Illiam Dhone: Patriot or Traitor?
The Life, Death and Legacy of William Christian
First published in Great Britain in 2012 by
Profile Books Ltd
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Copyright © Jennifer Kewley Draskau 2012
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List of illustrations
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1 A Tale of Two Families
2 The Straw Tenure and the Ronaldsway Vendetta
3 The House of Stanley in the Civil War
4 The Manx Rebellion
5 Power and Fall
6 The ‘Scandalous and Astonishing Slander’
7 ‘Disordered Accounts’ and Secret Flight
8 Political Intrigue
9 Imprisonment in the Fleet
10 Derby’s Vengeance
11 Gathering Evidence
12 Treason Trial
13 ‘To the Gate of Death’
14 Aftermath
15 Climax of the Show Trial
Conclusion: Legend and Legacy
Appendices
Notes
Bibliography
Index
William Christian of Ronaldsway; the only known likeness of Illiam Dhone. (Courtesy of Manx National Heritage)
Mid nineteenth-century engraving of Milntown House, Illiam Dhone’s birthplace. (The Milntown Estate)
Milntown between 1898 and 1912. (The Milntown Estate)
John Speed’s 1605 map of the Isle of Man. (Courtesy of Manx National Heritage)
The house at Ronaldsway, where Illiam Dhone eventually lived, in the 1940s. (Manx Heritage Foundation)
Illiam Dhone’s cap. (Courtesy of Manx National Heritage)
James Stanley, 7th Earl of Derby. (Courtesy of Manx National Heritage)
The 7th Earl with his countess, Charlotte de la Trémoille, and one of their children. (Courtesy of Manx National Heritage)
The siege of Lathom House in February 1644. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Lathom House as it appeared in the early nineteenth century. (Private Collection/© Look and Learn/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Two views of Castle Rushen by Daniel King, circa 1643.
The massacre of Drogheda. (Mary Evans Picture Library)
Engraving of Ramsey Bay from Quiggin’s 1836 Guide to the Isle of Man. (Courtesy of Manx National Heritage)
The Parliamentarian general Lord Fairfax. (© Trustees of Leeds Castle Foundation, Maidstone, Kent, UK/The Bridgeman Art Library)
The execution of the 7th Earl of Derby in Bolton in 1651. (Mary Evans Picture Library/Grosvenor Prints)
Knowsley Hall, ancestral home of the Earls of Derby. (Jonathan Kewley)
Charles Stanley, 8th Earl of Derby. (From Characters Illustrious in British Portraits by Richard Earlom and Charles Turner, 1815. Private collection/The Bridgeman Art Library)
Engravings of Peel Castle and Castletown seen from Hango Hill, from Quiggin’s 1836 Guide to the Isle of Man. (Courtesy of Manx National Heritage)
Castle Rushen today. (Courtesy of Manx National Heritage)
Hango Hill today. (Courtesy of Manx National Heritage)
Peel Castle today. (Courtesy of Manx National Heritage)
Memorial bust of Illiam Dhone in Malew Church by Bryan Kneale. (Manx Heritage Foundation)
ON THE MORNING OF 2 JANUARY 1662/3,1 William Christian was led out to a windswept field near his home and shot, his body being laid to rest later that day near the altar of Malew Church. Thus was born the legend of Illiam Dhone,2 ‘Dark-haired William’, Manx patriot and martyr. Four hundred years later, men and women still meet together at Hango Hill to commemorate his death, and in 2006, in a solemn service of dedication, a bust of Illiam Dhone was erected on the wall of Malew Church.
To every Manx person, and to anyone vaguely aware of the existence of the Isle of Man, the name of Illiam Dhone is both legendary and controversial. Existing records are garbled and fragmentary, and opinions as polarised and passionate today as they were in his own time. A martyred folk hero or a treacherous opportunist? There are compelling arguments on both sides, summed up over a century ago by the pre-eminent Manx historian and politician A. W. Moore: ‘William Christian has been variously represented as a perjured traitor and as the patriotic victim of a judicial murder, according to the sympathies of the writer.’3
It is an age-old controversy that rages still.
The extraordinary story of William Christian of Ronaldsway, who became an iconic folk hero under his nickname Illiam Dhone, or ‘Dark[-haired] William’, is a tale of substance and of shadow. Illiam’s supporters are as inclined as his detractors to confuse the one with the other. From our perspective, Illiam himself remains an ambiguous figure, remote in time, rendered more mysterious and complex by the shrouds of symbolism and legend that have gathered around his name over the years. The surviving records are imperfect. It is, in any case, notoriously difficult to judge with any degree of impartiality actions committed during a period of revolution.
At first sight Illiam Dhone appears a most unlikely hero. Judging from what we know of his early career and privileged upbringing, he was an improbable revolutionary. From a comfortable life of relative obscurity, he burst with meteoric force upon the Manx national consciousness, assuming at one stroke the fabulous mantle of supreme patriot, hero and martyr.
