KNYVETT, Thomas (c.1545-1622)

Keeper of Whitehall Palace, and the second-most senior officer of the Mint, Knyvett was a former household official under Elizabeth I and became one of the most trusted of the servants of James I. Settled at Westminster and at Stanwell, in Middlesex, he earned his monarch’s gratitude in November 1605 by apprehending Guy Fawkes in the cellars of the Parliament House. However, his reward, in the form of a peerage, was long delayed, presumably because James could not spare him from the Commons, where he sat for Westminster, the House being required to vote substantial supply in 1606 and consider the Union in 1607. Not until all hope of securing the Union had faded, on the penultimate day of the 1606/7 session, was Knyvett finally ennobled as Baron Knyvett of Escrick, which title he adopted after his manor of Escrick in Yorkshire.26 VCH Yorks. E. Riding, iii. 20. For his other Yorks. properties, see CSP Dom. 1595-7, p. 380; SO3/1, f. 639v; C66/1469. However, the king, then preparing to go on summer progress, preferred to bestow this honour upon Knyvett by means of a writ of summons to the Lords rather than by letters patent, which would have required a ceremonial investiture.27 A. Wagner and J.C. Sainty, ‘Origins of the Introduction of Peers in the House of Lords’, Archaeologia, ci. 133-4; Egerton Pprs. ed. J.P. Collier (Cam. Soc. xii), 409-10. Consequently, and as was by now usual in such cases, Knyvett was formally introduced to the upper House the following day, when he was flanked by Edward Neville^†, 8th and 1st Lord Abergavenny and John Petre^†, 1st Lord Petre.28 CSP Ven. 1607-10, p. 14; LJ, ii. 538a, 538b.

Knyvett was childless, but at the time of his ennoblement he and his wife were custodians of the king’s two-year-old daughter, Princess Mary. Described as ‘the joy’ of Lady Knyvett’s life, Mary died at Stanwell in September 1607 after an illness lasting 23 days and was buried in the Henry VII Chapel in Westminster Abbey.29 J. Nichols, Progs. of Jas. I, i. 154; J. Leech, A Sermon, preached before the Lords of the Councell, in K. Henry the Seavenths Chappell ... (1607). The Knyvetts never looked after any more of the royal offspring - Mary was the last of James’s children - but they continued to be regarded as reliable guardians. In late December 1609 they were instructed to take charge of the king’s adult cousin, Lady Arbella Stuart, after James heard disturbing rumours that she had converted to Catholicism and was planning to travel abroad without his permission, possibly to marry a Moldavian prince. However, Arbella succeeded in dispelling these reports, and was released after a short confinement.30 Chamberlain Letters, i. 292, 294; CSP Ven. 1607-10, pp. 405, 410, 414.

Knyvett attended the prorogation meeting of Parliament on 16 Nov. 1607, though he was not one of the commissioners appointed for the occasion.31 LJ, ii. 540a. During the summer of 1609 he endeavoured to prevent the felling of timber in Wheldrake wood, Yorkshire, by Francis Clifford, 4th earl of Cumberland^*, who needed timber to repair some nearby waterworks. Knyvett protested to the lord treasurer, Robert Cecil, 1st earl of Salisbury, that this wood, which he leased from the crown, had already been denuded of all useful timber by royal officials, to his great loss.32 HMC Hatfield, xxi. 119. A few months later, in November 1609, Knyvett stepped down as sole warden of the Mint, preferring instead to share the duties of this office with his former deputy Edmund Doubleday^‡. What prompted this decision is unclear, but by the middle of December at the latest he had become surveyor general to the queen consort, Anne of Denmark. Knyvett remained in Anne’s service until her death in 1619. Unlike the queen, however, Knyvett’s commitment to Protestantism seems never to have been in doubt. His chaplain, Jeremiah Leech, was considered sufficiently orthodox to preach at the funeral of Princess Mary, while his friends included James Ussher, the future Calvinist archbishop of Dublin.33 Leech, sig. A2; C58/13, dispensation of 31 May 1609; V. cl. Gulielmi Camdeni et illustrium vivorum ad G. Camdenum Epistolae (1691) ed. T. Smith, 239.

