The Damnation of John Donellan (6 page)

He also married fantastically well; Jane Coningsby came from glamorous stock. Her father, Humphrey, was Gentleman Treasurer to Queen Elizabeth I, and her brother, Thomas, had been knighted after mustering troops in Normandy on Elizabeth's behalf. Thomas Coningsby's alpha-male stories were so famous that they had influenced an up-and-coming playwright, William Shakespeare, to write
Henry IV Part II
, after having read Coningsby's diary of the Siege of Rouen in 1591. The Boughtons were now allied with a powerful clan; the Coningsby estates included an imposing fifteenth-century castle on the river Lugg in Herefordshire, lucratively framed by 60,000 acres. William's wife remained more Coningsby than Boughton, however, all her life. When she died, Jane was not buried in the Boughton vaults in Newbold church, but in the exclusive enclave of Westminster Abbey, as was her daughter Ann. The slim, pale face on a Nicholas Hilliard miniature of Jane shows an expression of wry amusement – whether in judgement of
the ambitious Boughtons, or simply satisfaction in her own sense of destiny, is debatable.

Like his Coningsby brother-in-law, William Boughton performed important duties for his monarch. In September 1586, after the Babington Plot to murder Elizabeth had been revealed, William Boughton was one of the men nominated by the Court to ‘remove the Scots Queen'.
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He dutifully shooed a distressed and disorientated Mary through Warwickshire, constantly moving her to prevent her supporters from finding her, obeying the chilling instruction to ‘Remove without giving to her … any warning longer than two or three days and not shewing to her what place certain she shall go … according to the Queen's Resolution'. A month later, Mary went on trial for treason.

The Boughtons had always been stubbornly loyal to the Crown, even when it might have put their own lives in danger. The first baronetcy – two generations further on than the Coningsby-Boughton marriage – was a gift to a man who had stood by the doomed monarch Charles I even though support of the Royalist cause in Parliamentarian Warwickshire was folly (or courage, whichever way one prefers to look at it). Sir William had waved the Royalist flag just twenty miles from the Parliamentarian stronghold of Northampton, and the bloody conflict of Edgehill had been fought in October 1642 only twenty-five miles from Lawford Hall. It was said that Warwickshire was haunted by the screams of 30,000 men for a year afterwards, as a spectral battle raged nightly over the rolling countryside. But this was a haunting that William's wife would neither see nor hear; she died in her thirties, probably in childbirth.
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Catherine Shukburgh therefore married into a family with a mixed history: it is to be wondered which type of Boughton she saw when she looked at her new husband. Was this William an obsequious servant obeying every royal command, or a courageous man outfacing any opposition? Was he cast in the mould of the raping-and-pillaging One-Handed Boughton or the upwardly mobile William who had married Jane Coningsby? Was she to be the wife of a hero, or a fool? A countryman or a courtier? Her
husband soon provided an answer. He refused a peerage, saying merely that he ‘preferred the life of a country gentleman'
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to that of Court. From this point onwards, the Boughtons were destined to be courtiers no longer.

Peerage or no peerage, Catherine demonstrated a keenly defined sense of reputation. On her instructions, a monument to both herself and William was raised in Newbold church, and the fourteenth-century tombs of Thomas Boughton, his wife Elizabeth de Allesley and Elizabeth's parents were moved into side aisles. On this Rysbrack memorial, William and Catherine stand side by side; between them sits a fiery urn, and three cherubs look affectionately down, representing three sons who died in infancy.
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On the top of the memorial the Boughton coat-of-arms dominates, the three crescents echoing the design given to William's great-grandfather over eighty years before. ‘Sir William Boughton,' reads the inscription, ‘descended from an honourable and ancient family, but far greater in worth than pedigree, for he has left to posterity an example of a tender and most endearing husband, a kind and provident father, a generous neighbour and a constant reliever of poor at his gate.' It goes on to record his ‘steady and untainted principle' as an MP and his ‘zeal for the established church'.

Catherine and William's marriage was fruitful. They had seven children: Richard, Thomas, Katherine, Eliza, William, Charles and finally Shukburgh Boughton, born in 1703, the only son to survive beyond early adulthood. In the last days of 1708, William drew up a draft will.
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It makes remarkable reading.

