But Harry, scholar, squire, father, widower, indebted defender of his own property against his siblings and relations (‘I doe take my estate for my most assured friend in my necessities’), was now hopelessly smitten. Kate’s father had died, she was the heiress and her father, who had known Harry all his life and was his friend, had appointed him her guardian. A crucial conversation had swept him away. An impoverished knightly family had whisked her off to London and tried to marry her off to one of their connections. Harry was keen that she should escape such traps:
I advised her to beware how and to whom, she married, and told her that her fortune and selfe deserved a good match, five to one better then myselfe; to which (casting her eies upon mee and as soone them downe againe) shee replyed, I know noe man I can thinke a better match or [MS torn] so well as yourselfe; this amazed mee, insomuch that where [MS torn] before I loved her as my child and friend, I now was forced to consider of loveing her as a wife.48
Kate knew what she was doing: those up-and downward-sweeping eyes caught the lonely widower. Harry, now thirty-four years old, was adrift in the torrents of love, perhaps for the first time in his life. He knew he was ‘talkinge at randome in moone shining nights’ but what could he do?49
I have tryed to cure my selfe by labour, art and friendship, nay I have practised the heathen philosophers’ rule, to drive out one love with another as they doe a fever. I have read over sundry authors uppon this subject … and all to little purpose … I have tried to cure myself by exercise and diet and fasting. I have endeavoured to hinder it in its first growing; in the bargaine I have kepte a whole quarter of a year out of her company. I have endeavoured to call to mind the weaknes of most women, their pride, their dissimulation, their uncertainty … I have tried Philters, Chaceters and Chales and all to such purpose as if I had run my head agt a post.50
He had considered throwing himself headlong off a rock but was ‘loath to go so far as to experience it’. None of it was any good: Kate Culling was his destiny.
Tides of anxiety quivered through the Oxinden network. Harry’s ex-brother-in-law Sir Thomas Peyton wanted to know even more urgently that his dead sister’s children would not be disinherited by the arrival of a new stepmother. Harry’s uncle Sir James Oxinden wanted to know what the Culling estate looked like. The Oxinden cousins wrote anxiously to ask Harry if he knew what he was doing.
Harry’s animosity to Peyton, already stoked by their political differences, looked as if it was deepening into real loathing. To his Oxinden cousins, particularly to the brilliant and educated Elizabeth Dallison, he embarked on a series of long and revelatory letters describing and justifying his love. There was, first of all, the question of money. Was Harry Oxinden going to burden himself with an impoverished wife? He laid it all out in detail to Elizabeth, giving a fascinating insight into the financial planning of mid-seventeenth-century gentry.51
The Culling farm at South Barham is still there, a small timbered farmhouse, with an eighteenth-century extension, and a rather larger, low-eaved barn next to it. The whole ancient ensemble is now half-submerged in the giant sheds of a modern dairy business based on a high-producing Holstein Friesian herd. But the atmosphere of a serious, working farming enterprise remains. This is not a place in which gentlemen have ever played with their Horatian visions. In the 1640s it sat at the middle of a small productive holding in the valley of the Nailbourne stretching up on to the wooded chalk hill above it. The coppice wood was worth about £17 a year, some used for fencing, but mostly as firewood. Between the coppice stools stood the much longer-lived timber trees, largely oak, with some ash. In all, the capital value of the woodland was worth £400. The rest of the farm was producing £109 12s. a year. Estates were valued in the seventeenth century at twenty times their annual income – a 5 per cent return on capital – and on that basis South Barham was worth about £2,192, to which Harry added the £400 value of the wood: a total of £2,592.52
That sounded good but Kate’s father had left substantial legacies and debts: £100 at the next Lady Day to Mr Huffam, her brother-in-law; another £100 two years after that to the same man; £100 to Mr Denwood at that time and another £300 three years later; to James Fag, £200 eight years thence; and to Kate’s younger sister Ellen Culling £600 when she was married or reached the age of twenty-one. When all that was taken into account, South Barham was worth £1,192 clear, which didn’t sound so good at all, particularly as the value would not be realized for many years. ‘But the house and seate [site] in this valuation’, Harry told Elizabeth a little too insistently, ‘is reckoned att nothing, which I esteeme at a considerable rate; for as concerning the seate, it is incompareably more pleasant than mine, and the house will not be builded for 4 or 500.’53
‘None of the legacies can be expected faster than the revenewes will pay’, Harry had written, but looked at rationally, this was clearly a plan driven more by love than by the financial interests of his family. Harry Oxinden was, in effect, slipping out of the gentry frame of mind.
