Category: 17th Century - Meandering Through Time

Georgina Era: The Coffee House

5/6/2022

The Georgian era was an age of expansion, an age of inventions that brought changes in agriculture, textiles and in mining. It was also a time when coffee became a big thing. Coffee houses, an 17th century equivalent of Costa Coffee and Starbucks, were extremely popular.

I imagine these modern day cafes have writers, artists and scientists among their clientele, all chatting over their steaming coffees and slices of walnut cake, London Coffee houses had much the same. Frequenting these houses were the who's who of the day, Samuel Pepys, Alexander Pope and Isaac Newton. However, unlike today women were not found in these establishments.

Women took up the banner against the consumption of this drink in their Women’s Petition Against Coffee, in which it was claimed that the 'old tar turned men into effeminate, babbling, French layabouts.'

Pasque Rosee, a servant to a London merchant opened the first coffee house in London as a side line in 1652, he claimed in The Virtue of Coffee that it was 'the grain or berry called coffee that groweth upon little trees, only in the Deserts of Arabia' others likened to “syrup of soot and the essence of old shoes.”

I have to agree on that point.

Despite that, the taste for coffee hasn't lessened, in fact you cannot walk down the high street without seeing some one clutching a plastic coffee cup.

Give me tea in a china cup and saucer any day.

John Nevison

1/5/2022

John Nevison was a notorious highwayman who had been convicted of horse theft and highway robbery. He went to his death on the 4th May in 1684 following his conviction of the murder.

Nevison was rogue who had a reputation as a 'gentleman highwayman' a veritable Robin Hood who it was said never used violence against his victims, who was always polite and robbed only the wealthy. He was an ex-military man from a wealthy family who fell on hard times following the death of his father. Everyone knew about Nevison at the time, even King Charles II had heard of him.

In 1676 Nevison was tried on a charge of armed robbery that took place in Kent. Evidence was heard at his trial that he was in York at eight o'clock on the evening of the murder and therefore it was impossible for him to have been in Kent that morning because agreed that it was impossible to cover over two hundred miles in one day and therefore Nevison was acquitted.
This ride from Kent to York was later used the embellish the story of another highwayman - does it ring any bells?

John Nevison's name has faded into obscurity, his life story is similar to that of many men who resorted to highway robbery to earn a living, however certain aspects of his life have been attributed to a man who few knew of at the time, but whose story would become stuff legends are made of.

Dick Turpin was a violent troublemaker in Essex, a horse rustler, a sheep stealer in Lincolnshire whose past finally caught up with him. Turpin was sentenced to death by hanging and executed this day in 1739. It is said that he paid for professional mourners to follow him up the scaffold where he put on a great show for the large crowd.

Reality and storytelling came together in 1834 in the book Rookwood, where the author, either by mistake or design, merges the gentleman highwayman that was Nevison with the violent show off that was Turpin and added his own twist to the tale in the form of Turpin's horse Black Bess who he said to have died on exhaustion following Turpin's ride from London to York to establish an alibi.

Both these men lived a life of crime and were punished for it, but I cannot help feeling sorry for Nevison, the life he chose seems to have been born out of necessity whereas Tupin's, in his later crimes anyway, out of greed and profit.

Whitehall Palace Burns

4/1/2021

In 1666 the cause of the Great Fire of London was blamed on a bakery on Pudding Lane, evidently, sparks from a fire fell into some dry flour. Over thirty years later another accident with the equally combustible items was the cause of a fire in which the Tudor Whitehall Palace burned down and along with it a Hans Holbein masterpiece.

It was at 4 o'clock in the afternoon of the 4th January in 1698 that women doing her laundry at a riverside house in London placed her clothing too near a fire, within minutes the washing was engulfed in flames as was all the furniture in the room.
The fire soon spread destroying residential and government buildings from the riverside to the Holbein Gate and the Banqueting House, both of which had survived a previous fire in 1691 that had damaged the older palace structures. Of the 1698 fire diarist, John Evelyn wrote

"Whitehall burnt! nothing but walls and ruins left."

The Palace of Whitehall as seen from St James's Park by Hendrick Danckerts, c. 1675

Whitehall Palace had been the main residence of the royal family in London from the reign of Henry VIII. In 1537 Henry VIII commissioned Hans Holbein to paint a large mural so he could show off his Tudor lineage. The magnificent painting was Holbein's largest and most important royal commission, in it Henry VIII was portrayed with his queen Jane Seymour and his parents Henry VII and Elizabeth of York. The mural was probably painted on the wall of Henry's privy chamber and no doubt dominated it. It is said to have faced the door and any visitor would have been immediately overwhelmed by the life-size image of Henry VIII confronting them.

