From local gentry to Shire Knight

At the age of twenty-three, as a young Lord of the Manor, Thomas Trentham III contracted what would turn out to be one of the most influential Trentham marriages so far - to Jane Sneyd. The Sneyds, under the direction of Sir William Sneyd (d. 1571), were fast becoming one of the wealthiest landowners in north Staffordshire after having consolidated the family wealth practicing law in Chester for a couple of generations. Having been Mayor of Chester, twice Sheriff of Staffordshire and being a Justice of the Peace, Sir William, to the surprise of his Chester friends, then moved his family back to the old family seat of Bradwell Hall in the Borough of Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire, while still relatively young, in order to invest in land. Amongst many acquisitions from this period, the most important was the purchase of the nearby manorship of Keele, a couple of miles north of the important market town of Newcastle-under-Lyme, which is where his son Ralph would build a great hall to become the new family seat. And, like the Trenthams, the Sneyds also had connections at court for Sir William’s father Richard had been councillor to Princess Mary, later Queen, as well as being Recorder of Chester for twenty-five years.

From the moment of Jane Sneyd’s marriage to Thomas Trentham III, the two families formed a great bond of friendship that would last down the generations. Perhaps the most crucial early benefit of this relationship was the influence that Sir William and his son Ralph Sneyd had in educating the young Thomas Trentham III in the ways of profitable estate management. Trentham wealth, hitherto, had been founded on their drapery business and ownership of townhouses in Shrewsbury as well as civic income - they had little experience of managing hundreds of acres of farmland.

Thomas Trentham III was an ambitious and shrewd man and with the wise council of the Sneyds in his ears and the expectations of his forebears running in his veins, the Trentham family enjoyed a great flowering at Rocester in Thomas’ capable hands. From evidence in the extensive Sneyd archive at Keele University it is clear that Sir William Sneyd introduced a programme of land improvement measures on his estates such as draining moorland and clearing ‘furze and heath’ to open up new pastures, the object being to increase the ‘value per acre’ of the land which determined the amount in leasehold rent that could be earned from a growing number of tenant farmers. It is very likely indeed that the Rocester estate under the management of Thomas Trentham III benefited from these acquired skills.

This investment in land improvement could be made to be self-financing, too. Undeveloped estates could be made profitable in Tudor times by a systematic thinning of the great mature woodlands on the estate - a ready supply of good timber was a very valuable commodity that could be exploited the year round for hard cash. It was especially profitable if you invested in a sawmill to prepare the lumber for market - and there are two extant 18C watermills at Rocester on the Dove and Churnett rivers. The 1781 Arkwright mill lies just beyond the southeast corner of Abbey Field - the site of both a Roman fort and then Rocester Abbey (founded 1146) and, as it’s the perfect spot for a watermill, there’s every chance that Thomas Trentham III used the site for cutting timber or grinding corn.

Having mentioned the Roman fort at Rocester - an interesting thought occurs regarding the Trentham Sneyd relationship. Setting off due west from the Rocester fort, a direct Roman road once set off across the moorland to link up with the next fort - situated at Chesterton just outside the present town of Newcastle-under-Lyme. The site of this fort is overlooked by the great escarpment to the west climbing up to Keele. Roads were poorly developed in Staffordshire in Tudor times - it’s an interesting thought that these two families kept in touch treading such an ancient pathway.

Over the next ten years Thomas and his wife Jane concentrated on putting down firm roots in this congenial, but isolated, corner of moorland Staffordshire situated about twenty-five miles to the south-east of the Sneyds at Keele Hall. It is likely that it was under Thomas that the existing abbey buildings underwent their first major rebuild - to fashion the place into a comfortable manor house. Their firstborn was named Elizabeth - she was the fifth member of the family to bear the name - and not the last. Sadly, no record has ever been found of her birth - the earliest extant Rocester Parish Register dates from just before the birth of Thomas and Jane’s fourth child Katherine on August 16 1569, after the births of Elizabeth, ffrancis and Dorothy. But there are reliable clues to suggest that Thomas and Jane married around 1561-2. By this reckoning, Elizabeth Trentham was aged around twenty-nine years old when she married Edward de Vere.

It is common knowledge amongst Oxfordians that Elizabeth Trentham was one of Queen Elizabeth’s Maids of Honour - among the highest caste of all the ladies who attended the Queen. With a good education that developed an aptitude for French and Italian language and all the courtly arts like music, dancing and poetry, the Maids of Honour formed an essential part of the lustre of Elizabeth’s court in its formal show when ambassadors were in town, and they also played their part in the feverish hothouse of court intrigue.

