Oglander eked out the remainder of his life, a terminally saddened man. In 1648 a Roundhead, ‘Captayne Stratton’, was billeted at Nunwell,93 a horrible experience for a man who had once considered this house the centre of his own universe, but he could speak no truth to his notebooks:
There was a time in Rome, when it wase not (as Tacitus sayth) lawfull for a mann to thinke, by his Countenance, and Carriadge his very thoughtes weare scrutined. Wonder not then that such times may Come wherein wee dare not wryght none dare wryght a Cornnicle duringe ye life of ye Prince exespt he bee very virtuous. Mors in olla: nemo falix ante obitum.94
‘There is death in the pot’ – the phrase referred to a famous story from Kings, but in the Latin of the Vulgate: ‘There is no happiness this side of death.’
He read his copy of Sir Walter Raleigh’s History of the World, which was scribbled in by his grandson, also called John Oglander, playing with pens in the library. And he longed for death:
O, that man had but that happines annexed to his nature that without any Offence to gods or mans lawes he myght departe this wordle when he is willinge, then showld I bee a happie mann.95
I am Confident that whenever it pleaseth God to Calle mee owt of this worldle (which havinge lost my poore wyfe, I infinitely desire) it will be with a Dropsy.
Owr ffamely weare never long-lived. About theyre Cleymiterricoll yeare 63, they most of them died, and I believe (and hope) that will bee the yere wherein it will please god to take me owt of this Earthly pilgramige. A good, and a short life is best.96
Oglander died in November 1655 in his seventy-first year and had the painted wooden effigies he had commissioned placed on his tomb and on his father’s in the Oglander chapel in Brading.97 His dear son George was commemorated by a miniature knight in a niche on the wall above him. All of this was antiquarian, his armour wildly out of date, his crossed legs an ancient signal which in the seventeenth century was thought to mean the knight portrayed had been a Crusader, the best and most honourable of men. There is no reason to think that his huge eyes, his florid complexion and his giant moustaches are not a depiction of the man as he was. He had, after all, approved and paid for a drawing before Crocker the sculptor got to work. Everything here depicts his idea of himself: a knight from the old days, full of vigour, entranced by antiquity, just raising himself from his bed for the resurrection to come, when he and George would meet each other again in an everlasting embrace.98
The Oglanders never wrote like this again but their achievement can be measured in a worldly way. A baronetcy was acquired by Sir John’s son William and the family made a spankingly successful marriage in the eighteenth century, acquiring the 16,000 acres of Dorset and Somerset that came with the Parnham estate. Sir William Oglander, 6th Baronet, possessor by now of a house in Portman Square in London and 24,000 acres of prime English earth, married the Duke of Grafton’s daughter in 1810. But he was ‘lacking in many of the qualities which go to the making of a career’, ‘was never known to write an unnecessary letter’99 and spent most of his life in the bosom of his family. The Oglanders continued rich; there were soldiers, scholars and imperialists among them. That tenor of life lasted until the 7th Baronet, Henry, died childless in 1874. In 1892, on the death of his widow, the Parnham estate was entailed elsewhere and the Oglander acreage shrank. Sir Henry’s cousin assumed his name but the twentieth century was, eventually, not kind to the family. In 1982 the house at Nunwell was sold and although Oglanders still live near by and still own many of the lands Sir John had loved, as well as the precious notebooks and the paintings from his hall, the house itself is occupied by another family, with their coat of arms displayed on the ancient walls, and no more than the ghost of Sir John treading carefully up the grey oak stairs.
