The Gentry: Stories of the English

This might have been the final arrangement. Even as the Wars of the Roses came to an end, and Henry Tudor claimed the throne as Henry VII, this distribution of lands amongst the Plumptons lasted for the next fourteen years, relatively untroubled. Robert, half the man his father was, both in property and resolution, nevertheless pursued the ideal of the knightly squire. He was short of money but he did his best to look after his people. He took on the local government of Knaresborough and its forest. He was a little dilatory, but he kept his correspondence carefully (which is how we know any of this), he served the new Percy Earls of Northumberland in battle against the Scots and was knighted. Tenants and land agents wrote to him, thanking him for the ‘tender mastership shewed me in all causes’.55 He did his best to address his declining financial position, claiming the fees due from the release of bondmen – there were still bound serfs in late fifteenth-century England and their release provided a steady income for landlords feeling short.56 Like his father, Robert was embroiled in long, expensive cases in Chancery, but going to the courts was not cheap and the threat of impoverishment was never far away.

Then, in February 1497, a letter arrived at Plumpton Hall which must have hollowed out a cavity in Robert Plumpton’s heart. It was from his lawyer and cousin Edward Plumpton, writing from the Inns of Court in London.

To my singuler good master, Sir Robart Plompton, kt.

In my right humble wyse I recomend me unto your good mastership, acertaynyng you that ther is in thes partes a great talking of those that belong & medle with Mr Hemson, that he intendeth to attempte matters agaynst you …57

By ‘Mr Hemson’, the lawyer meant Sir Richard Empson, ‘the great man E.’,58 as others referred to him, the most dangerous predator in the tangled wood of late fifteenth-century England. Empson, a lawyer, sophisticated, as slick as a slug, and his colleague Edmund Dudley were employed as debt-collectors-in-chief for the new Tudor crown. As Francis Bacon wrote a century later, they were Henry VII’s ‘horse-leeches and shearers: bold men and careless of fame’. Money was all, for them or their master, and to gain their ends, as Bacon went on, ‘they would also ruffle with jurors and inforce them to find as they would direct, and (if they did not) convent them, imprison them, and fine them … [Empson and Dudley] preyed upon the people; both like tame hawks for their master, and like wild hawks for themselves; insomuch as they grew to great riches and substance’.59 This was the enemy to whom Sir William Plumpton had exposed his son.

Empson, whose method was the detailed acquisition, by any means he could manage, of one property after another, however slight, sniffed an opportunity. He allied himself with the interests of the two granddaughters, Margaret Rocliffe and Elizabeth Sotehill, eventually marrying his own daughter to Elizabeth’s son Henry. The ways of the law moved slowly and it wasn’t until May 1501 that Empson began to close in on Robert. The predatory minister began first in Nottinghamshire, where he bought, packed and threatened the juries, and then went on to Derbyshire to do the same. Efficient, connected and businesslike, he took all the best rooms in Derby to house the jury members. Plumpton failed and probably could not afford to match this smooth manipulation of justice, despite the urgings of his lawyers. The result was inevitable. On behalf of his party, Empson got hold of Kinoulton and Mansfield Woodhouse in Nottinghamshire and the Staffordshire manors. Robert was now left with nothing but Plumpton and Idle in Airedale. ‘Thus’, as a Plumpton lawyer wrote of Empson’s methods, ‘he under myneth you.’60

The Plumptons’ world was dissolving; a queasy dread begins to fill the letters they preserved. The following year, in September 1502, Empson moved on to their heartland:

The procuringe & stirrings of Sir Richard Empson, Kt, by corrupt & vnlawful meanes obteyned the fauour & goodwills of the Sheriffe of the said county of York by giuinge of fes & rewards vnto him, & soe caused the panels to bee made after his owne mynd.61

After ‘diverse great gentlemen of the country’ had letters from the King himself, asking them to look kindly on his minister’s plans, Empson came to York. He brought a cavalcade with him of knights and squires, with two hundred of the King’s Yeomen ‘arayed in the most honnorable liverie of his said garde’.62 Empson himself rode through the streets of York with ‘his footemen wayteing on his stir-reps, more liker the degree of a duke then a batchelor knight’.63 This was justice entirely subservient to the facts and display of power. He was accompanied among all the others by Sir William Pierpoint, Plumpton’s old Nottinghamshire enemy, relishing ‘the vtter confusion & destruction’64 of his family’s ancient rivals. The Plumptons were trapped in a web not of kinship but of loathing.

