The Gentry
Page 19
Le Neve and his friends and family always referred to Great Witchingham in their letters as ‘Witch’ or ‘Witching’,10 the nickname for a place they loved, but you have to edit the modern landscape to recover the scene of his happiness. His wide-windowed, symmetrical brick house was surrounded by flower beds and fruit and vegetable gardens. Barns, kennels and stables were arranged in courts to one side. The river flowed past the south face of the house, beyond a lawn, from where a carriageway crossed it via a bridge to the Norwich road on the high ground.
It was the small gentry equivalent of the great riverside houses of England, Audley End, Wilton and Chatsworth, an image of well-watered contentment, and le Neve’s correspondence brims over with the delights of his world. Peaches, nectarines, plums, cherries and dwarf pears were all trained up in the warmth of the walled garden, as well as bushes of black-and redcurrants and gooseberries.11 May frosts and even snow in May both troubled the gardeners.12 There was a bowling green.13 His gardener grew yews from seed and grafted hollies for new hedges.14 His carnations were well known to his neighbours, especially ‘the white ones edged with red and purple’,15 and they wrote to him asking if he could send plants over for their gardens. Bay trees were imported from Holland in pots – and stolen on the Norfolk quayside before they were delivered to Witchingham.16 In early summer he sent the asparagus he had grown to his friends, followed a few weeks later by prize artichokes (‘heartychoaks’).17 Stone lions were ordered from London dealers.18
These were the immediate surroundings of the house, but le Neve lived in a richly layered world. Beyond the garden and the gardeners was the river, where le Neve, his employees and friends fished with nets, catching pike and bream which they transferred to the keep pond by the house, and for ‘noble trout’ with ‘angles’.19 One February the men at Witchingham caught seventeen pike with one drag of the net through the river ‘which they were very brag on’.20 Some live carp, packed in a tub between courses of rye straw mixed with grass, were sent to stock the Witchingham ponds but they died en route.21
Beyond these elegant playgrounds were the farmlands: meadow, pasture, arable and the woods of le Neve’s estate. Some of it he farmed on his own account, alert to the newest European techniques, importing clover from Holland and sainfoin, the most nutritious forage crop for working animals, from London dealers.22 Most of his land was let out to tenants, le Neve receiving their rents on Michaelmas Day in the autumn and Lady Day in early spring. That, anyway, was the theory but rents were almost always paid late, sometimes only a week or two, occasionally a couple of years, and le Neve in effect, by allowing these rents to come when they did, acted as a banker for his tenantry, tiding them over difficulties. At Christmastime he was charitable to the poor, slaughtering a beast and distributing the meat to them.23 The people of Witchingham seem to have responded with affection, writing to him beforehand to say how ‘we all long for your coming home’.24 In July 1707 Will Looker, his steward at Witchingham, wrote to say that ‘The tenants desire to know whether they may be permitted to meet you some part of the way when you come home.’25
At a time when you could buy a good cow for between £3 and £4, or employ a gardener for a year at £16, hire a man for the three weeks of the harvest for £1, or for the same amount buy three swans or get a good horse to take you the 130 miles from Great Witchingham to Westminster, le Neve’s property gave him an income of about £1,500 a year – the basis for a comfortable life, if nothing like on the Hobart level. But Oliver le Neve was not the natural heir to all these comforts and delights. He could not look back, as the Hobarts could, to centuries and generations of squiredom. His father, Francis, had been a draper in London, to be found at the Crown near Pope’s Alley, Cornhill, an upholsterer and retailer of chintzes, a poor cousin of a family which had been in Norfolk, if obscurely, for many years.26 Oliver’s mother, Avice, was the daughter of a City merchant. They had shops, warehouses and a little property in London. But his distant cousin, also called Oliver le Neve, a stationer, had accumulated lands in Norfolk, Surrey and Middlesex. This old Oliver had no children and in 1672 he decided that he would leave everything he had to his young, distantly related namesake, who was then ten years old, ‘in consideration of the natural love and affection’ he had for him. Money was following blood: young Oliver was old Oliver’s great-uncle’s great-grandson. But if anything can be judged by the verve and vitality of his later letters, young Oliver must have been a charming boy. He had a brother, Peter, who was two years older, but Peter was left nothing more than the ‘remainder’ to the property: he would inherit it only if young Oliver died heirless. This preferential treatment of the younger brother, rare enough in English history, would create its own difficulties later on. Peter le Neve was a herald, an expert in genealogies and coats of arms, a meticulous man and a distinguished antiquary, a great collector and preserver of documents. Every one of the stories in this book depends for its realities either on a court case, in which evidence had to be produced and preserved, or a scholarly hoarder in the family. It is through his brother’s filing of correspondence that anything beyond the bare bones is known of Oliver le Neve.27
