gentlemen could understand the local dialect, for intercourse with
their tenants and the servants and labourers in their employ would
otherwise have been difficult or impossible, and that the accent of
some Yorkshire squires might betray their origin as surely as that of
some Irish gentlemen to-day. But life in the country is no proof of
rusticity, and everyone who speaks with a brogue is not necessarily
a carter. At the time of which Macaulay writes, civilization was
not confined to London. York and Derby, to the inhabitants of those
counties, were “town” in the same sense that London is to their
descendants. London had not yet gathered to itself all the business,
the fashion, and the culture of the nation, and country gentlemen still
flocked in winter to cities which had once, perhaps, been the capitals
of independent kingdoms, and were even now centres of society, of
learning, and of government.
Neither in his virtues nor in his failings was the country gentleman
of Charles the Second’s time such as Macaulay has portrayed him. His
chief pleasure did not consist in drinking himself under the table with
strong beer, for excess was the exception and not the rule with the
class to which he belonged, and claret and sack, malago and rhenish,
were the beverages he was accustomed to, both at his own house and
at the taverns. His principal employment was not “handling pigs, and
on market days making bargains over a tankard with drovers and hop
merchants”; on the contrary, though a good judge of horses and oxen,
bullocks and swine, he left the stocking of the home farm and the
sale of produce to the steward who collected his rents. He was better
educated in Greek, Latin, logic, philosophy, divinity, and law, than
the country gentlemen of to-day, and more competent to manage his own
affairs; his taste (at least in building, furniture, gardening, and
dress) was more refined; he was keenly interested in public events,
and willing to make sacrifices for public objects; he took a kindly
and helpful interest in his poorer neighbours; though proud of his
position, was sensible enough to send his younger sons into trade; and
though he could not “shoot flying,” had a proper feeling for sport. He
was not free from the narrowness and want of charity, the aversion to
change and to new ideas so often found in those who have made divinity
and the classics the study of their lives, and religious bigotry was
his besetting sin.
The letter-book of 1662–6 throws much light on the George Sitwell, of
Renishaw, of that period. In appearance he was somewhat over the middle
height, and, as became one already well advanced in middle age, rather
neat and precise than fashionable in his dress. He wore a long periwig,
scented with orange flower water, a slight moustache and tuft of hair
upon his chin, a grey broad-brimmed beaver hat, large bands of white
linen or cambric, a dark grey cloth coat of simple cut, unbuttoned at
the waist, and with the wristbands turned back to show the soft linen
cuffs underneath, a sword belt and sword, cavalier breeches open at the
knee, riding tops of wrinkled buckskin, and square-toed shoes, with
high heels, and tongues to protect the instep from the stirrup. On
his arm he usually carried a horseman’s cloak.[80] His face, with its
good forehead and eyes, strong and clear-cut nose, and well developed
chin, gave an impression of force of character, tenacity of purpose,
and good reasoning powers; and this impression was strengthened by his
conversation, for even the most casual acquaintance could not fail to
observe that he was a man who had been accustomed to think and act for
himself, a man not only well educated, but gifted with a sound judgment
and a marked talent for business.
[80] See the effigy upon his tomb in Eckington Church.
He was an old cavalier who had garrisoned his house for the King, and
had suffered fines and “decimation” under the Commonwealth. In 1653
he had served as Sheriff, and had brought with him to Derby a chaplain
after his own mind, who preached a dangerously clever Assize sermon on
“Magistracie and Ministery, the State and the Church.” In a remarkable
letter to Lord Frecheville, written in April, 1661, he expresses his
opinion that the “late unhappy warr began about disputes in religion,”
and was the work of “crafty, wicked men,” “proud, insolent, factious,
seditious spirits,” who, finding it “best to fish in troubled waters,”
had made “Godliness their gaine” and “religion the cloake to cover
their intentions.” Such opinions were common enough at the Restoration,
but it is startling to find at such a moment the expression of a belief
that there had been faults on both sides, and that “flatterers of
Soveraignty” were as much to blame as “flatterers of popularity.” “We
have,” he adds, “a good, a gracious, and a prudent King, who, though he
hath not had long, yet hath had grand experience of men, which makes
him delight in and love those who are honest. He knows very well that
those who were the greatest flatterers of his ffather of happy memory,
divisers and promoters of monopolies and revivers of ould obsolete
laws, therby to lay uncoth and strange burdens upon the people, proved
his bitterest and worst enemies.” Justice between man and man the
writer considered to be the “sinews of all Commonwealths,” and the
laws of England the people’s “birthright” and their defence against
“arbitrary power.” At the first outbreak of the Civil War he had signed
two petitions inviting Charles to return from the North to meet his
Parliament; and after the Restoration his chief desire in politics was
to see “an Unity at home which will be a stronge Bullworke against
our advarsaries.” But he was sorely troubled at the King’s neglect of
business and the corruption of the public service.
