"In depth" Thomas Ashton (died 1578), headmaster of Shrewsbury School

Shrewsbury School, Castle Gates, Shrewsbury (image) [+]
Shrewsbury School and Castle in 17th Century.

Although not the first headmaster of Shrewsbury School, founded by royal charter in 1552, Thomas Ashton has rightly been regarded as the man who first established its reputation. (1) A predecessor John Eyton had not inspired much confidence among the town’s leaders and by the late 1550s the Shrewsbury bailiffs are known to have been looking for a replacement. They got their man on 21 June 1561 when Ashton was appointed from the Michaelmas following at a comfortable salary of £40 a year, assisted by a first master (salary £8 p.a.), and with provision for another schoolmaster. (2) He was to remain as headmaster until 1571, and despite his resignation in that year he stayed in touch with his former employers and before his death supervised what was in effect a second foundation of the school.

Little is known of Ashton’s career before he came to Shrewsbury, but he had been educated at St. John’s College, Cambridge, and was a fellow by 1522. He remained at the college until 1543 at least, and served as bursar on several occasions. He was therefore, as Barbara Coulton has written, part of the “golden age” of St. John’s which became an early centre of Protestant humanism, its members including John Cheke who set up the school in Prince Edward’s household, and Roger Ascham, tutor to Princess Elizabeth. Also at St. John’s were William Cecil, who later became one of Queen Elizabeth’s most influential advisors, and Thomas Lever who became master of the college and a notable protestant preacher during the reign of Edward VI. When Queen Mary came to the throne Lever resigned and left for Switzerland where he was strongly influenced by Henrich Bullinger, ‘who was defining the role of the reformed ministry at Zurich: the pastor was to preach, teach, admonish, care for, and live in the community, the laity being dependent on the clergy’. (3) This was very much the model that committed reformers tried to implant in Shrewsbury in the decades after Queen Elizabeth’s accession in 1559 – not, it has to be said, without some resistance, as the reaction to John Tomkys, public preacher from 1582 to 1592, indicates. (See the link to the Drapers’ Hall.) By 1560 Lever had returned to England and was settled at Coventry as a preacher maintained by the corporation, while his friend and colleague Thomas Bentham (another Marian ‘exile’) was consecrated bishop of Lichfield the same year. In 1560 both men visited Shrewsbury as part of the effort to resume protestant evangelism in North Shropshire, and although there is no direct proof, it is likely that Ashton’s appointment as headmaster was due to their influence and to the St. John’s connection.

How Ashton himself had spent the intervening years before his arrival in Shrewsbury in 1561 is something of a mystery. A man – or different men – of the same name are known to have had livings in the diocese of Lincoln, in Suffolk (but said to have died in 1558), and at Shawbury in Shropshire, where a Thomas Ashton was ejected in 1555 for not being in priestly orders. Close research may yet produce an answer to this question. (4) Certainly Ashton was already a licensed preacher when he first came to Shrewsbury, and of protestant persuasion. One early 17th century source suggests that Ashton was involved in producing a Whitsun play in Shrewsbury in 1561, and although the accuracy of that source can be doubted, (5) its veracity cannot be ruled out since Ashton was already present in the town by the spring of 1561, working there both as preacher and schoolmaster on what was perhaps a probationary basis. (See further below.) Thus in April 1561 Bishop Bentham wrote to the Archbishop of Canterbury asking that Ashton be allowed to stay at Shrewsbury (i.e. to be given licence for non-residence from his benefice) on the grounds that he was the only ‘godly preacher’ in that part of the diocese, and he had begun ‘a good work to the furtherance of a school in Shrewsbury.’ Bentham’s request reminds us that Ashton’s importance was not just that he established what was soon to become one of the great schools in England, but that he was also effectively, though not formally appointed as such, the first protestant ‘public preacher’ of the town. His significance in relation to Shrewsbury’s history is therefore as much religious as educational. Ashton’s connection to the evangelizing of Shropshire is illustrated by the fact that he became a friend to the Bromleys of Hallon (near Bridgnorth), and in June 1561 was also a sponsor at a family christening of the Corbet family of Shawbury (seven miles NE of Shrewsbury). Both the Bromleys and Corbets were gentry families closely involved with the drive to inculcate protestant belief in the county. Later by the 1570s another godly preacher, Christopher Hawkshurst, the curate of St. Chad’s, was also active in Shrewsbury, and as a graduate of St. John’s College too it is possible that he was a protegé of Ashton’s. (6)

