In Gawsworth Church are a number of monuments of members of the Fitton family, who lived at the Old Hall at Gawsworth. Mary Fitton was one of Elizabeth's maids-of-honour, and used to take part in plays for the amusement of the queen; and it is not at all unlikely that she was a friend of Shakespeare. It is indeed supposed that she is the 'dark lady' of whom the poet speaks in his sonnets. From an examination of these Fitton monuments you can learn what the costume at the end of the sixteenth century was like. Lady Alice Fitton is surrounded by the kneeling figures of her two sons and two daughters, the former in plate armour, the latter wearing the familiar head-dress and ruff which are such distinctive features in the dress of Tudor ladies. The figures are carved in alabaster, and have clearly at one time been painted in bright colours. The picture of Mary Fitton will help you to recognize the Tudor monuments which are to be seen in many Cheshire churches.
CHAPTER XXII
ELIZABETHAN CHESHIRE. II
Many attempts were made by the Tudor sovereigns to conquer the Irish. From time to time expeditions were sent across the sea, and the troops embarked at various points on the Cheshire coast. The fighting Leghs of Adlington raised a troop of Cheshire soldiers, and Thomas and Ralph Legh fell in battle against the Irish chieftain Shane O'Neill. A Cheshire knight, Sir Edward Fitton, of Gawsworth, was made Governor of Connaught.
In the later years of Elizabeth's reign a constant stream of ill-clad and ill-paid soldiers marched through Cheshire on their way to the wars. The soldiers had to be supplied with food and quarters by the towns and villages through which they passed, and the cost of billeting the men in the houses on their arrival at Chester fell very hard on the city merchants, who were soon brought to great distress. The soldiers were generally put on board ship at Parkgate, for the channel of the Dee had become so choked up with sand that only the smallest vessels could reach Chester.
The leader of one of the expeditions was the Earl of Essex, who was a frequent visitor at Lyme Park, where he hunted the stag with his host, Sir Piers Legh.
The wars with Spain ruined the oversea trade of Chester, consisting at this time largely in the export of tanned leather to the French ports of Rochelle and Bordeaux. In the year 1598, Thomas Fletcher, the Mayor of Chester, wrote to Lord Burghley that he 'had found the poor city to be generally very weak and much decayed, especially in the chiefest parts thereof (the merchants) who have been heretofore the most able to do her Majesty service'. For eight months there had not been 'one ship nor small bark laden into any foreign place'. The queen had, some years previously, given the merchants license to export 10,000 'dickers' (that is, bundles of ten) of tanned calf-skins within a certain time, but owing to the wars they were unable to get them away within the given period, and the merchants asked for the time to be extended.
An old gabled house in Watergate Street, with its pious superscription 'God's Providence is mine inheritance', reminds us of a more dreadful scourge than war which visited Chester, and indeed the whole of Cheshire, in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was the terrible plague, which attacked rich and poor alike, and stopped the trade of the city so much that, as one writer says, 'grass did grow a foot high at the Cross'. Houses that were infected with the disease were marked with a cross, that none might go near; no merchandise was allowed to enter the city until it had been unpacked and aired outside the walls. Death came suddenly, or within a few hours at most; and often 'to those that merrily dined it gave a sorrowful supper'. God's Providence House received its name from the fact that its inmates alone of all the neighbourhood escaped the disease.
Stanley Palace, Chester (showing influence of Renaissance)