Oliver asked his London agent if he could find him some imported hawks in the London docks, but Bass volunteered to find him a Norfolk sparrowhawk which would do just as well.52 He was only sorry he couldn’t ‘plesure you with ferrits’.53 One frozen January, over-anxious to please, Bass sent his man Bert the twenty-seven miles to Oliver at Great Witchingham with a young beagle but her walking in the frost ‘rendered her unfit for anything’.54
Setters, spaniels, greyhounds, foxhounds, beagles: their entire correspondence smells of dog. Court, Seuky, Stately, Jollyboy, Smoaker – ‘a very good character’55 – Topper, Synger, Curious, Comely, Venus, Sempetris, Beauty, Jewell, Dido, Doxey, Little Lady, Duchess, Phillida, Pallace, Countess, Little Gypsy (‘the finest beagle in England’56), Tinker, Tinkler, Ruler, Ringwood, Ranger, Daphne, Lovely, Flurry and a bitch called Virgin:57 these were the beauties of his fleet, named from Tory hearts that were affectionate, admiring, classical, deep English, pretentious and unpretentious in turn. Sir Henry Hobart might be portrayed by the wonders of his wardrobe; Oliver le Neve’s character appears in the names of his hounds.
The best of Oliver’s hunting friends was John Millecent, always known as Jack, a rumbustious, wenching, gambling squire from Linton in Cambridgeshire, where he was in a multi-generational dispute with his local Whigs. His estate was worth no more than £700 a year, he tended to ‘let my garden lie till I am ashamed of it’58 and he was often strapped for money, but his letters exude all the fruitiness of this Tory culture. ‘Ah! Noll!’, he wrote to le Neve in August 1701, ‘I want thy art for, next chamber to mine, has several nights lain a beautiful young lady, who, do what I can, is a noli me tangere.’59 His resources were constantly depleted by ‘all things chargeable, especially that of Petticoats.’60
Jack usually wrote to ‘my dearest Noll’ of little but ‘dog-talk as we call it’,61 interspersed only with heavy doses of horse talk: Cockle, Cradle, Flint and ‘Old Chuff, brother to the famous Why Not’,62 carried these gents over hedge and stream. Millecent suffered regularly from the gout, which made him ‘fit only for Bedlam, raving and tearing my clothes’.63 It was thought that turnips might be good for the affliction but not by Jack Millecent: ‘I have such an aversion for eating turnips that I could [not] live upon them if I was to have the Indies.’64 He often claimed other people’s hounds in reality belonged to him and would travel across country with one hound to compare it to another so that he could prove that they were both from the same litter.65 He recommended as a cure for any kind of melancholy or grief that ‘innocent and wholesome recreation, hunting’.66 When Oliver was in London, Millecent was usually stuck in Linton, unable to afford to visit the capital and forced to ‘live in a vacuum, nothing but air, and that much rarefied by cold’,67 longing for le Neve to return so that they could get back out in the field.
