When the Tudor antiquarian, John Leland, visited the Shropshire church of Whitchurch in the 1530s, he saw the tomb of Sir Gilbert Talbot, a ‘knight of fame’, and noted, with apparent approval, that Talbot had brought the bones of his grandfather, the great soldier, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, from Castillon, where he had fallen in 1453, for reinternment in the church. Sir Gilbert did not have a career to compare with that of his famous ancestor; none the less, despite the disadvantage of being a younger son, he was a notable servant, as soldier, administrator, and diplomat, of three Kings, Edward IV and the first two Tudors. Such future success had appeared improbable in his boyhood. His father, John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, had fallen in the Lancastrian cause in the battle of Northampton in July 1460, when Gilbert was about nine years old. Fortunately for the family, however, the new Yorkist King, Edward IV, was content for their lands to pass to Gilbert’s elder brother, another John, and, in the early 1470s, both brothers found places in Edward’s service, with the young Gilbert becoming one of the King’s cupbearers.

Gilbert’s career began in earnest with his elder brother’s death in June 1473 – in the mysterious words of Leland, ‘not without suspicion of poison’ – leaving as his heir a son, George, only five years old. This made Gilbert the effective head of the family during a long minority. As such, he led a retinue in the invasion of France in 1475, his first known military experience in what was to prove a long military career. He also advanced himself materially by marriage to a wealthy widow, as younger sons of leading families often did. In 1477 he married Elizabeth, widow of Thomas, Lord Scrope of Masham, and daughter of Ralph, Lord Greystoke, lord of the extensive lordship of Wem, about nine miles from the Talbot manor of Whitchurch.

Talbot’s prosperity was threatened by the deposition of Edward V.  He and the new King, Richard III, clearly distrusted each other. There was one obvious point of tension between them. Talbot’s stepson, Thomas, the new Lord Scrope of Masham, had been brought up in Richard’s household, and Talbot had every reason to consider this personal connexion a threat to his own wife’s interest in the Scrope lands. Probably more significant, however, was a more nebulous consideration. In constructing his title to the throne, the new King relied on the story of Edward IV’s alleged pre-contract with Gilbert’s paternal aunt, Eleanor, widow of Sir Thomas Butler of Sudeley (Gloucestershire). She had died in 1468, when Gilbert was only in his late teens, but there can be little doubt that the Talbots knew the truth (or otherwise) of the story. In this context, Gilbert can only have interpreted his removal from the Shropshire bench and the loss of his stewardship of the Talbot lordships of Blackmere and Whitchurch as evidence of the King’s hostility. 

His response was to return to his family’s earlier Lancastrian allegiance and enter communications with Henry Tudor. According to an admittedly rather doubtful source, The Song of Lady Bess, an early-modern narrative poem, there was a crucial meeting on 3 May 1485 at which he, alongside Tudor’s stepfather, Thomas, Lord Stanley, and others, firmly committed themselves to supporting Tudor. This story may be wrong in detail, but Talbot was certainly one of the first men of substance to join Henry after he landed at Milford Haven on the following 7 August. According to the Tudor chronicler, Polydore Vergil, he brought 500 men to Henry at Newport, about seven miles from the Talbot manor of Shifnal. He then went on to command the vanward of Henry’s army at the battle of Bosworth, where he was knighted.

Sir Gilbert’s reward was a place in the new King’s household, and, much more importantly, a grant of an inheritable estate in the valuable Worcestershire manor of Grafton.  These rewards were justified by further military service, both at home and abroad.

He fought for Henry at the battle of Stoke on 16 June 1487 and was there created a knight  banneret.  In June 1489 he was one of the commanders of the army, under the lieutenant of Calais, Giles Daubeney, Lord Daubeney, which repelled a Franco-Flemish force besieging the town of Diksmuide, some 50 miles to the east of the English garrison; and, in 1492, he joined with much of the political nation in the bloodless invasion of France. His military distinction was recognised in 1495 when he was admitted to the Order of the Garter, and he was again in arms in the autumn of 1497 to resist the unthreatening landing of Perkin Warbeck in Cornwall.  Later his status as soldier and courtier brought him an ambassadorial role. In February 1504 the King sent him to Rome to offer congratulations to the new Pope, Julius II, and to invest Guidobaldo da Montefeltro, duke of Urbino, with the Garter. The duke rewarded this service by commissioning Raphael, a native of Urbino, to paint an image of St. George adorned with the Garter, for presentation to his fellow Garter knight.

Not long after Sir Gilbert’s return from Rome, he was appointed as deputy-lieutenant of Calais, where he remained, on and off, for the remainder of his life.  As such, he took part in the 1513 invasion of France, commanded by his nephew, George, earl of Shrewsbury. A tantalising reference suggests that his service came at great personal cost. On 11 July it was reported that, during the siege of Thérouanne, some 30 miles south of Calais, the French artillery had done ‘great hurt’ to the besieging English camp. Talbot is said to have lost a leg and the chamberlain of the royal household, then Charles Somerset, Lord Herbert, to have been killed. In respect of Somerset’s death, the report was wrong, but it is possible that Talbot, who relinquished his Calais office soon afterwards, was severely injured.

On his death in August 1517, Sir Gilbert had an elaborate funeral, costing about £175, equivalent to the annual income of a substantial gentry family, before internment at Whitchurch (his tomb was lost when the church collapsed in 1711, rather ironically the year after his manor house at Grafton burnt down). He died a very wealthy man, in part because of the rewards of royal service but also because of his own entrepreneurial spirit.  His second wife, the widow of a London alderman and mercer, Richard Gardener, gave him an entrée into an élite commercial world, and he became a major wool merchant.  In the inventory taken on his death, his most valuable possession single possession was the store of wool he had at Calais, appraised at as much as £1850. In the longer context of the history of the comital family of Talbot, his successful career and his consequent establishment of a robust junior branch had great significance.  In 1618 his great-great-grandson, George, succeeded his childless fourth cousin, Edward Talbot, as earl of Shrewsbury.

SJP

The seminar takes place on 3 February 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

Political discourse is rooted in speech, and students of modern parliamentary politics have a wealth of material to draw on – Hansard, TV broadcasts of debates, newspaper reports, even WhatsApp messages. The picture for the House of Lords in the reign of Elizabeth I is very different. The principal source, the Lords’ Journal, was conceived by the Tudor clerks quite narrowly as a record of business transacted and decisions reached, but with a veil drawn over the accompanying discussions, which were, after all, meant to be confidential.

A typical page in the manuscript Journal has the date of the current sitting at the top, the date of the next sitting at the bottom, and three columns down the rest of the page; of these, two are used for recording which bishops and lay peers attended that day, while the third column, on the right-hand side, is reserved for any actual proceedings. (Not until 1597 was it thought necessary to allocate more than one page per sitting, to allow for a more detailed account of events.)

The final column might list bills read, and the verdicts agreed on them, reports of conferences with the Commons or audiences with the queen, or such mundane matters as apologies for absence. Or it might not – for some sittings no business is listed at all, creating the impression that the peers were twiddling their thumbs or perhaps nodding off to sleep.

By comparison, the Commons’ Journal, augmented in the latter years of Elizabeth’s reign by several private diaries, is full of summarised speeches, disputes and other incidents which give a good sense of the moods, initiatives and objectives of the lower House. Unsurprisingly, historians have tended to rely on these sources to reconstruct the political narrative of the Elizabethan parliaments, in the process exaggerating the importance of the Commons at the expense of the poorly reported Lords.

