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The Big House: The Story of a Country House and its Family
Christopher Simon Sykes
Please note that some images were unavailable for the electronic edition.The highly praised biography of an archetypal great house and the family who lived there for over 250 years.‘The Big House’ is the biography of a great country house and the lives of the Sykes family who lived there, with varying fates, for the next two hundred and fifty years. It is a fascinating social history set against the backdrop of a changing England, with a highly individual, pugnacious and self-determining cast, including: ‘Old Tat’ Sykes, said to be one of the great sights of Yorkshire (the author’s great-great-great-grandfather), who wore 18th-century dress to the day of his death at ninety-one in 1861. His son was similarly eccentric, wearing eight coats that he discarded gradually throughout the day in order to keep his body temperature at a constant. He was forced to marry, aged forty-eight, eighteen-year-old Jessica Cavendish-Bentick – a lively and highly intelligent woman who relieved the boredom of her marriage by acquiring a string of lovers, writing novels and throwing extravagant parties (her nickname became ‘Lady Satin Tights’), all the while accumulating debts that ended in a scandalous court case. Their son, Mark, died suddenly whilst brokering the peace settlement at the Paris Peace Conference at the end of World War I; Sledmere was destroyed by fire shortly afterwards.But the rebuilt Sledmere rose from the flames to resound again with colourful, brilliant characters in the 1920s and 1930s including the author’s grandmother, Lily, who had been a celebrated bohemian in Paris.‘The Big House’ is vividly written and meticulously researched using the Sykes’ own family’s papers and photographs. In this splendid biography of place and time, Christopher Simon Sykes has resuscitated the lives of his ancestors and their glorious home from the 18th- through to the 20th-century.




THE
BIG
HOUSE
The Story of a Country House
and its Family

Christopher Simon Sykes



DEDICATION (#ue0de378f-9614-57ec-bbf6-d8abd908dba5)
To the memory of my grandfather, Mark Sykes, and
for the new generation, my children, Lily and Joby.

EPIGRAPH (#ulink_0e320b01-4e08-51e6-ae44-c8fe59ee2555)
‘When I come back here, all the time I have been away seems like a dream. Everything is exactly the same here; the same conversation, the same jokes, the books in the same place on the same tables. My rooms just as I left them. One cannot believe that five months of incident and excitement have passed away. Home seems very calm and comfortable; a refuge quite inaccessible to any of the vexations and troubles of the world.’
Christopher Sykes, March, 1854.

CONTENTS
Cover (#uee190cb6-79f1-5c3d-adf1-b5cc9747a0dd)
Title Page (#u00ccc3f1-e11d-5a85-8e41-6947ddc0d763)
Dedication (#ue0de378f-9614-57ec-bbf6-d8abd908dba5)
Epigraph (#u87f34f8c-99fa-58d8-8480-bc1d9d9851a5)
Sykes of Sledmere Family Tree (#uc19988db-abaa-5ae4-b765-28ac05679dd0)
Prologue (#uba466990-6a57-5abc-99b3-347659ba7981)
I The Merchant (#u636a0808-4402-5952-9395-f6de64f16d1c)
II The Parson (#ua66df217-a648-5496-a31f-d2fa0d6df5bd)
III The Architect (#u2ed4b793-99e0-57f6-aff1-d98cc496b235)
IV The Collector (#u951b1b59-345e-5e21-baad-259db393b636)
V The Squire (#litres_trial_promo)
VI The Eccentric (#litres_trial_promo)
VII Jessie (#litres_trial_promo)
VIII Sykey (#litres_trial_promo)
IX Lady Satin Tights (#litres_trial_promo)
X Mark (#litres_trial_promo)
XI The Traveller (#litres_trial_promo)
XII A Restless Spirit (#litres_trial_promo)
XIII A New House (#litres_trial_promo)
XIV Richard (#litres_trial_promo)
XV Sledmere Reborn (#litres_trial_promo)
P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features… (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
A Slightly Rebellious Spirit (#litres_trial_promo)
Life at a Glance (#litres_trial_promo)
Top Ten Favourite Books (#litres_trial_promo)
A Writing Life (#litres_trial_promo)
A Photographer’s Diary (#litres_trial_promo)
Read On (#litres_trial_promo)
If You Loved This, You Might Like… (#litres_trial_promo)
Find Out More (#litres_trial_promo)
Epilogue: My Unexpected Uncle (#litres_trial_promo)
Select Bibliography (#litres_trial_promo)
Index (#litres_trial_promo)
Acknowledgements (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Notes (#litres_trial_promo)
Praise (#litres_trial_promo)
Copyright (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)

SYKES OF SLEDMERE FAMILY TREE (#ulink_53ee843c-4401-5916-8155-c69141c9242f)



PROLOGUE (#ulink_340915f6-8b4c-5609-a788-e21af3e9ae42)
In the afternoon of Tuesday, 23 May, 1911, in the village of Sledmere, high up on the East Yorkshire Wolds, a passer-by would have been confronted with a shocking and terrifying sight. The large grey stone Georgian house, dominating the village and clearly visible from the main road, was ablaze, thick black smoke and flames pouring from its roof. Had they been there around three o’clock, they would have met with the heavy horses and wooden wagons of the Malton Fire Brigade, at the end of an arduous journey of twelve miles, which had included the navigation of two long steep hills, come to join their fellow-firemen from the other local town of Driffield, and the entire population of the village as they fought to save whatever they could of the contents of a house that had been at the centre of their lives for over 150 years.
The fire had started because a roof-beam protruded into the chimney above the kitchen in the north-east wing. It had probably smouldered for days before igniting, and even then the progress of the flames was slow, inching their way forward until they made contact with other beams supporting the roof. So it was that by the time the first suspicious wisps of smoke were seen oozing out of the brickwork of a chimney, the fire had really begun to take hold. The alarm was raised at about noon, just as the elderly owner of the house, Sir Tatton Sykes, was sitting down to his lunch. The great bell of the hall was rung, and all the men employed on the estate, farmhands, grooms, coachmen, foresters, bricklayers and carpenters, were summoned to help. Even the children were called out from the village school. The agent, Mr Henry Cholmondeley, burst into the Dining-Room to tell Sir Tatton that the house was on fire and that he must leave at once. His warnings went unheeded, for at that moment the old man was interested in nothing but his food. ‘I must finish my pudding,’ he said, ‘finish my pudding.’
There were two fire brigades in the district, the nearest at Driffield, eight miles away, and the other four miles further still, at Malton. Both were summoned. In the meantime, Henry Cholmondeley, who had no illusions about how long they would take to arrive, organised all present into a human chain and began a bucket service from the reservoir which supplied the house. Just as this was beginning to prove useless, since it was impossible to get access to the seat of the fire, a neighbour from Malton, Mr Freddy Strickland, arrived by motor car, bringing with him Captain Jackson of the Fire Brigade and a quantity of hose. This was attached to fire hydrants near the house and ultimately unsuccessful attempts were made to play water on to the flames now issuing from the roof at the north-east corner.
Henry Cholmondeley then took a vital decision. Seeing that the fire was still burning fairly slowly, he ordered his human chain to concentrate all efforts on salvaging as much of the contents of the house as possible, many of which were great treasures. Starting on the upper bedroom floors, with the men at the head, then the women and finally, spilling out on to the lawn, the children at the far end, they began by rescuing anything that was easily movable, such as china, glass, pictures, carpets and smaller pieces of furniture. In the vast Library another group was engaged in throwing the thousands of books out of the windows into sheets and blankets held by those below. Others were unscrewing fine mahogany doors, prising out marble chimneypieces and carefully taking down the collection of family portraits.
‘The servants behaved with wonderful pluck and coolness,’ observed a reporter from the local paper, ‘in removing furniture from the burning rooms, the maidservants acting as coolly and bravely as the men. The fire, however, was now gaining rapid hold and was fanned by a slight breeze, which caused all the upper rooms of the east wing to blaze fiercely.’
(#litres_trial_promo) At half-past two, the Driffield brigade finally arrived, but, in spite of the fact that there was no shortage of water, their manual pumps proved quite inadequate to the task, the pressure from the reservoir, used solely for household purposes, being far too low. Shortly after three, the Malton Brigade were on the scene, but even their powerful steam-driven pump, which was able to send streams of water on to the roof and into the blazing upper storeys, did no good, the fire being now quite out of control. The best they could do was to keep the walls of the rooms sufficiently cool while the salvage work continued.
The roof of the east wing was the first to go, falling in with a ‘great crash’, but this seemed merely to strengthen the determination of the workers. ‘Notwithstanding the menacing nature of their task,’ commented the local paper, ‘the rescue parties worked most splendidly, and the way in which the rooms were emptied of their principal contents without confusion or disorder was really wonderful.’ A new hazard was caused by the large quantities of molten lead from the roof, which poured down the walls and threatened to splash anyone who came too close to it. The men worked on undeterred. As one huge painting was carried precariously down a burning staircase, supervised by the under-gamekeeper, he was heard to mutter, ‘Now lads, don’t damage t’frame.’
(#litres_trial_promo) There were many narrow escapes. ‘A long ladder was placed against an upper window, from which a large wardrobe was being lowered, two men standing on the ladder to steady it. An ominous swaying of the ladder was followed by a crack, and a moment later the ladder snapped, carrying the two men with it. Fortunately they were unhurt beyond a shaking, though the wardrobe was smashed.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In the Library, the roof above crashed in and pierced the ceiling, sending burning debris raining down on the group working there, a heavy beam narrowly missing one of their number as it fell thirty feet to the floor. They made their escape down ladders from the open windows, and helped to load the huge quantity of books on to wagons which carted them away to be stored in the church.
The scene on the lawn was extraordinary, if piteous, with furniture and fittings, china, bed linen and mattresses, statues, gold and silver plate, paintings and books strewn around as far as the eye could see. In the midst of it all the melancholy figure of Sir Tatton paced up and down, his hands held firmly behind his back. He had one last request. In the Hall there stood a very fine piece of sculpture, a copy in marble of the famous Apollo Belvedere which had originally been part of the Duke of Devonshire’s collection at Londesborough. It had been left till last since it was thought it might escape the flames. However, since the centre of the house was by now blazing and roaring as through a gigantic chimney with temperatures that must have been close to 1,000°C, it was obvious that the statue had no chance of survival. Sir Tatton asked if it might be saved, a difficult task as it was reckoned to weigh close to a ton, and though the ceiling of the Hall was still intact, the back and east sides were fiercely blazing. ‘Scores of hands volunteered to remove the statue,’ recorded the correspondent of the Yorkshire Post. ‘Jets of water were poured on the ceiling, and the hall flooded. Water was also poured on the walls behind the statue, which was itself drenched, to render it cool enough to handle. The front door was removed, and the jambs wrenched down to admit the passage of the large life-size figure. With admirable skill it was lowered from its pedestal into the arms of the stalwart farm labourers and helpers, and finally carried out, with barely a break or scratch to the lawn.’ It was the last act of salvage possible.
Throughout the night the fire brigades worked to keep down the flames, but it was not until noon of the following day that the fire was finally extinguished. Little was left at the end beyond the four outer walls. Looking into the roofless building, one of the more curious sights was a fire-place on the first floor which had miraculously escaped the flames and which remained ready for lighting, complete with paper, sticks and coals. ‘Although I did not see the fire,’ wrote one of Sir Tatton’s grandchildren in later years, ‘the shock and horror among the household, and the blackened ruin with the pungent smell, filled me with fear for a long time.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Sir Tatton himself showed stoicism in the face of such disaster. ‘All he said when a word of sympathy was offered,’ commented the Yorkshire Post, ‘was, “These things will happen, these things will happen”, repeating the words with resigned fortitude and recognising the utter hopelessness of it all.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But the correspondent of the Yorkshire Post had not reckoned with the absolute determination of the family who had built and loved this house that it would live again.

CHAPTER I The Merchant (#ulink_e6256d02-f3d2-5120-af29-763d11742082)
A house is more than bricks and mortar. To those who inhabit it, it lives and breathes. It has moods. It has a smell, an indefinable scent that is as peculiar to it as a genetic code is to a human being. It is made from the peculiar mixture of paint, polish, carpets, dogs, leather, wood-smoke, dust, fabrics, plaster, wood, cooking, flowers and numerous other aromas that exist in a home. Pluck me from my bed, blindfold me, drop me anywhere in the world and I could pick out the smell of Sledmere from a thousand others. This is the house in which my family have lived for 250 years. It is where I was brought up and spent my adolescence. Though I left it when I was eighteen, I still feel attached to it as if by some invisible umbilical cord. I do not live there yet my roots are there. For good or for bad, it inhabits my soul.
From the outside, Sledmere is a plain building, built of grey stone, with a lack of embellishment that makes it seem a little austere. This suits its setting, high up on the Yorkshire Wolds. It is a large country house, always known in the village as ‘the big house’, but it is not a palace like its neighbour, Castle Howard. I know every nook and cranny of it and, sometimes, if I am lying in bed at night trying to sleep, I play a game in which I return home and take a journey round the rooms.
I walk through the back door, the way in which everyone enters the house, and on the left is the Lift Room, depository for all coats, hats and boots. A large cupboard which faces me is filled with bric-à-brac – discarded shoes, old kites, tennis rackets, dog leads etc. – its drawers overflowing with objects that remain there year after year. In one corner there is a rack full of walking sticks, which immediately remind me of my late father. When my brother’s bull terrier, Lambchop, occupied the room for years, it became known as the Dog’s Lobby. To the right is the lift, to which the room owes its name. Built by Pickerings of Hull, it has steel folding doors with a small viewing window. As a child I was terrified of getting stuck in it between floors: something that did occasionally happen and, even today, my brother, Tatton, who now inhabits the house, won’t travel in it alone at night.
Beyond the lift, a stone passage runs the width of the house, leading on the left to the Staff Cloak Room, the Brush Room and the Servants’ Hall, and on the right to the Kitchen, the Small Dining Room and the Pantry. It is a hive of activity, particularly in the mornings, with Sue, the housekeeper, and her ladies arriving at eight to clean and dust, Maureen, the cook, soon afterwards, to prepare breakfast, and from then on a succession of callers – the postman, the gardeners, the works department – coming to conduct their business. This is where I spent much of my childhood, in and out of the Kitchen, the Servants’ Hall and what was then my father’s secretary, Mouzelle’s room, now the Small Dining Room.
I pass through a heavy swing door, halfway up the passage, which leads into the main part of the house, the first space being the stairwell of the back staircase, known as the Blue Stairs. It is dominated by a vast marble Roman statue of Caesar Augustus, which throws eerie shadows on the wall at night. Opposite the stairs, a door leads into the Turkish Room, decorated from floor to ceiling with twentieth-century copies of ancient Iznik tiles. This was my grandfather, Mark Sykes’s folly, a monument to his love of the Middle East, and if his ghost walks anywhere in the house, then it is in here. In the nineteen-sixties, I used to set up my music in the Turkish Room, fill it with candles, and come and smoke and chill out in it. Below it, down a flight of stone steps, are the Gentleman’s Cloakroom and the Gun Room.
Walking past the Turkish Room and turning left, I reach the Entrance Hall, which is the main entrance into the house. It is dominated by a huge statue of Laocoon and his sons being devoured by serpents, another object which generated fear when I was little. There are muskets on the walls that were used by a regiment raised by my Great, Great, Great Grandfather, Christopher Sykes, during the Napoleonic Wars. Walking out of the left-hand door, I find myself in the Stone Hall, which occupies the central space on the ground floor, and whose tall windows look south across the park. Looking down towards the windows, the first room on the left is the Horse Room, formerly my father’s study, the walls covered with paintings of horses. Next comes the Music Room, painted in shades of grey and pink, which is the comfortable family sitting room containing the drinks tray and the newspapers. The room opposite is the formal Drawing Room, with its highly decorative ceiling. It is dominated by a great equestrian portrait of my Great, Great Grandfather, Tatton Sykes, mounted on his favourite hack and carrying a walking stick, which sits on the side table below it. If I turn left out of here, I find myself first in the Boudoir which, though now changed beyond recognition, fills me with memories of my mother, since it was once her sitting room, and then in the Dining Room, with its beautiful portrait by Romney of Christopher Sykes and his wife.
At the north end of the Hall, I ascend the grand stone staircase leading up to the most unexpected room in the house, the Library. Nobody entering this room for the first time, through its plain mahogany door, could help but catch their breath at the sheer audacity of its monumental scale. Two storeys high, with a vaulted ceiling inspired by the Baths of Caracalla and Diocletian in Rome, and running the entire width of the house, with nine windows overlooking the landscape, the 120-foot long polished oak and mahogany floor was a paradise to slide about on as a child. The other three sides of the staircase have a balcony running round them, overlooking the Hall, behind which runs a bedroom passage. There are six bedrooms and a pantry on the first floor, including the last bedroom I slept in before leaving home, the Orange Room, which includes a charming portrait of my Great Grandmother, Jessica Sykes, as a child. There are a further nine bedrooms, another pantry and the linen cupboard on the top floor, which once upon a time was the nursery floor where we spent the first few years of our lives.
Turning left at the top of the Blue Stairs and immediately right through tall, double, glass-fronted doors, I push open a grey door on the left and climb a narrow metal staircase which winds up into the attics, a rabbit warren of passages, long-abandoned servants’ bedrooms, spacious galleries lit by glass domes and dark, ghostly areas of roof space. I then take the lift down five floors to the cellars, and walk down dark passages to the very back, beyond the wine cellar, where there are remnants of ancient walls dug from the local Garton Shale, which makes up the ground beneath the house. In the seventeenth century the builders would have carved their cellars straight out of this material, which forms the foundations of the house. The vaulted arches are extremely well built, as good as anything you will see. I walk past the wine cellar, through the first arch, turn left and through the next arch, and look at the wall on the left leading up to the door. Garton Shale and an immensely thick opening make me believe that this is probably where the house was born.
Sledmere is one of those houses in which very little has ever been thrown away. Every drawer in every desk or cabinet seems to be stuffed with an eclectic mix of papers, photographs, letters and objects, which spill out when you open them. I was always fascinated by these as a child and spent many happy hours rifling through seemingly endless repositories of treasures. In the attics there were wooden chests filled with minerals, cupboards full of old glass bottles, huge leather trunks overflowing with old clothes, and ancient suitcases containing loose negatives and faded photographs. I particularly loved the large partners’ desk in the middle of the Library, whose multitude of drawers revealed, when opened, all kinds of curiosities: old coins, medals, bills, pieces of chandelier, seals, bits of broken china, etchings, ancient letters and the charred foot of an early Sykes martyr.
These early explorations awoke in me a passion for the history of the house, which was further fuelled by the discovery of a remarkable collection of photographs, some loose and scattered about in various chests, others in photograph albums. Most of these were kept in a cupboard in the Music Room, and chronicled the comings and goings of the family since the early 1850s. I became fascinated by these images of my ancestors, the earliest of which is a splendid portrait of my Great, Great Grandfather, Sir Tatton Sykes, who was born in 1772. It was taken in 1853 and he is sitting in a high-backed chair, his left arm resting on a table. His thick white hair is swept back from his forehead, and his strong features bear the ghost of a smile. His clothes are curious, for he is not dressed in the fashion of the time, but wears a long-skirted high-collared frock coat with a white neck-cloth and frilled shirt, together with breeches and mahogany-topped boots, the manner of dress of an eighteenth-century squire. He is undoubtedly a ‘character’ and I find it impossible not to like him.
But what of the first builder of Sledmere, my Great, Great, Great, Great, Great Uncle Richard Sykes, a man who died ninety years earlier, in an age when there were no photographers to record his image? The house is crammed with family portraits. They line the reception rooms, the passages, the back stairs and the bedrooms; full-lengths, half-lengths, heads and shoulders in oils, pastels and watercolour, of relatives both close and obscure. They are objects of such familiarity that until now I had never really looked at them properly. Richard Sykes hangs in the best bedroom in the house, the Red Room, at the top of the stone staircase on the right. He is just to the left of the door, and his portrait shows him to have been a well-fed looking gentleman. He is wearing a long black velvet jacket with a frilly lace shirt and cuffs and breeches with diamond buckles, and is seated at a desk surrounded by books. He has a prominent down-pointed nose, a pinkish complexion and he looks … well, thoroughly pleased with himself.
He had every reason to be. The eldest of six children, he was rich from the success of his family’s various mercantile ventures in Hull. He had status, having been appointed High Sheriff of Yorkshire in 1752. Best of all, however, was the fact that he had succeeded, on the death of his uncle in 1748, to substantial estates on the East Yorkshire Wolds, an area of undulating chalky hills, not unlike the Sussex Downs, that run from east of York nearly all the way to the North Sea. His uncle, Mark Kirkby, had been the richest and most important merchant in Hull. He had used part of the great fortune he had amassed to buy Sledmere and the surrounding estates, and went to live in the Tudor manor house which then stood there and was used mostly as a hunting lodge. He loved it, and the memory of him still survived in my Grandfather’s time.
Sometime in the middle of October, 1748, a year in which the first excavations were made at Pompeii, Samuel Richardson published Clarissa, and the Peace of Aix-la-Chapelle ended the War of the Austrian Succession, Richard set out on a journey to look at his uncle’s land. Leaving his house in Hull, he rode north, first to the nearby market town of Beverley, made prosperous during the days of the medieval cloth trade and dominated by its cathedral-size Minster, then followed the course of the River Hull through flat wetlands to Great Driffield. Here he began a slow laborious climb uphill, passing the tower of St Michael’s Church at Garton, pushing his horse on until he reached the summit of Driffield Wold. This is where the Kirkby land began, thirty miles north-east of Hull.
The Yorkshire Wolds were then a Godforsaken place, being little more than a tract of barren wasteland, much of it one vast open field destitute of hedges and ditches, with stones here and there to mark where one property ended and another began. There were no roads as such, only grass tracks, most goods being carried to market on the backs of horses rather than by cart. Though the hills had once been covered with woodland, these had been cleared by the end of the eleventh century, leaving scarcely any trees, and thin and stony soil. There were the occasional scrappy fields of oats or barley and whatever grassland was not in use for grazing sheep was fenced off into rabbit warrens. Less than a century before, wolves had roamed the area freely. Daniel Defoe, writing in 1720, described it as being ‘very thin of towns, and consequently of people’,
(#litres_trial_promo) most of the villages having been depopulated in the sixteenth century to make way for sheep. It cannot have appeared to Richard as the most congenial of environments.
After a few miles’ ride across the top, from where, if the day was a clear one, he would have caught a glimpse of the North Sea glinting to the east, where the source of his wealth, a fleet of ships, plied their trade out of Hull with the Baltic, he came to a dip in the land. Pausing to give his horse a rest, he looked down upon what he had come to see. The village of Sledmere, which lay at the heart of the Kirkby estate, stood in the bottom of the valley straddling a Roman road, which ran from York in the west to Bridlington on the east coast. It had a church and a large mere, a pond used for the common watering of livestock and from which the village got its name, translating literally as ‘pool in the valley’. Little had changed there since 1572 when it was described as consisting of ‘thirty messuages, ten cottages, ten tofts, five dovecots, forty gardens, forty orchards, 1,000 acres of land, 100 acres of meadow, 1,000 acres of pasture, forty acres of wood, 100 acres of heath and furze and … Free Warren.’
(#litres_trial_promo) According to Nicholas Manners, a Methodist missionary who had been born there in 1732, its inhabitants were ‘extremely ignorant of religion, wild and wicked’.
(#litres_trial_promo) As Richard surveyed the scene below him, his eyes were drawn to a building which stood to the north-west of the village, on rising ground overlooking the mere. This was ‘the manor house of Sledmer upon the Woulds’,
(#litres_trial_promo) the home of his recently deceased uncle.
As Richard rode his horse slowly down the hill, memories of his Uncle Mark came flooding back. Daniel Defoe had written of ‘that glorious Head of Commerce, called the Merchant’, and in Hull, they had called Mark Kirkby ‘the Merchant Prince’, for at a time when trade with the Baltic was booming and merchant families were amassing great fortunes, he was the richest of them all. He had bought the land at Sledmere in order to pursue his favourite sport of hunting, and during the season would move into the manor house where he liked to surround himself with his sporting cronies. He was known to be fond of the bottle, a trait which he shared in common with all the squires of the day, and Richard smiled as he recalled the agreement that his uncle had once made with his Coachman, that they should never get drunk the same evening. Instead each should have the privilege on alternate nights. It had not been a success, for on the very first occasion that it had fallen to the Coachman’s turn to be sober and Uncle Mark was indulging himself without restraint at some friend’s house, early in the evening his enjoyment had been disturbed by the entry of his Coachman into the room crying ‘Tak care o’yesell Master, I’se going fast.’
