Kate Narveson

Reconciling Wealth and Faith

by KATE NARVESON, Professor of English

Last April, toward the end of a year-long sabbatical with the pandemic finally easing, I headed to England for archival work on a new project: how did Lady Grace Mildmay, a contemporary of Shakespeare, reconcile her spiritual beliefs and worldly commitments? Bookending my trip with stints at the British Library, I spent the central weeks in Northampton, once the center of shoe manufacturing in England (a la “Kinky Boots"), now a downat-heel midlands city. In the city center I passed the usual takeaways offering curries, bahn mi, Chinese noodles, and pizza by the slice, plus one burger joint called “Five Lads.” But I strode by. I was in pursuit of manuscripts related to Mildmay. I’d previously published on her scriptural meditations, and this venture still had a religious angle. Matthew 6 warns Christians to lay up their treasure in heaven, where neither moth nor rust will consume it. But what does this mean, in practice? Must we be lilies of the field, leaving all in God’s hands? Is it okay to worry about my retirement fund? In her 900-page manuscript of scriptural meditations, Mildmay regularly warns against placing one’s trust in earthly things. Yet she was daughterin-law to Sir Walter Mildmay, Queen Elizabeth I’s Chancellor of the Exchequer, mistress of Apethorpe, an estate that more than once hosted King James I, and she and her husband Anthony sued to gain possession of substantial land-holdings. Women of Mildmay’s rank oversaw staffs of servants, estate accounts, the medical care of the community, the education of children, and household devotional exercises. They used their social connections to negotiate marriages. They managed leases and executed wills. Many took part in lawsuits. Hence my research questions: Did someone like Mildmay compartmentalize, allocating different space in her mind for worldly and spiritual affairs? Or could I find evidence of how these aspects of her life might interpenetrate? The County Records Office, which houses the archive, is on the edge of a Thatcher era housing estate, next to the police station and ambulance garage. While the archive has suffered from the government’s “austerity measures,” the head archivist was quick to help me make use of one of their most remarkable collections, the family papers of the earls of Westmorland, which includes deeds going back to the twelfth century, since a noble family had to keep track of endless leases and conveyances and mortgages on farms, copses, and pastures, not to mention rights for grazing, fishing, hunting, and mineral extraction. Imagine a title abstract going back five centuries, and then imagine keeping track of dozens of them. Other documents detailed the personal and real property a woman brought to a marriage, and her jointure, the lands or money designated to support her on her husband’s death. Besides documents dealing with land, there were letters, agreements, warrants, and licenses, many from Queen Elizabeth or James I. The most stunning documents I looked at were those that recorded the settlements of major lawsuits. One suit fought the terms of Sir Walter’s will. He had entailed his lands on the male line, giving a large portion of his wealth to Anthony’s younger brother Humphrey, who had sons, whereas Anthony and Grace had only a daughter, Mary. The second set of suits was between the Mildmays, on the one hand, and Grace’s sister Olive and her family, on the other. Grace’s father had, on his deathbed, left a nuncupative (oral) will leaving the lion’s share of his estate to Olive. The Mildmays sued first to overturn the deathbed will and then to secure Grace’s share of her mother’s jointure. The settlements were written on huge sheets of vellum, over three feet by four feet. The “exemplification of a cause of partition between Sir Anthony Mildmay & his wife & Oliva Stapleton widow of lands in Wiltshire” was typical, with calligraphed flourishes and the royal seal of James I, a thick wax hockey puck, affixed at the bottom. These lawsuits seemed to fly in the face of Mildmay’s biblical meditations. “Let not the cares of this world, nor the deceitfulness of riches … enter into our hearts,” she prays (375). At another point, she mused on earthly possessions:

Every day draweth out the line of our lives, & every day shortens it.

