Resisting Silences: Gender and Family Trauma in Eighteenth‐Century England

The Newdigates were happy in the summer of 1683. There were four children under five, including newborn Juliana and six older siblings between five and fifteen.1 Sir Richard Newdigate’s diary presents an idyllic time: eating cherries with his pregnant wife Mary; gorging on orchard fruit with his eldest son Richard; teaching Amphillis accounting; rounding up birds flying in the buttery; visiting friends and family; enjoying family meals and walks.2 Twenty years later, the family disintegrated amid accusations of greed, madness and unspeakable acts. Newdigate’s biographers link the breakdown to Lady Mary’s death in 1692.3 Whatever the cause, the decline of such a contented family was tragic. The explanation Newdigate gave in his pamphlet, The Case of an Old Gentleman, Persecuted by His Own Son (1707), concentrates around four events. The first is a trip to France taken by Newdigate, accompanied by his eldest son, Richard and his sixth daughter, Elizabeth, in 1699. In Newdigate’s absence, second son John looked after the estate and family. The second event was Richard and John’s attempt to have their father committed as a lunatic in May 1701 – although they were initially successful, Newdigate had the committal overturned. The third event was a petition to the House of Lords in February 1702 by four of the daughters (Amphillis, Jane, Elizabeth and Juliana) asking for relief from their father’s cruel severities. The fourth event was the Family Settlement of March 1702, which divided property and money among the children and gave guardianship of Amphillis, Jane, Elizabeth and Juliana to their maternal uncle. In his pamphlet and account books, Newdigate blamed his eldest sons, Richard and John, for the family problems. His published story insisted on his daughters’ innocence, but other records indicate conflicted relationships with Amphillis, Frances, Elizabeth, Juliana and Jane. The remaining children – Mary, Anne, Frank and Gilbert – were faultless through absence (marriage or school) or illness.4 Newdigate’s story is oblique on matters that reflected badly on his patriarchal control. He does not mention that his second-eldest daughter, Frances (Lady Sedley), eloped in 1695 (aged eighteen). Similar evasiveness is evident with regard to Amphillis, committed as a lunatic in 1706 (aged thirty-seven), and the ‘lunacy’ from which Gilbert suffered by 1702 (aged twenty-eight).5 Newdigate discussed these instances only to

blame Richard and John for driving them mad through 'cruel usage'. 6 He likewise omitted discussing his scandalous second marriage to a young woman in 1703, which he kept secret until the bride's family legally forced him to acknowledge it. As to his alleged lunacy, Newdigate alluded to accusations of sexual improprieties, but never described the decisive event that induced his sons to commit him and his daughters to petition the House of Lords. The lunacy inquisition, however, gives a date (10 April 1701), while the petition offers details: 'Sir Richard Newdigate did by frequent solicitacions by threats & by force with sword in hand attempt his Daughter Elizabeths Chastity so that she was forced to fly his presence and for the safety of her life and Honour to swear the peace against him'. 7 Newdigate, unsurprisingly, denied his children's imputations of madness and incest. These events provide the chronology for my interpretation.
Newdigate's perspective is easily uncovered through his diaries, account books and pamphlet, but the children left only traces of their legal resistance. Those fragmentary records, however, suggest a family trauma with profoundly gendered suffering. By family trauma, I mean the family's response to an event that shattered their seemingly happy world. The cause of the trauma is less clear. Was Newdigate an old man victimised by his lying family? Was he mentally ill? Was the violent attack of April 1701 unique? Was there long-term sexual abuse? When writing this article, I wondered whether the story should remain untold: was it my right as a historian to uncover the family's secret? But as the #metoo movement has shown, we have an urgent duty to listen to the survivors of abuse (sexual or otherwise) and to recognise the ways in which we have enabled perpetrators' accounts to remain dominant. 8 Attending to silences in the records can provide new ways of understanding family histories.
This article considers Newdigate's account, putting the children at the centre. Building on my previous work on pain narratives (or, how to find meaning in sufferers' circular accounts of pain), I argue that the Newdigates' experiences can be read as a familial pain narrative; its gaps, uncertainties and seemingly unconnected complaints are like other eighteenth-century pain accounts on a meta-level. 9 To identify what caused their breakdown, I situate their health problems within the context of their family history. Bouts of illness occur at key narrative moments, hinting at a hidden wound of sexual abuse and/or mental illness. Newdigate's and the children's stories reveal how illnesses and the limitations of gender and age shaped the experiences of individual family members. In Newdigate's version, an unwell, ageing patriarch protected his family, despite being undermined by adult sons' demands for independence. The children's story involves an indebted, domineering household head, sons lacking patriarchal privileges and vulnerable daughters needing protection. Either way, the case underscores the instability of patriarchy, the dangers posed by a bad patriarch and the intersection of illness, gender and family strategy. My analysis focuses on the question of why the children later concealed their trauma, despite their initial publicising of it. Their act of silence, I conclude, was the most powerful act of reclamation open to them.

Narratives, silences and gender
A gentry family, the Newdigates had their main seat at Arbury Hall, Warwickshire. They kept excellent household records, which historians have used for topics ranging from food to politics. 10 Steve Hindle and Peter Edwards have examined Newdigate's account books to understand estate management, while Elaine Gooder and Lady outcomes. 25 There is a perpetual interpretative tension between reading the signs and inability to know. Whereas memory needs a narrative, traumatic recollections, like pain, are suspended in time, without a clear beginning, middle and end. 26 What narratives exist might be changeable, avoiding particulars or lacking facts, but the truth at their core is fear. 27 Looking for evidence to understand silence is necessary in other fields, too. Feminist scholarship typically considers voice as agency, but silence can enable resistance, offering protection and space to negotiate difficult situations. Researchers must be attuned to linguistic and bodily signs and alternative readings. 28 As for work on secrecy, studies of early modern Europe elucidate how secrets were a form of power. They occurred within a social context, binding those who shared them, while establishing hierarchical relations between those who knew everything, something or nothing. Secrets that became open knowledge could be more subversive than concealed ones. 29 What these different approaches foreground is that silences can be more than absences or suppressions, representing instead meaningful omissions. Attending to silences, secrets and physical signs of trauma offer insight into gendered experiences of family dysfunction.
