The Battle Abbey Roll. Vol. III.
by
The Duchess of Cleveland.
ADDITIONAL NAMES GIVEN BY DUCHESNE.
Prepared by Michael A. Linton
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Gascoyne : or Le Gascon.[1] "The name speaks for itself. William and Geoffrey de Gasconia are mentioned in 1209-10 (Hardy, Rot. de Libertate). In 1266, Ismenia, widow of Philip le Gascoyn, paid a fine in Salop (Roberts, Excerpt.), and Philip le Gascoyn had a suit in the same county twelve years before (Rotul. Hund.). An ancient family of this name was seated near Coutances, in Normandy (Des Bois)."—The Norman People. The Gascoignes were for many generations settled at Gawthorpe in Yorkshire, where their old hall stood by the side of the lake, about two hundred yards south of Lord Harewood's present house. It had come to them early in the fourteenth century, through the marriage of William Gascoigne with its heiress, Mansild de Gawkethorp. Thoresby, in his History of Leeds, quotes a voluminous pedigree, "transcribed from the Original in sixteen Large Sheets of Parchment curiously delineated and attested by Henry St. George Norroys," which, according to the fantastic wont of the heralds, deduces them from "Ailrichus, a noble Saxon who was banished by William the Conqueror"; and gives "fifteen Williams in lineal succession (of whom six were Knights): viz. seven before, and seven after the celebrated Sir William Gascoigne, Chief Justice to King Henry IV." But the pedigree in truth only begins with his grandfather, the fortunate William that espoused the Lady of Gawthorpe, for a shadowy haze of unreality hangs about the five preceding Williams. Thoresby can furnish us neither with a date, a wife, nor a dwelling place, for any one of them.
The great illustration of the family is Shakespeare's hero, the undaunted Judge who, as the Sovereign's representative, upheld "the majesty and power of law and justice" against the Sovereign's own son, and did not hesitate to
"Rate, rebuke, and roughly send to prison
The immediate heir of England."
The young prince had imperiously claimed one of his followers, who was arraigned for felony, and when Gascoigne refused to give him up, "came to the place of judgment, set all in a fury, all chafed, and in a terrible manner, men thinking that he would have slaine the judge." The Lord Chief Justice, thus threatened, "sat still without moving, and with an assured and bold countenance," charged the Prince to remember that "he kept there the place of the King his sovereign Lord and father," severely reproved him, and committed him to the Fleet for contempt of court. When the mad-cap prince had become his sovereign, Gascoigne expected to see this courageous act heavily visited upon him; but the young King generously reappointed him Lord Chief Justice:
"You did commit me;
For which, I do commit into your hand
The unstain'd sword that you have us'd to bear;
With this remembrance,—That you use the same
With the like bold, just, and impartial spirit
As you have done 'gainst me."
—Henry IV., Part II., Act V., Scene 2.
So says Shakespeare; and so it assuredly should have been. But, alas, for the pitiless logic of facts, before which our fairest illusions are doomed to disappear! These noble words in reality were never spoken; for the sequel of the story is unhappily not true. Mr. Foss, in his Judges of England, has conclusively proved that it was Sir William Haukford, and not Sir William Gascoigne, who, on March 29, 1413 (eight days after Henry's accession to the throne), was appointed Chief Justice of England. This is further confirmed by the inscription on a brass filletting that surrounded Gascoigne's tomb in Gawthorpe Church, which (though the filletting itself was stolen during the Civil War) is yet preserved. He is there recorded as "nuper Capit. Justic. de banco, Hen. nuper regis Angliae quarti": but we find no mention (as there infallibly must have been) of his having filled the same office under Henry V. His effigy represents him in his Judge's robes, wearing the collar of SS., with the coif covering, as of old, the whole head, and a gyptiere or purse at his girdle.[2] He was twice married, and left sons by both wives; but all his descendants in the male line had passed away by the end of the following century. His eldest son was the grandfather of another Sir William, who married Joan, the only child of John Nevill of Oversley in Warwickshire. This John's father was Ralph, the second son of Ralph Daraby, first Earl of Westmoreland, by his first wife Margaret Stafford. The elder brother, John Lord Nevill, died in his father's lifetime, leaving three sons, of whom the first-born, Ralph, succeeded as second Earl. "This Neville," says Leland, "lakkid heires male, wherapon a great concertation rose betwixt the next heire male and one of the Gascoynes." The next heir male was his nephew Ralph (son of Sir John, who fell at Towton in 1461): and his right was so manifest that it seemed impossible to dispute it. Yet, in 1523 Surrey writes to Wolsey (of whose household, as we shall presently see, one of the Gascoignes was Comptroller): "I am informed Sir William Gascoyne doth intende to beare my Lorde of Westmerland's armes, pretending title to the Earldom of Westmerland * * * * I beseech your grace to speake with the heralds in this matter, and to write unto Sir William for the reformation therein." The line ended in the time of Elizabeth with the fifteenth Sir William, whose only daughter and heir Margaret married Thomas Wentworth, grandfather of the famous Earl of Strafford. The latter thus became heir-general of these Gascoignes, and when he received his Earldom in 1640, chose to take his second title from the old Nevill castle of Raby, not only in honour of his grandmother's Nevill blood, but in provocation ("the most unnecessary," writes Lord Clarendon, "that I have known") of his old adversary Sir Henry Vane, who was then its owner.
