to
a draper (Thomas Barrow, another sister’s husband)
to
a London rake (John Hobart, his son-in-law)
and, eventually, as will emerge, to
a highwayman (Harry’s wayward son Thomas)
It was a continuous and seamless web almost from the top of society to the bottom. They borrowed money from each other, they stood surety for each other, they went hunting and coursing with each other, they became godfathers to each other’s children, they offered each other advice, the country squires bought goods from the city merchants and they gave each other presents. They sent each other medicines and cooking tips – ‘the Sparagus must bee but a little more then scalded’ (it was ruined if boiled).12 The lanes were alive with family traffic. Footboys (‘my little Mercurie’) took notes from one house to another,13 even in the middle of the night. Sir James recommended a gardener and sent his ‘cotch’14 in the evening so that Harry could visit him for lunch the following day. Harry’s aunt, Mrs Prude, asked him to inspect her woods at Woolage near Maydekin and promised to inspect Harry’s woods near her own house at Garwinton.15
Harry sent some spaniels to a friend, who returned one of them because it was ‘prowde and deafe’.16 With other neighbours he went hunting hares on the high downs with his beagles.17 The network spread across genders and generations. So Robert Bargrave of Bifrons wrote to Anne Oxinden, his sister-in-law, to thank her for her help with an ailing child and asked her to prevail with the wet nurse ‘to bee with us then for a moneth or two’18 as their baby was too weak to be weaned. Harry wrote at length and with great eloquence to the same brother-in-law, then acting as a magistrate, in defence of a woman in his village, Goodwife Gilnot, who had been accused of witchcraft. She was said to have ‘a wart or Teat uppon her body wherewith shee giveth her familier sucke’. Harry had inspected her and found that she did indeed have ‘a small wart upon her brest, which you may see an you please, and believe it there is none so familier with her as to receive any sustenance from thence’. Because ‘the poore woman’s cry, though it reach to heaven, is scarce heard here upon earth, I thought I was bound in conscience to speake in her behalfe; that noe hastie iudgment might passe upon her’. He signed this passionate plea to his brother-in-law the magistrate, as usual, ‘Your very lo: Bro: H.O.’19
Everyone within the network acknowledged the subtle gradations of the hierarchy, but that did not diminish either the warmth or the sense of duty and shared honour between them. It was an open structure in which all members were deeply and personally connected to people whose social standing was unlike their own. That does not mean it was a recipe for contentment. Far from it. Harry Oxinden was aware that he was clinging a little anxiously to the bottom end of a charmed world and that anxiety emerged, at least when he was young, in an over-sensitive and rather pompous irritability. This was the tone in which he addressed his neighbour the knight and MP Sir Basil Dixwell, the latest and very rich representative of a Warwickshire family which had been in Kent for only a couple of generations.
The Oxindens, as part of the deeply interconnected and intermarried world of the Kentish gentry, had been there as an established and knightly family at least since the middle of the fourteenth century. Harry may have thought he should teach the vastly more important Dixwell a lesson in gentry behaviour. In this way, as so often, value systems and their associated hierarchies overlapped: Harry the ancient Kentish gentleman, the real thing, but poor and powerless; Basil Dixwell a parvenu, a Member of Parliament with superb connections at Westminster and money to match. Who, out of this pair, could think of patronizing whom?
In 1635, Dixwell was buying up land around his spanking new mansion at Broome Park, for which, as Harry noted a little sourly in his diary, 27,000 bricks were made ‘besides thousands which he bought’.20 Broome is a wonderful piece of 1630s, big-money, show-off, Lord Mayor classicism, its pink-plum brick façades framed in giant pilasters, with tottering mannerist accumulations, like a coiffured wig, of scrolls, broken pediments and windows mounting skywards above them. Harry Oxinden’s own plantings and improvements must have seemed modest indeed.
