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Tyrwhitt of Kettleby, Part I: Goddard Tyrwhitt, Martyr, 1580

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2015

Patrick Martin  and
John Finnis
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Extract

Nor must we think them only to achieve this triumph, who by apparent violence, by wounds or effusion of blood conclude their life: but all they, though never so unknown, whose days by imprisonment, banishment or any other oppression are abridged in defence of the Catholic Faith

Among the most prominent Lincolnshire families in Tudor and Jacobean times were the Tyrwhitts of Kettleby and Twigmore. Other Lincolnshire branches of the family were seated at Scotter, Cammeringham and Stainfield. The Victoria County History of Lincolnshire says, ‘To follow various members of the Tyrwhitt family, whose names re-appear from first to last in connexion with Romanist sympathy, is to trace the history of recusancy in the county.’ But some important parts of the history of the Kettleby Tyrwhitts have been confused or overlooked by historians, and the record should be corrected. Here we shall focus on one of the sons of Sir Robert Tyrwhitt of Kettleby, a son who died in prison in 1580. In a further article we will identify a grandson of Sir Robert who gave John Gerard SJ much financial support from about 1598 until Gerard left England in 1606.

Type
Research Article
Information
British Catholic History , Volume 26 , Issue 2 , October 2002 , pp. 301 - 313
Copyright
Copyright © Catholic Record Society 2003

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References

1 Southwell, Robert, An Epistle of Comfort [1587/8], ed. Waugh, Margaret (London, Burns & Oates, 1966), p. 227 Google Scholar.

2 Hist. Lines., 56. See also n. 60 below.

3 [Robert Persons], An Epistle of the Persecution of Catholickes in Englande (trans. G.T., [Rouen], 1582), 98 marginal note ‘M. Tirwit sonne to Sir Robert Tirwit’; for the Latin original, De Persecutione Anglicana Epistola ([Rouen], 1581), we have consulted the edition published by the English College Rome in 1582: De Persecutione Anglicana Libellus (Romae ex Typographia Georgii Ferrarii, 1582), 52, and [Gibbons, John], Concertatio Ecclesiae Catholicae in Anglia adversus Calvinopapistas et Puritanos (Trier, 1588)Google Scholar, 29v; the 1582 marginal note reads ‘Tiruitus Roberti, Tiruiti equitis filius’, the 1588 marginal note reads ‘Tiruitus, Roberti Tiruiti equitis filius’. That the comma is misplaced in the 1582 note is made certain by the genitive ‘Roberti’, agreeing with ‘Tiruiti equitis’, not with ‘T[ir]uitus . . . filius’. All the Latin versions confirm that ‘M. Tirwit’ means ‘Master Tirwit’, as is in any case clear from other marginal notes in the English version, e.g. p. 95 ‘M. William Roper’. Note that the Epistle’s translator G.T. may be Gabriel Thimbleby (A & R, ii 627), a relative of the Kettleby Tyrwhitts (see n. 25 below).

4 Among the first is the Martyria alionan Catholicorum in the 1588 edition of Concertatio (n. 3 above), at 80r-v, which repeats in substance the account given at Concertatio, 29v, but now states that (in the words of the heading) this was the ‘Mors Illustris Adolescentis D. Tirviti Roberti Tiruiti equitis aurati filii’ (emphasis added). The marginal note at the head of the paragraph says ‘Ex epist. de persecutione Anglicana’. But the source of the identification of the deceased young Tyrwhitt as Robert is doubtless the Rerum pro Religione Catholica in Turri Londinensi, Gestarum ab anno Domini 1580 ad annum usque 1585 Indiculus seu Diarium, first published as an appendix to the 1586 Roman second edition (A & R i, 973; also Ingoldstadt 1586, A & R i, 974) of Edward Rishton’s version ([Rheims] 1585, A & R i, 972) of Nicholas Sander, De Origine ac Progressu Schismatis Anglicani; the second entry in the Diarium asserts that on 18 June 1580 ‘Robert Tirwhit, brother of William, was taken up for the same cause [scil, for hearing mass on the occasion of his sister’s wedding], and, though in extreme ill health, neither the entreaties of his friends, nor the offer of bail, could save him from the Tower, where he soon after died.’ Tierney, M. A., Dodd’s Church History of England, iii (London, 1840), p. 151 Google Scholar; for the Latin original, and another translation, see Harrison, Brian A., A Tudor Journal (London, St. Pauls, 2000), pp. 77 Google Scholar, 37. See below, text at nn. 6 and 8. The Index Personarum in the 1588 Concertatio has Robert as a Martyr (and not William, who is mentioned as imprisoned for the faith); in this the Index is in line with Martyria aliorum Catholicorum, 80v, which implicitly treats Robert as a saintly martyr.

