‘
he Squires of Renishaw in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were Whigs, quiet and scholarly country gentlemen who collected books and pictures, improved the farming and planting of the estate, amassed rents and royalties and married heiresses – hence the strange family names affected by later generations,’ wrote their descendant Reresby Sitwell.1
He might also have said that they neither hunted nor shot, and were in no way sportsmen. We know a fair amount about them and their world from the letters Sir George Sitwell edited at the end of the nineteenth century. Reresby adds, ‘Younger sons were put into trade and many worked so hard that they never had time to marry, so left their fortunes back to their eldest brother or nephew.’
Born in 1630, George’s eldest son and heir Francis Sitwell was educated at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and then read law at Gray’s Inn. Steady and hard-working, he got on well with his father. After inheriting the estate, he continued to run the forges and collieries. However, his only real achievement was marrying the sister of William Sacheverell of Barton near Nottingham, who became renowned as MP for Derbyshire. Sometimes credited with founding the Whig party, Sacheverell was a fervent anti-papist who believed firmly in the Popish Plot. He was also a considerable orator, and Mr Speaker Onslow called him ‘the ablest parliament man’ of his time.
Having fathered three sons and three daughters, and been High Sheriff for Derbyshire, the second squire of Renishaw died in 1671. His wife Katherine Sacheverell apparently mourned him deeply, for on his funeral monument in Eckington church are inscribed the lines:
Here death hath laid my treasure up.
This earth doth cover
My cordiall frind, my loyal
Spouse and faithfull lover.
Francis’s son George, fourteen when his father died, was lucky to have a mother who did not remarry and took good care of his inheritance. My Rent Book beginning whitsuntide 1678 testifies to her businesslike approach. It was in 1678 that George came down from Trinity College, Cambridge. He kept happy memories of his time there, responding generously with a donation of £10 when in 1680 the Master and Fellows of Trinity wrote asking for money:
Sir, we are engaged in building a great and magnificent library opposite to the hall in Nevill’s court, and in joining it to the two sides of that building with eight new arches, a work that will not only supply our necessity and convenience, but adorn the whole university and learning itself.2
An oak armchair in the hall bearing the date 1679 commemorates Katherine Sitwell refurnishing the house for George’s marriage to Anne Kent of Povey Hall, who was another considerable Derbyshire heiress. As Anne was sickly, for her first lying-in the couple lodged at Derby in the house of the town’s leading physician, Dr Polycarp Dakins, who duly delivered her of a son and heir, Francis. After bearing several more children, Anne died young, in early middle age.
George managed his estate carefully, enclosing common land and improving barren soil by sowing clover or planting turnips. He added a third ‘orchard’ at Renishaw, a kitchen garden on whose walls apricots, nectarines and peaches were grown. He also put new yew hedges into the gardens, besides planting trees on a large scale.
His main changes to the house itself were replacing the mullioned windows with sashed ones, besides building new stables and a coach house. Indoors, he added to the library, buying over a thousand books. These included a monumental work of cartography, the magnificent four-volume The English Atlas published by Moses Pitt between 1680 and 1683.
George had inherited the Whig principles of his uncle Sacheverell, a frequent visitor to Renishaw. In November 1688 George was among the Derbyshire gentlemen who, with their servants and retainers, escorted the Earl of Devonshire to Nottingham to show support for William of Orange’s bid to replace James II. The richest Whig in England, the earl was one of the seven magnates who had invited William to come over from Holland with an army.
The following March, the new king appointed George a commissioner for the Lord Lieutenancy of the City of London. During these months he was busy making his neighbours take the oath of allegiance to William and Mary. He became a magistrate for the county in 1693, and ever afterwards was known by the family as ‘Mr Justice Sitwell’.
In May 1696 the government sent him a warrant to arrest Captain Ralph Philips and ‘one John Steel’, Jacobites who were on the run for involvement in Sir John Fenwick’s plot to assassinate William III. George was ordered to search the houses of Sir Henry Hunloke at Wingerworth and Mr Pooles, who lived near Park Hall not far off, besides those of any other suspects, and apprehend ‘the said persons and all their papers.’ Plainly, the authorities regarded him as a sound Whig who would do his best to prevent the return of James II.