Some account of his fortune and surroundings is a necessary prelude to
a study of his manner of life. The Renishaw estates[81] produced at
this time about £800 a year, and from other sources—chiefly from the
iron furnaces and forges[82] upon his property, for like many of the
greater and lesser landowners of that district he was interested in
the iron trade—Mr. Sitwell received an amount at least equal to his
agricultural rents. In order that the meaning of these figures may be
understood, it is necessary to explain that in the seventeenth century
the nation was poorer, manners were simpler and more primitive, and
the value of money was not the same. The purchasing power of money, as
most intelligent schoolboys are aware, was then, according to the usual
estimate, four times what it is at present.
[81] These estates were considerable in the reign of Elizabeth. In
the Derbyshire subsidy roll of 1596–7 Robert Sytwell is assessed at
£20 a year in lands, John Curzon of Kedleston, the ancestor of Lord
Scarsdale, at £21, William Cavendish, the first Earl of Devonshire, at
£30, and John Manners of Haddon, the ancestor of the Duke of Rutland,
at £40. Robert was sixth in descent from John Sitewell, who had a good
estate at Eckington in the fourteenth century, as may be seen by a
curious entry on the court roll for January, 1386–7.
[82] In the winter of 1661–2, 1,181 tons of sow iron valued at £6 a
ton were made at these furnaces. This amount may be compared with the
ten thousand tons which, according to Macaulay, represented the total
annual output of iron in England at the close of Charles the Second’s
reign.
The loyal Duke of Newcastle, who is said to have been the wealthiest
subject in Great Britain at the outbreak of the Civil War, had a rental
of only £22,000 a year. After the Restoration, the greatest estates in
the kingdom hardly exceeded £20,000 a year, and in 1669 the average
income of peers, taken one with another, was estimated at £3,000, of
knights at £800, and of esquires at £400 a year. Mr. Sitwell, with
a revenue of £1,600, was therefore possessed of a fortune above the
common; he pleads guilty, in one of these letters, to having a “good
estate,” and it is clear that in his own country he had the reputation
of being a very wealthy man.
His house, “the capital messuage called Renishawe”—situated some six
miles from Chesterfield, then a walled town and the “fayrest in all
the Peake Cuntrie”[83]—had been rebuilt out of the savings of his
minority shortly before his marriage in 1627. It stood (and yet stands,
for the old hall is the centre of the new) on the summit of a rocky
hill projecting into the vale of Rother, which here narrows to two or
three hundred yards, and commanding fine views towards the north and
south. On the latter side, a richly cultivated country, cut up into
innumerable inclosures by hedgerows, and scattered with forest trees,
formed a pleasing contrast to the wild and rugged moorland by which
Eckington was approached; and beyond it, to the south and south-east,
rose that beautiful ridge upon which Barlborough, Bolsover Castle,
and Hardwick stand. The turrets and battlements of these three famous
houses, towering up on the hillside above the groves and woodland which
surrounded them, were all visible from Renishaw; and to the south-west
the country rolled on in successive ridges of meadow land and common
towards the faint blue line which marked the edge of the Chesterfield
moors in the far distance. From the north front of the house,
Mosborough Hall could be seen across the green valley through which the
Mosbecke flows to its union with the Rother; on the left, beyond the
church and village, lay the ancient woods and picturesque manor park
of Eckington in a deep cleft between the hills, and to the right the
view down the vale extended for many miles into Yorkshire. East of the
house, the promontory upon which Renishaw stands was bare of planting,
being sheltered by the higher ground beyond the river, and by the woods
of Park Hall and Barlborough, and on the west a plantation of oaks and
ashes protected it from the prevailing winds which sweep down from the
distant moors.
[83] See the Derbyshire church notes of 1590 in Harleian MS. 6,592.
The river below the house was crossed by a highway, described in a
letter of 1665 as a “great road from the West parts of Yorkshire
towards London.” Approaching from the London side a traveller would
catch his first glimpse of Renishaw from the point where the manors
of Barlborough and Eckington meet. The building was three-storied and
of stone, with a four-gabled front facing the east, and, towards the
south, a battlemented hall between two projecting wings, of which the
nearer was furnished with a great bow window. It was surrounded with
orchards and walled gardens, and behind it a plantation of ancient
trees formed an impressive background. Below lay the cliffs and rocky
slope known as Broxhill, then unplanted, but deep in fern and gorse; in
the left foreground a line of willows marked the winding course of the
river as it approached the bridge, and to the right the ancient mill
and water meadows beyond were framed in by the wooded steep of Birley
Hill. Proceeding along the causeway (built as a protection against
floods) and across the bridge, the road turned sharply to the right and
to the left again, and so mounting the hill passed within fifty yards
of the house.