This article contains multiple narratives. One motivating factor here is that I could not remain objective, being sceptical of Newdigate's claimed victimhood and sympathising with the children's actions. By separating the voices of victim and perpetrator (and historian), I leave room for an empathic unsettlement -by which I mean the avoidance of easy closure, excessive speculation and over-empathising with one side. 30 The children's counter-narrative challenges and informs Newdigate's dominant account. Reading the semi-symmetrical versions together elucidates imprecise, interlinked storylines, revealing the family's trauma. 31 When presenting two narratives, considering emplotment is helpful. 32 Newdigate structured his pamphlet as a romance with archetypal characters (hero and villain), along with themes of family betrayal and honour, all of which would have resonated with older members of his early modern audience familiar with Restoration political romances like Percy Herbert's Princess Cloria. 33 William Reddy's concept of 'emotives' is useful for analysing Newdigate's language: descriptions that reflected and reinforced his emotional state and could create change (people's perceptions of the family and his children's behaviour). 34 Indeed, as I pieced the children's story together, it seemed to me like a mid-eighteenthcentury novel's plot, centring on motives for divulging or concealing their secret. This version highlights the limits of 'emotives' as a concept. Examining the children's emotions points to their resistance, but their emotions emerge through silences not 'utterances'. 35 The siblings' actions need to be understood in terms of gendered social expectations and the lack of opportunity to resist patriarchal authority. The family adopted multiple strategies to protect their honour, from Newdigate's creation of a more respectable narrative to the children's legal defences against a tyrannical father. 36 Using two narratives allows me to tease out the Newdigates' hidden story of collective suffering, which briefly became public before disappearing once more.

Newdigate's story
Newdigate's Account Book D refers to the family breakdown: 'This begins at Ladyday 1701 which contains the most uncomfortable Part of my Life'. 37 The Newdigates' troubles became widely known: 'the By-ward of all Taverns and Coffee-houses about Town'. Gossip rekindled in November 1707, despite the Family Settlement, when twenty-four-year-old Juliana repeated 'The Infamy which was thrown upon [Newdigate] in 1701'. 38 Publishing a defence was common in causes célèbres and an obvious response for Newdigate (aged sixty-three), who had studied law, read avidly and penned bad verse. 39 Lawyers were also renowned for telling effective emotional stories. 40 The father deployed archetypal imagery and pain descriptions to elicit sympathy and reinforce his innocence. Three themes framed his narrative of suffering: independent manhood, loving fatherhood and vulnerable old age. Although a focus on old age served to buttress his contention that he could not be guilty, it potentially destabilised his claims to masculine honour. Newdigate counterbalanced this with extensive evidence that he remained an independent man and good father, despite his children's bad behaviour. 41 His defence was self-serving, but it also may have been a strategy to protect the family by replacing insinuations of incest and insanity with the trope of a father-son property dispute. Newdigate needed to persuade readers that he was an independent man. Early modern credibility was attached to gender and status, with independent men exercising self-mastery at the apex of a hierarchy. Not obligated to anyone politically or financially, independent men were loyal to the monarch and possessed moral rectitude. 42 Good citizenship was key to Newdigate's claims of masculine honour. Several expenditures listed in his pamphlet were for the country: defence funding in 1666 and 1677, treating with Freeholders of the County of Warwick when he was a Knight of the Shire and digging up a local traitor's armoury in 1696. He even loaned the king money. 43 The Newdigate daughters' accusations of incest made proving political loyalty essential. Late-seventeenth-century cultural anxieties associated unnatural behaviours (like incest) with rebellion and illegitimate authority, whereas good citizenship corresponded to moral uprightness. 44 Newdigate's loyalty was a counterpoint to his sons' failures as independent men, whom he likened to and presented as in league with Catholic traitors. For example, Richard was 'persuaded by his Father-in-law and Priests and Jesuits' to commit his father. 45 His sons, Newdigate complained, 'took a Hint from those Traitors and Enemys to the State' and followed 'the Popish Maxim, cast Dirt enough and some of it will stick'. 46 Newdigate emphasised his sons' 'treachery', 'villainy', 'ruin' or 'persecution' thirty-five times and used words of conquest or violence fifteen times (e.g. danger, shield, sword, seize). If a household was the foundation of the state, then traitorous sons were dangerous to society. 47 Newdigate thus established credibility by undercutting his sons' integrity.
Newdigate also emphasised his capability for estate management in contrast to his sons. In 1699, Newdigate toured France -a trip seemingly taken out of curiosity. He had been corresponding (via his second-eldest son, John, aged twenty-seven) with a Huguenot, the Marquis de Souligné, about his book The Desolation of France (1698). 48 While Newdigate was away, he left John to manage the estate. John, however, fell into debauchery, neglected the estate and 'shut up' his brother Gilbert (aged twenty-five), 'ma[king] him stark mad'. Called to account when his father returned home, John fell ill. 49 Newdigate and Richard also regularly argued about property. In his pamphlet, Newdigate maintained the main issue was Richard's 'treacherous contrivance' to have another £1000 annually. 50 Part of the problem may have been Richard's ambiguous status as an independent man. He married in 1694 but returned home in 1695 (aged twenty-seven) when his wife died. Newdigate's estate expenses (like his 'mighty Coalwork'), moreover, seemed to squander his inheritance. 51 The relationship was fractious by 1700 when Newdigate complained about Richard's 'Cross grained letter'. 52 The Newdigate men fought constantly about estate management.
