He describes further essential qualities:
The reason Sir S.S. parted with so valuable a jockey and trainer as Wilkinson, evidently shows that Sir S.S. will keep no man likely to get into scrapes or quarrels . . . Wilkinson had 40 guineas a year . . . He rode my horses and trained them but did nothing without consulting me always . . . and however he might differ from me in opinion, he always to the best of his powers rode to orders.
The letter ends, ‘My house is a very regular one, and no disturbance or drinking is allowed.’6
This high moral tone is ironical, in view of the writer’s private life. In 1797 Alice had given him a son and heir, the birth hastened by her having witnessed a violent quarrel between Sitwell and his rakehell brother Frank. She appeared to be recovering well, so her husband went off to a distant race-meeting. However, she fell fatally ill as soon as he left. Knowing she would never see him again, Alice wrote a farewell letter that overwhelmed the widower with grief when he returned to find her dead. Nevertheless, during the same year her lady’s maid, Sarah Harris, gave birth to a son by him.
Fourteen months after Alice’s death he remarried, choosing a bride from a sound landed background – the nineteen-year-old Caroline Stovin, daughter of the late James Stovin of Whitgift Hall near Doncaster. Tall and striking, it was said that in the classical gowns of the Regency she looked like a Sybil from antiquity. Her only child, a girl, died in infancy, so she treated her stepchildren as her own – George Sitwell was thirteen before he learned she was not his real mother. Always quoting from books, Caroline was a bluestocking; while kind to her, Sitwell shared neither her taste for literature nor her liking for literary lions.
Meanwhile, he kept on Sarah Harris as his mistress. A farmer’s daughter from Slitting Mill Farm nearby, who now called herself ‘Mrs Dixon’, she could sometimes prove an embarrassment. When he took her to see his legitimate son George at school in 1809, the boys yelled, ‘Strumpet! Strumpet!’
Although no letters to his wives or children survive, we have one to a brother that lets us hear Sir Sitwell’s voice. The brother was Francis Sitwell of Barmoor Castle, briefly MP for Berwick, who despite an ample estate was always in financial difficulties from reckless extravagance on hounds, betting, or rebuilding his castle in the Gothic style. Neighbours called him ‘Frank the Gambler’. He wrote again and again to Sir Sitwell, demanding money to pay his creditors, threatening to kill himself if committed to a debtor’s prison.
On 29 August 1810 Sir Sitwell replied,
You have sent me a letter which you call your finale, full of scurrility and only worthy of yourself and like many previous productions . . . I am now, with this, fully determined to close all future communication with you directly and indirectly. I shall, on your Solicitor certifying that the sum of £2,000 will extricate you from your difficulties (which you have stated to Mr Thomas to be your last), order such sum to be paid. But I mean it to be fully understood by you, that this sum, together with £100 sent (after deducting the £30 to Mr Milford’s Bank which I have promised to pay) finally closes every communication whatever between us.7
Sir Sitwell liked to entertain lavishly, giving routs in Renishaw’s new ballroom. One was a masked ball at which a strikingly handsome young guest in a powdered wig, wearing a rose-coloured velvet suit of George II’s time, was observed to have strangely pale lips and forehead. Dancing with him, girls found themselves chilled to the bone by his cold hands despite his gloves. He never spoke a word. Next day, his partners thought he had looked like the Verelst portrait – supposedly the Sacheverell who drowned in the River Rother.
In later years, Sir Sitwell was not only a martyr to gout, but hurt his back so badly by falling off a chair that he gave up hunting. One July evening in 1811, going down to the meadows by the river to show a friend some cattle he had bought, he caught a chill. Three days later, he died at forty-two from what doctors obscurely termed ‘gout in the head’. During the last few hours, he had been delirious, shouting, ‘Caroline! Caroline!’
A century later, Osbert Sitwell heard how his great-great grandfather could still be heard calling for his wife as he lay dying in a great four-poster bed, curtained and plumed – downstairs, in one of the big new rooms. On the night he died, his ghost was seen at Sheffield. That night, too, when his coffin lay in the library and while the servants were at supper, a kinswoman sitting alone in the hall (next to the library) heard the bell ring faintly at the front door. Opening it, holding up a lamp, she claimed to have seen Sir Sitwell, who stared at her before vanishing into the dark.
