(1625 - 1642)

James I died in 1625 and was succeeded by his son Charles I. The new king had married a French princess, Henrietta Maria, and the wedding treaty included secret clauses providing toleration for English Catholics.

Queen Henrietta Maria expressed her Catholicism more exuberantly and openly than her predecessor. The Court became a centre of cosmopolitan Counter-Reformation Catholicism, somewhat at odds with the discreet English Catholicism that survived in the country houses of Berkshire, Oxfordshire and elsewhere.

In the year of Charles's accession, Peter Curtis of Andover, Hampshire became a Jesuit after four years studying at the English College at Rome. His father was a member of the Curtis family of Enborne (2 miles WSW of Newbury). The elder Curtis was 'a Catholic of respectability ... who, on account of his poor circumstances, for many years was occupied in the trade of a fuller.' Downward mobility was something many Catholic families were having to come to terms with.

Sequestration of estates was quite common. For example, Sir George Browne's Great Shefford Manor was sequestrated about 1627. But some Catholics could still afford to purchase property. One such was Francis Fettiplace who, in 1627, bought Swyncombe Manor from the Crown. Previously his family had leased it from the Fortescues. The house stood in a fold of the Chilterns on the Ridgeway, three and a half miles west of Stonor. (The present Swyncombe Manor is a twentieth century replacement.)

Swyncombe Manor
Drawing based on an old unfinished engraving

In 1630 a churchwarden of Mapledurham was in trouble for not reporting Sir Charles Blount for being a Catholic. The churchwarden's defence was that he did not know how to write. Sir Charles had succeeded his father Sir Richard on the latter's death two years previously.

An incident in 1630 gives an insight into the problems faced by Catholics when it came to burying their dead. Clandestine baptisms and weddings were relatively easy to arrange, but with funerals there was always the problem of what to do with the body. Any Catholic who died without being admitted or reconciled to the Church of England could be refused burial.

In practice gentry were rarely refused interment alongside their ancestors in the parish church. Often the rules were also bent for lowlier folk and blind eyes were turned, but occasionally the Anglican authorities felt it necessary to record the fact that an unauthorised funeral had taken place. For instance, it was noted in 1624 that Agnes Tull, a Catholic from Burcot (1 mile NW of Dorchester) had been buried illegally in the churchyard at Dorchester.

The most celebrated clandestine funeral in the Thames Valley was that of Elizabeth Horseman, a convicted recusant who lived at Wheatley (4½ miles E. of Oxford). She died at the end of December 1629. Her friends had promised to bury her in church but were not prepared to lie to the Anglican archdeacon that she had repudiated Catholicism. Consequently the archdeacon would not give permission for a church burial. The vicar of the nearest parish church, at Holton half a mile north of Wheatley, was sympathetic to the dead woman's friends, but could not be seen to disobey the archdeacon.

One morning a week later it was discovered that the door of Holton parish church had been forced; Mrs Horseman had been buried under the Communion table.

There had been a wake the previous night and the servants said they had left the coffin in the garden for hygiene reasons. Persons 'unknown' had removed it. The authorities could find no witnesses but the whole village seemed to approve what had happened. 'God's blessing on the hands that buried the dead', said one woman.

Elizabeth Horseman was related to the Belsons and the Powells. Almost a century earlier a John Horseman was one of the servants imprisoned with Sir Adrian Fortescue. She therefore had links with at least two, and probably three Thames Valley martyrs, all now beatified; Thomas Belson, Fr George Napper and Sir Adrian Fortsecue.

The clandestine burial was organised by a Mr Powell, believed to be Richard Powell of Forest Hill (1 mile NW of Holton). And it is probable that the Jesuit chaplain from Waterperry House made the short journey to Holton to officiate at the secret funeral.

Lady Ann Curson of Waterperry died in 1631 after twenty years of widowhood. Most of this had been spent at the Stonors' manor house at North Stoke. There is a monument to Lady Ann and her husband in Waterperry parish church, next to Waterperry House. Their effigies kneel facing each other at a prayer-desk, on which is an hourglass to symbolise the brevity of life.

Waterperry House
The parish church is to the left

Also in 1631 Sir Francis Knollys's second son, William Lord Knollys, sold Greys Court. Shakespeare is said to have based Twelfth Night's Malvolio on William Knollys, who was also Viscount Wallingford and Earl of Banbury.

Despite his father's ardent anti-Catholicism, William Knollys's second wife Elizabeth was a Catholic. Her father, Sir Thomas Howard, was Viscount Andover and Earl of Berkshire. He and his brother Charles were keepers of the royal manor of Ewelme.

Had he been alive Sir Francis Knollys would have been even more shocked to discover that another son, Sir Thomas, had apparently become a Catholic and was having his daughter educated at a convent in Flanders.

