The Lancastrian Vauxs

The Wars of the Roses

From time to time my children ask me about our ancestors. Have we got a pirate in our family tree? Did we have someone at Waterloo? Were we part of the Raj?

Recently my daughter Charlotte wondered if our family had supported the Lancastrians or the Yorkists in the Wars of the Roses. The short answer of course, is ‘Yes, very likely’. The war started in 1455 and continued for over thirty years, so given the usual pattern of branching genealogical descent it is probable that we had forebears on both sides.

The Vauxs

The English civil wars known as the Wars of the Roses, fought over whether the House of Lancaster or the House of York should control the English throne, began in 1455 and continued for 30 years.

 “Plucking the Red and White Roses in the Old Temple Gardens” by Henry Albert Payne (1868-1940) based upon a scene in Shakespeare’s Henry VI. Retrieved from Wikipedia.

My fifteenth great grandfather William Vaux (1435 – 1471) supported the Red Rose of Lancaster, but when the Yorkists won a series of battles in 1461 Vaux was convicted of treason and his lands were confiscated, including his principal manor at Harrowden in Northamptonshire. He was killed at the Battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471. (Last year we visited Tewkesbury Abbey and looked at the nearby battlefield. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the name William Vaux seems to have gone unrecorded there.)

Tewkesbury Abbey

Vaux left a widow, Katherine, and at least two children: Nicholas (born about 1460, my 14th great grandfather) and Jane or Joan.

Katherine, a lady of the household of Queen Margaret, was with the Queen when she was taken prisoner by King Edward IV after the battle, and she stayed by the Queen during her imprisonment in the Tower of London. On the Queen’s release in 1476 Katherine went with her into exile.

Illumination from the Books of the Skinners Company : Queen Margaret of Anjou, wife of King Henry VI – the picture commemorates the Queen’s entry into the fraternity about 1475/6. Image retrieved from Wikipedia. It is suggested in the book “Middle Aged Women in the Middle Ages“ that the lady in waiting is possibly Katherine Vaux.

Nicholas Vaux and his sister Joan were brought up in the Lancastrian household of Lady Margaret Beaufort, mother of King Henry VII.

It seems likely that Nicholas Vaux fought under Margaret Beaufort’s husband, Thomas Stanley, 1st Earl of Derby, at the Battle of Bosworth Field in 1485. This of course was the decisive battle which put the Lancastrian Henry Tudor on the throne as King Henry VII. The defeated King Richard III, who Shakespeare has crying ‘a horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse’, was killed. (In 2012 his skeleton, identified by DNA, was unearthed beneath a carpark in Leicester.)

Battle of Bosworth Field by Philip James de Loutherbourg retrieved from Wikipedia

Nicholas Vaux prospered under the new king. His family property was restored to him, he was frequently at court, and he held a number of official positions, one of them the important command of Guisnes in 1502. Guisnes, an English possession, was a castle six miles south of Calais.

Guisnes castle pictured in a 1545 painting of The Field of the Cloth of Gold (see below)

Nicholas Vaux is said to have spent the summer months in Guisnes and the autumn and winter in England.

Nicholas’s sister Joan became governess to Henry VII’s daughters. Joan’s first marriage in 1489 was attended by the King and Queen.

When Henry VIII ascended the throne in 1509, Nicholas Vaux continued to be active at court. In 1511 he entertained the king at the Vaux estates in Harrowden. Among other roles Vaux was a royal ambassador to France in 1514 and 1518.

The Field of the Cloth of Gold

In 1520 Nicholas Vaux served as one of three commissioners responsible for a formal meeting between King Henry VIII of England and King Francis I of France, staged as a tournament. The summit, which ran for 18 days between 7 June and 24 June was arranged to strengthen the bond of friendship between the two kings.

The tournament was a magnificent royal spectacle which from the richly embroidered fabrics of the tents and costumes became known as the Field of the Cloth of Gold.

The Field of the Cloth of Gold, oil painting of circa 1545 in the Royal Collection at Hampton Court. Henry VIII on horseback approaches at bottom left. Retrieved from Wikipedia. Guisnes Castle is to the left of the temporary palace which has a wine fountain in its forecourt.

