Читать книгу The Big House: The Story of a Country House and its Family - Christopher Sykes Simon - Страница 9

Richard’s heir, Parson, was five years younger than him and conspicuously lacked his charm and joie de vivre. His portrait by Sir George Chalmers, which hangs to the left of the bed in the Red Room, shows him seated in a heavy wooden chair, dressed in powdered wig, black gown and bands. In his hands he holds a Sermon, the text of which is ‘Without Charity all is unavailing towards Salvation. Charity is the Chief Benefit of the Suffering and Death of Jesus Christ.’ He is thin and slightly bent, and though there is something of an expression of kindness and benevolence in his eyes, his demeanour is a solemn one. This may have something to do with the fact that of his six children, only one survived beyond the age of twenty-one.

Relatively little is known about the life of Parson Sykes. He was educated at Cambridge, where he became a fellow of Peterhouse College, and it was while he resided there that he met and fell in love with Decima Woodham, the daughter of a Cambridgeshire surgeon, Twyford Woodham of Ely. She was said to have been ‘remarkable both for beauty and cleverness’.¹ Her portrait, painted when she was in middle age, hangs on the other side of the bed in the Red Room, and inspired my Grandfather to describe her as ‘gorgeous in white satin, lace and diamond buttons – very handsome and commanding looking’.² They were married in 1735, on which occasion Parson’s uncle, Mark Kirkby, presented him with the Living of Roos, near Hull, thus setting him up for life in the style to which second sons of the Gentry were accustomed. They moved into the Rectory, an imposing red brick house, where their first child Polly was born in 1739, followed two years later by a son, Mark. A second boy, Richard was born in 1742, but died in infancy, while a third, also Richard, born in 1743, survived. After the death of their fourth son, Joseph, who was born in 1744, there was a gap of five years before the birth of their sixth and final child, Christopher, on 23 May, 1749.

Mark, the eldest son and heir, seems to have shown some promise at an early age, if one can believe the rather gushing words of the Rector of the nearby Parish of Patrington, Mr Nicols, who wrote to Parson in 1748, ‘I can hardly say which gave me most pleasure, whether to see the first Essays & Blossoms of a fine Genius in Master Mark’s letter, or the Rich Fruit & perfection of one in your Composition.’³ A year later Mark was writing to his father in a manner which suggests a precociously polite little boy. ‘Honored Sir, My Mama & I received an unspeakable pleasure at hearing that you was very well,’⁴ he wrote, the large scrawling handwriting of a boy of eight contrasting curiously with the quaint formality of expression. It is reassuring to learn that he was not all good. The year 1754 found Uncle Richard writing to Mark’s sister, Polly, ‘Your Brother doubtless has transgressed in a very high degree having forgott his duty to his Creator, Father, Mother and his other relations.’ Whatever the temptation was that he had succumbed to at the age of twelve remains a mystery, though it was serious enough for his uncle to state, somewhat dramatically, ‘the End I am afraid must be endless ruin and destruction of both Body and Soul’.⁵

There is a painting of Mark which hangs in the Red Room, next to that of his mother. He is wearing a beautiful red velvet suit with a richly embroidered matching waistcoat and lace jabot. His hand is resting on a globe. He has youthful good looks and a faint smirk playing across his face. ‘Look how fortune has smiled upon me’, he seems to be saying. Perhaps he was planning his Grand Tour, or which of the great universities he was going to attend. The label on the painting tells the sad truth; Mark Sykes 1741–1760. He died aged nineteen, the same year as his sister, two years before his younger brother, Richard.

Only two children survived to witness the move to Sledmere, which Parson inherited on the death of his brother, and which then consisted of an estate of just over five thousand acres. They moved in at the end of the summer. ‘I am curious to know how you pass your time in Sledmire,’ wrote his son-in-law, John de Ponthieu, on 10 September. ‘Pray do you delight in Gardning – how are your Trees, do they get the better of your Cold Climate, have you pine Apples in perfection? I should think in so private a place as Sledmire Gardning would be a very great amusement, especially as you cannot hunt – I intend you a parcel of Shrubs this Autumn. I desire you would order a spot to be dug up in your garden for them, as much sheltered as possible otherwise they might die.’⁶

Reading through the considerable volume of Parson’s correspondence written after he moved from Roos, gardening appears to have been the last thing on his mind. Scarcely was he settled than his son Richard fell ill. ‘I am very sorry for the account you give me of poor Cozen Dicky,’ wrote his banker and cousin by marriage, Joseph Denison, in November 1762. ‘I am very sensible of the affliction you must be under as a Parent, having felt it myself, when I lost both my boys in the same year. I have never heard of his being so ill before.’⁷ The following April he was sending his condolences ‘on your late severe loss, which has given both me and my Wife much sorrow’.⁸ There were frequent attacks of the gout, rendering him often bedridden, as well as keeping Dr Chambers as busy as he had been with Sledmere’s previous incumbent. Much of Parson’s time was taken up with clerical business and his high standing was reflected in the fact that on three occasions he was chosen to represent the Clergy of the East Riding in Convocation. That he had a high opinion of himself in this field is shown by the fact that when one local clergyman, the Rector of Hunmanby, wrote him a letter saying that he was considering standing himself, Parson scrawled across the letter ‘the man must have been drunk when he wrote it’.⁹

