RENISHAW
HALL
In memory of Reresby Sitwell
CONTENTS
Acknowledgements
Foreword
1. The Cavalier
2. ‘Mr Justice Sitwell’
3. A Mathematician
4. The Merchant Squire
5. Passing on the Torch
6. A Regency Buck
7. Ruin?
8. Camping in the Wreckage
9. An Unsung Heroine
10. The Golden Years Return?
11. A Miserable Marriage
12. Sir George’s Italian Cure
13. A New Renishaw
14. Renishaw Children
15. Leaving the Nest
16. The Great War, and Lady Ida’s Ordeal
17. ‘Sitwellianism’
18. Rivalry with Bloomsbury
19. Renishaw as Patronage
20. Marking Time in the Thirties
21. Renishaw and the Second World War
22. The Sitwell Renaissance
23. Decay
24. Renishaw Reborn
25. Today
Owners of Renishaw
Notes
Index
‘An ancient hall without its records is a body without a soul and can never be fully enjoyed until one has learnt something of the men and women whom it has sheltered in the past – of their lives and manners, their love affairs, their wisdom and their follies; how the oak furniture gave way to walnut, and the walnut to mahogany; how they laid out the gardens, raised the terrace, clipped the hedges, and planted the avenue.’
—SIR GEORGE SITWELL, INTRODUCTION
TO LETTERS OF THE SITWELLS AND SACHEVERELLS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is a book about the Sitwell family and Renishaw Hall, where they have lived since 1625. I am most grateful to Alexandra Sitwell (Mrs Rick Hayward) for asking me to write it and to Penelope, Lady Sitwell for encouragement, as well as invaluable information.
I must also thank Christine Beevers, an archivist whose suggestions and encyclopedic knowledge of the source material at Renishaw have been of enormous help throughout – as in finding unpublished letters from Evelyn Waugh and Dylan Thomas. Others who gave me information or advice were: Julian Allason; Gillian, Lady Howard de Walden; Stella Lesser (who read the proofs); Anna Somers-Cocks; and James Stourton.
I have been lucky to have such an unusually understanding and patient editor as Pippa Crane while, as so often before, I owe a special debt to my agent Andrew Lownie for his unfailing support.
Desmond Seward
Hungerford, 2015
FOREWORD
During the 1920s three writers, Osbert, Edith and Sacheverell Sitwell, became the generally acknowledged rivals of the Bloomsbury Group. According to their friend Evelyn Waugh, they ‘radiated an aura of high spirits, elegance, impudence, unpredictability, above all of sheer enjoyment. They declared war on dullness.’1
Behind the ‘Trio’ stood Renishaw Hall in Derbyshire, the family’s home since 1625, which down the generations has affected everybody who lived there. In a beautiful setting, filled with treasures, it enchanted all three when they were young. ‘The Sitwells might wander far from Renishaw, but they would always return in spirit,’ wrote Harold Acton.2 Rex Whistler, no stranger to great mansions, thought it the most exciting house in England, while it replaced Madresfield in Evelyn Waugh’s affections. Osbert’s lasting achievement was commissioning John Piper to paint it.
Unfairly, the Trio blamed their father Sir George for failing to save their beautiful, brainless mother from a prison sentence, while they resented being dependent on him for money. Osbert and Edith turned him into a figure of fun in their autobiographies, a caricature accepted unquestioningly by everyone who writes about the Sitwells.3 So far, nobody has acknowledged just how much he formed the minds of his children. For, while undeniably eccentric, he was also brilliantly gifted – a pioneer in re-discovering Baroque art, and one of the finest landscape gardeners of his day. Above all, he was the creator of modern Renishaw.
His children’s impact on the arts and their role as arbiters of taste have been forgotten (even if Edith’s verse still has admirers); so too has their feud with Bloomsbury, and all the malicious gossip that accompanied it. Yet their friends included Aldous Huxley, Siegfried Sassoon, Anthony Powell, L. P. Hartley, Dylan Thomas, Graham Greene and (up to a point) Virginia Woolf. Osbert’s closest literary friendship was with Evelyn Waugh.
