into position and a Book of Common Prayer was found. The party migrated to a candlelit upper room in the inn and there Edward Tennant, the man who had inveigled Thomas Thynne that morning to leave Oxford for a party, read out the words of the service because the Reverend Welles could not see properly in the flickering candlelight. Welles repeated Tennant’s words and Thomas and Maria made the solemn vows. According to sixteenth-century law, these vows spoken voluntarily in front of a minister constituted a valid and legal marriage.33
The Mervyns, in a spectacular coup, had captured the heir of the Thynnes. No dowry had been promised with Maria’s hand and so the deceitful deal which Sir James had tried to make with Thomas’s father twenty years earlier had now come good for him the next generation down. All that humiliation, Sir John Thynne’s rejection of Lucy in favour of a London merchant’s daughter, all those years of whispered contempt in the gentry houses, parks and hunting fields of Wiltshire, all had now been revenged.
A bed was made up in the inn and, as usual in Elizabethan marriages, the newly-weds went to bed together in front of the company. Edward Tennant was later clear that neither of them took their clothes off. They certainly didn’t have sex but the Mervyn witnesses were adamant that the two did ‘imbrace and kisse each other being in bed very lovingly’.34 Maria gave Thomas a beautiful pair of gloves. Eventually, as dawn approached, everyone else went to bed too, happy at the triumphant outcome of the evening.
Even when the newly married Thomas Thynne woke the next morning, he was said to be ‘joyful’.35 His beautiful bride, the daughter of a peer, whose godmother was the Queen, was surely the most wonderful catch. He wanted to go back with her to the court at Westminster, but the canny seriousness of the Mervyn clan intervened. Everyone who had witnessed the events of the last twelve hours was sworn to secrecy. Maria gave Thomas a needleworked waistcoat with which he was to return to Oxford.36 She went back to court, from which the Mervyns had arranged no more than two days’ leave, and where the Queen was to hear nothing of the marriage. The Thynne parents were to be kept in the dark, as were any Thynne retainers.
It was a dream of Elizabethan teenage happiness. The word ‘secret’ appears forty-eight times in Orlando Furioso37 and here now, for real, Romeo had at least kissed and slept in the same bed as his Juliet.
One can only imagine Thynne’s levels of anxiety that autumn when the feud between the two families turned bloody. Two allies of the Mervyns, the Danvers brothers, both distinguished and powerful soldiers, burst into a house at Corsham in Wiltshire, accompanied by seventeen or eighteen armed men, all carrying swords and pistols. Henry Long, John Thynne’s brother-in-law and Thomas’s uncle, was dining there with his fellow JPs. Between the Danvers and the Long families, there was a long-running subset of the Thynne–Mervyn feud. Charles Danvers began insulting and then cudgelling Henry Long but he was caught in a corner and injured. His brother Henry then took out his pistol and shot Long dead with a single bullet in the chest. It was murder. The Danverses fled abroad to France and renewed bitterness spread through the feuding Wiltshire families.38
In this heightened and dangerous atmosphere, Thomas Thynne managed to keep his marriage secret until the following spring. In April 1595 it somehow erupted into the public world of court and gentry gossip – perhaps at the hands of the Mervyns, who would have wanted to regularize the situation – and the Thynne parents exploded in grief and rage. Thomas’s mother, Joan, was in the Thynnes’ castle at Caus in deepest Shropshire, his father, John, in their house in Cannon Row in Westminster. Both were hard at work, Joan defending their castle and Shropshire lands from another family who claimed it, John attempting at court to promote his family interests and get himself a knighthood. The kidnapping of their son and heir was one disaster too many, one that combined treachery, humiliation, disobedience and financial disaster.
On 15 April 1595 Joan wrote to a cousin:
How hard is my hap to see my chiefest hope and joy my greatest grief and sorrow, for you know how much I have always disliked my son to match in this sort, but alas I fear it is too late. Alas the boy was betrayed by the Mervyns which I have often told Mr Thynne what they would do, and now it is too sure. But I trust they may be divorced for it is no good marriage in law for that he is under age.39
She was wrong. Properly witnessed marriages, as this had been, were binding contracts, even if the partners were under age. John Thynne was enraged and refused to see and talk to his son. Joan attempted to find intermediaries who might excuse ‘the deceits that hath been used to deceive a silly child’.40 But John Thynne was suffering more than humiliation. The essential calculations, the necessary money flows for a continuing gentry existence, had been disrupted by Thomas’s precipitate behaviour. Because there was nothing coming into the family account from Thomas’s wife, there would be no money for the Thynne daughters’ own dowries. No one would touch them without a dowry. The system was interlocked and if one part failed, all was in danger. The disobedience of one, as Joan wrote, would be the overthrow of the others. In the light of this, the dowry was the most important of social bonds. As a shared practice, dowries constituted the exchange medium of gentry life. A dowry allowed one family to accept a new member without any diminution of its own estate; and allowed that family to pass assets on to others. If the flow was dammed, the network dried up. Gentry society was tied to itself through the dowry system.
Letters ran between them. John wrote to say that Sir James Mervyn had approached him, attempting a negotiation. Joan was furious and could not ‘but marvel to hear with what face Sir James Marven can come to you, considering what traitorous abuses he and his have offered unto you and me’.41 The code had been broken and, as she wrote, ‘I will never think well of him nor any of his.’42 The Thynnes could not quite believe how carefully the Mervyns and Lucy Audley had arranged their deceit.
They have used all the policy and cunning to make it so sure that you nor I shall not break it. For after the contract she caused a pair of sheets to be laid on a bed and her daughter to lie down in her clothes and the boy by her side booted and spurred43 for a little while that it might be said they were abed together, herself and Edmund Mervyn in the chamber a pretty way off, and hath caused her daughter to write divers letters unto him, in the last naming herself Maria Thynne which name I trust she shall not long enjoy.44
Thomas Thynne was made to beg for forgiveness from his enraged father.45 His mother stood up for him, reporting Thomas’s account that he had asked whether his father approved of the marriage and the Mervyns had all assured him they did. He was ‘heartily sorry, and hath vowed to me to be ruled by us hereafter’. Discipline and obedience were the essential companions of inheritance and the future welfare of the family business. As John Thynne had in his time been threatened by his father, Thomas was threatened with disinheritance. ‘I have told him’, Joan told his father, ‘what your determination is if he will not be ruled. Otherwise let him never [have] you for his father nor me for his mother if he consent to them.’46
But the boy was under siege. He was buttonholed by Sir James Mervyn in the gossip shop of St Paul’s in London.47 He was promised letters from Maria, who had been hidden from him since that first Beaconsfield night. He was threatened by his own father and clucked over by his mother, who longed to protect him. The correspondence is almost entirely warm and loving. This was a family disaster but the love between man and wife, mother and son, boy and girl are all palpable on the page. Joan Thynne in particular knew that love and family welfare were not separable. She wrote to her husband at court that he was to look after himself, not only for his sake but for hers. ‘I trust your troubles will turn all for best,’ she wrote to him in May 1595, ‘and to both our comforts, although the strain be great for the present.’48 Of the erring Thomas, she begged his father ‘to accept of his true repentances which I hope you will receive him into your favour again, and to have that fatherly care which heretofore you have had of him, although he hath justly deserved your displeasure’.49
She
