o portrait survives of the George Sitwell who built Renishaw Hall, but in 1900, after a close examination of the effigy on his monument in Eckington church and of his letter-book, another George Sitwell imagined how he must have looked towards the end of his life:
over the middle height, and, as became one obviously well advanced in middle age, rather neat and precise than fashionable in his dress. He wore a long periwig scented with orange water, a slight moustache and a tuft of hair upon his chin [. . .] His face, with its good forehead and eyes, strong and clear-cut nose and well developed chin, gave an impression of force of character, tenacity of purpose, and good reasoning powers, and this impression was strengthened by his conversation, for even the most casual acquaintance could not fail to observe that he was a manufacturer who had been accustomed to think and act for himself, a man who was not only well educated, but gifted with a sound judgement and a marked talent for business.1
Born in 1601 at Eckington in Derbyshire, George was the son of a rich yeoman (also called George), who lived in a house on the village street and died six years later. In 1612, ‘Mr Wigfall, who was then of smale estate, marryed my mother, by which meanes he raised his fortune and came to have the guidance of mine estate dureing mine minority (which was about ten yeares)’, wrote George in 1653. Despite promising to leave him his property as settlement of a debt for £1,400, Wigfall married again after the death of his ward’s mother and, dying intestate in 1641, ensured that it went to the children of his second marriage, much to George’s anger.
With funds provided by Mrs Sitwell, Mr Wigfall had built them a house on the summit of a long, rocky promontory above Renishaw, a small hamlet near Eckington in the area then known as ‘Hallamshire’ – on the northern border of Derbyshire and the southern of the West Riding of Yorkshire. Six miles from Chesterfield and six from Sheffield, Renishaw lies between the Peak District and what are now called the Dukeries. Wigfall’s new home, where the Renishaw stables now stand, must have alerted his stepson to the beauty of the site.
In 1625–6 (the first year of King Charles I’s reign), using money saved during his minority, George built Renishaw Hall within sight of Wigfall’s dwelling. A ‘Pennine Manor’ on an H plan, this would become the nucleus of today’s Renishaw. In some ways George always remained a farmer here, eating with his servants in the hall. Even today, when you go through the north porch into the hall – which is not much changed since his day – the panelling, huge fireplace, stone floor and rough oak furniture have a distinctly rustic feel.
On three floors, the tall, gabled house nevertheless aspired to gentility. From the hall, a door at the right opened on to a Little Parlour, and another door at the right on to a buttery and kitchen. The Great Staircase and Great Parlour (now Library) were at the left. Thirty-four feet long, twenty wide, with a bay window on to the gardens, the Great Parlour was the best room. Panelled, this had a plasterwork ceiling and a frieze of mermaids and dolphins, squirrels, vine leaves and grapes, with a large oak carving over the fireplace of Abraham sacrificing Isaac. Above the hall was the principal bedroom, the Hall Chamber, with Mr Sitwell’s study next to it.
Around the house were gardens and orchards, some walled. A large south garden, wider than the house it surrounded on three sides, had green or gravel walks, box hedges, small knot gardens with aromatic herbs, yew pyramids and flowerbeds. On the left was a bowling green. The Great Orchard, south of the main garden, contained two archery butts and side alleys bordered by flowers. There was also a banqueting house of red brick that contained a tiny, oak-panelled room. A brew-house supplied the hall with beer until 1895.
For the seventeenth century the staff was small, consisting of a steward (Thomas Starkey); a housekeeper (Katherine Heays); a butler and a pair of footmen in green and yellow livery; a coachman and two grooms; a cook, a kitchen-maid and two servant-maids; a dairy maid; and two gardeners. This was in the 1660s, however, after the death of Mrs Sitwell, when the children had left home. In their day, it would have been larger. It is also likely that other servants who did not live in the house came up daily from nearby Eckington.
