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m. 1625
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Introducing Thomas Brinley of Exeter, Devon, England_______________________
[edit] Who Was Thomas Brinley?Brinley, Thomas (1591 - 1661) Thomas Brinley, "one of the auditors of the Revenue of King Charles the First and of King Charles the Second". b. 1591, Exeter, Devonshire, England d. 15 OCT 1661, Datchett, Buckshire, England Burial: Church Cemetery at Datchet, Buckinghamshire, England Father: Brinley, Richard Mother: Reeves, Joanne Spouse: Wase, Ann
[edit] Life of Thomas Brinleyhttp://www.datchethistory.org.uk/ The last historical article in the Link looked at a group of families who probably lived at the Manor House in the 1800s and perhaps as far back as the early 1700s. Before that, although the evidence is very slight, it seems to have been occupied by royal officials, part of a group based in London but also living conveniently close to the Castle in Windsor, Eton and Datchet. The most significant character was Thomas Brinley, whose tombstone in the church is frequently visited by Americans seeking their ancestors. This black marble slab has been re-set in the chancel floor behind the altar and is easily seen. The inscription reads: HERE LYETH Ye BODY OF THOMAS BRINLEY ESQ BEINGE ONE OF THE AUDITORS OF THE REVENNUE OF KINGE CHARLES THE FIRST AND OF KINGE CHARLES Ye SECOND BORNE IN THE CITTY OF EXETER HEE MARRYED ANNE Ye DAUGHTER OF WILLIAM WASE OF PETWORTH IN SUSSEX GENT WHO HAD ISSUE BY HER FIVE SONNES AND SEAVEN DAUGHTERS HE DIED Ye 15TH DAY OF OCTOr IN THE YEARE OF OUR LORD 1661 The Auditors of the King's Revenue were officials whom we would now call civil servants. Land and property made up much of the crown's great wealth, but Tudor and Stuart monarchs were constantly short of actual money. The Auditors' primary job had been to visit the king's estates to assess and collect rents, but increasingly they were also required to value land, make contact with buyers and negotiate sales to boost the royal coffers. Thus they combined the skills of a modern accountant, a surveyor and an estate agent, and answered fairly directly to the King although the office was a branch of the Exchequer. This was a closely-knit group, as young men were trained as clerks to one of the seven Auditors before becoming their deputies or partners and eventually taking on an Auditorship themselves. The first Auditor living in Datchet was Richard Budd, to whom Thomas Brinley was clerk. We know Budd was here at least by 1625 because in that year he wrote to the tax collector in London to say that he had already paid his dues in Datchet - but of course he didn't give anything so useful as his address! Budd had himself been clerk to Auditor Thomas Hanbury (brother of Richard) in the 1580s and was related through his wife Rose to Richard Hanbury and the Wheeler family of Riding Court. It is thought that these connections were the reason that he settled in Datchet. His sister had married into the Wase family, and that relationship was extended when his clerk Thomas Brinley married Anne Wase in about 1630. Such a dense network of family and business interests is typical of the time, and the above is only a brief outline of a much more complex situation. We do not know where in the village Richard Budd actually lived, but the current suggestion is that it may have been the Manor House, perhaps followed by the Wases and eventually by Thomas Brinley. It was rented out directly by the crown and then by the Wheelers who bought it as part of the Manor of Datchet in 1631, and is the only high status house with no known occupants during this period. Neither Richard Budd, William Wase nor Thomas Brinley left any property in Datchet by their wills, which strongly suggests that they had rented rather than owned the houses where they lived; this is just one more piece of circumstantial evidence. Budd was a wealthy man; in a taxation list he paid an amount second only to William Wheeler of Riding Court, but as the value of his possessions rather than land, which was probably even more impressive to his neighbours. He was godfather to Brinley's son Richard and left him by his will all his 'household stuff' at Datchet, to be used by Richard's mother Anne Brinley during her life. To Thomas Brinley Budd bequeathed his copy of Sir Walter Raleigh's History of England There is one source which provides a tiny glimpse into the lives of these people: in 1626 Eton College held an inquiry into the will of the vicar of Datchet, because his widow was refusing to hand over a bequest the vicar was said to have made to the College. Richard and Rose Budd, together with Thomas Brinley and several other gentlemen from the village, attested to how the will was found concealed in the vicar's clothes when he died suddenly at the vicarage house. Auditor Budd stated that the vicar had made a will by his advice, sitting in an arbour in the garden of Budd's house in Datchet. All the witnesses had come running to the vicarage when he was taken ill, having been carried there by two men in a chair. Rose said that the other gentlemen found the purported will in his 'bosom' as they unloosed the sick man's cassock while she ran to fetch clean sheets and a warming pan to make up his bed. When she came back the papers were shown to her, laid on the window sill, and she gave them to the vicar's maid to pass onto his wife as she was told they were important. The outcome of the inquiry is