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Richard also remembered an occasion when he had attended a supper given by his uncle for all his tenants and other dependants, at which, owing to the bottle having circulated the table one too many times, the general tenor of the evening had deteriorated and the mirth had become too uproarious. At this point, ‘Old Mark Kirkby’, as he was known in the neighbourhood, had risen somewhat unsteadily to his feet, his florid face beneath its flowing periwig contrasting vividly with his favourite blue velvet coat, and loudly rapped the table crying ‘Mark Kirkby is at home!’ It was evident that to all those gathered round the table this was a well-known signal at which all merriment was to be hushed and the proper decorum restored. However much of a good fellow the Merchant Prince may have been, he did not like his guests to forget their place.
Like Kirkby, the Sykeses were successful merchants. Originally yeoman farmers, they had come from a place called Sykes Dyke, near Carlisle. One of their descendants, William Sykes, had left Cumberland in about 1550 and settled in Leeds where he had set up as a clothier. He could not have timed his arrival better. The town, which is conveniently situated on the borders of the industrial West Riding and the predominantly agricultural North-East, was on the move. The textile industry was expanding rapidly, spreading wealth through the valleys and uplands west and south of the town. Cloth woven in the outlying villages was brought into Leeds to undergo all the various finishing processes and was then marketed by local merchants whose fortunes snowballed. As industry developed the population doubled and by the middle of the seventeenth century Leeds was the epicentre of woollen manufacture. Clothiers and merchants thronged the huge cloth market held on and around Leeds bridge. The town’s inhabitants, wrote Macaulay, ‘boasted loudly of their increasing wealth, and of the immense sales of cloth which took place in the open air on the Bridge. Hundreds, nay thousands of pounds had been paid down in the course of one busy market day.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Within two generations the family had accumulated so much money that William’s grandson, Richard, who had risen to being Alderman of Leeds and was the first ‘private gentleman’ in the city to own a carriage,
(#litres_trial_promo) was able to leave each of his three daughters the sum of £10,000, a staggering sum for those days, as well as vast estates to his five sons.
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While this branch of the family continued to prosper in Leeds, one of Richard’s grandchildren, Daniel, set up in business as a merchant in Hull, seeing the great opportunities that were opening up in the city from its burgeoning trade with the Baltic. Hull, whose port arose around the confluence of the Rivers Hull and Humber, had risen to greatness in medieval times when her proximity to the vast sheep runs of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire had stood her in good stead in the important wool trade. When cloth eventually replaced wool as the major English export, her fortunes had temporarily waned, the London merchants having a virtual monopoly in everything except raw wool, but they had risen rapidly again in the latter half of the seventeenth century with the opening up of direct trade to the Baltic. ‘There is more business done in Hull’, Daniel Defoe had observed in 1724, ‘than in any town of its bigness in Europe … They drive a great trade here to Norway, and to the Baltick, and an important trade to Dantzick, Riga, Narva and Petersburgh; from whence they make large returns in iron, copper, flax, canvas, pot-ashes, Muscovy Linnen and yarn, and other things; all which they get vent for in the country to an exceeding quantity.’
(#litres_trial_promo) By the time of his death in 1697, Daniel Sykes’s firm was part of an oligarchy of two or three dozen great merchant houses, which handled most of the goods passing through the port. He had been twice elected Mayor of Hull and had built up a fortune to leave to his son Richard, an equally successful merchant, who in 1704 further consolidated the family’s position by marrying Mary Kirkby, the sister of the Merchant Prince and co-heiress to Sledmere. It was a classic case of trade marrying into land, a formula which was to be behind the building of many of the most important houses in Britain.
Though Richard must have visited Sledmere there is no record of him ever having lived there. It was his eldest son and namesake, born in 1706, who was destined to be the first Sykes to move out of Hull to the country, though not until, like his father and grandfather before him, he had made his name in his native city. The family had recently built a new house in Hull High Street on a site which they had acquired in 1725 and which extended to the river. It is described as having been ‘a fine strong structure, built a little way back, with iron palings in the front. You ascended to the street door by a flight of marble steps.’ It also had a ‘coach house and stables belonging to it with substantial cut stone doorways … reached by a short passage on the opposite side of the street’.
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From here young Richard had immersed himself in the family business. With a fleet of seven ships, two of which were named The Richard and The Sykes, he carried on and expanded the family’s considerable trade with the ports of Scandinavia and the Baltic, exporting mostly large quantities of woollen cloth and importing iron. Swedish iron, which was high-grade, malleable iron, produced under stringent controls from the finest ores, was then regarded as the best in the world. It was considered the only iron fit for steelmaking. A number of firms built up a very great business on the basis of trading in this commodity, of which Sykes & Son became the largest. Richard was made Sheriff of Hull in 1740, and in 1745, when the Young Pretender was leading his rebel army on a gradual procession south, he was appointed Captain of a regiment of volunteers, composed of the chief Merchants of Hull, the purpose of which was ‘to take up arms on His Majesty’s behalf for the common defence of the Town of Kingston upon Hull’. These orders were signed the month after the Battle of Prestonpans, the same month that the Pretender was marching upon Derby and when such a panic prevailed throughout the northern counties that even the Archbishop of York, Dr Herring, thought it his duty to muster and levy troops, to attend Reviews and to urge all country gentlemen to take up arms in defence of the Protestant Religion. In the event of the triumph of the Pretender, Richard Sykes’s signature on such a document would certainly have pointed him out as being worthy of ruinous fines and penalties, and possibly have cost him his head.
These civil troubles were long passed when Richard rode out to his uncle’s house on that October day. He had made his fortune and his reputation, and he was ready for a change. It is quite clear that improvement of his new property was on Richard Sykes’s mind from the very beginning. He was married to Jane Hobman, the daughter of Hesketh Hobman, another important Hull merchant whose family had extensive interests in Danzig, and if he were to bring a wife to live in such a desolate spot, especially one who was used to living in some luxury in their Hull mansion, then he would have to make it worthy of her. No picture exists of the house, which was described variously as a ‘manor house’ and a ‘hall house’, and was probably a gabled Tudor building, which she would certainly have considered old-fashioned. The surrounding landscape was largely treeless, with the exception of the odd orchard and the occasional hedgerow in the vicinity of the village, and so Richard decided to concentrate on planting first.
Landscape gardening was all the rage at the time, largely due to the influence of a local man, William Kent, whose family came from Bridlington. The son of a coachman, he had as a young man spent a number of years painting and studying art in Italy, where he had fallen under the spell of the works of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, whose depictions of the Italian landscape showed a nature that had been improved or ‘methodised’. On his return to England in 1716, under the patronage of the Earl of Burlington, he worked as a painter and architect, and passed on to fashionable society his enthusiasm for all things Italian. He became the oracle on matters of taste and his influence was soon widely felt when he took up designing gardens in 1730. ‘He leaped the fence,’ wrote Horace Walpole, ‘and saw that all nature was a garden. He felt the delicious contrast of hill and valley changing imperceptibly into each other, tasted the beauty of the gentle swell, or concave scoop, and remarked how loose groves crowned an easy eminence with happy ornament.’
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Richard’s designs were, to begin with, on a relatively modest scale, being confined to the planting of an Avenue radiating out from the house on either side of the Mere. To assist him in carrying out this scheme he employed a firm of nurserymen from Pontefract called Perfects, which had its origins in the local industry of liquorice growing. John Perfect, an ex-mayor of Pontefract and ‘a Person well known in the North for his Skill in Nurseries and Planting of all Kinds’,
(#litres_trial_promo) had worked on designs for the gardens at another Yorkshire house, Nostell Priory, as well as supplying plants to Harewood and other mansions in the neighbourhood. There was another factor that might have played its part in swinging him the job and that was, as Richard commented to a neighbour in December, 1749, ‘Mr Perfect likes this Air very well.’
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Mr Perfect soon found his employer to be an impatient man, wanting his Avenue to be planted and then appear as if by magic. Richard was annoyed when the first consignment of trees turned out to be too small, Perfect having miscalculated the depth of the soil where they were to be planted, and he immediately ordered much larger ones. ‘I have planted some Beeches sixteen feet high,’ he wrote on 2 February 1750, ‘which I Expect will answer at the end of my Avenue, and the firrs will be larger than we first talked of as we find the soil much better than expected.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He delighted in the planting of his trees and in the period 1749–1750 is known to have planted 20,000 Beech, Sycamore, Wych Elm and Chestnut.
(#litres_trial_promo) The completed Avenue, a great and almost triangular belt of trees, enclosed a hundred acres of parkland. At its southern end the focal point was a gap in the peripheral belt in which a gate was set. At the northern end there was the Mere and the House, which Richard intended to rebuild.
Though his wife was the catalyst for all this work, scarcely had the project begun when tragedy struck. In the autumn of 1750, Jane fell ill. In spite of being sent by Richard to one of the best physicians in London, Dr James Munro, a man of ‘great Experience and knowledge’,
(#litres_trial_promo) she did not improve. In June of the following year, Jane’s brother, Randolph Hobman, wrote to Richard from Danzig, thanking him for a melancholy gift, ‘the Wearing Apparel which you was pleased to be ordered to be distributed between my Wife and Sister here’. He added ‘My Wife … assures me as long as it may please God to spare her life, she will wear those things in a most grateful acknowledgement of your Brotherly Love … as also in a continual remembrance of my most dear beloved Sister deceased.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Jane was forty-seven years old and she died childless.
After her death, Richard immersed himself in the building of his new house and on 17 June 1751 recorded the starting date with one short line written in his pocket book: ‘Laid the first Stone of the new house at Sledmere.’
(#litres_trial_promo) As to the actual position of the house, a contemporary witness, one Richard Kirkby, stated that ‘Richard Sykes … built the present Mansion house at Sledmire near the Plot of Ground where the Old House stood.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Richard himself made virtually no mention of the building of the house in his letters, apart from the occasional order for materials. ‘Please to send first a sample of two sizes of your Mortice Brass Joints for Doors,’ he wrote to Richard Pardoe & Son, on 9 June, 1752, ‘as also of iron, and your lowest prices of each sort with Screws proper for Screwing them fast, and the price of them. As the Doors are eight feet high, I have some thoughts of having three Joints to a door.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Others have him asking for ‘thousand four foot pail boards and please to let them be very good ones’, and ‘two Baggs of Nails such as you sent me last for pailing 15,000 of 6d, 40,000 of 3d and 10,000 of 2d Sprigs as all these sorts are greatly wanted’.
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As work on the new house progressed, Richard turned his attention once again to the landscape, and with the help of Mr Perfect set to work planning a garden. According to Richard Kirkby, whose family were tenants of the estate, ‘in order to make out Buildings, Gardens, Lawns and other necessary Conveniences to the New House, he took the old Pond or Marr into the ground called the Lawn, which then might contain an acre and upwards and before that Time laid open to the York, Malton and Scarborough roads … he also removed a Hill called Green Hill, along the North and South side of which the Roads went to York and Malton and to the Church, and inclosed the Hill and both the Roads within this Lawn by a Brick Wall.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This brick wall, which remains today, was in fact an elaborate form of ha-ha, with triangular, rectangular and semicircular buttresses, which marked the end of the garden. At either end were quite grand pavilions, long since gone, which faced up towards the house, each consisting of three buildings and a yard. To complete the scheme there was a general clearance of all enclosures or buildings that might spoil the view up the Avenue from the House.
On 2 January, 1752, Richard received a welcome letter from George Crowle, one of the MPs for Hull and a commissioner for the Navy Office. ‘I am at this moment come from Court,’ he wrote, ‘and I should not have forgiven myself if I slip’t the first opportunity of acquainting you what was hinted me by a person in power, that it is almost determined upon in Council to appoint you High Sheriff of Yorkshire this Year. I heard you mentioned with great honor.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The appointment came through in the spring and he was soon busying himself with all the details of taking up his new post, such as organising his livery – ‘the High Sheriff’s Livery is blew faced with red, the jacket red, white and green, gold coloured lace on the hatts … the expence of furnishing one man and hors with the livery for two assizes is this year Sixteen Shillings, som years are more and som less’,
(#litres_trial_promo) appointing a Chaplain – one applicant whom he turned down was the Revd Lawrence Sterne, soon to become the acclaimed author of Tristram Shandy – and dealing with approaches from various tradesmen. Amongst the latter was a curious letter endorsed ‘my Lady Elizabeth Burdet, 16 Jan., 1752’ in which she stated that she was the widow of Sir Francis Burdet of Braithwaite in the West Riding, who had invested and lost his entire fortune in the South Sea Scheme, the notorious ‘Bubble’. After Sir Francis’s death Lady Elizabeth had been obliged to take up the Coal Trade. She begged his permission to allow her to supply the Judges’ lodgings with coal: ‘our applications has been for ye Quality & Gentry not hoping for any regard from ye low sort of persons’.
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Richard’s appointment as High Sheriff was indicative of the high esteem in which he was held, a fact which was further borne out in August of the following year when the Prime Minister himself, the Right Hon. Henry Pelham, wrote to him to try and persuade him to stand as MP for Hull. They had met in Scarborough, then a fashionable spa in which it was said ‘earls, marquesses and dukes’ could be found ‘as thick as berries on hedges’,
(#litres_trial_promo) and where Pelham was indulging in the popular pastimes of drinking the waters and outdoor bathing. ‘There is no man I should wish to see more in Parliament than yourself,’ he told him, ‘and indeed the unreserved civilities I have received from your countrymen must always make me partial to Yorkshire …’
(#litres_trial_promo) Richard declined, and the position was taken up by Lord Robert Manners, Pelham’s brother-in-law, who put Sykes’s refusal to stand down to his preoccupation with Sledmere. ‘Till Sledmere is quite completed,’ he wrote to him, ‘the delight you take in that pretty place I dare say will not let you stop your hand, but afford you daily employment & the most delightful amusement. I hope all your improvements there answer your most sanguine expectations.’
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The real reason, however, that Richard was never able to take up a serious career in politics was that he suffered from very poor health. This already interfered with his position as High Sheriff. ‘Your Lordship I am afraid will think me remiss,’ he wrote to Sir Thomas Parker, one of the Assize Judges, on 6 June, 1752, ‘in not acknowledging the receipt of your kind favour till now but … I have been chiefly confined to my Bed by a Sharpe fitt of the Gout, the pain of which I thank God is greatly abated and if no relapse think I may flatter myself with the pleasure of attending your Bro: Judges at the Ensuing assizes in person.’
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Gout, which was the common enemy of the country gentleman, was caused mostly, and certainly in Richard’s case, by an excessive
fondness for Port.
Yes, one Failing he has, I recollect that
He prefers his Old Port to a Velvet ‘Old Hat’
wrote his younger brother, the Revd Mark ‘Parson’ Sykes, in a poem he entitled ‘Verses in praise of my Brother’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The size of Richard’s appetite for Port is made clear in one of many similar letters to Robert Norris, one of his shipping agents. ‘When you have any extraordinary Pipe of Old Red Port Wine, let me know and will take sixty or seventy Gallons of it, but will have it drawn into bottles with you and well corked any time betwixt now and the latter end of April.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Among the daily dining, supping and drinking companions listed by Richard in his pocket books are numerous parsons who shared his enjoyment, such as Parson Ferrit, Parson Morice and Parson Lazenby, but none more so than his own chaplain, a drunken old clergyman by the name of Parson Paul. ‘Parson Paul and the tenants of Sledmire dined with me,’ he recorded on Christmas Day, 1752; then on Boxing Day, ‘Parson Paul supp’d with me’, and on the following day, ‘Ditto breakfast with me and returned home’, no doubt much the worse for wear.
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Though one might be tempted to smile at these exploits, the subsequent Gout is an extremely painful condition, in which excess uric acid crystals are deposited in the joints of the big toe, the ankle and the knee, causing protuberant swelling and acute attacks of pain. ‘The victim goes to bed and sleeps in good health,’ wrote Dr Thomas Sydenham, who himself suffered from the disease. ‘About two o’clock in the morning he is awakened by a severe pain in the great toe … so exquisite is the feeling of the part affected that it cannot bear the weight of the bedclothes nor the jar of a person walking in the room. The night is passed in torture.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The condition was caused not so much by the ingestion of alcohol, but by the fact that the port was contaminated with lead, regular doses of which can induce the disease. The contamination came either from the port having been stored in lead lined casks or from contact with leaded pewter drinking vessels.
Gout plagued Richard’s life. ‘The Top of my Great Toe,’ he wrote to his doctor on 11 October, 1759, ‘began again to be inflamed and uneasy at night … I bathed it with Brandy … and continued to do so twice a day. Monday night it was very much inflamed and painful and kept me awake all night.… Wednesday morning pressing of the flesh of the toe close to the nail, there issued out white matter. I bathed my toe with Brandy …’
(#litres_trial_promo) There were times when the pain was quite devastating. ‘I am now confined to my chamber in the Gout,’ he wrote to Dorothy Luck, the wife of one of his tenants, on 30 December, 1753, ‘and have been very much afflicted therewith for these twelve months past (which prevented me coming to see you as I intended) in such a degree that life has become a burden and not worth desiring even amongst the abundance of the Riches of this World which God Almighty has been pleased to entrust to my care.’
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To cure him of his afflictions, he had entrusted himself into the care of a certain Dr Chambers, whose practice was in the nearby town of Beverley. Though Gout was the worst of these, and self-inflicted, he was plagued by other illnesses, the minutest details of which were communicated to the doctor in a series of almost daily letters. They included the ‘Scorbutick disorder’
(#litres_trial_promo), endless colds (‘coughed much and my lungs wheezing like a Broken Winded Horse …’),
(#litres_trial_promo) toothache (‘I have had a very great pain in my Teeth Gums and Roof of my mouth much Swelled as well as on the right side of my face’,
(#litres_trial_promo)) piles (‘my piles are yet very troublesome but not so much Heat or Inflamation about the Fundament’),
(#litres_trial_promo) and very unpleasant rashes (‘my Wife tells me my back and shoulders are full of red and blue spots with an itching and my armpits full of scurf’).
(#litres_trial_promo) In return the good doctor kept him well supplied with a battery of different remedies. There were Physick, the Electuary, Asthmatic Elixir, Virgin Wax Sallet Oil, Camomile Tea, Saline Julep, the Spring Potage, Sassafras, Mr Bolton’s Ointment, Rhubarb Tea, Apozem and Basilicon to name a few. Richard lapped them up. ‘I have pursued Dr Chambers directions hitherto in every respect,’ he wrote to his brother Joseph in September, 1759, ‘and am now waiting for what more he may please to send me.’
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All indications are that the new house at Sledmere was completed by the end of 1753 and Richard was certainly living there the following summer, for in August he advertised for a butler. ‘I yesterday received your favour of the 23rd,’ he wrote to a friend, Thomas Sidall, ‘informing me you have heard of a Butler that you think will do for me. I want one and such a one as is not fickle as I do not love to see new faces. I beg you will not only be particular in your inquiry if good natured, for I can’t brook with an ill temper or impertinent answers … As I can’t shave myself he must shave as he will chiefly attend me wherever I go.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The annual salary was £15. 2s. and William Shawe, who was hired to fill the post, was to find himself working in a household of twelve. His fellow servants were listed along with their wages by Richard in his pocket book for 1756 as ‘Sam Hirst, my Coachman. Wages £12. 12s.; Edward Guthrie, my Gardiner. Wages £16. 16s.; Mary Brocklesby, my Housekeeper. Wages £8. 8s.; Thomas Porter, my Groom. Wages £5. 5s. 8d.; James Wellbank, my Postilion. Wages £3. 3s.; Mary Mitchell, my Chamber Maid. Wages £3. 3s.; Mary Banks, my Chamber Maid. Wages £3. 0s.; Susanna Anderson, my Cook Maid. Wages £4. 0s.; Mary Thornton, my Dairy Maid, Wages £3. 5s.; and Robert Collings, Odd Man. Wages £3. 3s.’
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A drawing dated 1751 of the design for the principal elevation shows the new house to have been a solid comfortable building, three storeys high and of seven bays. It was built in brick with rather heavy stone facings and rusticated windows, and was more typical of the kind of gentleman’s house that would have been erected in the Queen Anne period. A detailed inventory made in January 1755, listing each of the rooms and their contents, shows it to have had eight bedrooms, two dressing rooms, a dining room, drawing room and study (‘my Own Room’), a hall, with a service area which consisted of two kitchens, servants’ hall, butler’s pantry, servants’ bedrooms, a laundry, dairy and brewhouse, and extensive cellars.
This Pile is polite! Free from Frogs & from Dykes
And was raised at th’Expense of Worthy Dick Sykes
The Pond, Full in view is clear of all Stench
Stock’d with Mackrel, with Carp and gold bellyed Tench,
The Master is generous! Free from envy and pride
Loves a Pipe in his Mouth, A Friend by his side.
wrote Richard’s brother ‘Parson’ in another of his poems entitled ‘Upon the New Structure at Sledmere & the Master’.
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Richard’s inventory gives a clear idea of how the house was furnished. Since carpets are listed in a number of the rooms one must presume that where they are not mentioned, the floor was simply wooden boards. Such was the case in Richard’s sitting room, which is referred to as ‘My Own Room’. It had ‘A Large Stove Grate, A fine open Fender, A Shovel, Tongs & poker, A Sconce Looking Glass, and A Marble Chimney Piece & Hearth’. There were ‘Six Wallnutt Tree Chairs Leather Bottoms, One Liber Stool Cover’d with Leather, One Wallnutt Tree Arm Chair Ditto’. There was ‘A Mahogany Square Table & Tea Chest, One fine Large in Laid Scruetoire & Bookcase, One Mahogany Shaving Stand, with a Glass, A Large Chest mounted with Brass two drawers, and set upon pedestals, A Mahogany Round table a yard Diameter, A Perspective Looking Glass and an Iron Holland Chest’.
(#litres_trial_promo) There appear to have been no pictures. Those were reserved for his bedroom, described as the ‘Lodging Room Over Kitchen’, which was delightfully comfortable.
The bed was a four-poster ‘with Mahogeny Poles, Blue Merrine Furniture, two Window Curtains of the same to draw up, a Feather Bed, a Check Cover, a Bolster, two Pillows, a Check Mattress, Three Blanketts and a Blue & White Linnen Quilt’. In this room there were ‘Two Old Bedside Carpets’. The other furniture consisted of ‘an Arm Chair Leather Bottom, Six Mahogeny Chairs Covered with Blue Merrine with Check Covers, A Lib. Stool with a Leather Bottom, A Wallnutt Tree Sconce Looking Glass, A Close Stool with a Pott, A Leather Seat, A Bureau, An Oval Table of Mahogeny, A Wainscott Reading Machine, A Large Mahogeny Book Case with Sash Doors and presses below, A Little Camp Bed with Furniture compleat and A Dressing Table with drawers & a Swing Looking glass’. Then there were ‘Three very fine Blue & White Delph Jarrs with Tops, two Chocolate Cups and saucers, 2 Milk potts, 4 Shoker Basons’. Finally he mentions ‘three Small pictures and My Uncle Mark Kirkby’s Picture’.
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The latter, a half-length portrait, which today hangs in the Red Bedroom at Sledmere and shows him looking rather pompous dressed in his blue coat, has an amusing anecdote attached to it. While my Grandfather, Mark Sykes, was engaged in researching an unpublished Sykes family history, his house carpenter, an old boy called John Truslove, once told him that when he was a very young man and had been employed to move some pictures in the house, he had slipped while taking down the Kirkby portrait and was obliged, with some trepidation, to tell the housekeeper, ‘I’ve cut Mark Kirkby’s throat!’
(#litres_trial_promo) To confirm the truth of this story I climbed up a ladder and gently touched the lace bands round his neck. Sure enough I felt the place where a gash had been repaired.
The only other pictures mentioned by Richard in this inventory were ‘Two pictures’ in the Servants’ Hall, ‘Three Black & White prints’ in the Store Room, ‘my Bro. Joseph Sykes picture’ in the Crimson Dressing Room, and ‘My Niece Polly’s Picture’, which hung over the chimneypiece of the dressing room adjoining ‘my Best Lodging Room’. This is where he would have kept his clothes, also minutely catalogued under the heading ‘My Wearing Linnen’ and including such finery as ‘fine Point Ruffles, Dresden Ruffles, fine Mechlin Ruffles, Fine New Holland Shirts, Ruffled Shirts, A Velvet Suit, Coat, Waistcoat & Breeches, a Light Gray Coat Lined with Crimson Silk Trimed with Gold Lace, a Flowered Silk pair of Breeches, etc, etc.’