Mary Yate, wife of Sir John Yate of Buckland, inherited Harvington Hall, Worcestershire in 1631. She was the daughter of the Catholic Humphrey Packington of Chaddesley Corbett. She harboured priests at the moated hall which now belongs to the Catholic Archdiocese of Birmingham and is open to the public.

Sir Francis Englefield the younger died in 1631. He was buried at Englefield parish church in accordance with family tradition. In his will he left not only Whiteknights and Englefield Farm, but other property at Englefield, Beenham and Bucklebury. He was succeeded at Whiteknights by his fifth son, Anthony.

Whiteknights was served by the Franciscans, who in 1630, had established two English districts. One was based in London, the other in the Reading area. The latter covered Berkshire, Hampshire and Sussex. The choice of Reading probably reflected the presence in the locality of three houses served by Franciscans; Whiteknights, Ufton Court and Mapledurham. However, the order soon relocated their base to Oxford. A young Franciscan chaplain, known as Stephen of the Holy Cross, is believed to have died at Whiteknights in 1640.

Bishop Richard Smith, the Vicar Apostolic, fled from England in 1631. A group of Catholic gentry had petitioned the Privy Council for his arrest because they saw him as a threat to their authority over their chaplains.

Bishop Smith made his way to Paris. He wrote to the Pope suggesting that England should have three Catholic dioceses, the senior one to be based at Dorchester-on-Thames. The plan was rejected but the country was later divided into four districts, each with its own bishop who was known as a Vicar Apostolic.

During the mid 1630s relations between the Crown and the Vatican improved. In 1633 the Queen's representative took up residence in Rome, ninety-nine years after Henry VIII's break with Rome.

In the following year papal representation was re-established in London. This was because Charles I wanted the diplomatic assistance of the Vatican in his European affairs, but there were also beneficial side effects for English Catholics.

The mid 1630s saw the deaths of some notable Catholic churchmen with Thames Valley connections. Bishop George Chamberlain of Ypres in Flanders died in 1634. He had been dean of the chapter of St Bavo's Cathedral, Ghent and was buried in St Martin's Cathedral at Ypres. Before his death he had returned to England to confirm his sister's title to the Shirburn estate. She married John Neville, Lord Abergavenny.

Dom John Curre, a Berkshire-born Benedictine died in Gloucestershire in 1634. He had been banished but had secretly returned to work on the mission.

Fr Arthur Pitts was a son of the church papist Arthur Pitts of Iffley. As noted earlier, Fr Pitts worked with the martyred Fr Edmund Campion. He later became chancellor to the Cardinal of Lorraine in eastern France before becoming Archdeacon of London. Fr Pitts spent the end of his life as a house guest of William Stonor at Blount's Court, Rotherfield Peppard. He is said to have been buried secretly at Rotherfield Peppard parish church about 1634.

William Stonor had succeeded to the Stonor estates on the death of his father, Sir Francis in 1625. William's recusant wife, Lady Elizabeth, had been released from jail after the accession of Charles I and the authorities now treated her more leniently. She suffered from a serious illness and in 1630 was excused from appearing before the Oxford magistrates. Eight years later the King granted her exemption from further prosecution. It may have helped that the Queen's private physician, Doctor William Gibbes, was a Catholic convert and William Stonor's brother-in-law.

In 1635 the parson of Pyrton wrote in the parish register that, at the request of William Stonor's curate, he had entered therein the christenings of William's children. However, he added that he did not know where, when or by whom they had been baptised. Pyrton was the parish then serving Stonor and William Stonor's 'curate' was his Catholic chaplain.

In the absence of civil registration of births it was important to register children at the parish church to avoid legal complications concerning their legitimacy. Where the Anglican clergy refused to compromise in the way the parson of Pyrton did, the Catholic clergy would often allow a second baptism according to the Anglican rite to ensure registration.

The 1630s saw further seizures of Catholic estates. John Dancastle, who had married Anne Fettiplace, was a recusant who owned the manor of Wellhouse. This is a small farming settlement on the Berkshire Downs (4 miles NE of Newbury). The site of Wellhouse Farm was occupied by the Romans and evidence of a Roman building more than 100 feet long has been found there. Wellhouse manor was sequestrated in 1635. It had been leased to John Dancastle's uncle, Griffin Dancastle, who also held The Grange at Shaw (1 mile NE of Newbury). Griffin's daughter Elizabeth married John Eyston, who became a Royalist major and was a son of William Eyston of Catmore.

John Dancastle's grandfather, also John, had married Mary Browne, a cousin of Sir George Browne of Great Shefford. This elder John Dancastle had purchased Binfield manor in east Berkshire. Binfield was in Windsor Forest, an area full of squatters and dissidents who were unlikely to be concerned about a neighbour's religion. The Dancastles held Binfield until the family died out in the second half of the eighteenth century. They forfeited a property there called Cliftons to the Crown during the reign of Charles I.