Centuries later, public demand has led to modern government buildings being named in his honour, and increasing numbers attend the annual commemoration of his death; people of all ages and walks of life, by no means all of them Manx. On these occasions, orations in Manx and English are proclaimed at Hango Hill, the approximate site of his execution, followed by a church service in Malew Parish Church. At both the hill and in the church, emotional wreath-laying ceremonies are carried out with due solemnity.
Illiam Dhone’s name resonates in the Isle of Man today. But his trial and execution cannot be dismissed as some petty parish pump affair, a mere parochial dispute which would quickly be consigned to the dusty backrooms of history. At the time, the impact of the execution of an obscure Manx official on a faraway island rocked the English legal system to its foundations. Its echoes resounded throughout England, occupying the finest legal minds in the country and throwing the newly restored and usually equable monarch into a towering rage.
So what was so remarkable about the story of Illiam Dhone? If we strip away the patina of the ages and discard the trappings of myth and symbolism, there are several strands which merit serious investigation, and which still have relevance today. These include:
• The political impact of the Illiam Dhone case on the House of Stanley, the feudal Lords of Man, with regard to its relationship both with the Island and with the English Crown
• The clarification of the legal status of the Isle of Man in relation to the English Crown
• The social, psychological and ideological impact of the Illiam Dhone myth
• The ultimate, possibly unanswerable, human question: should we regard Illiam Dhone as patriot and martyr, or as perjured traitor and opportunist?
This last question has occupied the minds of Manxmen for centuries. To examine it, we must revisit the world of seventeenth-century Britain, and consider not only the position of the Isle of Man within that world, but also that of the powerful Christian clan in the Island, especially with regard to their relationship with the Island’s lords, the Stanleys, who enjoyed many of the benefits of the status of petty kings, as indeed they originally were.
THE STANLEYS, a powerful and well-connected English family, were first appointed kings (later lords) of Man1 in 1405 by King Henry IV of England. In 1485, they were created earls of Derby, after the Battle of Bosworth Field established the Tudor dynasty. As rulers of Man, the Stanleys enjoyed sovereign powers in the Island; during their rule, while continuing to pay homage to the English king, they never sought political integration with England, nor did they make any real effort to anglicise the culture and language of the indigenous population of Man. (Lord Fairfax,2 the Parliamentarian ruler of Man during the seventeenth-century Interregnum, commanded an extensive library comprising 217 English and Latin texts to be shipped over to the Island for the edification of the populace, yet these remained largely unread, stored in Castle Rushen gathering dust. In the community at large, Manx Gaelic continued to be the principal means of communication for both official and unofficial transactions.)
The book of Statutes suggests that the Island’s early rulers, as absentee landlords, were less concerned about the welfare of their Manx subjects than about their own privileges and revenues. These were considerable: the Lord of Man was entitled to the best of fish and game, all wrecks, treasure trove and the goods of persons condemned to death. In addition, he enjoyed substantial supplies of free food and fuel. Tenants were obliged, on certain fixed days, to undertake repairs to the Lord’s forts and houses. For this captive workforce there was little escape: they were forbidden to leave the Island without special licence; compulsory military service meant that all men between the ages of 20 and 60 had to train as militiamen under the Captains of the Parishes;3 and the Islanders were required to pay taxes for fishing rights, for importing and exporting goods, and for grinding corn at the Lord’s mill. This last rule caused widespread resentment, but if people were suspected of attempting to circumvent the rule by using private hand-mills, or querns, the Lord’s officers were sent out to track these down and smash them.
Despite these many impositions on its inhabitants, under the Stanley rule the Island entered a period characterised by greater stability, both politically and economically. Although the first Stanleys rarely visited the Island, they appointed governors, who in the main appear to have been well chosen and to have acquitted themselves satisfactorily in undertaking the task entrusted to them. Certainly, as the House of Stanley grew in wealth and political influence, their Island fiefdom was finally safeguarded from the invasions and depredations of its neighbours, and able to develop in peace and relative prosperity.
Against this background, a handful of Manx families began to emerge as pre-eminent. The most remarkable amongst them were the prolific, ambitious and acquisitive Christians of Milntown and their numerous relations, the most famous of whom was William, third son of one of the Island’s two judges or deemsters, Deemster Ewan Christian. As Illiam Dhone, William Christian was to become the best-known Manxman of all time.
By 1608, when Illiam was born in Milntown on the outskirts of Ramsey, the small northern mansion had long been the seat and cradle of his family. The clan of the Christians of Milntown, or ‘MacCriste[e] ns’ – the name is probably of Scandinavian origin, and there are many variant spellings – had sprung to prominence early in the Island’s recorded history; their own roller-coaster narrative was interwoven inexorably with the history of the Island. By the time William was born, they had for centuries been the most powerful Island family.
The name ‘Milntown’ is recorded as early as 1448, when one of the McChristen clan was Comptroller of Man. The historical site chosen by the Christians for their mansion house was that of the most famous battle in Manx history, the Battle of Skyhill or Scacafel. It was here in 1079 that the best-known of the Island’s Norse rulers, chieftain Guðrøðr (Godred) Crovan, (King of Man from 1079 to 1095, and identified by historians with King Orry),4 defeated the Manx at his third attempt, and thereafter established in the Island a dynasty of Norse kings which was to endure for almost four centuries.