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So proud did Richard soon become of his new house that he would take great umbrage if it came to his notice that strangers to the neighbourhood had been to visit the much grander house at Castle Howard but had not been to Sledmere. He was thus delighted when, in April, 1755, he was approached by Edwin Lascelles, one of the richest men in Yorkshire, who was about to start work on building a new house at Harewood, near Leeds. He too had inherited an old manor house, Gawthorpe Hall, and was looking to Richard for advice on how to go about starting anew. ‘I am going into Mortar Pell-Mell,’ he wrote, ‘and shall stand much in need of the experience and assistance of such Adepts as you. The first step, I am told, is to provide the main materials; & wood & Iron being of the number, I flatter myself I shall learn from you, the Lowest price of the latter.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Drawing on the wealth of experience he had gained in the previous four years, Richard’s advice to Lascelles was to start by appointing a first-class foreman to oversee the work and to fix upon a plan from which he should not vary. He should then make sure that all the materials he needed were not only on hand, but prepared. Finally he should fortify himself ‘with a multitude of patience’.
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Though the house at Sledmere may have been finished, the work of landscaping continued. An undated design, probably from the mid-1750s, shows Richard to have contemplated the creation of an oval carriage drive in front of the house, between it and the Fish Pond, with planting to the west of the house to include a formal ride up to a garden temple.
(#litres_trial_promo) This work was never carried out, but in January, 1756, he wrote to Lord Robert Manners sending his ‘best respects to my Lord James and thank him for his kind wishes of the Improvement and Increase of my Nursery. I have been planting and transplanting for these six weeks past the Season, for that business has turned out very favourable and my trees come forward and grow almost beyond all imaginary expectations and great pleasure when I view them.’
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He also had a thriving kitchen garden of which he was especially proud. Back in December, 1752, he had written to Richard Lawson, a broker friend in London, asking for advice on buying a glass house: ‘Not having acquaintance with any in or about London, I hope you will excuse the trouble in desiring you to recommend one that will serve me with a Good Comodity. I have only got at present a few sash frames finished which gives me an opportunity of taking an Exact Measure of the Squares … & as they may be larger than Common I could like to have it of Crown Glass to be run or cast somewhat stronger and better if allowed a half penny a foot more than the usual price …’
(#litres_trial_promo) By August, 1760, he was able to write to his brother Joseph, ‘I perhaps may cut upwards of a hundred Pine Apples this year’
(#litres_trial_promo) and when he went on his annual trip to Harrogate to drink the waters, cargoes of nectarines, peaches, plums and melons followed him there.
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With the house and gardens completed, Richard needed a new wife to share his good fortune, and on 1 November, 1757, he married for the second time. He had not had to look far, for his bride was his first cousin, Anna Maria Edge, the widow of a Hull merchant, Thomas Edge. She was described in a local newspaper as being ‘a Lady of the most distinguished merit, & blessed with every amiable qualification that can adorn her sex’.
(#litres_trial_promo) She also had three children, Dicky, Bella and Kitty, to whom Richard appears to have been a most affectionate stepfather. ‘If at any time you should think my advice may be of Service,’ he told Kitty, ‘upon application I will give it to you honestly and sincerely to the best of my judgement, just the same as if you was my own Child.’
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Comfortably settled in his new home, Richard immersed himself in the life of a country squire. ‘Gentlemen from Hull hunted with me,’ ran his diary entry for 23 February, 1756, and on the subsequent days through until the 29th he wrote, ‘Ditto. Breakfasted, dined and suppd with me.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He hunted hares with a pack of harriers and frequently alluded to his runs in his letters. ‘My brother Parson and his wife came to see us the 11th of this month,’ he wrote to Bella Edge on 23 October, 1759, ‘and returned to Hull on the 21st. The day before they were a-Hunting in the Lawn with very great diversion. Killed and Eat four Brace of Hares and two Couple of Rabbits.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In December he told his niece Polly, ‘I have been able to mount my Hunter and ride a Chaise. Your Aunt and Kitty goes in the Coach a Hunting when the weather will permit. Once, twice or three times a week I accompany them therein to the field and back.’
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The daily entries in his pocket books show that scarcely a day went by without him entertaining somebody, either to lunch or dinner. If it wasn’t Parson Paul, then it was family or his tenants and neighbours. No doubt they relished their visits to Sledmere, for Richard was nothing if not a bon-vivant. They would have expected to find copious amounts of game on the table, such as hare, partridge and venison, but there were often surprises in store. In October, 1759, for example, he thanked his Danzig brother-in-law, Randolph Hobman, ‘for the kind present of the bagg of Sturgeon’,
(#litres_trial_promo) while in December he received ‘a forequarter of very fine Lamb and some Oysters’
(#litres_trial_promo) from ‘Brother Parson Sykes’. The same year he wrote to Joseph Denison in London to thank him for the olives that had been sent and proved ‘very good and acceptable’, and to order 12lbs of chocolate. He sent bottled mushrooms and potted hare to his friends in London, but a gift of potted char sent to him by his brother Parson got left behind in Hull, his servant Bob ‘not knowing what it was’.
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Your Melon was good
The Flesh red as blood
The flavour & juices how fine!
Here’s a health to ‘Squire Sykes’
Whom no man dislikes
I’ll drink it as oft as I dine.
wrote Parson Walmisley from Malton on 11 August, 1759.
(#litres_trial_promo) He would have found no shortage of drink with which to charge his glass. The new Cellar contained ‘twenty-four New Hogsheads Iron Bound, seven half Ditto, ten Twenty Gallon casks, Eight Gantrys’
(#litres_trial_promo) and it was well stocked, for Port was not the only drink for which Richard had a fondness. In November, 1759, he wrote of having received fifty-nine dozen bottles of wine from Robert Norris, and in the following January told him ‘I have been inspecting into my Stock of Madeira and to oblige you I have sent you seven Doz. by my Market cart … and can spare you 5 Doz. more.’
(#litres_trial_promo) This was in addition to eight dozen bottles of ‘Old Hock’ which he had pledged to spare him from his cellar only a few days earlier, while February found him writing once more to Robert Norris, inquiring anxiously, ‘When do you draw off the Red Wine? I must have some fit to drink about next October.’
(#litres_trial_promo) For the chosen few there was a rare treat, the ‘water of life’:‘I got one Mr Richard Lawson, a Broker in London,’ he wrote to Joseph Denison in November, 1759, ‘to Buy me two or three bottles of Usquaba. The best of my remembrance he bought it of one Burdon, famous at that time, and having none Left desire you will buy me two Quart bottles of it, the best and send it by the first ship to Hull.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The good life that Richard was enjoying is reflected in his portrait, which he commissioned from Henry Pickering, an artist who liked to paint people ‘in character’. Richard was rich and successful, he had a delightful new house, and he now had an instant family. Childless himself, Richard had a warm and affectionate nature which reveals itself best in his relationship with two close members of his family, his half-brother Joseph and his favourite niece, Polly, portraits of whom hung in his dressing room.
Joseph Sykes was Richard’s junior by seventeen years and was the product of their father’s second marriage to Martha Donkin. Since he never really knew his father, who died in 1726 when he was only three, Joseph had always looked to his older brother for support. He worked in the family business and Richard thought so highly of him that in 1753, when Joseph had just turned thirty, he made him a partner. ‘I have turned over the Charge of the Counting House,’ he wrote to his brother-in-law, Randolph Hobman in August, 1753, ‘to my Brother … for I am mostly in the Country when in Health.’
(#litres_trial_promo) That summer Richard went to a lot of trouble to help smooth the path for his brother to get married to a Miss Dorothy ‘Dolly’ Twigge, against the express wishes of his mother. ‘I observe that Mr Jos. Sykes’, wrote the prospective bride’s father, Nicholas Twigge, in June, 1753, ‘has communicated to you what passed at his last visits betwixt him, myself and Dolly, the Substance of which was that he made an offer of himself of which I disapproved but my Daughter accepted … I always thought the consent of Parents and nearest relations necessary for the happiness of the young ones.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He did, however, go on to say that he believed ‘as do you, that their affections are mutually engaged and so engaged that if I was now to attempt to break the affair, I should be under the greatest fear for the consequences’. He finished by asking ‘In the meantime if Mrs Sykes has any particular reason why she would not have her son’s marriage to take place, I should be glad to know it …’
It turned out that Joseph’s mother did indeed have very strong objections, which Richard laid out in his reply. ‘She says the frequent Headaches your daughter had at Hull must frequently disable her from looking over her family, that her son’s Industry must be spent at the discretion of Servants, and that she has instances in her family of great Miscarriages from the Mistress being Sickly … indeed there seems so great an aversion that it will be impossible to get over it. I need not tell you how bad a prospect there is where the Mother is so averse to the Lady.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Richard did not give up, however, for he could not bear to see Joseph so unhappy, and in the end he persuaded both sets of parents to allow the marriage, which took place in June, 1754 and turned out to be a very happy one. In spite of Joseph’s mother’s fears that Dolly’s health would lead to her having endless miscarriages, she gave birth to seven children, all of whom survived into adulthood, and she lived to the ripe old age of sixty-nine.
Richard’s niece was the only daughter of his younger brother, Parson Sykes, the Revd Mark Sykes, Rector of Roos, and although she was christened Maria, her Uncle always affectionately referred to her as Polly. His correspondence with her shows him to have taken an almost paternal interest in her upbringing. For example, in a letter to her dated 2 July, 1753, when she was fourteen, he gently chastised her for her last letter, which contained little more than ‘compliments love & duty’, expressing hope that ‘your next will be more entertaining … by giving me a description of your Journey as well as the Country Situation and prospect from your friend’s House and Garden’; he offered her advice on healthy eating – ‘The latter abounds with fruit. I make no doubt but you have been tempted to taste thereof. A little at proper times may be both good and wholesome as too much hurtful. I hope you are so prudent as to require no reminding you of that or anything else which may contribute either to your health or benefit’, and made a few suggestions of a more personal nature – ‘You will be very observing to give your friend as little trouble as possible, and do you mind to lay by your things in a careful manner and not to litter up your room with them. The one is commendable, the latter a sluttish and an indolent disposition and an unpardonable fault in a young lady.’
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A pastel portrait of Polly, done when she was in her early teens, shows her seated on a red stool wearing a white dress with a blue sash. She has thick curly brown hair to her shoulders and a sweet intelligent face wearing a mischievous smile, in which one can detect a touch of the ‘gidiness’ to which her uncle referred in his next letter. The time had come, he said, to cast this off ‘and become more Circumspect and thoughtful’. He showed his pious nature when he urged her not to forget her daily prayers, nor to ‘repeat them as a Girl at School does her Lessen but in a most humble posture with a devout Mind in such a manner as will be most acceptable to that Good and Gracious God your Creator’. He ended the letter ‘God preserve you Bless you and make you a good Woman.’
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When Polly was twenty, she was courted by and became engaged to John de Ponthieu, the eldest son of Josias de Ponthieu, the head of a successful Linen trading company, based in London but with strong links in Hull. It was a good match, the young man having a reputation for being ‘lively and active’ and ‘indefatigable in business’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was also well-off, having an inheritance of £6,000, which being added to Polly’s expectations of £4,000 enabled them to begin life on the not insubstantial sum of £10,000. They would have a house in London in Friday Street, and the free use of his family’s two villas, one on the outskirts of London, the other in Sir Thomas Egerton’s park near Manchester.
It was quite clearly the intention of Polly’s future father-in-law to keep a close eye on the young couple, and he set down his advice to them in no uncertain terms. He exhorted them ‘not to set out in an expensive way, to have every day a regular table of two dishes with vegetables & fruit pyes, & for desert the common fruit in season – to have no more servants than what are useful, a coachman, a footman, a cook, a chambermaid & the housekeeper; to dine and sup out very seldom, except with select friends with whom we make no ceremony; & who afford great satisfaction & pleasure & little expense; for I put it down as a known maxim that no person can receive much company & treat in an elegant manner but they must have great anxiety & trouble which overbalances the pleasure such company can afford them; besides the expense which is always considerable, everybody vying who shall exceed in luxury, or as they call it Genteel Taste.’
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‘Tho’ my Vanity will not permit me to think myself dirt yet I must acknowledge in point of fortune Polly might have done better,’ John wrote to her father, Parson, who appears to have at first opposed the match, ‘yet in Birth, Virtue and Honesty, I will give up to none.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Uncle Richard, on the other hand, was delighted and soon after her wedding on 5 June, 1759, wrote her a charming letter in which he reminded her of the particular care and regard which he had always entertained for her and her happiness. He hoped that her husband would find that the marriage state was ‘a Heaven upon Earth’. ‘Now my Dears,’ he continued, ‘… May the Day of your Marriage continue to the day of your Deaths, that you may Enjoy not only all the Happyness this world can afford but also all those in that which is to come. Our sincere Love waits upon your Father … and all the Families of your New Relations unknown to us and it will give us great pleasure if at any time their Affairs will permitt them to come here to partake of my One Dish which is a Friendly and Hearty welcome, and if any of the gentlemen like Hunting, perhaps I can in the Season here entertain them both as to the Country and Diversion. I wrote to your Pappa at Hull how we celebrated the day here at night. I exhibited some fireworks. We received the cakes and gloves for which we return you thanks for your kind remembrance of us both.’
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What hope there was for these two young people! A pair of portraits painted on the occasion of their marriage show her clutching a posy of roses, looking elegant and pretty, and him dressed in a coat edged with gold braid, positively oozing bonhomie and self-confidence. They moved to London from where John wrote rapturously to his father-in-law soon after the wedding, ‘from my Wife, my Servants, my Coach and my horses, one may truly say I’m a Lucky Dog’.
(#litres_trial_promo) He seemed particularly pleased with his mode of transport. ‘Our Equipage is as genteel a one as any I’ve seen, not Gaudy but gay; it’s painted Crimson mosaick; a pair of good horses, bays; they cost seventy guineas.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He also dwelt with great emphasis upon ‘their Assembly’. Assemblies were all the rage in London at the time. ‘There is not a street in London free from them,’ wrote Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ‘and some spirited ladies go to seven in a night.’
(#litres_trial_promo) These gatherings, which mixed conversation and cards with dancing, took place in the evening, and while they had begun their life in the early part of the century as quite small affairs, they had since developed into something much bigger, with the numbers of those attending running into the hundreds. ‘We have at length concluded the Assembly to the satisfaction of everybody; the number we have limited to 150 which is filled by the most considerable Merchants we have. We have about fifty petitioners desirous of being admitted in case of vacancies. The subscription price is two Guineas. I have sent you enclosed a Copy of our regulations, with a list of the Subscribers, which no doubt you will be glad to see; as I daresay nobody in Hull has it, and it has become a general topick of converstaion here in London – I shall by this means keep up the Connections that will be useful to us in business without having the trouble and expense of seeing them at home.’
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To cap it all, Polly was three months pregnant. ‘God Grant that you may arrive to your full time and then to a Speedy Delivery, as well as recovery,’ wrote Uncle Richard in September. ‘I am very much pleased to learn of your rising at six of the Clock, for when the days are so long as to permit it, tis certainly the most pleasantest part of the day.’
(#litres_trial_promo) When he wrote to her on 3 December, however, he noted that she had been ‘put under some restraint’, and counselled her that ‘if you were not so careful of yourself as you ought to have been, it may now be necessary for your future health.’
(#litres_trial_promo) A letter written by Richard to his brother, Mark, a week later revealed that a shadow had fallen across the young couple’s happiness. ‘I am not a little uneasy for Polly’s second Miscarriage and wish the advice they have consulted may have the desired effect for the future.’
(#litres_trial_promo) By March, Richard was extremly worried. ‘I am under great concern for our niece de Ponthieu,’ he wrote to his brother Joseph. ‘Brother Parson gave me but a very disagreeable account of the state of her health.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He wrote to Mark suggesting that a trip to Sledmere might do Polly the world of good. ‘I think it was well Judged to come down to try her Native Air since the Doctors that have been consulted could not do her any service. As soon as she is so much better and dare venture to under go the fatigue of a Journey here … I will meet her God permitting at Beverley with our Coach to conduct her here, and I am not without hopes that this air may partly contribute towards re-establishing her in her former state of Health.’
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But it was not to be. Worn down and depressed after her miscarriages, Polly was wasting away, suffering from what appears to have been Anorexia. ‘Her appetite is so bad,’ wrote Richard to Joseph on 20 March, ‘that she does not take nourishment sufficient to support nature, so must in consequence rather lose than gain strength.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Richard hoped she might be tempted by the Sledmere dishes she had loved in the past, and in April wrote to John de Ponthieu suggesting that she ‘perhaps could eat a Sledmere Pidgeon or a young Rabbitt … and if she can think of anything Else that Either this place or the Neighbourhood can produce that will be acceptable, let me know and will do my best endeavours to obtain it for Her with all the pleasure imaginable’.
(#litres_trial_promo) By 1 June, however, he noted that ‘every letter gives less encouragement of hopes of our Dear Polly’s recovery’, and went on to admit ‘I must own to you I have been preparing myself for the change these two months past, but while there is Life would hope for the best and pray God support you all and all of us against the Severe Tryal with Christian Patience.’
(#litres_trial_promo) On 18 June poor old Uncle Richard made the following entry in his pocket book, ‘Niece Polly de Ponthieu died at 7 o’clock of the evening at York.’
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The tragic loss of his beloved Polly receives remarkably little mention in Richard’s correspondence at this time. He took a stoical view, dealing with her death in the same way that, a few months later, he advised his friend Joseph Denison to cope after the death in the same week of both his father and his son. ‘Though these trials to our frail nature … appear very severe requiring great Fortitude of Mind to reconcile ourselves to the all Wise God dispensing providence,’ he wrote, ‘yet we must believe what ever he orders and directs is for the best … Let us sit down and seriously Consider asking ourselves at the same time will my Anxious Soul be benefitted by my unreasonable fretting? Will it not rather Endanger my future Health and constitution, or will it bring him to life again?’ When he had finished dispensing advice, he turned at once to other important matters. ‘Please to buy for us 2lb of best Hyson Tea, 2lb of Fine Green, 4lb of Gongs and 12lb of Common Breakfast Bohea Tea for the servants and send it by shipping to Hull directing it for me to be left at my brother Joseph’s.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Life must go on.
The death of Polly may well have been tempered by his growing fondness for his three stepchildren, of whom Bella seems to have been a favourite, and many amusing letters passed between them. He praised her artistic endeavours. ‘Shell work properly adapted and a Geneous to Imitate Nature,’ he told her, ‘is not only an agreeable amusement, but very delightful and Entertains both oneself & friends. I apprehend by this time, as it was your Taste before you left Sledmire, that you are a perfect Artist thereof and that you will be able to decorate every Room here where it wants your finishing Handy Work.’
(#litres_trial_promo) When she took up singing, he gave her a new nickname. ‘I think I must now drop all those familiar Names by which I out of my affection used to Apeller you & as you are become an Italian Singer I must now name you “the Belle Italienne” till another opportunity offers to change again for the better.’
(#litres_trial_promo) But perhaps what really drew them together was their shared love of pigs.
‘One of your Grunting Queens was brought to bed of eleven last week but one dead,’
(#litres_trial_promo) he wrote to her in October, 1759. The sow in question, nicknamed ‘The Chinese Queen’, had been a gift to Bella during the summer, so the news must have delighted her. The second litter, however, were all born dead. ‘I informed you what had happened to Her Majesty the Chinese Queen,’ Richard wrote the following January to Robert Norris, who had procured him the sow, ‘and desired to know what could be done for Her to prevent the like for the future, but you are silent.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Better news and a mystery followed in April. ‘I have had an uncommon increase of my family within this month past,’ he told Bella; ‘a Sow brought me Ten Piggs, six of which were Still Born, the remaining four by their Colour being mostly Black. By their form and shape we have strong suspicion to believe that His Chinese Majesty has not been so Chaste and Continent to Her Empress, who has not long to go before she will lay in, as becomes a faithful Husband. I can’t tell how John Yatton may not be to Blame in this affair, for you know he is their Guardian, and am afraid he has connived to their Love Meetings … If I conjecture right, the Emperor has by some token or other given him to understand that as he is an unmarried person he would make him a Present of One of the Princesses when fitt, and I have heard it reported of him that he is a great Lover of such Princesses, that he is for having two at a time, one not contenting him.’
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Richard’s new marriage brought great happiness to him and life into Sledmere with all the hustle and bustle and comings and goings that a family with children brings. These were amongst the best years of his life. His love of his house, his pride in his achievements – in his richly laden ships, his acres of land, his plantations and his gardens, his harriers and his pineapples – and his affection for his family are all self-evident. Sadly he had precious little time to enjoy them. ‘I fully intended coming over the next rent day,’ wrote Richard to John Rhodes, one of his tenants, on 9 January, 1761, ‘had it pleased God to have kept me well and free from Gout, but I have been confined to my Chamber since the 27th of last month with a very Severe fitt.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Yet in spite of the fact that he was suffering so much, and having constantly to surrender to Dr Chambers’s never-ending battery of remedies, he could not put aside his fondness for the bottle. Only four days later he wrote to his brother Joseph, ‘I thank you for your tender for some Butts of mountain wine at £23. 10s. I expect I have so much old Mountain left as will last my time or longer.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Prophetic words. On 19 January, he told ‘Brother Parson’ ‘I would flatter myself that this fit of the Gout is almost gone, but has left a great weakness.’
(#litres_trial_promo) A few days later he was dead.
The following epitaph, intended for a monument to him to be erected in the church, but never used, was written by his brother:
He was of strict Integrity
Universal benevolence
And a fast Friend
All the general Virtues shone conspicuously in him
Save Ever easy & cheerful in himself
Like Light he reflected
Joy, Pleasure & Happiness on all around him
He was a Grace to his Fortune
An Honor to his Country
True to his King and his God
Beloved while living-Lamented now Dead.
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CHAPTER II The Parson (#ulink_3dd3332b-83db-54eb-bc11-426ef938d7e2)
Richard’s heir, Parson, was five years younger than him and conspicuously lacked his charm and joie de vivre. His portrait by Sir George Chalmers, which hangs to the left of the bed in the Red Room, shows him seated in a heavy wooden chair, dressed in powdered wig, black gown and bands. In his hands he holds a Sermon, the text of which is ‘Without Charity all is unavailing towards Salvation. Charity is the Chief Benefit of the Suffering and Death of Jesus Christ.’ He is thin and slightly bent, and though there is something of an expression of kindness and benevolence in his eyes, his demeanour is a solemn one. This may have something to do with the fact that of his six children, only one survived beyond the age of twenty-one.
Relatively little is known about the life of Parson Sykes. He was educated at Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Peterhouse College, and it was while he resided there that he met and fell in love with Decima Woodham, the daughter of a Cambridgeshire surgeon, Twyford Woodham of Ely. She was said to have been ‘remarkable both for beauty and cleverness’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Her portrait, painted when she was in middle age, hangs on the other side of the bed in the Red Room, and inspired my Grandfather to describe her as ‘gorgeous in white satin, lace and diamond buttons – very handsome and commanding looking’.
(#litres_trial_promo) They were married in 1735, on which occasion Parson’s uncle, Mark Kirkby, presented him with the Living of Roos, near Hull, thus setting him up for life in the style to which second sons of the Gentry were accustomed. They moved into the Rectory, an imposing red brick house, where their first child Polly was born in 1739, followed two years later by a son, Mark. A second boy, Richard was born in 1742, but died in infancy, while a third, also Richard, born in 1743, survived. After the death of their fourth son, Joseph, who was born in 1744, there was a gap of five years before the birth of their sixth and final child, Christopher, on 23 May, 1749.
Mark, the eldest son and heir, seems to have shown some promise at an early age, if one can believe the rather gushing words of the Rector of the nearby Parish of Patrington, Mr Nicols, who wrote to Parson in 1748, ‘I can hardly say which gave me most pleasure, whether to see the first Essays & Blossoms of a fine Genius in Master Mark’s letter, or the Rich Fruit & perfection of one in your Composition.’