When Parliament reconvened in February 1610, Knyvett played a moderately active role in its proceedings, attending 61 of the session’s 88 days and becoming a member of 19 of the 58 committees established by the upper House. His longest recorded absence was between 15 and 25 May inclusive, and suggests that he went home early for Whitsun, although he was recorded as having attended the House on 26 May, on which day the Lords adjourned. Two of the committees to which Knyvett was named – to prevent moor-burning in northern England at certain times of the year and improve the administration of justice in the north – reflected his property interests in Yorkshire, where until recently he had been chairman of the bench.34 LJ, ii. 592b, 634b. A further five were connected in one way or another with East Anglia, though his only property interests there concerned the manor of Moor Hall, in Norfolk. Perhaps he was keeping an eye out for the interests of his kinsmen, the Knyvetts of Ashwellthorpe.35 Ibid. 569b, 517a, 600a, 639a; HMC Hatfield, xxi. 332. Among his remaining appointments was a committee to confer with the Commons concerning Dr John Cowell’s controversial legal dictionary, the Interpreter.

Knyvett made only three recorded speeches during the course of the session, two of them during the debate on the bill against clerical pluralism and non-residence, which had been sent up to the Lords by the Commons with a special commendation. Many of the bishops wished to throw out this measure as it dealt with matters that they believed should properly be handled by Convocation rather than Parliament. Moreover, on 3 May the archbishop of Canterbury, Richard Bancroft^*, declared that there was no point in drafting any measure on this subject until the Church had been re-endowed. Knyvett, who had only recently been a Member of the Commons himself, was irritated by the attitude of the prelates and announced that even though men of ‘great and authority’ were bent on its overthrow he was not convinced that the bill should be quashed, especially since it came ‘from a body representative of many thousands’. Nor did he believe that the Commons, in debating matters of religion, were acting ultra vires. On the contrary, he expressed support for another bill which had recently been sent up to the Lords requiring ecclesiastical Canons to be confirmed by Parliament. For good measure, he implied that it was not the Commons who were encroaching on matters belonging to the Church but the bishops who were seeking to intrude themselves into secular affairs; Convocation, he added, should ‘make no Canons to bind us or our lands or goods’. Instead of throwing out the bill, he advised, the Lords should seek a conference with the Commons ‘to hear their reasons’.36 Procs. 1610 ed. E.R. Foster, i. 232-3.

Knyvett’s remarks incensed Bancroft, who retorted that the Commons, in seeking to ‘meddle with the Church matters’, were certainly ‘out of their element’. As for Knyvett’s proposal that the peers should confer with the Commons he was entirely dismissive: ‘I think it tendeth to the dishonour of this House to be informed by that House’. Lord Treasurer Salisbury, who had earlier remarked that the bill was in need of being entirely redrafted, also took offence at Knyvett’s speech. ‘My lord … said that some great lords had a purpose to quash the bill. I think he meant not out of greatness. For my part, I have done nothing but my place’. Knyvett replied that he regretted having offended Salisbury, but he offered no such apology to Bancroft. ‘I did not desire to confer with the lower House to be informed by them’, he explained, but since they were ‘a grave House’ it was right to presume that they ‘have done upon reason that which they have done’. So far as Bancroft’s claim that the Commons were meddling in affairs that did not belong to them was concerned, he, like many Members of the lower House, considered that the Henrician Reformation had stripped the Church of the right to legislate without reference to Parliament, and ‘I desire that we may not go backward’.37 Ibid. 78, 233-4; HP Commons 1604-29, i. 19-20. Thanks partly to Knyvett’s robust intervention, the bill on pluralism and non-residence was placed in committee, to which Knyvett himself was named. The following month Knyvett was also appointed to the committee on the bill to prevent Canons from being introduced without parliamentary approval.38 LJ, ii. 587b, 611a.

Although Knyvett crossed swords with Bancroft over Church matters, the two men saw eye to eye regarding the bill to protect the king, which was introduced in the wake of the assassination of Henri IV of France. Salisbury and his elder brother, Thomas Cecil^*, 2nd earl of Exeter, disliked the clause which provided for the punishment of the malefactor’s parents and descendants, whereas both Knyvett and Bancroft heartily approved of this feature of the bill. Indeed, at the second reading debate on 18 July, Knyvett’s only concern was that the bill ‘should make good that [which] it doth import’.39 Procs. 1610, i. 139, 147, 148.