Tensions escalated on 10 April 1701. The House of Lords petition has few details of the violent attack, while the lunacy investigation provides a formulaic description (derangement with periods of lucidity). 53 Newdigate claimed that he suffered from a fever and delirium in May 1701. John and Richard allegedly used this incapacity to have him committed, attempted to poison him and organised a humiliating capture by ruffians. 54 Gooder thinks the lunacy accusations were false. First, the charge was at odds with the daughters' withdrawn petition to the House of Lords, which presumed sanity. Second, Newdigate legally re-established his sanity. 55 However, Newdigate's behaviour must have been concerning and well-evidenced over a longer term. At least one well-known physician, Gideon Harvey, participated in the inquiry. 56 The Lord Chancellors who oversaw lunacy investigations, moreover, focused on protecting individuals, particularly when family members misused the proceedings. Lunacy investigations were intended to restore family order, to provide care to long-term lunatics and to ensure good property management. If the lunatic was cured, a committal could be overturned. 57 For Newdigate, it was a long process to re-assert control. His diary shows unresolved legal issues until late 1702. In July, for example, Newdigate spoke to the Lord Keeper (Sir Nathan Wright), who believed Newdigate was sane. However, given the evidence, 'he could do no lesse then he did'. 58 Richard remained estranged, the situation worsening by 1705 after both men remarried. Richard began evicting tenants for unpaid rents, demanding his father take a new mortgage. Worse yet, Richard had 'shut [Amphillis] up as a Mad woman' to control her money. 59 In 1706, Newdigate granted Richard £2,500 annually to reduce 'temptation to wish or contrive his father's Death' and proposed dividing the land to spread out debts, ensuring that 'this noble Estate be preserv'd to the Family'. 60 Newdigate legally regained power, but Richard contested and subverted it through contrary estate management practices.
Masculinity and personal character were also visible on the men's bodies, reflecting a wider understanding that bodily deportment bared one's soul. 61 Newdigate stressed his embodiment of age and rank throughout the pamphlet. There are sixteen references to him as a gentleman, while his actions revealed innate gentility: caring for his family, discovering a traitor, or building lucrative coal works. 'Old Gentleman' appeared six times in the appendix, with a linkage of age and status that implied he deserved respect. 62 This contrasted with the prodigal John and reprobate Richard. Bad behaviour might be forgiven, but a father needed to decide when a son was irredeemable or dangerous. For Newdigate, his son's bodies offered clues. 63 After the French trip, John's remorse was discernible through his fever. John reconciled with Newdigate in 1701, apologising 'with Tears and great Compunction'. Richard also apologised, but 'put all the Slights and Affronts' on his father. 64 Richard's true disposition surfaced after he was widowed. For example, Richard advised his father to lease some land to avoid taxes, which Newdigate rewarded with a prime lease. However, the account indicates that Richard's body betrayed ill intentions, as he 'blush'd, and then lookt pale, which his Father did not take much notice of then, but has since often thought thereof'. 65 Newdigate embodied masculine gentility, while his sons were untrustworthy men.
Newdigate framed fatherhood in terms of natural affection. 'Father' was one of the most common nouns in the pamphlet, appearing fifty-nine times. Twenty-seven words referred to family or love (e.g. family, estate, duty, affection, reconciliation). He also stressed the size of his family -fifteen children, ten surviving to adulthoodand his desire to treat them equitably. Newdigate spared no expense in medical care, clothing, education and travel, even giving more to his children than inheritance? settlements required. 66 Paternal benevolence emerged elsewhere. Newdigate welcomed the newly widowed Richard home and remained an 'indulgent father' despite the children's abandonment. 67 He was even familiar with advice literature. Alluding to his daughters' petition ('cruel Severities and unreasonable Usage and Practices'), he used a curious phrase ('by reasons of his unnatural and Cruel usage') that came from a section on parental duties in a popular advice book by William Fleetwood. 68 In the passage, Fleetwood exhorted parents to treat one's children patiently, not harshly. Newdigate's point was that a father possessed of such natural affection would surely not act unnaturally to his child.
The family settlement promoted a continued relationship of paternal affection and filial duty. Settlements, which used the language of natural affection, aimed to strengthen family unity by preventing property disputes. 69 For the Newdigates, the settlement might even reunite the fractured family: 'for the reconcileing of all differences which have unhappily arisen . . . and to the End Paternall Affection & Filiall obediences may be continued'. Newdigate gave the children considerable financial support. Each unmarried daughter, for example, was to receive £5,000 through an annual allowance of £60 (£150 after ten years), with the remainder payable at marriage. 70 The annual amount for the first decade was paltry, but if Newdigate followed the pattern of his forebears, it would be paid -contrasting with the eldest son's indebted estate. 71 According to Newdigate, the sum was more generous than his father allowed: £571 8s 6d each and '3 farthings to have been divided among them' if there was no son. 72 But the settlement also required Amphillis (thirty-three), Jane (twenty-one), Elizabeth (twenty) and Juliana (nineteen) to move to the guardianship of their maternal uncle, Sir William Bagot, within ten days. 73 Despite the financial settlement, the family was broken.
Newdigate defended the family's honour by preserving the children's reputations and trying to reconcile their differences. From the pamphlet's first page, Newdigate portrayed himself as a forgiving protector, promising to 'bury all in oblivion' and 'never vent any thing that might tend to the disrepute of his dear Children'. Given the importance of maintaining family honour, Newdigate's public statement may have been part of his family strategy. 74 For example, he tried to hide any potential indications of familial madness by insisting that Gilbert and Amphillis had been falsely locked up by their brothers who wanted to control their money. 75 Newdigate also confirmed his daughters' innocence. Richard, he argued, was behind the petition to the House of Lords. The four 'poor innocent young Women' had not read the petition, believing it discussed finances. 76 Newdigate's reference to Fleetwood provided an opportunity to redefine what 'cruel' and 'unnatural' meant in the petition: unjust overreaching of his authority. 77 Definition was vital, as 'unnatural' in this period could denote sexual immorality, wickedness or excessive cruelty. 78 Newdigate thus reframed the petition to emphasise his daughters' purity. Of course, he also claimed that the House of Lords believed in his innocence (because of his good record-keeping) and that -as a good father -he took the blame on the advice of the Archbishop of Canterbury rather 'than utterly to ruin the Reputation of his said Sons' and, presumably, daughters. 79 Indexed in Account Book D is a 'Family Scheme for the Happinesse of it', displaying Newdigate's perpetual hope of family reunification. 80 His attempts to maintain family unity demonstrated his good fatherhood, while connecting his masculine honour and family honour.
