More On Tudor Times

Working my way slowly through The Register of the Guild of Knowle 1461-1535, in The County of Warwick, text available online, would seem to have little to do with the flurry of Tudor period items on BBCTV or the current actor celebrity Benedict Cumberbatch or celebrities of the mid and late 18th Century but it can happen if the connections might be there.

The programmes are Wolf Hall, last two episodes coming up and last week's Michael Wood hour on Mary Arden, wife of John Shakespeare and the mother of William Shakespeare.  To our amazement etc. she was a capable intelligent woman who could deal with business as well as running the home.

It is very likely that it was precisely these qualities as well as the portion and land that came with the marriage that attracted John as much as the swirl of a skirt or a come on look from under the bonnet.  Marriage was often business in those days as much as romance etc. whatever The Bard's popular entertainments might suggest.

In The Register one name caught the eye, it was a Comberbach.  There is a full and well organised Cumberbatch family history website, doubtless the source of all the media exclusives on his family past we have been given but I wonder if this one has been missed.

If so a pity because The Register lists three Shakespeare's, a John, a Richard and a Christopher along with others that caught the eye, notably a Somervyld and Throgmortons.  We should remember that name spelling was often elastic in those days.  Another thing is that Warwickshire then was not quite the same as it is now after reforms and changes in the late 19th and 20th Centuries tidied up and changed boundaries and removed separated parts in other county areas.

The Guild of Knowle (also Knoll) had its reach across a wide area of Warwickshire and was a major religious, charitable and administrative organisation which impacted on social matters as well.  This included the lands in which the Arden family were a major influence.

In those days if you are working out who was what and the rest it is far from easy to tease out the networks and groupings of families never mind just how things worked in practice at which the few remaining records only hint.  It is also quite alien to our modern life as well as periods in the more recent past.

The Somerville Plot 1583 might be a place to start, when John Somerville, Edward Arden and Francis Throckmorton lost their lives in a planned attempt to dethrone Queen Elizabeth and restore the Roman Catholic Church.  John Somerville was married to Margaret Throckmorton daughter of the marriage of Edward Arden and Mary Throckmorton, she being the daughter of Sir Robert Throckmorton of Coughton near Stratford upon Avon.

He was the eldest son of Sir Nicholas Throckmorton and Anne Carew.  Anne was the daughter of Sir Nicholas Carew, Master of the Horse, Companion to King Henry VIII, above, who grew up with Henry and was very close to him but lost his head in 1539.  He was a near cousin of Anne Boleyn and made the wrong call, with others, at a fraught time.

After Thomas Cromwell, it seems agent of this, lost his head the following year, King Henry had cause to regret Carew's loss.  As the Carew name was taken by the senior branch of the Throckmorton's, Queen Elizabeth had some sympathy with them, as long as they toed the line, which Francis did not.

Elizabeth (Bess) Throckmorton was a favoured Maid of Honour until she gave in to Sir Walter Raleigh and married in secret and found herself in the Tower as a kind of social housing.  Meanwhile, the John Somerville above, along with his brother who succeeded him Sir William, the close friend of The Bard were of Edstone in Wootton Wawen just north of Stratford.

This estate had come to the family with the marriage of their grandfather, Thomas Somerville  to Joan Aylesbury (also Ailesbury) daughter of John Aylesbury.  They were a leading family of gentry in Warwickshire ranked among the most senior in the Guild of Knowle emblazoning their coat of arms in the chapels.

They have long gone off the radar of our major families but not then.  Joan's uncle Ralph was the grandfather of William Aylesbury of Eastcote in Warwickshire and Holborn in London.  His son Thomas, who went on to high office was born in 1576 a little older than the bard.  William's marriage to Anne Poole of Sapperton in Gloucestershire brought connections to the Bridges, Whittington's and others.

A good many academics and others seeking to place The Bard in his "lost years" when there is little trace of him concentrate on peers in high places at Court and theories derived from his writing.  There are as many theories as there are sonnets and plays.  But it really could be quite simple.

