Renishaw Hall

by Desmond Seward

  Yet she watched with fascination the making of the railway through the park at Renishaw in the mid-1840s, when she was eleven or twelve years old – and the navvies who did the work. ‘We used to meet scores of them in all our walks, very fine young men (from Lincolnshire, I believe) and picturesquely dressed in white shirts or smock frocks, and red ties. They drank beer, ate four pounds of meat a day, and fought with their fists.’ These navvies were loathed by the locals, and one of them was mysteriously murdered – horribly slashed across the back with a scythe.10

  Violence was very much a part of rural life in those days. ‘People of any rank who really knew my father were very much attached to him, and he was very much attached to them,’ she told her nephew George Sitwell in 1881. He was distraught when a young gamekeeper was dangerously shot by a poacher. ‘The man suffered very much pain, and I remember my father coming out of the room in the stables where he was lying, with the tears running down his cheeks.’11

  Georgiana’s paradise eventually came to a sudden end. Osbert Sitwell says that his great-grandfather, ‘though only half his father’s fortune had come to him, liked to spend as much money’,12 which is unfair. Sir George’s problem was bad luck rather than extravagance. In 1840, after years of wrangling in the law courts, he had to pay £40,000 to the crown for the manorial rights of Eckington; while in 1846 he found himself in serious financial trouble when the family solicitor’s brother stole £35,000.

  Instead of going up to Scotland that year as usual, he took his wife and daughters abroad, hoping to live on £700 a year instead of £12,000. He settled at Wiesbaden, which was the capital of the Duchy of Nassau – an independent state with its own little army of 5,000 troops. They were well received at court, the reigning duke’s mother (daughter of the late King of Württemberg) giving them a pleasant welcome. Even so, as Georgiana, pining for Renishaw, tells us, ‘a small German Court with its miniature ceremonies – we walked out backwards as to a sovereign – was a very little world to live in’.13

  Sir George then found himself on the verge of total ruin when the Sheffield Land Bank suddenly failed in 1847, the day after his agent had deposited many thousands of pounds in it for him, having sold land to raise urgently needed cash. Renishaw was boarded up. Most of its pictures, plate, furniture and library were auctioned in 1849. The following year, even its woods were cut down and sold.

  At Wiesbaden George was so poor that he could no longer afford a fire in winter, and living there became beyond his means in summer, when prices rose because of the tourist trade. He moved to Nice, but at the end of 1848 went back to England with his wife and daughters. A sketch of him at this period shows a shabby, bewildered wreck of a man who looks twenty years older than his real age.

  Together with his family, he went to live near Windsor, then at Bognor, where, having for some time been increasingly frail, he died unexpectedly in March 1853 – to the grief of everyone who knew him.

  Kind and well-meaning, Sir George’s financial problems were entirely due to circumstances beyond his control. He was interred in Eckington church; during the funeral his ghost, like that of his father, was seen at Renishaw’s front door. His widow never returned to the house until her own funeral in 1880, when she was laid beside him.

  The Sitwells feared, with reason, that Renishaw might be doomed. Their plight was that of landowners all over England who did not possess substantial reserves of cash, since after the recent repeal of the Corn Laws, any income from tenant farms and land values had begun to decline dramatically. Simply trying to keep up the same standard of living could – and did – lead to ruin.

  During the winter of 1853, Georgiana, who was not yet married, spent several months at Renishaw with her brother, Reresby Sitwell. He had just recovered from a long fever, supposedly the result of too much walking from stall to stall during the Great Exhibition (of the Works of Industry of All Nations). The only servant in the house, apart from the odd skivvy, was an old Scots housemaid of nearly eighty, Bella Buchanan, who acted as housekeeper. ‘Only seven years had passed since my father and mother had taken us abroad: but how different our lives,’ wrote Georgiana. ‘My dear father was dead. The house had been gutted as if by fire. Now, day and night, the trains could be heard regularly in the distance, as they passed by the edge of the park, and the black plumes of the mines were beginning to sully the air.’ She was an accomplished watercolourist, and in a remarkable feat of memory, she carefully sketched the empty rooms as if their vanished furniture and pictures were still in place.