In recent decades some effort has been made to correct this imbalance, utilising a variety of different approaches. During the 1980s and 1990s the Lords’ management of legislation was examined in great detail by Sir Geoffrey Elton and David Dean. In conjunction with their research, T. E. Hartley published three volumes of material supplementing the Lords’ and Commons’ Journals, including a few actual speeches made by bishops or lay peers. Around the same time, a ground-breaking study of the 1559 Parliament by Norman Jones demonstrated how manoeuvrings in the Lords could be illuminated through reports from outside Parliament, close reading of the chronology of events at Westminster, and careful examination of the wider political context.

What was missing from these endeavours was a detailed understanding of the individuals who sat in the upper House, a gap in our knowledge which is now close to being filled by the History of Parliament’s project on the Elizabethan Lords. Since 2020 nearly 250 new biographies have been researched and written, reconstructing the lives of the bishops and lay peers who participated in Elizabeth’s 13 parliamentary sessions, identifying their political networks and personal objectives at Westminster, and pondering the place that Parliament occupied in their wider careers.

In following these men’s careers in the Lords over several decades, it has become possible to develop a sense of what ‘normal’ business may have involved and the routine patterns by which things got done. That in turn allows us to observe anomalies in those patterns, and to consider the political forces which operated in those grey areas for which we have only patchy documentation.

However, it is still enormously helpful to pursue these questions in a scenario where we have enough contextual data to speculate with some confidence on how individual peers may have behaved. Accordingly, the focus of this seminar is the Parliament of 1584-5, and specifically the struggles over religion that gave this session much of its flavour.

A quarter of a century after the Elizabethan church settlement of 1559, English Protestantism had reached another crossroads. The first generation of Elizabethan bishops, many notable for their evangelical fervour, were mostly dead, their hopes of continuing reformation disappointed. Their successors, headed by the recently appointed archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, were mostly content to defend what was now the ecclesiastical status quo, despite the poor quality of many clergy, and numerous abuses in appointments and funding.

Indeed, upon becoming archbishop, Whitgift had attempted to clamp down on Protestant clergy who refused to conform to those aspects of the Elizabethan settlement that seemed to hark back to Catholicism. In the process, Whitgift incurred the wrath of Elizabeth’s two most powerful advisers, Lord Burghley and the earl of Leicester, who believed that the primate’s tactics would weaken the Protestant cause at a time when English Catholic numbers were rising again and the threat of war with Catholic Spain was also increasing. Despite enjoying the continuing support of the queen, Whitgift was forced to scrap his plans. Even so, when Parliament met in November 1584, the archbishop came under attack again, this time from the fervently Protestant House of Commons, which petitioned for major reform of the Church, and introduced numerous bills to the same end.

But what of the Lords? When this Parliament opened, only 11 out of a possible 25 other bishops were present to offer the primate their support. On the face of things Whitgift was isolated and on the back foot. He continued to face hostility from Burghley and Leicester, and three of the Commons’ provocative bills were passed by the peers, before being vetoed by Elizabeth.

The bare facts look bad – but they are not the full picture. By exploring the group dynamics of the bishops in 1584-5, and drawing on contextual documentation both from the Commons and from outside Parliament, this paper will argue that Whitgift stood his ground, gathering his closest allies around him, and in the process consolidating the Church hierarchy’s revised priorities. Moreover, although Burghley and Leicester were broadly sympathetic to the demands of the Commons, they also knew that they could not afford to oppose the queen’s own views on the Church too strongly, and were therefore obliged to moderate their attacks on the archbishop. That sense of royal protection for the bishops in turn sheds light on their status within the Lords during Elizabeth’s reign.

The seminar takes place on 3 February 2026, between 5:30 and 6:30 p.m. It is fully ‘hybrid’, which means you can attend either in-person in London at the IHR, or online via Zoom. Details of how to join the discussion are available here.

PMH

Further reading:

G.R. Elton, The Parliament of England 1559-1581 (1986)

David Dean, Law-making and Society in Late Elizabethan England (1996)

T. E. Hartley (ed.), Proceedings in the Parliaments of Elizabeth I (3 volumes, 1981-95)

Norman L. Jones, Faith by Statute (1982)

In 1760 Thomas Worsley of Hovingham, a close friend of George III’s favourite, the earl of Bute, penned a letter to his friend and patron insisting on his family’s antiquity. In their possession, he claimed, were ‘authentic documents of coming over with William the Conquerer’. Worsley’s concern to prove that he was no johnny-come-lately had originally been seen when he was appointed to the privy chamber back in the 1730s, but he was still clearly concerned to emphasise his suitability at the time of his appointment as surveyor general of the king’s works (thanks to Bute).

He had nothing to worry about. The Worsleys were an old family, who could trace their ownership of estates in Lancashire to at least the 14th century. Another branch of the family, ultimately settled in Hampshire (and on the Isle of Wight), produced a parliamentary dynasty of their own.

Supporting Thomas Worsley’s assertion of descent from a companion of William the Conqueror were accounts in ‘ancient chronicles’ recording the family’s progenitor as the giant Sir Elias de Workesley, who had followed Robert Curthose, duke of Normandy, on ‘crusade’. The 1533 Visitation of Lancashire referred to this character as Elias, surnamed Gigas on account of his massive proportions, and suggested he was a contemporary of William I.

It took some time for the northern Worsleys to establish themselves but by the 15th century a number of distinguished figures had already emerged. The marriage of Seth Worsley to Margaret Booth linked the family to two archbishops of York, Margaret’s uncles, William Booth (archbishop 1452-64) and Lawrence Booth (1476-80). Their son, William, later became dean of St Paul’s Cathedral and towards the end of his life became caught up in the Perkin Warbeck conspiracy, for which he was sent to the Tower.

William Worsley may have conspired against Henry VII, but by the 16th century other members of the family had managed to establish themselves on the fringes of the Tudor court in the retinue of the earl of Derby and it seems to have been thanks to the 3rd earl (Edward Stanley) that Sir Robert Worsley was returned to Parliament in 1553 as knight of the shire for Lancashire. Nine years earlier, he had been knighted at Leith in recognition of his services in the English army. Worsley’s return in 1553 seems to have been somewhat accidental, only occurring as a result of a by-election after one of the other recently elected members had declared himself too ill to serve. By becoming one of the Lancashire knights of the shire, Worsley was following in the footsteps of his father-in-law, Thurstan Tyldesley, who had been elected to the same seat in 1547.

Sir Robert’s son, another Robert, continued the family tradition of following the Derbys by attaching himself to the retinue of the 4th earl (Henry Stanley). A passionate Protestant, as keeper of the gaol at Salford he had numerous recusant (Catholic) prisoners in his care, whom he tried to persuade away from their faith by organising time dedicated to reading from the Bible. How successful that policy was is uncertain, but he found the burden of his role intolerable and by the end of his life he had lost all of his principal estates in Lancashire. Like his father, he seems to have owed his election to Parliament to his patron, Derby, though in his case he was returned for the Cornish borough of Callington.

The best part of a century passed before another Worsley was returned to the Commons. In the interim, having lost their original estates, the family had relocated to Hovingham, near Malton in North Yorkshire. The manor had been acquired by Sir Robert Worsley in 1563 from Sir Thomas Gerard, and the connection was reinforced by the subsequent marriage of the younger Robert to Gerard’s daughter, Elizabeth. In 1685, it was one of the Hovingham Worsleys, Thomas (great-great-grandson of Robert and Elizabeth), who succeeded in being returned for Parliament, where he proved to be ‘totally inactive’.