And whatsoever presenteth itself unto us, for the use of many days, even the same day it departeth from us. So that it is a question what is ours in this life? Whereto

I answer – only that which we have for the present, & that which we have, we only have it as we are

Gods, and God is ours in Christ

Kate Narveson

Jesus. Then can we lay up no lasting treasure to be enjoyed in this life. (265) What attitude toward property disputes would have been taken by a woman who professed to have no lasting treasure on earth? This problem seems to have concerned Mildmay herself. She twice narrates the drama surrounding her father’s inheritance, once in a memoir written for her daughter and future descendants, and once in a meditation on God’s providence in her life. Both times, she plays up her Christian comportment. There were real stakes involved. Because of Sir Walter’s entail, Mildmay’s husband would possess his lands only during his lifetime, after which they would go to his brother, meaning he could use none as a marriage portion for their daughter. Therefore, Grace Mildmay assigned to her daughter all “present possession” of her own inheritance from her father, save what would come to Grace at her mother’s death. If Anthony died before his father’s entail was broken, Mildmay would be left with little and would have to leave Apethorpe. And Anthony was in ill health. As she puts it in the memoir,

If my husband had died at that time, I should have had no Land but the bare rent of about 300£ a year … Neither could I have been able to contend by law with my husband’s brother for my thirds, nor with my Sister for the right of mine inheritance. … [Thus] my state in myne age stood upon

Hazards. Mildmay recounts that she therefore asked her husband to repair a small parsonage so that she would have a place to go should anything happen to him. She would spend my whole life in that place in the most private manner possible … with great contentation of mind, and mortification to

the world, without repentance of whatsoever I had given [her daughter], wishing it much more with the abundance of Gods blessing therewith…. Often times I have prayed to God that if it were his pleasure that I should be cast out of this house in mine age by my Husbands brother, yet that he [God] should be pleased to go out with me as he came into this house with me … and then let his will be done. (49o)1 Mildmay dwells on this theme. She insists “I have often times said unto my soul in the secret of my heart; God forbid that I should so much wish or desire to dwell in this house during my life or to possess the Lands & provisions belonging thereunto, as that God would be pleased much rather to hold me in mine integrity and faithfulness towards God & my husband” (49o-50o). Having played out in her mind this drama of resignation, she then presents

the reversal of fortune that awarded them the estates as evidence of God’s favor, for God “looked upon me & gave me those earthly blessings which I asked not nor deserved neither could expect” (50o). The enumeration of providences is key in early modern life-writing, and Mildmay turns next to the conflict with her sister, heightening God’s role and stressing her own acceptance of whatever outcome the Lord should give. We sense a tension, though, between her sense of grievance and her efforts at Christian resignation. She laments that on his deathbed, her father forgot that “my sister & I proceeded both from one father & from one mother, & that I had ever been his obedient and loving daughter, & that I had never provoked him A page from Lady Grace Mildmay's memoir to displeasure by any misdemeanor” (51o). Having hurried across England to say farewell, Mildmay was on arrival brought into his Chamber upon a sudden at the very instant when the judge [called to create the new conveyance] was there, & those accompanying him which were plotters, and workers of this unjust alteration, & upon the sight of me they scattered one from another & put away the books and parchments. Mildmay was then bustled out of the room, whereupon “one after another” her mother, sister, and uncle came professing to assure her of her father’s love. But they did not let her see her father again until the conveyance in her sister’s favor was complete, even while she urged them to remind her father to be good to various servants and friends. As her father’s end neared and she knelt by his side, she writes, he looked with tears upon her and said “thou shalt have much trouble with thy land I tell thee, but I pray God thou mayest well