This road, with its wayside oaks and strips of green, was not, as
might be imagined, a quiet country lane, but a highway full of life
and colour and movement. Here, past the court gates, and in full view
from the first-floor windows of the house, flowed by throughout the
summer months a ceaseless stream of traffic. The smocked carriers
cracked their whips as they passed with their covered waggons and
long train of patient packhorses, or shouted to the women passengers
crouching behind them in the straw. Postboys with budgets of letters
cantered by, sounding their horns as they turned down to the village.
Beggars in rags, with their little bundles carried upon staves across
the shoulder, and wandering pipers and fiddlers, turned to look at
the house; Scotch pedlars, with cheap linen cloth in their packs;
and hawkers or chapmen with wallets full of little trifles—gloves of
cordevant and sheep leather, tobacco boxes, ribbons and shoe-strings,
almanacs, horn-books, jocktalegs, and ballads on the Dutch war and
the hearth tax. Gentlemen in long boots, riding suits and cloaks,
and velvet caps, trotted past, followed by mounted servants; or
honest yeomen in coarse cloth and worsted stockings, with their
wives in homespun and steeple hats riding pillion behind them. The
little processions of marketing and fairing folk came and went; brown
barefooted mower-women at hay and corn harvest; labourers in their
loose frocks tied in at the waist, patched breeches and hose, and
tall hats with vast projecting brims; country women riding to market
between baskets of farm produce, with chickens or ducks swinging
from the saddlebow; labourers’ wives trudging it on foot with wicker
trays of vegetables or fruit upon their heads; farmers’ wains drawn
by huge oxen, older and bulkier than any which can be seen to-day;
and, in autumn, droves of swine on their way to the woods. Often Lord
Frecheville’s or Lord Deincourt’s chariot and four passed the gates,
the coach of some neighbouring gentleman bright with heraldry and
gilding, a train of charcoal waggons bringing fuel to the Staveley
ironworks, or of others laden with long saws and brewers’ squares,
cannon shot, fire-backs, or sugar-stoves; and more rarely a ponderous
furnace-hearth drawn by twenty oxen, a company of militia in their
buffcoats faced with crimson plush, a gentleman riding to the poll at
Derby at the head of his tenantry, or the cavalcade of some great
nobleman journeying towards London with three coaches and an armed
escort of thirty or forty attendants on horseback. It was an ever
changing panorama of human life, an endless procession labouring
towards an unknown goal, for in the seventeenth century the nation was
to be studied rather on the roads than in the cities, and for commerce,
for travel, and for news, the roads were all that the railways and
telegraphs are to us, and more.
[Illustration: Arrival of a Guest at a Country House.]
From the busy world outside one entered a little haven of peace and
rest within the gates. The main entrance to Renishaw, which was
immediately off the road, led by wooden doors between stone piers into
a close court, the walls being planted round with fruit trees and the
borders with flowers, and so by a broad paved walk between two grass
plats to the steps of the porch. The building itself was of the usual
Jacobean type, with mullioned windows protected by string-courses,
gables and cupola tiled with stone, and battlemented roof over the
hall. In plan, it was a double E, the central member being given by
the porch on the north and by the great hall chimney to the south; on
the former side the projecting wings contained a buttery (to the east)
and a kitchen, on the latter a great and little parlour. Entering the
porch, a second door led into a hall of moderate size (twenty feet by
twenty-four), handsomely paved with grey and yellow stone, and ceiled
with heavy cross beams covered with plaster. Upon the oak panelling,
stags’ heads, escutcheons of arms, and maps of Europe and of Jerusalem
were hung, and the centre of the room was occupied by the long table
at which the family dined. On the opposite wall, between two windows
corresponding to those on either side of the porch, was a great
fireplace of stone, framed in by a mantel of carved oak. There was an
oak cupboard by the kitchen door, and here also hung a buffcoat and
some pistol-holsters. In the window lay the family Bible.
[Illustration: A Ball at an Assembly Room.]
