Just after William died, however, Mr Justice Sitwell had been distracted by a danger even more fearsome than an imperilled inheritance. A fervent supporter of the Protestant Succession, he treasured a letter received by his late son-in-law in November the previous year, describing George I and his family, who had just arrived from Hanover:
As for newes, I must tell you in the first place that 2 nights agoe I was at Court, where I first saw the King, Prince, & Princess. The King is about my size, the Prince about yours, or not so tall, & the Princess about the size of us both, tho’ setting aside her being fat, she is of a fine complexion, & seems, if very ugly, very good natur’d & obligeing. The lookes of the King answer the character he has, and I think deserves, of being one of the best humour’d, wisest, and honestest men in his dominions . . .
Understandably, Mr Sitwell was panic-stricken when in October 1715 he learned of a Jacobite rising in Scotland and Northern England to restore the Catholic King ‘James III’ and send the Hanoverian usurper packing. Receiving a ‘full and authentick Narrative of the intended Horrid Conspiracy and Invasione’, he rushed down to London to ask the Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire, the Duke of Devonshire, for orders. He also bought swords, guns and ammunition for his tenants, including a carbine for his own use. But the weapons were never needed, as the rising was crushed.
A letter of the same month, addressed to George at Will’s Coffee House from his steward William Hattersley, lists arms bought to fight the Jacobites, but also gives details of more normal activities at Renishaw. A manager has laid off the colliers too soon, while a coal pit has been flooded, making it difficult to mine, so they have run short of coal. Luckily, they have found other supplies, despite coal being hard to obtain at Chesterfield. They have got the harvest in, with excellent yields of corn and oats. The hay seed has been sown, but so far little wheat. Ploughing has been hampered by wet weather, which has left most meadows under water, so this will have to wait until the ground has dried out and hardened. He has bought forty-four sheep.
The Sacheverell case dragged on. Mrs Rhodes’ ‘marriage certificate’ was shown to have been forged by a clergyman at Scarborough, who confessed the marriage had not taken place – he had never even met Robert Sacheverell, who had paid him £50 to forge the certificate after the ‘widow’ threatened to expose her seducer. She was lucky to obtain £200 for her son’s maintenance and an apprenticeship found for him.
Anne Marshall had a better case in law than Mrs Rhodes. Her wedding certificate was the earliest, while there was no repentant parson to prove the marriage had never taken place. Even so, Mr Justice Sitwell’s neighbour and kinsman, Samuel Pole of Radbourne – ‘Old Pole’ – was convinced he could outwit ‘Mr Sacheverell’s whore’. There was good reason for his trying to do so, since his son, Captain Pole (who had been with the Duke of Marlborough’s army at Malplaquet), was married to Robert’s only legitimate child and therefore stood to lose a lot of money.
Glad that someone else would foot the bill for exposing Mrs Marshall, George encouraged the Poles; but his influence over them was diminished by insisting that they repay a loan of £700. There was no way Mr Pole could avoid paying, George making it clear that delay meant distraint or a debtor’s prison.
A hot-tempered old man, Samuel Pole was blind to any legal pitfalls. Well-versed in the law, Sitwell warned him that the case against Mrs Marshall might miscarry on technicalities and that he should proceed with the utmost care. George established contact with the ‘widow’, hoping to buy her off, winning her confidence to such an extent that in December 1719 she wrote to him, ‘Sir, when in my power [I] shall do all reasnobel & just things you desire of me.’ But Pole refused to listen to George, and unwisely agreed to a hearing before the Court of Chancery.
In 1720 the Lord Chancellor found in Anne Marshall’s favour, ordering that she be paid a proper widow’s dowry by the Sacheverell estate. Thunderstruck, Mr Pole refused to accept the judgement or pay her costs, whereupon the Lord Chancellor committed him to the Fleet Prison. One of Mr Justice Sitwell’s correspondents reported that Old Pole ‘saies hee’l stay durante vita before he’ll move for his discharge, and saith he will never come out till he is brought out in a coffin’.
