The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson

without ye get some comaundement, I wott not how your house shalbe kept, for I know not wherof to levy one peny worth. No more at this tyme, but the Trenietie keepe you. From Plompton in hast, the xij day of Aprill.

      By your wyfe, Dame AGNES PLOMPTON⁸³

      Two weeks later she was writing again. She was holding the fort, telling him their news. They were all well, the children, their servants, herself. He had been anxious to know if the Rocliffes had received any of the rents (‘the farm’) from the Yorkshire manors, but as far as she knew all they had done was sell some of the timber trees, at way below the market price: ashes and oaks worth 40 pence had been sold for 12 pence, and some holly wood sold at Idle. But that was all, ‘Scrybled in hast, the fryday next after St. Marke day. By your wyffe, Dame AGNES PLOMPTON.’⁸⁴

      Then at last a piece of good news. Against all expectations, Henry VII made Robert a ‘Knight of the Body’, an honorary member of the royal bodyguard, and as such screened him and his servants from all arrest. It was the trump card in any court. The Plumptons could keep hold of the manors at Plumpton and Idle, where they had been for 300 years, with impunity. The Rocliffes, at least legally, could do nothing.

      A success but no victory. That summer Agnes Plumpton died, perhaps exhausted by the strain of maintaining the dignity of this ragged and tattered family. And despite the legal protection conveyed by Robert’s new status, the facts on the ground, the fear cast into gentry and yeoman alike by the power nexus of Richard Empson and his lawyer friends the Rocliffes and Sotehills, were enough to keep the country almost entirely shut against them.

      Symptomatic is an angry letter to Robert Plumpton, from a Yorkshire lawyer, delivered to Plumpton Hall by the lawyer’s man, in November 1506. It was the second time of asking and a promise had been broken:

      I pray you that I may have my money now at this tyme, for I must occupy much money within thes iiij dayes, as this bearer can shew you.

      If ye will not delyver it at this tyme, I will send no more to you for it, but the berer shall goe to the Shereff and have from him a warrant to leve the sayd money, or els to take your body, the which I wold be as sory for, as any man in Yorkshire, if I myght other wayes doe, as knowes Our Lord, who keepe you in worship. At Staynley, this St. Martyn even. Yours to his litle power,

      ROBART CHALONER.⁸⁵

      Chaloner was in fact Rocliffe’s man, helping him to increase the pressure on Robert Plumpton. Friends who had stood surety for Plumpton on loans of up to £100 found bailiffs at their doors, seizing their lands and goods, with Plumpton unable to pay or do anything about this spreading disaster. Month after month, Plumpton can have been aware only of the closing of doors. He had married again, Isabel, the daughter of a peer, Lord Neville. She too was soon at her wits’ end. No one would pay him what they owed him. No one would buy what the Plumptons could offer in the way of either underwood or timber trees.

      No one would buy any land from the Plumptons as their title to it was so insecure. The Rocliffe-Empson band had shut them out of any timber or wood market. Isabel was reduced to sending Plumpton a few shillings through the post. Her mother, Lady Nevill, sent her £4 13s. 4d. in a letter, saying it was all she could afford and advising her that ‘God is where he was, and his grace can and will pooruey euery thing for the best, & help his servant at their most needes, and so I trust his Hynes, he wil do you.’⁸⁶

      At the death of Henry VII in 1509, Robert ceased to be a Knight of the Body, as the office died with the King. Both Plumpton and Isabel his wife, still guilty of occupying Plumpton Hall illegally and owing money at all points, were thrown into the Counter, the debtors’ gaol in London. The Rocliffe and Sotehill cousins took possession of the manors of Idle and Plumpton itself. But the same turn of the wheel brought Plumpton release. Richard Empson and Edmund Dudey, the saw and razor of Henry VII’s oppression, were also arrested on the old king’s death and after conviction on false charges of treason were executed on Tower Hill to general delight, a sop to the masses from the new young King. Empson’s death released the Yorkshire gentry from a reign of terror and the way was opened for yet another attempt at arbitration between the Plumptons on the one side and the Rocliffes and Sotehills on the other.

