GENTRY EB

Adam Nicolson

• Publisher: HarperPress
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780007335510
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: History

Adam Nicolson tells the story of England through the history of fourteen gentry families – from the 15th century to the present day. This sparkling work of history reads like a real-life Downton Abbey, as the loves, hatreds and many times of grief of his chosen cast illuminate the grand events of history.

We may well be 'a nation of shopkeepers', but for generations England was a country dominated by its middling families, rooted on their land, in their locality, with a healthy interest in turning a profit from their property and a deep distrust of the centralised state. The virtues we may all believe to be part of the English culture – honesty, affability, courtesy, liberality – each of these has their source in gentry life cultivated over five hundred years. These folk were the backbone of England.

Adam Nicolson's riveting new book concentrates on fourteen families, from 1400 to the present day. From the medieval gung-ho of the Plumpton family to the high-seas adventures of the Lascelles in the eighteenth century, to more modern examples, the book provides a chronological picture of the English, seen through these intimate, passionate, powerful stories of family saga. Drawing on a wealth of unpublished archive material, here is a vivid depiction of the life and code of the gentry.

'The Gentry' is first and foremost a wonderful sweep of English history, shedding light on the creation of the distinctive English character but with the sheer readability of an epic novel.

PART I

The Inherited World

1410–1520

1410s–1520s

Survival

The Plumptons
Plumpton, Yorkshire

In early May, under the narrow footbridge at Brafferton, a few miles north of York, the river Swale flows over the shallow bed of what was once Brafferton Ford. The water is dirty, a thick, chocolatey brown, its silty fertility drawn from the rich country of the Vale of York through which it has run. A giant fresh-leaved beech tree shades the churchyard of St Peter. Pollarded ashes and grey-green willows stand on the river banks. It doesn’t take much to imagine these broad wet acres in the Middle Ages: the oxen from the plough teams grazing on the spring fallow, the boys with their goads, the open fields with the new wheat up and growing, the crows scattered across the ridge-and-furrow and beside the river the long meadows thick with the first of the summer grass, the corncrakes hidden there and the skylarks above them.

Here, just at this crossing, deep in the middle of comfortable, unremarkable England, one morning in May 1441, this first story of a gentry family and its own particular catastrophe begins.¹ Sir William Plumpton was thirty-seven years old. He was a strong man, a soldier, knighted in the French wars, energetic, violent and assertive but also canny, a manipulator and deceiver, endlessly weaving webs of connection and influence, knowing how to court the great and suppress the weak, consciously looking to sustain the fortunes of his ancient and dignified name, happy to receive the hatred and contempt of those he had crossed or betrayed, confident that in the turmoil of this chaotic and desperate century he would emerge a winner.

He was approaching the peak of his powers and had come here this morning, Friday 5 May, with his tenants and followers, the twenty-four men of his own household and many others, perhaps a hundred or more, with the idea of having a fight. His men were armed with bows, swords and pole arms, the semi-agricultural instruments with which a man could slash at an enemy as he would at a hedge.²

Plumpton had seen chivalry and heroism in action and had heard of it from his father and grandfather. That grandfather, in defence of ancient honour, had rebelled against the usurper Henry IV and been executed, his boiled head displayed for months on York’s Micklegate Bar.³ His father, Sir Robert Plumpton, had been a knight at Agincourt, a retainer of Henry V’s brother, the beautiful and cultivated 25-year-old Duke of Bedford. Robert went to France, with his squire, two valets and eight Yorkshire archers, each paid five shillings a month, horsed, clothed and fed by him on condition that they ‘pay unto him halfe the gude that they win by war’.⁴ Money was never far from these chivalric arrangements. But this Robert was to die in the war, at the mud-drenched siege of Meaux on 8 December 1421, at which an English army, debilitated and made squalid by dysentery, subsided in its flooded trenches outside that city on the banks of the Marne.⁵

William was eighteen when his father died. Within five years he too had gone to France, as a squire, also with the great Duke of Bedford, and William was knighted there as his father had been. But English fortunes were on the wane. The siege of Meaux had been an early portent of English failure abroad. Joan of Arc soon swept them out of the country and the Plantagenet empire was reduced to the stump of the Pas de Calais. The Hundred Years War ended in English failure, and as it ended the English turned their appetite and genius for violence on themselves. The English civil wars, known since the sixteenth century as the Wars of the Roses, were, at least in part, the behaviour of a military class with no one left to fight.

