiglione’s Book of the Courtier, which argued that it was pointless for a counsellor, no matter how well intentioned, to give good advice to a prince unless he was willing to ‘sugar the pill’ using all a courtier’s wiles to ensure that the prince was receptive (B. Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, transl. G. Bull (1967), 289).

Despite this reticence, in early 1607 the lord treasurer’s patience seems to have finally snapped, and he refused to pay out money which James intended to give to one of his Scottish courtiers. During the subsequent heated confrontation between Sackville and the king, the lord treasurer suffered some kind of health crisis, possibly a stroke, and he was forced to retire to the country. James sent Sackville a diamond ring as an assurance of his continued favour, but predictably did nothing to rein in his improvident largesse. The following year Sackville suffered what was probably a second stroke, this time fatal, during a privy council meeting. However, the trigger on this occasion was not the king’s spending but a private dispute about an estate which he was hoping to secure for the wife of his grandson Edward Sackville, later 4th earl of Dorset.

BC

Further reading:

R. Zim, ‘A Poet in Politics: Thomas Sackville, Lord Buckhurst and First Earl of Dorset (1536-1608)’, Historical Research, lxxix. (2006)

R. Hoyle, ‘ “Shearing the hog”: the reform of the estates, c.1598-1640’, The Estates of the English Crown, 1558-1640 ed. R.W. Hoyle (1992)

A.P. Newton, ‘Establishment of the Great Farm of the Customs’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, ser. 4, i. (1918)

C. Russell, King James VI & I and his English Parliaments ed. R. Cust and A. Thrush (2011)

Biographies of the 1st and 4th earls of Dorset, and of the 1st earl of Salisbury, will appear in the House of Lords 1604-29 volumes, scheduled for publication later this year.

On 26 October 1605 the Catholic nobleman William Parker, 5th Lord Monteagle, received an anonymous letter urging him to absent himself from the forthcoming session of Parliament, due to open on 5th November. This missive, the first significant hint of the Gunpowder Plot, warned mysteriously that those attending ‘shall receive a terrible blow … and yet they shall not see who hurts them’. Monteagle took the letter to Court, where he showed it to the secretary of state, Robert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury. The earl was initially sceptical of the letter, in part because he thought it ‘very improbable that only one nobleman should be warned and no more’ (Winwood’s Memorials ed. E. Sawyer, ii. 171). At this date there were perhaps as many as 17 Catholic members of the House of Lords and, unlike the Commons, there was nothing to prevent them from taking their seats. Consequently, it was likely that had the conspirators succeeded, they would have blown up several of their most powerful coreligionists, at the very moment when they needed the support of the Catholic peerage for their intended new regime.

Unsurprisingly, the subsequent investigation into the plot revealed that preventing Catholic peers from attending Parliament on 5 November had been a lively issue of debate among the conspirators. Some of them, notably Robert Catesby and Thomas Winter, feared that warnings would compromise the security of the plot. Catesby said he would rather the Catholic nobility were blown up than that the plot should fail. Moreover he contemptuously dismissed these peers as ‘atheists, fools and cowards’, thereby expressing tensions within the Catholic community over the widespread tendency of its most prominent lay members to seek accommodation with the Protestant authorities rather than suffer for their beliefs. Nevertheless, he found it necessary to assure his colleagues that ‘tricks’ would be used to keep the Catholic peers safe – and such undertakings reinforced the authorities’ assumption that Monteagle was not the only lord who had been warned to stay away (D. Jardine, A Narrative of the Gunpowder Plot, 73-8).