Dixwell had bought some land next to Maydekin which Harry wanted himself, and for which he was prepared to swap some land of his own that was next to Broome. About fifteen acres were involved on each side but Harry, quoting scripture and the classics, weighed in with the false modesty of the truly touchy as if solving the problems of war-ravaged Europe:
Far it is from mee to think that FAITH, IUSTICE, and HONESTY are ornaments only in fashion amongst private men, holding that the greater and richer a man is the more he is bound to excel in them.21
If Dixwell wouldn’t do the swap as he had promised, Harry wrote,
I must then rest myself contented with mine owne, upon which I shall receive one greater benefit then on any of the lands I should have of you, and that is the prospect of the superlative house of yours which is now a building, whose rare fabrick and unparalleled beauty cannot chuse but affourd an infinite delight unto mee, especially when I shall behold it without controlment at so neere a distance.22
Dixwell was too suave to be troubled by any of this, the land swap went ahead and in June 1638, when the wonderful new house was approaching completion, Dixwell invited his neighbour for a picnic:
Mr Oxinden,
I request that you and your wife and the Capt that is with yow would be pleased to take the payne to walke downe on Thursday next about two of the clocke in the afternoone to Broome house wher yow shall meete myself and the gentlemen and gentlewomen which are of my house, that are very desirous to see yow all there and to eate a cake and drinke a bottle of wine together and soe you are most friendly and respectively saluted by
Your affection. frend
Basil Dixwell.23
Amid all this toing and froing with the menfolk of gentry Kent, it is slightly difficult to make out the nature of Harry’s marriage to Anne Peyton. Her near-absence from the letters might be seen as a witness to their companionship within the confines of home. When he did write to her, he called her ‘Sweete Love’ and she replied ‘Deare Hartt’.24 But he didn’t write to her as often as she would have liked and she hoped that was a symptom of ‘forgettfullness and no neglectt of me’.25 On her part, when he was away, she dealt entirely practically with rabbits, partridges, silver plate, the barley and their children. In the eight years of their marriage, she bore him a son, Thomas, and two daughters, Margaret and Elizabeth. When he was in London, a place he hated, she asked him to remember to buy her a linen cap, ‘a morning peake, which will cost 5s., and forgeat not a furnitur for my horse’.26 Harry’s cousin Henry Oxinden used to describe her as ‘old oblivion’, ‘the greatest enimie to true frendshippe’ who ‘hath so stupifid your braines as to make you forget your best friends’.27 This is how men joke with each other in private and it is probably a sign that Harry loved her.
Anne Oxinden fell seriously ill in the summer of 1640, this time – she had been dangerously ill before – with a nagging sore throat, for which Harry’s ‘afectionat Ant’ Lady Oxinden at Dene sent her a cordial and a ‘tisain to eas the paynfullnes of her coff’.28 It did no good and on 28 August 1640, Anne died.
It is nowhere clear quite how Harry responded to her death but that December, as a gesture of warm, gentle, slightly teasing kindness, his Oxinden cousin Henry wrote to him from their house at Dene:
My father, my mother, my wife and myselfe doe earnestly and hartilie invite you to Dene to keepe your whole Christmas, and doe desire that you would neither denie nor delay your suddain coming, our request being so reasonable, you being neither tide to wife nor familie nor entertainement of neighbours.29
This was the larger Oxinden family gathering around a widowed relative but it wasn’t the only reaction to her death. At the same time Anne’s brother Sir Thomas Peyton, with scarcely a pause, applied himself to the question of Anne’s children, his nephews and nieces, carriers of his own genes. Anne’s d
eath seems immediately to have severed the unity of interests between Oxindens and Peytons. Peyton wanted to know what exactly Harry was going to do financially for his half-Peyton children. Anne had died at the very end of August and in the first two or three days of September Peyton had already taken this up with Harry face to face. Peyton had got little satisfaction from that conversation and now he wrote intemperately from his gabled brick house at Knowlton, embowered in trees, almost a twin of the Oxindens’ house at Dene. His ex-brother-in-law, with whom as recently as the beginning of August he had been happily coursing after hares on the downs above Barham, was to submit to his grandeur and authority. ‘If writing have more poure [power] with you then speaking I should bee glad to have found this way to obtaine my request.’30
Sir Thomas Peyton, acting in effect as the trustee of the funds which his sister had brought to Harry’s marriage, insisted that Harry was not to use those funds for his own purposes but to distribute them to the children of the marriage. Peyton required that Harry give his ‘unblameable sone’ Thomas £140 a year – the equivalent of a capital sum of £2,800 at 5 per cent interest – and his ‘guiltlesse doughters’ Margaret and Elizabeth £300 each ‘presently’ – that is, straight away.31 This huge total of £3,400 claimed by Peyton on behalf of the children was unaffordable for Harry but Thomas was adamant.