1630s–1660s
Withdrawal
The Oxindens
Denton, Kent
In 1632 Harry Oxinden, tall but ‘over-slender’, a scholar and poet, a reader and admirer of John Donne, was twenty-three. His portrait, painted in the late 1630s by the Fleming Cornelius Janssen, shows a slightly spaniel-eyed man, with a scratchy moustache and wearing the fine linen his correspondence often mentions or desires.1 For the two years since his father’s unexpected death he had been looking after his lands and living in the family’s house at Maydekin, at the northern end of Denton, a small Kentish village a few miles south-east of Canterbury. The village’s tiled and thatched roofs are pushed deep into the cleft of one of the many dry valleys of the North Downs. Bunches and drifts of woodland decorate the valley sides. Steep pastures separate them. Where the footpaths come to a narrow gateway, they wear down through the turf to the whiteness of the chalk. Hares bolt away across the grassland from under your feet and grey-legged partridges creep into the margins of the woods. Above those pastures, on the smoothed hillbacks, you can look out, across the eastern chin of Kent, to the North Sea.2
It is a mushroomy, private, creased country, where signs of the gentry are thick on the ground. No great houses dominate this strangely remote and unvisited province. The aristocracy was never important here. This is the gentry world above all else, every mile or two marked by another small manor house and its associated gardens and closes, so that the country itself comes to seem like a kind of social network. Go for a walk along its lanes draped in old man’s beard, between the orchards, the woods and the pastures, and you will find yourself buried in a world of small places, the threads and nodes of a gentry system, none of the significant houses more than a mile or two from its neighbour, twenty minutes’ ride away. It is like walking through a map of localism, of places shaped by a deep, shared attachment to place. It becomes clear that civility here is not an urban quality. If there is such a thing as an urbane landscape, this is it.
East Kent was as alluring then as it is today. A seventeenth-century traveller, Thomas Baskerville, rode down the Dover road,
a great part of my way that I went being through delicious orchards of cherries, pears and apples and great hop-gardens. In husbandry affairs they are very neat, binding up all sorts of grain in sheaves; they give the best wages to labourers of any in England, in harvest giving 4 and 5 shillings for an acre of wheat and 2 s. a day meat and drink, which doth invite many stout workmen hither from the neighbouring country to get in their harvest.3
This was as rich as England came, much of the wheat and most of the fruit and hops bought by London fruiterers and brewers and shipped to the capital from quays on the north Kent coast. Peas, onions, carrots, asparagus and artichokes were all grown in this market-gardening hotspot, where families of Flemings had been practising intensive vegetable and seed production since the middle of the sixteenth century.4
About six hundred acres of this perfect country belonged to the Oxindens of Maydekin. It was a little estate and they were the most minor of gentry. Harry Oxinden’s father, Richard, who was a younger son, had been left this little subsidiary estate by his father when his elder brother inherited the main Oxinden property at Dene just to the north. The Maydekin acres consisted of a mixture of grassland, wood and some arable, on which they grew peas which they sold to London merchants. Maydekin is still a beautiful place, best seen from above now, clumped in its trees, a house in a sheltered hollow, with barns, cart sheds and stables gathered beside it. The raging Folkestone road now drives past but strip that away and you can imagine what the records describe: a history of attention and care. A ring of sixteenth-century ash trees and an orchard above the pigeon-house, persisting throughout the following century; perry pear trees, winter pear trees, and pearmains or warden trees, whose fruit were the longest keeping of all, planted here in the reign of Elizabeth, still fruiting in the 1660s. After he came to live here in 1610, Richard planted a new hedge between the Cowlease and the cherry garden and another between the two horse leases. When Harry’s sister Elizabeth was born in January 1616, her father planted a cobnut to commemorate her coming.5
Richard had died young, when just forty-one, and Harry had
returned early from Corpus Christi in Oxford, to take up the reins of his inheritance. He set about improving the house: he ‘seeled the chamber over the little parlour’ – it had been open to the rafters before and this was for comfort and warmth – ‘and enlarged it from the chimney to the little closet’, took down the old malthouse which had been outside the ‘with-drawing roome’ (the smell of the dampened grain had become intolerable), added a new staircase in the house and rebuilt several of the outbuildings, including the brewhouse and the milkhouse.6 All his life long he tucked and tended to his house and garden, putting in new floors, opening new windows, laying paved paths in Purbeck stone (delivered from Dorset by sea),7 adding a porch, planting more cherry trees, putting in a hop garden, planting the yews with which the house is still surrounded, setting up oak gates in the garden wall, ‘making and levelling my flower garden and artichoke garden, carrying out all the rubbage, and bringing in mould [rotted compost], levelling of it, quick-setting it [with hawthorn], planting it, making the summer houses, and setting up the frame for the vines, making the pear garden and the terrace walk in it’. Friends and relations would come for winter lunches and plant an oak tree or a damson. The landscape was the vehicle through which the gentry expressed its sense of order, sociability, mutuality and wellbeing.
