Muhlenberg College Digital Repository

Tighe, William J. “Five Elizabethan Courtiers, Their Catholic Connections, and Their Careers.”

British Catholic History 33.02 (2016): 211–227.

NOTE: This is the peer-reviewed post-print (author’s final manuscript), identical in textual content to the publisher PDF available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british- catholic-history . Copyright 2016 Cambridge UP. The post-print has been deposited in this repository in accordance with publisher policy. Use of this publication is governed by copyright law and license agreements.

COVER SHEET

William J. Tighe, Ph.D. History Department Muhlenberg College 2400 Chew Street Allentown, PA 18104-5586 UNITED STATES

E-mail: [email protected]

Telephone: 001.1.484.664.3325

Academic affiliation: Associate Professor, History Department, Muhlenberg College

ABSTRACT

This article briefly surveys men and women holding positions in the of and men holding significant positions in the (outer) Chamber for evidence of Catholic beliefs, sympathies or family connections before going on to discuss the careers of five men who at various times in her reign were members of the Band of Gentlemen Pensioners and whose court careers were decisively affected for weal or for woe by their Catholic beliefs (or, in one case, temporary repudiation of Catholicism) or connections. The men’s careers witness both to a fluidity of religious identity which might facilitate their advancement at Court, but also to its narrowing over the course of the reign.

KEY WORDS

Elizabethan Catholic courtiers. Religious identity.

1

FIVE ELIZABETHAN COURTIERS, THEIR CATHOLIC CONNECTIONS, AND THEIR CAREERS

This article is a preliminary investigation of the careers of known or suspected Catholics in the

upper reaches of the Elizabethan Court, among those closest to the Queen in the Privy Chamber and

Chamber. I shall discuss several of these, in increasing detail as the account progresses, and of whom

one, Sir Lewis Lweknor, son of the Catholic-minded but ‘occasionally conforming’ Lewknors of Selsey,

Sussex, would no doubt stand on his own as the subject of an article such as this, if one would undertake

the formidable task of tracing his career through the archives of Brussels and Spain, as well as those in

England, and of whom another, Sir George Gifford, would be a fine subject for a lurid account of spies,

counter spies and attempting to make one’s fortune by serving as a double-agent. This study does not

include lower-ranking officers and servants in the Chamber (the Domus Regis Magnificentiae) and those

of the Household (the Domus Regis Providentiae); it also excludes noblemen suspected of Catholicism

who either frequented the Court without holding an office (such as Edward de Vere, Earl of ) or,

rarely, held an office (such as Edward Somerset, Earl of Worcester, from 1601-

1616). It is an amplification, and further exploration, of work begun in my doctoral thesis on the

Gentlemen Pensioners during the reign of Elizabeth I and in my continuing work on the Elizabethan Privy

Chamber and Chamber.1

As one might expect, there were very few, if any, known Catholics among the men and women who staffed the Queen’s Privy Chamber. Of the men, there were only two who may have had Catholic

sympathies, as well as family connections. The first of them was the obscure Henry Middlemore, who

served in the position of a Groom of the Privy Chamber from 1569 to his death in 1592, but was never

1 William Joseph Tighe, The Gentlemen Pensioners in Elizabethan Politics and Government (unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1984); see also Tighe, ‘Familia reginae: the Privy Court’, in The Elizabethan World, ed. Susan Doran and Norman Jones (London, 2011:Routledge), 76-91. 2

appointed to the office formally.2 His wife was an open Catholic, and some of his children were to embrace their mother’s faith, but in his case there is no evidence – save for an accusation – that he was somehow complicit in his nephew William Middlemore’s role in the forwarding and distribution of clandestine correspondence between English Catholics living abroad and those in (both William and his father John were strongly attached to Catholicism).3 On the other hand, the strong Protestant Sir

Nicholas Throckmorton had written to the Queen on 18 November 1558, the second day of the reign, to solicit for ‘my cosyne harry mydylmore’ a groomship there, which might point away from Catholic leanings on Middlemore’s part.4 The second was , esquire of Fifield, Berks, to whose complicated career I intend to give further attention at another time. Often confused with the older brother of the who was to Henry VIII and whose career and life came to a tragic end in 1536 as one of the supposed adulterous paramours of – but Henry Norris’ older brother was the childless Sir John Norris of Yattendon, Berks., who died in 1564 – although in fact a distant cousin, Norris held the position of Gentleman Usher daily waiter in the Chamber from c. 1536 onward. Queen Mary made him Gentleman Usher of her Privy Chamber at the beginning of her reign, and his conservative religious views emerged very clearly in his clashes with the “hot gospeller” Edward

Underhill, which the latter recorded in great detail. Relegated at the beginning of Elizabeth’s reign to his earlier position in the Chamber, he regained within a year his position in the Privy Chamber, retaining it until his death in 1577. Norris was never charged with recusancy, and his elder son, William, was to have a successful and, under Elizabeth, “conforming” Court career as a Gentleman Pensioner from 1554 to his

2 TNA, SP 12/228/1 is the complaint of one ‘Mr Middlemore’ of his poverty after twenty years of unremunerated service in his office and of the failure to remedy it of various monopoly (and other) grants he had obtained, but of which he had been forestalled of any profit. What that ‘office’ was is nowhere specified in the document, but it suits Henry Middlemore’s circumstances exactly. 3 P. W. Phillimore and W. F. Carter, Some Account of the Families of Middlemore of Warwickshire and Worcestershire (London: privately published, 1901), 176-8. 4 TNA, SP 12/1/4. 3

death in 1591, but his younger son, Henry, and his wife, were reported as recusants in 1577, shortly after

the father’s death.5

There is no evidence for even this much among the women of the Privy Chamber staff – although, to be sure, some of these women came from families in which there is no trace of that Protestant zeal that can be found among those of others of them. There was one case, however, of a young woman,