He could well have been enjoying the hospitality, as well as the security, of the Aylesbury's given the mutual connections over several generations.  He will have needed it because across the Avon from Stratford at Charlecote was Sir Thomas Lucy who had it in for the Arden's as well as the Shakespeare's and who took full opportunity of the 1583 fiasco to impoverish them.

It will be interesting to see whether Sir Nicholas Carew turns up among the characters in Wolf Hall and what they make of him.  At that time he was a major figure and his memory was carried on for some generations in the families of his many descendants.

Among the Aylesbury descendants were Queen Mary II and Queen Anne.  Sir Thomas, born in 1576, had a daughter, Frances, who married an up and coming lawyer called Edward Hyde who attached himself to the exiled King Charles II.  He was made Earl of Clarendon after the Restoration and his daughter Anne married James, brother of the King with some scandal and bore him Mary and Anne.

Later the main branches of both the Arden's and the Somerville's moved close to Lichfield were they became acquainted with Dr. Johnson, David Garrick and others.  It is not surprising there was then a revival of interest in The Bard.

If you think that the TV items are complicated they do not get near the reality of it and the intermingling of families, people and the rest.

Happy Times On Hold

With the American dock workers apparently putting the supply chain for USA retailing and manufacturing at risk, notably in California, it is not surprising that the scientific doom merchants are suggesting that mega droughts in the American West could be coming soon.

Meanwhile, in the East, New York is about to freeze and the bad weather continues in the area.  The traders and bankers are counting the costs and it may add a new dimension to the currency wars that are going on.

Worried experts try to work out what all this might mean and none of them are happy.  In the UK there is talk of negative inflation by economists meaning deflation to the rest of us.  Because of stoked up money flows recently this is very bad news.

Inflation, by discouraging saving is supposed to promote consumption and taking on of long term debt that keeps electors and business happy especially when combined with ultra low rates of interest.

But deflation in real terms is bad news if you are spent out and loaded up with debt.  It will be harder and longer to pay down, if you ever do.  Worse, people may start to save, putting money away instead of buying all that tat and rubbish and the latest gizmo's.

For those with an interest in the more arcane figures, the Baltic Dry Index has gone down and the last time it happened like this we had the crash of 2007/8.  One way of promoting extra spending is to fight a few wars and President Obama is taking advice on when and where.

Given the uncertainties in the Middle East and the somewhat mixed results in those areas in recent decades, the idea of doing something noisy in Eastern Europe is possible.  After all, in the past when an Empire was in trouble it was often that starting a fight in that area might distract attention.

On the other hand, is the EU beginning to wonder about sending in the banking Mafiosa to Greece to exert its authority and help the Germans get all their money back.  It is not only the bank's money, but a lot of EU's better off citizens rushed to buy property in Greece when the going was good.

The British Navy, gawd bless them, with others, seemed to have stopped the piracy emanating from Somalia.  But this was a major source of income, so impoverished Somali's have headed for the Yemen.  This is in collapse along with Syria and Iraq.

This promises major shifts of refugees and others from the area. For them there is really only one way to go.  So they are heading for Europe where the streets are paved with if not gold, then benefits payments and homes.

Like all sensible and rational people they prefer to go where the better choices and facilities are available.  Make your own guesses where that might be.  But the homes part might prove more difficult.

One big bank ready to blow is Frau Merkel's own Deutsche Bank whose liabilities it is said exceed world gross national product.  As you may guess this is on ongoing problem.  Alas, it is not just an EU matter for what many do not know is that this bank has been buying up titles to UK freeholds.

If Deutsche Bank hits the fan then so will much of the UK leasehold sector together with a lot of other very sensitive investment areas notably in energy and its transmission.

Sumer is i'cumin in loudly sing cuckoo.

Spreading Harmany

There has been widespread derision around the press and the web about Deputy Leader of the Opposition Harriet Harman's plan for a pink battle bus to travel from benefits estate to benefits estate to get all those single mums and other diverse females on side for the Labour Party.