At the same time, Newdigate drew on tropes about vulnerable old age to make clear that his sons were unnatural, not him. In 1701, fifty-seven-year old Newdigate was healthy, recently returned from his European travels. The children attacked their father's independence when he was at a stage in life that he might expect family support -a common enough tale. 81 Although Newdigate did not mention it, his pamphlet recalls King Lear, with madness and troubled father-daughter relationships. Nahum Tate's The History of King Lear (with a happier ending and less incest than Shakespeare's version) was familiar to late seventeenth-century theatregoers, including Newdigate who had inherited an extensive collection of playbooks. 82 Moreover, Newdigate was religious. To illustrate the horror of his situation, he referred to the account given in Genesis 9:18-29 of how Noah left the Ark to plant a vineyard, but drank too much wine and was discovered naked by the disloyal Ham, who told his brothers. This brazen indiscretion contrasted with the filial piety demonstrated by Shem and Japhet, who covered their father. Indeed, Newdigate's children 'were so far from imitating the Blessed Shem and Japhet, viz. covering their Father's Nakedness, that they outdid cursed Ham'; they 'pretended Nakedness where there really was none'. 83 Thus Newdigate's imagery vividly exploited cultural anxieties about masculinity and ageing.
His papers, though, suggest that he keenly felt the pains of old age and betrayal. 84 His diary mentions gouty spells and a steady diet of pills until his death in 1709, while his remarriage in 1703 to an eighteen-year-old woman (Henrietta Wigginton), the stereotypical 'old man's nurse', points to a genuine dread of loneliness. 85 At the start of Account Book D, Newdigate included a Latin epigram with English discussion about an old man who remarried: 'But now grown Feeble, & scarce Like to Live, I've got a Helper, to who no Help I give'. 86 Historian Vivienne Larminie connects the pamphlet's publication to renewed family hostilities after Newdigate's marriage to Henrietta. 87 But Newdigate's cancelled will of 1707 signposts another reason: justifying the disinheritance of unkind children in favour of his second wife. 88 Newdigate, an ageing man, feared lost independence, helplessness and isolation.
Newdigate encouraged readers' compassion by focusing on illness, which he characterised as the true cost of his sons' actions. Ageing and illness appear together fifteen times in the pamphlet's second half, with most in his illness description (five) and the appendix (six). 89 The fifteen-page pamphlet was structured around seven illnesses, which functioned as narrative transitions and character descriptions. The first bout was that of Richard (thirty-one) and Elizabeth (seventeen), which forced them to return from their French trip of 1699. It marked the end of family unity, with Newdigate, who continued his tour, finding himself separated geographically from all his children. The second and third illnesses occurred after his arrival home from his travels to find that John had mismanaged the estate, destroyed his own health and driven Gilbert mad. 90 The initial ailments reflected the beginnings of familial breakdown.
The main account of illness was Newdigate's, comprising two middle pages. During Newdigate's fever and delirium of 1701, John and Richard had him committed.
The removal of power during illness played on fears about vulnerability. Newdigate defended himself 'Sword in hand for five Hours', a martial image evidently intended to nullify any intimation of weakened masculinity. 91 The subsequent poisoning attempt inadvertently cured Newdigate's fever. When a hamper from Warwickshire arrived, the footman 'suspect[ed] the drink to be poison'd'. The poison caused Newdigate to vomit, curing his fever. 92 The poisoning underscored the insidiously treacherous nature of the sons' attacks. As a crime, poisoning typically occurred in intimate relationships and directly attacked the domestic order; moreover, it was widely associated with womanly deceit. 93 The final two illnesses -John's death from smallpox (1705) and Amphillis's lunacy committal (1706) -represented the family's dissolution. Illnesses signified critical moments in the family's history and contrasted Newdigate's manliness (even in illness) with his sons' unmanly attacks.
The repetition of 'Old Sick Gentleman' evoked fears about helplessness and ageing, specifically abuse by one's family. Newdigate's rich language of suffering had dual physical and emotional meanings. 94 Richard was presented as a 'peccant Son', a description signifying both sinfulness and disease: like a bad humour, he infected the family. Newdigate used imagery of wounds and violence such as his 'lacerated' reputation and 'injurious' dealings with his children. 95 Words caused damage. He blamed Richard and John for hastening old age by ruining his reputation and isolating him from his family. 96 Although sudden illness could shift green old age into decrepitude, Newdigate was as concerned by his defencelessness as by physical indignities. 97 For example, in the middle section, he paralleled his physical problems ('sick' twice, 'unhealthy' once) with his sense of being attacked: 'persecuted' twice and 'afflicted' once. The sons' humiliation of him included his physical seizure by a 'strong Ruffian, who took him in his Arms' like a child. 98 Old age's vulnerability was a type of suffering.
By 1707, Newdigate was an 'Old Sick Gentlemen', a description of age, masculinity and power. His family's attempts to commit him and to accuse him of improprieties could have come from a play. While the accusation brought shame, being declared a lunatic removed legal authority over his estates and person. In a story drawing on wider concerns about age and masculinity, Newdigate emerges as an old man bullied or abandoned by his children. This is important. As Reddy argues, 'emotives' have tremendous shaping power -and one can derive authority from meeting society's emotional ideals. 99 Newdigate's emotional language provoked sympathy, while establishing his reliability. The real suffering of old age was not physical, but emotional: abandonment or victimisation by one's family. Patriarchy had limits if adult sons colluded to subvert it, like Richard, 'indefatigable in the Persecution of his own Father'. 100 Newdigate used this concern to re-establish his reputation -and to protect the family honour from the scandal of a 'very lewd' madman accused of 'Incontinency with his own Daughters'. 101 The pamphlet turned scandalous gossip into a common domestic tragedy by shifting attention to an ungrateful son and an old man.