Inactive he may have been, but this did not prevent him from making his views clear to the lord lieutenant when he was faced with the ‘Three Questions’, framed to tease out opposition to James II’s policies. In response to them he insisted that he would ‘go free into the House, and give my vote as my judgment and reason shall direct when I hear the debates’. This was not at all the response required by the king’s officials, and he was removed from his local offices. He regained them shortly after at the Revolution but it was not until 1698 that he was re-elected to Parliament, again for Malton. In 1712 he was removed from local office again, this time probably on account of his Whiggery.

The older Thomas lived to see the Hanoverian accession, which he doubtless welcomed. Three years before that his son (another Thomas) had been returned to Parliament as one of the Members for Thirsk, after failed attempts in 1708 and 1710. This Thomas Worsley also seems to have played little or no role in the Commons. This was perhaps ironic, given that his marriage to Mary Frankland linked him directly to Oliver Cromwell. Efforts by his father to secure him a government post through the patronage of the earl of Carlisle came to nothing.

The trio of Thomas Worsleys in Parliament was completed by the election for Orford of the second Thomas’s son in 1761. It was this Thomas Worsley, the friend of Bute, who had been so concerned to prove his family’s antiquity. Although he was to sit first for Orford and then (like his forebear, Robert) for Callington, Parliament was not Thomas’s passion. Rather, his interests lay in equestrianism, collecting and architecture. His true claim to fame was rebuilding the family seat at Hovingham, creating the elegant Georgian house that endures to this day, but his dedication to horseflesh was equally strong and he seems to have looked out for suitable mounts for his contacts, the king among them. Writing to Sir James Lowther, 5th bt. (future earl of Lonsdale) in 1763, he mentioned trying out one of Lowther’s horses in front of the king and queen. They liked the animal, but concluded it was not ‘strong enough to carry [the king’s] weight’. [HMC Lonsdale, 132]

Thomas Worsley died in December 1778 at his London residence in Scotland Yard. [Morning Chronicle, 15 Dec. 1778] Just a few months before, he had been contacted by the duke of Ancaster, the lord great chamberlain, requiring him to see to the repair of the House of Lords, which was reported to be ‘in bad condition’. [PA, LGC/5/1, f. 279] By then, he was probably in no fit state to oversee the work.

This Thomas seems to have been the last member of his family to show much interest in national politics until the 20th century. His eldest son, another Thomas, had died four years before him, leaving the inheritance to a younger son, Edward. In 1838 Edward’s nephew, Sir William Worsley, was created a baronet but his interests appear to have been largely confined to his immediate surroundings in North Yorkshire. The 4th baronet was a talented cricketer, serving as captain of Yorkshire, as well as president of the MCC. It was his son, Sir Marcus Worsley, 5th bt., who finally broke the family duck and returned to Parliament, first as MP for Keighley and latterly for Chelsea. In November 1969 he presented a bill to encourage the preservation of collections of manuscripts by controlling and regulating their export. His other chief preoccupation was as one of the church commissioners.

The late duchess of Kent was Sir Marcus’s younger sister. She continued the family’s long tradition of interest in sport (in her case tennis) and quiet dedication to their locality.

RDEE

Further reading
Estate and Household Accounts of William Worsley, Dean of St Paul’s Cathedral 1479-1497 (Richard III & Yorkist Trust and London Record Society, 2004), ed. H. Kleineke and S. Hovland
VCH Yorkshire North Riding, volume one
Visitation of Lancashire and a part of Cheshire, 1533, ed. William Langton (Chetham Soc. 1876)

In March 1559, Elizabeth I’s government had a serious problem on its hands. The first Parliament of the reign had been meeting for two months, but the crown’s flagship legislation to bring back Protestantism had run into trouble. With some difficulty, a bill had been passed to restore the royal supremacy over the Church, but the powers granted fell short of what Elizabeth wanted, while plans for reviving Protestant worship had stalled. The House of Commons was broadly in favour of these changes, but in the Lords, where committed Protestants were in the minority, the Catholic bishops were very effectively obstructing the government programme. As the Protestant observer John Jewel reported on 20 March:

the bishops are a great hindrance to us; for being … among the nobility and leading men in the upper House, and having none there on our side to expose their artifices … they reign as sole monarchs in the midst of ignorant and weak men, and easily overreach our little party, either by their numbers or their reputation for learning. (Zurich Letters ed. H. Robinson (Parker Society, 1842), 10-11)

By this point, the situation was so bad that Elizabeth was seriously contemplating an early dissolution of Parliament, so that she could use her new powers to deprive the existing bishops and appoint new Protestant ones, before pressing on with the reform programme. In the event, the queen decided against this course, but action was clearly needed to weaken the bishops’ hold over the lay peers.

The government’s solution was to arrange a public conference or disputation between two panels of Catholic clergy and Protestant divines. According to a subsequent official account of this exercise, the objective was to thrash out differences of opinion about religion, and reach agreement on the best way forward for the Church. In reality, the government’s objective was to discredit the bishops, and sway public opinion in favour of Protestantism. From the outset, everything possible was done to place the Catholic participants at a disadvantage. Their leader in the Lords, the widely respected Nicholas Heath, archbishop of York, was appointed to help preside over the disputation in his capacity as a privy councillor, a move which would effectively sideline him during the debates. Similarly, the three propositions which the Privy Council selected for discussion were all designed to win support for the government’s reform programme: that church services should be conducted in the vernacular tongue rather than in the traditional Latin, which most congregations didn’t understand; that national Churches had the power to alter the format and content of services; and that the Catholic doctrine of the sacrificial mass was not based on the teachings of the bible.

There’s some confusion over exactly how many people took part in the disputation, though there seem to have been eight or nine men on each side. The Catholic camp comprised a mix of bishops and other senior clergy, while the Protestant delegation was made up almost exclusively of clerics who had spent Mary I’s reign in exile on the continent. In effect, they represented the existing and prospective hierarchies of the English Church. The Catholics wanted to debate in Latin, which would have made it harder for the audience to follow the arguments, but the government insisted on proceedings being conducted in English, and selected the spacious Westminster Abbey as the venue, to allow as many people as possible to attend. As expected, a substantial number of lay peers turned up, precisely the individuals whom the government most wanted to influence.

Perceiving that the odds were stacked heavily against them, the Catholic camp looked for ways to sabotage the debates. The Privy Council had ruled that each side should prepare a written statement on each proposition, which would be circulated in advance to the opposing group, and read out on the day. The Protestants seem to have stuck to this format, but the Catholics chose not to cooperate. Invited to open debate on the first day of the conference, 31 March, they claimed that they’d misunderstood the rules, and therefore didn’t have a written statement to present. Instead, Henry Cole, dean of St Paul’s cathedral, launched into a violent and colourful diatribe against Protestantism in general, before finally sketching out the Catholic position on the correct language for worship, essentially defending the use of Latin by appealing to tradition. Once Cole had finished, his opponent Robert Horne read out a learned argument in favour of the local vernacular, with copious references to the bible and early Christian writings. Horne prefaced his remarks with a lengthy prayer appealing to God to reveal the true way forward. As this prayer was introduced, all the privy councillors present except Archbishop Heath fell to their knees, further demonstrating which side the government favoured. Once Horne had finished presenting the Protestant case, the Catholic disputants asked to respond, but were told to wait until the next debate, three days later.

