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King’s
Place and an heir Actually,
Queen Elizabeth couldn’t see for the life of her why her Maids
of Honour and the ladies of her Bedchamber and Privy Chamber would
ever want to get married in the first place and she would “much
exhort all her women to remain in virgin state as much as may be”.
She expected their first loyalty to be to her, and husbands got
in the way of this as did the disruption to her household brought
on by the inevitable pregnancies. Even after marriage, her Maids
of Honour were expected to continue in their full service to her
and they still needed her permission to absent themselves from court.
Prior
to the move, in 1597, to King’s Place at Hackney, little has
been discovered of the domestic arrangements of Edward and Elizabeth
after their marriage. Nominally they first lived at Stoke Newington
a couple of miles north of the city of London but, as Queen Elizabeth’s
court tended to move with the seasons, the Countess of Oxford would
have followed it wherever it happened to be. The Queen’s principal
London palace was Whitehall and from here the Countess could have
used the coach which we know she possessed to have commuted between
the palace and her home – maybe this was why she bought this
exceedingly rare item. But in the winter when the court moved to
Richmond, the warmest of the royal palaces, and to Windsor in the
summer, either the Earl and Countess joined the court there and
were allocated rooms or the Countess joined the court alone unless
she had been granted leave to remain with Edward or to travel home
to Rocester. It
is often thought that Edward de Vere largely turned his back on
court life in his later years. Yet there is ample evidence in his
correspondence with Burghley and, later, with Robert Cecil, of his
continued involvement in court affairs. In many ways, now that he
was married to one of the more spirited and assertive of the Queen’s
ladies (in contrast to the shrinking violet that was his wife Anne),
this mature phase of his courtly career actually saw him recover
some influence after the traumas of the past. After all, it was
well known amongst courtiers that suits to the Queen could be furthered
through the advocacy of the Queen’s ladies. And some of this
influence, as we shall see, when allied with the political influence
of his new brother-in-law ffrancis Trentham, could be most effective. When
the licence to purchase the manor of King’s Place was granted
by the Queen on 2 September 1597 to, “...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”, largely funded, no
doubt, with the £1000 which her father had bequeathed to Elizabeth
for her preferment in marriage, it was a substantial country manor
house with around 270 acres of farmland, orchards and gardens. It
was here that Edward and Elizabeth brought their three year old
son Henry, who had been born on 24 February 1593, and it would remain
their principal London home until Edward’s death in 1604, the
Countess finally moving in 1609 after selling it to the poet ffulke
Greville. The
original house, built in the 1470s, came into the possession of
Henry VIII’s secretary Thomas Cromwell around the year 1536
and he added two new wings that partially enclosed a single courtyard
at the rear before handing the property back to the King. By 1580,
Lord Hunsdon had added a further two wings thus creating an imposing
E-shaped brick manor house with two courtyards. By this time, the
house contained a classic Tudor long gallery as well as a private
chapel and the great hall was so impressive that it was later copied
for a City of London livery company hall. There
are two fascinating references in Sir William Herbert’s leasehold
of 1547 to the property which give us some indication of the appeal
of the house to Edward de Vere: firstly, the house possessed “a
proper lybrayre to laye bokes in” and, secondly, “the
said house is inclosyd on the backside wyth a greate brode dyche
and without that a Fayre large garden ... And at the Hither end
of the House comynge from London ys a Faire large garden grounde
inclosyd with a bricke wall.” Edward de Vere, I should like
to suggest, had a passion for herb-lore, botany and in the aesthetic
delight of flower gardens and, here at King’s Place, he had
the opportunity to devote at least some of his time during the last
eight years of his life to this passion. That the gardens at King’s
Place were notable is not in doubt – the diarist John Evelyn
recorded a number of visits to Lady Katherine, the widow of Robert
Greville, 2nd Baron Brooke, at King’s Place (then known as
Brooke House) in the 1650s and was clearly impressed by “one
of the neatest and most celebrated [gardens] in England.” Perhaps
it was Edward de Vere who prepared the groundwork for this horticultural
delight. There
is solid circumstantial evidence that King’s Place became a
well visited, bustling family home, after all Elizabeth Trentham
had grown up in a large family that was frequently augmented by
the arrival of aunts, uncles and cousins. Elizabeth’s brother
ffrancis had also married in 1591 and he and Katherine, daughter
of Sir Ralph Sheldon, already had the first four of their fifteen
children when his sister moved to King’s Place – the heir
(Sir) Thomas Trentham V, (Sir) Christopher Trentham and the twins,
Anne and Jane. Additional to the Rocester estate, ffrancis had also
inherited from his father the wardship, education and marriage of
Francis Meverell (son and heir of Thomas Trentham’s sister
Margaret and Sampson Meverell), and this included not only managing
the Throwley Park estate (seven miles north of Rocester) but also
maintaining Francis Meverell's younger siblings, Richard, Ralph
and Anne, until Francis Meverell came of age. Of
her nieces by ffrancis and Katherine, Countess Elizabeth became
god-mother to Vere Trentham, born in 1599, and in her will she has
this to say of Marie, born in 1607, “I give and bequeath unto
Marie Trentham (whom I intend, if God give me life, to educate and
train up) five hundred pounds towards her preferment in marriage.”
Elizabeth had not only become very attached to the young girl, she
had also spotted that she had what it took to become a Maid of Honour
– which is the meaning of her intention to train the girl up.
Visits back home to Rocester must have been very rare during her
marriage – maybe Edward accompanied her at least once, though
the evidence is not forthcoming – yet there is good evidence
to believe that the Trenthams and the Sneyds were regular house-guests
at King’s Place. After
all, ffrancis Trentham had good reason to divide his time between
Rocester and London. As a prominent Staffordshire landowner with
close ties to other influential Staffordshire and Shropshire families
like the Sneyds, Corbets and Newports, ffrancis spent most of his
time in Staffordshire managing his estates and enjoying the rich
and varied social life of a young lord of the manor. He also had
his civic duties to fulfil and, as much of this work was directed
by the Privy Council, he was certainly a familiar face amongst the
minor courtiers conducting business with them at Queen Elizabeth’s
court. From 1596 to 1615 he served as a Staffordshire Justice of
the Peace, holding court sessions at Stafford and Lichfield; he
served two terms as the High Sheriff of Staffordshire, in 1592 and
1611, and earned his Parliamentary spurs as a Shire Knight in 1610.
He was just as active as his father in carrying out his civic duties,
though there are strong indications that he listened very closely
to the counsel of his new brother-in-law in certain policy matters.
And, as ffrancis had taken Edward de Vere’s finances in hand, it is more than likely that on his frequent visits to London he mixed business, family and pleasure and lodged at King’s Place. During prolonged absences from Rocester, there is evidence that either his younger brother Thomas or his brother-in-law Sir John Stanhope looked after things back home. Copyright
2007 Jeremy Crick. |
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