Courtier – Abingdon on Thames Town Council

The Knollys family, based at Rotherfield Greys near Henley, were pre-eminent in Berkshire and Oxfordshire through much of the sixteenth century, and remained powerful and influential well into the seventeenth. William Knollys (c. 1545-1632) was High Steward of Abingdon from 1601 until his death. It was he who secured for the town the two important charter revisions of 1610 which improved the status of its courts, added certain properties to its endowment, and granted it additional fairs and markets as sources of income.

The Knollyses are especially interesting as a gentry family that rose to power and authority in the time of Queen Elizabeth, was ennobled, but then declined largely through a lack of male heirs.

Their rise started in 1540, when Francis Knollys (?1512-97), a courtier of Henry VIII, married Catherine Carey, a first cousin of the future Queen Elizabeth I. After Elizabeth’s accession he became an active parliamentarian, managing the interests of the Crown in the House of Commons. From 1563 until his death, he was a fixture as knight of the shire for Oxfordshire. He was High Steward of Oxford from 1564 to 1592 and joint Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire and Berkshire from 1585. In about 1575 he rebuilt Greys Court in the latest architectural fashion.

Greys Court
(Photo by Simon of Reading, Wikimedia Commons)

Francis Knollys had seven sons and four daughters and it was to ensure places and functions for them that he worked hard on his regional interests. William shadowed his father in his court and parliamentary functions and succeeded him in them at his death. He cemented his regional authority by accumulating the high stewardships of towns: Reading, Banbury, Wallingford, Abingdon.

William was born as a second son and would not have thought it important to have an heir. In 1573, he married Dorothy Brydges, a widow much older than himself and past childbearing age. But his older brother died in 1582 and the situation changed. In the 1590s, he openly courted Mary Fitton, a young maid of honour to the queen, with the promise of marrying her to legitimise their children when his wife died. She refused him but became pregnant by another man, and there was considerable amusement at his expense at court.

His wife died in 1605. By then, William was Baron Knollys of Greys, and approaching sixty. He incautiously chose for his second marriage Elizabeth Howard, a teenaged daughter of the Earl of Suffolk. The Howard family was renowned for the beauty, but less so for the virtue, of its women who, furthermore, were Catholic. His new connection certainly brought advantages. His influence at court increased, he became Master of the Court of Wards which was highly lucrative, and in 1616 was promoted to be Viscount Wallingford. But the only child of the marriage was a daughter who did not survive.

The position of the Howards depended on Robert Carr, Earl of Somerset, a favourite of James I. Carr was the husband of Elizabeth’s sister Frances who had had her first marriage – incidentally, to a grandson of William’s sister Lettice – annulled on dubious allegations of impotence. In 1616 the couple were sensationally accused and convicted of the murder of another courtier, Sir Thomas Overbury, who had opposed their alliance. The king was shamed, and reacted forcefully. The case brought about a power shift at court: the Howards fell along with Carr, and William, though not directly involved, fell with them. It was probably little consolation when the king assured him that his only fault was in his choice of a wife.

William lost the Court of Wards amid accusations of mismanagement and was no longer welcome at court. For the rest of his life he concentrated on his regional responsibilities. It was for his local success in raising government loans that in 1626 Charles I made him Earl of Banbury. Because of his advanced age and lack of an heir, it was deemed safe to give his earldom precedence over other recently created ones. Unfortunately, Elizabeth soon after produced two sons in quick succession. It was understood that their father was Edward Vaux, a childhood friend whom she would marry immediately after William’s death. The children could legally call themselves the second and, after the early death of the elder son, the third Earl of Banbury, but would never be admitted to the House of Lords.

William had meanwhile chosen a nephew, Robert (1589-1659), as his effective successor. Robert was the son of his younger brother Richard, resident at Stanford-in-the-Vale. He was knighted in 1613. By William’s influence as high sheriff and regional magnate, he represented Abingdon in Parliament four times, was once a knight of the shire for Berkshire and once a burgess for Wallingford. Unlike his forbears, he was almost totally inactive in parliament. He offered his services to Abingdon at the election of April 1640, after his uncle’s death, and was politely turned down. But it was Robert who received Rotherfield Greys as a gift from his uncle to ensure that Elizabeth’s offspring would not inherit.

