One Mistress Whorwood in Oxfordshire, was wont to bring in intelligence to the late king, as well as to Oxford as to the Isle of Wight. She was sent several times of messages.
Thomas Coke, interrogated in the Tower, May 1651
Sir Paul Pindar sent several sums of money in gold to Oxford (by the hand of Madam Jean Whorewood, yet living) in 1644, for the transporting of [the then] Prince of Wales and the late Queen, his mother, to France.
Pindar Family Petition to Charles II, 1680
As lord of Sandwell Park, Brome Whorwood owed the provision of two cavalrymen for the king’s use. The armour, weapons and buff coats were still hanging there in 1684. In Wartime the link between the landed gentry and their horses gave the Royalists an initial advantage – and the ambivalent nickname ‘cavalier’. In 1639, however, Brome Whorwood, and many like him, failed to answer the muster for the Scots or Bishops’ Wars, the king’s rash attempt to wage war without Parliament.1 When England’s own war broke out in 1642, Brome evacuated his family away from hostile neighbours, taking Jane, now thirty, Brome junior, seven, and Diana, three, into refuge with Lady Ursula at Holton. In 1646, when Brome attempted to redeem Sandwell Park from sequestration (confiscation), the Staffordshire committeemen took so long to detail their objections that Parliament accused them of contempt.2 When they did file, they overreached themselves with malice, accusing Brome of
having many arms in [Sandwell] in 1642. He did accordingly send them to Warwick when the [Royalist] Earl of Northampton besieged the Castle there. His neighbours told him they would stop him and he said ‘Let them do so if they durst [as] he and other gentlemen have £500 each and would spend it all in the king’s service’. The king was in the right and Parliament’s courses were destructive. He and [they] would spend and lose their blood before the king should be beaten down. He then cursed the adherents of Parliament and swore he would lose his whole estate rather than they should prevail.
Brome, a trained lawyer, rode to Sandwell in 1646 to expose the lie in person: sequestration was not introduced by Parliament until spring 1643!3
He insisted in 1646 that he had been ‘no way conscious of any wilful delinquency’ in 1642, although he did send arms and money to the Earl of Northampton, then besieging Warwick to secure its magazine and provisions for the king. However, a relief force defeated Northampton on 22 August; the day the king declared War at Nottingham and marched south. Brome and family reached Holton before the end of the month. Oxford had declared for the king and blocked its bridges on 13 August. With Uncle Field Whorwood, the city banker then living at Holton Park, and their Curson neighbour at Waterperry, Brome welcomed Sir John Byron’s Royalist force into Oxford overnight on 28 August; the mayor and vice-chancellor billeted the arrivals. In the presence of these same gentry, the mayor paraded the town militia exhorting them to join the university for the king, but the town bailiff called the Crown a ‘tyranny’, and Oxford remained more or less divided, town against gown, for the duration, due as much to local resentment of Chancellor Laud’s grip on Oxford town as to any national issue. On 10 September Lord Saye’s column took Oxford back for Parliament, and ten days later abruptly left.4
Cary Gardiner in her exposed new home at Cuddesdon was scared: ‘1200 soldiers came here [Oxford] this day and I am afraid they will make a great massacre of all the books. What cannot be billeted in the Town is sent to all the towns about. I am in a mighty fright.’ (In May 1643 the Gardiner manor house was looted by Parliamentarians.) Her cavalryman husband, Thomas Gardiner junior, had joined the king at Nottingham, leaving Cary with a bitter father-in-law who hated her ‘neutrality’ and her continued correspondence with brother Ralph. Sir Thomas even forged a letter from her, to turn her family, but they were not fooled: ‘If I were you,’ wrote Sir Ralph’s wife Mary, ‘I would not purchase my welcome to any place at so dear a rate.’ Cary’s husband remained above the quarrel, writing to Lady Mary, ‘were not your Parliamentary officers so busy in stopping and opening letters, I would write oftener to you. I hate to have my secrets laid open, read openly in Westminster Hall, and proclaimed at the Cross. Neither king nor Parliament has any quarrel against women who never did hurt, save with their tongues.’5
Sir Thomas soon swallowed his pride to ask Sir Ralph to safeguard a trunk of valuables. ‘You have been pleased to do me a favour and you may well expect thanks. We could trust the trunk here no longer. One extravagant word spoken by one man is enough to confiscate the goods of a whole family to the Parliament soldiers. Conscience enters not into vulgar hearts.’ Brome, meanwhile, returned to the Midlands, to a commission of array before the king at Perry Common on 19 October. He may have fought at Edgehill, thirty miles away, on 23 October when Ralph and Cary’s father died holding the king’s standard; Anthony Wood of Oxford certainly believed Brome had ‘stuck close to the king in his necessities’, despite his unacceptable (to Wood) Whig stance after 1660. From Edgehill field the king’s columns rode to Oxford where Brome, ‘sometime gentleman commoner of Trinity’, was created doctor of laws with thirty-two others on the first day of Convocation at St Mary’s, on 1 November, donning scarlet robe and black cap with Prince Rupert, the Duke of York, and his own cousin Sir Christopher Lewknor, MP for Chichester, whose mother was a Holton Brome.6 The king used the occasion to appeal to the wider nation beyond Oxford, ‘give me, as God’s second, your hearts’, and to warn it that ‘to fight against God’s Vice-Gerent is to fight against Heaven’. At root, the war was about authority, civic and religious, but it found varied expression in terms of race, class and ritual.
The king marched on London, failed to enter it and fell back on the college ‘palaces’ of Oxford, fifty miles away, which offered attractive winter quarters. Oxford was the first Stuart exile from a capital since Queen Mary Stuart fled Edinburgh seventy years before, and it presaged refuges to come. Wintering at Oxford would be little different from the plague summer Parliament of 1625, or the royal visit of 1636 when Whitehall requisitioned the town. The town walls could be strengthened with bastions and the Thames and Cherwell rivers could be engineered into a moat for a long defence. Oxford folk were used to an itinerant court, although not to an occupying army with it. Charles garrisoned 4,000 troops on 8,000 citizens and a distracted university whose shrinking numbers were balanced by incoming refugees from Parliamentarian territory.
Soldiers filled the villages and took winter fodder, grain and animals. Farms nearest the city, including Whorwood fields in Marston, lost trees and topsoil for improvised earth bastions forward of the medieval walls. Receipts (‘billets’) promised payment, but on victory. Hooves, boots and wheel rims scoured crops and grazing; local men hid from conscription; horses and wagons were requisitioned; gentry surrendered plate and money on Charles’s crude appeals. ‘Whatever you lend, I shall see, in the word of a king, justly repaid. I shall take especial notice of such who shall be backward.’ He threatened ‘speedy course with refusers, as persons disaffected’, and wrote to the ‘well-affected’ in person to make private agreements. With other gentry, Brome was ordered to impress men and to raise quartering money.7 Months later he opted for neutrality. ‘Not minding to have to do in the unhappy difference between the king and the Parliament, [Brome] did in the beginning thereof, travel into Holland and other foreign countries in the Continent until the month of December 1645.’8
He left Jane, the children and his mother at Holton. An extramarital relationship with Katherine Mary Allen, a Holton servant, which was to last until his death in 1684, may have already begun in 1642, increasing pressure on him to leave to cool his ardour, but however strained the marriage, Jane disapproved of his leaving. She testified in Chancery in 1659 that ‘in or about 1643 Brome absented himself from [her] wilfully and without cause and went beyond the seas’.9 It may have added to a growing resentment between her and Lady Ursula.