Anne Bromfield, possibly one of the Maids of Honor – several of whom do seem to have come from reluctantly conforming families, if one can identify them with some assurance – who, seemingly disappointed in love, went abroad and became a nun at Louvain, after having become a Catholic under the tutelage of the famous Jesuit John Gerard.6 This is an odd case. The girl’s widowed mother, Katharine

Bromfield, served as ‘Mother of the Maids’ towards the end of the reign: she was a sister-in-law of the

famous (or infamous) astrologer Dr. John Dee, and her husband, William Bromfield, who had been first

in the list of graduating students when he left Cambridge as a B. A. of Trinity College in 1562 and who

died in 1582, had been a client of the Dudleys. He had held the position of one of the Gentlemen

Pensioners at Court from 1569 to 1578, and his departure from the band coincides with a spell of

imprisonment which he suffered after being involved in an affray with the servants of another Gentleman

Pensioner, Sir Richard Bulkeley – Bulkeley (whose family seat was at Beaumaris, on the isle of

Anglesey) being an open opponent of the Earl of Leicester’s attempts to build up an interest and

5 W. H. Rylands, ed., The Four Visitations of Berkshire, 1532, 1566, 1623, 1665-6, Vol. II, Additional Pedigrees and Notes (London, 1908: Harleian Society, 57), 184-6; Letters and Papers, Foreign and Domestic, of the Reign of Henry VIII, 21 vols., ed. J. S. Brewer, J. Gairdner, and R. H. Brodie (London, 1862-1932: HMSO), 10:392 (11), 1256 (30); “The Autobiography of Edward Underhill,” Narratives of the Reformation, ed. J. G. Nichols, Canden Society, old series, 77 (1859), 161, 169; Dasent, Acts of the Privy Council, 7:4; Miscellanea XII, Catholic Record Society (London, 1921), 22:86. Norris was the author of a voluminous and important manuscript concerning ceremonies and ceremonial occasions at the courts of Henry VII, Henry VIII, and Mary (and at which, under Mary, he was both a participant and a supervisor) all in relation to the duties of a gentleman usher, excerpts from which have been published as “Religious Ceremonial at the Tudor Court: Extracts from Royal Household Rgulations,” ed. Fiona Kisby, in Religion, Politics, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England, ed. Ian W. Archer, Camden Fifth Series 22 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press for the Royal Historical Society, 2003), 1-33. Internal evidence demonstrates that the manuscript (BL, Additional MS 71009) was written, or at least completed, in very early weeks or months of the reign of Elizabeth I. 6 Charlotte Isabelle Merton, The Women who Served Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth: Ladies, Gentlewomen and Maids of the Privy Chamber, 1553-1603 (unpublished PhD thesis, Cambridge University, 1992), 207-8. 4 following in North Wales.7 (In some accounts, as in the Bulkeley papers and in Leicester’s

Commonwealth, Bromfield, sometimes by name, sometimes anonymously, is represented as an assassin in Leicester’s service and intrigues. In short, there are no obvious Catholic connections of any sort for

Anne Bromfield – fewer even than the famous Fr. Gerard, whose father and older brother ‘conformed’ in the 1580s (although the father returned to Catholicism before his death in 1601); the conformist older brother, Thomas, himself became a Gentleman Pensioner in 1599 and was rewarded by James I with a baronetcy in 1611 for his father’s support for the Queen of Scots (his son and heir was a recusant and all subsequent generations of baronets have remained Catholic to this day).

It is, in fact, among the Gentlemen Pensioners – alone of the men who held positions which gave them access to the Privy Lodgings that we can find a number of Catholics. The ‘Privy Lodgings’ were that section of every royal residence which was reserved for the monarch and his or her immediate entourage, and to which admission (before 1603 at least) was guarded zealously. They consisted of the

Bed Chamber, the Privy Chamber (a kind of day room to which the monarch might admit selected courtiers or, on rare occasions, receive ambassadors or other delegates on a semi-formal basis; and which gave its name to the staff), the Presence Chamber (a reception room with a throne and cloth of estate over it) and the Privy Closet, a small private chapel. The Gentlemen Pensioners were an elite guard corps of fifty men (plus five officers, three of them in command positions and two of them servants of the corps) that had been founded by Henry VIII at the end of 1539 to be the monarch’s ‘nearest guard’ at war, in battle and at court and, less officially, to perform at the tiltyard and (in some cases) to be entrusted with military commands, escourt duties, the delivery of important or delicate messages (such as the summons of the Duke of Norfolk to Court at the outbreak of the Northern Rebellion in 1569) and, more generally, to serve as a kind of ‘finishing school’ for the inculcation of loyalty and devotion to the Tudor monarchy among sons of landed gentry and nobility. The place where the Band served – or ‘waited’, to use the contemporary term – was the Presence Chamber, and there they waited ‘by quarters’, that is, in rotation, with twenty-five men on duty at any time for three months at a time. In the first two decades of the corps’