However, the Trio are just a part of this modest chronicle of Renishaw Hall and its squires. Among the owners have been a Cavalier, a Jacobite, and a Regency Buck who added palatial new rooms. Not least was the maligned Sir George Sitwell, who, besides transforming the house’s interior, created the gardens. The book’s climax is Renishaw’s triumphant restoration.
Chapter 1
THE CAVALIER
o portrait survives of the George Sitwell who built Renishaw Hall, but in 1900, after a close examination of the effigy on his monument in Eckington church and of his letter-book, another George Sitwell imagined how he must have looked towards the end of his life:
over the middle height, and, as became one obviously well advanced in middle age, rather neat and precise than fashionable in his dress. He wore a long periwig scented with orange water, a slight moustache and a tuft of hair upon his chin [. . .] His face, with its good forehead and eyes, strong and clear-cut nose and well developed chin, gave an impression of force of character, tenacity of purpose, and good reasoning powers, and this impression was strengthened by his conversation, for even the most casual acquaintance could not fail to observe that he was a manufacturer who had been accustomed to think and act for himself, a man who was not only well educated, but gifted with a sound judgement and a marked talent for business.1
Born in 1601 at Eckington in Derbyshire, George was the son of a rich yeoman (also called George), who lived in a house on the village street and died six years later. In 1612, ‘Mr Wigfall, who was then of smale estate, marryed my mother, by which meanes he raised his fortune and came to have the guidance of mine estate dureing mine minority (which was about ten yeares)’, wrote George in 1653. Despite promising to leave him his property as settlement of a debt for £1,400, Wigfall married again after the death of his ward’s mother and, dying intestate in 1641, ensured that it went to the children of his second marriage, much to George’s anger.
With funds provided by Mrs Sitwell, Mr Wigfall had built them a house on the summit of a long, rocky promontory above Renishaw, a small hamlet near Eckington in the area then known as ‘Hallamshire’ – on the northern border of Derbyshire and the southern of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Six miles from Chesterfield and six from Sheffield, Renishaw lies between the Peak District and what are now called the Dukeries. Wigfall’s new home, where the Renishaw stables now stand, must have alerted his stepson to the beauty of the site.
In 1625–6 (the first year of King Charles I’s reign), using money saved during his minority, George built Renishaw Hall within sight of Wigfall’s dwelling. A ‘Pennine Manor’ on an H plan, this would become the nucleus of today’s Renishaw. In some ways George always remained a farmer here, eating with his servants in the hall. Even today, when you go through the north porch into the hall – which is not much changed since his day – the panelling, huge fireplace, stone floor and rough oak furniture have a distinctly rustic feel.
On three floors, the tall, gabled house nevertheless aspired to gentility. From the hall, a door at the right opened on to a Little Parlour, and another door at the right on to a buttery and kitchen. The Great Staircase and Great Parlour (now Library) were at the left. Thirty-four feet long, twenty wide, with a bay window on to the gardens, the Great Parlour was the best room.
Panelled, this had a plasterwork ceiling and a frieze of mermaids and dolphins, squirrels, vine leaves and grapes, with a large oak carving over the fireplace of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Above the hall was the principal bedroom, the Hall Chamber, with Mr Sitwell’s study next to it.
Around the house were gardens and orchards, some walled. A large south garden, wider than the house it surrounded on three sides, had green or gravel walks, box hedges, small knot gardens with aromatic herbs, yew pyramids and flowerbeds. On the left was a bowling green. The Great Orchard, south of the main garden, contained two archery butts and side alleys bordered by flowers. There was also a banqueting house of red brick that contained a tiny, oak-panelled room. A brew-house supplied the hall with beer until 1895.
For the seventeenth century the staff was small, consisting of a steward (Thomas Starkey); a housekeeper (Katherine Heays); a butler and a pair of footmen in green and yellow livery; a coachman and two grooms; a cook, a kitchen-maid and two servant-maids; a dairy maid; and two gardeners. This was in the 1660s, however, after the death of Mrs Sitwell, when the children had left home. In their day, it would have been larger. It is also likely that other servants who did not live in the house came up daily from nearby Eckington.