Holton Park was literally on the front line, half a mile west of Wheatley Bridge. Early in 1643 a Parliamentarian deputation to Oxford agreed that ‘His Majesty’s forces should advance no nearer Windsor than Wheatley [Bridge] and shall take no new quarters above 12 miles from Oxford’. The talks collapsed, leaving Wheatley Bridge with one arch already cut, drawbridged, and guarded as a de facto demarcation point, to be proposed again in talks at Uxbridge in 1645. The respective sides fell back on defending Oxford and London as capital bases from which to sally across England. Oxford became a fortress. John Taylor poeticised its inner moat as ‘flowing putrefaction’, in contrast to the Thame in its clean flood meadows. London also threw up earthworks, ‘the Lines of Communication’, but unlike Wheatley Bridge and Oxford’s works they were never tested in anger.
The warring sides fought with words as they formed their armies. Puritans called Oxford a ‘papist garrison’. The taunt ‘roundhead’ or ‘rattlehead’ (crop-headed apprentice, skinhead) was met with ‘cavalier’ (caballero, cavalière, horseman, foreign and Catholic-inclined). ‘Godly puritans’ were dubbed ‘fanatical rebels’, and they dubbed their enemies ‘malignants’ and ‘delinquents’. Cavaliers pleaded that their vices (women and wine) were human, but puritan vices (hypocrisy and pride) were devilish. Later, two Parliaments clashed, Westminster calling Oxford ‘anti-Parliament’, Oxford decrying Westminster as ‘traitors’. Initially, Charles called them both ‘the Lords and Commons assembled at Oxford and Westminster’, but after Westminster snubbed ‘those at Oxford who have deserted your Parliament’, he retaliated against ‘those at Westminster who call themselves a Parliament’. (Privately, to his wife, he called his Oxford Parliament a ‘mongrel’ with its majority of Lords and minority of MPs.) As the taunting escalated, Sir Paul Pindar, the Royalist City merchant patriarch, summed up the War: ‘our age is as children falling out and fighting about the candle until the parents come in and take it away leaving them to decide their differences in the dark.’10
In January 1643 James Maxwell appeared at Oxford, to explain his not attending the Garter Feast at York, and his selling of the office of deputy Black Rod with the help of his son-in-law, Lord Lanark. Questioned by the king, Maxwell shrugged: ‘everyone would do the best for himself’; Sir Thomas Roe, Garter Chancellor, cut him to size: ‘a gentleman born, but never bred one.’ As Black Rod, Maxwell was in an impossible position between King and Parliament at war. In May he left with Lanark for Scotland with the agreement of ‘both’ Parliaments.
Lanark, secretary of state for Scotland, had a rougher reception at Oxford than his father-in-law, and just as the king ordered him out in May, the Estates summoned him back to Edinburgh, saving his face. He and Maxwell – Lanark spent that summer at Maxwell’s Innerwick home – carried north the king’s condemnation of any Scots alliance with Parliament. They lobbied hard, but unsuccessfully, and remained in constant touch with the king. Both eventually allied themselves with the Covenanters against the king and Jane did not see her father again until 1647. Lanark reappeared briefly at Oxford in December 1643, and understandably was arrested. In 1645 Maxwell loaned the Scottish Army of the Covenant in England about £8,000 (sterling equivalent) for food. In London his locked home at Charing was forced by English bailiffs to raise a war levy, but Parliament ordered it repaired and protected. Westminster appointed its own Black Rod in Maxwell’s place, while Maxwell’s deputy, Sir James Thynne, served the king and his shadow Parliament at Oxford.11
London’s trade and supply lines were severed by Royalist garrisons stretching from the Midlands to the south-west, although eastern England remained closer-linked to the capital. Westminster and St Martin’s were ‘distinctly underpopulated’; London and Oxford were vulnerable to spies and smugglers. On market days intelligence flowed in and out of Oxford over Wheatley Bridge. (Cromwell halted dragoons there in 1645 to question folk returning from the market before riding to an attack at Islip.) Sentries gossiped and men removed or turned the sashes and ribbons which passed for uniforms on the outbreak of the War. Inns at Tetsworth, the last stage before and the first stage from Oxford on the London Way, were notorious for loose talk. Pedlars and chapmen carried intelligence round the countryside. Men urinated below an open window in one Oxford street, passing notes over the sill as they did so; the notes were taken out into the Parliamentarian countryside by ‘city gardeners’ and left in ditches. A jingle described such messages from Oxford to London, ‘written by owl light, intercepted [collected] by moonlight, posted by twilight, dispersed by daylight, and read by candlelight’. Couriers were rewarded, or hanged if caught, in a war as brutal as any tribal feud. In April 1643 Parliament ordered that anyone nearing London from Oxford be punished ‘as spies or intelligencers’.12
Besides her father and brother-in-law, other faces from court familiar to Jane crossed Wheatley Bridge, past Holton Park and over Shotover to Oxford. With Christ Church ‘palace’ only four miles away, and with a grandmother and servants to look after Brome junior and Diana, she had time to visit old friends. Old Johann Wolfgang Rummler lodged in St Aldate’s, the royal apothecary who had travelled Europe with her father buying restoratifs for King James. The widowed duchess of Buckingham, an old neighbour at Wallingford House, was at Brasenose College with Lady Mary whom Jane had known as a child. Within weeks of Edgehill, Sir Peter Wyche, Sir Nicholas Crispe and Sir George Benyon, East India men and commercial colleagues of her father, took refuge. Her brother-in-law, Anne’s husband Sir Thomas Bowyer, and Sir Christopher Lewknor of Chichester, a Brome cousin, also came fleeing Parliament. Possibly Mark and George Ryder billeted in St Aldate’s parish were her blood cousins.13 Inevitably, Jane was drawn into the War. While ‘royal service’ or ‘the cause’ was an impeccable alibi, it may not have found approval at Holton, yet she had noble precedents. Prominent Royalists left their children in care for a higher cause. Sir Edward Walker’s wife left theirs with relatives so she could join him in Oxford; the Verneys left theirs when they went into exile, and the queen herself left her children for so many years she never saw some of them again. The king’s acid test of loyal friends was ruthless: that they ‘forsake themselves’.
