Ursula Hutton

Spouse of Henry Proctor, married into the Proctor (Yorkist) line from a local family.

Ursula Hutton was born in 1612 in Pontefract, Yorkshire, in a town that lived under the eye of its castle. The great fortress of the Lancastrian dukes stood on its rock above the streets, a place of old grievances, where Richard II was said to have died and where the townspeople had grown used to thinking of history as something that happened just overhead. Liquorice fields lay around the town, and the small black lozenges that Pontefract made famous were already sold at the market. The records give her no parents and no siblings by name, and she seems to have grown up in the crowded, industrious sort of house where a girl was expected to earn her keep as soon as she could hold a needle, and where nobody thought to write down who she was. She was apprenticed to a dressmaker in her early teens, in a shop on the Market Place where the clatter of the coaches carried through the door all day. Pontefract sat on the Great North Road, and the Yorkshire coaching roads made it a place where travellers changed horses, took supper and ordered a pair of gloves or a mended gown before the coach was ready. Ursula learned to measure a stranger in the time it took to bring a pot of ale, to cut cloth from sheet, tape and chalk, and to keep an accurate memory of what a customer wanted when the customer would be three counties away by nightfall. She also learned to talk without being noticed, and to listen in the same way. By the end of her apprenticeship she could recognise the county and rank of a traveller by his buttons. She was tall and dark, with a low voice and a slow smile, and she had a reputation among the Pontefract shopkeepers for being impossible to cheat. The most difficult of her customers, a haughty alderman's wife, once tried to dispute a bill, and Ursula took down the gown she had made, turned it inside out and showed the woman her own seams, each one sewn with a stitch so even that no one could argue. The alderman's wife paid. It became the story that Ursula told at her own table for forty years, though she always said that the lesson in it was not about the gown but about the thread, which she had spun herself. She met Henry Proctor in the 1630s. He was six years younger, a yeoman's son with a fine hand and a great deal of ink on his cuffs, working then as a scribe for a Pontefract attorney and copying wills, leases and manorial rolls. His family belonged to the White Ledger, the Yorkist line of the great feud, and it was through him that she first heard the old story of Towton, told over supper with the odd blend of pride and irritation that all the Proctors seemed to bring to the subject. She listened and asked sharp questions. He remembered that she said, at the end, that it seemed to her a strange thing to be proud of a quarrel one had inherited. He never forgot it. They married in 1642, the year the king raised his standard at Nottingham, in the parish church of All Saints, and it was the kind of wedding that a country at the edge of war makes hurried and plain. The war came to Pontefract directly. The castle was garrisoned for the king, then taken by Parliament, then seized again by Royalists, and besieged three times between 1644 and 1649. The town was fought over, burned in places and starved. Henry, who had gone to serve as a clerk to the armies, following the pay-chests and the muster rolls from Yorkshire into the Midlands and back, was absent for months at a time. Ursula stayed in Pontefract with her firstborn, Roland Proctor, born in 1645, and kept her shop open as best she could, making shirts for soldiers of both sides, since neither side could afford to argue about the colour of a customer's coat. She sewed under the noise of cannon, and it is a family tradition that she never dropped a stitch, though the ledgers themselves say only that her account book shows no gap in those years. Her daughter Susannah Proctor was born in 1650, when the fighting had moved elsewhere, and her youngest, Lettice Hutton Proctor, in 1654. Susannah and Roland were both called as slayers, and Ursula, who had never wished for the calling and had never quite understood it, found herself in the odd position of cutting cloth for two children who were going out into the dark. She made them coats of thick, closely woven wool, lined with hard-wearing linen, with deep pockets sewn at the hip for stakes and a stiff, high collar that guarded the throat. The design was so plainly right that the Proctor slayers of Yorkshire took it up, and for a generation the Pontefract coat was the recognised garment of the White Ledger. It is a curious and pleasing fact that a dressmaker who had no craft of her own became the maker of a slayer's uniform. Lettice was not called, and grew up to be the household's steadying hand. Ursula gave her daughter her own family name as a middle name, a custom the Proctors permitted, and the girl bore it as long as she lived. Her relationship with the rivalry was that of a woman who had married into it and refused to be captured by it. She kept Henry's ledger copies in a chest and read them, and she noticed that the Red Ledger's entries, when the two sides exchanged copies, were as accurate as the White. She said so at the table, and Henry, to his credit, agreed. It was a heresy in the Proctor household, though a mild one, and it did not prevent her from being trusted. The Proctor slayers who came to her shop for repairs learned that she would mend a torn sleeve without asking how it was torn, and that she was not to be teased about Lancashire, since she had a great many Lancastrian customers and valued them all. The great plague year of 1665 brought fear to Yorkshire even though the disease itself mostly kept to the south, and Ursula, who was fifty-three, spent that summer sewing shrouds and vinegar-soaked masks for the town, and refusing to take a penny for the shrouds. She was a woman who believed that cloth was a kind of kindness. She outlived the danger, and she outlived the wars, and she saw her son Roland become a well-known slayer of the White Ledger and her daughter Susannah a formidable one. She died in 1682 at the age of seventy, of a winter cough that had troubled her for years and finally overtook her in the coldest part of the season. Henry survived her by nine years. She was buried in the churchyard at Pontefract, and her name was entered in the White Ledger among those who served, though she was never counted among the slayers. In the Slayerverse she is remembered as the dressmaker of Pontefract whose coats went into the dark, and who stitched the quarrel of two families a little closer to peace.