Next year, Francis changed his name to Sitwell by royal licence, as his cousin’s will stipulated that he must take the family’s name and arms. Very conscious of being the Sitwells’ heir, he brought back the family portraits that had been stored at Sheffield. The only change he made to the house was adding a long-vanished servants’ hall and providing mahogany doors for the upstairs drawing room (formerly the ‘Parlour Chamber’ or best bedroom).
Yet there was a change in the atmosphere at Renishaw. Whereas Francis’s Sitwell predecessors had been steady Whigs, he himself was president of the Jacobite Church and King Club. The Hurts had always been Tories and it looks as if Francis remained a supporter of the exiled Stuarts till the day he died. The portraits of William and Mary that had hung on the walls since Mr Justice Sitwell’s time were thrown into a lumber room, to be replaced by paintings or prints of ‘James III’ and ‘Charles III’ – the Old and the Young Pretenders.2
However proud he was of Renishaw as his family seat, Francis preferred to live in Sheffield. Very rich indeed, with £22,000 a year in rents and half a million in the funds, Mr Sitwell (as he was now styled) employed the architect John Platt to build a big, square three-storey mansion on farmland on the edge of the town. Platt, who had previously worked for the Earl of Strafford on Wentworth Castle at Stainborough, was told to spare no expense.
Mount Pleasant was bigger than Renishaw at that date and was in the fashionable Adam style: red brick, with doorways and architraves of cream-coloured stone, and a particularly beautiful window over the main doorway. Inside were massive mahogany doors and plasterwork ceilings with classical motifs. An imposing stable block flanked the house, whose name alluded to the site – a hillock with pleasing vistas. Surrounded by gardens and a small park, the mansion was a landmark for every traveller driving into Sheffield along the road from London.
It must have been at Mount Pleasant that in 1787 Francis’s friend, the American exile John Singleton Copley, painted the four Sitwell children. The portrait, A Young Lady and Her Brothers, was exhibited at the Royal Academy the same year. (Copley’s most recent commission had been a portrait of George III’s three youngest daughters.) Dominated by the youthful Sitwell Sitwell in hunt uniform, and emphasising that he is the heir, Copley’s painting sets its subjects against a big window of a sort that did not exist in the Renishaw of that date and was probably at Mount Pleasant. The most important portrait in the entire Sitwell collection, this takes pride of place in the dining room at Renishaw, over the chimney-piece. The hills around Sheffield can be glimpsed through the window.
While using Renishaw or his London house in Audley Square as summer residences, from now on Francis Hurt Sitwell spent the winter at Mount Pleasant. Here he was able to patronise Sheffield’s new assembly rooms and theatre, and the subscription library opened in 1771, while the house was ideal for music. It was easier to find tutors for his children’s education – even if macadamed toll roads were starting to replace muddy trackways, Renishaw was too far off for them to go there on a daily basis.
The influence of Mount Pleasant on Sitwell Sitwell, Francis’s eldest son and heir, has been overlooked. Eight years old when the family moved in to Mount Pleasant, he grew accustomed to up-to-date architecture, making him eager to modernise Renishaw. The property also alerted him to the potential of Joseph Badger, the Sheffield carpenter-turned-architect who built the stables.
Today, swallowed up by the town and standing forlornly in Sharrow Lane in a run-down area, its grounds tarmacked over apart from a patch of unkempt grass and flanked by such amenities as a halal butcher and a hairdresser, Mount Pleasant is sadly neglected. One can only hope that by some miracle it will eventually be rescued and restored. Yet even in its present state, it remains a fine piece of architecture. It is also a monument to Francis Hurt Sitwell, telling us a lot about him and about his taste.
Francis was a keen buyer of pictures – many of which were sold at the great Renishaw sale the following century – and constantly visited galleries. Sometimes Copley accompanied him to London exhibitions. The American was not his only painter friend; Nathan Drake, the son of a Nottinghamshire parson who had painted Francis in pale blue satin, produced work ranging from landscapes to portrait miniatures. Francis also bought paintings from several leading artists including the gentleman painter Henry Walton (whose Cherry Barrow, purchased in 1779, still hangs in the Library at Renishaw), Henry Morland, and William Marlow, who specialised in country scenes.