When Mrs Sitwell died later that year, George decided to let Renishaw and live in London for a while. He arrived there at the end of 1697 and stayed there for nearly a decade instead of the two years he had intended. A portrait by Sir Godfrey Kneller during this time is of a dignified gentleman in a full-bottomed periwig, with a face memorable only for a high-bridged nose; it has the look of someone who does not possess too much imagination.
At first he lived in his brother Francis’s house in Dyer’s Court, Aldermanbury, but he later took lodgings with Mrs Pocock in Cursitor’s Alley, and then with Mr Carlton in Fuller’s Rents, Holborn, between Chancery Lane and Gray’s Inn. This was the world of Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, and George frequented Will’s Coffee House, which was among the essayists’ favourite haunts. Conveniently, this was in Fuller’s Rents, and he went there so often that he used it as an address. Coffee houses were like today’s London clubs, with newspapers and good conversation, a home from home for a man in late middle age. He continued to visit London regularly even after returning to full-time residence at Renishaw in 1706.
A capable man of business, George increased his wealth without taking risks. From the 1690s the ironworks were leased out, although he kept control of the collieries. What interested him was improving the estate.
A good father, George helped his younger sons with their careers. One became a merchant, sailing on a trading venture to Jamaica in 1705. His uncle Francis wrote to his father in summer 1706:
Some of your son George’s friends have been persuading him to go to India about Michaelmas next, & continue there about two yeares, for to establish an acquaintance in order to have full business from the Gentlemen & planters hereafter . . . you must furnish him with five or six hundred pounds in three months, part of the fortune you design for him, for to purchase a cargo.
The younger George sailed to Virginia in July 1707. He later went on similar expeditions to China and India, making a substantial fortune.
Mr Justice Sitwell was closest to his daughter Alice and her husband William Sacheverell, the great Parliamentarian’s second son. After marrying in 1708, the young couple lived in a fine stone mansion on Cockpit Hill in Derby – and at Barton, where they ‘kept house’ for William’s widowed elder brother Robert, who drank too much to look after himself. ‘Musters, I & Jack have been mellow a weeke together,’ Robert had informed William after a drunken bout in May 1706. The Rector of Barton wrote in vain to William, living with his brother at Barton, about the ‘pernicious sin of Hard-drinking . . . making Men forfeit the Felicity of Heaven and plunging them forever into the Lake of Fire with the Devil’.
William’s portrait at Renishaw shows a handsome if sickly face. Sadly, there is no portrait of Alice. George’s letters to William begin, ‘Dear Son’ and end, ‘Your very affectionate ffather & Servant’, while William signs his as ‘Yr. Most Dutyfull Sonn’.
In July 1709 George thanked William for ‘joyfull news of my Daughter’s safe delivery of a son . . . I shall gladly embrace this happy opportunity of being a God-father and shall (God willing) come to Derby on purpose when you shall please to let me know the day when you design to have the Christening.’
But William’s poor health was a worry. In 1711 George wrote to him, ‘I was very glad to hear by James Jackson that you was pretty well in health when he came last from Barton, especially considering that a little before my Daughter wrote [to] Betty that you was much out of order.’ After Alice’s death in 1713 at twenty-six from complications following the birth of their second son, William’s health broke down completely, and two years later he died of the ague.
William’s elder brother Robert had died in 1714. On 14 May, after a night’s boozing, he set out at 3.00 a.m. to ride to London. Having ridden at breakneck speed for five hours, he fell off his horse shortly before reaching Northampton and died of an apoplexy within a few minutes. ‘The reason why Mr Sacheverell rid so hard was that he thought he was pursu’d’, wrote a friend, implying he had suffered a fit of delirium tremens – the ‘Horrors’.
Following his death, his kin became involved in a protracted legal case that Mr Justice Sitwell must have watched with horror. Robert had been the son of the great Whig and, like his father, was MP for Nottingham, but there the resemblance stopped. Robert was not only a drunk, but a womaniser. Worse still, he turned out to have been a bigamist.