His primary interest however was making money, in particular by investment in mortgages and speculation in government bonds. He was described by one contemporary, John Courtney, a wealthy young financier, as ‘an artful cunning fellow, ready to take all advantages where he can’.¹⁰ Numerous letters he wrote to his London banker, Joseph Denison, testify to his love of speculating. Denison, who had also looked after his brother’s affairs, was an extraordinary figure, a former Leeds bank clerk who moved to London and prospered to such a degree that he came to own his own bank. He married Sarah Sykes as his first wife, who was a distant cousin of Parson’s. Celebrated for his spectacular meanness as he clawed his way to riches, he left great fortunes to his children, principally to his son, William Joseph Denison, who became one of Yorkshire’s biggest landowners and left a fortune of £2,300,000 in 1849, but also to his daughters, one of whom, Elizabeth, married the Marquis Conyngham, and became notorious as the mistress of George IV. ‘I wish most heartily I had now your £10,000 by me,’ began a typical letter from Denison to Parson, written in November, 1762. ‘I would lay it out this very day, & I am very confident I could clear you 10 p.ct in a few months … but it must be done immediately … you may Judge what an immense profit will be and is made.’ The letter concluded with a hint of his tightfistedness, conveniently blamed on his client. ‘I was once going to send this by Express, but I did not know if it might be agreeable to you, or whether you would think the expense too much.’¹¹ Parson celebrated the profits from one deal early in their partnership by paying £1,000 for a single diamond, equivalent to approximately £50,000 in today’s terms, which he made into a ring which graced his finger for ever after.¹²

Denison, with a canny eye for the future, was also careful to cultivate ties with Parson’s son and heir. ‘Your Son was heartily welcome,’ wrote Denison in March, 1770, ‘to any small Civilitys it was in our power to show him during his short stay with us … He is a very worthy young Gentleman, & you are very happy in having so pleasing a prospect of his future amiable conduct and usefulness.’¹³ Parson’s only surviving son, Christopher, was twenty at the time and down from Brasenose College, Oxford, for a brief spell in London as the guest of Mr and Mrs Denison at their house in St Mary Axe. He had gone up to Oxford in the autumn of 1767, where, after the obligatory period of idleness and tomfoolery, requiring many parental admonitions, he appears to have grown into a model student. ‘I have not at any period studied harder than at present,’ he wrote to his father early in 1770.

Christopher’s decision to devote himself to study appears to have been inspired by the love of a woman. ‘I solemnly declare,’ he told Parson, ‘it was my attachment to Miss B. which alone brought to light what little abilities I may now possess; it was the desire I had of rendering myself worthy of her which first roused me to pursue my studies with application. They cost me for some months many hours of pain, but by a resolute pursuance they afterwards became a pleasure & now I may safely say the pursuit of knowledge is my only pleasure in the absence of her.’¹⁴ He studied law, history, botany, French and drawing under men who were the experts in their field in the world, such as ‘the famous Scotchman Williamson’¹⁵ who taught him mathematics and Thomas Hornsby, his astronomy tutor, one of the leading scientists of the day, whose observations of light ascension and declination were not surpassed in accuracy until 1925, and who went on to build the Radcliffe Observatory. There seems to have been no stopping Christopher in his pursuit of learning, all of which contributed to his development as a perfect example of the Renaissance Man. ‘I have begun a new study,’ he wrote on 6 May, 1770, ‘to add to all my other business. Music as far as it depends upon Mathematical principles, & strum a fiddle an hour or two every day.’¹⁶

The woman he loved, ‘Miss B.’ or ‘my dearest Bessy’, as he commonly referred to her, was Elizabeth Tatton, the daughter of William Tatton Esq. of Wythenshawe in Cheshire. She was a friend of long standing who was referred to in one letter as being ‘a woman I have from childhood adored’.¹⁷ It was a match that both his parents had apparently vigorously promoted. ‘When my heart was free and unconquered by Miss B.’ Christopher reminded Parson, ‘I well remember how many arguments you both used to persuade me to call upon her in a morning to walk out, & how you forwarded every opportunity of bringing us acquainted.’¹⁸