Francis led a vigorous social life. In 1786, with his wife and daughter, he spent the spring and summer in London. There, besides going to art exhibitions, they went to the opera and watched displays by a ‘Polish dwarf’ and a ventriloquist. His evenings were spent at coffee houses, or playing cards. He had brought his carriage, which sometimes conveyed them to ‘routs’ (dances). In the autumn they went down to Brighton and then took the waters at Bristol and Bath, before going home to Mount Pleasant for the Cutlers’ Feast.
Sir William Wake long remembered Francis as ‘a gentleman of the old school’. During a visit to Renishaw early in 1789, Wake, as an idealistic young Whig, told the equally youthful Sitwell Sitwell how much he welcomed the new ideas that were about to give birth to the French Revolution. ‘[Old] Mr Sitwell, listening with both hands on his knees, would remark, “That’s your opinion is it? Well, it isn’t mine.”’
In September 1789 Francis took his wife and daughter to the great ball given by Earl Fitzwilliam for the Prince of Wales’s visit to Wentworth Woodhouse. In 1791, the entire family attended the races at Derby. Francis was slowing up, however, and in December that year he asked for his name to be taken out of the book at the Freemasons’ Tavern, as he was seldom well enough to attend meetings.
In 1791 Francis was left further valuable estates by a cousin, Samuel Phipps. Among these were lands in South Yorkshire, Barmoor Castle in Northumberland, and Ferney Hall in Shropshire. Keeping the Yorkshire property for Sitwell, Francis left Barmoor to his second son, Francis, and Ferney Hall to his third son, Hurt. This was the year, too, when the Sitwells sold the ironworks, finally parting company with the industry that had been the foundation of their fortunes.
Francis had intended that after his death Mount Pleasant should become a hospital for the use of the people of Sheffield, but he was forestalled in this by a committee of townsfolk who founded and endowed a large infirmary. Instead, he bequeathed a large sum to the new establishment. Eventually, the house was sold to a prominent local businessman who later became Master Cutter.
Why he decided to dispose of a mansion on which he had lavished so much care, and where he had lived for fifteen years, is a mystery. Perhaps he was disillusioned by the rapid growth in Sheffield’s population and the new factories that were making the air ‘smokier’ than ever. He may have decided that, all things considered, he preferred the beauties of Renishaw. The most likely explanation, however, is that he realised his son was a countryman who did not enjoy living in towns.
Mrs Hurt Sitwell died at the house in Audley Square in July 1792. Her husband did not long survive her, dying at Brompton, where he had gone for a change of air, on 16 August 1793. He had ensured that the Hurts would carry on the Sitwell line, and that Renishaw would be in good hands.
Chapter 6
A REGENCY BUCK
he new squire, aged twenty-four in 1793, was Frances Hurt Sitwell’s son, Sitwell Sitwell – the most dynamic of them all, an autocrat bursting with energy. His ‘Christian’ name had been bestowed without anyone realising it would also become his surname, but he bore it with aplomb. He was middle-sized, high-shouldered, yellow-haired and handsome; we know what he looked like in the prime of life from a portrait bust by Francis Chantrey (modelled on a death mask) which gives him a great beak of a nose, arrogant eyes and a ferocious air of command. Even so, he had plenty of charm – when he cared to use it.
Although he died in the first year of the Regency, often his behaviour was that of a classic Regency Buck. The Sporting
Magazine for November 1798 reports a characteristic exploit – how, with his harriers, he hunted down and killed a ‘Royal Bengal Tiger’ that had escaped from a circus at Sheffield, some hounds losing their lives. He was much admired for his stud, whose horses won many trophies. Yet at the same time he possessed impeccable taste in architecture and pictures. Above all, he was determined to cut a figure in the world.
So it was surprising that, while an Oxford undergraduate, Sitwell Sitwell should fall in love with Alice Parke, who was the daughter of an obscure Liverpool merchant. To make him forget her he was sent on the Grand Tour; but at Constantinople he received a letter from a meddling old aunt, Miss Warneford, telling him she had died, whereupon he rushed back to England – to find her very much alive. His father relenting, they were married in August 1791. In a portrait by William Beechey, Alice has fine blue eyes and a sweet expression. Clever, gentle, she charmed everybody. Two daughters were born, although it was some time before she produced an heir.