Will this from Youtube be the call if not to arms then to leg it to the polling booth to put her back in power?  Back on 30th July 2012 in "Harriet's Little Secret" I pointed out that her family were long standing members of our ruling class.  Who could possibly fail to follow her lead with a rousing tune like this?

In the spirit of this ditty which is a call to arms perhaps this might be the right response to distance them from Harriet as quickly as possible if so minded.  It comes from a time when Britain was but a word for an Atlantic Isles at odds with itself and well as the rest of Europe.  This is where she and her friends are going.

The way this election campaign is being fought on all sides endorses my worst fears about the lunacy of setting fixed terms between General Elections.

Buddy Can You Spare A Beneficial Trust?

So there is a huge fuss about the HSBC bank and its ability to save its clients a great deal of money by moving it to offshore accounts allied to imaginative financial arrangements. One of the stranger aspects to this is politicians whose families for some time have benefited from such deals down the decades are doing much of the yelping.

What took them all so long?  It must be around thirty years ago that I was tottering from pub to pub in the City of London with persons working and active in that very field.  As they plied me with food and drink, who was I to complain?  It was not only politicians, singers, actors and the like but also media people in the BBC.

As is happened, my funds and finances were nowhere near enough to make such arrangements, the socialising was only personal and in any case my own tax avoiding had been the ordinary ones then widely in use.  These were mortgage, car purchase, using cash and ensuring things went on the expenses claims.

For those with real money there was nothing new about it then.  It had been going on for some time.  It is difficult to fix any precise date.  One factor was that when many small locations of Empire were granted independence there were problems of employment and finance.  If we did not want all their entire populations to arrive in South London jobs needed to be created.

In essence it was a marriage made, if not in heaven, then certainly not in the hell in the highly taxed UK of the 60's and 70's.  As some places close to home were already in the game, the Isle of Man and the Channel Islands, in the name of equality etc. why not these little places in the Caribbean etc.?

Monaco and Switzerland were all very well for certain kinds of elite but there was a kind of special frisson attached to the romantic or such places where tourism sat well with money moving and tax avoiding.  Films were made on the back of some very profitable money movements.

It was government and the politicians and their allies who enabled the tax havens and it was a kind of open secret amongst the top people that if you wanted to keep or make money grow you sent it somewhere else.  And went it did, in large sums.

But that was a different world, with only primitive IT systems and a lot of paper work etc. etc.  Now we are in a very different world in terms of globalised finance and with incredible powerful systems.  What may have been for the few then in avoiding tax is for the many now and routine for any entity of any size.  It is a kind of new democracy.

Forty or fifty years ago we opened the stable doors and let the horses who pulled the tax carts bolt.  They are now over the hills and far away and are not coming back.  But as a result of all our profligate spending and borrowing we need the loot.  The trouble is that as all the big boys are into moving money to low tax locations they prefer the government to look elsewhere.

One way governments have been trying to stay popular and keep the money flowing has been by extensive tinkering and tax fiddling and subsidies in the property market.  A striking example of this was the Care Act of 2014 which shifts costs onto the tax payer while enabling fortunes for owners, much of which will be destined for tax avoiding schemes in the fullness of time.

For all the false indication and promises that something will be done it is my view that it is already too late.  One simple reason for that is that the power of modern IT will always be ahead of them.  It takes time to make new laws and longer to implement them.  In that time the trace will disappear.

As the politicians thrash around looking for ways to raise some real money as the books are already so over cooked they could be about to burn.  There are things they cannot do because of the EU and other restraints.  The area where there is money to be had is the very area they do not want to touch.

It is property.  If they can persuade the tax avoiders and evaders to come home because all will be forgiven they might get away with it.  But I doubt if they can and some very nasty choices are in view for the post May government.

Addling Up The Figures

A major feature of our times is politicians and other leaders talking figures and what they mean.  With rising inflected voices and other rhetorical devices like poking fingers they want to convince us that they know what they are doing and have the figures to prove it.  Alas, were it so simple.

Three items on the web this week caught my eye as to how far we can rely on them because of how far they can rely on the figures they are chattering about and the organisational basis for them.  All three are hefty think pieces that need some reading.