The children's story
Although Newdigate's pamphlet is convincing, there is another way of telling the story. It begins with Newdigate's lack of manly self-mastery (whether profligacy, mental illness or abuse), which destabilised his patriarchal rights. In this version, the children's desire to escape Newdigate's excessive control shaped their decisions to commit their father on grounds of lunacy, petition the House of Lords and accept the family settlement. Their story is one of sibling cooperation to minimise the effects of a bad patriarch and reveals the profoundly gendered nature of their actions. While it was the patriarch's prerogative to present his anger as righteous, his daughters had no recourse but to stifle their own, and his sons express theirs cautiously. The Newdigate daughters depended on fraternal support, with Richard as potentially their most helpful ally, his position as heir providing the surest bulwark against an unstable patriarch. 102 The family records hint at secrets, dysfunction and illness, but any story drawing on them -like pain narratives -is challenging to tell, filled with gaps and incoherence. And yet the silence is the story. The family records suggest that such reticence was deliberate, reflecting a collective strategy adopted by the children. Rumours faded from memory, and the children's actions were erased from family documents. The family's deliberate excision of their father's version of family history was a powerful act, allowing them to control their story and to protect the daughters' reputations.
When framed by social expectations for gendered roles (male hierarchies and female vulnerability), the plot of the children's story centres on trauma, mental illness, violence, incest and escape. Their version evokes, for me, family secrets of later novels such as Mansfield Park (1814) or Eleanora; Or, A Tragical But True Case of Incest in Great-Britain (1751). 103 The Newdigates' difficulties in speaking publicly about their father's behaviour also parallels the 1631 trial of the second Earl of Castlehaven, who was found guilty of raping and sodomising his wife and servant. The accusations were made by Lord Audley, his eldest son, who was concerned about disinheritance and claimed that Castlehaven had encouraged a favoured servant to impregnate Lady Audley. During the trial, the Earl, like Newdigate, was empowered through male honour to proclaim his innocence freely. The countess, like the children, had limited leeway to question publicly a patriarch's tyranny while upholding her own honour or that of the family. 104 The Castlehaven case may have been familiar to the Newdigates, as both families had estates in Harefield, Middlesex. An effigy of the Countess of Derby and her three daughters -including the Countess of Castlehaven -is located in St Mary Church, alongside Newdigate family monuments. 105 Family histories could be unsettling.
The Newdigate children's story begins with disquieting undercurrents during the summer of 1683. Newdigate reported eight instances of his own anger between 14 July and 4 August, including being 'violent angry' on 4 August. Protestant diarists, like Newdigate, focused on spiritual self-examination. 106 He read spiritual literature, prayed daily and struggled with his temper. In early modern England, anger was considered a choice that could be nurtured or ignored. Moderate anger was acceptableat least for patriarchs who had to oversee the behaviour and reputation of their families -but excessive anger was destructive. Such emotions, then, needed to be carefully monitored. 107 Although only diary fragments remain, Newdigate's pocketbooks and account books noted grievances with workmen, tenants, servants and family members. Newdigate could evidently be overbearing with his staff, but does not appear to have exceeded his patriarchal privilege; he rarely noted extreme anger in his dealings with them. 108 In 1683, he had good reason to be short-tempered. On 1 July, soldiers searched his household, charged with disarming Whig supporters after the Rye House Plot in June. Despite reassuring Newdigate that he was no traitor, Captain Lacy removed all weapons including a drum used to call everyone to meals. 109 Newdigate's honour, nonetheless, had been impugned and the removal of his armoury undermined his gentility and masculinity. His references to violent anger suggest extraordinary outbursts in response to such a loss of face.
Newdigate was a hard taskmaster who managed his children through a complicated system of monetary rewards and penalties. 110 He rewarded six-year-old Elizabeth for finding a document and three teenage daughters for attending family prayers, but he penalised bad behaviour. When quarrelling with Elizabeth, he threatened to reduce her dowry by £1,000. In 1697, Newdigate fined her for two shillings, blaming her carelessness when he broke a glass. Gooder sees these instances as forgiving and forgetting, while Hindle thinks that Newdigate's temper did not trouble the household. 111 Financial methods of managing children's behaviour were common, being part of moral education. 112 At the same time, such financial monitoring was a routine element of patriarchal power, even where it was delivered affectionately. 113 On 19 March 1702, for example, Newdigate unusually demanded that Jane (twenty-one), Elizabeth (twenty) and Juliana (nineteen) sign allowance receipts, just as the settlement was being reached. An increased attempt to monitor their money might imply punishment for their role in the dispute, but it could also be interpreted as an attempt to remain in their lives. 114 Affection, patriarchal control and money were entwined, a constellation rendered more problematic by the addition of a father's bad temper.
