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

appears to have been somewhat naive in his approval of Mark’s set, for the one thing that they appear to have been most ingenious about was in parting their rich young friend from his money. Christopher was obliged to engage a new private tutor for Mark and to send them both into the country to study in a rented cottage. ‘I cannot conceive how he contrived to spend so much money in the University,’ wrote George Halme to his employer, on 30 September, 1790. ‘He did not appear extravagant when I was in College, but in Oxford, though one hardly expects it amongst Gentlemen, there are numbers ready to take advantage of generosity and inattention: a few of that description, I suspect, assisted him spending his money and his time.’ In the new situation in which Mark found himself, living in a country village, ‘his pocket expenses cannot be very great,’ Halme assured Christopher, ‘as there are no temptations to spend his time which is not spent in his own improvement’.²⁶

      Mark managed to rein in his extravagance during the rest of his father’s lifetime and after he left Oxford he did everything he could to gain his approval. He became engaged to a local heiress, Henrietta Masterman, the only daughter of Henry Masterman of Settrington Hall, near Malton. Orphaned when she was only five years old, Henrietta was heir to the Settrington Estate, which included two houses: an Elizabethan manor house, enlarged about 1703, and a new rather austere neo-classical mansion, still partly under construction, which was intended to replace it. She was five years older than Mark, and, being a close neighbour, had known him for some time. She was well educated, spoke and wrote French, and wrote novels in her spare time. It was a love match and one the family warmly approved of. ‘I can assure you we are all extremely anxious to hear how you go on,’ his younger sister Decima wrote to him in June, 1795, ‘& I hope you will relieve us from our anxiety as soon as it is in your power.’

      Decima, who was herself on the point of marrying a neighbour, John Robinson Foulis, the second son of Sir William Foulis of Ingleby Manor, York, was evidently alone at Sledmere with her parents, and the strain of sitting around for days on end with very little to do was beginning to show. ‘I long to see you again either married or unmarried,’ she told him, ‘as at present we are left entirely to ourselves & as you know well to our devout conversations which are still very numerous. I have nothing more to say of any consequence & will only add the anxious wishes for your lasting happiness.’²⁷ Mark and Henrietta were married on 11 November, in the church of Holy Trinity, Micklegate, York, where Henrietta had herself been baptised in October, 1766.

      On the following day, 12 November, ‘the morrow of St Martin’, Mark, aged twenty-four, was nominated as High Sheriff of Yorkshire. It was a prestigious post and Christopher was so delighted that he agreed to pay for the considerable expenses that were involved. The cost of fitting out the sheriff and his retinue alone came to £355, which included £80 for horses, £35 for a coach, £19. 11s. for a banner, £68. 18s. to his tailor, £80. 18s. for silks & velvets etc, £26. 18s. for lace, £18. 18s. to the shoemaker, £9. 12s. to the hosier and £15. 12s. for buckles. By the end of the year, the total costs had amounted to the huge sum of £1,077. 17s. 6d.²⁸

      After the wedding Mark and Henrietta went to live at Settrington, and in September of the following year, as co-heir to his wife’s property, he adopted the name of Masterman to run before Sykes. Since Settrington was only ten miles from Sledmere, there was much toing and froing between the two houses. ‘Lady Sykes with Mrs Sedgewick, Miss Charlotte the lovely, & Mrs Crockay, your little Flirt, dined with us on Thursday,’ wrote Henrietta to Tatton, soon after her marriage. ‘Chr. also and Miss Crofts; & on Saturday she took her whole phalanx of Ladies, the above, Miss Langfords and my Sister to Heslerton.’ Henrietta seems to have struck up a particularly close relationship with Tatton, of all Mark’s siblings. ‘Fie on the lame Horse or the lazy Master, My dear Tatton,’ she wrote to him in the same letter, referring to an occasion when she and Mark had ridden over to Sledmere to see him and he had failed to appear, ‘for you have between you grievously disappointed all here especially My Saint and I who came over Saturday evening with a fair Wind and light Sailing to meet you. I in particular was in such a Merry way at the thought of so soon shaking hands with you …’ If his horse, ‘the unworthy Beast’, went lame again, she continued, then rather than be disappointed once more, she would send over her own mount, ‘my Old Brilliant’, to fetch him. ‘She will canter you over, sail foremost, from Dagger Lane in a tangent.’

      It appears from this letter that she and Tatton may have formed some kind of sentimental friendship, for she refers to him as her ‘Pet’ and thanks him for a ring he sent her, set with a lock of his hair, which she is now wearing. ‘It shall never be taken from thence till the Wearer of it be dead,’ she assures him, continuing ‘This promise, slightly as it be made, I hold as sacred as the Friendship I long ago gave you without Reserve.’ She returns the compliment, sending him ‘Another, sett in the very same manner’, which she begs him to wear ‘until the hair of some Lady yet in the clouds, & justly preferred, has a stronger claim to its place.’ She finishes her letter by telling him that his sister, Elizabeth, wants his opinion on a horse. ‘Elizabeth, with her love, bids me tell you she has got a new horse, with a long tail, but will neither pass her opinion, nor mount it till you have been here.’²⁹ Tatton’s close friendship with the Masterman Sykeses is further borne out by the fact that when they were painted by Sir Thomas Lawrence in 1805, he was included in the portrait.

      On the death of Mark’s father, in September, 1801, the Masterman Sykes’s moved from Settrington into the newly completed Sledmere, though they kept the former as a second residence. The ‘improvidence’ which Mark had shown as a young man, and which he had so carefully reined in during his father’s last years, was now let loose. He inherited an estate that, in spite of the considerable annual income brought in from rents, was saddled with debts of over £30,000. This was because, to Christopher, rising incomes were an excuse to spend more on his land and increase investment. He saw the debt as a temporary necessity. Mark, however, did not share his father’s interest in agriculture. His interests were sport and books. Unfortunately for Sledmere, he was also a prolific gambler.

      Within a few months of inheriting the estate he had saddled it with a debt that came close to being ruinous. Mark lived in an age when eccentric wagers between gentlemen were a common occurrence. No incident was too trivial to bet upon; the colour of a horse, the next day’s weather, the distance a man might walk, the impending birth of a child were all topics that might be the subject of a bet. A favourite speculation was on how long a man might live and the old betting book at White’s Club is full of such wagers. On 8 October, 1746, for example, Lord Montfort bet Mr Greville 100 guineas that Mr Nash would still be alive on the same day in four years’ time, while on 4 November, 1754, ‘Lord Montfort wagers Sir John Bland one hundred guineas that Mr Nash outlives Mr Cibber.’³⁰ In a similar tome at Brooks’s Club, one member bet another 500 guineas to ten that none of the Cabinet would be beheaded within the following three years.³¹

      As the new landlord, Mark made it his duty during the first few months of his arriving at Sledmere to entertain his neighbours and tenants to supper. Among these were the various members of the clergy whose parishes lay within the estate’s boundaries. On 31 May, 1802, it was the turn of the Revd James Gilbert, rector of the adjoining village of Kirby Grindalythe, and during the course of the evening a heated debate took place on a subject which was on everyone’s mind at the time, namely the threat posed to Britain by Napoleon Bonaparte, the terror of Europe. A majority of the guests present, including the Revd Gilbert, took the view that in spite of the recent signing between the English and the French of the Treaty of Amiens it was only a matter of time before France attempted an invasion of England. Mark had a quite different theory. In his opinion, Bonaparte’s position was less secure than it looked because ‘the very atmosphere that [he] breathed was fraught with treason’, and even if he were to escape death in the hazardous pursuit of his ambitions then he would