William Whiteway’s diary
Roger Guttridge takes a peep at the Pepys of Dorchester
Published in January ’18
There is nothing like a diary to bring history alive and the seventeenth century scribblings of the Dorchester merchant and MP William Whiteway are among the best. Though presumably not intended for publication, William’s diary is full of stories of the kind that would make the newspapers even today. For seventeen years until his untimely death in 1635, William jotted down news from
far and near – of wars and politics, of fire, flood and sickness, of the fortunes and misfortunes of family and strangers alike.
Even astronomical events came to his attention. His first entry in 1618 records a comet or ‘blazing star’ while in May 1629 there was a ‘white circle seen about the sun, after which followed much fair and dry and hot weather for a long season’. The following January and February there were ‘strange flashes of light seen in the sky, which much troubled the King and court’.
The weather pops up regularly. In January and February 1624, ‘we had extreme frost and much snow, so that many died of cold upon the highways. The River Thames was frozen over.’ October of the same year brought ‘an extraordinary storm of wind and rain, which blew down many houses, overthrew many great trees, cast away many ships in all ports’. Four ships were wrecked at Weymouth alone and eleven Frenchmen drowned. In August 1629 a gale in Dorset ‘tore a coach all in pieces upon Eggardun Hill, and beat out the brains of a waiting maid that was in it’. January 1635 was cold enough to freeze the ink in the diarist’s pen.
William records news of several fires, including one which destroyed twenty-seven houses at Dorchester in 1623, claiming one life and causing damage worth £3,500. The following year ‘six houses were burnt at Poole about midnight, and a day before one house at Blandford’. In August 1634, ‘the town of Bere Regis was burnt, the most part of it to the ground, with great quantity of corn. The loss is valued at £20,000.’
The plague was a constant worry and Whiteway includes many reports on ‘the sickness’ in Dorset and elsewhere. In 1625 more than 9,000 Londoners died in one week as well as some in Dorset and other counties. The following year ‘the sickness began to break out in Blandford, very dangerously, and within ten days after at Bridport, and spread into many parishes thereabouts. At Blandford there died in all some twenty persons. In Bridport seventy. It was suspected also again to be in Weymouth.’
These were the days of the so-called Pilgrim Fathers, and 1634 William wrote: ‘Mr Neuburgh of Marshwood Vale and many others set sail from Weymouth towards New England … This summer there went over to that plantation at least twenty sail of ships, and in them 2,000 planters.’
Few political or international events escaped William’s attention. In November 1618, he noted disapprovingly that ‘Sir Walter Raleigh was beheaded in London about the end of October, and after his death was much lamented by the Londoners’. The entry for April 1, 1621, begins: ‘This day died Philip III, King of Spain, having the day before proclaimed war against the Low Countries.’ The following January, King James I of England had a lucky escape while riding in his deer park. ‘Being upon the ice, it brake, and his horse fell
backward into the water, and the King all under water was drawn out by the legs, lay speechless for an hour, having received much water into his mouth, but is now well recovered, God be praised.’
James I’s death in 1625 and the succession of Charles I are dealt with at length. Five years later Whiteway notes that the birth of Prince Charles (the future Charles II) was accompanied by the appearance of a new star. He had no inkling of the Civil War that was soon to engulf the nation and its royal family – and that he would not live to witness.
William includes much gossip of the day, such as the beheading of the Earl of Castlehaven for sodomy and other sex offences at Fonthill near Shaftesbury, and Clement Walker’s stabbing of his wife ‘as they sat at dinner’ in 1629. At Sherborne in 1634, a maid was ‘barbarously ravished and killed near the Lodge; and it was suspected that some of the Earl of Bristol’s servants were the authors of it, but the matter was smothered’.
William reports an unsuccessful three-day search for buried treasure at Upwey and a court case at Winchester, where a highway robber facing execution threw a piece of flint at the judge and removed his black cap. Nearer home, in November 1625 ‘died Robert Blandford, servant to Mr Gardner, having been bitten by a mad dog six weeks before’. During a game of bowls near Bridport in 1634, things got out of hand and one player ‘beat out his fellow’s brains with a bowl’.
William records the major events in his own family, including his marriage to MP’s daughter Elenor Parkins at Holy Trinity in 1620 ‘in the presence of the greatest part of the town’. The following year his grandmother Elenor Chappell died leaving her estate to her son Richard, who himself died eight days later leaving everything to his wife. William and Elenor Whiteway had eight children but six died in infancy. In February 1635 William was treated for ‘shortness of breath’ and chest pains. He died four months later aged 36 and before the birth of his eighth child, Mary.
William Whiteway of Dorchester: His Diary 1618-1635 was published by the Dorset Record Society in 1991 and reprinted in 2015.