Writing to his father from the Denisons’, Christopher made quite clear his intentions so far as Bessy was concerned, strengthened all the more by his admiration for his hostess. ‘I am very fond of Mrs Denison,’ he told him; ‘she seems to be a very amiable & agreeable woman & of the sweetest temper; surely with such a woman the marriage State must be the happiest Mortals here enjoy (& such my Bessy is) for without good sense & a sweet temper every little accident will embitter its pleasures & any very unfortunate one even destroy its happiness … If unjust pray correct me for as I shall shortly (with the blessing of God & my Parents approbation) marry my Bessy, I could wish to know whether I have formed a right opinion of that state.’¹⁹

Soon after Parson received this letter, he gave his consent to the marriage. ‘I already perceive it will require the greatest economy to make my allowance serve till I am married,’ Christopher told him, echoing the familiar cries of incautious students down the ages. ‘Not-withstanding the many bills I have already paid, there still remains to pay as far as I can guess £170 – I have now by me £50.’ He was keen to show his father that in his opinion not one penny of the money spent had been wasted. ‘I shall send into the country goods to a very considerable amount: a very valuable collection of books in most branches of science; a much admired collection of prints of the best Masters which will be of infinite use in drawing & in forming a pure & just taste; a collection of coins not to be despised; Mathematical instruments & many miscellaneous things of less moment, with a set of beautiful specimens of the various kinds of Fossils collected by a man the most famous in the Fossil world; all these may most fairly be valued at £500. & I hope I may without vanity say that I either am now or shall shortly with the blessing of God be able to make a considerable use of the articles here contained.’²⁰

The marriage between Christopher and his ‘beloved Bessy’ took place on 23 October, 1770, at St Wilfred’s, Northenden, the Tatton family’s parish church. As well as personal happiness, it brought him great riches, for not only did he officially become the inheritor of Sledmere and all its estates, but Bessy brought with her a considerable dowry from her father, in the form of two banker’s drafts, one for £10,000, the other for £2,542. These were the first payments as part of the terms of the marriage settlement which had been signed on 1 September, under which Christopher was to receive a total of £16,000 out of the fortune left to his wife by her maternal aunt, Elizabeth Egerton of Tatton.

Though he took his bride to Sledmere on 29 October and stayed for five weeks, it was never Christopher’s intention to move into the house, as might have been expected, preferring instead to allow his parents to live on there, while he removed his bride to Wheldrake Hall, a modest house owned by the family to the south-east of York. After Christmas the young couple travelled together to London for an extended shopping spree, taking lodgings at Jewels Hotel, Surrey Street, which ran from the Strand down to the Embankment.

This was an important time in London’s history, with the City growing in power as a financial centre and rapidly expanding its banking, shipping and trading activities, and as they stood on the terrace of Somerset House, a few minutes’ walk from their hotel, looking out over the Thames, Christopher and Bessy surveyed a scene which had changed little since Canaletto had painted it twenty years previously. As they looked west up to the Banqueting Hall, Westminster Abbey and Westminster Hall, and east down to St Paul’s, a view which took in numerous facades of fine waterfront mansions and the myriad spires of city churches, dozens of small boats sailed the water: lighters, barges, brigs, hoys, dinghies, bum-boats, ferry-boats, packets and wherries all scuttling about and connected in some way to their larger cousins, colliers from the North, whalers from Greenland, merchant ships from the Continent, East Indiamen and West Indiamen, and square riggers from America who plied their trade in ever increasing numbers in and out of the port of London. To the east stood a monument to the man who had restored the greatness of Britain. The newly completed Blackfriars Bridge, opened in 1770, was named Pitt Bridge, after William Pitt, whose successful, almost single-handed, prosecution of the Seven Years War had brought France to her knees and Canada under the British flag. What a sense of excitement and pride the young couple must have felt.

In accordance with their new status, there was much shopping to be done, details of which Christopher meticulously recorded in neat, tiny handwriting in his account book. A large quarto volume protected by a pale calfskin dust jacket, and stamped on the front with the initials, C.S., and the date 1770, it was discovered a few years ago hidden away in the Estate Office, and has now been restored to the Library, where it is one of the most important books to have survived. It tells us in the first few pages exactly the kind of things a fashionable young couple down from the country would be buying to take home. For Christopher there were new clothes – pairs of breeches, a waistcoat, gentlemen’s ruffles, a sword and belt – and a visit to his tailor, while Bessy visited the milliner, and the barber ‘for curls’, and bought two gowns, one of India silk, lace trimming, a fan and cloak, and shoes. On 28 February her new husband took her to Mr Young, the antique dealer, and spent the not inconsiderable sum of £106. 14s. 6d. on jewels. They also went food shopping and ordered a whole Parmesan cheese, weighing 55 ½lbs, a Stilton cheese and some tea.