There was another problem: class. Kate ‘was a Yeoman’s daughter; True itt is her father was a yeoman, but such a Yeoman as lived in his house, in his company, and in his sportes and pleasures like a gentleman, and followed the same with gentlemen’. She had been sent to school for four years ‘amongst other gentlemen’s daughters, att the same costs and charges they were at’. Besides, the Cullings were ancient Kentish people, who had been at South Barham, Harry discovered, since 1280. ‘If the definition which the heralds have given to Gentilitie be true (that is of antient rase) I see no reason why the possessors of so ancient an estate may not as well have the benefit of the foresaid definition as others.’54
A small revolution was going on in the heart of Harry Oxinden. Since the Middle Ages the discussion had flowed back and forth over the nature of gentility: did it rely on virtue or on blood? Was it dependent on your father’s qualities or on yours? As the old definitions of a hierarchical society were for a moment dissolving around him, Harry now had no doubt: ‘The wisest men have ever held vertue the best and truest nobilitie, and as sure as death it is soe, and for my owne part my former highlie esteeming of politicall nobilitie I now reckon amongst the follies of my youth.’55
The beauty of Kate’s eyes had convinced him. There were some people in the world ‘of soe stupid and grosse capacities, that conceive there is something extrordinarielie inherent in this politicall nobilitie’56 but Harry had abandoned that idiocy now. Men were not born equal, but their virtues and nothing else was what distinguished the noble from the ordinary: ‘If I see a man of what low degree or quality ever that is virtuous, rich, wise or powerful, him will I preferre beefore the greatest Lord in the kingdome that comes short of him in these.’57 This line of thought, and the recognition that the young Kate Culling was as fine a person as he’d ever met, had changed his mind and his view of the world. Rather than being patronized and put upon by his Royalist brother-in-law Thomas Peyton, he was now engaged to a woman who loved him and looked up to him, as the rest of her family would. A new sense of liberty coursed through Harry, a sudden coalescence of public and private selves in this time of civil war. As he wrote to his cousin Henry
It shall ever be as far from my beleife as the East is from the West, that so many millions of men as are in the Christian world were created to bee slaves to about half a score mortall gods … Put not your trust in princes for there is no healpe in them.58
The gentry value system fell away. It now seemed absurd to Harry Oxinden that one of his neighbours, Harry Palmer, had got himself knighted in service of the King. Why should Harry Palmer not ‘continue in a degree with other men’?59 On top of that, his own brother, the vicar James Oxinden, had now turned to the right and wanted ‘to advance the pompe and libertie of the clergie over the Laytie’.60 In Harry’s view, all that the church needed was a true reformation.
The arguments and passions over which England divided in civil war had entered his life, even if it was sequestered
in the depths of a chalky Kent valley. Now those passions were to come even closer to home. Early in 1643, Parliament had abolished all bishoprics and archbishoprics and the Puritan faction in the church had come to dominate the country. John Swan, the rector of Denton, took to his new significance with a passion, to Harry’s contempt:
Little did I once dreame that there would arise out of the ashes of the Bishops a precise offspring, outwardly pious and zealous, seemingly humble and lowly, but inwardly wicked and profane, secretly proud and ambitious, more medling, more temporalizing then those they condemned.61
Swan and his sort had decided ‘to reigne like Lords and Kings themselves in their owne Circuits’. It was a system that would ‘set up a teacher greater then a Bishop in everie parish, who, like Mr John Swan, will studie more to inslave his parishioners then to save their soules’.62
Late in October 1643, this clash between the newly enlightened squire and the newly empowered clergyman had come to a head at Maydekin itself. Two of Harry’s tenants, Adam Jull and a man called Woollet, the assessors for the village, had levied a local tax on one of Swan’s servants at double its usual rate. Swan maintained that this was because the servant had been chasing and killing Jull’s hogs and Jull was getting his revenge. Harry Oxinden, clearly disgusted with the sanctimonious Swan, started shouting and swearing oaths at him, ‘spoken in such passion as I scarce know I spake them’.63
Swan, whose father had also been the vicar here, was a malevolent presence in the village. ‘I have greatly disliked many things in you since your father went from hence’,64 Oxinden told him. Swan wrote back to say that he would leave Harry to his ‘owne wrath and to entangle yourself in your owne snares’.65 Then on 31 October, Hallowe’en, a moment when by tradition the accepted order was turned upside down in rowdy village rituals – deeply disapproved of by the Puritans – Harry took part and Swan was furious.