Robert was lucky in the woman he married. Agnes Gascoigne was an educated and powerful Yorkshire gentrywoman. There can be no doubt he loved her, addressing her in his letters as ‘my entirely and most hartily beloued wife Agnes Plumpton’ and signing them ‘By your owne louer Rob:’.65 He was to need her in the years to come.

For the hearings at York that September, Robert had left Agnes and their son William, who was about seventeen, at home in Plumpton. Waiting for the court process to begin, with his retainers, the men of the forest and his cousinage around him, sixty-three men in all, he wrote to her:

To my entyrely and right hartily beloved wife, Dame Agnes Plumpton, be this Letter delivered.

My deare hart, in my most hartily wyse, I recommend mee unto you, hartily prayinge you, all things laid apart, that you see that the manor and the place of Plumpton bee surely and stedfastly kept;

and alsoe that I have this Tuesday at even 6 muttons slene, to bee ordained for the supper the said Tuesday at night: and alsoe that yee cause this said Tuesday a beast to be killed, that if neede bee, that I may have it right shortly.

And thus I betake you to the keepinge of the Holy Trinity, who preserve you evermore to his pleasure. From Yorke

By your owne lover Robert Plompton Kt.66

In court, Empson produced a document showing that old Sir William had left the manors of Plumpton and Idle to his granddaughters. Given the confusion of Sir William’s affairs, it is perfectly possible that the document was real but Robert refused to accept it as anything but a forgery. His advisers urged him to make a compromise – there were negotiations with Empson’s lawyers held in St William’s Chapel on the bridge over the Ouse67 – but Plumpton would not move ‘and said that he would not departe with noo party of his land’.68 The negotiations were broken off and the bought and frightened jury awarded everything Plumpton owned to his cousin-enemies. It was then that open war began.

Agnes and her son William had fortified the house and its yards ‘with guns, bowes, crossebowes, bills, speares and other weapons &c. as if it were in of warr’.69 The Plumpton men squeezed in there, taking in beasts and other supplies, bolting the gates, storing the water.

The attack on the hall occurred at some time that October, a ferocious fight in which at least one man of Plumpton’s, Geffrey Towneley, who was probably a cousin, was killed, but the assailants were beaten off and the Plumptons remained in physical possession of the place.70 The bravest of their cousins, Sir John Townley, offered to support them, assuring them that ‘if ther be any thinge that I may doe for you, yt shalbe redy to you, as ever was any of my ansistors to yours, which, I enderstand, they wold have bene glad to do any pleasure to’.71

Other cousins and sons-in-law, scattered across the northern counties, found themselves besieged by the Empson gangs, writing anxious letters to Robert Plumpton, asking for ‘knowledg by the bringer herof how that ye do in your great matters’,72 fending off threats and visits from men demanding money, their goods and lands.

Robert, as a last hope, rode to Westminster to implore protection from the King. Agnes and her son William were left anxiously at Plumpton: not exactly under siege but expecting at any moment a renewed attack. Money was short and, as they had all agreed before Robert rode south, William went out with his men, armed, to collect the rents from their tenants due at Martinmas, 11 November. Some paid up, some refused, ordered by the Rocliffes to do so as the Plumptons were no longer their legal landlords. Those who wouldn’t pay William evicted from their houses and lands, seizing their cattle and goods. The Empsons, Rocliffes and Sotehills hovered, waiting to pick up the pieces. Desperate letters from Agnes went south, looking for an answer to their predicament.73

In the middle of that winter, she went down to join him, perhaps to urge him on, perhaps to comfort him. The seventeen-year-old William was left alone in Plumpton. The forces of the establishment, including the Archbishop of York, currying favour with Empson, threatened William but he stood firm, upholding what was left of his family’s honour and summoning ‘divers other husbands, labourers, yeomen, shermen, a webster, and a smith’74 to court for trespass on land where they did not acknowledge him as landlord. If they attempted to plough the strips in Plumpton’s open fields to the east of the hall, he said he would attack them.

That winter, probably to raise some money when the sap was down, he had timber trees felled in the Plumpton woods, ashes and others, valuable property which Sir John Rocliffe claimed was his. The Archbishop wrote again, warning William of the consequences of this ‘senestor’ behaviour. The Archbishop was prepared to let him take boughs for fuel but not the whole tree. ‘Sir, I wold advise you to doo otherwise. If ye will not be reformed, I acertaine you that the said Sir John shall be for me at liberty to take his most avantage.’75

