AN anonymous correspondent from Middleton St George puts us on the trail of Royal scandal by directing us to Nunstainton – now no more than a couple of farms on the west of the Skerne beside the A1(M).

A thousand years ago it was a village called Stayton-upon-Skyren, which Bishop Hugh du Puiset of Durham (1154- 1195) gave to the nuns of Nunmonkton, to the north of York.

The nuns built a chapel, and the village was renamed Nunstainton.

However, it was confiscated from the nuns by Henry VIII when he dissolved the monasteries in the 1530s, but their Catholicism clung to the area.

For example, Thomas Watson was born in the village in 1515. He studied in Durham and went up to St John’s College, Cambridge. So strident was his Catholicism that Henry VIII locked him up in the Tower of London.

There he remained until Catholic Queen Mary took the throne in 1553. She decided that Watson was the man to announce to the assembled multitude in London that she was returning the country to Catholicism.

She then sent him to Cambridge University to drive out the Protestants, and to Durham Cathedral to perform a similar feat, before the Pope made him Bishop of Lincoln in 1557.

Sadly for him, a year later Elizabeth I became queen and swung the country back to Protestantism. Watson was banged up once more in the Tower. The lad from Nunstainton remained in prison until he died in Wisbech Castle in 1584.

Back at Nunstainton, following the nuns’ departure, their tenant, William Smythe, had taken over. He, too, was fiercely Catholic and took part in the 1569 Rising of the North against Elizabeth I.

He married Margaret Eshe, whose staunchly Catholic family had lived in Esh Hall, to the west of Durham City, since the 12th Century.

The Smythes’ religion put them on the side of the Royalists during the Civil War of the 1640s, and the Parliamentarians seized their Durham estates. When Charles II was restored to the throne, he gave the land back and rewarded Edward Smythe with a baronet.

It was Sir Edward’s great-great-granddaughter, Maria, who was involved in the Royal scandal.

Her first husband died three months after their wedding when he fell off his horse. Her second lasted three years. Then, a beautiful and wealthy widow, she took up with Prince George, the heir to the throne.

In her drawing room in London, on December 15, 1785, they were “married”, but because she was a Catholic this marriage was declared invalid.

George took a more legitimate wife, Caroline of Brunswick, whom he quickly came to hate, preferring the charms of Maria.

Their ardour cooled in 1811. In 1820, he became King George IV, and when he died in 1830, it was found he had kept all Maria’s love letters.

It was during Maria’s lifetime that her family sold their Nunstainton estate. In the 1790s, the Smythes passed it on to the Lambtons.

Around the old village of Esh, there is still plenty of evidence of the Smythes’ Catholicism.

There’s the sandstone cross on the village green which they erected in 1687, possibly on the site of one of their chapels.

A beck nearby is called Priest’s Burn.

There’s the Church of Esh Laude, built on their land in 1800, which makes it the oldest Roman Catholic church between the Tweed and the Tees.

When their hall – which contained a Roman Catholic chapel – was demolished in 1857, a secret priestly hidey-hole was discovered.