The name of John McChristen is recorded as Deemster in 1408, and as a member of the Tynwald Court in 1422. The first of John’s three successors, who were also all christened John, resided at Altadale, in the parish of Lezayre, near Ramsey; the second John McChristen held the office of Deemster from 1500 to 1510, and the third, from 1511 to 1535. It was the last-named who first recorded Manx law in written form; and it was he who acquired the property adjoining Altadale, and named the whole estate Milntown. His eldest son, William, who would later serve as Deemster along with his father, succeeded briefly to the estate in 1535, dying just four years later.
Milntown retained its importance throughout the fifteenth, sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and was regularly used as the meeting place of the Sheading Courts. When the ‘Captain’ or ‘Lieutenant’ of Man (as the Governor was known during the first two hundred years of Stanley rule), went on circuit, accompanied by the Island’s chief officers, the Deemsters, Receiver, Comptroller and Water-Bailiff, the mounted procession of judges and clerks must have been a spectacular sight for people living on outlying farmsteads. From Glenfaba to Kirk Michael and thence to Ayre, the cavalcade, accompanied by pack-horses carrying the records in leather trunks slung in horse-creels (wicker baskets), picked its way over the rough bridle paths. They would spend two days at each place visited. At houses such as Milntown, they were catered for by the householder, who subsequently submitted a bill for his outlay. The millstream at Milntown, after which the estate had been renamed, had flowed through that land from ancient times; it had also played a major role in the consolidation of the fortunes of the family first known as MacChriste[e]n, and later, as the Goidelic patronymic ‘Mac’ became absorbed, as Christians. During the long period of Stanley rule, mills offered an opportunity for profit for landowners who were sufficiently influential and prosperous to apply and pay for mill grants. There was keen competition among landowners who sought to be awarded the Lord’s leases, and the Christians were as competitive as any, and frequently more successful. The Christians of Milntown succeeded in obtaining permanent control of water mills in other parts of Lezayre, in Maughold, and, for a while, extended their empire to include Jurby as well.
Not content with their economic success, the Christians of Milntown soon extended their aspirations to the trappings of nobility. Their ambitions included the acquisition of arms: when granted, these were azure, a chevron humet, with three covered golden chalices on a canton argent, an anchor erect, with part of the cable around the stock. The crest, out of a naval coronet or, shows a unicorn’s head, argent, collared gules, crested and armed or; and two mottoes: ‘salus per Christum’, and ‘perseverando’. For some of their enemies, this pretentiousness must have been the last straw.
As is the case with prominent families everywhere, the rise in fortunes and status of the powerful Christian clan, and the political, social and financial dealings which secured it, owed much to vaulting ambition and acute intelligence allied to pragmatism. The Christians acquired the best land either through astute dealing or by marriage; they sued for and obtained posts of influence and importance through audacity as well as ability. Their rise was attended, predictably, by rumblings among the malcontents whose success was less spectacular, or who had felt upon their necks the weight of the Christians’ boots in their ruthless upward scramble; there were whispers of restrictive practices, nepotism, corruption and misappropriation.5
But the Christians were indisputably a formidable power. In 1627, when the 6th Earl of Derby handed the government of Man to 21-year-old James, Lord Strange (by 1642 the 7th Earl of Derby), his son’s enquiries led him to be well aware of the reputation of the Christians. James (1607–51) was a remarkable man. Later known to his Manx subjects as Yn Stanlagh Mooar, the Great Stanley, he noted that ‘the family of Christians, or rather, Christins, for that is the true name, have made themselves chief in the Island and occupied the most important posts’. James, like his Stanley predecessors, recognized that he was in need of a reliable lieutenant-governor. The member of the Christian clan who immediately sprang to mind as a successful leader was Illiam Dhone’s relation, the charismatic Captain Edward Christian of Maughold.
Edward, second son of the Revd John Christian, Vicar of Maughold from 1589 to 1625, was a cosmopolitan Manxman who had forged a successful career outside the Island. He had amassed a fortune as a merchant adventurer, operating his own vessel under the auspices of the East India Company. Moreover, as a member of the Duke of Buckingham’s suite at court, he had achieved a high rank in the Royal Navy, obtaining through the duke’s influence the command of the Bonaventura, a frigate of thirty-seven guns. In the light of his achievements, it was quite understandable that, when he returned to the Island in 1627, Edward should at once attract the attention of the new young ruler of Man.
James was initially very taken with Edward: he wrote: ‘He is excellent good company: as rude as a sea-captain should be, but refined as one that had civilized himself half a year at Court where he served the Duke of Buckingham.’ Despite an underlying suspicion that some of the Christians were ‘Puritanically affected’, and that their inclination for political agitation included making their compatriots swear compromising oaths – an action criminalised at the time6 – James, impressed by Edward himself and by his reputation, took the unprecedented step of appointing him Governor, a post never previously held by a Manxman. Edward accepted graciously; in a manner calculated to please the Lord of Man, he stated that he would be glad to serve as Governor even without being paid for his services.
