The Temptation of Elizabeth Tudor (22 page)

The story crops up again, bizarrely, in a twenty-first-century collection of ghost stories set in the US state of Maine. Here, it concerns a phantom fiery infant said to haunt the father who so cruelly threw him in the fireplace.
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His birth is once again mysterious, and a midwife is brought blindfolded to a house. There, she finds a ‘lovely young woman’ about to give birth. There is no wedding ring in sight. Close by, ominously, is the child’s father, intent on doing harm.

At first glance, the story, in all its incarnations, appears to be nothing more than a macabre fairy tale or folk legend – a figment of the writers’ imaginations. Unless the world was awash with blindfolded midwives and charred babies, the tales must ultimately have the same origin, dating to at least the mid-sixteenth century. Those writers that retold it for their own time did so with particular aims in mind: Dormer to damage Elizabeth’s reputation, Carleston to attack Catholics, and Aubrey to smear Popham. It could be left at that – except that, surprisingly, these events really
did
occur in the mid-sixteenth century, while Elizabeth was young.

One evening, in 1577, the magistrate Sir Anthony Bridges was called to Great Shefford in Berkshire to attend the deathbed of a local woman, Mother Barnes, whose family was well known in the village, having lived there for generations.
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Bridges was a busy man. He did not usually rouse himself to witness the dying of old ladies, but he had been informed that the woman, who had served for many years as the community’s midwife, had a confession that she needed to make. This revelation concerned murder.
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Bridges was ushered into the old woman’s small home. He found her in bed, where she was ready finally to unload her burden.
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The events she described had happened a number of years before, she told him.

She was, she explained, by that time already an experienced midwife, well respected in the local area and often travelling some distance to tend to the ladies of quality who required her service. One evening, as she rested in her house, she heard riders approach. Glancing out of the window, she saw two men, dressed like servants in black frieze coats. They approached her door after dismounting from fine, expensive horses.

Intrigued, Mother Barnes hurried out to them. They informed her that they were employed by the respectable Mrs Knyvett, wife of Sir Henry Knyvett, who lived 30 miles away at Charlton.
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Their mistress prayed that the midwife ‘of all loves to come unto her forthwith at her promise’, since she had already engaged Mrs Barnes to attend her in her expected labour. Mrs Knyvett was an excellent client for Mother Barnes, so the midwife was anxious to do a good job, immediately gathering her things and mounting a horse behind one of the two men.

To her surprise, they did not go in the direction of Mrs Knyvett’s house – and to her considerable alarm, it soon became clear that the men were not who they said they were. Instead, with thundering gallops, the horses raced through the night, covering the miles through the inky blackness as the midwife clung precariously to the waist of her abductor. It was almost daylight when they finally arrived at ‘a fair house’, which the midwife did not recognize.

She was hustled from the horse and towards a door, at which a tall, slender gentleman appeared, wearing a fine long gown of black velvet. He carried a candle and beckoned her inside, shutting the door on those that had brought her and leading the midwife in silence up the stairs. Mother Barnes was thoroughly alarmed, but followed the gentleman, finding herself in ‘a fair and large great chamber, being hanged all about with arras’. A fire was burning in the grate and she was taken through to another room of a similar size, also richly hung with tapestry and lit by a burning fire. She again passed through, entering a third room as lavish as the others. There, she found a ‘richly and gorgeously furnished’ bed, around which the curtains were firmly drawn. The man stooped low to her, whispering in her ear: ‘Lo, in yonder bed lieth the gentlewoman that you are sent for to come unto, go unto her and see that you do your uttermost endeavour towards her, and if she be safely delivered, you shall not fail of great reward, but if she miscarry in her travail, you shall die.’