On the left hand two doors opened out of the hall, the first into a
paved and arched entry which led past the buttery hatch (on the left)
to the garden entrance; and the second to the “Great Staircase,” finely
wainscotted and carved, and lighted by windows to the east. At the foot
of the stairs was the door into the great parlour, about thirty-four
feet long by twenty broad, by far the finest room in the house. A large
bow window at the further end, and three windows to the east, looked
out upon the flower garden. The ceiling of graceful renaissance plaster
work, light and in low relief, was designed with large quatrefoils and
diamonds, the points of the latter running out into branches of quince,
oak, or vine, or large fleur-de-lis of varying patterns. In the centres
of the spaces between were moulded ornaments of mermaids, dolphins,
squirrels, roses, octofoils, and winged and coronetted lions’ heads.
On the walls, immediately below the ceiling, was a frieze, also in
plaster, which exhibited a running pattern of vine leaves, grapes, and
birds, stopped at intervals by strapwork escutcheons, with renaissance
masks and heraldic lions’ faces upon them. Richly carved panels of
oak, with floral designs of lilies, roses, etc., supported the frieze,
and beneath them was plainer panelling broken up at intervals by flat
pilasters decorated with foliage or fruit. On this panelling a few
family portraits were hung; the furniture here, as elsewhere in the
house, was of carved oak, already a generation old, and there was much
needlework of the kind ladies then occupied themselves in making. The
mantelpieces were also of oak, one which showed in high relief the
sacrifice of Isaac, supported by figures of Samson and Hercules, being
especially noticeable. The fire backs in all the principal rooms had
been cast at Foxbrook furnace, some two miles away, from moulds of a
flower-pot, a phœnix, or the royal arms and supporters.
On the right of the hall were two doorways corresponding to those on
the left. The further led by double doors into the little parlour,
a small room with two windows to the south opening upon the garden,
and two to the west looking out across a little green court to the
brewhouse and the trees which overhung it. In the centre of the ceiling
a great double rose of plaster, more than two feet in diameter, covered
the junction of the beams. On the walls, maps of the World, France,
Paris, and Ireland were hung, and a few Dutch pictures. The nearer door
on the same side of the hall communicated with the little staircase and
the kitchen, the latter room remarkable for its great three-centred
chimney arch of stone, and for the pewter plates and dishes and brass
stewpans and pudding pans which were ranged upon the wall. A back entry
led into the kitchen court, or “well court,” a large yard built round
with offices, stabling, coach-house, brewhouse, dairy, laundry, ovens,
and barns. This was closed by great gates at night and contained many
bays of building.
To return to the house; the bedrooms were furnished with curtains
and rugs of green, purple, or “sad colour,” the great oak bedsteads
decorated with hangings of needlework, and the walls covered with
tapestry or wainscot. On the first floor was the “great chamber,” over
the great parlour, and another of smaller size (here, under a sliding
board, a secret receptacle in the floor for money or papers was found
a few years ago) above the buttery. The “hall chamber,” like the hall
below, was panelled with oak and ceiled with cross beams covered with
plaster. This was the owner’s bedroom, and the windows to north and
south, sheltered from sun and wind by the projecting wings, must have
made it the pleasantest in the house. It was entered from the landing
of the great staircase, and a door in the further wall led to Mr.
Sitwell’s study, above the little parlour, and to the little staircase.
In the study Mr. Sitwell wrote up the letter-book, passed the accounts
of his steward, Thomas Starkye (Starkye came up the back stairs),
and interviewed his tenants; on the panelling over the mantelpiece a
carbine and some pistols were hung, and recesses in the thickness of
the wall harboured a small library of books on divinity, law, and the
classics, of which the greater part had been collected by Mr. Sitwell,
though a few had been brought from the older house at the head of the
village. Above the kitchen was another large bedchamber, given over, I
suppose, to Mr. Sitwell’s youngest son, the only one of his children
who was still under his care. The plan of the third story was similar
to that of the second, the chamber over the hall chamber being again
the only means of communication between the two staircases. This was
occupied by Mrs. Heays, the housekeeper, who probably had one or two of
the younger maidservants to sleep with her; and here in the long winter
afternoons they wove and spun by the light of tallow dips, and talked
over the gossip of the village. The two rooms to the east had formerly
been used as nurseries, but were now guest chambers; and on this side
also was a store-closet over the stairs. On the west, the study chamber
was occupied by the cook and kitchenmaid, and that over the kitchen by
the maids. The men-servants and grooms probably slept over the stables.
At the Sacheverells’ house at Barton, an inventory of 1691 shows a
“maids’ chamber,” a “men’s chamber,” and a “grooms’ chamber,” and this
no doubt was the usual arrangement at the time.