The Manor

by Mac Griswold

  Grizzell was four when the historic Long Parliament, so called because it remained in power for so long, was finally summoned in 1640. It enacted legislation intended to control the monarch. He retaliated with more royal edicts. The Irish, seeing a chance to escape English domination, raised a rebellion, whereupon Parliament saw its chance, taking over official responsibility for national defense from the king. In August 1642, the two sides—Parliamentarian Roundheads and Royalist Cavaliers—took to the battlefield. And for nine years, bouts of war alternated with fitful outbreaks of peace.

  Upside Down

  Grizzell was eight when the royal household fled London in 1642 at the start of hostilities, and Charles settled on Oxford as a safe place to establish an ad hoc court. He reassembled the cumbersome apparatus of royal governance around him, but only two auditors obeyed his summons. The others, including Thomas, either retired discreetly to their country estates or stayed in London, as Thomas did at first. Life in Clerkenwell continued at the same tranquil pace, but the sense of uneasiness increased beneath the daily round. Unluckily for Thomas, his northern properties lay within a major theater of war. In 1644, parliamentary forces gained control of Yorkshire. In an age when armies lived off the land and commanders turned a blind eye to pillage, Thomas must have feared for his distant holdings.

  How Thomas Brinley’s certainties crumbled has little to do with any romantic drama of Cavaliers and Roundheads. Each side in the combat drew supporters from all social strata and almost every Christian denomination, as well as adherents who switched allegiances. And for every unwavering loyalist in either camp, a dozen others lay low or hedged their bets. Of the twenty-nine auditors and clerks in the Exchequer, only twelve, including Thomas, were avowed Royalists. Ten were more or less neutral, and seven were out-and-out Parliamentarians.

  Early in the summer of 1646, Oxford surrendered to Oliver Cromwell’s forces and the king turned himself in as a prisoner. In November 1647 he escaped and fled to the Isle of Wight, where the governor whose sympathies he had counted on instead held him politely captive. Secret plans Charles laid from prison resulted in the final round of war, but meantime Parliament, firmly in the hands of his enemies, began to pursue prominent Royalists in government service. Many, including Thomas, now bowed to the inevitable, accommodating themselves as best they could without entirely compromising either their principles or their safety.

  In restive London, an uneasy heartbeat of revolution—Puritan against Anglican, commoner against courtier, poor against rich—throbbed at the lower end of St. John’s Lane. In 1647, unrest surged uphill into exclusive Clerkenwell. “Lady Bullock’s house, on Clerkenwell Green, was attacked by soldiers who stole fifty pieces of gold and tore five rich rings from her ladyship’s fingers. Dr. Sibbald, the incumbent of Clerkenwell, who resided near, remonstrated with the Parliamentary soldiers from his window but the only reply was three musketballs at his head, which they narrowly missed.”

  The family fled to the safety of Datchet, Buckinghamshire, where his wife Anne’s family lived. Sixteen forty-seven was also the year that Grizzell’s youngest brother, little William, was born and baptized in Datchet, not in Clerkenwell. Thomas lay low somewhere, either in Datchet or in Eton, across the Thames, a town familiar to him as a young man when he had first begun to work for his wife’s uncle, Richard Budd.

  After a three-day prayer session in November 1648, grim Puritan leaders hit a flash point, defending their decision as just retribution for the agonies of the Civil War (in which more English lives were lost, proportionately to the population, than in World War I), Calling on Charles as “Charles Stuart, that man of blood, to account for the blood he had shed,” they executed him as a monarch who had made war on his own people—the one thing that a king must not do.

  The Final Struggle

  By this time, 2004, I had tracked the progress of the war and visited Datchet, still a village, up the Thames from London, where Thomas had long perched with some of his fellow auditors when he was not working for the king at the Exchequer in London or on his rounds to collect rents. Grizzell had cousins and aunts and uncles there, a comfortable nest of relatives.

