STOURTON, William (c. 1594-1672)

William Stourton, 11th Baron Stourton, succeeded to a title of ancient origin but with little political or economic influence. The Stourtons’ principal landholdings were in and around their house at Stourton in Wiltshire, with a number of lesser properties in Dorset. The inquisition post mortem held at the death of his father in 1633 indicates landholdings worth less than £300 a year. C.B. Joseph et.al., History of the Noble Family of Stourton, i. 491. Six years later, in response to Charles I’s request for funds towards his northern expedition, the 11th Baron Stourton offered a mere £500, excusing himself by reference to his ‘weak estate,’ nearly half of which had been made over to his three brothers (Thomas, Francis and Edward) for their lives, leaving him with less than £1,500 a year to support his own five children, ‘two of them daughters near ready for marriage’. CSP Dom, 1638-9, pp. 472-3. Only £300 was actually paid. CSP Dom Addenda, 1625-49, p. 604.

The marriage of his eldest son, Edward, to Mary Petre, daughter of the wealthy Robert Petre^†, 3rd Baron Petre, in 1641 brought renewed hope of financial stability with a down payment of £3,000 on a promised dowry of £6,000, but in the early 1640s circumstances were changing all too rapidly and the alliance with the Petres soon proved disastrous. Recusant Hist., xi. 92. The Petre finances were plunged into disarray by the early death of the 3rd baron and the effects of civil war. William Petre, 4th Baron Petre, refused to pay the remainder of his sister’s dowry. The death of Stourton’s heir, Edward, killed on royalist service at Bristol in 1644, and the remarriage of his widow to Sir Thomas Longueville, created additional complications – complications that were redoubled when Mary Petre died shortly after her second marriage leaving her husband to claim £300 a year from the Stourton estates as her jointure. The ensuing litigation between Stourton and Longueville and between Stourton and Petre was not finally settled until the mid 1660s. TNA, C22/172/3.

The Civil War also brought more direct financial consequences for Stourton. Although his immediate forebears had plotted against James I (his maternal uncle, Francis Tresham, was one of the Gunpowder Plotters and his father was also implicated in the plot), Stourton and his family were closely associated with the royalist cause. He was with the king at Oxford early in 1644 and in March 1644 was listed as one of the ‘peers employed in his majesty’s service, or absent with leave’. Rushworth, Hist. Colls. v. 574. As noted above, his eldest son died that year in the king’s service; a younger son, William, was one of a party of gentlemen who assembled with horses and arms ‘ostensibly for fox-hunting’ just before Penruddock’s rising of 1655. J. A. Williams, Catholic Recusancy in Wilts. 1660-1791, p. 210.

By 1646 he had been sequestered, and complained that ‘all my estate is sequestered, and my wife, children and grandchildren have not beds to lie on.’ HMC 6th Rep. 108. An attempt to improve the finances of his estate (probably by means of an enclosure scheme) also went wrong when Stourton’s tenant retained the lands – and profits – as his own. TNA, C9/410/457. Other disputes related to lands in Dorset, rights of presentation to a benefice and an unpaid debt of £200 owed to his deceased younger brother, Francis. TNA, C5/562/12, 13; C9/18/138; CSP Dom, 1660-1, p. 232. Like his disputes with Petre and Longueville, these too ended up in the court of chancery. Stourton’s resort to litigation may have been symptomatic of his financial and political weakness and consequent inability to exploit more informal methods of pressure on opponents.

Stourton was a committed Catholic. A list of 48 persons ‘conceived to be popishly affected’ drawn up by the rector and churchwardens of Stourton in September 1662 started with his name. He maintained a Catholic mission at Stourton, served by a Benedictine, from at least 1652. In 1658 his younger brother, Thomas Stourton, was accused of being a Catholic priest; two of his children, Thomas and Frances, also embraced the religious life. Williams, 110, 208; Noble Family of Stourton, i. 453-4, 497. The protection and encouragement of local Catholics seems to have been the one area in which he was able to exert influence. In 1670, the constable who reported omnia bene (all well) in the notoriously recusant neighbourhood of Stourton, was himself a Catholic, and many of the Catholics in the area seem to have been Stourton tenants or members of the Stourton household. VCH, Wilts. iii. 91; Williams, 212-3. A close relationship with the neighbourhood is suggested by the 11th baron’s bequest of £10 to the poor of the parish to be paid the day after his funeral; he also left generous bequests to his servants.

Stourton’s contribution to parliamentary life is difficult to assess. His first and apparently only appearance in the House before the Civil Wars was in April 1640. His attendance after the the Restoration was initially high. He was present on 74 per cent of sitting days during the Convention but his attendance dropped to 59 per cent during the first (1661-2) session of the Cavalier Parliament. He did not attend the 1663 session at all, although his attendance during the 1664 session rose slightly to 64 per cent. In the absence of a family archive and with no recorded dissents, protests, speeches or knowledge of his activity in committees and conferences, it is impossible to draw any conclusion about what he considered to be his role in the House. In 1660, Philip Wharton*, 4th Baron Wharton, listed him, not surprisingly, as a papist; in 1661, he was expected to vote against the bid by Aubrey De Vere, 20th earl of Oxford, for the great chamberlaincy. In February 1663, in response to a call of the House, he entered his proxy in favour of the Catholic William Howard, Viscount Stafford, who was expected to use it in favour of the impeachment of Edward Hyde, earl of Clarendon.

Stourton’s last attendance was on 20 Aug. 1664, when Parliament met simply to be prorogued. Thereafter he regularly sent in his proxy, always to a fellow Catholic and usually, but not always, in favour of his Wiltshire neighbour, Henry Arundell, 3rd Baron Arundell of Wardour. In the 1665 session it was given to James Tuchet, 13th Baron Audley, better known by his Irish title as 3rd earl of Castlehaven, and in 1669 it was once again given to Stafford. Stourton was said to be sick at a call of the House on 26 Oct. 1669. It is possible that his non-attendance was as much due to advancing age and ill-health as to lack of interest or poverty, though when he made his will in 1670 he declared himself to be in good health.

Two of his sons, Edward and John, predeceased him. Of the remaining sons, William married Margaret, daughter of George Morgan of Penrith, and Thomas became a Benedictine monk. His elder daughter Mary married Sir John Weld (brother of Humphrey Weld^‡), the other, Frances, became a nun. Williams, i. 497. He was succeeded by his grandson, William Stourton, to whom he bequeathed his ‘Parliament robes with my footcloth, and all furniture belonging to them’. Parliament robes were expensive. The implicit assumption that the new baron would be unable to afford a new set of robes is probably further confirmation of the extent of Stourton poverty.