Sir Anthony, A Protestant Reformer

One of Sir Anthony Cooke's daughters married William Cecil, Lord Burghley, who funded Sir Anthony’s exile to the Continent. Our noble progenitor made the mistake of supporting Lady Jane Grey’s quest for the throne, so when Mary Tudor became Queen, he fled the country. While in Strasbourg he heard Peter Martyr lecture, and the experience reinforced his Protestant inclinations. He stayed abroad for three years, corresponding with the leading reformers in Europe and writing pamphlets for circulation in England.

He returned home when Elizabeth I ascended the throne and promptly began writing her lists of instructions on how to handle religious issues. Gloriana reacted as she always did when some male presumed to give her orders: she totally ignored him. Undiscouraged, he participated in a number of commissions concerning the establishment of the Church of England, but fussed about the new church being too elaborate and “Popish”.

Book of Common Prayer, Church of England. Source: http://www.search.windowsonwarwickshire.org.uk/

A modern biographer condemns Sir Anthony as having a “dark and unforgiving nature.” A seventeenth-century historian was kinder: “Sir Anthony took more pleasure to breed up statesmen than to be one. Contemplation was his soul, privacy his life, and discourse his element.”

The last decade of his life was spent in consolidating his estate and refurbishing Gidea Hall, where Queen Elizabeth visited him in the summer of 1568.

Gentleman of the Privy Chamber

 Cooke noblemen married aristocratic women with the names of de Malpas, Knollys-Belnap, and Saunders. The ladies’ backgrounds were Norman, usually results of various Plantagent indiscretions.

Sir Thomas’ grandson Sir John Cooke (1473) died at 43, leaving his eleven-year-old son Anthony to be raised by his uncle Richard Cooke, a diplomat for Henry VIII, and his stepmother, first a lady-in-waiting to Katherine of Aragon and later to Princess Mary.

Sir Anthony Cooke of Gidea Hall proved to be one of our most distinguished ancestors.  At the end of Henry VIII’s reign, he obtained his only court office, “Gentleman of the Privy Chamber,” which he maintained until the death of Edward VI. He taught the boy king, who made him a knight of the Bath, “good letters and manners”. Other children in the royal circle like Lady Jane Grey were also his students.

Etching of Sir Anthony Cooke. One statement from his funeral monument states: "Sir Anthony Cooke, knight, named tutor to King Edward VI because of his exceptional learning, prudence, and piety. Source: Wikipedia.

When he was about 17, he married a girl he had long been contracted to, Anne Fitzwilliam. Anne was a wealthy knight’s daughter and a descendant of Geoffrey Plantagenet, Count of Anjou, by mistress #1, mistress #2, or mistress #3. By the way, Geoffrey in turn claimed direct descent from Charlemagne.

Please don’t get too excited about this. Every person of European origin can claim Charlemagne as a forefather. He lived a long time ago, and fathered 20 children. And the Plantagenets were very, er, sociable fellows themselves. Years ago, a book called The Last Plantagenets hit the best-seller list. Even its author, Thomas B. Costain, must have realized the title was misleading:  our earth will harbor Plantagenet offshoots until the sun supernovas and engulfs it.

 Anthony Cooke wrote Anne a touching epitaph, where he praised her for being attractive, but not so stunning that her beauty interfered with his studies.

Sir Anthony “The Scholar” was famed in Tudor England for personally educating his daughters as well as his sons. These daughters married spectacularly well and were renowned as poets and translators of religious and classical works in their own rights. Eventual Cooke offspring ranged from Sir Francis Bacon to the marvelous historical romance novelist Daphne du Maurier. Oh, and to some politician named Barack Obama.

The Lord Mayor and Gidea Hall

Jean de Ross's daughter Ena turned her back on the “Scots Wha’ Hae Wi’ Wallace Bled” business and married an Englishman, Harold Cooke.

Harold Cooke’s (born 1345) family lived in the City of London before the Norman Conquest, so they were likely a Celtic-Saxon mixture.  Sometime before 1106 William Daniel Cooke moved out to Leicester’s countryside. At this point the Cooke men married women with decent but unpretentious last names like Hook, Miles and Auscomb.  

The names of Harold Cooke’s father and grandfather have been lost altogether, but they definitely were offspring of the earlier Cookes, who were what Jane Austen would term “gentry”. Ena, the granddaughter of the Fourth Mormaer of Ross, wouldn’t have forsaken her glorious if bloody heritage to grovel in a hovel with a peasant. She may have been young and in love and all that rot, but she was still a patrician, and her aunt was a Queen Consort.

The connection with Ena de Ros and her family had a salubrious effect on the Cooke fortunes. One of Ena and Harold’s sons became Sir Norman. Sir Norman’s grandson Thomas (born 1422) was a successful draper (he wasn’t an interior decorator; “drapers” dealt in cloth and all sorts of dry goods) who had his own merchant ship, owned numerous lucrative parcels of real estate, and was the Lord Mayor of London. He made the mistake of involving himself in the War of the Roses by lending money to the beleaguered Queen Margaret, and so was imprisoned for a while. The victorious Edward IV fined, released, then re-imprisoned, re-fined, and re-released him; fortunately Sir Thomas wasn’t high enough on the Royal Enemies List to merit more lethal vengeance.

Sir Thomas’s greatest contribution to his family was in purchasing an old London manor house called Gidea (pronounced “giddy”) Hall, built before 1250. In 1466 he was granted a license to “crenellate” his house, which meant to fortify it. It took two years, and excavating an actual moat, for Sir Thomas to be satisfied. The estate consisted of a main manor house with two adjacent wings forming three sides of a courtyard. There was an open colonnade on the fourth side, and a number of outbuildings completed the property.

Succeeding generations of Cookes loved this grand establishment. Sir Phillip Cooke was born there in 1454, as was his son Sir John in 1473.

Gidea Hall in 1908. Source: http://jaysteeleblog.wordpress.com/