7 J. R. Dasent, ed. Acts of the Privy Council of England, 32 vols (London: HMSO, 1890-1907), 9:238. 5

existence membership turnover was rapid, and it would seem that for most of the members the position

was incompatible with their situation when once they had inherited their estates, or perhaps had

progressed far into middle age. Under Elizabeth, however, the turnover slowed appreciably, the

proportion of heirs vis-á-vis younger sons grew, a growing proportion of members retained their places even after inheriting or after promotion to other offices, some of which might draw them away from Court for considerable periods of time, and the service of many of them extended over two, three or four decades (although few came close to the fifty-four years’ service of Sir George Beeston between 1547

and 1601 or the fifty-three of Clement Paston between 1545 and 1598). In part this was due to

Elizabeth’s characteristic semper eadem, a loyalty which extended even to her servants, in part to the lack of any group military service on the band’s part over the course of her reign, but mostly due to the fact that from early on in her reign (or perhaps even from Mary’s reign) gentlemen pensioners who were ‘in quarter’ for a particular three month period might arrange for a fellow-corpsman who was ‘out of quarter’

to wait on his behalf (or even, with the permission of the Captain and the agreement of the Queen, to

allow a suitable ‘outsider’ to the band to do so – an outsider who thereupon became eligible for a position in the band upon the death or retirement, perhaps in the latter case for a ‘consideration’, of one of its members). Of equal significance was the fact that, with the Privy Chamber largely and the Bed Chamber completely devoid of a male staff (in the course of the whole reign only two men served as Gentlemen of the Privy Chamber, three as its Gentlemen Ushers and fifteen as its Grooms), a position among the

Pensioners became the ‘highest’ court position to which men might reasonably aspire (apart, perhaps, from the Esquires of the Body, who served in pairs and kept watch over the Privy Lodgings at night, sleeping or perhaps dozing on pallet beds in the Presence Chamber, and of whom there appears to have been no more than ten in the course of the reign). In these circumstances, which in many ways formed a continuation (with some constriction in numbers) of those of Mary’s reign, the Gentlemen Pensioners came to function, in part, as a sort of displaced male Privy Chamber – always bearing in mind, however, 6

that the corps was double the size of the Privy Chamber at its maximum size under Henry VIII or Edward

VI.8

Before I go on to discuss these men, perhaps it is here that I ought to add a side-note about men in

positions that gave their holders a comparable degree of access to the monarch, albeit outside the Privy

Chamber. I have found no evidence for Catholics among the Cupbearers (of whom there were perhaps

three or four in the course of the reign), the Carvers (one or two), or the ‘Sewers’ – Scutellarii, who

arranged the dishes and meats table, served them, and kept them in order – (about ten). Among the ten

Esquires for the Body, there are none for certain, but there is the curious case of Sir Nicholas Poyntz of

Iron Acton, Gloucestershire, who served as one from the beginning of the reign until about 1567, and who

died in 1585. He was regarded as a firm Protestant when he obtained his office, but his will, which seems

to be permeated by a sense of resentment, of which he specifies neither the causes nor the objects, has

religiously conservative undertones and his wife and daughters were recusants, and his sons regarded as

suspect.9 His attitude of resentment emerged clearly in a letter which he wrote to his sister, the wife of

Elizabeth’s , Thomas Heneage, in 1575, in which he wrote that he was

‘deseaved in her that nowe dothe govern’ and complained how the Queen’s ‘forgettfulness, thoughe hitt disgraced me before the world and diminished my portion, hath benefited my sowle, I dowpt not’; and, in reply to his sister’s surprise that he had not come to court ‘being so near it’, he wrote ‘how willingly, tell

me, wold you go into hell, to salute the devils their, though you weare standing on the brink thereof’.

Poyntz was himself imprisoned on suspicion of Catholicism in 1580 and James Fenn, once Poyntz’s

steward, went on to be ordained at Rheims in 1580 and to be executed at Tyburn in 1584.10 So he may

have turned to Catholicism or, alternatively have suffered for his wife’s and children’s religion, and

resented his predicament. I have come across no accusations or evidence of Catholicism among those

8 Tighe, Gentlemen Pensioners, 12-40 and passim. 9 TNA, PROB 11/68, ff. 329r-30v. 10 TNA, PROB 11/68, ff. 329r-30v; T. B. Trappes-Lomax, ‘The Family of Poyntz and its Catholic Associations’, Recusant History 6:2 (1961-62), 68-79. I owe this last reference to one of the anonymous readers of this article. Poyntz’s letter to his sister can be found at Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on the Manuscripts of Allan George Finch, Esq., of Burley-on-the-Hill, Rutland, Volume I (London, HMSO: 1913), 21. 7

officials of the Chamber under Elizabeth I whose positions were of lower rank than those already

mentioned, such as the twelve men who were Gentlemen Ushers daily waiter, the approximately forty

who were Gentlemen Ushers quarter waiters and the approximately twenty who were Gentlemen Waiters

(and whose office appears to have been purely honorific one which did not require its holders to be at

court except when summoned).

Our four Catholic Gentlemen Pensioners, in their chronological order, are Edmund Powell, of

Sandford, , who served from about 1563 to 1571 or 1572; William Tresham, a younger son of

the Treshams of Rushton, Northamptonshire, who served from January 1578 to January or February

1582; Charles Tylney, the heir of the Tylneys of Shelley Hall, Co. Suffolk, who served from June 24,

1583 to his execution on September 21, 1586; and Lewis Lewknor, the heir of the family of that name

(one of a number of branches) settled at Tangmere and Selsey, Co. Sussex, who served from late 1598

until his appointment to the newly-created office of Master of the Ceremonies in November 1605. We might term them, if we will, the self-exposed friend of the Scottish queen, the forlorn fugitive, the traitor, and the prodigal (but repentant) apostate. The fifth, whose Catholicism was, if not more dubious, then more enigmatic is George Gifford of Weston-under-Edge, Gloucestershire, who served as a Gentleman

Pensioner from 1578 until his death in 1613 – a man whose mother and two of his three brothers were recusants (one of whom was a Benedictine monk and ended his life as Archbishop of Rheims in France in

1629) but who himself was a double-dealing agent provocateur who tainted the lives or reputations of those who had dealings with him. Perhaps we can term him the dissembling desperado.