Therefore by your presence I pray lett me receive some satisfaction without ambiguous termes, which are nott to be used in expressions of true and reall meanings. And this is the way nott to suspend that alliance and friendship which you have yet in good seisine and possession from
Your very lo: brother
THO: PEYTON32
In this way, which brought moral but not legal pressure to bear, the blood family of a wife could continue to make claims on the behaviour of her husband, even after her death. No nuclear family existed in isolation; each was only a small panel in the continuous quilt of gentrydom. Harry turned to his own blood family, in the form of his uncle Sir James, his virtual father, who advised him to go slow and be careful in anything he promised, ‘to stand it out untille your time of mourninge be done. It will not be amiss for you to be very cautious what you write, for words written continue, sometimes, to stand as testimony against theire master.’33 Peyton was asking for too much, Sir James said. Harry should do what he felt was right in terms of looking after his dead wife’s children but he should also look after his own interests. It is not difficult to imagine the conversations at Dene that Christmas of 1640, as the Oxindens as a whole contemplated the shoals of the future, and their best means of negotiating them.
Something had come between him and Peyton. Their friendship had always had an element of sharpness in it. Tom Peyton had rejected a woman Harry suggested as his bride, as she was neither rich nor well connected enough. ‘Me thinks the Diamond showes best when ’tis sett in gold and a comely face looks sweeter when it stands by the king’s picture,’ he told his brother-in-law. ‘The other weaker vessel, woman,’ he added, ‘because of the generall depravity of that sexe’ needed ‘some good addition to sett her of and make her estimable in [a man’s] eye, before hee will rest on her.’34
That was tough talk but now the great crisis of seventeenth-century England was stealing up on them and ‘the rumors of warre’35 were coming with every post down the London road. The world itself seemed to be in dissolution. Harry stayed at Maydekin but Henry Oxinden went up to London to be close to where the decisions were being made. Thomas Peyton was elected one of the Members of Parliament for the port of Sandwich and excitedly reported to Harry the speeches he heard in the chamber of the Commons. He had loved John Pym’s great oration in April 1640 on the threatened liberties of Englishmen, lauding Pym as ‘an ancient and stoute man of the Parliament’.36 All three of these young gentry men, now in their early thirties, were, at this stage, resolved to see the ancient rights of the Commons defended against the ambitions and erosions of the crown.
But the world was shifting fast and by the summer of 1640, a change had come over Thomas Peyton. He sent Harry another vivid dispatch from the front line in Westminster in which his natural conservatism had started to swing over to the crown. All their youths, they had known England as ‘soe flourishing a kingdom’.37 They had ridden and hunted and played with each other as if this was the most blessed of countries. Now, to Peyton ‘every houre seemed readie to bring forth some strange matter’. He had ‘noe good newes to send’ to Harry but had been swept away by the ‘speech of a gratious and mild king’. Charles, to Peyton’s eyes, had not responded to the taunts and provocations of the gentry in Parliament with anger and violence but ‘as a true father of his subiects would rather choose to stroke them still, till he had overcome their natures and assimilated them to his owne goodness’. Peyton, under the influence of this gracious rhetoric, had become a Royalist. The Commons seemed to him full of ‘tumultuous and popular spiritts’. The more zealous were disturbingly inspired. Moderation had gone and it was the King who ‘suffers in the honor of his government’ when everyone abroad heard ‘at what disagreement hee is with his owne people’. Peyton now was sure of what side he was on. ‘Since wee will nott give, the king must take … The king may use the goods of his subjects … for the conservation of the more universall and generall good.’38
Soldiers were in the streets of London and cannon drawn up outside the palace of the Archbishop in Lambeth. Crowds surged along the embankments and quays by the Thames. Troopers were committing outrages, thieving, setting fire to buildings, ravishing women. Everyone was in confusion and ‘I cannot meete with any man butt knows what will become of these things.’ ‘Death’s harbinger, the sword, famine and other plagues that hang over us are ready to swallow up the wicked age,’ Peyton wrote to Harry. He looked with dread at what he and Knowlton were to suffer ‘in this fiery declination of the world’.39
The sense of shared apprehension is palpable but to both Harry Oxinden and his Oxinden cousins, Peyton’s turn to the crown was treachery. Peyton favoured what he called Duty (to the King) over what he called Virtue, the gentry values of self-sufficient honour. No Oxinden would ever agree with that and none would ever fight for the King. Peyton and the Oxindens now found themselves on opposite sides in the coming war.