At first, this appeared a successful appointment. James congratulated himself on his unorthodox choice, noting with satisfaction that Edward had the quality most desirable in a good servant: if the Lord’s orders proved unsuccessful, Edward took the blame on himself, but, if matters turned out well, he gave his Lord ‘the glory of it’.
Later, however, James came to regret his decision. It was not long before Edward revealed his true colours, confirming the young Lord’s worst suspicions about the political inclinations of some members of the Christian clan and their subversive and revolutionary tendencies.
Despite James’s wariness of the Christians, the one member of the family who managed to retain his favour throughout his long life in office was Illiam Dhone’s father, the canny Deemster Ewan Christian of Milntown (1579–1656). Known as the ‘Old Deemster’ even while still middle-aged, Ewan Christian is the first Council member of whose activities we have any record. His private life was not inactive, either. Earl James, aware of the Deemster’s dynastic aspirations, remarked, only half in jest, that Ewan ‘begot so many bastards not from lust but in order to people the island with his family’. This was not idle gossip: in addition to at least three other children born out of wedlock through liaisons with various local women, Deemster Ewan Christian sired, acknowledged and gave his name to his three children by Jane Woods, his common-law wife. Jane (1600–44/5), of Baltrin, Maughold, was recorded on her death as ‘not married’, but in Burke’s Peerage she is referred to as Deemster Christian’s second wife,7 and he bequeathed a considerable inheritance to the two sons and the daughter she bore him before she married one Ferdinando Fox.
The virile Ewan Christian had been appointed Deemster at the early age of 26, and retained that office until his death fifty-one years later (his son John acting as his deputy during the last six years of his life). Deputy-Governor of the Island from 1634 to 1636, he was appointed Deputy-Captain of Peel Castle in 1640. In the years that followed the threatened revolts of 1642 and 1643, the shrewd Deemster Ewan successfully maintained good relations with the Island’s overlords, and retained their trust despite the fact that people closely connected to him by blood or marriage, Edward Christian and John Curghey, and also his legitimate sons, Illiam and John, became embroiled in various plots and insurrections against the Stanley regime.
The historian A. W. Moore remarks that Deemster Ewan is ‘more remarkable for the powerful position he attained in the island than for, as far as we know, any special ability he showed either as councillor or deemster’. However, whatever his other abilities, in addition to a talent for diplomacy and the dynastic aspirations perceptively observed by Earl James, Deemster Ewan possessed considerable business acumen. With so many offspring, both legitimate and illegitimate, to provide for – and, to his credit, he not only openly acknowledged his bastards but was concerned to provide for them in his will at a time when most people of lesser wealth died intestate – the need to consolidate the family fortunes remained uppermost in his mind. With this end in view, he advised his legitimate sons to marry off-Island, and to follow his example and marry, if not solely for money, at least where money was. Illiam Dhone’s mother, Mrs Ewan Christian, née Miss Katherine Harrison of Bankfield, Eastham (Eastholme), was a propertied Lancashirewoman who conveniently brought with her, on marriage, a moiety, or half share, of the estate of Warton Manor, the estate later being settled upon the couple’s third surviving son, Illiam.
Illiam Dhone was thus born into an influential and upwardly mobile family whose fortune was already established. The best record of his life, character and motivations must, however, be pieced together from the proceedings of his trial, and from fragmentary household and estate accounts. There is no telling how much documentary evidence was lost in the regrettable, and probably deliberate, destruction, in 1852, of the family muniment room at Milntown.
The nickname ‘Dark’ is our most reliable clue to what Illiam looked like, apart from the only known portrait, a dignified and sombre work8 which once hung in his family home, Milntown, and now enjoys pride of place in the Manx Museum. This full-length portrait shows a somewhat heavy-set, bearded figure, past the first flush of youth, but with a bright intelligent gaze, a patrician nose and the fresh complexion which some historians have identified as typical of the Manx. The sitter wears the celebrated embroidered cap, the only certified relic of Illiam Dhone, which has been preserved and prized by the Christians of Milntown for generations.9 The cap is of linen, once faded to mottled beige, but now fully conserved and restored.10 Traces remain of an elaborate embroidered pattern worked in silver gilt thread, depicting a series of coiling stems, with stylized honeysuckle and roses; it is typical of the type of headgear known as the ‘linen night cap’, worn indoors, although not in bed, by professional men or by the elderly.
The portrait itself was probably painted in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century, the same date as the frame of the present large canvas. A representative of the National Portrait Gallery, who examined it at Workington Hall in 1930,11 has suggested that it was originally a small canvas of head and shoulders, enlarged into a full-length portrait. Enlarging of this type was not uncommon in portraiture at the time, and would account for the fact that the head and shoulders in the portrait appear to be out of proportion to the rest of the figure. Roy Strong, the National Portrait Gallery’s pre-eminent authority on portraiture of the period, commented somewhat scathingly in a letter to the Manx Museum dated 20 August 1963:
This [the date of the painting] accounts for the inaccurate and somewhat comic costume and I would think that the retouching extends at least into some areas of the original head and shoulders portrait. The lace edging which has been given to the collar strikes me as particularly peculiar; the collar otherwise is of c.1640 and embroidered caps of the sort that he is wearing went on being worn for quite some time. Charles I, for instance, wore one at his execution. There does not seem to be any reason to doubt the sitter’s identity.