Who would have dreamed that you would have so farre engaged yourselfe (in these sober times) in such a ridiculous sport as that was. Was it not folly for a gentleman of your quality to have a man dressed in women’s apparel in your court and obseanely to hang up your servant’s smock on a pole and to follow that and an asse etc. accompanied with rude boyes up and doune the streete?66
Harry said it was just a ‘harmelesse pastime, which to the opinion of honest divines is not only lawful but in some sort necessarie’.67 Swan would not have that and summoned the trained band of the local militia captained by one of the leading Puritan gentry of Kent, Sir Edward Boys. For Harry, this was an ‘uncivill odious and detestable affront’,
(the verie thought whereof cannot chuse but put mee into an extreame passion) given mee and my dearest [wife crossed out] consort in my owne house, by being there, by men of meane qualitie, bid stand, stand; one of who charged the rest give fire upon us.68
It was obviously a tense moment. No one had the right to tell Mr and Mrs Oxinden to stand up in their own parlour. Kate had ‘made a pish’ of Mr Swan – teasing him in all his seriousness – and Harry had been in a red fog of rage.
There are layers of significance in this stand-off between the newly democratized squire and the intemperate Puritan minister. Harry’s rage was both against a form of tyranny and against a lack of class respect; Swan’s against a degenerate world, of which degenerate gentry were yet another symptom. Harry had not abandoned the idea of himself as a gentleman – ‘all men that have the least sparke of gentillitie or breeding in them must equally resent with us who have suffered in such an intolerable and unexampled manner’ – but he could not tolerate ‘presbiteriall government’. He had acquired a form of wisdom. The Hallowe’en japes in the village street were to be defended against intolerant Puritan modernity because they were an integral part of the Maydekin world which Harry loved.
He turned to his uncle Sir James to make peace between him and Swan. The reconciliation was not immediate but in the following September Harry sent Swan a young swan as a peace offering. The vicar wrote a graceful reply: ‘I returne you many thanks for your rara Avis in terris’ – ‘a rare bird in the lands’, a phrase from Juvenal, and a joke here because Juvenal was referring to that impossibility, a black swan – ‘and doe reckon it so much the greater Courtisy because your present is homogeniall to my name.’ Swan added another elegant little witticism: ‘You may assure yourselfe that with this Cygnett as with a Signett you have sealed your true affection to me.’69
For a few days Harry joined the Parliamentary army at the siege of Arundel Castle in Sussex, during the frozen first week of January 1644. He hated it, grieving ‘to see men of the same Religion, and of the same Nation, so eagerly engaged one against the other’.70 His friend and neighbour Mark Dixwell, nephew and heir to Sir Basil at Broome Park, was killed at the siege beside him. Harry never withdrew his allegiance from Parliament but he never fought again. Instead he continued to do what his situation in life led him to believe in: loving his neighbours and family, even when they were fighting on the other side. His Royalist brother-in-law Sir Thomas Peyton, who had treated him so condescendingly, was imprisoned by Parliament and heavily fined. Harry, though, did his best for him, writing to him in prison and making sure that his children were all right – they went to stay with the Bargraves at Bifrons. Peyton wrote a beautiful letter thanking him and telling Harry that he was ‘a vertue betweene two extremes’, a model of
the true and evangelicall virtues of good neighbourhood. ’Tis nott the neerenesse of doores nor the confining of Inheritances makes us Neighbours; but the Acts of Love and Charitie which exercise their offices in all places and att all distances … For myselfe, I must esteeme of your affectionate offers as enlargements of a liberal and kind heart; and lay them up in my owne breast for my study and observation.71
A kind of goodness had come to Harry Oxinden with his marriage to Kate Culling. Other neighbouring Royalists also benefited from his kindness and care. Sir Anthony Percivall, his Denton Royalist neighbour, was imprisoned and his property and rabbits came under attack from covetous Parliamentarians. In a letter to him in prison, Harry stated his credo: ‘You shall suffer as little ecclipse as my small power will permitt, which shall extend to its utmost to doe you all the right and service I can, being none of those summer birds which take their leave before the winter and snows come.’72
On the other side, a deep friendship developed between Harry and a radical separatist preacher, Charles Nichols, who was on the run from the Parliamentary authorities.73 Unlike many other Kentish gentlemen, who preyed as hard as they could on the property of their neighbouring enemies, Harry Oxinden was a neutralist, committed to no side, but positively engaged with all of them. ‘I can assure you’, Thomas Peyton wrote to ‘his very loving bro Mr Hen Oxinden’, ‘more devoted affections have bin gotten you by the late reports of your non-confedircy than had you courted every man’s particular humour for it’.74 Quite distinctly, in his mid-thirties, Harry Oxinden had become a noble spirit.