But this was no clarified falling into camps. Gentry friendships and gentry tensions survived any ideological separation. And even between Henry Oxinden and his cousin Harry there was a division. What was Harry doing, Henry wrote to him from London, wasting his time in the country? ‘Neither business, nor frends, nor rumors of warre, nor brother, nor sister, nor uncle, nor aunt, nor beautie, nor good companie can invite or draw you to this loathed of you place.’40 ‘The passages of the grand and weightie affaires now in agitation’41 seemed to hold no interest for Harry Oxinden. He remained at Maydekin, even as the prospect of civil war grew darker. ‘I am sadly much alone’, he wrote to his aunt, ‘and now much inclined to melancholy.’ In a long and revealing letter to Tom Peyton he portrayed himself without irony as the Horatian gentleman, withdrawn from the hideousness of politics and business into the comforts of his own ancestral lands.42
The Horatian vision did not play well with Harry’s friends and relations. In January 1642 an angry letter arrived at Maydekin from his cousin Henry Oxinden, then in Westminster, ‘that great phsaere [sic] of Activitie, which now whirles about three whole Kingdomes Blisse or destruction’. Crisis was imminent: ‘If division in a private house brings ruine, how more in a kingdome where itt is so great among the rulers of itt.’43 It was now Henry’s turn to be entranced by the vigour and power of John Pym, whose latest speech he had just heard. ‘Never anything was delivered with that modest confidence and heroicke courage by any common of this kingdome.’ Henry, have no doubt, was a Parliamentarian but his gentry world was in turmoil:
I find all here full of feares and almost voyd of hopes. Parents and children, brothers, kindred, I and deere frends have the seed of difference and division abundantly sowed in them. S
ometimes I meet with a Cluster of Gentlemen equally divided in opinion and resolution, sometimes 3 to 2, sometimes more ods, but never unanimous, nay more I have heard foule languig and disparat quarelings even between old and intire frends, and how wee can thus stand and nott fall, certainly God must needs worke a miracle paralelle to some of his great ones in the old time.44
For Harry to be dreaming of a Horatian heaven down in Kent at this time of crisis was a failure to do his duty:
Were you butt heere to heare the drummes, see the warlike postures and the glittering armour up and down the towne, and behold our poore bleeding libertis att stake, itt would rouze your Sperits, if you have any left, socour that deepe drousie lethergie you are now orewhelm’d in; I could say much more, butt I feare I have gon alreadie too farre.45
What the politicized Henry did not know was the one very good reason that Harry was failing to engage with the great crisis of the kingdom: he was in love.
Sloping out from the mourning over the death of his first wife, he suddenly fell, uncontrollably, for a seventeen-year-old girl, Kate Culling, the daughter of a yeoman farmer, Goodman James Culling, whose house and land were a mile away from Maydekin on the other side of the chalk ridge at South Barham, and who, according to a poem the stricken Harry wrote for her, had bright brown hair, a ‘faire’ forehead and starlike eyes which had ‘not their matches underneath the skies’, damask cheeks, cherry lips and a smooth chin.46 He was lost.
The thoroughly politicized Henry Oxinden had little patience with any of this:
I am glad you have gott a horse; provide you of Armes; it is Mars, nott Venus, that now can help; shee is now so much outt of fashion that where she herselfe here present, in all her best fashines, she would be the gazeing stock of contempt to all but lashe and effaeminat mindes.47
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