How wonderful would it have been to wander the corridors of such a palace and look upon the faces of those people who changed our history, sadly it was not to be, however today some parts of the old palace do still exist but have been incorporated into new buildings in the Whitehall.

Death of Oliver Cromwell

2/9/2020

On the 3rd September in 1658 Oliver Cromwell died due to complications relating to Malaria and the effects of a kidney stone.

To this day Oliver Cromwell continues to be one of England's most controversial and fascinating figures whose notoriety revolves around his views on monarchy and his attempts to turn the country into a republic. Cromwell had appointed Richard, his son, as his successor, but by May the following year he had renounced power, thus ending the protectorate.

I used to straddle the line when it comes to liking/disliking Oliver Cromwell (I was felt much the same about Simon de Montfort) Montfort over the years he has gone up in my estimation as has Oliver Cromwell. Therefore I ask this question -

Should we look at Cromwell as good or bad or should we at least consider him a victim of propaganda?

The Gunpowder Plotters: Ambrose Rookwoode

25/6/2020

Ambrose Rookwoode was one of the Gunpowder Plotters, he was said to have been a ‘well-built and handsome, if somewhat short’, 'genial', ‘well-lettered’, and ‘very secret.

My interest in Rookwoode in particular, was as a member of the family of Stanningfield in Suffolk who were wealthy and staunchly Catholic and his wife Elizabeth Tyrwhitt's family was also a prominent Catholic family from my local area in Lincolnshire.

It was on the 8th November 1606, at precisely 11 0'clock in the morning that over two hundred men arrived at Holbeche House where seven of the plotter were holed up. The house was surrounded and the plotters fired upon, four of them killed the other two injured including Ambrose Rookwoode.

You will know the rest of this sorry tale, on the 27th January 1607, Rookwoode was taken to Westminster Hall where he pleaded guilty, three days later he was tied to a hurdle and dragged by horse from the Tower to Westminster before being hanged, drawn and quartered along with his fellow conspirators.

Stepping into the 17th Century

20/5/2020

The parish church of St Columba sits at the heart of the ancient town of St Columb Major in Cornwall. In this churchyard lie many of my ancestors who lived in and around the town from the early 15th century and where my family still live today.

In the image above you can see a passageway under the churches clock tower. This path was a right of way to a college founded by my ancestor Sir John Arundell in 1427. The Arundell's, for many years, were influential within the town, a number of them prayed in their private chapel and are buried inside the church, you can see one of them in the image below, their ancestral home was in a neighbouring village.

However, it is another St Columb Major family I am researching at present, that is the family of Scoboryo, a family whose ancient origins lie further south and most of whose mortal remains lie peacefully in the churchyard.

The Scoboryo family story, in regard to the survival of a family and in particular it's surname, is a sad one - the fine detail I have yet to discover. It begins however with a marriage in 1641.

You can imagine a small wedding party walking to St Columba's church on a cold morning in February. The wedding and the feast that followed would likely have been a grander affair than what other members of the town could expect, the Scoboryo's being either gentry or yeoman farmer's. Three years later two children were born and baptised, only the son Thomas making it into adulthood. Eventually, Thomas would be the father of fifteen children, a good basis, you would think, to start a small but successful Cornish dynasty. However, this was not to be, Thomas's children were born in the years between 1669 and 1694, but by 1695 only three, two daughters and a son had survived - the other twelve had joined their grandparents in the parish churchyard.

If all of these children had survived then eight of them, being boys, would have seen to it that this unusual surname would have been around for a few more generations, but sadly this did not happen, for it was left to my ancestor, the one surviving son, to carry the name of Scoboryo into the future - and this he did successfully, but two generation later, the surname, in St Columb Major at least, was extinct.

My research continues.

Execution of Charles I

30/1/2020

The weather in January of 1649 was bitterly cold, it was not a good day for an execution, especially when the man standing on the scaffold was the king of England.

On the 30th King Charles waited inside the Banqueting House in Whitehall for the doors to be opened so that he might make his way to the scaffold that had been erected outside. Maybe there was ice on the windows, as history tells us Charles asked to wear two heavy shirts so that he might not shiver in the cold. Charles did not wish that his people think that he was afraid.

Charles I was beheaded that day - he said:

"... truly I desire their liberty and freedom as much as anybody whomsoever; but I must tell you that their liberty and freedom consist in having of government, those laws by which their life and their goods may be most their own. It is not for having share in government, sirs; that is nothing pertaining to them; a subject and a sovereign are clear different things. And therefore until they do that, I mean that you do put the people in that liberty, as I say, certainly they will never enjoy themselves. Sirs, it was for this that now I am come here. If I would have given way to an arbitrary way, for to have all laws changed according to the power of the sword, I needed not to have come here; and therefore I tell you (and I pray God it be not laid to your charge) that I am the martyr of the people..."

