In the summer of 1632, their cousin John Kempe suggested he and George go abroad for an adventure. Franck and Nan Oglander were set against it but John ‘persuaded my unwillinge wyfe to lett him spend one Summer in ffrance’.52 On 11 June, with many tears from his mother and sister, the boys set off, crossing the Channel from Ryde to Barfleur in the Cotentin, twenty miles or so north of Orglandes from where John thought his family had come to England in 1066, 566 years before. He would have loved the idea of his son adventuring in the ancestral lands. George was going to be back in the island by Michaelmas and John was hoping ‘that he should succeede mee in ye affayres of ye Countery and pourchase my ease by undertakinge ye burden on his owne shoulders’.53
They landed on 12 June at Barfleur, where they stayed one night, and then rode down to Caen, from where ‘a chain of happy letters’54 began to arrive. George was staying with the Mayor, a perfumer, and was having his portrait painted, which he was going to give to Ann.
At home his father, who, when profound seriousness or emotion overcame him, had the habit of pricking his thumb and writing in his notebook in his own blood, the writing still iron-red on the page four centuries later, was not in quite such a cheerful mood:
I must spend lesse otherwayes I shall be undone, and which waye to beginn I knowe not Sir John Oglander, with his owne Blood his Blood grieving at his greate expences.55
On the following page, after a note jotting down the number of faggots his woodmen had made (4,400), the number he had sold (1,700) and so the number he had left on his hands in the coppice (2,700), he wrote this:
On the 21st July 1632, I beinge at Newport and ther busy in many thinges Concerning ye good of ower Island, in hearinge differences between partie and partie … I heard a murmuringe and Sadness amongst ye gentlemen and clergy and ye rest. Mr Price of Calbourne towld mee he hoped that ill news yt was come to towne was not truwe.
Oglander’s natural sense of drama, of himself as a player in his own life, shapes his account of this moment of sudden uncertainty.
I then, being more suspitious, demaunded wheather he had herde any ill newes of any of my famely. He, presently findinge my ignorance, converted it to a Losse of ye Kinge of Swedens army. Many moe Overtures I had, but knewe nothinge untell I wase puttinge my foote in ye stirrop. Then ye Mayor Sir Robert Dillington and Sir Edward Dennys came unto mee and tould mee of a flyinge reporte, yt should come by a Barke of Weymouth, lately Come from Cane, that my eldest sonn George wase very Sick – if not Dedd.
That final monosyllable clangs across the years:
Let those judge yt have had a hopefull younge son 22 years aged, well brought up and learned in all ye Artes, dewtifull, wise, sober discrete, and geven to no vice; but talle, handsome, judicious and understandinge, yea far above ye Capacitie of his younge yeares, what a Case I wase in, and howe deepely strooken, insomutch as I had mutch adooe to gett home.56
‘Deepely strooken’, he had struggled back to Nunwell on his horse, filled with grief and guilt that he had ignored the worries of Franck and Ann. ‘Sero sapiunt Phriges’, he wrote in his notebook once back at Nunwell, from the Aeneid (Late were the Trojans wise).
With my tears in steed of incke I wryght thes last Lynes. O George, my beloved George is Dedd, and with him most of my terrestioll Comfortes, although I acknowledged I have good and dewtiful sons left. He dyed of ye Smale Poxe in Caen in Normandy ye 11th of July 1632.
Crammed into the margin besides these fading words he added, in that same colourless script:
Only my Teares with a fowle pen wase this wryghtyn.57
And in his blood,
Oh My Sonn George my son George, woold my Lyfe Could have excused thine, then hadst thou lived, the honnour of thie family and my selfe, being Owld, have gone but soom weekes before my time. [He was forty-eight]58
On 20 July he bought mourning clothes, spending the enormous sum of £38 on them ‘for my sonn George whome I Bred with all ye Care and Chardge that a lovinge ffather might bestowe on a Dewtifull Sonn’.59
Although, as George lay dying, he had asked his cousin Kempe to ‘embalme my body and send it to my ffather and Mother (A dolefull present) to bee interred amongst my Awncestors’, he could not be brought home ‘for ye poxe had so putryfied his Bodye’60 and the Oglanders sank into ‘unutterable Gryfe’.
