Renishaw Hall

by Desmond Seward

  Some modern writers sneer at this association with ‘trade’, but George would have seen nothing demeaning. Seventeenth-century iron-making was the squirearchy’s preserve, their woods providing charcoal to heat the forges, their streams powering the hammers. There were other gentleman ironmasters in Derbyshire, such as the Hunlokes of nearby Wingerworth. George enjoyed the society of neighbours like these, riding over to Chesterfield on Saturday to dine with them at the Red Lyon on fish, mutton, chicken and ale, afterwards playing shovel-board. He also went regularly to Derby for the Assizes or the Fair. Sometimes he visited Sheffield for the Tuesday market, dining at the Angel Inn near the Irish Cross.

  Many letters in the letter-book are to ‘Cosen ffranceys’. This was Ralph Franceys, who lived in London at the White Hart in Friday Street and acted as George’s unofficial agent. George was constantly asking Ralph for small purchases, such as cinnamon water, which was good for the digestion and rheumatism. In December 1664 he wrote, ‘My sone[-in-law] William [Revel] wants a ffrench hat, and I have a grandchild about six yeares old, who wants one too.’ Over the years Ralph became a valued friend, he and his wife sometimes spending Christmas at Renishaw. He helped George to correspond with his sons overseas – and kept an eye on John, the youngest son and black sheep, who was half-heartedly working in London.

  Two of George’s younger sons became successful merchants. The second, another George, established himself at Seville, dealing in Spanish silks before retiring to London as a rich man. He regularly sent his father presents of red Alicante wine and sweet Malaga – clearly much appreciated – with oranges and lemons. The third, Robert Sitwell, entered the Levant Company, exporting English woollen cloth and metals in return for oriental silks, cottons and spices. For many years he lived in Syria at Aleppo and then in Italy at Leghorn (Livorno), the Company’s headquarters, eventually coming back to spend his old age at London.

  The fourth son, John, was less satisfactory, losing his place as apprentice to a tailor in Derby. His father found him a new place in London, continuing to help him with money and advice. He confided to Cousin Franceys, ‘John hath been a great griefe to me.’

  Unusually kind-hearted, George drafted a petition on behalf of his neighbour, Mr Leigh of Coldwell Hall, who had fallen on hard times, to beg a place for him in the Duke of Norfolk’s almshouse at Sheffield, besides paying for one of his sons to be apprenticed to a Sheffield tailor. He sent a letter to another of Mr Leigh’s sons, telling him ‘write by the next post this comes to you to hould up the hartt of the ould man’.

  He asked the creditors of a former maid at Renishaw to be lenient because she had unknowingly married a man deep in debt. Twice he bailed out a debtor from Chesterfield’s House of Correction, helping him again when he was imprisoned a third time.

  George also did his best to aid young Whittles, ‘a poore ffatherless and Motherless boy, an object of pitty to move one’, rescuing him from his ‘Knavish uncles’, paying for his release from apprenticeship to a cruel master, and giving him clothes and money to save him from starving.

  The letter-book reveals an interest in public affairs, at home and abroad. George regularly received ‘news books, papers of news, letters diurnall, gazettes, royal declarations and speeches, and acts of Parliament’, which were sent to him from London by Cousin Franceys. He learned of the Great Plague of 1665 with horrified fascination, noting in July, ‘it’s said there was 100 houses shutt up on one day in one parish, viz., St Andrew’s in Holborn. I humbly pray it would please the Lord to take of[f] this heavy judgement.’ He was well-informed about the Dutch war, commenting in July 1667 that ‘there is a rumor that the Dutch are at sea againe with theire Navy, but I think they are not so ready’.

  Every year George visited the London of Charles II and Samuel Pepys, always in the spring, in order to sell his iron. The journey took him four days on horseback, armed with a brace of pistols. Invariably he was escorted by a servant, who also carried arms.

  When he arrived he lodged at the Greyhound Inn in Holborn (adjoining Furnival’s Inn), where he gave dinner parties, and met friends at the Exchange, with whom he ate in nearby taverns. He saw others at Westminster, which he reached by barge along the Thames. Having settled business matters, he went shopping, leaving orders at booksellers, tailors, silversmiths and tobacconists. Each Sunday, he attended divine service at St Paul’s or St Andrew’s Holborn. He looked forward to these visits, telling Ralph Franceys, ‘God send us a merry meeting.’