(#litres_trial_promo) A year later Mark was writing to his father in a manner which suggests a precociously polite little boy. ‘Honored Sir, My Mama & I received an unspeakable pleasure at hearing that you was very well,’
(#litres_trial_promo) he wrote, the large scrawling handwriting of a boy of eight contrasting curiously with the quaint formality of expression. It is reassuring to learn that he was not all good. The year 1754 found Uncle Richard writing to Mark’s sister, Polly, ‘Your Brother doubtless has transgressed in a very high degree having forgott his duty to his Creator, Father, Mother and his other relations.’ Whatever the temptation was that he had succumbed to at the age of twelve remains a mystery, though it was serious enough for his uncle to state, somewhat dramatically, ‘the End I am afraid must be endless ruin and destruction of both Body and Soul’.
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There is a painting of Mark which hangs in the Red Room, next to that of his mother. He is wearing a beautiful red velvet suit with a richly embroidered matching waistcoat and lace jabot. His hand is resting on a globe. He has youthful good looks and a faint smirk playing across his face. ‘Look how fortune has smiled upon me’, he seems to be saying. Perhaps he was planning his Grand Tour, or which of the great universities he was going to attend. The label on the painting tells the sad truth; Mark Sykes 1741–1760. He died aged nineteen, the same year as his sister, two years before his younger brother, Richard.
Only two children survived to witness the move to Sledmere, which Parson inherited on the death of his brother, and which then consisted of an estate of just over five thousand acres. They moved in at the end of the summer. ‘I am curious to know how you pass your time in Sledmire,’ wrote his son-in-law, John de Ponthieu, on 10 September. ‘Pray do you delight in Gardning – how are your Trees, do they get the better of your Cold Climate, have you pine Apples in perfection? I should think in so private a place as Sledmire Gardning would be a very great amusement, especially as you cannot hunt – I intend you a parcel of Shrubs this Autumn. I desire you would order a spot to be dug up in your garden for them, as much sheltered as possible otherwise they might die.’
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Reading through the considerable volume of Parson’s correspondence written after he moved from Roos, gardening appears to have been the last thing on his mind. Scarcely was he settled than his son Richard fell ill. ‘I am very sorry for the account you give me of poor Cozen Dicky,’ wrote his banker and cousin by marriage, Joseph Denison, in November 1762. ‘I am very sensible of the affliction you must be under as a Parent, having felt it myself, when I lost both my boys in the same year. I have never heard of his being so ill before.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The following April he was sending his condolences ‘on your late severe loss, which has given both me and my Wife much sorrow’.
(#litres_trial_promo) There were frequent attacks of the gout, rendering him often bedridden, as well as keeping Dr Chambers as busy as he had been with Sledmere’s previous incumbent. Much of Parson’s time was taken up with clerical business and his high standing was reflected in the fact that on three occasions he was chosen to represent the Clergy of the East Riding in Convocation. That he had a high opinion of himself in this field is shown by the fact that when one local clergyman, the Rector of Hunmanby, wrote him a letter saying that he was considering standing himself, Parson scrawled across the letter ‘the man must have been drunk when he wrote it’.
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His primary interest however was making money, in particular by investment in mortgages and speculation in government bonds. He was described by one contemporary, John Courtney, a wealthy young financier, as ‘an artful cunning fellow, ready to take all advantages where he can’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Numerous letters he wrote to his London banker, Joseph Denison, testify to his love of speculating. Denison, who had also looked after his brother’s affairs, was an extraordinary figure, a former Leeds bank clerk who moved to London and prospered to such a degree that he came to own his own bank. He married Sarah Sykes as his first wife, who was a distant cousin of Parson’s. Celebrated for his spectacular meanness as he clawed his way to riches, he left great fortunes to his children, principally to his son, William Joseph Denison, who became one of Yorkshire’s biggest landowners and left a fortune of £2,300,000 in 1849, but also to his daughters, one of whom, Elizabeth, married the Marquis Conyngham, and became notorious as the mistress of George IV. ‘I wish most heartily I had now your £10,000 by me,’ began a typical letter from Denison to Parson, written in November, 1762. ‘I would lay it out this very day, & I am very confident I could clear you 10 p.ct in a few months … but it must be done immediately … you may Judge what an immense profit will be and is made.’ The letter concluded with a hint of his tightfistedness, conveniently blamed on his client. ‘I was once going to send this by Express, but I did not know if it might be agreeable to you, or whether you would think the expense too much.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Parson celebrated the profits from one deal early in their partnership by paying £1,000 for a single diamond, equivalent to approximately £50,000 in today’s terms, which he made into a ring which graced his finger for ever after.
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Denison, with a canny eye for the future, was also careful to cultivate ties with Parson’s son and heir. ‘Your Son was heartily welcome,’ wrote Denison in March, 1770, ‘to any small Civilitys it was in our power to show him during his short stay with us … He is a very worthy young Gentleman, & you are very happy in having so pleasing a prospect of his future amiable conduct and usefulness.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Parson’s only surviving son, Christopher, was twenty at the time and down from Brasenose College, Oxford, for a brief spell in London as the guest of Mr and Mrs Denison at their house in St Mary Axe. He had gone up to Oxford in the autumn of 1767, where, after the obligatory period of idleness and tomfoolery, requiring many parental admonitions, he appears to have grown into a model student. ‘I have not at any period studied harder than at present,’ he wrote to his father early in 1770.
Christopher’s decision to devote himself to study appears to have been inspired by the love of a woman. ‘I solemnly declare,’ he told Parson, ‘it was my attachment to Miss B. which alone brought to light what little abilities I may now possess; it was the desire I had of rendering myself worthy of her which first roused me to pursue my studies with application. They cost me for some months many hours of pain, but by a resolute pursuance they afterwards became a pleasure & now I may safely say the pursuit of knowledge is my only pleasure in the absence of her.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He studied law, history, botany, French and drawing under men who were the experts in their field in the world, such as ‘the famous Scotchman Williamson’
(#litres_trial_promo) who taught him mathematics and Thomas Hornsby, his astronomy tutor, one of the leading scientists of the day, whose observations of light ascension and declination were not surpassed in accuracy until 1925, and who went on to build the Radcliffe Observatory. There seems to have been no stopping Christopher in his pursuit of learning, all of which contributed to his development as a perfect example of the Renaissance Man. ‘I have begun a new study,’ he wrote on 6 May, 1770, ‘to add to all my other business. Music as far as it depends upon Mathematical principles, & strum a fiddle an hour or two every day.’
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The woman he loved, ‘Miss B.’ or ‘my dearest Bessy’, as he commonly referred to her, was Elizabeth Tatton, the daughter of William Tatton Esq. of Wythenshawe in Cheshire. She was a friend of long standing who was referred to in one letter as being ‘a woman I have from childhood adored’.
(#litres_trial_promo) It was a match that both his parents had apparently vigorously promoted. ‘When my heart was free and unconquered by Miss B.’ Christopher reminded Parson, ‘I well remember how many arguments you both used to persuade me to call upon her in a morning to walk out, & how you forwarded every opportunity of bringing us acquainted.’
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Writing to his father from the Denisons’, Christopher made quite clear his intentions so far as Bessy was concerned, strengthened all the more by his admiration for his hostess. ‘I am very fond of Mrs Denison,’ he told him; ‘she seems to be a very amiable & agreeable woman & of the sweetest temper; surely with such a woman the marriage State must be the happiest Mortals here enjoy (& such my Bessy is) for without good sense & a sweet temper every little accident will embitter its pleasures & any very unfortunate one even destroy its happiness … If unjust pray correct me for as I shall shortly (with the blessing of God & my Parents approbation) marry my Bessy, I could wish to know whether I have formed a right opinion of that state.’
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Soon after Parson received this letter, he gave his consent to the marriage. ‘I already perceive it will require the greatest economy to make my allowance serve till I am married,’ Christopher told him, echoing the familiar cries of incautious students down the ages. ‘Not-withstanding the many bills I have already paid, there still remains to pay as far as I can guess £170 – I have now by me £50.’ He was keen to show his father that in his opinion not one penny of the money spent had been wasted. ‘I shall send into the country goods to a very considerable amount: a very valuable collection of books in most branches of science; a much admired collection of prints of the best Masters which will be of infinite use in drawing & in forming a pure & just taste; a collection of coins not to be despised; Mathematical instruments & many miscellaneous things of less moment, with a set of beautiful specimens of the various kinds of Fossils collected by a man the most famous in the Fossil world; all these may most fairly be valued at £500. & I hope I may without vanity say that I either am now or shall shortly with the blessing of God be able to make a considerable use of the articles here contained.’
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The marriage between Christopher and his ‘beloved Bessy’ took place on 23 October, 1770, at St Wilfred’s, Northenden, the Tatton family’s parish church. As well as personal happiness, it brought him great riches, for not only did he officially become the inheritor of Sledmere and all its estates, but Bessy brought with her a considerable dowry from her father, in the form of two banker’s drafts, one for £10,000, the other for £2,542. These were the first payments as part of the terms of the marriage settlement which had been signed on 1 September, under which Christopher was to receive a total of £16,000 out of the fortune left to his wife by her maternal aunt, Elizabeth Egerton of Tatton.
Though he took his bride to Sledmere on 29 October and stayed for five weeks, it was never Christopher’s intention to move into the house, as might have been expected, preferring instead to allow his parents to live on there, while he removed his bride to Wheldrake Hall, a modest house owned by the family to the south-east of York. After Christmas the young couple travelled together to London for an extended shopping spree, taking lodgings at Jewels Hotel, Surrey Street, which ran from the Strand down to the Embankment.
This was an important time in London’s history, with the City growing in power as a financial centre and rapidly expanding its banking, shipping and trading activities, and as they stood on the terrace of Somerset House, a few minutes’ walk from their hotel, looking out over the Thames, Christopher and Bessy surveyed a scene which had changed little since Canaletto had painted it twenty years previously. As they looked west up to the Banqueting Hall, Westminster Abbey and Westminster Hall, and east down to St Paul’s, a view which took in numerous facades of fine waterfront mansions and the myriad spires of city churches, dozens of small boats sailed the water: lighters, barges, brigs, hoys, dinghies, bum-boats, ferry-boats, packets and wherries all scuttling about and connected in some way to their larger cousins, colliers from the North, whalers from Greenland, merchant ships from the Continent, East Indiamen and West Indiamen, and square riggers from America who plied their trade in ever increasing numbers in and out of the port of London. To the east stood a monument to the man who had restored the greatness of Britain. The newly completed Blackfriars Bridge, opened in 1770, was named Pitt Bridge, after William Pitt, whose successful, almost single-handed, prosecution of the Seven Years War had brought France to her knees and Canada under the British flag. What a sense of excitement and pride the young couple must have felt.
In accordance with their new status, there was much shopping to be done, details of which Christopher meticulously recorded in neat, tiny handwriting in his account book. A large quarto volume protected by a pale calfskin dust jacket, and stamped on the front with the initials, C.S., and the date 1770, it was discovered a few years ago hidden away in the Estate Office, and has now been restored to the Library, where it is one of the most important books to have survived. It tells us in the first few pages exactly the kind of things a fashionable young couple down from the country would be buying to take home. For Christopher there were new clothes – pairs of breeches, a waistcoat, gentlemen’s ruffles, a sword and belt – and a visit to his tailor, while Bessy visited the milliner, and the barber ‘for curls’, and bought two gowns, one of India silk, lace trimming, a fan and cloak, and shoes. On 28 February her new husband took her to Mr Young, the antique dealer, and spent the not inconsiderable sum of £106. 14s. 6d. on jewels. They also went food shopping and ordered a whole Parmesan cheese, weighing 55 ½lbs, a Stilton cheese and some tea.
Then there was their new home to consider, which, having stood empty for many years, required completely refurbishing. On 29 January they visited Mr Elliot’s and spent £112. 2s. 8d. on china, while 6 February found them at Mr Christie’s buying pictures for £82. 8s. 6d. Ten days later they bought a second lot for £63, and further purchases of picture and prints from various dealers bought the sum spent up to £234. 17s. Their biggest single expense was on ‘plate’, bought from Mr Young on 20 February at a total cost of £303. 18s. In addition to these major acquisitions, they spent considerable sums on furniture, carpets, books, busts and a medicine chest, as well as paying visits to Mr Wood for a new chaise at £60, and Mr O’Keefe for a coach at £121. 15s.
(#litres_trial_promo) Christopher also spent money on adding to his collections of coins and fossils. They returned to Sledmere on 5 March, where they no doubt imparted the good news to Parson and Mrs Sykes that Bessy was four months pregnant. They finally arrived back at Wheldrake on 20 March, Christopher having bought himself a new horse for the journey.
The next few months were spent settling into their new home. Correspondence between Christopher and his wine merchant, Sam Hall, shows that in true family tradition a love of fine wine ran in his blood and that stocking the cellar was a priority. He had evidently suggested to Hall, that he might come and personally supervise its laying down and must have given him some vague description of Wheldrake. ‘The notion I have of your place of abode from your description,’ wrote Hall, ‘is that it has been some old uninhabited mansion (at least by human kind) and which feeling the weighty hand of time call’d loudly for such assistance as I make no doubt you have given to it in yr. best manner.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Christopher took delivery of a hundred dozen bottles of Champagne and five hogsheads at the end of April, and on 22 May received the following letter from Hall: ‘My father has wrote to London for six dozen of the very best French Claret that can be had and it shall come with the Malmsey agreeable to your orders.’ He apologised for not being able to come and oversee things himself, but told him that ‘the wines that we sent you will be fine and fitt for Bottling by the time the bottles are become thoroughly dry (and if they were rinsed out with a little brandy it would be serviceable) and the sooner it is then done the better … you will please to direct your Buttler to lay them on their sides in a cool dry place of the cellar.’
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With the cellar organised and the furnishing complete, the house was ready to receive the new baby. Bessy was seven months pregnant when Christopher received a letter from her uncle, Joseph Stafford, expressing his family’s delight at the impending birth. ‘We are greatly rejoyced to hear you are likely to have an increase of your family soon,’ he wrote, ‘and most sincerely wish Mrs SYKES an happy Delivery & Luck in a Lad – according to yr. Cheshire phrase.’
(#litres_trial_promo) His sentiments were timely, and on 20 August his niece was delivered of a son, whom they christened Mark. A guinea was paid to the Northenden bell-ringers to ring out the good news to the neighbourhood. A few weeks later, Joseph Denison wrote to say how delighted he and his wife were ‘to hear the young gentleman is so well – our little Goods thank God are the same. Will is a perfect Parrott, & talks everything.’ His own wife, he added, ‘expects every day to follow Mrs SYKES’s example’.
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For Mrs Denison, however, whose good sense and sweet temper Christopher had so admired, it was not to be. A letter arrived in November from Denison’s Clerk, Nicholas Dawes, bearing melancholy news. ‘I am Extremely sorry to acquaint you that last Night about nine o’clock it pleased God to take away the Life of Mrs Denison after lying in. She was taken with a Slow fever, under which she laboured ten days, & tho’ under the care of two eminent Physicians, their utmost endeavours proved ineffectual, so that it ended with a Mortification in her Bowels.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Denison was heartbroken, ‘incapable of writing’. When he did eventually put pen to paper, it was to his old friend Parson that he turned. ‘I seem,’ he said, ‘to have many Afflictions to struggle with by the removal of those most near and dear to me.’
(#litres_trial_promo) It was something that Parson knew about more than most.
Now that Christopher was settled, with a happy marriage and a son and heir, he turned his attention to what was to be the great work of his life: the improvement of Sledmere. Thomas Jeffreys’s Yorkshire Atlas, published in 1771, gives one a rough idea of what the place then looked like, its appearance virtually unchanged since the alterations carried out by Uncle Richard. The house stood in front of a rectangular ‘garden’, with a few trees on either side and the Mere in the middle. To the east lay the Kitchen Garden with its glasshouses. South of the Mere, beyond the ha-ha, ran the main road from York to Bridlington, bisecting the U-shaped belt of trees known as The Avenue. The village was scattered mostly to the east of the house, but there were a few dwellings to the south-west. All around, the Wold land rose up to a height of more than five hundred feet.
In order to understand the full import of the work carried out by Christopher Sykes, which was to eventually earn him the sobriquet ‘Reformer of the Wolds’, it is necessary to understand the nature of the land as it then was. Farming as we know it today did not exist. To the north and south of the village lay a small number of large open arable fields. These were divided into long strips, ‘ridge and furrow’, which were owned by individual farmers. The land owned by a farmer was rarely in one place, his strips being widely distributed across the entire field system, and although he farmed this land himself, the management and regulation of the open fields as a whole were vested in the community and administered through the manorial court. A wide range of crops were grown, on a two- or three-course rotation, with one third of all land lying fallow at any one time; long-eared or sprat barley was grown on the better soils, with naked or wheat barley on the intermediate or less fertile soils. Summer and winter varieties of wheat, including buckwheat or French wheat, were also grown as was massledine, oats, clean rye, beans and peas.
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Beyond the village and its surrounding arable lands lay vast sheep walks which dominated the great expanse of bare upland that was the landscape, ‘open, scarce a bush or tree … for several Miles’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Daniel Defoe described the Wolds as being like ‘the plains and downs … of Salisbury’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Extensive rabbit warrens were also a characteristic feature of the area, one of the biggest being at Cowlam Farm, just outside Sledmere. This was described by the agriculturalist, William Marshall, writing in 1788, as being ‘the largest upon these Wolds; and probably the most valuable warren in the Island. The … farm contains about nineteen hundred acres; and, generally speaking, it is all warren.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Bounded by sod walls, they were an important part of the local economy, on a par with sheep. Each warren supported several thousand pairs of rabbits, yielding between 100,000 and 150,000 couple annually, whose skinned carcasses would be sold for meat in the industrial towns of the West Riding, as well as in local towns such as Hull, Beverley and York. The skins were dried and sold to furriers, whose main markets were the hat manufactories of London and Manchester.
This was all about to change, and the way it was transformed into the landscape that exists today was through enclosure. This was the replacement of the old open-field, strip-farming system, which was increasingly regarded as being outmoded and inefficient, with smaller fields both owned and controlled by one farmer. As the eighteenth century progressed, greater demands were being placed upon agriculture by a rapidly growing population, which rose from six million in 1741 to eight-point-nine million in 1801, and was to nearly double in the next half century. This created a powerful motive to improve productivity and in the minds of modern agricultural thinkers, amongst whom Christopher certainly numbered himself, enclosure was the way forward. It enabled landowners to improve their farming techniques, to consolidate their property into larger farms, and to add to its value by building farmhouses and outbuildings. Enclosed land also steadily rose in value, an important consideration since before 1800 each enclosure required the passing of an individual act of Parliament, making it an expensive business. A valuation carried out by Christopher’s steward, Robert Dunn, in May, 1776, estimated that the land at Sledmere unenclosed was worth between 1s. 3d. and 20s. an acre, rising to 2s.–20s. on enclosure, and 3s. 6d.–20s. after fifteen years.
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Though family legend has always maintained that Christopher was the pioneer in this department, the truth is that he was carrying on a tradition that had been started by his Uncle Richard, when he took in hand the land which formed The Avenue, and later an area to its west, to form the Park. In Richard’s lifetime he spent £40,000 on buying and enclosing land to consolidate the estate. ‘I yesterday signed an Article of Agreement,’ he had written to his brother Joseph in July, 1760, ‘to pay £1,550 for £31 a year net Tythe rent of thirty-six Oxgangs at East Heslerton which is fifty years purchase, but if an inclosure take place may not be too dear.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Christopher just did it on a larger scale. He began in 1771, when his account book recorded that he had spent £2,051 on ‘Inclosing’ at East Heslerton, and by 1775 he had instructed Robert Dunn to start on Sledmere. ‘Mr Dunn has perhaps already informed you,’ he wrote to one of his neighbours, Luke Lillingstone, in January, 1776, ‘that I propose to enclose Sledmire’,
(#litres_trial_promo) explaining to him that ‘In Sledmire … for some Years past there has not been above 500 Acres in Tillage … but upon the Inclosure the whole will be divided into three large and two smaller farms with not less than 1,500 or 1,600 Acres in Tillage.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In his lifetime Christopher was to spend £180,000 on adding 18,000 acres to the estate, and on enclosing and improving the land.
Apart from two estates bought in the early 1770s, at Wetwang and Myton Carr, most of Christopher’s major acquisitions took place in the 1780s, after his father’s death. In the intervening years he concentrated his attention on laying out a new landscape at Sledmere. He had begun planting as early as 1771, when he spent £70. 15s. 7d. on trees, taking delivery of two consignments, one bought from Mr Dixon, the second, larger order from Mr Telford. This was the start of a programme which began on a relatively small scale, with about fifteen acres a year being planted, and became increasingly ambitious. Being young and modern with his finger on the pulse of everything new in the world of science and art he probably found his uncle’s taste dull and outmoded. His earliest attempts at stamping his own ideas on the landscape can be seen in two drawings he made on a single sheet of paper which exists in the Library at Sledmere. The first is of Mr Perfects Design of the Plantations, which depicts the two belts of trees on either side of the Mere. The second shows ‘The alterations of the Plantations’. On the east side, which runs next to the village street, the belt was to be ‘fill’d up with Trees to cover the Houses’, while its inside edge adjoining the Mere was given a ragged, more informal appearance. The belt to the west, adjoining the church, was to be cut into shapes, forming a series of circles and a diamond with, interweaving them, ‘two little Serpentine Walks to Cross the plantation’.
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In 1775 Christopher decided to call in a professional to help him with his schemes: Thomas White, a landscape designer and nurseryman from West Retford near Gainsborough, who had previously worked for the celebrated Capability Brown on two major local projects at Sandbeck, South Yorkshire, and Temple Newsham, near Leeds. In April, 1776, he delivered to Christopher A General Plan for the Improvement of the Grounds at Sledmere, beautifully executed in watercolour on paper mounted on linen. This proposed the building of a new house to be sited directly in front of the existing stables, with the two buildings separated by lawns and a wooded area. It also showed the sites of three yet-to-be-designed farms, each of which would act as an ‘eyecatcher’ at the end of a vista. The plan covered a large area, with shelter belts proposed all round the boundaries and plantations topping the deep dales which are a feature of the Wolds. The most dramatic aspect of the new design was the sweeping away of Uncle Richard’s entire Avenue, leaving the area directly to the south of the house almost totally devoid of trees, and the filling in of the Mere. Although planting had already started on the boundaries, and some of White’s ideas were eventually to be incorporated into the final plan of the landscape, it is evident that Christopher was not entirely happy with the overall design. Though White continued for some years to supply him with trees, he was dropped the following year in favour of his more famous former employer.
On 18 September, 1777, Christopher recorded in his diary that ‘the Great Brown came to Sledmere in the morning early’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Lancelot Brown was the best-known landscape designer of the day, the successor to Kent, who died in 1748, and it is a measure of Christopher’s ambition that he chose to employ him. He would certainly have come highly recommended by two Yorkshire neighbours, Edwin Lascelles at Harewood, and Sir William St Quintin at Scampston, both of whose parks he had recently transformed. Brown stayed for a day and although no details exist of exactly what passed between them on this visit, one must assume that he was shown around the grounds and that they discussed what part of the existing landscape was to be retained and incorporated into any new scheme. With the enclosure of Sledmere progressing at a pace, Christopher would have been especially keen to finalise the positioning of the three new farms, to be called Castle, Life Hill and Marramatte. Brown left early the following morning, 19 September, his client’s mind thoroughly concentrated on the great task ahead.
Christopher was a ‘hands on’ gardener who had undoubtedly read Horace Walpole’s essay ‘On Modern Gardening’, written in 1770, in which he had stated his belief that ‘the possessor, if he has any taste, must be the best designer of his own improvements. He sees his situation in all seasons of the year, at all times of the day. He knows where beauty will not clash with convenience, and observes in his silent walks or accidental rides a thousand hints that must escape a person who in a few days sketches out a pretty picture, but has not had leisure to examine the details and relations of every part.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He lost no time in getting started, and the very next week found him personally ‘staking out’ a series of new plantations. ‘My method of planting,’ he wrote, ‘is in small holes made in the turf … The holes are made in the autumn at three feet asunder, and eight or ten inches over, returning the soil into the hole at the time of making it with the turf downwards.’ A month later, on 30 October, he ‘began to plant … having prepared several thousand holes’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The next day he made a note in his pocket book of an order he had placed with Thomas White for a further 109,500 trees – ‘20,000 seedling Larches, 50,000 Scotch fir seedling, 5,000 Spruce 2y.o, 10,000 Spruce 1y.o, 1,500 Weymouth pine, 2,000 Silver fir, 10,000 Beech seedling, 1,000 Sycamore, and 10,000 seedling Birch of 1 or 2y.o’.