In just over two months, a huge English workforce erected several thousand tents, built a tiltyard (or tournament arena) for jousting and armed combats, and constructed a vast temporary palace of 10,000 square metres to accommodate the English King.

The feasting and entertainments were extraordinarily lavish.  “Each king tried to outshine the other, with dazzling tents and clothes, huge feasts, music, jousting and games.” 12,000 people attended. The English accounts English food and drink accounts showed provisions of nearly 200,000 litres of wine (wine was flowing from two fountains) and 66,000 litres of beer; the English food supplies included 98,000 eggs, more that 2,000 sheep, 13 swans, and 3 porpoises.

Both kings took part in the tournaments. “While the carefully established rules of the tournament stated that the two kings would not compete against each other, Henry surprisingly challenged Francis in a wrestling match, but it turned sour for Henry when he quickly lost.”

Vaux’s marriages

Vaux married twice.

His first wife, Elizabeth Fitzhugh (died 1507) was the widow of Sir William Parr (died 1483; her granddaughter Catherine Parr through her first marriage became the sixth wife of Henry VIII).  Elizabeth was the niece of Richard Neville, 16th Earl of Warwick (known to history as Warwick the Kingmaker). The Lancastrian Vaux’s first marriage was thus to a Yorkist.

His second wife, Anne Greene, was the sister of Maud Parr nee Green, who was the wife of Thomas Parr who was the son of Nicholas’s first wife. Maud was the mother of Catherine Parr. Anne Greene was the sister of Nicholas Vaux’s first wife’s daughter-in-law Maud.

Abbreviated family tree showing the two wives of Nicholas Vaux (c 1460 – 1523).
Vaux’s first wife was grandmother and his second wife was aunt to Catherine Parr who married King Henry VIII in 1543.

In May 1522 England was at war with France and Vaux was at Guisnes ensuring its defence. In September 1822 he was reported to be “very sore”: either sick or wounded. He returned to England and died on 14 May 1523 at the hospital of St. John, Clerkenwell, London.

Nicholas Vaux had three surviving daughters by his first marriage and two surviving sons and three surviving daughters by his second marriage. His oldest son Thomas inherited the title and was also at court.

Nicholas Vaux is a minor character in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. He has four lines directing a barge to be prepared to ferry Buckingham to his execution. It has been observed that Vaux showed ‘his humanity and respect for the Duke by ordering that the barge to convey him to his death be properly decorated to reflect the Duke’s status’.

Sources

• VAUX, Sir Nicholas (c.1460-1523), of Great Harrowden, Northants. History of Parliament Online.  https://www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1509-1558/member/vaux-sir-nicholas-1460-1523
• Niebrzydowski, Sue (2011). Middle-aged Women in the Middle Ages. DS Brewer. page 88.
• King, T., Fortes, G., Balaresque, P. et al. Identification of the remains of King Richard III. Nat Commun 5, 5631 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms6631
• Russell, J.G. (1969). Field of Cloth of Gold: men and manners in 1520. London: Routledge. Retrieved from archive.org.
• The Field of cloth of gold. Historic Royal Palaces. https://www.hrp.org.uk/hampton-court-palace/history-and-stories/the-field-of-cloth-of-gold/
• Who’s Who in Shakespeare’s Henry VIII: Chapter 6 : Nevill – Vaux. Tudor Times. https://tudortimes.co.uk/people/whos-who-in-shakespeares-henry-viii/nevill-vaux

Travelling north with lunch at Whitmore

On Wednesday 8 May we drove north from Bath, calling in at the village of Whitmore in Staffordshire, near Stoke-on-Trent, to visit some of my cousins. On the way we stopped at Tewkesbury, near Cheltenham in Gloucestershire, to look at the abbey there. From Whitmore we went on to West Didsbury near Manchester, our next base.

