Sir Thomas's hopes for ‘educating’ Peter to be what he considered to be a worthy heir who would protect his inheritance for successive generations of Temples were dashed by Peter's resolve to live a very different kind of life from that of his father and especially his grandfather before him. On the surface at least, Sir Thomas's plans were more readily taken on board by his third son, also, confusingly, named Thomas Temple and known within the family from 1633 as Rev. Doctor Temple. Thomas junior not only went to university, took a degree and entered clerical orders but also studied the law and became, in effect, his father's legal expert. Thomas Temple junior achieved an estate through becoming a beneficed clergyman (with its famed freehold). A fourth son, Miles, served apprenticeship. Thomas junior and Miles Temple, whom we met briefly in the introduction to this book, had different destinies from either Sir Thomas Temple's heir or his spare, although there is little information to settle the question of whether it was their personal characteristics and aptitudes, and their parents’ financial and social position as well as their position in the family, that shaped their futures.

Relationships with younger sons, with the sole exception of younger sons who eventually inherited their father's estate owing to the mortality of an elder brother, have received little scholarly attention. It has become a truism to state that younger sons were destined for a career as a clergyman or a merchant. Joan Thirsk wrote a stimulating essay on the position of younger sons in English society and this was followed by a brief but exceptionally interesting piece by Linda Pollock in History Today. Joan Thirsk's emphasis was upon the resentment of angry young men directed against the system and against their fathers and elder brothers as encapsulating that system's perceived injustices; Linda Pollock provided a valuable corrective – pointing out that younger sons were not neglected either by their parents or by their older siblings, that the services they performed for the heir and for their family in general were highly valued by all concerned, and, even more importantly, that they accepted and did not rail against the system of primogeniture.

Intergenerational conflict in the early modern period has received some welcome attention from historians. For example, Lawrence Stone and Barbara Harris both pointed to the many arguments that focused on finance. Recently Carole Levin has examined the dreams of early modern parents who penned autobiographical documents as well as manuals of dream interpretation. In Thomas Hill's The Pleasant Art of the Interpretation of Dreams (published in London in 1576) one dream depicts a father being consumed by his children. Levin sees this as revealing ‘one of the most intense sites of cultural anxiety …: conflicts between parents and children’. She concludes, however, that parents’ actual dreams not only revealed this fear of the power of surviving children but also anxiety about illness and death; dreams of children about their parents reflected pain and guilt; and amidst it all the dreams ‘testified to deep affection’. The transition from childhood to adulthood was tense in the past as it is often today and valuable work has been done in this area also. The Temples’ complex relationships with their sons, and especially their two eldest – Sir Peter and Sir John – show how such tensions lingered into mature manhood.

Sir Alexander Denton beinge at Stowe with Sir Peter, Sir Peter complayned, and alleadged his want of Armes to be caused by my Mr [Sir Thomas Temple]

Sir Thomas's ‘education’ of Sir Peter was interrupted by a series of family quarrels, one or more of which resulted in major court cases. In order to appreciate the severity of the problem it is necessary to understand its origins. The story of Sir Thomas and Lady Hester's strained relations with Peter is relatively well known although its interpretation is problematic. Nevertheless, there is certainly evidence to indicate that the couple viewed Peter as a ‘problem’. According to Thomas, Peter had always been wayward. In his teens he was already seeking loans where he could to support him in London. Worse still, he was being interviewed in the Star Chamber in 1612 for his part in the manslaughter of Thomas Pilkington by Sir Edward Peyto and his servant Peter Peyto. Sir Thomas and Lady Hester were more than anxious to see him settle down with a wife but a few matches did not materialize.

