The Englefields and after

 

Successive generations of the Englefield family continued as lords of the manor from about 1166 until the accession of Queen Elizabeth the First, many of them holding high offices of state. Sir Roger Englefield was knight of the shire in the parliaments of 1307 and 1312 and is probably the subject of the stone effigy in the parish church.  He may also have been the founder of the Englefield chantry with its chapel of St Mary in the aisle where the effigy is situated.  Sir Thomas Englefield also represented the shire in several parliaments and was Speaker of the Commons in 1496.  He has a prominent tomb in the sanctuary of the church.  His son, also Thomas, was a Justice of the Common Pleas and his son Francis attained the highest position of any of the family.  He was Sheriff of the county in 1547 and Knight of the Carpet at the coronation of fiercely Protestant Edward VI.  Unfortunately that was the apogee of Sir Francis’s success for he was a prominent Roman Catholic and became one of the chief officers in the household of Princess Mary and in 1551 he was sent to the Tower for celebrating mass in the Princess’s household.  On the accession of Mary as queen later that year Francis came back into favour and was made a privy councillor and master of the Court of Wards and Liveries; he also sat in parliament for the shire on many occasions.

 

However, when the Protestant Elizabeth came to the throne in 1558 Sir Francis fell from grace again and the following year secured her leave to go abroad, the first withdrawal from England by a leading Catholic.  When his licence to remain abroad expired two years later he did not return and refused a royal command to do so.  From 1568 he was a key figure as an “English advisor” at the court of Philip II in Spain and was indicted for treason and outlawed in 1584 after the discovery of the Throckmorton plot (organised by his cousin Sir Francis Throckmorton) to kill Queen Elizabeth and make the imprisoned Catholic Mary queen.  Throckmorton was executed and Englefield was indicted and outlawed for treason in 1584.  In 1587 he was included in the Act of Attainder, which was confirmed in 1593, and died in Spain in 1596.

 

After Sir Francis refused to return to England his estates reverted to the Crown in 1563. Although the bulk of the manor of Englefield passed from the eponymous family, Sir Thomas Englefield, the Justice of the Common Pleas and father of Sir Francis, seems before his death to have settled part of the manor on his second son John and so it escaped the forfeiture of Sir Francis’s lands. A house and some land in the village was retained by the Englefields until 1792 when the last baronet, Sir Henry Englefield, sold them to Richard Benyon de Beauvoir.

 

A hundred turbulent years

 

After Sir Francis was dispossessed in 1563 there followed some seventy years during which the manor of Englefield appears to have changed hands several times, and sometimes been left in the hands of the Sovereign, before unquestionably ending up in the hands of John Paulet, 5th Marquess of Winchester, in 1635.  The situation is made more complex by the fact that there were during this time three separate estates: the disputed estate of Sir Francis, the one left by Sir Thomas Englefield to Francis's brother John (and then owned by his son, and Sir Francis's nephew, also Sir Francis) and one owned by Sir Anthony Sherley but sold to Lord Norreys. The descent of these estates and their coming together is illustrated in the chart The Three Estates.

 

The Lysons in their Magna Britannia of 1813, say that the main estate was given by Queen Elizabeth to Sir Francis Walsingham, having been told that by Mr Benyon and this has been repeated (and embellished) by several other sources since then. It is still given some credence despite having been authoritatively refuted by both the account a hundred years later in the Victoria County History, meticulously-referenced to the original sources, and also in the Bradfield Rural District official guide of 1949. Gervase Jackson-Stops in Country Life (26 February 1981) says that the main house at Englefield with the bulk of Sir Francis Englefield's estates was given by the Queen to the Earl of Essex and later (in 1597) to Lord Norreys. This is not entirely true either and Norreys's presence at Englefield is an additional complication that is dealt with elsewhere. It is clear from Magna Britannia that the Lysons inferred the gift to Walsingham by working backwards from Honora de Burgh who was the wife of John Paulet and also Walsingham's granddaughter  - the post hoc fallacy.

 

The hard evidence cited by the Victoria County History is that when Sir Francis refused to return his lands were seized for the Queen but no record of any grant before 1586 is known of. This period was occupied by unsuccessful attempts by Sir Francis to recover the estate through appeals to the Privy Council and as a final effort in 1575-6 he settled his estate on his nephew, also Francis, on condition that he could regain it on presentation of a gold ring. After the attainder of 1587 emissaries of the Queen offered the nephew a ring but he refused to surrender the estate on the grounds that only his uncle was empowered to fulfil the condition.

 

In 1586 the Queen had leased the manor house and certain lands to Humphrey Foster and George Fytton for a period of forty years but this lease was declared void during another law suit brought by agents for Sir Francis. First the courts and then an Act of Parliament found in favour of the Crown and in 1589 the manor house and lands were leased to Thomas Crompton, Robert Wright and Gelly Meyrick as trustees for Robert Devereux, the 2nd Earl of Essex. Devereaux’s maternal grandfather was Sir Francis Knollys of Battle Manor in Reading, whose wife was the niece of Anne Boleyn and a cousin of the Queen. Essex married Frances Walsingham, daughter of Sir Francis in 1590 the year he died, but his was clearly a Crown lease to Essex and not inheritance by his wife or a marriage settlement.

 

Essex was executed for treason in 1601 and the estate came back to the Crown again, though no arrangements seem to have been made regarding the ownership until in 1611 King James I granted the estate to John Eldred and William Whitmore.  They conveyed it to Thomas Erskine, Viscount Fenton and in 1622 Erskine, by then the Earl of Kelly, sold it to his creditors Sir Peter Vanlore and William Rolfe. The latter then sold it on to Sir John Davis whose wife was the step-daughter of Lord Kelly. When Sir John died in 1625 the manor was settled on his daughter Lucy who had married Ferdinando, Lord Hastings at Englefield in August 1623, the record in the parish register giving the bride’s father as “Sir John Davis, lord of the manor of Englefield”. At the time Hastings was 17 and his bride just 10. This was, in fact, their second wedding the first having taken place a month earlier and apparently conducted without licence or clergyman, causing Archbishop Abbott to threaten all concerned with excommunication.

 

In 1635 the manor was alienated by them to John Paulet, 5th Marquess of Winchester but even then the situation remained unsettled for John Paulet was a Royalist in the Civil War and is celebrated for his valiant but futile defence of Basing House against the Parliamentary forces in 1645.  Subsequently he was imprisoned in the Tower and his lands, including Englefield, were sequestered.  Englefield was bought in 1649 by Sir Thomas Jervoise but after the Restoration Paulet regained it.

Paulets and Wrightes