When the conference resumed on 3 April, the Catholic camp tried to pick up where they’d left off, but were informed that they must first set out their arguments on the second proposition, concerning the power of national churches to modify their liturgies. However, the bishops began to complain that they were being treated unfairly, and the conference rapidly descended into a row over the format of the disputation. Recognising that if the Protestants always spoke second, their arguments were likely to carry more weight with the audience, the Catholics called for the order of debate be switched around. When this demand was rejected, the bishops again tried to change the topic, asserting that they represented the true Church, and attacking their opponents as schismatics. At length, once it became clear that the Catholics had no intention of addressing the second proposition, the disputation was brought to a premature close.

Predictably, Catholic commentators on the conference, such as the Spanish ambassador, the Count de Feria, maintained that the bishops had trounced the Protestant divines. John Jewel, who had been present as one of the Protestant disputants, took a rather different view: ‘It is altogether incredible, how much this conduct has lessened the opinion that the people entertained of the bishops; for they all begin to suspect that they refused to say anything only because they had not anything to say.’ (Zurich Letters, 16)

Whether or not Jewel himself was exaggerating, the conference had a decisive impact on developments in Parliament. The five bishops who participated in the debates were all charged with contempt of the crown for failing to follow the agreed format. Two of them, the bishops of Winchester and Lincoln, were imprisoned in the Tower of London until after the end of the session. This unsurprisingly served to dampen opposition in the Lords to the government’s programme. Several staunchly Catholic lay peers suddenly decided to absent themselves, while others dropped their objections to the Protestant legislation. The bill for the royal supremacy was duly revised, though the measure to reintroduce the Book of Common Prayer still only scraped through the upper House by three votes.  Without the Westminster conference, it might not have passed at all. The disputation strategy was clumsy and underhand, but it weakened the Catholic cause, broke the parliamentary deadlock, and helped pave the way for the Elizabethan religious settlement.

PMH

Further reading:

N.L. Jones, Faith by Statute (1982)

G. Burnet, History of the Reformation of the Church of England ed. N. Pocock (1865), vol. 5

The Acts and Monuments of John Foxe ed. S.R. Cattley (1839), vol. 8

Biographies of all the clerics mentioned above will appear in due course in our volumes on the House of Lords 1558-1603.

In the early modern period, both England’s Church and its Parliament changed. A Catholic country split from Rome and the importance and prominence of the two Houses of Parliament dramatically increased. These two seismic shifts were not isolated from one another. Parliament’s role in the transformation and governance of England’s ecclesiastical settlement has been much debated, especially since the seminal work of Sir Geoffrey Elton, who argued Parliament’s role in enacting the early stages of the Reformation was a formative moment in parliamentary history. To address this complex relationship, the History of Parliament hosted a colloquium on 26 April 2025 entitled ‘Parliament and the Church, c.1530-c.1630’. Convened by Dr Alexandra Gajda (University of Oxford) and Dr Alex Beeton (History of Parliament), eight speakers and almost twenty audience members, many of them leading academics, debated a myriad of issues and topics in an energising and convivial atmosphere.

The eight speakers, split between three chronological panels, had produced their papers, (which will be published in a special edition of Parliamentary History) for pre-circulation; this meant the majority of the day was spent in discussion of their findings. In the first panel, Dr Gajda and Dr Paul Cavill (University of Cambridge) delved into the first half of the sixteenth century. Dr Cavill launched a vigorous attack on a famous essay of Elton’s, ‘Lex Terrae Victrix: the triumph of parliamentary law in the sixteenth century’ which argued that in the 1530s emerged the twin ideas of the supremacy of parliamentary law (i.e. common law) and the notion of the king-in-Parliament being the ultimate authority in the kingdom. Using the example of the court of delegates, Dr Cavill’s paper skilfully showed how laws other than common law continued to be used, and that the monarchy ruled through the common law rather than under it. Dr Gajda took the discussion forward into the mid-century, showing that the Parliaments of Edward VI deserve to be known as Reformation Parliaments which enacted sweeping reforms via statute. This process did not occur because the crown believed the two Houses to be particularly appropriate as authorities on religious matters, but because parliamentary statute reached all the monarchy’s subjects and because the lay members of Parliament were more amenable to changes in religious practices than Convocation.

After a lunch break, the second panel of the day focussed largely on the reign of Elizabeth I. Dr Paul Hunneyball (History of Parliament) produced an excellent study of the bishops in the Lords as a group during the 1584-5 Parliament. Drawing on the cutting-edge research of the Lords 1558-1603 project, Dr Hunneyball teased out a number of insights about the bishops and their political activities, showing the value of investigating the Lords Spiritual as a body. Dr Esther Counsell’s (Western Sydney University) fascinating contribution focussed on the same Parliament, investigating a manuscript speech-treatise written by Robert Beale, clerk of the privy council, which was intended for the Parliament but never delivered. Dr Counsell argued that Beale was representative of a group within the English establishment which was eager for further religious reformation, worried about the encroachment of Catholicism, opposed to the jurisdictional overreach of ecclesiastical authorities and courts, and concerned that the denial of Parliament’s authority to determine ecclesiastical matters would undermine the stability of Elizabeth’s reign. The third speaker, Adam Forsyth (University of Cambridge), took the panel into the early seventeenth century with an impressive analysis of statutory interpretation and multilateralism in judicature, delineating the disputes between civil and common lawyers about who could interpret statutes and the different positions which civil lawyers adopted concerning the prerogatives of statutory interpretation.

Despite the hot weather and the lack of air conditioning in the History of Parliament’s common room, spirits and energy remained high for the third and final panel of the day. Professor Kenneth Fincham (University of Kent), who was chairing, prefaced the panel with an elegantly concise set of remarks about Parliament and religion in the 1630s before introducing the speakers. Emma Hartley’s (University of Sheffield) paper insightfully investigated the early Jacobean Parliaments, showing how their disputes and proceedings demonstrated that the future of the English Church was still considered to be uncertain at the time. Enormous tensions existed over ecclesiastical jurisdiction, Parliament’s role in religious matters, and the constitutional positions and authority of bishops and Convocation. She was followed by Dr Kathryn Marshalek (Vanderbilt University) whose paper offered a brilliant account of how, pace earlier revisionist historiography, religious issues and constitutional crisis became a deadly combination in English politics well before the end of the 1620s. Dr Marshalek’s study of the 1620s Parliaments argued that the European geo-political situation made a re-negotiation of the English religious settlement, and the place of English Catholics within it, possible. It was in this context that calls from Parliament for the enforcement of religious conformity became more forceful and provoked a broader consideration of the relationship between the king, royal prerogative, and parliamentary statute. Closing the day’s proceedings, Dr Andrew Thrush (History of Parliament) offered a thought-provoking overview of the right of the House of Commons to debate religious matters between 1566-1629. He discussed why the Commons right to do so was not clearcut and why the crown, despite strenuous efforts, repeatedly failed to prevent the lower House from considering religious matters. He finished by concluding that the Commons achieved little in the way of tangible results through their extensive debates since they lacked the ability to enforce their will.

As with their predecessors, this final panel stimulated plenty of questions and debate between speakers and audience which continued in a more relaxed atmosphere following the end of official proceedings. As the vivacity of the day demonstrated, the relationship between Parliament and Church in early modern England remains a topic with potential for important discoveries and exciting insights.

