A contested election
Following the death of George Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, in 1590, Queen Elizabeth appointed her new favourite, Robert Devereux, 2nd Earl of Essex – whose family seat was at Chartley – to become the new Lord Lieutenant of Staffordshire. Essex had many followers among the Staffordshire gentry, most notably the Bagot family of Blithfield. Richard Bagot, along with Richard Broughton, had been appointed by Burghley to manage the Chartley estate during the young Earl’s minority. And when Essex took command of the army besieging the city of Rouen in the autumn of 1591, with around 4000 Englishmen both horse and foot, a sizeable contingent of this force was supplied by Staffordshire and included Richard Bagot’s second son Anthony who had been close to Essex throughout his teens.

The reason for this interest in the Bagots and Essex is twofold: firstly, unlike the Trenthams and the Sneyds, a massive archive of Bagot correspondence from the Tudor period has survived the ravages of time and, as the family played a prominent role in Staffordshire civic affairs, a good deal of the activities of other Staffordshire families can be reconstructed through this archive. Sadly, the Bagots were not particularly close to either the Trenthams or the Sneyds and only two letters from Ralph Sneyd and one each from ffrancis Trentham and Thomas Trentham V exist in the Bagot archive. Yet this brings us to the second point of interest: on the 16th November 1592 ffrancis Trentham was appointed for the first of two terms as the Sheriff of Staffordshire.

As Sheriff, ffrancis was supposed to report both to Essex, as Lord Lieutenant, as well as directly to the Privy Council in matters like the conduct of ‘the showe of horses and men’ at the annual musters, the prosecution of recusants and the collection of the County subsidies to the Crown. Yet it appears that relations between ffrancis and Essex were frosty, to say the least. Whereas the previous Lord Lieutenant, the Earl of Shrewsbury, addressed countless letters to the Staffordshire Justices of the Peace, Sheriffs and Deputy Lieutenants – all received by Thomas Trentham (see the Talbot Papers) – Essex seems to have foregone these formalities and dealt instead with his loyal supporters, whatever their actual civic roles were.

The most outrageous example of this concerned the Parliamentary elections of 1593. As the Sheriff, ffrancis Trentham was the officer in charge of conducting the election yet, in letters from Hampton Court dated 31st December 1592, 2nd and 9th January 1593, Essex wrote to his three Staffordshire supporters, Richard Bagot, Sir Edward Lyttleton and Sir Edward Aston – all staunch protestants – urging upon them his nominations for the two Shire Knights as well as five of the eight borough seats of Stafford, Lichfield, Newcastle-u-Lyme and the relatively new borough of Tamworth. Essex was particularly keen to see his step-father Sir Christopher Blount (who’d married the widow of the Earl of Leicester) elected as the senior Shire Knight and for one of his twenty-one ‘Rouen knights’ (treated with much derision by Elizabethan society), ‘Sir’ Thomas Gerard, as the junior Shire Knight. Essex, rather pompously, added the following to ensure that his friends fulfilled his wishes, “I should think my credit little in my own country, if it should not afford so small a matter as this, especially the men being so fit.”

It so happened that Sir Walter Harcourt, who had been elected Shire Knight in 1588, was determined to stand again. Readers will remember that it was Walter’s father Simon Harcourt (Shire Knight in 1559 and 1562) who’d seen his son-in-law John Grey fraudulantly elected as Shire Knight, alongside the legitimate choice of Thomas Trentham, at the election of 1571. The Harcourt faction had been a major force in Staffordshire County elections since the 1560s and it was notable that they had marked Catholic sympathies.

The confusion over the possibility of a contested election is reflected in correspondence between Bagot and Lyttleton – Bagot had already received the promise of support from sixty of his friends for the choice of Blount and Gerard. It then became apparent that someone had put pressure upon Gerard to withdraw in favour of Harcourt – yet neither Bagot nor Lyttleton ever got to the bottom of the matter. So when ffrancis Trentham stood up in the Shire Hall at Stafford and called for a show of voices from the freeholders and burgesses, it became clear that Essex’s authority in the county was less than absolute, and ffrancis duly entered the names of Blount and Harcourt as the two Shire Knights on the indenture.

In his summary of this election (published in 1917), Josiah C Wedgwood makes a most remarkable statement. It is so tantalising that I have – without success – spent months attempting to locate the source of his information. He writes: “Robert Devereux, second Earl of Essex, Lord Lieutenant of the County, then at the height of his power, recommended the election of the members. Essex was supposed to favour Puritanism, but the sheriff, Francis Trentham, was allied with de Vere, Earl of Oxford.” It is also interesting that when Wedgwood reviewed the election of 1601, he had this to say about ffrancis Trentham’s younger brother Thomas Trentham IV who, with considerable help from the Sneyds who dominated the borough, was elected for Newcastle-u-Lyme, “His sister Elizabeth, moreover, had married, as his second wife, Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford, whose influence was very great at this time.”

It would be reasonable to believe that Edward de Vere had a hearty dislike of Puritanism – the ideological assaults by its advocates upon the theatre establishment and against liberal publishing would be anathema to him and, as someone who had flirted with Catholicism himself, his enlightened view was that it was possible to be a loyal Englishman and a Catholic. Perhaps under his influence, there is evidence that ffrancis Trentham, while remaining a solid Protestant, pursued a more liberal line in his civic duties than his father.

Copyright 2007 Jeremy Crick.