5 Thus, for example, Dodd’s ‘List of persons who perished in prison, for religion [during the reign of Elizabeth]’, Tierney, Dodd’s Church History, iii, p. 169, includes under 1580 ‘William Tyrwit, gentleman—The Tower’. Challoner, Richard, Memoirs of Missionary Priests [1741], ed. Pollen, John Hungerford SJ (London, 1924), p. 18 Google Scholar, has both William and Robert dying in the Tower for hearing mass at their sister’s wedding, and (p. 625) describes William and Sir Robert as Confessors.

6 See Harrison, A Tudor Journal, p. 37; or Tierney, , Dodd’s Church History, iii, p. 151 Google Scholar. The same information was stated to be the basis for the references to William and Robert Tyrwhitt in Challoner, Memoirs of Missionary Priests, p. 18.

7 Pollen, J. H. showed Hart’s authorship crisply in his ‘Tower Bills, 1575–1589’, CRS 3, Miscellanea III (1906), p. 4 Google Scholar.

8 Harrison, A Tudor Journal, p. 37 n. 1.

9 See Bindoff, S. T., The House of Commons 1509–1558 (London, 1982), iii, pp. 502–03 Google Scholar; cf. Lines. Ped., 1020 (suggesting 1526); and [R. P. Tyrwhitt], Notices and Remains of the Family of Tyrwhitt (a volume said on its title-page to have been ‘never published’, privately printed 1858, 1862, and with corrections 1872), p. 21.

10 Harrison, A Tudor Journal, p. 37 n. 2, confounds the two Sir Roberts. Sir Robert Tyrwhitt of Leighton Bromswold served the household of Queen Catherine Parr, was Sheriff of Lincolnshire in 1540–41, a member of Parliament 1545, 1554, and 1559, appointed Lord Lieutenant of Lincolnshire (with Sir Walter Mildmay) in 1569, and died in 1572. His interrogations of the young Elizabeth on behalf of the Council are often recounted: e.g. Williams, Neville, Elizabeth the First, Queen of England (New York, 1968), pp. 18–20 Google Scholar; Johnson, Paul, Elizabeth I: a study in power and intellect (London, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1974), pp. 29–30 Google Scholar.

11 The Elizabeth Oxenbridge who married Sir Robert of Leighton Bromswold was daughter of Sir Goddard Oxenbridge, father of Sir Thomas Oxenbridge, and was thus an aunt of our Sir Robert’s wife. Cf. Lines. Ped., 1020; Notices and Remains of the Family of Tyrwhitt, pp. 24–5, 27.

12 Hodgett, Gerald A. J., Tudor Lincolnshire (Lincoln, 1975), pp. 63–64 Google Scholar.

13 Ibidem, p. 92; Thomson, Gladys Scott, Lord Lieutenants in the sixteenth century: a study in Tudor local administration (London, 1923), p. 48 Google Scholar.

14 Bateson, Mary (ed.), A Collection of Original Letters from the Bishops to the Privy Council, 1564 (1893), p. 27 (in Camden Miscellany, vol. 9, Camden Society n.s. no. 53 (1895))Google Scholar. The bishop had conferred (p. 28) with three persons, one of them John Aylmer, archdeacon of Lincoln, later Bishop of London.

15 Lee, Arthur Gould, The Son of Leicester (London, Gollancz, 1964), pp. 33, 36, 43, 109, 188Google Scholar.

16 SP 12/165/28 (briefly calendared CSP Dom. 1581–1590, where it is erroneously treated as a document of 71583).

17 The Dean of Lincoln was William Wickham, who became Bishop of Lincoln in 1584 and greatly annoyed Puritans by holding out some ‘mild hope, as to the ultimate salvation of the late Queen [Mary Queen of Scots]’ when preaching at her funeral at Peterborough on 2 August 1587: Hist.Lincs., p. 58; Nichols, J. G., The Progresses and Public Processions of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1823), ii, pp. 512—3 Google Scholar.