Three ‘wives’ emerged. Julian Rhodes of Nottingham came forward with a certificate of marriage, claiming a dowry and maintenance for her baby son Samuel, while Anne Marshall of Barton made the same demands for herself and her daughter Mary, producing a similar certificate. So did a Mrs Stor. In addition, Mary Castle of London wrote to say that she and her child by Robert would starve unless they received money. These were just some of the ladies on whom he had fathered bastards.
The ‘Great Sacheverell Case’, a succession of lawsuits, dragged on for years and entailed hearings in Chancery, the Court of Common Pleas, the Bishop of London’s Court, the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, the Lord Mayor’s Court, the Court of Arches and elsewhere. All this incurred heavy costs for the rest of the Sacheverells – which, after William’s death in September 1715, meant two small boys scarcely out of the cradle, William and Henry. Inevitably, George became involved, in an effort to save his grandsons’ inheritance.
Just after William died, however, Mr Justice Sitwell had been distracted by a danger even more fearsome than an imperilled inheritance. A fervent supporter of the Protestant Succession, he treasured a letter received by his late son-in-law in November the previous year, describing George I and his family, who had just arrived from Hanover:
As for newes, I must tell you in the first place that 2 nights agoe I was at Court, where I first saw the King, Prince, & Princess. The King is about my size, the Prince about yours, or not so tall, & the Princess about the size of us both, tho’ setting aside her being fat, she is of a fine complexion, & seems, if very ugly, very good natur’d & obligeing. The lookes of the King answer the character he has, and I think deserves, of being one of the best humour’d, wisest, and honestest men in his dominions . . .
Understandably, Mr Sitwell was panic-stricken when in October 1715 he learned of a Jacobite rising in Scotland and Northern England to restore the Catholic King ‘James III’ and send the Hanoverian usurper packing. Receiving a ‘full and authentick Narrative of the intended Horrid Conspiracy and Invasione’, he rushed down to London to ask the Lord Lieutenant of Derbyshire, the Duke of Devonshire, for orders. He also bought swords, guns and ammunition for his tenants, including a carbine for his own use. But the weapons were never needed, as the rising was crushed.
A letter of the same month, addressed to George at Will’s Coffee House from his steward William Hattersley, lists arms bought to fight the Jacobites, but also gives details of more normal activities at Renishaw. A manager has laid off the colliers too soon, while a coal pit has been flooded, making it difficult to mine, so they have run short of coal. Luckily, they have found other supplies, despite coal being hard to obtain at Chesterfield. They have got the harvest in, with excellent yields of corn and oats. The hay seed has been sown, but so far little wheat. Ploughing has been hampered by wet weather, which has left most meadows under water, so this will have to wait until the ground has dried out and hardened. He has bought forty-four sheep.
The Sacheverell case dragged on. Mrs Rhodes’ ‘marriage certificate’ was shown to have been forged by a clergyman at Scarborough, who confessed the marriage had not taken place – he had never even met Robert Sacheverell, who had paid him £50 to forge the certificate after the ‘widow’ threatened to expose her seducer. She was lucky to obtain £200 for her son’s maintenance and an apprenticeship found for him.
Anne Marshall had a better case in law than Mrs Rhodes. Her wedding certificate was the earliest, while there was no repentant parson to prove the marriage had never taken place. Even so, Mr Justice Sitwell’s neighbour and kinsman, Samuel Pole of Radbourne – ‘Old Pole’ – was convinced he could outwit ‘Mr Sacheverell’s whore’. There was good reason for his trying to do so, since his son, Captain Pole (who had been with the Duke of Marlborough’s army at Malplaquet), was married to Robert’s only legitimate child and therefore stood to lose a lot of money.
Glad that someone else would foot the bill for exposing Mrs Marshall, George encouraged the Poles; but his influence over them was diminished by insisting that they repay a loan of £700. There was no way Mr Pole could avoid paying, George making it clear that delay meant distraint or a debtor’s prison.