In September, John paid off George’s debts of £28 17s. 6d.61 and wrote a long account of how he had replanted his beloved orchard and garden, making it a place fit for a gentleman and somewhere George would have enjoyed.62
This was the perfecting of an estate as an act of courage but in the margin, beside this account, he added these verses:
I goe, I goe, but to my Grave,
To find owt him I Could no save.63
For years afterwards, when looking over his old notebooks or when filling new ones, he would find himself overcome with grief at this loss:
Oh George, my Sonn George, thou weart to good for mee: … hadest thou Lived thou hadst bene an honnour, to thy ffamely and Country. But thou art ded, and with thee all my hopes: vale: vale: vale. tempore sequor [Farewell: farewell: farewell: in time I shall follow]64
Often writing in his own blood:
Melius est oblivisci: quod not potest recuparari [Better to forget what you cannot recover]65
Then in marginal notes to George himself:
Thy like I looke not for to see
Till beinge Dedd I meete with thee
Or strangers:
Enquier no more wheather Sir John Oglander had an elder sonn or whoe or what he wase. If thou wilt be Curious thou wilt but Discover thye owne shame, for I must tell thee he wase sutch as thou wilt nevor bee. He wase the Phenix of Owr house, the Phillip of the Sydnyes. Sutch as owr ffamely neuor had before, And I ffeare neuor will have agayne.
And finally on that page to himself:
My sorrowe confowndes me and maketh my wryghtinge to bee non Sence.66
John Oglander never recovered from the death of this boy. His next son, William, became his heir, but the psychological burdens of not measuring up to the dead and increasingly sanctified hero can only have been intolerable.
With the coming of the Civil War, Oglander’s world took a further step towards collapse.
He drew up a ‘Declaration’ as war approached in early 1642, agreed to and signed by most of the gentry on the island, that they would defend it ‘with their lives and estates’ against any ‘ill affected persons’ or ‘new government.’67 But this was whistling in the wind. For all his long experience and many administrative positions, Oglander was politically naïve and was outmanoeuvred by the Parliamentarian gentry on the island. Their supply ports of Portsmouth and Southampton were both soon in Parliamentarian hands and there was no way the island could stand out against them. Bands of Parliamentarian sailors were roaming the islands and gentry were having their houses ‘rifled and robbed in their absence’.68
Although the times meant he could not write down everything he wanted to, Oglander filled his notebook with hints at his anxiety and dread: ‘Lett me advise thee take a Nyghtes Deliberation Before thou Concludest on any greate action.’69
In August 1642, he was deprived of his offices.
O The Tirannicall Misery that the Gentlemen of England did Indure from July 1642 till Aprill 1643 and how much longer the Lord knowith, they Cowld Calle nothinge therowne, and lived in Slavery and Subiection to ye unruly base multitude. O tempora O mores70
The Virgilian system represented by everything at Nunwell was falling apart under threat from the people it had controlled for so many generations.
I beleive such tymes were never before sene in England, when the Gentry weare made Slaves to ye Comunalty, and in theyre Power not only to abuse but to Plunder any Gentleman. No lawe, and Government, but every mann to act his owne will without Controle, no Courtes at Westminster, no Assises, no Sessions, no Justices that woold be obeyed, no Spirituall Courtes. If any notorious Mallefactor weare sent to ye Goale, the next soldiers that
came realeased them by breakinge up ye Goale. Wee expected better fruytes from those Parliaments but as yet wee test nothinge but Sower grapes. Our feares arr the worst is to Come.71
Close up against that, this bleak entry, in ragged handwriting, in his blood: ‘Tuesday nyght the 13th Aprill had a most fearfull dreame of my Daughter Lennard.’72 His beautiful and treasured daughter Ann – whom he called ‘Nan’ – had married Sir Stephen Lennard of West Wickham in Kent. For Oglander to dream of her in trouble was a sign of deep anguish. He had been ill himself all spring and the notebook, with its usual filterlessness, transcribed exactly what had been wrong with his body: a cold caught when riding across the Downs to Newport, a cough with it, but ‘it lay most in my hedd … Every day my nose fowled 2 handkerchiefs and glaunders [a streaming nasal discharge] Came from mee as from a horse.’ He had suffered a ‘Distemper’ all over his body ‘insomuch as I left of Tobacco, cowld neyther rellisch that or my beare’. Only after two months did it leave him.73 This was part of the connectedness of the man: if the body politic was in turmoil, it was almost inevitable that Oglander’s body would take on the pain.
