Nobleman – Abingdon on Thames Town Council

James Bertie, Earl of Abingdon, by Sir Geoffrey Kneller

James Bertie, 1st Earl of Abingdon

James Bertie, who would be the first Earl of Abingdon, was born in 1653. He was a younger son of the second Earl of Lindsey, so would not inherit the title. His mother Bridget, the earl’s second wife, was a descendant of an Earl of Berkshire, but that title had become extinct for lack of male heirs. However, the Earl of Berkshire had simultaneously held a barony which could descend through the female line. Thus, when Bridget died in 1657 the young James became the fifth Baron Norreys of Rycote. He was owner of extensive properties in Oxfordshire and Berkshire; the main ones were at Wytham and Rycote. In adulthood, he would make Rycote his principal residence.

A half-sister of James was married to an important politician under Charles II, the Earl of Danby. It was a time of vicious, sometimes literally deadly, political conflict. In 1674, Danby made James, although scarcely of age, Lord Lieutenant of Oxfordshire with the remit of bringing the strongly Whig city of Oxford under Tory control. This he achieved over time by merciless harassment of the leading Whig councillors, bringing trumped-up lawsuits against them, ruining their businesses, and forcing a surrender of their charter. He promised that a new charter would increase the city’s liberties against the customary outrageous and humiliating demands of the university. To his chagrin, the university refused to give way. However, he did manage to position himself as the city’s defender, and finished in 1687 by being made its High Steward.

He held no official position in Abingdon, since it had the Earl of Clarendon as its High Steward, and his own authority was nominally restricted to Oxfordshire. Nonetheless, he intervened actively in its internal politics, using a Tory corporation member, George Winchurst, as his agent. This resulted in 1684 in the surrender of the town’s 1663 charter and the issue of a new one that brought in outsiders as magistrates and gave the central government additional powers to control membership of the Corporation. Clarendon seems to have acquiesced. The new charter would, however, be abrogated in 1688.

In 1681, Charles II, in pursuit of his political agenda, called a parliament to sit in Oxford, far from the Whig pressures of London. Bertie organised the event, and later in the year managed the legal proceedings against the Whig activist, Stephen Colledge. This was a high profile case, intended to frighten and demoralise the Whigs. Bertie hand-picked the jury, put his brother Henry on it as foreman, and used the notorious Edmund Warcup to recruit and rehearse a team of ‘witnesses’ to a totally imaginary crime of treason. Colledge was duly condemned and executed. Bertie at that point achieved his earldom, and there were civic celebrations in Abingdon when it emerged that he had chosen that town for his title.

James II invited the Earl to become Catholic, and dismissed him from all his functions when he refused. When the future William III invaded in 1688, the Earl of Abingdon was the first important British nobleman to desert to his camp. Nonetheless, he seems to have been slow to realise that William intended to seize the crown, and in the crucial division in the House of Lords voted that the throne was not vacant. This lost him credit with the new regime, but he made his submission and his career continued.

Bertie married Eleanora Lee in about 1672. They had five children. When his wife died in 1691, he commissioned John Dryden, the poet laureate, to compose an elegiac poem in her memory. It was a purely business arrangement; the poet had never met the lady. The product was notable as being probably the worst poem Dryden ever wrote, in almost 400 lines of mechanical rhyming couplets. The Earl remarried, but died in 1699 without further offspring.

The first Earl of Abingdon was never High Steward of the town. His son Montague succeeded him as second earl and as High Steward of Oxford and Wallingford, but had to wait for Clarendon’s death in 1709 to take up the office in Abingdon. He would later add Banbury to his patronage list, and had an active political career which included switching from the Tory to the Whig benches. From 1709, the high stewardship of Abingdon would be inherited with the earldom, as it still is today.

© AAAHS and contributors 2015

Willoughby Bertie (seated) as a composer.

Willoughby Bertie, 4th Earl of Abingdon

Willoughby Bertie became fourth Earl of Abingdon on the death of his father, also Willoughby, in 1760 and was made High Steward of Abingdon and of Wallingford in the same year.

He was an active radical politician, who as a young man had gone in company with the then outlawed John Wilkes to visit Voltaire, the great figurehead of advanced Enlightenment politics, in Geneva. His political opinions seem unexceptionable today but were regarded as outrageous by his contemporaries. He strongly opposed the war against the American colonies, taking the view that Parliament was acting outside its legal powers in seeking to justify taxation without representation, and that this might lead to a parliamentary tyranny in Britain as it had in America. He took a similar position on British rule in Ireland. His effectiveness as a politician was always limited; he was too principled to join with others and too undiplomatic to make tactical alliances, and was often regarded as eccentric rather than serious.

Bertie was a notable musician. He played the flute, and was a prolific and skilful composer and song writer. About 150 of his compositions are extant. Some works were joint productions between himself and Haydn. He was patron of a series of concerts in London, on which he lost a large amount of money. A painting of him by J F Rigaud (shown above as a print) depicts him in the act of composition.

In Abingdon, he was active in local politics, supporting Whig candidates at the hustings. At his accession, he presented the Corporation with two valuable silver bowls and ladles, and in 1788 he made a gift of his accumulated fees as High Steward which were sufficient to pay for the culverting of the Stert Stream from the end of Broad Street to the Vineyard.

An enthusiastic huntsman and horse breeder, Bertie was very probably one of the backers of the Abingdon Races, which began in 1767 at Culham Heath; certainly, he opened the dancing at the ball given on the occasion, and served as a steward of the course in the following year.

In 1768 Bertie married Susanne Warren, daughter and co-heiress of a wealthy naval officer with interests both in England and America, but this did not save him from severe financial difficulties which had their origin in debts inherited from his father. He had to withdraw from the turf and sell off the furnishings of his seat at Rycote (near Thame). He died, bankrupt, in 1799, and his third and only surviving son, Montague Bertie, succeeded at the age of fifteen to the earldom, to the High Stewardship of Abingdon, and to his debts. Successive Earls of Abingdon have continued to be High Stewards of the town to this day.

© AAAHS and contributors 2015

William Knollys

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.

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