Clearly Ashton’s probationary performance in Shrewsbury was satisfactory as in June 1561, he was appointed headmaster of Shrewsbury School, as described above. He must already have been in late middle-age. His subsequent success in reinvigorating the school is outlined in the general history of the town during this period. Not much is known of his educational programme, but it was evidently derived from the humanist tradtion, with both Greek and Latin being taught. (Ashton himself wrote two textbooks which were used in class. (7)) Better recorded is his role in shifting Shrewsbury’s tradition of popular dramatic performance to an appropriate, reformist direction. There can scarcely be any doubt that this was due both to the fact that Ashton’s old college at St. John’s had possessed a strong dramatic tradition of its own, and to the acceptance by the early protestant reformers of the propriety of theatrical performance, if suitably staged. Martin Bucer, for example, who was Professor of Divinity at Ashton’s old University in 1549-1551, and helped to formulate protestant liturgical thinking about that time, once wrote ‘The young will be able to take part in acting comedies and tragedies and thus provide their public with wholesome entertainment which is not without value in increasing piety: but religious men will be needed to compose these comedies and tragedies, men schooled in the knowledge of Christ’s Kingdom and also endowed with discrimination.’ (8) Such advice neatly describes the role that Ashton came to exercise in Shrewsbury.

At Shrewsbury the Whitsun plays had been staged before the Reformation, as they were afterwards, in a semi-circular amphitheatre called the ‘dry quarry’, near the Austin Friars – not to be confused with the ‘wet quarry’, now known as The Dingle which lies in the Quarry park. (9) The ‘dry quarry’, now occupied by the municipal swimming pool, was used for digging clay as well as for wrestling, bull-baiting, cock fighting and other pastimes. The plays themselves had been quite expensive to put on, and all the craft fellowships of the town were expected to contribute to their production. Money was spent on bells, gold foil, false beards, silver and gold paper, gunpowder, and painted scenery. Dramas had included the martyrdom of Saints Feliciana and Sabina in 1516, which was watched by the abbot of Shrewsbury; the Kings of Cologne, i.e. the Magi of Epiphany, in 1518; and a play about St. Catherine in 1526. Notable spectators included in 1446 Lady Talbot, whose husband John Talbot, earl of Shrewsbury, was killed fighting the French at Castillon near Bordeaux in 1453; Arthur, Prince of Wales in 1495; and the Lord President of the Council in the Marches in 1533. (10)

The sources are not entirely clear as to the precise dates of Ashton’s involvement, but it is certain that he put on plays at Whitsun in 1564, 1565 and 1569. He may also have staged a performance in 1561 on the subject of the Passion of Christ, said to have been his first play, and if so staged prior to his appointment as headmaster. That is not implausible as the bailiffs’s accounts show that in that year the borough entertained him and another gentleman from Cambridge on Whit Sunday. In addition another performance, said to have been Ashton’s ‘great play’, is recorded for 1568. (11) Individual contributions towards the cost of the plays were solicited, and as in the years before the Reformation the craft fellowships were also tapped for money and furnishings (copes and vestments are mentioned). Some at least of the productions were elaborate: in 1565 the town bailiffs passed on £25 to Ashton, a significant sum and one that did not include the craft contributions. (A similar sum was also paid to Ashton in 1566, indicating that a play was probably staged that year as well. (12)) The best recorded play is that of 1569, described by the local annalist as follows: ‘This year at Whitsuntide was a notable stage play played in Shrewsbury in a place called the quarry which lasted all the holidays unto the which came great number of people of noblemen and others, the which was praised greatly. And the chief actor thereof was one Master Ashton being the head schoolmaster of the free school there, a godly and learned man who took marvellous great pains therein.’ (13)

In 1587 Thomas Churchyard, a poet who had been born in Shrewsbury, described the dry quarry and the scene as it had once been in the days of Ashton’s productions:

‘A space belowe, to bayt both Bull and Beare,
For Players too, great roume and place at will.
And in the same, a Cocke pit wondrous feare,
Besides where men, may wrastle in their fill.
A ground most apt, and they that sits above
At once in vewe, all this may see for love:
At Aston’s Play, who had beheld this then,
Might well have seene, there twentie thousand men.’