In August 1700, Oliver sent him another dog present but it wasn’t suitable. ‘I recd the Bitch which I feare will not prove for my turn,’ Millecent wrote, ‘she having no promising ’fiz.’68 Dog fizz was his principal joy in life and it was he who in 1694 had first urged Oliver to get his own pack of beagles – the whole pack could be bought for £15 or £2069 – and although much more expensive than hawking, largely because a kennel boy needed to be housed and kept if the mange was to avoided, hunting with dogs was, in Millecent’s view, quite clearly the better way. It was ‘more pleasure to hunt with one’s own pack’, he told his friend, recommending ‘a little short trussed, slow-running beagle, with a chumping tongue’ as the style of hound le Neve should go for.70 A chumping tongue: the whole Millecent-le Neve-Gawdy Norfolk world is in that phrase. Within a dozen years, Millecent would claim that le Neve was the owner of ‘what was generally considered the finest pack of beagles in England’.71
They used to chase the hares near Reepham and net for partridges and quails.72 If there were poachers, they used to carry small pocket pistols ‘for the easyer disspatching of Pochers doggs or any other that offends me’, as Bass Gawdy wrote to his brother-in-law.73 They shot rooks, and occasionally pheasants, with spaniels to flush them and pick them up. A spaniel that would flush birds only within shootable range was among the most precious of all possessions. ‘If you could help me to a dog that has been hawked you would do me knight’s service,’ John Rous, another neighbour squire, wrote to Oliver one August.74 If someone shot a deer, joints and haunches were distributed around the net of friends.75 They met occasionally in a pub for dinner, where a ‘a good Dish of a Sea Fish for six or eight persons’ would be ordered in advance.76
Not, of course, that Oliver le Neve himself conformed to the clichéd vision of the sequestered country squire. Much of his life remained attached to London, to his father’s properties which he had inherited there and from which he received an important part of his income. He had twelve London houses and shops from which he received £480 in rent a year (a quarter of his total income) but he clearly did not see them as anything like an entrepreneurial possibility. Rather than investing in what might have been a developing portfolio, he simply milked them for their rents. In the 1690s, he even sold one London house and part of another for a capital boost of £1,500 to the Witchingham books.77
Le Neve employed London men to receive his rents and run the buildings, but it was incompetently done. None of the houses was kept in good condition. When Thomas Rose, his London agent, ‘went with the carpenter’ to view one of them in 1706, he ‘never saw any house that was inhabited in worse condition, nor worse furniture, which makes it look worse’.78
Other tenants complained of his indifference and neglect:
August 12 1693
Mr Leneive Sr I very much admire that I cannot have the honner of a Line or two from you in answer to my last. I cannot imagine the meaning thereof without you think that I am soe sorry a tennant not worth takeing notice of
Yor humble servant and tennant
Eliza Millner79
Le Neve ignored his paperwork and tenants begged, up to a year after a deal was done, that ‘the writings be completed’. In 1694, another tenant, Charles Fisher, complained of the rent which le Neve was requiring him to pay, a ‘great extravagant price under which I have labored for these years past, only to work purely for you. The door pavement is out of order and the windows and bars are worn to pieces’.80
Here, for a moment, is a rare glimpse of the underside of gentry life, the exploitation of the weak on which the gaieties and pleasures of Tory squiredom relied. Mr Fisher’s grievance is precisely to the point: it was his labouring in the London shop that sustained le Neve’s delightful world of beagles, fishing and bumpers of strong-brewed Norfolk nog.
The le Neve files are also scattered here and there with begging letters from the truly poor. Again and again, from a sequence of mutely articulate addresses, a woman called Elizabeth Story wrote to him: first in February 1695, when she was living with ‘Abratnats an oyle man next dore to the French arms in Drury lane over against Russill courte’: ‘knowing how kind yor family has bin to ours’;81 then in February 1696 from ‘Next dore to the Sholder of mutton in Shew laine nere fletestrete’:
Honoured Sir
I humbley bege your pardon for these presumeing lines, which is honoured Sir to humbly bege your charity for I had not presumed to truble you but yt my wants forces me almost beyond my common reason to aske ye charity of my frinds
Having not a farthing in ye world to help my self with nor sometimes bred to eate for three days together I humbly beg of you for god sake to send me something if never so smale to releave me in this my distressed condition & pray Sir be not angry with me for hunger and cold are perceing & j hope god will make it up to you againe82
Alongside this shiftless geography of despair was its opposite – shopping. Oliver was endlessly useful to his friend Jack Millecent, his father-in-law the deaf painter Sir John Gawdy and his adoring brother-in-law Bass Gawdy for the errands he could run for them when up in London. Their requests stretch unbroken from year to year.