ALB

On a clear, calm evening in April 1580, south-eastern England, as well as the Low Countries and parts of northern France and Germany, were struck by a violent earthquake. In London, as the ground moved, church bells rang uncontrollably, water courses ‘shook and frothed wonderfully’ and many chimney stacks collapsed. At a church near Newgate Market, falling masonry killed an apprentice named Thomas Gray and fatally injured his servant, Mabel Everitt. At Sandwich, in east Kent, a sound like the discharge of several cannons was heard before the ground shook, the sea swelled and the gable end of St Peter’s church collapsed. Down the coast at Dover part of the cliffs fell, while Saltwood Castle, overlooking Hythe, suffered damage. The quake was followed by as many as four aftershocks, the last of which occurred on 1 or 2 May. Tremors were evidently felt as far afield as Edinburgh; in October the Master of Gray reported that his house ‘did shake and rock in the night as with an earthquake’.

These sudden bursts of violent seismic activity struck terror into the populace. Two days after the main quake, the court jester Richard Tarlton recorded that many in the Royal Exchange ‘wept with fear’. At the same time the writer Thomas Churchyard reported that in one London theatre those in the balcony were so frightened that the gallery would collapse that they leapt ‘from the lowest standings’. In Kent, according to a contemporary chronicler, many of those woken by the last of the aftershocks during the night of 1 May ran to the local church to pray.

Although the main earthquake lasted for little more than a minute, it was of an unusually high magnitude for the British Isles, where seismic activity is rare. Dr Roger Musson, the author of the historical earthquake catalogue for the UK (maintained by the British Geological Survey), includes the 1580 event among the four greatest earthquakes ever to have struck England. Originating 33km below the seabed in the Straits of Dover, the quake was almost certainly associated with movement of a major structural feature in the eastern English Channel known as the Variscan Thrust Front. This area has a long history of seismic activity. As early as 1382 a synod in London held to examine the writings of the Lollard John Wycliffe was interrupted by an earthquake in the Dover Straits which caused widespread damage in south-eastern England and the Low Countries. In November 1776 another earthquake, of lesser magnitude, originated in the same location. It is because the Straits of Dover are seismically active that the Channel Tunnel was designed to be earthquake-proof.

In early modern England, understanding of earthquakes was limited. One theory held that they were caused by the earth’s expulsion of trapped wind, a view first advanced by Aristotle in the fourth century B.C. In the quake’s immediate aftermath, the Cambridge academic Gabriel Harvey agreed that it might have been caused by ‘some forcible and violent eruption of wind, or the like’, occasioned by excessive rainfall the previous autumn. This, Harvey argued, had ‘stopped and filled’ up ‘the pores and vents and crannies’ of the earth with moisture, so that ‘the windy exhalation and vapours pent up as it were in the bowels thereof could not otherwise get out’. However, many contemporaries were sceptical whether the Aristotelian argument was relevant in this case. They included the Essex gentleman Arthur Golding, who argued in print that the 1580 earthquake cannot have had a natural cause since among the places affected were areas ‘which by reason of their substantial soundness and massy firmness, are not to be pierced by any winds from without’. Moreover, quakes that had natural causes were preceded by signs such as tempestuous seas, whereas in this case the weather was ‘fair, temperate and unwindy’.

For many Elizabethan Englishmen – perhaps the vast majority of them – the 1580 earthquake, like most natural disasters, was an obvious expression of God’s displeasure at the nation’s sinfulness. To argue otherwise was, as Arthur Golding saw it, a mere evasion, an attempt ‘to keep themselves and others from the due looking back into the time erst misspent … lest they should see their own wretchedness’. Among the many sins Golding imputed to the English were widespread corruption, hatred, malice, disdain, pride, flattery, dissimulation and the desire for revenge. He also complained that servants behaved like masters; that men adopted ‘the garish attire and nice behaviour of women’; and that women ‘have gotten up the apparel and stomach of men’. To Golding, the 1580 earthquake was just one in a recent series of warnings to the English to mend their ways. Other signs of God’s wrath included unseasonal heavy rainfall and snow, and sharp and long-lasting frosts. Golding could not have known that a temporary dip in solar sunspot activity meant that England, like the rest of the globe, was experiencing what many historians have dubbed the mini ice age.

In fact Golding, who had worked at the London house of the Queen’s chief minister William Cecil, Lord Burghley, during the mid-1560s, was expressing views commonly held in official circles. Immediately after the quake, both John Aylmer, bishop of London, and Edmund Grindal, archbishop of Canterbury, drew up prayers for circulation in their respective dioceses calling for repentance. The Privy Council approved of these initiatives. It also declared, like Golding, that England had had a lucky escape. Whereas other countries had suffered far greater disasters in recent years, such as civil wars, massacres and the earthquake which had destroyed a large part of the city of Ferrara, in northern Italy, ten years earlier, England had escaped relatively lightly. As the Council put it, God had dealt ‘more favourably with us … than he hath dealt with other nations in the like case’, having sustained little damage and few casualties (just two fatalities in fact).

By comparison, other countries had suffered the loss of whole cities and thousands of people. At the Council’s urging, Grindal’s prayer service was circulated throughout the realm, along with Golding’s short treatise. Urging repentance, it described the quake as ‘the strange and terrible token’ of God’s ‘wrath and indignation’. As if to set an example to her subjects, the Queen shortly after the earthquake urged the principal gentry of every shire to contribute generously to a collection on behalf of the plague-afflicted Huguenots of Montpellier. She cited ‘God’s merciful warning by the late earthquake’ as an ‘extraordinary admonition’ to England to act with Christian compassion.

The 1580 earthquake is unlikely to have been quickly forgotten; a line in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet (Act One, Scene 3), written sometime in the early 1590s, seems to allude to it (‘’Tis since the earthquake now 11 years’). For a short while it may even have shaken the English in their confident belief that God was an Englishman, an idea which can be traced back to at least the early stages of the Reformation and was still current: in 1559 John Aylmer urged his fellow countryman to fear neither French nor Scots ‘as God is English’, and in 1573 Matthew Parker, archbishop of Canterbury, pressed Burghley to advance the cause of true religion because God was ‘so much English’. However, if the 1580 earthquake did give the English pause for thought about their favoured status, these doubts were dispelled eight years later with the defeat of the Spanish Armada, when ‘God blew and they were scattered’.

AT

Further reading:

Liturgies and Occasional Forms of Prayer Set Forth in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (Parker Society, 1847) ed. W.K. Clay

Historic British Earthquakes

Pamphlets on the Earthquake of 1580 – Darin Hayton

Biographies of the 1st Lord Burghley, John Aylmer, bishop of London, and archbishops Matthew Parker and Edmund Grindal will in due course feature in our volumes on the Elizabethan House of Lords.

Hugh Oldham (c.1450-1519), bishop of Exeter from 1505, has had a good press from historians. Described by the Exeter MP and chronicler, John Hooker alias Vowell (d. 1601), ‘as a great favourer and a friend both to learning and to learned men’, he was a major benefactor of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, the foundation of his friend, Richard Foxe, bishop of Winchester. Although Hooker was no advocate of Oldham’s own academic attainments, rather patronisingly remarking that he had ‘more zeal than knowledge and more devotion than learning’, he praised him for his friendliness. A curious action in the court of King’s bench in 1512 gives a rather contrasting picture of the bishop, albeit one, as an ex parte statement, on which little reliance is to be placed.  When the bishop’s servant, William Knot, came to Crediton to summon one of the clerks of the diocese, Edward Grigson, to appear in the consistory court, Grigson responded uncharitably, claiming that ‘the Bysshoppe  of exet[er] is the most extorcyoner and poller that is in Englond for he hath extorcyoner and polled both me and my Tenauntez and that he hath more poison in that grete fowle bely of hys then all the Bysshoppes in Englond’. A jury found for the bishop, and he was awarded the relatively modest sum of £8 in costs and damages.