In these circumstances, threat and legality become indistinguishable. In March 1503, William finally wrote to his parents in London, from where for weeks they had not bothered to tell him their news. Spring was around the corner and William was faced with the prospect of his Rocliffe enemies ploughing up the land they claimed they owned for spring wheat. ‘Sir, I marvell greatly that I haue no word from you vnder what condition I shalld behaue me & my servants. Sir, it is sayd that Sir John Roclife will ploue, but we are not certayne.’76

With help from his Gascoyne cousins, William was re-arming. Ten longbows were delivered to the hall. He was ready for the next stage of the battle and suspected that his father might be guilty of wishful thinking or a lack of resolution. Any talk of royal protection, he told his father, seemed like little more than ‘fayr words’.77 His mother had returned to Plumpton and just before Valentine’s day Robert for once wrote to her from London. Cash was short again:

To my right hartily and mine entyrely beloved wife, Dame Agnes Plompton, bee this delivered.

Best beloved, in my most harty wyse I recommend mee unto you. Soe it is, I mervaile greatly, that yee send mee not the money that yee promised mee to send with John Waukar within 8 dayes after you and I departed, for I am put to a great lacke for it. Therefore, I hartily pray you, as my especiall trust is in you, to send me the said money in all hast possible, and alsoe to send me money, for my cost is very sore and chargeable at this tyme: for I have spent of the money that I brought from you.

Therefore, deare hart, I pray you to remember mee. And as for my matter, there is noe mooveinge of it as yet. And for diverse consideracions and greate hurts might falle to you and mee and our children hereafter, I heartily pray you to remember to hast the money unto mee, as my especiall trust and love is in you,

From London in hast, the Tuesday next afore St. Valentines day, by your lovinge husband, Robert Plompton, kt.78

Hurried, repetitive and emotional as this was, less coherent than she was to him, Agnes can have been left in no doubt.

Through the spring of 1504, the sense of an impending disaster grew more insistent, as did Agnes’s realization that Robert was incapable of saving them. In mid-March she sent him the money he needed, which she had somehow scraped together, and asked him that he ‘be not miscontent that I sent it no sooner, for I have made the hast that I could that was possible for me to do’.79 She was managing the tricky situation with the tenants, evicting some, squeezing money out of others. In mid-April, her patience was breaking. He hadn’t written; he had let the whole business go on too long. Word had reached her of his hopelessness and their adversaries’ persistence and ingenuity: ‘Sir, I marvell greatly that ye let the matter rest so long, and labors no better for your selfe, and ye wold labor it deligently. But it is sayd that ye be lesse forward, and they underworketh falsly and it is sene and known by them.’80

The rent that was due at Whitsun in early May would be a valuable prize for whoever gained the right to the manor by then. There was talk all over the county that Robert was allowing his enemies to win. ‘Sir, I besech you to remember your great cost and charges, and myne, and labor the matter that it myght have anend.’81 The Rocliffes had taken to arresting select individuals. They had got the machinery of the law on their side. And what was he doing? ‘Ye dow none to them, but lett them haue there mynd fullfilled in every case.’82

The Rocliffes and Sotehills were tightening their grip on the county, by threat and persuasion excluding the Plumptons from the world they had once called their own. Plumpton loyalists were being charged and held. No one would buy the wood the family had felled over the winter, or anything else they were trying to sell. Robert needed to bring the whole question to an end, and soon.

For 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 in English history. Owen Tudor, an obscure and impoverished North Wales squire, working as a servant in the royal household, managed in about 1428 to catch the eye of Henry V’s widow, Catherine of Valois, a few years after her warrior husband had died. It is not quite certain how he did it but Owen either fell into her lap when dancing drunk or went swimming in front of her and her ladies. It was a Mr Darcy moment. One chronicler, who knew Catherine well, said she was ‘unable fully to curb her carnal passions’1 when confronted with the magnificent sight of Tudor in the water – she was about twenty-five, he a year to two older – and English history changed. Their sons became power-players in the Wars of the Roses and from that long violent crisis their grandson Henry Tudor emerged the victor at Bosworth Field in 1485. On 30 October that year he was crowned King of England as Henry VII. In this way, the smallest of vicissitudes can change whole worlds.

The civil wars of the fifteenth century which had brought the Tudors to power had destroyed the world of the great medieval magnates. Under the Tudors, overwhelmingly aware of the vulnerability of a crown weaker than its greatest subjects, the great magnates were excluded from influence. After the 1530s, and Henry VIII’s raid on church property and independent power, the church went too. That should have left the crown itself dominating the field, buttressed by the imposing and often terrifying authority of the Tudor state, but in an era before comprehensive taxation, the crown was chronically underfunded, inherently extravagant and forced to spend capital as income. Between the 1530s and the 1630s, it lost what it should have gained.