PHOTOS COURTESY OF THE AUTHOR

overcome it.” Then, at his death, he exclaimed “oh that it were to do again” (52o-54o). By shaping a story of her father’s deathbed repentance, Mildmay can represent herself as the loving daughter of an upright father who was not ultimately of the company of those who betrayed her. The drama did not end there. Mildmay goes on to relate that when her sister told her of the deathbed will, she responded “is it so indeed that my father hath dealt thus with me who never offended him willingly”? Well, she tells her sister, “if God moved him thereunto without any indirect dealings by your Husband, your selfe, or any other friends for you, then, the will of God be done … my small portion shall content me.” But “if you have laboured my father by all means to work, & bring to pass this unnatural wrong towards me, I commit my whole cause into the hand of God.” Thereupon, she relates, she went off by herself to commit her heart to God, and then “my mind was satisfied & never troubled after” (54o-55o). Stressing her assumption of the high ground with family and submission to the will of God, Mildmay retrospectively shapes her account around a renunciation of the things of this world. This attitude continues through the next acts of the drama. Sir Walter succeeds in having the nuncupative will declared void and her husband successfully battles her sister’s claim to full control of her mother’s jointure. Mildmay presents herself as passive in those disputes, accepting as God’s hand whatever came to pass, even while she dramatizes her sister’s unruly passions, noting that Olive exclaimed at one point “I will be drawen in pieces with wyld horses before ever I will yeeld unto her!” (56o). Mildmay (in her telling) held out charity to the last, and her sister reconciled herself, so that “all strife ended, natural love revived and confirmed, with all well wishing to each other & our posterities … all which was the work of God expressly (57o). Mildmay thus presents to her posterity a portrait of how submission to the will of God is rewarded both in heaven and on earth. Historians, of course, bring a healthy dose of skepticism to a narrative written for public consumption. Pronouncements on the vanity of the world seem easy enough when you live in a stately home and one of Queen Elizabeth’s most powerful advisors is on your side. By 1602, the family had a reputation for great wealth; John Manningham writes in his diary that Mary’s husband, Francis Fane, is “a gentleman of great hope and forwardness” in part because of the fortune to be received from Sir Anthony, whose worth he estimates at £3000 per annum, and from Lady Grace, at £1200. Given her wealth and financial activity, how could I flesh out Mildmay’s actual understanding of the relationship between earthly and spiritual riches? The Northamptonshire archive contains several documents from the 1590s that provide a fuller picture of what would have shaped Mildmay’s sense of her socio-economic circumstances. One is a license allowing Sir Anthony Mildmay, “by the advice of Physicians to repair to certain Bathes in ye parts of Germany for the recovery of his health, & to remain for 1 year with 5 servants, 3 horses, 3 geldings, £100 in money together with certain Jewells of his own & a chain of gold.” It was dated July 19, 1595, and signed by Queen Elizabeth. This manuscript witnesses the seriousness of Anthony’s ill health, underlining Mildmay’s concerns for her future in the 1590s. It also suggests the level of expense and display necessary to a royal servant, which led Anthony into debt, as it had his father. One of Grace Mildmay’s manuscripts contains a page headed “I made Sir Anthony Mildmay this cordial as followeth”; it is a treatment for the heart. That illness and debt made the 1590s a tense time is further evident in the conveyance of property that Mildmay made, part of the marriage settlement for Mary Mildmay and Francis Fane, dating from 1596, a document that confirms that by signing away her inheritance for the sake of her daughter’s advantageous marriage, Mildmay made herself yet more vulnerable to financial distress. Less dramatic but also telling are manuscripts that indicate the matters that demanded Mildmay’s everyday attention. An account book dated from 1593-96 suggests the size of the household their estate had to support, with weekly provision of bread, beef, mutton, beer and numerous smaller items, as well as the expense of Anthony’s travels, primarily to London, accompanied by up to 30 attendants, with payments for dinners on the road and saddlers. A leather-bound volume contains some of Mildmay’s medical notes, and there’s a gathering of her prescriptions, prefaced by lists of herbs and other more costly ingredients. A packet of loose papers contains an inventory of the bottles in her stillroom, where she distilled her tinctures and electuaries. Testimony to Mildmay’s managerial skill appears in Sir Anthony’s will, which not only left her the bulk of his property but named her as his executrix and instructed her to oversee the creation of a grand tomb monument to be placed in the parish church. The complex emblematic design, which seems to have been Grace Mildmay’s, stresses both biblical themes and family honor. Other documents develop a context suggested by the tomb monument: there are pedigrees for the Sharingtons (Mildmay’s family), the Mildmays, and the Fanes (the family of Mary’s husband). These may reflect efforts to establish property rights. However, they also suggest the weight of lineage on one’s sense of identity. That idea that one represents a family line that will continue in one’s posterity is manifest in another manuscript volume, a “Book of Advices” bound in a cover embroidered in silk and silver thread. The manuscript collects letters of advice, primarily to Mary’s eldest son, Mildmay Fane, who would become the second earl, from Grace Mildmay and Anne le Despencer, his maternal and paternal grandmothers, and from Mary and her husband, each penned by its author. After these letters, Mary has copied a letter by Sir Walter Mildmay to Anthony, as his eldest son. Most letters focus on honor. Of Walter’s letter, Mary writes that all his posterity that “desires to have his earthly possessions blessed unto them, to live honored & leave a never-ending memory behind them as he hath done,” should “Lay [his letter] before them for directions” (15v). The volume is material evidence of the value placed on honor and lineage.

