Читать книгу The Big House: The Story of a Country House and its Family - Christopher Sykes Simon - Страница 8

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’,¹ 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.’² According to Nicholas Manners, a Methodist missionary who had been born there in 1732, its inhabitants were ‘extremely ignorant of religion, wild and wicked’.³ 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’,⁴ 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.’⁵

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.’⁶ 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,⁷ 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.⁸

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.’⁹ 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’.¹⁰

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.’¹¹

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’,¹² 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.’¹³

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.’¹⁴ 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.¹⁵ 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’,¹⁶ 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.’¹⁷ 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.’¹⁸ 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.’¹⁹ 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.’²⁰ 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’.²¹

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.’²² 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.’²³ 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’,²⁴ 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’.²⁵

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’,²⁶ 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 …’²⁷ 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.’²⁸

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.’²⁹

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’.³⁰ 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.’³¹ 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.³²

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.’³³ 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 …’³⁴ 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.’³⁵

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’³⁶, endless colds (‘coughed much and my lungs wheezing like a Broken Winded Horse …’),³⁷ 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’,³⁸) piles (‘my piles are yet very troublesome but not so much Heat or Inflamation about the Fundament’),³⁹ 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’).⁴⁰ 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.’⁴¹

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.’⁴² 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.’⁴³

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’.⁴⁴

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’.⁴⁵ 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’.⁴⁶

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!’⁴⁷ 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.’⁴⁸

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.’⁴⁹ 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’.⁵⁰

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.⁵¹ 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.’⁵²

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 …’⁵³ By August, 1760, he was able to write to his brother Joseph, ‘I perhaps may cut upwards of a hundred Pine Apples this year’⁵⁴ and when he went on his annual trip to Harrogate to drink the waters, cargoes of nectarines, peaches, plums and melons followed him there.⁵⁵

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’.⁵⁶ 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.’⁵⁷

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.’⁵⁸ 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.’⁵⁹ 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.’⁶⁰

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’,⁶¹ while in December he received ‘a forequarter of very fine Lamb and some Oysters’⁶² 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’.⁶³

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, 1759.⁶⁴ 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’⁶⁵ 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.’⁶⁶ 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.’⁶⁷ 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.’⁶⁸ 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.’⁶⁹ 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.’⁷⁰ 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.’⁷¹ 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.’⁷²

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.’⁷³

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’.⁷⁴ 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.’⁷⁵

‘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.’⁷⁶ 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.’⁷⁷

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’.⁷⁸ 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.’⁷⁹ 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.’⁸⁰ 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.’⁸¹

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.’⁸² 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.’⁸³ 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.’⁸⁴ 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.’⁸⁵ 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.’⁸⁶

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.’⁸⁷ 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’.⁸⁸ 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.’⁸⁹ 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.’⁹⁰

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.’⁹¹ 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.’⁹² 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.’⁹³ 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,’⁹⁴ 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.’⁹⁵ 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.’⁹⁶

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.’⁹⁷ 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.’⁹⁸ 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.’⁹⁹ 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.¹⁰⁰