Prison walls changed Samuel Pole’s mind. He paid up and went home to Radbourne. Even so, in 1729 he wrote to George’s son, Francis Sitwell, that he remained convinced Anne Marshall
was no more married to Rt. Sacheverell as she pretends, than she was married to your father, your selfe, or me. And if I be right in my opinion, I take that whole affair to be as great a piece of knavery and villainy as any of that sort hath been transacted in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, in the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster, and in Chancery.
The costs of six years’ litigation and settling with Mrs Marshall nearly ruined the Sacheverell estate, but enough remained to provide for the upkeep of Mr Justice Sitwell’s grandsons. The outcome was a blow for him even if (unlike Old Pole), he had been canny enough to lose little in legal fees. He failed to obtain the books and papers bequeathed by their Parliamentarian grandfather, despite obtaining Sacheverell family portraits that are still at Renishaw.
George had a pleasant correspondence over the years with Jane Sacheverell, Robert and William’s half-sister, who, because her letters survive, is the only woman to emerge as a flesh and blood personality from the family’s early history. A shrewd, high-spirited old maid born in 1682, cheerful and amusing despite her hypochrondia, Jane was devoted to her kindred. George must have enjoyed her letters, as he kept them. In September 1716, she thanked him for a present of money ‘which came very seasonably to supply my wants’, adding, ‘I find the weather has a mighty influence over me, for, while it was warm & serene, my fitts were fewer.’ Characteristically, she sends ‘Affectionate Love & service to yr. Self, Dear Cousin, & all ffriends with you, who am yr much obliged kinswoman J. Sacheverell.’
In June 1718, Jane writes with the news that her stomach fits are less frequent. ‘I’m so farr arrived to my former diet as to be able to eat a piece of chicken or pidgeon or a small bitt of broil’d bacon.’ Referring to the great law case, she tells George, ‘I’m informed Barton is too deeply ingaged to continue long in the possession of any of our familly.’ She thanks him for the support he is giving while expressing uneasiness about Mr Pole: ‘I don’t, nor shall I like to, depend on any of his promises, that already deals shufflingly. I take him to be a man of no solidity, a mere fair speaking airy projector.’ She is trying asses’ milk for her weak stomach, ‘which occasioned those violent agonyes’.
In August 1720 she tells her Renishaw cousin that her fits of the ‘Collick’ are caused by ‘whetness and uncertainty of the weather’. Referring to the result of the Sacheverell case, and the conduct of Samuel Pole, she says,
a more unreasonable man I never heard of: I cannot suspect his gaining anything but the reputation of a lunatic . . . I thought the next care would be how to make the best of poor Barton in order to clear all debts, but I am now persuaded he designs to consume all in law, & make you all beggars.
Mr Justice Sitwell’s prosperous if uneventful career came to a sudden end in 1723, while he was staying with a friend at Derby. His body was brought home on a hearse, escorted by two coaches full of mourners for burial in Eckington church. He had been squire of Renishaw for over fifty years. Despite the Sacheverell case, George died a rich man with an income of over £1,000.
Chapter 3
A MATHEMATICIAN
he new squire of Renishaw was George’s eldest son, Francis, who had been born in Dr Dakin’s house at Derby in 1682. At only four he was sent to Mr Cooke’s day school in Eckington, and at nine to Chesterfield Grammar School; at thirteen he went down to London to be tutored by Sir Isaac Newton’s former secretary, Humphrey Newton (no relation) in Euclid, algebra and practical geometry. The boy stayed with a Mr Fuller at the Fleur de Luce in Little Britain, the booksellers’ street, his father paying £22 a year for his board, washing a
nd lodging.
In October 1699, Francis wrote to his father, ‘I told Mr Newton I had a mind to learn something of Astronomy (which will be no less usefull than pleasant) but he told me he must first write to you about it.’1 He did not learn it for long, however, since 1699 was the year he was admitted to Gray’s Inn to study law before going up to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
He emerged from this lengthy education as a gentleman scholar, very different from the ‘country booby squires’ in Fielding’s novels. He had a good working knowledge of the classics, which he read with pleasure for the rest of his life, as well as a taste for the sciences, indirectly acquired from the great Isaac by way of Mr Newton. John Milton was a favourite author, and he annotated his folio copy of Paradise Lost with apposite quotations from the Greek and Latin poets. Throughout his life, his hobby seems to have been algebra.
