Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 57.djvu/83

 died 26 Sept. 1491, having married Anne, daughter of Sir Thomas Itchingham. After her first husband's death, she married John Rogers, by whom she had a son Henry. She died between 11 Nov. 1497, when her will was made, and 24 June 1498, when it was proved, outliving her second husband (Testamenta Vetusta, p. 436).

James, the son and heir of the sixth baron, born about 1465, was made K.B. at the creation of Prince Edward as Prince of Wales in 1475. He succeeded his father in the barony on 26 Sept. 1491, and was summoned to parliament from 12 Aug. 1492 to 16 Jan. 1496–7. He was in France with Henry VII on the expedition of 1492, and possibly may have there got into debt, and consequently became dissatisfied. One account makes him a petitioner for peace, but that was but a device of Henry to have an excuse for the peace of Etaples. In consequence of the Scottish war occasioned by Perkin Warbeck fresh taxation was necessary, and though it ought not to have pressed hardly on the poor, they seem to have been roused by agitators to resistance. The outbreak began in the early part of 1497 in Cornwall. The rebels, marching towards London, reached Well, and there were joined by Lord Audley, who at once assumed the leadership. On 16 June 1497 Blackheath was reached, and on 17 June the rebels were decisively defeated by the Earl of Oxford and Lord Daubeny. Audley was taken prisoner, brought before the king and council on 19 June and condemned. On the 28th he was led, clothed in a paper coat, from Newgate to Tower Hill, and there beheaded. His head was stuck on London Bridge. His body was buried at the Blackfriars Church. He married, first, Joan, daughter of Fulk, lord Fitzwarine, by whom he had a son John, who was restored in blood in 1512, and was ancestor of, baron Audley and earl of Castlehaven [q. v.]; secondly, Margaret, daughter of Richard Dayrell of Lillingston Dayrell, Buckinghamshire, who long survived him.



TOUCHET, JAMES, of Hely or Heleigh, third  (1617?–1684), the eldest son and heir of Mervyn, lord Audley, second earl of Castlehaven, by his first wife, Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of Benedict Barnham, alderman of London, was born about 1617. His father (1592?–1631), a man of the most profligate life, who married for his second wife Lady Anne, daughter of, fifth earl of Derby [q. v.], and widow of, fifth baron Chandos [q. v.], was executed for unnatural offences, after a trial by his peers, on 14 May 1631 ({{sc|Cobbett}, State Trials, iii. 401–26; The Arraignment and Conviction of Mervin Touchet, Earl of Castlehaven, with rough portrait as frontispiece, London, 1642; accounts of arraignment and trial, letters before his death, confession of faith, and dying speech and execution in Harl. MSS. 2194 ff. 26–30, 738 f. 25, 791 f. 34, 2067 f. 5, 6865 f. 17, 7043 f. 31). He was the only son and heir of George Touchet, baron Audley (1550?–1617), sometime governor of Utrecht, who was wounded at the siege of Kinsale on 24 Dec. 1601, was an undertaker in the plantation of Ulster, was summoned by writ to the Irish House of Lords on 11 March 1613–14, was created a peer of Ireland as Baron Audley of Orier, co. Armagh, and Earl of Castlehaven, co. Cork, on 6 Sept. 1616, and died in March 1617 (, Plantation of Ulster, pp. 134, 335; Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1611–18, p. 449).

When a mere boy of thirteen or fourteen, James, earl of Castlehaven, was married to Elizabeth Brydges (daughter of his father's second wife, Anne, by her first husband, Grey Brydges, fifth baron Chandos of Sudeley). When scarcely twelve years of age, the girl had been forced by her stepfather into criminal intercourse with her mother's paramour, one Skipwith. She died in 1679, and was buried on 16 March at St. Martin's-in-the-Fields. Utterly neglected as to his education, and disgusted at the scenes of bestiality he was compelled to witness, but preserving his natural sense of decency intact, ‘he appealed for protection from the earl, his natural father, to the father of his country, the king's majesty,’ and was instrumental in bringing his father to justice (Cal. State Papers, Dom. 1629–31 p. 371, 1631–3 p. 20). His conduct, though a severe strain on his filial duty, was regarded with approval, and on 3 June 1633 he was created Baron Audley of Hely, with remainder ‘to his heirs for ever,’ and with the place and precedency of George, his grandfather; but in the meanwhile most of his father's estates in England had passed into the possession of Lord Cottington and others. In so far as the creation was virtually a restoration to an ancient dignity it lay outside the power of the crown alone to make it, but the necessary