At least one other portrait of Illiam Dhone may still be in existence. At one time it was in the possession of a Dr Nelson of Douglas – probably the respected Dr Samuel Christian Nelson (1818–83), reputedly a ‘noble and benevolent man, especially distinguished by the unpaid services he never grudged to the poor’12 – but its present whereabouts are unknown. In this second portrait, the sitter is described as wearing a collarless green coat and close wig, appearing ‘youthful and well-looking, very unlike the expression of foreboding’, no doubt in comparison with the only other known portrait, the full-length work which currently hangs in the Manx Museum.13
Illiam was certainly a well-established young man with good prospects. Like his older brothers, John and Edward, he was prepared to heed his father’s advice when it came to matrimony: John, Illiam’s oldest brother, had married a daughter of John Parker of Bradkirk Manor, Kirkham, and the second brother, Edward, was already established away from Man, having married another heiress, the widowed Dorothy Morley, who had inherited Rosgill Hall, Westmoreland, from her brother, Richard Salkeld. Having successfully overseen the advantageous marriages of his two older sons to English heiresses, Deemster Ewan had never concealed his ambition to see his son Illiam similarly established outside the Island. His suggested bride for his third son was the Lancashire heiress Elizabeth Cockshutt.
The Christian family tree, held in the Manx National Heritage Library, suggests that Illiam Dhone’s bride was ‘an Irish lady’, and that, after Illiam’s downfall, the family were hounded out of the Island by enemies and creditors, and settled in Ireland. Financial aftershocks there certainly were, and although Elizabeth did not originate from Ireland but from north-west England, where her family had owned property at Great Harwood in the Kirkham neighbourhood for four or five generations, several of Illiam Dhone’s direct descendants did eventually make their home in Ireland. The daughter of the wealthy George and Alice Cockshutt, Elizabeth came with a desirable dowry, and after marriage, the happy couple’s extensive property comprised Sparth, with fifty acres of land in Clayton-le-Moors, Birdholme in Great Harwood, and the Warth in Rishton. After Illiam’s death, his widow survived him by less than three years, and was still residing in the Island at the time of her death. Records show that Mrs Elizabeth Christian ‘of Ronaldsway’ was buried in Malew in November 1665.
On their marriage, to match Elizabeth’s dowry of £600, Ewan settled on his son Illiam not only the Warton moiety but also Freckleton, another property previously acquired by the Christians (following the family policy of marrying heiresses), through the dowry of Joan Skillicorn, wife of Deemster John McCrysten V. The Cockshutt money was used to purchase a suitable house for the young couple at Nether Sparth14 (in the district of Clayton Harwood and Rishton) for the sum of £900.
Illiam’s Warton estate possessed considerable potential: one of its most important features was the presence of embryo coal pits. In the seventeenth century, many forward-thinking minds were already contemplating the exploitation of coal-mining as a potential source of wealth. Deemster Ewan clearly cherished the hope that his third son would seize this opportunity to launch his career on the road to riches. There are, however, conflicting views as to whether the coal seam had already been discovered on Illiam’s Lancashire estates before they came into his possession. If it had, Illiam must have disappointed his father’s ambitions for him by failing to make the most of his opportunities to found a profitable empire based on mining. Although other authorities claim the coal seam was not in fact discovered until after Illiam’s sons had sold the estate in 1672, local records show that coal was first mined in the Clayton-le-Moors area over thirty years earlier, in 1641; but by that time, Illiam and Elizabeth had already been back in the Isle of Man for four years.
In 1637, Illiam executed a deed conveying Sparth, Birdholme and Warth to Roger Nowell15 and Laurence Duxbury to hold in trust for him during his lifetime and ‘remainder to his wife for her life in lieu of dower, remainder to eldest son and other sons in order, in consequence of the affection he has for Eliz. his wife’. For whatever reason, having concluded this transaction, Illiam then left Lancashire and returned to the Isle of Man, accompanied by his wife and two young sons.
The Old Deemster now confronted the need to devise a new launchpad for his son’s career, since Illiam had failed to maximise his prospects in Lancashire. Fortunately, Ewan enjoyed the confidence of the Lord of Man and had his finger on the political pulse, and so he was soon able to find a situation he could exploit to his advantage, although this was to have unforeseeable repercussions.
The mid seventeenth century was perhaps the most turbulent and memorable period in Manx history. The Isle of Man was far removed from the seat of central power in Britain; indeed, its location, and the notorious inclemency of the Irish Sea in winter, would frequently play a crucial part in its history; this was certainly the case in the story of Illiam Dhone. Yet despite everything, the Island’s strategic position at the centre of trading and invasion routes across the Irish Sea, and, in the words of one seventeenth-century visitor,16 ‘encompassed by the air and environed by the sea … planted in the deep by the council of the Almighty’, gave it a value and importance far exceeding its geographical size.
