If patriarchy was once seen as the strict model according to which early modern society in general and families in particular were organized, recent historians have shown that, while it was certainly promoted by many, it was highly contested both in theory and in practice. Laura Gowing, for example, has shown that many women were far from submissive. Even when they did not overtly resist their fathers and husbands, women found ways to bypass such ‘authority’.

In this part, rather than concentrating on the debate about patriarchy as such, I have chosen to explore the Temples’ marriage. Here there is a wide-ranging discussion of the roles and relationships of both Hester and Thomas Temple. There is no attempt to look in great detail at Thomas's public life or, indeed, his management of the family estates, although these are discussed. The focus instead is upon Hester's activities and how these compared to and interacted with those of her husband. Relatively few scholars have considered the workings of the marital partnership, generally emphasizing instead patriarchy in theory or in practice. Ask the man or woman in the street what role the wife played in pre-modern marriages and the answer would probably tally with that voiced by Miriam Slater in the mid 1970s: ‘This unusual opportunity for propertied women to prove their usefulness was due to the extraordinary circumstances imposed by the [Civil] war. But even an upheaval of that magnitude was insufficient to reverse male opinion on the subject of women's innate inferiority or to shake their confidence in the idea that women were largely incapable of dealing with any matter of genuine importance.’ Yet contemporary teaching about marriage stressed the partnership between husband and wife. These chapters seek to throw light upon how such a partnership operated in this particular elite family.

The author is far from dewy eyed about the Temples› marriage or in denial about the reality of its acknowledgement of patriarchy. A micro-historical approach, however, demonstrates the interplay between patriarchy and other forces within a marriage, whether these be those of unpredictable life events, those of the life cycle, or those of personality, capability, patronage, natural affection, emotion or fortune. Students of patriarchy may see this simply as evidence of the adaptability of the patriarchal system.

A more recent emphasis in the history of the family has been upon siblings. Socio-economic and demographic historians interested in the history of the family in England have tended to focus on relationships within a nuclear household, between parents and unmarried and co-resident dependants. When considering the elite family, the nature of this focus has been more often than not structural in approach. The growing use of strict settlements to define the inheritances of male heirs through primogeniture and the provision for younger children has demanded attention from many, including women and gender historians. A glance at the family trees of both John Temple and Thomas Temple readily illustrates that sibling relationships during both childhood and adulthood were a reality for the Temples. The existence of close bonds is more debatable.

It will indeed always be a matter of debate how much such involvement was motivated by emotion and affection and how much by a sense of responsibility and/or self-interest. Some seventeenth-century writers saw that siblings could form an important part of the clientele of the heir to a great estate.

While historians may well discuss the terminology which we use to address kinship, it could seem that there is little room for doubt concerning what constituted one's siblings – these were an individual's brothers and sisters. However, such was the prevalence of blended families in early modern England that historians should also include step- and half-brothers and sisters in any in-depth study of siblinghood. Similarly one should at least consider including brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. Here, however, we concentrate on the full-sibling relationships of the parents’ generation. It is clear from the archive that both Hester and Thomas had continuing and meaningful relationships with their own siblings. Sibling bonds and responsibilities were important within the framework of patriarchy. When a father died, the male heir assumed the role of patriarch not only in his own nuclear household but also regarding the affairs of his sisters and brothers, especially but not only when they were unmarried or widowed. So we find wives trapped in unhappy marriages appealing for assistance from their eldest brothers. Early modern historians have paid relatively little attention to the general significance of sibling relationships yet various primary sources attest their strength.

Cast of characters

This book is about a family. It is that of the Temples of Burton Dassett and Stowe. This family belonged to the gentry. It is generally estimated that the entire landed elite or aristocracy represented about 2 per cent of the population of England at this time. Under Elizabeth I there were about 55 peers of the realm and 350 knights. By 1603 nationally there were approximately 1,600 esquires or gentlemen who, together with the knights, made up the gentry. Buckinghamshire, wherein lay Stowe, had about 200 gentry families, of whom 40 or so were especially prominent. If one prefers to describe social status using the contemporary language of sorts, then the Temples were clearly the ‘better sort’ of people. Their estate was large and their net annual income from farming in the first quarter of the seventeenth century has been estimated as ￡2,000. Richard Grenville by 1640 assessed the estate at ￡3,000. The Temples of Stowe made the move from the squirearchy (lower gentry) to the ranks of knights and baronets (upper gentry) quite early in James I's reign. James I made a conscious attempt to raise money through the sale of honours and swelled the ranks of the titled elite.

