Dutton

Category : Person Category : Article Beyond the control of the crown, despite the King being Earl of Chester, early Tudor Cheshire was a lawless gangland in which warring local magnates battled for power. None were more ruthless than Sir Piers Dutton.

Sir Piers Dutton (c1480–1545) of Dutton, Cheshire was an "esquire of the body" to Henry VIII in 1520 and rose to be knight (chief esquire) of the body by 1527. He was the uncle of William Brereton but loathed this rival for power in Cheshire. Local power was very important because the crown only had limited control of the provinces and relied on local magnates to keep order, meaning political power was more local than it is today. Cheshire was a semi-autonomous ‘palatine’ with no MPs; its own de facto parliament; its own legal system and its own head of state – the king in his capacity as Earl of Chester. As such, the leaders of Cheshire wielded real power, and rivalry for it was fierce. Dutton was lord of the manor of Dutton from 1527 until his death. He was involved in the closing of Norton Abbey during the Dissolution of the Monasteries in 1536. He started rebuilding Dutton Hall in 1539. The Duttons are associated with the Minstrel Court held at Chester and provide the name for a principal character in The Chester Mystery Novels.

Piers Duttton
The son of a gentry outlaw, Dutton rose from languishing in the jail at Chester Castle for breaches of the peace, through changing Henry VIII's pants, to being a powerful mayor of Chester (1512-1514). He was made a courtier as part of an attempt to flatter local magnates and so keep the distant, lawless provinces under crown control. His strongly Protestant wife was acquainted with the Protestant Thomas Cromwell and after allying himself with Cromwell (as "esquire of the body" to Henry VIII), Dutton’s ascent began.

Both keen to eliminate William Brereton, Thomas Cromwell helped ensure that Dutton inherited a huge estate from a distant cousin to which William Brereton's allies (see below) had a better claim. Lawrence Dutton, the head of the senior branch of the family living in Dutton, had died and left no male heirs: however, Lawrence was survived by several sisters. Subsequently there was a dispute between the sisters Alice, Eleanor, Anne, Margaret and Isabel on one side and Piers Dutton, who was judged the next male heir, on the other. To resolve the suit (which lasted seven years) the Dutton land was settled to Piers Dutton, with some small portion of the other lands settled to the sisters of Lawrence. As heir at law Piers gained possession of the Lordships and lands of Dutton, Weston, Preston on the Hill, Bartington, Little Leigh, Ness in Wirral, Little Mouldsworth, Acton, Hapsford, and lands in Clifton, Dunham, Stoke, Picton, Halton, Thelwall, Onston, Middlewich, Stanthorne and Runcorn. The co-heirs were awarded Dutton lands in Kingsley, Norley, Cuddington, Barnton, Budworth, Whitley, Helsby, Frodsham and Chester.



Thomas Cromwell is believed by many historians to have engineered the downfall of Anne Boleyn. Anne Boleyn (c. 1501 – 19 May 1536) was Queen of England from 1533 to 1536 as the second wife of King Henry VIII. Henry's marriage to her, and her subsequent execution by beheading, made her a key figure in the political and religious upheaval that was the start of the English Reformation. Anne was the daughter of Thomas Boleyn, 1st Earl of Wiltshire, and his wife, Lady Elizabeth Howard, and was educated in the Netherlands and France, largely as a maid of honour to Queen Claude of France. Anne returned to England in early 1522, to marry her Irish cousin James Butler, 9th Earl of Ormond; the marriage plans were broken off, and instead she secured a post at court as maid of honour to Henry VIII's wife, Catherine of Aragon (see Leche House for her rather dubious connection with Chester). Henry and Anne formally married on 25 January 1533, after a secret wedding on 14 November 1532. On 23 May 1533, newly appointed Archbishop of Canterbury Thomas Cranmer declared Henry and Catherine's marriage null and void. Anne was crowned Queen of England on 1 June 1533. Cromwell appointed Dutton to Cheshire offices, which Brereton had held, and had him made sheriff of Cheshire. When Brereton was executed in May 1536 Dutton took over even more of his nephew’s offices and Cromwell had a man in charge of fiercely independent Cheshire who would do anything he wanted.

In 1535, King Henry VIII had crossed out other candidates suggested to him for sheriff of Cheshire, insisting Dutton was reappointed. Dutton put down a pro-monastery rebellion, plundered the abbeys and had enemies murdered, boasting that he was above the law because he was so intimate with the king. Sir Piers Dutton became High Sheriff of Cheshire on 22 November 1542 and died on 17 August 1545.

When the commissioners arrived to close Norton Abbey as part of the Dissolution of the Monasteries in October 1536 they faced opposition from around 300 people. They locked themselves in the tower and sent a letter to Sir Piers Dutton, who arrived and arrested the abbot and several others. Dutton then sent a report of the incident to Henry VIII. Sir Piers also managed to secure the ancient priory door which became the imposing entrance to his newly rebuilt home at Dutton Hall. King Henry was outraged that priests had attempted to stop his men from closing Norton Priory. He demanded the abbot be hanged, disembowelled and then chopped into four pieces with his body parts displayed 'around the country' in a warrant written under dictation from King Henry to a secretary. It is possible that Piers Dutton, who reported the resistance at Norton, was deliberately exaggerating the situation and provoking the King to further his own political goals.

