If patriarchy was once seen as the strict model according to which early modern society in general and families in particular were organized, recent historians have shown that, while it was certainly promoted by many, it was highly contested both in theory and in practice. Laura Gowing, for example, has shown that many women were far from submissive. Even when they did not overtly resist their fathers and husbands, women found ways to bypass such ‘authority’.

In this part, rather than concentrating on the debate about patriarchy as such, I have chosen to explore the Temples’ marriage. Here there is a wide-ranging discussion of the roles and relationships of both Hester and Thomas Temple. There is no attempt to look in great detail at Thomas's public life or, indeed, his management of the family estates, although these are discussed. The focus instead is upon Hester's activities and how these compared to and interacted with those of her husband. Relatively few scholars have considered the workings of the marital partnership, generally emphasizing instead patriarchy in theory or in practice. Ask the man or woman in the street what role the wife played in pre-modern marriages and the answer would probably tally with that voiced by Miriam Slater in the mid 1970s: ‘This unusual opportunity for propertied women to prove their usefulness was due to the extraordinary circumstances imposed by the [Civil] war. But even an upheaval of that magnitude was insufficient to reverse male opinion on the subject of women's innate inferiority or to shake their confidence in the idea that women were largely incapable of dealing with any matter of genuine importance.’ Yet contemporary teaching about marriage stressed the partnership between husband and wife. These chapters seek to throw light upon how such a partnership operated in this particular elite family.

The author is far from dewy eyed about the Temples› marriage or in denial about the reality of its acknowledgement of patriarchy. A micro-historical approach, however, demonstrates the interplay between patriarchy and other forces within a marriage, whether these be those of unpredictable life events, those of the life cycle, or those of personality, capability, patronage, natural affection, emotion or fortune. Students of patriarchy may see this simply as evidence of the adaptability of the patriarchal system.

A more recent emphasis in the history of the family has been upon siblings. Socio-economic and demographic historians interested in the history of the family in England have tended to focus on relationships within a nuclear household, between parents and unmarried and co-resident dependants. When considering the elite family, the nature of this focus has been more often than not structural in approach. The growing use of strict settlements to define the inheritances of male heirs through primogeniture and the provision for younger children has demanded attention from many, including women and gender historians. A glance at the family trees of both John Temple and Thomas Temple readily illustrates that sibling relationships during both childhood and adulthood were a reality for the Temples. The existence of close bonds is more debatable.

It will indeed always be a matter of debate how much such involvement was motivated by emotion and affection and how much by a sense of responsibility and/or self-interest. Some seventeenth-century writers saw that siblings could form an important part of the clientele of the heir to a great estate.

While historians may well discuss the terminology which we use to address kinship, it could seem that there is little room for doubt concerning what constituted one's siblings – these were an individual's brothers and sisters. However, such was the prevalence of blended families in early modern England that historians should also include step- and half-brothers and sisters in any in-depth study of siblinghood. Similarly one should at least consider including brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law. Here, however, we concentrate on the full-sibling relationships of the parents’ generation. It is clear from the archive that both Hester and Thomas had continuing and meaningful relationships with their own siblings. Sibling bonds and responsibilities were important within the framework of patriarchy. When a father died, the male heir assumed the role of patriarch not only in his own nuclear household but also regarding the affairs of his sisters and brothers, especially but not only when they were unmarried or widowed. So we find wives trapped in unhappy marriages appealing for assistance from their eldest brothers. Early modern historians have paid relatively little attention to the general significance of sibling relationships yet various primary sources attest their strength.

Two roads diverged

Tristram Shandy's realisation of the different directions his writing could take, inspired by travelling in a racing post-chaise, is confirmed by the sight of a ponderous wagon labouring in the opposite way. This collision between fast and slow, present throughout the long eighteenth century, intensifies as a result of ‘flying’ coaches, John Palmer's mail-coaches, which started plying major routes from 1784, and the lighter, faster gigs, curricles, and sporting coaches that became increasingly popular. Britain became patterned by speed; proximity to a good road allowed rapidity and a greater connectivity, while poor turnpikes and country byways created pockets of slowness. Writers responded to this multi-speed nation in various ways. Ramble novels flourished when the transit system still enjoyed a ‘holiday’ ethos, while in it-narratives the speed of exchange is paramount. In novels such as Humphry Clinker, the dangers of the tour (from tornus, ‘describing a circle, a turner's wheel’) are investigated, with the lifeblood trope of circulation descending into a more dangerous circular motion, the ‘vortex’ and the ‘whirl’ of hurry. Towards the turn of the century, radical pedestrianism (as evidenced in William Wordsworth's poetry, or Robert Bage's Hermsprong) questioned the desirability of moving quickly by coach roads, Gothic fiction investigated liminal spaces, while picturesque travellers avoided coach roads, often using an older, winding road to join their compositions. Thomas Love Peacock's Headlong Hall (1815) is structured around the moment the fastest mode of transport in Britain, the mail-coach, arrives in one of the ‘slowest’ areas of Britain, North Wales. It is a prolonged meditation on what happens when a ‘headlong’ society meets that most immobile of structures, the ancient ‘Hall’. The creation of ‘slow’ and ‘fast’ realms is also important for the regional novel, which appears circa 1800, with Josephine McDonagh neatly arguing that the new genre ‘made it possible for the reader to inhabit an anachronism, to live life at different paces’.