At the Mises Institute Gary Galles has a think piece about how the aggregation of figures can disguise or distort the realities of what is actually going on and why.  He finishes,

Quote:

The main point, however, is that to rely on aggregates as the focus moves attention away from individuals, who are the only ones who choose, act, and bear consequences.

Even without further complexities and problems, that approach can hide everything from income redistribution between different groups (net taxes) to income redistribution within groups (minimum and living wage laws) to supply-side effects on production (taxes and means tested government benefit programs) to the impossibility of central planners directing an economy efficiently (with statistics that throw away details that are crucial to the creation of wealth) to the ambiguity of measures of the value of output (government production assumed to be what it cost).

That is a lot to disguise or misrepresent, and such issues provide more than ample reason for suspicion whenever someone puts forth an argument from a major premise that “government aggregate X did Y, therefore we know that Z follows.”

Unquote.

Moving on to the shifting and difficult ground of climate change, a matter on which many a national and supranational policy is being determined there is another issue of some complexity.

Energy Matters has a post by Roger Andrews on The Horrors of Homogenization about the treatment of raw temperature figures in the debate on climate warming.  This needs close reading but near the end says:

Quote:

So homogeneity adjustment adds warming in Central Australia, Southern Africa and South America, and similar adjustments by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology and NIWA add warming over the rest of Australia and over New Zealand too.

Pretty much the entire Southern Hemisphere is adjusted. How does one justify adding warming to raw records over the entire Southern Hemisphere? One doesn’t. The warming is clearly manufactured, spurious, non-existent.

Curiously, however, the raw surface air temperature records in the Northern Hemisphere are rarely subjected to warming-biased homogeneity adjustments. I will not speculate as to why. I will just observe that they show approximately twice as much warming as the raw records in the Southern Hemisphere and leave it at that.

Unquote.

My own view is that as climate has changed often so it will again, but whichever which way we will find out when it happens and it will not be happy.  The next item is another matter and is about Europe.

The question asked is what on earth is the ECB up to by Frances Coppola in a long analytical piece where clearly she, an able and informed observer, wonders what in blazes is going on.  She ends:

Quote:

If Germany was seen to force Greece out of the Euro by refusing to negotiate, it would become an international pariah. There are already voices reminding Germany of its own debt forgiveness in 1953, and anti-austerity movements in many other Eurozone countries would only be encouraged by Germany and/or the ECB looking like bullies. Forcing Greece out of the Euro could result in the disorderly unravelling of the whole thing. I may be completely wrong, but this looks far more plausible to me than a simple explanation that fails to take account of the signals given by both Varoufakis and Draghi.

In which case, Schäuble should beware. His position is nowhere near as strong as he thinks. He is dangerously close to the cliff edge himself. If Germany pushes Greece over the edge, Greece may well take Germany down with it.

Unquote.

So our leaders pretend to know what they are doing, present us with figures to suggest it, although the figures are far from reliable and work in organisations supposedly serving democratic states but which are far from democratic in any real way.

And we wonder why the voters have lost confidence.

A Wolf At The Fold

To return to the BBC TV series "Wolf Hall".  Necessarily, there is a great deal left out of the story let alone the many people who had crucial roles in the Court of King Henry VIII.  One aspect which is very complicated and difficult is the finances of monarchy etc. at the time and how the Exchequer was run.

King Henry 7 had imposed a strict regime which meant his key men became very unpopular and got rid of when his son came to the throne.  But between the way the Exchequer was run and Henry 8's huge spending (how many palaces?) it wasn't too long before the finances were in serious disorder.  The continuing chronic financial crisis is a key to understanding his reign.

Sir William Cavendish came to be a key man at the centre of affairs for some time, the link is to Wikipedia.  The extract below is from the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography which says a lot more.

Quote:

Cavendish, Sir William (1508–1557), administrator, was born on 1 May 1508, a younger son of Sir Thomas Cavendish (c.1480–1524) of Cavendish, Suffolk, and his wife, Alice, daughter of John Smith or Smyth of Padbrook Hall, Cavendish.