Then there was their new home to consider, which, having stood empty for many years, required completely refurbishing. On 29 January they visited Mr Elliot’s and spent £112. 2s. 8d. on china, while 6 February found them at Mr Christie’s buying pictures for £82. 8s. 6d. Ten days later they bought a second lot for £63, and further purchases of picture and prints from various dealers bought the sum spent up to £234. 17s. Their biggest single expense was on ‘plate’, bought from Mr Young on 20 February at a total cost of £303. 18s. In addition to these major acquisitions, they spent considerable sums on furniture, carpets, books, busts and a medicine chest, as well as paying visits to Mr Wood for a new chaise at £60, and Mr O’Keefe for a coach at £121. 15s.²¹ Christopher also spent money on adding to his collections of coins and fossils. They returned to Sledmere on 5 March, where they no doubt imparted the good news to Parson and Mrs Sykes that Bessy was four months pregnant. They finally arrived back at Wheldrake on 20 March, Christopher having bought himself a new horse for the journey.

The next few months were spent settling into their new home. Correspondence between Christopher and his wine merchant, Sam Hall, shows that in true family tradition a love of fine wine ran in his blood and that stocking the cellar was a priority. He had evidently suggested to Hall, that he might come and personally supervise its laying down and must have given him some vague description of Wheldrake. ‘The notion I have of your place of abode from your description,’ wrote Hall, ‘is that it has been some old uninhabited mansion (at least by human kind) and which feeling the weighty hand of time call’d loudly for such assistance as I make no doubt you have given to it in yr. best manner.’²² Christopher took delivery of a hundred dozen bottles of Champagne and five hogsheads at the end of April, and on 22 May received the following letter from Hall: ‘My father has wrote to London for six dozen of the very best French Claret that can be had and it shall come with the Malmsey agreeable to your orders.’ He apologised for not being able to come and oversee things himself, but told him that ‘the wines that we sent you will be fine and fitt for Bottling by the time the bottles are become thoroughly dry (and if they were rinsed out with a little brandy it would be serviceable) and the sooner it is then done the better … you will please to direct your Buttler to lay them on their sides in a cool dry place of the cellar.’²³

With the cellar organised and the furnishing complete, the house was ready to receive the new baby. Bessy was seven months pregnant when Christopher received a letter from her uncle, Joseph Stafford, expressing his family’s delight at the impending birth. ‘We are greatly rejoyced to hear you are likely to have an increase of your family soon,’ he wrote, ‘and most sincerely wish Mrs SYKES an happy Delivery & Luck in a Lad – according to yr. Cheshire phrase.’²⁴ His sentiments were timely, and on 20 August his niece was delivered of a son, whom they christened Mark. A guinea was paid to the Northenden bell-ringers to ring out the good news to the neighbourhood. A few weeks later, Joseph Denison wrote to say how delighted he and his wife were ‘to hear the young gentleman is so well – our little Goods thank God are the same. Will is a perfect Parrott, & talks everything.’ His own wife, he added, ‘expects every day to follow Mrs SYKES’s example’.²⁵

For Mrs Denison, however, whose good sense and sweet temper Christopher had so admired, it was not to be. A letter arrived in November from Denison’s Clerk, Nicholas Dawes, bearing melancholy news. ‘I am Extremely sorry to acquaint you that last Night about nine o’clock it pleased God to take away the Life of Mrs Denison after lying in. She was taken with a Slow fever, under which she laboured ten days, & tho’ under the care of two eminent Physicians, their utmost endeavours proved ineffectual, so that it ended with a Mortification in her Bowels.’²⁶ Denison was heartbroken, ‘incapable of writing’. When he did eventually put pen to paper, it was to his old friend Parson that he turned. ‘I seem,’ he said, ‘to have many Afflictions to struggle with by the removal of those most near and dear to me.’²⁷ It was something that Parson knew about more than most.

Now that Christopher was settled, with a happy marriage and a son and heir, he turned his attention to what was to be the great work of his life: the improvement of Sledmere. Thomas Jeffreys’s Yorkshire Atlas, published in 1771, gives one a rough idea of what the place then looked like, its appearance virtually unchanged since the alterations carried out by Uncle Richard. The house stood in front of a rectangular ‘garden’, with a few trees on either side and the Mere in the middle. To the east lay the Kitchen Garden with its glasshouses. South of the Mere, beyond the ha-ha, ran the main road from York to Bridlington, bisecting the U-shaped belt of trees known as The Avenue. The village was scattered mostly to the east of the house, but there were a few dwellings to the south-west. All around, the Wold land rose up to a height of more than five hundred feet.