  I return to the manor to check on some documents in the vault that might help make sense of Grizzell’s last three years in England. A minuscule handle projects just above the hallway wainscot. I turn the key halfway in the keyhole. Pulling open the close-fitting heavy panel is a struggle; then the door lunges toward me, crying out with a gothic screech.

  A short, slight, bearded man steps forward: Charles I, king of England, Scotland, and Ireland. He walks through the tall second-story window of his banqueting hall at Whitehall Palace and onto the executioner’s scaffold specially constructed for this day, January 30, 1649. He wears two shirts so he won’t shiver and look as if he’s afraid. Of all his decorations and honors, he wears only one, the glittering silver star of the Order of the Garter—the star of St. George the Martyr. He lays his head calmly on the block and the hooded executioner raises, then swiftly lowers his ax. The body of the anointed sovereign slumps. The crowd groans, then falls silent. There is no rejoicing.

  On that cold morning, almost nobody wanted the king to die—in fact, few in the nation had thought he would. But Cromwell’s austerely Puritan son-in-law, Henry Ireton, had gained control of the army, and in December 1648 he had purged the House of Commons of MPs who might vote against the execution. In the following month, more than a hundred additional members absented themselves from Westminster to avoid being involved in the show trial of the king, thus creating what was later derisively known as the “Rump” Parliament of about eighty members, the remains of the Long Parliament, which stayed in power until 1653. An obscure provincial judge presided over the trial, the only one who agreed to do the job. A threadbare parliamentary quorum signed the execution order.

  The darkness of the manor vault thickens with a swirl of snow, and I hear the lapping of river water. In an early February storm, oarsmen bend their backs to row a barge, laden with the royal corpse, up the Thames for a hasty and secret burial by night under the floor of St. George’s Chapel at Windsor. (The king’s head has been sewn back on.) No prayers, because parliamentary officers stop the royal chaplain from accompanying the tiny cortege into the church.

  Immediately across the Thames and far below the towering mass of Windsor Castle lies sleeping Datchet. Asleep, but hardly tranquil: as many as four thousand troops are quartered in the area with as many as twenty to forty soldiers in some houses. The castle, ancient stronghold of kings, is now Cromwell’s headquarters; his New Model Army is drilling in Windsor Great Park. The dead king’s auditor, probably concealed nearby, could not have missed the telling reversal.

  On this night, the surrounding landscape is picked out in snow. An owl in flight looks down on the clustered village of Datchet and its gabled manor house, the farms with their gates, hedges, and enclosed gardens, the rough common shared by all, the open fields striped light and dark in fallow, stubble, and plow. (Every year the authorities stake the bounds of each strip.) He swoops over the hairy blackness of the Great Park where the king and his court hunted fallow deer and villagers are permitted to gather fallen forest branches for firewood. He soars above the Thames, bordered by rich water meadows that are harvested according to specified haying rights.

  Everything that makes Datchet home for thirteen-year-old Grizzell is bounded and parceled out according to laws, rights, duties, privileges, customs, and feudal endowments. (The same will be true on Shelter Island, but the Manhansetts’ practices will be unfamiliar to the colonists, and often misunderstood and abused.) On this February night, she lies in her Datchet bed, unconscious of the final act of the drama taking place, although by now she undoubtedly is aware of King Charles’s beheading. Pillowed in family and the familiar, Grizzell has no idea that she will soon leave home.

  “The Said Anne”

  “Mr. Auditor” Thomas Brinley had last been recorded doing royal business in April 1641, when
he certified the receipt of some £67 or so in fines levied on the queen’s properties in Yorkshire. Fifty years old, this diligent royal servant found his world beginning to crack. He continued going about his business amid news of money shortages, discontented troops, and the movement of horses and wagons already preparing for a fight. But by 1644, after Thomas’s job had vanished and his close connection to the crown made him suspect, it was clear he could lose everything he had worked for. His income as auditor has been estimated as £600 annually, or £55,000 (about $100,000) in current money.