Family troubles and illnesses started after Lady Mary's death in 1692. Twentythree-year-old Amphillis took over her mother's place as mistress of the household. From 1693, her signature appears on household expense receipts. 115 Two daughters' deteriorating health signalled other problems. Eighteen-year-old Frances was treated for hysteria from February 1695, which Gooder attributes to lovesickness for an unsuitable man. After Frances secretly married in July, she improved quickly, with no more treatments and only two physician visits (31 July and 16 September). She gave birth in November 1696. 116 Amphillis became ill in 1697 and went to stay with her father's sister, Anne Pole. The unspecified illness lasted from January to March, likely the first of many bouts of mental illness. 117 The breaking point came after Newdigate's family project, the 1699 tour of France. After a few weeks, Richard (thirty-one), Elizabeth (seventeen) and a servant became 'extremely sick'. They returned to England while Newdigate continued to the United Provinces. 118 Perhaps the illnesses overlaid a family dispute, offering an excuse for Richard and Elizabeth to return home, although Newdigate's travel journal portrays a harmonious trip. Besides noting that his 'dear son Dick' had been 'waiting for my Arrival' before the trip, Newdigate depicted the family as a bulwark against foreign dangers. 119 One Sunday entry, for example, reported that the day was 'miserably spent in this Popish Country. Yet prayed & read a sermon to my small family'. 120 But there were later strains, with the trip interrupted by ill health. 121 The Newdigates occasionally disagreed over what to see, or when and how far to travel. On 2 August, Newdigate visited the churches ofÉvreux in 'complaisance to [his] dear children', but he criticised them for travelling too far that week. The day of 9 August was 'Spent in too much Altercation'. The following day, the children departed Montreuil in the rain against Newdigate's advice. He smugly described their coach sticking in mud, a servant taking ill in the wet, and Elizabeth falling into a watery ditch. 122 His pamphlet indicates other tensions. For example, before embarkation Richard 'grew timorous, and express'd a great Aversion'; during the trip he was 'really Uninquisitive'. 123 There were 'unhappy Differences between a Father, and a Son and Daughter of his', resolved by early 1702 'through the Mediation of Friends . . . at least seemingly'. 124 However, as is apparent, the family splintered and a parallel decline of bodily and family estates began.
The family's health was poor. At the family settlement, Gilbert and Amphillis were mentally incapacitated and John recently ill. 125 By 1711, Frances, Anne, Elizabeth, John and Newdigate had died, while Amphillis and Gilbert had been declared lunatics. Although it is unclear whether the Newdigates' mental illness was a cause or result of their wider difficulties, both mental illness and sexual abuse can cause familial health problems, including aggression, depression or post-traumatic stress disorder. 126 Longterm caregiving roles, particularly of parents, can also result in family disputes, anxiety and depression. 127 Considering the number of illnesses and the family's relatively short lifespans, it is evident the Newdigates were suffering.
The cause of their pain might be found in the children's motives for accusing their father of lunacy and abominable behaviour. As families generally kept their problems private, the Newdigates' willingness to take public legal action suggests their desperation. 128 Whatever happened on 10 April 1701 compelled Richard and John to launch a lunacy inquisition. 129 Newdigate's financial problems did not help. His ledgers show a man who accounted for everything, including emotions, but failed to keep good accounts. Money concerns continued after the settlement, which the children pursued in court to enforce. 130 After Newdigate's death, Richard inherited about £55,000 in debts, suggesting his sons were perhaps right to worry. 131 Newdigate occasionally recorded that he could not recall paying debts or being paid, yet he also schemed 'Where & how to get Mony as it occurs' (1705) or 'How to pay Debts Anno 1706 & Which respite'. He justified his financial difficulties by shifting blame, as when he complained about the 'treachery' of the coal pit manager who allowed the deepest and most productive mines to flood. 132 Emotions figured prominently in Newdigate's accounts, in which money was associated with anger or happiness. During the dispute of 1701-1702, Richard (aged thirty-four) questioned his father's management of the portion from his first marriage. Newdigate refused to give him more money: 'since my Death hath been so much desired, I will part wth no Reversions. If my Son returns to his Duty & Filiall Affection, I design him 3000 £ per annum: Since I wrote this my son RN has been so base to me that now I will have the Portion'. 133 The 1705 accounts specified that the portion was tied up in the estate and that Richard, being difficult, would not receive any more. 134 The explicit place of emotions was similarly evident in Newdigate's indexing of his scheme for family happiness and how to make peace with Richard, but noted his 'Daughters 1705/6 their unkindnesse to me' and the continuance of Richard's 'devillish humour'. 135 Although he did not go into details regarding his children's unkindness, it may have been linked to an ongoing dispute about Amphillis' care. In 1705, rather than paying Amphillis' settlement, he argued that she owed him for her long-term education and maintenance, noting that her over-thinking 'hath almost continually obstructed her health, as well as hinder'd her preferment in Marriage'. 136 This measure was particularly punitive, since education and maintenance were considered parental duties. Given that men typically reinforced their paternal authority through economic provisioning, Newdigate's withdrawal of support seems to have been a rejection of family bonds. 137 Even so, he insisted on his generosity to his daughters; 'What their Grandfather intended for them if I had had no son' was substantially less than his own settlement. 138 Overall, it appears he kept better emotional tallies than financial onesbut then using controlled anger to rebuke the children was part of patriarchal privilege and duty. 139 Although emotionally manipulative and a poor estate manager, neither defect equated to lunacy at a time when gentry and noble families were typically in debt. Conspicuous consumption was part of displaying one's status. 140 As Newdigate regained control of his estates, the court obviously agreed that debt was insufficient to undermine patriarchal authority.
While the tenuous character of the allegation brought by the sons raises the question of why they might try to have their father committed, it is the daughters' petition before the House of Lords in February 1701/2 that intimates the reason: Sir Richard sexually assaulted Elizabeth. Newdigate described the accusations of being 'very lewd' and demonstrating 'incontinency' with his daughters as 'abominable, malicious, false allegations'. 141 Intriguingly, Newdigate mentioned 'daughters', although the suit only referred to Elizabeth. The 1702 settlement also expressed the importance of removing the daughters from their father's physical presence, suggesting that the incontinency was of longer duration, not one violent moment with one daughter. If Newdigate was sexually abusing his daughters, the family strategy of a two-pronged legal attack makes sense. Success in the lunacy inquisition would protect the family assets and offer discretion for the daughters' reputations while ensuring that Amphillis, Elizabeth, Juliana and Jane were out of his control. Perhaps the daughters realised the committal was doomed to failure and petitioned the House of Lords out of desperation.