Yet seventeenth-century Renishaw was no lonely sylvan paradise, since a busy road (later moved downhill) ran past the main front of the house, going on to cross a bridge over the River Rother. An important highway between West Yorkshire and London, it was a road thronged with traffic – carts, pack-horses, horsemen, travellers on foot. Bolsover and Hardwick, then Derbyshire’s greatest mansions, could be seen on a beautiful ridge to the east.
George came from a family long established in or around Eckington. In 1301 Simon Sitwell of the parish was recognised in a lawsuit as heir of Walter de Boys, who had died on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, while in 1310 Roger ‘Cytwelle’ helped to found the Guild of St Mary of Eckington. The first Sitwell of substance had been Mr Robert Sytwelle of Staveley Netherthorpe Hall three miles away, who made his money from a coal mine at Eckington Marsh and acquired the Renishaw site. A Catholic without sons, he had tried unsuccessfully to leave his fortune away from his Protestant heir, George’s grandfather.
After attending the grammar school at Derby, George knew Latin and Greek, and apparently went up to Cambridge to finish his education at Corpus Christi College. In 1627 he married Margaret, daughter of Hugh Childers of Carr House, near Doncaster. We know nothing of Mr Childers, apart from where he lived and his styling himself ‘gentleman’ – or about Margaret, except that she gave her husband nine children, of whom several did not survive infancy, and that she died in 1658.
During the 1630s George began mining iron ore on a large scale, building a blast furnace to forge it at Plumbley, a mile north-west of Eckington, in partnership with Wigfall. The Civil War’s need of iron for weaponry increased his market, which already included the West Indies and Virginia, and in 1652 he built another furnace nearer home, at Foxbrooke. This became Derbyshire’s biggest ironworks, producing pig and bar iron together with castings and other iron goods. In 1656 George set up a rolling mill at Renishaw to make rod iron for nails, scythes and sickles. He also owned a forge at Pleasley, which turned out saws.
In 1641, with four other local gentlemen, George and his stepbrother Henry Wigfall sent a letter to the House of Lords urging it to petition King Charles to meet Parliament on his return from Scotland. When the Civil War broke out, George let royalist troops garrison Renishaw (no doubt from the regiment raised by his neighbour, John Frescheville) and guard the road below. Osbert Sitwell claimed that when he was a boy, old men pointed out to him the marks of cannonballs on the stone of the upper storeys, but there is no record of any siege.2
After the royalist defeat at Marston Moor George obtained a ‘protection’ from the Parliamentary commander in Yorkshire, Ferdinando, Lord Fairfax. Dated 9 August 1644, it orders that ‘George Sitwell of Renishaw in the County of Darby, Gentl., bee not plundered, pillaged, or in any way Injured in any of his howses or goods’. Later, however, he was fined £400 as a persistent delinquent, which can only mean that the authorities saw him as a hard-line Cavalier. His sympathies may have been reported by his stepbrother, Henry Wigfall, who was a committed Roundhead.
George could afford to pay, as the Renishaw estates with other lands produced £800 a year, doubled by profits from his ironworks. A Justice of the Peace, eager to turn himself into a proper gentleman with a coat of arms, in 1648 he applied to Parliament’s herald, ‘Garter, Principal King of Arms of Englishmen’, for a grant, receiving three black lions on gold and silver bars (once borne by the Stutevilles, medieval lords of Eckington). It was re-granted after the Restoration, the bars changed to gold and green. The herald noted how George, ‘in the late unhappy times of distraction [had] indeavored as much as in him lay to the advancement of his Majesties just Authority, whereby he may pretend to some marke of distinction’.3
George Sitwell displayed these new arms on his banner at the Derby Assizes in 1653, when serving as High Sheriff for Derbyshire under Lord Protector Cromwell. As his chaplain he brought the Eckington parson, Dr Gardiner, whose appointment to the living he had procured four years earlier and who had been his eldest son Francis’s tutor at Cambridge. Gardiner preached a dangerously indiscreet Assize sermon on ‘Magistracy and Ministry, the State and the Church’, reflecting his patron’s views. (Significantly, when the Restoration came, Dr Gardiner was appointed a chaplain to the Duke of Monmouth.)
