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

have been made in the turnpike roads throughout this kingdom,’ wrote a contributor to the Gentleman’s Magazine in 1792, ‘would be incredible did we not actually perceive them.’ When Faujas de Saint Fond, the noted French traveller, set out on his journey to the Hebrides in 1784, he travelled up the Great North Road. ‘From London to Barnet, twelve miles,’ he noted in his journal, ‘– a superb road, covered with carriages, and with people on horseback and on foot, who were returning, in a fine moonlight evening, to London, from the country houses and neighbouring villages, where they go to recreate themselves during Sunday.’ He passed through Hatfield, Stevenage, Dugden and Stilton, where he commented, ‘Nothing can surpass the beauty and convenience of the road during these sixty-three miles; it resembles the avenue of a magnificent garden.’ Saint Fond also noticed that ‘at Stilton, one begins to observe, on the sides of the road, large heaps of stones destined to repair it’.²¹

      The Highflyer took the same route. After Stilton, with a change of horses at staging posts some twelve to fifteen miles apart, and an average speed of seven miles an hour, the main stops were at Stamford, Newark, Doncaster, Ferrybridge, Tadcaster, and finally York. Here Tatton was deposited at the York Tavern at around midday on 22 August, his eighteenth birthday. He chose to lodge in the city for the night, and on the following day he visited the hairdresser. Then he picked up a horse and rode over to Sledmere. He didn’t stay long. Driven away by the piles of rubble everywhere, the scaffolding all over the house, and the constant noise of the workmen, he decided that some sea air would do him good and went instead to Scarborough, still a fashionable spa, where he took lodgings for a month and passed his time sea-bathing, riding, coffee-housing and visiting the play at the theatre on Tanner Street. Altogether he spent ten weeks in Yorkshire, before returning to London at the beginning of November and back to the offices of Atkinson and Farrer. He was soon visiting his old haunts and 13 November found him back at the boxing school.

      Apart from his love of boxing, there is one other clue as to the path that Tatton’s life was to take, and it is to be found on the inside cover of the book in which he wrote his accounts. In small neat handwriting he wrote, ‘My bay Mare covered by Astonishment in May 1790. Astonishment was bred by the late Sir John Lister Kay and sold by him to Col Ratcliffe. Astonishment was got by Highflyer, his Dam (which was also the dam of Phenomenon) by Eclipse, his Grandam by Engineer …’ For a seventeen-year-old this demonstrates a precocious interest in breeding, for Astonishment, the stallion which had covered Tatton’s bay mare, had a startling pedigree. His father, Highflyer, had sired the winners of 470 races, including three Derbys and four St Legers, and had made so much money for his owner, Mr Richard Tattersall, that he was able to build himself a mansion near Ely, which he named Highflyer Hall. Astonishment’s mother was a daughter of Eclipse, said to have been ‘the fleetest horse that ever ran in England’.²²

      Tatton’s heart was not in the Bar. While he sat in the office, hunched over documents and occasionally scratching away with his quill pen, he was dreaming of horses and the Turf. According to the sporting journalist, Henry Hall Dixon, better known as ‘The Druid’, Tatton astonished his fellow clerks by walking from London to Epsom in June, 1791, to see the Duke of Bedford’s Eager win the Derby, leaving his lodgings at four in the morning and returning the same night at eleven. Why he chose to go on foot is a mystery, since his accounts show that he kept a horse in town, stabled at Joseph Denison’s house. The following year he rode down to watch the race won by Lord Grosvenor’s John Bull, and stayed on to see the Oaks taken by Lord Clermont’s Volante, another progeny of Highflyer. Three weeks later, an entry in his account book for 12 June reads ‘Expences at Ascott Races two days. £2. 2s.’. He was hooked.

