Catholic Gentry in English Society

The Throckmortons of Coughton from Reformation to Emancipation

Geoffrey Scott, Peter Marshall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9780754664321
• eBook ISBN: 9781351953085
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume advances scholarly understanding of English Catholicism in the early modern period through a series of interlocking essays on single family: the Throckmortons of Coughton Court, Warwickshire, whose experience over several centuries encapsulates key themes in the history of the Catholic gentry. Despite their persistent adherence to Catholicism, in no sense did the Throckmortons inhabit a 'recusant bubble'. Family members regularly played leading roles on the national political stage, from Sir George Throckmorton's resistance to the break with Rome in the 1530s, to Sir Robert George Throckmorton's election as the first English Catholic MP in 1831. Taking a long-term approach, the volume charts the strategies employed by various members of the family to allow them to remain politically active and socially influential within a solidly Protestant nation. In so doing, it contributes to ongoing attempts to integrate the study of Catholicism into the mainstream of English social and political history, transcending its traditional status as a 'special interest' category, remote from or subordinate to the central narratives of historical change. It will be particularly welcomed by historians of the sixteenth through to the nineteenth century, who increasingly recognise the importance of both Catholicism and anti-Catholicism as central themes in English cultural and political life.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction: The Catholic Gentry in English Society

Peter Marshall and Geoffrey Scott

Early modern Catholic history has begun to come in from the cold. Recounting the vicissitudes of the Catholic community was once regarded as a distinctly specialist historical project, marginal, if not unconnected to the main themes of England’s social, cultural and political development. Catholic history was largely left to the Catholics themselves, and the emphases of the account were what one would expect from a self-conscious minority, deeply aware – well into the twentieth century – of its peculiar status within the nation. Catholic history was ‘recusant history’, a story of resistance and refusal, of separation and survival. Its principal focus was the clerical mission, beginning in the 1570s and punctuated by persecution and martyrdom, by confinement in the prisons of the Elizabethan and Stuart state, or in the priest-holes of sympathetic manor houses. The Catholic laity, particularly the gentry, were not marginalised from this account, but the emphasis was ever on their separateness, on their being identified and fined for the statutory offence of recusancy, and on the inward-looking practice of a faith in which, as Lord Vaux claimed when presented for not attending church in Bedfordshire in 1581, the gentry manor house might be ‘a parish by itself’.¹ The study of post-Reformation Catholicism took a major step forward in 1975, when John Bossy published his The English Catholic Community 1570–1850. This ambitious synoptic account brought scholarly rigour to its subject, eschewing the hagiographical tone of some earlier studies, and presented Catholicism as (sociologically speaking) a species of non-conformity. But Bossy’s was an avowedly internalist study, concerned with ‘the body of Catholics as a social whole and in relation to itself’; his subject was the society of Catholics, rather than Catholics in society.²

Within the last decade or so, however, a growing body of work has brought about a significant realignment, encouraging us to consider both the variety of ways in which Catholics were integrated into mainstream society and the extent to which Catholicism itself should remain integral to the master narrative of national history throughout this period. Much of this work has taken as its focus the remarkable potency of anti-Catholicism for forging identity, or creating division, within English society as a whole.³ But other studies have invited a reconsideration of the social and political significance of Catholicism by advocating a reassessment of the term itself.

In particular, it has become clear that the words Catholicism and recusancy should not be regarded as interchangeable. Recusancy was a legal category, imposed on a certain group of dissenters by the state – those identified as refusing to attend Protestant services as required by law – but not all Catholics were recusants. That there were those after 1559 who can meaningfully be described as Catholics within the fold of the Church of England has long been recognised, and was widely commented on at the time. True Protestants disdained these ‘Church papists’, and the Roman Catholic clergy stigmatised them as ‘schismatics’, but they were a significant (in some eyes, alarmingly significant) social group. An older view that Church papistry was a transitional phenomenon of the first half of Elizabeth I’s reign has been persuasively revised in recent years. It is now apparent that the boundary between strict recusancy and conformity, or occasional conformity, remained porous throughout the course of the seventeenth century. Individuals moved in and out of recusancy at certain points in the life cycle, or in response to the intensity of state repression; Catholic families might be divided between recusant and conformist branches, or the split might be evident within the household itself, with (typically) a conforming husband married to a recusant wife.⁴ Catholics were thus often the outsiders within, a situation which might, depending on circumstance, ameliorate neighbourly relations, or might serve to heighten fears and anxieties within the majority Protestant community.