One of my fifteenth great grandfathers, William Vaux (1435 – 1471), who fought in the War of the Roses for the Red Rose of Lancaster, was killed at the Battle of Tewkesbury on 4 May 1471. He is said to have been buried at the Abbey, but I have been unable to find any record of this in the Abbey archives, and the list of inscriptions in the Tewkesbury Abbey church does not mention his name. This didn’t matter, for if you had an untraceable ancestor said to have been buried somewhere you couldn’t do better than not have him in Tewkesbury. It’s a lovely old church, said to be the one of the finest Norman abbeys in England.

 

We drove on to Whitmore and had lunch and an edifying chat with my cousins about Brexit, which turns out to be a plot to deprive England of its sovereignty, like 1066. At least one Australian present was reminded of the joke about a headline in an English newspaper that read, ‘Fog in Channel. Continent cut off’. On the other hand, the German car we had hired was showing unmistakable signs of having been designed and assembled by a committee of bureaucrats in Brussels, so who knows?

The Eureka flag was flying, a present we had sent to England some time previously. There is a family connection other than cousins from Ballarat; a Cudmore cousin fought at Eureka (on the Government side).

Lunch was served on the family’s Minton china, commissioned by my great uncle Rafe Cavenagh-Mainwaring (1906 – 1995), a copy of a setting that his great great grandfather (my fourth great grandfather) Rowland Mainwaring (1783 – 1862) had ordered. Time moves slowly in the pottery towns, and Minton apparently still had the records from the first commission to run up a second one. When you got to the bottom of your plate, there was the family crest, an ass’s head on a crown. The motto is ‘Devant si je puis’ [Forward if I Can], a useful reminder to wait for the next course.

We had a tour of the house and stables and saw many family portraits. The house, now listed with Historic Houses, is open to the public. Our guide seemed very knowledgeable on the family history. In one or two places a section of the modern wall had been removed to expose the original structure. This had an interesting consequence. Breaching the wall had allowed a ghostly lady from an earlier era playing ghostly old music to wander into the present. There has been a house on the same site for over 900 years and it has belonged to the same family since the time of the Domesday Book in 1086, so I suppose you’d expect an apparition or two.

 

 

 

My fourth great grandfather Rowland Mainwaring kept a diary, now stored and displayed in an upstairs sitting room. Several volumes have been stolen unfortunately, probably souvenired by visitors. While we were at Whitmore my son Peter photographed some pages of the diary for me, including, sadly, the last entry, written by Rowland Mainwaring on the day he died.

 

 

Before we left we visited the churchyard and some family graves.

 

 

Related post

• D is for Domesday

U is for university

St John’s College, Cambridge by Joseph Murray Ince. Watercolour. Signed and dated 1835.

 

Quite a few of my forebears studied at Oxford and Cambridge. Many of their names appear in the universities’ lists of their alumni, some in very early lists.

The University of Cambridge was founded in 1209. Oxford is older, with teaching in some form there as long ago as 1096. The University of Oxford developed rapidly from 1167, when King Henry II banned English students from attending the University of Paris.

The earliest ancestor I have found at one of these universities is my fourteenth great grandfather Nicholas Vaux (1460 – 1523). He is listed as an Oxford alumnus. Unfortunately his college and dates of study there are not recorded.

Thomas Vaux (1509 – 1556), Nicholas’s son and my 13th great grandfather, studied at Cambridge university; again, I do not know when or which college.

When I looked at my Champion de Crespigny forebears who attended Cambridge University I found that there did not appear to be any familial loyalty to a college: all of them were at different colleges. My fourth great grandfather Charles Fox Champion Crespigny (1785 – 1875) was at Sidney College. Two of his three sons went to Cambridge. George Blicke Champion de Crespigny (1815 – 1893) went to Trinity Hall in 1832. Philip Robert Champion de Crespigny (1817 – 1889) went to Downing in 1838.

My Mainwaring forebears, by contrast, showed some degree of family loyalty to a particular college. My eighth great grandfather Edward Mainwaring (1635 – 1704) attended Christ’s College Cambridge. His son Edward (1681 – 1738) attended St John’s College Cambridge from 1699. His sons, Edward (1709 – 1795) and Henry (1710 – 1747), both also attended St John’s Cambridge.