And in the margin of the book in which the poem was published, Churchyard added, ‘Maister Aston was a good and godly preacher.’ (14) It is not implausible that the audience, gathered around the slopes of the dry quarry, might have numbered at least a few thousand. Ashton’s Whitsun plays were clearly a great occasion in the town, whose population at that date was in excess of 3,000, and the borough is known to have solicited contributions from the surrounding countryside, indicating that spectators were not restricted to townsfolk. (15) That the plays were well known outside Shrewsbury’s hinterland is suggested by the experience of the London haberdasher John Smith. Visiting friends in Leominster, Herefordshire, in 1569, he heard that the plays (there was evidently more than one performance) were to be held at Shrewsbury that Whitsuntide, and came north to see them. (16) He arrived some days before the plays began, and found lodgings at the ‘mansion’ of George Higgons. (An inn no doubt, and quite possibly what is now the Lion and Pheasant at the bottom of Wyle Cop. Higgons is known to have resided in that location – see the notes on that property. It would have been one of the first inns Smith would have seen on crossing the English Bridge.) Smith went to see the performance on the last day of May and as he was leaving afterwards, ‘amongst many people’, he found a hat and brooch lying on the ground. Taking the hat back to his lodgings, he removed the brooch, which was valuable, found a pawnbroker and got ten shillings for it. Unfortunately the loss of these belongings had already been notified to the town authorities and broadcast by public proclamation around the town. Smith was then brought before the J.P.s, examined and bound over, though he denied having heard any proclamation.

Whether or not Ashton performed in all his plays, he was clearly what would now be called the producer. His key role in the staging of the Whitsun plays emphasizes the significance of Ashton’s public persona in Shrewsbury. He was, like other public preachers in protestant England, something of a civic mentor, ‘a magisterial figure, as headmaster, preacher, and rebuker of corrupt officers in the town.’ (17) During a bitter dispute on the town council in 1571-2, Ashton himself had admonished the warring parties in a sermon, stating that ‘it was a shame to bring such a stink of their factions and debates’. (18) Later he was to rebuke‘ill-meaners’ who were hindering his efforts to draw up new ordinances for the school, threatening one pair of bailiffs, ‘Before God, if you look not better to it, I will alter all anew’. (19) He was not a man to be trifled with, yet nonetheless much respected in the community, and a person to whom one could turn for help or advice. In 1562, for example, he was asked to arbitrate in a dispute between the lawyer Richard Prynce and Thomas France, a glover, both residents of Abbey Foregate, in a dispute over the rental obligations attached to a house of which France was the tenant. (20) And he was also often consulted by the Drapers’ and Mercers’ companies over disputes and other matters. (21) In religion too Ashton’s role was crucial. By about 1570 the bishop Thomas Bentham was planning to set up a preaching ‘exercise’ in Shrewsbury (there were by then sufficient preachers in the vicinity to justify it), with Ashton himself serving as the moderator. In the event, with the headmaster’s career turning in other directions, the plan had to be postponed. (22)

But Ashton’s reputation was not merely local, however much Bentham might describe him, as he listed the reliable protestants of North Shropshire, as ‘a worthy man amongst them’. (23) Along with his friend Sir Andrew Corbet of Shawbury, Ashton was employed by the Crown to thwart efforts to send funds to supporters in Scotland of Mary Stuart, by then a prisoner in England; and in that respect had corresponded with that other alumnus of St. John’s College, William Cecil (now Lord Burghley) about Thomas Browne, a Shrewsbury draper and busy-body who had played a minor role in uncovering the duke of Norfolk’s treasonable dealings with Ridolphi and Mary Stuart. By 1571 Ashton was in the north reporting on the situation there. Writing to Cecil, he condemned ‘double faced gentlemen’ who were ‘protestants in the Court and in the country secret papists’. (Cecil had advised the Queen that good schoolmasters were a key to suppressing the number of Catholic adherents. Ashton would have been the kind of master he had in mind.) In the autumn of 1571 Ashton also joined the household of Walter Devereux, then Viscount Hereford, later first earl of Essex, as tutor to his son, and in 1574 he was sent to Ireland to persuade Essex to make peace with Turlough Luineach O’Neill. Successful, he afterwards acted as mediator in a serious quarrel between Essex and Robert Dudley, earl of Leicester. (24) He was sent to Ireland again by the Queen in 1575 to persuade Essex to give up his Ulster enterprise, and when Essex died in 1576 he bequeathed Ashton an annuity of £40 for life and made him a trustee of his son, the ill-fated Robert Devereux (whose subsequent tutor was to be one of Ashton’s former pupils at Shrewsbury School, Robert Wright).