Mother Barnes stood for a moment amazed, before moving to the bedside and drawing back the curtains tentatively. Inside, she found a gentlewoman, her body arched with pain, but lying in luxury on the bed in fine nightclothes. To the midwife’s surprise, the woman’s face was covered with a mask, although she did not note it in detail, later being unable to recall whether it was a visor or a caul. The birth proved to be quick. The midwife delivered a baby boy, wrapping him in her apron since she was surprised to find nothing else had been provided. She then picked up the baby and walked into one of the bigger chambers, where she found the gentleman waiting. He demanded to know whether the woman had been safely delivered ‘or no’. She had, the midwife said, proffering up the baby proudly and asking that some clothes be provided for him. The man made no attempt to take the child.

Mother Barnes moved closer to the fire, where the gentleman was standing. She held the baby out to him as the flames crackled in the grate, but he would not look at her bundle. Persisting, the midwife was then silenced by a sudden command to cast the baby into the fire. This was the horrifying moment when Mother Barnes realized that the man’s concern was only for the mother’s safety, not the child’s. She fell to her knees, begging that ‘he would not seek to destroy it, but rather give it unto her’. She promised to raise the boy as her own child, if only he would not murder him. Yet the man had no intention of allowing the child to live. Eventually, the tiny wriggling bundle was thrust into the flames. Mother Barnes was then ordered to go back to the mother and tend to her, where she remained for the rest of the day.

When night finally fell, the exhausted midwife was led outside, and the same two men who had brought her to the house helped her onto a horse. Although it was dark, she was determined to note the route they took, recognizing Donnington Park on her right-hand side. They crossed a great and long bridge, which she supposed must be over the Thames, lying some miles from her house. Once home, she kept her secret, although it lay heavy on her mind. Many years passed – although how many was not clear. Finally, as she felt her end approaching, she unburdened herself of her tale. As far as she was concerned, the events of that night were real – as they seemed to the magistrate to whom she spoke. There had been a masked lady, there had been a birth, and there had been a child cruelly destroyed. But who was the mother?

Great Shefford lies only six miles from Littlecote Manor, on which John Aubrey later fixed the tale, his florid touches little masking the fact that he recounted Mother Barnes’s story. The magistrate who sat with the old woman as she breathed out her words also had some connection to Littlecote. Sir Anthony Bridges was a relative of Sir William Darrell, who owned the manor. After his own cursory investigation, Sir Anthony passed the papers to Darrell the following July at the same time as those relating to another murder, requesting that he consider them both as a magistrate and landowner in the local area. Neither matter was particularly urgent, Bridges informed his ‘good cousin’, beginning his covering letter with a reminder about £20 that his kinsman owed him. With the formalities out of the way, Sir Anthony complained that he had ‘been of late amongst crafty crowders’ who took up his time and meant that he was unable to attend to business. There was no indication that anything was out of the ordinary or that either murder was connected to Darrell other than in his professional capacity as justice of the peace. Indeed, Bridges simply wanted to share the administrative work of keeping justice in the local area, inviting a colleague to assist him with matters.

‘Wild’ Will Darrell was, though, a far from suitable figure to administer justice. Born in 1539, he was a troublesome man and a difficult neighbour. He was often a party in local disputes, finding himself imprisoned in 1587 for a misdemeanour.
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John Aubrey certainly believed that he was the father of the murdered baby and it is clear that he did indeed have a connection to Sir John Popham, who took over the Littlecote estate after his death. Darrell must have spent a good deal of time with the future judge, who served as one of his lawyers, since at one point he was simultaneously involved in twelve legal cases.