      Having acquired a rudimentary knowledge of the Law, but shown no aptitude for the Bar, Tatton was summoned by his father back to Sledmere at the end of 1792 and set to work in the East Riding Bank. He lodged with a Mrs Martin in Dagger Lane, Hull. Evidently he did not forget his fellow clerks back in London, for one of the friends he had made amongst them, Thomas Byron, wrote to him on 5 December thanking him for a gift of hares which he had sent them. ‘I assure you I never tasted better,’ he told him, going on to say how glad he was ‘you like your new Situation so well; something more agreeable I think than an Attorneys Clerk’.²³ True to form, Tatton caused raised eyebrows on his first Saturday at the bank by walking the thirty-two miles home to Sledmere at the end of the day’s business, in order to spend Sunday there, and walking back again in time for work on Monday morning. Already, at the age of twenty, legends were beginning to grow up around him.

      Tatton’s diary for 1793 suggests that his life in Hull was mostly taken up with life at the bank, visits to his father at Sledmere, where he occasionally helped with the accounts, hunting and riding. He also made frequent visits to his grandmother, Decima, Lady Sykes, who lived in Beverley and whose health was failing. On Friday, 15 February, he received unwelcome news: ‘A Messenger came from Beverley with the sad news of my Grandmother’s being seized with the Palsy. My Father and I came over.’ Apart from the odd rally round she never recovered and his entry for 9 March reads ‘4 o’clock this morning my Grandmother died. My father came down from London.’

      Before he died, Parson had left a touching eulogy to her, entitled ‘My Wife’s Character’.

      She was lovely and amiable in her Person

      Courteous and affable in her Behaviour

      Lively and cheerful in conversation

      Of a sweet and engaging temper

      Of an open and ingenuous mind

      In her Judgement of others candid

      Zealous & sincere in the discharge of all conjugal duties

      In the care of her children tender and affectionate

      To her Servants kind & indulgent etc. etc.

      It was written from the heart and he accepted its shortcomings. ‘This Character not being in Rhime,’ he wrote, ‘nor Poetical, & perhaps too long for the Present Taste, may be improper for an Epitaph; yet I choose to leave it, as a Testimony of my affection & love for, & the High Opinion I had of her. And I sincerely believe the whole to be strictly & fully true.’²⁴

      Tatton made no mention of his grandmother’s funeral in his diary, entries in which show that, outside working at the bank, he was becoming more and more tied up with his horses. ‘My brown mare foaled a Filly,’ he wrote on 26 March, and noted excitedly the details of its sire, Guido: ‘a bright bay Horse, full fifteen hands, one inch high with a deal of Bone, remarkably temperate and quiet to ride & leaps well; was bred by the Duke of Queensbury. Guido at four years old won the Revolution Stakes of 200 guineas each at Newmarket beating eight others … Guido twice beat the famous mare Dido.’ As the year wore on more foals were born, physick was administered on a regular basis, and in the summer months, when fashionable society was gathering in the spas, taking the waters and attending assemblies and balls, the only balls mentioned by Tatton were those of a medicinal nature, such as on 18 July, when he began his mare on a course of ‘Taplin’s Cordial Balls and a Mash Morning and Night’, or on 11 August when ‘my Mare had a Ball. I went and dined at Welton. My Mother, brother and Sisters were there. Returned at Night.’

      All the while that Tatton was serving his apprenticeships, Mark, who was being groomed to inherit everything his father had created, remained at Oxford to round off his education. According to a letter written to Christopher in June, 1790 by his then tutor at Brasenose, the Revd George Harper, in which he spoke of Mark’s desire ‘to gain your esteem and confidence’, he came close to being a perfect student. He was attentive to lectures ‘during the whole of Lent & the first part of the Easter Terms’, mixed with a group of ‘respectable and ingenious men’, and could now, wrote Harper, ‘number among his intimate acquaintance some of the most valuable persons in this place’. However, what prevented him from giving ‘an absolute and unqualified approbation of his conduct’ was the fact that ‘there still remains on his mind a boyish improvidence