On the Great Staircase and in the Little Drawing Room at Coughton Court in Warwickshire hangs a family group of portraits which came from Harvington Hall in Worcestershire. The earliest, of Humphrey Pakington (1555-1631), is dated 1599 and shows him in an oval frame, with receding hair, goatee beard and dark, slightly protruding eyes. He is wearing a ruff and black doublet, and the long fingers of his left hand lightly grasp a pendent jewel. His lips are set in a straight line, and the general effect is one of woodensolemnity. Close by is the portrait by Cornelius Jansen of Humphrey’s second wife, Abigail Sacheverell, a much more vivid character. She is a podgy woman with a double chin, in a magnificently padded and slashed dress of blue and silver and an enormous lace collar set off by jewellery. Here, beyond doubt, was a capable and masterful woman, an impression which is confirmed by her surviving letters. The portrait is signed by Jansen above theleft sleeve, and is dated 1630, the year before Humphrey’s death. The series continues with two portraits of their elder daughter Mary Yate (one by the school of Jansen); with one of their younger daughter Anne Audley (also attributed to Jansen); with one of Sir John Yate, who married Mary; and with one by Adriaen van der Werff of Sir Charles Yate, son of Sir John and Mary. Finally, there is a portrait (school of Lely) of Sir Charles’s daughter, another Mary Yate, whose marriage to Sir Robert Throckmorton took the Harvington estates to the Throckmortons in 1696.
Part I of this Index was published in Recusant History fifteen years ago, in October 1982. It was designed to serve two purposes: as an appendix to an earlier series of articles in Recusant History, in which I had discussed about thirty of the most important houses; and as a preliminary list of additions and corrections to Granville Squiers, Secret Hiding-Places (1933), which had been out of print since the publisher’s warehouse was bombed on the night of 29 December 1940. In 1989 my own book, also entitled Secret Hiding-Places, was published by Veritas; but, in order to allow room for necessary architectural and genealogical material, it only deals with about 180 houses, against 360 in Squiers, and of the 180 only 120 are in Squiers. Even after 1989, therefore, there remained about 240 houses where the hides had not been discussed in print since 1933, together with a number of others which had never been collected at all. Part II of the Index now lists another 123 houses (making a total of 300), of which 83 were in Squiers and 40 not. There are also further details on a few houses which were included in Part I, but these retain their original reference nos. (in square brackets) and so do not affect these statistics. Houses which were not in Index I but are in Hodgetts 1989 are not included here unless there is more to report on them, as with nos. 230, 236 and 239.
This is the third and (barring further significant discoveries) the final part of my index, the first and second parts of which were published in Recusant History in October 1982 (nos. 1–177) and May 1998 (nos. 178–300). In Part II, for reasons of space and cost, I omitted, unless there was more to report on them, houses mentioned in my Secret Hiding-Places (1989) but not included in Part I. For reference and analysis, however, it is inconvenient to have a numbered list and a book, each including houses not in the other; and in any case there is now more to report on many of these houses. The one hundred houses in Part III (nos. 301–400) therefore include all sixty-nine of those that were mentioned, however briefly, in Hodgetts 1989 and were not included in Parts I or II. Among them is Scotney Old Castle in Kent (no. 320), which is one of only ten houses in the country where there is a surviving hide mentioned in an Elizabethan or Stuart account of a search. Forty-eight of the hundred were in Granville Squiers’ Secret Hiding-Places (1933).
This paper is the final part of a trilogy dealing with Harvington Hall in Worcestershire from 1529 until 1923, when it passed into the ownership of the Archdiocese of Birmingham. The first part, ‘The Pakingtons of Harvington [1529–1631]’ by Lionel and Veronica Anderton Webster, appeared in Recusant History in April 1974; my sequel, ‘The Yates of Harvington, 1631–1696’, followed in October 1994.’ This third part appropriately appears in an issue of Recusant History to mark the ninetieth birthday of Fr. Geoffrey Holt, S.J., who over the years has published many studies of other country-house missions in the eighteenth century, and whose characteristic combination of scholarship, lucidity and human sympathy is a model of how such things ought to be done. He appreciates the problems and will, I hope, appreciate the result.
This paper is a sequel to ‘The Pakingtons of Harvington’ by Lionel and Veronica Anderton Webster, which was published in Recusant History in April 1974. There they only had room to discuss in detail the century between the purchase of Chaddesley Corbett and Harvington by Sir John Pakington in 1529 and the death in 1631 of his great-nephew Humphrey III, who had built the Elizabethan Hall with its remarkable priest-holes and wall-paintings. In continuing the story I have had invaluable help from the Websters’ genealogical and legal notes, which Veronica passed on to me in the summer of 1991, the year before her death; but their references have been checked, a great deal has been added, and the structure, the inferences and any errors are mine. The paper therefore appears under my name with these acknowledgements, rather than as a joint publication. I hope that in due course the trilogy can be completed by another paper on The Throckmortons of Harvington, 1696–1923’.
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