Related post

• Champion de Crespignys at Cambridge from the earliest times to 1900

Sources

• retrieved through ancestry.com and googlebooks:
  • Venn, J. A., comp. Alumni Cantabrigienses: A Biographical List of All Known Students, Graduates and Holders of Office at the University of Cambridge, from the Earliest Times to 1900 2 Volume Set also available through Google books . Cambridge University Press, 2011
  •  Foster, Joseph. Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1715-1886 and Alumni Oxonienses: The Members of the University of Oxford, 1500-1714. Oxford: Parker and Co., 1888-1892.

Anne Bray nee Vaux (1550 – 1619)

One of my 12th-great-grandmothers was Anne Bray nee Vaux (1550 – 1619), daughter of Thomas Vaux (1509–1556) and Elizabeth Vaux nee Cheney (1505 – 1556).

In 1556, when she was about six, Anne’s parents died: Thomas in October and Elizabeth in the following month, possibly from the plague. Her brother William was then 21, and sister Maud about 17.

The Vaux enjoyed considerable wealth. Their estate, Harrowden Hall in Northamptonshire, was

… a household of almost fifty people that included grooms, laundresses, the cook, the baker, an embroiderer, the chaplain and the steward. An account book survives for the year of [the birth of Anne’s brother William in 1535 showing] payments for a birdcage, soap, swaddling and, on 14 August, five shillings to buy ale for the nurse.

(Harrowden Hall was rebuilt in 1719; the Tudor house does not survive.)

After her parents died Anne would have been placed in another household.

About 1568 Anne Vaux married Reginald (or Reynold) Bray (1539 – 1583), the fifth and youngest son of Reginald Bray and Anne, daughter and heiress of Richard Monington of Barrington in Gloucester. Three of Reginald’s older brothers died without issue. His brother Edmund inherited the estate of Barrington; the estate at Steyne (Stean) and Hinton in Northamptonshire was settled on Reginald.

Reginald, aged about 44, died in October 1583 and was buried at Hinton in the Hedges.

Anne and Reginald had one son, William, who died in his father’s lifetime aged about 7. They had five daughters, all Reginald’s coheirs:

• Mary, born about 1569. On 16 August 1586 at Eaton Bray, Bedfordshire,  she married Sir William Sandys (c 1562 – 1641) of Fladbury, Worcestershire. She appears to have died by 1597 about the time of  his second marriage, to Margaret Culpepper. She appears not to have had children.
• Anne, born about 1573; she was later the wife of John Sotherton (1562 – 1631), a judge and later a Baron of the Exchequer. John Sotherton married two more times and had two sons and a number of daughters. Anne was possibly the mother of one or more of these children. Anne had died by 1602..
• Alice, born about 1577. In 1592 she married Nicholas Eveleigh, a lawyer. Nicholas Eveleigh died aged 56 in 1618 when the Chagford Stannary Courthouse collapsed killing him, two of his clerks and seven others, also leaving a further 17 injured. She secondly married Elize (Ellis) Hele, a lawyer and philanthropist who died in 1635. The trust from his will was used to found a number of schools including Pympton Grammar School. Alice died on 20 June 1635, probably childless. She and her second husband are buried at Exeter Cathedral. There is a monument to both of her husbands at Bovey Tracey Church.
• Temperance, born about 1580. She married Thomas Crew, a politician.
• Margery, born about 1581. She married Francis Ingoldsby of Boughton and they had a son John.

The Vaux family of Harrowden were a notable Catholic family. Anne’s brother William, 3rd Baron Vaux of Harrowden ( 1535 – 1595), was several times convicted of recusancy during the reign of Elizabeth I. He was committed to the Fleet Prison by the Privy Council, and afterwards was tried in the Star Chamber on 15 February 1581 along with his brother-in-law Sir Thomas Tresham for harbouring the Jesuit Edmund Campion and contempt of court. He was sentenced to imprisonment in the Fleet and a fine of £1,000 (about £263,000 as of 2018).

Anne and her sister Maud however appear to have married Protestants.