Through its remoteness and its history, the small island enjoyed an unusual degree of independence and autonomy. Manx government retained many features of Scandinavian origin, introduced during almost four centuries of Norse rule (c. 800–1266). Chief amongst these were the open-air assembly of Tynwald, which convened annually for the public promulgation of laws; the House of Keys, which acted as a representative body; and the system of local government administration through the Deemsters, or justices. Over this structure presided the Lord of Man, whose position was held to be sacrosanct, on the grounds that he enjoyed the powers of a monarch. The only independent authority in the Island was exercised by the Lord of Man and his representative, the Governor.17 Apart from the extraordinary circumstances of the English Civil War, which would cast the adjacent regions into tumult, the keynote of seventeenth-century Man was the development of efficient bureaucracies (other than land tenure and payment of the Lord’s rent, both of which had been well established since 1507). Reforms were desperately called for and eagerly pursued, the main demand being the right of jury trial, enjoyed by Englishmen since the Magna Carta of 1215. For the Manx this right would not be established until its embodiment in the Act of Tynwald of 1737, the ‘Manx Bill of Rights’.
By 1639, the Lord’s trusted officer Captain Edward Christian had fallen out of favour and been stripped of his post. When Earl James dismissed him, he complained that Edward had become greedy: ‘the more I gave, the more he asked.’ But in 1642, on the outbreak of the English Civil War, James, a devoted Royalist, had immediately thrown himself wholeheartedly into the war on the Royalist side. He raised an army of 5,000 men from north-west England to fight for King Charles I, equipping them at his own expense. He also set about raising troops in the Isle of Man; and it was at this point that he realised that he desperately needed Edward’s skilled leadership.
During the English Civil War, a wounded Royalist veteran and follower of Earl James, ‘Halt’ Will Blundell, spent time recuperating at Castle Rushen as the earl’s guest and took a keen interest in the Island and its people. He noted with approval the ‘constant loyalty’ of the Manx to the English Crown and their unwavering support of the Royalist cause. He observed that the Manx had never raided England, and that the English King Henry VIII had specifically stipulated, in the pact he had contracted with Emperor Charles V in 1541, that if the French were to launch an attack on any of the British islands, especially the Isle of Man, the emperor should send aid.18
Blundell probably overestimated the devotion of the Manx to the English Crown; their dutiful support of the House of Stuart certainly owed more to the power and personal connections of the 7th Earl than to any surge of genuine monarchist sentiment in the Island. As for supplying troops to accompany Lord Derby in his campaign, the Manx had very little choice.
When Earl James found he needed someone of proven ability to command the Manx forces, despite his misgivings, Edward Christian was partly restored to favour. But James, his mind on the campaign ‘across the water’, had underestimated Edward’s social and patriotic conscience. In 1643, Edward, although a wealthy and successful man himself, was tired of seeing his fellow Manxmen groaning under the yoke of crippling tithes and other marks of oppression. Although he himself had much to lose, he led the popular party to rebel. When King Charles I became aware of what was going on, he ordered Lord Derby to return in order to deal with the threat of insurgency. A man ahead of his time, Edward Christian was campaigning for a democratically elected Keys,19 and the imposition on the Keys and the Deemsters of a new oath, which would require them to promise to repeal all laws that were not in the interests of the people. For these criminal activities, after a public encounter with Earl James in which he came off badly, Edward was charged with inciting sedition. He was heavily fined, and thrown into the dungeons of Peel Castle for an indefinite term (he was only released in 1651 when the Parliamentarians assumed control of the Island). Even this level of severity did not entirely satisfy Lord Derby, now completely disillusioned and embittered towards Edward. He admitted that he wished that he had laws in place that would have allowed him to order Edward’s execution. The Manx judges, however, decreed that there was a lack of relevant precedents for imposing the death penalty and James, disappointed of his prey, grumbled that in the Isle of Man the only crime considered deserving of the gallows appeared to be sheep-rustling. He also declared, somewhat presciently: ‘God willing, I will have laws declared for treason, and the like!’
Treason, in this time of conspiracy, civil war and regicide, was a word with ominous overtones, as Lord Derby and others would discover to their cost. When the relationship between the Lord of Man and members of the Christian clan deteriorated to its nadir two decades later, Earl James’s son and successor, Charles, 8th Earl of Derby, had no such qualms. In his pursuit of his quarry, Illiam Dhone, he would refuse to allow the law to stand in his way.
POSSIBLY THE OLD DEEMSTER, having hoped that his third son was set up and settled in Lancashire, was dismayed when, in 1637, Illiam turned up on his doorstep at Milntown accompanied by his wife and two young sons. If Illiam’s unscheduled return to the family fold had caused a problem, however, his resourceful father, with his customary aplomb and extensive sphere of influence, had the means at his disposal to solve it: he perceived a way of exploiting the vexed question of the land tenure to his and his son’s advantage.