Following the arrest of Guy Fawkes and the exposure of the plot, certain peers came under immediate scrutiny. Foremost among them was Anthony Maria Browne, 2nd Viscount Montagu, whom Catesby had definitely approached. During the previous session, on 25 June 1604, Montagu had made an outspoken defence of the Catholics in the upper House, for which he was briefly imprisoned. His reputation as a champion of his faith, together with the fact that he had been absent from Westminster on 5 November, quickly aroused the government’s suspicions, and he was taken into custody on the 7th. In addition the presence of Robert Keyes among the plotters undoubtedly brought Keyes’ employer, Henry, 4th Lord Mordaunt, to the attention of the authorities. Mordaunt had also been absent on 5 November and ten days later both he and Viscount Montagu were sent to the Tower. The following day Guy Fawkes revealed that Francis Tresham had been ‘exceeding earnest’ with Catesby and Winter to ensure that his brother-in-law, Monteagle, was forewarned. Ever since then, it has been generally assumed that it was Tresham who wrote the anonymous letter. According to Fawkes, the conspirators were also informed that Edward, 10th Lord Stourton, another of Tresham’s brothers-in-law, ‘by accident’ would not be attending the start of the session (TNA, SP 14/216/1, f. 150). This revelation brought Stourton to the attention of the authorities; he had indeed been absent on the 5th, and he was promptly dispatched to the Tower. However, such absences alone were apparently not enough to render a Catholic lord suspect. No action was taken against John, 1st Lord Petre, Thomas, 3rd Lord Darcy of Chiche, or several other Catholic peers, even though they were also missing from the Lords that day.

Mere knowledge of treason, without informing the authorities, is in itself a serious felony, termed misprision of treason. By late February 1606 the government had decided not to arraign Montagu, Mordaunt and Stourton for that offence, the king having concluded that they stayed away on 5 November because of ‘some general advises in respect of uncertain troubles’, rather than specific warnings (J. Hunter, Hallamshire ed. A. Gatty, 122; J. Hawarde, Les Reportes del Cases in Camera Stellata, 438). Nevertheless, the suspicions about their conduct lingered, and it was felt necessary to take some exemplary action against them. At the very least, all three were guilty of absenting themselves from Parliament without having first secured the king’s permission. Mordaunt and Stourton were duly put on trial in Star Chamber the following June, though Montagu was spared through the influence of the lord treasurer, his father-in-law Thomas Sackville, 1st earl of Dorset. Mordaunt and Stourton were heavily fined and sentenced to remain imprisoned during the king’s pleasure. In the event Mordaunt’s fine was never collected, while Stourton only paid a quarter of his. Even so, the former was probably still under some form of restraint when he died in 1609, and the latter did not fully regain his liberty until ten years later.

BC

Biographies of all the peers mentioned will appear in the History of Parliament’s forthcoming volumes on the House of Lords 1604-1629.

In March 2017 a new, cartoon-style mural by artist Chris Burke was unveiled on platform 2 of Tunbridge Wells station in Kent. This replaced an older mural painted in 1989 by Brian Barnes, which had been removed for safety reasons. Like its predecessor, the new artwork illustrates the history of the town and, also like its predecessor, it depicts Dudley North, 3rd Lord North who, we are informed, ‘discovered the healing properties of the chalybeate spring’ in 1606.

According to an eighteenth-century historian of the town, North had fallen ‘into a lingering consumptive disorder’ which defied the ministrations of his doctors. Seeking a cure, in the spring of 1606 he retired to Eridge House, a hunting lodge about two-and-a-half miles from Tunbridge Wells, belonging to his friend Edward Neville, 8th or 1st Lord Abergavenny. He stayed there about six weeks but, finding no improvement in his condition, set out to return to London. Passing through a wood, he came across a spring and noticed that the water had a ‘shining mineral scum’ and a ‘ferruginous’ [i.e. rusty] taste, causing him to suspect that it might have medicinal properties. He had some bottled and brought back with him to London, where his physicians confirmed its beneficial properties. He subsequently returned to Eridge and, after three months, the combination of the spring water and pure country air had wrought a total cure.

