Renishaw Hall

by Desmond Seward

  About four o’clock he seemed weaker, and I called the doctor and begged him to tell me truly if those he loved should not be sent for. He still said he would rally soon, but my heart told me otherwise and at six . . . I felt his dear pulse sinking rapidly. Then God helped me to tell him cheerfully that I thought he was going to a better land, where he would be quite happy and not suffer any more . . . I asked him to see how calm I was, rejoicing for his sake at the happiness that would be his so soon, and that he must not mind leaving me and the children, we should all meet again so soon, and he kept looking at me with a happy smile.

  Reresby’s last words were, ‘I don’t feel-as-if-I was-going’ – and then he died, still with the smile. He was forty-one, and they had been married for less than five years.

  ‘Dear Alice, don’t be afraid for me. God will help me, I am sure of it.’

  Louisa Lucy’s slender reserves of strength were exhausted by days and nights of nursing. She collapsed, unable to attend the funeral at Eckington. It was taken by a cousin – Dr Tait, Bishop of London – who wrote to her the next day, telling her how a wreath of late snowdrops and violets had been placed on Reresby’s coffin, and how he was laid ‘beside his father and brother under the Communion table in the old church’. He added, ‘the five really happy years of his life have been those during which he has known you, and it may soothe you to know how much all his friends feel that you were by God’s blessing the light of his life.’

  Louisa Lucy never forgot her husband. ‘I have just been reading through this old journal,’ she wrote in her diary in April 1863 – twelve months after he had died.

  It seems very strange that I did not write more of our happiness, and the affection we both felt so truly and deeply for each other. Trials deepened and strengthened that every year. My Reresby has left me now, he is gone to his rest, his simple, earnest spirit and loving heart has passed into a higher sphere beyond disappointment or grief to care. My love is still as fresh and as true to him, and I believe his is to me.

  Chapter 9

  AN UNSUNG HEROINE

  ithout Louisa Lucy, the Sitwells would have lost Renishaw Hall – but almost immediately she set about saving it for her son, even before she had fully recovered her health.

  ‘I have written to Mrs Beresford-Peirse [to ask] if she would let me stay one night with her at Bedale for I am sure she could give me a good deal of information about my new duties,’ Louisa Lucy wrote to her father on 29 July 1862. (Colonel Hely-Hutchinson is unlikely to have been encouraging – after a first visit, he commented, ‘By whom, or by how many, Renishaw was built, it is a folly.’)1 Louisa Lucy continued, ‘Ask Mama not to be the least afraid about my going back to Renishaw. It must be done some day and now I can really move about, I think I am fit to go.’2

  Mrs Henry Beresford-Peirse of Bedale Park in Yorkshire was in a similar situation. Recently widowed, with a young son (also heir to a baronetcy), she too was striving on her own to save a great mansion and estate. Whether or not this lady gave good advice, Louisa Lucy got down to work with a will. ‘I am expecting Mr White the lawyer to arrive from town tomorrow,’ she informed her mother on 18 August. ‘I thought it would be better to have a visit from him to set me going in keeping the books etc. I hope it won’t crush me altogether but duties must seem very heavy when all the pleasure is gone . . . Tomorrow is our fifth wedding day.’3

  She was suffering from a bout of her old complaint when little Blanche fell ill. In September 1863, after being invited to spend a holiday with Blanche at Brighton by her mother, Mrs Hely-Hutchinson, she replied,

  It is very good of you to think so much about me, and I wish I could fall in with your plans, for you know how different it would be for me to be amongst you all, but it is a desperate journey from the north of England to the south. I do not think either Blanche or I are capable of it, [and] then the expense would be very great . . . this has been a very expensive year to me.