A ‘good tenor horn’83 for Millecent; ‘enough muslings for 12 neckcloths, 2 of fine sort, & 4 of cours for hunting’;84 ‘My father desires you wold buy him 100 of oringes, if they be anything resionable; and 30 lemonds,’ Bass wrote helpfully.85 ‘I hope you will not forget some Beagles to add to your small number’;86 plus coach glasses and clothes for Bass: ‘pray bye me a neat silk stitcht waste belt for my black belt is soe excessive Hott I am not able to endure itt this summer time.’ He also wanted a more fashionable sword, ‘either of Plate hilt or stele, which you se most worne’.87 Anne Gawdy, Bass’s sister and Oliver’s wife, needed artist’s materials for their father. She
desires you wold send down with the other things one grain of white marine [paint], & the same quantity of Carmine [ditto], with 8 fine pencills, with halfe a pounde of Trippelow [Tripoli, a sedimentary stone from North Africa used as an abrasive] to polish. You may have all of these at the Catt in Powle Church Yard [St Paul’s]; with halfe a pound of the finest white fleke [white lead paint] & half as much Course [coarse Flake white paint]88
Apple trees were sent for the walled garden at West Harling – ‘Six Gouldin Russetings, four Deusans, foure Summer Paremains’89 – as well as reams of paper, sugar, brandy, ‘a dosen of whight hafted knifes & two Glass bottles with eares that will hold something more than a quart to rack liquer of into & 6 Glass salts, such as there are’,90 ‘buck-hafted knives’,91 ‘a payer of Brass candlesticks, I care not how playn they be, if strong’,92 ‘a Copper Coffy pott like yours’93 and wigs, the cause of much soul-searching, as Bass wrote to Oliver in London one day:
The things cam all safe to my hand but ye Wigg is too shallow in ye head & I know not how to wear it I fear it cannot be altered for myself. Return it if ye person will take it again & make me another. I like ye coler & shape very well, it is wide enough but it does not cover my ears which will subject me to take cold.94
All of it came by sea, down the Thames from London and up the East Anglian coast to Yarmouth, from where a carrier would bring it to West Harling or Witchingham.95 Mail order of this kind, with inadequate labelling, was never entirely satisfactory. Trees were delivered which would have been better if Oliver
had Sene them, before they had bin sent. They are so small that they will not be out of the reach of Cattle, this thre or fore year if they live; the man has not sent me the names of any of them, onely tyed bits of sticks to them, with markes, which I cannot understand.96
They all missed Oliver when he was away in London and the correspondence oozes affection. ‘My father sends his Blessing & I my Love to you,’ Bass habitually wrote to him.97 ‘I wish you A merry Christmas’, he wrote on 10 December 1695, ‘tho I am sure of A very dull one in yr absence.’98 The following September he was ‘drinking yr helth with prosperity in A bumper of Nogg’.99 ‘I have often drank yr helth in yr absence & as oft wished for yr company.’100 But for all this warmth between them, much was not entirely happy with this family. One of Oliver’s sons had been deaf101 and had died young and the other, Jacky, had also inherited the Gawdy deafness, had difficulty talking and was a sickly boy.102 Oliver’s wife, Anne, was not strong herself, weakened by repeated pregnancies and miscarriages, to the point where her father advised Oliver that she should ‘ly fallow’103 for a while. In February 1696 she died in childbirth.
Almost immediately the incorrigible Jack Millicent began urging new girls on his friend. ‘A young, comely, good-humoured, ingenious widow’, Millecent wrote to him the summer after Anne’s death, ‘aged between nineteen and twenty years, worth at least to our knowledge £15000, is stopping here, being Mrs Millicent’s niece. You needs must come and court her before she gets snapped up at London.’104
That suggestion came to nothing but word of Oliver’s flirtation so soon after the death of Anne upset his father-in-law. Bass wrote to Oliver in January 1697, mentioning a report they had heard of his being married to an unsuitable party, while saying reassuringly that they knew him ‘to be a man of sence & so consequently one who will not act anything contrary to yr own reputation, nor the disadvantage of yrs’.105
In June the following year, le Neve married Jane Knyvet, a much-loved Suffolk girl whom Jack Millecent had found for him, and entered a happy and loving second marriage with her. Congratulations and presents arrived for the newly-weds at Witchingham. On 4 July, his steward reported, ‘the sheep are clipped, the turnips sown, and the meadows will begin to be cut today’.106 His friend Robert Monsey at Reepham sent over his congratulations with a few cherries ‘which did outlive the severities of a May-winter morning’.107 But the summer of 1698 was not to be happy for Oliver. It was election year and a moment of crisis for the Whig regime of which Sir Henry Hobart was a part and from which Oliver and his Tory friends felt bitterly excluded.
