Lives in Cricket No 9 - JH King

for its late fourteenth-century rector, John Wycliffe, who from here under the protection of John of Gaunt attacked both the beliefs and practices of the Church and instigated the translation of the Bible into the vernacular. Fittingly the nineteenth-century builder became a much respected mason of the local Wiclif Lodge. James Temple King begat two sons, William and Charles, by a first wife whose name is unknown, before he married Ann Cole of Lutterworth. Ann, born herself in 1829, was descended from a long-serving soldier described in Nichols’ History and Antiquities of Leicestershire , based in part on the Visitation of Lutterworth (at that time merely a large agricultural village) on 21 March 1681, as ‘William Cole Esq. of Lutterworth Ad. 67 in 1681. A Captain in the Services of King Charles Ist and in 1681 Major of the Trained Bands in Leicestershire and in commission of the Peace. . . . Buried at Laughton’. The memorial at Laughton vouchsafes further information: ‘Here underneath on the North side of Barbra Cole [his first wife, daughter of the second son of Sir Richard Halford of Wistow] lyeth interred the Body of Col. William Cole Esq. who served His Majesty King Charles Ist. of Blessed Memory and three Kings his successors. 58 Years a Commission Officer Who departed this Life March 27th 1698 in the 85th Year of his age.’ The ‘three Kings’ were Charles II, whose return he aided upon the collapse of the Commonwealth, James II and William III. William Cole also became Lord of the Manor at Laughton, and thereby obtained the lease of the manor known as the ‘Spittall’, which was over the River Swift from Lutterworth, in the parish of Misterton, on the site of the ancient Hospital (hence its name) of St John the Baptist, endowed and consecrated in 1218 by Roaesia-de-Verdum, widow of the Lord of the Manor of Lutterworth. The estate was sequestrated by Queen Mary upon the execution in 1554 of the Duke of Suffolk (the father of Lady Jane Grey) into whose hands it had come. In the reign of Elizabeth I, the now ruined hospital was demolished and at some point the new manor built. Through marriage, however, the manor passed one generation later out of the Cole family to a Rev Bailey Shuttleworth and, together with the advowson, sold in 1776, but not before a descendant, one Robert Shuttleworth, had demanded the feudal right of compelling the inhabitants of Lutterworth to grind their corn at one of the estate’s mills, which he burned down in pique when he lost his law-suit against the parishioners in 1758. The Coles, nonetheless, had remained in Lutterworth, actively Early Days 13