In later life, having bargained away his inheritance to pay his legal expenses, Wild Will spent much time in London, although he was visiting Littlecote when he died in October 1589. Legend claims that his end came while he was out riding too fast on his estates, at a place that came to be called ‘Darrell’s Leap’. Leap he did, but not successfully. When his horse failed to jump at the last moment, the middle-aged reprobate was thrown, breaking his neck. By the nineteenth century, there were rumours that the horse had started on seeing the ghost of the burned infant out to wreak revenge.
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Darrell was never charged, but, as one writer later said, he became ‘stuck with the murder’.
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Yet, there was no contemporary evidence to pin the murder on him. Mother Barnes laid no accusations against him. It may even be the case that his enemies seized on the stories to tarnish him.
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The story was not commonly told at Littlecote in the late sixteenth century when the antiquarian William Camden passed through, since he did not record it when he wrote of both Popham and the Darrells.
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Interestingly, Elizabeth I’s arms appear in one of the bedrooms in Littlecote Manor – although these were carved towards the end of her life, in 1601, when she proposed to visit there.
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If the baby were indeed Darrell’s, then the mother was most likely Anne Hungerford, who was his mistress. She was divorced from her husband in around 1569 because of the affair, and she retired to Louvain, living there until her death in 1603.
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The couple had been deeply in love. Anne called her paramour ‘dear Dorrell’ and signed herself ‘all yours during life’ even as her divorce case was being heard.
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She also begged him: ‘for the love of God my good Will be careful for me in this matter’ (meaning her divorce), before asking him to establish an alibi. Yet, although the couple tried to prove that they were slandered, in private Lady Hungerford swore an oath on scripture promising to marry Darrell if only ‘Sir Walter Hungerford, my husband, now living do depart out of this life’.
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There were claims that she meant to hasten that day: Sir Walter accused her of trying to poison him in 1570, while also denouncing her affair, which he claimed had lasted the best part of a decade.
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Anne was not only the subject of a scandal – she was also the beloved sister of Jane Dormer, who would hear nothing unkind said about her. In Jane’s eyes, Anne had lived a blamelessly Catholic life in England, until her religion earned her the wrath of a husband who ‘albeit nobly descended, yet by his base covetousness and disordered sensual living much blemished his person and worth’.
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Finally, Anne was able to persuade him to allow her to leave England, ‘where she might have liberty of conscience and serve God freely’. She lived in the Low Countries for thirty-two years ‘with great example of true nobility and Christianity, much honoured for her rare parts of valour, and discretion’.
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Anne’s sister insisted that Anne lived a charitable, respectable life in Flanders, instead accusing her husband of adultery.
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Anne died in December 1603, ‘full of good works’. This was the picture of Anne Hungerford that her sister wanted to present to the world, but it was very much at odds with Anne’s dangerous passion for Wild Will Darrell. Jane Dormer, who had lived in the local area herself, must have been recounting the rumours of Mother Barnes’s story to Henry Clifford – but she had no desire in doing so to cast any blame on her sister. Perhaps she meant to remove suspicion from her sister by smearing Elizabeth. More likely, since she was unlikely to record a scandalous story in which her sister’s name risked being mentioned, there was simply no known connection between the events and Littlecote, Wild Will Darrell or Anne Hungerford until John Aubrey set down his scurrilous tale. If not Anne, who was the mother of the murdered child?

Mother Barnes, a woman who knew the local area and who lived just 6 miles from Littlecote, is unlikely to have been fooled, even if she was led by a roundabout route to the house in the dark.
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There are other problems with the identification too. The journey from Littlecote back to Great Shefford does not pass Donnington Park on the right – the one location the midwife was largely certain about. Interestingly, however, until Mother Barnes’s deposition came to light in the nineteenth century, tradition held that the midwife had been summoned from Great Bedwyn in Wiltshire, a place that, if one takes a circuitous route via Donnington Park, is 30 miles from Great Shefford, a distance that would take much of the night to ride.

Clearly, Mother Barnes did not come from Great Bedwyn; but perhaps she was going there. It has long been suggested that the river she crossed, which she believed was the Thames, might have been the Kennet at Hungerford, which is particularly broad at that point. This diversion makes no sense on a journey from Great Shefford to Littlecote, but was necessary if a party intended to travel from the midwife’s house to Great Bedwyn – the home parish of the Seymours.
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Edward Seymour – the future Protector – had inherited Wolf Hall on his father’s death, but it remained the ancestral home. Both the old Sir John Seymour and his eldest son, John, were commemorated by tombs in Great Bedwyn Church following the destruction of their first – monastic – burial place.
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In the nineteenth century Sir Walter Scott publicized the story, including it in his poem
Rokeby
: it had been drawn to his attention by Lord Webb Seymour, who was aware of the local tradition.
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