2 rings more then I saw beefore uppon each cuffe string, of the value of 50l. the piece, besids other rings uppon his fingers.81…
His cloath is of 35s the yard: his linen exceeding fine: he hath a chaine of gold goeth 7 times about his wrist and a Diamond ring upon his finger.82
Harry’s neighbours the Dixwells at Broome Park were doing well out of the Commonwealth – one of them had signed Charles’s death warrant – but only troubles clustered around Harry Oxinden. He married his daughter Margaret to John Hobart, a man who looked as if he had prospects – the Hobarts were an important Norfolk family – but who turned out to be a rake and ne’er-do-well. Margaret’s uncle the Royalist Sir Thomas Peyton, still in prison, wrote upbraidingly to Harry in August 1653 when Margaret was six months pregnant:
There is a daughter of yours I heare towards lying in and her husband minds it as much as my Cowes calving. Shee is as unprovided for as one that walkes the highwaies and how to provide for all things I knowe not, nor will I have long to do with such incessant troubles.83
Peyton then wrote to Harry’s uncle Sir James Oxinden at Dene, about ‘my sister’s children, whom [Harry] hath hitherto put to shift for themselves, and consumed all their patrimony in vaine imaginations’.84
This was humiliating, the unravelling of Harry’s gentry world, the loss of honour, the loss of continuity, the loss of respect. His son Thomas was no better, falling in with a gang of highwaymen and turning to a life of violent crime on the highways of England and the continent. Harry Oxinden must have been holding his head in his hands. From the endless negotiations in London he wrote to Kate: ‘I know not how I shall according to the saying keepe buckle and thong together.’ And then he faced the ultimate solution: ‘If I could have my price for land, I have a desire rather to convert itt into mony.’85
Harry’s collapse is the rarest of glimpses into the ending of a gentry family, the final slither into insignificance. Harry asked Kate to find out how likely the Dixwells were to buy Maydekin if he offered it for sale.
Pray sift out to your utmost abilitie how they of Broome stand affected to the buying of what I have formerly acquainted you with; I do not value what was my forefathers if inconvenient to mee, as they would have altered their estates if for their conveniency; they have left me the same liberty and I may lawfully take it; and Posterity will take the same libertie should I do my utmost to prevent itt.86
This was whistling in dark. He had loved Maydekin all his life; everything about him was bound up with it. Now he had to claim otherwise. ‘It is only that true love and a true lover’s knot beetwene man and wife’, he told his beloved Kate, ‘continues indissoluble.’87
Harry drew up particulars for the sale and in July 1656 his cousin Henry Oxinden of Dene introduced him to Edward Ady, ‘a Merchant that I found willing [to deale] with you for your house and Lands’.88 But when things are on the slide, everything goes wrong. Harry was thought to have overvalued his land ‘and your tres too, tops of ashes etc’ and Ady was reluctant to close on the sale. Harry had borrowed money against it from several people, including one John Carpenter, ‘of the City Stampe, hard and flinty, and very earnest for money, or for a very strict prosecution for the same’.89
When the sale was delayed, Carpenter wanted his money back and wrote insultingly to Harry: ‘It is vayne for you to flatter yourselfe with the thought of obteyneing longer tyme, because my occasions are of that consequence which will admit of noe more delayes. Your answer (without a putt off) will oblige.’90
Harry’s name, standing, financial position and ability to command any form of respect were now bankrupt. Only in 1663 was Maydekin and its lands finally sold, and then at a pitiably low price. Harry had wanted £1,500 but Ady paid no more than £800 for the main house and its premises. The orchards were to be valued by arbitration on top of that and there were some other cottages sold at fourteen times their annual rent, the bulk of the land at eighteen times, both well below the conventional twenty years’ purchase. Maydekin was sold, in other words, at a buyer’s price.91
In April 1663 Mr Ady gave Kate Oxinden leave to stay at the house until the middle of May. ‘If you have any other goods that you cannot conveniently dispose of before our coming you may leave them in the garrette,’ he wrote generously.92 The Greenwich man bought quite a lot of the Oxindens’ furniture, the brewing vessels and barrels, the table and benches in the hall, two beds, one better, another worse, and the things belonging to the dairy.