Clearly Ashton was held in high regard by some of the leading figures at the Elizabethan court, and the additional responsibilities thrust upon him from the late 1560s may explain why he resigned as headmaster of Shrewsbury School in 1571. Two years later in 1573 he was to be admitted to the living of Haversham in Buckinghamshire, supplementing the livings he already had at Stockton, near Bridgnorth, and at Keyston, Huntingdonshire, to which last he had been presented by the earl of Essex. (Ashton had probably had preferment thoughout his time at Shrewsbury. (25)) Yet despite his resignation from the school, and the burden of the tasks which he undertook in the 1570s, Ashton was still consulted on Shrewsbury affairs, and in October 1572 acted as an arbitrator in the on-going dispute on the town council. (26) His continuing interest in the affairs of the school is well-known. Ashton in effect oversaw a second foundation. First in 1571, entirely through his own efforts – in the course of which he had an audience with the Queen – he substantially increased the school revenues, obtaining from the Crown a grant of the valuable tithes of Chirbury in the west of the county, together with some of the revenues of the dissolved college of St. Mary (Shrewsbury). Secondly, after negotiations which often frustrated him in his old age, Ashton drew up the detailed school Ordinances of 1578 which were to remain in force until 1798. (27)

By giving the right to appoint the masters to the fellows of St. John’s College, Cambridge, subject to corporation approval and the condition that candidates should be preferred who had been educated at the school, Ashton ensured that his old college would retain an important role in the school’s subsequent history. In that way, so he must have calculated, the school would remain within the ambit of an upright, national protestantism. Doubtless then Ashton would have approved when in 1586, eight years after his death, the school-boys laid on an anti-papist ‘triumph’. The scholars were arrayed in the Quarry (then usually known as the ‘pasture behind the walls’), ‘against the pope’s army and other rebels, whom they triumphantly vanquished to the great rejoicing of the beholders, departing from the field through the town victoriously towards the castle there being over the town, where they with sound of trumpet, drum and shouts, sounded out their victory, with great fires made and thankful psalms most joyfully sung to God in the comfortable hearing of all the town.’ (28) This event took place during the tenure, as public preacher, of John Tomkys, who was to take, or attempt to take, protestant reformation in Shrewsbury a good deal further (see the link to the Draper’s Hall).

The ‘triumph’ of 1586 is a reminder of its kind that theatrical performance remained a feature of the life of Shrewsbury School. Under the 1578 Ordinances the top form at the school had to ‘declaim and play’ an act of a comedy every Thursday in term-time, and it has generally been assumed, though not proved, that the scholars themselves took part in the Whitsun plays. (29) However, with Ashton’s affairs taking him elsewhere, followed by his resignation from the school, the Whitsun plays themselves appear to have been discontinued. And in 1575 the town council agreed that a frame of timber that stood in the Quarry, which may have been used to stage the plays, should be given to the school for its own use. (30) But Ashton’s legacy lived on, and at St. John’s College in 1579, at least five of the actors in a performance of Legge’s ‘Richard the Third’ had been to Shrewsbury School, including the poet and playwright Abraham Fraunce. (31) On several occasions around this time the school also laid on displays or pageants for the visiting Council in the Marches, as in May 1581 when the lord President Sir Henry Sidney, who was leaving Shrewsbury by barge, was greeted by several scholars on an island downstream of the Castle. Dressed as green nymphs with willow branches tied to their heads, they recited verses across the water as the Lord President passed by, ‘And will your honour needs depart, and must it needs be so? Would God we could like fishes swim, that we might with thee go.’ Admitting that the verses were ‘somewhat tedious’, the town annalist nonetheless recorded that Sidney, whose own son (Sir) Philip Sidney had been admitted to the school in 1564, was brought close to tears. (32)

