Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 44.djvu/106

 and Heath, archbishop of York, and Thirlby, bishop of Ely, were deprived at his house in Austin Friars (ib. vi. 194;, p. 203). For some years he was on excellent terms with Cecil, to whom he wrote, after an English reverse before Leith in May 1560, that ‘worldly things would sometimes fall out contrary, but if quietly taken could be quietly amended’ (, vi. 370). Three months later, when the queen visited him at Basing, he sent the secretary warning against certain ‘back counsels’ about the queen (ib. vi. 413). Elizabeth was so pleased with the good cheer he made her that she playfully lamented his great age, ‘for, by my troth,’ said she, ‘if my lord treasurer were but a young man, I could find it in my heart to have him for a husband before any man in England’ (, Annals, i. 367). Two years later, when she was believed to be dying, Winchester persuaded the council to agree to submit the rival claims to the succession to the crown lawyers and judges, and to stand by their decision (, vi. 589). He was opposed to all extremes. In 1561, when there was danger of a Spanish alliance to cover a union between the queen and Dudley, he supported the counter-proposal of alliance with the French Calvinists, but seven years later he deprecated any such championship of protestantism abroad as might lead to a breach with Spain, and recommended that the Duke of Alva should be allowed to procure clothes and food for his soldiers in England, ‘that he might be ready for her grace when he might do her any service’ (ib. vi. 461, viii. 445). He disliked the turn Cecil was endeavouring to give to English policy, and he was in sympathy with, if he was not a party to, the intrigues of 1569 against the secretary (, p. 151).

Winchester was still in harness when he died, a very old man, at Basing House on 10 March 1572. His tomb remains on the south side of the chancel of Basing church. Winchester was twice married, and lived to see 103 of his own descendants (ib.) His first wife was Elizabeth (d. 25 Dec. 1558), daughter of Sir William Capel, lord mayor of London in 1503, by whom he had four sons—(1) John, second marquis of Winchester; (2) Thomas; (3) Chediok, governor of Southampton under Mary and Elizabeth; (4) Giles—and four daughters: Elizabeth, Margaret, Margerie, and Eleanor, the last of whom married Sir Richard Pecksall, master of the buckhounds, and died on 26 Sept. 1558 (, p. 367;, ii. 377). By his second wife, Winifrid, daughter of Sir John Bruges, alderman of London, and widow of Sir Richard Sackville, chancellor of the exchequer, he left no issue. She died in 1586.

Sir Robert Naunton [q. v.], in his reminiscences of Elizabethan statesmen (he was nine years old at Winchester's death), reports that in his old age he was quite frank with his intimates on the secret of the success with which he had weathered the revolutions of four reigns. ‘Questioned how he had stood up for thirty years together amidst the changes and ruins of so many chancellors and great personages, “Why,” quoth the marquis, “ortus sum e salice non ex quercu.” And truly it seems the old man had taught them all, especially William, earl of Pembroke’ (Fragmenta Regalia, p. 95).

Winchester rebuilt Basing House, which he obtained license to fortify in 1531, on so princely a scale that, according to Camden, his posterity were forced to pull down a part of it. An engraving of the mansion after the famous siege is given in Baigent (p. 428). The marquis was one of those who sent out the expedition of Chancellor and Willoughby to northern seas in 1553, and became a member of the Muscovy Company incorporated under Mary (Calendar of State Papers, ed. Lemon, p. 65;, Memorials, v. 520). A portrait by a painter unknown is engraved in Doyle's ‘Official Baronage,’ and another, which represents him with the treasurer's white staff, in Walpole's edition of Naunton (p. 103), from a painting also, it would seem, unassigned, in King's College, Cambridge. Two portraits are mentioned in the catalogue of the Tudor exhibition (Nos. 323, 348), in both of which he grasps the white staff. If the latter, which is in the Duke of Northumberland's collection, is correctly described, its ascription to Holbein must be erroneous, as he did not become treasurer until 1550, and the artist died in 1543.

[Cal. of Letters and Papers of the Reign of Henry VIII, ed. Brewer and Gairdner; Cal. of Dom. State Papers, 1547–80, ed. R. Lemon; Rymer's Fœdera, original edition; Strype's Memorials and Annals, Clarendon Press edition; Camden's Annales Rerum Anglicarum regnante Elizabetha, ed. 1615; Naunton's Fragmenta Regalia, ed., with Hentzner's Travels, by Horace Walpole in 1797; Machyn's Diary, the Chronicle of Calais, and Wriothesley's Chronicle, published by the Camden Soc.; Froude's Hist. of England; Collinson's Hist. of Somerset; Baigent and Millard's Hist. of Basingstoke; Cayley's Architectural Memoir of Old Basing Church, including Armorials and Monuments of the Paulet Family, by S. J. Salter (Basingstoke, 1891); Brooke's Catalogue of Nobility, 1619; Dugdale's Baronage; Courthope's Historic Peerage, and Doyle's Official Baronage.] 