Le Neve replied, denying that he had ever said such a thing and trying to find out who was accusing him of spreading the rumour. But Hobart, wounded by his humiliation and financial catastrophe at the election, was insistent. They must fight. On 19 August, he rode over to the small brick market square at Reepham near Witchingham, and repeated the accusations about le Neve, now adding that the only reason le Neve had denied he had been spreading the rumour was that he was too frightened to fight.
The next day Le Neve replied to the great Whig grandee:
Honored Sr,
I am very sorry I was not at Riefham yesterday, when you gave yor self the trouble of appearing there, that I might not only have further justified the Truth of my not saying what is reported I did, but that I might have told you that I wrote not that Letter to avoid fighting you; but that, if the credit of yor Author has confirm’d you in the belief of it, I am ready & desirous to meet you when & where you please to assign me; if otherwise, I expect yor Author’s name, in return to this, that I may take my Satisfaction there, Or else conclude the Imputacon sprung from Blickling, & send you a time & place, for the matter shall not rest as it is, tho’ it cost the life of
Yor Servt,
OLIVER NEVE
Aug. ye 20th: 98.116
There are many fascinating aspects to this letter. It draws itself up to its full height, in the same slightly opaque tone as le Neve had used to Thomas Browne fifteen years before. Oliver also dropped the ‘le’ from his surname at this critical moment, when his dignity was being questioned. Why? Because the ‘le’ was no more than affectation, introduced by a relative earlier in the century. His father had never used it and this was no moment for affectation. He was to play the true, solid and unquestionable man and he would do that as Oliver Neve. He saw himself as a coequal of Hobart’s. There was no submission here to a man of wealth and power. He was courteous not curt in his response to the challenge, sorry not to have been at Reepham and aware of the trouble which this business had put Sir Henry to. He was portraying himself as a man committed as much to truth as to courage, ready to exact a price from the unworthy, or to pay it himself if required. Death was nothing in the face of shame. Captain Neve had become an Arthurian knight, acting to the principles Malory would have endorsed 200 years before.
The psychology of the duel was founded on the understanding that honour, if not revalidated in life, would rust.117 Honour could not be drunk by babies from their mother’s breast and then kept for ever. It could only be earned in conflict or when faced with shame. A man could claim to be from an honourable family, but honour was not heritable. Each generation had to earn it anew and this was, in effect, recognition that the gentry lived a life of struggle and competition. Their status was not fixed. It could only be claimed and reclaimed, shown and re-shown. A gentleman’s ability to maintain his honour in an explicit and violent confrontation was a public declaration of who, as a gentleman, he was. The duel was a moment in which a private conception of the self and a membership of a class could be tested for their truth.118
Since the early 1600s, the government had repeatedly attempted to suppress duelling but this deeply absorbed code was indifferent to any sanction government could impose. The value of the duel was not in the destruction of an enemy but in the test it provided. Death or even pain was an irrelevance. There were plenty of guidebooks on how to do it and the repeated emphasis was on the gracefulness of your behaviour around the murderous act.119 It was of course always triggered by an uncivil act – an insult, an accusation of lying or cowardice – but the duel itself was intended as a means of recovering the civility of the relationship. Once both men had stood up and faced each other, the community of honour was restored. It was a means by which jealousy, mutual loathing and suspicion could be accommodated within a single social fabric.
Samuel Butler, the author of Hudibras, claimed that duellists met with two weapons, ‘a single rapier and civility … There is nothing of unkind in all the quarrel but only the beginning of it, and the rest of the proceedings are managed as civilly as any other treaty; and in the end when one falls, they part with extraordinary endearments.’120 Civility and politeness were as essential parts of the duel as the test of honour it represented.
These conceptions would have been in the minds of Oliver le Neve and Sir Henry Hobart as they made their separate ways to the appointed site for the duel that Saturday evening. The legality of what they were doing was ambivalent. Charles II had sanctioned a duel between courtiers as recently as the 1680s but other duellists, when arrested and convicted, were burned on the hand as punishment. Several were transported to the colonies. The killing of a man in a duel might still be seen as murder and Scots duellists were still beheaded in the seventeenth century.121 Perhaps as protection from prosecution, neither man this evening had any second with him. No witnesses meant no case to answer.