18 APCX11, 71 (Nonesuch, 26 June 1580).

19 Lusitani, Hieronymi Osorii, De Gloria libri quinque (Basilae, 1571; Florence, 1552)Google Scholar; a handy pocket-sized, leather-bound demi-octavo version was published in London in 1580.

20 For Osorio’s works of controversy, dated 1563 and 1567, and the vigorous response by defenders of the Church of England, see Milward, Peter, Religious Controversies of the Elizabethan Age (Ilkley, Scolar Press; Lincoln, Nebraska, and London, University of Nebraska Press, 1977), pp. 18–19; A & R, i, 1430–51Google Scholar.

21 Goddard’s prominence and actions in this ceremony may have something to do with the fact that he, alone among the sons of Sir Robert, is recorded as having some association with the profession of the law, being admitted a student of Lincoln’s Inn on 19 April 1572; Records of the Honourable Society of Lincoln’s Inn, i. Admissions from 1420 to 1799 (Lincoln’s Inn, 1896), p. 78 Google Scholar.

22 He says that one of the Tyrwhitt daughters has been coming to prayers ‘now of late since Whitsuntide’; in 1580 Whitsunday was 22 May.

23 APC XII, pp. 49–50 (Star Chamber, [8] June 1580). The entry on p. 41 of the original volume is marked ‘At the Starre Chamber, the viiijth of June, 1580’, but the endorsement on the same sheet of paper, bound into the volume as p. 48, is dated ‘8 Junii, 1580’; p. 42 of the volume is blank, and p. 43 has an entry dated 8 June 1580. A copy of the order was prepared ‘to the intent he might have a better regard to see the same in every point accomplished’, but a note in the margin says ‘But he came not for it’: APC XII, p. 50.

24 SP 12/193/13: 4 September, 1586, endorsed by Burghley ‘Extract out of Ant. Tyrell’s last book’; calendared briefly in CSP Dom. 1581–1590, 351 (‘Names of Jesuits and Seminary Priests in several shires, with their places of resort’).

25 Anstruther, Godfrey, The Seminary Priests i, Elizabethan 1558–1603 (St. Edmund’s College, Ware & Ushaw College, Durham n.d. [1968]), p. 365 Google Scholar s.v. Tyrwhit. We suspect that Fr. Nicholas was a son, cousin or nephew of Sir Robert. Sir Robert’s family tree as shown in standard sources such as Lines. Ped. is incomplete, failing to show his daughter Mary who married George Browne. A son who was a priest might well go unmentioned in pedigrees and in the wills underlying them. Sir Robert’s aunt Katherine Tyrwhitt had married Sir Richard Thimbleby of Irnham, and this family was Catholic and closely associated with the Tyrwhitts; if this couple had a son who became a priest, he may well have done as a great many seminary priests did: adopt the name of their mother for the priesthood; this would certainly account for Fr. Nicholas Tyrwhitt’s presence in the Thimbleby household in Lincolnshire in 1588. He is mentioned again in a spy report of October 1601 as one of the principal associates of Fr. George Blackwell, Archpriest: SP 15/34/42, in Foley, Henry, Records of the English Province of the Society of Jesus vi (1880), p. 736 Google Scholar.

26 Persons, Robert, ‘A Story of Domesticall Difficulties’ (c. 1599), in CRS 2, Miscellanea II (1906), pp. 48–185 at p. 176Google Scholar; Pollen, John Hungerford, The English Catholics in the Reign of Queen Elizabeth (London, 1920), pp. 334–35 Google Scholar; Edwards, Francis, Robert Persons: The Biography of an Elizabethan Jesuit 1546–1610 (St. Louis, Institute of Jesuit Resources,n.d. [1995]), pp. 33–34 Google Scholar.

27 APC XII, p. 67 (Nonesuch, 26 June 1580).

28 APC, XII pp. 71–2 (Nonesuch, 27 June, 1580). Harrison’s investigations of the Tyrwhitt martyr omit to mention this decisive minute.