But his goodness, and the sense of reliability which he embodied for his friends and some of his relations, became his downfall. He had long been in debt and any gust of difficulty was always in danger of capsizing the whole enterprise. His downfall came in the end from the most unlikely of sources.
When Harry’s old friend Vincent Denne died in June 1642, his nephew and heir Tom Denne was not yet twenty-one and Vincent made Harry his executor until the boy came of age. There was a substantial inheritance: the manor house at Wenderton near Wingham, some surrounding farms and pieces of land further afield in Kent on the Isle of Thanet and on the rich summer grazing of Romney Marsh, worth in all some £8,000. Wenderton, as one seventeenth-century Kentishman described it, was ‘eminent for its excellent air, situation, and prospect’.75 It is still a beautiful and entrancing place, wisteria sprouting like a moustache from the plum-apricot brick, with pear orchards running down to the marshes by the river. Huge old chimneys give its date away as from the 1640s despite the big nineteenth-century windows. In its relationsh
ip to the lane – neither withdrawn behind a big wall nor hidden from view – it looks as calmly integrated with the wider world as Vincent Denne himself had been. As his will had instructed, he is buried under a slab of Purbeck in the church in Wingham, as near as he could be to the pew in which he had worshipped all his life.
Vincent had given legacies to his nieces but to his own older brother Thomas Denne of Denne Hill, young Tom’s father, he left only a little land near Denton. Old Thomas was sixty-seven, an embittered, subtle and unscrupulous barrister in the Middle Temple. As soon as he heard that his younger brother had cut him out of the Wenderton inheritance, he resolved to sue both his son Tom and Harry Oxinden as the executor. He would go after them, as Harry wrote to Tom, ‘till neither of us be worth a groat’.76 Harry hoped that ‘all these great words will vanish like smoake in the aire’77 but they didn’t. Thomas Denne subjected him to years of litigation, entangling him in multiple, overlapping cases, claiming that Tom’s inheritance was in fact his own. When suddenly young Tom died in 1648 and left much of his property to Harry, old Denne turned his fire on him directly. Tom had left large legacies to his four sisters and for years they and their father pursued the executor, surrounded by an outer halo of dissatisfied creditors and legatees.
Months went by in which Harry was forced to be in London while Kate stayed at home attending to their lands. ‘Pray put on the breeches until I come home’78 he told her but being away from her was ‘the greatest and longest purgatory I ever yet knew’.79 ‘Kate Dearest’, he wrote in September 1651, ‘I will not bee bound uppon any termes to live so long from thee againe, being contented to live uppon bread and waters rather with thy company then with any conveniences this Kingdom can afford without it.’80
In the end, but only after fifteen years’ legal tussle, Harry won his case against Denne. But it was an empty victory. The webs of legal entanglement still meant that he could not get his hands on the money from the estate and he had been ruined by lawyers’ fees. A little sickeningly, others seemed to be doing well. His brother-in-law Thomas Barrow had become draper to the aristocracy. His own younger brother Richard, known as ‘Dicke Ox’, who had gone off to fight as a soldier of fortune, returned dripping in loot, with
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