Despite his overbearing manner, Sitwell had been much liked. ‘Sir Sitwell was a very warm hearted, open handed man, very popular, though he was very strict with poachers and liked to have a great quantity of hares,’ his granddaughter Georgiana was told by his physician, Dr Askham. ‘He had a very strong will and a hot temper, very affectionate to his children and devoted to his first wife, and also to his second.’ He was genuinely benevolent. ‘The Hon. Baronet pre-eminently distinguished himself on all occasions by showering his benevolence and charity on the virtuous, needy and afflicted part of his fellow creatures,’ commented the Sheffield Iris. ‘His premature death will be long and sincerely regretted by many good men.’
Providing too generously in his will for his daughters, and for his illegitimate son George Harris (apprenticed to an apothecary) and his descendants (one of whom was receiving payments as late as 1909), Sir Sitwell left a seriously encumbered estate. Instructing his trustees to buy the manorial rights of Eckington from the crown at a ruinous price made matters worse. He had already spent too much on bailing out Frank – who outlived him by three years, despite all those threats to commit suicide, and was still in possession of Barmoor.
Yet, in transforming Renishaw Hall, Sitwell Sitwell left a lasting monument.
Chapter 7
RUIN?
itwell Sitwell’s son, the first Sir George, inherited Renishaw in 1811 at fourteen. He was a sickly child and too delicate for Eton. Yet he grew to be six feet tall and strong enough to go up to Trinity College, Cambridge. He was protected by his adoring stepmother, who took a dramatic attitude to widowhood, wearing a veil of black gauze that hid her features and went down to her feet. Caroline did not remarry until 1821, when George had grown up and was himself married – her second husband being a Nottingham banker, John Smith-Wright.
Slender, shy and badly lacking in self-confidence, George had no trace of Sitwell Sitwell’s dynamism.1 Even so, when he contested Chesterfield – unsuccessfully, in the 1832 election – he was addressed by supporters of his Whig opponent with the words, ‘Thou art the King of Tories, O Geordie, the fox-hunting son of a cock-fighting father.’ This was in a book called Figaro in Chesterfield, which was entirely devoted to abuse of Sir George and his followers.2
When twenty-one, George acquired a small pack of harriers that he kennelled at Renishaw, often hunting foxes instead of hares. They were replaced in 1823 by a pack of foxhounds, and shortly afterwards he became master of a subscription pack at Whiston near Rotherham, within hacking distance of Renishaw. (A pub at Whiston is still called the Sitwell Arms.) Although an excellent horseman, with such sensitive hands that horses always behaved quietly under him, his hunting was of ‘the old scientific sort’, his daughter recalled; by which she meant that he preferred hound-work – watching hounds puzzle out a difficult scent – to hard riding and jumping fences.3
An 1820s group portrait of the young baronet with his adoring wife and small children, painted by the much-in-vogue John Partridge (who would one day become ‘Portrait Painter Extraordinary’ to Queen Victoria), hangs today in the dining room at Renishaw. Sir George proudly wears a pink coat, with the period’s blue ‘bird’s eye’ hunting stock. The portrait may have been commissioned to celebrate his acquiring a new pack of foxhounds; however, the family did not like the picture, and relegated it to a passage.
George preferred another sporting artist whom he had personally discovered. Thi
s was J. F. Herring Sr, who became one of the nineteenth century’s great animal painters and, like Partridge, was patronised by Queen Victoria. Travelling on board a mail coach in about the year 1820, George sat next to the driver, who showed him some drawings. It was the young Herring, then a sign painter and part-time coachman living at Doncaster. Recognising the drawings’ quality, Sir George promptly offered him the use of a stable at Renishaw as a studio and lent him a dog-cart to roam Northern England in search of commissions.
He commissioned Herring to paint one of his first major works. This was a picture of Sir George, with the huntsman and the whipper-in, all wearing green hare-hunting coats, mounted on their horses in front of the Renishaw harriers. The green coats suggest that it was done during George’s harrier days, predating the Partridge portrait.
