Dutton

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Beyond the control of the crown, Early Tudor Cheshire was a lawless gangland in which warring 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.

Piers Duttton
The son of a gentry outlaw, Dutton rose from languishing in the jail at Chester Castle for breaches of the peace 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. However, his strongly Protestant wife was acquainted with the Protestant Thomas Cromwell and after allying himself with Cromwell (as esquire of the body), 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 Brereton allies 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.

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.

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 new home.

Sir Piers Dutton became High Sheriff of Cheshire on 22 November 1542 and died on 17 August 1545.

The Duttons are associated with the Minstrel Court held at Chester.

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.[1] 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, 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;