A Shire Knight would consider himself in great favour indeed should his eldest daughter be chosen to become an intimate of the Queen’s Majesty. It might interest Oxfordians to discover that Elizabeth Trentham may have had this destiny chosen for her at birth: Josiah C. Wedgwood, author of the three volume ‘Staffordshire Parliamentary History’ (1917-1919), in his biography of Thomas Trentham III as the MP for the County of Stafford in 1571, states, “The Queen may have been god-mother to his eldest daughter, Elizabeth.” Furthermore, GE Cokayne (a Victorian ancestor of the the Trenthams and author of ‘The Complete Peerage’) has a manuscript note that for new year’s presents one year, Queen Elizabeth gave gilt plates to two of her Maids of Honour - of all her ladies - one of whom is recorded as being Miss Trentham.

Perhaps the most vivid indication of the high esteem that Elizabeth Trentham (plus brother ffrancis and cousin Ralph Sneyd) was held in by the Queen is shown in the latter’s personal tone in the salutation at the start of the licence document granting the purchase of King’s Place, Hackney in 1596,

“...to our well beloved cousin Elizabeth, Countess of Oxenford, wife of Edward, Earl of Oxenford, and to our beloved ffrancis Trentham, esquire, Ralph Sneyd, esquire, & Giles Young, gentleman...”

Thomas and Jane had a further two children at Rocester - Lettice (b+d 1573) and Thomas Trentham IV (1575-1605) - at around that time in his life, in his early thirties, when Thomas Trentham III was beginning to spread his wings. On 2 April 1571, he took his seat as a Shire Knight in the House of Commons as one of two members for the County of Stafford. Interestingly, taking his seat in the House of Lords for the first time on this day was the young 17th Earl of Oxford who had just come into his inheritance.

Parliament in Elizabethan England is barely recognisable to the Parliament of today. The summoning and dissolution of Parliament, for a start, was a Royal prerogative. Whenever Elizabeth got tired of their presumptious questions, as she often did, she could simply tell the members to pack their bags and Parliament would not exist for months and months on end. The government of the Kingdom, by the Privy Council under Burghley’s stewardship, would not be affected in any way. Parliament was useful for framing laws and for raising cash for foreign adventures - but England was governed by Burghley, Leicester and Walsingham under the cautious but wilful princely direction of the Queen.

Staffordshire elected eight members in total: two for the County of Stafford - who became the Shire Knights; and two each for the boroughs of Stafford, Newcastle-under-Lyme and Lichfield. The ‘electors’, such as they were, for the important Shire Knights were the Sheriff (whose job it was to administer the ‘election’), between 12 and 25 ‘named’ electors and a group of ‘freeholders’ that included guildmen, prominent landowners and burgesses. But in reality, the choice of the two Shire Knights was decided in smoke-filled rooms well in advance. In the section on Staffordshire in the second volume of the official history of Parliament, the description of the ‘election’ in 1571 seems to have been typical:

“At the next election, in 1571, we know that he [Sir Ralph Bagnall] and the Harcourt party clashed. There were three candidates: Bagnall, Harcourt’s son-in-law John Grey, standing again, and Thomas Trentham I [sic III]. Harcourt himself had evidently had his fill of Parliaments.... As for Trentham, he was a pronounced Protestant, and it may well be that he and Bagnall combined forces against the Harcourt faction. According to Bagnall’s statement in a subsequent Star Chamber case, he and Trentham had a majority of voices at the election; but the sheriff was Harcourt’s brother-in-law, [Sir] Walter Aston, and when he came to make his return, he returned Grey and Trentham, simply substituting Grey for Bagnall as the senior Knight. Bagnall had to have recourse once more to a seat at Newcastle-under-Lyme.”

It seems, in general, that the Staffordshire gentry were apathetic when it came to Parliament - having the honour of representing the county as a Shire Knight was one thing, but taking a borough seat was deemed less worthy. A much more important and coveted post was that of the County Sheriff. This post was held for a single year at a time, and incumbents reported nominally to the Lord Lieutenant of the County when it came to surveys and musters - but, as for the day-to-day matters, much correspondence in the archive suggests that Burghley and Walsingham were the chief puppet-masters.

Barely a month after taking his seat, Thomas Trentham’s parliamentary career came to an abrupt end when the Queen became tired of all the members’ questions regarding her marriage and the succession and promptly wound them up. But in November that year, Thomas Trentham III was selected to replace the outgoing Sir Walter Aston as Sheriff of Staffordshire.

As he took up his post and gathered all the reins of power in his hands, he could hardly have been unaware of a very dangerous current running through the affairs of the Kingdom that would burst forth in the coming spring and come to dominate his remaining years in public life.

Copyright 2006 Jeremy Crick.