The plague had become endemic in England since its first devastating eruptions a century before, and it struck again in the West Riding of Yorkshire in 1438 and again in 1439.⁶ Harvests had failed, people were starving, their immune systems weakened. By the spring of 1441, something desperate was in the air. Since 1438 William Plumpton had been steward of the big royal forest of Knaresborough, 4,500 acres, much of it the wild and moory waste stretching up into the Pennines to the west of where Harrogate now stands. This royal appointment made him lord over hundreds of tenants, who were under no obligation to pay tolls levied by other authorities – on bridges, fairs, roads, quays and markets. In 1440, William and 700 of these Knaresborough men had ridden over in a frightening posse ‘arrayed in manner of war, and in ryotous wise assembled’ to the market town at Otley, where the Cardinal Archbishop of York had been trying to enforce the payment of his market dues.⁷

He was no innocent in this and from the mid-1430s onwards had been aggressively attempting to widen his influence and enlarge his income.⁸ He hired mercenaries from the Scottish border, battle-hardened and well-armed men from the valley of the Tyne and near Hexham on the Northumberland moors, and on Thursday 4 May, decided to send them on a raid out into the Knaresborough country, south-east of Ripon towards York. In the twin villages of Brafferton and Helperby, Plumpton’s men put up a road block to meet them, ‘with stoks, thorns, and otherwise, to thintent that when the said officers, tenants and servants came thither, they should be stopped their and incumbred’.⁹

The crisis came early on Friday 5 May and moved fast. Before sunrise, ‘on the morne, by the spring of the day’,¹⁰ William and his gang came up the road ‘with all the diligence that they could, makeing a great and horrible shoute upon the said officers, servants, and tenants.’ The archbishop’s men, attempting to get away, made for the ford over the Swale at Brafferton, crossed the river, where the footbridge now is, and rode up past the church into the main street of Brafferton-Helperby.

Here they met Plumpton’s roadblock. Desperately the Archbishop’s gang looked for ways of escape, some finding ‘a long straite lane’ along the back of the village; others got out ‘by breaking of an hedge into a feild’.¹¹ But Plumpton and his men were not happy with frightening their enemies. They pursued them out of the village on to the dark wet boglands of Helperby Moor, riding after them for more than half a mile, shouting at them, as they had all morning: ‘Sley the Archbishop’s Carles’ – an Old Norse word meaning ‘men’ – and ‘Would God that we had the Archbishop here.’¹² The brutality was unforgiving. The Plumpton mob killed Thomas Hunter, a gentleman, and Thomas Hooper, a yeoman, even after they had given themselves up to their pursuers. They were killing prisoners in cold blood. A man called Christopher Bee, one of the Archbishop’s affinity,

was maymed, that is to say, smitten in the mouth and so through the mouth into the throat, by the which he hath lost his cheeke bone and three of his fore teeth, and his speech blemished and hurt, that it is not easy to understand what he speaks or saies, and may not use therefore the remnant of his teeth and jawes to th’use of eating, as he might before.¹³

Others were maimed and left for dead out on the moor.¹⁴ Those not beaten, stabbed and cut by the Plumpton men were robbed and terrorized, their horses, harness, gold and silver all taken from them, gentlemen, yeomen, artisans and labourers alike. Plumpton was left in possession of the field, his war transferred from the wet fields of France to the springtime green of the Vale of York, his status enhanced and his future good.

When people think of the English gentry, this may not be the picture that comes to mind: the unforgiving assertion of violent authority in a disintegrating world; the application of the habits of war to a legalistic, economic and almost domestic dispute; the gathering of one’s people, ‘the affinity’, as a form of self-promotion; the crude gang identity of those shouted taunts. But there can be little doubt that this triumph stood William Plumpton in good stead. Within two years his feudal superior, the young Harry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, had put him in charge of all the Percy estates and castles in Yorkshire. The crown had rewarded him with a gift of twenty mature oak trees, felled and trimmed, delivered to Plumpton Hall. He was now steward of the castle at Knaresborough and a Justice of the Peace, and was to become Sheriff or chief law officer of Yorkshire and a few years later of both Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, each appointment for a separate year. The violence at Brafferton was a mark of Plumpton’s willingness to impose his authority, even if it was at the cost of murdering gentleman and yeoman prisoners. That entrepreneurial virility, in the unravelling word of mid-fifteenth-century England, was the most valuable quality a man could have.¹⁵

The Plumptons were loyal followers and tenants of the Percy Earls of Northumberland. They had even imitated the Percy coat of arms (yellow lozenges on a blue background), merely differencing it, as the heralds said, with five red scallop shells. Visually and heraldically the Plumptons bound themselves to their feudal overlords. They were gentry; they had no claim on nobility, but were part of the same knightly world inhabited by the truly great.