  Alluding to an attempt at restoring her late husband’s health, she continues, ‘Brighton is full of sad associations for me which perhaps would not help one towards recovery.’ She ends, ‘I do not expect myself that dear Blanche will recover. In my own mind, I resigned her long ago, but I wish to do the very best for her and not ever to have to reproach myself by dragging her [on] long journeys for my own sake, or taking her inland even, when the doctor thinks she would droop at once.’ Blanche died later that year.4

  In order to live more cheaply Louisa Lucy settled at the Yorkshire seaside resort of Scarborough, where she rented a newly built villa called Sunnyside. She spent only a few months at Renishaw in the summer. This was the first of many economies designed to save the estate. Somehow, she succeeded. ‘By no means a rich woman, with little more than her jointure to support her, she possessed a remarkable head for business, and her enterprise and power of organisation enabled her to extract an almost incredible value for every pound spent,’ said her grandson Osbert.5 She may have received a discreet allowance from the Hely-Hutchinsons – her father certainly gave her money from time to time – but it cannot have been very much.

  She was given moral support by her son’s guardian, Archibald Campbell Tait, the Bishop of London who had buried Reresby and who later became Archbishop of Canterbury in 1868. One of those Scottish relatives whose sojourns at Renishaw had contributed to her father-in-law’s ruin, unlike most of them he was grateful and a tower of strength. She was also lucky in having an efficient if temperamental land agent – Peveril Turnbull, who helped to tutor little George – and a capable steward, Reginald Bellyse.

  To quote Osbert again: ‘by her constant attention and cleverness, she pulled the estate round. She was indeed a woman of remarkable dignity and charm, with latent fires in her, a great personal dignity and an inflexible but softly marked will.’6 She learned to master her anxiety attacks, although neurasthenia could still prostrate her.

  Steel showed in the way she dealt with Uncle Fred, who had become totally unhinged, calling himself ‘Duke of Renishaw’, not bothering to wash or shave, and running up enormous bills. Lured to Renishaw and certified insane, Captain Sitwell was taken to a lunatic asylum in York, where he spent the rest of his life. The fees of the asylum – one of the best in the country – and an allowance to his family were paid by the estate, which proved cheaper than the former handouts to save him from bankruptcy.7

  Although she was too shrewd to spoil him, Louisa Lucy’s warm affection combined with the absence of a father figure instilled in her son an excessive conviction of his own worth. At the age of four, George informed a stranger on a train, ‘I am the youngest baronet in England.’ His later hypochondria owed much to her worries about his health – understandable in view of his father’s early death.

  In 1870, when Renishaw’s financial situation improved, Louisa Lucy left Sunnyside and bought a property called Wood End on Scarborough’s most sought-after street, The Crescent. The big stone house (purchased cheaply from an owner in financial difficulties) had been built in William IV’s reign, and had distant views of the North Sea. Her first change was to convert three ground-floor rooms into a single long drawing room whose walls were covered with eighteenth-century Genoese cotton. Later she added a new wing with a vast conservatory, where exotic birds such as cardinals, blue robins, Pekin nightingales and nutmeg finches flew over the heads of the dancers when she gave a ball.

  She began collecting furniture, but not the French sort which was then so much in vogue. Her collection included a lovely seventeenth-century silver Augsburg cabinet that she bought in Germany, a fine cassone, and four red and gold seicento chairs from the Palazzo Buonsignori in Siena. All of these are now at Renishaw.

  Louisa Lucy also acquired Hay Brow, a small country house in a pretty setting on the edge of Scalby – four miles outside Scarborough – where she always spent part of the summer. Hay Brow charmed everyone who saw it – especially the garden, with its little lake and rare trees. Inside it was full of flowers, from a hothouse as w
ell as from the garden, in brightly coloured china bowls. Louisa Lucy had engaged a gifted Belgian gardener, Ernest de Taeye – a huge man, described in later years by her granddaughter Edith as looking like ‘a dear great lumbering bear had he not been completely bald’, who ‘spoke of flowers tenderly, as fathers sometimes (I suppose) speak of their children’.8 Despite de Taeye’s skill, the beauty of the flowers at Louisa Lucy’s houses was largely due to her enthusiasm.

  She kept what Osbert describes as a ‘collection’ of cherished old servants. Foremost was Leckley, her personal maid for sixty-three years, who became a gnarled figure with a wise, disagreeable face and keys at her waist. (In her will, Louisa Lucy asked to be buried next to Leckley.) The staff accompanied her when for some years she leased Gosden Lodge near Shalford in Surrey, not far from Guildford. Each spring she and her party travelled by a private train, hired from the Great Northern Railway, which without changing went directly from Scarborough to Shalford via King’s Cross, London Bridge and Dorking. The party always included six white Samoyed dogs.

