+ “Here lyeth the body of Thomas Eymis, esquier, one of her Majesty’s counsell established in the north parties, and secretary and keeper of her Highness signett appointed for the said Counsell, who married Elizabeth, one of the daughters of Sir Edward Nevill, Knight, and departed out of this life to the mercy of God the XIXth day of August, An. Dom. 1578.”—Eboracum, p. 496.
[13] These Chamberlaynes were a younger branch of the ancient Oxfordshire family of that name. It appears from the pedigree they recorded at the Heralds’ visitation in 1584, that the William Chamberlayne named in Edward Turner’s will was the first who settled at Thoralby, in Yorkshire. It is very probable that he, or his son Leonard Chamberlayne, was in some way or other connected with the Council of the North, which might account for the circumstance of their having granted an annuity to Edward Turner. Thoralby Hall is in the parish of Bugthorpe, of which Mr. Secretary Eymis was the proprietor. Francis Chamberlayne, Esq., the eldest son of Sir Leonard Chamberlayne, Knight (as he is styled in the pedigree), by his first wife, the daughter of Sir William Middleton, Knight, of Stockeld, near Wetherby, was living at Thoralby in 1584. Sir Leonard’s second wife was Katherine, daughter of Roger Cholmeley, Esq., of Brandsby, a sister of Lady Beckwith, the tenant of Edward Turner.
[14] Few persons who have visited our noble Minster will have failed to notice, affixed to the south side of one of the massive piers which support the central tower, a monumental brass engraved with the portraiture of a prim old lady in the starched ruff and pinched-up coif of the days of Queen Elizabeth. The inscription beneath it informs us that this is the effigy of Elizabeth Eymis, widow, late the wife of Thomas Eymis, Esq., deceased, who was one of the gentlewomen of the Queen’s privy chamber, and daughter of Sir Edward Nevill, Knight, one of the privy chamber to King Henry the Eighth. Mrs. Eymis, “the singular good mistress” of Edward Turner, did not long survive him. In her last will, which is dated the 31st of January, 1584-5, she desired, if she died at York or Heslington, to be buried in the Minster of York, nigh her late husband; and she ordered her executors to provide a stone of marble to be set upon a platt, with superscription of her descent, and also the arms of her late husband and her own, graven thereupon. Had her injunctions been implicitly obeyed by her executors, her monument would have shared the fate of that of her husband, and of numberless others which have long since disappeared from the nave and aisles of York Minster. Her epitaph, being written in brass instead of marble, has escaped the wear and tear of nearly three centuries. It is not irrelevant to my subject to introduce here a few of the bequests contained in her will. To “my good Lord of Huntingdon” she gives “one portingue of gould”; to “my good ladie his wife,” her best silver tankard, double gilt; to her brother, Sir Henry Nevill, Knight, she gives her great goblet of silver with a cover, and to her brother, Edward Nevill, Esq., her “jewell of gould with the unicorne horne in the same, maid licke a shippe, and a gilt canne of sylver”; to her sister “Frogmorton, my best tuftafitie gowne”; to her very good friend, Mr. Pailer, “a tankard of silver, parcel gilt”; to Alice Hall, “one morning gown” and 20s.; and to her god-daughter, Elizabeth Darley, one silver spoon. The residuary legatees and executors are Robert Man, and Francis Nevill, the son of Edward Nevill. Witnesses—William Payler, Anne Payler, Thomas Wanton, Alice Darley, John Stevenson, Katherine Blenkarne. We have here one or two facts showing the intimacy that subsisted between the families of Edward Turner and Mrs. Eymis. Alice Hall, one of her legatees, was the widowed sister of Edward Turner; Robert Man, her executor, was one of the supervisors of Edward Turner’s will; Katherine Blenkarne, one of the witnesses of Mrs. Eymis’s will, was a daughter of Edward Turner; John Stevenson, another witness, was most probably the person of that name who married Margaret Willowbie, another daughter of Edward Turner.
Mrs. Eymis had reason to be proud of her descent. Her father, Sir Edward Nevill, a younger brother of George Nevill, Lord Abergavenny, was a distinguished ornament of the court of Henry VIII. in its palmiest days. He was one of “the noble troop of strangers” who formed the royal masquing party when the King visited Wolsey, and first saw Anne Boleyn. A few years after that event, he incurred the displeasure of the suspicious Henry, and was brought to the scaffold upon a charge of being implicated in the pretended conspiracy of Cardinal Pole and his brothers.
[15] A monumental brass to the memory of the testator’s “very good friend, Mr. Thomas Wood,” is still preserved in the church of Kilnwick Percy, near Pocklington, in the East Riding of Yorkshire, where he was buried in the month of October, 1584. The inscription has not, I believe, been printed:—
“Thomas Wood Gentilman, who in warfare hath be,
He fought in Scotland, in Royall armyes thre,
Lyeth now buried, in this grave hereunder.
Of Bulloign when it was English, Clerk comptroller;
Of the Ward Court, sixe and twenty yeres together
Depute Receyvor; of Yorkshire once eschetor;
Clerke of the Statut, in London noble cytye;
Collector of Selby, with tenne pound yerely ffe.
For thought wordes or deeds which to God or man were yll,
Of bothe he askt forgyveness with glad hart and will.
He buylt th’owse hereby, and this churche brought in good case:
God grant his wyfe and sonnes to passe a godly race.—Amen.”
In the seventeenth century, Mary Wood, the grand-daughter of this Thomas Wood, and the niece and heiress of his eldest son, Barney Wood, married Sir Edmund Anderson, Baronet, and carried the estate of Kilnwick Percy into that family, by whom it was long enjoyed.
Kilnwick Percy is now the beautiful seat and domain of Admiral the Honourable Arthur Duncombe, M.P. The Rev. M. A. Lawton, vicar of Kilnwick Percy, has obligingly favoured me with a copy of the above inscription.
[16] John Stephenson was the owner of a “capital messuage” in Coney-street, York, which was occupied by himself and Ralph Rokeby, Esq., one of the secretaries of the Council of the North, and which was at one time distinguished by the sign of the Bear, and afterwards of the Golden Lion. In 1614, Margaret Stephenson and her son, John Stephenson (the nephew to whom Lancelot Turner bequeathed all his books, except his song-books), sold the messuage to Thomas Kaye, who established there an hotel which he called the George Inn, a name it retains to this day.
[17] Miles Newton was the name of the town-clerk of York who died in 1550, and was succeeded in that office by Thomas Fale, the first husband of the testatrix. He was very probably the same person who is named in the Newton pedigree of 1585 as the grandfather of the Miles Newton who married Jane Beckwith.