The action was an innovative one.  Medieval statutes of scandalum magnatum, the first dating from 1275 and reenacted in almost the same terms in 1378 and 1389, had given peers and the King’s great officers protection against the circulation of defamatory rumours about them. The purpose was political: as the 1378 enactment put it, such rumours created ‘Debates and Discords’ whereby, in the hyperbolic language of such statutes, the realm might be brought to ‘quick Subversion and Destruction’.  Despite this alarming danger, the statutes were rarely used until the first years of the sixteenth century, when lawyers began to wonder whether their peerage clients might use the offence of scandalum magnatum as a civil plea to win damages against those who could be accused of speaking ill of them. Their first recorded effort proved a failure. In 1495 Sir Richard Croft sought to forward a land dispute with Richard, Lord Beauchamp, by bringing an action under a statute which penalised the fabricating of false deeds. Beauchamp’s response was to counter-sue for damages of £1,000 on the eccentric claim that the allegation he had fabricated false deeds was itself an offence under the scandalum magnatum statute of 1378. This claim, which, if successful, would have given peers extensive protection against litigation, was quickly dismissed by the chief justice of the common pleas, Sir Thomas Bryan, who succinctly observed that the statutes of scandalum magnatum were ‘not made to oust men of their legitimate actions’.  Yet Bryan’s ruling did not preclude the use of the statutes to sue for scandalous words.  There were a series of such actions in the common-law courts in early years of the sixteenth century.  The most famous of these was brought by Edward Stafford, duke of Buckingham, in the same year as Odiham’s, against his former servant, Thomas Lucas of Inner Temple, former solicitor-general to Henry VII, for allegedly saying that ‘he sett nott be the Duke two pens’ and that the duke ‘hath no more conseyens than a Dogg’.

It would, however, be mistaken to see these actions solely in terms of the exploitation of aristocratic privilege under arcane medieval statutes, for they can also be seem as part of a more general development. Church courts had enjoyed a monopoly over cases of defamation, and, as in those courts the plaintiff could gain no damages beyond the imposition of penance upon the defendant, this was unsatisfactory. These actions of scandalum magnatum were only one attempt to redress this deficiency, for, at about the same time as they emerged, the common-law began to provide a general remedy with plaintiffs able to sue for damages for reputational damage caused by defamatory words.  Scandalum magnatum certainly gave peers a legislative advantage, one that was later to be ruthlessly exploited by the future James II in the early 1680s, but lesser men also had a common-law remedy for slander.

Further reading

Article on Hugh Oldham, bishop of Exeter, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

J.H. Baker, The Oxford History of the Laws of England, 1483-1558 (2003), pp. 781-2, 797-8.

J.C. Lassiter, ‘Defamation of Peers: the Rise and Decline of the Action of Scandalum Magnatum’, American Journal of Legal History, xxii (1978), pp. 216-36.

In 21st-century Britain, clothes are seen as a means of expressing our individuality. Distinctions between smart and casual dress have become blurred, and anyone can buy designer outfits, provided they have enough money. That was not the case four or five centuries ago. Back then, clothing was seen as a key marker of social status, and it was government policy to preserve clear visual distinctions. Poor people were expected to dress cheaply, in linen and coarse woollen cloth, while the most commonly available dyes were drab browns and greys, or pale blues and pinks.

More vibrant colours, such as bright red, deep blue, or purple, were harder to produce, and therefore the preserve of the rich and powerful. Similarly, the finest cloth was made of silk thread, which had to be imported, and was very expensive. Silk might be woven into satin, velvet, brocade, damask or taffeta. For the ultimate in luxury, silk was blended with gold or silver thread, which in Tudor times was also manufactured abroad. Cloth of gold or silver might have a smooth metallic sheen – as seen in Holbein’s portrait of Sir Henry Guildford – or be woven with some sections in relief to create patterns (called tissue). Another approach was to interweave coloured silk with gold or silver threads to produce a sparkly fabric known as tinsel.

These top-quality fabrics were beyond the reach of most of the population, but provided scope for competition within its higher echelons. Wealthier members of the lower classes might also try to dress above their accustomed status as a means of social climbing. To regulate the former, and guard against the latter, Acts of Parliament were brought in from the mid-14th century. Known as sumptuary laws, these statutes dictated which fabrics and adornments were permissible for men of different ranks and income levels. Ostensibly, they were intended to encourage the use of home-produced cloth, and to discourage poorer people from spending beyond their means. But in reality their primary concern was to ensure that only the most privileged classes had access to the most exclusive materials.

The Acts were very precise in their stipulations. Henry VIII’s first such legislation, promulgated in 1510, specified that only the royal family might wear cloth of gold made with purple silk, and that no man below the rank of baron could dress in tinsel. Imported furs were banned for anyone below the status of gentleman (except university graduates, and landowners worth at least £10 p.a.). Another Act of 1515 ruled that only peers, and the sons of dukes and earls, were allowed clothes embroidered with gold, silver or silk thread, while men below the rank of knight were barred from wearing gold chains or bracelets. A subsequent Act of 1555, during Mary I’s reign, denied silk nightcaps to anyone with a landed income of less than £20 p.a. These rules were underpinned by quite stiff penalties: forfeiture of non-compliant garments, and fines of 3s. 4d. a day for the duration of the offence.

It speaks volumes about the essentially patriarchal nature of Tudor society that no regulation of women’s dress was attempted until the mid-1570s, the female population being exempted from statutory oversight prior to this. It’s tempting to speculate that Elizabeth I was worried about competition from her subjects. At this juncture the use of cloth of gold, cloth of gold of tissue, and sable fur was prohibited for anyone below the rank of countess. To wear sleeves trimmed with gold or silver ornamentation, one needed to be at least the wife of a knight. Only women who were at least knights’ daughters were permitted taffeta petticoats.

The sumptuary laws were not totally inflexible. Further exceptions were made for the robes of office customarily worn by judges and mayors, and for clerical vestments. Other special categories included heralds, minstrels and actors, all of whom were allowed to dress above their station during public appearances. Nor did the government generally attempt to regulate fashion trends, though the wide, padded breeches and elaborate ruffs characteristic of Elizabethan male dress intermittently came in for criticism. The primary objective was to preserve an ordered society, where everyone could tell at a glance who they were dealing with, and where people knew their place.

While it’s clear that the laws were largely ignored, in broad terms they conformed to popular expectations. It was taken for granted that peers of the realm would put on a show. In the later 16th century Henry Stanley, 4th earl of Derby, routinely sported a gold chain and two diamonds, and was also famous for his golden breeches. Conversely, one of his contemporaries, Henry Howard, 2nd Viscount Howard of Bindon, scandalized polite society by periodically appearing in public dressed like a peasant. Accordingly, the sumptuary laws, by prescribing the dress appropriate to specific ranks, helped to define the terms of competition at the highest levels.

We can get a good sense of the sartorial tastes of England’s elite from their portraits, in which the costumes are generally depicted with care and precision. Such paintings are also likely to show their subjects in their most expensive outfits, such as they might have worn at court. There the benchmark was of course set by the monarch. Henry VIII and Elizabeth I in particular were famous for their magnificent clothes. The so-called ‘Ermine portrait’ of Elizabeth (ermine was both a mark of status and a symbol of virginity) clearly demonstrates the aesthetic encouraged by the sumptuary laws. Here the queen is a vision of costly silks, gold and silver embroidery, and lavish and abundant jewellery.

