At her baptism by the Rector of Kirklington, it must have seemed to everybody that the future – if, with God's grace, she survived all the childhood perils of illness and accident – looked promising for her and for the country.
Young King Charles
Queen Elizabeth had died childless in 1603 when Alice's parents were small children, and the Stuart king James VI of Scotland had become the ruler of the three kingdoms of Scotland, England and Ireland – Wales had been conquered by England 350 years earlier. With one king ruling both England and Scotland, there was at last not even a lingering fear of war between the two countries. No more need, after many centuries, for either country to keep troops on the border, no more low level warring and sudden incursions, and the violent outlawry of the Border Reivers had finally come to an end.
And the new King James VI & I was a Protestant king – the Wandesfords, and those of their opinion and allegiance, could feel that the Church of England was secure. A little more than fifty years earlier, a longing among many for the return of Catholicism had brought about the Rising of the North in 1569. Alice Wandesford's great-grandfather Christopher Wandesford had ridden aged twenty to reinforce Sir George Bowes' garrison holding Barnard Castle for the Queen against the besieging rebel forces. In Kirklington itself, twenty-two men who held to the old faith had joined the Rising, including the village constable. When the Queen exacted her terrible retribution against the ordinary people – far more terrible than anything her father King Henry or her sister Queen Mary had done – three of them were appointed by the Queen's commander to be hanged in the village. And as a dreadful warning for the future, the bodies of the hanged men were to be left "till they fall to pieces at the hanging place". But those days were over. The Church of England now looked secure.
And now King James had been dead for less than a year and his son Charles was monarch of the three kingdoms – in fact, his coronation in England had only just taken place.
The new King Charles was a shy, sheltered young man of twenty-five. He would soon prove to be a man of fixed ideas and little experience. And not a little slippery. There were worries. Many of his English subjects were already wishing heartily that he had broken with his father's example and come to respect the ancient, hard-won limits on his power over the people of England. If only, people thought, he wasn't so completely dependent on the Duke of Buckingham, his late father's handsome favourite.
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| Charles I by Gerrit van Honthorst, 1628 |
And if only, many of his English and Scottish subjects began to fear, the King's religious policies did not look so suspiciously hostile to their own dearly-held Puritan and Presbyterian beliefs. This was a serious matter. Religious toleration was not a virtue in those days – the future of the immortal soul was at stake, and how could a nation be secure and peaceful if people incurred God's wrath by heresy and irreligion? What if, some people began to wonder, the King was actually planning to draw the country back to Catholicism, the religion of his own French Queen? Catholicism was reviled and dreaded by all Protestants, however much they might live peaceably alongside their Catholic relations and neighbours. They feared the reimposition of the Pope's authority and tended to greatly overestimate the number of Catholics.
But how peaceful and hopeful the future was for the three Kingdoms of the British Isles, especially compared to Europe, which was mired in conflict and suffering from the appalling toll of the terrible Thirty Years War.
Kirklington & Yorkshire
Alice's birthplace Kirklington lies in a sheltered basin in the pleasant, undulating country between Bedale and Ripon. Fifteen miles to the north lay another of her father's properties, and Alice was to come to know it well. This was Hipswell Hall in the parish of Catterick on the southern bank of the River Swale. The North Riding stretched from the northern dales of Swaledale and Wensleydale, the high fells at the Westmorland border and the source of the Tees eastward to the important ports of Whitby and Scarborough. It was a vast and thinly populated agricultural area, home to perhaps some 120,000 of England's five million people – and about 2,800 of them lived in Scarborough.
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| Kirklington Hall by David Rogers CC BY_SA 2.0 |
At the centre of Yorkshire lay the Ainsty and City of York, the second capital of England, the centre of the King's government in the North, and quite as good – its inhabitants were sure – as London. The East Riding, like the North Riding, was agricultural. It bordered on the independent borough of Hull, Yorkshire's most important port. The West Riding – where most of Yorkshire's population could be found – was increasingly industrial. Its inhabitants made their livelihoods through the woollen industry, mining and metalworking, many of them living in large villages and thriving cloth towns like Leeds. The West Riding's independent and self-sufficient workers were strongly Nonconformist and Calvinist – not for them a respect of church hierarchy and ritual observance.
Mr & Mrs Wandesford of Kirklington Hall
Alice's father, Mr Christopher Wandesford, had inherited his estates fourteen years before she was born, when he was only twenty. Auburn-haired and ruddy-cheeked, he was a good, serious and devout young man. He had just decided to become a clergyman when his father died, leaving him with his younger siblings to provide for out of an inheritance burdened with debts – the late Sir George had been both careless and extravagant. To be fair to Sir George, it was not only his extravagance that had left his son with impoverished and reduced estates. Misfortune played a part. For a hundred years, each heir had been under age and that meant that most of the rents had been taken by the monarch, who also had the right to marry the heir off as they pleased. Christopher was the fifth under-age heir in succession and it cost his grandfather Ralph Hansby £900 to buy off King James so that Christopher could choose his own bride.
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| Christopher Wandesford (1592-1640) |
After his father's death, Christopher left his studies at Cambridge for Kirklington, where he set about restoring the family fortunes, diligently studying law and providing for his siblings. Within two years he was able to look about for a wife and his choice fell on Alice Osborne, daughter of one of the wealthiest men in London. Carefully brought up by her mother in all that a good education and the Court could provide, she was proficient in writing, singing, dancing, and playing the harpsichord and the lute. And she was as serious and devout as Christopher himself. They married in 1614 and settled at Kirklington Hall.
Mr Wandesford took in hand some of his land and, by farming it himself, provided for his own household while giving a weekly allowance of corn to the poor of the townships and villages on his estates. He provided his cottagers with wool so that they might add to their income by weaving and Mrs Wandesford encouraged spinning for the linen industry by growing hemp and flax. The Hall had been rebuilt by Mr Wandesford's grandfather Sir Christopher in about 1571. Mr and Mrs Wandesford's additions were practical: new stables, a large walled orchard and a new dairy, its water supplied by lead pipes running from a cistern near St Michael's Well, close by the mill race.
Their daughter Catherine was born the year after they married, and Christopher and Joyce soon followed. And perhaps the Wandesfords might have remained always on their Yorkshire estates, improving their land and developing new industries, if it had not been for a strong and lasting friendship that was to determine the direction of Mr Wandesford's life.
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