But as gentry they were heavily involved in the dirty details of local government. They had held and ruled the manor at Plumpton since the twelfth century, and others higher in the Pennines, including the beautiful limestone woods and meadows at Grassington in Upper Wharfedale, and the Airedale manors of Steeton and Idle. William’s father had married an heiress who brought still more and richer lands in Nottinghamshire, Derbyshire and Staffordshire. Like many of the medieval gentry families, the Plumptons had their place, their centre, but were attached to others across the country. They were lords in their own country but tied to their feudal superiors. They could be summoned at will by the earls or by the King. They travelled, as Justices of the Peace, and as Sheriffs of all the counties in which they held their lands and as Members of Parliament in Westminster. They were local grandees but with a national perspective. They pursued without hesitation their inferiors. And they were fuelled by ambition, a desire not only to preserve the name of Plumpton but to enhance it and enlarge it, to insulate it from the shocks of mortality and the failure to breed.¹⁶

The Brafferton affray was symptomatic of this gentry life: it borrowed from the world of martial glory; it asserted lay and royal authority in the face of the church; it required competence in command; it played fast and loose with legal niceties; it relied on a sense of local loyalty; and it did not hesitate to do dreadful deeds. It may also have looked at the time like the beginning of Plumpton’s ascent to greatness.

From the 1440s onwards William’s public career could not have been clearer. He stayed loyal to the Northumberlands and to the Lancastrian crown which he and his father had both served with such honour in France. He acquired local office and with it influence and riches. And at least to begin with, his policy for his family and its name followed the same well-defined path. He had been married when he was twelve in 1416 to a local gentry girl, Elizabeth Stapleton, and on his return from the French wars in 1430, a son, Robert, had been conceived, born the following year. A younger brother, William, was born four years later. With this male inheritance, the future of the Plumptons seemed secure and Sir William took a mistress to whom a further two sons were born. So powerful was the patriarchal mandate in this class that they too were called William and Robert.¹⁷

This phenomenon, which was common to the gentry throughout the centuries, was especially marked in the Plumptons: William Plumpton’s father was called Robert, his grandfather William, his younger brother Robert and his eldest son William, his younger son Robert, his elder bastard son William, his younger bastard son Robert, yet another son Robert – of whom much more below – and his grandson William. It is as if these people’s genes did not belong to them. They were no more individualized than pieces on a chess board, all Plumptons but there to play a role. In an age both obsessed with the transmission of value from one generation to the next and struggling with the erosion of knightly values, each successive Robert and William must have felt that burden more acutely than the last.

Elizabeth Stapleton, the boys’ mother, died in the early 1440s and in 1446 Sir William embarked on elevating the prospects of the next generation. His eldest son, Robert, now fifteen, was married to Elizabeth, the six-year-old daughter of a great Yorkshire and Westmorland magnate, Lord Clifford. They were ‘wedded at the chappell within the castell at Skypton’.¹⁸ The Cliffords’ castle remains complete, a muscled, stony northern fortress at the head of Skipton market, but the chapel in which these children were married is now a bruised and broken wreck, the mouldings on its roof timbers still there but with later windows and doors crudely knocked through its walls. In the 1440s, it was glorious, a family shrine to northern warlords. Here, a Clifford retainer ‘John Garthe bare [Elizabeth Clifford] in his armes to the said chappell’, where her young Plumpton husband was standing waiting for her. It is the most poignant image in this story: a small girl carried into her marriage and her destiny, no choice, little understanding, the men of the cloth, a blessing, a party, smiles, drinks, toasts in the great hall of the castle, the stranger of a boy, a young man, her husband, smiling down at her. It was agreed, as usual, that they were not to ‘ligg togedder till she came to the age of xvi yeres’.¹⁹