‘One Mistress Whorwood,’ confessed Thomas Coke in 1651, ‘wife of Mr Brome Whorwood in Oxfordshire, was wont to bring intelligence to the late King [Charles I] as well to Oxford as to the Isle of Wight. She was sent several times with messages privately to the late king.’ Coke, an MP in the Long and Oxford Parliaments, ‘held the secrets of all His Majesty’s designs and friends in England’. His father, Sir John, was a friend of the Nauntons, neighbours to the Maxwells at Charing. What messages Jane carried to Oxford or from whom went unspecified, but Coke knew her from there. Secretary Edward Nicholas called Coke’s confession ‘a disaster’ for the Royalist cause, as Coke knew so much.14
Jane’s red hair, even with a linen undercap, marked her out in Oxford, as Anthony Wood recalled years later. The Scots were slow to enter the War, but the threat was as real as the feeling against them. John Cleveland composed The Rebel Scot at Oxford, likening the word ‘Scot’ to ‘poison with no antidote, unless my head were red’. He called Scots ‘lice’, ‘Jews’, ‘witches’, ‘wolves’, ‘infections’, ‘leeches’, ‘zoo animals’, ending his litany of hate with ‘haemorrhoids’. John Taylor was gentler: ‘must Oxford and sister Cambridge both learn of St Andrew’s and Aberdeen?’ The Hamilton brothers returned to Oxford in December 1643, ahead of the invasion they had failed to prevent, and were immediately imprisoned; William escaped to London with the help of his Scots page, and into the protection of Parliament now that Scotland was its formal ally. He reconciled with the Covenanters, as his father-in-law evidently had also done; his regiments of foot and horse were in the Covenanting Scots Army and he, an army commissioner. Lanark’s loyalty was seriously torn between his countries: the one personified by his fiercely Covenanting mother who actually bore arms in the 1639 war; the other in the person of his cousin the embattled king. John Maxwell, now an archbishop, also took refuge at Oxford from his Irish diocese of Tuam where he had been appointed after being chased out of Scotland. In the garrison he was honorary preacher to the king, but of little other use. Despite the dangers, Jane presumably kept links with her own, but only from 1648 does evidence show how close she was to her Lanark sister and brother-in-law (see Chapter 8).
Traffic in intelligence and unlicensed publications flourished. Messages in books were smuggled to and fro by ‘certain adventurous women. It was easy to sew letters privately in the covers of a new book and give the book a secret mark.’15 Books were stored wholesale in London river barges on a river commercially navigable above Oxford. Jane would have been wasted (and conspicuous) on such service, but in 1648 she did use an advance, marked copy of a book to smuggle intelligence from London to the king on Wight. Another garrison Scot, Kate, Lady d’Aubigny (olim Stuart, later Newburgh), the king’s cousin, obtained a pass from Oxford to London to settle her late husband’s affairs early in 1643. She smuggled the king’s commission for an uprising in the capital in the spring of 1643, intended to prevent the bloodshed of the first campaign season, but she was discovered and spent a year in the Tower before returning to Oxford until the surrender in 1646. Later, she and Jane conspired together in the king’s escape attempts, and Jane’s mother included Lord Newburgh, Kate’s third husband, in her will.
The evidence for Jane Whorwood as royal intelligencer is credible coming from Coke, who knew firsthand her activities in Oxford, and in the light of her known work after 1646. However, it lacks any detail. In contrast, her gold-running into Oxford is documented. It centred on the Royalist merchants of the East India and Levant companies who had traditionally supported the king in peacetime, particularly when he ruled without Parliament, 1629–40, and when the City was synonymous with wealth, ‘the liver of the Italian goose, drawing all the nutrient and riches to itself’. The merchants were James Maxwell’s commercial colleagues, several of whom fled to Oxford. When Maxwell became a money-lender to the king in peacetime, his capital came from trade and commerce, monopolies, exemptions, and notably his Scottish African company’s exclusive importing of gold and silver. In peacetime, the raising of money for the Crown without Parliament’s authority was illegal and in contempt, but astonishingly, even after War broke out, City gold still flowed into the king’s coffers and credit was given. This was despite the defeatists, Parliament’s control of London, the collapse of trade and customs, and the roadblocks on the way to Oxford. East India and Levant company merchants provided much, if not most of that cash flow from their personal wealth.
Sir Paul Pindar and Sir John Jacob, leading East India men, were admitted to Grays Inn in 1631 on the same day as James Maxwell and other prominent Scots courtiers, a mark of how closely entwined commerce and the Court became in the absence of Parliament. Sir William Courteen, grandee of the East India Company and close partner of Pindar and Jacob, called Maxwell ‘my respectful friend’ in his will of 1636. Jane’s daughter Elizabeth was baptised in Pindar’s home parish in 1638. In 1640 Maxwell’s younger stepdaughter, Anne Ryder, married Sir Thomas Bowyer, one of a family of East India merchants, and Bowyer made Maxwell his executor in 1648. Pindar himself, a veteran maritime explorer from Queen Elizabeth’s reign, was the king’s most generous financier. In his eyes, loyalty to the Crown was both honourable and profitable, the Crown as eternally safe a bet as the divinity behind it. The king saw Pindar’s City colleagues as a ‘silent volcano’ of loyalty, his merchants sworn to allegiance on their aldermanic oaths. Levant and East India merchants needed safe seas, particularly the Mediterranean, so they supported the king’s peace with Catholic Spain and the hated Ship Money, which built ships to fight North African pirates. Leading merchants Job Harby and John Nulls helped Henrietta Maria pawn Crown jewellery in Holland in 1642, to purchase and deliver supplies to Oxford in 1643. In effect, pre-War royal finance had been largely privatised, and only private capital could meet the even greater expenses of Wartime. Maxwell, like the merchants, had invested and profited, to the point where supplementation, loyalty to the Crown, self-enrichment and family considerations became inseparable.16
One significant commercial gamble, however, returned to haunt Maxwell. In 1640 the king purchased compulsorily all the pepper in the East India warehouses for £63,000 on credit, to be repaid through future concessions; he sold the pepper at a loss for £50,000 ready cash for his Scots war. The merchants, locked into their cycle of assumptions – royal promise, low risk and solid long-term expectation – acceded pliantly, if uneasily: ‘this will give good satisfaction to the king and cause him to give our Company favours in matters formally requested.’17 At least the deal was better than his seizing of the bullion in the Tower to force a loan in June 1640, or his threat to issue brass coin; but Parliament returned to Westminster that year, indignant after a long enforced absence. It confiscated the pepper to punish the City’s long-term contempt, and fined the merchant culprits £168,000.
Paul Pindar, Peter Wyche, John Nulls, John Jacob and Nicholas Crispe, all knights, aldermen and merchants, had allowed Maxwell to help underwrite the king’s pepper credit up to £4,000. On his depositing of that sum he would be insured ‘harmless’ from liability for the royal debt up to £100,000. The king, however, lost his Scottish wars and could not pay creditors, despite selling off land and timber; in defeat, his bond, privy seal and word were worthless. The English War soon followed, and with it Parliament’s revenge.
Royalist merchants had gambled with peacetime cards. The last civil war had been between the Roses 160 years before, and they only knew the slow but sure profits of peacetime: the outbreak of War made their commercial experience irrelevant. After 1642 trade and customs slumped, the king could not enforce monopolies or repay loans, the merchants lost civic and commercial power and finally control of their companies as Parliamentarian merchants took over. The Royalist merchants suddenly found themselves in a minority and their diminishing wealth trapped in London where Parliament could levy heavily, force loans and confiscate any money discovered loaned or given to the king. Abroad, the Royalist ambassador in Turkey, Sir Sackvile Crowe, was even more alienated from the companies, then Royalist, now Parliamentarian, which had nominated him in 1633, and the final straw came when his property at home was sequestrated. Crowe compensated with his version of supplementation by collecting Levant Company dues and his own imaginative levies on English ships in Turkish ports. The pepper came back to haunt Maxwell when he was arrested in 1649 and held liable for the whole of the king’s pepper debt. In 1664 Lady Anne Bowyer, Jane’s sister, produced the £4,000 bond in a bold attempt to claim £100,000 maximum liability from the merchants, and in 1675 Parliament did at least award her back the £4,000 deposit with thirty-three years’ interest! Maxwell trained all his daughters well.