They rode up from their respective valleys through the corn fields yet to be harvested, along the net of curved medieval lanes, with medieval churches on the horizon and ivy clinging to the gnarly oak and ash pollards along the way. The sandy, brackeny ridge of Cawston Heath is still relatively unfrequented land now. There is the busy Norfolk–Holt road, with a petrol station and an old pub, the Woodrow Inn, now closed. The shooting range of a local gun club is buried in a modern stand of pines. Next to it is a patch of open heath where in summer, between the bracken and birch, the Silver Studded Blues and Small Skippers flit from the scabious to the thistles.
Somewhere here – the precise spot is not known – le Neve and Hobart met. There are two hints as to what happened. Narcissus Luttrell, the parliamentary diarist, heard that ‘captain Le’neve was wounded in the arm’ and Sir Henry ‘run into the belly’.122 The antiquarian John Nichols, in a book of anecdotes published in 1812, added that Oliver ‘knew nothing of the sword, but had a great coat of coarse cloth; and his adversary’s weapon being entangled in it, he easily stabbed him’.123
Whatever the truth of these accounts, they carry a metaphorical freight. Hobart was the grandee swordsman, with his exquisite blades, his familiarity with power, his overweening metropolitan contempt for the little Norfolk man who had dared to confront him and impugn his honour. Le Neve, in this account, was the man of the earth, no great expert in arms but equipped with something as rooted to the Tory soil as ‘a great coat of coarse cloth’. Hobart managed to wound Oliver in the arm but that material thickness of English stuff clogged the rapier of the dandified Whig, made his slick weapon useless, disabled him and allowed le Neve to run him through. Can you not, even now, see the look of appalled astonishment on Sir Henry’s face as the point of the Norfolk sword went through his guts, those beautiful eyebrows lifted into an arc of amazement, the elegant lips turned into an open O of surprise?
Can this picture be true? Surely not. For more than a decade le Neve had been captain of a foot company of the Eynsford militia and had regularly drilled and practised with them. As a hunting man, he was physically fit. There can be little doubt he would have known how to use a sword. Nor on this August evening, knowing that he had the fight of his life in front of him, would he have worn ‘a great coat of coarse cloth’. It would have been too hot and hampered every movement.
These details have been gathered around the tale to turn it into an emblematic moment: this is the local defeating the metropolitan, the plain, upstanding country man trouncing the cynical power-broker, all that is good in the gentry world triumphing over its corrupt, deceiving, Westminster-and court-based culture-enemy. Any thought that Oliver le Neve was in fact involved in owning and running commercial property in London, or that the Hobarts were more deeply embedded in Norfolk than this minor branch of a London draper’s family, has no part in this mythology.
The wounded Hobart dragged himself back to Blickling, bleeding and in pain, where he was met by his wife, Elizabeth, and their only son, John, then four years old. Henry died there the next day and the estate carpenter, Thomas Burrows, made him a coffi
n lined with six yards of white baize, in which Henry was laid in the Blickling vault.124 A year or two later his widow had a simple stone urn put up for him near the site of the duel, bearing as an inscription nothing but the two letters ‘H H’.