Edmund Powell’s grandfather was a Welsh yeoman from Cardiganshire who lived in Norfolk and

London before settling in Oxfordshire. His father, also named Edmund, was connected by friendship (and property management) with the Henrician courtiers Henry Norris and Sir Francis Bryan, as well as with the Brydges family, and his wife was a kinswoman of the Oxfordshire maganate Sir John Williams (later

Lord Williams of Thame). He was an Oxfordshire JP and in Mary’s reign sat three times in the House of

Commons, once for Oxfordshire, before dying in 1559. Perhaps it was these connections – especially those with the Norris family, whose Catholic branch was in high favor under Mary, just as the Protestant 8

branch was under Elizabeth – that secured our man’s admission to the Gentlemen Pensioners in 1561 or

1562. For eight years his service appears to have continued tranquilly, and apart from securing a twenty-

one year lease of some crown lands in 1567 his name is absent from all the records that I have searched.

This seeming tranquility was abruptly shattered when the Ridolphi Plot broke open in September 1571.

Powell had not been involved in the plot itself, but in the course of the investigations and interrogations

that ensued it emerged that in the spring of that year, while parliament was sitting, Powell had been a

party to discussions among servants of the Earl of Arundel and of the earl’s son-in-law Lord Lumley, together with the Bishop of Ross (Mary Stuart’s factor at the English Court), about ways to get the Scots’

Queen out of prison and out of England. On behalf of his friends, Powell had approached Sir Thomas

Stanley, who had been in trouble a year previously for a similar attempt, and Sir Henry Percy, the future earl and brother of the sainted rebel, who himself was to die in the Tower under mysterious circumstances in 1585. Both men were interested in the project, but when Percy withdrew in the hope (which proved successful) that he might be able to obtain his attainted brother’s earldom from the Crown by a show of conformity, the discussions fizzled out. When the plot broke open, Powell was put in the Tower of

London and, on May 14, 1572, convicted and condemned for high treason. Instead of being executed, he was returned to the Tower, where he remained, until in June 1573 he was released into private custody, which came to an end in May 1574.

He never regained his court position. Perhaps he never sought it, for by 1577 he and his whole family were outright recusants, never coming to church and suspected of harboring priests in their house at Sandford, a former priory of the Knights Hospitallers. ‘Rememberinge the sudden changes and chances that dayly doe happen amonge men nowe a dayes’ (an apt reflection upon his own career) he made his will on August 23, 1591 and was buried in Sandford church on March 31, 1592. His descendants continued at Sandford until the eighteenth century, when the male line expired in two

Franciscan friars.11

11 Tighe, Gentlemen Pensioners, 426-7; Bodleian Library, MS. Wills Oxon., 50/1/69 9

William Tresham was a younger brother of the famous or notorious recusant Sir Thomas Tresham

(1543-1605) of Rushton who strove throughout Elizabeth’s reign with surprising success to combine the

dual obligations of allegiance and conscience and was even knighted by the Queen in 1575. Their father

had died in 1546, while their grandfather, who as a widower took a vow of celibacy in Queen Mary’s

reign and had been made Prior of the restored Order of St. John of Jerusalem, the Knights Hospitallers,

died in March 1559, as the bill dissolving the restored religious orders was making its way through

Parliament. Perhaps Sir Thomas had been helped to his knighthood by his Northamptonshire neighbor,

Christopher Hatton, who had himself begun his court career as a Gentleman Pensioner in 1564, added to

it the position of Gentleman of the Privy Chamber in 1571 and Captain of the Guard in 1572. (Hatton

himself had come from a religiously-conservative family and, although a conformist, was notorious

among ‘the godly’ for his lack of zeal and for his opposition to ‘further reformation’ in the Church.)

What is sure is that when Hatton became Vicechamberlain in late 1577 and gave up his position in the

Pensioners he procured William Tresham’s entry into his vacated place – as, at least, Sir Thomas Tresham

claimed in a letter to Hatton four years later,12 although on December 28, 1578 he had written to an unidentified Lady at Court to thank her for her kindness towards his brother ‘who’ (as he wrote) ‘of himself is unable to wade through the thwarts and storms at Court’ but whose fortune, under her patronage, will now permit him happily to continue what he has begun.13 He was not to hold it very long.

On September 21, 1581 he was called before the Privy Council to be questioned about his presence at his brother’s house at Rushton when ‘Campion the Jesuite’ hand confessed to being there, and swore on oath on the Bible that never to his knowledge had he spoken with Campion, and that if he had been in company with Campion he had not known him to be a Jesuit.14 Four months later, William Tresham bolted from the Court and fled to Paris. He wrote letters to his brother, to Hatton and to the Earl of

Sussex (Captain of the Pensioners) to explain his sudden departure, and in each of them he explained that