Successful prosecutions for child sexual abuse were few and far between, especially with older children. 142 Although families are the primary locus for sexual abuse, it is rare for historians to uncover clear evidence of instances. 143 And yet, early modern people recognised its possibility. They identified two categories of rapists: everyman (typical) and monster (excessively brutal). If rape resulted from misunderstandings or being overtaken by lust, then every man -except boys and old men -was a potential rapist. 144 Rapists of children were considered particularly lewd and immoral. 145 The line between good and bad patriarchy was also easily crossed. Abusers were unfit household heads, but complaining publicly went against social order, raising questions about the limits of obedience. 146 Prosecution of an elite father could be easily thwarted, as it was difficult to reconcile the image of a publicly respectable man with a domestically abusive one. 147 Newdigate's descriptions of age, honour and fatherhood, for example, constructed him as 'not a rapist'.
When cases went to court, even children were revictimised. Publicity, for one, damaged older girls' reputations and marriageability. 148 It was easier for (male) perpetrators to redeem reputations than it was for (female) victims. Charlotte Guyard, who accused her father of incest in eighteenth-century Germany, ended up in jail while he went free -albeit with a tarnished reputation. Although executed, the Earl of Castlehaven vigorously proclaimed his innocence, while the countess' honour was damaged by her in-laws' accusations and her mother's lack of support. 149 Focusing on estate management, by contrast, offered more decorous means for holding a bad patriarch to account. 150 Financial records could also support allegations of mismanagement, whereas proving 'unreasonable usage' of the daughters was difficult. While the attempt to have Newdigate committed was risky, the children might remove his power over them while retaining family honour.
No document definitively proves long-term sexual abuse, but there is circumstantial evidence, including ill health. The nature of Amphillis' illnesses from 1697 was not specified, though she was committed as a lunatic to the care of her sister Frances in 1706. 151 Her condition deteriorated in 1704, with five physicians listed for payment on 12 July. 152 Gooder links Amphillis' breakdown to Newdigate's remarriage in August 1703, speculating that Amphillis, an unmarried woman in her thirties, was troubled by losing her role as household mistress. 153 Not only was eighteen-year-old Henrietta young enough to be Amphillis' sister, but Newdigate had her pretend to be his daughter while they lived together in London. The new couple married and lived publicly together at Arbury, but when they returned to London in November, Newdigate inexplicably claimed it was inconvenient to have the marriage known. Instead, he took lodgings and Henrietta returned to her mother's house. Newdigate told his landlady that Henrietta, a regular overnight visitor, was his daughter. Newdigate only acknowledged the marriage in 1704 after Henrietta and her family sued him in the Court of Arches. 154 The scandalous marriage and Amphillis' subsequent illness point to a troubling interpretation. One might wonder whether Amphillis' illness was triggered by sexual abuse by her father after she had assumed the role of household mistress. 155 Elizabeth's health further suggests long-term abuse. From 1705 to 1707, she was treated for possible venereal symptoms: a whitish vaginal discharge and a weak back. 156 In children's sexual assault cases, such symptoms were considered decisive evidence of an assault. 157 The physical symptoms, combined with Elizabeth's genteel, unmarried status, offer grounds for suspicion.
The witnesses who would have appeared before the House of Lords were intimately familiar with the family. Three of these were entrenched within the household: Obadiah Key, steward and gentleman; James Nash, clerk and chaplain at Arbury; and Mary Eburne, widow and nurse. 158 Nash, as clergyman, was responsible for treating troubled souls, while Eburne, their long-term nurse, would have been a trusted motherfigure. The steward, Key, was familiar with the family's daily life. Key and Nashwell-educated men of the gentry -were reliable witnesses, while Eburne's proximity to the children made her testimony valuable. The daughters' suffering was written on their bodies, but they required the testimony of others to give voice to and corroborate their questioning of Newdigate's fitness as a patriarch.
The daughters' elopements provide the final piece of circumstantial evidence. Although the daughters moved from the control of one man to another, it was at least to relationships they chose. Unmarried daughters had few options for leaving. Francesthe second eldest daughter -eloped with Sir Charles Sedley in 1695. Newdigate was so angry that Sedley's father intervened, agreeing that the newlyweds should have 'wayted for our consent', but he had forgiven his son and would 'make the yonge couple easy'. 159 According to a page torn from the family bible, Elizabeth 'married herself' in 1708, as did Juliana in 1710. 160 Just as running away is a common adolescent response to abuse today, the series of Newdigate elopements may have served a similar purpose. 161 Frances's elopement might have enabled escape from an untenable situation, while for Elizabeth and Juliana it offered an opportunity to exert control over their own lives. Although the pattern of illnesses and behaviour among the daughters cannot be conclusive, it suggests deep family problems and highlights the limited remedies available to abused daughters. Ill health, however, made disputes observable by providing the Newdigates with opportunities for self-determination. Illness enabled resistance to patriarchal authority. John's fever occurred when he was supposed to have a difficult conversation about money. During the French tour, Richard's and Elizabeth's opportune illnesses afforded escape from a trip that (apparently on Richard's end) was unwanted. Amphillis' need for constant supervision meant that she escaped the control of her father (and other male relatives) by staying with Aunt Pole or Frances. 162 Ill health even supplied Elizabeth with a fashionable physician to intervene on her behalf when needed. In 1707, Elizabeth used her poor health to marry Abraham Meure, a Huguenot schoolmaster whom the family thought was a fortune hunter. In a letter to Dr Hans Sloane in 1706 she complained that her siblings refused to believe that she was ill and denied her the chance to love as she chose. Their unkindness caused 'the destruction of my health if not the loss of life'. 163 Elizabeth thanked Sloane for intervening with her family. 164 Significantly, she saw her siblings as valued arbiters of her life, in spite of being placed in her uncle's guardianship. Indeed, the family continued to see itself as a unit, even if at odds. Illness pointed to the family's stress-points, but also provided the children with space for defiance or autonomy.