A hot-tempered old man, Samuel Pole was blind to any legal pitfalls. Well-versed in the law, Sitwell warned him that the case against Mrs Marshall might miscarry on technicalities and that he should proceed with the utmost care. George established contact with the ‘widow’, hoping to buy her off, winning her confidence to such an extent that in December 1719 she wrote to him, ‘Sir, when in my power [I] shall do all reasnobel & just things you desire of me.’ But Pole refused to listen to George, and unwisely agreed to a hearing before the Court of Chancery.
In 1720 the Lord Chancellor found in Anne Marshall’s favour, ordering that she be paid a proper widow’s dowry by the Sacheverell estate. Thunderstruck, Mr Pole refused to accept the judgement or pay her costs, whereupon the Lord Chancellor committed him to the Fleet Prison. One of Mr Justice Sitwell’s correspondents reported that Old Pole ‘saies hee’l stay durante vita before he’ll move for his discharge, and saith he will never come out till he is brought out in a coffin’.
Prison walls changed Samuel Pole’s mind. He paid up and went home to Radbourne. Even so, in 1729 he wrote to George’s son, Francis Sitwell, that he remained convinced Anne Marshall
was no more married to Rt. Sacheverell as she pretends, than she was married to your father, your selfe, or me. And if I be right in my opinion, I take that whole affair to be as great a piece of knavery and villainy as any of that sort hath been transacted in the Prerogative Court of Canterbury, in the Court of Common Pleas at Westminster, and in Chancery.
The costs of six years’ litigation and settling with Mrs Marshall nearly ruined the Sacheverell estate, but enough remained to provide for the upkeep of Mr Justice Sitwell’s grandsons. The outcome was a blow for him even if (unlike Old Pole), he had been canny enough to lose little in legal fees. He failed to obtain the books and papers bequeathed by their Parliamentarian grandfather, despite obtaining Sacheverell family portraits that are still at Renishaw.
George had a pleasant correspondence over the years with Jane Sacheverell, Robert and William’s half-sister, who, because her letters survive, is the only woman to emerge as a flesh and blood personality from the family’s early history. A shrewd, high-spirited old maid born in 1682, cheerful and amusing despite her hypochrondia, Jane was devoted to her kindred. George must have enjoyed her letters, as he kept them. In September 1716, she thanked him for a present of money ‘which came very seasonably to supply my wants’, adding, ‘I find the weather has a mighty influence over me, for, while it was warm & serene, my fitts were fewer.’ Characteristically, she sends ‘Affectionate Love & service to yr. Self, Dear Cousin, & all ffriends with you, who am yr much obliged kinswoman J. Sacheverell.’
In June 1718, Jane writes with the news that her stomach fits are less frequent. ‘I’m so farr arrived to my former diet as to be able to eat a piece of chicken or pidgeon or a small bitt of broil’d bacon.’ Referring to the great law case, she tells George, ‘I’m informed Barton is too deeply ingaged to continue long in the possession of any of our familly.’ She thanks him for the support he is giving while expressing uneasiness about Mr Pole: ‘I don’t, nor shall I like to, depend on any of his promises, that already deals shufflingly. I take him to be a man of no solidity, a mere fair speaking airy projector.’ She is trying asses’ milk for her weak stomach, ‘which occasioned those violent agonyes’.
In August 1720 she tells her Renishaw cousin that her fits of the ‘Collick’ are caused by ‘whetness and uncertainty of the weather’. Referring to the result of the Sacheverell case, and the conduct of Samuel Pole, she says,
a more unreasonable man I never heard of: I cannot suspect his gaining anything but the reputation of a lunatic . . . I thought the next care would be how to make the best of poor Barton in order to clear all debts, but I am now persuaded he designs to consume all in law, & make you all beggars.
Mr Justice Sitwell’s prosperous if uneventful career came to a sudden end in 1723, while he was staying with a friend at Derby. His body was brought home on a hearse, escorted by two coaches full of mourners for burial in Eckington church. He had been squire of Renishaw for over fifty years. Despite the Sacheverell case, George died a rich man with an income of over £1,000.