However, there was more than one way to create an impact within the legislative guidelines. In 1590 the 2nd earl of Essex, the queen’s favourite, was in temporary disgrace following his marriage to Frances Sidney. In a public show of penitence, he appeared at that year’s Accession Day tilt at court ‘in sable sad’, sporting black armour. Nevertheless, that was topped by a spectacular black surcoat richly embroidered with silver thread, pearls and gemstones. Having demonstrated that he was literally an ornament to the court, Essex was soon back in favour.

By the closing years of the 16th century the sumptuary laws had in fact run their course. Although Elizabethan parliaments saw more than half-a-dozen government attempts to update the legislation, only one measure was passed, a short-lived Act in 1563 banning the purchase of expensive foreign clothing on credit. While the House of Lords was happy to entrench peers’ existing privileges, Members of the Commons proved increasingly resistant to further restrictions on their own sartorial choices. The queen was instead obliged to issue a string of proclamations enforcing or modifying the sumptuary statutes. Her successor, James I, all but abandoned this struggle, and instead tried to profit from the manufacture of gold and silver thread, which had by now reached England. (Famously, his attempt to introduce silkworms to the country failed when the wrong kind of mulberry tree was employed.)

Even so, the cultural impact of the sumptuary laws lingered into the 17th century. When Richard Sackville, 3rd earl of Dorset needed an outfit for the wedding of Princess Elizabeth and the Elector Palatine in 1613, he opted for this extraordinary ensemble, which featured a doublet of cloth of silver embroidered in gold and black silk, a black velvet cloak embellished with gold and silver, and silk stockings similarly decorated with gold, silver, and black silk thread. In the light of such unashamed excess, it is no surprise that the last sumptuary bills debated by Parliament, during the 1620s, were promoted by puritans intent on banning the elitist luxury which the old legislation had encouraged.

PMH

Further reading:

Eleri Lynn, Tudor Fashion (2017)

Roy Strong, The Elizabethan Image (2019)

Anna Reynolds, In Fine Style: the Art of Tudor and Stuart Fashion (2013)

Aileen Ribeiro, Fashion and Fiction: Dress in Art and Literature in Stuart England (2005)

A biography of the 3rd earl of Dorset features in The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (2021). Biographies of the 2nd earl of Essex, 4th earl of Derby and 2nd Viscount Howard are in preparation as part of our project on the House of Lords 1558-1603.

The death of Thomas Cromwell, late earl of Essex, in 1540 brought to a dramatic end the extraordinary rise of someone who had been born in obscurity but progressed at Court to become Henry VIII’s chief minister. Subject to an act of attainder, all of Cromwell’s titles were stripped from him, leaving his heir, Gregory, without a peerage to inherit. Just as suddenly, though, the king determined to make amends for bringing down his former favourite [Graves, 35]. Just a few months after Thomas Cromwell’s execution, then, Gregory, described in stark contrast to his brilliant father as ‘rather slow but diligent’, if rather helpfully married to Jane Seymour’s sister, was created, once more, Baron Cromwell. As such, he attended the Lords until his death in 1551 with a degree of diligence that bore out his old tutor’s earlier assessment. [Graves, 225]

For the next century or more, there would be Lords Cromwell in Parliament – kinsmen of the more famous Oliver, who was himself a descendant of Thomas Cromwell’s nephew, Sir Richard Williams alias Cromwell.

By the 17th century, changing fortunes had left the Cromwells more Irish than English magnates. Edward, 3rd Baron Cromwell, had entangled himself in the Essex Rebellion in 1601, but was luckier than his ancestor. Although charged with treason, he got away with a hefty fine rather than the loss of his head. He was, though, forced to sell most of his English lands and relocate to County Down. His heir, Thomas, 4th Baron Cromwell, followed in the family tradition as a capable soldier and in 1645 was created earl of Ardglass in the Irish peerage (having previously been made an Irish viscount) in return for his support for the king in the Civil War.

If capable soldiers, none of the earls of Ardglass came near to the eminence of the original Thomas Cromwell. They did, however, exhibit considerable capacity to survive, sometimes at the expense of others. Thomas, 3rd earl of Ardglass, was probably the last person one wanted to spot on the passenger list for the packet service to Ireland. He was one of 23 survivors of a boat going down in 1672, and three years later was widely blamed for causing the loss of another packet ship, which foundered with the earl of Meath on board. The ‘drunken’ Ardglass, who was transporting several bottles of wine at the time, was believed to have plied the captain and crew with too much of his excess supply, leaving them incapable of carrying out their duties. He survived.

Along with surviving shipwrecks, Ardglass’s other party trick was granting protections to people unconnected to him. At that time, peers were allowed to offer limited protection from arrest to their immediate family and servants, but many abused the system. Queried by the Lords, Ardglass claimed he was not aware of there being any problem with the protections he had handed out, but promised to abide by the rules thereafter. He died without heirs, probably not much regretted, and was succeeded by his uncle, Vere Essex Cromwell, as the last of the earls of Ardglass.

Like many of the family, the new earl had been a soldier and was principally based in Ireland, but he attended the House of Lords at Westminster on James II’s accession and proved fairly diligent in his attendance of Parliament for the remainder of his brief career. On his death in November 1687 the earldom became extinct, as almost certainly did the barony of Cromwell, though that did not prevent it having an intriguing afterlife.

On the extinction of Thomas Cromwell’s honours in 1540, one of the titles to go was the original barony of Cromwell, which had been created by writ. The later title conferred on Gregory in the winter of 1540 was by patent, and so not communicable to heirs general. That did not stop the last earl of Ardglass’ daughter, Elizabeth, assuming the title Baroness Cromwell, though. As such she walked in the funeral procession of Queen Mary (1695) and at the coronation of Queen Anne (1702), when she should not have been at either – or at least not in the guise of a peeress.

Confusion over the nature of the original creation may have led contemporaries to believe that Elizabeth had inherited the peerage, but some clearly understood the distinction. A portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller at Kings Weston, depicting her striking a pose in a maritime setting and with (pace her kinsman, the 3rd earl) a small sailing boat in the distance, is subscribed ‘Lady Eliz. Cromwell’, as is an engraving likely based on the same image, which was produced after her father’s death (in the latter case her name is given in full). This suggested, correctly, that she was styled Lady Elizabeth as the daughter of an earl; not the holder of a title in her own right.

In 1704 Elizabeth married Edward Southwell, secretary of state for Ireland: ‘a particularly polished example of the class of middling administrators who… served with exemplary skill and industry’ [HP Commons 1690-1715], having rejected the advances of a planter from Virginia. At some point she also seems to have attracted the attention of Lord Raby (later earl of Strafford), as around the time of her death in 1709 Lady Wentworth informed him of the death of his ‘old mistress’, leaving behind ‘three lovly boys… and a dismall mallancolly husband…’ That confusion over the Cromwell barony still persisted, though, was suggested by Lady Wentworth’s comment that Elizabeth’s ‘eldist son will be Lord Crumwell, but som say he will not.’ [Wentworth Papers, 70]

The ‘mallancolly husband’ survived his wife for over two decades [Wentworth Papers, 462] and Elizabeth’s son, another Edward Southwell, chose not to claim the title, satisfying himself with a seat in both the Irish and British House of Commons instead. It was left to his heir, also Edward Southwell, to reclaim the family’s seat in the Lords. Having sat as MP for Bridgwater and Gloucestershire, following a thoroughly independent line, he finally took advantage of an opportunity of promotion to the peerage towards the end of his career. Like his father, though, he made no effort to revive the Cromwell barony, rather establishing his claim as the 20th Baron de Clifford following the death of his maternal great-aunt.