12 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Report on Manuscripts in Various Collections, Volume III (London: HMSO, 1904), 23-4. This account of Tresham expands upon Tighe, Gentlemen Pensioners, 454-5. 13 Ibid 2. 14 Dasent, Acts of the Privy Council, 12:216. 10

the cause of his flight. He wrote to Sussex on January 27 that he would not have fled ‘if I had seene any

meanes lefte of securyte to have served myself from the iniust persecution of the erle of Leicester’ whose

favor he claimed to have lost ‘without any my desert’ and for recovery of which he claimed to have used

such humility as never had been used in times past, even to princes, but all in vain, as he claimed that he

had also explained in his letter to the queen. He went on to assure Sussex that he had not been involved

in any act or practice, but the cause of his flight had been ‘onely extreame feare I had of the crueltye of

the erle of Leicester, whose [word missing] I was not in any sort longer to withstand, my frend in court

having fayled mee, whome I had by much perfect faythe and inteare good will assuredly to be myne’.15

On February 20 Sir Thomas Tresham wrote to Hatton, from prison, to censure his brother’s inconsiderate

behavior to ‘his dear good friend…that of a thrall prisoner delivered him a freed subject, that of a

countryman procured him a settled courtier, that of a person disgraced restored him into her Majesty’s

good favour, yea, that bestowed on him forth of your own coffers your own office of a pensioner’s

room.’16 Five days later Sir Thomas wrote to Lord Burghley, to much the same effect, but this letter amplified his previous letter in stating that his brother had labored under Leicester’s displeasure for some years, and had been able neither to learn the cause of the earl’s displeasure nor to gain his good opinion.17

By October 1583 he was seeking to return to England, approaching the English ambassador in Paris, a

fellow Gentleman Pensioner, Sir Edward Stafford, for assistance. Stafford promptly wrote to Leicester a

jittery letter in which he repeatedly expressed his unwillingness to deal on behalf of anyone that had

offended the earl, but ended by suggesting that Leicester might heap coals on his enemies’ heads by

returning good for evil.18 Nothing came of this, and Tresham soon took service with the Spanish in the

Netherlands, where he was reported to be of that faction of the exiles which had no great desire for a

Spanish conquest of England and looked rather to James VI of Scotland for a better day – although by

1594 he had become a member of the ‘Council of State for England’ in the Spanish Netherlands.

15 TNA, SP 15/27A/57. 16 HMC, Various, 23-4. 17 Ibid, 24-5. 18 B. L., Cotton MSS, Caligula E. VII, f. 236. 11

Beginning in 1599, and continuing for over three years, he began a determined attempt to procure a pardon and return home to live like a ‘loyall Catholike faythfull & obedient subject’,19 writing letters to

Essex, Cecil, Henry Howard and even a fairly humble courtier like Cecil’s client Henry Lok asking them to support his plea, and meanwhile left the Spanish Netherlands to take up residence in Boulogne. He reminded Cecil of his father’s favors and ‘espetially in that it pleased his honor of his great good nature and proness to protect the wronged, seeinge my innocence redy to be suppressed by the over great authoritye of a powrous personage in that Court, who because he is forth of humane conversation I will not revive, vouchsafed to contenaunce me and the equity of my cause’,20 and he asked Lord Henry

Howard to intercede on his behalf due to their ancient friendship.21 In England, Treshman’s brother and

Edward, Lord Zouch wrote to Cecil on his behalf, but in vain; word got back to Tresham from Cecil by

November 1600 that the time was not yet ripe. Tresham went on to offer to serve against the Spanish in

Ireland, but by August 1602 he was writing to Cecil to protest the latter’s refusal to meddle any further

any further with his suit.22 Apparently he was allowed to return to England after the queen’s death, but this was not the end of his troubles. His older brother, Sir Thomas, died on September 11, 1605, and the heir, Sir Thomas’s eldest son Francis, was an actor – if a marginal and equivocal one – in the Gunpowder

Plot and died in the Tower in its aftermath on December 23, 1605 (he had also been one of Essex’s followers in his rebellion in February 1601, and his father bought his freedom at a great price). It would appear that William Tresham was not involved in the plot – although he was in London in November

160523 – but that he was imprisoned for some time in the Fleet afterwards. This information is contained in a letter from Sir Charles Cornwallis, the English ambassador in Spain, to Salisbury (Cecil) on

November 16, 1606, begun before, and finished after, an interview between Cornwallis and William

Tresham. In a strange parallel with his earlier behavior, he had seemingly been released from the Fleet

19 TNA, SP 12/34/2. 20 TNA, SP 12/271/39I. 21 TNA, SP 12/272/85. 22 Historical Manuscripts Commission, Calendar of the Manuscripts of the Most Hon. The Marquess of Salisbury, K. G., preserved at Hatfield House, Hertfordshire, 22 vols (London: HMSO, 1883-1971), 12:330. 23 TNA, SP 12/216/49R. 12

after undertaking to take the oath of allegiance required of recusants, but instead had fled to Spain,

without leave, because he was not well-resolved in conscience whether he might take the oath. ‘I protest unto your Lordshippe, the consideracion of what he hath ben, his years and lamentable complaints doe much affect mee’, Cornwallis concluded.24 Eventually he made it back to England again and settled in

Mile End, Stepney, Co. Middlesex. I have been able to find nothing about his last years, but when he made his will on May 31, 1620 he mentioned various Tresham kinsfolk and reckoned the debts owing to him at 745 pounds and his own debts at nineteen pounds, so he appears not to have died in poverty.25

Charles Tylney was born, as the family’s Fifteenth-Century Book of Hours, now in the Pierpont

Morgan Library in New York, records, on September 23, 1561, the only son of Philip Tylney of Shelley