In order to understand the full import of the work carried out by Christopher Sykes, which was to eventually earn him the sobriquet ‘Reformer of the Wolds’, it is necessary to understand the nature of the land as it then was. Farming as we know it today did not exist. To the north and south of the village lay a small number of large open arable fields. These were divided into long strips, ‘ridge and furrow’, which were owned by individual farmers. The land owned by a farmer was rarely in one place, his strips being widely distributed across the entire field system, and although he farmed this land himself, the management and regulation of the open fields as a whole were vested in the community and administered through the manorial court. A wide range of crops were grown, on a two- or three-course rotation, with one third of all land lying fallow at any one time; long-eared or sprat barley was grown on the better soils, with naked or wheat barley on the intermediate or less fertile soils. Summer and winter varieties of wheat, including buckwheat or French wheat, were also grown as was massledine, oats, clean rye, beans and peas.²⁸

Beyond the village and its surrounding arable lands lay vast sheep walks which dominated the great expanse of bare upland that was the landscape, ‘open, scarce a bush or tree … for several Miles’.²⁹ Daniel Defoe described the Wolds as being like ‘the plains and downs … of Salisbury’.³⁰ Extensive rabbit warrens were also a characteristic feature of the area, one of the biggest being at Cowlam Farm, just outside Sledmere. This was described by the agriculturalist, William Marshall, writing in 1788, as being ‘the largest upon these Wolds; and probably the most valuable warren in the Island. The … farm contains about nineteen hundred acres; and, generally speaking, it is all warren.’³¹ Bounded by sod walls, they were an important part of the local economy, on a par with sheep. Each warren supported several thousand pairs of rabbits, yielding between 100,000 and 150,000 couple annually, whose skinned carcasses would be sold for meat in the industrial towns of the West Riding, as well as in local towns such as Hull, Beverley and York. The skins were dried and sold to furriers, whose main markets were the hat manufactories of London and Manchester.

This was all about to change, and the way it was transformed into the landscape that exists today was through enclosure. This was the replacement of the old open-field, strip-farming system, which was increasingly regarded as being outmoded and inefficient, with smaller fields both owned and controlled by one farmer. As the eighteenth century progressed, greater demands were being placed upon agriculture by a rapidly growing population, which rose from six million in 1741 to eight-point-nine million in 1801, and was to nearly double in the next half century. This created a powerful motive to improve productivity and in the minds of modern agricultural thinkers, amongst whom Christopher certainly numbered himself, enclosure was the way forward. It enabled landowners to improve their farming techniques, to consolidate their property into larger farms, and to add to its value by building farmhouses and outbuildings. Enclosed land also steadily rose in value, an important consideration since before 1800 each enclosure required the passing of an individual act of Parliament, making it an expensive business. A valuation carried out by Christopher’s steward, Robert Dunn, in May, 1776, estimated that the land at Sledmere unenclosed was worth between 1s. 3d. and 20s. an acre, rising to 2s.–20s. on enclosure, and 3s. 6d.–20s. after fifteen years.³²

Though family legend has always maintained that Christopher was the pioneer in this department, the truth is that he was carrying on a tradition that had been started by his Uncle Richard, when he took in hand the land which formed The Avenue, and later an area to its west, to form the Park. In Richard’s lifetime he spent £40,000 on buying and enclosing land to consolidate the estate. ‘I yesterday signed an Article of Agreement,’ he had written to his brother Joseph in July, 1760, ‘to pay £1,550 for £31 a year net Tythe rent of thirty-six Oxgangs at East Heslerton which is fifty years purchase, but if an inclosure take place may not be too dear.’³³ Christopher just did it on a larger scale. He began in 1771, when his account book recorded that he had spent £2,051 on ‘Inclosing’ at East Heslerton, and by 1775 he had instructed Robert Dunn to start on Sledmere. ‘Mr Dunn has perhaps already informed you,’ he wrote to one of his neighbours, Luke Lillingstone, in January, 1776, ‘that I propose to enclose Sledmire’,³⁴ explaining to him that ‘In Sledmire … for some Years past there has not been above 500 Acres in Tillage … but upon the Inclosure the whole will be divided into three large and two smaller farms with not less than 1,500 or 1,600 Acres in Tillage.’³⁵ In his lifetime Christopher was to spend £180,000 on adding 18,000 acres to the estate, and on enclosing and improving the land.

Apart from two estates bought in the early 1770s, at Wetwang and Myton Carr, most of Christopher’s major acquisitions took place in the 1780s, after his father’s death. In the intervening years he concentrated his attention on laying out a new landscape at Sledmere. He had begun planting as early as 1771, when he spent £70. 15s. 7d. on trees, taking delivery of two consignments, one bought from Mr Dixon, the second, larger order from Mr Telford. This was the start of a programme which began on a relatively small scale, with about fifteen acres a year being planted, and became increasingly ambitious. Being young and modern with his finger on the pulse of everything new in the world of science and art he probably found his uncle’s taste dull and outmoded. His earliest attempts at stamping his own ideas on the landscape can be seen in two drawings he made on a single sheet of paper which exists in the Library at Sledmere. The first is of Mr Perfects Design of the Plantations, which depicts the two belts of trees on either side of the Mere. The second shows ‘The alterations of the Plantations’. On the east side, which runs next to the village street, the belt was to be ‘fill’d up with Trees to cover the Houses’, while its inside edge adjoining the Mere was given a ragged, more informal appearance. The belt to the west, adjoining the church, was to be cut into shapes, forming a series of circles and a diamond with, interweaving them, ‘two little Serpentine Walks to Cross the plantation’.³⁶

