Hello and
welcome back to another adventure with … well actually just Me (Mercedes) so I
guess that we can call this another side quest adventure.
Me being such a good wife to him decided to go and see him in Northampton and since he was working all day I thought I would take the opportunity to see yet another beautiful bit of English Heritage along the way.
So this blog is about Lyveden - an unfinished garden house with a strong testament to the catholic church.
So although this is an old building it is not in disrepair or a ruin but it is an unfinished building. There were never any windows or floors, let alone a roof!
Lyveden was the dream of Sir Thomas Tresham who was a devout Catholic… one could even say to the extreme!!
Which is certainly something that his son Francis Tresham also followed after, as a member of the party that tried to blow up the then protestant King James the First in parliament house of England that we now recognise as the Gun Powder Plot.
It is suspected that it was Francis who wrote the letter to tell his cousins not to go to parliament that day and the letter that ultimately foiled the plot.
Cool right?! See parents - it’s important to not pass on your crazy to your children.
So that was a cool part of how history was related to this place!
But back to Ol' Thomas Tresham!
So the reason why the garden house was never completed was that he died!
But he didn't just die, he was broke and owed about what is today 1 Million pounds. So when the builders heard that he had died they downed tools and went home knowing they were never going to get paid.
The following photos are some of the features of the house that were never completed, besides obviously the roof:
Below: The floors were never added
Below: These shields that surround the house were to be inscribed but never were
Below: on the left side of the house you can see the main entrance to the house that is inaccessible even if there were floors put it you would not have been able to get into the house!
Below: Even the windows and bars were never installed.
One other cool feature of the house is that there is a small/ very low servants entrance to the house that is in the back and is access through a trench so that when one is in the garden your views would not be distracted by the comings and goings of the servants!!
Below: A photo of me at the two servants entrances you can see that they are quite low!
So that is some of the unfinished business that was initially apparent.
The Garden house (Above Yellow) was to be built however as a ‘stop over’ place for visitors to the Manor house (Above Red) that is just over the hill past the orchard.
While I was there I asked about the manor house and the staff/ volunteers said that they had only just acquired the property so it is currently being renovated or I guess un-renovated to show some of it's former glory but also to install plumbing etc. So that should be available to visit in the next few years.
But lets tell more stories about Sir Thomas Tresham here is a quick synopsis of what he got up to that I have copied and pasted from Wikipedia:
"He was widely regarded as clever and well-educated, a correspondent of William Cecil, the Secretary of State to Queen Elizabeth, and Sir Christopher Hatton, the Lord Chancellor.
Well-read, Tresham dedicated much of his life to collecting books. He was much disliked, however, for an enclosure policy towards common land. Following a riot which destroyed some of his hedges, he had 50 people executed
Tresham was picked as sheriff for Northamptonshire in 1573 and was knighted at the Queen's Royal Progress at Kenilworth in 1575. He frequently entertained large numbers of friends and acquaintances and pursued an aggressively reforming estate policy.
Tresham was a devout Catholic at a time when Queen Elizabeth (A Protestant) was anxious about the Catholic threat posed by Spain and by her cousin Mary, Queen of Scots, Catholics were made targets for persecution by their spiritual loyalty to another temporal power."
...SO...
Between 1581 and 1605, Tresham paid penalties totalling just under £8,000. (equivalent to £1,640,000 in 2016). These heavy financial demands were, in reality, overshadowed by the expense of his building projects and his insistence on making advantageous marriages for his six daughters, bringing with them sizeable dowries (£12,200).
His credit was thus impaired, and on top of all this the ill-advised involvement of his son, Francis, in the Earl of Essex's rebellion, cost him over £3,000...
And that is how a rich guy ended up broke... I guess kids and religion will do that to a man.
But I guess Francis (the naughty son previously mentioned from the gun powder plot) was very very lucky that daddy had money because only his family's intervention and his father's money saved him from attainder. Despite this, he became involved in two missions to Catholic Spain to seek support for English Catholics (then heavily persecuted).
It entailed losing not only one's life, property and hereditary titles, but typically also the right to pass them on to one's heirs.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attainder
This attainder thing was basically used when a Monarch could not get nobility to do something, so they would condemn them but then say that they would lift the attainder if you, for example go to war for me.. etc..
I mean at the end of the day what is worse for a rich person? to die? or to have all their money taken away from the family? They might be thinking:
"well I guess I will die so my family can live comfortably!! and also as to not lose generations of family estates and butt-kissing rewards"
Ok more photos!
But I hope that you enjoyed reading this and getting an idea of how a rich man back in the day had to behave himself or he would lose all of his money. Also that having children cost him a lot of it too!!
For more information feel free to check out: https://www.nationaltrust.org.uk/lyveden
As always thanks for reading and stay tuned as I hope to release the final blogs from our Road Trip through the south of Spain soon!
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Life is a dream for the wise, a game for the fool, a comedy for the rich, a tragedy for the poor.
-Sholom Aleichem-
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