There were many reasons for the popular unrest that prevailed in the Island during these unsettled times. People were bitterly resentful of conscription, tithes, the Lord’s monopoly on the grinding of corn and fishing rights, the levying of taxes on all imports and exports, and the quartering of English troops. These impositions would only be ended by the ‘Manx Magna Carta’, the Act of Settlement of 1704. The successful passing of this Act was ascribed by several authorities1 to the good offices of ‘good Bishop Wilson’, and his influence over Earl James’s grandson, another James, the 10th and last Earl of Derby, Lord of Man. But in the mid seventeenth century this solution was a long way off. The greatest source of discontent was the 7th Earl’s claim to the ownership of all land, and his determination to introduce a new system of land tenure, which encountered widespread opposition among the local population.
The background to the land tenure question in the Isle of Man dated from the time of Godred Crovan, whose conquest of Man in 1079 was achieved on the very site at the foot of Skyhill which would later become known as Milntown, family seat of the most powerful branch of the Christian clan. It is traditionally believed that, after his defeat of the Manx at the Battle of Skyhill, Godred reformed the Island’s system of land tenure on new terms which gave the king greater powers. According to the legend, perpetuated in many sources including the Chronicle of Mann,2 Godred introduced a new, non-hereditary system of land tenure, whereby he divided the land between his Norse followers and the surviving Manxmen, stipulating that ‘none should ever presume to claim any of the land by hereditary right’, but only as tenants ‘at will’ to the king.
However, R. H. Kinvig, the eminent Manx historian, contests this. In support of his position, Kinvig quotes Deemster Farrant’s3 argument that, prior to the Scandinavian period, the Manx had held their lands under the pre-feudal tenure system of Odal, or Udal,4 that is, held in uninterrupted succession by hereditary right rather than from the king. Farrant and Kinvig both claim that this system in fact remained relatively unchanged in the Island throughout the Scandinavian period, and only fell into disuse during the dark and chaotic period between the end of Norse rule in 1266, and 1405, when it was granted to the Stanleys.5
The precise nature of the system of land tenure before the Stanley regime is disputed by historians, but of one thing we may be certain: it was complicated. Whatever the truth, the Manx had traditionally treated their lands as hereditary holdings, paying the Lord a small fixed annual rent (comparable to the situation of a fee-farm in England). They had also, over time, begun to look upon the lands they farmed as their own, and to engage in property deals, buying and selling land through the Common Law Court. The procedure in such cases was that the vendor would hand the purchaser a straw grown on the piece of land in question, and this symbolic transaction then constituted the title to the land. (The same applied to transactions involving personal property). Thus the Manx were said to hold their lands ‘by the stipula, or straw’. Such transactions were carried out in the presence of the Lord or his steward. From the legal point of view, the symbolic handing over of the straw meant that one tenant was surrendering his land to the Lord, who then granted it to another tenant, the purchaser.
The system of land tenure ‘by the straw’ had been confirmed by King James I of England in 1607, in the brief but significant period in which the English sovereign was in charge of Man. Two years after this, the Island was returned to the Stanleys, and settled jointly upon Earl James’s parents, William, 6th Earl of Derby and his wife, Elizabeth. But when, as the lord of an English manor might settle among his tenants, James came to live in the Island, he quickly appreciated that, from the Lord’s point of view, there was little profit in this system and at once determined to change it to his advantage. In 1643, as a first step towards transforming the time-honoured system, he enacted a new kind of succession tax called an ‘alienation fine’ on each change of ownership. But he intended to take matters much further. Writing to his son and heir, Charles, the future 8th Earl, he complained that, although his own hereditary rights were paramount, the inhabitants cherished illusions about their own rights and position. They were deluded, of course, in his view, but it was notoriously difficult to argue with the masses and convince them of their error:
They … think that their dwellings are their own ancient inheritances, and that they may pass the same to any, and dispose thereof, without license of the Lord therein, wherein they are much deceived. But it is not always reason can prevail with a multitude.
Doutbtless bearing this last observation in mind, Earl James resolved to outwit those who opposed him, seeking to ‘catch them with guile’ rather than to browbeat them into submission. To this end, he cast around for a few local allies who could further his aims, prominent men who would lead the way in the adoption of the new form of land tenure, thus encouraging others to follow suit. He soon found one influential Manxman prepared to connive with his abandoning of the straw tenure. This was Ewan Christian’s fellow Deemster, John Cannell, son of Sir Hugh Cannell.6 The earl’s supporters stepped up their propagandising endeavours, warning the Islanders that their traditional straw tenure was insecure, and that ‘holding for three lives’ – a leasehold that would last for three lives or twenty-one years – would be beneficial to all parties. If the land were leased, so ran the ‘official’ argument, this would be the equivalent of holding title deeds, which would make it easier to ensure that the land could be passed on to future generations of the occupying family.
Their efforts were met with scepticism. The rumour that the time-honoured and familiar land tenure system was to be revolutionised created widespread anxiety and suspicion throughout a community whose primary source of livelihood was agriculture, and for whom holding land was the equivalent of membership of the minor aristocracy elsewhere. The earl was pleased, therefore, when he was able to strike a bargain with Deemster Cannell. Cannell made a big show of agreeing to change the tenancy of his own lands from the ‘straw tenure’ to the new ‘holding for three lives’ system. However, Cannell was as wily a negotiator as James himself. Before he agreed, he took the precaution of concluding a private arrangement with the Lord of Man, whereby his possessions would subsequently be restored by an Act of Tynwald.
