Hope of Israel: Destination Yorkshire

The final destination in our Hope of Israel tour is Yorkshire, the home region of Lucy's parents, John and Mary Dunnington. During the English Civil War, Yorkshire was mainly royalist. Many Catholic families lived in Yorkshire in opposition to the ban on Catholics in England during the Interregnum from 1649-1660. When Charles II took the throne after eleven years of Puritan rule of Britain, he set the tone for a more open period of religious toleration in England. Catholics and Jews were not welcome, but tolerated as long as they knew their place. Of course this period of toleration did not extend to Charles's brother, James, who became king in 1685. James was openly Catholic. When his second wife, Mary of Modena, gave birth to a son in 1688, Protestant nobles called upon James's son-in-law, William of Orange, to invade England and take the throne. There has never been a Catholic monarch since James II.

Thorganby, winter

Lucy's mother was an ardent Catholic who refused to attend the state church, the Anglican Church. Because she was a woman, her recusancy did not result in arrest or a confiscation of property. Her husband, John, an atheist, attended Anglican services the minimum times required, about once a month, and paid a fine for his wife's absence from services. Mary Dunnington's brother, Hugh, also refused to turn Protestant because the law demanded it. He escaped to Flanders and entered a seminary there. After taking orders as a priest, he returned to England to secretly tend the Catholics in the north of the country. However he had to be careful because the punishment for active Catholic priests was death by being drawn and quartered.

York landscape, autumn

Manor house parlor

17th-century oak bed

Lucy's father is of the middling class. His brother, Richard, inherited the land and the title. However, Richard indulges his brother's family because he has none of his own. Thus Lucy straddles two worlds: that of the landed class and that of the merchant class.

York landscape, summer

How I imagine Chapel House may have looked

Interior Tudor style house

Richard Dunnington lives in Thicket Hall, an expansive manor bought by the Dunnington family during the dissolution of the monasteries during the reign of Henry VIII. Richard bequests a smaller dwelling, Chapel House, to his brother for the times when John's family comes to Yorkshire.

Thicket Priory, Yorkshire