By this time, only two of his daughters by Mary Ramsey were still alive, but if they had hopes of sharing in their father's wealth with their step-brothers and sisters, they were to be disappointed. William left these eldest girls, Mary and Anne, ‘all my Moneys and Efforts in Chambers in London divided between them' (this would have been a property occupied while he was in Parliament) but Catherine Shukburgh's children fared considerably better. Daughters Katherine and Eliza were each to receive £1,000 (equivalent to £78,000 today) when they reached twenty-one or on the day of their marriage (whichever happened first) and until then £50 (£4,000)
a year ‘for her maintenance'. William's eldest son by Catherine, Richard, was to receive £80 annually and a property called Bilton Hall (a home he was never to enjoy to the full, as he died in Lyons as a young man). As a kind of postscript, William remembered his own sisters Katherine and Abigail, giving them £80 a year for life. Everything else he left to his eldest son by Mary Ramsey, Edward, born in 1689 and now sixteen years old.

But even more astonishing than the vast gulf in the bequests are the alterations made to them subsequently. Still on the draft will, the generous amounts given to Catherine's daughters were left intact, but the bequests to Anne and Mary were crossed out in ink; the £80 per annum to William's sisters was an amendment, a previous sum which appears to begin with the letter ‘h' (hundred?) being just visible beneath. There is also another puzzling omission: no mention was made of Shukburgh Boughton, Catherine and William's youngest son, even though he was five years old at the time.

William died eight years later, in 1716, by which time the will had been drafted yet again. This 1716 version stood. His sisters, who were by then both married, received £30 (not £80) a year; but his daughters by Mary Ramsey received nothing at all.
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By contrast again, his daughter Katherine, by Catherine Shukburgh, received even more than in the first draft – £2,000 (£170,000) on the day of her marriage and £2,000 thereafter to be given to her as his executors saw fit.
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The division in the family developed still further.

Edward, the heir from his father's first marriage, was now twenty-seven, and received all his father's estate. There was nothing that Catherine could have done about this: if Mary Ramsey's daughters had vanished from their father's bequests, Edward – as the first-born son – had to inherit. Edward subsequently married Grace, the eldest daughter of Sir John Shukburgh, Catherine's niece. Grace was at least ten years younger than her husband, and it is probable that Shukburgh family machinations, rather than romance, were behind the marriage.

Poor Edward had not had an easy life. Having lost his mother when he was five, he had then all but lost his father to Catherine Shukburgh a few short years later. He was the heir, but he was
second best: by the time of his father's death his position in the household had been usurped by his half-brother Shukburgh, Catherine's adored only surviving son, who was by then thirteen. Edward rattled around Lawford in the company of his grandmother and older sisters; he was hardly the stuff of which Boughton legends were made. The fact that he was due to inherit everything in preference to darling Shukburgh reputedly drove Catherine to extreme measures. She hatched a plot, it was claimed, to bring Edward's life to a hasty close, whose details were alleged after his death.
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Edward collapsed and died, aged only thirty-three, in 1722. He and Grace had three surviving sons: Edward, William and Francis, of whom the eldest, Edward, was only three years old – another boy left without a father. Worse was to come, however, for the young boys. Grace, whose relationship with their father was later proved in court to have been unhappy, re-married within the year.
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It is not known if she immediately moved out of the family home; but she rapidly began a large second family with her new husband, Matthew Lister.
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Grace's eldest son Edward was only seventeen, and at Oxford University, when he met his future wife. She was called Anne Brydges and to the dismay of the family she was thirty-five years his senior.
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Within two years they were married, thus propelling the family into a legal battle where Catherine Shukburgh's influlence was revealed. Before Edward's father had died so suddenly, he had rendered invalid his wife's jointure to various estates in Little Lawford, Newbold, Bretford and Little Harborough. Grace had not disputed this when he died, possibly because she had remarried so quickly, possibly because she felt that her young son would still look after her interests when he was an adult. However, she had not foreseen his marrying Anne Brydges. Grace seems to have had an ally in the Shukburghs, for it was Catherine's family who initially took up her cause, bringing a lawsuit to try and keep Grace's estates from Edward's wife. They evidently loathed her, blaming her for the public scandal.
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‘The true reason for these lawsuits have been occasion'd by the Plaintiff's wife who by her cunning and artifice drew him in while he was at Oxford to marry
her … although she was then above sixty years of age, and without the knowledge of any of his friends or relations who afterwards were so exasperated with the old Lady who is three years older then his grandmother …' the Shukburghs ranted on, adding years to Anne's real age and finishing their accusation with the flourish: ‘She stirred up these Unnatural Suits.'