Despite increasing war losses, the merchants stood remarkably firm by the king. Nicholas Crispe claimed to have lost £300,000. Sir Paul Pindar, perhaps the major donor, died bankrupt in 1650. His pre-War syndicate – Crispe, Nulls, Jacob, Harby, Wyche and Eliab Harvey (a close friend of the Maxwells) – rented from the Crown the collecting or farming of customs. They paid lump sums (six paid £200,000 for the 1640 contract, approximately £35,000 each), waited for their profit and received honours for their patience, but the returns evaporated. Abraham Dawes acknowledged that loyalty to the Crown had a double price and he was willing to ‘pay it and pay for it’. John Jacob spoke from the heart: ‘Though I give all I have, I can be no loser; if not, though I keep all, I can be no saver.’
Pindar exhausted his fortune on the king, then borrowed widely to continue lending, thereby bankrupting others whom he could not repay. By 1645 Parliament was finding his creditors everywhere, each owed between £500 and £5,000 by Pindar, and all of it instantly forfeit on discovery. Dorothy Seymour, for example, spinster maid-of-honour to Henrietta Maria and known for her greed, began to feel the pinch at Oxford and wrote to Pindar in 1644 asking for the interest on £5,000 she had lent him. Parliament intercepted her letter, took the £5,000 from Pindar, on top of a £20,000 loan and a £3,500 war levy which they had already imposed on him. At the Restoration in 1660 the Crown owed the grandee families of Pindar and Courteen approximately £250,000 on debts incurred before and during the War, but Charles II could not cope with the wider multitude of creditors demanding repayment for his father’s frantic borrowing. Pindar’s heirs were still pursuing their dues forty years later; Dorothy Seymour received two-thirds of the £5,000 she had lent Pindar, but without a penny of eighteen years’ interest.
In 1680 Pindar’s executor claimed that
out of great zeal and loyalty towards the preservation of the Royal family, [Pindar] sent several sums of money in gold to Oxford (by the hand of Madam Jean Whorewood, yet living) in the year 1644, for transporting of His Majesty [Charles II] when he was Prince of Wales, and the late Queen his mother, with their servants and goods to Brest in France.18
It was summarised in 1679 as ‘money in gold to a considerable value for the protection of the Royal family’. Jane was key surviving witness, and prime actor. Before the War, insisted the executor, Pindar and Courteen had also paid for the funeral of James I, the relief of La Rochelle, the upkeep of the exiled Winter Queen, the Irish expedition ‘and made several disbursements for diamonds and other jewels of the Crown’, amounting to £85,000 in 1638–9 alone. Charles II felt a debt of honour to Pindar for the queen’s escape abroad in 1644 (he left England only later, in 1646), and promised the Pindar heirs a part-payment in 1667. It would not be a direct payment by the Crown, nor would it carry interest on the twenty-seven-year delay, but it would be a refund of Pindar’s £35,000 share of the 1640 Customs rent of £200,000 (see above), to be taken from the 1667 Customs Farm revenue earned by Crispe and other syndicate survivors of 1640. Oxford 1644 was ancient history; the Customs Farm 1667 was a going concern, as indispensable to Charles II as it had been to his father. The confidence of the participating merchants had to be maintained, but predictably, Nicholas Crispe took care that no money was ever handed over.
Even had the gesture payment of £35,000 actually been made to Pindar’s estate, his executor protested in 1680, ‘it doth not extend to half the value of the gold sent to Oxford as aforesaid [author’s italics]’. Pindar, therefore, on the estimate of his executor with well-rehearsed figures before him, sent more than £70,000 to Oxford in 1644 alone. If a conservatively assumed 10 per cent (£3,500) shortfall is added to the £35,000 (which ‘doth not extend to half’), and then doubled, the guesstimated total principal of gold sent into Oxford by Pindar, ‘by the hand of Madam Jean Whorewood’ in early 1644 alone, amounted to £77,000. However, Pindar had also sent gold to the king in 1642–3, again through ‘Mistress Horwood’.
The sole account ledger to survive from royal Oxford was signed off in October 1643. Any formal record of gold delivered in 1644 or later (the queen left Oxford in April), or in the last quarter of 1643, was burned with four years of records in June 1646, just days before Oxford surrendered. The surviving Accompt was the responsibility of John Ashburnham, treasurer at war and pay-master for eighteen months from April 1642, and after the battle of Edgehill, based at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. Ashburnham had been a groom of the bedchamber with James Maxwell since 1628, and was father-in-law to John Jacob, an East India Company Royalist donor. His mother was a Villiers and he a protégé of the late Duke of Buckingham. Once established in the Oxford garrison, he delegated the account-keeping to his gentleman retainer, John Browne, evidently a lawyer, in November 1642. Browne recorded and back-recorded Royalist cash contributions from April 1642 until he relinquished the accounts in October 1643 – a total of £162,117, of which he handed £82,903 to the army quartermaster. Outgoings were meticulously reconciled. Other donations to the king were presumably either recorded elsewhere, by others, or not at all. The importance of ready cash to the royal war effort cannot be overstated, just as when Charles sold the pepper at a loss to procure cash for the Scots wars. Years later, when Commonwealth officials tried to make Ashburnham reveal who had advanced the king money during the War, so they could fine the lenders and confiscate the equivalent sums loaned and any bonds or securities held for them, he concealed his accounts, and in the panic ‘scarce had time to eat’. The Accompt survived the search parties to be published only in 1830.19
‘Moneys are the nerves of war,’ the king reminded his Oxford Parliament in April 1644, ‘expedite supplies of it by subscription or excise.’ Manor house plate and ‘contributions’ were not enough. The Accompt recorded Lady Ursula Whorwood’s widow’s mite of £158 and her ‘36 plate trenchers [valued at] £89’ from Holton House.20 They would be minted into coin and never repaid, but if the St George salt and gilt dessert settings recorded in 1684 were at Holton as early as 1643, Lady Ursula concealed them. Ashburnham’s gentleman also recorded rich men’s donations, some of them East India and Levant company loyalists with whom Ashburnham, James Maxwell and Lord Cottington, Chancellor of the Exchequer, had worked closely for years. Cottington was already in Oxford; merchant financiers there, Nicholas Crispe and George Benyon, even acted as treasurers to the parishes where they were billeted, St Peter’s and St Ebbe’s.