There is abundant evidence that Lady Hester played an important role in the years including and following 1629. After Thomas's accident, John Rous offered his mother-in-law advice on what she needed to do when acting on Sir Thomas's behalf in legal matters. There is once more occasional written evidence that Hester acted as Thomas's filing clerk and aide-mémoire. For instance, in 1630 Thomas recorded that she had reminded him of debts owing to him: ‘[margin: To my wife the Lady Hester Temple] Memorandum delivered to her of which she told me & I remembred not 2 statutes which mr Edw Ewer acknowledged to me Sir Tho Temple & other obligacons which & howe manye she remembreth not.’ And again she served to remind him of the existence of a lease: ‘memorandum my wife putt me in minde of a lease to me Sir T Sir Ro: Hide made of Holloway Grange rendring yearely 70li, which I delivered & lent to my daughter the Lady Ashcombe to answere the sherife of Oxfordshere whereupon remayneth dew to me in her hands & dew arrerages of rent, but when I delivered it query [margin: My daughter the Lady Ayschcombe].’

In 1630 Sir Thomas deployed his wife and Robert Smith to renew the valuable lease he had of Tingewick fish pools from New College, Oxford. Probably on this occasion she sent George Rouce, to inquire about the status of the lease. His letter makes clear Lady Hester's capacity as Sir Thomas's agent. Sir Thomas had Hester search for documents in one or more of the studies he maintained in each of their residences during this period – Wolverton and Burton Dassett – and follow his detailed instructions in respect of them: ‘Quere for thob [the obligation] I thinck I Sir T. saw on my study at Wolverton to put downe his Quernes in Lutterworth & then being found to deliver to my said wife to be shewed in Easter Terme 1631 by mr W. Lenthall in Theschequer [the Exchequer] at the hearing of mr Tho: Incelye.’

Spring 1631 saw Sir Thomas asking Hester to search for his unfinished will.

In addition to the formal acknowledgements made separately I am enormously grateful to Peter Sowden, Commissioning Editor for Boydell & Brewer, who not only accepted this book for publication but also was tremendously understanding as personal circumstances beyond my control created untold delays, and for supporting me throughout with his enthusiasm. I thank Rebecca Cribb for guiding the book through the press.

In preparing the book I realized the need both for genealogical information and for illustrations demonstrating the types of sources used and the problems involved. Because of the cost of artwork, I could not include as many family trees as I would have wished. In preparing the genealogies and related information I have been bound by the limitations of the software I used. For instance, although I was able to use terms such as ‘about’, ‘circa’, fl., and ‘after’ in the database of individuals such uncertainties do not appear in the resulting trees and reports. I have tried to be as accurate as possible but the reader is advised to treat the ancestry trees as provisional. I have included several family trees and other genealogical information for the reader's reference. There were similar constraints on the presentation of illustrative material. I am so grateful to Martin Fiennes of Broughton Castle, SHPT/Stowe School and Henry E. Huntington Library not only for permission to publish images of items in their possession but also for waiving fees. The illustrations I have chosen demonstrate important points made in the text. I could have presented more images of documents but some of the candidates for inclusion were too illegible or faded for successful reproduction. The reader may require a magnifying glass to read some of the documents, just as I did when I read them! I decided also to reproduce the direct quotations from documents with the original spellings, making minimal changes such as extension of common contractions and abbreviations in the interests of readability. I am forever in debt to Sian Lewis who designed the artwork for the family trees, and to Tony Carr who helped to prepare the index.

As I write this preface I am come directly from another lengthy research trip to the Huntington.

The case of Peter the Lunatic, Sir Thomas Temple's youngest brother, commands our attention here. This chapter attempts several things. Firstly it seeks to establish the nature of Peter's malady, how it would have been regarded by contemporaries, and the various problems posed by Peter's care. Secondly, it examines how he was cared for. Thirdly, it considers the implications of his care for his eldest brother Sir Thomas and his wife Lady Hester, for his own wife Katherine, and for his other siblings. While in no way disagreeing with the perspectives adopted by previous historians or their conclusions, the emphasis here is upon the demands sibling care could make upon families with many other calls upon their time and energy from the simple nuclear family. In this specific case any difficulties were compounded because Peter's care became the subject of litigation. I give considerable detail regarding the course of the legal case in order to emphasize both its tortuous and complex nature, and the problems an incomplete record presents for the historian seeking to describe what happened. I have also touched upon the methodological issues involved in using evidence provided by court cases, and further attention is accorded this in future chapters.