In 1775 Christopher decided to call in a professional to help him with his schemes: Thomas White, a landscape designer and nurseryman from West Retford near Gainsborough, who had previously worked for the celebrated Capability Brown on two major local projects at Sandbeck, South Yorkshire, and Temple Newsham, near Leeds. In April, 1776, he delivered to Christopher A General Plan for the Improvement of the Grounds at Sledmere, beautifully executed in watercolour on paper mounted on linen. This proposed the building of a new house to be sited directly in front of the existing stables, with the two buildings separated by lawns and a wooded area. It also showed the sites of three yet-to-be-designed farms, each of which would act as an ‘eyecatcher’ at the end of a vista. The plan covered a large area, with shelter belts proposed all round the boundaries and plantations topping the deep dales which are a feature of the Wolds. The most dramatic aspect of the new design was the sweeping away of Uncle Richard’s entire Avenue, leaving the area directly to the south of the house almost totally devoid of trees, and the filling in of the Mere. Although planting had already started on the boundaries, and some of White’s ideas were eventually to be incorporated into the final plan of the landscape, it is evident that Christopher was not entirely happy with the overall design. Though White continued for some years to supply him with trees, he was dropped the following year in favour of his more famous former employer.

On 18 September, 1777, Christopher recorded in his diary that ‘the Great Brown came to Sledmere in the morning early’.³⁷ Lancelot Brown was the best-known landscape designer of the day, the successor to Kent, who died in 1748, and it is a measure of Christopher’s ambition that he chose to employ him. He would certainly have come highly recommended by two Yorkshire neighbours, Edwin Lascelles at Harewood, and Sir William St Quintin at Scampston, both of whose parks he had recently transformed. Brown stayed for a day and although no details exist of exactly what passed between them on this visit, one must assume that he was shown around the grounds and that they discussed what part of the existing landscape was to be retained and incorporated into any new scheme. With the enclosure of Sledmere progressing at a pace, Christopher would have been especially keen to finalise the positioning of the three new farms, to be called Castle, Life Hill and Marramatte. Brown left early the following morning, 19 September, his client’s mind thoroughly concentrated on the great task ahead.

Christopher was a ‘hands on’ gardener who had undoubtedly read Horace Walpole’s essay ‘On Modern Gardening’, written in 1770, in which he had stated his belief that ‘the possessor, if he has any taste, must be the best designer of his own improvements. He sees his situation in all seasons of the year, at all times of the day. He knows where beauty will not clash with convenience, and observes in his silent walks or accidental rides a thousand hints that must escape a person who in a few days sketches out a pretty picture, but has not had leisure to examine the details and relations of every part.’³⁸ He lost no time in getting started, and the very next week found him personally ‘staking out’ a series of new plantations. ‘My method of planting,’ he wrote, ‘is in small holes made in the turf … The holes are made in the autumn at three feet asunder, and eight or ten inches over, returning the soil into the hole at the time of making it with the turf downwards.’ A month later, on 30 October, he ‘began to plant … having prepared several thousand holes’.³⁹ The next day he made a note in his pocket book of an order he had placed with Thomas White for a further 109,500 trees – ‘20,000 seedling Larches, 50,000 Scotch fir seedling, 5,000 Spruce 2y.o, 10,000 Spruce 1y.o, 1,500 Weymouth pine, 2,000 Silver fir, 10,000 Beech seedling, 1,000 Sycamore, and 10,000 seedling Birch of 1 or 2y.o’.⁴⁰

One of the reasons for the success of Christopher’s planting was that, as in all he did, he had immersed himself in the subject, learning everything that there was to know, and in the process becoming an expert in the chosen field. He understood that the most successful trees were those raised by the proprietor from seedling, taken from the bed exactly when they were required and planted immediately, so that they did not suffer from being out of the ground for too long. To this end he had two nurseries, one at Sledmere, the other at Wheldrake. An endpaper in the diary shows that his immediate requirements were 300,000 trees from White, 136,000 from John and George Telford, nurserymen from York, and 33,000 from William Shiells of Dalkeith, the majority of which would have been seedlings.

It was not only at Sledmere that Christopher had been planting. ‘Mrs S. was taken ill at three,’ reads the last entry in his pocket book for 1777, on 27 December, ‘and delivered between four and five in the morning of a Girl Elizabeth.’⁴¹ She was the fourth child born to Bessy since the arrival of Mark in August, 1771, all healthy, and making ‘a pretty little flock’⁴² as Joseph Denison referred to them in a letter to Parson. A second son, Tatton, named after his mother’s family, had been born on 22 August, 1772, followed by another boy, Christopher, in October, 1774. Their first daughter, Decima Hester Beatrix, was born in December, 1775, and the new-born Elizabeth completed the family.