29 APC XII, pp. 91–2 ([Nonesuch], 10 July 1580).

30 APC XII, p. 108.

31 Public Record Office PROB 11/64; see text and nn. 36–37 below.

32 Lines. Ped., p. 1020. See also n. 57 below.

33 Epistle of the Persecution of Catholics in England, pp. 98–100; see n. 3 above.

34 As is confirmed by Persons’s Latin: ‘Adolescens quidam magnae & honorificae familiae vocatus in crimen auditae Missae, quae sororis in nuptiis dicebatur celebrata, fugerat quidem e domo paterna, & Londini se abdiderat superiori anno’—meaning that the events described occurred in the year, i.e. 1580, preceding Persons’s preparation and publication of his account in the last months of 1581.

35 He was in London when the Privy Council specifically ordered the examination and seizure of Goddard Tyrwhitt. Persons and Campion left London on or about 18 July. Francis Edwards, Robert Persons, pp. 30–36; McCoog, Thomas, The Society of Jesus in Ireland, Scotland, and England 1541–1588 (Brill, 1996), pp. 142–17Google Scholar.

36 Public Record Office PROB 11/64.

37 See also the Tyrwhitt of Kettleby family tree in Lines, Ped., p. 1020. This work incorporates information from various sources including visitations and wills, with markers of 1564 and 1581. From the 1581 will of Sir Robert, his son Robert is identified as ‘2d son in 1581’; a George Tyrwhitt is listed as ‘3rd son’, ‘John Tyrwhitt, called ‘me Rider’ as 5th son 1564; 3rd son in 1581’, Marmaduke is ‘4th son 1581’ and ‘Goddard Tyrwhitt, 3rd son in 1564’. Marmaduke Tyrwhitt was still alive in 1581, and was counted then as the 4th of Sir Robert’s sons. He would have been the 6lh son in the 1564 counting, just as John is recorded as being 5th in 1564 but 3rd son in 1581. Sir Robert’s first and second sons were William and Robert, and both were alive at the time of their father’s death in 1581, as is confirmed by the will and, as we shall see, by Privy Council actions in relation to them. Marmaduke and John moved two places between 1564 and 1581 because George and Goddard Tyrwhitt had both died prior to the 1581 counting. From the description of Goddard as ‘3rd son in 1564’ we can infer that George, who originally had been third son, died prior to 1564. No George Tyrwhitt appears in Richard Smith’s statement or in the Privy Council proceedings.

38 APC XII, p. 186 (Oatlands, 4 September 1580).

39 APC XII p. 306 (Westminster, 11 January 1581).

40 APC XII, 318 (Westminster, 25 Jan 1581).

41 Moreover, Gerard Southill was admitted a student of Lincoln’s Inn only six months before Goddard Tyrwhitt and another Lincolnshire Tyrwhitt, Philip: loc. cit. n. 21 above.

42 APC XIII, p. 75 (Whitehall, 13 June 1581).

43 APC XIII, pp. 79–80 (Whitehall, 14 June 1581).

44 APC XIII, p. 238 (Richmond, 19 October 1581).

45 APC XIII, p. 252 ([Richmond?], 5 November 1581).

46 APC XIII, pp. 325–6 (9 February 1582).

47 APC XIII, pp. 409–10 (Star Chamber, 4 May 1582); pp. 446–7 (15 June 1582).

48 SP 12/152/54 (CSP Dom. 1581–1590, 46), full text in CRS vol. 5, Pollen, J. H., ed., Unpublished Documents relating to the English Martyrs 1584–1603 (London, 1908), pp. 26–27 Google Scholar.

49 CRS vol. 2, Miscellanea II (1906), p. 223 (Prison certificates from June 1582 to March 1583): ‘7. Roberte Tirwhit of Thometon Abbey in the Com. Of Lyncoln Gent, discharged by warrante from my LI of the privie Counsaile to make his furder appearaunce wch warraunt came under Mr secretarie Walsingham his hande onely, dated the xxijth of Novemb 1582.’

50 Strype, John, Annals of the Reformation, iii/1 (Oxford, 1824), p. 434 [299]Google Scholar.

51 SP 12/188/51 (CSP Dom. 1581–90, 324); Hist. Lines., p. 58. William Fitzwilliam is probably the Mablethorpe brother-in-law of William and Robert Tyrwhitt. SP 12/193/13 (in Foley, Records vi, p. 729), dated 4 September 1586, names William Tyrwhitt’s as a place of resort of Fr. Andelby (=Fr William Anlaby: Anstrather, Seminary Priests i, p. 9). Another document of September 1586, SP 12/ 193/47 (Foley, Records vi, p. 732) names William Tyrwhitt as a recusant.