There are good reasons for accepting this account. North himself wrote that he ‘first made known to London and the king’s people’ the ‘uses of Tunbridge and Epsom waters for health and cure’. Moreover, although North lived to be over 80, his writings are full of complaints about his health, which he believed had been permanently impaired by the overuse of a ‘treacle’ he had taken to guard against the bubonic plague during the 1603 epidemic, one of the worst of the seventeenth century. (This treacle was probably theriac, otherwise known as Venice treacle, a preparation which typically included viper’s flesh and opium).

However, there is a problem with dating his discovery to the spring of 1606. Parliament was in session from 21 January until 27 May and, although North was only recorded as attending slightly more than half the sittings of the House of Lords during this time, there is no period of absence long enough to accommodate a six week stay at Eridge. It is, of course, possible that the incident took place later that year. However, there is an alternative account, recorded by a descendant of Lord Abergavenny’s steward. In this version, dated to 1615 or 1616, North discovered the spring while journeying to Eridge, and thought that the waters must have medicinal properties because they tasted like those of Spa, in modern Belgium, whose waters were so famous that the town became synonymous with medicinal watering-places. Whatever the date of North’s discovery, in 1619 it was reported that for three or four years the waters of Tunbridge ‘have been much frequented’ and the fortunes of a spa town had been made.

BC

For further details see:

• B. Burr, History of Tunbridge-Wells (1766), 5-14
• [D. North], Forest of Varieties (1645), 122, 134, 214
• ‘Papers Relating to Proceedings in the County of Kent’ ed. R. Almack in Camden Miscellany iii (Camden Society lxi, 1854), p. v
• Chamberlain Letters N.E. McClure (1939), ii. 261

Biographies of Lords North and Abergavenny will appear in the History of Parliament’s volumes on The House of Lords 1604-29, scheduled for publication in 2019.

Contrary to popular belief, Sir Francis Drake did not command the English fleet which defeated the Spanish Armada in 1588. That man was the then Lord Admiral Charles Howard, 2nd Lord Howard of Effingham , later 1st earl of Nottingham. The prestige of the victory helped ensure that Nottingham was still Lord Admiral in 1606 when the King of Denmark, Christian IV, arrived in England to visit his brother-in-law James I.

On 11 August, the eve of Christian’s return home, he entertained the English king and queen and their court, including Nottingham, on board his ship. James was unwilling to stay too long and assigned Nottingham to keep an eye on the time. Accordingly the Admiral put his pocket-watch forward by two hours to give his master an excuse to leave early. In due course, James asked Nottingham what time it was, and the earl replied that it was four o’clock and time to disembark. Understandably Christian protested that it was still only two and to emphasise his point he raised two fingers to Nottingham.

This was an unfortunate choice of gesture. Although most English sources insist that Christian had no intention of offending the earl, the French ambassador reported that Christian had frequently teased Nottingham about the substantial age difference between him and his young wife Margaret, and that the gesture was a deliberate ‘sign of the horns’, the traditional symbol of the cuckold. To make matters worse, the countess was currently pregnant. She did not witness the incident but leapt to the same conclusion as the French ambassador. She duly fired off a furious letter to the Danish king’s secretary protesting that ‘there is as much baseness in him [Christian IV] as can be in any man’ and that ‘I deserve as little that name which he gave me, as either the mother of himself or of his children’ (you can read her letter in full here, in the Egerton Papers). Christian in turn complained to James about the countess, who was promptly banned from the English court. However, Nottingham himself remained in office until 1619 when, despite two damning reports into corruption in the navy, he was allowed to retire with a handsome pay-off and a large pension.

There remains the question of what gesture exactly the Danish king made. The sign of the horns is usually thought of as involving the thumb and little finger, but one source states that Christian IV raised his ‘foremost fingers’, presumably his index and middle fingers. If such a gesture could be interpreted as the sign of the horns in early seventeenth century England, could this in fact be the origin of the two fingered salute?

BC

For more unusual 17th century diplomacy, see Dr Paul Hunneyball’s recent blog: ‘How to cause a diplomatic incident with a false beard’.