When his father died, Sitwell Sitwell contemplated buying Clumber Park, the Duke of Newcastle’s gigantic mansion in Nottinghamshire; but he decided instead to enlarge and modernise Renishaw, which was very little since the day it had been built. ‘This Mansion is a good specimen of the ancient mode of constructing houses,’ the Universal Magazine for 1796 informs us, somewhat patronisingly.
‘The ground plan is nearly that of an H,’ it continues. ‘The body of the house is embattled, and an old projecting tower is the principal doorway.’ As for the setting, ‘The grounds are disposed in the now exploded fashion, with obelisks placed formally at equal distances, and a fine avenue of old trees extends in a line from the house. This taste, perhaps, corresponds better with the antique appearance of the building than would the now prevailing mode of ornamenting our gardens.’
Sitwell began by giving the Library (formerly the Great Parlour) new bookcases, with carved friezes ornamented with masks and flowers. Over the next fifteen years he added a dining room, a great drawing room (nearly seventy feet long), a billiard room and a ballroom, with more rooms above. Neoclassical stables were built on the site of Wigfall’s house, and in the grounds a ‘Gothick Temple’ and a ‘Gothick Lodge’ – for which his initial, hand-drawn sketch survives. Other additions were the icehouse and the dairy cottage, all probably designed by Sitwell himself and erected by Joseph Badger. Yet another was a Gothic entrance porch. The temple, originally glass-covered, served as a conservatory.
Throughout, he kept a sharp eye on the workmen. ‘I know if not watched, they will put the beams near chimneys,’ he wrote to his steward John Gilliatt in 1806. ‘They are as prone to do it as drink at a beer barrel. I found it so when my back was turned. I know Badger’s obstinacy of old.’1 For Sitwell was terrified of fire. In 1804, he had given strict orders to the housekeeper Mrs Rotherham that she must keep the fires small in all grates – they burned coal, not wood – and ensure they were put out by 9.30 every evening, besides ensuring that chimneys were swept regularly.
The first new room to be completed was the dining room, on the site of the Green Court of the 1625 garden. Perhaps inspired by the one at Kedleston not far away, this had a semi-circular alcove that contained a crescent-shaped buffet table, an ornamental ceiling and stucco dados.
‘On Friday last a very splendid entertainment was given at Renishaw Hall in the county, by Sitwell Sitwell, Esq., on the occasion of the opening of a very noble room which has lately been built in addition to his house,’ reported the Derby Mercury for 12 November 1795. ‘Among a very numerous assemblage who graced the meeting were Lord and Lady Effingham, Ladies Sherborne and Hunloke, with several of the respectable families and individuals within a large area of the place.’ The report comments that
the brilliance of the room, the fashion and taste of the company, the sumptuousness and elegance of the supper and, above all, the easy, polite and engaging attention shown by Mr and Mrs Sitwell to every individual . . . were rarely exceeded, either in this or any part of the kingdom.
When the Great Drawing Room and the ballroom were completed, he installed marble chimney-pieces by Sir William Chambers (which he had bought at the Duke of York’s sale at York House in May 1802), adorning them with five huge tapestries by the Brussels tapissier Judocus de Vos, based on allegorical designs by Charles Le Brun, Louis XIV’s court painter. They ‘haunt these rooms with a plumy exoticism of pearls and elephants, garden vistas and trophies’, wrote his great-great-grandson Osbert.2
Sitwell showed no less magnificence in his choice of paintings, purchasing a Perugino, The Three Maries, painted about 1500. This may have come from a sale of pictures owned by the Duc d’Orléans, Philippe Égalité, who had recently perished beneath the guillotine. It was hung over the fireplace in the Great Parlour, replacing the old oak carving of Isaac and Abraham (this was later made into the back of a ‘settle’, now in the hall).
Another acquisition from the York House sale was a superb commode, which some experts consider to be the most beautiful piece of furniture ever made in England. The first Viscount Melbourne (father of the Prime Minister) had commissioned it in about 1774 from Thomas Chippendale, who added ormolu mounts cast by Matthew Boulton and inlaid it with vignettes by the Swede Fuhlvohg. It is now in the Great Drawing Room.3 He also acquired two exceptionally fine eighteenth-century commodes by the great Milanese ebanista Giuseppe Maggiolini, who had worked for the Habsburgs.