  Trying to recall the aspect of the rooms frequently carried my mind back to the old days, to all those annually recurring months of winter, spring and early summer spent at Renishaw, and I often thought of all the gaieties, as I have described them, in the old house when it was full; the Christmas festivities, with the walls and pillars of the hall festooned and twined with holly or mistletoe, the blazing coal fires so characteristic of the north country, the dancing, the games and music.14

  The elegiac tone is unmistakable. Georgiana Sitwell believed that her beloved Renishaw was dead and gone for ever.*

  _______

  * In 1856 Georgiana would make a very happy marriage to a prominent Edinburgh lawyer, Archibald Campbell-Swinton of Kimmerghame in Berwickshire, acquiring a fine country house of her own.

  Chapter 8

  CAMPING IN THE WRECKAGE

  t thirty-three years old, Sir Reresby had a daunting inheritance. For once, we can believe Osbert Sitwell unreservedly when he says that shutting up Renishaw and selling off so much of its contents had been a shattering blow to his grandfather.1

  Reresby was a good-looking young man, to judge from a sketch of him in military uniform. A daguerreotype, probably taken on his honeymoon in 1857, shows a burly, virile figure with a strong face and thick hair who bears a distinct resemblance to his great-grandson (another Reresby). But despite his muscular appearance, he had wrecked his health in the Highlands by too much shooting and stalking, regardless of drenching rain, and by not bothering to eat properly.

  Besides being responsible for his father’s debts, Reresby had to provide for his brothers and sisters – and pay his step-grandmother, Mrs Smith-Wright, a jointure of £3,000 a year. After putting Renishaw up for sale in 1854 but failing to find a buyer, in desperation he contemplated pulling down Sitwell Sitwell’s additions. He went on living there, in ‘bachelor apartments’ – the rest of the rooms were locked – and was looked after by old Bella. However, he frequently visited London.

  He would be a shadowy figure, were it not for his wife’s journals and letters. He had joined the 1st Regiment of Life Guards as a Cornet (subaltern) in March 1840, which was an expensive business. A commission in such a regiment cost £1,260; he also had to buy his uniforms and chargers, entailing an outlay several times his annual pay, and a substantial private income was needed to keep up with brother officers. Possibly because of poor health, in April 1843 Reresby ‘sold out’ and left the army.

  In the same year, his sister Alice became engaged to a fellow cornet of horse – the future Viscount Combermere, who was heir to an estate in Shropshire. (His father, Stapleton Cotton, had been one of Wellington’s generals during the Peninsular War.) Almost certainly, the couple were introduced to each other by Reresby. It was the first time a Sitwell had married into the peerage.

  Ill-equipped for any other career, Sir Reresby had artistic leanings (he was a friend of John Ruskin) and was a fine watercolourist. Many of his paintings of the Highlands are still displayed at Renishaw, while he was keen enough to take lessons in London from an artist called Thomas Cafe, hiring a model for thirteen sittings. He was also a keen wood-carver, buying tools that would help him while away the time at Renishaw.

  Hot-tempered, but capable of strong affection, Reresby was deeply religious. He was a friend and admirer of the great Victorian philanthropist Lord Shaftesbury, whose Low Church faith he shared. In 1857, he was lucky enough to find a soulmate.

  Louisa Lucy,
Rereseby’s wife, has never received her full due. Although the person who emerges from her daughter Florence’s journal and from her grandchildren’s autobiographies was in some ways narrow-minded, there were other sides to her, often impressive. Shrewd, determined, imaginative and generous, she needs to be rescued from the caricatures of Osbert and Edith.

  A beautiful Anglo-Irish girl, with delicate, aquiline features, fair hair and a speech impediment (she could not pronounce the letter R), Louisa Lucy was nervous but iron-willed. She was born in 1831, one of five daughters of Colonel the Hon. Henry Hely-Hutchinson, who fought at Waterloo and was a brother of the third Earl of Donoughmore. Brought up in considerable luxury at Weston Hall in Northamptonshire (which was her mother’s family home) and at her father’s London house in Brook Street, when young she enjoyed dinner parties, balls, riding in the park, and the opera. However, her enjoyment was always qualified.

