From schooldays at Well near Kirklington – or perhaps only from university days at Cambridge, nobody is sure – Mr Wandesford was the friend of Sir Thomas Wentworth of Wentworth-Woodhouse in the West Riding. Mr Wandesford had a talent for friendship; Sir Thomas Wentworth had a talent for making enemies. But Sir Thomas was much loved by his small circle of close friends and perhaps they loved him the more because his enemies hated him so much. However it was, the friendship between Mr Wandesford and Sir Thomas Wentworth was real and deep.
 |
| Sir Thomas Wentworth |
So when in November 1620 King James found himself obliged to call the third Parliament of his reign – needing it to vote funds for military operations he planned in Europe – and Sir Thomas was engaged in a contested election to be one of Yorkshire's two MPs, he was able to persuade his friend and supporter Mr Wandesford to join him. Mr Wandesford became one of the two MPs for the little borough of Aldborough in the West Riding and moved with his family to London.
It was a sadly reduced family – little Joyce had died in 1620 at the age of two. They remained in the South for a while after the King had brought the Parliament to a close in a fury, swearing never to call a Parliament again. They set up housekeeping together with Mrs Wandesford's brother Sir Edward Osborne and his wife at Stratford Langton in Essex and it was there that a second son, George, was born to them in 1623.
Then the King, needing funds, found himself obliged to call Parliament once more and Mr Wandesford once more joined Sir Thomas Wentworth in the House of Commons. But only briefly – Parliament sat for a couple of months before the King prorogued it, not just once but repeatedly. And then, on 27 March 1625, King James died and the Wandesfords returned to the peace of Kirklington.
But Sir Thomas Wentworth was fully committed to a life in politics and Mr Wandesford followed him. From early 1621 to the spring of 1629, he was in the House of Commons. All in all, he was there for the last two Parliaments of King James and the first three Parliaments of King Charles, and each time the division between King and Parliament grew deeper and more bitter.
So from the beginning Alice knew her father as a man who was sometimes immersed in the care of his estates and sometimes embroiled in fierce politics. Family life was divided between Kirklington and London. When she was born in Kirklington in February 1626, he was in London in the thick of the business of King Charles' acrimonious second Parliament. So he will have met his new daughter for the first time when he went home in the summer. She was by then a few months old, a strong and thriving child. He could take up family life and the management of his estates once more – for a couple of years.
Alice's early childhood
Mr and Mrs Wandesford were tenderly attentive to their children's upbringing. Family life was filled with the practice of their Anglican religion. There were household prayers three times a day and, every morning before breakfast, the children would gather round their mother who would hear them pray, repeat Psalms and chapters of the Bible and kneel for her blessing.
 |
| A Royalist family in 1640: Arthur, Lord Capel, wife & children |
Many years later when Alice looked back, she was filled with love and admiration for her parents, "through whose care and precepts," she wrote, "I had the principles of grace and religion instilled into me with my milk." And so she recorded, in vivid detail, the accidents and illnesses of her childhood and praised God for her deliverance from them. Children's lives were precarious – her eldest brother Christopher died from an accident when Alice was a year old and he was ten. He had broken a rib in a fall, apparently from a child's coach, and it injured his lung. When Mrs Wandesford bore her sixth child the following year, she and her husband named him Christopher after the boy they had lost, as was often done.
Among the earliest memories that Alice recorded were a horrid accident, a frightening illness and an escape from fire.
She had been well looked after by her wet nurse and Mr and Mrs Wandesford engaged the same woman to nurse the new baby Christopher – she had milk because she had had a child herself in the meantime. Alice had passed into the care of her dry nurse Sarah Tomlinson once she was weaned, and it was when she was following Sarah, who had Christopher in her arms, that her first bad accident happened. Alice, a toddler of three, was clutching Sarah's coat and trying to keep up, when she stumbled and fell on the cornerstone of the hearth in the passage chamber which led to her mother's bedchamber. She was like to have bled to death from the grievous cut on her forehead and the skin of the brain was seen, she said – but her mother's careful nursing and a kind Providence left her only with a great scar as a reminder of God's goodness in preserving her.
Then a year or so later, while her parents went to London, Alice was left to stay at St Nicholas, the house just outside Richmond which was the home of her beloved aunt Anne, who was her father's sister and the wife of Maulger Norton. And there she fell so ill, so low and weak, that Mrs Norton and Sarah Tomlinson almost despaired of her life. The little girl had eaten some beef that was not well boiled – or perhaps not well digested – and this brought on vomiting, which had driven her into a fever and then into the measles.
 |
| St Nicholas in 1824 |
When Alice was about five, the family went to London and took a house in St Martin's Lane. One evening, while Mr and Mrs Wandesford were attending Court – the Court of King Charles and Queen Henrietta Maria was renowned for its splendour, ceremonial and elegance – a fire broke out in the house next door and began to spread to their own. While the servants fought the blaze, Sarah Tomlinson carried the terrified children to Lady Livingston's and safety.
During this time, the future of Alice's sister Catherine was decided. In 1630 she was married to Mr Wandesford's eighteen year old ward, Thomas Danby of Thorp Perrow. Catherine was fifteen. Marriages were arranged to be advantageous for the family and in this case her father could be sure of the state of the young man's affairs because he himself had put the Danby estates upon a sound footing. As Catherine and her husband were too young to set up house together, they lived for some years at Kirklington – but of course Catherine was not too young to be pregnant and she was soon expecting her first child.
And in these same years, Alice's father's career and the future of the country both reached a turning point.
No comments:
Post a Comment