The Mainwarings
Ashmole recorded in his diary18 that on 27 March 1638 :
I was married to Eleanor Manwaring eldest daughter to Mr Peter Mainwaring (and Jane his wife) of Smalewood in Com'Cest : gent: She proved a virtuous and good wife. The marriage was in St. Benets Church neere Paules wharfe by Mr : Adams Parson there.
While it seems that the couple had met in London (where Ashmole was soliciting in Chancery), Eleanor seems to have spent most of her short married life at her father's house at Smallwood. Ashmole visited regularly and got to know the area and her (extensive) family, in which he took a keen interest.19 From the point of view of social status, Ashmole's marriage was a ‘step-up’ in the world. While his grandfather Thomas Ashmole (d.11 Jan. 1620) had been senior bailiff of the City & County of Lichfield, Elias's father had had to make ends meet by working as a saddler. Ashmole's new father-in-law, though relatively poor compared to other gentry families in Cheshire, did struggle to live off his small estate and was part of what had been, since the Norman Conquest, and still was, one of the most significant and wealthy families of Cheshire (with a significant branch at Whitmore, three miles south of Keele in Staffordshire). His wealthiest relatives owned the estate of Peover Superior, amongst other lands in Cheshire, and lived only eight miles to the north of Smallwood.
In 1641 plague broke out in the town of Congleton near Astbury, two miles from Smallwood. From the home of William Laplove, the plague, which had engulfed most of his family, spread about Astbury, the parish records showing that almost 300 people of that village died in this terrible year. Ashmole recorded in his diary that between the fifth and sixth of December 164120 :
My deare wife fell sodainely sick about evening and died (to my owne great Griefe and the griefe of all her freinds) the next night about 9 o'clock.
On the 8 December 1641 :
She was buried in Astbury church in Cheshire neere the entrance of the south Isle of that Church. viz. the West end of that isle : Manwarings of Smalewood buried in west end of north isle.21
In fact, Ashmole, who was in London while all this was going on, did not hear of his wife's death until he got to Lichfield on 16 December. By the time he reached Smallwood, she had already been interred. On a freezing cold January morning (16 Jan. 1642 - twelve days after Charles I went to the Commons to arrest Pym, Hampden, Hazelrigg, Strode and Holles), Ashmole finally felt able to visit his wife's grave. Although he would marry twice more, Ashmole's memory of Eleanor never dimmed, but was kept alive in his heart through regular visits to his in-laws of whom he was fond22. When he made the decision to be initiated a Free Mason in 1646, he travelled to the lodge up the Warrington road (which the Smallwood lane meets at the western end of the hamlet) with Colonel Henry Mainwaring, Eleanor's cousin, who lived four miles away at Karincham23 where his father had been born, the fifth son of Henry Mainwaring. Not much more than a year after Ashmole stepped out of the porch of S. Mary's Astbury on that cold and bitter morning, Sir William Brereton's Roundheads - who were beseiging Biddulph Hall (which was holding out for the King24)-would stable their horses in Astbury church, smash all of the medieval stained-glass, and carry the organ and pre-Reformation furniture to a field and burn the lot. Tumultuous events were on the horizon of Ashmole's life, as they were for the country at large. When things went badly for the Royalist cause (after Naesby in 1645), Ashmole would return again to the Staffordshire-Cheshire border to regain his footing; he had roots there.
As Ashmole stepped down from Astbury cemetery to the village square, he would have passed two unusual medieval tombs - canopied tombs outside a church are not a common sight. There lay the bodies of the knight Richard de Venables de Newbold (circa 1342) and of William de Venables, rector of Astbury in the late thirteenth century. An earlier William de Venables, along with Roger de Mein-warin25 (Mainwaring) witnessed Ranulphus earl of Chester's instruction to his barons regarding the founding of Dieulacres abbey (1214). In fact, Ashmole was a distant relative of the Venables family, as was his first wife, Eleanor Mainwaring. Eleanor's forebear, Margery Mainwaring, was the daughter of Hugh Venables, baron of Kinderton and, according to Thomas Mainwaring (1656)26, it was Margery who erected the unusual chapel at the church of S. Lawrence, Upper Peover, over her husband Randle Mainwaring's tomb; Sir Randle (known as Handekyn the Good) died in 1456. Around his helmet is inscribed the motto of the order “Jesu the Nazarene”, an order which I have been unable to trace.