Whatever the terms, Cannell accepted the change. Now, having achieved the collusion of one Deemster, Earl James proceeded to turn his attention to persuading the other, Ewan Christian, of whom he entertained high hopes, remarking: ‘If he breaks the ice, I may well catch some fish.’7 Deemster Ewan, James observed, held extensive lands ‘by the straw’, and had a broad sphere of influence. The Christian family, he noted, had ‘crept into’ all the key positions, married into the most prominent families, and acquired the most desirable land holdings throughout the Island. They were, therefore, a powerful force. The earl surmised that if he succeeded in persuading Ewan Christian to embrace the unpopular new system of leasehold he planned to introduce, others would follow his example:
By reason of his eminence here and that [he] holdeth much of the same tenure of the straw … he is so observed that certainly, as I temper the matter with him in this, so shall I prevail with others … There be many of the Christians in this country – but they have made themselves chief here … by policy they are crept into the principal places of power; and they be seated round about the country, and in the heart of it; they are matched with the best families; have the best livings [that is, farms]; and must not be neglected.8
Ewan Christian had no illusions about the way the wind was blowing. However, the cautious Deemster knew his fellow Manxmen. His fellow Deemster, Cannell, had attracted much opprobrium from his countrymen through his demonstration of sycophancy and duplicity. Ewan had no intention of suffering the same treatment. He therefore devised a more subtle plan that, in addition to boosting his family’s fortunes, would also launch the career of his son Illiam, establishing him as a man of property in the Isle of Man. This enterprise required considerable deviousness on Ewan’s part, and was to have dramatic consequences for Illiam, initially favourable, but ultimately disastrous.
The key to Ewan’s machinations was the ongoing and bitterly contested wrangle over Ronaldsway. In 1643, a petition against Deemster Ewan Christian was presented to the 7th Earl of Derby, Lord of Man, concerning the long-standing dispute between the Calcotts and the Christians of Milntown over the Ronaldsway estate. Ronaldsway (from Norse Ragnwalds-vagr) was an ancient house originating in a watchtower, reputed to have been a dwelling of Godred Crovan, King of Man. The estate was located on a small peninsula, to the east of the bay now known as Derbyhaven.
The 1643 petition was presented to the Lord on behalf of an infant member of the powerful Calcott clan by the child’s trustees, the child being said to have a claim on the Ronaldsway estate, which was currently in the possession of Ewan Christian. Ronaldsway had formerly formed part of the property of Ewan’s widowed sister, Jane Christian. When Jane died childless in 1630, Ewan had managed to register a claim on Ronaldsway under the complicated law of corbes.9 Jane herself had originally inherited the estate from her deceased husband, Deemster Thomas Sam(mes)bury, Illiam Dhone’s uncle by marriage,10 to whom the Calcott child was related. It is in connection with the Ronaldsway affair that the name of Illiam Dhone makes its first appearance in the Manx records.
The earl’s Commissioners had originally suggested a compromise, under the terms of which Ewan Christian was to settle matters with the Calcotts through payment of an undisclosed sum; but the issue had been left undecided, principally because Ewan persistently refused to commit himself financially to its settlement.
The mutual antipathy between the Christians and the Calcotts was of long standing. Back in May 1632, Earl James, then Lord Strange,11 already weary of Ewan’s prevarications, had written him a sharp letter from his Lancashire home at Lathom, intended to bring him to heel and bring matters to a conclusion:
Christian,
I have received your letter of the 28th of April wherin you certifie mee how the case stands between Calcott and the poorer people; but since he still claymes and pretendeth right unto the same and that it concerneth many and myself also, with that it is fit there be some cours used to bring the same unto an end, according to the lawes of the lande (which I am bounde to see done and so will).
Therefore I would have you give them warning that they bringe what [proofs] they can before the 24 for this shall be the last heering of it.
And for you to absent yourself I know no reason, for if I have chosen you Deemster you must do your office there, for if you be not fit to do this business you must not do another neither
And so Farwell for this time
Yor Mr Strange
Lathome 23rd of May 1632
In keeping with his favourite ‘carrot-and-stick’ approach, James added a postscript to this brusque missive, lavishing praise on Illiam Dhone’s eldest brother, John (Deemster Ewan’s heir, assistant Deemster and later Deemster), to whom he extended vague promises of some official post in the future:
Your son hath followed your business well and caryes himself soberly.
Give him charge to doe so still, and I will take the time for some employment for him.
Now, eleven years later, in 1643, the spectre of the Ronaldsway land dispute rose again. The claim raised on behalf of the Calcott infant once again contested Ewan’s right to the estate. Perceiving a potential advantage if they appeared to go along with the Lord’s stance over the land tenure question, the petitioners engaged on behalf of the Calcotts now gave an undertaking that, if the hearing were held and the case decided in the said infant’s favour, they would be willing to surrender the estate to the Lord and lease it back from him for three lives, in accordance with his wishes. James wrote to his son Charles, later 8th Earl and Illiam Dhone’s Nemesis, that it was decreed that there was to be a fair trial, the outcome of which would ‘startle’ the Deemster.12