Browne showed a lawyer’s caution with many donors, masking them behind initials or anonymity. No entry is dated. ‘A woman employed in secret service’ received £20; ‘Sir W.G.’ had £50. The majority, however, were named, and had the Accompt been found by Parliament’s Committee for the Advance of Money, it would not have cost an astrologer’s fee to identify the initials. Merchants’ contributions were not widow’s mites; only City men could afford to gamble four-figure donations on the royal cause. Five donors known only by initials gave a total of £11,040: IH (? Job Harby) £2,500; IN (? John Nulls) £3,000; II (? John Jacob) £1,040. AP, who gave £2,000, and LH, who gave £2,500, remain obscure, but the first three, if correctly identified, were Pindar’s syndicate colleagues and leading East India men.
The largest individual contributions came from ‘PP’ (Paul Pindar) himself, who first gave the king £2,995 ‘through a Mr Markham’. PP next gave £2,000, perhaps once the king had settled into Oxford and first appealed for money. Finally, ‘Mistress Horwood for PP and others at times [paid in] £6,041’, the largest single donation recorded by Browne over eighteen months.21 Pindar, therefore, paid around £8–10,000 in 1642–3, allowing for the ‘others at times’ who contributed to the £6,041. In addition, he later gave the estimated sum of £77,000 in gold smuggled to Oxford early in 1644. No clue survives of any donation he may have made later in 1644 or in 1645–6, but then funds were running out. Had Ashburnham/Browne’s ledger evidence of Jane Whorwood’s money-smuggling been discovered, Parliament could have used it against her and those for whom she acted. They did punish her in 1651, on an unrelated exemplary charge of corrupting the chairman of the parliamentary Committee for the Advance of Money. Browne and others were successful in concealing her and others’ names.
Other East India and Levant men gave to breaking point: Sir Peter Wyche loaned £30,000 and fled to Oxford; Sir George Benyon sent £5,000 to the king at York which was intercepted and confiscated before he fled to Oxford; MarmaDuke Roydon came to Oxford in 1643, spent his fortune on the king and died as governor of Faringdon. At the other end of the scale, smaller amounts were recorded in Browne’s columns. Mr Adams (£50) was possibly Alderman Thomas Adams, the ex-Lord Mayor who sent funds to the king through Jane Whorwood in 1647–8. Sir Edward Bowyer (£50), was brother-in-law to Jane’s sister Anne, and others lurk behind initials in the Accompt still to be identified.
The known sum of £85–87,000 from Pindar alone (£8–10,000 in 1642–3, and £77,000 in 1644), is a minimum; a conservative estimate based on fragmentary records, and those only for the first two years of the king’s four years at Oxford. The approximate £83,041 which Jane is known to have smuggled for Pindar ‘and others’ in the same period, is also a minimum, the two sums approximately the same money. Pindar was used to working in syndicates, and the ‘others’ may have been part of his and Jane’s smuggling operation. His calculated minimum contribution amounts to almost the output of the Wartime mint in Oxford, and to more than the army quartermaster’s entire revenue over eighteen months, April 1642–October 1643. It was also cash, not credit, essential for paying (and retaining) soldiers, as well as financing royal escapes; in neither circumstance would credit have been acceptable. Pindar’s contribution through Jane Whorwood was significant, and while we do not know its full extent, even at its minimum it was a great weight of metal.
The contract for minting gold at the Tower Mint, 1642–5, stipulated that forty-one laurel or unite coins be struck from one troy pound of twenty-two carat gold. If the respective Pindar or Whorwood figures are rounded to £85,000, it means that Jane organised the smuggling of a known 2,073 lbs troy of gold, 1,705 lbs avoirdupois (775kg) for Pindar alone, and evidently more than that ‘for others at times’.22 The conveying of gold in such bulk would test anyone’s ingenuity. Uncle Field Whorwood at Holton, a Lombard Street goldsmith and financier, might have advised. Holton Park, so close to the main road, offered a natural dropping point and many hiding places. East India Company merchants were expert bullion traders and knew about transporting it. Frequently in peacetime they had outbid the Mint and caused shortage of coin. Even small gold weighs heavily in bouffant hair, a body belt, the hem of a dress or a book binding, and in bulk it has been known to defeat bullion thieves. A contemporary believed Sir Nicholas Crispe’s agents smuggled ‘thousands in gold’, one ‘riding on his way to Oxford in [between] a pair of panniers like a butterman going to market … [another] a porter … [another] a fisherman … [another] a merchant’.23 Crispe may have been one of the ‘others’ working with Pindar and Whorwood. Most likely, Jane learned her smuggling and intelligencing skills from other women, not from merchant bankers, and her confidence allowed her to be an obvious organiser. In the trafficking of gold she was unlikely to have been a mule, although she may have travelled to London in the organising of it.
In 1642–3 an air of unreality still hung over the roads (and waterways) between the warring capitals which invited smuggling. Passes were relatively easily obtained. ‘Sentries at town gates,’ wrote the French ambassador to Scotland after visiting Oxford, ‘are little exact in remarking dates [on passports] and for the most part are unable to read.’ Respect for the Crown, traditional protocols and courtesies were observed, albeit against a backdrop of increasing hostility. Well-bred women with a pass and confident manner were less likely than men to be searched. Lady Mary Stafford – her husband was of the queen’s household – entertained the Dutch ambassador in 1652 with her account of having smuggled ‘the king’s crown and a great quantity of other jewels to Oxford at his request when he was there with his army, and the ruses she had to employ to hide them, without ever being caught’. The Journal of the House of Commons confirms she was not exaggerating. Four times in 1643 she obtained passes to visit London, twice by coach, with Lady May and Lady Grey. They lodged in St James’s Palace, the king’s pre-War home, and literally helped themselves for his cause. Parliament finally barred their visiting London and banished them permanently back to Oxford.24 If the crown of England could be smuggled to Oxford, anything could.
At one point Parliament voted to allow the king to retrieve spare stockings from Whitehall. In June 1643 alone he paid £190 for clean ruffs and cuffs. Laundresses were allowed passes, along with soap consignments, for the cleaning of linen and clothes; like Jane’s rural midwives, Oxford washerwomen were not good enough for the royal body and its apparel. Soap also served as an enema in a city under siege where the diet and water were deficient and exercise limited: constipation from ration packs still haunts soldiers. John Ashburnham paid ‘Mistress Burgenny, laundress, £20’, and ‘Mistress Freeman, the Prince’s Laundress, £5’. In July 1643 Parliament allowed Mistress Elizabeth Wheeler, ‘laundress for His Majesty’s body’, to go from London to Oxford with her servants, but without soap her journey was pointless. Peacetime London produced some 700 barrels of soap a week and the barrel was the ubiquitous weather-proof and damage-proof container of the day. Barrels went from Oxford University to London carrying books for safe keeping; John Dale, bursar of Magdalen, hid college plate among the tomes in barrels; publishers transported new imprints wholesale and dry in barrels. Thomas Coke, prior to the battle of Worcester in 1651, confessed to his interrogators that pistols and powder were being smuggled, as he spoke, by Royalist rebels into London ‘in barrels under the name of soap’.