The 26th Baron was the last peer to be tried before the Lords for manslaughter (he was acquitted). A descendant of the 20th Baron, and hence of Thomas Cromwell, Miles Southwell Russell, 28^th Baron de Clifford, still sits in the Lords as a cross-bencher.

RDEE

Further Reading:

David Grummitt, ‘Cromwell, Edward, third Baron Cromwell’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Michael Graves, The House of Lords in the Parliaments of Edward VI and Mary I: an institutional study (Cambridge, 1981)

William Montgomery, The Montgomery Manuscripts: 1603-1706, ed. George Hill (Belfast, 1869)

Notes and Queries (4th ser. vi. 1870)

The Athenaeum, No. 885 (1844)

The History of Parliament: the Commons 1690-1715, ed. D.W. Hayton, S.N. Handley and E. Cruickshanks (Cambridge, 2002)

The History of Parliament: the Lords 1660-1715, ed. Ruth Paley (Cambridge, 2016)

In July 1599 the mayor and aldermen of Hull complained to the Privy Council that five ships from their town had been seized by Christian IV, king of Denmark-Norway, while fishing near ‘Wardhouse’ (Vardøhus), a fortress off Vardo, on the north Norwegian coast. Their crews had been placed in irons, and some of the seamen were allegedly tortured. Four of the ships were detained as prizes, while the fifth was sent back to England with a message that no-one was to fish in Danish-Norwegian waters without licence. Hull’s governors were incensed. Even though Hull’s ships had long fished off the Norwegian coast, many of the town’s merchants now faced financial ruin. Moreover Christian’s aggressive actions, if left unchecked, threatened the English trade route to Muscovy. The harsh treatment meted out to the Hull fishermen was undoubtedly due to the fact that Christian IV was then trying to assert his authority over northern Norway. He was engaged in a territorial dispute with Muscovy, which claimed that Vardo and the surrounding Lapp country belonged to the Tsar.

Naturally both the queen, Elizabeth I, and the Privy Council sympathized with Hull’s complaint and agreed to intervene. However, as neither England nor Denmark employed a resident ambassador in the other’s capital, it took several months and the dispatch of a special ambassador to Copenhagen to arrange a meeting to discuss the dispute. Eventually, over the winter of 1599/1600, it was agreed that commissioners from both countries would meet on neutral ground the following Easter. The place chosen was Emden, a quasi-autonomous city in north-western Germany which enjoyed the protection of the neighbouring Dutch Republic. In March 1600, with the conference now imminent, Elizabeth selected three delegates to attend this conference. Unsurprisingly, two were civil lawyers experienced in maritime law, Dr Christopher Parkins and Richard Swale. However, the third figure chosen, and the nominal head of the mission, was a leading churchman, Richard Bancroft, the 45-year old bishop of London.

Perhaps no one was more astonished by Bancroft’s selection for this mission than Bancroft himself. Quite apart from the fact that he had never been abroad and lacked both diplomatic experience and expertise in the civil law, he was the first bishop chosen to serve on a diplomatic mission since Thomas Thirlby, bishop of Ely, had been included on the delegation which negotiated the 1559 treaty of Câteau-Cambrésis. Since her accession in 1558, Elizabeth had broken with the practice of the past and largely restricted prelates to their ecclesiastical duties. The only exceptions to this rule were her appointment of Thomas Young, archbishop of York as lord president of the council in the North in 1564 and the addition of John Whitgift, archbishop of Canterbury, to the Privy Council in 1586.

Elizabeth’s reasons for choosing Bancroft remain unknown. She may have thought that, as a Protestant bishop with well-known anti-Calvinist leanings, he would be acceptable to the Lutheran Danes. However, why choose a bishop at all? Would not a nobleman have been preferable? The answer to this question is probably ‘yes’. But by the late 1590s the queen was having difficulty in finding noblemen capable of performing diplomatic missions, as many peers were either not up to the task or simply lacked the means to subsidise the cost of an official embassy. Bancroft, by contrast, was shrewd and capable, the bane of radical puritans. Moreover, he had neither wife nor children to support and an annual income of more than £1,100 at his disposal. Elizabeth’s only concern was not the depth of Bancroft’s pockets but his notorious thriftiness. For that reason, she reminded him that, as leader of the Emden mission, he would be expected to ‘keep a bountiful house’.

Bancroft was not in the least bit pleased to have been selected for this mission and initially pleaded inexperience and a ‘tertian ague’ (malaria) to avoid having to go. However, once it became clear the queen would not budge, he threw himself into the task with his customary vigour. Determined to make a good impression, he decided to take with him a 40-strong entourage and a large amount of plate, which he borrowed, with the queen’s permission, from the Jewel House. He also got himself admitted to membership of Doctors’ Commons, the professional body to which all leading civil lawyers belonged, presumably in order to improve his credentials in the eyes of the Danes.

Bancroft and his two fellow commissioners sailed from Gravesend on 18 April 1600. However, a persistent easterly wind meant that as late as the 29th they were still at Queenborough, in north Kent. By the time they reached Emden on 10 May the Danish commissioners were on the point of departure, their commission being about to expire, having awaited the English delegation for more than a month. Thoroughly angry, the Danes refused to confer with the newly arrived delegates unless the English rowed out to their ship, an offer which Bancroft and his colleagues rejected as humiliating. Eventually the English were forced to relent, whereupon one of their number, perhaps Bancroft himself, took to the water. On seeing this the Danes immediately spread sail and departed.

In the immediate aftermath of this fiasco, the English delegates were obliged to return home empty-handed. As a result, the governors of Hull had no choice but to renew their suit for redress later that same year. The queen did not blame Bancroft for the ignominious failure of his mission, though, but rather thanked him for undertaking the journey.

In the aftermath of this, his first and only diplomatic mission, Bancroft managed to retrieve something from the wreckage. During his short time at Emden, he had succeeded in cultivating some useful contacts in the town, where he was evidently wined and dined. Consequently, over the next few years, he was able to keep the queen’s chief minister, Sir Robert Cecil, informed of events in north-west Germany, a not unimportant service in an era when reliable news was often in short supply. Bancroft may have derived a further benefit from his trip to Emden. According to the newsletter-writer John Chamberlain, a well-informed observer, he did not return to England with his two colleagues but instead travelled alone and incognito through the United Provinces. This raises the intriguing but hitherto unconsidered possibility that Bancroft, who liked to study his religious enemies up close, used the opportunity of this unplanned adventure to witness Dutch Calvinist practices at first hand. Whatever the truth of the matter, Bancroft’s trip to Emden is notable as being the last occasion on which a bishop headed a diplomatic mission until 1712-13, when John Robinson, bishop of Bristol, represented Great Britain at the Congress of Utrecht.

ADT

Further reading:

P. Collinson, Richard Bancroft and Elizabethan Puritanism (Cambridge, 2013)

S.B. Babbage, Puritanism and Richard Bancroft (London, 1962)

Although neither of these studies discusses it, Bancroft’s trip to Emden will feature in the biography now in preparation for our volumes on the Elizabethan House of Lords. For the bishop’s later career, see also his entry in The House of Lords 1604-29 ed. Andrew Thrush (Cambridge, 2021).