Historians of his family like White Kennett and Edmund Lodge were ill-informed about this progenitor of the great Cavendish dynasties, surmising that it was he, rather than his brother George Cavendish, who was gentleman usher (and biographer) to Wolsey, and that William was sworn of the privy council when he became treasurer of the chamber.

In fact the latter's career was based upon his work as an agent of crown finance. Thomas Cavendish had been a senior clerk in the clerk of the pipe's office in the exchequer, and William followed in his father's footsteps, making his fortune as an auditor. By the early 1530s he was an accepted financial expert.

In December 1530 he was authorized to receive the surrender of Sheen Priory. Having become one of Thomas Cromwell's trusted clerks he was empowered in 1532 to deal with Holy Trinity Priory, Aldgate, and in 1533 with the temporalities of Ely sede vacante. He already had the confidence to face down opponents, but he took risks, and his reputation was far from spotless.

He was one of Cromwell's principal agents in the dissolution of the monasteries, which gave him additional bargaining power at a time when he had recently set up house in Hertfordshire and was starting to acquire leases.

But he was accused of adding to the rewards allocated to commissioners like himself without the knowledge of his clerks, prompting an expensive but ultimately inconclusive inquiry into his conduct. It was not until January 1546, moreover, that he obtained a discharge for Ely revenues totalling £2033 0s. 6d. which he was said to have paid to Cromwell for the king's use.

By 1534 Cavendish had married Margaret, daughter of Edward Bostock of Cheshire, with whom he had five children; only two daughters survived infancy. He was desperately anxious at this time to accumulate offices in order to improve his ‘poor living’.

In 1536 he was touting to become auditor to the earl of Shrewsbury and to the hospital of St John of Jerusalem, persisting in pursuit of the latter office even when it was granted elsewhere: ‘It would be high advancement for him for he would have continually meat and drink for himself and his two servants with their liveries and chamber’ (LP Henry VIII, 10, no. 425).

From 28 April 1536 he held the desirable auditorship of the home counties circuit of the court of augmentations, which did not prevent his becoming auditor of Lord Beauchamp, and therefore having to cope with conflicting demands upon his energies, later in the year. In February 1540 he bought the manor of Northaw, Hertfordshire, formerly leased by him from St Albans Abbey. On 9 June his wife died.

Cavendish enhanced his reputation by his performance as a commissioner in Ireland, where he arrived on 8 September 1540, appointed to investigate the administration of Lord Deputy Grey, along with the vice-treasurer's accounts and the surveys for the dissolution of the Irish monasteries.

He won praise for his painstaking (he journeyed as far as Limerick, where no English commissioners have been this many years, and that in such frost and snow as the writer never rode in) and for being a man that little feareth the displeasure of any man, in the King's service. (LP Henry VIII, 17, no. 304).

Cavendish paid £1000 for the position of treasurer of the chamber, granted to him on 19 February 1546. A month later he was in trouble with the privy council for failing to bring the declaration of his accounts before the chancellor, but he was still knighted on 23 April.

He may have owed this promotion to Sir William Paget, or to Edward Seymour, earl of Hertford, whose auditor he was, but he had clearly been acquiring a wide range of patronage, for his marriage to Elizabeth Barley,  née  Hardwick (d. 1608), which took place secretly at 2 a.m. on 20 August 1547 at the Greys' manor house at Bradgate, Leicestershire, seems to have been promoted both by the Greys and the Brandons.

They had three sons and five daughters. Cavendish had arrived. In 1547 he sat in parliament for Thirsk, was a JP for Hertfordshire, and furnished great horses, light horses, and demi-lances for the wars, under an assessment of £100.

Cavendish had also been appointed treasurer of the court of general surveyors, but he lost this position in 1547. The office of treasurer of the chamber was losing importance, moreover. He received it in a state of disorder, and complained that after the death of Henry VIII he had lost 5000 marks through the earl of Warwick's withholding his dues.