Yet seventeenth-century Renishaw was no lonely sylvan paradise, since a busy road (later moved downhill) ran past the main front of the house, going on to cross a bridge over the River Rother. An important highway between West Yorkshire and London, it was a road thronged with traffic – carts, pack-horses, horsemen, travellers on foot. Bolsover and Hardwick, then Derbyshire’s greatest mansions, could be seen on a beautiful ridge to the east.
George came from a family long established in or around Eckington. In 1301 Simon Sitwell of the parish was recognised in a lawsuit as heir of Walter de Boys, who had died on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, while in 1310 Roger ‘Cytwelle’ helped to found the Guild of St Mary of Eckington. The first Sitwell of substance had been Mr Robert Sytwelle of Staveley Netherthorpe Hall three miles away, who made his money from a coal mine at Eckington Marsh and acquired the Renishaw site. A Catholic without sons, he had tried unsuccessfully to leave his fortune away from his Protestant heir, George’s grandfather.
After attending the grammar school at Derby, George knew Latin and Greek, and apparently went up to Cambridge to finish his education at Corpus Christi College. In 1627 he married Margaret, daughter of Hugh Childers of Carr House, near Doncaster. We know nothing of Mr Childers, apart from where he lived and his styling himself ‘gentleman’ – or about Margaret, except that she gave her husband nine children, of whom several did not survive infancy, and that she died in 1658.
During the 1630s George began mining iron ore on a large scale, building a blast furnace to forge it at Plumbley, a mile north-west of Eckington, in partnership with Wigfall. The Civil War’s need of iron for weaponry increased his market, which already included the West Indies and Virginia, and in 1652 he built another furnace nearer home, at Foxbrooke. This became Derbyshire’s biggest ironworks, producing pig and bar iron together with castings and other iron goods. In 1656 George set up a rolling mill at Renishaw to make rod iron for nails, scythes and sickles. He also owned a forge at Pleasley, which turned out saws.
In 1641, with four other local gentlemen, George and his stepbrother Henry Wigfall sent a letter to the House of Lords urging it to petition King Charles to meet Parliament on his return from Scotland. When the Civil War broke out, George let royalist troops garrison Renishaw (no doubt from the regiment raised by his neighbour, John Frescheville) and guard the road below. Osbert Sitwell claimed that when he was a boy, old men pointed out to him the marks of cannonballs on the stone of the upper storeys, but there is no record of any siege.2
After the royalist defeat at Marston Moor George obtained a ‘protection’ from the Parliamentary commander in Yorkshire, Ferdinando, Lord Fairfax. Dated 9 August 1644, it orders that ‘George Sitwell of Renishaw in the County of Darby, Gentl., bee not plundered, pillaged, or in any way Injured in any of his howses or goods’. Later, however, he was fined £400 as a persistent delinquent, which can only mean that the authorities saw him as a hard-line Cavalier. His sympathies may have been reported by his stepbrother, Henry Wigfall, who was a committed Roundhead.
George could afford to pay, as the Renishaw estates with other lands produced £800 a year, doubled by profits from his ironworks. A Justice of the Peace, eager to turn himself into a proper gentleman with a coat of arms, in 1648 he applied to Parliament’s herald, ‘Garter, Principal King of Arms of Englishmen’, for a grant, receiving three black lions on gold and silver bars (once borne by the Stutevilles, medieval lords of Eckington). It was re-granted after the Restoration, the bars changed to gold and green. The herald noted how George, ‘in the late unhappy times of distraction [had] indeavored as much as in him lay to the advancement of his Majesties just Authority, whereby he may pretend to some marke of distinction’.3
George Sitwell displayed these new arms on his banner at the Derby Assizes in 1653, when serving as High Sheriff for Derbyshire under Lord Protector Cromwell. As his chaplain he brought the Eckington parson, Dr Gardiner, whose appointment to the living he had procured four years earlier and who had been his eldest son Francis’s tutor at Cambridge. Gardiner preached a dangerously indiscreet Assize sermon on ‘Magistracy and Ministry, the State and the Church’, reflecting his patron’s views. (Significantly, when the Restoration came, Dr Gardiner was appointed a chaplain to the Duke of Monmouth.)