My brother Peter's malady: ‘It is the very error of the moon, She comes more nearer earth than she was wont And makes men Mad’

The bald facts about Peter's life are these: he was born in 1589, the fifth son of John Temple Esquire and his wife Susanna Spencer Temple. This was about three years after John's heir Thomas married Hester. Following John Temple's death in 1603, Peter, then about 13, lived at Stowe with his widowed mother, although he was educated at Winchester College and then served in the retinue of the Earl of Northampton. Peter's expenses were paid by his eldest brother, Thomas, sometimes through the agency of older brothers Sir Alexander and William or that of Hester. In 1614 he was sent home very ill to his mother Susan (Spencer) Temple. In December of that same year he married Katherine Kendall, daughter of a clergyman, and the two had several children, born between then and the 1630s. A mythology has since arisen surrounding this Peter Temple, which requires closer scholarly examination.

Although the widowhood of Dame Hester Temple necessarily did not occur within the marital partnership with Thomas, it seems appropriate to include a short chapter treating it within the context of that relationship and that with her children, grandchildren and servants. Indeed, Hester's married life until her husband's death usefully may be viewed as an apprenticeship for her life as his widow.

Historians and the history of widowhood

Scholars writing about medieval and early modern England have adopted varying approaches to and views on the subject of widowhood. For example, Joel T. Rosenthal, on the basis of research into the percentage of peers summoned to Parliament between 1399 and 1500 who left widows (68 per cent), argued that support of these women constituted a huge drain on the resources of great estates, and led to the extinction of many peerages; Barbara Harris, however, argued that most aristocratic widows profitably managed their jointure estates, on death distributed their wealth amongst family members, and ‘collectively their activity ensured the survival and continued prosperity of their class’. In my own earliest work on the subject of widows, in 1982 and 1983, the emphasis was laid upon the fact that during widowhood married women were at their most powerful. Certainly it was during widowhood that women from all social classes gained an independent legal identity, and often exercised power and authority as heads of household where there was no adult male heir. Even when only briefly widowed, such women would often seek to protect the interests of themselves and their children before remarrying. On average, at any one time, 20 per cent of households in an English community were headed by widows. This said, I, among others, have come to realize that widowed women were also extremely vulnerable. They were frequently subject to pressure from male kin, for example. Yet at the same time they were often dependent upon close male kin of their birth families for protection against marauding attacks by a deceased husband's male relatives. Garthine Walker, in an insightful study of ‘crime and the early modern household’, has observed that when a woman's wealth and household position were changed through death or otherwise, the hierarchy of family relationships was destabilized ‘in distressing ways’.

A general picture of the quality of the relationship the Temples maintained with their daughters and granddaughters is elusive. This chapter concentrates on the daughters, daughters-in-law and grandchildren of Thomas and Hester Temple.

There was a realm of difference between the behaviour prescribed by puritan preachers for unmarried women and that practised in families. It is much simpler to discover what the conduct literature contained than to access the behaviour that was actually prevalent. Even more so is it difficult to demonstrate any socio-economic or religious distinctions in behaviour over a chronological spectrum: there is a danger that we perceive a static situation when, in reality, there was change over time.