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One of the reasons for the success of Christopher’s planting was that, as in all he did, he had immersed himself in the subject, learning everything that there was to know, and in the process becoming an expert in the chosen field. He understood that the most successful trees were those raised by the proprietor from seedling, taken from the bed exactly when they were required and planted immediately, so that they did not suffer from being out of the ground for too long. To this end he had two nurseries, one at Sledmere, the other at Wheldrake. An endpaper in the diary shows that his immediate requirements were 300,000 trees from White, 136,000 from John and George Telford, nurserymen from York, and 33,000 from William Shiells of Dalkeith, the majority of which would have been seedlings.
It was not only at Sledmere that Christopher had been planting. ‘Mrs S. was taken ill at three,’ reads the last entry in his pocket book for 1777, on 27 December, ‘and delivered between four and five in the morning of a Girl Elizabeth.’
(#litres_trial_promo) She was the fourth child born to Bessy since the arrival of Mark in August, 1771, all healthy, and making ‘a pretty little flock’
(#litres_trial_promo) as Joseph Denison referred to them in a letter to Parson. A second son, Tatton, named after his mother’s family, had been born on 22 August, 1772, followed by another boy, Christopher, in October, 1774. Their first daughter, Decima Hester Beatrix, was born in December, 1775, and the new-born Elizabeth completed the family.
In spite of the fact that Christopher owned and ran Sledmere and that the family now numbered seven, Parson and Mrs Sykes remained ensconced there, while their son and daughter-in-law were still living at Wheldrake. ‘As we have not met with a house to our satisfaction,’ Christopher had written to his brother-in-law, William Egerton, in December, 1775, ‘we shall probably stay here.’
(#litres_trial_promo) They appear to have lived fairly modestly with relatively few servants. There was Styan, the butler; William, Christopher’s valet, who had been with him since his bachelor days; Charlotte, Bessy’s personal maid; various ‘servant women’; a housekeeper; a gardener, Richard Cooper; a coachman, and a full time nanny, Nurse Moore, who was to be the longest serving member of the household. At the various times of Bessy’s pregnancies, the account book also shows payments to ‘Nurses’ and, in 1775, to a ‘Wet Nurse’.
Christopher did not keep a detailed diary recounting the events of his life, but in a series of little pocket books, sometimes ‘Goldsmith’s Almanack’ or perhaps ‘The Ladies Own Memorandum Book, or Daily Pocket Journal’, he briefly noted down his guests and dining companions, financial and estate matters, memoranda of servants, his travels, notes about gardening, etc., In the midst of which trivia are the occasional poignant reminders of more important personal matters. ‘Mrs Sykes miscarried for the first time in her life after a months severe illness,’
(#litres_trial_promo) ran the entry for 15 December, 1779, for example, while on 22 March, 1778, ‘Little Tom Tatton, my Brother’s Son died suddenly.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Reading through some of the other entries for 1778, the first year of Elizabeth Sykes’s life, one gets some idea of the domestic life of Christopher and Bessy.
There are few entries during the first six months, other than Christopher going back and forth to Sledmere. On 12 June, they set off on holiday, not to London or the Continent, but to the nearby east coast town of Bridlington, a popular resort for the newly fashionable pastime of sea bathing. ‘Wife and Self dined at Sledmere,’ he wrote. ‘Got to Hilderthorpe at night. Servants dined at Wetwang.’ Hilderthorpe, a coastal village to the south of Bridlington, was part of Christopher’s estates and the site of the family’s summer retreat, Flat Top Farm, since 1776. This was a three-storey house, built upon rising ground above Bridlington Bay and commanding magnificent views out to sea. The ground and top floors consisted of permanent accommodation for the tenant farmer, while the first floor, which had an octagonal salon and well-proportioned lodging rooms, was reserved for the occasional use of the family. It is important because it was almost certainly the first house designed by Christopher, being remarkably similar to other architectural drawings made by him in the Library at Sledmere.
On this occasion they stayed at Hilderthorpe for a month, and on 13 July, Christopher recorded ‘I went to Sledmere to dinner. Wife went to Wheldrake.’ Nineteen August found them in the midst of a house party. ‘Wheldrake. Mr and Miss Sarrandes, Mr and Mrs Daniel, Miss Simpson, Miss Collings, Mr and Mrs Paul, Wife and self fished in the old River, dined, drank tea and danced upon the rugs.’ A charming scene, repeated the following day. ‘All the above drank tea and danced upon the grass.’ On 31 August, Christopher rode over to Sledmere for dinner and ‘sent Styan to wait for Mr Brown at Wetwang.’ He did not turn up and finally arrived on 5 September. ‘Mr Brown came this morning and we rode about, dined and lodged at Wetwang.’ Brown left the next day. ‘I returned home to dinner, met my Wife and Tatton,’ noted Christopher. Ten days later the whole family visited Sledmere and also on 16 September ‘Wife and Self went to Castle Howard. Dined there, drank tea at Eddlethorpe Grange and returned to Sledmere at night.’ They stayed for a week and on 24 September ‘Wife, self and children returned to Wheldrake at night.’
A curious letter written at this time from Christopher to an old Oxford tutor, the Revd William Cleaver, throws some light on the education of his children. Evidently the boys had a tutor at Wheldrake, who had been teaching them to read. He was, however, on the point of leaving, and in asking Cleaver to help him find a replacement, Christopher made it quite clear that he was unhappy with the way the children spoke, a sign that in the aristocratic society to which he aspired, local dialects were beginning to be frowned upon. ‘The person who has had the instruction of my Children hitherto is going into another line of life,’ he wrote on 15 September, ‘indeed he is no loss as he has done them all the Good he is capable of which was to teach them to read English tho’ but Ill. If you know of any Young Man you think fit to Succeed him, who can correct their Yorkshire tone and instruct them to Your Wishes (I am sure it will be to mine) I wish you would let me know to continue with them till you and he think they are fit for School.’
(#litres_trial_promo) On 6 October, 1778, Christopher noted in his diary, ‘Master Tatton and Christopher went to Mr Simpson to be under his care.’ They were aged six and four respectively.
‘The Great Brown’s’ return in September bore fruit when, two months later in November, he produced his ‘Plan for the intended Alterations at Sledmere’. Christopher immediately preferred it to White’s plan because, while new plantations encircled the Park to its south and west, the design incorporated much of the existing landscape, retaining all the southern portion of The Avenue and thinning out the section nearer to the house into a series of clumps. The Mere and the buildings around the house remained unaltered. So far as the positions of the three ‘eyecatcher’ farmsteads proposed by White were concerned, Brown was greatly helped by the fact these were already partly built.
‘I do not at present see any probability of being freed from my engagements at an earlier period,’ wrote Christopher in September, 1778 to a friend, ‘by the constant attention I have paid to the Wolds having built fourteen dwelling houses with several Barns and Stables.’ The most important of these new buildings were the three farms which would form the focus of the new vistas. The first of these appeared as an entry in his diary for 13 July, 1778, when he noted ‘begun Castle’. Situated a mile or so to the south-east of the main house, and today my own home, Castle Farm was designed by John Carr of York, the best-known architect in the north of England. The design took the form of a Gothic gatehouse, with neo-classical wings – which were never completed. Work on it moved fast and on 3 September, two days before Brown’s second visit to Sledmere, Christopher scribbled ‘finished the Castle brickwork’.
The other two farms, Life Hill, to the south-west of the main house and Marramatte, to the north-west, were designed by Christopher himself, who drew up two sets of drawings for them, both working and presentation. These show him to have been a skilled draughtsman with a good architectural knowledge and a genuine ability to design. They were not just cribbed from one of the many pattern books available at the time, such as Thomas Lightoler’s The Gentleman and Farmers Architect, but were his own ideas, cleverly combining the need for the houses to look beautiful while at the same time preserving their practical function as agricultural buildings. The charming pavilions at Life Hill, for example, which have pilasters on their gable ends and stand to the right and left of the farm house, are barns, and at Marramatte, the gable ends of the farm buildings also form pavilions, which have pilasters and oculi.
In the end neither White’s nor Brown’s schemes were adopted, though elements from both were used and they may have served as an inspiration, because Christopher’s own ideas were on a far grander scale than anything either of them envisaged. They were more akin to those of the essayist Joseph Addison, who in 1710 had written ‘Why may not a whole estate be thrown into a kind of garden by frequent plantations? A man might make a pretty landskip of his own possessions.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Christopher’s vision was indeed to turn his whole estate into a Park, to extend his woodlands and plantations so that they enhanced not only the surrounds of the house, but the entire agricultural landscape. He dreamed of creating a Paradise amongst the bleak hills of the Wolds. To this end, after he received Brown’s plan, he indulged in a veritable orgy of planting, covering 130 acres in the 1778–1779 season, the largest area planted in the whole of the forty years it was to take to complete the landscape. His ‘account of Trees planted at Sledmere’, given to the local agriculture society, listed all the species used – ‘forty Wild Cherry, sixty Mountain Ash, 300 Yews, 358 Silver Fir, 500 Weymouth Pine, 600 Birch, 1,540 Oak, 6,400 Holly, 12,000 Beech, 25,260 Spruce, 33,600 Ash, 42,122 Scotch Fir and 54,430 Larch’.
(#litres_trial_promo) In recognition of his ‘having planted the greatest quantity of Larch Trees’, the secretary, William Ellis, wrote to tell him that ‘you are entitled to make choice of any Book or set of Books not exceeding the price of Five Guineas’.
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When John Bigland toured Yorkshire at the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, his description of Sledmere showed precisely how great a transformation of the landscape had taken place in the relatively short time that Christopher Sykes had lived there.

Sledmere is situated in a spacious vale, in the centre of the Yorkshire Wolds, and may be considered as the ornament of that bleak and hilly district. All the surrounding scenery displays the judicious taste of the late and present proprietors: the circumjacent hills are adorned with elegant farm houses covered with blue slate, and resembling villas erected for the purpose of rural retirement. The farms are in as high a state of cultivation as the soil will admit; and in the summer the waving crops in the fields, the houses of the tenantry elegantly constructed, and judiciously dispersed, the numerous and extensive plantations skirting the slopes of the hills, and the superb mansion with its ornamented grounds, in the centre of the vale, form a magnificent and luxuriant assemblage, little to be expected in a country like the Wolds; and to a stranger on his sudden approach, the coup d’oeil is singularly novel and striking.
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It was a fitting tribute to Christopher’s great vision.

CHAPTER III The Architect (#ulink_7a4362d5-d507-5e3b-88c1-3be59332e137)
In February, 1783, the month in which the American War of Independence finally drew to a close, Christopher received a letter from his brother-in-law, William. ‘My Sister mentioned in her last’,’ he wrote, ‘that you were looking for a House, I hope you have heard of one by this time that will be comfortable for you at the present, I can’t help wishing very much that the Doctor wou’d give up Sledmere to you, but I conclude that is out of the question.’
(#litres_trial_promo) If only for one reason, this was true: Parson was now an old man in his seventies and suffered from poor health. He had seen little of his son in the previous few years, who, as a result of the war, had taken up a commission as a Captain in Colonel Henry Maister’s Regiment, the East Yorkshire Militia, though while away from home, Christopher had been kept informed as to his father’s condition from regular letters sent to him by the Sledmere butler, John Hopper. Parson suffered constantly from pains in his chest, regular spasms and dreadful gout. ‘He is very Low Spirited and Eats very little,’
(#litres_trial_promo) Hopper wrote in April, 1782, though there were the occasional good days. ‘I have the pleasure to acquaint you,’ wrote Hopper on 15 August, ‘that your Father got out an Airing last Saturday and has continued it every day since, he was at Church on Sunday.’ In a memoir written by my grandfather, he recalled meeting, when he was a child, an old lady who remembered seeing Parson at church, ‘a little old man with a powdered wig carried into Sledmere Church on his footman’s back’.
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Parson did not recover from his illness, and his death the following year solved Christopher’s housing problem. He survived long enough, however, to be the beneficiary of a great honour bestowed upon him by the King. Writing to Christopher early in February, 1783, Richard Beaumont, his friend and fellow plantsman, told him that he had heard ‘that a Baronet will shortly be created in the East Riding, so saith a Friend connected with the Rulers of the Nation’.
(#litres_trial_promo) The Baronetcy to which he referred was to be offered to Christopher as a reward for his contribution to the reclamation of the Wolds. The high esteem in which he held his father is evident from the fact that he chose to turn down the title, insisting that it was conferred upon Parson instead. On 25 February, 1783, the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs, the Rt Hon. Thomas Townshend, signed a patent on behalf of King George III: ‘Our will & pleasure is that you prepare a Bill for our Royal Signature to pass our Great Seal containing the Grant of the Dignity of a Baronet of this our Kingdom of Great Britain unto our trusty and well beloved Mark Sykes, Doctor in Divinity, of Sledmire in our County of York.’
(#litres_trial_promo) So Parson became the Revd Sir Mark Sykes, 1st Baronet of Sledmere.
Amongst the hundreds of letters of congratulation that came pouring in for both the new Baronet and his son was one from Uncle Joseph, who lamented that ‘his poor state of Health will afford him so little enjoyment of this or of almost any earthly Comfort’.
(#litres_trial_promo) They were prophetic words. On 9 September Christopher recorded in his diary, ‘My father taken ill’, and the following Sunday, 14 September, ‘My Dear Father died at 4½ this morning. I got to Sledmere at 8½ not knowing of his illness till the night time at Hull Bank.’ He was buried on 19 September. ‘The Remains of my Dear Father,’ noted Christopher, ‘was taken from Sledmere at 8½ o’clock and was buried at Roos at 6 o’clock in the evening.’
(#litres_trial_promo) His coffin was attended only by his servants, a stipulation he had made in his will. ‘The very painful & lingering life which My Uncle led,’ wrote Parson’s nephew, Nicholas, to Christopher, ‘may make his death be looked upon as a happy release by all his Friends.’
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By the end of 1783, Christopher, Bessy and the five children had moved into the big house, unfortunately for them in the middle of an exceptionally cold winter. In an age when most of us live in over-heated houses, it is easy to forget how uncomfortable it must have been to live in a large draughty house in periods of harsh and freezing weather. It was still a number of years before the advent of any kind of central heating, and the inhabitants had to rely on individual fires as their only source of warmth. ‘I hope you all keep well & have plenty of Coals,’ wrote Henry Maister to Christopher in January, 1784, ‘for around a good fire is the only comfortable place’,
(#litres_trial_promo) though the truth is that most fireplaces usually produced more smoke than heat, and the only guaranteed way to keep warm was to wear more clothes. On 3 January, Christopher recorded ‘a heavy storm of snow’ in his diary, and throughout January and February there are regular entries for ‘deep snow’ and sometimes ‘extremely deep snow’. Things finally began to improve on 22 February, when Christopher was able to write ‘began this day to thaw’.
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No doubt inspired by the Arctic conditions they had been experiencing, Christopher also set about a new piece of building work at Sledmere, the creation of an ice-house. These buildings, which were de rigueur in most big houses of the day, were an advanced version of a ‘snow-well’ built for the Duke of York at St James’s Palace in 1666. While that had been little more than a pit dug into the ground and thatched with straw, the new models were often architect-designed and vaulted in brick or stone.
(#litres_trial_promo) They were situated close to the nearest large stretch of water – in the case of Sledmere, it would have been the Mere – so that during the winter the ice could be cut and placed in the ice-house, carefully insulated between layers of straw, for use the following summer, when it would have been used primarily for the refrigeration of food as well as for the occasional iced dessert. The design for the Sledmere ice-house came in the form of a working drawing, showing a detailed and carefully labelled section, sent to Christopher in February, 1784 by John Carr, the architect of Castle Farm. It was dug out in July and a sum of 12s. 6d. was entered in the house accounts the following January for ‘filling Ice-House’.
Seventeen eighty-four may well have been a momentous year for Christopher and his family, their feet firmly perched upon the ladder of social ascendancy, but so it was for the outside world too. There was change in the air. The disastrous War of American Independence was over, and the ministry of the man who had presided over it, Lord North, had disintegrated. A new group of radical thinkers was beginning to influence politics, men like Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, Erasmus Darwin and Benjamin Franklin, who believed in the reformation of Parliament and in John Dunning’s famous motion ‘that the power of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished’. They had found a voice in the short-lived Parliament of Lord Rockingham’s Whig Party and had achieved a number of reforms before his sudden death in July, 1782, including the reorganisation and reduction of the Royal household, the disenfranchisement of revenue officers, and the debarring of government contractors from sitting as MPs.
The short reign of Rockingham’s successor, Lord Shelburne, and the speedy collapse of the ministry which followed – an ill-judged coalition of two implacable enemies, the unpopular Lord North and the Whig, Charles James Fox – allowed King George III to invite a rising young star, William Pitt, to form a Government. Pitt, the second son of the Earl of Chatham, himself Prime Minister over a period of twelve years, made his maiden speech at the age of twenty-one, served in Lord Shelburne’s Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer aged twenty-three, and was only twenty-four when he became First Minister. Though this might seem an extraordinary feat to most people, it would not have surprised his family, whose nicknames for him – ‘William the Great’, when he was a small child, and ‘the Young Senator’, ‘the Orator’ and ‘the Philosopher’ when he was in his teens – suggest that they had a strong hunch he would go far.
(#litres_trial_promo) When aged only seven, his mother had written to her husband, ‘of William, I said nothing, but that was because he cannot be extraordinary for him’.
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Pitt was in the right place at the right time when oratory was becoming more and more a feature of debate. His maiden speech, made on 26 February, 1781, caused the assembled members to prick up their ears, especially since it was made off the cuff as a result of an unexpected call by a number of the opposition, eager to test out the so-called brilliance of Chatham’s son. They were not disappointed. ‘It impressed … from the judgment, the diction and the solemnity that pervaded and characterised it,’ wrote Nathaniel Wraxall, who was present. ‘The statesman, not the student, or the advocate, or the candidate for popular applause, characterised it … All men beheld in him at once a future Minister, and the members of the Opposition, overjoyed at such an accession of strength, vied with each other in their encomiums as well as in their predictions of his certain political elevation.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Indeed Edmund Burke was so overcome with admiration that he is reported as having said ‘he is not merely a chip off the old block, but the old block itself’.
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It was not long before Pitt had the ears of the House whenever he spoke, an honour rarely granted to new young members, and his name soon began to be known to a wider public beyond the benches of the Commons. As early as February, 1783, when he was still only twenty-three, he was the choice of a number of astute politicians to succeed Shelburne, who had resigned after two Government defeats. ‘There is scarcely any other Political Character of consideration in the Country,’ wrote Henry Dundas, ‘to whom many people from Habits, from Connections, from former Professions, from Rivalships and from Antipathies will not have objections. But he is perfectly new ground …’
(#litres_trial_promo) He actually was sent for by the King, but turned down the offer, on the grounds that if he was to come to power it was to be on his own terms. It was a brave and shrewd decision, for when the King asked him a second time the following December and he accepted, he was in an unassailable position. The news was received in the House of Commons with a shout of laughter. It was, after all,
A sight to make surrounding nations stare; A Kingdom trusted to a school-boy’s care.
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Any ambitious young man of position would have been swept up in the excitement of the moment, and in the general election of March, 1784 that put Pitt into office, a notorious affair that had gone on for forty days – ‘forty days’ poll, forty days’ riot and forty days’ confusion’ as Pitt himself put it
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(#litres_trial_promo) It is a measure of Christopher’s own popularity that he was returned with a majority of thirty-three, inspiring a local poet, John Bayley of Middleton, to come up with a suitably unctuous set of lines:
Whilst through the Streets loud Acclamations rung,
And Sykes’s Praises dwelt on every Tongue,
‘Twas you whose Merits influenced each Voice,
Unanimous to make so wise a choice.
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‘I … heartily congratulate you on your Success,’ wrote Henry Maister, ‘ ’tho I lament the furor of the times which call’d you forth, & only hope you may have no cause to regret the necessity of attending the House which I am sure will not agree with your Constitution, if the Hours in future are too as late as heretofore.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He was sworn in on 20 May, and in the early summer he was summoned to Downing Street – ‘14 at table’ he noted in his diary – where Pitt expressed his gratitude both to him and to his fellow MP, William Wilberforce, for the success of the important Yorkshire vote. Ironically it was the defeated Fox who had said in the past ‘Yorkshire and Middlesex between them make up all England.’
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While Christopher voted, there were the first stirrings at Sledmere of a move to improve the old house. On 29 June, 1784, ‘Lady S. laid foundation stone of offices in Court Yard,’
(#litres_trial_promo) noted Christopher in his diary. The work in question was the enlargement and modernisation of the probably rather cramped domestic offices at the north side of the house. The work was especially important as, according to a letter written in September, 1784 by a Miss JC to her sister Nancy, Mrs Marriott, Christopher and Bessy were already entertaining. She attended a small family party, consisting of the Sykeses and their five children, Mr and Mrs Egerton, Bessy’s brother and sister-in-law, and Richard Beaumont, Christopher’s West Yorkshire neighbour, whom she described as a ‘pretty little upright Man of Brazen Nose with a great deal of Linnen about his Neck … a strange being indeed.’ ‘I thought to captivate him,’ she added, ‘but he does not suit my taste.’
JC stayed the better part of a fortnight, and her letter gives a hint of what the atmosphere of the old house was like. ‘ ’Tis now a very good one of its Age,’ she wrote, ‘& reminds me of the Highgate House below stairs – here’s plenty of Books, Pictures good & Antiques, which keep one in constant amusement, besides Organ, Harpsichord, etc. etc.; which strange to tell I’ve exercised my small skill upon, before all the Party every day.’ Though she said she had been ‘taught to dread these Wolds’, she found herself ‘highly delighted & well may; nothing can be finer than the pure air here, only eighteen miles from Bridlington, the beautiful hill & dale of the country makes charming rides etc. Sir C has form’d & is forming great designs in the planting way which will beautify it prodigiously.’ She also confirmed that ‘the house is to be transformed some time’. Of her hosts she wrote, ‘Sir C & Ly Sykes are both extremely obliging, indeed I don’t know in what Family so nearly strangers to me, I cd. have been so agreeably placed for a visit … & not tire of it I assure you. Lady Sykes is very kind yet you must not expect any great polish in her, a resident in the country always, and without Education suitable to her great Fortune but she’ll improve in Londres.’
(#litres_trial_promo) She had, she added, ‘very weak nerves’, and ‘dreads being presented at Court, w’ch you can pity her for: but the family must be elevated’.
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Now that her husband was in politics, presentation at Court was something that Bessy could not avoid, since the wife of an MP could not go out in Society or attend any Court functions unless she had been presented and Christopher wanted to be seen. He bought himself a smart London house, paying £3,700, the equivalent today of £185,000, for 9 Weymouth St, just south of Regent’s Park and his diary for 1785 proudly opens with the words ‘Sir Chris Sykes Bart. MP Weymouth St.’ In accordance with his new status, he also bought himself a smart new coach, and had his coat of arms emblazoned on the doors. On 16 February, this gleaming new vehicle took the proud new member for Beverley and his beautiful wife to St James’s Palace for the ceremony she so dreaded.
Any woman of a nervous disposition could be forgiven for feeling anxious about the approaching ritual, in spite of the fact that she would have been preparing for it for weeks. ‘You would never believe,’ wrote Fanny Burney, Assistant Keeper of the Wardrobe to Queen Charlotte, to her sister-in-law, ‘the many things to be studied for appearing with a proper propriety before crowned heads.’ She then gave a barely ironic list of ‘directions for coughing, sneezing, or moving, before the King and Queen’, none of which were permitted, finishing with the observation that ‘if, by chance, a black pin runs into your head, you must not take it out … If, however, the agony is very great, you may, privately, bite the inside of your cheek, or of your lips, for a little relief; taking care to do it so cautiously as to make no apparent dent outwardly.’
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There would have been endless fittings for Bessy’s presentation gown, which was hoop-skirted and elaborate and had to be worn with a train, as well as many expeditions out to buy the accessories required to wear with it, such as slippers, a fan, ostrich feathers and jewellery. Then she was forced to endure hours of deportment training so that she could approach the Sovereign elegantly, curtsy in a single flowing movement, without losing her balance or tripping on her gown, and then – the most nerve-racking part of the whole business – walk backwards out of the room, gathering up her train as she went, striving her utmost not to fall over it. Such practice was often carried out using a tablecloth as a simulated train. Bessy’s presentation went without a hitch, and after it she patiently remained in London for three months while Christopher attended Parliament.