At different historical moments, writers responded to this new patterning of the landscape in specific ways. Laurence Sterne, not only the first to consider the kinetic experience of speed, was probably also the first to theorise the rival attraction of slow travel, valorising the benefits of ‘sentimental’ journeys. Sterne's move away from the Scriblerian mode in Tristram Shandy is rendered in much more emphatic form in his next work, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768).

The complex space of the ‘domestic’ novel

In Jane Austen's Emma (1815), the well-meaning but prattling Miss Bates, on seeing Mr Knightley pass by on horseback, opens a window and tries to get him to join the company assembled in her house. On hearing his rival Frank Churchill is one of the party, Knightley asserts ‘I could not stay two minutes. I must get on to Kingston as fast as I can’. As Miss Bates tries to get him to stay in her rambling, circuitous way, Austen makes a clear contrast with Knightley's clipped, direct, straightforward mode of speaking:

The dialogue ends with Knightley simply riding off as Miss Bates’ attempt to thank him for a consignment of apples is left trailing in the air. ‘Ah! he is off’ she relates to the party inside. It is a pattern that is seemingly repeated throughout Austen's novels; long-distance, rapid, linear mobility is the preserve of men, while the female, ‘domestic’ world, with its circumscribed realm of actions and interests, is subsidiary, existing less as its own realm but rather framed by its relation to the world of business and hurry. In Pride and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth Bennet bristles when Mr Darcy suggests Charlotte Lucas should be congratulated for settling at ‘so easy a distance of her own family and friends’. Elizabeth replies: ‘An easy distance do you call it? It is nearly fifty miles’. Darcy's rejoinder, that ‘what is fifty miles of good road? Little more than half a day's journey. Yes, I call it a very easy distance’ lays bare the different expectations for men and women. A succession of heroines – Catherine Morland, Elizabeth Bennet, Fanny Price, Emma Woodhouse, and Anne Elliot – all have their mobility restricted in ways that the Knightleys, Darcys, Churchills, and Wentworths do not. In Emma, after Harriet is importuned by gypsies on the Richmond Road, Mr Woodhouse trembles at the news ‘and, as Emma had foreseen, would scarcely be satisfied without their promising never to go beyond the shrubbery again’ (332).

Cast of characters

This book is about a family. It is that of the Temples of Burton Dassett and Stowe. This family belonged to the gentry. It is generally estimated that the entire landed elite or aristocracy represented about 2 per cent of the population of England at this time. Under Elizabeth I there were about 55 peers of the realm and 350 knights. By 1603 nationally there were approximately 1,600 esquires or gentlemen who, together with the knights, made up the gentry. Buckinghamshire, wherein lay Stowe, had about 200 gentry families, of whom 40 or so were especially prominent. If one prefers to describe social status using the contemporary language of sorts, then the Temples were clearly the ‘better sort’ of people. Their estate was large and their net annual income from farming in the first quarter of the seventeenth century has been estimated as ￡2,000. Richard Grenville by 1640 assessed the estate at ￡3,000. The Temples of Stowe made the move from the squirearchy (lower gentry) to the ranks of knights and baronets (upper gentry) quite early in James I's reign. James I made a conscious attempt to raise money through the sale of honours and swelled the ranks of the titled elite.

This book is about people. The line of Temples with which it is concerned originated with Thomas Temple of Whitney. Thomas's son Peter settled in Burton Dassett, Warwickshire, and it was there that he and his wife Millicent Heritage Temple raised two sons (John and Anthony) and Millicent's four daughters by two former husbands. Central to the book are Sir Thomas Temple and Hester (Sandys) Temple and their children and grandchildren, and, to a lesser extent, their own parents, siblings and half-siblings, nieces and nephews, and cousins. Thomas Temple was born in winter 1567/8 to John and Susan (Spencer) Temple. John was the elder of the two sons of Peter Temple of Burton Dassett. Towards the end of old Peter's life he leased land at Stowe, Buckinghamshire and this became his heir John and Susan's main home thereafter. Thomas their eldest son was baptized at Stowe, near Buckingham, on 9 January 1567/8.Thomas seems to have been their first child and first-born son and heir. John was styled as an esquire.