This book is about people. The line of Temples with which it is concerned originated with Thomas Temple of Whitney. Thomas's son Peter settled in Burton Dassett, Warwickshire, and it was there that he and his wife Millicent Heritage Temple raised two sons (John and Anthony) and Millicent's four daughters by two former husbands. Central to the book are Sir Thomas Temple and Hester (Sandys) Temple and their children and grandchildren, and, to a lesser extent, their own parents, siblings and half-siblings, nieces and nephews, and cousins. Thomas Temple was born in winter 1567/8 to John and Susan (Spencer) Temple. John was the elder of the two sons of Peter Temple of Burton Dassett. Towards the end of old Peter's life he leased land at Stowe, Buckinghamshire and this became his heir John and Susan's main home thereafter. Thomas their eldest son was baptized at Stowe, near Buckingham, on 9 January 1567/8.Thomas seems to have been their first child and first-born son and heir. John was styled as an esquire.

Within the context of debates about law and the family, this brief study helps to show how two or three generations of Temples interacted with existing and changing rules of inheritance. Lloyd Bonfield, Maria Lynn Cioni, Amy Erickson, Elaine Spring and Tim Stretton have all, from differing viewpoints, discussed the ways in which these rules were made manifest in marriage settlements, and afforded or did not afford women protection. Cioni, Stretton and Erickson have discussed the extent to which the church courts and the equity courts offered women quarter when the Common Law courts denied it. Their emphasis has been upon women of the middling sort. Elaine Spring's argument is that ultimately the rules were changed in favour of entailing an estate and replacing the old dower rights with the provision of a less generous jointure in order to protect male primogeniture and to limit the resources diverted to support widows and younger children from the entailed estate. The movement away from common law rights of widows to a dower, amounting to a third of her husband's land and chattels, to a system of jointure acted to the detriment of married and widowed women. Her work suffers, however, from being almost entirely based upon close reading of legislation, and heavy reliance upon the mass data collected by previous historians.

Much of this book indirectly considers the position and roles of women within the family. The ensuing brief study considers how the large Temple family generally treated its womenfolk under the very law of inheritance studied by Spring and Erickson. This provides context for the discussion in Part Two of the way in which Lady Hester Temple sought to protect herself in the changing environment of her growing family, as her sons married and new provision was made for them and their wives. Typically Temple marriage agreements are represented in the archive by indented deeds purchasing jointures in the names of husband, wife and eldest son, after the son's marriage, and of books of entail drawn up after a marriage. John Temple joined with not only his wife Susan but also with his son and heir Thomas to purchase various lands; Susan was to enjoy these during her widowhood but the remainder went to her eldest son Thomas.

This book focuses, unusually for histories of individual families and households, on the dynamics of elite family life in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries within a midland, upper gentry family. To the fore are the roles of a formidable and long-lived elite matriarch, Hester (Sandys) Temple, and her fussy, pedantic and Polonius-like husband, Sir Thomas, 1st Baronet of Stowe. But this is perforce a multiple-plot drama, which looks back also to Sir Thomas's father and paternal grandfather and forwards to his son and heir, Sir Peter, 2nd baronet of Stowe. It draws upon an extensive and rich archive, which documents not only nuclear family relationships between spouses, between parents and male and female children, but also those relationships involving younger children, adult younger children living outside the home, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, and siblings of the parents. It reminds us of something that is too easily forgotten – that families and households were about more than husbands and wives or even husbands and wives and children. For the Temples parenting was indeed for life but so also were other relationships. While on first examination the Temples might appear to be a dysfunctional family, on closer inspection one could well argue that this family was highly functional.

We see Hester as wife, mother, mother-in-law, grandmother, sister-in-law, sister and aunt. We also see her as housewife and manager, mistress of servants, disciplinarian, secretary-cum-accountant, farmer, negotiator, patron, creditor and debtor, even as litigator. Her performance in these varying roles is seen against the information available about her husband Sir Thomas's. Her husband's attitude to her realization of the role of wife, helpmeet and mother is not selfevident but is gauged on the basis of a great variety of sources – correspondence, legal cases, account books, lease books, memoranda, court papers and so forth.

