Gentry culture and the politics of religion

Cheshire on the eve of civil war

Richard Cust, Peter Lake

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781526114402
• eBook ISBN: 9781526114433
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This book revisits the county study as a way of understanding the dynamics of civil war in England during the 1640s. It explores gentry culture and the extent to which early Stuart Cheshire could be said to be a 'county community'. It also investigates how the county's governing elite and puritan religious establishment responded to highly polarising interventions by the central government and Laudian ecclesiastical authorities during Charles I's Personal Rule. The second half of the book provides a rich and detailed analysis of petitioning movements and side-taking in Cheshire in 1641–2. An important contribution to understanding the local origins and outbreak of civil war in England, the book will be of interest to all students and scholars studying the English revolution.

Part I

The Cheshire gentry and their world

1

The culture of dynasticism

After a long and eventful life, Sir Ranulph Crewe sat down to write his will at the age of eighty-six in 1645. He reflected that the greatest ‘external token … of God’s favour to me’ was that ‘it hath pleased God, of his abundant goodness to reduce the house and manor of the name to the name again’. Crewe had risen to the dizzy heights of speaker of the House of Commons and lord chief justice, only to be sacked from his office in November 1626 after leading a delegation of judges to protest against Charles I’s forced loan. But what preoccupied him at the end of his life was the way in which ‘it hath pleased God in some measure to raise the name again which for many years hath been greatly weakened and impaired’. It was the establishing – or, rather, re-establishing – of his dynasty that mattered to him above all.¹

According to Ranulph, the Crewes could trace their descent back to Patreus de Crewe in Edward I’s reign. But the family manor at Crewe in Cheshire had passed into the hands of the Foulshurst family in Edward III’s reign, when Sir Robert Foulshurst had married the daughter and heiress of Thomas Crewe. Sir Ranulph belonged to a collateral branch of the family and his father had been a tanner in nearby Nantwich. Having made his fortune as a sergeant at law, he embarked on a systematic strategy to rebuild the family’s presence and inheritance in Cheshire. In 1609, at a cost of £6,000, he purchased the manor of Crewe and the adjacent Barthomley from the heirs of Lord Chancellor Hatton, who had acquired the estates in Elizabeth’s reign. On 3 April 1615 he laid the foundation stone for Crewe Hall, which was finally completed in 1639 (Figure 1). During the 1620s he reconstructed the chapel and burial vault in Barthomley church to serve as a mausoleum for future generations of Crewes. And around 1630 he commissioned a decorated family pedigree from the Cheshire herald and antiquary, Randle Holme I.² The success of his efforts was already being acknowledged in the early 1620s by the local chronicler, William Webb. He hailed Sir Ranulph for having revived both the family and the house at Crewe, ‘which for many years aforegoing had drooped and fallen in much decay, as it were lingering and longing for one that might raise up that name and seat’.³

1 Wenceslaus Hollar’s engraving of Crewe Hall, rebuilt by Sir Ranulph Crewe between 1615 and 1639. William Webb equated the rebuilding of the house with the revival of the Crewe family, describing the ‘stately fabric of the hall of Crewe which for many years aforegoing had drooped and fallen in much decay, as it were lingering and longing for one that might raise up that name and seat’.

The impulse that gave rise to Crewe’s expressions of thankfulness is familiar to early modern scholars. Dynasticism has been recognised by historians such as Natalie Davis, Lawrence Stone, Felicity Heal and Clive Holmes as an increasingly powerful force in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries as feudal constraints weakened and patriarchs enjoyed new opportunities to acquire wealth and property and build up the status of their families.⁴ Among the English elite this process was assisted by the principles of primogeniture and patrilineal descent, enshrined in common law and commanding increasing respect in the early modern period. According to these, the bulk of the family estate should pass to the eldest surviving son or his son. Where there was no immediate male heir – which, given the harsh demographic fact that in each generation around a quarter of landed families would fail to produce a surviving son, was not infrequently – families would generally go back to a paternal grandfather and his descendants, that is, uncles, cousins or nephews bearing the family name, before they resorted to inheritance by an heiress of the female line. The division of estates was discouraged, except where younger children could be endowed with property acquired in addition to the original family inheritance. As a consequence, the majority of estates passed intact from one generation to the next.⁵

At the same time as primogeniture helped to ensure extensive concentrations of property in the heads of families, developments in English land law were giving them greater control over the management of this property. During the course of the sixteenth century the effectiveness of medieval entails – which had turned the owner into a virtual trustee for the transmission of the patrimony to future generations – was steadily eroded by the Statutes of Uses and Wills, and various accompanying legal judgments. Developments in mortgages, settlements and instruments of credit were also providing new tools to manage the disposal of property. Family heads now exercised much greater freedom to alienate estates and raise ready cash in order to play the property market, endow younger sons and inflate the marriage portions of their daughters.⁶ This gave them increased authority over their family members, which was reinforced by post-reformation religious and political teachings on the deference and obedience that was due to patriarchs. The rule of patriarchs within the ‘little commonwealths’ of their families replicated that of magistrates and princes within the state; and order and unity in both was seen to depend on the exercise of a benevolent but strictly enforced authority. What this could mean in practice was vividly illustrated in the complaint of the social commentator Thomas Wilson, himself a younger son:

Such a fever hectic hath custom brought in and inured amongst fathers, and such fond desire they have to leave a great show of the stock of their house, though the branches be withered, that they will not do it, but my elder brother forsooth must be my master. He must have all, and all the rest which the cat left on the malt heap, perhaps some small annuity during his life or what please our elder brother’s worship to bestow upon us if we please him and my mistress his wife.⁷

The main constraint on their actions – apart from feelings of fatherly or brotherly affection – was the expectation that younger brothers and sisters would be adequately provided for, and that if they were not this would reflect badly on the head of the family.⁸

Sir Ranulph Crewe’s will was a product of these circumstances as he sought to manage his family’s future from beyond the grave. The urge to do so was no doubt in part a product of his forceful and controlling personality and the rather tense relationship with his eldest son, Sir Clippesby Crewe, whom he does not appear to have trusted to secure the family inheritance in Cheshire.⁹ But it was also a reflection of the importance that the elite attached to maintaining their family name and titles, consolidating the connections between lineage and place and leaving ‘a great show of the stock of their house …’. In the trusts and settlements set out in his will, he made detailed provision not only for his children but also for his grandchildren, specifying the education and marriage portions appropriate for Sir Clippesby’s offspring, down to itemising the estates that he had purchased with the intention of servicing their needs. Above all, he provided for Crewe Hall itself, which was to be maintained as the focus of the family’s inheritance and identity. He allocated landholdings in Cheshire to ‘the better supportation of my house at Crewe’; he listed the ‘heirlooms’ which were to be preserved perpetually at the house as reminders of his illustrious connections with the earls of Shrewsbury and Derby, Lord Keeper Coventry and Lord Chief Justice Coke; and he delivered a specific injunction to his second son, John – who had married a local heiress and bought into his father’s Cheshire enterprise – to ‘take especial care for the safety and preservation of my household stuff … the repairing of the house and mills … and the handsome keeping of my gardens …’.¹⁰

The influence exercised by Sir Ranulph Crewe in shaping his family’s future was replicated among his Cheshire neighbours. These included a number of extremely forceful patriarchs – virtual ‘godfathers’ to their families – who, by dint of longevity, prestige and personality, maintained their power to shape their families’ destinies to their dying day, and often well beyond. A good example was Sir Peter Leigh of Lyme, who ruled his family with a rod of iron from the moment he succeeded his grandfather in 1589 to his own death at the age of seventy-three in 1636. As a soldier in the Elizabethan wars, and member of parliament (MP) and justice of the peace (JP) in the shire, he commanded the respect of both his peers and his family, and this translated into dominance over every aspect of his children’s lives. He was viewed with an awed deference, typified in the willingness of his third son, Thomas, to become a minister against his own inclinations, but in accordance with his father’s wishes.¹¹ It was in his dealings with his son and heir, Piers, however, that Sir Peter most clearly demonstrated his ruthless and authoritarian personality.

Piers was sent to Cambridge in 1604 at the age of sixteen, but was removed a year later at his father’s behest – presumably because of some indiscretion – and was made to submit to the humiliation of being home tutored while his brothers went to Oxford. In 1610, having at last been released from Lyme, Piers formed what his father considered to be an unsuitable attachment to a Mistress Morley. The young man agreed to give this up after a solemn undertaking by his father that he would be allowed freedom of choice in his next match, provided that the bride was of suitable family and status. Two years later Piers became engaged to Ann Savile, daughter of the leading Yorkshire knight Sir John; but Sir Peter again refused to countenance the match, insisting that the marriage portion that Sir John was offering was demeaning to his family’s status. Sir Peter’s closest family friends, including Sir John Egerton, Sir Thomas Gerard and Lady Molineux queued up to remind him of his earlier promise to his son and urge him to ‘strain … not … the power of a father … to the confusion … of a loving and dutiful son’. In spite of this, Sir Peter remained unbending and, when Piers married Ann in 1616, he carried out his threat to disinherit him. However, mindful of the future of his family, he also undertook to make any son produced by Piers and Ann his heir. When Piers died in 1624, soon after the birth of ‘little Peter’, Sir Peter mobilised his court connections in a lengthy campaign to secure the wardship of his grandson; and, having done so, promptly removed him from the custody of his mother and had him brought up at Lyme. Sir Peter died before he could arrange a marriage for his grandson, but he did persuade his second son, Francis, to take on the role of his nephew’s guardian, which he loyally discharged until ‘little Peter’s’ premature death as a result of a duel in 1642.¹² As the regular reminders from his friends to act less harshly and unbendingly towards his children indicate, Sir Peter Leigh was an unusually forceful and domineering family patriarch. Most of the heads of Cheshire families exercised a far more benevolent oversight of their siblings and offspring. But his actions are another indication of just how much energy and force a leading landowner was prepared to mobilise in order to secure what he saw as the best prospects for the future of his dynasty.

Dynasticism, then, was at the core of gentry belief systems and family strategies in this period. Securing the future of their lineage and building its reputation was the principal life-time project of most heads of gentry families. It was of paramount importance for them in terms of their sense of identity and self-worth within a culture which valued very highly the achievement of passing on one’s estates in an uninterrupted succession from one generation to the next. But this was not just an individualistic enterprise. These dynasties were the building blocks of gentry society. Dynastic patriarchs had a strong sense of belonging to wider collectives of gentry families among whom they socialised, transacted business, governed their households, serv...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I The Cheshire gentry and their world
• Part II The Personal Rule and its problems
• Part III The crisis, 1641–42
• Bibliography of Manuscript Sources
• Index