Jane grew up in a world of Castile soap, manufactured in Antwerp with fine thistle ash; Huguenots brought soap production to London, and her Antwerper mother was the queen’s laundress. Merchants competed for the soap monopoly through a ‘whiter and sweeter’ soap-and-linen competition judged by the Lord Mayor. Monopolists (Patrick Maule, Maxwell’s colleague of the bedchamber, was one) had the right to test soap and assay-mark the barrels, the largest of which weighed 26 lbs empty and held 254 lbs of guaranteed Castile. Barrelsful transported by wagon, too greasy, deep and cumbersome for a roadblock picquet to even want to examine, offered ideal cover for gold. Laundress Elizabeth Wheeler worked so closely with Jane Whorwood after the War, carrying messages between London and the king in his various prisons, that the alliance may be assumed to have begun earlier in peacetime Westminster. They were about the same age, one from Charing, the other from Kensington, and Jane knew the laundry routines and royal laundresses from her cradle. She would have been quite at home incognita as a member of the travelling team. In January 1649 Wheeler and Whorwood were even confused with each other as they waited in the wings (See Chapter 10) before the king’s execution. Thomas Coke, too, named them to his interrogators in the same breath in 1651: ‘Mrs Wheeler, laundress to the late king, likewise brought letters to him on the Isle of Wight.’25
William Lilly, the astrologer, was privy to the secrets of both sides in the War. Safe under the Commonwealth, he wrote a cynical account of Charles I:
Citizens of London assisted the king with their flatterings and large gifts [and] in his latest extremity relieved him with considerable sums of money, even at Oxford, in soap barrels, yet he slighted them, thought them too rich, and intended for them a secret revenge [author’s italics].
Angrily, Sir Edward Walker, Royal Secretary at Oxford who took over the War accounts from Ashburnham in October 1643, denied that the king was vindictive or that the ‘sums’ donated were all that ‘considerable’. He admitted that citizens (prominenti of the City of London) did send contributions and in soap barrels, but his priority in 1653, like Ashburnham’s in 1651, was to conceal their names. Ashburnham, Browne and Whorwood were already heavily implicated, and Walker’s reticence reflected the very real risk of severe financial retribution against anyone discovered to have been a Wartime donor to the king. Many faced financial ruin already because of the king’s defeat.
It would have been, Walker continued, ‘justice [for the king] to punish those of the City that had rebelliously opposed him, [but] if any of them supplied him in his extremity it was done as good subjects [ought]’. He certainly had in mind the Royalist merchants and went as close as he dared to acknowledging them when he praised ‘City aldermen of the better and discreeter sort. I am sure His Majesty had many most loyal and affectionate to him as their actions and sufferings have sufficiently demonstrated [author’s italics].’ The king’s restraint towards the newly Parliamentarian merchant companies who had been less loyal, Walker insisted, had actually saved London from destruction.26 ‘By the hand of Madam Jean Whorewood’ Paul Pindar, alderman, knight and London citizen, a survivor of Drake’s era, sent the king at least three-quarters of a ton of gold, in weight the equivalent of more than six gross barrelsful of soap (127kg, 280 lbs each), spread across many barrels and many months: and probably much more.
Lady Ursula or Uncle Field may have funded Brome’s neutrality through Robert Abbott, the family’s banker. One trace from his exile in France remains. In August 1645 he wrote from Paris to his cousin Ralph Verney in Rouen about the impending marriage of Margaret Lucas, the queen’s maid-of-honour, to William Cavendish, Duke of Newcastle. Brome was Verney’s distant cousin, not even on the Verney cipher list. Lord Lucas had asked Cavendish to care for his sister who, along with Mary Gardiner of Cuddesdon, attended the pregnant queen from Oxford, via Exeter, to Brest in 1644, the escape for which Jane Whorwood conveyed Pindar’s gold. The queen knew nothing of the marriage plan. Margaret, nicknamed ‘Mad Meg’ for her imaginative intelligence – she once quizzed an amused Bishop Wilkins, a serious astronomer, about moon travel – hated the exile court in Paris, ‘a place of much censure’, profligate and gossipy, ‘court devils in their dissenting hell’.27
Rouen was cheaper than Paris, and Verney was a Parliamentarian, avoiding all contact with the Royalist exiles at the Louvre whenever he visited the capital. Brome informed his ‘Honest Cousin’ he had just been at St Germain, the exile queen’s summer palace, and that he had a letter for him from Sir Ralph Sydenham, former courtier and MP; he had also seen Mary and Margaret at Verney’s request. ‘I did obey your command to them [and] Mistress Gardiner presents her service to you and my Lady cousin.’ Verney may have been wary of Mary Gardiner because of the way her family treated his sister Cary at Cuddesdon, and for her intrigues among the émigrés. Brome promised, but failed to come to Rouen.
A month later he asked that his courier may ‘kiss your hands and present my love and service to yourself and my dear cousin Mary [Lady Verney]. I have obeyed your command to get two virgins of honour [bridesmaids] who I have not seen this day for I came late [to St Germain] last night from Paris and this morning write before I visit them.’ He promised to come to Rouen soon, ‘but will not prefix any certain time. If you see my lord of Devonshire [Charles Cavendish] and his lady [Elizabeth Cecil, sister-in-law to Jane’s sister, Diana Cranborne] pray present my service, Thy affectionate kinsman and servant.’28 Like Verney, Cavendish had absented himself from Parliament, and the colonies of exiles from both sides and from none often did not mix. He and Brome returned after the battle of Naseby to submit to a Parliamentary ultimatum in December 1645 and were fined and pardoned. Naseby spelled the end of the king’s cause and many came home from abroad, tails between their legs, as bankruptcy for a war already lost seemed pointless. ‘Men do well to compound in time and be wise, for the king is in a most low and despicable condition.’ Brome left behind him arrangements which ended in a secret marriage in the English ambassador’s chapel and Henrietta Maria’s passing displeasure.
Cary Verney left Cuddesdon for Bedfordshire early in the War. When her husband was taken prisoner by Parliament, Ralph Verney had him released. Her fears for Cuddesdon had been well-grounded. The Gardiner house on the spur was looted in 1643 and Governor Legge of Oxford ordered the house and the bishop’s new palace torched in 1644 to prevent their becoming enemy vantage points west of the Thame. Cary’s husband, Captain Thomas, returned to fight and was killed in action in 1645; three months later his younger brother fell. Their father attended both funerals in Christ Church as mourner-in-chief and his bitterness still showed in his will ten years later. Cary lived off the charity of relatives. A consultation with William Lilly in 1645 about her disabled daughter cost fees and was a measure of her desperation. By then, the eighteen-year-old widow was a lifetime older than the fifteen-year-old bride of 1642, excited by summer evening coach jaunts.29
Jane Whorwood certainly emerged from the shadows after Oxford fell. In 1647 the records, despite their fragmentary nature, begin to reveal a seasoned agent who had for some time already proved her ingenuity and trustworthiness. She had access to court, the king’s ear and had earned expressions of his personal confidence (see Chapter 7). She had helped create and maintain networks and channels in Oxford, the obscurity of which was their Wartime strength, but which sadly remains their chief characteristic.