It was a perilous time for closet royalists to air a preference for King and Bishops as opposed to Protector and Major-Generals. Sitwell and his chaplain were lucky to escape serious charges. Since the Book of Common Prayer had been outlawed, Gardiner officiated in Eckington church without book or surplice, administering the Sacrament to parishioners who sat at a long table. No doubt, he also said the illegal Anglican service at the Hall, in secret – whispering it to the family behind locked doors.
After Mrs Sitwell’s death in 1658 the housekeeper, Mrs Heays, ran the house, ensuring its tranquil routine. The servants ate with their master. Breakfast was at seven o’clock: cold meat, oatcakes, white bread and butter, washed down by small ale. At eleven Mrs Heays led them into the hall for prayers, and afterwards the butler laid the table for dinner at midday – a substantial meal, which Mr Sitwell followed by a pipe of tobacco in the Little Parlour or the banqueting house. Supper was also eaten in the hall, where the day ended with evening prayers.
The whole household went to Eckington on Sunday to hear Dr Gardiner’s sermon, the preacher and his wife riding back with them for dinner. On special occasions there was dancing in the Great Parlour and card-playing in the Little Parlour, while at Christmas fiddlers came over from Staveley or Chesterfield, the hall being decked with holly and ivy.
George, who reveals a good deal about himself in his letter-book, lived an active outdoor life besides managing his estates and his iron. He bred horses, hunted with Mr Frescheville’s harriers, and may have kept greyhounds for coursing. He also owned a fowling-piece, which suggests that he shot regularly, since we know he presented his neighbours with pheasants.
George prudently concealed his feelings about Oliver Cromwell’s regime, destroying letters that might put him in danger. The sole exception is a note in his hand (perhaps a copy) reporting a plot to assassinate the Protector by starting a fire in the chapel at Whitehall when he was hearing a sermon, and then kill him in the confusion. George comments that while the authorities pretended it was one of ‘the restless attempts of the Cavalier partie’, the man behind it was a discontented Leveller, an army captain, whose aim was to discredit Royalists.
After the ‘Great Rebellion’ was over, George described his country’s former Puritan masters as ‘crafty, wicked men [who] conceave it best to fish in troubled waters, and apprehending religion to be the finest cloake to cover their intentions . . . they seem much to resemble those Zealotts Josephus mentions among the Jews a little before their de
struction . . . factious, seditious, self-ended people, who when they neither care nor dare begin a disturbance in Civile affaires, then will they quarrell about religion’.
By 1659 England had grown to detest the tyranny of the ‘Major-Generals’ and despise the new Protector, Richard Cromwell, Oliver’s incapable son. At the end of the year General Monck marched on London, reinstating the Long Parliament, which in May 1660 declared that Charles II had succeeded his father as king in 1649. We know how George, the staunch Cavalier, felt about it from a letter he wrote to his old friend and neighbour Mr Frescheville the following April.
All honest, truehearted Englishmen are bound to render harty thanks and praise to our mercifull God, who hath miraculously restored our gracious Sovereign, and us to our right, in a calme peace, in the throng of soe blustering and unnaturall a war; wherein I cannot sufficiently set forth the worth of the good Duke of Albemarle [Monck], who was cheifly instrumental in our happiness.
George welcomed ‘that great and grave Council of our Nation’ – his name for the ferociously royalist ‘Cavalier Parliament’ – with its statutes against Levellers, eviction of Puritan parsons and savage punishment of seditious pamphleteers. ‘The preservation of our laws ought to be dearest to us, for by them the crowne is kept from tottering on the head of our Sovereign.’
By this time George Sitwell had become England’s biggest manufacturer of nails, reputedly producing a tenth of the kingdom’s entire iron production. (It should be remembered, however, that most iron articles were imported.) During the winter of 1661–2 his furnaces turned out 1,181 tons of sow iron worth £6 a ton, when the whole country’s annual output was no more than 10,000 tons. Some was sold in London, taken by barge and ship from a depot at Bawtry on the River Idle as well as by road. He also made a complete rolling mill for a client in the West Indies.
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