He struggled through Edward VI's reign without much regular income. His receipts in his first year were £46,555 0s. 5d., but there had been a sharp drop by 1549, and by 1553 they came to only £9924 12s. 1d., insufficient to meet the fixed payments.

He supported Mary in 1553 at a cost to himself of 1000 marks, so he claimed, and she reappointed him to the office. But the receipts continued to decline and had to be supplemented from other treasuries. In 1555 he also became deputy chamberlain of the exchequer. By 1557 his accounts were under examination. As always with unexpected audits, utter confusion was alleged but not really substantiated.

The report on Cavendish's debts submitted to Lord Treasurer Winchester on 12 October 1557 shows an initial assessment of his debt as £5237 0s. 0½d., but he put forward various counter-claims, including the dishonesty of his clerk Thomas Knot, who ran away leaving him £12,031 1s. 8d. in debt.

Cavendish wrote a grovelling appeal for clemency, describing himself as ‘a humble pore man standing without her highnes great mercy’ (TNA: PRO, E101/424/10), and listing his resources as 500 marks in land and £440 in fees and life annuities.

He died on 25 October 1557 and was buried on the 30th. By 14 December following his widow had married Sir William Saintloe, captain of the queen's guard.

They were duly pursued for Cavendish's debts, in proceedings which became a cause célèbre, with a major debate at the bar of the exchequer over the liability of his lands. Warned that the law was against him and his wife, Saintloe compounded with the queen for £1000 and had a release and pardon for the residue.

Unquote.

At least they were better organised and more efficient than those we have today at the Exchequer and The Treasury.

Promises Promises

As the USA recovers from the last few minutes of the Super Bowl football final; the New England Patriots winning by a whisker, we in the UK are still locked into the last deadline day of the soccer transfer market.

We worry whether that one with the funny hair cut who is always being sent off will appear for another English side or mercifully be packed off to Europe.

Our first election declaration dropped this morning, that of the Tories, from our lovely MP who is making us offers we cannot possibly refuse.  But wait!  Gordon Brown, our former Labour Prime Minister has a better one on benefits.  The Lib Dem's tell us we will all get more from Europe, UKIP says we will be all the richer without it.

Meanwhile at the tail end of the news, or rather folk tales and nursery rhymes of the BBC, corking gels are telling us that we are in for a bit of real winter and to forget about global warming for a few weeks.  If we should be so lucky.  I remember '47 it was quite fun in its way unless you had to work or do much.

The head spins, not helped by having to fiddle about sorting out a bad download on the machine that dumped unwanted rubbish into the system.  But this is how it is, we are enduring an unending torrent of rubbish politics, rubbish government, rubbish consumerism and rubbish media.

A jolt to the memory has been the marking of the fifty years since Churchill had his state funeral.  There has been enough comment and analysis on this elsewhere.  But it is worth thinking about what might have happened if Lord Halifax had taken his chance at the critical moment in 1940.

Churchill promises at the time were brutally clear, blood toil tears and sweat, Halifax could and probably would not have made any others much different.  But whether he may have looked in other directions is now simply speculation.

The nearest I ever got to Churchill was playing rugger against the 4th Hussars when he was both Prime Minister and Colonel in Chief of the Regiment.  Blood, toil, tears and sweat were the order of the day, it was not entirely a sporting encounter.  Like Churchill the Regiment could play it rough at times.

With the baby boomers now largely in charge of the media and many of its thought processes we are being told that the end of Churchill was the end of Britain as it was.  But it wasn't and I am not going to claim it was my age cohort who were previous who began the changes.

They really began with all the rapid developments late in the 19th Century but mainly the early 20th, which culminated in the rapidity of change in the 20's and 30's.  World War 2 created both a hiatus and a major setback for some little time but then in the late 1940's it did resume.

Because so many people saw Churchill as someone from the past, who by the chances of history made a decent fist of the job of war leader, was not the one to vote for in 1945 in what was the already a new Britain is enough.  After that War there could be no going back only a different future.

Which is the problem now with our politicians.  They are promising what we may have liked or wanted in the past.  We are not going to get it and they cannot deliver it.

We are going into an unknown future.