  She records in her diary for 25 May 1857:

  went down to Maidenhead to Burnham Beeches, a little crowd of 40 people, the country looked so beautiful and it was the strangest, merriest party I ever knew. I might write a long account of our rustic dinner under the trees and a delicious walk with Mr Drury Wake and Sir Reresby Sitwell, who was very good natured . . . How the time passed with fiddlers, dancing, tea and a gypsy fire and how the flyman [hired carriage driver] got tipsy coming home and ran races in the pouring rain, and how the footman being ditto . . . and how all the young people got into wrong carriages without their chaperones, and how Min [her sister] – wonderfully safe, considering ¼ past 10 . . . I took a great fancy to Lady Wake’s sister and her nephew [Reresby Sitwell] seems very nice indeed.

  Two days later, ‘Minny and I went to have lunch with Lady Wake, and on with their party to the royal academy. We enjoyed it very much and met Sir Reresby Sitwell, who justifies one’s first impression certainly.’ A week after this, ‘Sir R.S. talked to me a little in the evening about Paulina Teby and her earnest life – it seems to me that he is very good and nice himself.’ The next day, she visited exhibitions with him. A week later they went riding together, two days running.

  Louisa Lucy suffered from a form of neurasthenia far worse than the ‘vapours’ that afflicted so many Victorian ladies. A psychological disorder whose symptoms included fatigue, anxiety and depression together with high blood pressure and neuralgia, it struck without warning, making social life difficult. She found religion a great help, even if it brought out a puritanical streak. On Wednesday 17 June 1857, she confided to her diary, ‘Today I made up my mind that if possible I would leave Town. It seems very weak but I fancy the quantities of society I meet now every day will unfit me for other things.’

  Understandably, she was attracted by those who shared her faith, especially someone so personable as her new friend. On 20 June she wrote, ‘A pleasant ride in the Park and Sir R.S. told me a great deal about Scotland which I am never likely to see, came home more anxious than ever to leave Town at once.’

  A week later, after an evening at the opera, she wrote pensively,

  The music of Don Giovanni was so delicious. I admire the new tenor Giulini very much, and Piccolomini sang like a great thrush, but think – I think – that this must be the last opera for me. I had a strong feeling that I ought not to be there, and there were many things that shocked and offended me. And the ballet! How anyone can like it or look at it I cannot think!

  Far from leaving London, on 3 July Louisa Lucy went by steamboat to Richmond in a party that included her admirer, with whom she strolled very slowly up Richmond Hill.

  Sir R.S. talked to me of Renishaw, and then about his ‘hasty temper’. ‘Do believe it, it is really true, but with God’s help I may conquer it yet. Could you take me, faults and all, to be your husband?’ As we came home at dusk upon the river, and no one was minding about us, he told me all his plans. ‘Rome for the winter and Scotland afterwards, and first of all that wherever we may be we should serve God together all our lives.’

  The next day:

  Sir Reresby came about 11 and spoke to Papa, afterwards he was with me till luncheon and left me (I must confess it) rather tired and most sadly frightened, with a diamond ring to keep reminding me it was no dream . . . I believe that to serve God with his whole heart is his first object, may it be mine too, for out of the riches of His mercy, he has given me this priceless affection of my own.

  The day after, Reresby went to tell his mother at Huntercombe. He returned with his sister Mary. ‘She kissed me with her kind eyes full of tears and said, “Nothing Reresby has ever done has given us half such pleasure.”’

  The wedding took place on Wednesday 19 August 1857 at the parish church of Weedon Lois near Weston, after which they began their honeymoon at Biddlesden Park, a great Georgian house nearby. From their first meeting at Burnham Beeches at the end of May, it had taken Reresby just five weeks to propose. Despite the whirlwind courtship, the marriage turned out to be an ideal match.

  At first, Louisa Lucy was overwhelmed by her malady. ‘Oh God help me, I don’t know what to do, feeling how grateful I ought to be and am for all that Thou hast given and yet I cannot stop my tears and it must grieve Reresby who is so good to me,’ she wrote two days after the wedding. ‘In the morning I am better, in the evening it becomes almost intolerable, and I cannot leave him to try and get quieter by myself. He holds me tight in his arms and I hear him praying for me all the time. It must be that I am nervous, not unhappy with Reresby, God knows.’