  His 1662 visit was concerned with apprenticing his son John to Nicholas Delves, a silk merchant. The boy, who was clearly a wastrel, made an enemy of Delves’s partner, Mr Brownsword, although for a time Cousin Franceys managed to see that John kept his place. At the end of 1663 George wrote gratefully to Ralph, ‘I will not trouble you with more words about him, but will Register your great kindness in my bosome, to remaine there to minde me of the great store of friendshipp I owe you.’

  In January 1664, Delves formally complained of John’s bad behaviour. George replied:

  I was much troubled when I heard my sonne was so untowardly indiscreet to cause you to write thus to me againe . . . I hope hereafter he will nether thinke Christmas nor any other time lawless to play the foole in, but when you are pleased at any time to give him leave to recreate himselfe among friends, he will make choyce of sober civell company and keepe good howers . . . Sir, I acknowledge my selfe dubblely obliged to you, first in takeing care to observe my sonne’s Courses, and letting him see the danger and folly, and then for pardoning him.

  In the end, the prodigal was shipped out to Seville to work for his brother George. He appears to have died young, since nothing more is recorded of him.

  From what we know of Mr Sitwell’s library at Renishaw, he enjoyed some very serious reading indeed in his study upstairs. Besides Homer, Aristotle and the Greek and Latin classics, it contained such fathers of the church as Tertullian, Eusebius, Augustine and Chrysostom, together with Bishop Jewel’s Apologia and Fuller’s History of the Holy War. Among law books were Justinian’s Institutes and Coke’s Statutes. On the shelves, too, were Erasmus, Machiavelli, Bacon and Milton. Science was not neglected, with Galen and Galileo as well as William Harvey’s De motu cordis – the pioneering study of the circulation of the blood.

  Modern philosophy was represented by Descartes, while there were books on mathematics, trigonometry, logic, navigation and perspective. More frivolous was Henri Boguet’s Discours exécrable des sorciers. There were also numerous pamphlets on current affairs, dealing with the Civil War or the Restoration, all tied in bundles.

  Apart from Dr Gardiner, George had few friends with whom to discuss his reading. A possible exception, even if he saw little of him, was Richard Love, Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and a former chaplain to King Charles I. It was Dr Love who in 1649 had advised George to appoint Gardiner as rector, pleasantly ending his letter of recommendation, ‘Sir, be pleased to present my service to your whole family and all staying with you,’ which indicates a certain familiarity. No doubt other letters were destroyed because they expressed dangerous opinions. George may have known Love at Cambridge; and perhaps it was at Love’s suggestion that he sent his eldest son, Francis, to Corpus Christi.

  George Sitwell had built his family’s fortunes on very firm foundations indeed by the time he died in 1667. He was buried in Eckington church, where there is a monument with busts of himself and his wife. He comes down the centuries as a kindly and cultivated man, who although one of nature’s entrepreneurs never lost an iota of humanity. His best epitaph is a phrase from a letter he wrote in September 1665 – ‘in mine apprehension plain dealing is a jewel’.

  Chapter 2

  ‘MR JUSTICE SITWELL’

  ‘he Squires of Renishaw in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were Whigs, quiet and scholarly country gentlemen who collected books and pictures, improved the farming and planting of the estate, amassed rents and royalties and married heiresses – hence th
e strange family names affected by later generations,’ wrote their descendant Reresby Sitwell.1

  He might also have said that they neither hunted nor shot, and were in no way sportsmen. We know a fair amount about them and their world from the letters Sir George Sitwell edited at the end of the nineteenth century. Reresby adds, ‘Younger sons were put into trade and many worked so hard that they never had time to marry, so left their fortunes back to their eldest brother or nephew.’

