The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson

leaving, which is thick with late medieval piety. Masses were to be sung for his soul at Evesham to the south and by the Augustinian canons at Studley to the north. Dominicans in Oxford and Cambridge and the poor in the almshouse he had set up in Worcester were all to receive money to pray for his soul in purgatory. A priest in the chantry at Coughton was ‘to teache grammer freely to all my tenantes children’.⁴ The church itself was to be glorified with beautiful stained glass and gilded and painted saints. There was to be no shortage of Throckmorton heraldry. An altar tomb made of Purbeck marble was built in the nave for Robert’s own body to lie in one day, surrounded by this evidence of his piety and works. He had rebuilt the church as a reliquary for Throckmortonism. The whole building was a Throckmorton shrine. There was no gap between social standing and goodness or between the metaphysical and the physical. It was all part of a single fabric, like Christ’s coat at the crucifixion, ‘without seame, woven from the top thorowout’. If the Plumpton story was about disjunction and failure, this Throckmorton vision was of integration and wholeness.

      Robert was never to occupy the tomb he built for himself. When in Rome, en route to the Holy Land, he died and was buried there, and his son George, born in 1489, came into the inheritance.

      George had been married since he was twelve to Kathryn Vaux, and from about 1510 they began producing an extraordinary number of children, 19 in 23 years, most of whom lived until adulthood. Lands, localism, children, a household, local politics and the law: all of that was a dominant reality in George’s life. But the Throckmortons were far from parochial. Both George’s and Kathryn’s fathers had been close allies and courtiers to Henry VII. George would have considered Westminster and Whitehall his own to conquer. After some years learning the law in Middle Temple, he had entered the court of Henry VIII in 1511, fought alongside the King in France and was knighted in 1516. Royal favours began to trickle down: he became steward of royal estates and keeper of royal parks in Warwickshire and Worcestershire.

      There is one minor incident which stands out from this steady progress. In the winter of 1517–18, he killed a mugger called William Porter who had come at him ‘maliciously’ in Foster Lane, the Bond Street of its day, off Cheapside, full of goldsmiths’ shops. It is possible George had been buying jewellery and his attacker was trying to rob him. George had slashed out at the man ‘for fear of death and for the salvation of his own life’ and killed him. A royal pardon followed.⁵

      This was all entirely conventional: it was what people like George Throckmorton did with their lives. Legal competence, marriage and children, effective violence at home and abroad, minor functions at court and in Warwickshire, the management of the lands: this was the gentry in action, as it had been throughout the Middle Ages, the central, universal joint of English culture.

      George Throckmorton could look forward to a life of unremitting and blissful normality. He was his father’s son, pious, efficient, forthright, courteous, sociable, capable both of performing duties for his social and political superiors and of attending to Throckmorton wellbeing.

      The 1530s ensured that would not happen. For two or three years, Henry VIII had come to think that his marriage to his brother’s widow, Catherine of Aragon, was cursed. Leviticus said as much. The King had offended God by marrying her and God had ensured she would bring him no son. Catherine was now too old to bear children and, anyway, since the spring of 1526 the King had been entranced by one of Catherine’s ladies in waiting, the young Kentish gentlewoman Anne Boleyn, with whose family Henry had long been familiar. He thirsted for divorce, to bed Anne Boleyn and to continue his dynasty. But a divorce was impossible. When his chief minister, the brilliant and deeply loathed Cardinal Wolsey, proved himself incapable of bringing it about, Henry’s desire for Anne, for freedom of action and for legitimacy all fused into one, overlapping, multi-headed crisis.

      George Throckmorton, who was forty in 1529, found himself embroiled in every part of this crisis. Before Wolsey’s disgrace he had been working for him at Hampton Court, acting as the Cardinal’s agent in confiscating the monastic lands Wolsey needed at this stage to endow his new college at Oxford (which later would become Christ Church). When the King dismissed Wolsey for his inadequacies over the divorce in November 1529, tides of loathing swept over the fallen man. All the arrogance, regal style, vaingloriousness and independence of mind that he had shown in office were thrown back at him. Throckmorton might have been tainted with these connections but he managed to slip out from under them. At Hampton Court he had made friends with Wolsey’s rising assistant, the brewer’s son Thomas Cromwell, sending him gifts of £20 and a greyhound, asking for some sturgeon and quails in return, with the assurance that he was his friend and ‘hoping you wyll see me no loser’.⁶ Now, as Cromwell moved towards the centre of power, that connection came good. George’s son Kenelm went into service as a member of Cromwell’s household and George himself was made a member of the commission looking into the possessions Wolsey had claimed in Warwickshire.

      It looked as if Throckmorton was calmly doing what his forefathers had done, easily sliding from one power-allegiance to the next, the traditional method by which successful gentry families survived from generation to generation. But the Reformation was more than just another power shift. As liberating juices ran into the crannies of English minds, the bound-together world of inheritance, piety and service, which his father, dead in Rome, had left to him twelve years before, came under threat. Lutheran ideas; Thomas Cromwell’s ambitions for a new and reformed relationship of church and state; the King’s desire for a new and possibly unholy divorce and marriage: this was not only a crisis for England. It was a life crisis for George Throckmorton himself.

      In 1529 he had been elected to the Reformation Parliament, which met from time to time, without re-election, until 1536. That parliament was the instrument, deftly steered by Thomas Cromwell, through which the Reformation was brought to England. In one Act after another, church independence was eroded and the authority of the crown enhanced. Cromwell made the English state watertight: church money and lands were channelled towards the crown; no appeals were allowed to any authority outside England, especially not to the Pope; and increasingly repressive laws were passed against anyone who disagreed with royal policy, culminating in the 1534 Act of Supremacy and the Treasons Act, by which the King was acknowledged as supreme in church and state. Any disagreement was punishable by death. The cumulative effect of the parliament was to destroy the role of the Pope, the inheritance of St Peter, and put secular terror in its place.

      From his actions and words, it is clear that George Throckmorton was agonized by the conflict of allegiances. Crown or family, his past or his future? His father’s church or the King’s? To which should he be more loyal? Half secretly, he began to oppose Henry’s reformation of church and state. But the whisper system of Thomas Cromwell’s listening network heard much of it, and although the chronology is often confused, in Cromwell’s papers you can hear and see this Warwickshire gentleman a little clumsily and a little foolishly navigating the shoals and tides of the Tudor seas.

      A mass of business passed through the 1530s House of Commons, the regulation of towns, the tanning of leather and the dyeing of wool, the sowing of flax and hemp, the duties on wines, laws against eating veal (to preserve the stock of cattle) and for the destruction of choughs, crows and rooks (to preserve corn crops), for paving the Strand and ‘for the saving of young spring of woods’, against ‘excess in apparel’, and, amidst all this ordinary business, the cataclysmic ‘Appeals to Rome forbidden’.⁷

      All England was talking of the changes confronting them. Throckmorton liked to meet a group of Parliament friends for dinner or supper in an inn called the Queen’s Head in Fleet Street. Others met and talked to him in private places around the City: the garden of the Hospital of St John, just north of the walls; or in a private room in the Serjeants’ Inn near the Temple; or at other inns in Cheapside, the shopping hub of the City where he had been mugged years before. London was full of these evening conversations between like-minded conservative gentry. ‘Every man showed his mynde and divers others of the parliament house wolde come thither to dyner & soup and comun with us.’ Usually, ‘we wolde bidde the servaunts of the house go out and in lik maner our owne servaunts because we thought it not convenient that they shulde here us speke of such mattiers’.⁸ But conversations were reported and to Cromwell this joint and repeated privacy looked conspiratorial.