For all this connectedness and rootedness, Harry was nevertheless a man slightly removed from the world around him. His letters show him to be a little aloof, both restless and filled with vague melancholy, at one crucial moment overwhelmed with passion for a young woman, at others withdrawn from the dramatic events of seventeenth-century England, perennially short of cash, warmly affectionate to those he loved, a deep thinker, self-consciously driven by his nobility of spirit and ragingly dismissive of those he considered treacherous to himself and their own duties.
Every house and place in Harry Oxinden’s story can be visited on foot in a single long summer’s day, about eighteen miles on the lanes and footpaths through these chalky valleys. Not quite uniquely, but with extraordinary richness, it is possible to look beyond the brick and timber façades and their fields and gardens and to re-construct the social landscape of Harry Oxinden’s realm. It is a little world deeply connected by marriage and inheritance, but also tense with rivalry and distrust, usually mended by a kind of forgiveness, supremely aware of minor differences in status, touchy with hierarchy anxiety, if not always constrained by it, and sometimes surprisingly loose at its margins. These netted East Kent valleys were the scene for a kind of corporate gentry existence, and as in most corporations, that enterprise was both coloured by joint purpose and riddled with the discontent and strain that joint enterprise breeds.
The reason we know all this is that Harry Oxinden was both a fixer, communicator, plotter and planner and the most extraordinary hoarder, recorder and keeper, not only of any letter that he received but of letters to other members of his family and the network of friends and relations scattered across these valleys, as well as any draft of any letter he sent. The accumulated mounds of correspondence, a compost heap of seventeenth-century gentry consciousness, has ended up in the British Library, along with the assorted notebooks and journals which the squire of Maydekin kept through the vicissitudes of his life. He is, in his way, a minor, rural, slightly earlier Samuel Pepys.
After his father’s death, Harry became the head of his own small family. He had three younger brothers. James was at Cambridge and destined for the church. Richard was apprenticed to a Mr Newman, a cloth merchant in Fish Street in London, but hated that life and went off instead to fight in the Netherlands with his uncle, a man blessed with the name of Colonel Prude. The youngest brother, Adam, was also in trade, apprenticed to a Mr Brooks, who dealt in merceryware – silk cloths, gold and silver ribbons and fringed gloves. Adam hated it too and went to sea instead. Harry’s sister Kate was married to a high-class draper in London, Thomas Barrow, mercer of Cheapside. And there was the youngest sister, Bess, who lived with Harry at Maydekin. By his father’s will, Harry owed each of these siblings a legacy of £300 (no distinction between girls and boys) which he had to pay them out of the rather slight income of the Maydekin estate.8 Needless to say, he was slow in doing so and for year after year they pestered him for tiny instalments, a few pounds here and there, of the money that was rightly theirs.
These are the lower fringes of the gentry world: not quite adequately funded, sliding off into the riskier dimensions of war and London trade. But these Oxindens were also connected to the higher and more potent reaches of gentrydom. Harry was married on Christmas Eve 1632 to Anne Peyton, the sister of a great Kentish knight, Sir Thomas Peyton. On marrying her, Harry gave her a diamond ring, which cost him ‘eighteen pound eleaven shilling’.9 The Peytons came from Knowlton, a beautiful, many gabled brick house a few miles to the east of Maydekin, still in the middle of its own park, with its own church close next to it and its windows enriched with painted glass, its chancel decorated with the many banners and helmets of the Peyton knights and their predecessors, an interior dim with antiquity and provincial grandeur. (Not any more: the Victorians swept most of this away.)