The church of Upper Peover is a treasure-house of Mainwaring remains27, such as the magnificently carved effigies of Randle and Margery's eldest son, Sir John Mainwaring, and his wife Joan. These, like the effigy of Sir William Mainwaring (dated 1399) at Acton church were carved by freemasons out of alabaster. There were alabaster quarries in Derbyshire (Chelleston), in east Staffordshire and near Tutbury, thirteen miles south-east of Ashbourne. Also within S. Lawrence's there are fine alabaster monumental slabs to John Mainwaring, knight (d.1515) and his wife Katherine, who died in 1529. The Mainwarings seem to have enjoyed a longstanding relationship with fine sculptors - freemasons - from the Middle Ages right into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This relationship extended to building.
In 1225, Earl Ranulphus of Chester (founder of Dieulacres), fellow knight of crusading Mainwarings, began building Beeston Castle, possibly designed by Ranulphus himself. The Earl had been in Egypt for two years, hearing at first hand of the crusader castles of Palestine and Syria with their sophisticated defences. Beeston has been compared to Sahyoun in Syria. It was innovative. Unfinished at his death in 1232, the castle was taken over by Henry III whose son Edward I strengthened the castle in major works in 1303/4, known from accounts kept by the king's officials (vol. 59 Lancs. & Cheshire Records Society. 1910). The cost of the masons' work, including metalwork, amounted to £38. In charge of the masons working at the castle was Master Warin. The name is suggestive. The Mainwarings were descended from a Norman family who derived their name from the River Guarenne or Varenne and the small town of that name near Arques in Normandy. The name was anglicised to Warenne or Warren and often Warin. The name Mein-warin appears frequently in the records of medieval Cheshire. Mein refers to the house of the Warin family, that is to say Upper Peover.
Six miles north of Upper Peover (on land given by the Conqueror to the Venables family) is that church's mother church of Rostherne, some six miles south-east of Warrington (where Ashmole was initiated in October 1646). In 1578 an arbitration award was made to Thomas Legh against Sir Randle Mainwaring who had claimed possession of the Legh chapel in Rostherne church. According to Raymond Richards28 : “The Legh Chapel at Rostherne stood ruinous in the sixteenth century for want of glass, [and] Sir Randle Mainwaring repaired it at his own expense,” assuming possession for himself and his family “only to be turned out by Thomas Legh”. The passion for building continued. In 1585 the stately home of Peover was completed and still stands, unspoilt, in the midst of Peover Park, overlooking the church of S. Lawrence.29
In 1647, Philip Mainwaring, knight for the Parliamentarian cause, died, and his wife Ellen built the north chapel of Upper Peover to house a magnificently preserved effigy of her husband in armour, and later herself (she died in 1656). Ellen greatly assisted Cromwell with money and influence (local legend has it that Cromwell's troops were frequently billeted in Upper Peover church) but this did not stop the Protestant vandals of the Protectorate period from cutting off her praying hands which, raised upwards on her effigy, were taken as signs of Romish religion by the ignorant. In 1644, while Ashmole was in Oxford trying to get Parliament to pressure the governor of Lichfield into surrendering excise monies, Philip Mainwaring received a letter from Charles I (based that September at Chester), addressed to “Our trusty and well beloved Philip Maynwaringe”, expressing concern that Mainwaring was “ill affected to us and our sayd service” and that if he should “answer the contrary”, travel across the country would be “at your utmost peril”. Philip stayed with Parliament, as did all the fig
hting-age Mainwarings of whom we have knowledge. There is no record of Ashmole's regarding the Mainwaring's disloyalty to the person of Charles I with censure. Perhaps there was something in him which he felt to be above such partisan concerns. In the lodge to which he would be fraternally bound he encountered a Roman Catholic, an Anglican, a Parliamentarian and himself : a Royalist. A man who could stomach the desecration of a church where his wife lay buried, by associates of his friends was clearly very broad-minded or unusually capable of being in two minds - but then, for Elias (whose motto was Ex Uno Omnia ) - the Hermetic philosophy united all phenomena, no matter how heart-breaking. Certainly his political position in this instance was enigmatic; Ashmole was an enigma - most of all, probably, to himself.
