George Puttenham - Domestic Disputes and Later Legal Troubles

Domestic Disputes and Later Legal Troubles

Much of the information known about George's later personal and professional life stems from court records of the dissolution of his marriage and of his attempt to get out of debt by wresting control of Sherfield House from his niece Anne Morris and her husband, Francis. These documents paint a decidedly troubled picture of George Puttenham as a compulsive adulterer, a serial rapist and a wife-beater. In addition he seems to have followed his elder brother's precedent in having at least one child with his maidservants. One he took to Flanders and abandoned. One of the more lascivious stories asserts that when Puttenham was forty-three, he also had his servant kidnap a 17-year-old girl in London and bring her to his farm at Upton Grey near Sherfield, where he raped her and kept her locked up for three years.

While the veracity of these court records should reasonably be questioned (given the particularly nasty nature of Puttenham's divorce and the tendency of early modern court cases to present the most fantastical accounts of their participants), surprisingly little was said in defense of Puttenham's character. It is, perhaps, telling that the neutral observer Richard Horne, Bishop of Winchester, reacted with surprise and disdain to Puttenham's appointment as a Justice of the Peace, writing to William Cecil, Lord Burghley hoping that it "be not true, for his evil life is well knowne."

In 1579 he presented to Elizabeth I his Partheniades (printed in a collection of manuscript Ballads by F. J. Furnivall), and he wrote the treatise in question especially for the delectation of the queen and her ladies. He mentions nine other works of his, none of which are extant. George Puttenham is said to have been implicated in a plot against Lord Burghley in 1570 and in December 1578 was imprisoned. In 1585 he received reparation from the privy council for alleged wrongs suffered at the hands of his relations. His will is dated September 1, 1590.