The ethic of mobility

The development of the road network in the long eighteenth century fostered a generation of novels fascinated by mobility, such as Eliza Haywood's Betsy Thoughtless and her heroine's career through the urban sites of sociability, the so-called ‘domestic’ novel (such as Samuel Richardson's Pamela and Clarissa, where the restriction of mobility is central to the plot), and above all in a series of texts based on journeys, following the success of Henry Fielding's Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749). These novels, named after their protagonists, are evidence of a new interest in an individual's life choices. People had always found ways to move through Britain, whether via the pilgrimages of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, or the proto-novels of John Dunton and John Bunyan, while a post-horse network and carriers’ routes predated the turnpikes. However, by the early 1700s there was a dramatic change in how mobility was conceived. If the subtext of Thomas Nashe's The Unfortunate Traveller (1594) was that all travellers were unfortunate, there was a shift to what Elizabeth Deeds Ermarth has called ‘the ethic of mobility’, where ‘people have to recognise that their identity depends upon themselves and their actions, rather than on family, class, or some such “mark” of identity’. Travel, instead of being thought of as ‘travail’, became fundamental to how an individual progressed. Journeys also started to become active ingredients in the plot. Fielding, resistant to describing the natural world, and claiming he was ‘not particular’ about the routes his protagonists took, still imbues the world of transit in Tom Jones with a sense of agency. Critics have described his spaces as ‘de-realised’, and yet the central road section allows the landscape Tom moves through, and his shuttling between road and inn, hill and vale, to pattern the novel. Instead of moving through ‘empty’ space, one of the features of Tom Jones is that the physical journey (the post-roads, the country byways, the hills on the fringes of society), rather than functioning as a backdrop, adds its own contours to the narrative.

Within the context of debates about law and the family, this brief study helps to show how two or three generations of Temples interacted with existing and changing rules of inheritance. Lloyd Bonfield, Maria Lynn Cioni, Amy Erickson, Elaine Spring and Tim Stretton have all, from differing viewpoints, discussed the ways in which these rules were made manifest in marriage settlements, and afforded or did not afford women protection. Cioni, Stretton and Erickson have discussed the extent to which the church courts and the equity courts offered women quarter when the Common Law courts denied it. Their emphasis has been upon women of the middling sort. Elaine Spring's argument is that ultimately the rules were changed in favour of entailing an estate and replacing the old dower rights with the provision of a less generous jointure in order to protect male primogeniture and to limit the resources diverted to support widows and younger children from the entailed estate. The movement away from common law rights of widows to a dower, amounting to a third of her husband's land and chattels, to a system of jointure acted to the detriment of married and widowed women. Her work suffers, however, from being almost entirely based upon close reading of legislation, and heavy reliance upon the mass data collected by previous historians.

Much of this book indirectly considers the position and roles of women within the family. The ensuing brief study considers how the large Temple family generally treated its womenfolk under the very law of inheritance studied by Spring and Erickson. This provides context for the discussion in Part Two of the way in which Lady Hester Temple sought to protect herself in the changing environment of her growing family, as her sons married and new provision was made for them and their wives. Typically Temple marriage agreements are represented in the archive by indented deeds purchasing jointures in the names of husband, wife and eldest son, after the son's marriage, and of books of entail drawn up after a marriage. John Temple joined with not only his wife Susan but also with his son and heir Thomas to purchase various lands; Susan was to enjoy these during her widowhood but the remainder went to her eldest son Thomas.

The global emerges as a repeated motif in the advertising by Cumbria's many schools, academies and tutors in the long eighteenth century. The ‘use of globes’, navigation and something commonly referred to as ‘preparation for a mercantile life’, were typical disciplines in the educational finishing of Cumbrian young men. Those educational preoccupations were a manifestation of a realm of Cumbrian life which has been largely neglected. This book fills that profound empirical gap around Cumbria's involvement in the East Indies. It has uncovered the size and characteristics of the Cumbrians who went to the East Indies over the long eighteenth century and explored the drivers and sensibilities associated with that encounter. But it does more than retrieve the East Indies ventures of Cumbrian middling and gentry folk from the shadows.