  By then, having “just cause to be very apprehensive of the danger of the tymes,” he and his wife, Anne, turned to a successful merchant with trade interests in Europe and Virginia, John Bland. It was “the said Anne,” not Thomas, who “did repaire to the Complainant [Bland] & acquaint him with some parte of her feares.” “Shee or her servant” asked him to entrust “some money [an initial £400] for the benefit of her said children in the hand of some friend beyond the seas” so that “whatever might happen to these defendants … the said children might have somewhat wherewith to subsist.”

  The money was invested for them in Spain, Bland stated, and over the next several years, the Brinleys made further investments that realized returns. But in 1649, according to the court case, the connection turned sour when the Brinleys sought to draw out £200 “to be given as the marriage portion of their daughter,” probably Anne, who married Governor William Coddington of Rhode Island in January 1650, a year after the death of the king. (Marriage portions were probably uppermost in the Brinleys’ minds: their boys would be able to take care of themselves, but the girls had to have respectable funds to marry well.)

  Bland countered that the Brinleys had illegally sent their funds abroad to evade seizure and charged Anne’s brother, William Wase, with laundering the couple’s money. Most dangerous of Bland’s allegations, given the political climate, was that Anne had accused Laurence Brinley, Thomas’s brother, of becoming “a very unkinde brother [who] would destroy” Thomas and Anne and “any of theire estate yt he could seize on.” Laurence, a London merchant, was by this time active in the Commonwealth cause.

  In court, Anne stoutly denied “that she did desire ill in respect of any unkindnesse of Laurence.” She dealt with her brother William’s involvement by saying that he was not called in to cover her tracks (a doubtful statement), but as trustee for his nieces and nephews. Wase himself testified that he had brought the case on the Brinleys’ behalf to force Bland to produce the marriage portion. Anne was not the only wife to take charge during the war; many capable women did the same, managing estates and family while their husbands fought. But in an era when married women generally could not own property or speak publicly, that women like Anne stood up in place of men is proof of desperate times. Whatever the outcome of the case, enough money appears to have been salvaged from the wreck to provide funds for Anne and Grizzell in the New World.

  Cromwell’s total victory was not long in coming. In early September 1651, Charles II, who had been hastily crowned in Scotland five days after his father’s execution, commanded his troops at Worcester, where the Royalists went down in final defeat. Charles made a daring escape, hiding overnight in an oak tree near the hunting lodge of Boscobel, in Shropshire, then fleeing across England. After a month of desperate concealment, on October 15 he sailed to France on a coal boat, and into nine years of European exile. Could Thomas have been part of the circle that accompanied Charles abroad to form an unhappy, peripatetic shadow court? An American genealogical researcher who thoroughly examined the records in the early twentieth century for Cornelia Horsford found no trace of Thomas on the Continent.

  It is true that after Charles II came to the throne in May 1660 he promptly reappointed Thomas to his old position at the Exchequer, but Thomas did not regain most of the lands that had been confiscated under the Commonwealth. Perhaps the new regime didn’t value his services enough to aid him; more likely Thomas’s grant holdings in the north had been seized by the Commonwealth and sold to pay off its enormous war debt. The king, ruling a barely reunited nation, would have been reluctant to press new owners to return properties they had purchased only to give them to a former Royalist supporter. Or maybe Thomas, dead within eighteen months of Charles’s coronation, had too little time to press for reparation.

  * * *

  The Civil War’s larger-than-life antagonists fill history’s screen: battling, bleeding, dying or escaping death, enduring mutilation and imprisonment for their religious beliefs and political convictions, crying out in letters, diaries, pamphlets, and prayers. Thomas and Anne flicker in and out of view. I feel an odd sympathy for this frightened, displaced pair, hiding in their own country, trying to preserve some measure of protection for their children. How nightmarish it must have been, after a lifetime of security, to make their way in a world of conflict where allegiances shifted overnight, inviting treachery, denunciation, imprisonment, or worse: where a troop of horses could blow over the hill or onto the end of the street, borne on the winds of religious fanaticism and greed for plunder. The monarchy—an institution that had endured for nearly seven centuries—had crashed, and with it the Brinley family. Thomas and Anne had played by the old rules, but now they faced a new harsh order.