In 1635 George Tattersall's West Court estate at Finchampstead was seized by the Crown. He subsequently leased the property back and continued paying £20 a month in recusancy fines (= £1,100 today). Later he paid a lump sum to clear his backlog of fines and regained full possession of the estate.

William Wollascott III died in 1637. He had built a separate aisle with a chapel on to the parish church at Brimpton. This was therefore another Anglican church with a Catholic-owned private aisle, as at Mapledurham, Noke and Pishill (the latter serving the Catholics of Stonor village). Wollascott was buried in a vault attached to his chapel. He was succeeded by his son, William Wollascott VI, whose wife Susan Fryer was also a Catholic. (The Wollascotts' aisle no longer exists.)

The Wollascotts held the right to appoint the parson of Brimpton. However, legislation now prevented Catholics from exercising such rights. William Wollascott III had successfully done so, probably because he was a church papist who, in the Wollascott tradition, managed to conceal his Catholicism. In 1638, however, three men who were not members of the family made the presentation. They may have been William Wollascott III's executors. One of them was Sir Thomas Vachell, the Protestant heir of the old recusant, Thomas Vachell of Ipsden.

In 1637 the Archbishop of Canterbury, William Laud, thought he had converted the heir of the Wollascott family to Anglicanism. This was presumably William Wollascott V who died young. Archbishop Laud was a Reading man and had placed the young Wollascott at Wadham College, Oxford.

The Archbishop had been appointed to the See of Canterbury in 1633 and tried to reintroduce to the Church of England a semblance of pre-Reformation liturgy. This was in keeping with the King's high church ideas, but was bitterly opposed by the Puritans. Ludovic Bowyer, also a Reading man, spread rumours that Laud was in league with the Pope. Laud was indeed invited by the Pope to join the Catholic Church and become a cardinal, but he did not accept the offer. The unfortunate Bowyer had the letters L for liar and R for rogue branded on his forehead. He was pilloried in Reading and London, being nailed by the ears. He was then sentenced to hard labour for life. During the Civil War Archbishop Laud was beheaded by the Parliamentarians, on Tower Hill, London in 1645.

The survival of Catholicism along the three mile stretch of the Thames from Clifton Hampden through Burcot to Dorchester was unusual for the Thames Valley area. It was centred not on one or two gentry homes, but on a group of yeomen families. Yeomen were middle class holders of small estates, typically farmers.

At Dorchester it seems that there was only one gentleman recusant in the early seventeenth century. George Beauforest was listed in 1612, exactly a century after the death of an Abbot of Dorchester of the same surname. When Dorchester Abbey was suppressed Sir Richard and Lady Beauforest had bought the monastic church as a gift for the parish, thus saving it from destruction. George may have been Sir Richard's son.

The Catholic yeomen of the Dorchester district were predominantly members of the Davey, Day and Prince families. The first record of the Days as Catholics is when a member of the family died in 1639. Day's Lock at Little Wittenham was named after this family.

The Princes, some of whom lived at Clifton Hampden, were listed as recusants as early as 1604. In the 1620s George Prince of Clifton Hampden was a churchwarden but, nonetheless, seems to have been a Catholic. His appointment probably reflected the high standing of his family in the village. Some forty years later one of the Days of Dorchester also served as a churchwarden.

The Daveys of Dorchester and nearby Overy eventually became the most prominent and enduring recusants of the area. Ann, wife of Richard Davey, was listed for recusancy in 1641.

About 1640 the ratio of priests to Catholic laity in England was perhaps at its all time peak. It is estimated that there was one priest for every eighty lay people. Vocations were numerous. In 1641, for instance, Francis Bruning became a Jesuit. Although he was not a Thames Valley man, his mother was a Simeon from Brightwell near Watlington, and he used her surname as an alias. In the previous year Isett Moleyns became a Benedictine lay sister at Cambrai in northern France. The principal seat of her family was at Mongewell (now the site of Carmel College) a mile up the Thames from the Stonor manor of North Stoke.

A mile downstream from North Stoke was another Catholic house where vocations were nurtured. Littlestoke Manor was then the principal residence of the main East Ilsley line of the Hildesleys. It was only two and a half miles downstream from their previous seat at Newnham Murren.

Littlestoke Manor today is a much altered farmhouse with a Georgian facade, but one or two traces of Tudor construction can still be found. A branch of the Hildesleys had lived there as early as the reign of Edward VI when Archbishop Cranmer granted Francis Hildesley a dispensation to eat meat during Lent.

Littlestoke Manor
An ancient and much altered house

Littlestoke is on a narrow finger of Checkendon parish that gave the latter Chiltern village direct access to the Thames. The house stands where the Ridgeway, having crossed the Thames at Goring, passes through the meadows alongside the river on its way to North Stoke, Mongewell and Swyncombe; all places where Catholic families lived in the seventeenth century. From Swyncombe it was only three and a half miles to Stonor.

