Stagg's history of Salthouse - page 6

The Heydons - continued

Sir William Heydon, eldest son of Sir Christopher, succeeded in 1579 at the age of thirty-nine. He married Ann Woodhouse of Hickling and had three sons—Christopher, William and John. The eldest, Sir Christopher, was living at Saxlingham Hall (whose ruins still stand close to Saxlingham Church) with his first wife, Mirabel, in the year of the Spanish Armada, 1588.
The following entry appears in the Registers of Holt Church for that year:

In this year was the town of Waborne fortified both with a continuall garrison bothe of horse and foote with skonces [earthworks], ordinaunce and all manner of warlike appoyntment to defende the Spannyardes landinge theare. Sir Willm Heydon being leiftenant appoynted Sir Xper Heydon his prime captaine, with meny other gent wch in order cam in wth their companies.

That field in the extreme north-east of Salthouse parish called Spanish Pits was no doubt the site of some of these ‘skonces’ dug by Heydon’s men.

Some five years after the Armada the fortunes of the Heydons crashed, Sir William having become heavily involved in some unsuccessful speculation in London. He was obliged to mortgage many of his manors, including those of Berdwell in Salthouse and Ilketeshale in Kelling and Salthouse, to Thomas Croft Esq of Sheringham who in 1593 transferred the mortgage to Thomas Thetford Esq ‘with all rents, services, foldcourses (sheep walks), & clear of all encumbrances done by him, Sir William Heydon, or Sir Christopher, his father’. In that same year Thomas Croft delivered to Henry Sidney of Walsingham Esq the manors of Saxlingham, Nowers and Linacres, which had also been Heydon properties.
Possibly through worry over his financial embarrassments, Sir William died 19 March 1593 at the age of fifty-three and he lies buried in the south aisle of Baconsthorpe Church. The following is a translation of the Latin inscription on his monument:

To Sir William Heydon a most noble Knight of Norfolk, once Admiral and High Sherif, Justice of the Peace—Lady Anne Heydon, his wife, daughter of Sir G. Woodhouse, Knight, longing and hoping, has during her life-time placed this monument in token of her faithful and undying love. He lived fifty and three years and four months. Died on the 19th day of the month of March 1593.

Amongst his fathers and forefathers, Heydons, William is here, one of the nobles, a lover of religion, faithful to his county of Norfolk, by land & by sea he was renowned in the offices of war and state. Enriching by arms, arming by laws far off lands, he gave the gifts of peace, he has the reward of peace.
If the last paragraph of this epitaph is not empty praise from a devoted widow, it points the way to a pretty tale of adventure and patriotic endeavour which should repay some student of imperial history.
Although with Sir William’s mortgage of the manors of Salthouse and Kelling in 1593 the connection with the Heydon family ends, our interest in that splendid family prompts us to follow the fortunes of the Heydons for two or three more generations. We recall Sir Christopher in 1588—then about twenty-five years of age—as living in Saxlingham Hall with his first wife Mirabel, daughter of Sir Thomas Rivet Knt, a London merchant. This Lady Mirabel Heydon was buried in Saxlingham Church beneath a tomb which almost filled the chancel and nearly reached the roof. It was in the form of an Egyptian pyramid, and there was a figure of a lady kneeling before a bible open at ‘I am sure that my Redeemer liveth’.

This bible page and a small female figure are all that remains from the hands of the restorer. Sir Christopher (a leading astrologer of the day) had the tomb covered with hieroglyphics, and is said to have published a book specially to explain their meaning.

In 1931 there was living an old resident of Saxlingham who remembered that all the children in his boyhood days were scared to go near the avenue leading to the Hall after dark, for fear of meeting Lady Heydon (Mirabel) on her nightly ride to Bayfield Hall. His elder sister who had been in service as a girl in the farm house which was then within the ruins of the Hall, remembered an indelible red spot on the stone stairs which was believed to have been the blood of a serving wench killed by Lady Mirabel.

One wonders whether the uneducated among the Saxlingham inhabitants had taken the mysterious signs on her tomb to have denoted a pact with the Powers of Darkness and therefrom attributed to a lady (who may have been as sweet as her name sounds to our ears) all the evil which imagination could conjure up.

This Sir Christopher graduated at Cambridge in the days when the Danish Astronomer Tycho Brahe was propounding theories regarding the universe which caused the intellectuals of all nations to turn their thoughts to the skies and stars. Sir Christopher must have been bitten badly, for not only did he cover the entombed body of his Lady Mirabel with zodiacal emblems, but he wrote voluminously on the ‘science’ of astrology and was a leading figure in the defence of astrology in the intellectual disputations of his time.
In 1602 he published A Defence of Judiciall Astrologie and, in 1605, An Astrological Discourse . . . in Justification of the validity of Astrology. He also wrote a pamphlet called A Recitall of the Coelestiall Apparitions of the present Trygon now in being—which, however, was never published.

In political life, Sir Christopher was induced by the ‘immoderate brag’ of one Thomas Farmor to oppose his candidature for the representation of Norfolk in Parliament in 1586. The election, on account of the contested return, attracted some attention, but finally the House of Commons adjudged the seats to Farmor and Gresham. But Sir Christopher represented Norfolk in 1588 though he soon after travelled abroad, perhaps hoping to forward his father’s interests (‘enriching by arms, arming by laws far-off lands,’ as Sir William’s epitaph has it).
In 1596 Sir Christopher was knighted by the Earl of Essex, at the sacking of Cadiz; he and his brother, John, got involved in Essex’s mad rebellion, for which crime, however, they were both pardoned in 1601. This brother John appears to have been somewhat of a fire-eater. He went to Ireland with Essex in 1599, and in that year had a duel with Sir Robert Mansfield which resulted in the loss of Sir John’s hand. This hand is still preserved in Canterbury Museum.

In 1620, in the early days of the Thirty Years War when King James I was trying to assist his son-in-law the Protestant King of Bohemia, the Privy Council issued letters to all the nobility and gentry in England, requesting a loan for the recovery of the Palatinate. This was earnestly desired by Sir Christopher, who sent a letter to the Privy Council stating that the Papists were as ready to support the Emperor of Germany as the King was the King of Bohemia, and that they met at the house of Mr Henry Kervile at St Mary’s Marshland (Terrington St Mary’s). Kervile was sent for and imprisoned, but the charge was dropped and he was soon released.

Sir Christopher had several sons by Lady Mirabel, of whom the eldest—Sir William—was killed in the expedition against the Île de Rhé in 1627. By his second wife, Anne, widow of Sir John Potts of Mannington, he had four daughters and a son.
Sir Christopher died in 1623 at the age of sixty, and lies buried at Baconsthorpe together with his wife Anne who died in 1642. His second son by Lady Mirabel, John, succeeded him.

Frank Noel Stagg
Salthouse1930