The data regarding as yet unmarried daughters and granddaughters in the Temple connection is relatively sparse though often informative. There are a number of letters from both unmarried and married daughters to their parents. These seem to have been preserved not as treasured mementoes of parent/child relations but as containing useful information. Those that have survived are often difficult to interpret, given poor handwriting, idiosyncratic spelling and especially the damage suffered over the centuries. The spelling and punctuation reproduced in quotations from their letters illustrate this problem. For the most part additional information has to be derived from stray mentions in account books, memorandum books and papers, court cases, bills (which normally supply little information about the emotional attachment that may have existed) and other people's letters. With minor exceptions it is not possible to say how the Temples related to their very young children, either male or female. It is slightly easier to establish their attitude to older Temple children and teenagers. There is also the question of whether parents’ attitudes towards and expectations of their daughters and granddaughters changed when they entered the married state. Moreover, it would be interesting to examine in detail the attitude of daughters (and sons and in-laws) to their parents. Occasionally we can approach these issues laterally – through, for example, the letters of sons-in-law. Such requires extreme caution. No correspondence is transparent and the meaning of a letter's contents is yet more obscured when the information is at second-hand. I offer no apology for the speculative nature of some parts of this chapter but I remind the reader to approach it with caution. Where the meaning is ambiguous, I have quoted the evidence at length.

If one visits Stowe House today, little attention is given to the Temples who owned the land before Cobham. It is assumed, probably correctly, that visitors are interested not in the history of the Temples but in the heritage represented by the grand eighteenth-century mansion and particularly its gardens. No apology is made for concentrating here upon the internal mechanics of family life among the Temples who preceded Cobham and, indeed, Sir Richard Temple the 3rd Baronet of Stowe, as seen through their archival and largely manuscript remains. Since the groundwork done by E.F. Gay and Godfrey Davies in the first half of the twentieth century, the early Temple family has been little studied, despite voluminous archival remains. This micro-history is intended to provide an essential counterweight to the fashionable thematic macro-histories, which cover broad chronologies and large geographical areas. Historians need both if they are to understand past societies on their own terms. The study of detailed case histories such as this should allow the historian to place ‘examples’ or ‘case studies’ in the proper context that supplies meaning. The book is principally concerned with establishing why family mattered to the Temples, the differing roles played by family members, and the linked issue of how the Temples conducted their personal family relationships within and outwith the household.

While the reader will not find here a chronological narrative of the lives of the late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Temples of Stowe, they will nonetheless learn a good deal about the way in which they lived. A serious attempt is made also to relate these findings about the Temples to a number of debates and areas of interest in modern scholarship. The subjects of kinship and family have received important attention from other historians, historical demographers and historical sociologists. Not least, family historians have suggested the relevance of their work to continuity and change within the state itself. In particular, evidence from the courts has been used to show how the ordering of family life was negotiated through litigation. But we must walk before we can run. A micro-history of the early modern family will afford a valuable corrective to these macrostudies: there is a need for both. The book is principally concerned with Sir Thomas and Lady Hester Temple and their roles and relationships. This first part consists of three chapters.

In this chapter the focus is upon the Temple connection. Only a knowledge of the Temples’ past will enable the reader to understand their present in the period 1570 to 1660. This knowledge leads us to comprehend many of the relationships which the Temples formed and maintained with others. This said, the late sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Temples made other, newer friendships which were important to them. The terms ‘friend’ and ‘friendship’ are used to refer to people with whom the Temples had close associations marked by liking, affection or loyalty and also to those who were their allies, patrons and/or supporters. These relationship characteristics frequently overlapped.

The chapter does not attempt to mention all members of the Temple connection – that would be a huge task and create a mammoth narrative. Additionally we should approach with due caution any attempt to define precisely the nature of some of these relationships and their repercussions. One should not assume that because individuals knew one another or moved in the same social circles there was a close relationship which influenced their behaviour or fortunes. Moreover, as observed earlier, the Temple archive is insufficiently comprehensive to enable us to create a complete picture with any confidence. Instead, these pages introduce only those individuals and groups within the Temples’ social ‘reach’ who were important in our story of the Temples, their roles and active relationships.