The world of Henry Oxinden, now aged fifty-five, was in collapse. ‘Surely, surely, without considerable monie nothing can considerably be done.’93 This was not how it was meant to end. Still writing from ‘this stinking smoakie Cittie’,94 he tried to put the best possible gloss on it to his young wife, Kate. They had been deserted by their friends and by their class. The Peytons, the greater Oxindens, the Bargraves and the Dixwells had all abandoned them to their fate. A gentleman with no money was a gentleman no more. ‘None of our real or pretended friends would help us’ – Harry wrote those phrases which are printed here in italics in a simple code so that the courier could not read them – but he insisted that they had ‘cause to bless God that wee met with such a one (though a hard one) as we have’. Edward Ady and his purse was a kind of ally when all help had deserted them. ‘For without mony nothing is to be had of the best friendes, and that is a certaine Truth as anie I know.’95
He couldn’t come down to Kent because if he did ‘Those to whom I owe money to will haunt mee before I have it for them.’96 Kate was to take ‘the hangings in the little parlour, the Long Chamber and the maids’ chamber’ as well as the diamond panes in his study windows on which a lion and fox were engraved.97 Some furniture including the bedstead was to be taken to Kate’s old house at South Barham, which they were going to rent out. Harry and Kate would themselves move to the small house across the road from Maydekin which they called the Red House or Little Maydekin, twenty yards away from the paternal house he had been forced to relinquish.
The Ady family arrived at Maydekin on Ascension Day 1663, coming from Greenwich in two coaches, full of excitement. Harry wrote to Kate at this most painful moment in his life:
My dere beyond all expression, this is to desire Thee not to be troubled in the least measure at that which joyes mee which is our removal to thy red house; before wee were sure of Nothing, now we are of somewhat; for I have all ready setled it uppon Thee as it lyes not in my power to unsettle it.98
From his vantage point across the road, he watched carefully as Mr Ady made changes and adjustments to the old house, noting how ‘in that yeare hee came, hee tooke part of the entry into the Kitchin, and removed the windore out of the little parlour to the south side of the Kitchin. He then paved the Kitchin with purbeck stone.’99
These were only the first of many such notes in his private journal, every one delineating the outlines of loss. He did come to some kind of necessary resolution about the disastrous turn his life had taken. His brother Richard, the now-wealthy soldier and adventurer, had spoken to Harry’s son Thomas about the pain and hurt Harry must experience living opposite his old abandoned house. In October 1666, Harry wrote to Thomas:
As concerning my brother’s wonder how I can endure the smoake of these chimnies which were my father’s, I have only to say that if endeavours as much as in mee lay could have preserved what I was forced to sell I had not done it; and sure I am many have got estates with lesse care and trouble then I parted with mine.100
He had presided over the collapse of his family but he had done his best. Harry still felt he belonged in Kent, in the country of his own loss, because he saw himself not as the paterfamilias who had failed, but as the grandson who belonged. Richard had said that he hated that part of the country ‘since his father’s estate was gon’. Not Harry:
I must confess I know not how to understand that part of his letter; for though his Father’s estate in Kent be gon, his grandfather’s and great grandfather’s family remaine in it, f
rom whom he lineally descends; and can any man descended from a line expect the same respect in a strange country, where what hee is, and from whence hee comes, nobody knowes, as hee meets where he is known? True it is (as I find by experience) one’s rich kindred will mightily disrespect such an one, and that upon proud and base principles, but others will have better respect of him where his extract is known then he will find where he is not known.101
These are the pitiable thoughts of a man near the end of his life. Those who had been his friends and allies when he was young and with property, including Henry Oxinden, Thomas Peyton and Robert Bargrave – his rich kindred – looked down on him now, but still he considered himself the ‘extract’ of the great Oxinden inheritance.