Other members of the Knollys family remained active. William’s brother Francis and his son, also Francis, sat for Reading in the parliament that fought the civil war. The younger died in 1643; the older held his seat until his death in 1648, at the age of 96. A son of Robert Knollys of Rotherfield Greys was briefly knight of the shire for Oxfordshire after the restoration, but died in 1664. The family thereafter ceases to be prominent in the historical record.

© AAAHS and contributors 2017

(Note that there are numerous spellings of Wellesbourne’s name)

When, in February 1538, Henry VIII’s ministers dissolved Abingdon Abbey, they realised that they would need a representative resident in the town. The man they chose was the courtier John Wellesbourne, a Gentleman of the Privy Chamber, in which role he was a close companion and intimate body servant of the king.

Wellesbourne was a Buckinghamshire man, born in or about 1498. In the early 1530s a connection with Abingdon was established through his brother Oliver who worked as a bailiff on abbey estates in the region and who had married an Abingdon woman, Joan Humfrey. John Wellesbourne was mentioned as a friend of the abbot. The brothers jointly held property at Culham.

On his arrival at the time of the dissolution, Wellesbourne had first to oversee the demolition of the abbey buildings and to help the ex-abbot and his senior monks settle into retirement at Cumnor. But his function thereafter was essentially that of an estate steward: he had to maintain and if possible to improve the property, and he had to deal appropriately with the tenants for whom he was the direct representative of the landlord. The property included the town of Abingdon, the neighbouring manors, and the river both up- and downstream of Abingdon with rights to fishing and fowling. The tenants included the populations of Abingdon and the outlying villages. The landlord, of course, was now the king. Wellesbourne’s position in the king’s Privy Chamber added legitimacy to his representative role.

Wellesbourne’s duties as a steward do not seem to have been too onerous. His way of safeguarding the property was to take leases on much of it in his own name; this especially concerned the river, fisheries and mills. He made use of Oliver who found his bailiff functions expanding greatly and was referred to as ‘the king’s friend’. As the king’s representative, John Wellesbourne kept open house in the way that feudal lords had been expected to do. One of the criticisms of the monasteries was that they no longer practised the tradition of indiscriminate hospitality, although this was becoming generally obsolete. Wellesbourne provided daily six or eight ‘messes’ – tables for four people – which cost him £7 a week. He could report to Thomas Cromwell that ‘the town and country say they were never better contented than now’, and added ‘they have cause’.

It is not clear how much time Wellesbourne actually spent in Abingdon; he sat in the parliament of 1539-40, he had his own estates at Mixbury and Fulwell in Oxfordshire to look after, and in his correspondence continually pleads to return to his duties in the Chamber. In 1544, the king planned an invasion of France and Wellesbourne answered the call for soldiers, raising a force of 80 billmen and 20 archers. Many richer men did no more. His reward was to be knighted by the king before the walls of Boulogne.

Henry VIII died in November 1547 and his Chamber was dissolved. Wellesbourne seems already to have been ill, and died in the following April.

In 1546, Wellesbourne had made what seems to have been a shotgun marriage to a local woman, Elizabeth Lawrence of Fulwell, who was within two months of giving birth to their first child, John. A second son, Edward, followed within a year. There was also an illegitimate son, Arthur, apparently a few years older, whom Elizabeth was enjoined in her husband’s will to bring up and educate.

John Wellesbourne comes over in his correspondence and in the details of his career as a well-meaning, amiable, but unimaginative man. He was necessarily a personage of some significance in Abingdon in the years after 1538, but it is not obvious that he did anything of importance for the development of the town and the benefit of its inhabitants. Under his stewardship, the fulling mills, on which he had a lease, fell into disrepair. An effort by a Burford businessman to set up a clothing manufacture came to nothing, and a few years after his death the buildings of the town were said to be dilapidated. But these were matters on which he had no training, aptitude, or instructions from his superiors. The best that can be said of him is that, as far as can be known, he was an honest steward who refrained from asset-stripping and left scope for the more beneficial activities of men like William Blacknall and Roger Amyce in the next generation.

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