in which he broke, when his allegiance to his inheritance could no longer survive the assault of modernity. He was no Thomas More. John Guy has said of More that ‘his morality was his executioner’.33 Throckmorton’s frailty was his saviour.
He gave in. By agreeing not to oppose the King and the reformation of the church, he ensured that his family would survive. He had chosen to suffer in eternity. His wife’s half-brother William Parr, who may have intervened with Cromwell, probably put the deal to him. Throckmorton was released in April 1538. For the remaining fourteen years of his life, he became the conformist squire and the family thrived. Like most of the gentry, Catholic or not, he did well out of the Dissolution of the Monasteries. He had developed a close relationship with the poisonous Richard Rich, whose lying evidence had condemned both Thomas More and John Fisher at their treason trials, but who was Throckmorton’s second cousin. It was another blood-trump. Rich was in charge of the court that dealt in confiscated monastic property and he ensured that quantities of it came Throckmorton’s way. This was a bitter place for Throckmorton’s career to have reached – plotting with the mortal enemy of his Catholic mentors – but he would have calculated profit and loss. Better to gain monastic property than not to engage at all; and the only potent form of engagement was with those who had access to power. Throckmorton already had since Wolsey’s day a lease on the former priory at Ravenstone in Buckinghamshire. Now, from Bordesley Abbey in Worcestershire he received a load of stone, glass and iron. Leases on previously monastic manors in Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Warwickshire all steered towards the Throckmorton estates. In the fluid mid-sixteenth-century land market, everyone, of all religious persuasions, was trying to bolster his land holdings from the flood of ex-monastic property.
The situation of the Throckmortons in the 1540s and in the following decades became an extraordinary diagram of what happened to a family when faced with the questions posed by the Reformation. First, there was the problem of George’s aunt Elizabeth. She was abbess of the small and ancient community of holy sisters at Denny, north of Cambridge, a beautiful, richly endowed place, on a gravelly island in the fens, with the lantern of Ely Cathedral presiding over the marshes to the north of it. Denny was finally surrendered to the crown at some time before October 1539 and Elizabeth came to live with her nephew at Coughton. She brought with her two or three of her nuns, who may have been George’s two sisters Margaret and Joyce, and his cousin, Joanna Peto, the niece of the William Peto who at the beginning of the decade had urged him to stick with his faith to the death.
According to eighteenth-century antiquary William Cole, who heard the story at Coughton, these Catholic ladies lived in an upper room, wearing their proper habits, their days devoted to ‘attendance in the oratory and work at their needle’.34 Their room was connected to the rest of the house by a passage which opened into the hall. With them they had also brought the dole-gate from the abbey, a door in which there was a pair of small hatches, through which the nuns had spoken to strangers and given bread or money to the poor. This dole-gate is still at Coughton, with Elizabeth’s name carved on it, and it may be that it was fixed on the door to that upper, private corridor, so that in effect the abbess continued to preside over a tiny, shrunken, secret nunnery concealed inside Coughton itself.
This little capsule of an earlier treasured world operating hidden in the middle of a post-Reformation house might be thought of as a model of George Thockmorton’s heart: a private, buried Catholicism, still complete, encased in a conforming, outwardly proper, worldly shell, the only possible means of survival. If you had walked down the inner corridors of George Throckmorton in the 1540s, perhaps you would have found his Catholic inheritance sheltering there concealed but unchanged.
But the geometry of Throckmorton belief and behaviour was more complex than a simple division between inner Catholicism and outer Protestant conformity. The whole family came to embody the conflict and crisis of the Reformation. George and Kathryn had seven sons who lived to adulthood. Three of them became fiercely committed Roman Catholics, the other four equally committed Protestants. In his will George remembered them all equally well, instructing his son and heir Robert ‘to permytt and suffer every of my younger sonnes quyetlie and without vexacion, trouble or interruption’35 to have all the properties he had already given them. He would not betray a son on the basis of ideas he had been unable to reconcile himself.
There was nothing middle-of-the-road about any of the Throckmortons. The Protestant side, most of whom had come under the wing of their mother’s relations the Parrs, were relatively straightforward. Once they had survived the suspicions of the Catholic regime under Mary Tudor (when Nicholas Throckmorton was imprisoned and tried for treason but was acquitted), they led, on the whole, good serviceable lives as loyal gentry to the Elizabethan state. Only Job, the author of the vituperative anti-bishop Puritan pamphlets called the Marprelate Tracts, embraced some of the ferocious religious fervour of his Catholic cousins.
It was on the Catholic side that the extraordinary inheritance of suffering and rage emerged in generation after generation of the family. Two of George’s sons were imprisoned by the state for their Catholicism, as were a grandson and a granddaughter’s husband, repeatedly, over many years, while subject to huge, repetitive fines of £20 a month for non-attendance at church.
Three of his grandsons lived and died in exile, plotting for the restoration of a Catholic England. One of his grandsons and the husband of a granddaughter, as well as four of his great-grandsons and two husbands of his great-granddaughters, were involved in murderous Catholic plots against Queen Elizabeth and her cousin James. All of them died in the course of their desperate rebellions, most of them a violent and humiliating traitor’s death. Five of those descendants were central figures in the Gunpowder Treason of 1605. This inheritance flowed on through the generations at least as much in the female as the male line. Francis Throckmorton was executed for his part in the plot that bore his name in 1583, but it was his aunt Catherine and his cousins Mary, Anne and Muriel who mothered traitor after traitor, martyr after martyr, in the Catholic cause.
This division of a family is what Peter Marshall has called ‘a crisp microcosm’36 of the religious divide of Reformation Europe. But that is not the whole story. Loyalty and a sense of shared family enterprise lived alongside the deepest possible divisions of the age. Religious and ideological differences, which in the country at large were leading men and women to their deaths, were accommodated within the corporate body of the Throckmortons as less important than family love. As the structures of the outer world lost coherence, as loyalty to state, loyalty to God and loyalty to the past came into conflict with each other, it was the family identity which remained whole. Despite the ferocity of the positions they adopted, and the uncompromising attitudes of government to religious dissent, these cousins, uncles, nephews and friends remained, on the whole, on wonderfully good terms with each other.
Privately, Catholic John gave Protestant Arthur legal advice. Protestant Nicholas asked Catholic John if he could get hold of a rare Anglo-Saxon New Testament for an archbishop who was a client. Catholic Antony went on hunting expeditions with Protestant Arthur. Both of them stayed the night with Catholic Thomas and with rabidly Protestant Job. Catholic Robert left Protestant Kenelm his best clothes in his will, as did Protestant Nicholas to Catholic Antony. Protestant Arthur wrote friendly letters to his fiercely Catholic cousin and plotter Francis, even on the same day that he wrote to his fiercely Protestant cousin Job. They witnessed each other’s wills and stayed in each other’s houses if they happened to be near by.
In the cool dark church at Coughton, there is one poignant memorial to this ambivalent Throckmorton legacy. In the chancel, right up at the east end, as near to salvation as they could possibly be, George Throckmorton’s son John and his wife Margery Puttenham lie side by side under a marble canopy. John’s moustache droops across a solid, Noah-like beard. She holds up her left hand, whose fingers are broken, as if in wary salutation. In his right, he has a staff of office but in the other, his fingers and hers (also now broken) just touch, her sleeve ruckled as she moves it towards him. It is no full-blooded grasping of the hand, just the lightest of signals, a private demonstration, unnoticed by others.