It was a perilous time for closet royalists to air a preference for King and Bishops as opposed to Protector and Major-Generals. Sitwell and his chaplain were lucky to escape serious charges. Since the Book of Common Prayer had been outlawed, Gardiner officiated in Eckington church without book or surplice, administering the Sacrament to parishioners who sat at a long table. No doubt, he also said the illegal Anglican service at the Hall, in secret – whispering it to the family behind locked doors.
After Mrs Sitwell’s death in 1658 the housekeeper, Mrs Heays, ran the house, ensuring its tranquil routine. The servants ate with their master. Breakfast was at seven o’clock: cold meat, oatcakes, white bread and butter, washed down by small ale. At eleven Mrs Heays led them into the hall for prayers, and afterwards the butler laid the table for dinner at midday – a substantial meal, which Mr Sitwell followed by a pipe of tobacco in the Little Parlour or the banqueting house. Supper was also eaten in the hall, where the day ended with evening prayers.
The whole household went to Eckington on Sunday to hear Dr Gardiner’s sermon, the preacher and his wife riding back with them for dinner. On special occasions there was dancing in the Great Parlour and card-playing in the Little Parlour, while at Christmas fiddlers came over from Staveley or Chesterfield, the hall being decked with holly and ivy.
George, who reveals a good deal about himself in his letter-book, lived an active outdoor life besides managing his estates and his iron. He bred horses, hunted with Mr Frescheville’s harriers, and may have kept greyhounds for coursing. He also owned a fowling-piece, which suggests that he shot regularly, since we know he presented his neighbours with pheasants.
George prudently concealed his feelings about Oliver Cromwell’s regime, destroying letters that might put him in danger. The sole exception is a note in his hand (perhaps a copy) reporting a plot to assassinate the Protector by starting a fire in the chapel at Whitehall when he was hearing a sermon, and then kill him in the confusion. George comments that while the authorities pretended it was one of ‘the restless attempts of the Cavalier partie’, the man behind it was a discontented Leveller, an army captain, whose aim was to discredit Royalists.
After the ‘Great Rebellion’ was over, George described his country’s former Puritan masters as ‘crafty, wicked men [who] conceave it best to fish in troubled waters, and apprehending religion to be the finest cloake to cover their intentions . . . they seem much to resemble those Zealotts Josephus mentions among the Jews a little before their destruction . . . factious, seditious, self-ended people, who when they neither care nor dare begin a disturbance in Civile affaires, then will they quarrell about religion’.
By 1659 England had grown to detest the tyranny of the ‘Major-Generals’ and despise the new Protector, Richard Cromwell, Oliver’s incapable son. At the end of the year General Monck marched on London, reinstating the Long Parliament, which in May 1660 declared that Charles II had succeeded his father as king in 1649. We know how George, the staunch Cavalier, felt about it from a letter he wrote to his old friend and neighbour Mr Frescheville the following April.
All honest, truehearted Englishmen are bound to render harty thanks and praise to our mercifull God, who hath miraculously restored our gracious Sovereign, and us to our right, in a calme peace, in the throng of soe blustering and unnaturall a war; wherein I cannot sufficiently set forth the worth of the good Duke of Albemarle [Monck], who was cheifly instrumental in our happiness.
George welcomed ‘that great and grave Council of our Nation’ – his name for the ferociously royalist ‘Cavalier Parliament’ – with its statutes against Levellers, eviction of Puritan parsons and savage punishment of seditious pamphleteers. ‘The preservation of our laws ought to be dearest to us, for by them the crowne is kept from tottering on the head of our Sovereign.’