Formerly there was a ferry across the Thames at Littlestoke. The road from the ferry on the opposite bank at Cholsey today passes through the grounds of Fair Mile Hospital, becoming a public road to the west of its junction with the Reading to Wallingford road. Significantly it is called Papist Way and points towards the Hildesleys ancestral home at East Ilsley, about eight miles away. It also leads towards East Hendred, home of the Eyston family, some ten miles distant.

Using the Thames as a highway the Hildesleys could reach fellow Catholics eight miles upstream in the Dorchester area and nine miles downstream at Mapledurham. Littlestoke was therefore at a meeting of the ways for Catholics in the area.

Walter Hildesley, head of the East Ilsley and Crowmarsh line, was apparently succeeded by his younger brother William, probably the Hildesley who was at Lyford Grange when Fr Edmund Campion was arrested. He in turn was succeeded by his son, another William.

This William Hildesley married Anne Hawkins who, between 1618 and 1631, gave birth to two sons and four daughters. The family lived at Littlestoke. The girls - Mary, Anne, Catherine and Susannah - all became nuns at Liége. (Littlestoke in Oxfordshire should not be confused with Little Stoke near Chipping Sodbury in Gloucestershire, which was a Benedictine mission.)

In 1641 the last known Catholic Vachell died. This was John Vachell who must have been the youngest brother of Sir Thomas and therefore a nephew of old Thomas Vachell of Ipsden. John Vachell was buried with his wife Mary at Warfield parish church (1½ miles N. of Bracknell). Their epitaph reads:

'While they lived together they were living apart, and death itself has neither joined them nor separated them. They were both of them Catholics, she of the Anglican, he of the Roman faith. Both, nevertheless, lived temperately, piously, virtuously; and, which is a riddle, were friends with one another.'

Anglican and Catholic co-operation was also necessary between the King and Queen's chaplains. Charles I's chaplain, Bishop Jeremy Taylor, developed a close working relationship with the Queen's chaplain, Fr Christopher Davenport, who later served Charles II's queen, Catherine of Braganza. Fr Davenport was a Franciscan theologian, often known by his religious name, Franciscus a Sancta Clara. As the Queen's chaplain he enjoyed much greater liberty than other Catholic priests, and was said to 'pervade' Oxford. He was also an ecumenist and tried to show that the Church of England's Thirty-Nine Articles could be interpreted in accordance with Catholic tradition, two centuries before John Henry Newman tried to make the same case.

At Oxford in 1640 Charles Green, innkeeper of the Mitre, was dismissed from the city council for being a Catholic. Two years later his house and that of another prominent Catholic family, the Nappers, were raided. Bonfires were made of their Catholic books and pictures. This reflected the growing influence of Puritanism.

That spring the Puritan poet John Milton travelled to Stanton St John (4½ miles NE of Oxford) to get married. His late grandfather, Richard Milton, was a Catholic who lived in the village and worked as an under-ranger of Shotover Forest. Vestiges of the forest remain on and around Shotover Hill two miles south of Stanton St John.

Although raised a Catholic, John Milton's father had become a Protestant whilst studying at Christ Church, and had therefore been disinherited. He had subsequently moved to London where he made a comfortable living as a scrivener.

John Milton's bride was seventeen year old Mary Powell. She was one of eleven children of Richard Powell, the man implicated in the clandestine Catholic burial of Elizabeth Horseman twelve years earlier.

As previously noted, Richard Powell lived at Forest Hill (1 mile SE of Stanton St John). He had bought Forest Hill Manor, which stands north of the parish church, from John Brome, a member of another family who were, or recently had been, Catholic. Powell was plagued by financial problems. He failed to pay Mary's dowry of £1,000 (= £50,000 today) and Milton's father had previously lent him £300 (= £15,000 today).

John Milton is generally regarded as having been anti-Catholic. Yet, as we will see later, he had many friendly contacts with Catholics, even including a cardinal in Rome. It is not known, though, to what extent the Powells of Forest Hill were Catholic when Milton married into the family. Richard Powell was certainly not in a position to pay recusancy fines, although he may have been a church papist.

The marriage got off to a bad start. Milton's bride deserted him after a few weeks and went home. Three months later the Civil War broke out. John Milton was a Parliamentarian, and the Powells were Royalists. Consequently there was to be no reunion between John and Mary Milton until after the war.

Meanwhile at Purley, Richard Hyde had inherited Hyde Hall from his father Francis. Richard's son, Francis II, must have seen the way the Puritan wind was blowing. A month before the King raised his standard, Francis Hyde had his new son John baptised at Purley parish church. During the 111 years that the Hydes lived at Purley, baby John Hyde was the only member of the family recorded as having been christened according to the Anglican rite.