This is not, however, just the study of one woman or even just one couple. It is a family history because only a micro-study of this large family can expose the various roles played within it. Here we shine the floodlights upon the very nature of ‘family’ and ‘kin’ to the Temples. The book builds upon but makes critical use of feminist and other scholarship in order to offer a scholarly and appropriately nuanced picture of this elite family.

Nineteenth-century scholars were wont to describe the archival survivals of the lives of past luminaries as their ‘Remains’. The scholar in the twenty-first century does well to recollect that family archives have a history which goes back to the moment of their creation. In the case of the Temple family of Stowe we are faced not just with what survived of their correspondence and papers and certainly not with the remnants of their waste-paper baskets. Rather we are for the most part presented with what remains of what the master (and to a lesser extent the mistress) wished to retain for their own and sometimes their immediate descendants’ use. It is, of course, idle to speculate about what they chose to throw away. It is important to reflect upon what they chose to preserve.

A good deal of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Stowe Temple material relates to matters of litigation. One of the most intriguing cases refers to the marriage between Anne Temple, the seventh daughter of Thomas and Hester Temple, born in March 1600/1, and William (later Sir William) Andrewes Esquire of Lathbury, Buckinghamshire. Although this marriage gave rise to litigation of a kind, the sources for our knowledge of it do not occur in the Temples’ legal files but rather in the surviving correspondence and financial files of the family. Some of the papers relate to materials presented to the ecclesiastical courts and others to the examination of the case before Justices of the Peace.

This marriage took place at Stowe on 4 April 1617, when Anne was just 16. The groom was slightly older. It must have seemed an auspicious match. The marriage brought together two families, the patriarchs of which lived in quite close proximity and participated together, apparently amicably, in the government of Buckinghamshire, where both were Justices of the Peace. The marriage settlement, which could have been an underlying cause of the later dispute: Anne brought with her a portion of ￡3,000, which was apparently, following a down payment of ￡1,000, paid in instalments. The first of these, for ￡1,000, was paid to the groom's father in the November following the wedding. The record of the acquittance was kept, along with the note of other similar transactions, on the back of a letter.

Earlier in this book I raised the question whether ‘family’ mattered in early modern English society, whether to the individuals who inhabited them or to the society in which they formed the primary unit. The various chapters have explored this question from many different vantage points. Clearly the ‘family’ was very much more than a nest and nursery for the simple, nuclear family so beloved of demographers. The ‘family’ had many different facets. This study of the early Temples of Stowe has shown that there were active family relationships between parents, children and grandchildren that endured from cradle to grave and even beyond. The Temple descendants formed a kind of mini society; frequent family gatherings and communications drew together cousins and connections, and, unsurprisingly, cousin marriage is noticeable in the family tree. The fact that a child had reached adulthood and entered the married state did not mean that the influence of the parents ceased. Equally the Temples were heavily involved in the affairs of some of their siblings and half-siblings and their descendants. Certain of these relationships appear to have been more active than others, although it is never possible to establish this with certainty because the surviving documentation is partial. As noted, the creation of new nuclear families as children married and had children brought with it tensions. The extant archives do not facilitate a chronological narrative but rich documentation surrounding particular episodes permits the historian to study in considerable detail specific relationships, and especially those in times of crisis, within what was essentially an upper gentry family.

At the level of a study of family interaction I hope that I have given some sense of how this particular family ‘operated’. The family did not exist in isolation; children were prepared for the outside world in many ways by both parents.

Sir Thomas Temple addressed his son and heir, Sir Peter Temple of Stowe, on the occasion of the heir's marriage in 1630 to Lady Christian Leveson, niece of Sir Richard Leveson of Trentham, Staffordshire, writing: ‘All foiles are fitt for a wise man, as the proverbe is, & as Sir Clement Throckmorton trewly said, that it is not so great a benefitt to have a good wife, as to love her.’

This letter provides a rare glimpse of Sir Thomas Temple's explicit thoughts and beliefs on any subject. It also serves as an entree to his approach to bringing up his four sons. This was characterized by appeals to Holy Writ underwritten by reasoned discourse. According to early modern educational thought, the purpose of a humanist education was to equip males to offer good advice in both public and private matters. Erasmus, as we are reminded by Gemma Allen, saw letters as appropriate vehicles for such counsel. Sir Thomas Temple, acquainted with such teaching at Oxford, pursued this example.