Hall, Suffolk.26 Philip Tylney was not a recusant, but he came rarely to church and most of his friends

and associates were ‘church papists’ or crypto-Catholics. The family’s only connection with the court

was through a distant cousin, Edmund Tylney, who served as from 1579 to his death

in 1610, and before that had been a servant or associate of the Howards of Effingham, and in the absence

of any other plausible link young Tylney probably owed his introduction to court to this cousin. While

serving as a Gentleman Pensioner Tylney underwent a conversion to militant Catholicism and became

involved in the Babington Plot to assassinate the Queen; indeed, his Court position made him a key figure

among the six men who would carry out the assassination, as one who would assist the others to burst into

the Privy Chamber and to surprise and slay the queen upon her couch there. He was tried and convicted

of treason, and sentenced to death on September 15, 1586 and executed on the 20th or 21st. He died,

‘verie obstinatelie’ professing his Catholicism, with more than the customary horror at such scences, for

‘after he was turned of the ladder the roppe brake or slipte, for he hanged never a whitte’.27 The record of his birth in the family’s book of hours must have been written after his execution, for it concludes ‘Sic transit Gloria mundi. Vivens autem deo’, So passes the Glory of the world, yet he lives with God, which

24 BL, Harleian MS 1875, ff. 661-8. 25 TNA, PROB 11/137, f. 468. 26 Pierpont Morgan Library, New York, MS. M. 1033, f. 129v. 27 B. L., Harleian MS. 290, ff. 163, 165v-167r, 169, 171; Tighe, Gentlemen Pensioners, 457. 13

whatever it signifies does not seem to be a censure of his actions, and may even, in its bland assurance of

his presence with God, betoken approbation.

Lewis Lewknor was probably born around 1560, judging by his admission to the Middle Temple from Lyons Inn in October 1579. His family was of conservative religious views, and whether as recusants or ‘church papists’ were thorns in the side of successive Elizabethan bishops of Chichester.

Lewis Lewknor went abroad in 1580 and entered the Spanish army in the Netherlands, where he was both

married and maimed in his arm. In 1587 and 1588 he petitioned the Duke of Parma for relief – by 1590

he was receiving thirty crowns a month as opposed to William Tresham’s forty28 – but by 1590 he had decided to seek to return home to England. He accomplished this by producing a prospectus for an intended book in which he stated ‘…I will laye the tyrannous and most detestable intencions of the

Spaniardes [before all loyal subjects], which I doe in parte presume to knowe, because I have long lived with them bothe in Courte and Campe, in fielde and garrison, in their Cavallerie & infantrie. I lived in good reputacion among them and had conference with the best, I understande and speake their language, and therefore, especially conferring dayly with them, am not ignorant of their humours and condicions’.29

An early (and shorter) draft of the book, which appeared in 1595, first in a pirated version and then in an authorized version, the latter entitled The Estate of the English Fugitives (STC 15,562 – 15,565), and finally in a corrected version in 1596, survives in manuscript form, annotated by Lord Burghley. In the draft version, Lewknor assumed the role of a disillusioned Catholic writing from the Low Countries to an

English kinsman, also a Catholic, to dissuade the latter from going abroad to serve the Spaniards, but in the published versions he renounced his Catholicism as well as his service with the Spaniards.30 Perhaps the shape of Lewknor’s original draft was not simply a writer’s conceit, as his youngest brother or half- brother, Samuel, himself went abroad to serve the Spanish in 1591 or 1592.31 Over the next few years

several works which Lewknor translated from Italian or Spanish were published in England: Olivier de la

28 TNA, SP 12/283/31, 32; Tighe, Gentlemen Pensioners, 404-5. 29 B. L., Harleian MS. 6798, No. 16 [ff. 80-4]. 30 B. L., Stowe MS. 159, ff. 276-302. 31 B.L., Harleian MS. 7042, f. 166v. 14

Marche’s The Resolved Gentleman in 1594, Gasparo Contarini’s The Government and Commonwealth of

Venice in 1599 – both of these were dedicated to the Countess of Warwick, Anne Russell Dudley, one of the queen’s Privy Chamber ladies – and a work of natural philosophy and divinity by Antonio de

Torquemada, of which the English title was The Spanish Mandevile of Miracles. Or the garden of curious flowers in 1600. Lewknor appears to have had some sensitivity about his writing style, for towards the end of his dedicatory epistle to the Countess of Warwick in The Resolved Gentleman (a work originally written in 1483, but widely disseminated in the form of a Spanish verse translation made for the

Emperor Charles V in 1555) he abruptly turned to address his readers, urging ‘new fangled & fickle conceyted heads, that whensover they reade any thing, never go farther then the rynde, mysliking of every thing, how virtuous matter soever it conteyne, that thundreth not into their cares with a lofty tempest of words’ to forbear to censure his style.

By 1598 he had begun to attend Court as a gentleman persioner extraordinary and around

September 1599 entered into ordinary service in the band. His language skills contributed to his rapid advance, and by 1600 he was on occasion employed to look after the needs of foreign dignitaries visiting

England. After James I accession he was knighted, and in May 1603 he was appointed to the new office of Master of the Ceremonies, which dealt with the reception, ordering and protocol of foreign ambassadors, and when he was granted the office for life in November 1605 he left the band. His later career was marked by increasing pro-Spanish sympathies: he was in receipt of a Spanish pension by July

1603; a younger son, William, whom he seems to have regarded as his heir, entered the Spanish service in

Antwerp in 1616; and on April 22, 1618 he was secretly received back into the Catholic Church at the

Spanish embassy. His last years were marked by clashes between him and John Finet, his assistant and eventual successor as Master of the Ceremonies. By the time of his death on March 11, 1627 his only surviving child was his eldest son, Thomas, a Jesuit priest.