  Louisa Lucy also inspired devotion in people other than her staff. At some period during the 1870s, when she was in her early forties, she was visited by the teenage Ethel Smyth – the future suffragette and composer of March of the Women – who, years later, wrote an account of their meeting. Always a keen admirer of good looks in her own sex, Ethel recalled, ‘I was too infatuated to ask myself whether she was really as beautiful as the vision that haunted me for the next few years; but of one thing I am certain: when Nature set herself to create an ideal Victorian grande dame with a pronounced religious bent, she can never have done better!’

  Ethel also remembered her wonderful manners. ‘You never heard her talking about herself; her conversation always centred on the affairs of the people she was talking to.’ She never forgot the impression made on her by ‘a most remarkable and lovable woman’.9

  ‘Radiance is a better word to match her quality, I think, than beauty, and a certain sad radiance still clung to her,’ says Osbert Sitwell, who adds that she possessed a grace of movement he had never seen in another woman of her age. Her houses were brightly decorated, but in the day she dressed in black, and in the evening in dark green or brown or blue velvet. She liked brooches and bracelets, and even when in mourning wore long necklaces of onyx, jet or ivory.10

  When George was ten his mother sent him to Dr Chittenden’s School, The Grange, at Hoddesdon in Hertfordshire, which in those days was a well-known preparatory school for Eton. (The future Prime Minister Arthur Balfour had been a pupil.) ‘A wearisome journey through a flat country to Hoddesdon, George in low spirits all the way,’ she recorded in her diary on 6 May 1870. I ‘inspected house, gardens, school rooms, play grounds etc. etc.’ The next day she wrote, ‘Left by an early train. Sad without my boy.’11

  In the same year that Louisa Lucy purchased Wood End and George Sitwell went off to school, a rich seam of coal was found under the park at Renishaw which revived the family fortunes. Fearing it might run out, she continued her economies and remained at Scarborough. Yet despite the house and the gardens being covered in soot, and the mine at the gates – the rumbling of miners’ carts could be heard from the cellars – Renishaw kept its beauty and allure. She still saw it as the jewel of her son’s inheritance and spent a few weeks there every summer, making modest attempts at refurbishment.

  Louisa Lucy’s was a complex character. For all her economies, she loved travel, and once or twice George complained of being left at Eton for part of the holidays while she was abroad. As has been seen, she dressed elegantly and furnished her houses exquisitely. Yet at the same time, she was a fervent Evangelical Protestant. Surrounded by Low Church clergymen – including the gloriously named Canon Groucher – whom she invited to give sermons and hold prayer meetings, she made Sundays a misery for the less devout, forbidding novels or newspapers.

  It is easy to make fun of her charitable works, which Osbert summed up as ‘the removal of the inebriate from his drink and the conversion of sirens into Magdalene washerwomen’. Admittedly, they sometimes resembled those of the Ebenezer Temperance Association in The Pickwick Papers. ‘We are making plans (Mother’s idea) for inviting Bar-maids for quiet Sunday afternoons in this garden, where we could read to them, with perhaps a little sacred singing, and get to know and help them,’ wrote Florence Sitwell in her journal.

  At Scarborough, Louisa Lucy set up the Home of Hope, a hostel for homeless working girls who were given employment in its laundry. Her granddaughter Edith later described them as ‘unfortunates’ kidnapped off the streets, claiming that on one occasion every single inmate was found to have been made pregnant by a handsome young man who had got into the home disguised as a girl.12 Yet Louisa Lucy was at least offering her girls a chance to avoid prostitution, which when their bodies grew unsaleable would leave a choice between the workhouse or starving on the streets.

  Some of her activities were undeniably practical. Among them was founding and maintaining out of her own pocket a small ear and eye hospital in King Street that later catered for other ailments too – providing the only free hospital in Scarborough – as well as a home for streetwalkers trying to leave their trade, and a club for working women. All were run by properly trained staff. She made a point of having invalid clergy to stay at Wood End or Hay Brow – any ailing curate was sure of a welcome.