      The final award was made in March 1515. Plumpton was indeed to have Plumpton. The others were to have everything else. If the Rocliffes and Sotehills didn’t let the Plumptons back into Plumpton, they were to give them £40 a year, which was in effect Plumpton’s net worth. Seventy years before, the family had been en route to glory; now they had sunk to this, an annual income below which almost no family could call itself gentry.⁸⁷

      Robert was broken. In 1516, he was sixty-three, his ‘grand climateric’, the moment at which, according to classical medical theory, a man’s life turned down towards death. In that year he made a deal with his son William, by which, in a sad and haunted act of resignation, a Lear-like transition from this world to the next, the father surrendered all say over his own life and lands and allowed William to dictate the conditions in which he and Isabel would now live. Will was to ‘have ordering and charge of all the household and goods therto longing’. Robert and Isabel were ‘to take their ease and reast, and to be at board with the said William at the proper costs and charges of the said Will’. Will was to have all the income from the lands and rents and was to pay all the costs, ‘that is to say, meate, drinke, and wages’. He was also to pay for his brothers and sisters and to be in charge of employing the servants, except that ‘the said Sir Robert his fader shal have thre at his owne pleasure, such as he will apointe’. Robert was to have an allowance of £10 a year and Will was to listen to his advice on farms, woods and debts.⁸⁸

      It is a broken conclusion. Robert’s legacies at death were a few shillings to a church here and there, a pound or two to his younger sons and daughters ‘which sums William Plompton his son and heir was to pay’.⁸⁹ To Isabel Plumpton, his wife, all the goods in his chamber after his death, and the half of all his other goods. Witnesses to his will were his chaplain, a Plumpton cousin, and his servants Ralph Knowle and Oliver Dickenson, who had been with him at the siege of the hall and in prison in London.

      The lands Robert had lost slid on in the hands of the Cliffords, soon to be the high-glamour Earls of Cumberland. None of those old Plumpton lands is more beautiful than Grassington in upper Wharfedale, none more unrecognizable than Idle, now buried in Bradford, none more poignant than Plumpton, where moss grows on the abandoned road and the stone walls on the edge of the wood have been allowed to collapse and crumble.

      Is there a moral to this story? Perhaps only that there is no safety. The world of the gentry, even in its medieval beginnings, was not only endlessly negotiable but constantly in need of negotiation. If you happened to get caught in a tough political struggle or a tangle of deceit, it was perfectly likely for the entire family enterprise to be fatally damaged.

      The Plumptons remained Roman Catholic at the Reformation, fell increasingly into debt and ended up on the wrong side in the Civil War. John, the last Plumpton of any substance, was wounded at Marston Moor and died after languishing for several days in Knaresborough, where he is buried, owing £6,393. The last of the line was another Robert Plumpton, who died at Cambrai in France unmarried in 1749. He had gone there to confer with his aunt Anne, a Benedictine nun. After his death, the manor of Plumpton was sold to Daniel Lascelles, the son and part-heir of one of the great and most brutal slave-financiers of the eighteenth century. Daniel intended to make it his seat. He pulled down Plumpton Hall and, as Thomas Stapleton, the nineteenth-century editor of the Plumpton letters, described, ‘formed about its site extensive pleasure-grounds; but, after having begun the erection of a new building, he desisted and went to live at Goldsborough Hall, another of his purchases and which, like Plumpton, had once been the residence of a knightly family’.⁹⁰

      Everything medieval at Plumpton has gone, erased in the eighteenth century, no more than one or two bits of broken sandstone now surviving among the brambles and the bracken.

      PART II

      In the Renaissance State

      1520–1610

      The Tudors were the most successful gentry family