Births and deaths were recorded, of neighbours, cousins, grandchildren, employees and friends. Children dying young, mothers dying in childbirth, a man dying in the same week as his father: all were noted down as part of ‘a miserable distracted time’.74 As soon as the war had begun, Oglander found himself in a hostile universe and the notebook gathered the fragments of pain, loss, regret and indignation.
The world had turned against him and he was surrounded by enemies. But what had Oglander done to summon this hostility? Was the beautiful Virgilian system, in which he could pay £5 for a coach to London and pay two young women the same money for an entire year’s work, in fact a mechanism for rage? His own voice of unquestioning contempt for those who were not born into the governing class breaks through occasionally into the notebooks:
We had here a thing called a Committee which overruled Deputy lieutenants and also Justices of Peace and of this we had brave men: first Ringwood of Newport, the pedlar, Maynard the apothecary, Matthews the baker, Wavell and Legge, farmers and poor Baxter of Hurst Castle. These men ruled the whole Island, and did whatsoever they thought good in their own eyes.75
Those sentences are very nearly an invitation to revolution. He was heard by his enemies to remark that he would willingly give £500 out of his own pocket to see the King’s ships returned to ‘their rightful owner’, ‘dangerous talk’ that was reported to London.76 Oglander’s remorse went straight into the account book:
It wase the greatest fawlt in Sir John Oglander, that he wase to precipitate in all his Action, not suffitiently Chawinge the Chidd [or cud] upon them. It was a wyse mans sayinge he woold sleepe before he woold doo any thinge.77
In May 1643, under the rubric ‘What ffatting Cattell I have now to putt of’, he listed his oxen, his bulls, his heifers and barren cows and then this:
I only knowe this, that I knowe nothinge I cannot read eythor my selve, or other men, this wordle is Changed, and our Antipodes possesseth owr places, althinges are tourned Tosi-tourvy In nova fert animus, mutates dicere formas.78
Oglander was quoting Ovid, the opening lines of the Metamorphoses: ‘My spirit urges me to say that the shape of things has changed.’ The world was neither what it had been nor what it should be. Oglander was told that he was considered the ‘only Malignant in ye Isle of Wight’. ‘I have not one of my Neyghbours that speakes well of me.’ This was a moment of profound and disturbing isolation. ‘I am hated of every man almost in the island, and live like the owl amongst birds.’ Why should this charming, industrious, dutiful, affectionate and loving man feel so friendless at his time of need? Almost certainly the roots of his trouble were political: he was a (moderate) Royalist in an island full of natural Parliament men. And he was in the habit of taking bad news very hard, so that the political turn of events came to seem like a moment of personal and social failure.
A week later a body of horsemen rode up to Nunwell, banged on the door and presented him with a warrant for his arrest.79 The Parliamentary Committee for the Safety of the Kingdom required him in London and the next day he was taken up there to hear the worst.
Franck was left at home at Nunwell.
June 27th 1643
Dear Husband,
I knoe you long to here from me as I doe from you how you did in your going and how you have your helth sence, I give God thankes we ar all well yet, the gratest Sicknes I have nowe is the grife for your absence.
Your newe Shepperd when he came sade you had made no bargin with him and if I would not let him have the keping of 6 yoes [ewes] for himself he would not com so I granted it him till you com home and for no longer. Our servants mete will last but on week longar right me word whether I shall kill or by sum. Your baby [the bailiff at Nunwell] seth you haue left no order what hay you would haue kepe for your Shepe, but I hope you will be at home before that time.
This with my love remembered to you praying to God to send you a happy end of all your troubells and to send us a happy being together agane
I ever remain your Loveing and sorofull wife
Francis Oglander80
In London, a river of information flowed up against him from the island and his prospects looked bleak. On 11 July he wrote to Franck, bemoaning the fact that ‘now in owr owld adge we showld be fforced to live asounder, even when wee had most need one of ye others Company’.
