Category: 17th Century - Meandering Through Time

John Bradshaw

20/1/2025

In 1649, John Bradshaw, lawyer and politician was made president of the parliamentary commission to try King Charles I. He was also President of the High Court of Justice for his trial which began on the 20th January 1649. When the trial began the king refused to recognise the authority of the court and would not plead, and despite his protests Charles I was found guilty and condemned to death on the 26th.

Bradshaw called the king a 'tyrant, traitor, murderer, and a public enemy' and refused him the right to speak. Charles' death warrant was signed by fifty-nine commissioners.

The fear of attack saw Bradshaw accompanied by a personal guard. He carried a sword at his side and wore a velvet covered broad-brimmed, bullet-proof beaver hat lined with steel. He also wore armour underneath his robes.

Bradshaw's hat - held at the Ashmolean Musuem Oxford

Despite his reputation as the 'viper from hell' or 'god's battleaxe' John Bradshaw died in his bed in 1659, unrepentant of the 'murder of a king' declaring that he would be "the first man in England to do it" if he was called upon to try a king again. He was buried in Westminster Abbey where he lay for ten years. However, an avenger arrived in the form of Charles's son Charles II, and on the anniversary of his father's execution Bradshaw's body was exhumed and hung in chains for three days, he was then decapitated and his head was displayed on pikes at Westminster Hall and his body thrown into a pit.

Bradshaw's poor wife, Mary Marbury was also exhumed from the abbey and reburied in a common pit at St Margaret's in Westminster along with other followers of Oliver Cromwell.

Robert Cecil Ist Earl of Salisbury

3/11/2024

Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury, is viewed in history as an 'archetypal, shadowy, creepy man' who 'operated quietly, but dangerously in the shadows.' Born on the 1st June in 1563, he was physically frail and small in stature with a curvature of the spine, and despite the pain he must have endured, he devoted himself to the service of the crown following in the footsteps of his father. He entered parliament in 1534, and very quickly established himself, but was not as popular.

Robert Cecil was the son of Elizabeth I's chief minister Lord Burghley, he was a courtier, a successful politician, and an administrator who took over his father's role in government when he became too ill to do the job himself. In 1596, Cecil became Elizabeth's secretary and out-maneuvered her favourite Robert Devereux resulting the what history calls Essex's Rebellion, thus eliminating any rivals to his position as the queen's minister. He was also responsible for the smooth transfer of the crown to James VI of Scotland on Elizabeth's death in 1603. On the succession of James to the English throne, he temporarily lost some of his influence as James had been a supporter of Essex, but the king came to trust and rely on Cecil, eventually calling him his 'little beagle'. In 1605 Cecil quashed yet another rebellion - the infamous Gunpower Plot, although it is thought that Cecil was actually behind the plot with the aim of convincing James that he should not trust those of the Catholic persuasion.

Robert Cecil, 1st Earl of Salisbury 1602. NPG 107

As well as a bit of political intrigue Cecil was a dab hand at entertaining, welcoming both Elizabeth and James to his home, he had an eye for the arts, like collecting paintings and even swapped one of his homes for one of the kings. However, the burden of work eventually wore him down and in the spring of 1612, he complained of being "in great pain and even greater wretchedness of mind" and following a trip to take the waters in the town of Bath, he died on the 24th of May in 1612 of cancer.

How sad is it then that both Elizabeth I and James I referred to Cecil in an unkind manner, Elizabeth is said to have called him her pygmy and a monkey, and James called him a beetle, and after all he had done for them too! It is highly likely that Shakespeare was referring to Robert Cecil, as the unpopular hunchback, when he was writing his play Richard III, and this is captured very well in the 2011 film Anonymous where he is portrayed as a small dark creature, underhand, and skulking.

Robert Cecil is buried in St Etheldreda's Church, Hatfield in Herefordshire. His tomb, seen below, deserves a blog of its own!

St. Ethelreda, Hatfield Tomb of Sir Robert Cecil, 1st. Earl of Salisbury: Credit John Myers

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.