illiam Sitwell’s heir, Francis Hurt of Hesley Hall near Sheffield, belonged to a family of small Yorkshire landowners. Until now, its sole member of note had been Francis’s grandfather, employed as a land agent by Thomas Wentworth, Earl of Strafford – Charles I’s great minister.1
An only son, born at Sheffield in 1728, Francis lost his father Jonathan Hurt when he was three and was brought up by his mother and grandmother. Medium-sized and stocky, with a noticeably blunt, no-nonsense sort of face, he grew to be a steady, capable man who had no difficulty in handling his affairs and money, although there was never any question of his earning a living. He also developed a sensitive, imaginative side, becoming the first aesthete to live at Renishaw. His taste has been underrated by later generations.
At the time of his birth his parents lived in the High Street near Sheffield’s parish church, but soon after Jonathan’s death in 1731 Catherine Hurt moved with her mother to a large house close to the Lady’s Bridge, not far from the ruins of Sheffield Castle.
Despite being a smoke-filled manufacturing place whose prosperity came from high-quality knives – Horace Walpole called it ‘one of the foulest towns in England’ – Sheffield was surrounded by beautiful countryside. In winter the local gentry flocked there, renting houses or apartments, as they would otherwise have been prevented from visiting each other by the dreadful roads.
Francis received a good education in Latin, Greek, French and mathematics, probably at Chesterfield Grammar School. His uncle Francis left him £500, with the proviso that some should be used to pay for his schooling, while as a boy he often visited Renishaw. Almost certainly he was taught music, since he learned to play the ‘German Flute’ and the violin, accomplishments that gave him pleasure for the rest of his life. In addition, he had lessons from an art master, developing a gift for figure drawing in pen or pencil.
As a very young man he paid a subscription to the Sheffield Assemblies, to join in the weekly minuets or card games (ombre and piquet) that took place on three nights during the Sheffield Races and the Cutlers’ Feast. He also subscribed to the York Assemblies. He had more serious interests, however, visiting art galleries and artists’ studios, while he may have travelled in France in the early 1750s, inspired by a love of French literature.
In common with more than a few Derbyshire gentry, Francis was a secret Jacobite who drank the King-over-the-Water’s health, passing his wine glass over a finger-bowl. At seventeen, he must have deplored Prince Charles Edward’s decision to turn back from Derby in 1745 and withdraw to Scotland, even if not prepared to risk his life by joining him. How he derived his opinions is unknown, but plainly he kept them secret from his staunchly Whig Sitwell kindred, as they would have jeopardised his inheritance.
His adoption by William Sitwell filled an emotional void, his uncle taking the place of the father he had never known. Together, the pair travelled all over England. In the summer of 1755 they visited Portsmouth to see Admiral Lord Anson’s fleet at anchor in the harbour, twenty-nine ships of the line, then attended a reception in honour of Anson and the Duke of Cumberland. Next year they went down to Surrey to view the ‘encampments’ of the Guards, who were stationed there in readiness for a French invasion.
Most of their expeditions were to watering-places, not only Bath and the Hot Wells at Bristol, but Harrogate, Buxton and Scarborough (the start of a long family association). Occasionally they went back to Sheffield, as in 1755 when they attended a ‘grand musical entertainment’ to inaugurate a new organ at St Paul’s church, where William’s father had been a trustee. The winter was always spent in London, where they gave evening music parties with as many as six performing sonatas, symphonies and concertos in which William played his German flute. Both uncle and nephew enjoyed going to Child’s Coffee House.
In 1766, when nearly forty, while taking the waters Francis met Mary Warneford, the ‘Beauty of Bath’, a bluestocking or ‘précieuse’ who shared his love of music. Her father was a canon of York, her uncle squire of Warneford Place, a great Elizabethan manor house in Wiltshire, and her cousin a colonel in the army. The next year, the couple were married at Clifton near Bristol.
They began their married life at Little Sheffield, a village a mile outside the town, from which it was separated by Sheffield Moor (where the races were run). They often took part in the Renishaw music parties. Three sons and a daughter were born, a relative pinning a banknote to the eldest boy’s christening robe. There were others, who died in infancy.
