gesture is invisible from the body of the church. You have to lean into the shelter of their tomb to see it. But what does it mean? There are clues. Under Queen Mary, John had been a distinguished and important judge. He had witnessed the Queen’s will in 1558, and was clearly identifiable as a Catholic. But under Elizabeth he had, outwardly at least, conformed to the new religion and the new Queen knighted him, appointing him Vice President of the Council in Wales. He remained a loyal and outward Protestant until he died in 1580, when he was about fifty-six. Margery died about eleven years later.
All that time, in private, hidden from the world, his household and his wife remained as deeply Catholic as any in the kingdom. Margery brought up four fiercely Catholic sons. Francis plotted to murder the Queen and was horribly executed as a Catholic martyr in 1583. Their three other sons became Catholic exiles abroad, one, Edward, dying as a twenty-year-old Jesuit in Rome. A memoir of the boy was written by the English Jesuit Robert Southwell, praising his saintliness and attributing to his mother ‘an invincible constancy to the Catholic faith, whence she never swerved in the least from the moment that heresy invaded the kingdom’.
John Throckmorton, for all his outward conformity, never abandoned the Catholicism of the heart, and in that deceitful devotion was sustained by Margery’s private and invincible constancy. That is what her touch on his hand surely means: she was his guide, leading him towards a shared salvation.
Their wide-open eyes now stare at the marble ceiling above them and they have become their attributes: the gravity-defying pleats of her dress and cowl, his buttoned doublet and chain of office, her twisted girdle, the knightly helm beneath his head, the cushion under hers, travelling together into eternity. Only that secret and everlasting meeting of their fingers indicates the agony which, even then, their family was passing through.
The Throckmortons had a long and eventful history after the sixteenth century and are still living at Coughton today, proudly nurturing the Catholic inheritance for which their Tudor forebears suffered so much. It was only their attachment to their lands in the English Midlands that meant they stayed and dissembled until England turned more liberal and tolerant. If the Throckmortons had been equally committed Separatists or radical Protestants, they might well have gone to America to re-establish their family culture there. In that way, the inner corridors at Coughton, with their priest’s holes and their secret vestments and altars, might also be seen as that most modern of things: a private settlement, away from the world, where conscience could be free, hidden from the prying and violence of the all-intervening state.
1580s–1610s
Control
The Thynnes
Oxford, Beaconsfield, Wiltshire, Shropshire and London
One morning in May 1594, three years after the death of Margaret Puttenham, Thomas Thynne was in his rooms in the quiet, pale-cider-yellow quad of Corpus Christi College, Oxford.1 He was handsome, rich, dark haired, witty, a flirtatious sixteen-year-old undergraduate, no great scholar,2 but a man of his moment. He owned copies of Sidney’s Arcadia, perhaps the version published by Sidney’s sister the Countess of Pembroke the year before, and a new English translation of Orlando Furioso, the great romance of the Italian Renaissance.3 They were the two dream books of the age, designed to fill the minds of young men with erotic and heroic adventures in which their fantasy selves could star. Thomas was a musician, with a pair of citterns in his rooms, like flat-backed mandolins, and a big-bellied lute,4 an emblem for the Elizabethans of the melancholy music that lived, as Sidney had written, in ‘the mute timber when it hath the life lost.’5
A visitor called on him that morning, a man called Edward Tennant. He was the servant of one of the Thynnes’ Wiltshire neighbours, Sir James Mervyn. Thomas would have known that all Mervyns hated all Thynnes. But Tennant brought a letter from John Mervyn, the forty-year-old nephew of Sir James and the great exception to that enmity. Unlike every other Mervyn in England, John Mervyn could be trusted. He was an old friend of Thomas’s own father, John. But even here, at the very beginning of the story, there is treachery and deceit, because Tennant’s mission, under John Mervyn’s instructions, was to entrap young Thynne into the greatest mistake of his life.
Over the previous twenty years the two families had been conducting a vicious and at times murderous feud, a power struggle to control the county of Wiltshire in which they were both rich and powerful landowners.6 There was nothing aberrational about this: all over Elizabethan England, particularly in those counties where there was no single great, controlling aristocratic or courtly family, the gentry battled for reputation, influence and office. Bribery, deceit, slander, threats, street fights, woundings and murders: all were part of the struggle between leading English families in the sixteenth century. Friends were appointed to juries and to the magistrates’ bench; enemies had their reputations destroyed by whispers at court and in the local gentry community. Marriage alliances were made in the old way between families whose interests seemed aligned; provocations, insults and violence were thrown at rivals. The world of the Montagues and Capulets would have been entirely familiar to its audience.7
The hostility between the Thynnes and the Mervyns had first come to a head in the 1570s.8 Each family was almost but not quite alike in dignity. Both were new gentry, on the up, emerging in the early sixteenth century from medieval obscurity into the vicious Tudor world of opportunity and riches. But they were far from satisfied and by the 1570s both still wanted more in the way of land, money and power. The Thynnes were originally modest Shropshire people.9 The founder of their family greatness, John Thynne, born in about 1513, had become steward to Edward Seymour, the great servant of Henry VIII. Seymour had risen as high as a commoner ever could, eventually becoming Duke of Somerset and effective ruler of England as the Lord Protector of Edward VI. John Thynne, a man of purpose, culture and discernment, a loyal servant, had risen on Seymour’s tails, acquiring large amounts of land in Wiltshire, including the old Priory at Longleat, where between 1540 and 1580 he built and then rebuilt the most perfect Renaissance house in England.10 He was a deeply cultivated man, urging his sons to learn Greek, sending from London remedies for his children’s afflictions in cold weather.11 Much of his expensive life was paid for with the money that came flowing into the Thynne coffers from his marriage to Christian Gresham, the daughter and heiress of Sir Richard, one of the wealthiest men in England, an import–export merchant in the City, dealing in grain and fine textiles, supplying Henry VIII with the tapestries, satins and velvets that embellished his palaces.12 Thynne had made use of the two key sources of modern gentry wellbeing – office and trade – and was busy pouring them into a provincial power base.
The story of the Mervyns – or Marvins, as their name was also spelled – had begun slightly earlier and a little more murkily.13 In the 1470s, in ways that are not entirely clear, they somehow acquired the manor of Fonthill Gifford, the far side of a beautiful high chalk ridge from Longleat. By the 1560s, successive Mervyns had built up their landholdings enough to put them among the leading Wiltshire gentry. They lived in style: a stone house with the usual ranks of big glazed windows on three floors, surrounded by a large park containing a newly enlarged lake, with a turreted gatehouse, woods, a heronry, a hop yard, a dairy and pasture for herds of sheep and cattle. There was a vineyard here in 1633, which may well have been planted a century before. It sounds like a gentleman’s paradise, but as so often in these stories, the physical description, the view you would get if you turned up at sixteenth-century Fonthill Gifford as a tourist, belied the realities of tension and struggle behind it.14
They were approaching from slightly different places in the gentry universe: both knightly families but the Mervyns three or four generations deep as Wiltshire gentlemen; the Thynnes richer, more explicitly Protestant, less provincial, sharper, riskier, with