Despite dysfunction, there are vestiges of the siblings' strategy to conceal the dispute. The story's most telling elements are absent: lunacy accusations without details and a House of Lords hearing that never happened. 165 Newdigate's diaries are also piecemeal, though that was not necessarily deliberate, as paper was re-used domestically. 166 More noteworthy is the intentional damage to the family account book -compromising the careful itemisation of financial transactions that might be needed in the future. At some point, someone evidently tried to conceal what happened. As Deborah Cohen has argued in her book Family Secrets, secrets are sustained as much by talk as by silence, which leaves traces in the record. 167 And the record, even as an object, is never neutral. As an object, it becomes another type of text -one communicating its creator's emotions and eliciting or inflecting users' emotional responses. 168 By excising family documents to erase uncomfortable secrets, the Newdigates pointed directly to them. Where the indices in Newdigate's account books note that further details of the dispute were to follow, crucial parts have disappeared. For example, Newdigate indexed a letter (no. 392) discussing his daughters' unkindness, a document now not to be found in the archives -leaving the nature of their unkindness unknown. An index entry for 'Daughters of mine' has one or two words sliced out (Figure 1). The page listed as 'W[ha]t I have to say to [Richard]' has been removed from the book altogether ( Figure 1). 169 In the back index, the 'Lunacy imputed discharge of' refers to page 130 -a page now giving regular accounts and no mention of lunacy. Tantalisingly, a large section of the page, which presumably had discussed the lunacy, has been removed ( Figure 2). 170 Gooder does not mention these careful redactions and concealments, although she thinks that Newdigate tried to keep his accounts from close examination. 171 Yet it makes little sense for him to cut out these sections; if anything, Newdigate's emotional accounting stood as an admonishment to his heirs, while references to lewdness and incontinency came from his own pamphlet. 172 Richard, however, had much to gain. Key sections relating to the dispute -specifically pertaining to Richard and property -remain. Significantly, the missing parts refer to the daughters and the accusation of lunacy. 173 It was in the family's interest, for the daughters and for posterity, to obscure the specifics. The intention was not to erase the whole dispute, just parts of it.
The damage left a message for future readers. To early modern readers, texts and their material components were forms of embodiment with interpretative possibilities. 174 'Emotional debris', such as torn pages, shaky handwriting or ink blots (intentional or not), were a recognised vocabulary. 175 Ink could be considered a humoral transmission. 176 Paper was skin-like, whether the actual skin of parchment or the second-skin of clothes in rag paper. 177 The act of writing was violent, from cutting quills with penknives to scratching letters onto parchment. 178 Within this context, readers responded unconsciously to the object's materiality -and its bodily parallelsbeyond the text. 'Suture' occurs when the text and material (or damage) correspond. 179 In the Newdigates' case, their father wrote in his quite-literal 'Account Book', which contained the financial and emotional details of his quite-literal estate. Newdigate's relics could be experienced as an aggressive act forcing the reader to engage with his story, bridging the temporal and spatial gap between author's and reader's bodies. But excising the text was a violent act against an object representing Newdigate. Significantly, by leaving index descriptions as pointers to what had been removed, his version of events was effectively silenced, albeit, perhaps tellingly, not erased. For modern readers, suture makes visible on the excised pages the co-existence of broken family relationships, the family's trauma and the daughters' (potentially) wounded bodies. Just as early modern cures involved the expression of bad humours or the removal of an infected part, so the Newdigates' suffering was unspoken, with the possibility of the most damaging remnants of the disease being removed to protect the family. The children's story materialises through the attack on Newdigate's virtual body and silencing of his voice.

Conclusion
The Newdigate case is about a family's trauma. Their disputes and poor physical and mental health expose the collective pain shaping their lives. Their suffering and attempts to gain autonomy were also gendered. The sons confronted their father directly about his mental capacity to control their estates and were credible enough to be initially successful. The daughters had fewer options -such as escaping by marriage or staying with a relative -and depended on the support of others. Their attempts at legal recourse were precarious. Despite the children's initial willingness to speak publicly, it was their father's story that survived. Silence, however, was not about powerlessness. It was a strategy that enabled the children to protect family members, reshape their history and limit their father's account. In a patriarchal world that valued family honour, illness and silence allowed resistance to authority, especially when dealing with an unstable head of household. Although there were legal methods of removing a father's control, these actions were likely to fail or call the family's honour into disrepute, as the Newdigate children found. The family settlement allowed the children to escape, but the act of obscuring the details enabled them to reclaim their story and their honour.
Less clear is the cause of family trauma: violent attack, sexual abuse, mental illness -or a combination? While Newdigate's (masculine) account is compelling and easily supported by textual evidence, the children's (mostly feminine) version is fragmentary. Whatever the truth, the case permits the historian to study long-term emotional and physical effects of trauma on a family. The Newdigate case is not a straightforward one of abuser and victims. The accounts overlap to show a family in pain and collaboration to protect their collective honour. Both versions reveal, too, how gender and status shaped the experience of suffering, from the unmarried daughters' struggles to express (or escape) their pains to the father's fears of old age diminishing his patriarchal privilege.
To understand the nature of the Newdigates' trauma, I have read their case like a pain narrative -attending as much to what was unwritten as written. Shifting the focus from the illness-experience of an individual to examine the family raises new questions about relationships, family health and gender in daily life. For example, reading Newdigate's pamphlet only as his illness narrative would overlook the effects of his actions or mental illness on the whole family. It is common for historians to prioritise detailed accounts like Newdigate's over fragmentary, circumstantial evidence. But trauma is intrinsically slippery, perhaps only visible through a family's illnesses, and we miss opportunities to uncover it when we ignore silence's interpretive possibilities. Reconstructing the Newdigates' trauma affirms their experience of sexual abuse or mental illness and witnesses their unrecorded choices made within patriarchal structures. The posterity of written documents may belong to the privileged, but the silence of the marginalised is not necessarily oppression. Sometimes, the act of silence is the strongest form of resistance.