He soon had his first opportunity to prove his loyalty to the Prime Minister. Ever since he had first entered Parliament in 1781 Pitt had been a passionate advocate of parliamentary reform, believing that it was vitally necessary for the preservation of liberty. Amongst plans he had proposed were the checking of bribery at elections, the disenfranchising of corrupt constituencies, and the shortening of the duration of Parliament. On 18 April, 1785, he proposed a Bill that would extinguish thirty-six rotten boroughs and transfer the seventy-two seats therein to the larger counties and to London and Westminster. The House was full, with 450 members present, of which 422 voted in the division. Christopher and his fellow Yorkshiremen, the gentlemen and freeholders of a great county, were a powerful lobby and voted to a man with the Prime Minister, but he was defeated by 248 votes to 174. Memories were short. The movement for reform had been born in a time of crisis, now over, and with a recovery in trade and a resurgence of confidence, the issue was no longer a live one. Pitt’s success in other areas had virtually killed it off and he did not try again. Perhaps Christopher became dejected by Pitt’s unwillingness to pursue further the subject of parliamentary reform, but in the six years he represented Beverley he never once spoke in the House. More likely is the possibility that his heart was never really in politics at all, being firmly ensconced at Sledmere.
On 30 May 1785, the day he and Bessy returned to Yorkshire after his first vote in the House, Christopher was one week into his thirty-sixth year, and a very rich man. His landed income alone for that year was the equivalent of over £300,000 at today’s values, and he had a corresponding sum in the bank of well over £4,000,000. It was money he was to put to good use in carrying out his ambitious plans. His first task in the preparation of the landscape he envisaged round the house was to clear away any buildings standing within its sightlines. These consisted of the few houses that remained from the old village, whose street had run in front of the house. Levelling work began in the summer of 1785 and continued over the next year. The inhabitants, who had no choice in the matter, were moved to new cottages, which had already been built elsewhere.
At the same time he was also planning a walled garden, a design for which he drew on the survey that had been commissioned by his Uncle Richard back in 1755. It was positioned to the east of that part of the old Avenue which was closest to the house, and was designed as an octagon, with tall brick walls enclosing it and hot houses against the north walls. The attention to detail in this design was typical of everything that Christopher did. Each door, for example, had its own reference identifying what type of lock it was to have and who should have a key, namely ‘Labourer, Gardiner, and Master’. His final flourish was the design of a magnificent Orangery, nine bays in length with a semi-domed roof, sited immediately to the south-east of the house, between it and the walled garden. Though the Orangery has long since been demolished and the old wood-framed hothouses have been replaced by modern ones, this garden still survives, its beautiful brick walls, pale pink when they were built using bricks from the estate’s own brickworks, now a deep rusty red. Some of them, which are of double thickness, have the remains of grates at their base, in which fires were lit to heat the walls through a series of inner pipes so that fruit could thrive on them.
With his plans for the garden and landscape well and truly in place, Christopher was at last ready to turn his attention to the house and bring to fruition the schemes he had been harbouring for many years. He was always sketching. His diaries and pocket books are full of hastily executed drawings, and undated designs and scribbles abound in the Library cupboards at Sledmere.


His passion for architecture was no secret to his friends, who were only too ready to turn to him for advice when they were planning to build. ‘I have an alteration in view for the House at Tatton,’ wrote his brother-in-law, William, in February, 1783, ‘… I shou’d be happy in your advice about my proceedings.’
(#litres_trial_promo) For his West Yorkshire neighbour, Richard Beaumont, whose park at Whitley Beaumont had been laid out by Brown, he designed a pair of lodges to stand ‘at the end of the Avenue where those stood built by my father’. In spite of Beaumont’s enthusiasm for the project, Christopher himself appears to have been unhappy with the designs. ‘The lodges are begun,’ wrote Beaumont in September, 1783, ‘but the cellar only of one is dug. It was my intention to build one this & another next year. If the weather continues bad I shall not finish either of them this Year … Tho’ you disapprove of your Plan it is by no means disagreeable to me but if you will send me one more worthy of execution I shall be obliged to you. I intended the buildings to be exactly the size of those you sent me last Year … I have lost yr. Plan of those lodges & the gates & have only one copy of the lodges.’
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Because he was not a trained architect, Christopher was never in any doubt that he would require assistance on his Sledmere project. The first person to whom he turned was the architect of Castle Farm and the ice-house, John Carr, whose pedigree when it came to building large houses was matchless. A disciple of Robert and James Adam, he had worked on, amongst others, Harewood for Edwin Lascelles, Kirby Hall for Stephen Thompson, Constable Burton for Sir Marmaduke Wyvill, Temple Newsam for Lord Irwin and Kilnwick House for John Grimston, all Yorkshire houses of great importance. He had also built the stables at Wentworth Woodhouse for the Marquess of Rockingham and at Castle Howard for the Earl of Carlisle. At some point, possibly in 1786, though it is difficult to say this with certainty since none of the designs are dated and no reference to them appears in the Account Book, he came up with a plan for the principal, south, elevation of the new house, which was to be a very traditional seven-bay front with a central pediment supported by six Ionic columns. It was not chosen by Christopher, who would have considered it far too conventional and, perhaps, not nearly grand enough.
He next approached Samuel Wyatt, an architect whose practice was based in London, but who had undertaken two important commissions in Cheshire, one for Sir Thomas Broughton at Doddington Hall and the other for Sir Thomas Stanley at Hooton Hall. Christopher had met him through his in-laws, the Egertons of Tatton, with whom Wyatt had become acquainted while working on these projects and who were regular patrons of his. The first design he showed to Christopher was certainly imposing. It consisted of a seven-bay front with a shallow dome supported on columns – two single and two pairs – over the three central bays, all above arched ground-floor windows and a semicircular ground-floor porch. It was rejected by Christopher, possibly because he found it too fussy.
True to form, and probably what he had in mind all along, Christopher now tried his own hand, producing a scheme which married elements of both the Carr and Wyatt designs, but introduced a note of striking simplicity. Keeping the scale of the elevation the same, he reduced the seven bays to three, using tripartite windows on both the first- and ground-floor levels, with the central dome replaced by a pediment supported on two pairs of columns. Considering that Christopher was an amateur competing with two of the most renowned architects of the day, he made a remarkable job of his design, and it was upon his drawings that the final scheme drawn up by Wyatt was based. Gone would be the old-fashioned house built by Uncle Richard. In its place would rise up an elegant country seat in the very latest neo-classical style, that would be a monument to the success and aspirations of its owner. The main rooms, off a central staircase hall, were to be a library, drawing room, music room and dining room on the ground floor, and a long gallery on the first floor.
Most patrons building on the scale that Christopher was doing would have employed a competent builder or carpenter as clerk of works to oversee the progress of the project. This was how many young men who went on to become successful architects began their careers. Carr, for example, had worked in this capacity for the financier, Stephen Thompson, at Kirby Hall, and Wyatt for Lord Scarsdale at Kedleston. Characteristically, Christopher, as well as acting as executive architect, decided to be his own clerk of works, which brought an added cohesion to the whole scheme. It also meant that since he was the person corresponding with the various contractors, his preserved letters go a long way to telling the story of the building of the house.
The intention was to build two new cross-wings to the north and south of the 1750 house thus creating a new and much larger building on an H plan, the whole to be encased in Nottinghamshire stone. Work began in 1787. The stone proved problematical from the start, since it had to travel a great distance, and Christopher was to conduct a running battle with Mr Marson, the foreman of the stone quarry at Clumber, Nottinghamshire, from which it was dug. The grey limestone was then shipped up the River Trent to Hull, from where it was transported up the River Hull and the Driffield Canal to Driffield. It was then carried the last eight miles of its journey by wagon, a slow and arduous trip for the heavy horses who had to drag it uphill all the way from the flatlands of Driffield to the uplands of the Wolds. Obtaining it in the right sizes and quantities, at the right price and on time, provided him with many a headache. ‘Till the last load or two,’ he wrote to Marson in July, 1788, ‘when our Vessel arrived at Stockwith, there was only one Boat load ready for her & she had to wait for another Boat returning from the Quarry. That the additional Expence has been on our side & hope you will allow me ½d. a foot the disadvantage. But seriously I believe all sides will be well satisfied if you could have one Load upon the Wharf & two Boats loaded against the Vessel gets to Stockwith, & the Captain or master can tell them within a Day or two at most when that will be.’
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He wrote another letter to Marson in August, complaining bitterly of his failure to deliver materials on time. It painted a vivid picture of the situation on site a year into the building work. ‘The House wch. we are obliged to live in, having no other,’ he wrote, ‘is laid open on evry side, & will be till the facia is put on, as my New Additions entirely surround my Old House. When you Read this wch. I wish you would do every Monday Morning & consider my Situation with a large family, you must not be of Human Materials if you do not Employ all Hands to get me stone for one Vessel not to wait an Hour & two Vessels if possible. I assure you upon my Word we have not stone here for fourteen days Work without turning away the Hands we have employed all Summer & without wch. we cannot live in my House this Winter.’
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The scene must have been one of chaos, with Uncle Richard’s perfect, neat house opened up on all sides, new walls rising all around it beneath a forest of scaffolding, the air filled with a cacophony of noise – the shouts and curses of the workmen, the creaking and shrieking of the ropes and pulleys, the banging of tools, the rumbling of the arriving and departing wagons, and the neighing of horses. The family were tormented by dust and Christopher wrote that they were surrounded by ‘hills of Rubish’.
(#litres_trial_promo) To cap it all, Bessy’s favourite dog, a Pomeranian bitch called Julia, was at death’s door. ‘How sorry I am to hear of her dangerous state,’ wrote her son’s tutor John Simpson to Christopher in October, ‘I am afraid Lady Sykes will take it too much to heart. I wish she wou’d never have another favourite dog. It is a Dog’s life to have to mourn for the loss of them every six or seven years.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The problems with the quarry dragged on. ‘I entreat you will use every effort to send us immediately some large Stones,’ Christopher wrote to Marson on 4 October, ‘which we wrote for so long ago & three Col[umns]: we cannot conclude our Work without them this Winter, and shall be all at a standstill in a Week’s Time.’
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The outside walls appear to have been up by April, 1789, which was a crucial year in Christopher’s life, in that it was when he made his decision to give up politics, sell his London house, and devote all his time to Sledmere. This is not so surprising when one considers how much time and energy he was giving over to his great project, leaving little room in his life for the machinations of the political world. He also liked to be at the helm and could never have been happy as a small cog in a large wheel. Bessy hated the political and court life, and this too may have been a factor in his decision. He broke the news to his constituency at the beginning of June, writing to his agent, Mr Lockwood, ‘I have given up every thought of Standing again for Beverley. When I came the last Time it was done on a sudden, & I find a steady attendance at the House of Commons not consistent with my health, or consonant to my feelings & mode of Life.’
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In anticipation of the completion of all the stonework by the end of the year, Christopher now embarked on the next stage of the work on the new house, which was to consider the interior decoration. While helping out a neighbour, Sir Thomas Frankland, with designs for the improvement of his house, Thirkleby Park, near Thirsk, he had been introduced to the work of Joseph Rose, one of Robert Adam’s leading decorators, whose work included the ceilings of the Gallery at Harewood, the Library at Kenwood, the stuccoes of the Hall at Syon and the ceiling of the Great Parlour at Kedleston. ‘I am building a large House,’ he wrote to Rose on 26 July, ‘& thro the Recommendation of Sir Thos. Frankland, & your General fame wish you to undertake the plaistering … I intend to finish very slowly as I wish the Work to be well done neat & Simple rather in the Old than New Stile nothing Rich or Gaudy, but suiting to plain Country Gentn.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He asked him to come as soon as possible, and in a further letter expressed his wish that ‘all the Men you employ here will not be sent from London as I have a particular pleasure in employing Persons in my Neighbourhood when it can be done consistently with the Work being well executed, & they are usually well acquainted with the Nature of the Materials’.
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Sir Thomas Frankland could not have made a better recommendation than Rose whose ideas turned out to be exactly what Christopher had been looking for. He was thrilled with the first set of drawings. ‘I perfectly agree with you in your Ideas of the Stile in wch. my House ought to be finished,’ he wrote excitedly at the beginning of October, ‘& I would have but few Ornamts. But what decorations are introduced I would have them singular, bold and Striking & only where propriety & good Taste required them.’ The delivery from London of an order of fixtures and fittings the following week might have suggested that work was now progressing at a pace. ‘On Saturday Night the Doors arrived here,’ Christopher confirmed to John Andrew of Aire Street on 12 October, ‘and when we opened them this Day they had got some little wet but will be no worse, I think them very handsome Doors.’ Not so. There was, inevitably, a sting in the tail; ‘the Hinges also come, but you have forgot to send the Screws’.
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Errors such as this, small though they may have been, were an irritation to Christopher and his family who had been steadily retreating into more and more cramped conditions, virtually confined to the top floor of the old house. Here they survived until 1 February, 1790, when, at five in the morning, they set out for London. They were to spend as much of the year as possible in town, sheltering from the dust and the discomfort, and taking advantage of the fact that the house in Weymouth Street still remained unsold.
When the family finally returned to Sledmere, in the winter of 1790, they found the situation there greatly improved, with most of the exterior completed. This allowed Christopher to turn his attention to thoughts of the interiors, beginning with what was to be the most important room in the house, the Gallery, which had made its initial appearance on the design submitted by Samuel Wyatt in 1787. Though no drawings for it have survived, it is likely that Wyatt must have executed some, and it was these, or adaptations of them by Christopher, that Rose used as the basis for his ideas. ‘Both your last letters have much pleased me,’ he wrote on 2 April, 1791 ‘your first in giving me an account of the Gallery and saying that you was much pleased with it – I think it will be one of the finest rooms in the Kingdom.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He did not exaggerate, for to this day the room has few rivals in grandeur, even in houses twice the size. Two storeys high and running the entire length of the south front of the house, a distance of 120 feet, it is divided into three great cross-vaulted compartments, inspired by such Roman buildings as the Baths of Diocletian and Caracalla, soaring upwards into the roof space. Though Wyatt undoubtedly intended it to be a room for the display of pictures, for congregation and for occasional use as a ballroom and it was always referred to by Rose as ‘the Gallery’, at some point the idea took hold in Christopher’s mind that it should become a Library.
The rooms which followed, in particular the Music Room and the Drawing Room, suggest that, about this time, Christopher appears to have modified the notion of himself as the ‘plain country gentleman’ who wanted things done ‘neat & simple’, a description which could in no way be applied to the Drawing Room, an exquisite creation of which Rose was especially proud. ‘I must own that I think it the best design I ever made,’
(#litres_trial_promo) he wrote on 31 May, 1792, and with its intricately designed ceiling, containing motifs depicting Greek religious rites, with complex patterns coloured in blues, terracotta and light pinks, and its gilded highlights, the room showed Rose in his most ornamental mood. He was nervous, however, that Christopher would find it too elaborate. ‘I am afraid you will send it back again,’ he continued gingerly, ‘you will tell me that it is far too fine for your house, and too expensive and yet when I think of your Gallery, the proportion will bear me out.’ He excused the finery by saying that ‘the design is made for Lady Sykes room.’
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‘I never saw any place so much improved as Sledmere,’ wrote Christopher’s nephew, William Tatton, to his father, during a ten-day stay in May, 1792. ‘I think the Gallery as fine a room as I ever saw. They have not yet finished the Sealing and I suppose it will be nearly two years before they will be able to make any more of that room.’
(#litres_trial_promo) A year later, apart from the floor of the Gallery, all the major building work was complete, and Rose’s time was taken up with painting and decorating. At the end of May, Rose, whose relationship with his client had grown to a stage where he was also acting as his agent in London, had sent Christopher ‘a great number of patterns of papers … many of them very pretty’ from shops in Swallow Street and Ludgate Hill.
(#litres_trial_promo) This was the first mention of wallpaper in their correspondence and he returned to the subject now. ‘Mrs Rose has been about your papers to Ludgate Hill and chosen the borders … if the papers are to be glaz’d upon an average they will cost three halfpence more.’
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Though John Houghton, a contemporary of Evelyn and Pepys, had written as early as 1699 that ‘a great deal of Paper is nowadays so printed to be pasted upon walls to serve instead of Hangings’,
(#litres_trial_promo) wallpaper did not truly become fashionable till the 1730s when improvements in manufacturing brought down the price. ‘I am told there is a new sort of Paper now,’ a neighbour of Christopher’s, Nathaniel Maister, had written to his friend, Thomas Grimston, in 1764, ‘made for hanging rooms with, which is very handsome, indeed from the price it ought to be so, for I think it is 2s. 6d. a yard. Have you seen any of it?’ Christopher’s paper was ready to be shipped on 4 September. ‘I have not been so fortunate as to see any room fitted up with the furniture and the paper having a border of the same pattern,’ wrote Rose. ‘I should imagine it would look very pretty … if you please I will make further inquiries about it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He had soon found a Mr Sagar, a former upholsterer turned wallpaper-hanger, to ‘come over to Sledmere & hang as many Rooms as are wanted to be hung at 7d. a Sheet, borders included, everything to be found for him to hang the Rooms with.’
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Rose also took it upon himself to furnish Christopher with everything he needed for his new home. It was a job he was only too happy to do, particularly since he knew his employer to be a prompt payer. ‘I am exceedingly obliged to you for your offer of money,’ he wrote in June, 1793, ‘but I am not in want of any at present, and I am fully persuaded I never should be, if all my employers paid as you do: or only one half of them.’ Rose organised the ironwork for the staircase, mirrors for all the rooms and supervised numerous other orders, such as a ‘lamp for the Drawing Room ceiling’, ‘handles for the Vazes in the Hall’, the ‘Altar and Grate’ for the hall fireplace, and ‘sham stoves’ to heat the outer hall. Something else arrived for the house in the middle of August, something for which the Sykeses had waited seven years and which was one of the most important purchases Christopher ever made. ‘By Sir Christopher Sykes’s directions,’ noted William Saunders of Cavendish Square, London, on 2 August, ‘I pack’d up in a packing case upwards of nine feet long, a picture, & with it a small Box – sent them to the White Horse, Cripplegate, directed to you – the Waggon left London Yesterday (Thursday) Morning, by that you will know when to expect them.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The small box contained a white satin dress, the packing case ‘a large whole length picture’. It was to turn out to be one of the greatest eighteenth-century portraits ever painted.
‘Painted by Mr Romney,’ stated the account, dated 16 May, 1793, ‘a large whole length picture of Sir Christopher and Lady Sykes. £168.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The picture, so carefully packed up by the framer, William Saunders, was a full-length portrait of Christopher and Bessy by George Romney that had been started in 1786. This painting, which today is regarded as being one of Romney’s finest works, was commissioned by Christopher when he first became an MP, as an expression of his status. Twelve sittings for this painting were recorded in 1786 and the picture was then left unfinished in Romney’s studio for several years. The fact that it took so long to complete meant that by the time it was delivered it had evolved into something much more than just a straightforward portrait of a country gentleman.
Here stands an elegant slim young man, wearing a scarlet coat and black breeches. With a long, straight nose and high forehead, he is tall and brimming with confidence. In his right hand he holds a pair of spectacles, in his left a plan of some kind, both of which suggest the seriousness that becomes a man of his station. If he were on his own, one might describe him as haughty, but he is saved from this by the charming and softening nature of his beautiful red-haired wife, Bessy. Wearing a long white silk dress, with a string of pearls flung almost casually across her right shoulder, she leads him out of some Ionic portico into a landscape which reflects his accomplishments; those in architecture represented by a distant ‘eyecatcher’, probably Life Hill Farm; in agriculture by the acres of plantations and enclosed fields which stretch out before him. Her hair, strung with pearls, catches the wind and at her feet a brown and white spaniel stands adoringly. She is gazing at her husband with a look of both love and admiration. Often called The Evening Walk – in comparison to Gainsborough’s famous painting of Mr and Mrs William Hallett, The Morning Walk – it is a portrait of the greatest charm.
More important, however, is the fact that it represents Sir Christopher Sykes as he saw himself, a man who was at the very pinnacle of his achievements, who had risen from the ranks of the merchant class to become the epitome of the aristocratic landowner. In the general scheme of things it could not possibly have come at a more appropriate time. His land holdings were approaching their peak. He bought eight estates in the years 1792 and 1793, spending on them in excess of £52,000, the largest sum he had ever spent in such a short period. This brought the rental income he received annually from his estates up to £12,004. 8s. ¾d., which was a remarkable increase on the £1,960. 11s. 6d. he had started with in 1771.
The spaniel which Romney painted standing at the feet of its owners is a sporting dog, lending the suggestion, not incorrectly, that the subject was a lover of field sports. Christopher considered ‘the pleasures of the chase’ to be ‘really useful and beneficial to Society’. He laid out his reasons for this in a letter to his close friend Thomas Grimston. ‘They give opportunities of wearing off Shinesses, dispelling temporary differences, forming new friendships and cementing old, and draw the Gentlemen of the Country into one closer bond of Society.’
(#litres_trial_promo) His account book shows that he was a regular subscriber to a number of hunts throughout his life, while his diaries record several occasions when he rode out with hounds, his last outing having been in November, 1785, when he ‘hunted with Sir J Legard’.
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In spite of this, it was well known in the neighbourhood that hunting was not allowed at Sledmere. The reason for this was that he did not want his young plantations trampled to pieces. His neighbours were happy to respect his wishes. ‘You have objections, which no one has a right to controvert or even discuss,’ Lord Carlisle had written to him in October, 1788 from his nearby seat at Castle Howard. ‘You may depend upon my hounds not approaching in quest of their game any covers from which it is your inclination to exclude them.’ This rule did not apply, however, to other parts of his estate where hounds were free to go as they pleased. ‘I thankfully receive the permission to go upon your other estates,’ wrote Carlisle, ‘with the obliging offer of making covers, & accommodations upon them.’
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The final element in the Romney portrait, represented by the ruined Temple and the distant view of Life Hill, was architecture. It was timely since the arrival of the painting signified the virtual completion of the house. Rose was critical of the picture, ‘indeed I cannot see any likeness to Lady Sykes,’ he said dismissively,
(#litres_trial_promo) and there was a long-running argument as to where to hang it. Neither Rose nor his wife wanted it to hang in the Drawing Room. ‘Mrs R says the Picture must not hang over the Chimney,’ he had told Christopher in August, 1792, ‘and she is sure that Lady Sykes will not agree to it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He even suggested that ‘Lady Sykes … shall scold when she sees you.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In the end it was hung in the Dining Room, where it still hangs to this day.
It seems that by the end of August, 1793, Christopher, although still telling people that ‘my House is far from finished’, was ready to receive a few guests outside the family. ‘How happy it would make Lady Sykes and myself,’ he wrote to the Duke of Leeds, on hearing that he was to visit Beverley, ‘if my Lady Duchess and your Grace would do us the Favor to come upon the Wolds … we have Beds sufficient to accommodate your Grace, and any Friends you may do us the Honor to bring with you.’
(#litres_trial_promo) By the time they visited, in October, with the exception of the Drawing Room and the Gallery, they would have found most of the main rooms painted and papered. Christopher having spent the princely sum of £1,384. 17s. 5d. in 1792 and 1793 on furniture, there was also presumably no lack of places to sit.
There was still much work to be done on the Gallery, including the laying of the floor, but so impressed by it were all those who saw it that Christopher decided to commission a picture of it to send out to all his friends. The man he chose to do this was Thomas Malton, an architectural draughtsman and occasional scene painter who had recently published with some success A Picturesque Tour Through the Cities of London and Westminster. Malton’s finished drawing, a watercolour, which arrived early in 1795, was exquisite. It showed the room empty except for a desk, thereby considerably enhancing its size, and the feeling of space was further magnified by the use of perspective, achieved by leading the eye towards the window at the far end and out of it to the church tower. Three minute figures, one seated at the desk, the others lolling in an alcove, completed the impression of vastness. The plate read ‘The Library at Sledmere, the Seat of Sir Christopher Sykes Bart, in the East Riding of Yorkshire’, and in the bottom left-hand corner an inscription gave credit where it was most due: ‘Designed and executed by Josh. Rose in 1794.’ Two hundred black and white impressions were made from it which must have greatly stirred the imaginations of all those who received them. The architectural historian, Christopher Hussey, wrote of it in 1949, ‘architecturally designed libraries are a feature of several of Adam’s country houses, most notably Kenwood. But this one surpasses them all in majesty of conception, suggesting rather the library of a college or learned and wealthy society; indeed in the space allotted to it, in the amount of shelf room, and in the beauty of its decoration it is surely the climax of the Georgian conception of the library as the heart and soul of the country house.’