A few miles to the north at Dene near Wingham was the elder branch of the Oxinden family itself, vastly richer, more powerful, more connected than their Maydekin cousins, presided over by Harry’s uncle, Sir James. Harry’s cousin Henry Oxinden, later Sir Henry, baronet, became one of his dearest friends, ‘my second selfe’ as he often called him,10 a fellow huntsman but politically impassioned, a man with a sense of the gentry’s political destiny. The children of this grand Oxinden branch, like the Peyton children, were all married into the great political gentry families of Kent. Their sons and daughters were carefully educated, unlike Harry’s siblings, who apart from the vicar James were only marginally literate. None of those grander Peytons or Oxindens ever went into trade.
Harry’s wife’s sister Elizabeth was married to Robert Bargrave, another big Kentish squire, the descendant of a family of yeoman tanners, whose father John had been a mercenary and Virginia planter and whose mother had been the daughter and heiress of the wonderfully rich London haberdasher Giles Crouch. This joint inheritance (London trade + colonial land) had set the Bargraves up as powers in Kent, newly based on their wonderful house called Bifrons (it had two equal façades, perhaps to reflect the Crouch–Bargrave alliance) near Patrixbourne, just south of Canterbury.
A seventeenth-century painting of Bifrons is now in the Mellon collection at Yale and although it was painted at some time towards the end of the century – neither the artist nor the date is known11 – and almost certainly the house had been extended after the Restoration, this is nevertheless a near-perfect representation of the subject of this book: gentry-in-the-landscape.
The group of horsemen cresting the rise in the foreground is something of a visual cliché, as is much of the mise-en-scène: the framing trees, the receding ridges, the sun falling carefully on the house and the Norman church at Patrixbourne. Command, ease, settlement, civility and the tidiness of the walled gardens and orchards, with the wall fruit trained against them, represent an order that extends to the fields in which the sheaves are gathered in stooks, and the distant roofs of Canterbury. There is newness and sharpness here but those new contributions take their place in a set of ancient patterns. The half-autumnal woods in which the oak standards stand high above the lower coppice; the sociability of the figures in the garden who are in conversation, gesturing to the worlds around them, past the little garden pavilion; the carefully distributed statuary; the new allées of trees and hedges, the elegant gates which are swept low to allow a view to the country beyond; the gilding evening light; the thatched cart sheds and the tiled barn with long outshots; the flocks of autumn starlings; the cattle; the near-elegiac lateness of the view: all contribute to a vision of beauty and settlement, of an ordered place in an ancient world.
No contemporary picture survives of Maydekin equivalent to the beautiful Bifrons scene, and that itself is a signal of
the way in which the class diverged. The Bargraves, the greater Oxindens and the Peytons swam on into the assured riches of a landed future. The poorer Maydekin Oxindens, the children of a younger son, were mostly thrown on to the vagaries of the market, war and the beginnings of empire. Success in those risky fields might steer a family into the mainstream, as it had done with the Bargraves, but more often than not the poor relations sank from view, losing influence, political power, even literacy, depending as it did on expensive private education which even the relatively poor could not afford.
Nevertheless, even as the class divided, it remained in touch and Harry’s vast letter compendium is witness to a continued vitality of family connection across social difference. This small slice of a gentry net extended across the whole spectrum:
from
a baronet (Sir Henry Oxinden, Harry’s best friend and first cousin)
to
a knight (Sir Thomas Peyton, his wife’s brother)
to
a rich squire (Robert Bargrave of Bifrons, his wife’s sister’s husband)
to
an impoverished squire (Harry himself)
to
a clergyman (his brother, James Oxinden)
to
an old military captain (his uncle by marriage, Colonel Prude)
to
a soldier of fortune (his brother, Richard Oxinden)
to
an apprentice in the Exchange, turned seaman (his younger brother, Adam)
The Gentry Page 15