  She even took care of the town’s postmen. At Christmas 1893, they wrote en bloc to thank her, in a naively illuminated address:

  We, the staff employed at the Post Office, Scarborough, venture to approach your Ladyship, to return our grateful thanks for the deep interest you have for a number of years taken in our welfare, and for the many kindnesses you have shown to individual members when on beds of sickness. The presence of your Ladyship at the breakfast you kindly provided for the staff on Christmas morning, and the words of encouragement spoken by you, are not soon to be forgotten. We cannot refrain from referring to the fact that we have received your hospitality on the past twelve Christmas mornings.13

  Louisa Lucy enjoyed having Archbishop Tait to stay at Renishaw, which he did frequently, his presence proudly reported in the local newspapers. Suffering from a chronically sore throat, the Primate gargled daily during his visits, using vintage port as a prophylactic. In consequence, he drained Renishaw’s entire stock of 1815 ‘Waterloo’ port – the best vintage of the century.

  Despite her shyness, Florence (‘Floss’) Sitwell, a year older than George, attended an art school at Scarborough and made cloisonné plates of her own design that sold quite well. The first literary Sitwell, she published two novels in the 1880s that are occasionally reprinted – Daybreak: A Story for Girls and Mistress Patience Summerhayes’ Her Diary during the Siege of Scarborough Castle AD 1644–1645. Even more religious than her mother, in her journal (later to form the second part of Two Generations) she recorded the pious life they led together. Osbert says she was trustful and otherworldly, and looked like a saint from a picture by Fra’ Angelico. She never married, but her brother saw that she was well provided for, living comfortably in the family’s Tudor dower house at Long Itchington near Rugby until her death in 1930.

  George always remained fond of his mother and sister, regularly writing to ask Louisa Lucy for advice. They shared many interests – books and furniture, decoration and gardening – while he never forgot how she saved Renishaw. (When he moved in, she made useful suggestions about furnishings and William Morris wallpapers, telling him to install a kitchen range.) Perfectionists, they both possessed the same determination to organise their lives down to the last detail – and the lives of those around them.

  When staying at Cannes in the Villa Allegra in May 1881, Louisa Lucy received a letter from George, shortly after he had come into his inheritance. ‘Do think finally over the Allegra before leaving it,’ he wrote. ‘I should be very glad to buy it, leaving you entire control over it, and to settle another hundred a year on you . . . so as to meet the extra
expense. I am sure it would be very good for Floss and you, and for me too, to pay you a visit occasionally in the winter.’14

  Eventually, enfeebled by increasing ill health, Louisa Lucy retired to Bournemouth for the sea air, taking Floss and her beloved staff with her. Her son visited her frequently, and her grandchildren often came to stay. She died at the age of eighty in March 1911 – nearly half a century after her husband’s death – and was buried next to Leckley.

  George had reason to be grateful to his mother. One could forgive any widow for despairing after an all-but-bankrupt husband’s death, while the best-intentioned guardian might well have decided that he had no option other than to insist on the empty house and encumbered estate being sold, if he was to act in his ward’s best interests. Strong, shrewd, subtle, Louisa Lucy had laid the foundations for Renishaw’s renewal. Above all, she gave her son some of her finer qualities.

  Chapter 10

  THE GOLDEN YEARS RETURN?

  ir George Reresby Sitwell, fourth baronet of Renishaw, came of age on 27 January 1881. In June, to take advantage of warmer weather, there was a great party in celebration in the grounds of the Hall, attended by all Derbyshire as well as the tenants, the Archbishop of Canterbury’s speech congratulating his nephew being reported by The Times in full. It looked as if the golden years of Sitwell Sitwell had returned, once again based on solid wealth.

  Already unmistakably distinguished, George was over six feet tall, slim and well built, with aquiline features, reddish hair and curiously pale blue eyes. He wore a moustache (later a pointed beard) and possessed the art of dressing in such a way that you knew he was well dressed but could not say why. Impeccably mannered, he was at the same time aloof, although he had plenty of charm if needed. Despite his children comparing him to Melone’s portrait of Cesare Borgia, he looked exactly what he was – a late Victorian, upper-class Englishman of the ‘earnest Eighties’, who would not have seemed out of place in one of Anthony Trollope’s last novels.