them. Each family had something to offer the other. But one further status-colouring element may have been in play: in 1549 and again in 1551, as the rivalries surrounding the Tudor crown reached their mid-century crisis, Edward Seymour, Duke of Somerset, was arrested and sent to the Tower.15 His loyal servant John Thynne was sent there with him. The Privy Council’s warrant to conduct Thynne to the Tower was addressed to ‘Mr Mervyn, sheriff of Wiltshire’.16 It was a moment of humiliation: Thynne, the parvenu steward, being conducted to prison by Mervyn, the ancient county gentleman. Status, to say the least, was nuanced here.
By the 1570s, the head of the Mervyn family was Sir James, a wily practitioner of gentry arts, and in 1574, the memory of the arrest a quarter of a century earlier was set aside. Negotiations were opened between him and Sir John Thynne for a marriage between Mervyn’s daughter Lucy and Thynne’s son, also called John. Lucy Mervyn and young John Thynne were betrothed and it seems as if John fell in love with the girl.17 Family agents discussed terms and, as usual, Sir James Mervyn offered his daughter along with a set of Wiltshire manors as her dowry, land that by convention would then descend to the heirs of the marriage. But Sir James was cheating: the manors he was offering were entailed, designated by law to be heritable only by male members of the Mervyn family. Sir John Thynne was in danger of making a contract with his neighbour (Fonthill is about fourteen miles from Longleat) which would fail to enrich his own family at all. His son’s hand in marriage, the most valuable property a member of the gentry possessed, would have been sold for a pup.
Enraged at this insult, perhaps at the assumption of his gullibility, perhaps at the lack of respect it implied, Sir John broke off the negotiations.18 But love is a smoke raised with the fume of sighs and young John was so in love with Lucy that he would not give her up. Only the threat of disinheritance from his father persuaded him that Longleat was preferable to Lucy and instead he was married to Joan Hayward, the daughter of another wonderfully rich City merchant and Lord Mayor of London.19 It was no brutal marrying of money to power. A letter to Sir John survives from his agent and fixer Richard Young, written halfway through the negotiations. It was important to all parties that the bride and groom to be should approve of each other. Richard Young had agreed with Joan’s father that ‘Unless the two parties could the one so like of the other and they themeselves to be as joyful as the father, there should be no displeasure but to part in great friendship on both sides.’20 Young asked Joan, who was not quite seventeen, what she thought of John.
She said she would not nor could say nothing, for she had not spoken with him and at our speaking, she said, it is possible he shall not like me, and in the other side I may say the same of him, but I do put my trust in God and in my good father that God will put into my father’s heart to choose me such a one as God will direct my heart not to dislike.21
Lucy Mervyn was consigned to an impoverished military lord, the 11th Baron Audley, an ally of the Mervyns in their great feud, his immensely ancient Wiltshire family larded with a history of lunacy and incompetence. One of their daughters, Eleanour, would eventually claim she was the Bishop of Lichfield, sprinkling tar, which she called holy water, on the hangings in the cathedral there, after which she was committed to Bedlam.22 Their son and heir was beheaded for sodomizing his servants and holding down his wife while their servants raped her.23 The benefits of an Audley marriage were not entirely unequivocal.
Here is one way of understanding the Thynne–Mervyn difficulty: relatively small-time gentry family (the Mervyns) aim to hitch their star to high-rolling, ambitious professionals (the Thynnes) but imagine that their higher county status can allow them to cheat. It doesn’t and so each party in the encounter withdraws to a safer place – the Mervyns to old hopeless aristocracy, for status enhancement, the Thynnes to City money, for further enrichment.
Thynnes allied to Mervyns would have been an entirely satisfactory marriage of money with status. As it was, the marriage of Thynnes with Haywards was money allying itself to money. Mervyns joining with Audleys was status joining with status. For each family the second marriage left them lacking something: the Mervyns wanted cash and the Thynnes wanted rooted county standing. Sir James Mervyn’s greed, and his inability to play by the rules, had wrecked the deal and he had made the wrong choice. The Thynnes had done better: alliance to money would guarantee their future.
Ever since that moment of betrayal, the Thynnes and the Mervyns had been at each other’s throats. A more general struggle for control of the Wiltshire courts and political structures lay behind it and there had been bloody street fighting between followers of the two parties at the Marlborough quarter sessions and the Salisbury Assizes in 1589, endless status struggles and mutual humiliations, sending each others’ servants to jail at successive court hearings, raids on stock, destruction of hedges, the killing of deer in parks, a self-sustaining mutual antipathy.24
Teenagers do not always know their family histories but a miasma of half-remembered enmities and loyalties must have hung over the May morning encounter in Thomas Thynne’s set of rooms in Oxford. Thomas was the son and heir of the marriage between John Thynne and Joan Hayward, the London merchant’s daughter. Edward Tennant brought him a letter from John Mervyn, nephew of the hated and duplicitous Sir James.
But here there is a complexity: John Mervyn, despite the history and although he was of an older generation, was Thomas’s ‘very familiar friend’.25 It is not known how the friendship had evolved or what it consisted of, but it was real enough because Thomas responded instantly to John’s invitation to ride thirty miles or so down the London road to High Wycombe, where, John Mervyn said, they would ‘make merry’.26 Thynne, bored with his work – it was a Monday – and ‘desirous of some Liberty and recreacon from his booke and study’,27 set off with Edward Tennant, taking about three hours to reach High Wycombe. Thomas Mosely, another Mervyn servant, met them there, with the message that they should ride on another six miles to Beaconsfield, where at the Bell Inn they would find John Mervyn waiting. There is no telling if this part of the plan was deliberate – John Thynne might have thought Wycombe easily reached from Oxford, Beaconsfield perhaps a little too far – but in retrospect, we can see the hand of Sir James Mervyn slowly and gently closing in on his intended victim.
At the Bell, Sir James himself was not there, but his nephew John was and so was Sir James’s favourite daughter, Lucy, Lady Audley, with her two daughters, Amy Touchet and the brilliantly red-haired sixteen-year-old Maria Touchet, a superbly well-educated and fiery girl, one of the Queen’s four or five maids of honour. With their mother, Maria and Amy had travelled the twenty-five miles or so from Westminster in a coach that afternoon. There were numerous other Mervyns there, and their retainers: it was to be a party.28
The Mervyns ordered sweetmeats and ‘a great store of wine’.29 Everyone sat and drank, toasted and talked, laughing and joking around a table. The evening ran on and at some time, as the wine flowed, and as the Mervyns intended, the young, handsome, adventurous, romantic Thomas Thynne found himself sitting next to the beautiful Maria Touchet. They had ‘frendly and familiar speache’ together.30 Then, unlikely as this sounds, unless the teenagers were very drunk, as they probably were, or Maria’s mother had a supremely tight control over the unfolding of events, as she probably did, the two of them, at least according to the deposition of one Edmund Mervyn at the later court case, ‘grew into such good liking of each other as that they seemed desirous to be married presently’,31 meaning, in sixteenth-century English, ‘straight away’.
Lucy Audley, according to her own testimony, then displayed the wares and
caused her said daughter to be turned about, to the end the same Mr Thyn might see that she was no way deformed, but that if he liked her outwardly she wowld assure him that for the disposicon of her minde it showld appeare to him to be much more perfecte.32
Thynne liked what he saw, and imagined the higher, hidden qualities as even better. An old man called Welles,
