For Sale: Rich Orphans - The Tudor Court Of Wards

by Barbara Kyle 

       

       In the late 1400s a young woman named Jonet Mychell was abducted. Her step-father, Richard Rous, wrote to the Chancellor of England asking for help. According to Rous, Jonet had been living with her uncle in London when some "evil disposed" people led by one Otis Trenwyth took her away so that "neither father nor mother, nor kin nor friend  that she had could come to her, nor know where she was." She was subsequently forced to marry against her will to "such a person that was to her great shame and heaviness."

       To modern eyes, the crime of a man abducting a young woman is a sexual one. But Tudor eyes saw things differently. The main dispute in Jonet Mychell's abduction was about wardship and marriage, and what those two things entailed, above all, was money. What concerned Tudor bureaucrats was the abduction of young women who were heirs to property.

Henry VII

 Abduction of heiresses was not uncommon. Certainly it occurred frequently enough to necessitate a statute passed in 1487 under Henry VII, the first Tudor monarch:  "An Act Against Taking Away of Women Against Their Will."  A stolen heiress meant lost revenues for the Crown.

The revenue stream went back for centuries. The wardship of minor heirs of any tenant-in-chief was one of the king's ancient feudal rights, a royal prerogative dating back to the feudal principle of seigneurial guardianship. It entitled the king to all the revenues of the deceased's estate (excluding lands allocated to his widow as dower) until the heir reached the age of majority: twenty-one for a male, fourteen for a female. The king generally sold the wardships to the highest bidder or granted them gratis to favoured courtiers as a reward for services.

       
        In other words, all orphans, male and female, who were heirs to significant property became wards of the king, who then sold the wardships. Gentlemen bid for these sought-after prizes, because control of a ward's income-generating lands and their marriage was a significant source of revenue. The guardian pocketed the rents and revenues of the ward's property until the young person came of age, at which time the guardian often married the ward to one of his own children.

Henry VIII

       
        When Henry VIII, the second Tudor monarch, came to the throne he fully exploited the royal right of wardships. Monarchy had to be a money-making business, and wardships provided an excellent way to replenish the royal treasury. Surveyors were appointed to search for potential royal wardships throughout the realm. Managing all of this was a Master of the King's Wards who supervised royal wardships and administered the lands and revenues of wards during the period of crown control, and sold those not to be retained. The revenues went into the king's private funds.

       
       In 1540 Henry VIII replaced the office of Master of the King's Wards with the Court of Wards, which assumed complete control of wards and the administration of their lands and the selling of the wardships. Eventually, the Court of Wards became one of the Tudor crown's most lucrative ministries. In the reign of Elizabeth I, the last Tudor monarch, the Court of Wards was supervised by Sir William Cecil (later Lord Burghley) who exerted enormous control over this court, keeping several lucrative and important wardships for himself.

      
       I became familiar with the situation of royal wardships when I wrote The Queen's Lady. My book features Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII's chancellor, who famously went to the execution block rather than swear the oath that Henry was supreme head of the church in England, a title Henry created in order to divorce Catherine of Aragon and marry Anne Boleyn.

Sir Thomas More

 Sir Thomas More had two wards, Anne Cresacre and Giles Heron. He brought them up in his household where they were educated alongside his children. Eventually Anne married More's son John, and Giles married More's daughter Cecily. The marriages seem to have been happy ones.

Sir Thomas More and Family

Anne Cresacre (sketch by Hans Holbien)

       

       Anne Cresacre's story inspired me to create another ward for Sir Thomas More: Honor Larke, the heroine of my novel The Queen's Lady. Honor grows up revering More and becomes a lady-in-waiting to Catherine of Aragon. Forced to take sides in the religious extremism of the day, Honor fights to save the church's victims from death at the stake, bringing her into conflict with her once-beloved guardian. She enlists Richard Thornleigh, a rogue sea captain, in her missions of mercy, and eventually risks her life to try to save Sir Thomas from the wrath of the King.

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Barbara Kyle is the author of The Thornleigh Saga series:

Visit Barbara at www.barbarakyle.com.

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