And now for the enigma, George Gifford. He was the eldest of the four sons of John Gifford of

Weston, Gloucestershire, who died in 1563, a month after his son’s tenth birthday. The family was a cadet branch of the Giffords of Chillington, Staffordshire, the latter a family of recusants who in 15

Elizabeth’s reign produced the Catholic priest (and spy in the pay of the English) Gilbert Gifford, who

provided invaluable information to the Elizabethan regime about English exiles in France and their

dealings with the Spanish and the Duke of Guise and whose career came to an end only with his arrest in

a Paris brothel in 1588 and subsequent death in prison; and his mother was a Throckmorton. Our man

George, a distant cousin of Gilbert Gifford, had six sisters and three younger brothers. His mother was a

recusant, or at least had become one by 1593, when she was committed to his custody.32 Two of his

younger brothers were living abroad as recusants by 1580. One of them, Richard, was obscurely involved

with the conveyance of correspondence between recusants living abroad and their friends and kinsfolk in

England, and may also have been a double agent. The other, Dr. William Gifford, a theologian and

Benedictine monk, became a client of the Guise family and in 1618, in the absence of a suitable member

of the Guises for the position (which they had monopolized for some decades), was appointed archbishop-

coadjutor of Rheims and died as archbishop in 1629; in his younger days he had been active in recusant

politics. How George entered the queen’s service and obtained his position in the Gentlemen Pensioners

in 1578 is unknown, although it is possible that he had already come to the attention of Walsingham or

Burghley (or both) as a man willing to keep company with his supposed fellow-Catholics in the religious

underworld, inciting them on to desperate deeds, and then betraying them. He moved freely among

crypto-Catholic circles at court, and his behavior suggests that he was a loud-mouthed swashbuckling spendthrift. In March 1583 he seems to have arranged for the escape of one Nix, a robber gaoled in the

White Lion in Croydon awaiting either trial or execution, and to have paid the fees to which the goaler was liable for the escape, and in the examinations that followed the suggestion was bruited the Gifford had had a part indisposing of Nix’s ill-gotten goods.33 As an apparent result of the Nix affair, Gifford went abroad, and in May 1583 met the Duke of Guise and offered to assassinate Queen Elizabeth for a

32 Dasent, Acts of the Privy Council, 24:251; Tighe, Gentlemen Pensioners, 372-3. 33 TNA, SP 12/160/29. An updated complaint among the Talbot/Shrewbury papers at Lambeth Palace accuses one Northall, a servant of the Earl of Shrewsbury who shared lodgings with Gifford at the White Ladies inn, of doubling as a thief – Shrewsbury MS. 707, ff. 187-8. 16

large sum of money34 – but by Midsummer was back at Court on duty in the Band of Pensioners. He was arrested in connection with the Babington Plot, and one of the plotters, John Savage, confessed that

Gifford had boasted of having received 800 crowns or pounds (he couldn’t remember which) from the

Duke of Guise to kill the queen.35 As Savage’s account goes on, though, it appears that he might have been referring to Gifford’s involvement with the Duke of Guise in 1583, since, repeating what he claimed to have heard from Gilbert Gifford, he added that the Duke had later promised to kill George Gifford if he ever came into his hands, as the latter had taken his money and done nothing; and he also claimed that

Gilbert Gifford had disclosed that George’s two exile brothers, William and Richard, had urged him to conclude the agreement with Guise. In another document relating to the plot, one Richard Young, after accusing Gifford of arranging robberies, receiving stolen goods, assisting and harboring burglars and attempting to counterfeit foreign money, mentioned as an aside that Ballard (another Babington Plotter) had confessed to delivering to Gifford letters from his brother William which requested George to leave

Court and come to France, to which George, evidently speaking aloud after reading them, replied ‘Nay, sith that I have consumed and spent my selfe in the Courte I will take an other course’, that course being involvement with the plotters.36 Gilbert Gifford himself, after his double-dealing was exposed and he was imprisoned in Guisard Paris, confessed at some point before his death in 1590 to having contact with

George, but only once, and far from trying to persuade him on Guise’s behalf to kill the queen his purpose was only, he said, to pass on a message from one of George’s brothers that he should hasten his intended voyage to Constantinople – and the Privy Council did intervene in February 1591 in a very complex lawsuit arising from Gifford’s having committed himself under penalty in May 1590 to make a mercantile voyage to Constantinople, and then abandoning it. In any event, at some point between 1586 and 1590

Gifford was confined to the long enough to carve his name and arms on the wall of his

34 John Hungerford Pollen, S. J., Mary Queen of Scots and the Babington Plot (Edinburgh: Scottish History Society, 1922), 169-75. 35 B. L., Cotton MSS, Caligula C. IX, pt. 2, ff. 408-9. 36 TNA, SP 12/195/48[I]. 17

cell. Not long after his release from the Tower, the Privy Council had to write to the Lord Mayor of

London to grant bail to Gifford, whom the mayor had caused to be imprisoned on suspicion of felony.37

Then there ensued a lacuna of some six years, during which he kept his position at Court, but

which is broken only by the Privy Council’s confirming its commitment of his aged and unwell recusant

mother to his custody in 1593, until he was knighted by the Earl of Essex, along with many others, at

Cadiz in 1596. On August 10, 1597 he was wounded at an ‘affray’ in London at which a boy was killed

and which, to judge from Gifford’s ensuring letters to Sir Robert Cecil, aroused the queen’s indignation

and led to his banishment from Court; however, he kept his position in the Gentlemen Pensioners and

continued to receive its stipend all the while.38 He may have been serving as a captain of a band of troops

in Connaught in 1597 and in January 1599 he was certainly dispatched on Crown business to and from

Devon and two months later was summoned to Court.39 When, in the immediate aftermath of Essex’s rebellion, or rather failed coup attempt, in February 1601, Essex’s devoted servant Captain Thomas Lea made his harebrained attempt to break into the Privy Chamber and to force the Queen to sign a warrant for the earl’s release, it came out afterwards that the day before he had named Gifford as one of six ‘men of the resolution’ who, if they made the attempt together, could bring to a successful conclusion what he was to attempt on his own the following day.40 (This does not indicate his complicity in the plot, but it

does give added support to his swashbuckling reputation.)