These, then, are the roots of the slightly amphibious position occupied by Oliver le Neve throughout his life: from an old but unimportant Norfolk family; with his own father in trade, and his mother from a trading background; with a large fortune settled on him and now substantially if not wonderfully rich; and with a love for the life of the Norfolk squire. He was both deeply attached to the hunting, hawking, fishing, farming, gardening, drinking, joking, racing, gambling existence summed up by the one word ‘Witchingham’ and a natural born Tory, suspicious of ‘that glorious monarch king William’,28 as he and his friends habitually referred to him; both a local Justice and a captain in the local militia, who would look with suspicion on the court corruption and power-broking of the Whig grandees and their morally superior sense of authority; and for whom the phrase ‘turn Whig’ meant ‘turn double rogue’.29 At the same time he was a new man, a city boy, with important commercial links to London, the taint of commerce on him and a great deal of business to be done there.
The question of standing, of dignity and respect, of everything bundled into the word ‘honour’, would lead in the end to the crisis on Cawston Heath in 1698. It surfaced first fifteen years earlier in a letter which the 22-year-old Oliver wrote to Thomas Browne, in March 1683. Browne was his near-neighbour at Elsing Hall, a wonderful moated medieval house just the other side of the Wensum, an ex-Parliamentarian, his family part of the Norfolk gentry for more generations than anyone would care to hear about. Browne had dared to patronize le Neve among the local gentry and this letter was le Neve’s flaring response, expressed in crazily overblown language (it was only a year or two after he had left Oxford). In a letter which has disappeared, le Neve had written to Browne and Browne had ridiculed his literary style in public, accusing him of writing in ‘a bald, insipid (& as you are pleased to term it) mircatorian stile’.30 Le Neve was being told by the old gent that he had the manner of a trader.
Now he went to town. Browne’s own family, for all its grandeur, had also married beneath itself, le Neve wrote,
mingling your most generous, and ancient blood with Mircatorian blood … I must boldly tell you that as I scorn to spiak ill of you behind your Back & flatter to your face (a gift most ripe in you) I am much of the opinion that it is beneath a Gentleman (as you pretend to be) to treat a neighbour’s much less a friends name with that scorn, contempt and Reproach, of exposing his inferiority to common veiw.31
It was the rage that came from shame, from hurt and offended honour. Le Neve acknowledged that he had made the mistake of assuming, from their brief talk, too great an intimacy with this minor grandee. ‘I reasonably concluded that our Conversation together had sufficiently entitled me to the same familiarity with you as you with me; and that I may as bluntly call you Tom as You me Oliver.’32 As so often, the outcome of the argument is unknown, but the deg
ree of social insecurity is unmistakable.
The following year, Oliver le Neve fell in love, and these same class and status anxieties and desires circle around his infatuation with the girl. Anne Gawdy had all the right attributes, came from the best sort of Norfolk family and had the right amount of money to her name. But there was a problem. A girl’s parents, when she was to be married, expected the groom’s family to provide her with a jointure, a quantity of land or investments that would be held back from the inheritance of the next generation and whose income would support her if her husband were to die before her. On her death, the jointure lands would return to the heir and so on into the future. But Oliver’s own estate at Great Witchingham, for all its apparent ease and comfort, was heavily indebted and there was no way he could provide for her widowhood at the level which her family was demanding. Her father required that if Anne was to marry Oliver, he should guarantee to her a jointure of £250 a year. The rate of return on capital was dropping in the last years of the seventeenth century and so that figure represented a capital investment approaching £6,000. So Oliver wrote to his brother Peter in London.