Maud (abt 1539 – abt 1581) married Anthony Burgh / Burroughs / Burrows of Burrow on the Hill, Leicestershire. Following Maud’s death, her daughter Frances (abt 1576 – 1637) went to live with her cousin, Eleanor Brooksby nee Vaux, the widowed daughter of Maud’s brother William. Eleanor raised Frances as a Catholic. In about 1595 Frances joined the Canonesses Regular of the Lateran at Louvain in Belgium. According to one history of these Lateran Canonesses, as a child Frances was taken to with her family to attend ‘heretical’ (Protestant) services on Sundays and holy days, but during them regularly fell asleep, a sure sign of her firm commitment to Catholic orthodoxy.

That Anne Bray nee Vaux named one of her daughters Temperance is clearly a mark of her Protestant Puritan leanings. Thomas Crew, Temperance’s husband, was noted for his strong Puritan convictions.

Anne Bray died on 7 May 1619 at the age of 69. She was buried on 12 May at Hinton in the Hedges, Northamptonshire. A plaque in the chancel features the arms of Bray (Ar. a chevron between three eagle’s legs erased a la cuisse S. armed G.) and the arms of Vaux (impaling chequy Ar. & G. on a chevron Az. three roses O.) and the following text:

 

HERE LYES BURIED REYNOLD BRAY LATE OF
STEANE IN THE COUNTY OF NORTH. ESQ. AND
ANNE HIS WYFE, THE ONE, A YONGER SON OF REYNOLD
BRAYE THAT WAS BROTHER TO EDMOND LORD BRAY
AND THE OTHER A DAUGHTER OF THOMAS LORD VAUX
OF HARROWDON: THEY HAD ISSUE ONE SON NAMED
WILL’M THAT DIED OF THE AGE OF 7 YEARS, AND
5 DAUGHTERS. VIZ. MARY MARRYED TO WILL’m SAND
ESQUIER, ANNE MARRYED TO JOHN SOTHERTON ESQUIER
ALICE MARRYED FIRST TO NICHOLAS EVELEGH
ESQUIER AND AFTER HIS DEATH TO ELLIS HELE
ESQUIER, TEMPERANCE MARRIED TO THOMAS CREWE
ESQUIER, & MARGERY MARRIED TO FRANCIS
IN’COLDSBY ESQUIER. THE SAID REYNOLD DIED Ye
28th OF OCTOBER THE 25th OF ELIZABETH ABOUT
THE AGE OF 44 YEARES. AND THE SAID ANNE
DIED 7th OF MAY 17 JAC: ABOUT THE AGE OF 77
YEARES : AND THEY BOTH ARE NOW AT REST IN THE LORD.

 

 

The arms of Bray (Ar. a chevron between three eagle’s legs erased a la cuisse S. armed G.) and the arms of Vaux (impaling chequy Ar. & G. on a chevron Az. three roses O.)                                       Bray arms by Wikimedia commons user Lobsterthermidor [CC BY-SA 3.0], retrieved from Wikimedia Commons. Vaux arms generated using Drawshield https://drawshield.net/create/index.html

 

Sources

• Dictionary of National Biography, 1885-1900, Volume 58 entry for Thomas Vaux (1510 – 1556) retrieved through Wikisource https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Vaux,_Thomas_(DNB00)
• Wikipedia: Thomas Vaux, 2nd Baron Vaux of Harrowden
• Google books
  • Jessie Childs (2014). God’s Traitors: Terror and Faith in Elizabethan England. Oxford University Press. pp. 11 – 12; pp 182- 183.
  • John Burke (1836). A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Ireland Enjoying Territorial Possessions Or High Official Rank: But Uninvested with Heritable Honours. Colburn. p. 244.
• Archive.org
  • Family tree of Reginald Bray retrieved from Baker, George. “History and Antiquities of the County of Northampton.” 1822, page 685 retrieved electronically through Archive.org archive.org/stream/HistoryAndAntiquitiesOfTheCountyOfNorthamptonBakerVol1/History%20and%20Antiquities%20of%20the%20County%20of%20Northampton%20-%20Baker%20Vol%201#page/n687/mode/2up. Also page 637.
• History of Parliament online
  • CREWE, Thomas (1566-1634), of Gray’s Inn, London and Steane, Northants.; later of Serjeants’ Inn, Fleet Street, London.