In spite of the fact that Christopher owned and ran Sledmere and that the family now numbered seven, Parson and Mrs Sykes remained ensconced there, while their son and daughter-in-law were still living at Wheldrake. ‘As we have not met with a house to our satisfaction,’ Christopher had written to his brother-in-law, William Egerton, in December, 1775, ‘we shall probably stay here.’⁴³ They appear to have lived fairly modestly with relatively few servants. There was Styan, the butler; William, Christopher’s valet, who had been with him since his bachelor days; Charlotte, Bessy’s personal maid; various ‘servant women’; a housekeeper; a gardener, Richard Cooper; a coachman, and a full time nanny, Nurse Moore, who was to be the longest serving member of the household. At the various times of Bessy’s pregnancies, the account book also shows payments to ‘Nurses’ and, in 1775, to a ‘Wet Nurse’.

Christopher did not keep a detailed diary recounting the events of his life, but in a series of little pocket books, sometimes ‘Goldsmith’s Almanack’ or perhaps ‘The Ladies Own Memorandum Book, or Daily Pocket Journal’, he briefly noted down his guests and dining companions, financial and estate matters, memoranda of servants, his travels, notes about gardening, etc., In the midst of which trivia are the occasional poignant reminders of more important personal matters. ‘Mrs Sykes miscarried for the first time in her life after a months severe illness,’⁴⁴ ran the entry for 15 December, 1779, for example, while on 22 March, 1778, ‘Little Tom Tatton, my Brother’s Son died suddenly.’⁴⁵ Reading through some of the other entries for 1778, the first year of Elizabeth Sykes’s life, one gets some idea of the domestic life of Christopher and Bessy.

There are few entries during the first six months, other than Christopher going back and forth to Sledmere. On 12 June, they set off on holiday, not to London or the Continent, but to the nearby east coast town of Bridlington, a popular resort for the newly fashionable pastime of sea bathing. ‘Wife and Self dined at Sledmere,’ he wrote. ‘Got to Hilderthorpe at night. Servants dined at Wetwang.’ Hilderthorpe, a coastal village to the south of Bridlington, was part of Christopher’s estates and the site of the family’s summer retreat, Flat Top Farm, since 1776. This was a three-storey house, built upon rising ground above Bridlington Bay and commanding magnificent views out to sea. The ground and top floors consisted of permanent accommodation for the tenant farmer, while the first floor, which had an octagonal salon and well-proportioned lodging rooms, was reserved for the occasional use of the family. It is important because it was almost certainly the first house designed by Christopher, being remarkably similar to other architectural drawings made by him in the Library at Sledmere.

On this occasion they stayed at Hilderthorpe for a month, and on 13 July, Christopher recorded ‘I went to Sledmere to dinner. Wife went to Wheldrake.’ Nineteen August found them in the midst of a house party. ‘Wheldrake. Mr and Miss Sarrandes, Mr and Mrs Daniel, Miss Simpson, Miss Collings, Mr and Mrs Paul, Wife and self fished in the old River, dined, drank tea and danced upon the rugs.’ A charming scene, repeated the following day. ‘All the above drank tea and danced upon the grass.’ On 31 August, Christopher rode over to Sledmere for dinner and ‘sent Styan to wait for Mr Brown at Wetwang.’ He did not turn up and finally arrived on 5 September. ‘Mr Brown came this morning and we rode about, dined and lodged at Wetwang.’ Brown left the next day. ‘I returned home to dinner, met my Wife and Tatton,’ noted Christopher. Ten days later the whole family visited Sledmere and also on 16 September ‘Wife and Self went to Castle Howard. Dined there, drank tea at Eddlethorpe Grange and returned to Sledmere at night.’ They stayed for a week and on 24 September ‘Wife, self and children returned to Wheldrake at night.’

A curious letter written at this time from Christopher to an old Oxford tutor, the Revd William Cleaver, throws some light on the education of his children. Evidently the boys had a tutor at Wheldrake, who had been teaching them to read. He was, however, on the point of leaving, and in asking Cleaver to help him find a replacement, Christopher made it quite clear that he was unhappy with the way the children spoke, a sign that in the aristocratic society to which he aspired, local dialects were beginning to be frowned upon. ‘The person who has had the instruction of my Children hitherto is going into another line of life,’ he wrote on 15 September, ‘indeed he is no loss as he has done them all the Good he is capable of which was to teach them to read English tho’ but Ill. If you know of any Young Man you think fit to Succeed him, who can correct their Yorkshire tone and instruct them to Your Wishes (I am sure it will be to mine) I wish you would let me know to continue with them till you and he think they are fit for School.’⁴⁶ On 6 October, 1778, Christopher noted in his diary, ‘Master Tatton and Christopher went to Mr Simpson to be under his care.’ They were aged six and four respectively.