A devout Protestant, Francis took a keen interest in theology, reading the early ‘fathers of the church’, from whom he could quote at length. This made for a bond with his youngest brother, Dr Thomas Sitwell, a clergyman and Fellow of Christ’s College, Cambridge. Francis stayed in close touch with him, corresponding regularly until Thomas’s death.
His few surviving letters, nearly all to his ‘Honoured Father’ and ending, ‘Your most dutiful son’, show him as a bit of a bore. He was a Whig to his fingertips, and the people who really upset him were High Churchmen and Jacobites.
In November 1712, when he was thirty, he wrote from Renishaw to his father George about choosing a new curate for Eckington despite the rector’s hostility. An extra parson was needed to run the school the Sitwells were starting in the village – ‘how great an Advantage a good school will be to the Parish’ – and the man they had in mind was ‘very well qualified to teach to write & cast accounts . . . which will be of more use than Greek & Latin in a Country School’.
He added, ‘I went last Tuesday with C. Gardiner [the rector] to wait upon my Lord Scarsdale [at Sutton Scarsdale] where I found two Jacobites & a Papist.’ Less disapproving news concerns a Sacheverell kinswoman:
My Lady Newton is extreme weak & ill, we expect her Death every day: our Ladies were all in Tears to-day at noon, as supposing she was going . . . As for Sir John & his Lady, I believe [not having to pay] the joynture will support the Spirits, & inable them to bear the Loss with Christian Patience.
At the end of September 1715, writing from Renishaw to his father care of Will’s Coffee House, he showed himself equally shaken by news of the Jacobite rising – ‘the horrid plot you speak of’. What angered him most was the involvement of so many churchmen. He wrote sardonically, ‘The true and most genuine sons of the Church, it seems, are discovered to be deeply engaged in the Conspiracy against their King and Country, and therefore no doubt but the Rebellion in Scotland and intended Invasion of England are designed for the good of the Church,’ adding that these misguided churchmen wanted to bring in ‘those who are worse than Heathens and Infidels’ – papists.
‘As for the school,’ the letter goes on, returning to life at Renishaw, ‘they are now making the stairs into the Chamber, and are got almost half Way.’ Very much the country gentleman, he also gives news of the home farm. ‘Thos’ Thomson finished the sowing of the Fallow this night: and they have plowed the better half of the Fleet, and laid the manure in the lower fold upon it . . . Will [Hattersley] has bought forty sheep to stock the Pastures now the Cattle are gone.’ He wants his father to buy him a new steel drawing pen. A few days later, forgetting the impending civil war, he reports that the rooms of the new Eckington school have been built, ‘and I think they are very well done’. All that remains is to put in window panes. His father had given the site and an endowment, besides collecting money for it. It provided free schooling for the locals, and was later known as ‘Camm’s School’.
Francis also liked to send his father news of Renishaw folk, as on 10 September 1720:
Your tenant Vincent Towndrough is dead of the common Distemper that now afflicts the County pretty much – it is a Kind of Fever. Dixon, too, at the Lane end is in some danger. Widdow Hattersley, too, is very ill, she was indifferent well again, but plaid the Fool by going out too soon.
Ten days later, he reports,
Mr Ward there died last Sunday, as did George Machan the quondam Clerk [of the parish] today. As for Widdow Hattersley she is got pretty well again, & Dixon is on the mending hand, tho’ since I wrote last he fell into convulsions after he had so far recovered as to creep out . . . As for Towndrough, his Body swelled prodigiously after he was dead, so that when John Whitworth, on the Sunday morning when he was to be buried, brought his coffin, it was so much too little that he was forced to work on Sunday to make him another almost as big again.
‘The late proceedings in the South Sea [stock] were owing to a sort of political inchantment, which turned people’s brains with an imaginary shew of riches; which to be sure will end in real poverty in too many instance,’ Francis wrote to his father from Renishaw in September 1720, just after the infamous Bubble had burst.
Well, since so great a Burden is fall’n upon the people, I wish it may light as much as possible on those who are best able to bear it; but more especially on the chief authors of their mischief, I mean those Knavish stock-jobbers by whose artifice people have been thus bubbled to their ruin.