These documents make clear that Mildmay must have felt the pressures of the world and its demands. Given her pursuit of property on the one hand and rejection of the world on the other, perhaps it’s a case of cognitive dissonance, of unconscious compartmentalization. But can that be true of a highly self-aware woman of deep faith? We all weave together varied threads of experience in our inward account of ourselves. What particular assumptions, values, and ideas combined to make Grace Mildmay a person who could hold seemingly incompatible ideas in her mind? In the article I am writing I offer a fuller version of an argument I have space only to summarize here. Mildmay faced financial insecurity until she was in her fifties. Her concerns embraced not just money but family position. We see this in her remark that if her husband had died, her income would be “not sufficient to keep any house” suited to “my father’s daughter nor my husband’s wife” (48o). Similarly, Mildmay criticizes Sir Walter for failing to “leave any sufficient portion for the preferment of his [son’s] only child & daughter” (40o). In a later summary of the same situation, she meditates that “when no jointure was assured me by my Husband nor by his father” the failure “tended to the prejudice of me & of my posterity,” but the Lord “restored & established me my whole portion, both the law of God, & and the Law of the land assisting me” (618). These reflections position her in relation to lineage and her place in society. Seen in this light, Mildmay’s choice to give her lands to her daughter as a marriage portion reflects her commitment to the family line she had married into. As a Mildmay, she was obliged to contribute to the continuance of the line; right action (the law of God) and social obligation (the law of the land) coincided. Birth brought the obligation to serve God with one’s wealth. In the guidance Mildmay gives her descendants, a recurring theme is the right attitude toward and use of one’s material possessions. They must withdraw “from all inordinate love & desires of earthly things,” but even more, “as soon as we receive the benefits & blessings from God, let us give & distribute the same unto the needy, as nurses when their breasts be full are never quiet until they be drawn” (26o). They should not spend the gifts of God idly, upon vain needless delights, but rather “whilst we have time, let us do good unto all, in the name of the Lorde, from whom all goodness proceedeth” and call upon God’s name, “whereby we may receive new supplies from God to furnish our store & maintain the work of our benevolence” (27o). But alas, she fears, we are too careful and costly in our superfluous & unnecessary meats, drinks, & apparel, & spend too much time therein ... [but] if we did use our plenty well, in those good uses, for the which God hath given them unto us, we should be sure never to want, but be endued with the love of God, & receive from him blessing after blessing, as we make the needy blessed, and multiply the praises of God thereby. (27o-28o)

This exuberant vision of benevolence increasing one’s plenty and multiplying blessings, both temporal and spiritual, for rich and poor, is perhaps wishful thinking. But it is also a reasonably coherent position. A well-born Christian cannot simply turn her back on the world. When contemplating the use of her “plenty,” Mildmay thinks in terms of what is ordinate or inordinate, needful or superfluous. Secular things require proper care. If God has given “great things” then let God also give “large hearts” to distribute those things (543). Mildmay warns that “it is a dangerous thing to be in league and friendship with this world” but later inserts “too much” – “too much in league and friendship” (589). By contrast, when meditating on ultimate things, she thinks in absolute terms: “we must not embrace this world nor the vanity & glory thereof but esteem them as they are even fruitless unprofitable & dangerous; & an arrogant and proud spirit must depart from us” (782). The vanity of this world contrasts with the sure eternal promises of God, which “are forever, never failing thy chosen ones who put their trust in thee. The heavens shall vanish away like smoke & the earth shall wax old like a garment, and they that dwell therein shall perish in like manner. But the salvation of the Lord shall be forever” (189). For Mildmay, wealth is a function both of her birth in the divinely given social order and of God’s providence in immediate, emergent occasions. She sees the stewardship of wealth as a duty by which one serves God, carried out with the firm recognition that wealth is a good only in a qualified sense. One must never trust in things of this world, but place one’s final trust in God. The piece that fits uncomfortably in this ethics might seem to be the prosecution of lawsuits in order to secure legacies, and her memoir betrays some uneasiness in the way it vacillates between resignation to God’s will and a sense of grievance about the wills that deprived her of the inheritance she expected. Yet ultimately, I think, she can see these lawsuits as justified because the property is their rightful inheritance according to the law of God and the land; and it is her duty to preserve it for her daughter and all the generations to follow. Special pleading? My sabbatical is over, and further pondering must wait. Still, Mildmay’s attempt to reconcile her wealth and her faith challenge us all, over 400 years after her death.

What attitude toward property disputes would have been taken by a woman who professed to have no lasting treasure on earth?

Notes

1. Page numbers with a superscript “o” refer to Mildmay’s memoir; those without refer to the scriptural meditations that follow in the same manuscript.