To recap briefly, historians for some time have been aware of kin connections in sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English society. As long ago as 1975 Anthony Fletcher concluded from an examination of Nicholas Assheton's Journal for 1617–18 that 30 per cent of people Assheton met were kin and 40 per cent of those he simply mentioned. Miriam Slater opined, ‘in this society it was the family, defined here as the parents and their children, who together with the kin were the brokers of access to opportunities of all kinds, whether educational or career, and especially of marriage’. Ian Archer's analysis of Pepys's social network revealed that, even within London, kin outside his immediate household formed a significant part of his male and female interactions. The importance of kin has, however, been much debated and contested.

While scholars have studied the lives of single women in the early modern period, historians rarely discuss relations between parents and daughters, married and unmarried. Relationships with married daughters have fared particularly badly although specialist monographs on particular families have sometimes considered them. Elizabeth Foyster has argued that parents remained involved in the lives of their adult children. Amy Froide has indicated that single women frequently ‘remained for a good portion, if not all, of their lives’ within their natal family. She has demonstrated, using an impressive variety of sources, that the bond between mother and unmarried daughters was particularly strong although not always amicable. Relations with fathers appear to have been more difficult but this could have been because of the nature of the evidence, deriving as it did from court depositions concerned with conflict over plans for arranged marriages. Most of Froide's examples are drawn from the eighteenth century, which makes a study of such relations in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries especially useful.

The archives permit us to explore only certain aspects of Hester and Thomas's interactions with their daughters. Records of various kinds survive regarding life stages such as birth, baptism and marriage. Some letters survive from daughters to their mother. Apart from this there is occasional mention of daughters in correspondence and other documentation such as Sir Thomas Temple's accounts and notebooks. Court papers have proved especially helpful. Daughters-in-law and granddaughters also figure in the archive, albeit less prominently. The archive has permitted consideration of female wards who, in this case, formed part of the family. I have described the cases of Anne Andrewes and of Dorothy and Mary Lee in some detail, and used direct quotation, in these chapters simply because so little is known about the treatment of daughters and female wards, and about the procedures followed in the courts.

The first two chapters in this part proffer an overview. The sources have been supplemented by work on the Temple connection and genealogy, which has revealed a few surprises, and several unanswered questions, which may in time be answered by further research by scholars. The first chapter examines issues surrounding matchmaking, marriage, childbearing and early child care. The second discusses the nature of the relationship between the Temples and individual daughters.

The Stowe Temple papers provide evidence for the marriages of several generations but are richest for the daughters of John and Susan Temple, and for the children of Thomas and Hester Temple. The focus is on the arrangement of daughters’ marriages. Historians have studied arranged marriages from a number of perspectives, from detailed examining of individual cases to the collection and analysis of mass data relating to particular social groups and geographical areas. There is general agreement that marriages normally were arranged by family members. The way in which they were arranged is thought to have followed a pattern, common at least to most elite families. Some authors have identified what they call ‘a London marriage market’. Some believe that the women of the family played a prominent part in the process of matchmaking. There is disagreement about whether this process changed over time within the early modern period. Historians do differ in the emphasis they lay upon the participation of the young couple themselves: did they just exercise a negative veto or could they play a more positive role? Many historians have focused upon the arrangement of the marriages of sons and especially firstborn sons. They have been somewhat dismissive of the bride's side. Was it, as Lawrence Stone claimed, simply a matter of ensuring the least possible drain upon the parents’ estate, and maintaining family status, or were there other deeper motives at work? As historians produce more and more work indicative of the important role elite and middling-sort women played in building and cementing family networks, it seems that choosing the appropriate groom for one's daughters was crucial (and, conversely, that selecting the right sort of bride for one's sons was much more than simply an issue of acquiring or securing property).

Historical demographers suggest that early marriage was encouraged among the females of the property-owing classes of early modern England in order to achieve the longest possible period of reproduction. This would give the young women concerned a reproductive life of about twenty years, during which she could give birth to ten or more live children. Much of the evidence points to different reasons: the desire to keep the young woman pure before her marriage and to train her to be the right sort of wife and mother.