"James Gascoigne, the son of the Lord Chief Justice by his second wife, settled at Cardington in the reign of Henry VI., and became possessed of a manor, which seems to have been the principal manor, by marrying the heiress of Pigott; his grandson, Sir William, who twice served the office of sheriff of the counties of Bedford and Buckingham, was comptroller of the household to Cardinal Wolsey.[3] On each side of the altar in Cardington church is a monument with an open arch, in the Gothic style, but of no very ancient date. That on the S. side is in memory of one of the Gascoignes, perhaps Sir William Gascoigne, grandfather of John Gascoigne, the last heir male of the family; the other is the monument of Sir Gerard Hervey, who died in 1638. This Sir Gerard, who was knighted by the Earl of Essex for his bravery at the siege of Calais, he being the first man who entered the town, possessed a temporary interest in the manor of Cardington, of which in his epitaph he is called Lord, by marrying one of the co-heiresses of John Gascoigne. The manor afterwards became the property of Sir George Blundell, who married the other."—Lysons' Bedfordshire.
One other branch there was, that survived till the present century. A brother of the Chief Justice, Nicholas Gascoigne of Lasingcroft, was the ancestor of Sir John, seated at Parlington, and created a baronet of Nova Scotia by Charles I. in 1635. There were six baronets of this name, of whom Sir Edward, the fifth, had the credit of re-paving York Minster with stone from his own quarry at Huddlestone. Sir Thomas, the last, lost his only son by an accident in the hunting-field in 1809. The young man (he was then but twenty-four) when taking a fence, caught his head in an overhanging bough, and was killed on the spot.[4] His father died a few months after, and was succeeded at Parlington by an utter stranger in blood, to whom he bequeathed the whole of his fortune, Mr. Richard Oliver, the husband of his step-daughter Mary Turner. She was the only surviving child of Lady Gascoigne's first marriage with Sir Charles Turner, and both she and her family adopted the name and arms of Gascoigne.
"This ancient and worthy family," says Fuller, "gave for their Armes the Heade of a Lucie or Pike, cooped in Pale; Whereon one merrily:—
"The Lucie is the finest Fish
That ever graced any Dish;
But, why you give the Head alone,
I leave to you to pick this Bone."
The following astounding entry in the Register of St. Edward's Church, Cambridge (see Lysons) refers to one of this family;—
"Elinor Gaskin said She lived fourscore years a Maid,
And twenty-two years a wedded Wife,
And ten years a Widow, and then left this Life."
The Elizabethan poet, George Gascoyne, who remains to be noticed, was "born of an ancient and honourable family in Essex," and the eldest son of Sir John Gascoyne, knight. But he was early in life disinherited by his father, it is conjectured on account of his extravagance while studying the law at Gray's Inn; and sought to better his fortunes abroad. "Having a rambling and unfixed head," writes Wood, "he left Gray's Inn, went to various cities of Holland, became a soldier of note, which he afterwards professed as much, or more, as learning, and therefore made him take this motto, Tam Marti quam Mercurio." He held a captain's commission under the Prince of Orange, and did good service in the wars, but was taken prisoner under the walls of Leyden, and sent back to England. We are not told how he was introduced at Court, but he accompanied the Queen in her progress to Kenilworth, and wrote a masque for the occasion, in which he performed a part. The first collection of his poems appeared in 1572, five years before he died: and was the only "unchastised" edition ever published of them, as some of his verses are exceedingly licentious. Yet a pamphlet written in his praise by George Whetstone eulogizes "his well-employed life no less than his godly end." He was not much over forty at the time of his death.