  My Loving Brother

  Fortunately for his brother Thomas, Laurence was a moderate Presbyterian, a powerful layman in his influential London church and a steady supporter of the efforts to remove (but not execute) the king. As events turned out, this was exactly the right kind of Protestant to be during the unsteady twenty years from 1641 to 1660. As such, he was at the forefront of the political struggle to control Parliament in the winter of 1641–42. It is probably thanks to Laurence that Thomas later met with more lenient treatment than others equally close to the crown, and even retained some of his assets.

  By the end of 1650, Cromwell commanded England and was on his way to crushing resistance in Scotland and Ireland. Thomas Brinley’s connections were useless as a means to advance his children. It was time to make new alliances. Laurence stepped in. He probably helped Anne and Grizzell get a start in life after the loss of Thomas’s post and estate by reaching out to the Atlantic community of Puritan merchants and colonizers such as Matthew Craddock and Samuel Vassall, to which the Sylvesters also belonged. The early 1650s marked the zenith of New England’s Puritan confidence and power as godly colonists. They were breathing easy. They flexed their muscles, hardened by years of iron determination, since Laud’s persecutions began, to see every event as deserved punishment or reward doled out by an inscrutable but just Lord God. Looking around them in the new clear light of vindicated righteousness, they viewed the Commonwealth as God’s reward and welcomed it as their own.

  William Coddington had arrived in New England in 1630 as one of the first colonists of the Massachusetts Bay Company, founded in England as a trading company in 1629. (He was thus known to Craddock and Samuel Vassall, both founding partners of the Company.) The Bay Colony’s fourth-richest citizen, and the colony’s treasurer until a break with Massachusetts’s religious policy forced him out in 1638, he left Massachusetts for Rhode Island, where he prospered. In 1649, Coddington sailed back to London in search of a new charter for Rhode Island that would put him in control of the colony, and a new (third) wife. He stayed for three years, reveling in the new freedoms for Puritans like himself, and running into old friends such as Stephen Winthrop, brother of Governor John Winthrop Jr. of Connecticut. Laurence Brinley must have seen the bluff Rhode Islander as an excellent catch for his niece, Anne, in the new dispensation. She was then about twenty-four years old, and he twice that, not unusual in the day of serial wives, due mostly to their death in childbirth. They were married in January 1650 in Datchet.

  Grizzell, at most fifteen and a half years old and now almost a woman of marriageable age, set sail for America with the Coddingtons and their infant son sometime before June 1651. Our final view of Thomas comes from a phrase in Gri
zzell’s will. She describes “my loving Brother in Law Mr. William Coddington of Road Island to whose care and custody I was committed by my father Mr. Thomas Brinley at my departure from him.” As the father entrusted his two girls to this robust Puritan so different from himself and said goodbye, he and his daughters must have understood that they might never see one another again. Thomas was seventy when he died in Datchet in November 1661. (Grizzell went back to England that year, accompanied by Nathaniel—her first visit home in ten years—but it is not certain that she arrived before the death of her father.) The phrases of his will tell us he died faithful to the Church of England.

  Four Brinley children out of the brood of twelve—Francis and William, Anne and Grizzell—crossed the Atlantic to find new lives. Anne and Grizzell’s migration and their marriages to men whose politics and beliefs were so unlike Thomas’s bear striking testimony to the English political shakeup. Anne Wase Brinley, so intrepid and outspoken in protecting her children and their interests in 1650, suffered little but sickness and loss as the years passed. She wrote from London four years after Thomas’s death to her “sonne Francis” in Rhode Island about the death of his sister Rose in England. Reflecting on her children, she lamented that “I have but them two now left in old England to bee a comfort to mee.” She was old, she was ill— “I have kept my chamber all this winter and doe at this present writing … think [I am] in a consumtion [tuberculosis] for all my flesh is gone from mee & I think I shall never write to you more.” Not quite true—she would last another five years. But she would never see the constellation of children who, in another time, might have clustered around her in her old age, in her own house.

  8

  “TIME OF LONGING”