psychological acuity and a sense of moral equality with her husband. ‘Yet consider of him by yourself when time was.’ Judge your son, in other words, by the man you were when you were his age. John Thynne at that age had been in love with Lucy Mervyn, the very woman who had now hijacked the Thynne family enterprise. He had probably remained in love with her even as his parents introduced him to Joan Hayward, the young merchant’s daughter from London. A touching letter from her survives at Longleat from that early period in their lives, soon after their first meeting in 1575. ‘Good Mr Thynne,’ Joan wrote to him,
I give you most humble thanks for your letter, but that will not suffice me from letting you to understand of my heavy heart and my pensive [i.e. sorrowful] mind, hoping that when you understand the cause you will do your endeavour to release me of some part of it, which if I could speak with you it should not be long unknown to you. For as the distance is short, so I think your absence long.
By your pensive friend in heart and mind
J.H.50
The subject of this letter is not clear, but could it be that she was urging him to relinquish his love for Lucy Mervyn, to obey his own father and turn to loving the twice-pensive Joan herself? Perhaps. And this favouring of love over obedience was perhaps what Joan was reminding him of twenty years later.
But their son Thomas wasn’t playing entirely straight. He had lied to his parents, by saying that he thought his father had given permission for the marriage, and even while submitting to his mother’s pleadings and father’s ferocity, he was sending letters to the ever-more desirable Maria, one including a gold ring, another signed ‘your loving husband’.51 Lies were the only way Thomas could find to creep through the labyrinth of fear, love and guilt in which he found himself.
The patriarchs of the two families now took their battle to the courts, first to the Star Chamber, where Mervyn had Thynne demoted from the most prominent magistrate in Wiltshire to the bottom of the list; then to the great church court held in St Mary-le-Bow in Cheapside, where Thynne wanted to prove the illegality of the marriage. There, in the Court of Arches (named after the huge arches of the Norman church), all the principal players were summoned and asked to give witness statements. Those long hearings, which dragged on for four years, are the reason we know so much about this story.
Everybody lied in court. Witnesses were suborned and patience-sapping speeches by lawyers explored the precedents. Aspersions were cast on the character and validity of the man called Welles who had appeared in the pub that evening as an ordained minister. Slurs were laid on the character of the Mervyn witnesses as adulterers and fornicators. Threats of violence were made or alleged. Both sides lobbied the Queen herself. John Thynne attempted to exhaust the Mervyns’ money and courage with expensive and vastly irrelevant legal delaying tactics.52
Not until the early spring of 1601 was there any sign of an end to the fight. Maria Touchet had consistently appeared in the various courts defending the propriety and reality of her marriage. Thomas Thynne had been kept by his parents in hiding somewhere in England, although it seems he may from time to time have managed to see his wife. But then, perhaps at the moment everyone was bored and frustrated by the long legal struggle, the Thynnes seem to have given in. John Thynne’s sister-in-law, Elizabeth Knyvett, wrote to him to say that he and Joan in their anger should not forget to love their son. He had made a mistake, as sixteen-year-olds do, and they should forgive him, and take it as a mistake rather than ‘bitterly in displeasure condemne [it] as an unpardonable offence’. She was a wise woman. Thomas and Maria were now twenty-three. ‘It resteth nowe seeing it is fallen out thus that it be followed advisedly for a fynall end thereof.’53
Only then, extraordinarily, as all appeared to be moving to a kind of resolution and the Knyvetts looked as if they might be organizing some kind of agreement between the parties, did Thomas finally appear in court. It seemed as if he had finally submitted to his father’s will. First, he told the court everything his parents would like to have heard. When Edward Tennant came to his Oxford rooms, Thomas said, he had no idea that the man worked for Sir James Mervyn. He thought this was just an invitation to a party from John Mervyn, his father’s old friend. Nor did he have any idea that John Mervyn had ‘turned Judas’, betraying the Thynnes to the Mervyns. That he should have done so is not in itself surprising: Mervyn family loyalty out-trumped mere friendship. At Beaconsfield, Thomas went on, Lucy Audley and her daughters and all the other Mervyns had plied him with drink and he was ‘so much distempered therewith that he did not, neither doth, knowe or remember in any particular what was further said, done, or practized by him nor them that night’. Crucially, then, he had not been conscious of getting married to Maria and if that was true the marriage was invalid and the Thynnes were free.54
How could the dignity of a man be preserved in this world so dense with manipulation if he did not manipulate things himself? And Thomas, it seems, had learned the arts of survival. Maria, his wife, had with immense self-possession declared the reality of the marriage in hearing after hearing and deposition after deposition. Thomas had been tucked away in the country, effectively imprisoned by his father. Now, it seems, he had got himself to court by agreeing to say what his father wanted him to say. But once that was said, he could then declare his love for Maria. Now at last evidence was produced in the Court of Arches which showed that the marriage was real. When back at Oxford Thomas had written to Maria, signed the letter ‘your loving husband’, sent her a pair of gloves, instructing they should be delivered ‘to his wife’ and another letter with a gold ring in it, on which he had the words ‘a frendes guifte’ engraved.55
This was evidence that Thomas had not been quite so much of a drunken victim on the evening in Beaconsfield. The letters had been asked for earlier in court proceedings but had never appeared. The Oxford historian Dr Alison Wall, who has studied this case in great depth over many years, thinks they may not have existed before 1601 ‘and Thomas may have written them now [in 1601] to prove a marriage his father had forced him to deny’.56 Certainly the judge was impressed by Maria’s lawyers’ claim that ‘the letters this day exhibited in the Court are wholly written with the hand of the said Thomas, and the said letters and ring this day exhibited are the same Thomas sent’.57
Having heard his son’s new evidence, John Thynne’s rage returned at full force. The escape that seemed to be within his grasp had been snatched away. He wrote to Joan, still in Shropshire, from London, where he had been enmeshed in dealings over property disputes. Now he was confronted again with the everlasting crisis over Thomas, his
proud undutiful son … [who] hath to me most undutifully demeaned himself to my no small grief, and for which cause I will also especially stay to see the same either settled or no longer dissembled, and you and myself no more abused, for to my face he used me undutifully, and is such cause of contempt of me as I neither can nor will endure, but will put him to the point either of having of her or utterly leaving of her, to the end I may no more spend in that suit my time and charges in vain.58
This was a gentry cry from the heart: the most important family asset, the son and heir, was not conforming to the managing director’s vision but instead was asserting his own short-term interests over those of the family corporation. These financial-cum-strategic problems were emerging in terms of private family emotions. Thomas was failing to tell the truth, was proud, knew nothing of duty and was abusive and inconsistent in his actions. He could have been sacked (or disinherited) but that in itself would have been shameful. The paterfamilias, so often portrayed by modern historians as a source of grief for his imposed-on children, had in reality few places to turn. No one was more vulnerable than a father to his children.
The great contrast between this overburdening sense of frustration in his relations with Thomas was John’s real love and affection for his wife, Joan, still struggling with their affairs in the wilds of Shropshire. ‘I have sent you a keg of sturgeon and vinegar and Rhenish wine’, he wrote to her on 26 July 1601