unclear, but the circumstances could be seen as suspicious. The main interest of this case is to show that by 1626 we have not only Richard Budd living in the village but also his clerk Thomas Brinley at least visiting if not actually living here with him. In 1647 Brinley's youngest child was baptised in the village church, all the others having been baptised in the 1630s and 1640s in London. During the period of the Civil War and Cromwell's Commonwealth, from 1649 to 1660, Thomas and Anne Brinley were in dire trouble; he was seen as a Royalist by the Parliamentary side and stripped of his office and it is possible that all his assets were seized. It has been suggested that he went into hiding, and he certainly kept a very low profile throughout those dangerous years. There is evidence that the couple were trying to maximise their financial investments overseas in order to provide for all their children, the seven daughters and three surviving sons, in case the worst should happen. On the restoration of Charles II in 1660 Brinley was given back his original auditorship but died a year later, which explains the tombstone claim of having been an Auditor to Kings Charles I and II. The last, and most convincing, piece of evidence is provided by Brinley's will in 1661. As was usual, two of his neighbours drew up an inventory of the possessions in his house, valuing them for probate purposes and listing items in each room in order as they walked through. It is strange that Brinley's possessions seem hardly sufficient to furnish the house and are of low value; perhaps he had fallen on very hard times or maybe everything of quality had already been passed on to his children for safe-keeping. Such inventories are often used for establishing the number and type of rooms in houses of the past, and the internal layout at various periods. In this case, if the two present tenements of the Manor House are read as one, the appraisors' route exactly fits for the three stories and the sequence of rooms, including some unusual features which are similar to Riding Court. On this basis alone it is highly likely that it was Thomas Brinley's house, at least at the time of his death. As at present there were subsidiary dwellings each side of the big house which may have been occupied simultaneously by this group of families - or by others completely unrelated. The reason for American interest in the Brinley tombstone is that several of his children settled on Long Island, having been sent out for their own safety and prosperity during the perilous Civil War years in England. In the next Link article their fortunes at Sylvester Manor, an important and almost unchanged early settlement, will be followed. The previous Link article about people who had lived in the Manor House described how Thomas Brinley was an Auditor of the Revenue to King Charles I at the time of the English Civil War in the 1640s. He was seen as a royalist and lost his post, while his family and property were threatened by his disgrace. When the king was beheaded in 1649 Brinley had at least two surviving sons and all seven of his daughters to provide for and part of the solution was found in the New World. Marriage was of course the only way of life for the daughters and four of them married locally, the first in about 1650. Since their families were baptised and buried at Datchet it is likely that one or more of them may have continued to live in the Manor House. The other three (Anne, Grissell and Mary) had much more adventurous futures ahead. In 1650 Anne, the eldest daughter was married in Datchet to William Coddington, Governor of Rhode Island. She became his third wife, which may not have been so agreeable to her as it was to her father. Coddington is known to have acted as a sort of guardian and marriage broker to young women and on the couple's return to Newport RI in 1653 they took Anne's younger sister Grissell with them. The eldest son, Francis, also settled on Rhode Island at about the same time where he founded a dynasty of Brinleys, some of whose descendants now visit Datchet in search of Thomas's tombstone. The other surviving son took a different path, becoming a scholar and clergyman at Kings College Cambridge. At about the same time that Thomas Brinley's career was developing in England, a merchant named Giles Sylvester was chartering ships to trade in tobacco from a base in Amsterdam. We know that Giles came from Somerset and belonged to an extreme puritan sect but his parentage and early life remain a mystery. He married Mary Arnold, whose family had probably moved to Amsterdam from Suffolk in search of religious freedom. This city also provided opportunities for enterprising merchants to trade independently, away from the restrictions of English guilds. Among his wide-ranging foreign interests, Giles was involved in the development of the sugar trade on islands such as Barbados and in the 1640s his son Constant bought plantations there in order to control the Sylvester family's lucrative business from its source. In their frequent crossings of the Atlantic from Holland or England to Barbados in the West Indies, merchants took advantage of the south-westerly trade winds but travelling home again was harder. They sought protection by following the Gulf Stream northwards, close to the eastern coast of America and making the run back across the open ocean as short as possible. Barbados itself could not produce any of the supplies needed for the journey back to Europe so