‘Since they had been called to the direction of affairs,’ Macaulay wrote of the Whigs in his matchless history of this period,
every thing had been changed, changed for the better. There was peace abroad and at home. The merchant ships went forth without fear from the Thames and the Avon. Soldiers had been disbanded by tens of thousands. Taxes had been remitted. The value of all public and private securities had risen. Trade had never been so brisk. Credit had never been so solid. All over the kingdom the shopkeepers and the farmers, the artisans and the ploughmen, relieved, beyond all hope, from the daily and hourly misery of the clipped silver, were blessing the broad faces of the new shillings and half crowns.108
But the country did not see it quite like that and ‘the Tory gentry’, as Macaulay described them,
had special grievances. The whole patronage of the government, they said, was in Whig hands. The old landed interest, the old Cavalier interest, had now no share in the favours of the Crown. Every public office, every bench of justice, every commission of Lieutenancy, was filled with Roundheads. There were three war cries in which all the enemies of the government could join: No standing army; No grants of Crown property; and No Dutchmen.109
For the toasts made in the bumpers of nog by le Neve and his Norfolk Tory friends you could add a fourth: ‘No Hobarts.’
Everything combined against Sir Henry Hobart in the election of 1698. He had been chairman of a club of influential Whigs who met in the Rose Tavern near Temple Bar. He had chaired committees of the House of Commons and acted as teller in crucial votes. But the mood of the country was impassioned, it wanted a change and suspected the Whigs of corruption. ‘Nothing but their own tribe and gang will ever be employed in anything of profit’, John Millicent would write later to le Neve, ‘though never so prejudicial to the public.’110 Sir Henry was closely identified with an administration which was thought to be lining its pockets and the result was a fiercely contested fight, involving huge numbers of people (maybe as much as 40 per cent of the adult male population could vote, according to the property they owned). In Norfolk over 10,000 votes were cast. If a candidate wanted a man’s vote, he was expected to pay his travel, food and lodging on his visit to Norwich, the only place where a vote could be cast. With the need to secure at least 2,500 votes, these were vast expenses.
When the votes were counted after the election on 3 August 1698, Sir Henry had managed to gather 2,244, but Sir William Cooke, an old, rich and powerful Norfolk Tory, had received 3,107 and Sir Jacob Astley, a Whig, 2,960. They became the Members of Parliament for the county and Sir Henry, despite massive expenditure, had lost his seat.111 Given the wrecked state of his finances, he may have been outspent. A letter from Hobart written in April 1696 to Sir John Somers, one of the most powerful men around the King, reminded Somers that Hobart had formerly served the King as a ‘gentleman of the horse’ until he became ill. Now his ‘circumstances are very uneasy’ and he would like a further favour from the King.112
The man was sick and failing. Lack of cash may also have played its part in other ways. Two years previously, it was being said in Norfolk that he was treating his creditors disgracefully.
Here is a lady of one of ye best fami
lies in ye countrey who hath all her fortune in his hands, and he hath not payd her any interest these severall years, whereby she is put to great hardships for her subsistence. The case of severall others of ye like nature will come against him next sessions.113
The same gossiping clergyman reported the following year that ‘an ejectment [a legal instrument for repossession of mortgaged property] hath been left at Sir H. Hobart’s house for £8,000, which will reach a greater part of his estate’.114
The highly politicized and tense atmosphere of the election re-ran many of the animosities of the century – high church against low, court against country, Whig against Tory, the old world against the new. Fierce rumours were circulating and one reached the ears of Sir Henry Hobart. It was being said that Oliver le Neve was ‘spreading a report that [Hobart] was a coward, and behaved himself so in Ireland’ in 1689–90, when he had been a Gentleman of the Horse with William III.115 Imputations of cowardice locked into other, larger and semi-subterranean questions – the legitimacy of the Whig government, its urban effeminacy, its self-seeking priorities – and the rumour spread. When Hobart lost the election, he blamed le Neve for destroying his name and sent a man to Oliver at Witchingham, challenging him to a duel.
The Gentry Page 20