Le Neve was now on the run. Not only had he killed a man in a duel, but it would be difficult to think of anyone with more powerful connections. Lady Hobart was looking for revenge. Troops of the militia began to comb Norfolk for him. One body of men rode down to west Harling, where Bass Gawdy and old Sir John had heard nothing of the crisis. The soldiers turned over everything in the West Harling house, riding through the standing crops while the deaf and dumb Sir John stood on the steps of his house shouting huge wordless rage at the soldiers, several of whom raised their swords to him.125
Le Neve made for London and then for Holland, returning to England occasionally in secret, living under assumed names. His groom, Nat, and his much-loved wife, Jane, joined him in Rotterdam in April 1699. Bass Gawdy wrote lovingly to him in Holland:
I am fearfully glad to heare you are safely arrived, after yr tedious & dangerous viyege, you cannot think how many hartakes I had for you, the time of yr being in England, fearing every post should have brought some ill news concerning you.126
His enemies – ‘ravenous woolves’ Bass calls them – were hoping to make £1,000 a year out of his estate while he was away. Lady Hobart offered £500 for his capture and Bass heard that he was ‘very neare being surprized in town’.127
In Tory East Anglia, le Neve was a hero and a martyr. Jack Millecent told him his name was ‘a general health to all honest gentlemen in two counties, being often drank when our greatest man’s [the King’s] is not’.128 His friends warned him that informers and kidnappers were everywhere. He was not to go in private boats or stay out late at night. Attempts were made by the Hobart faction to have him outlawed if he did not return to stand trial. In response, his friends lobbied hard to have a sympathetic sheriff appointed and, as Bass wrote helpfully, to choose for the jury ‘twelve honoust men … which I doubt not will be very serviceable to you, they being all verry responsable & men of sence’.129
For all the plotting and secrecy, the threat of punishment from a corrupt court and a packed jury, normal life went on. Oliver was missing all sorts of homely goods from Norfolk and they were dispatched across the sea: bottles of the strong Norfolk beer called nog, artichokes and flour from Witchingham all found their way to Rotterdam. In return, Oliver sent tubs of sturgeon and pieces of fine Holland and muslin, neckcloths and a well-made ‘casting-net’ for pike. His hunting friend Giles Bladwell ordered a dozen fine Holland shifts for Mrs Bladwell but Oliver was to ‘remember she is one of the fat size’.130
At the end of April 1700, Oliver stood trial and the careful preparations paid off. He was acquitted of all charges, guilty neither of manslaughter nor of murder, and he could resume his life at Witchingham.
In 1704, his wife, Jane, died and as soon as she was safely interred in the beautiful church at Great Witchingham, the unstoppable Jack Millecent was again out on the trail looking for a marital deal for his friend. For several months Millecent nosed his way through the drawing rooms of Norwich and London until on 12 December 1706 he wrote excitedly to Oliver back in Witchingham. He was in Kensington (where he had also been negotiating to buy a new gout chair), in the house of Robert Sheffield, the grandson of the Earl of Mulgrave:
Through my cousin Biddy I have made enquiries about the Sheffields. £3000 ready money will be laid down, and if Mr. Sheffield likes, £4,000 and the estate, when he dies, between the two sisters, whose just characters are – the eldest, tall, well-shaped, mild-temper, extraordinary housewife, her father’s commands a law, and not acquainted with any one young man, her face very agreeable, age 29. The youngest sister, a beautiful face, not tall, much inclined to fat, and in her temper a perfect stoic, not of so ready or pleasing conversation as the other, her age 26. If you find any suitable to your inclinations, I should be glad you’d begin whilst we are here, you might lodge near Dyett here, and set your horses at an excellent inn over the way.131
After protracted negotiations, Oliver chose Elizabeth, the elder, nicer, uglier, thinner, more easy-going and highly domesticated Sheffield girl, and married her in July 1707. The surviving correspondence doesn’t record her thoughts on the matter, only that in November that year, without warning, three months after the wedding, she died too.
Oliver’s enemies the Hobarts were pushing on to a grand aristocratic career as the Earls of Buckinghamshire – a title which still exists, but the present earl is no longer connected to Blickling – while the le Neves soon came to an end. Oliver died of a sudden apoplexy in November 1711. He was forty-nine. His sons had died before him and his estate at Great Witchingham went to his brother Peter, the herald, from whom it passed out of the family into the hands of a conniving Norwich lawyer. Oliver’s three daughters inherited the Gawdy house and lands at West Harling (they soon sold them and moved away) and it was those three, Isabella, Anne and Henrietta, who put up a monument on the chancel wall of Great Witchingham church.