Dutton Hall
The hall was built around 1150 by Sir Geoffrey de Dutton and at one time formed part of a larger quadrangular structure. It was subsequently rebuilt several times following its partial destruction by warfare. Oliver Cromwell ordered it rebuilt when his roundheads wreaked havoc upon it during the English Civil War in the 1640s. In describing Dutton Hall, Peter Leycester, baronet, wrote the following in his "Leycester's Historical Antiquities," published in 1673:


 * "The Mannor-house of Dutton is well seated, and hath great store of meadowing by the River [Weaver] side belonging to the Demain, which is accounted the largest and best Demain within our County, comprehending 1400 Statute Acres by Survey. This House standeth upon a pleasant Prospect to the opposite Hills of the Forest; and hath in it an ancient Chappel built first by Sir Thomas Dutton towards the end of Henry the Third's Reign; unto whom Roger de Lincoln then Prior of Norton, and the Convent there, did grant liberam cantariam in Capellis suis de Dutton & Weston infra Limites Parochiarum nos- trarum de Budworth & de Runcorne; id est Free liberty of Reading Divine Service, or Singing the same; so as the Mother-Churches receive no detriment either in their greater or lesser Tythes. That of Weston is long since vanished but this Chappel at Dutton yet remains, and is now a Domestick Chappel within the Mannor-House of Dutton, unto which Sir Piers Dutton, of Hatton, after he was adjudged next Heir Male to the Lands of Dutton by the Award of Henry the Eighth, did annex his new Buildings at Dutton, Anno Domini 1539, as appears by the Inscription round about the Hall of Dutton yet extant adjoining those unto the Chappel and so making it as one continued Building; before which time the old House stood a little distance from the Chappel aforesaid."

Much of the Hall built by Sir Piers Dutton was demolished in the 18th and 19th centuries. What remained became a farmhouse, the home of a succession of tenant farmers. In 1935, what remained of the house was dismantled stone by stone and beam by beam, each carefully numbered, hauled by steam wagon to Sussex and reassembled on the estate of John Arthur ("Lucky") Dewar (the whisky magnate) in East Grinstead where it became a part of Dutton-Homestall Manor. At the present time it is part of the Stoke Brunswick School in Ashurst Wood, just south of Grinstead. The original site of the hall in Dutton, Cheshire, is now occupied by a stud farm.



William Brereton
William Brereton (c. 1487 – 17 May 1536), the son of a Cheshire landowner, was a Groom of the Privy Chamber to Henry VIII. In May 1536, Brereton, the queen's brother, George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston and a musician, Mark Smeaton, were tried and executed for treason and adultery with Anne Boleyn, the king's second wife. Many historians are now of the opinion that Anne Boleyn, Brereton and their co-accused were innocent.

Brereton, born between 1487 and 1490, was the seventh[3][4] son of Sir Randle Brereton of Ipstones, Shocklach, and Malpas, Knight Chamberlain of Chester, knight banneret and knight of the body of Henry VII. His mother was Eleanor, daughter of Piers Dutton of Halton, Cheshire. Along with three of his brothers, William entered royal service. By 1521 he was a groom of the king's chamber, and from 1524, groom of the privy chamber. In 1529, Brereton married Elizabeth, daughter of Charles Somerset, 1st Earl of Worcester, widow of Sir John Savage, and second cousin to Henry VIII. He and Elizabeth had two sons: Henry Brereton and Thomas Brereton.

Elizabeth's first husband was the grandson of Sir John Savage, who had been a Lancastrian commander at the battle of Bosworth in 1485. When the grandson had fallen into debt, and was also being held in the Tower for murder, all his lands were forfeited to the crown, and Brereton, as the king's man in Cheshire, was granted jurisdiction over them. After Sir John Savage's death, Brereton's marriage to his widow established a family relationship with the king and thus cemented his position as a royal servant.

In reward for his work for the king, Brereton received a number of royal grants in Cheshire and the Welsh Marches. These eventually brought him more than £10,000 a year. However, he wielded power ruthlessly, on one occasion, engineering the judicial murder of John ap Gryffith Eyton, whom he blamed for instigating the killing of one of his own retainers.

The Boleyn Trial
In May 1536, Anne Boleyn was accused of adultery with Mark Smeaton, a musician of the royal household, and the courtiers Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, William Brereton as well as her brother, George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, all of the privy chamber. The king's chief minister, Thomas Cromwell, "authorised and commissioned by the king," masterminded the proceedings against the queen and her co-accused. The allegation against Brereton, who had been arrested on 4 May, was that Anne solicited him on 16 November 1533, and "misconduct" took place on 27 November. Historian Eric Ives argues that Cromwell added Brereton to the plot against Anne to end the troubles he was causing in the Welsh Marches, and to reorganise (and centralise) the local government of this area.

The trials of William Brereton, Henry Norris, Sir Francis Weston, and Mark Smeaton took place at Westminster Hall on 12 May. They were charged with high treason against the king, adultery with the queen and plotting the king's death. Having been found guilty, they were all sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered. The queen and her brother were tried separately on 15 May within the Tower.

On 17 May, William Brereton, George Boleyn, Viscount Rochford, Henry Norris (groom of the stool), Sir Francis Weston and Mark Smeaton, were led from the Tower to a scaffold on Tower Hill. George Constantyne, an eyewitness to their executions, recorded their last words. Brereton's words as he faced the executioner's axe, "The cause whereof I die, judge not. But if you judge, judge the best," may be interpreted as a cautious declaration of his innocence which would avoid the forfeiture of his estates. An indication of his wife's continued trust in her husband is provided by her bequest to her son nine years later: "one bracelet of gold, the which was the last token his father sent me."

Sources and Links



 * Prof. Eric Ives on Brereton;
 * Dutton Hall;
 * The Dutton Family;
 * The Ruler of Cheshire: Sir Piers Dutton, Tudor Gangland and the Violent Politics of the Palatine;
 * Norton Priory Abbot's death notice;