'Points of Contact': Court Favourites and County Faction in Elizabethan England

'Points of Contact': Court Favourites and County Faction in Elizabethan England 'No suit can prevail in Court (be it never so mean) except he be first made acquainted', claimed a polemic against Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester, in 1584.1 This exaggerated Leicester's primacy, but perhaps not the significance of patrons at Court2 Elizabeth's favourites and councillors could wield essential influence for the ambitious, the needy or the greedy among her subjects. The recommendation of an influential courtier was crucial to the success of county gendemen: a seat in the House of Commons, appointment to local office, grants of other profitable or powerful positions, often depended on the exertion of political patronage. So ambitious gentry cultivated 'friends at Court', besieged leading men with requests, and sometimes kept agents in London to oversee the progress of their suits. Such 'points of contact' with the Court were especially necessary to those gentry w h o competed for dominance in the government of their counties. It was John Stanhope's acquisition of high Court office in 1595 which helped his local aUies to overcome the earl of Shrewsbury in the turbulent Nottinghamshire contentions.3 The examination of a highly factionalised county such as Wiltshire can demonstrate the ways in which county gentry sought to manipulate Elizabeth's favourites and officials for competitive local ends. The gentry of Elizabethan Wiltshire divided into twofiercely-contendingfactions for three decades. The personnel of the two alliances remained remarkably stable, and nearly all the county gentry were 'constrained in some sort to be a party' to the conflict4 One faction included William Darrell, the Danvers family, Edmund Ludlow, and Sir James Marvin. Their opponents were led by Sir Henry Knyvet, John ^Secret Memoirs of Robert Dudley earl of Leicester, London, 1706 (Leicester's Commonwealth), 53. I wish to thank Christopher Haigh for reading a draft of this article. 2 Professor Elton has drawn attention to the significance of the Court in Elizabethan patronage and politics in G.R. Elton, Tudor Government: The Points of Contact, HI. The Court, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 5th. ser., 1976. See also W.T. MacCaffrey, Place and Patronage in Elizabethan Politics, in S.T. Bindoff et. al., eds., Elizabethan Government and Society, London', 1961; Simon Adams, Eliza Enthroned? The Court and its Politics, and Penry Willliams, The Crown and the Counties, both in Christopher Haigh, ed., The Reign of Elizabeth I, London, 1984; D.M. Loades, The Tudor Court, London, 1 9 8 6 - . . . XT V. i . 3 Loades, op.cit., 204; J.R. Dias, Politics and Administration m Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire 1590-1640, D. Phil, thesis, Oxford, 1973, 250-268. 4 A Wall, Faction in local politics 1580-1620, Wiltshire Archaeological Magazine, 72/73, 1980, 119-33, 125. 216 A. Wall Thynne, Waller Long, and Thomas Wroughton. Each side sought the control of county government and the exclusion of its enemies from office. In 1579 Knyvet and his allies secured the imprisonment of William Darrell; in 1580 there was intense lobbying for the position of custos rotulorum; in 1581 there was a struggle over the composition of the subsidy commission; in 1588 Darrell tried to have Knyvet removed from the commission of the peace, accusing him of protecting murderers; in 1589 there were violent affrays between the factions at the Salisbury assizes and the Marlborough quarter sessions; in 1594 the Danvers brothers killed Henry Long. Accusations of malpractice were continual, and led to frequent changes on the bench of magistrates. Poor Thomas Snell was dismissed twice and reinstated twice, within the space of three years.5 The Wiltshire factions could only pursue their county conflicts with the help of allies at Court. There could be no question of conflict between a 'Court faction' and a 'Country faction' (as may have happened elsewhere)6 ; both Wiltshire factions had to be Court factions. They needed powerful patrons to secure grants of office, and to protect themselves from the attacks of their rivals. The Knyvet-Thynne group sought the favour of the earl of Leicester, under the guidance of John Thynne's London agent Maurice Brown wrote regular reports on Court politics to Thynne between 1580 and 1583, and advised on...