Francis enjoyed attending York Assembly Rooms, and for the winter of 1773 he rented a house in Bootham Bar, bringing his furniture. He was a fop, a portrait painted by his friend Nathan Drake showing him in a suit of light blue satin trimmed with silver, while he owned others of superfine green cloth, of Tyrian Bloom (purple red), of white with silver buttons and of pea-green kerseymere with silver-wire buttons. Even before succeeding to his inheritance, he dressed his servants in the green and yellow Sitwell livery.
He and his wife were often with his uncle William, at Renishaw and in London. While the young couple visited Scarborough in the summer of 1774, they kept their affection for Bath, where they had first met, wintering there from October 1774 to January 1775.
Francis got on well with his Warneford in-laws, from the evidence of a silhouette from the 1770s by Francis Torond, a leading ‘profilist’ at Bath. At the left, the old couple sit at a tripod tea-table; Francis stands at the right, showing his watch to his baby daughter on his wife’s knee, with a small girl behind him. On the far right his young son and heir, who has tactfully been given Sitwell as a first name, plays with a dog.
Francis was with his uncle William when he died in 1776. After the funeral, he and his wife moved into Renishaw Hall. That same year a certain Mrs Bagshaw is recorded as observing, ‘Renishaw may be ye most beautiful place in Derbyshire.’ Yet the new squire was not entirely under its spell, since he continued to spend winter months at Little Sheffield. He also spent time in London, although his residence was no longer Dyer’s Court in the City, but a smart house in Audley Square in the increasingly fashionable West End.
Next year, Francis changed his name to Sitwell by royal licence, as his cousin’s will stipulated that he must take the family’s name and arms. Very conscious of being the Sitwells’ heir, he brought back the family portraits that had been stored at Sheffield. The only change he made to the house was adding a long-vanished servants’ hall and providing mahogany doors for the upstairs drawing room (formerly the ‘Parlour Chamber’ or best bedroom).
Yet there was a change in the atmosphere at Renishaw. Whereas Francis’s Sitwell predecessors had been steady Whigs, he himself was president of the Jacobite Church and King Club. The Hurts had always been Tories and it looks as if Francis remained a supporter of the exiled Stuarts till the day he died. The portraits of William and Mary that had hung on the walls since Mr Justice Sitwell’s time were thrown into a lumber room, to be replaced by paintings or prints of ‘James III’ and ‘Charles III’ – the Old and the Young Pretenders.2
However proud he was of Renishaw as his family seat, Francis preferred to live in Sheffield. Very rich indeed, with £22,000 a year in rents and half a million in the funds, Mr Sitwell (as he was now styled) employed the architect John Platt to build a big, square three-storey mansion on farmland on the edge of the town. Platt, who had previously worked for the Earl of Strafford on Wentworth Castle at Stainborough, was told to spare no expense.
Mount Pleasant was bigger than Renishaw at that date and was in the fashionable Adam style: red brick, with doorways and architraves of cream-coloured stone, and a particularly beautiful window over the main doorway. Inside were massive mahogany doors and plasterwork ceilings with classical motifs. An imposing stable block flanked the house, whose name alluded to the site – a hillock with pleasing vistas. Surrounded by gardens and a small park, the mansion was a landmark for every traveller driving into Sheffield along the road from London.
It must have been at Mount Pleasant that in 1787 Francis’s friend, the American exile John Singleton Copley, painted the four Sitwell children. The portrait, A Young Lady and Her Brothers, was exhibited at the Royal Academy the same year. (Copley’s most recent commission had been a portrait of George III’s three youngest daughters.) Dominated by the youthful Sitwell Sitwell in hunt uniform, and emphasising that he is the heir, Copley’s painting sets its subjects against a big window of a sort that did not exist in the Renishaw of that date and was probably at Mount Pleasant. The most important portrait in the entire Sitwell collection, this takes pride of place in the dining room at Renishaw, over the chimney-piece. The hills around Sheffield can be glimpsed through the window.
While using Renishaw or his London house in Audley Square as summer residences, from now on Francis Hurt Sitwell spent the winter at Mount Pleasant. Here he was able to patronise Sheffield’s new assembly rooms and theatre, and the subscription library opened in 1771, while the house was ideal for music. It was easier to find tutors for his children’s education – even if macadamed toll roads were starting to replace muddy trackways, Renishaw was too far off for them to go there on a daily basis.