By this time George Sitwell had become England’s biggest manufacturer of nails, reputedly producing a tenth of the kingdom’s entire iron production. (It should be remembered, however, that most iron articles were imported.) During the winter of 1661–2 his furnaces turned out 1,181 tons of sow iron worth £6 a ton, when the whole country’s annual output was no more than 10,000 tons. Some was sold in London, taken by barge and ship from a depot at Bawtry on the River Idle as well as by road. He also made a complete rolling mill for a client in the West Indies.
Some modern writers sneer at this association with ‘trade’, but George would have seen nothing demeaning. Seventeenth-century iron-making was the squirearchy’s preserve, their woods providing charcoal to heat the forges, their streams powering the hammers. There were other gentleman ironmasters in Derbyshire, such as the Hunlokes of nearby Wingerworth. George enjoyed the society of neighbours like these, riding over to Chesterfield on Saturday to dine with them at the Red Lyon on fish, mutton, chicken and ale, afterwards playing shovel-board. He also went regularly to Derby for the Assizes or the Fair. Sometimes he visited Sheffield for the Tuesday market, dining at the Angel Inn near the Irish Cross.
Many letters in the letter-book are to ‘Cosen ffranceys’. This was Ralph Franceys, who lived in London at the White Hart in Friday Street and acted as George’s unofficial agent. George was constantly asking Ralph for small purchases, such as cinnamon water, which was good for the digestion and rheumatism. In December 1664 he wrote, ‘My sone[-in-law] William [Revel] wants a ffrench hat, and I have a grandchild about six yeares old, who wants one too.’ Over the years Ralph became a valued friend, he and his wife sometimes spending Christmas at Renishaw. He helped George to correspond with his sons overseas – and kept an eye on John, the youngest son and black sheep, who was half-heartedly working in London.
Two of George’s younger sons became successful merchants. The second, another George, established himself at Seville, dealing in Spanish silks before retiring to London as a rich man. He regularly sent his father presents of red Alicante wine and sweet Malaga – clearly much appreciated – with oranges and lemons. The third, Robert Sitwell, entered the Levant Company, exporting English woollen cloth and metals in return for oriental silks, cottons and spices. For many years he lived in Syria at Aleppo and then in Italy at Leghorn (Livorno), the Company’s headquarters, eventually coming back to spend his old age at London.
The fourth son, John, was less satisfactory, losing his place as apprentice to a tailor in Derby. His father found him a new place in London, continuing to help him with money and advice. He confided to Cousin Franceys, ‘John hath been a great griefe to me.’
Unusually kind-hearted, George drafted a petition on behalf of his neighbour, Mr Leigh of Coldwell Hall, who had fallen on hard times, to beg a place for him in the Duke of Norfolk’s almshouse at Sheffield, besides paying for one of his sons to be apprenticed to a Sheffield tailor. He sent a letter to another of Mr Leigh’s sons, telling him ‘write by the next post this comes to you to hould up the hartt of the ould man’.
He asked the creditors of a former maid at Renishaw to be lenient because she had unknowingly married a man deep in debt. Twice he bailed out a debtor from Chesterfield’s House of Correction, helping him again when he was imprisoned a third time.
George also did his best to aid young Whittles, ‘a poore ffatherless and Motherless boy, an object of pitty to move one’, rescuing him from his ‘Knavish uncles’, paying for his release from apprenticeship to a cruel master, and giving him clothes and money to save him from starving.
The letter-book reveals an interest in public affairs, at home and abroad. George regularly received ‘news books, papers of news, letters diurnall, gazettes, royal declarations and speeches, and acts of Parliament’, which were sent to him from London by Cousin Franceys. He learned of the Great Plague of 1665 with horrified fascination, noting in July, ‘it’s said there was 100 houses shutt up on one day in one parish, viz., St Andrew’s in Holborn. I humbly pray it would please the Lord to take of[f] this heavy judgement.’ He was well-informed about the Dutch war, commenting in July 1667 that ‘there is a rumor that the Dutch are at sea againe with theire Navy, but I think they are not so ready’.