At least they admitted they were ‘unnatural'. The lawsuits were aggressively divisive, pitting mother against son. Edward was forced to defend his own father's actions, while the Shukburghs and Listers tried to argue that there was a simple, overwhelming reason why Edward Senior had disinherited his wife. It was not that he had been unhappy with her, they said, but because he had been a raging alcoholic and out of his mind. Edward was forced to rally a number of friends to testify that, although his father had indeed liked a drink, he had been sane. The depositions make jaw-dropping reading.
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‘Sir Edward was always of good understanding,' testified Thomas Kipwell and James Caldecott, though adding, ‘except when he was in Liquor when he was as all men are.' The local vicar agreed. ‘The Plaintiff's father was a person of sound mind,' he said, ‘but a little whimsical when in Liquor.' Richard Williams phrased it slightly more strongly: Edward used to drink to excess, he admitted; but he had ‘good judgement'.

Edward himself was forced to testify as to his own father's character, even though he could not possibly have remembered much about him; and, in doing so, he made an astounding accusation. While agreeing that his father, when drunk, ‘would remit some indiscreet notions', he claimed that the only reason that his father drank at all was because of his step-mother, Catherine Shukburgh. ‘Lady Boughton,' he said, ‘used all possible endeavours to keep him in liquor – with a view as is apprehended to kill him so that her own children which she had with Sir William might inherit his estate it being settled upon them upon failure of issue.'
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He went on to say that his father had only been saved from drunkenness by going to stay with Catherine's father, Sir John Shukburgh, ‘where he lived a sober life and behaved himself as well as any gentleman
in the County'. The defence documents, however passionately phrased by Edward, still do not disguise the fact that his father had a serious problem. ‘He was reputed a madman,' another less-than-helpful deposition asserts.

The lawyers' comments on these documents are almost as entertaining as the depositions themselves. Attached to the brief is a bill of their expenses for a single month, showing that they consumed £5 6s. 5d.-worth (£460 in today's money) of ‘breakfasts, wine, cyder, ale and tea in the afternoon'. In the margin of the brief, one wrote, ‘If (the opposition) should try to prove that Sir Edward rode from Bath without his hat or wig and in his mother's night-gown, contradict them.' They added that they knew that Edward had spoken to the ‘lowest servants', adding, ‘when intoxicated with liquor he would speak to any person'. It is a desperately sad description. Edward, hounded by his step-mother and married to a woman who seemingly had little respect for him (to judge by the court documents), remained forever a man capering about the countryside dressed in women's nightwear, being ‘whimsical' with his friends and ‘speaking to low persons'. However, whether he was alcoholic, indiscreet or just plain mad, Catherine's alleged ambition was achieved. Edward dropped dead at thirty-three.

His son did win the legal battle, but the parting was bitter.
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His mother eventually left the area with her husband and was buried far from the Newbold family vault, at Burwell in Lincolnshire, in 1779. Edward and Anne were free to continue their married life in peace. His written household accounts demonstrate his attachment to her, but we shall never know the real reason why he chose such a mature woman as his first wife. Anne, although she had been married before to a Mr Arthur ‘from London', had no children of her own, so perhaps her relationship with him was not so much as a wife as a surrogate mother to the teenaged Edward and his younger brothers. She may well have been in the house even earlier than 1738, as is suggested by a strange letter published in a newspaper by Edward when he was sixteen.
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In this he offers a reward for the true identity of ‘Tobias Swill', the author of a threatening letter which read: ‘Sir Esquire, this is a warning to you that if you will not
banish that damn'd old bitch of a housekeeper in less than a week, your house, your buildings, cattle, corn and fish ponds shall be utterl'y destroy'd and, if possible, your own great person … ' One wonders who was the ‘housekeeper'? And who hated her enough to want her thrown out of Edward's house?