Sitwell Sitwell’s taste in pictures, furniture and tapestries was impeccable. His reliance on his own idea of what was beautiful, instead of depending entirely on the fashion of the day, would be inherited by later owners of Renishaw. It is this element of personal choice that makes the collection here so different from those at other great houses.
Sadly, his taste failed him out of doors, save for moving the road further away. The lengthened frontage created by new rooms gave the house’s north side a stretched-out look, with a bleak, even sinister appearance; and he was notably unsuccessful in replacing the ancient formal gardens by what was intended to be a fashionable Capability Brown ‘field’. The low walls and little courts were levelled and the flowerbeds removed, even the tiny bowling green disappearing, to give way to broad expanses of turf, the ‘pleasure grounds’. The only survival from the old layout was the long lime avenue on the Top Lawn, to the south-east of the house.
Eager to become the first Sitwell to sit in Parliament, in 1795 Sitwell wrote to the Duke of Portland (who was his neighbour at Welbeck) asking if he would find him a seat. In response, the duke invited him to come down to London and discuss the matter. As a result, from 1796 until 1802 Sitwell sat for the rotten borough of West Looe in Cornwall, although it is unlikely that he ever visited his constituency.
He did not always support the government, voting at the end of 1796 for Charles James Fox’s motion against giving subsidies to Britain’s allies without Parliamentary approval. None of his speeches has survived, but he must have delivered a fair number, since a political journal, The True Briton, described him as a good man for a long debate. His name became well known at 10 Downing Street, and in 1802 Portland recommended him for a baronetcy, without success.
At the general election of 1807 Sitwell Sitwell helped Earl Fitzwilliam’s twenty-one-year-old son, Lord Milton, to win a seat in the Commons as one of two MPs for Yorkshire. The two sitting members were William Wilberforce, the great slavery abolitionist, and Lord Harewood’s son, Henry Lascelles. There had not been a contested election in the county since 1748, and this was the most expensive ever known, the three candidates spending £250,000 between them in an orgy of bribery.
‘Though Milton is in the rear, his case is by no means lost: he has a considerable strength left, much greater than his antagonist, and sufficient to carry the election: but of course it will be hard run and a single vote may carry him the seat,’ Fitzwilliam wrote anxiously to Sitwell from Wentworth Woodhouse on 30 May. ‘I cannot refrain from begging you to add to the strength you have sent to his support b
y going to York to give your own vote. Are there any gleanings of voters in your neighbourhood to be picked up?’ Wilberforce won, with 11,808 votes, and Lord Milton came second with 11,177 – only 177 more than his opponent, Lascelles.4
Sitwell had worked hard to ensure Lord Milton’s election, which attracted a great deal of attention, and Portland, now Prime Minister, saw that he got his baronetcy the following year. However, family tradition prefers to believe it was to acknowledge a ball he gave in 1808 for the Prince of Wales (later Prince Regent), who also sent him a bust of his daughter, Princess Charlotte. No doubt, Sir Sitwell showed his guest an ornament in the new ballroom’s stucco ceiling – all part of Badger’s work – which had the Feathers of the Prince of Wales as its centrepiece. Later he was presented to Queen Charlotte, disgracing himself by sneezing when he kissed her snuff-stained hand.
He had been presented to the Prince on the racecourse, his colours of green with an orange cap being a familiar sight at every important meeting, while his stud was renowned. He ‘was much interested in breeding and very successful with his horses’, says his granddaughter. ‘I know that he gave one horse to the Prince Regent, with whom he had some acquaintance, if not friendship.’5 She recalls ‘nine gold racing cups – real cups, the shape and size of old-fashioned tea-urns – which used to stand upon the dining-room buffet’.
Sport had replaced politics as Sitwell’s road to distinction. He took his thoroughbreds’ training very seriously indeed, with a private racecourse at Renishaw. A letter to his trainer with instructions for engaging a new jockey reveals him at his most demanding. ‘The person will have frequently to write to Sir S.S., so must be able to write himself. No hints to be given to others, of trials or of anything of the kind, or of any merits of your horses.’
Renishaw Hall Page 5