Alice Thornton, Memory and Middleham Castle

Blog article published by Joanne Edge on 25 July 2022  castleschildbirthmanuscriptswars of the three kingdomsyorkshire

What is Alice Thornton’s connection to Middleham Castle? While Alice grew up in relative privilege, living in nice halls such as Kirklington and Hipswell with her family, she certainly didn’t live anywhere as grand as a castle. But an incident recorded at the end of her Book 1: The First Book of My Life shows how she fits into the history of Middleham Castle, now looked after by English Heritage. This is how Alice introduces the story:

My deliverance from drowning in the river at Middleham when I went to be a witness to my sister Danby’s first Francis, born at Middleham Castle in the year 1644.^[1]

'Witness' here means 'godmother' – a witness to the child's baptism.

Here is Alice's recounting of the near-drowning:

But when we were gone so far that I could not turn back, the river proved past riding and the bottom could not be come to by the poor mare, which was an excellent mare of my poor brother George Wandesford’s, so I saw myself in such apparent danger and begged of God to assist me and the poor beast I ride on and to be merciful to me and deliver me out of that death for Jesus Christ his sake.^[2]

Book 1 is predominantly a record of the times in her life where Alice and her family have been 'delivered' from death and injury, and so this is why she's noting it down. Luckily, she and the horse made it over the river in one piece and continued their journey to Middleham.

This section of Alice's book was probably written later than the main body of the work (thought to be written c. 1669). It is added at the end and outside of the book's chronological sequence and so, in all likelihood, she forgot to incorporate it into the main narrative and noted it down on some blank pages at the end.

Alice doesn't record the precise date of the incident beyond the year. However, two separate but related archival documents in the North Yorkshire County Record Office at Northallerton give us the birth dates of Katherine and Thomas Danby's children, which has enabled us to pinpoint this incident to late August 1644.^[3]

The Wars of the Three Kingdoms

In terms of why her sister was at Middleham Castle, Alice relates:

At that time, Sir Thomas Danby was forced with my sister and children to be in safety from the Parliament forces, he being for King Charles the first, to Middleham Castle, a garrison under my Lord Loftus.^[4]

Alice's older sister, Katherine, born in 1615, had married Thomas Danby (b. c. 1610), son of Christopher Danby of Farnley, in July 1630. In 1640, Thomas was elected MP for Richmond, but in 1642 was barred from sitting in Parliament due to his support for the king. The Royalist forces of King Charles I, who had decided to abolish Parliament in the 1630s, were fighting Parliamentarians over the governance of the Three Kingdoms – England, Scotland and Ireland – and religious freedom. The Parliamentarian cause was prevailing in Yorkshire in 1644; the battle of Marston Moor, in which Royalist forces were defeated, had taken place that July, and the city of York had been under siege from April to July. Danby was a fugitive at this time. After being captured fighting for the king by Lord Fairfax in 1643, he had escaped and taken refuge with his family at Middleham Castle, some 12 miles away from the family home at Snape.

The Loftus family, who owned Middleham, and the Wandesfords had family connections: Christopher Wandesford had been a close associate in Ireland of Adam Loftus in the 1630s. The 'Lord Loftus' mentioned by Alice is Edward Loftus, Adam's second son. Edward Loftus married Jane Lindley, heir to Middleham Castle, and so inherited the property by marriage. The Danbys, Wandesfords and Loftus families were all unwavering supporters of Charles I and this is why the Danbys would have known the castle was a safe space for them.

The birth

Of the birth, Alice informs us that:

There she was delivered of her first son Francis Danby, my sister having got my Lord Loftus, & myself with Co. Branlen for witnesses.^[5]

The other godparents listed by Alice were Lord Loftus and 'co. Branlen'. Here we encounter a difficulty. Does 'co.' stand for 'cousin' (a word used to indicate any sort of wider family member at the time) or 'colonel'? If the latter, the person must have been male, and Raymond Anselment tentatively identified this person as Colonel Robert Brandling (1620-69), a Royalist soldier from York.^[6] At this time, it was standard for children to have three godparents – two of the same sex as the baby and one of the opposite.

Katherine was giving birth to her fifteenth of sixteen children at Middleham in 1644, as Alice describes it, her 'first son Francis'. Alice is writing much later and so knew that the next year, September 1645, Katherine gave birth to another son, who was also named Francis, as Alice puts it 'after another of that name'. Sadly, Katherine died not long after the second Francis was born of postpartum complications on 10 September 1645.

Remembrance and Memory

How accurate, then, is Alice's recounting of this episode at Middleham, written at least 25 years after the events in question? The archival documents mentioned previously show us that her retelling was imperfect. Firstly, the child in question was called Edward, not Francis. Two lists of the dates and places of birth and the godparents of the children of Katherine and Thomas Danby survives in the North Yorkshire County Record Office, one produced by John Gale, Thomas and Katherine Danby's steward, and the other perhaps in Thomas Danby's own hand. This is what one of them says about the child born at Middleham:

Mr Edward was born at Middleham castle the 26th of August 44. [Witnesses] my Lord Loftus, Mr Jackson and Mrs Alice Wandesford, and died the 6th of July 47 and buried at Leeds.^[7]

So the child was not called Francis at all! Why then did Alice get such a key piece of information wrong? Quite simply, the Danbys lost another son in July 1645, called Francis, to whom Alice also acted as godmother. Katherine's final child, born in September 1645, was named Francis after that son. Thinking back to the incident much later, Alice simply confused which son was born at Middleham because both died very young and she had been godmother to both. And, in fact, Edward himself was named after a son born to the Danbys ten years earlier in May 1634, who lived only two weeks

Alice doesn't get the godparents right, either – you can see in the image above of the page in her book that she at first didn't recall that she herself had been a godparent, and also added in Co. Branlen later. The much more reliable lists in the Northallerton archive show that the third witness was a Mr. Jackson, which the list in Gale's booklet adds was 'of Cowline' (probably Cowling, North Yorkshire).^[8] Brandling may well have been at the castle when the child was born, given his royalist allegiances, but he was not a godparent.

Alice, then, remembered this incident refracted through the lens of many years. She remembered the birth of a child named after another child who died but confused the name and recalled that there were godparents but got slightly muddled on the details. Given how much later she was writing, and the lack of ease in finding out these sorts of details, it is not surprising she got quite a few key details of the event wrong.

To find out more about Alice and Middleham Castle, listen to episode 173 of the English Heritage podcast.