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So the Gallery officially became the Library. The bookshelves ran down both sides from the floor to beneath the vaulting, with semicircular ones at each end on either side of the windows. Two great mirrors, designed by Wyatt, hung on the north wall while the floor was covered with a fine worsted carpet which stretched the entire length of the room and had a design which matched that of the ceiling. This was an entirely homespun affair, having been woven at a carpet factory run by Mr Christopher Bainton on one of Christopher’s estates at Wansford. Today it only exists in the Malton watercolour, since at the time of the fire it was being stored in the attics and was subsequently amongst the few contents of the house that were destroyed.
Thomas Malton also painted a watercolour of the exterior of the house, which is the only existing picture showing the grounds as they were in 1795. On the right of the picture, the landscape to the east of the house is heavily planted with large shrubs and maturing trees, and the ground slopes down to Christopher’s beautiful Orangery, with its rows of tall windows. In the middle a roughly cut lawn rises on a gentle incline right up the front door, which is reached by five steps, and where a number of people are congregating. To the left of the house a number of deer are gathered beneath a mature tree, observed by a woman and child, while in the foreground a couple are enjoying a leisurely stroll. It represents a romantic idyll, and is the first recorded view of the final realisation of a great project.
While the peaceful mood of the scene suggests the best of times, in the outside world there were clouds gathering which were soon to take Christopher away from his beloved Sledmere. Since 1793, England had been at war with France, and there had been few successes for her in the conflict. As Napoleon Bonaparte rose inexorably to power, Prime Minister Pitt and his colleagues could only look on with growing horror. One by one Britain’s allies on the Continent either made peace with or were defeated by the French, culminating with the collapse of Austria in 1797, which left England effectively fighting alone against this now all-powerful enemy. When Pitt himself made an attempt to reach a settlement with France, he was treated with the utmost contempt by the Directory, which had governed the country since the end of the Terror. They set terms that they knew would be impossible for Pitt to meet and immediately set about mobilising the combined French, Spanish and Dutch fleets to sail against Britain. Napoleon, triumphant after his success in conquering Italy, was appointed ‘Commander-in-Chief’ of the forces for the invasion of England, the Army of England.
On 22 January, 1798, Henry Dundas, Principal Secretary of State for War, sent Christopher the following letter. ‘Sir, Living in this distant part of England,’ he wrote, ‘I request you will excuse me troubling you to inform me if there is any plan to be given to the Country Gentlemen for having their Tenants and Neighbours enrolled for the use of their Waggons or their personal service either on Foot or Horseback at or near their Homes or whether anything of this kind is in Contemplation … and if not whether we … are justified in assembling those who are willing either with or without arms …’
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Dundas had in fact anticipated exactly what Christopher had in mind, who, before he ever read this letter, had written to the Duke of Leeds telling him that ‘I have lately thought that something should be done towards being prepared for defending ourselves against the French our infernal Enemies.’ He had appealed to the Duke to ‘make the proper Application to know if arms and Ammunition will be allowed to any Body of Horse or foot appointed for Defence of our own Coast & neighbourhood only, under myself & other neighbouring gentlemen. The Officers to be answerable for the Arms when called upon. The Men and Officers requiring no Pay except for Sergeants to teach them the Exercise & Evolutions. By Arms I mean a Sabre & pair of Pistols in Holsters for the Horse & Muskets with Bayonets (perhaps if one half had pikes) for the Foot.’
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Christopher concluded his letter to the Duke by saying he was certain that if he was allowed to pursue his scheme, ‘I have Reason to believe I shall be able to assemble a Number of Persons in this Neighbourhood.’ The result was the formation of the Yorkshire Wolds Gentlemen and Yeomanry Cavalry, which raised forty-five men as volunteers from sixteen parishes adjacent to Sledmere. On 22 February his friend Thomas Grimston from Kilnwick, who had his own troop, was writing to tell him that Sergeant Robert Wilson, one of the Sergeants in the Militia, wished ‘to refresh his Memory by overlooking now & then the Regulations laid down for ye Sword Exercise,’ and hence he had taken the liberty of ordering from the York bookseller, Mr Todd, ‘a Book of the Sword Exercise’.
Ten days later Grimston was offering him ‘ye Sabres which have been used by my Troops’, so long as he could keep back four ‘in order to be used for the Attack & defence’. ‘There will still remain fifty,’ he assured him, ‘which if you wish for you may have immediately’, though he added the proviso ‘that in case my troop shd. be embodied or be called out for any Service before I get new Swords that you will lend me the old ones in the interim’. They would cost him 19s. each; ‘Christopher’s account book shows that he spent altogether £678. 18s. 9d. on equipping his cavalry. Many of the muskets, bayonets and other arms that he acquired still decorate the walls of the Entrance Hall at Sledmere.
So seriously did Christopher take his role as Captain of the Militia that at one point he was considering equipping them with cannon. His neighbour Lord Mulgrave, unlike Christopher an experienced soldier, soon set him right about this misguided plan. ‘With respect to the advantages which you might derive, in the event of actual service before an enemy, from the addition of cannon to your corps, I entertain strong doubts,’ he wrote on 19 June, 1798. ‘Large corps of Cavalry, forming the Wing of an army or detached to a distance & obliged to maintain themselves in their Post, find great advantage from a small proportion of light artillery, well trained and under the command of skilful Artillery officers. But a small corps, acting as light troops would find themselves much embarrassed in their movements, would lose much of that most essential quality of rapidity, and would in many instances expose themselves to the sacrifice of many men, or to the loss of their guns if the Enemy should encounter them with a superior body of Cavalry.’
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On 19 July, Christopher, who had organised his troop with the same efficiency and pride that he had set about the rebuilding of Sledmere, received his official orders from the King. ‘To Our Trusty & Wellbeloved Sir Christopher SYKES Bt. Greeting,’ they began, and followed on ‘We, reposing especial Trust and Confidence in Your Loyalty, Courage and good Conduct, do, by these Presents, constitute and appoint you to be Captain of the Yorkshire Wolds Gentlemen and Yeomanry but not to take rank in Our Army except during the Time of the said Corps being called out into actual Service.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The call never came. On 1 August, 1798, Admiral Nelson and the British Navy, described by Pitt as the ‘saviours of Mankind’, successfully annihilated the French fleet at the Battle of the Nile, thereby ending Napoleon’s dreams of an invasion. The Yorkshire force was soon disbanded.
The last year of the eighteenth century saw Christopher much on the move, apparently in search of a cure for Bessy’s failing health. ‘I am truly sorry for the indisposition of Lady Sykes,’ Rose had written to Christopher in May, 1798, ‘and I hope the Machine, which I have ordered from Mr LOWNDES will be of infinite use, indeed I think it a very ingenious machine.’ The contraption he referred to was an exercise machine, and he was quick to assure his employer that he would not be recommending something that he had not tried himself. ‘After Mr LOWNDES had showed me utility of it, I got into it, and find that it will be very strong exercise.’ Mr Lowndes, he continued, ‘has promised to inform you of all the situations for the different parts of the body, it will be particularly strong if you turn the machine yourself, I have ordered the Pedometer as I think it may be of great use, as by it you may know how many miles you have supposed to go.’ He concluded by telling Christopher that ‘from the simplicity of the construction of the device I think it is impossible to be ever out of order’, though he did admit, hinting at the truly Heath Robinson nature of the machine, ‘only you may want a new string now and then’.
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Though there is no mention of the exact nature of what was wrong with her, other than that she suffered from ‘weak nerves’, there is a strong likelihood that she may have been victim to one of the many illnesses which are now known to have been caused by lead poisoning, such as disease of the kidneys, recurring headaches, lassitude, and indeed problems of the nerves, all due to the then common use of the metal in everyday things such as water pipes, earthenware, cooking pots, pewter plates and tankards, cosmetics, hair dyes and medicines. Unsurprisingly, Mr Lowndes’s apparatus did little for Bessy’s condition, and the bitter cold month of January, 1799 found her and Christopher consulting a Dr Hall in London, staying with some of the family at a house they had rented in Lisson Grove.
At first her condition appeared to be improving. ‘I am happy to say my Mother is much better,’ wrote their son Christopher to his brother Tatton, ‘and in a very fair way of Recovery.’ Though it was at a cost. ‘This man puts her to a great deal of pain,’ he continued, ‘& I have to go to him every Morn. above three miles off. In short for what she undergoes with him, she deserves her health. From his account the Complaint has been long coming on, & will be long in getting the better of it.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In February, an Irish friend, the Hon. William Skeffington, wrote to inquire after her health. ‘I have felt much for Lady Sykes during the recent severe weather,’ he told her husband, ‘I am very impatient to hear that it has not thrown her back & flatter myself your next will give a good acct. of her recovering with Dr Hall.’
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June found the Sykeses in Bath, with Bessy apparently no better. ‘I was happy to find … that you had arrived safe,’ wrote George Britton to Christopher, ‘and found Lady Sykes not worse than might be expected from her late Relapse; I hope the Change of Air, Journey and Benefits of the Bath Waters will be of infinite service.’
(#litres_trial_promo) By far the most popular and fashionable form of treatment of the day was ‘taking the waters’ at one of the many spa towns, such as Harrogate, Bath and Weymouth. This consisted of both drinking the mineral waters and taking prolonged baths in them. Recent studies have shown that there was indeed great benefit to be gained from doing this, particularly for those people who suffered from diseases caused by lead poisoning: full immersion of the body in water for several hours increases the excretion of urine from the body, and out with it goes a significant amount of lead. Drinking a large quantity of the waters has the same effect. They were, proclaimed an eighteenth-century postcard, ‘wonderful and most EXCELLENT agaynst all diseases of the body proceeding of a MOIST CAUSE as Rhumes, Agues, Lethargies, Apoplexies, The Scratch, Inflammation of the Fits, hectic flushes, Pockes, deafness, forgetfulness, shakings and WEAKNESS of any Member – Approved by authoritie, confirmed by Reason and daily tried by experience.’
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While Christopher and Bessy were benefiting from their daily immersions, George Britton, who had succeeded to the post of his Steward, after the death of the faithful Robert Dunn in January, 1795, conducted a regular correspondence, keeping them informed about everything which went on at Sledmere in their absence, and answering Christopher’s endless inquiries. On 2 June it was a piece of ornithological news: ‘I have occasion to write till near 12 o’clock two nights,’ he told them, ‘at which late hours I heard the two Nightingales distinct. After opening the Window they filled my Room with Melody, their different Notes exceeded everything.’ On 9 June he described the disastrous unpacking of a new carriage: ‘Truslove went to unpack it and set it up & Mrs Rousby brought it here. Truslove informs me that it was very ill packed. The rats while on shipboard have eaten the greater part of the leather trunk behind …’ A fortnight later he gave an account of how the garden was looking. ‘The Laburnums are just showing the Flower Bud, the Apple Trees in full Blossom, so are Strawberries, the former in abundance, the White Thorn not out yet, every Hedge and Tree will be full, one may just perceive from the House a whitish cast from the tops of the single trees in the Lawn, old Ash not yet in full leaf.’ By the end of the month he was able to write ‘I am very glad to hear that Lady Sykes continues gathering strength’, adding rather wistfully ‘I wish you all had a Month of Sledmere Air.’
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After Bath they went to Weymouth, the most fashionable of all the resorts, being the favoured haunt of the King and Queen. ‘I suppose you are now so great with Royalty & Royal Parties,’ William Skeffington teased Christopher, ‘that you could hardly enjoy the humble Society of the family’, though he added ‘I most sincerely hope Lady Sykes will receive benefit from Sea Bathing.’
(#litres_trial_promo) One blessing of this particular stay was that the weather was warm, which George Britton hoped would ‘speed her Ladyship’s recovery’. In the meantime he continued his reports from home. ‘We have had three or four charming Hay days in the course of last Week which have enabled us to … get into stack in very good condition.’ ‘Currants are very plentiful,’ he wrote of the garden. ‘The servants took at the same time two fine melons and a small Pine.’ In the autumn they returned to Bath for more of the waters. ‘I’m sorry to find by your two last letters that your colds seem to hang on,’ Britton wrote to them there, adding ‘the Change of Weather will I hope soon remove them’.
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There are continuous anxious references to Bessy’s health in Christopher’s correspondence over the next two years, and in 1801 he fell ill himself. The first indication that all was not well came in a letter sent by George Britton to Christopher while he was en route to the Hotwell Spa at Bristol, whose mineral waters had a reputation as a cure for diverse ailments such as kidney complaints, ‘hot livers’ and ‘feeble brains’.
(#litres_trial_promo) ‘Your Health was particularly enquired after by all the Gentlemen at Driffield,’ he wrote on 30 August. ‘I hope you are approaching near to Bristol when you will then be relieved from Fatigue of Travel and I trust in a little time you will be gathering strength so as to bring about a speedy Recovery.’ A few days later they had still not reached their destination and Britton was writing ‘we are all sorry to find that your travel was slow and irksome’, adding ominously ‘I was very sorry to find that upon the whole you had gathered little strength.’
By 13 September the party ‘had all reached Clifton safe and met with a comfortable situation’. But all was not well. ‘I am equally sorry to find,’ Britton told Christopher, ‘that the State of your Health appears not in any shape to improve, God grant a Change for the better.’ His letter was then filled with the usual account of the day-to-day goings on at his beloved Sledmere. Richard Beaumont had sent ‘a small Box containing a Gate Sneck … the Kind is very simple and may be of use for Hand Gates, the one sent is to be let into stone but with a little Alteration may be made do for Wood’. The gardeners would ‘attend to the new planted trees in time, Cole to the new paled trees agreeable to your directions. I cannot see that the Deer or Horses have disturbed the trees in the Park since you left Sledmere.’ The hay stacks had all been ‘thatched without a Wisp of Hay damaged’, but there were ‘only five Bunches of the Raisin Grape, three of which are spoiled by Mildew occasioned by the steam or Vapour rising from the Tank in the Vinery’. There had been ‘a fine week of Harvest Weather … I have got our Clover Stubble eaten with sheep and have begun to plow the same and from the appearance of the land shall be tempted to sow the same with a hardy kind of Red Wheat.’
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All this information was doubtless passed on to Christopher in answer to worries he had expressed over estate matters, and shows that even when he was supposedly resting at a spa, he was incapable of relaxing. Britton concluded his news as follows: ‘I think I have nothing more particular at this time to name – I remain with my ardent Wishes for your Recovery. Your obedient humble servant, Geo. Britton.’ It was the last letter he was ever to write to Christopher, who died four days later on 17 September aged fifty-two. No account exists of the manner of his death, but it is tempting to speculate that he died with Britton’s letter in his hand and Sledmere on his mind. What killed him is a mystery, though it was probably heart failure due to chronic fatigue brought on by a lifetime of overwork. ‘He has left an excellent character in every relation of life, whether public or private, and was, in every sense, an enlightened country gentleman.’ So ran his obituary in the The Gentleman’s Magazine, continuing ‘His early rising and great activity, both of body and mind, prompted the conduct of every plan of amending the state of the country, whether by drainage or inclosure, building or navigation: and his improvements extended themselves over a surface of nearly 100 miles. The Wolds of Yorkshire will be his lasting monument.’
But Sledmere itself was to be his chief monument. Eight years after his death, a Hull merchant, Theopilus Hill, making an autumn tour through Yorkshire by chaise, visited it and wrote an account of his impressions. When Hill and his friends had finished their tour of the house, they roamed the grounds, taking in all of the ‘numerous and extensive’ plantations. They were amused by ‘a Pyramidical Monument of stone, with an inscription to the memory of some favourite dogs’, and visited the Orangery, which had ‘the largest and finest fruit we ever saw’. A gardener gave them a tour of the Walled Garden.
The Gardens are about two-and-a-half acres with Hothouses etc: in the latter we found many fig trees, and were informed they produced abundant fruit, which ripened well; the family are partial to this fruit. We found some very good apple trees, which the Gardener highly extolled for bearing large fruit and in all seasons: he said he knew not where Sir Christopher had got them from, but they had now acquired the name of Sledmere Apples. We also observed against a wall, a species of shrub, which the Gardener said was between a raspberry and a bramble, and bore fruit till Christmas: we tasted some of the fruit, and found it to be of good flavour.
Hill concluded his memoir with a eulogy to the creator of this paradise.
The House has been built twenty-two years, and the Plantations were made about eighteen years ago, by the late Sir Christopher Sykes; whose improvements are a lasting honour to his memory. He changed a naked and barren tract into a fertile, woody, and cultivated region; and his successor is treading in his steps; many other useful and ornamental additions being now in contemplation.
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CHAPTER IV The Collector (#ulink_67032ea6-c9b7-5051-bcbf-cfa742874a76)
On 19 February, 1784, a day on which exceptionally deep snow lay round about, Christopher noted in his diary, ‘Mr Simpson and the boys left us.’ They were heading for York by coach, and the journey proved an eventful one. ‘We set off for York, got to Weighton in ye coach with much danger and difficulty,’
(#litres_trial_promo) reported Simpson, though they finally reached their destination on the evening of 21 February. The Mr Simpson who took Christopher’s sons away with him was the Revd John Simpson. He had been their tutor since October, 1778 when he had been recommended for the post by the Revd William Cleaver, Christopher’s former tutor at Oxford. He was paid a salary of £120 a year and was evidently regarded as a friend by his employer, who lent him money on a regular basis and occasionally took him as a companion on trips to London. On 2 January, 1782, for example, they had both ‘supped’ with Dr Johnson, while on 4 January they ‘dined’ with Mr Brown.
(#litres_trial_promo) The boys were now coming up to the ages of thirteen, twelve and ten respectively and it was time for Christopher to consider the next step in their education. He decided to send Mark and Tatton to Westminster, where his Uncle Richard’s friend Henry Pelham and his brother the Duke of Newcastle, both Prime Ministers, had been pupils. The youngest boy, Christopher, was to remain under Mr Simpson.
‘I am exceedingly rejoiced you have determined to send your two Eldest Boys to Westminster,’ wrote Henry Maister in February, 1784, delighted that the boys were going to a school frequented by the sons of other Yorkshire gentry. ‘I went yesterday to Mrs CLAPHAMS, the House the HOTHAMS & HUDSONS are at, & which by all Accts. is the best in the place … she will have room for your two young Men, should you come up with them. I am sure you will like their Dame as they call her.’ He concluded his letter with an account of her terms: ‘£25 p.a. for Board and Washing, two Guineas for Fire and candle, two Guineas for Servants, eight shillings for Mending Linen and Cleaning Shoes, five Guineas Entrance Fees, two Guineas to the Masters, and an extra four Guineas a quarter for the use of a Single Bed’. In addition ‘each Young Gentleman to bring one Doz. Of Towels and one Table Spoon’.
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Mark and Tatton went up to Westminster, to board in ‘Mother’ Clapham’s house, in June, 1784. The Headmaster was Samuel Smith, a man described by one of his pupils, the dramatist George Colman, as being ‘very dull and good-natured’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Under his regime, the boys enjoyed a freedom that would be considered unthinkable today and the general atmosphere of the school appears to have verged upon almost constant anarchy. Bullying was rife. Frederick Reynolds, a contemporary of Colman’s, who a few years previously had attended the same house as the Sykes boys, described the treatment of new boys in his memoirs. On the very eve of his arrival, to shouts of ‘New boy! New boy!’, he was set upon by ‘a vast number of boys’ who subjected him to every manner of indignity. ‘After enduring an inundation of ink from every squirt in the room,’ he recorded, ‘till I, and my fine clothes, were of an universal blackness; after performing various aerial evolutions in my ascents from a blanket managed by some dozens pairs of hands insensible of fatigue in the perpetration of mischief; and after suffering the several torments of every remaining species of manual wit, I was at length permitted to crawl into my bed. There I lay, comforting myself with the assurance that torture had done its worst, till I gradually sobbed myself into a sound sleep.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Reynolds’s Welsh roommate was so tormented by bullies that he tried suicide by hanging himself from the bedpost, an attempt which failed when Reynolds returned to the room unexpectedly and cut him down. The boy’s reaction to his rescuer, when he had fully recovered, was to knock him to the ground. ‘There, take that,’ he cried with much apathy, ‘and the next time I choose to hang myself, you will know better than to prevent me.’
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There were instances of violence and rebellion against which the goings on in most of today’s inner-city schools pale in comparison. The Annual Register for 1779, for example, gave an account of the trial of ‘Messrs. Kelly, Lindsay, Carter, Hill, Durrell, and another six Westminster schoolboys … for an assault of a man in Dean’s Yard in January last, when they beat and wounded him in a most shocking manner, and after that, Kelly, with a drawn knife in his hand, said, “If you don’t kneel down and ask pardon, I will rip you up.”’
(#litres_trial_promo) In 1786, there was a rebellion at Westminster, led by Sir Francis Burdett. Though this may have been inspired by similar events at Eton College three years previously, when the boys had broken every window in the school, smashed up the Headmaster’s chambers and burnt chunks off the flogging block, it was ended swiftly when Headmaster Smith decided to exert his authority. He confronted Sir Francis and, when he refused to give ground, felled him with a blow from a thick stick.
(#litres_trial_promo) He was subsequently expelled.
Though there is no record of what Christopher’s attitude was to the lax regime that existed at Westminster, the fact that his sons only remained there a year suggests that it did not please him. They both left in August, 1785, and, through his Egerton in-laws, he organised for them to attend a school run by the Bishop of Chester, until they were to go up to Brasenose College, Oxford. On their return home, the scene they found at Sledmere, where they were reunited with their family for the summer holidays, was one of chaos. The place was a building site, with work on the new servants’ wing at the back of the house being in full swing, and the levelling of the remains of the old village going on at the front. Even the gardens were a mess, with work on the new walled garden and the construction of hot houses going on apace. It was, however, a delightful change from the horrors of public school, and they were happy to see their siblings.
Of the younger children, Christopher, as befitted the third son of a gentleman, was destined for the clergy and attended the Revd Goodinge’s school in Leeds. The two girls, Decima and Elizabeth, remained at home with a governess. They were described by John Simpson after they had paid a visit to him at his parish in Roos as being ‘such good children that they must excite affection and regard for them wherever they go’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Mark and Tatton matriculated from Oxford together in May, 1788. A letter written to their father in September, 1788, from the Bishop of Chester, reflects Christopher’s concern that they should be kept away from university low life. ‘I consider the Winter months,’ he wrote, ‘as much more useful with a private Tutor in College, and less dangerous, as giving less occasion to schemes & parties, than those of the Summer, and should think it better to take them away at Ladyday than now, as I have always found more difficulties with young men in the two Summer Terms.’ He recommended a Mr Morris. ‘Whilst [he] keeps them to their studies in the Evening from six to nine, they can never be more safe from drinking than under that engagement constantly kept up.’
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Tatton spent only six terms at Oxford, taking up a post in February, 1790 as an articled Clerk to Atkinson and Farrer, attorneys of Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with a view to studying for the Bar, a suitable job for a second son. He travelled to London at the end of January and took lodgings with a Mrs Lockall in Lambs Conduit Street. Scarcely had he arrived there than a letter was delivered from his mother announcing her intention to visit him. His hopes of independence were shaken. ‘Your Mother and Sister unite in wishing to see you this week,’ she wrote, continuing ‘be assured it would be a true comfort to me to have that happiness.’ She made her affection for him obvious. ‘Absence never can erase the Love I have,’ she told him, ‘for God only knows when & where we may be permitted to meet again, therefore embrace if not very inconvenient our present meeting.’ There was also an element of the kind of nagging that any son of seventeen might expect from his mother, when living away from home. ‘If you have not sent the Shrimps to Mrs Ardens at the Leases near Northallerton, let them go as soon as you can, & … also pay Mr Scotcherd eight Shillings for two pound of Cocoa he sent me to Bridlington.’
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Though Tatton’s account book for that first year in London is full of mundane entries for such items as ‘Hairdressing’, ‘Washerwoman’, ‘Fruit’, ‘Breakfast’ and ‘Tarts,’ in amongst them are recorded other payments which give an indication of the kind of life he was leading. London was an extraordinary city, a wonder to those who visited it. From the very outskirts they were struck by its hustle and bustle. ‘The road from Greenwich to London,’ wrote the Prussian traveller, Carl Philipp Moritz in 1782, ‘is actually busier, and far more alive, than the most frequented streets in Berlin; at every step we met people on horseback, in carriages, and foot-passengers.’