A growing interest in Church popery has been accompanied in the past few years by a noticeable shift of attention towards the phenomenon of popular and plebeian Catholicism. When William Trimble published in 1964 a book on the Catholic laity in Elizabethan England, his subject matter was in fact almost entirely the gentry. Bossy sought ‘to keep a balance between the gentry and the rest of the community’, but in recent years, and for some good and understandable reasons, the balance has started to tilt towards the latter.⁵ Paradoxically, however, as historians of early modern Catholicism have begun to shift their gaze downwards, there has been a noticeable revival of interest in landed families within the historical profession more broadly. Scholars have been fruitfully examining such themes as marriage strategy and kinship networks, estate management and expansion, the exercise of patronage, patterns of consumption and expenditure, cultural interests, concepts of honour and ideological commitments among the gentry. As a result, our understanding of early modern English society, at both local and national level, has been much enhanced.⁶ But, with some exceptions, the social, cultural and political worlds of English Catholic gentry families have not been a discernible focus of this work.⁷ The only significant recent book-length study is Michael Questier’s important analysis of the ‘entourage’ centred on the Browne family, Viscounts Montague, of Cowdray and Battle in Sussex. Questier incisively opens up the theme which Bossy had avoided, ‘the interaction of the Catholic community with the outside world’, while at the same time demonstrating the vital importance of Catholic kinship networks.⁸ But the aristocratic Brownes were hardly archetypal of Catholic landowners as a group, and further studies are needed if we are to understand how, in a new and changing historiographical landscape, the elites of the Catholic community stand in relation to the social topography around them.

This volume is intended as a fresh tributary to this productive confluence of historical themes. It takes as a case-study the experiences of a single Catholic gentry family, and examines them from a variety of perspectives over the course of a long early modern period, from c.1530 to 1860. The chronology here is thus considerably broader than Questier’s (1550–1640) and, while it follows Bossy’s lead in tracing the story through emancipation to the restoration of the Catholic hierarchy in England, it implicitly challenges the latter’s emphatic denial that ‘the proper place to begin a history of the English Catholic community [is] the reign of Henry VIII’. Bossy’s view was that orthodox religion of the early sixteenth century ‘is so far a different thing from the history of English Catholicism that anyone who tries to conflate the two is in trouble’.⁹ It is not part of the agenda here – far from it – to assert an unproblematic continuity across the Reformation divide. In parallel with Bossy, a 1976 study, by the former Benedictine Hugh Aveling, warned its readers against ‘the grand and moving vision’ of a post-Reformation Catholicism which was ‘a direct prolongation into the modern world of late medieval English religion, continuing its characteristic temper and virtues’ – a vision which could move ‘even a complete outsider’ when he or she visited ‘such old Catholic mansions as Coughton Court’.¹⁰ Nonetheless, it is the contention here that following the choices and experiences of an individual family from before the break with Rome has the potential to enhance our understanding of how the Catholic community took shape, and of why it took the shapes that it did.

A question immediately presents itself. Why this gentry family? What is special about the Throckmortons of Coughton? Their claim to historical attention is not self-evident, and indeed has not always been recognised. Bossy takes no notice of any individual member of the family before the late eighteenth century, and ‘Throckmorton’ does not even appear in Aveling’s list of 42 leading Catholic families of the seventeenth century, a catalogue evincing a ‘magnificence and solidity about the roll of names’.¹¹ Only a couple of family members in the direct line appear in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB). Previous scholarship has not entirely passed the Throckmortons by. The fortuitous survival of a seventeenth-century steward’s account book prompted the antiquarian Etwell Barnard to publish a study of one head of the family, Sir Francis Throckmorton, in 1944 (reassessed in Malcolm Wanklyn’s chapter). And another fortunate archival survival (a sixteenth-century diary; discussed below), coupled with the fact that one of the Throckmorton women married Sir Walter Raleigh, led a more renowned twentieth-century historian, A.L. Rowse, to produce his book, Ralegh and the Throckmortons, in 1962.¹² A family history of any sort requires an archive, and the Throckmortons possess a good one. The family’s papers were preserved at the ancestral seat at Coughton in Warwickshire until they were transferred in recent times to the County Record Office and the Shakespeare Library in Stratford.¹³

But it is one feature of the family’s early modern history in particular which has periodically grabbed the attention of historians. From an early date the Throckmortons were, in Felicity Heal’s phrase, ‘that ideologically divided family’.¹⁴ The head of the family in the 1530s, Sir George Throckmorton, had to decide whether or not to accept Henry VIII’s break with Rome, and chose to conform, just (his travails are the subject of Peter Marshall’s chapter). His sons, however, took divergent paths, and Protestant and Catholic branches of the family were founded. One of Sir George’s grandsons was Job Throckmorton, the Puritan activist and part-author of the scurrilously anti-episcopal Marprelate Tracts; another was Francis Throckmorton, a Catholic conspirator who gave his name to one of the more serious plots against Elizabeth I.¹⁵ To Rowse it seemed that there was ‘something in the family temperament – its extremism. With the Throckmortons it was either one thing or the other: either wholly Catholic, involved in recusancy, exile, sometimes treason, or else left-wing Protestant, militant and aggressive … No middle course was good enough for them.’¹⁶ Patrick Collinson once termed the Throckmortons ‘a family of slightly unstable extremists’, and David Starkey has referred to a ‘family gallery of heroes and traitors (which is which, of course, depends on your point of view)’.¹⁷