  Renishaw, largely unfurnished and sadly forlorn, terrified her when she saw it in October. The bells of Eckington church were pealing and continued ringing all day, while the couple’s dog-cart was escorted up the drive by thirty horsemen from the neighbourhood, wearing white favours and with flowers on their horses’ heads. They gave the bride three cheers as they alighted. Then she went ‘into the solemn house where I was embraced by the old housemaid Bella, who meant it kindly, no doubt, but it would have been more inspiriting if she had not looked so solemn and not burst into tears.’ She cheered up a little at seeing ‘Reresby’s bachelor rooms . . . so pretty and so droll, and we had a pleasant evening in them’. But she grew frightened by ‘the wind howling through the empty passages of this vast house’.

  The next morning:

  Reresby tried to show me over it, thereby making me sadly confused in my head, and afterwards I tried to explore alone, but could not get it done. Some distant door slammed, or the wind howled like a human voice and back I ran, never stopping till the two boudoir doors were shut behind me.

  When she and her husband set off for Rome after little more than a fortnight, from the train window she saw ‘the grand old house standing out in full sunshine, looking as if it wondered how it could be left, dismantled and deserted’. Despite her fear, Renishaw had already cast its spell over her.

  Their lengthy honeymoon in Italy was a great success despite the torrential rain of an Italian winter, the couple’s happiness seemingly unmarred by both of them falling ill. Reresby did so more than once – a bad omen. Louisa Lucy spent much of the time sketching (for which she had real talent), as did her husband. Their sketch books survive. ‘I am sitting for my picture to Signor Crispini,’ she wrote in February 1858. ‘He will be clever [if] he makes anything out of my present pale, sickly looking face and it is hard work sitting for him as he can only speak Italian – and we cannot say a word.’

  On their return to England they moved into Renishaw. Poor old Bella retired to Scotland, upset by new servants. Children came: Florence Alice in 1859, George one year later, and finally Blanche. The family lived very quietly. Regular attenders at Eckington church, they went in for religious and charitable activities such as ‘poor peopling’ – which meant visits with medicine and food to the estate’s sick or aged labourers and their families – and helping out-of-work miners. The parson was allowed to hold a Sunday school in the ballroom.

  Reresby shot a good deal by himself on his own land, over the dogs and along the hedg
erows, but gave up hunting as too expensive. His financial problems grew worse than ever. He became wretched at finding himself unable to keep his wife and children in the style he had known as a young man; complete ruin cannot have seemed far away. He could see no possible solution.

  Among his burdens was his brother George Frederick, eight years younger, who had also been a soldier – starting as a Cornet in the First Life Guards, but then ‘selling out’ and transferring into the Shropshire Light Infantry, where he reached the rank of Captain. Penniless and unable to support his spendthrift wife Fanny Fitzroy and three sons, ‘Fred’ – who lived uncomfortably close, at Leicester – was always begging for money. Even worse, Fred’s behaviour had begun to show signs of insanity.

  ‘No reasonable mind can dispute that he is very ill,’ Louisa Lucy wrote of Reresby to one of her sisters, early in the spring of 1862. ‘But he is in God’s hands and I am full of hope that this new treatment may with His blessing prove successful.’ However, the illness was terminal cancer. ‘I [had] asked the doctors previously, if they had anything unfavourable to say, to tell me and leave me to break it to him, but Dr Bence Jones thought it proper to tell him without any preparation . . . that he had an internal tumour for which nothing could be done.’ (Henry Bence Jones was one of the most respected physicians of the day, a model for Trollope’s Sir Omicron Pie.)

  ‘Dear Alice, you must not fret at not having come directly, indeed I don’t think it could have given you any comfort or my darling either, for he was so weak and could hardly say a word,’ she wrote to her sister-in-law Alice on 13 April 1862, in the wake of Reresby’s death. After he had a violent fit of coughing, ‘I insisted upon the doctor staying all night, and did not undress myself, but sat by my darling’s side.’