There is reason to believe she was still at Oxford when it surrendered in 1646. Certainly Elias Ashmole, who served in Oxford from late 1644 to December 1645, the only period when their time at Oxford ever coincided, ‘knew her well’. His commission there was to oversee the eastern defences at the Eastgate, the approach from Wheatley Bridge and Holton. By 1646 Jane had nowhere else to go. Just before the king fled from Oxford to the Scots outside Newark late in April 1646, the king entrusted John Ashburnham with a jewel cache. They may have been the broken Garter Stars, Georges and other jewels which Charles obtained from a lady in Westminster after his trial in 1649. Perhaps they were among ‘the great quantity of other jewels’ retrieved by Lady Stafford from St James’s Palace in 1643. Jewels were often Charles I’s comfort cushion when isolated and bankrupt. Then, as now, the richly ornate Garter insignia had to be returned to the monarch on the death of the holder; Garter membership was freely conferred in Oxford garrison years and the necessary jewels were available. Ashburnham must have passed on his cache – Garter jewels or other – for safekeeping, as neither he nor the king could escape with them across guarded countryside. John Browne left Oxford ahead of the king’s escape, when the roads were still open, and may have carried away his master’s old Accompt, but royal jewels were still too much to risk on the highway. The tradition persisted that Jane Whorwood looked after them, and that they were the Garter pieces in the unnamed Westminster lady’s possession in 1649. Jane would have been an appropriate guardian, as the king’s gold-smuggler and daughter of the Garter Usher. In a letter to Sir Edward Nicholas from Newcastle on 24 June 1646, the day the Oxford garrison marched out, Charles asked, ‘send me word where my jewels are which 449 had and if my cabinet or p[?ortmanteau] which I left with you be at ad.[?] or not’. These may have been two distinct items: jewels in a box or cabinet, and a case or cloak bag (portmanteau) of papers; they may have been three items: jewels, a cabinet of private correspondence, and a bag of papers.30
The king may have worried more about losing the correspondence, after the Naseby experience when his and the queen’s letters were captured, published and mocked. Nicholas interpreted ‘449’ as Ashburnham (‘IA’), and in Jane’s lifetime Dugdale the historian from the Oxford garrison claimed that a jewel ‘cabinet’ was retrieved by Sir Thomas Herbert from Jane, two nights before the king’s execution, she ‘then living’ in Westminster. His authority was Herbert himself. Anthony Wood, the Oxford diarist, document collector from Dugdale, Ashmole, Lilly and Herbert, and confidant of them all, remained convinced that ‘Jane Whorwood is the same lady mentioned [by Herbert] in Athenae et Fasti Oxonienses II, 523, where King Charles I had put into her hands a cabinet of precious jewels to be by her kept until such time that he should send for them, which he did a little before he died’ (see Chapter 10). This was despite a last-minute change of mind by Herbert before he died.
In 1646, encircled, walled Oxford, on the verge of surrender, was no place to hide valuables. The roads were blocked, the king in Scots hands and London was out of bounds; 20,000 Parliamentarian soldiers were about to occupy the small dilapidated city. Kate d’Aubigny was refused an exit pass in May, as were Prince Rupert and the Duke of York, despite their private pleading. Jane’s Holton home, however, out on the edge of garrison territory, under New Army guard as General Fairfax’s personal quarter from 1 May, was about the safest place to hide anything. Six weeks later the Naseby generals celebrated a Cromwell family wedding at Holton House and lodged there, possibly yards from the king’s jewels.
1. TNA PROB 28/387, 114461; CSP 1638–9, CCCCXII, 9, 2 February 1639.
2. CCAM, I, 84, 106, 162, 166; II, 648; CCC, II, 966; III, 1813.
3. TNA SP, 1642, XIX, 63.162.167.
4. HMC Report, XI, House of Lords, Misc. Mss, Addenda 1514–1714 (1962), 322–33, 352, 17 September 1642, ‘Grievances at Oxford’ concerning events on 1 September.
5. Lady Frances Verney, Memoirs of the Verney Family, II (1892–9), 58–79.
6. John Ashton, The Story of West Bromwich (1964), 27; Frederick Hackwood, A History of West Bromwich (1895), 56; Anthony Wood, Fasti, II, 43, 1 November 1642.
7. See also CCAM, II, 996–1005, Oxford Engagement; William Black, Docquets of Letters Patent under the Great Seal at Oxford, 1642–46, I (1837), 97, where even in absentia Brome Whorwood – or his Holton estate – was liable to provide soldiers in November 1643, along with his cousin Christopher Lewknor, Nicholas Crispe, Thomas Gardiner and many other gentry sheltering at Oxford.
8. Basil Henning, ed., History of Parliament: The Commons, 1660–90, III (1983), 714–16.
9. Lambeth Palace Archives, Court of Arches records inherited from Commonwealth Court of Chancery, Whorwood vs Whorwood, Case 9938, 1672, E 5/29/10.
10. David Lloyd, Memoirs (1668), 633 citing Pindar.
11. HLJ, V, 498; VI 576, 621; VI, 54; Ashmole Ms 1111, 137–8, Bodleian Library; Mary Keeler, The Long Parliament 1640–41: A Biographical Study (1954), 360–1.
12. Seventeenth-century news sheets, accessible as ‘Periodicals’ in Early English Books Online; Anthony Wood, Pamphlets, 632, Bodleian Library; Margaret Toynbee and Peter Young, Strangers in Oxford (1972); Frederick Varley, The Siege of Oxford (1932); Frederick Varley, Supplement to the Siege of Oxford (1935); Rosemary Kelly, A City at War; Oxford 1642–46 (1987); Stephen Porter, ed., London and the Civil War (1996), notably Chapter 6, 149–74; Ian Roy, A Cavalier View of London, and Chapter 7, 175–204; Stephen Porter, Impact upon London of The Civil War.
13. Margaret Toynbee and Peter Young, op.cit., 252–3.
14. Camden Society, NS 50, 1880, Nicholas Papers I, 237, Edward Nicholas to Edward Hyde, 3 May 1651; HMC XIII, Portland I, 1891, Appendix I, 603, 28 May 1651: Thomas Coke (or Cooke)’s confession, made between March and May 1651, was reported in full to the Commons (ibid., 576–609). Coke was Sir John Coke’s younger son, an MP in the ‘mongrel’ Oxford Parliament of 1644, who collaborated in Royalist espionage with his brother John. Austin Woolrych, Soldiers, Writers and Statesmen of the English Civil War (1988), 86.
15. Peter Barwick, Life of Dr John Barwick (1724), 58–64, on intelligencing and smuggling to Oxford; Ashmole Ms 1112, 61–4, Bodleian Library; ‘Richard Royston’, ODNB, 2004. John Barwick acted as a smuggler and courier but did not know ‘what other private agents the king had in London’. The Earl of Pembroke, he claimed, provided passes for smugglers between London and Oxford, by whom intelligence and ‘sometimes money and ammunition furnished by certain citizens was conveyed to Oxford’.
16. Grays Inn Admissions Register, 191–2, 1 March 1631; Richard Ashton, Court and Money Market (1960), 78, 175; Robert Brenner, Merchants and Revolution (1993), for the London merchant companies’ role in the War, notably 53–107; Robert Brenner, Past and Present, 58 (1973), 53–107, ‘Civil War Position of London’s Merchant Community’; Robert Ashton, The Crown and The Money Market (1960), and The City and The Court, 1603–1643 (1979); A.C. Wood, The Levant Company (1935); Alfred Wood, The Levant Company, Oxford thesis, 1934, Bodleian Library. For Crispe and Benyon’s humble responsibilities in St Peter’s and St Ebbe’s parishes, Bodleian Library, Additional Ms, D114–15.
