Chapter II: The Turners (3)

Guye Fawkes was not the only native of York who was implicated in the Gunpowder Plot. Edward Oldcorne the Jesuit, who assumed the name of Hall, and was the companion of Father Garnett at Hendlip and in the Tower, was the son of John Oldcorne, a bricklayer at York. He was sent abroad about the year 1584, and was first placed at the College of Douay whilst it was stationed at Rheims. He was afterwards at Rome, where the General of the Jesuits admitted him into their society. _Chaloner_, part ii. p. 485. He was executed at Worcester, April 7, 1606, as a partaker in the Gunpowder Plot conspiracy. _Jardine_, p. 210. A name in Collinge's letter, partly obliterated, seems meant for Oldcorne, and renders it probable that he was then one of the English residents at Venice.

We may be sure that when Lancelot Turner despatched his youthful brother to Venice, he knew that he was not consigning him wholly into the hands of strangers.

In the list of the Romish Priests and Jesuits resident in and about London in 1624, the name of Turner occurs once.--MORGAN'S _Phoenix Britannicus_, p. 437.

[31] "On Monday next after Twelfth Day, 1620, he revoked nuncupatively the gift of the clock to Sir William Alford, saying, 'he forgets his old friends,' and gives it to his nephew, William Turner. To this were witnesses, Thomasine Newton, Henry Dent, and Alice Atkinson, who depose that William Turner reminded him that there had been much kindness between him and Sir William. This was a few days before his death."--_Pope Tract_, p. 30.

[32] _Collectanea Top. et Gen._, vol. iv. p. 178.

[33] Emanuel Lord Scrope, afterwards Earl of Sunderland.

[34] At Malton.

[35] _Parl. Hist._, vol. vii. p. 286.

[36] _Pope Tract_, p. 31.

[37] At a court held by the lords of the manor of Strensall, in April, 1622, William Turner was called as a copyholder of Towthorpe; and again in April, 1624.

Towthorpe is an insignificant and very secluded village, about four miles north of York, a little off the high road from thence to Sheriff-Hutton. Nothing is now left of the old manor-house; but near to the spot where it may be supposed to have stood, a not uninteresting object still remains, to carry the mind back to the days when Lancelot Turner and his nephew William were the proprietors. This is a sort of pleasance upon a small scale--a quadrangular plot of ground, about fifty yards square, surrounded by a rather broad moat, and thickly planted with fruit-trees arranged with some approach to symmetry--two or three of the outer rows being nut or filbert trees, the rest apple, pear, and plum. The nut-trees are obviously of great age, their stems being strangely contorted, and having attained a thickness seldom seen in this part of the country. The other trees have a less aged appearance; and probably a temple or summer-house may have formerly been placed upon the centre of the little island. A building of this kind, with its accompanying moat, was a favourite ornament in the quaint pleasure-grounds of the Elizabethan mansion. The moat would doubtless form a useful _piscaria_, especially valuable to persons to whom fish was, at certain seasons, an indispensable article of diet. At present, instead of seeing carp and tench, as in former days, quietly gliding through its waters, on approaching the island our ears were greeted with the harsh croaking of innumerable frogs and toads, the sole inhabitants of the moat.

Whilst viewing this now solitary memorial of the past, it was impossible to avoid giving a little license to the imagination, and peopling the tiny pleasance with the forms of William Turner and Thomasine Newton in the happy hours of their courtship and early married life, which were spent at Towthorpe,--she musing over one of the song-books of their uncle Lancelot, which were so significantly reserved by his will for her especial use.

What a contrast is the dull and uninteresting and most unpicturesque plain of the ancient forest of Galtres, in which the countryhouse of Edith Pope's parents stood, to the glorious vale of the Thames, where her illustrious son solaced himself with his trim garden, his grotto, and his quincunx!

[38] Miles Newton, of Thorpe, in the county of York, gentleman, made his will on May 18, 1604. He desires to be buried in the church of Rippon. He gives to his eldest son Richard the bedstead which was his grandfather Thomas Collins's. To his son Christopher, a bedstead which was his (the testator's) father's. He names his wife, Jane Newton; his son, Henry, and his daughters, Katherine, Johanna, Rebecca (to whom he gives the better of the cushions which was her grandmother Beckwith's), Dorothy, and Elizabeth. He makes his children, Richard Newton and Christopher Newton, executors; and his brother Leonard Beckwith, and George Mallory, supervisors. Proved at York, by Richard Newton only, April 8, 1605.

Richard was the testator's son by his first wife, Eleanor, daughter of Thomas Collins. Christopher and Henry were the sons of his second wife, Jane Beckwith. According to the pedigree of the Newtons, recorded at the visitation of 1585, the grandmother of Miles Newton, was one of the distinguished family of Roos, of Ingmanthorpe.

[39] Afterwards the wife of Samuel Cooper. Your supposition that she was one of the elder daughters, is thus shown to be correct.--_Pope Tract_, p. 40.

[40] _Pope Tract_, p. 42.

[41] _Pope Tract_, pp. 34, 35.

[42] _Pope Tract_, p. 26.

[43] Vide _Pope's Letter to a Noble Lord_.

[44] _Pope Tract_, p. 32.

[45] The two daughters who became Mrs. Mace and Mrs. Tomlinson, most probably formed their matrimonial engagements at York during their mother's widowhood. These are the names of highly respectable York families. The Tomlinsons belonged to the trade aristocracy of the city. The Rev. Henry Mace was sub-chanter of York Minster from 1661 to 1680; Thomas Mace, the author of that curious book, _Musick's Monument_, published in 1676, was his brother. There cannot be any reasonable doubt that the clergyman named Mace, who married one of the daughters of William Turner, either Martha or Margaret, was the Rev. Charles Mace, one of the sons of Henry Mace, the sub-chanter, who had himself a son baptized by the name of Charles, at the collegiate chapel of the sub-chanter and vicars choral, near Goodramgate, in York, on Oct. 29, 1682. Christiana Cooper, in her will made in 1693, mentions her nephew Charles Mace, although she does not give us the christian-name of his mother. _Athenaeum_, July 18, 1857. Of the death of the Rev. Charles Mace the father, Thomas Gent, the old York printer, in his _History of Hull_, tells an affecting story. It was, he says, about the year 1711, when the Rev. Charles Mace, Sen., departed this life. "He died in the pulpit; for as he was preaching in York Castle to the condemned prisoners who were to be executed the day following, one of them was so hardened as openly to interrupt and even defy him in that part of his discourse that hinted at his crime. Which unparalleled audacity so deeply pierced the tender minister to the heart (whose melting oratory was pathetically employed in moving the unhappy wretches to repent of their crying sins, whereby to obtain divine mercy), that he instantly fainted away, dropped down, and departed this life, to the great sorrow of all those persons who were witnesses of his holy life and innocent conversation." _Annales Regioduni Hullini_, by Thomas Gent; 1735, p. 194. Charles Mace, the son, was also a clergyman, and was chosen vicar of the Holy Trinity Church at Hull, Dec. 3, 1716.

[46] The Rev. Canon Hey, vicar of St. Helen Stonegate; the Rev. Thomas Myers, vicar of Holy Trinity Goodramgate; the Rev. B. E. Metcalfe, vicar of Huntington; the Rev. James Raine, Jun., M.A.; William Hudson, Esq., and Joseph Buckle, Esq., Registrars of the Court of Probate at York; William Richardson, Esq., Lord of the Manor of Strensall; and Henry Richardson, Esq., my worthy successor in the office of Town Clerk of York.

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