It is now clear that while freemasons were undoubtedly to be found in the moorlands of Staffordshire, as Dr Plot correctly asserted, and while Ashmole might have been accepted among their number, it was the connection with the mainly Cheshire-based30 Mainwaring family which provided set and setting for Ashmole's initiation.
On 16 October 1646, Elias Ashmole accompanied his cousin by marriage, Col. Henry Mainwaring on the road north to Warrington, and to Free Masonry.
Warrington - what happened?
The short answer to this question is that we don't know. However, we can partially fill the void thanks to Norman Rogers' investigations, published in 1952 in the Transactions of Quatuor Coronati Lodge (vol. 65). Rogers investigated the names of those who appeared in Ashmole's short reference to his initiation in 1646, and it is clear from Rogers' work that the Warrington lodge, whether occasional or not, was largely made up of landed gentlemen from the borders of north Cheshire and south Lancashire : mostly Royalists and a significant number from families with traditions of faithfulness to the ‘old religion’, ie : Catholicism. It is clear that the contact for Ashmole came through the Mainwaring family and that family's connections with gentry (and probably craftsmen) to the north of the old County Palatine of Chester. Why Warrington?
If, as seems most likely, Ashmole's reference to “Mr. Rich Penket Worden” means that Richard Penket was Warden of the lodge (he is mentioned first), then the Penket family-name may give us a clue. In 1407, a Friar Thomas Penketh (d.1487 : one of the Penkeths who held lands from the lords of Warrington, the Boteler (Butler) family) lived at the Priory of S. Augustine, Warrington (suppressed under Henry VIII). We see here a suggestive connection between gentleman-landowners and the monastic system which we have seen among the Mainwarings and in Staffordshire. (Many relics of the Warrington monastery can be seen in the Warrington Museum). Shakespeare mentions a Friar Penketh, Provincial of his Order, who supported Richard of York against Edward V (Richard III, Act III, Sc.5). The Penkeths also patronised the church of Farnworth, to the west of Warrington, and it is now clear that it was the ecclesiastical world which provided the chief medium of contact between gentlemen and operative freemasons. For example, MS Ashmole, 1, 125, f.11v-12v contains the copy of an indenture made between the Lord Steward, Lord Chamberlayn, and Sir Thomas Lovell (on behalf of King Charles II) and the Knights of the Garter, and the “fre-masons” John Hylmer and William Vertue, specifying work for the Choir of Windsor Chapel : roof-vaulting and ornamenting with “archebocens, crestys, corses and the Kinges bestes.” This kind of work did not come cheaply, and Rogers seems to this author to be quite wrong in thinking that the Richard Ellom of Lymm, co. Chester (close to Warrington, and quite possibly the Richard Ellam present at the Warrington Lodge of 1646) whose will (7 September 1667) describes him plainly as a “freemason”, is unlikely to have been an ‘operative’ due to the fact that his will reveals he had lands to dispose of in a gentlemanly fashion. Rogers seems to be locked into rather Victorian attitudes to ‘trade’, as well as being surprised that Catholicism played such a part in most of the families mentioned at Ashmole's initiation. Who but the adherents of the old religion would have the greatest concern with old family chapels &c. and their ornamentation? Puritans, and Protestants generally, devalued (at best) the physical representations of God's houses. Rogers makes the point that Ashmole was one exception to the generally Catholic background of the lodge, being “attached” to the Church of England, without realising fully that it was the (for many, welcome) re-catholicisation of the Anglican church ritual under Archbishop Laud which did so much to spark the Civil War in the first place. For men such as Ashmole, the Church of England was not a Protestant Church, but the old (if reformed) church under the King.
Rogers, in a now established tradition of masonic scholarship, confuses the issue by being at pains to demonstrate that the Warrington lodge was “speculative”. The use of this word is demonstrably out of context in the seventeenth century. Warrington was a lodge of principally Accepted Free Masons, almost certainly working an operative (ie : traditional) ritual : an old interest of old landed families with private interests in the ‘old religion’. It may have been only a part of a larger body, separated for the purpose of initiating gentlemen, or, as stated before, a micro-association formed by accepted Free Masons for their own purposes.