Knyvett attended only four days of the final session of James’s first Parliament – two successive Tuesdays (30 Oct. and 6 Nov.) and two successive Thursdays (15 and 22 Nov.) - and played no recorded role in its proceedings. In January 1611 he was one of 24 barons to receive a New Year’s gift from the king.40 SP14/61/39. That same month he agreed to surrender to James’s Scottish favourite, Sir Robert Carr^* (later earl of Somerset), the keeperships of Whitehall Palace and St James’s Park, in return for which James promised him £2,000.41 Birch, i. 104. A warrant for payment of this sum was issued in April, and the formal surrender took place two months later, by which time Carr had been ennobled as Viscount Rochester.42 CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 25; SO3/5, unfol. (June 1611). However, the Exchequer found it difficult to honour the promised payment quickly, and in mid January 1612 a further warrant, for an instalment that should have been paid six weeks earlier, was issued.43 E403/2731, f. 71v. Knyvett was well able to afford to wait, however, for in November 1611 he had spare cash to lend to three separate individuals who, between them, entered into bonds worth more than £4,133 for his repayment.44 LC4/31, nos. 257-61. The following month he also lent around £500 to John Elphinstone, a member of the queen’s privy chamber, on the security of Chenston manor in Staffordshire.45 C54/2150/46. The bond for repayment was worth £1,000.

Knyvett formed part of the procession at the funeral of Prince Henry in December 1612.46 Harl. 5176, f. 208. He was the recipient of a number of royal grants during the middle years of James’s reign, including woods in Escrick and nearby Dighton, for which he paid £420, and the manor of Staines, in Middlesex, which cost him £800. Both sets of properties were sold to him in fee-farm.47 SO3/5, unfol. (Dec. 1613); C66/1998/10. It seems likely that Knyvett, now in his late sixties and perhaps increasingly infirm, bought Staines in order to be closer to the queen, whose residence outside London was Oatlands Palace, near Weybridge.48 This conclusion is certainly suggested by comparison of APC, 1616-17, p. 349 with E315/243, ff. 189v-90.

Despite his advancing years, Knyvett was one of the most frequent attenders of the House of Lords in 1614, missing just four days of the session. However, he played little recorded part in proceedings. He was named to just four committees, one of which may have been of particular interest to him since it concerned the preservation of timber, while another, a measure to prevent the wasteful consumption of gold and silver, probably reflected his concerns as an officer of the Mint. He was also a member of the committee to confer with the Commons on the Palatine succession bill.49 LJ, ii. 691a, 692b, 697b, 699b. In his only recorded speech, delivered during the impositions debate of 23 May, he urged the Lords to confer with the Commons before they consulted the judges, perhaps for the same reason as Edmund Sheffield^*, 3rd Lord Sheffield (later 1st earl of Mulgrave), who thought that to hear the judges first would be ‘a forejudging of the Commons’.50 HMC Hastings IV, 255; Petyt, Jus Parliamentarium (1739), 344.

In October 1614 Knyvett was prosecuted in the Exchequer by Sir Richard Martyn^‡, the master of the Mint, whose accounts he had previously caused to be condemned. As a result of Knyvett’s actions, Martyn claimed to have lost around £8,000, but he proved unable to overturn the verdict previously reached by the court.51 E112/99/1012; E124/19, f. 265v; 124/20, ff. 203v, 209v. The following spring Knyvett came to an arrangement with John Elphinstone, 2nd Lord Balmerinoch [S], in respect of Chenston manor, Staffordshire, the property which its previous owner John Elphinstone (presumably a kinsman) had used as collateral to secure a loan from Knyvett. Elphinstone had died leaving the manor to Balmerinoch but without first settling his debt to Knyvett, who now received a payment of £1,000.52 C54/2245/43. In December 1615 Knyvett and his fellow warden of the Mint, Edmund Doubleday, together with Francis Russell^*, 2nd Lord Russell (later 4th earl of Bedford), agreed to act as trustees for Thomas Clinton*, 3rd earl of Lincoln, who had married one of Knyvett’s nieces. For Knyvett at least this may have proved to be more than a mere formality, as Lincoln died three years later leaving as his heir an under-age son.53 Lincs. Archives, 3ANC1/3/4, 7.

