Chapter 17 - Relations with younger sons

Summary

Sir Thomas's hopes for ‘educating’ Peter to be what he considered to be a worthy heir who would protect his inheritance for successive generations of Temples were dashed by Peter's resolve to live a very different kind of life from that of his father and especially his grandfather before him. On the surface at least, Sir Thomas's plans were more readily taken on board by his third son, also, confusingly, named Thomas Temple and known within the family from 1633 as Rev. Doctor Temple. Thomas junior not only went to university, took a degree and entered clerical orders but also studied the law and became, in effect, his father's legal expert. Thomas Temple junior achieved an estate through becoming a beneficed clergyman (with its famed freehold). A fourth son, Miles, served apprenticeship. Thomas junior and Miles Temple, whom we met briefly in the introduction to this book, had different destinies from either Sir Thomas Temple's heir or his spare, although there is little information to settle the question of whether it was their personal characteristics and aptitudes, and their parents’ financial and social position as well as their position in the family, that shaped their futures.

Relationships with younger sons, with the sole exception of younger sons who eventually inherited their father's estate owing to the mortality of an elder brother, have received little scholarly attention. It has become a truism to state that younger sons were destined for a career as a clergyman or a merchant. Joan Thirsk wrote a stimulating essay on the position of younger sons in English society and this was followed by a brief but exceptionally interesting piece by Linda Pollock in History Today. Joan Thirsk's emphasis was upon the resentment of angry young men directed against the system and against their fathers and elder brothers as encapsulating that system's perceived injustices; Linda Pollock provided a valuable corrective – pointing out that younger sons were not neglected either by their parents or by their older siblings, that the services they performed for the heir and for their family in general were highly valued by all concerned, and, even more importantly, that they accepted and did not rail against the system of primogeniture.