In the same sporting spirit George bought travelling carriages of the latest design, always drawn by high-bred bays – in deliberate contrast to the Renishaw cart-horses, which were grays. All his vehicles were painted green, and his coachmen and grooms wore green livery. His dashing ‘high-flyer’ phaeton, fast and dangerous with four huge wheels, was much admired. It had four bays between the shafts and two postilions wearing dark green jackets, yellow striped waistcoats and black velvet jockey-caps. Accompanied by Lady Sitwell and escorted by outriders in green, George drove it to the local race meetings.
Yet he was no mere hunting squire. ‘My father had the simplest tastes,’ his daughter Georgiana recalled. ‘Indeed, we often thought that he would have made a capital explorer in new countries and would have been quite happy in such a life.’4 He attended church twice on Sundays, and barely touched alcohol. His real passions were botany and geology.
As early as 1823 he began collecting plants seriously. The great Joseph Paxton sent him rare specimens from the hothouses at Chatsworth, while the botanist Gideon Mantell (better known as a fossil hunter) became a close friend. He also knew Dr Hooker, the director of Kew Gardens. Although he did not recreate the gardens vandalised by his father, he was a keen horticulturist. His gardener, Alexander Lambie, made Renishaw Hall celebrated for its hothouses’ early-ripening grapes and peaches, as well as beautiful chrysanthemums. Later, Sir George and Lambie’s successor, McLaurin, were particularly proud of making a breadfruit tree in one of the hothouses bear fruit. In addition, George was an enthusiastic ornithologist, assembling a collection of stuffed rare birds in glass cases.
In 1818 George had married a Scots girl, Susan Tait, whose father belonged to a family of Edinburgh lawyers, the Taits of Harviestoun. The couple enjoyed an idyllic family life, producing four sons and five daughters, although some of the children died in infancy. Susan was very pretty, pale-skinned, with large, ‘happy’ blue eyes, auburn curls and a light, graceful figure. She was well read, with a taste for history. She started the first Sunday school at Eckington, in which she took a keen interest, as well as encouraging a local dame’s school founded by the Sitwells.
Susan introduced George to the Highlands, where he became one of the first English sportsmen to appreciate the shooting – grouse being shot over the dogs, instead of from butts. From 1830 until 1845 he annually leased houses there, first at Kinrara near Aviemore, then at Birkhall on Deeside, and finally Balmoral (before Queen Victoria rebuilt it). Each year there was a migration from Renishaw: servants, dogs, wardrobes, furniture, wine and provisions travelled by ship from Hull to Aberdeen, while the family travelled overland in a ‘caravan’ of three carriages.
A less happy consequence of the marriage was invasion by penniless Tait relations, who moved into Renishaw. Sir George did not have the heart to turn them out, and his generosity helped to ruin him. One of the tribe was definitely worthwhile, however: Susan’s motherless, disabled youngest brother Archibald, who was four years old at the time she married and from then on lived under her care. When she died half a century later and he was Archbishop of Canterbury, he wrote that she had been a second mother to him and Renishaw his second home.5 Sir George had found bone-setters who cured his lameness – otherwise, Archibald would have been barred from a career in the Church.
An indication of the Sitwells’ standing in Derbyshire society was their friendship with the county’s greatest magnate, the Duke of Devonshire, helped by a shared passion for horticulture. Godfather to Sir George’s eldest son, the ‘bachelor Duke’ (once a suitor of Byron’s mistress, Lady Caroline Lamb) often stayed at Renishaw, where a bedroom is still called the Duke’s Room. George and his wife were invited to the ball he gave at Chatsworth in 1832 for Princess Victoria and her mother, the Duchess of Kent. Under the benevolent eye of the duke, who was Lord Chamberlain, the couple were presented at court to William IV and Queen Adelaide.
The third of Sir George’s five daughters, Georgiana (whom he called ‘Georgie’), has left an account of life at Renishaw when she was a young girl during the 1830s and 1840s. It reads like an early Victorian novel, and is a testimony to the amazing spell that Renishaw cast over those who lived there. A natural writer, Georgiana had a gift for atmosphere and a touching rustic elegance. Later, the journal was given a charming title, The Dew it lyes on the Wood. It is the first description we have of family life at the Hall. Her father emerges as gentle, pious and scholarly, much loved by those who knew him.