In March 1616, following the death of Ralph Ewens^‡, auditor to the queen and clerk of the Commons, Knyvett and another of Anne of Denmark’s officers were granted the right to collect unpaid debts to the crown amounting to £12,000, which right Ewens had previously enjoyed.54 CSP Dom. 1611-18, p. 357. Three months later Knyvett assisted at the investiture of John Roper^* as Lord Teynham, though Roper’s family were widely suspected of Catholic sympathies.55 Harl. 5176, f. 222. In 1617 the Privy Council, forced to intervene in a quarrel between Sir Edward Coke^‡ and his estranged wife Lady Hatton, proposed that the couple’s daughter Frances, whom Coke had forcibly abducted, should stay with Knyvett at his house near Staines.56 APC, 1616-17, p. 317.

In May 1619 Knyvett attended the funeral of Anne of Denmark.57 Harl. 5176, f. 235v. The following year he and his fellow peers were desired by the Privy Council to dip into their pockets to help defend the Palatinate.58 APC, 1619-21, p. 292. He subsequently asked to speak with the Privy Council clerk responsible for issuing the letters and promised to ‘send to the Lords’.59 SP14/117/97; 14/118/43. There is no evidence that he was ever induced to pay.

The opening of the 1621 Parliament coincided with the conclusion of an Exchequer lawsuit between Knyvett and one of his Stanwell tenants, John Page, who refused to pay rent on the grounds that his lands were actually freehold. The court, however, resolved that the lands in question were actually copyhold and thus subject to rent.60 E126/2, ff. 205-6. Knyvett attended the first sitting of the Parliament only sporadically, missing five consecutive business days between 5 and 12 Feb. inclusive and six more between 9 and 17 May. Over the course of the winter sitting he attended only once on 20 November. He made no recorded speeches and was appointed to just two committees, the first on the informers bill and the second on the bill to prevent swearing.61 LJ, iii. 75b, 101b. Knyvett was not among the signatories to the Humble Petition of the Nobility of England which was drafted, while Parliament was sitting, by several peers resentful that the English purchasers of Irish and Scottish viscountcies were allowed precedence over English barons, like himself. One reason for this, perhaps, was that Knyvett, being a senior officer of the Mint, was unwilling to upset the king, who was incensed at the petition. However, he may also have been swayed by the fact that his nephew, Sir Henry Carey^‡, was among those Englishmen who had purchased for himself a Scottish title (that of Viscount Falkland).

Knyvett was ill by early June 1622,62 Knyvett Letters ed. B. Schofield (Norf. Rec. Soc. xx), 57. and died at his house in King Street, Westminster on 27 July following. In the preamble to his will, drafted two years earlier, he set out the basic tenets of his Christian faith, declaring that he believed ‘literally’ and ‘without ambiguity or doubt’ every article of the Nicene, Athanasian and Apostolic creeds. He was buried, as requested, in the chancel of St Mary’s, Stanwell on 1 Aug. 1622, without the ‘superfluous charge or ceremony’ of the sort that was usual at the funerals of men who were ‘as vain by their titles in their lives as by their pomps after their decease’. In a codicil prepared ten days before his death, he asked his widow, whom he appointed his executrix, to build a free school in Stanwell and to buy up land in Middlesex and Buckinghamshire to pay for its maintenance. However Lady Knyvett died only seven weeks after her husband, leaving the establishment of the school (in 1624) to her executrix and niece, Elizabeth Hampden.63 Coll. of Arms, ms I.8, f. 8; PROB 11/140, ff. 124v-6v, 175r-v; VCH Mdx. iii. 49-50.

Although Knyvett asked that his place of burial be marked only by a gravestone bearing a simple inscription, in 1623 an elaborate monument of alabaster and marble, supported by Corinthian columns and incorporating nearly life-size effigies of him and his wife kneeling, was erected over his grave. Costing £215, and designed by Nicholas Stone, the leading stonemason of his day,64 Notebk. and Acct. Bk. of Nicholas Stone ed. W.L. Spiers (Walpole Soc. vii), 65; D. Lysons, Mdx. Par. 259-60. it was probably commissioned by Knyvett’s niece, Katherine, countess of Suffolk, on behalf of her son Sir Edward Howard^* (subsequently 1st Lord Howard of Escrick) who, in accordance with an agreement reached with Knyvett in April 1607, now inherited Knyvett’s Escrick estate.65 C142/435/119. The rest of Knyvett’s property passed into other hands: the manor of Stanwell was divided between two of his grandchildren, while Staines manor went to a member of the Ashwellthorpe branch of the Knyvett family.66 VCH Mdx. iii. 18, 37.