‘The Great Brown’s’ return in September bore fruit when, two months later in November, he produced his ‘Plan for the intended Alterations at Sledmere’. Christopher immediately preferred it to White’s plan because, while new plantations encircled the Park to its south and west, the design incorporated much of the existing landscape, retaining all the southern portion of The Avenue and thinning out the section nearer to the house into a series of clumps. The Mere and the buildings around the house remained unaltered. So far as the positions of the three ‘eyecatcher’ farmsteads proposed by White were concerned, Brown was greatly helped by the fact these were already partly built.

‘I do not at present see any probability of being freed from my engagements at an earlier period,’ wrote Christopher in September, 1778 to a friend, ‘by the constant attention I have paid to the Wolds having built fourteen dwelling houses with several Barns and Stables.’ The most important of these new buildings were the three farms which would form the focus of the new vistas. The first of these appeared as an entry in his diary for 13 July, 1778, when he noted ‘begun Castle’. Situated a mile or so to the south-east of the main house, and today my own home, Castle Farm was designed by John Carr of York, the best-known architect in the north of England. The design took the form of a Gothic gatehouse, with neo-classical wings – which were never completed. Work on it moved fast and on 3 September, two days before Brown’s second visit to Sledmere, Christopher scribbled ‘finished the Castle brickwork’.

The other two farms, Life Hill, to the south-west of the main house and Marramatte, to the north-west, were designed by Christopher himself, who drew up two sets of drawings for them, both working and presentation. These show him to have been a skilled draughtsman with a good architectural knowledge and a genuine ability to design. They were not just cribbed from one of the many pattern books available at the time, such as Thomas Lightoler’s The Gentleman and Farmers Architect, but were his own ideas, cleverly combining the need for the houses to look beautiful while at the same time preserving their practical function as agricultural buildings. The charming pavilions at Life Hill, for example, which have pilasters on their gable ends and stand to the right and left of the farm house, are barns, and at Marramatte, the gable ends of the farm buildings also form pavilions, which have pilasters and oculi.

In the end neither White’s nor Brown’s schemes were adopted, though elements from both were used and they may have served as an inspiration, because Christopher’s own ideas were on a far grander scale than anything either of them envisaged. They were more akin to those of the essayist Joseph Addison, who in 1710 had written ‘Why may not a whole estate be thrown into a kind of garden by frequent plantations? A man might make a pretty landskip of his own possessions.’⁴⁷ Christopher’s vision was indeed to turn his whole estate into a Park, to extend his woodlands and plantations so that they enhanced not only the surrounds of the house, but the entire agricultural landscape. He dreamed of creating a Paradise amongst the bleak hills of the Wolds. To this end, after he received Brown’s plan, he indulged in a veritable orgy of planting, covering 130 acres in the 1778–1779 season, the largest area planted in the whole of the forty years it was to take to complete the landscape. His ‘account of Trees planted at Sledmere’, given to the local agriculture society, listed all the species used – ‘forty Wild Cherry, sixty Mountain Ash, 300 Yews, 358 Silver Fir, 500 Weymouth Pine, 600 Birch, 1,540 Oak, 6,400 Holly, 12,000 Beech, 25,260 Spruce, 33,600 Ash, 42,122 Scotch Fir and 54,430 Larch’.⁴⁸ In recognition of his ‘having planted the greatest quantity of Larch Trees’, the secretary, William Ellis, wrote to tell him that ‘you are entitled to make choice of any Book or set of Books not exceeding the price of Five Guineas’.⁴⁹

When John Bigland toured Yorkshire at the end of the first decade of the nineteenth century, his description of Sledmere showed precisely how great a transformation of the landscape had taken place in the relatively short time that Christopher Sykes had lived there.

Sledmere is situated in a spacious vale, in the centre of the Yorkshire Wolds, and may be considered as the ornament of that bleak and hilly district. All the surrounding scenery displays the judicious taste of the late and present proprietors: the circumjacent hills are adorned with elegant farm houses covered with blue slate, and resembling villas erected for the purpose of rural retirement. The farms are in as high a state of cultivation as the soil will admit; and in the summer the waving crops in the fields, the houses of the tenantry elegantly constructed, and judiciously dispersed, the numerous and extensive plantations skirting the slopes of the hills, and the superb mansion with its ornamented grounds, in the centre of the vale, form a magnificent and luxuriant assemblage, little to be expected in a country like the Wolds; and to a stranger on his sudden approach, the coup d’oeil is singularly novel and striking.⁵⁰

It was a fitting tribute to Christopher’s great vision.