I am glad Baby prooves so well. Pray Incourage him, and lett him followe ye hayinge when fayre weather comes, and to lett the wheat out by the acre to cuttinge, and ye Barley to Rakinge … Lett the Coachman look to the hop gardens. If the butchers will Buy any of the Fattinge beasts, let my sonn, with Babys advise, sell them, but for ready Monyes.
My Black swyte [suit] begins to be torne Wherefore, pray, in the trounke in the seller, where ye tobaccoe is, send up my sattin doublet and Cloth hose, and Claoke lined with plusch, and som tabaccoe; and put the other tobaccoe in the Binn.
Good ffrancke, be Merry, and lett him have your prayers whoe louves you Dearer than his owne lyfe
Your louvinge howsband
John Oglander81
There is no suggestion that she was not his equal co-bearer of this misery:
Only lett mee intreate you not to seme discontented, but beare itt owt with a Masculine Courrage, and to carry it patiently. I am much affrayd wee shalbe Plundered if I doo not comply with theyre demaundes. Woold your hanginges were well secured.82
Oglander sent his grandson ‘little Jack’ a coral to chew on and by late August was back at Nunwell, having paid a fine of £1,000. But he was too dangerous and inconvenient a figure to leave on the island and by early October he was back in custody in London, where he would stay for the next two and a half years, for much of the time held at ‘the basest place in London, A messengers howse at ye farthest Ende of Cabidge Lane in Westminster’,83 a place of cramped sub-mondaine lodgings.84 If geography had for most of his life been his glory and the theatre for his significance, this was geography as humiliation, degradation by address.
Franck went up to London to try to help, lobbying for him and arguing his case. At the end of May 1644, she at last met with success: John was released from his hovel in Cabbage Lane and allowed to move to his own rooms at the Seven Stars, a lawyers’ inn in Carey Street off the Strand.85
Now, though, the terminal disaster of his life struck:
June 12th 1644
My poore wyfe overheatinge her bloode in procuringe my Liberty, gott ye smale poxe and died, and made me a worse Prisoner then before.86 O my poor wyfe, with my bloud I wryght it thy death had made me most miserable. Indeede greater Gryfe and Sorrowe Could not have befallen any mann.87
She was fifty-four, five years younger than her husband. The parliamentary authorities had the grace to allow him to bury her on the Isle of Wight, but after the funeral he returned to London, where he was compelled to remain within the defences. Only in
February 1646, on the payment of another fine, was he finally released to Nunwell.
His notebook for these years is a ragged thing, whole sections cut out of it, many parts of pages removed with a razor, all for fear that what he had written would incriminate him with the authorities. From being a man who was central to his own world he had become marginal to it. He had to pay off his coachman Henry, as he had been in arms against Parliament, and again and again he poured into his notebook a surging nostalgia for the past:
This Island was beyond Compare Anno Domino 1630 So full of Knyghts and Gentry, … It wase the Paradise of England, and nowe Anno 1647 itt is Just like the other partes of ye Kingdome A melancholy deiected Sadd place/no Company/no resort/no neyghbors seinge one of the other so you may truly say/tempora mutantur.88 Would I could write or that I could be permitted to write, the history of these times.89 I have lived so much too long as to se myself deprived of all the places and to be vilified and condemned to be imprisoned and to have all affronts and disgraces put on me.90
A moment of bittersweet delight came to Oglander when the King himself stayed the night at Nunwell in November 1647. He had arrived on the island two days before, imagining with faulty intelligence that it might be a refuge for him, but on landing found himself a prisoner. Oglander was appalled at the news and ‘could doo nothinge but Sighe, and weepe, for 2 nyghtes and a Daye’. At Nunwell the King ‘graciously accepted a purse of gold … proffered on bended knee’, and stayed in ‘my wrought chamber, so called because it was hung with wrought stuffs’.91 The tapestries have all gone now, destroyed by moth, but the elegant room and its accompanying cabinet is still pointed out to visitors. Oglander gave his guest oysters, prawns, shrimps, whiting, cod, woodcock, ‘Sweetemeates’ and wine, as well as his own provisions,92 but their conversation, of necessity, went unrecorded. The sense of disorientated failure and self-pity must have hung heavily in the rooms at Nunwell.
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