March 1515. Plumpton was indeed to have Plumpton. The others were to have everything else. If the Rocliffes and Sotehills didn’t let the Plumptons back into Plumpton, they were to give them £40 a year, which was in effect Plumpton’s net worth. Seventy years before, the family had been en route to glory; now they had sunk to this, an annual income below which almost no family could call itself gentry.87
Robert was broken. In 1516, he was sixty-three, his ‘grand climateric’, the moment at which, according to classical medical theory, a man’s life turned down towards death. In that year he made a deal with his son William, by which, in a sad and haunted act of resignation, a Lear-like transition from this world to the next, the father surrendered all say over his own life and lands and allowed William to dictate the conditions in which he and Isabel would now live. Will was to ‘have ordering and charge of all the household and goods therto longing’. Robert and Isabel were ‘to take their ease and reast, and to be at board with the said William at the proper costs and charges of the said Will’. Will was to have all the income from the lands and rents and was to pay all the costs, ‘that is to say, meate, drinke, and wages’. He was also to pay for his brothers and sisters and to be in charge of employing the servants, except that ‘the said Sir Robert his fader shal have thre at his owne pleasure, such as he will apointe’. Robert was to have an allowance of £10 a year and Will was to listen to his advice on farms, woods and debts.88
It is a broken conclusion. Robert’s legacies at death were a few shillings to a church here and there, a pound or two to his younger sons and daughters ‘which sums William Plompton his son and heir was to pay’.89 To Isabel Plumpton, his wife, all the goods in his chamber after his death, and the half of all his other goods. Witnesses to his will were his chaplain, a Plumpton cousin, and his servants Ralph Knowle and Oliver Dickenson, who had been with him at the siege of the hall and in prison in London.
The lands Robert had lost slid on in the hands of the Cliffords, soon to be the high-glamour Earls of Cumberland. None of those old Plumpton lands is more beautiful than Grassington in upper Wharfedale, none more unrecognizable than Idle, now buried in Bradford, none more poignant than Plumpton, where moss grows on the abandoned road and the stone walls on the edge of the wood have been allowed to collapse and crumble.
Is there a moral to this story? Perhaps only that there is no safety. The world of the gentry, even in its medieval beginnings, was not only endlessly negotiable but constantly in need of negotiation. If you happened to get caught in a tough political struggle or a tangle of deceit, it was perfectly likely for the entire family enterprise to be fatally damaged.
The Plumptons remained Roman Catholic at the Reformation, fell increasingly into debt and ended up on the wrong side in the Civil War. John, the last Plumpton of any substance, was wounded at Marston Moor and died after languishing for several days in Knaresborough, where he is buried, owing £6,393. The last of the line was another Robert Plumpton, who died at Cambrai in France unmarried in 1749. He had gone there to confer with his aunt Anne, a Benedictine nun. After his death, the manor of Plumpton was sold to Daniel Lascelles, the son and part-heir of one of the great and most brutal slave-financiers of the eighteenth century. Daniel intended to make it his seat. He pulled down Plumpton Hall and, as Thomas Stapleton, the nineteenth-century editor of the Plumpton letters, described, ‘formed about its site extensive pleasure-grounds; but, after having begun the erection of a new building, he desisted and went to live at Goldsborough Hall, another of his purchases and which, like Plumpton, had once been the residence of a knightly family’.90
Everything medieval at Plumpton has gone, erased in the eighteenth century, no more than one or two bits of broken sandstone now surviving among the brambles and the bracken.
PART II
In the Renaissance State
1520–1610
The Tudors were the most successful gentry family in English history. Owen Tudor, an obscure and impoverished North Wales squire, working as a servant in the royal household, managed in about 1428 to catch the eye of Henry V’s widow, Catherine of Valois, a few years after her warrior husband had died. It is not quite certain how he did it but Owen either fell into her lap when dancing drunk or went swimming in front of her and her ladies. It was a Mr Darcy moment. One chronicler, who knew Catherine well, said she was ‘unable fully to curb her carnal passions’1 when confronted with the magnificent sight of Tudor in the water – she was about twenty-five, he a year to two older – and English history changed. Their sons became power-players in the Wars of the Roses and from that long violent crisis their grandson Henry Tudor emerged the victor at Bosworth Field in 1485. On 30 October that year he was crowned King of England as Henry VII. In this way, the smallest of vicissitudes can change whole worlds.
The civil wars of the fifteenth century which had brought the Tudors to power had destroyed the world of the great medieval magnates. Under the Tudors, overwhelmingly aware of the vulnerability of a crown weaker than its greatest subjects, the great magnates were excluded from influence. After the 1530s, and Henry VIII’s raid on church property and independent power, the church went too. That should have left the crown itself dominating the field, buttressed by the imposing and often terrifying authority of the Tudor state, but in an era before comprehensive taxation, the crown was chronically underfunded, inherently extravagant and forced to spend capital as income. Between the 1530s and the 1630s, it lost what it should have gained.
Statistics can only be the roughest of informed guesses. Nevertheless, through the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there is no doubt that the economic and social structures of England underwent the deepest of transformations and the great beneficiaries of this double revolution – the failure of the magnates and then the failure of the crown – were the gentry. Their landholding rose from 20 per cent in the Middle Ages to something like half the country by the middle of the seventeenth century. The result was that where the crown, the church and the great lords had ruled medieval England, the great lords and the gentry came to rule early modern England.
This is the fluid and difficult environment in which the Throckmortons found themselves in the 1530s and where the Thynnes rode to riches and significance. Any number of sixteenth-century ‘new men’ understood the lesson promulgated by the old and cynical Tudor statesman William Paulet, Marquess of Winchester. When asked at the end of his career how he had managed to survive for thirty years at the centre of power, through so many reigns and changes, he said, ‘Ortus sum ex salice, non ex quercu, I was made of the plyable Willow, not of the stubborn Oak.’2 The heart of survival: pliancy.
It would be a mistake to make the focus of this history only the pain and struggle of survival in a challenging world. Tudor England was beautiful. Nowhere else in Europe was as green as England and every foreign visitor remarked on it – the thickness of the overhanging trees, the day-long spread of pasture as you rode across country. It was a world of beef and sheep. To keep the fertility up, advisers on Tudor agriculture recommended sowing the meadows with a mixture of clovers, yarrow, tormentil and English plantain. The ‘whole country is well wooded and shady’, a Frenchman, Estienne Perlin, wrote in 1558, ‘for the fields are all enclosed with hedges, oak trees and several other sorts of trees, to such an extent that in travelling you think you are in a continuous wood’.3 English pigs amazed strangers with their size and fatness. The best chickens Polydore Vergil ever ate came from Kent. The horses were strong and handsome and were exported abroad. It was a thickened country, dense with locality. This was the wild thyme, oxlip and honeysuckle landscape that would form the remembered and dreamed-of background to a century of violent political and religious change. That is the definition of sixteenth-century England: government bordering on tyranny in a country filled with sweet musk roses and eglantine.
The sixteenth century was a time to be in land. The weather was improving and more children were surviving into adulthood. The number of people in England was rising faster than the amount of food
