Nineteenth-century scholars were wont to describe the archival survivals of the lives of past luminaries as their ‘Remains’. The scholar in the twenty-first century does well to recollect that family archives have a history which goes back to the moment of their creation. In the case of the Temple family of Stowe we are faced not just with what survived of their correspondence and papers and certainly not with the remnants of their waste-paper baskets. Rather we are for the most part presented with what remains of what the master (and to a lesser extent the mistress) wished to retain for their own and sometimes their immediate descendants’ use. It is, of course, idle to speculate about what they chose to throw away. It is important to reflect upon what they chose to preserve.

A good deal of the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Stowe Temple material relates to matters of litigation. One of the most intriguing cases refers to the marriage between Anne Temple, the seventh daughter of Thomas and Hester Temple, born in March 1600/1, and William (later Sir William) Andrewes Esquire of Lathbury, Buckinghamshire. Although this marriage gave rise to litigation of a kind, the sources for our knowledge of it do not occur in the Temples’ legal files but rather in the surviving correspondence and financial files of the family. Some of the papers relate to materials presented to the ecclesiastical courts and others to the examination of the case before Justices of the Peace.

This marriage took place at Stowe on 4 April 1617, when Anne was just 16. The groom was slightly older. It must have seemed an auspicious match. The marriage brought together two families, the patriarchs of which lived in quite close proximity and participated together, apparently amicably, in the government of Buckinghamshire, where both were Justices of the Peace. The marriage settlement, which could have been an underlying cause of the later dispute: Anne brought with her a portion of ￡3,000, which was apparently, following a down payment of ￡1,000, paid in instalments. The first of these, for ￡1,000, was paid to the groom's father in the November following the wedding. The record of the acquittance was kept, along with the note of other similar transactions, on the back of a letter.