The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson
to my prayers to Him, with this hope, that He who hath wrought some as great miracles as this, will in time incline your heart to pity and pardon your son, and me for his sake.66
Still nothing, but then, months later, out of the blue, Joan wrote to Lucy Audley, Maria’s mother. Her letter is the central document in this story, fusing a powerful consciousness of rank with ‘discomforting grief’67 at her betrayal, all the while taking refuge in her own individual pride. ‘I confess your daughter’s birth far above my son’s deserts or degree,’ she began, ‘but since you were pleased not to scorn my son to be yours, methinks you should not have scorned to have acknowledged me to be his mother.’ There was a dignity that went beyond rank. The rights and privileges of rank did not allow the mistreatment of an individual. This was a question not of the law but of the honourable regard for the humanity of others. Lucy Audley had accused her of feeding her husband’s mind with slanderous tales about the Audleys and Joan replied to that accusation with the same mixture of acute social consciousness and an irreducible sense of her own moral position.
Now for Mr Thynne’s calling of your honour in question, I cannot deny but I have heard it, but that myself was either author or demonstrator of any such reports I utterly deny. I am not so ready to wrong inferior persons, much less an honourable Lady of your place and reputation, and so conceive of me for so you shall ever find me.68
Joan Thynne placed these two codes – social hierarchy and the rules of dealing well with other individuals – face to face. She believed in both but recognized that they did not always acknowledge the value in the other. Thomas had broken one code in favour of the other: ‘He hath hazarded for your love, and yours, the loss of theirs that he was born to honour perpetually.’ It was a gamble he had lost. ‘But this I confess,’ she went on, ‘I have more reason to respect your honour than your friendship towards me.’ Lady Audley was her acknowledged social superior but there was no trusting her goodness.
For two years the situation remained unchanged. Joan repeatedly refused to engage with Maria or Thomas. Maria repeatedly wrote asking her for love. Joan was confined to her remote and difficult, windy and leaky castle at Caus in Shropshire; Maria was pining away either at Fonthill or in the beautiful timber-framed Mervyn manor house at Compton Bassett in the thick-cream-and-butter country of north Wiltshire.
Something of these geographical differences emerged in the letters. Maria, the daughter of a baron, was, despite her proclaimed grief over Joan’s indifference, luxuriating in the lap of her father’s and grandfather’s various manors, distributed across England’s richest and most luxurious county. Joan Thynne meanwhile was a little desperately defending and maintaining her remote property against rival claimants to it.69 Her husband was busy in London; these Shropshire lands were part of the dowry she had brought to the marriage, and so it fell to her to defend and maintain them. Not that he was indifferent to their wellbeing. Joan was struggling to get the farm accounts in good order for her husband’s approval; she found that no one in Shropshire would sell beef or sheep to her at reasonable prices and so asked for some ‘very forward in fat’70 to be sent over from Wiltshire; corn and malt were equally pricy; malt and hops had to come from Wiltshire;71 she asked for salad oil and sturgeon from London;72 lute strings and copper wires for the virginals were posted to her along with ‘cambric thread, silver and spangles’ or sequins.73
She worried from her distance that her husband, whom she scarcely ever saw from one month to the next, was not well. His eyes were troubling him. She sent him ‘physic’ for them along with her letters.
I hope you will have more care of yourself for the good of me and your poor children, humbly desiring you above all things to have respect unto your health, and not to defer the time of taking physic, and let your greatest care be for the preservation of your health, in whose welldoing consist my only joy and comfort. And therefore sweet Mr Thynne, if you love or make account of me have a special regard of it.74
Nearly every other letter in this correspondence, or at least those that have been preserved, was to some extent in public. But Joan’s letters to her husband had the affection and directness of intimate conversation. She hardly ever heard from him, let alone saw him, but struggled to maintain her world alone. The woman Maria imagined her to be was scarcely connected with the woman these loving, careful, generous-hearted letters revealed.
Then came the catastrophe which Maria, Thomas, Lucy Audley and the Mervyns had all been waiting for and which Joan Thynne had been dreading: on 21 November 1604, John Thynne died. Thomas had not been disinherited and so he and Maria took possession of Longleat, the heart of the Thynne estates. Thomas himself seems to have remained in London, leaving Maria in Wiltshire but not apparently trusting her to run his affairs at Longleat. This lack of respect for a woman’s ability to run an estate, as his mother was doing so competently in the wilds of Shropshire, produced an excoriating letter from Maria. She was still at one of her father’s houses, not allowed yet to be mistress of the Thynne properties: ‘Well Mr Thynne, believe I am both sorry and ashamed that any creature should see that you hold such a contempt of my poor wits, that being your wife, you should not think me of discretion to order your affairs in your absence.’75 It was, she said, her right to ‘be mistress there’ – at Longleat – but if he wanted to leave her ‘like an innocent fool here [in her father’s house], I will the more contentedly bear the disgrace.’ It is the angriest letter in the collection, which she signed, furiously, ‘Your loving wife howsoever, Maria Thynne’.76
He soft-soaped her (but his letters don’t survive) and allowed her to take charge at Longleat. Mervyn servants were brought in and old Thynne servants sidelined. She became as she told him ‘a careful officer’ in his absence. His letters from London flirted with her and ‘made her modest blood flush up into [her] bashful cheek’77 so that she wrote back to him as her ‘best and sweetest Thomken, and many thousand times more than these 1000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 000 for thy kind and wanton letters Thine and only thine Maria’.78 She managed all the men and the complexities of rent and tenancies at Longleat with aplomb. They were happy, in possession of his inheritance, with her now settled in the chatelaine’s saddle.
From that position Maria could abandon the mask of deference. Her mother-in-law, silently or not, had abused her for so long. Now, as the next generation in possession, her loathing and contempt could be allowed to emerge. In a letter that is undated but was probably written not long after Maria’s and Thomas’s arrival at Longleat, the young woman in the comfort of Wiltshire wrote to the old woman in despair and isolation in Shropshire. They were openly at war, engaged on a bitter lawsuit over the Thynne estates and possessions. ‘yf you or yr heyers haue an exspectation in revertion of Longleate howse or garden,’ Maria told Joan, she might as well give up. ‘The case beinge as ytt ys, meethinkes you Should not vnkindlye intermedle, more then mr Thynne doth wth all yr lande of inherytance’ – a phrase meaning those lands Shropshire which Joan had brought to her marriage as a dowry and now formed her own sustenance or jointure.79
As she went on, Maria warmed to her task:
I confes (wthowt Sham) ytt ys true my garden ys to ruinous, & yett to make you more merrye I wyll make you shall be of my Cowncell, that my intente ys before ytt be better, to make ytt worse; for findinge that greate exspence Coulde never alter ytt from being lyke a poridg pote, nor never by reporte was lyke other I intend to plowe ytt up & Sowe all varitye of frute att a fytt Seazon, I beseech you laughe, & So wyll I att yr Captiousnes.80
Joan may have been captious and intent on finding fault but this is as bitter as a perry pear. For a class whose identity was bound so closely to the nature of land and to the shaping and moulding of that land, it would be difficult to find a more explicit form of hate. It is the voice of victory. The previous generation may have done its best to make the land around the house at Longleat into an elegant garden but it had failed and Maria now was planning to erase everything Joan and John had done. Often enough you see in old English houses a new wing added, a garden transformed or an old one demolished; how rarely, though, can you see through a window like this to the vengeance and rage which lay behind the change.
In her anger, and not immediately