Sir Thomas and Lady Hester gained first-hand experience of wardship in the early part of the second decade of the seventeenth century when Sir Thomas acquired the wardships of the co-heiresses to Stantonbury, Buckinghamshire, Dorothy and Mary Lee, when both were beneath the age of 14 years. The circumstances in which these wardships came to the Temples, the purpose for which they were intended and the care which Thomas and Hester accorded the wards are the main subject of this chapter.

The sale of wardships has been studied from a rather different perspective from that adopted here. Work previously focused on sales of wardships as a source of income and patronage for the crown or individuals. Historians have debated whether it was a tale of corrupt practices. There has sometimes been an emphasis on describing and sympathizing with the fate of the wards, particularly when female. However, the acquisition of wardships by the aristocracy and gentry also has to be seen as part of developing investment strategies in the age before the foundation of the Bank of England and investment in stocks.

Joel Hurstfield describes the ‘evil’ trade in wardships, which made substantial profits for agents and middlemen, but individual aristocrats and gentlemen possibly regarded specific wardships as a contribution to the family coffers, present and future. For it is equally true that the purchase of a wardship might have, and often did have, a deeply personal implication for the individual families involved. These twin strands frequently became entangled in the approach to the wards themselves.

The Temples like so many of their class had great familiarity with the system of wardships and proceedings in the court that was there to protect the interests of the wards. In 1536 Thomas Herytage I had purchased the wardship of Anthony Styrley of Styrley, Nottinghamshire from Sir Nicholas Styrley apparently in anticipation. Anthony's mother was Isabel Spencer, daughter of John Spencer I, a distant relative of the Herytages. Thomas Herytage granted the rights to this wardship to Peter Temple (1516–78) and John Palmer of London, whose money had been used to buy the wardship in the first place, on 12 November 1537. Sir Thomas Temple found evidence that his grandfather Peter had also been granted the wardship of stepdaughter Alice Ratcliffe.

Sir Thomas was sovereign in the little kingdom that was the Temple household and estate, until 1624 when he effectively surrendered much of it. He tried to cling to this position even after he handed Stowe to his son and heir. As patriarch it was Thomas who had overall authority. Any authority exercised either by his wife Hester or by other members of the family was delegated by him. According to the religious teaching of the time, all wives thus had bestowed upon them the authority to lead the household. By the 1620s it was widely accepted that whereas a married woman would normally require the implicit or explicit consent of her husband she could enter into a contract independently in cases of necessity.

The practical application of this doctrine and the assertion of power were another matter than authority or legal rights and one which conduct books did not generally address and legal rules could not control. The evidence suggests that Hester Temple had both power and influence inside and outside household and estate circles. There is little evidence that either Hester or her daughters’ movements and activities were circumscribed spatially and otherwise in the way apparent at, for example, Wollaton, Nottinghamshire in the previous reign. There are strong hints that Sir Thomas tried to exercise some control over his daughter Meg's propensity to engage in ‘business’ but, if he did so, he failed. It is impossible to tell whether this freedom was a feature of the social standing or the excess of the respective households, of family tradition, of personality, of a change through time or of the available documentation. Hester, however, does not appear ever to have followed Henry Smith's dictum of 1591 that a wife be not a street wife, like Tamar, nor a field wife, like Dinah, but a housewife ‘to show that a good wife keeps her house’. This resulted in part from the authority delegated to her by her husband but in part from her own strong personality and considerable abilities, which were recognized (though not always admired) not only by her spouse but also by members of the family and network.

In order to understand relationships within the Temple family it is important to establish as far as possible the organization of the household and the ways in which both Sir Thomas and Lady Hester related not just to each other and to family members but also to their servants. This is all the more true of the Temples because of the ways in which some of those servants demonstrably had an impact upon the future of both family and estate. Servants acted as intermediaries in the relationships which the early Temples had with their kin and, indeed, with others.

Natasha Korda's invaluable discussion of the legal position and material practice regarding women's property rights under coverture has demonstrated their complexity. William Gouge's Domesticall Duties of 1622 at first presents what appears to be a straightforward denial that a married woman might hold any property, whether moveable or immoveable, but then proceeds to offer many exceptions to this rule. This was, it seems, as a direct response to the uproar caused by his earlier attempt to prevent the housewife from ‘disposing the common goods of the family without, or against her husband's consent’. Korda suggests that ‘ this rule may have been as honoured in the breach as in the observance’. Gouge gives the following exceptions to the rule that a wife can hold no property under coverture: paraphernalia ‘proper to wives’; and goods set aside as separate estate or as a jointure; and gifts made to herself where her husband has not adequately provided for her, which she may conceal from him. He also argues that the wife has de facto managerial control over common goods and does not need her husband's specific consent to spend them: ‘I doubt not but the wife hath power to dispose them; neither is she bound to ask any further consent of her husband. For it is the wives place and dutie to guide or governe the house.’ He specifies many circumstances in which the common law regarding women's absence of control over property is unworkable.

Scholars in history and related disciplines have been writing about specific examples of sibling relationships for years. Only now, however, are they studying the phenomenon of the sibling relationship itself or what historian Amy Harris calls ‘siblinghood’. The subject has received more but not overly much attention from scholars and practitioners in the social sciences. Here studies have been of relatively small family units, containing youngsters who grew to adulthood within the same household, often within a primarily urban environment. Specific explorations of modern sisters and brothers have frequently concentrated upon no more than two siblings. Handling multiple sibling relations has been regarded as too complex and slippery for the scholar to attempt. Historians of the early modern period do not have this luxury. The Temple family with which this book is concerned involved at least three very large nuclear families, comprising eleven, thirteen and ten children, most of whom achieved adulthood.

Within the Temple household these relations between brothers and sisters may have been underpinned by what we today might term ‘family feeling’ but they were also played out against a more pragmatic backcloth. Hester's brother Henry, for example, loaned her and his brother-in-law Thomas money and also borrowed money from them. He and her brother William acted as her trustees and thus formed a continuing and crucial part of her life. The issue of the entail placed on the Temple estates by John Temple and its implications for sibling relationships among his heir Sir Thomas's children are treated in later chapters.

Thomas, as executor of his father John's will, had a particular obligation to his several younger siblings, male and female. He was made responsible for the education of his brothers. In John Temple's will especial care was taken to make watertight provision for these four younger sons, John, William, Alexander and Peter, and especially for the three youngest. To safeguard their interests further, copies of the will and of documents securing the annuities of the younger brothers were deposited both with their mother Susan Spencer Temple and with Sir Edward Wotton. Thomas was also left to tidy up the jointure arrangements for his sisters, especially young Mary and Elizabeth. He was a trustee for Elizabeth's separate estate and provision for her younger children.