What is revealed here is a profound connection between the eighteenth century provincial worlds of the British Isles and a global world connected through trade and increasingly subject to colonial expansion and territorial acquisition. It was not national preoccupations that prompted middling and gentry Cumbrians to investment quantities of financial, human and social capital in the East Indies. Those investments were directed to success as Cumbrians. In that context, the ‘use of globes’ can be read not merely as printed orb, twirled by tutors and in classrooms of schools and academies. It represents a deeper phenomenon: the accessing and utilisation of global resources by provincials for provincial purposes.

The early and comparative intensity of those investments were manifestations of the particular conditions of provincial life in Cumbria and shaped its regional social and economic development. But does the Cumbrian encounter with the East Indies only matter for Cumbria, or does it have implications beyond its own provincial world? There is no doubt that other provincial encounters with the East Indies will differ in intensity and be prompted by different domestic dynamics.

This book focuses, unusually for histories of individual families and households, on the dynamics of elite family life in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries within a midland, upper gentry family. To the fore are the roles of a formidable and long-lived elite matriarch, Hester (Sandys) Temple, and her fussy, pedantic and Polonius-like husband, Sir Thomas, 1st Baronet of Stowe. But this is perforce a multiple-plot drama, which looks back also to Sir Thomas's father and paternal grandfather and forwards to his son and heir, Sir Peter, 2nd baronet of Stowe. It draws upon an extensive and rich archive, which documents not only nuclear family relationships between spouses, between parents and male and female children, but also those relationships involving younger children, adult younger children living outside the home, sons-in-law and daughters-in-law, and siblings of the parents. It reminds us of something that is too easily forgotten – that families and households were about more than husbands and wives or even husbands and wives and children. For the Temples parenting was indeed for life but so also were other relationships. While on first examination the Temples might appear to be a dysfunctional family, on closer inspection one could well argue that this family was highly functional.

We see Hester as wife, mother, mother-in-law, grandmother, sister-in-law, sister and aunt. We also see her as housewife and manager, mistress of servants, disciplinarian, secretary-cum-accountant, farmer, negotiator, patron, creditor and debtor, even as litigator. Her performance in these varying roles is seen against the information available about her husband Sir Thomas's. Her husband's attitude to her realization of the role of wife, helpmeet and mother is not selfevident but is gauged on the basis of a great variety of sources – correspondence, legal cases, account books, lease books, memoranda, court papers and so forth.

This is not, however, just the study of one woman or even just one couple. It is a family history because only a micro-study of this large family can expose the various roles played within it. Here we shine the floodlights upon the very nature of ‘family’ and ‘kin’ to the Temples. The book builds upon but makes critical use of feminist and other scholarship in order to offer a scholarly and appropriately nuanced picture of this elite family.

Nineteenth-century scholars were wont to describe the archival survivals of the lives of past luminaries as their ‘Remains’. The scholar in the twenty-first century does well to recollect that family archives have a history which goes back to the moment of their creation. In the case of the Temple family of Stowe we are faced not just with what survived of their correspondence and papers and certainly not with the remnants of their waste-paper baskets. Rather we are for the most part presented with what remains of what the master (and to a lesser extent the mistress) wished to retain for their own and sometimes their immediate descendants’ use. It is, of course, idle to speculate about what they chose to throw away. It is important to reflect upon what they chose to preserve.

A good deal of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Stowe Temple material relates to matters of litigation. One of the most intriguing cases refers to the marriage between Anne Temple, the seventh daughter of Thomas and Hester Temple, born in March 1600/1, and William (later Sir William) Andrewes Esquire of Lathbury, Buckinghamshire. Although this marriage gave rise to litigation of a kind, the sources for our knowledge of it do not occur in the Temples’ legal files but rather in the surviving correspondence and financial files of the family. Some of the papers relate to materials presented to the ecclesiastical courts and others to the examination of the case before Justices of the Peace.

This marriage took place at Stowe on 4 April 1617, when Anne was just 16. The groom was slightly older. It must have seemed an auspicious match. The marriage brought together two families, the patriarchs of which lived in quite close proximity and participated together, apparently amicably, in the government of Buckinghamshire, where both were Justices of the Peace. The marriage settlement, which could have been an underlying cause of the later dispute: Anne brought with her a portion of ￡3,000, which was apparently, following a down payment of ￡1,000, paid in instalments. The first of these, for ￡1,000, was paid to the groom's father in the November following the wedding. The record of the acquittance was kept, along with the note of other similar transactions, on the back of a letter.