The influence of Mount Pleasant on Sitwell Sitwell, Francis’s eldest son and heir, has been overlooked. Eight years old when the family moved in to Mount Pleasant, he grew accustomed to up-to-date architecture, making him eager to modernise Renishaw. The property also alerted him to the potential of Joseph Badger, the Sheffield carpenter-turned-architect who built the stables.
Today, swallowed up by the town and standing forlornly in Sharrow Lane in a run-down area, its grounds tarmacked over apart from a patch of unkempt grass and flanked by such amenities as a halal butcher and a hairdresser, Mount Pleasant is sadly neglected. One can only hope that by some miracle it will eventually be rescued and restored. Yet even in its present state, it remains a fine piece of architecture. It is also a monument to Francis Hurt Sitwell, telling us a lot about him and about his taste.
Francis was a keen buyer of pictures – many of which were sold at the great Renishaw sale the following century – and constantly visited galleries. Sometimes Copley accompanied him to London exhibitions. The American was not his only painter friend; Nathan Drake, the son of a Nottinghamshire parson who had painted Francis in pale blue satin, produced work ranging from landscapes to portrait miniatures. Francis also bought paintings from several leading artists including the gentleman painter Henry Walton (whose Cherry Barrow, purchased in 1779, still hangs in the Library at Renishaw), Henry Morland, and William Marlow, who specialised in country scenes.
Francis led a vigorous social life. In 1786, with his wife and daughter, he spent the spring and summer in London. There, besides going to art exhibitions, they went to the opera and watched displays by a ‘Polish dwarf’ and a ventriloquist. His evenings were spent at coffee houses, or playing cards. He had brought his carriage, which sometimes conveyed them to ‘routs’ (dances). In the autumn they went down to Brighton and then took the waters at Bristol and Bath, before going home to Mount Pleasant for the Cutlers’ Feast.
Sir William Wake long remembered Francis as ‘a gentleman of the old school’. During a visit to Renishaw early in 1789, Wake, as an idealistic young Whig, told the equally youthful Sitwell Sitwell how much he welcomed the new ideas that were about to give birth to the French Revolution. ‘[Old] Mr Sitwell, listening with both hands on his knees, would remark, “That’s your opinion is it? Well, it isn’t mine.”’
In September 1789 Francis took his wife and daughter to the great ball given by Earl Fitzwilliam for the Prince of Wales’s visit to Wentworth Woodhouse. In 1791, the entire family attended the races at Derby. Francis was slowing up, however, and in December that year he asked for his name to be taken out of the book at the Freemasons’ Tavern, as he was seldom well enough to attend meetings.
In 1791 Francis was left further valuable estates by a cousin, Samuel Phipps. Among these were lands in South Yorkshire, Barmoor Castle in Northumberland, and Ferney Hall in Shropshire. Keeping the Yorkshire property for Sitwell, Francis left Barmoor to his second son, Francis, and Ferney Hall to his third son, Hurt. This was the year, too, when the Sitwells sold the ironworks, finally parting company with the industry that had been the foundation of their fortunes.
Francis had intended that after his death Mount Pleasant should become a hospital for the use of the people of Sheffield, but he was forestalled in this by a committee of townsfolk who founded and endowed a large infirmary. Instead, he bequeathed a large sum to the new establishment. Eventually, the house was sold to a prominent local businessman who later became Master Cutter.
Why he decided to dispose of a mansion on which he had lavished so much care, and where he had lived for fifteen years, is a mystery. Perhaps he was disillusioned by the rapid growth in Sheffield’s population and the new factories that were making the air ‘smokier’ than ever. He may have decided that, all things considered, he preferred the beauties of Renishaw. The most likely explanation, however, is that he realised his son was a countryman who did not enjoy living in towns.
Mrs Hurt Sitwell died at the house in Audley Square in July 1792. Her husband did not long survive her, dying at Brompton, where he had gone for a change of air, on 16 August 1793. He had ensured that the Hurts would carry on the Sitwell line, and that Renishaw would be in good hands.