An observer in the crowd said of the execution:

'There was such a groan by the thousands then present as I never heard before and desire I may never hear again’.

Poor Charles, yes he was his own worst enemy, but did he deserve a death such as this?

Tudor Women: Jane Dormer

13/1/2020

On this day in 1612 the death of Jane Dormer, Duchess of Feria. Jane was a long time friend of Queen Mary I.

Jane's family were not strangers in the royal court, her maternal grandfather William Sidney had been a tutor to Edward VI and her father William Dormer had been in the service of Thomas Cromwell.

On the death of her mother, Jane was cared for by her paternal grandmother, also named Jane. It was from her home that Jane was sent to be a member of the household of Princess Mary to whom she would become a lady in waiting. Loyal to the queen until her death, Jane was at Mary's bedside when she died in 1558 and it was into her hands that Mary placed her jewellery to be passed to her sister Elizabeth.

Considered a beauty, Jane was courted by a number of English nobles, but after Mary's death, she married Gomez Suarez de Figueroa of Cordova, the Duke of Feria who had accompanied Philip of Spain when he arrived in England to marry Mary. However, following Mary's death and the accession to the throne of Elizabeth, the duke was replaced as an ambassador and the couple left for Spain.

In 1609 the seventy-one-year-old duchess broke her arm and over the next few years her health slowly deteriorated. Anticipating death Jane Dormer wore a death's head, a terminal bead attached to her rosary and ordered a coffin to be made which she kept in the house. She was buried at the monastery of Santa Clara in Zafra in Spain twelve days following her death.

Battle of Stratton

15/5/2018

The Cornish town of Stratton, that lies close to the boarder with Devon, was a manor owned by my ancestors in the early 12th century, its history, and theirs is quite fascinating. Stratton was the head of its hundred (a division of the county for judicial purposes) which is a good indicator of its importance in the north of Cornwall. It had a thriving agricultural and leather trade.

By the 17th century there was little to show that my ancestors ever lived there, however on the 16th May 1643, a civil war battle, the Battle of Stratton, took place at the base of Stamford Hill, less than a mile north of the family's castle.

The battle raged for most of the day, but by the end of it Henry Grey, Earl of Stamford, had lost half of his forces enabling the Cornish Royalist army to march across the border from Cornwall to Devon. It was a Royalist victory, and a quite remarkable one considering the three thousand Royalist troops, under Sir Ralph Hopton, faced Grey's Parliamentarian army that numbered over five and a half thousand.

By July, Hopton had lead his forces in two more battles, one at Crediton and one at Landsdowne, where Hopton was injured. A year later he successfully defended Devizes from an attack by William Waller's forces and two years after that he had taken up a defensive position in the Devon town ofTorrington, a battle that marked the end of Royalist resistance in the West Country.

Henry Grey, Earl of Stamford

Sir Ralph Hopton

Henry Grey's failure at Stratton and the surrender of the City of Exeter after a three month siege effectively ended his career as a Parliamentary commander.

The Salam Witch Trials Begin

28/2/2018

At the beginning of February in 1692 in the village of Salam in Massachusetts William Griggs, the village doctor, came to the conclusion that a number of girls, including the daughter of the Samuel Parris the villages preacher, were ill because they were bewitched.

By the 25th of the month Parris's servant, a slave girl who he had bought while in Boston, confessed following a beating from Parris to practicing witchcraft. By the 29th of February a complaint was made against the servant girl and she and her husband and two other women were arrested on suspicion of witchcraft.

This one accusation was the first of many, soon fingers were pointed and tall tales told, eventually, hysteria reached such great heights that it resulted in trials and executions.

The Salam Witch Trials as they have come to be known ended in the May of 1693 when those still accused were given pardons - that's over five years of terror for the people of Salam and the deaths on twenty innocent people nineteen by hanging and one by pressing.

Many place the blame for the witchcraft trials firmly at the door of the Parris household, that is Samuel Parris, his daughter and her cousin. Parris added fuel to the fire of a community in turmoil by preaching provocatively from the pulpit - ‘there was one devil among the twelve disciples so in our church God knows how many Devils there are’ he said. The actions of his daughter and her cousin were where the trouble first began, they were said to have used what is called the Venus Glass and been frightened by what that thought they saw. Perhaps they were influenced by talk of the religious practices of the servant girl's homeland - who knows?

How easy would it have been for the girls to blame the servant when their puritan father found out what they had been doing and for Parris to use witchcraft to further his religious crusade.

No one person was held responsible for what happened in Salam but history tells us that when such things as religion, superstition, intolerance, fear and community feuds come together there can be only one result.