Sir William Plumpton settled wonderful lands on the pair: manors and estates in Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire, including among many others Edensor, where Chatsworth now stands. For the privilege, he also paid Lord Clifford a fee of £40, two-thirds of a year’s income from his manor at Plumpton.²⁰ For William, this was an elevation: the knight’s dream of transition to the nobility was made more likely by such an alliance. The descendants of young Robert and Elizabeth might at least have the money to support the status and dignity of a barony. For old Lord Clifford, his daughter’s marriage to such a boy was not only profitable but politically useful. The marriage of a peer’s daughter to a knight’s son required less of a dowry than would be asked for by a peer, as the increase in status made up for the lack of cash. And Plumpton, with his undoubted vigour, and a connection which Clifford valued with the Lancastrian Earls of Northumberland and the Percy family, was a form of mutual insurance, an element in the power grouping set against the other great northern family, the Yorkist Nevilles, with their power base in the north-west, hated by the Cliffords and with whom the Percys were on the point of a long and brutal feud. Political, martial, personal, dynastic, financial, status conscious, courtly, handsome and splendid: the Clifford marriage can only have warmed Sir William Plumpton’s heart.

The bridegroom was dead within three years, aged eighteen, from an unknown illness, and the marriage of course was unconsummated. But too much was riding on the alliance with the Cliffords for the boy’s death to alter the arrangements. The young Elizabeth Clifford, now aged twelve, was married again in 1453 to Robert’s younger brother, William Plumpton, now aged seventeen, the same terms applying. That is how it had to be: girls did not walk to their weddings; boys stepped up when their brothers died; Williams followed Roberts; and girls complied.

All apparently remained well with the Plumpton enterprise. England was drifting into civil war, but civil war might be an opportunity for a man of his stamp. Sir William was pursuing his personal enemies through the courts both in Yorkshire and in Westminster with unparalleled toughness, crushing his victims with teams of expensive and effective lawyers. He took part in 1459 in the English battles on the Scottish border and emerged from them with martial credit. In the same year a granddaughter, Margaret, was born to Elizabeth and two years later another granddaughter, another Elizabeth, joined her. Daughters and granddaughters were poor currency compared with a male heir, but they were at least a sign of fertility. All might yet be well. There was no reason the Plumpton name would not continue happily into the future.

At Plumpton itself, the towered sandstone hall, with its own chapel of the Holy Trinity, was richly decorated and furnished.²¹ Some twenty servants worked and lived there. Silver-chased hunting horns and salt cellars were part of the furnishings. The family chapel, where they worshopped with their own full-time priest, had rich silk dressings for the altar and for the priest himself. The Plumptons had beautiful clothes: cloaks ‘furred with martyns’,²² a coverlet of red satin and a canopy of white silk. Men and women wore silvered belts and girdles, amber beads and gold, sapphire and emerald rings. They had books and psalters covered in red satin and red velvet. The little children learned French and could speak it by the time they were four.²³ In the great fishponds which are still at Plumpton, bream, tench and pike were raised for the table.²⁴ Rabbits, hares and pheasants came from the Plumptons’ beautiful manor at Grassington in Upper Wharfedale. Game, including venison, came from the wide open stretches of Knaresborough forest. The house was well armed with stocks of bows, swords, shields, armour and the pole arms with which the retained men were fitted out. The hall itself, the heart of the manor, was decorated with those coats of arms which reflected the dynastic and land-gathering enterprise on which the family was embarked: Plumpton quartered with Foljambe (his mother’s family from Nottinghamshire), Plumpton with Stapleton (his own wife’s), Plumpton with Clifford (his son’s).²⁵

In the cold and frozen spring of 1461, catastrophe overtook them all. A letter from the Lancastrian king, Henry VI, on the run at York, was brought by messenger to Plumpton. Edward IV, known to Lancastrians as the Earl of March, had been declared King in London on 3 March and was now on his way north to destroy his rival. Henry and the whole Lancastrian affinity to which Plumpton...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Map
• Introduction
• Part I: The Inherited World 1410–1520
• Part II: In the Renaissance State 1520–1610
• Part III: The Great Century 1610–1710
• Part IV: Atlantic Domains 1710–1790
• Part V: The Failing Vision 1790–1910
• Part VI: The After-Life 1910–2010
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Searchable Terms
• Other books by Adam Nicolson
• Copyright
• About the Publisher