As regards the particular Richard Penket whom Ashmole encountered, Warrington and Farnworth parish records mention a large number of persons of that name for the period, and we cannot be sure which of them was involved in the initiation of Ashmole and Colonel Henry Mainwaring. While Rogers gives copious information about the other brethren present at the 1646 lodge, it is sufficient for our purposes to note that the Littlers were of a gentle Cheshire family, that the Sankeys of Great and Little Sankey held lands - like the Penkeths - from the Boteler (Butler) family, that one of the Ellams, Richard, may have been an operative freemason, that Hugh Brewer may have been the man of Lancashire yeoman stock who distinguished himself as a Sergeant-Major in Lord Derby's Royalist regiment of horse (the burial of a Hugh Brewer is recorded in Warrington parish church records on 29 May 1658) and that Mr. James Collier may have been the James Collier of Newton, gentleman, reported in a certificate taken by Randle Holme (Deputye to the Office of Armes) who, on 3 June 1640 - at the age of 32 - married the Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Edward Stanley of Bickerstaffe, Lancashire, whose grandfather was Sir Randle Mainwaring of Peover - a relative of Colonel Henry Mainwaring, and distantly thereby, of Elias Ashmole himself. (Record Society of Lancs. & Ches., Lancashire Funeral Certificates, Vol vi, p.207). Whether or not this was the man, it seems likely that the James Collier of the Warrington Lodge did come from Newton and was a Royalist.
So, having encountered Messrs. Brewer, Littler, Ellam, Collier, Penket and Sankey, what did Ashmole and Mainwaring undergo in pursuit of initiation? The balance of current scholarly opinion is of the view that only two degrees were worked in the seventeenth century : entered apprentice (‘interprintice’) and ‘fellow crafte’. There was, as far as we know, no third degree (nor any reference to the Hiramic legend), and one appears to have been called a ‘master’ on fulfilling that particular role in the lodge. In short, an accepted fellow craft was effectively a master (there being no further degree). When recording a lodge-summons to Mason's Hall in London, (an operative establishment, note), Ashmole described himself as the ‘Senior Fellow’ in attendance on Sir William Wilson's (and others') initiation. It may be that ‘master mason’ was a term more used of a fine sculptor or architect after he had undergone a seven-year apprenticeship and become a fellow craft. In Ashmole's 1682 diary entry, Mr. Thomas Wise is described as Master of the Masons Company “this present year”, again suggesting that the term ‘Master’ may generally have been used of those who had undergone operative apprenticeships, and that it was used to describe an office of the operative craft. Gentlemen would naturally wish to attain the lodge's highest position of honour, without the practical apprenticeship - and this honour would be encapsulated in the term ‘fellow craft’ or, simply, ‘Fellow’, suitable for a fellowship. Gentlemen would, presumably, already have undergone a gentleman's education - unlikely in the case of practical apprentices. Their education was in the hands
of fellow crafts or masters. However, it is still worth considering that Wilson was initiated when already a practising sculptor and architect. Why had he not been initiated before? Had accepted masons created some kind of development of the operative system, or was it that Wilson had been trained as a mason outside of restricted ‘freemason’ circles with their particular rites of passage? The surprising answer to this question will emerge in the section on the London Masons Company later in this chapter.
Symbolic association with the idea of Free Masonry seems to have been what counted to gentlemen who entered the ‘mystery’ (skill) of the ancient craft - an association doubtless welcome to practical masons, since these gentlemen were generally in a position to commission work. The monasteries had gone, and most churches and chapels existed under private gentry patronage. House-building and ornamentation constituted another source of freemasons' income. Gentlemen could enjoy the grafting of traditional symbolism and geometrical craft into the very bosom of their habitations : another way, perhaps, of continuing the traditional religious attitudes (which frequently included classical, traditional or ‘pagan’ themes of one kind or another) of perhaps happier pre-Reformation days. It should be borne in mind that Protestant religious practices and attitudes were imposed on the English people by act of Parliament and the aggression of iconoclasts, where that is, there was no local enthusiasm for Protestantism. (Now that the state no longer enforces religious uniformity, many people in England have returned to ways and thoughts to which the zealous Puritan would have responded with faggots and fire). Gentlemen, then as now, valued privacy and necessary secrecy. The operative freemasons had, unwittingly perhaps, created the ideal gentlemens' club-format : a place (and the ‘lodge’ was almost an imaginary place) to get away from current religious and political strife and where one could be immersed in more ancient ideals and tried certainties : on the square.
The Golden Builders Page 28