  Born in 1630, George’s eldest son and heir Francis Sitwell was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and then read law at Gray’s Inn. Steady and hard-working, he got on well with his father. After inheriting the estate, he continued to run the forges and collieries. However, his only real achievement was marrying the sister of William Sacheverell of Barton near Nottingham, who became renowned as MP for Derbyshire. Sometimes credited with founding the Whig party, Sacheverell was a fervent anti-papist who believed firmly in the Popish Plot. He was also a considerable orator, and Mr Speaker Onslow called him ‘the ablest parliament man’ of his time.

  Having fathered three sons and three daughters, and been High Sheriff for Derbyshire, the second squire of Renishaw died in 1671. His wife Katherine Sacheverell apparently mourned him deeply, for on his funeral monument in Eckington church are inscribed the lines:

  Here death hath laid my treasure up.

  This earth doth cover

  My cordiall frind, my loyal

  Spouse and faithfull lover.

  Francis’s son George, fourteen when his father died, was lucky to have a mother who did not remarry and took good care of his inheritance. My Rent Book beginning whitsuntide 1678 testifies to her businesslike approach. It was in 1678 that George came down from Trinity College, Cambridge. He kept happy memories of his time there, responding generously with a donation of £10 when in 1680 the Master and Fellows of Trinity wrote asking for money:

  Sir, we are engaged in building a great and magnificent library opposite to the hall in Nevill’s court, and in joining it to the two sides of that building with eight new arches, a work that will not only supply our necessity and convenience, but adorn the whole university and learning itself.2

  An oak armchair in the hall bearing the date 1679 commemorates Katherine Sitwell refurnishing the house for George’s marriage to Anne Kent of Povey Hall, who was another considerable Derbyshire heiress. As Anne was sickly, for her first lying-in the couple lodged at Derby in the house of the town’s leading physician, Dr Polycarp Dakins, who duly delivered her of a son and heir, Francis. After bearing several more children, Anne died young, in early middle age.

  George managed his estate carefully, enclosing common land and improving barren soil by sowing clover or planting turnips. He added a third ‘orchard’ at Renishaw, a kitchen garden on whose walls apricots, nectarines and peaches were grown. He also put new yew hedges into the gardens, besides planting trees on a large scale.

  His main changes to the house itself were replacing the mullioned windows with sashed ones, besides building new stables and a coach house. Indoors, he added to the library, buying over a thousand books. These included a monumental work of cartography, the magnificent four-volume The English Atlas published by Moses Pitt between 1680 and 1683.

  George had inherited the Whig principles of his uncle Sacheverell, a frequent visitor to Renishaw. In November 1688 George was among the Derbyshire gentlemen who, with their servants and retainers, escorted the Earl of Devonshire to Nottingham to show support for William of Orange’s bid to replace James II. The richest Whig in England, the earl was one of the seven magnates who had invited William to come over from Holland with an army.

  The following March, the new king appointed George a commissioner for the Lord Lieutenancy of the City of London. During these months he was busy making his neighbours take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary. He became a magistrate for the county in 1693, and ever afterwards was known by the family as ‘Mr Justice Sitwell’.

  In May 1696 the government sent him a warrant to arrest Captain Ralph Philips and ‘one John Steel’, Jacobites who were on the run for involvement in Sir John Fenwick’s plot to assassinate William III. George was ordered to search the houses of Sir Henry Hunloke at Wingerworth and Mr Pooles, who lived near Park Hall not far off, besides those of any other suspects, and apprehend ‘the said persons and all their papers.’ Plainly, the authorities regarded him as a sound Whig who would do his best to prevent the return of James II.

  When Mrs Sitwell died later that year, George decided to let Renishaw and live in London for a while. He arrived there at the end of 1697 and stayed there for nearly a decade instead of the two years he had intended. A portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller during this time is of a dignified gentleman in a full-bottomed periwig, with a face memorable only for a high-bridged nose; it has the look of someone who does not possess too much imagination.

  At first he lived in his brother Francis’s house in Dyer’s Court, Aldermanbury, but he later took lodgings with Mrs Pocock in Cursitor’s Alley, and then with Mr Carlton in Fuller’s Rents, Holborn, between Chancery Lane and Gray’s Inn. This was the world of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, and George frequented Will’s Coffee House, which was among the essayists’ favourite haunts. Conveniently, this was in Fuller’s Rents, and he went there so often that he used it as an address. Coffee houses were like today’s London clubs, with newspapers and good conversation, a home from home for a man in late middle age. He continued to visit London regularly even after returning to full-time residence at Renishaw in 1706.