I have a request which I hope you will not deny me, there is a woman in ye world yt I have a kindness for. Hr Fortune though itt is not grat but I think in ye circumstances of my estate itt is as much or more than I can challenge yt is £3000, if you will joyne with me to make a Joynture of £250 pr Ann, you will be instrumental to make me I hope ye Hapiest man breathing.33
It was both calculation and love, with no cynicism in that, but a worldly understanding that if he provided from his own resources such a large jointure for his wife, he would be depriving his heirs of a happy future. It had happened often enough in the past, that sons waited in relative poverty for years after their father had died until their mother died too and the unencumbered estate was released into their hands. But Oliver loved Anne. She may have had only £3,000 to her name as her dowry or ‘portion’ but her qualities as a person more than made up for that. She was ‘the only women that I ever saw agreable to my temper which fortune of good temper and personal Perfections make up a very plentifull Portion, and indeed a woman I love and am certain will be acceptable and a Reputation to us both.’34
Oliver was not indifferent to preserving the family corporation in good shape; he was aware of the importance of love and personal happiness; but his third position was to see that these things could fuse, not least in the public mind: a marvellous woman would be ‘a Reputation to us both’. If you remember that Sir Henry Hobart had pulled in a girl with £10,000, it is clear, in a perfectly straightforward sense, that Hobart, for all his debts, was three times the man le Neve could ever claim to be.
But Oliver’s brother, who had married a shrew called Prudence Hughes, the daughter of a Bristol merchant, was feeling the pinch. He turned his brother down. Another flaring response came from Oliver. He had no more than £830 a year to live on. ‘I must either live a Batchildor or marry a Biggar’, he wrote to Peter.35 It is not quite clear if Peter stuck to his ground or Anne’s family changed theirs, but one way or another an agreement was reached and later that year Oliver and Anne were married.
Her family, the Gawdys, occupied yet another position in the subtly nuanced social ecology of late seventeenth-century Norfolk gentry life. Like the Hobarts, Gawdys had been lawyers and MPs in Elizabethan and Jacobean England. Through judicious marriages to heiresses, they had accumulated land, with their headquarters in an old moated and fortified house at West Harling in the damp valley of the Thet on the Norfolk–Suffolk border. Anne’s grandfather, Sir William Gawdy, had bought a baronetcy. They had been on the side of Parliament in the Civil War, but unlike for the Hobarts the ambition and power-seeking had drained from them. They were now an easy-going family, profoundly Norfolk based, with few London or Westminster connections, and not en route to aristocratic glory. Somehow but inexorably the Gawdys were going downhill.
The decline of the Gawdys can be put down to a sequence of disasters. First, deafness stalked the family through one generation after another. Of Sir William’s four sons, two were stone deaf and completely dumb. Sir William, realizing that deaf sons could not operate in the world of politics or the law, had them trained up as painters. Both for a while became pupils in the studio of Sir Peter Lely,36 whose fees were high but their father was doing his best for them. These deaf boys could not talk, but they could communicate by signs, among the first people in English history who are known to have done so. On 6 February 1665, George Freeman, their London tutor, wrote to their father:
Mr Framlingham has been sick this ten days, and we thought he would have had the small-pox, but he is now pretty well. He was somewhat discontented that he had not black clothes for he made signs that the Court was in mourning, and that he was ashamed to go see his friends in his old ones.37
The other two sons, who could hear perfectly, were entered at the Inner Temple as law students. Then, in 1661, a terminal catastrophe: the two hearing sons, William and Bassingbourne, died within a week of each other of smallpox.38 The family’s future was removed at a stroke.
When Sir William died in 1669, it was John, the elder of his two deaf sons, who inherited his father’s baronetcy and the creaking old house at West Harling. This Sir John Gawdy was Anne’s father and became Oliver le Neve’s father-in-law.