merchants' provisioning bases were established on the eastern seaboard of America; this circuit is called the 'three-cornered trade' and it developed rapidly as the sugar business boomed. In 1651 'Shelter Island', between the far eastern points of Long Island, New York, was bought by Giles' sons Nathaniel and Constant as a provisions base for their ships returning to Amsterdam, paying for it with 1600 pounds of muscovado sugar. Then in 1653 Nathaniel Sylvester married the eighteen year old Grissell Brinley from Datchet, presumably through contacts with Coddington, and they established a homestead on Shelter Island by the shore of a deep and protected natural harbour. (Three years later Grissell's sister Mary was married to Nathaniel's brother Peter.) Their original timber framed house has not survived but its grand 1750 replacement, known as Sylvester Manor, is still almost unchanged; the parlour panelling has only had two coats of paint since it was installed. The extraordinary and exciting thing about the whole settlement is that it has neither been absorbed into a town nor abandoned, but preserved without further development. It has also remained in the hands of almost direct descendants of the Sylvesters down to the current owner who is a feisty lady in her 90s. Equally amazing is that no one ever seems to have thrown anything away, so that sea chests of letters, papers and objects dating back to the 1650s were crammed untouched in a strongroom until the current researchers arrived. Family stories about Grissell and Nathaniel's arrival on the island tell of a shipwreck and the loss of a great chest containing her fortune. While this is probably an exaggeration, Thomas Brinley with his claim to a royal connection was (and still is) a figure revered by subsequent generations. If it began with a shipwreck, conditions for Grissell and Nathaniel scarcely improved in their early years. They were making a new life in an isolated and very harsh setting, with their closest contact several days away across dangerous sea channels. This was Sir John Winthrop, Governor of the New Haven Colony on the mainland coast of Connecticut, north of Long Island. Among the surviving correspondence between the two settlements is this touching plea from Nathaniel, who says he is: ' …making bold of you at present by reason of my youngest child, which is taken with extreme stopping in the nose so much that it is not able to fetch its breath through the nostrils, which doth disenable the poor infant to suck & is not able to eat without great pain. And being ignorant of anything which may bring comfort to the child I make bold to humbly crave your advice with such means as you may think of most use, for it is a great grief to see the child in such a sad condition & we are quite out of the ways of help here'. He went on to ask if Sir John was willing to part with an Irishwoman he had heard was in his employ, to work on business around the house on Shelter Island. Nathaniel was desperate for someone to help Grissell out before the winter. Seven of their children did survive, including a Grissell, a Giles and a Nathaniel, to establish a profitable and comfortable home, estate and business. From the American point of view Sylvester Manor is a goldmine of early cultural history, important for archaeologists and industrial historians as well as documentary researchers. Indigenous American Indians were already occupying Shelter Island and were employed on the estate, living alongside Europeans without conflict. African slaves were brought in by Nathaniel, to whom slavery would have been part of his experience on Barbados. In 1680 his will listed twenty four Africans to be inherited by Grissell and their children. Even more surprising is the fact that Nathaniel and Grissell were Quakers, giving sanctuary to the persecuted, but saw no contradiction in being devout Christians as well as slaveowners. The great George Fox visited the Sylvesters on Shelter Island, but even he was not an abolitionist; no one was until many years later. This provides fascinating material for the study of Negro slavery in the northern states, since it is mostly associated with the south. Family memory of Thomas Brinley and Datchet is a strong thread running through the generations. Several mansions in the wider area were called 'Datchet House' (a reference to the village as a whole, not the house next to our church), and enterprising travellers visited Thomas's grave to report back that it did indeed exist and did mention Charles I and II. Following the custom of perpetuating family surnames, the builder of the present house in 1753 was Nathaniel's grandson who was given the auspicious name 'Brinley Sylvester'. The witnesses to this codicil were William Wase, Budd Wase, William Carter, and William Brinley. The will was proved by the Widow, Anne Brinley. He married Ann Wase.1 Thomas was born circa 1591 at Exeter, co. Devon, England.2 He was the son of Richard Brinley and Joanne Reeve. Thomas was present at Grisell Brinley'S christening on 6 January 1635/36 at in St. James Church Clerkenwel, England.1 Thomas died on 15 October 1661 at Datchett, Buckshire, England.2 Citations