  A capable man of business, George increased his wealth without taking risks. From the 1690s the ironworks were leased out, although he kept control of the collieries. What interested him was improving the estate.

  A good father, George helped his younger sons with their careers. One became a merchant, sailing on a trading venture to Jamaica in 1705. His uncle Francis wrote to his father in summer 1706:

  Some of your son George’s friends have been persuading him to go to India about Michaelmas next, & continue there about two yeares, for to establish an acquaintance in order to have full business from the Gentlemen & planters hereafter . . . you must furnish him with five or six hundred pounds in three months, part of the fortune you design for him, for to purchase a cargo.

  The younger George sailed to Virginia in July 1707. He later went on similar expeditions to China and India, making a substantial fortune.

  Mr Justice Sitwell was closest to his daughter Alice and her husband William Sacheverell, the great Parliamentarian’s second son. After marrying in 1708, the young couple lived in a fine stone mansion on Cockpit Hill in Derby – and at Barton, where they ‘kept house’ for William’s widowed elder brother Robert, who drank too much to look after himself. ‘Musters, I & Jack have been mellow a weeke together,’ Robert had informed William after a drunken bout in May 1706. The Rector of Barton wrote in vain to William, living with his brother at Barton, about the ‘pernicious sin of Hard-drinking . . . making Men forfeit the Felicity of Heaven and plunging them forever into the Lake of Fire with the Devil’.

  William’s portrait at Renishaw shows a handsome if sickly face. Sadly, there is no portrait of Alice. George’s letters to William begin, ‘Dear Son’ and end, ‘Your very affectionate ffather & Servant’, while William signs his as ‘Yr. Most Dutyfull Sonn’.

  In July 1709 George thanked William for ‘joyfull news of my Daughter’s safe delivery of a son . . . I shall gladly embrace this happy opportunity of being a God-father and shall (God willing) come to Derby on purpose when you shall please to let me know the day when you design to have the Christening.’

  But William’s poor health was a worry. In 1711 George wrote to him, ‘I was very glad to hear by James Jackson that you was pretty well in health when he came last from Barton, especially considering that a little before my Daughter wrote [to] Betty that you was much out of order.’ After Alice’s death in 1713 at twenty-six from complications fo
llowing the birth of their second son, William’s health broke down completely, and two years later he died of the ague.

  William’s elder brother Robert had died in 1714. On 14 May, after a night’s boozing, he set out at 3.00 a.m. to ride to London. Having ridden at breakneck speed for five hours, he fell off his horse shortly before reaching Northampton and died of an apoplexy within a few minutes. ‘The reason why Mr Sacheverell rid so hard was that he thought he was pursu’d’, wrote a friend, implying he had suffered a fit of delirium tremens – the ‘Horrors’.

  Following his death, his kin became involved in a protracted legal case that Mr Justice Sitwell must have watched with horror. Robert had been the son of the great Whig and, like his father, was MP for Nottingham, but there the resemblance stopped. Robert was not only a drunk, but a womaniser. Worse still, he turned out to have been a bigamist.

  Three ‘wives’ emerged. Julian Rhodes of Nottingham came forward with a certificate of marriage, claiming a dowry and maintenance for her baby son Samuel, while Anne Marshall of Barton made the same demands for herself and her daughter Mary, producing a similar certificate. So did a Mrs Stor. In addition, Mary Castle of London wrote to say that she and her child by Robert would starve unless they received money. These were just some of the ladies on whom he had fathered bastards.

  The ‘Great Sacheverell Case’, a succession of lawsuits, dragged on for years and entailed hearings in Chancery, the Court of Common Pleas, the Bishop of London’s Court, the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, the Lord Mayor’s Court, the Court of Arches and elsewhere. All this incurred heavy costs for the rest of the Sacheverells – which, after William’s death in September 1715, meant two small boys scarcely out of the cradle, William and Henry. Inevitably, George became involved, in an effort to save his grandsons’ inheritance.