Every year George visited the London of Charles II and Samuel Pepys, always in the spring, in order to sell his iron. The journey took him four days on horseback, armed with a brace of pistols. Invariably he was escorted by a servant, who also carried arms.
When he arrived he lodged at the Greyhound Inn in Holborn (adjoining Furnival’s Inn), where he gave dinner parties, and met friends at the Exchange, with whom he ate in nearby taverns. He saw others at Westminster, which he reached by barge along the Thames. Having settled business matters, he went shopping, leaving orders at booksellers, tailors, silversmiths and tobacconists. Each Sunday, he attended divine service at St Paul’s or St Andrew’s Holborn. He looked forward to these visits, telling Ralph Franceys, ‘God send us a merry meeting.’
His 1662 visit was concerned with apprenticing his son John to Nicholas Delves, a silk merchant. The boy, who was clearly a wastrel, made an enemy of Delves’s partner, Mr Brownsword, although for a time Cousin Franceys managed to see that John kept his place. At the end of 1663 George wrote gratefully to Ralph, ‘I will not trouble you with more words about him, but will Register your great kindness in my bosome, to remaine there to minde me of the great store of friendshipp I owe you.’
In January 1664, Delves formally complained of John’s bad behaviour. George replied:
I was much troubled when I heard my sonne was so untowardly indiscreet to cause you to write thus to me againe . . . I hope hereafter he will nether thinke Christmas nor any other time lawless to play the foole in, but when you are pleased at any time to give him leave to recreate himselfe among friends, he will make choyce of sober civell company and keepe good howers . . . Sir, I acknowledge my selfe dubblely obliged to you, first in takeing care to observe my sonne’s Courses, and letting him see the danger and folly, and then for pardoning him.
In the end, the prodigal was shipped out to Seville to work for his brother George. He appears to have died young, since nothing more is recorded of him.
From what we know of Mr Sitwell’s library at Renishaw, he enjoyed some very serious reading indeed in his study upstairs. Besides Homer, Aristotle and the Greek and Latin classics, it contained such fathers of the church as Tertullian, Eusebius, Augustine and Chrysostom, together with Bishop Jewel’s Apologia and Fuller’s History of the Holy War. Among law books were Justinian’s Institutes and Coke’s Statutes. On the shelves, too, were Erasmus, Machiavelli, Bacon and Milton. Science was not neglected, with Galen and Galileo as well as William Harvey’s De motu cordis – the pioneering study of the circulation of the blood.
Modern philosophy was represented by Descartes, while there were books on mathematics, trigonometry, logic, navigation and perspective. More frivolous was Henri Boguet’s Discours exécrable des sorciers. There were also numerous pamphlets on current affairs, dealing with the Civil War or the Restoration, all tied in bundles.
Apart from Dr Gardiner, George had few friends with whom to discuss his reading. A possible exception, even if he saw little of him, was Richard Love, Master of Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and a former chaplain to King Charles I. It was Dr Love who in 1649 had advised George to appoint Gardiner as rector, pleasantly ending his letter of recommendation, ‘Sir, be pleased to present my service to your whole family and all staying with you,’ which indicates a certain familiarity. No doubt other letters were destroyed because they expressed dangerous opinions. George may have known Love at Cambridge; and perhaps it was at Love’s suggestion that he sent his eldest son, Francis, to Corpus Christi.
George Sitwell had built his family’s fortunes on very firm foundations indeed by the time he died in 1667. He was buried in Eckington church, where there is a monument with busts of himself and his wife. He comes down the centuries as a kindly and cultivated man, who although one of nature’s entrepreneurs never lost an iota of humanity. His best epitaph is a phrase from a letter he wrote in September 1665 – ‘in mine apprehension plain dealing is a jewel’.