The Big House: The Story of a Country House and its Family. Christopher Sykes Simon

eighty-four may well have been a momentous year for Christopher and his family, their feet firmly perched upon the ladder of social ascendancy, but so it was for the outside world too. There was change in the air. The disastrous War of American Independence was over, and the ministry of the man who had presided over it, Lord North, had disintegrated. A new group of radical thinkers was beginning to influence politics, men like Joseph Priestley, Richard Price, Erasmus Darwin and Benjamin Franklin, who believed in the reformation of Parliament and in John Dunning’s famous motion ‘that the power of the Crown has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished’. They had found a voice in the short-lived Parliament of Lord Rockingham’s Whig Party and had achieved a number of reforms before his sudden death in July, 1782, including the reorganisation and reduction of the Royal household, the disenfranchisement of revenue officers, and the debarring of government contractors from sitting as MPs.

      The short reign of Rockingham’s successor, Lord Shelburne, and the speedy collapse of the ministry which followed – an ill-judged coalition of two implacable enemies, the unpopular Lord North and the Whig, Charles James Fox – allowed King George III to invite a rising young star, William Pitt, to form a Government. Pitt, the second son of the Earl of Chatham, himself Prime Minister over a period of twelve years, made his maiden speech at the age of twenty-one, served in Lord Shelburne’s Cabinet as Chancellor of the Exchequer aged twenty-three, and was only twenty-four when he became First Minister. Though this might seem an extraordinary feat to most people, it would not have surprised his family, whose nicknames for him – ‘William the Great’, when he was a small child, and ‘the Young Senator’, ‘the Orator’ and ‘the Philosopher’ when he was in his teens – suggest that they had a strong hunch he would go far.¹² When aged only seven, his mother had written to her husband, ‘of William, I said nothing, but that was because he cannot be extraordinary for him’.¹³

      Pitt was in the right place at the right time when oratory was becoming more and more a feature of debate. His maiden speech, made on 26 February, 1781, caused the assembled members to prick up their ears, especially since it was made off the cuff as a result of an unexpected call by a number of the opposition, eager to test out the so-called brilliance of Chatham’s son. They were not disappointed. ‘It impressed … from the judgment, the diction and the solemnity that pervaded and characterised it,’ wrote Nathaniel Wraxall, who was present. ‘The statesman, not the student, or the advocate, or the candidate for popular applause, characterised it … All men beheld in him at once a future Minister, and the members of the Opposition, overjoyed at such an accession of strength, vied with each other in their encomiums as well as in their predictions of his certain political elevation.’¹⁴ Indeed Edmund Burke was so overcome with admiration that he is reported as having said ‘he is not merely a chip off the old block, but the old block itself’.¹⁵

      It was not long before Pitt had the ears of the House whenever he spoke, an honour rarely granted to new young members, and his name soon began to be known to a wider public beyond the benches of the Commons. As early as February, 1783, when he was still only twenty-three, he was the choice of a number of astute politicians to succeed Shelburne, who had resigned after two Government defeats. ‘There is scarcely any other Political Character of consideration in the Country,’ wrote Henry Dundas, ‘to whom many people from Habits, from Connections, from former Professions, from Rivalships and from Antipathies will not have objections. But he is perfectly new ground …’¹⁶ He actually was sent for by the King, but turned down the offer, on the grounds that if he was to come to power it was to be on his own terms. It was a brave and shrewd decision, for when the King asked him a second time the following December and he accepted, he was in an unassailable position. The news was received in the House of Commons with a shout of laughter. It was, after all,

      A sight to make surrounding nations stare; A Kingdom trusted to a school-boy’s care.¹⁷

      Any ambitious young man of position would have been swept up in the excitement of the moment, and in the general election of March, 1784 that put Pitt into office, a notorious affair that had gone on for forty days – ‘forty days’ poll, forty days’ riot and forty days’ confusion’ as Pitt himself put it¹⁸ – Christopher stood as MP for Beverley. His election was by no means a foregone conclusion since the rival candidate, Sir James Pennyman, had an enthusiastic following. ‘Sir James came yesterday’ wrote John Hopper, ‘… they all cry Sir James for ever as usual, and the Bells Ringing with Every Demonstration of Joy at seeing him’.¹⁹ It is a measure of Christopher’s own popularity that he was returned with a majority of thirty-three, inspiring a local poet, John Bayley of Middleton, to come up with a suitably unctuous set of lines:

      Whilst through the Streets loud Acclamations rung,

      And Sykes’s Praises dwelt on every Tongue,

      ‘Twas you whose Merits influenced each Voice,

      Unanimous to make so wise a choice.²⁰

      ‘I … heartily congratulate you on your Success,’ wrote Henry Maister, ‘ ’tho I lament the furor of the times which call’d you forth, & only hope you may have no cause to regret the necessity of attending the House which I am sure will not agree with your Constitution, if the Hours in future are too as late as heretofore.’²¹ He was sworn in on 20 May, and in the early summer he was summoned to Downing Street – ‘14 at table’ he noted in his diary – where Pitt expressed his gratitude both to him and to his fellow MP, William Wilberforce, for the success of the important Yorkshire vote. Ironically it was the defeated Fox who had said in the past ‘Yorkshire and Middlesex between them make up all England.’²²

      While Christopher voted, there were the first stirrings at Sledmere of a move to improve the old house. On 29 June, 1784, ‘Lady S. laid foundation stone of offices in Court Yard,’²³ noted Christopher in his diary. The work in question was the enlargement and modernisation of the probably rather cramped domestic offices at the north side of the house. The work was especially important as, according to a letter written in September, 1784 by a Miss JC to her sister Nancy, Mrs Marriott, Christopher and Bessy were already entertaining. She attended a small family party, consisting of the Sykeses and their five children, Mr and Mrs Egerton, Bessy’s brother and sister-in-law, and Richard Beaumont, Christopher’s West Yorkshire neighbour, whom she described as a ‘pretty little upright Man of Brazen Nose with a great deal of Linnen about his Neck … a strange being indeed.’ ‘I thought to captivate him,’ she added, ‘but he does not suit my taste.’

      JC stayed the better part of a fortnight, and her letter gives a hint of what the atmosphere of the old house was like. ‘ ’Tis now a very good one of its Age,’ she wrote, ‘& reminds me of the Highgate House below stairs – here’s plenty of Books, Pictures good & Antiques, which keep one in constant amusement, besides Organ, Harpsichord, etc. etc.; which strange to tell I’ve exercised my small skill upon, before all the Party every day.’ Though she said she had been ‘taught to dread these Wolds’, she found herself ‘highly delighted & well may; nothing can be finer than the pure air here, only eighteen miles from Bridlington, the beautiful hill & dale of the country makes charming rides etc. Sir C has form’d & is forming great designs in the planting way which will beautify it prodigiously.’ She also confirmed that ‘the house is to be transformed some time’. Of her hosts she wrote, ‘Sir C & Ly Sykes are both extremely obliging, indeed I don’t know in what Family so nearly strangers to me, I cd. have been so agreeably placed for a visit … & not tire of it I assure you. Lady Sykes is very kind