The letter is modelled upon the Ten Commandments and its advice echoes the division of the same into two tablets: ‘Two Comaundements concerning god, I would yow had espetiall care to keepe, which is not to take the name of god in vaine, secondly, remember not to profane the sabboth, which laste will be a principall meane, that yow shall keepe the rest of the comaundements.’

This passage emphasizes Sir Thomas's belief in the need to keep holy the sabbath day, a belief which is expressed in a few other letters in the archive. It also perhaps reflects anxiety about the company that his son was keeping.

Such anxiety is more explicitly addressed in the passage from which the opening quotation is taken. Christian was Peter's second wife; it was about ten years since his first wife, Anne Throckmorton, had died. Peter's father had mourned for Anne Throckmorton Temple, as is apparent from a scribbled note of May 1620 in his account book: ‘whereas Acres Temple … paid in paymente of parte of the said 400li to Ri[chard] Chaplin to be given for dole of my deare daughter in law the Lady An Temple’.

In the early years of marriage (c. 1586–1611) Hester Temple's time and energy presumably were consumed by, on the one hand, bearing children and caring for them, and, on the other, managing an ever-growing household. One historian has gone so far as to say that ‘Maternity was seen as the essence of the role of wife.’ Certainly for many years Hester was perpetually pregnant and we should be aware of this as we consider her activities during these years. Yet to these early years of her marriage belongs Hester's first will – a signal of her consciousness of herself as an individual with possessions of her own, as well as of herself as daughter, wife and mother. Her will contained a highly personal preamble, a definite wish to be buried next to her ‘good hosband’ Thomas, bequests that prescribe precisely where she wanted her possessions to go on her death (including not insubstantial portions of money to each of her then eleven surviving children), and a declaration that she had ‘wret it all with my oune hande and have sete to my hande: and my selle of Armes’. Moreover, her husband wrote at the bottom of this will his intention to execute her wishes. And other evidence points to a housewife and mother who for a long time also had roles outside the walls of her house. This is an area not often discussed by scholars, who have assumed that a wife's responsibilities lay inside her house.

Hester Temple's management of her jointure estates, c. 1586–1628

One of Hester's major preoccupations, assisting in the arrangement of her children's marriages, is discussed in more detail below. Historians have long known that the women of a family and especially widowed mothers were engaged in making marriages. In 1897 Lady Newdigate-Newdegate drew attention to Anne Fytton Newdegate's attempts to find matches for her son, John. Modern studies of match- and marriage-making have illuminated our knowledge of the subject and of married women's part in it.

No formal prior settlement exists for the Temples’ own marriage. Nevertheless, it is possible to piece together parts of the agreement from the books of entail made after marriage had occurred.

Since Philippe Aries's groundbreaking work in the late 1960s and early 1970s on the history of childhood, historians have paid attention to boyhood in early modern times. Initially the approach chiefly concerned the education of boys, formal and informal. In my work in the early 1980s I argued that Tudor and Stuart education was regarded primarily as a tool to prepare both boys and girls for their roles in adult life. The relationship between parents and sons was considered by historians in general principally through the evidence provided by books of advice to sons. Lawrence Stone's Family, Sex and Marriage, drawing upon a wealth of sources, made bold assertions about the changing nature of family bonds over the centuries. Then came the important work of Linda Pollock, who studied in more detail the actual relationships that parents enjoyed with both sons and daughters.

The growing emphasis in the period after 1980 on the history of women diverted historians momentarily from the subject of men. It was not long, however, before a discipline obsessed with the issue of early modern patriarchy turned its collective mind to the issue of how males were prepared for patriarchal roles. This, in its turn, was followed by detailed and subtle work on manhood, following on from the suggestion by Linda Pollock that male relationships with other men within the family were all important. Simple models of patriarchy proposed by earlier historians were challenged. Elizabeth Foyster pinpointed the construction of manhood in early modern England, explaining in the meantime the relevance of their sexual relationships, and also of the reputation of their wives and daughters to this process. Alexandra Shepard showed that not all men were born to be patriarchs and discussed how men fitted into various categories that stood in different relationships to patriarchy. Karen Harvey continued the discussion for a later period. Most of this work concentrated upon the middling ranks of society. A collection of primary sources has furthered our understanding of elite manhood in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

The chapters in this part of the book make a contribution to these debates. Chapter 15 considers in detail the ways in which Sir Thomas Temple sought to educate his eldest sons for manhood and for a future as patriarchs and masters of estates.