Harry spent the last few years of his life at Little Maydekin, ill, poor and weak, planting fruit trees and vines against any south-facing wall. His wicked son Tom was finally arrested for his various plottings, pickpocketings and thievings and died in a London prison in December 1668.102 Harry lasted eighteen months more and died in June 1670. He had ordained that there should be two ‘scutchions of Armes’ painted for his funeral in Denton church, his own identity subsumed in the family which to the end he considered greater than his own self.103
Why did Harry Oxinden fail? Perhaps because he didn’t fight the fight, didn’t engage with business or London life, didn’t marry a rich woman and didn’t devote his life to furthering his own family’s future. His failure was his own fault, the result of too much indulgence in an elegant, semi-philosophical detachment from the business of life. But that verdict may be too harsh. The resilience of a tiny 600-acre estate, particularly in the rough economic conditions of the mid-seventeenth century, was not enough to weather even one generation’s failure to attend to the business of survival. Harry Oxinden’s fate is a measure of the difference between gentry and aristocracy, or at least between lower and higher gentry. No cushion, nothing in reserve, meant time and trouble would soon enough cut into the bone. Harry’s houses – Maydekin itself, Little Maydekin across the road, and Kate’s farmhouse at South Barham – all still exist; his branch of the Oxindens has not been heard of since the seventeenth century.
The richer branch of the family, the Oxindens of Dene, persisted until the early twentieth century. Then they too died out and at Dene today, the great house and its park have disappeared, leaving only a few barns, a coach house and a dovecote as a memory. In Wingham church, whose spire prods up across the fields from Dene, there is a wonderful Oxinden memorial, a model of its kind, erected in 1681104 and testament to the intentions of the Oxindens who made it. Apart from Harry’s correspondence, this remains their only record.
So alluring is it that a recent vicar tried to have it removed to the back of the church where it wouldn’t distract the congregation during services. Conservationists saved it and the sunlight still falls on the helmeted cherubs, the huge black curly-headed marble oxen at each corner, the carved marble fruits, and the long lists of Oxinden knights, baronets and dames, the marble all paid for with money from the East India Company for which a late seventeenth-century Oxinden, Sir James’s third son George, was for a while Governor of Bombay.
It is a monumentalization not of any great man, nor of his children, but of the Oxinden spirit itself, sturdy, armed, forthright, with an architectural vision of its place here in Kent as something that outlasted individual generations, a ‘Family’, as the inscription says, ‘whose Ancesters have flourished in this County for severall Ages’, a tribute to the corporate, trans-generational enterprise which lay at the heart of any gentry family.
1660s–1710s
Honour
The le Neves
Great Witchingham, Norfolk
In the early evening of Saturday, 20 August 1698, a small act of English class drama was played out on a patch of heathland at Cawston, twelve miles north of Norwich. It was a duel with swords, an honour-scuffle, which ended in one agonizing death and led to a murder hunt that stretched over the next two years. But this chapter is less about the after-effects of the fight than what led up to it. What brought two early-middle-aged Norfolk men to the point of death one warm August afternoon? Why were they there? What was at stake? What fuelled the loathing?1
Sir Henry Hobart (the name was pronounced and sometimes written Hubbard) was about forty that summer and for most of his life had lived with the idea of his own significance.2 He was a member of a moral ruling class. England was his for the taking and the using. For two centuries Hobarts had been involved with power, as Tudor legal officials, Elizabethan lawyers and important Jacobean judges, as Members of Parliament for Norfolk throughout the Civil War years of the 1640s and as leading players in the English republic of the 1650s. They were highly cultivated Puritan gentry, readers of Milton, Spenser and Virgil, governors, agricultural improvers, committed Presbyterians and deniers of arbitrary royal authority. They had been happy to see Charles I deposed but, for all that, they were courteous men. One Hobart was described as blessed with ‘an excellent eloquence, the éclat of ancestry [and] the most engaging sweetness animated with a singular gravity’.3 It was not an unusual combination of qualities in the seventeenth century. Of the Hobarts’ sense of their own importance there is no doubt.
After the Restoration, Charles II visited Norfolk in 1671, anxious to restore relations with his father’s enemies. In the great galleries of the Hobarts’ palace at Blickling, in the valley of the river Bure, the King knighted Henry, who was then fourteen. But the Hobarts did not love the Stuarts and when the choice came in 1688 to dismiss the Catholic James II and welcome in his son-in-law the Dutch Protestant Stadholder as William III, Sir Henry Hobart was in no doubt which side he was on. He became Norfolk’s leading Whig, intimate with the Williamite crown and with power, his family en route to the aristocracy (his son would become the Earl of Buckinghamshire) and firmly committed to the Protestant religion.