Among her topics are ‘mummers’ – ‘a village church in the 1830s’ – ‘the aristocratic poor’ – ‘governesses and other tortures of childhood’ – ‘the novels of Charles Dickens’ – ‘Frank Sitwell the rake and his two similar returns after death’ – ‘charades; the best actors’ – ‘the 5th Duke of Portland as a boy’ – ‘Apparition of a Red Indian’ – ‘the Servants’ Ball’ – and ‘the coming of the railways’.
Georgiana’s wistful nostalgia is very apparent when she describes the Sitwells rambling together around Renishaw on summer evenings. ‘It was a real family walk,’ she writes.
My mother on her pony, my dear father and all the train of children with their pet lambs and pet red deer, sallied off together down the lower flower garden, across the brook, into the park, over the hill then dotted with many horse-chestnuts, flowering thorns and crab-apples, down the green lanes to Foxton Wood; or, still more often, into the meadows by the river. Foxton Dam was then very pretty, and we often used to take lunch there and row about. The Rother then ran its natural course, twisting and doubling over acres of beautiful turf as fine as any lawn, between many fine oaks and willows. My parents came home for dinner at eight or later, but we only returned to family prayers in the hall, and then to bed.6
She is at her lyrical best in recalling the celebrations that she and her brothers and sisters organised for their parents’ wedding anniversary:
The happiest festival of the year to us – even happier than Christmas or the New Year – was our father and mother’s wedding day, on the first of June; though sometimes we celebrated it later. At that season of the year, the park and garden were all ablaze with flowering shrubs, rhododendrons, white, pink and scarlet hawthorn, white and scarlet horse-chestnut blossoms, lilacs, laburnums, syringas, snowballs and wild crab, which scented the air with their fragrance. Of these we made garlands interspersed with roses and honeysuckle, and covered up with them an old summer-house, the scene of the festivity. This stood in the park beyond the elms and lime avenues, against the wood through which a carriage drive leads to Chesterfield. The old sycamores and limes behind the arbour were hung with wreaths, and tethered to them with long lines were to be seen our pet lambs, of which we usually had two or three, and our graceful red deer hinds. Suspended from the branches were numerous cages of turtle doves, canaries and any other pet birds we happened to possess. Late in the afternoon our father and mother came to the bower, in which was a table covered with our little presents, some of which had taken half the year to prepare – drawings, work, copied music, books bought with our pocket-money. Here we drank their healths, and they drank ours: and the day concluded with a servants’ dance, begun before sunset and carried on by moonligh
t on the lawn in front of the house.7
A sadness Georgiana does not dwell on is the death of her little brother Campbell (‘Cammy’), who had been so attached to their father that he followed him around everywhere, just like a small dog. But she conjures up the isolation of a girl’s life at Renishaw in the 1830s and 1840s:
When I recall our young days, the extreme ignorance of the world that characterised all our ideas makes me smile. We read a good deal of poetry, of Tennyson, Wordsworth, Byron, Gray and Shelley, and parodied some of their poems in our schoolroom newspaper. But, like other young people of our position whose home was in the country, we lived so simply, read so few novels, heard so little gossip or discussion of other people’s affairs, that we lived in an ideal world and could not see life as it really was. There were no scandal-mongering journals such as exist today, newspapers were not considered quite suitable for young ladies, and only the political and historical articles in them were read to us.8
Georgiana disliked the impact of industry since her childhood in the 1830s, the ‘ugliness that has swallowed up the country’ – tall chimneys, monstrous buildings and factories, filthy railway stations and coal mines, all pouring forth black smoke. ‘What shall we say, too, of the discordant noises that now assail our ears?’ she laments.
Instead of the gentle rumbling of the distant coach, the patter of trotting horses, and the soft music of the guard’s horn as the traveller passed on to some wayside inn trellised with flowers or fruit trees, or to some busy market town, we have the rattle of the train, the snorting of the engine, the hideous screech of the whistle. Truly from many tracts of country the glory of beauty has departed.9
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