(#litres_trial_promo) The city thronged with people going about their business at a pace. Briskly walking pedestrians, street-sellers shouting their wares, and trotting sedan-chairmen weaved their way through the streets, each trying to avoid the other as well as the hooves of horses pulling numerous carriages at breakneck speed. ‘The hackney-coachmen make their horses smoke,’ complains Smollett’s Matt Bramble, ‘and the pavement shakes under them; and I have actually seen a waggon pass through Piccadilly at the hand-gallop.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Even the river was a crowded thoroughfare. ‘On the Thames itself,’ noted Moritz, ‘are countless swarms of little boats passing and repassing, many with one mast and one sail, and many with none, in which persons of all ranks are carried over. Thus, there is hardly less stir and bustle on this river, than there is in some of its own London’s crowded streets.’
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There were even the equivalent of today’s fast-food outlets. The historian Robert Southey, a pupil at Westminster not long after the Sykes brothers, described visiting a pastrycook’s shop one bitterly cold winter’s morning and inquiring of the proprietress as to why she and her fellow tradesmen kept their windows open during such severe weather. ‘She told me,’ he recalled, ‘that were she to close it, her receipts would be lessened forty or fifty shillings a day – so many were the persons who took up buns or biscuits as they passed by and threw their pence in, not allowing themselves time to enter. Was there ever so indefatigable a people!’ It was no doubt at just such a place that young Tatton would have bought his tarts.
While Tatton worked in the solicitor’s office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields during the day, after hours he busied himself exploring all the varied pleasures that London had to offer a seventeen-year-old boy. On 9 March, for example, only a short time after he had taken up his new post, he paid 3s. for ‘Seeing the Wild Beasts at Exeter Change’. Menageries were at the time a popular diversion for people from all walks of life, most of whom would only have seen wild animals in pictures. The most famous was the one in the Tower of London, where lions and occasionally other species had been kept for the King since medieval times. Visiting it in April, 1787, Thomas Pennant saw ‘a leopard of a quite unknown species, brought from Bengal. It was wholly black, but the hair was marked on the back, sides, and neck with round clusters of small spots, of a glossy and most intense black … Here were also two tigers.’
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The Exeter Change in the Strand was the eighteenth-century equivalent of a shopping mall, with various shops lining the walks around a central staircase. It was on four floors, and one of the rooms on the upper floor, the walls of which were painted with appropriate jungle scenery, was traditionally let to a menagerie. Tatton saw an entertainment called Pidman’s Exhibition of Wild Beasts, which consisted of a variety show followed by a viewing of various helpless animals kept in cages. Byron visited the Exeter Change in 1812. ‘Such a conversazione!’ he remarked in his journal. ‘There was a “hippopotamus”, like Lord Liverpool in the face; and the “Ursine Sloth” hath the very voice and manner of my valet – but the tiger talked too much. The elephant took and gave me my money again; took off my hat; opened a door; trunked a whip; and behaved so well that I wish he was my butler.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Unfortunately, Tatton’s evening was slightly marred. ‘Lost out of my pocket 5s.,’ he noted, though in later entries, when he was more experienced, he wrote simply ‘Had my pocket picked.’
Other entertainments he appears to have particularly enjoyed included frequent trips to the theatre. ‘At the Lyceum. 1s. 6d.,’ he wrote on 13 March, where he would have been treated to a performance of The Wags, by Charles Dibdin, a pot-pourri of anecdotes and gossip, interspersed with sea songs. After the show, he then took a ‘coach to the Playhouse. 2s. 6d.’, either the Drury Lane Theatre or the Haymarket, to watch a play by Sheridan. He went to ‘Merlin’s Museum’ on 17 March, Westminster Abbey on 13 April, and on 3 May, ‘took a Coach to a rout’, one of those evening rendezvous in public rooms, where people drank tea and walked up and down gossiping. In June he paid his shilling to visit the celebrated Vauxhall Gardens on the south bank of the Thames. On any night in these elaborate pleasure gardens, laid out with walks, statues and tableaux, he could listen to one of several orchestras, watch dazzling fireworks, dance if he wished to, and take supper in a gaily painted alcove.
When he was not being a tourist, Tatton spent some of his spare time ‘at Johnson’s School’, and ‘the Boxing School’. Owing to the patronage of the sport by the Prince of Wales and his cronies, prize fighting had begun to attract the attention of men of substance and respectability. Fighters sprung up who were more sophisticated than the thugs who had represented the sport in fairground boxing booths, and who brought with them a more elegant and scientific technique. One of these men was Tom Johnson, whose most famous fight was with a seventeen stone, six foot two inches giant from Birmingham called Isaac Perrins, who had issued a challenge to fight anyone for £500. The fight, which took place in October, 1789, ended in victory for Johnson, who was three stone lighter than his opponent, though it took him one-and-a-quarter hours and sixty-five rounds to achieve it. His backer, a Mr Bullock, won £20,000 on the contest, and gave Johnson £1,000, part of which he used to set up his own boxing school. Such establishments became popular with the young gentlemen of the day, and the lessons would have given confidence to Tatton who, though tall, was of a somewhat skinny physique and had a rather thin, squeaky voice.
The man who was to teach Tatton the most valuable lessons was ‘Gentleman’ John Jackson, a man of almost perfect physique, who was said to be ‘the best-made man of a generation of very well-made men’.
(#litres_trial_promo) Though he only fought in the ring three times, on the last occasion beating the reigning champion, Dan Mendoza, in ten minutes, he made a deep and lasting impression on all who saw him. ‘His style of boxing,’ wrote Lord Knebworth, a historian of the sport, ‘was elegant and easy, and he was particularly light and quick on his feet. His judgement of distance, so important in boxing, was unsurpassed, and his blows, which were terrific in their force, were delivered so fast that they were said to be perceptible in their effect alone.’
(#litres_trial_promo) He too set up a school in rooms at 13 Old Bond Street, and it was here that Tatton attended. The Revd M. Morris, who knew the Sykes family well in later years, told a story in his Reminiscences, of how the young Tatton ‘once got his father to go to London to see a great fight on some sort of stage. On reaching the appointed spot the father, to his surprise, saw his son appear as one of the combatants, whereupon he instantly took his departure.’
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In August Tatton set out on a visit to Sledmere. ‘Took a place in the York Coach,’ he noted on 19 August. He paid a down payment of £1. 5s., which represented half of the fare. He paid the other half when he left two days later. Long before dawn, a hackney coach, price 2s., collected him and his trunk from his lodgings and took him to the White Horse Inn, Fetter Lane, in time to catch the 5.00 a.m. York Highflyer. He would also have had the choice of either the Royal Mail, which left from the Bull and Mouth Inn, St Martins-le-Grand, or the Mercury, from the Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill. Thirty years previously, such a trip, a distance of 200 miles up the Great North Road, would have taken three days in the summer and four in winter. The coach boarded by Tatton did the same journey in thirty-one hours.
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The time the journey took reflected the advances in the state of England’s roads, which had taken place in the latter half of the eighteenth century. ‘The great improvements which, within the memory of man, have been made in the turnpike roads throughout this kingdom,’ wrote a contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1792, ‘would be incredible did we not actually perceive them.’ When Faujas de Saint Fond, the noted French traveller, set out on his journey to the Hebrides in 1784, he travelled up the Great North Road. ‘From London to Barnet, twelve miles,’ he noted in his journal, ‘– a superb road, covered with carriages, and with people on horseback and on foot, who were returning, in a fine moonlight evening, to London, from the country houses and neighbouring villages, where they go to recreate themselves during Sunday.’ He passed through Hatfield, Stevenage, Dugden and Stilton, where he commented, ‘Nothing can surpass the beauty and convenience of the road during these sixty-three miles; it resembles the avenue of a magnificent garden.’ Saint Fond also noticed that ‘at Stilton, one begins to observe, on the sides of the road, large heaps of stones destined to repair it’.
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The Highflyer took the same route. After Stilton, with a change of horses at staging posts some twelve to fifteen miles apart, and an average speed of seven miles an hour, the main stops were at Stamford, Newark, Doncaster, Ferrybridge, Tadcaster, and finally York. Here Tatton was deposited at the York Tavern at around midday on 22 August, his eighteenth birthday. He chose to lodge in the city for the night, and on the following day he visited the hairdresser. Then he picked up a horse and rode over to Sledmere. He didn’t stay long. Driven away by the piles of rubble everywhere, the scaffolding all over the house, and the constant noise of the workmen, he decided that some sea air would do him good and went instead to Scarborough, still a fashionable spa, where he took lodgings for a month and passed his time sea-bathing, riding, coffee-housing and visiting the play at the theatre on Tanner Street. Altogether he spent ten weeks in Yorkshire, before returning to London at the beginning of November and back to the offices of Atkinson and Farrer. He was soon visiting his old haunts and 13 November found him back at the boxing school.
Apart from his love of boxing, there is one other clue as to the path that Tatton’s life was to take, and it is to be found on the inside cover of the book in which he wrote his accounts. In small neat handwriting he wrote, ‘My bay Mare covered by Astonishment in May 1790. Astonishment was bred by the late Sir John Lister Kay and sold by him to Col Ratcliffe. Astonishment was got by Highflyer, his Dam (which was also the dam of Phenomenon) by Eclipse, his Grandam by Engineer …’ For a seventeen-year-old this demonstrates a precocious interest in breeding, for Astonishment, the stallion which had covered Tatton’s bay mare, had a startling pedigree. His father, Highflyer, had sired the winners of 470 races, including three Derbys and four St Legers, and had made so much money for his owner, Mr Richard Tattersall, that he was able to build himself a mansion near Ely, which he named Highflyer Hall. Astonishment’s mother was a daughter of Eclipse, said to have been ‘the fleetest horse that ever ran in England’.
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Tatton’s heart was not in the Bar. While he sat in the office, hunched over documents and occasionally scratching away with his quill pen, he was dreaming of horses and the Turf. According to the sporting journalist, Henry Hall Dixon, better known as ‘The Druid’, Tatton astonished his fellow clerks by walking from London to Epsom in June, 1791, to see the Duke of Bedford’s Eager win the Derby, leaving his lodgings at four in the morning and returning the same night at eleven. Why he chose to go on foot is a mystery, since his accounts show that he kept a horse in town, stabled at Joseph Denison’s house. The following year he rode down to watch the race won by Lord Grosvenor’s John Bull, and stayed on to see the Oaks taken by Lord Clermont’s Volante, another progeny of Highflyer. Three weeks later, an entry in his account book for 12 June reads ‘Expences at Ascott Races two days. £2. 2s.’. He was hooked.
Having acquired a rudimentary knowledge of the Law, but shown no aptitude for the Bar, Tatton was summoned by his father back to Sledmere at the end of 1792 and set to work in the East Riding Bank. He lodged with a Mrs Martin in Dagger Lane, Hull. Evidently he did not forget his fellow clerks back in London, for one of the friends he had made amongst them, Thomas Byron, wrote to him on 5 December thanking him for a gift of hares which he had sent them. ‘I assure you I never tasted better,’ he told him, going on to say how glad he was ‘you like your new Situation so well; something more agreeable I think than an Attorneys Clerk’.
(#litres_trial_promo) True to form, Tatton caused raised eyebrows on his first Saturday at the bank by walking the thirty-two miles home to Sledmere at the end of the day’s business, in order to spend Sunday there, and walking back again in time for work on Monday morning. Already, at the age of twenty, legends were beginning to grow up around him.
Tatton’s diary for 1793 suggests that his life in Hull was mostly taken up with life at the bank, visits to his father at Sledmere, where he occasionally helped with the accounts, hunting and riding. He also made frequent visits to his grandmother, Decima, Lady Sykes, who lived in Beverley and whose health was failing. On Friday, 15 February, he received unwelcome news: ‘A Messenger came from Beverley with the sad news of my Grandmother’s being seized with the Palsy. My Father and I came over.’ Apart from the odd rally round she never recovered and his entry for 9 March reads ‘4 o’clock this morning my Grandmother died. My father came down from London.’
Before he died, Parson had left a touching eulogy to her, entitled ‘My Wife’s Character’.
She was lovely and amiable in her Person
Courteous and affable in her Behaviour
Lively and cheerful in conversation
Of a sweet and engaging temper
Of an open and ingenuous mind
In her Judgement of others candid
Zealous & sincere in the discharge of all conjugal duties
In the care of her children tender and affectionate
To her Servants kind & indulgent etc. etc.
It was written from the heart and he accepted its shortcomings. ‘This Character not being in Rhime,’ he wrote, ‘nor Poetical, & perhaps too long for the Present Taste, may be improper for an Epitaph; yet I choose to leave it, as a Testimony of my affection & love for, & the High Opinion I had of her. And I sincerely believe the whole to be strictly & fully true.’
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Tatton made no mention of his grandmother’s funeral in his diary, entries in which show that, outside working at the bank, he was becoming more and more tied up with his horses. ‘My brown mare foaled a Filly,’ he wrote on 26 March, and noted excitedly the details of its sire, Guido: ‘a bright bay Horse, full fifteen hands, one inch high with a deal of Bone, remarkably temperate and quiet to ride & leaps well; was bred by the Duke of Queensbury. Guido at four years old won the Revolution Stakes of 200 guineas each at Newmarket beating eight others … Guido twice beat the famous mare Dido.’ As the year wore on more foals were born, physick was administered on a regular basis, and in the summer months, when fashionable society was gathering in the spas, taking the waters and attending assemblies and balls, the only balls mentioned by Tatton were those of a medicinal nature, such as on 18 July, when he began his mare on a course of ‘Taplin’s Cordial Balls and a Mash Morning and Night’, or on 11 August when ‘my Mare had a Ball. I went and dined at Welton. My Mother, brother and Sisters were there. Returned at Night.’
All the while that Tatton was serving his apprenticeships, Mark, who was being groomed to inherit everything his father had created, remained at Oxford to round off his education. According to a letter written to Christopher in June, 1790 by his then tutor at Brasenose, the Revd George Harper, in which he spoke of Mark’s desire ‘to gain your esteem and confidence’, he came close to being a perfect student. He was attentive to lectures ‘during the whole of Lent & the first part of the Easter Terms’, mixed with a group of ‘respectable and ingenious men’, and could now, wrote Harper, ‘number among his intimate acquaintance some of the most valuable persons in this place’. However, what prevented him from giving ‘an absolute and unqualified approbation of his conduct’ was the fact that ‘there still remains on his mind a boyish improvidence …’
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The Revd Harper appears to have been somewhat naive in his approval of Mark’s set, for the one thing that they appear to have been most ingenious about was in parting their rich young friend from his money. Christopher was obliged to engage a new private tutor for Mark and to send them both into the country to study in a rented cottage. ‘I cannot conceive how he contrived to spend so much money in the University,’ wrote George Halme to his employer, on 30 September, 1790. ‘He did not appear extravagant when I was in College, but in Oxford, though one hardly expects it amongst Gentlemen, there are numbers ready to take advantage of generosity and inattention: a few of that description, I suspect, assisted him spending his money and his time.’ In the new situation in which Mark found himself, living in a country village, ‘his pocket expenses cannot be very great,’ Halme assured Christopher, ‘as there are no temptations to spend his time which is not spent in his own improvement’.
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Mark managed to rein in his extravagance during the rest of his father’s lifetime and after he left Oxford he did everything he could to gain his approval. He became engaged to a local heiress, Henrietta Masterman, the only daughter of Henry Masterman of Settrington Hall, near Malton. Orphaned when she was only five years old, Henrietta was heir to the Settrington Estate, which included two houses: an Elizabethan manor house, enlarged about 1703, and a new rather austere neo-classical mansion, still partly under construction, which was intended to replace it. She was five years older than Mark, and, being a close neighbour, had known him for some time. She was well educated, spoke and wrote French, and wrote novels in her spare time. It was a love match and one the family warmly approved of. ‘I can assure you we are all extremely anxious to hear how you go on,’ his younger sister Decima wrote to him in June, 1795, ‘& I hope you will relieve us from our anxiety as soon as it is in your power.’
Decima, who was herself on the point of marrying a neighbour, John Robinson Foulis, the second son of Sir William Foulis of Ingleby Manor, York, was evidently alone at Sledmere with her parents, and the strain of sitting around for days on end with very little to do was beginning to show. ‘I long to see you again either married or unmarried,’ she told him, ‘as at present we are left entirely to ourselves & as you know well to our devout conversations which are still very numerous. I have nothing more to say of any consequence & will only add the anxious wishes for your lasting happiness.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Mark and Henrietta were married on 11 November, in the church of Holy Trinity, Micklegate, York, where Henrietta had herself been baptised in October, 1766.
On the following day, 12 November, ‘the morrow of St Martin’, Mark, aged twenty-four, was nominated as High Sheriff of Yorkshire. It was a prestigious post and Christopher was so delighted that he agreed to pay for the considerable expenses that were involved. The cost of fitting out the sheriff and his retinue alone came to £355, which included £80 for horses, £35 for a coach, £19. 11s. for a banner, £68. 18s. to his tailor, £80. 18s. for silks & velvets etc, £26. 18s. for lace, £18. 18s. to the shoemaker, £9. 12s. to the hosier and £15. 12s. for buckles. By the end of the year, the total costs had amounted to the huge sum of £1,077. 17s. 6d.
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After the wedding Mark and Henrietta went to live at Settrington, and in September of the following year, as co-heir to his wife’s property, he adopted the name of Masterman to run before Sykes. Since Settrington was only ten miles from Sledmere, there was much toing and froing between the two houses. ‘Lady Sykes with Mrs Sedgewick, Miss Charlotte the lovely, & Mrs Crockay, your little Flirt, dined with us on Thursday,’ wrote Henrietta to Tatton, soon after her marriage. ‘Chr. also and Miss Crofts; & on Saturday she took her whole phalanx of Ladies, the above, Miss Langfords and my Sister to Heslerton.’ Henrietta seems to have struck up a particularly close relationship with Tatton, of all Mark’s siblings. ‘Fie on the lame Horse or the lazy Master, My dear Tatton,’ she wrote to him in the same letter, referring to an occasion when she and Mark had ridden over to Sledmere to see him and he had failed to appear, ‘for you have between you grievously disappointed all here especially My Saint and I who came over Saturday evening with a fair Wind and light Sailing to meet you. I in particular was in such a Merry way at the thought of so soon shaking hands with you …’ If his horse, ‘the unworthy Beast’, went lame again, she continued, then rather than be disappointed once more, she would send over her own mount, ‘my Old Brilliant’, to fetch him. ‘She will canter you over, sail foremost, from Dagger Lane in a tangent.’
It appears from this letter that she and Tatton may have formed some kind of sentimental friendship, for she refers to him as her ‘Pet’ and thanks him for a ring he sent her, set with a lock of his hair, which she is now wearing. ‘It shall never be taken from thence till the Wearer of it be dead,’ she assures him, continuing ‘This promise, slightly as it be made, I hold as sacred as the Friendship I long ago gave you without Reserve.’ She returns the compliment, sending him ‘Another, sett in the very same manner’, which she begs him to wear ‘until the hair of some Lady yet in the clouds, & justly preferred, has a stronger claim to its place.’ She finishes her letter by telling him that his sister, Elizabeth, wants his opinion on a horse. ‘Elizabeth, with her love, bids me tell you she has got a new horse, with a long tail, but will neither pass her opinion, nor mount it till you have been here.’
(#litres_trial_promo) Tatton’s close friendship with the Masterman Sykeses is further borne out by the fact that when they were painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1805, he was included in the portrait.
On the death of Mark’s father, in September, 1801, the Masterman Sykes’s moved from Settrington into the newly completed Sledmere, though they kept the former as a second residence. The ‘improvidence’ which Mark had shown as a young man, and which he had so carefully reined in during his father’s last years, was now let loose. He inherited an estate that, in spite of the considerable annual income brought in from rents, was saddled with debts of over £30,000. This was because, to Christopher, rising incomes were an excuse to spend more on his land and increase investment. He saw the debt as a temporary necessity. Mark, however, did not share his father’s interest in agriculture. His interests were sport and books. Unfortunately for Sledmere, he was also a prolific gambler.
Within a few months of inheriting the estate he had saddled it with a debt that came close to being ruinous. Mark lived in an age when eccentric wagers between gentlemen were a common occurrence. No incident was too trivial to bet upon; the colour of a horse, the next day’s weather, the distance a man might walk, the impending birth of a child were all topics that might be the subject of a bet. A favourite speculation was on how long a man might live and the old betting book at White’s Club is full of such wagers. On 8 October, 1746, for example, Lord Montfort bet Mr Greville 100 guineas that Mr Nash would still be alive on the same day in four years’ time, while on 4 November, 1754, ‘Lord Montfort wagers Sir John Bland one hundred guineas that Mr Nash outlives Mr Cibber.’
(#litres_trial_promo) In a similar tome at Brooks’s Club, one member bet another 500 guineas to ten that none of the Cabinet would be beheaded within the following three years.
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As the new landlord, Mark made it his duty during the first few months of his arriving at Sledmere to entertain his neighbours and tenants to supper. Among these were the various members of the clergy whose parishes lay within the estate’s boundaries. On 31 May, 1802, it was the turn of the Revd James Gilbert, rector of the adjoining village of Kirby Grindalythe, and during the course of the evening a heated debate took place on a subject which was on everyone’s mind at the time, namely the threat posed to Britain by Napoleon Bonaparte, the terror of Europe. A majority of the guests present, including the Revd Gilbert, took the view that in spite of the recent signing between the English and the French of the Treaty of Amiens it was only a matter of time before France attempted an invasion of England. Mark had a quite different theory. In his opinion, Bonaparte’s position was less secure than it looked because ‘the very atmosphere that [he] breathed was fraught with treason’, and even if he were to escape death in the hazardous pursuit of his ambitions then he would be killed by an assassin.
At this point in the proceedings, Gilbert stood up, no doubt less than steadily after the imbibing of large quantities of port, and in no uncertain terms expressed his belief that his host was wrong and that Bonaparte would in all likelihood live to see the achievement of his plans. So strong was his conviction on this point that he would lay a wager on it, there and then, of 100 guineas, on the condition that Sir Mark would agree to pay him one guinea a day for every day that Napoleon lived. ‘Done!’ cried Mark, in the excitement of the moment. Though the other guests present showed their disapproval of the proceedings with cries of ‘No, no, no wager!’ neither their host nor the rector chose to listen to them. The die was cast.
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As it happened, Mark’s belief that Napoleon would be assassinated was not some foolish fancy. There had already been two attempts on his life, the second of which had come dangerously close to succeeding. The first, which took place in Paris on 10 October, 1800 and involved the Adjutant-General, Arena, and a Roman sculptor called Ceracchi, was a plot to knife him in his box at the opera while he was attending the first performance of Salieri’s Les Horaces. It was foiled by the arrest of the conspirators during the production. On Christmas Eve, he had a much closer brush with death when, en route to watch Haydn’s Creation, a bomb, ignited by three Breton royalists, Limoëlan, Saint-Réjant and Carbon, exploded in the Rue Saint-Nicaise as his coach passed close by. The windows of the coach were all smashed but miraculously Napoleon escaped without injury, though nine people were killed and twenty-six injured in the blast.
On the morning of 1 June, the day after the wager was laid, the Revd Gilbert, evidently a wealthy as well as an honest parson, sent his patron the princely sum of 100 guineas. On 8 September, with no sign of Bonaparte succumbing to an assassin, Mark returned the money and began the slow process of paying his part of the wager, seven guineas per week. The days rolled by, and as the warlike activities of the French increased and they consolidated and extended their domination of Europe in Holland, Switzerland and Italy, it became apparent that the so-called peace was nothing more than an uneasy truce. In May, 1803 the British declared war on France and with the threat of invasion once again raising its ugly head the government began the mustering of troops up and down the eastern maritime counties. The East Riding coast, though a considerable distance from the main body of French troops at Boulogne, was so perfect a potential landing place that there was a strong possibility the enemy might try their luck there. Up and down East Yorkshire, disbanded units of militia were reformed, including the Yorkshire Wolds Gentlemen and Yeomanry Cavalry, formerly commanded by Sir Christopher Sykes. Mark was its new commander and he raised 300 men, equipping them with a smart uniform of scarlet, with green facings.

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