John Tunstall (usher)

John Tunstall or Tonstal was a servant and gentleman-usher to Anne of Denmark, wife of James VI and I in England, and Henrietta Maria, wife of Charles I.

John Tunstall grew Colchicum variegatum in his Croydon garden

Career

In the summer of 1615 Anne of Denmark visited Bath twice for her health to bathe in the warm spring water.^[1] John Tunstall was later paid £105-10s-9d for fitting up her lodging in Bath and some expenses of her journeys.^[2]

In February 1618, Tunstall was sent to the Lady Elizabeth, Electress Palatine in Heidelberg. He carried a gift of £100 for her nurses and midwives, following the birth of Charles Louis.^[3]

Tunstal served as an usher to Henrietta Maria, as did Francis Constable and Timothy Pinkney, two of the quarter waiter ushers who had served Anne of Denmark.

Tunstall helped organise the performance of a masque Gargantua and Gargamella at Somerset House, then known as Denmark House, to celebrate the birthday of Henrietta Maria, on 16 November 1626. In the performance, the court dwarf Jeffrey Hudson fenced with a giant, the Welsh porter William Evans.^[4]

Tunstall had a house at Edgcome or Edgecombe (later Addiscombe) by Croydon, and the flowers he grew for Henrietta Maria, including Colchicum variegatum and Myosotis arvensis were mentioned and illustrated by the botanists John Gerard and John Parkinson.^[5] His gardener sent supplies to John Newdigate, who had a house at Croydon and a portrait of Tunstall.^[6] In the 1630s he objected to commissioners taking saltpetre from his pigeon-house or dovecote for making gunpowder and had it demolished.^[7]

Tunstall and the Newdigate family

John Tunstall married Penelope Leveson, a daughter of Walter Leveson of Lilleshall in Shropshire.^[8] and a sister of the vice-admiral Richard Leveson (died 1605).^[9] Penelope Leveson was a cousin of the Fittons and Newdigate families.^[10]

Tunstall was a godparent to the children of Anne Newdigate, and may have arranged an invitation for her and daughter Mary Newdigate (1598-1643), to attend a masque at court in January 1617,^[11][12] probably The Vision of Delight.^[13] Mary Newdigate later married Edmund Bolton, whose sister may have been the Elizabeth Bolton who took part in Robert White's Masque of Cupid's Banishment at Ladies Hall, Deptford.^[14] One of Anne Newdigate's daughters, Lettice Newdigate (1604-1625), attended the Ladies Hall school in 1620 (or a school in Deptford). Her portrait, aged 2, at Arbury Hall, includes one of the earliest depictions of an English knot garden.^[15]

Tuntall was a godfather to Lettice or Anne Bolton, daughters of Edward Bolton and Mary Newdigate.^[16] In May 1621 he was a witness to the marriage settlement of Susan Lulls, the daughter of a court goldsmith Arnold Lulls to John Newdigate (1600-1643). Tunstall may have made an introduction between the apparently wealthy goldsmith and a gentry family in some financial difficulty.^[17]

References

1. Emanuel Green, 'The Visits to Bath of Two Queens', Proceedings of the Bath Natural History and Antiquarian Field Club, 7 (Bath, 1893), p. 223.
2. Frederick Devon, Issues of the Exchequer During the Reign of James I (London, 1836), p. 183.
3. Frederick Devon, Issues of the Exchequer During the Reign of James I (London, 1836), p. 206.
4. Thomas Postlewait, 'Notorious Jeffrey Hudson: The Court Wonder of the Caroline Masques', Nadine George-Graves, The Oxford Handbook of Dance and Theater (Oxford, 2015), p. 629.
5. John Gerard, Herball Or Generall Historie of Plantes, vol. 1 (London, 1636), p. 161: Charles E. Raven, English Naturalists from Neckam to Ray (Cambridge, 1947), p. 282: George Steinman, A history of Croydon (London, 1833), p. 49.
6. Vivienne Larminie, Wealth, Kinship, and Culture: The 17th-Century Newdigates of Arbury (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), pp. 168-9.
7. John Bruce, Calendar of State Papers, Domestic, 1634-1635 (London, 1864), p. 388 no. 53.
8. Visitations of the County of Surrey (London, 1899), p. 189.
9. Vivienne Larminie, Wealth, Kinship, and Culture: The 17th-Century Newdigates of Arbury (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), pp. 131, 213.
10. Anne Emily Garnier Newdegate, Gossip from a Muniment Room: being passages in the Lives of Anne and Mary Fytton, 1574–1618 (London: David Nutt, 1897).
11. Vivienne Larminie, 'Newdigate , Anne, Lady Newdigate (1574–1618)', Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004
12. Vivienne Larminie, 'The undergraduate account book of John and Richard Newdigate, 1618-1621', Camden Miscellany, XXX (London, 1990).
13. Vivienne Larminie, Wealth, Kinship, and Culture: The 17th-Century Newdigates of Arbury (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), p. 123.
14. Anne Emily Garnier Newdegate, Gossip from a Muniment Room: being passages in the Lives of Anne and Mary Fytton, 1574–1618 (London: David Nutt, 1897): John Nichols, Progresses of James the First, vol. 3 (London, 1828), p. 284: Vivienne Larminie, 'The undergraduate account book of John and Richard Newdigate, 1618-1621', Camden Miscellany, XXX (London, 1990), p. 202.
15. Kenneth Charlton, Women, Religion and Education in Early Modern England (Routledge, 1999), p. 137 (as a niece): Roy Strong, The British Portrait, 1660-1960 (Woodbridge, 1999), p. 43: Mary's daughter was Lettice Bolton (1629-1694).
16. Vivienne Larminie, Wealth, Kinship, and Culture: The 17th-Century Newdigates of Arbury (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), pp. 131, 210.
17. Vivienne Larminie, Wealth, Kinship, and Culture: The 17th-Century Newdigates of Arbury (Woodbridge: Boydell, 1995), pp. 39-40, 136.