17. Calendar of Court Minutes of the East India Company, 1640–43, ed., Sainsbury (1912), 82.
18. ‘Madam Whorewood’ in George Carew, Several Advertisements concerning the Services and Sufferings of Sir William Courteen and Sir Paul Pindar for The Crown of England (1680), 1, copy in Huntington Library, California, Wing/S2748. Carew was second successive administrator of Pindar’s will, thirty years after Sir Paul died. Also, The Humble Address of the heirs …of Paul Pindar, 1679, Wing/H3380AC, and Edward Graves, Brief Narrative of the case … of Paul Pindar to Both Houses of Parliament, 1679, Wing/G1605. The Commonwealth Parliament agreed in 1653 that the Customs farmers were owed £276,000, but the merchants failed to agree and the offer was reduced, each farmer being assessed at the bare £4,000 agreed in 1649 with James Maxwell. William Foster, ‘Charles I and the East India Company’, EHR, XIX, 1904, 456–63. See Chapter 10.
19. ‘John Ashburnham’, ODNB, 2004; Henry Cary, Memorials of the Civil War in England (1842), I, 109; John Ashburnham, Narrative and Vindication (1830), to which the Accompt was first published as an appendix. Browne was apparently Jane Whorwood’s companion on the Medway in 1648 and attended the Newport talks. See Chapters 8 and 9.
20. Lady Whorwood’s ‘widow’s mites’ were recorded on sheets vii and xi of twenty-four pages of undated revenue entries. Assuming some chronological order, she gave early in the War, perhaps winter 1642/3, when the king first requested money. She was lodging in Oxford in spring 1644 but was certainly back in Holton by December 1645 (and probably much earlier), when her son wrote to ask her for details of his property to help him compound with Parliament. See CCAM, II, 648.
21. PP’s three donations were recorded on pages vi, viii and xiv of the Accompt, the last just over halfway through the revenue entries, therefore possibly early in 1643. ‘PP’ has been interpreted in the past as ‘Privy Purse’ and ‘Peter Perceval’, but the evidence for ‘Paul Pindar’ is compelling.
22. Christopher Challis, A New History of the Royal Mint (1992), 282–3, 305–20, 689, 740.
23. David Lloyd, Memoirs (1668), 628–9; CSP 1641–3, 498, 11 September, 11 October; Camden Miscellany 8, Camden New Series, 1883, ‘A Secret Negotiation with Charles I’, 1643, 1–2. The weight of £85,000 in gold is calculated based on the 1588 standardising of troy and avoirdupois pound weights. Gold bullion prices rose beyond $900 per troy ounce in May 2009, at which rate Jane’s gold was worth $22,388,400 (£14,925,600 at exchange rate $1.50) in modern times.
24. Lodewijck Huygens, The English Journal, 1651–2, tr. Bachrach and Leiden Collmer, 1982, 81; HLJ, V, 559, 641; VI, 235; HCJ, III, 1662. The Crown was, in the second draft of the Oxford Surrender Articles, 1646, to be handed over with ‘seals and all other insignia of office and honour’; it was omitted from the first draft. Bodleian Library, Additional Ms, D114–15.
25. Clarendon Papers, 16109, 1694, Bodleian Library, 66, 3 June 1643; CCC, I, 196, 511; PRO E 134, East 14, 19 Charles II; ‘Paul Pindar’, ‘Peter Wyche’, ‘John Shaw’, ‘George Benyon’, ‘Nicholas Crispe’ and ‘MarmaDuke Royden’, ODNB, 2004 articles; Mary Keeler, The Long Parliament, 1640–41: A Biographical Study of its Members (1954) for articles on Nicholas Crispe, John Jacob, William Masham and John Nulls; for further merchant and courtier donations to the king at Oxford, CCAM, II, 996–1005, Parliament’s enquiry into ‘The Oxford Engagement’ of 4 July 1643, in which many had pledged donations, including the Benyon brothers, Thomas Lawrence, silkman, Henry Pratt, Matthew Bradley, George Strode, all of them merchants, and Judge Thomas Hyde who assisted Jane during and after the Commonwealth. This investigation into twenty-two of the king’s key donors at Oxford continued until December 1653. Before that, all bonds, securities and cash loaned to Charles were forfeit to Parliament, which now needed the money as desperately as the king had a decade before. Field Whorwood, Lombard Street goldsmith, lived at Holton House with his widowed sister-in-law, Lady Ursula, from 1634. He issued England’s first known banknote. For Eliab Harvey’s financial involvement with Jane’s mother and stepfather, see Chapter 10. ‘Paul Pindar’, ODNB, 2004, notes that Parliament was pursuing Ashburnham in May 1651 for evidence against Pindar for shipping gold to Oxford. At the same time Thomas Coke was informing on Jane Whorwood’s work for the king. A month later she was fined and imprisoned for bribery and on the same day, 25 June, the investigation into the Oxford Engagement donors intensified.
26. HMC, XIII, op.cit., 582; Sir Edward Walker, ‘Letter to William Lilly’, 1652, 5, in Historical Discourses, ed. 1707, 238–9, responding to Lilly’s Monarchy or No Monarchy in England: Observations on the Life and Actions of the Late King Charles I (1651); HCJ, III, 157, 3 June 1643, permit for Mrs Wheeler to go to Oxford.
27. Letter in Claydon House Papers, Bodleian Ms 1249, 1644–5, 15/25 August 1645, Paris. Margaret asked Bishop Wilkins of Chester where she might stop off for the night if moon travel were feasible. He replied that she had so many ‘castles in the air, you may live every night at one of your own’, Arthur Stanley, Westminster Abbey (1886), 217.
28. Paris, 16/28 September 1645. Brome was a distant cousin to the Verneys through the Dentons of Ambrosden, near Bicester, into whose family his great-great-aunt Magdalen Brome had married.
29. HMC Report 7, Verney Letters, 1 September 1645, Henry Verney to Sir Ralph Verney; Sir Thomas Gardiner’s will, 1656, TNA PROB 11/259; Lady Gardiner’s will, written in February 1647, TNA PROB 11/301, 1660, made no mention of her widowed daughter-in-law: she had borne them no grandson and by then had remarried.
30. British Library, Additional Ms 78264, f. 98; also printed in John Evelyn, Diary and Correspondence, ed. W. Bray, 814; Cordell W. Firebrace, Honest Harry, 51 (1932). Sarah Poynting of Keele University kindly pointed out that the letter is to ‘IA’ (John Ashburnham) and not, as Firebrace wishfully misread, ‘IH’ (Janna Horwood), see British Library, Egerton Ms 2550, 52, for cipher ‘449’. Anthony Wood, Secretum Antonii, Tanner Ms 102, cited in Life and Times of Anthony Wood (ed. Clark, 1891–1900), I, 1632–63, xxix–xxx. For the jewels and the lady who held them in 1649, see Chapter 10.