The tension between money and status was threaded into every corner of their lives. The Brownes could despise the le Neves for being too commercial; the Hobarts could enhance their standing by acquiring a royal sinecure on the customs; the Gawdys could dream of past significance and in effect sell some of that significance to the money-backed le Neves; and the le Neves could despise at least some of the Gawdys for their crusty old arrogance. When Oliver le Neve asked his brother Peter to pay a visit to old Framlingham Gawdy, his father-in-law’s cousin, to arrange some business in London, he was frankly contemptuous:
I … have wrote to my Vncle ffranc: Gaudy whoe is now in London, and lodges at mr Squibs next Door to the Plough Stables in little Lincolns Inn feilds, where I told him you should waite on him, to know his resolution; you will finde him proude & ignorant. Tolerate him till ye affaire is over, then bid him kiss yr Ars if you pleese.39
That is the modern man knowing he could leave the old snobbery behind.
So bad was the Gawdys’ financial situation that after his wife’s death in the 1680s, Sir John Gawdy actually let his own house out to his neighbour, and drew up an elaborate document which would allow him and his family to remain in the house with the new tenants but as paying guests, paying for ‘what soever wine beere or Ale’ he drank and the pies he consumed.40 Even later, when Oliver came to stay with his father-in-law or they with him, as they often did, they would all pay for their bed and breakfast, and negotiations would be had by letter over what might be ‘resionable’ as the fees due.41
Despite the financial worries, the relationship was warm between Oliver and his father-in-law, Sir John, and with his brother-in-law, the not over-brilliant Bassingbourne. Over many years, with one or two hiccups, their correspondence remained funny, jokey and deeply affectionate, fuelled by Oliver’s own openness of character, Bass’s unaffected love of him and Sir John’s easy cultivated charm.
A sudden window opens up on to Sir John Gawdy’s character when in September 1677 he attended a service of dedication and a lunch party at the Earl of Arlington’s new house and church at Euston near Thetford. The diarist John Evelyn was there too:
There dined this day at my Lord’s one Sir John Gawdie, a very handsome person, but quite dumb, yet very intelligent by signs, and a very fine painter; he was so civil and well bred, as it was not possible to discern any imperfection in him. His lady and children were also there, and he was at church in the morning with us.42
This was the atmosphere of gentlemanly grace into which le Neve had successfully married. John Gawdy was clearly fond of him. He signed off his letters to Oliver ‘with Blessing to your whole selfe’43 or from ‘y
or very neare Relation by matrimony’.44 He usually had either Bass or the vicar Mr Cressener write the letter for him, using sign language to communicate with his temporary secretary, and making jokes to Oliver at their expense: ‘I was pleased last night to acquaint ye Lazy Scribe with my receiving a letter from you last Thursday.’45 On other occasions he changed his mind in the course of dictating a letter: the wig Oliver had sent from London was too expensive; it had to go back; no, perhaps he should think again; he loved it; he would have to keep it; he would wear it only on ‘hallowdays’; could Oliver send another, cheaper one from London?46 Bassingbourne faithfully followed his father’s wishes, occasionally adding his own note at the end. ‘My fingers are now so cold’, he wrote in November 1692, ‘I can scherce feele them. I remain yr fridged Brother BG.’47
His friends and relations loved Oliver. When he was away, they longed for him to return. When he was at home, they clustered to his table and hearth at Witchingham. He was at the centre of a crowd of young Tory squires, whose fathers had been Cavaliers in the Civil War, who loathed and distrusted the court and the Whigs, who drank for England, and whose lives were embedded and enmeshed in those of their animals. They were ‘the Rakes’ of north Norfolk, their language full and florid, yet to be tempered by any whiff of Enlightenment politesse.48 Men got in ‘hufs’, Oliver and his friends toasted each other in ‘bowls of the old liquor’,49 siblings got in ‘mifs’,50 fencing masters were to be distrusted, hangovers were an everyday reality: ‘you may see by my scrawl I was at it last night, near a dozen knights and gentlemen here.’ Hounds and horses, grooms and stable boys, partridges, pheasants and hares were the medium of friendship. ‘Deare Brother’, Bass Gawdy wrote adoringly to Oliver in April 1692, ‘I have chose you a bitch whelpe & it will be fitt to take off within A fourtnight.’51 It was his equivalent of sending a kiss.