It was a period of falling rents – the productivity of English land had dropped in the Little Ice Age of the seventeenth century – but, unlike many smaller men, Hobart was rich enough to be heavily indebted. On inheriting his father’s seriously encumbered estates in 1683, he was forced to sell both lands and his father’s large and cosmopolitan library.4 The Hobart lands had shrunk by three-quarters since 1625 and what remained was mortgaged to a London merchant, John Pollexfen, who in 1683 was urging on Sir Henry ‘a Lady … that had 5 or 6,000, and 700 per an’.5 Hobart did better than that, in the following summer marrying Elizabeth Maynard, who brought him the £10,000 which allowed him at least to buy out the egregious Pollexfen.
For all these financial inconveniences, there is no doubting Hobart’s grandeur. Money was poured into the furnishing and dignifying of Blickling and into paying the electors who would return him to Parliament. Men were sent out across the fens and marshes of Norfolk to find the young swans that would grace the expanses of water in the park.6 An account of Sir Henry’s wardrobe in the 1670s contains a great deal of sobriety (‘a dark coloured druggat coat and breeches’, ‘a coate and a pair of sleeves of black cloath with black triming’) but alongside that is the suppressed flamboyance of the powerful: ‘a silk pink wastcoate’, ‘a light coloured branched silk wastcoate’, ‘a coate and a pair of breeches of a darke coloured searge lynd with flowrd silke and a wastcoate suitable to the lyning of ye coate and a pair of silke stockins suitable’.7
Amongst this well-equipped and manly elegance were some rather out-of-date armour and several pairs of pistols, as well as two rapiers with silver hilts, ‘a short walking rapier’, ‘a scemytar hatcht with gold’ and ‘a walking sword with a damask’d hilt’.8 Even at the end of the seventeenth century, gentlemanliness had not yet separated from expertise in martial violence. When, in 1690, William III was in Ireland, defeating his Catholic enemies there, Hobart was on his staff as a cavalry commander. As a reward, William made him one of the Commissioners of Customs, a post worth £1,000 a year.9 Religious allegiance allied to military power and politic
al influence meant, as ever, money in the pocket.
Sir Henry was at the summit of the gentry world, his eyes on the beautifully upholstered comforts of the aristocratic life for which he was aiming. Oliver le Neve was about thirty-six on the day of the duel. His own relatively small but beautiful house was about four miles south-west of Cawston Heath at Great Witchingham in the valley of the river Wensum, just along the valley from where a nineteenth-century mansion houses the modern headquarters of Bernard Matthews, the Norfolk turkey company.
When le Neve suggested to Hobart the place for their duel, many things were unequal between them, but the geographical symmetry was exact: both of them rode up from the lush, reedy, meadowy valleys of their two rivers, past the warm, cooked-tomato-red brick and pantiled farmhouses and cottages of their tenants, across the arable lands on the upper edge of the valleys, much of them still unenclosed and worked on the medieval strip pattern, and on to the sandy, sparsely occupied heath of the ridge which separated their two provinces. For each man, it would have been no more than an hour’s ride.
The wonderful, landscape-defining presence of Blickling Hall, which sits in its slice of north Norfolk like an earl at ease in his portrait, has lasted in well-funded perfection until today. It is not like that in the Wensum valley, which is both emptier and a little rougher than in le Neve’s time. The holdings and fortunes of the smaller gentry were far more vulnerable to loss and change, to disease, the death of heirs and mismanagement, than those of their greatest neighbours. And now at Great Witchingham the sheen of a loved place has largely gone. The ditches which once drained the riverside meadows are blocked and the grassland has become moory. Wide matted beds of Norfolk reed interrupt the fields. Willows and alders stand and collapse in sodden, owl-inhabited woods. Down here, in this damp and riverine world, Oliver le Neve had his house. It has almost entirely disappeared. The only remains are a beautiful brick barn and a length of ivy-bearded garden wall, twelve feet high but buried in a brambled wood, where nowadays gamekeepers raise partridges and pheasants. His stone coat of arms was dug out of the brambles here a few years ago and given to his distant descendants.
The Gentry Page 18