52 SP 12/231/61 (CSP Dom. 1581–1590, 657) records a grant in early 1590 of a parcel of lands and possessions ‘of the late Robert Tyrwhitt’, formerly granted to others. But this may be a reference to Sir Robert, for William Tyrwhitt’s will of 1 May 1591, n. 53 below, having imposed some requirements on a ‘brother in law’, imposes a similar requirement on ‘my brother Robert Tyrwhitt’, he also makes some gifts of animals and ‘my hawk’ to ‘my brother Robert’.

53 His will, PRO PROB, 11/78 is dated 1 May 1591 with codicil dated 17 July 1591, and was proved 3 December 1591. Bindoff, The House of Commons, 1509–1558 iii, p. 504, says he died on 18 July. One of the will’s provisions orders that ‘my said wife have the keeping and disposing of the bed furniture and four pieces of hanging given by my brother Goddard to my daughter Elizabeth his goddaughter until it be to be delivered to my said daughter.’

54 In 1592 William Tyrwhitt esquire is entered on the Lincoln recusant roll as owing £40 for absenting himself for two months (11 May to 8 July 1591) from divine service: CRS vol. 18, Calthorp, M. M. C., ed., Recusant Roll No. I, 1592–3, Exchequer, Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer Pipe Roll Office Series, (London 1916), p. 151 Google Scholar. Other Tyrwhitts of the Kettleby branch are recorded in that year as incurring or owing larger sums: Ibidem, pp. 151–2. At the beginning of 1600, Thomas Lord Burghley reports that these northerly parts of Lincolnshire are more disaffected religiously than ‘the worst part of Yorkshire’: Hist. Lines., p. 58, citing CSP Dom. 1598–1601, p. 379.

55 Bindoff, The House of Commons, 1509–1558, iii, p. 504 says that he was under surveillance but not recommitted to prison after November 1581. But Strype, John, The Life and Acts of John Whitgift (Oxford, 1822), i, pp. 527–9 Google Scholar, records that William and ‘many lay gentlemen of that religion’, persons ‘of considerable rank’, were arrested and detained in Wisbech castle after the defeat of the Armada, and kept in prison after refusing to sign bonds, drafted by the Attorney-General, of £2,000 apiece.

56 Marmaduke’s will dated 16 December 1588 was proved on 10 December 1589, Lines. Ped., p. 1020.

57 Harrison, A Tudor Journal, p. 162 quotes this ‘undated petition of William Tirwhit from the Tower to Sir Francis Walsingham’, and identifies it as ‘State Papers, Domestic, Elizabeth, volume 148, fol. 18.’ At p. 149 he calls it ‘a letter which William sent to the Council during the year of his incarceration’ and as ‘so important to this case that [the contents] have been transcribed and reproduced in full [at p. 162].’ At the root of Harrison’s hypothesis that Marmaduke died in 1580 is his acceptance of the dating of this document to 1581. SP 12/148 contains documents of March/April 1581, but we have been unable to find the document. But, since it is certain that Marmaduke was alive later in 1581 (see text at nn. 31–32 above), it is clear that if the document were in SP 12/148, it would be misdated. It would in any event have been unlikely that William would wait until March 1581 to petition for release to attend to the affairs of a ‘lately deceased’ brother if the latter had died in late June or early July 1580. And William was certainly incarcerated more than once, in more than one year.

58 CSP Dom. Addenda 1580–1625, pp. 365–6 (SP 15/33/19).

59 See Questier, Michael, Conversion, Politics and Religion in England, 1580–1625 (CUP, 1996), pp. 161–65 Google Scholar.

60 ‘As regards numbers, the account for Lincolnshire in the Roll of 1592–1593 is insignificant, but most of the names will be found to belong to persons living in the neighbourhood of Kettleby, close to the family home of the Tyrwhitts of Wigmore, the very front [sic] and pillar of recusancy in the county. The history of recusancy during these momentous years may be followed through the fortunes of this family. And this little cluster, of which they were the centre, grows larger with every successive Recusant Roll until it becomes a formidable colony in Lindsey [the northern district of Lincolnshire]’: M. M. C. Calthorp in CRS vol. 18 (n. 54 above), p. xix.