All of this sounds as if the Throckmortons should be regarded as a remarkably untypical gentry family, which in some respects they were. ‘Typicality’ may in any case be something of a historical chimera: English gentry families, like Tolstoy’s unhappy families, often conducted their business in their own distinctive ways. But if we substitute for all-embracing typicality an ability to focus discussion on a range of broader representative themes, then the Throckmortons have much to recommend them. The fact of their ideological fracture was not unique, or even unusual in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century England: many convinced Catholics had conformist or even whole-heartedly Protestant kinsfolk.¹⁸ The extended family, it deserves to be more widely recognised, may thus be a prime location from which to study inter-confessional relations in this period. In other ways, too, the Throckmortons serve as an effective window onto the relationship between the Catholic community and wider society. Despite their persistent adherence to Catholicism over several centuries in the main line, in no sense did the Throckmortons inhabit a ‘recusant bubble’, even if their role as managers of substantial estates, and leading members of ‘county society’ in Warwickshire, Worcestershire and Buckinghamshire, had allowed them so to do. Members of the Coughton branch of the family were periodically involved in politics on the national stage, from Sir George Throckmorton’s resistance to the break with Rome in the 1530s to Sir John Courtenay Throckmorton’s involvement in the emancipation campaigns of the late eighteenth century, and Robert George Throckmorton’s election as the first English Catholic MP in 1831. As a gentry family that remained politically and socially significant from the sixteenth century through to the nineteenth, the Throckmortons provide a golden opportunity to track the fortunes of lay Catholic elites in a changing world.

A brief overview of the history of the Throckmorton family will serve to underline some of the key themes which the subsequent chapters in this volume explore in more detail. The Throckmortons, or Throgmortons (this and other variants are common up to the eighteenth century), originated from Fladbury in Worcestershire, but a fortunate marriage in 1409 led to the acquisition of the manor of Coughton in Warwickshire. They prospered in the fifteenth century as clients of the earls of Warwick, and intermarried with other Midlands gentry families – one of these marriages brought into their hands the Buckinghamshire estate of Weston Underwood, which was to be a second and sometimes principal residence for the family over several succeeding centuries (Figure 1.1).

Throughout the fifteenth century, the family was purchasing land, and by the time of Robert Throckmorton (Sir George Throckmorton’s father) the principal focus of their economic and social interests had shifted from Worcestershire to Warwickshire, and a major rebuilding of the house at Coughton was undertaken. The Throckmortons proved themselves adept at navigating the treacherous shoals of fifteenth-century politics, and were in favour with both Lancastrian and Yorkist kings. Robert Throckmorton was knighted by Henry VII in 1494 (the first of the family to be so honoured by the Crown) and received other tokens of royal favour in exchange for conspicuous loyalism to the new dynasty.¹⁹

If the fifteenth-century Throckmortons were politically and economically astute, they seem to have been more than ordinarily engaged in the practice of their religion. In addition to the chantry foundations and gifts to religious houses that were the conventional status markers of the late medieval gentry, several members of the family seem to have collected vernacular religious texts. One surviving manuscript, which may have belonged to Thomas Throckmorton (d. 1414) or John Throckmorton (d. 1445), prescribes a pious daily regimen for a layman – the medievalist W.A. Pantin characterises its owner as ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Foreword by David Starkey
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Notes
• 1 Introduction: The Catholic Gentry in English Society
• 2 Crisis of Allegiance: George Throckmorton and Henry Tudor
• 3 Reputation, Credit and Patronage: Throckmorton Men and Women, c.1560–1620
• 4 Coughton and the Gunpowder Plot
• 5 Agnes Throckmorton: A Jacobean Recusant Widow
• 6 Stratagems for Survival: Sir Robert and Sir Francis Throckmorton, 1640–1660
• 7 The Throckmortons at Home and Abroad, 1680–1800
• 8 An English Catholic Traveller: Sir John Courtenay Throckmorton and the Continent, 1792–1793
• 9 The Throckmortons Come of Age: Political and Social Alignments, 1826–1862
• Appendix: Genealogical Tables
• Index