It is in white marble, with slightly wobbly lettering, and it describes without shame or cavilling the social framework in which their father had lived. He was a magistrate and a captain in the militia, a man of Mars, but his own father was a London draper and his mother the daughter of a London merchant, the deepest of mercantile origins. The girls’ mother, Anne Gawdy (‘who lyes by his side’), was the daughter of a baronet and Oliver’s third wife was the great-grand-daughter of an earl, described here a little distantly as ‘longsince deceased’, but the acknowledgement of trade comes before either of them. The Latin conclusion at the foot of the stone tells the story: ‘Tam Marti quam Mercurio’ (As much a man of war as of commerce).
This was the mixed background which had been a cause of such shame and rage for Oliver in 1683. Was it now a source of pride for his daughters? Had his courage in 1698 somehow validated not only his honour but his family’s ‘Mircatorian’ origins? Perhaps that is the ironic moral of his life. By the time this archetype of the Tory hunting squire died in 1711, many parts of the gentry had come to understand the value of business. If only he had recognized it, Oliver le Neve could have been a model for the future, a fusion of things that seems modern: a country-loving property developer.
Instead, the Witchingham world to which he was committed looked backwards. His friends lived on as relicts of a previous age, widowed by modernity. Of all these Norfolk rakes, Sir Bassingbourne Gawdy Bt was the last. He survived, unmarried, until October 1723, when he died ‘of a bruise in his privities, which he received by his horse’s stumbling as he was hunting’,132 and both the baronetcy and the mental universe of which he was an ornament were extinguished.
PART IV
Atlantic Domains
1710–1790
Through the course of the eighteenth century, the gentry, crudely put, divided into rural, conservative, increasingly impoverished, ill-educated, backward-looking Tories and urban, progressive, commercially minded, government-controlling Whigs. From having been the unchallenged core of the political classes, at least part of the gentry started to look absurd. Geoffrey Hickes, the early eighteenth-century smart London salonnier, described one ‘Deputy Lieutenant’ who
had confined his Knowledge within the Bounds of his own County; all the rest of the World was Terra Incognita to his Worship.
Had this Lieutenant hunted less, and read more; had he cultivated his understanding, and let a Field or two lie fallow, he might have been Company for Men.1
But he wasn’t and he stands at the head of the long sequence of out-of-it squires who began their unstoppable career in English fiction, from the bumbling Sir Roger de Coverley in the pages of Addison’s Spectator, who insisted on walking through the streets of London, ‘saluting everybody that passes by him with a good-morrow or a good-night’,2 like a country dog on a lead, and on through Squires Western and Allworthy in Tom Jones to the idio
ts of Thackeray and Surtees.
There is a social and economic background to that stereotype. At the end of the seventeenth century, the long ascent of the gentry stalled. The introduction of strict settlement of estates, by which individual heirs were prevented by their fathers from selling off bits of land and were compelled instead to leave them whole to their own heirs, meant that aristocratic landholdings were no longer divided up and the gentry was deprived of that drip feed from above of younger sons with small subsidiary estates. In the difficult conditions of 1660–1725, many small gentry and yeoman families failed, and the great landowners, benefiting from new commercially available mortgages and cheap finance, hoovered up the pickings. Those great landowners began to accumulate ever larger estates (one eighteenth-century Norfolk grandee liked to say that his nearest neighbour was in Denmark) while the yeoman farmers, whose entrepreneurial energies had traditionally fed the gentry from below, found themselves unable to survive in the more demanding commercial environment.
By the end of the eighteenth century, the crown and church still owned about 10 per cent of England and the great aristocrats about a quarter. The yeomen, who had been the owners of as much of a third of England in the seventeenth century, owned no more than 15 per cent of it by 1790. The residue – as much as half of the land surface of England – remained in the hands of the gentry, the rural squires who were becoming the laughing stock for the newspaper-and novel-reading public of the cities.3
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