He was not alone in his opinion: one MP advised Parliament that bankers should be tied in sacks filled with snakes, and thrown into the Thames.
‘If you happen to walk near Little Britain, I beg you would please to ask for Wallis’s Algebra in Folio,’ he ended his letter. No doubt he himself regularly visited this street, where he had lived when Mr Newton’s pupil – it housed all the City bookshops, and he spent a good deal of time in London. He often saw there his second brother George, the India merchant, while he enjoyed Squire’s Coffee House, once the rendezvous of choice for Sir Roger de Coverley in The Spectator.
On entering into his inheritance, Francis made a number of small changes at Renishaw inside and out that were designed to suit eighteenth-century taste. He completed the replacement of the old mullion windows, while the hall panelling was stripped out and the hall walls painted a pearl colour; the doors to the two staircases were turned into arches with double doors. There was also a stove, with screens to keep out the cold.
The panelling in the Great Parlour, where the family portraits hung, was painted in an oak colour and given new furniture that included a harpsichord and a clock costing 11 guineas – more than a year’s wages for a labourer. The Little Parlour was redecorated with old maps of France and Paris, with an oil painting of a Dutch fair over the chimney piece. A new ‘Smoaking room’ was created, which had black, leather-seated walnut chairs and Dutch pictures.
The best bedroom, the ‘Red Chamber’, also received new furnishings – bedspread, counterpane and window curtains of crimson damask, an India carpet, a gilt brass pier glass and a walnut table on which stood a walnut-framed dressing glass. The next best, the ‘Green Chamber’, was redecorated in fine green camlet. Other bedrooms were given walnut dressing tables and glasses. Each apartment had prints of famous personages – Sir Isaac Newton, the Duke of Marlborough, and of course William and Mary – or of scenes from classical history and mythology.
‘He has brought from London a great deale of verey hansom furnitures,’ the steward of Dr Thomas Sitwell’s little estate at Povey (an Eckington man called Dick Cowley) reported to his master at Cambridge in 1730. These included two small tables of mahogany, a wood only recently in fashion. There were quantities of china (blue and white dinner plates, gilt-edged teacups and saucers) and silver plate – notably, a magnificent punchbowl engraved with the Sitwell crest. The staff had a service of armorial pewter from which to eat, and there were steel, copper and brass utensils for the kitchen.
Renishaw had become ‘altogether too comfortable a house for a bachelor who, as appears from a letter [from Dick Cowley] of the last-named year, had “declared
against matrimony”’, Sir George Sitwell observed suspiciously in 1900. Perhaps he suspected Francis of being a homosexual. Admittedly, Francis never married. However, he may have been courting a lady, which could explain why he refurnished Renishaw with such luxury.
Nor did Francis’s two brothers marry. The only sibling who did so was Alice, to William Sacheverell. As has been seen, the short-lived couple had left two sons, the last of the Sacheverells. Both of them died young – one by drowning in the River Rother and the other from smallpox. Some of the family’s lands passed to Francis, with a portrait (by a member of the Verelst family) of the boy who drowned, The Boy in Pink. This still hangs in the dining room at Renishaw. A tale grew up of his waking girls with a kiss and how, dripping with water and his face covered in river weed, he walked through the house at night.
The squire of Renishaw was no lonely old bachelor, however. His house was always full of cousins, young and old – Sitwells, Osbornes, Wilmots. Sometimes Jane Sacheverell was among them. When Barton was finally sold up in 1727, after complaining of ‘My share in the common calamity of stubborne coughs’, she firmly declined to let him have the books so coveted by his father, but insisted on their being auctioned. However, she agreed that he could keep the Sacheverell portraits.
The refusal in no way affected their good relations. In 1734 she asked Francis Sitwell for help with pettifogging laywers – ‘Mr Shampante, whom I take to be Brother to Counceller Puzelcause, obliges me to give you this trouble.’ Jane had such confidence in Francis that she made him her executor. In 1741 the solitary old woman left instructions for her funeral – ‘a Hearse, one Coach, a Neat but not fine Coffin. I desire to be buried in Linnen. When you send my Couzin a letter, inform him what I have directed.’
Renishaw Hall Page 3