In a letter to the Shrewsbury bailiffs in May 1577 Ashton reflected on his work in the town: ‘It was the good providence of God which made you commit the credit of such a matter to a weak person at the first, whose purposed power should give strength of the same at the last’. Working with the townsmen his had been a great achievement, as William Camden, master of Westminster, acknowledged: ‘they have set up a school for the training up of children, wherein were more scholars in number, when I first saw it, than in any one school throughout all England.’ The new Ordinances of the school, Ashton’s crowning achievement, were finally drawn up and signed in February 1578, and in August ‘that godly father’, as the local annalist described him, paid his last visit to the town where ‘he preached famously’. A fortnight later on 29 August Thomas Ashton died near Cambridge. (33) The finest tribute to him was one paid some years later by one of his former pupils at Shrewsbury School Andrew Downes, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, and one of the translators who produced the Authorized Version of the Bible under James I: ‘After God and my parents he is the person to whom I am most indebted for all the literature I possess. . . Whatever I have of humanity, or of any good in me, proceeds from him nor do I feel so grateful to the Almighty for anything else as for this, that, by his Providence, I enjoyed the advantage of a preceptor supreme, indeed an unparalleled felicity, that my father put me, when a boy, under the care of this most excellent person.’ (34)

Sources
1 Except where stated this account is based on the entry on Ashton in the Dictionary of National Biography (2004 edn.); Barbara Coulton, ‘The Establishment of Protestantism in a Provincial Town: A Study of Shrewsbury in the Sixteenth Century’, Sixteenth Century Journal , xxvii (1996), especially pp. 312-320; and Barbara Coulton, ‘Implementing the Reformation in the urban community: Coventry and Shrewsbury 1559-1603’, Midland History, xxv. (2000).
2 Shropshire Archives [SA] 3365/76, fo. 45v.
3 Coulton, ‘Establishment’, 312.
4 The Shawbury case is interesting given Ashton’s known friendship with the Corbets of that place (see text). My thanks to James Lawson for information on the question of Ashton’s whereabouts before 1561.
5 J. Alan Somerset, Records of Early English Drama. Shropshire, 2 vols. (Toronto, 1994), ii. 378-80.
6 Coulton, ‘Implementing the Reformation’, 51.
7 B. Oldham, A History of Shrewsbury School (1952), 7.
8 Quoted by Coulton, ‘Establishment’, 315.
9 Somerset, ib. ii. 387-388.
10 Somerset ib. i. 134, 161, 172-3, 183, 191. Bill Champion, Everyday Life in Tudor Shrewsbury (1994), 9-10. A typescript copy of this book, but with notes and corrections, can be found at Shropshire Archives [SA] qD64.5, Acc. 46/1.
11 Somerset, ib. 207, 211; ii. 379-80. Coulton, ib. 315.
12 Somerset, ib. 207-215.
13 Transactions Shropshire Archaeological Society [T.S.A.S.] iii. (1880), 268.
14 Thomas Churchyard, The worthines of Wales (Spencer Society edn. 1876), 85.
15 Somerset, ib. 211.
16 For the following, see Somerset, ib. 212.
17 Coulton, ib. 317.
18 National Archives [NA] STAC 5 P61/9, P9/34.
19 Coulton, ib. 317; Oldham, A History of Shrewsbury School, 9.
20 NA C3/68/56. The house had belonged to Shrewsbury abbey, and the rent had then included an obligation to deliver a load of fire-wood from Lythwood. Prynce claimed this, France denied it.
21 Coulton, ‘Implementing the Reformation’, 51.
22 Coulton, ib.
23 For this paragraph, see the sources given in note 1.
24 Already in Feb. 1573 Ashton had written to Dudley with great freedom and frankness about Dudley’s behaviour: Longleat MSS. (My thanks to James Lawson for this information.)
25 Information supplied by James Lawson.
26 SA 3365/76, fo. 161.
27 A copy of the ordinances can be found in H.W. Adnitt (ed.), History of Shrewsbury School (1889), 46-52.
28 T.S.A.S. iii. (1880), 307-08.
29 Oldham, ib. 23.
30 Somerset, ib. i. 220.
31 Ibid. 12.
32 T.S.A.S. iii. (1880), 287.
33 Coulton, ‘Establishment’, 319-20; T.S.A.S. iii. (1880), 280.
34 Oldham, ib. 7-8.