He retained his place among the Gentlemen Pensioners in May 1603, when nearly half of the old

members retired, but in the last decade of his life he had to struggle against mounting debts, and wrote

desperately to Salisbury in March 1611 to seek aid in dealing with his creditors, as some reward to ensure

that he not ‘sinke and perish after thirty nyne yeares searvis without having the least gifte or reward to

coumfard and hould me up…’.41 Two years later, on 10 June 1613, John Chamberlain reported his death

37 Dasent, Acts of the Privy Council, 22:281-4; 19:222. 38 B. L., Lansdowne MS. 85, f. 45; HMC, Hatfield House, 7:374, 517. 39 Dasent, Acts of the Privy Council, 27:212, 29:453, 634. 40 TNA, SP 12/278/61. 41 TNA, SP 14/62/28. 18

in one of his letters to Sir Dudley Carleton, ‘whose loss’, he concluded, ‘had been less both for himself

and his posterity if he had gone thirty years ago’.42

How did these men enter the Gentlemen Pensioners? While the monarch in theory and in law appointed members of the Band, it was clear after the Restoration that the Captain of the Band had the sole right to nominate suitable individuals for members to the monarch. By this late date such prospective members had to agree to pay an agreed-upon fee to the Captain on appointment, and it rested with the Captain to approve a Gentleman Pensioner’s desire to vacate his position in favor of an aspiring member, and to take his ‘cut’ from what was effectively the purchase price.43 The few bits of evidence that survive from Elizabeth’s reign make it clear that the Captain nominated members to the queen –

Herbert Croft was to complain in 1596 about how the queen on several occasions refused to have him in the corps after Lord Hunsdon, the Captain, had nominated him44 – and while there are a number of

episodes that suggest a traffic in these office throughout Elizabeth’s reign, there is no hard evidence.

None of the men discussed in this article seem to have had any personal links to Thomad Radcliffe, Earl

of Sussex, Captain from Mary’s reign until his death in June 1583 or to Henry, Lord Hunsdon, Captain

from June 1583 until his death in July 1596, or to George, Lord Hunsdon, Captain from November 1596

to May 1603, so in these cases the Captains must have been acting to gratify other courtiers or magnates.

42 Norman Egbert McClure, ed. The Letters of John Chamberlain, 2 vols (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1939), I:457, 459. 43 The near abolition and subsequent reorganization of the Gentlemen Pensioners in 1670-1 evoked over a decade of controversy over the perquisites of the Captain to nominate members, to receive a fee from new members, and to sell vacant places or to allow members of the corps to sell their places and himself to take a share of the proceeds (TNA, SP 29/366/pp 309-11; SP 44/34 f. 76r; PC 2/70 p. 89). In a petition against their corps’ abolition a number of them mentioned as reasons for its continuance the service of the corps’ officers and many members to the Crown during the civil wars, ‘and the rest having according to custom and permission bought their places’ have as much right to them as to lands purchased (TNA, SP 29/215/115). 44 TNA, SP 12/259/82; cf. Tighe, ‘Herbert Croft’s Repulse’, Bulletin of the Institute of Historical Research 58 (1985): 106-9. A further example of the Captain’s effective control of admission to the corps comes early in the reign of James I. Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland, a religious conformist who became Captain upon the retirement of George Carey, Lord Hunsdon, in May 1603, immediately upon his appointment procured the appointment of one of his younger brothers, Allen Percy, as Lieutenant of the Corps. In June 1604 he procured the appointment of his distant cousin, client, and estate steward, Thomas Percy, later one of the Gunpowder Plotters, as a gentleman pensioner. In the aftermath of the plot Northumberland lost his position and was to suffer seventeen years’ imprisonment in the Tower, not because of any suspicion of involvement in the plot, but because, knowing of his cousin’s resistance, he had not administered the Oath of Supremacy to him, despite taking it being a requirement for membership. 19

Of these five cases, it may well be that the Catholic sympathies of Powell and Tylney were unknown or

discounted, while Lewknor had renounced his faith, and written against it. William Tresham’s is a harder

case, but is appears that Sir Thomas Tresham did not move over to total resusancy until 1579 or 1580 (as

late as 1578 he was having his children baptized in the parish church he rarely attended, but he ceased to

do so after that year),45 so it is possible that William might have been, or have plausibly been presented as, a conformist. Gifford remains an enigma, but he may have owed his position both to an already- known willingness to act in clandestine affairs beyond the boundaries of the law and to make him more attractive to his supposed fellow-consiprators and their paymasters as a man with ‘connections’ and with access to the inner reaches of the court – in the same manner that Tilney was the key man in making it appear plausible that those involved in the Babington Conspiracy might be able to kill the queen. Their careers all bear witness to the fluidity of religious identity that was possible to a considerable but (among the elite, at least) narrowing extent over the course of Queen Elizabeth’s reign.

45 Lawrence Goldman, ed. Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 61 vols (Oxford: , 2004) 55:315-6.