From the Loyalists of Massachusetts and the Other Side of the Atlantic, p395- Thomas Brinley had a son Francis who settled at Barbados but the climate wasn’t suited to his habits and constitution so he came to New England and settled at Newport, RI in 1652 (14 years after the settlement); Francis held several offices, among them was Judge. Sometimes he resided in Boston, owning a large estate; he died there in 1719 @87Y; he was buried in King’s Chapel, Boston. [edit] Mentioned in Historical Papers of Shelter Island, Reverend Jacob Edward Mallmann, 1899, p16Upon coming here to live Nathaniel brought Grissel Brinley, his bride. She was the daughter of Thomas Brinley, Esq, of Datchett, Buckinghamshire, England. Her faher was auditor for Charles I and Charles II, the keeper of the accounts of the dower of Henrietta Maria, a position implying great friendship with the royal family. In the middle aisle of the church at Datchett, near Windsor, is the inscription for the tombstone of Thomas Brinley, Esq, born in Exon, married Anna Wade of Pettsworth in Sussex, by whom he had 5 sons and 7 daughters. He was born in 1591 and died 1661. One of his daughters married Nathaniel Sylvester, Esq. Francis Brinley, one of his sons, accepted a land grant for his father’s services and went to Newport, RI. [edit] Will of Thomas BrinleyThomas Brinley, of Datchett, Co. Bucks, Esq., 13 September, 1661 with codicil of 16 October, 1661, proved 11 December, 1661. My third of tenements in the town of Newcastle upon Tyne, and two thirds of the manor of Burton in Yorkshire, to eldest son, Francis Brinley and his heirs. My half of the township or manor of Wakerfield, heretofore parcell of the Lordship of Raby, and my lands and tenements in Wakerfield, county and Bishoprick of Durham, purchased in the names of William Wase of Durham and of Robert Worrall, lately deceased, and of Michael Lambcroft, lately deceased, and of John Maddocke, of Cuddington, co. Chester, in trust for the use of me, the said Thomas Brinley, and the said Robert Worrall and our heirs and assigns forever, to my wife, Anne Brinley, during her natural life; at her death to eldest son, Francis Brinley. My lands in Horton and Stanwell, in the several counties of Middlesex and Bucks, and, by me purchased of Henry Bulstrode of Horton, to wife Anne for life; then to my second son, Thomas Brinley, a lease of ninety-nine years. Certain other lands and, lately bought of James Styles, the elder, of Langley, to daughter Mary Silvester, widow and her daughter, my granddaughter, Mary Silvester, the younger, who are both left destitute of subsistence by the decease of my said daughter's late husband, Peter Silvester, To the children of my daughter Grissell, the now wife of Nathaniel Silvester, gentleman, dwelling in New England, in the parts of America, in an island called Shelter Island, one hundred pounds within one year after my decease. The witnesses to the will were Robert Style and Rose Baker. In the codicil he bequeaths legacies to his brother Lawrence Brinley and Richard Brinley his son, both of London, merchants, to the intent that they shall with all conv enient speed sell that half of said lands, (in Wakerfield), for the best rate and value that they can get for the same. The witnesses to this codicil were William Wase, Budd Wase, William Carter, and William Brinley. The will was proved by the Widow, Anne Brinley. [edit] Church of St. MaryThe church of ST. MARY consists of a chancel, nave, north and south aisles, north transept, south porch, and northeast octagonal tower with spire. Many marble slab memorials have been re-set in the chancel floor from elsewhere in the church, including that of Thomas Brinley (1661) He was auditor of the revenue to King Charles I and II and the memorial records his five sons and seven daughters. Several of these left England around 1650, during the English Civil War, to found a settlement on Long Island and American visitors often come to view this tombstone. With the exception of the chancel, the church was entirely rebuilt in 1857–60 in the 'decorated' style. The walls of the chancel, though much restored, retain part of their original facing, but the windows and other details have been renewed. Many old monuments, however, remain. On the south wall of the chancel is a brass inscription and shield of arms to Katherine daughter of William Blount and wife of Sir Mores Berkeley, who died in 1559. A tablet on the north wall has a rectangular brass plate with the kneeling figures of Richard Hanbury, citizen and goldsmith of London, the date of whose death (1608) is not filled in, Alice his wife (d. 1593), and two daughters, one married to Sir William Combe and the other to Sir Edmond Wheler. There are also two shields of arms, and on the pediment above are the arms of London between two Tudor roses. In the chancel are mural tablets to Christopher Barker, (fn. 169) who died in 1599, and Rachel his wife, 1607; to Mary wife of Edmund Wheeler, 1626, with arms; to Hanbury Wheeler, 1633, with bust and shield of arms; and to John Wheeler, 1636, also with bust and shield and tablets to the Gore family. In the floor are slabs to Hanbury Wheeler and to Thomas Brinley, who died in 1661, auditor of revenue to Charles I and Charles II, and his father-in-law William Wase, who died in 1642. In the north aisle is a floor slab to George Cooke, who died in 1687, and Alice his wife, 1692; in the south aisle are slabs to Rose wife of Richard Budd, auditor of the king's revenue, who died in 1624, and other members of her family, and to Robert Conway, who died in 1673 (?). In the vestry is a mural tablet to Katherine, wife of John Balch, who died in 1679. Three of the stained glass windows were erected as a memorial to Albert Prince Consort. References
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