The Gentry: Stories of the English. Adam Nicolson

      Adam Nicolson

      The Gentry

      Stories of the English

      For my daughters

      Contents

       Cover

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Map

      Introduction: Ungentle Gentles

      Part I: The Inherited World 1410–1520

      1410s–1520s

      Survival

      The Plumptons, Plumpton, Yorkshire

      Part II: In the Renaissance State 1520–1610

      1520s–1580s

      Discretion

      The Throckmortons, Coughton, Warwickshire

      1580s–1610s

      Control

      The Thynnes, Oxford, Beaconsfield, Wiltshire, Shropshire and London

      Part III: The Great Century 1610–1710

      1610s–1650s

      Steadiness

      The Oglanders, Nunwell, Isle of Wight

      1630s–1660s

      Withdrawal

      The Oxindens, Denton, Kent

      1660s–1710s

      Honour

      The le Neves, Great Witchingham, Norfolk

      Part IV: Atlantic Domains 1710–1790

      1710s–1750s

      Dominance

      The Lascelles, Yorkshire, Barbados, Richmond and London

      1730s–1790s

      Courage

      The Pinckneys, Wappoo and Charleston, South Carolina, and Richmond, Surrey

      Part V: The Failing Vision 1790–1910

      1790s–1840s

      Fecklessness

      The Capels, London, Brussels and Lausanne

      1780s–1910s

      Fantasy

      The Hugheses, Kinmel, Denbighshire and Grosvenor Square, London

      Part VI: The After-Life 1910–2010

      1890s–1950s

      Renunciation

      The Aclands, Killerton, Devon and Holnicote, Somerset

      1950s–2010s

      Continuity

      The Cliffords, Frampton on Severn, Gloucestershire

      Conclusion: Return of the Native

      Notes

      Acknowledgements

      Searchable Terms

      Other books by Adam Nicolson

      Copyright

      About the Publisher

      INTRODUCTION

      Ungentle Gentles

      No country has described itself so intimately and for so long as this one. The English have been the great self-recorders and England has preserved more of what its people have written about themselves than anywhere else on earth.¹ Inevitably, millions of English men and women have lived with no record of their existence but the writings of the self-recordists – the literate, the scholarly and the litigious, lovers and haters, accountants, manipulators, the worried and the triumphant, the gossips, the distant friends, people separated by business or ambition – have often been kept by their descendants. That is why the English gentry are such an intriguing world to explore: they both wrote and kept, and because of what they kept they are the most knowable English there have ever been. They may well be the most knowable people that have ever lived. Only governments and navies have been so careful about their own past.

      Over the six centuries this book covers, the gentry wrote their lives down. Most of their documents, it is true, have disappeared. Often only one side of a correspondence remains. Sometimes a sequence breaks off without explanation. Sometimes there is nothing but the recording, yet again, of the properties owned, the debts incurred, the credit given. Individual families take up tens of shelf-yards with their title deeds. But alongside that, quantities of letters and journals have also found their way to the great public repositories with which this country is blessed: not only the National Archives in Kew and the British Library in St Pancras, but the strings of County Record Offices, all of which are stuffed with heartstoppingly vivid and unregarded treasures.

      The people who appear in this book wrote in private and the experience of their words on the written page remains mysteriously private. When you sit at a desk in Exeter or Newport, in Norwich or Bangor, with their words in front of you, there is no discreet mulberry-coloured rope holding you away from them. There is no glass over the pictures, no Please Don’t Touch. The young men and women, the paterfamilias and the desperate nephew, the estate steward and the indigent younger brother, are all there with you in the room. Each letter or journal entry articulates its moment, not only in its words but in its physical form, the hurry or care with which it is written, the sense of politeness or intimacy, or rage. The unfolding of a letter from an envelope always seems to me like the opening of time itself. Nearly always they wrote on beautiful, handmade paper, in now fading brown ink, occasionally in blood, sometimes with a lock of hair folded up in a twist of the paper, once in these stories with the hair glued to the paper with a blob of sealing wax, sometimes in tears, when big blurring puddles have fallen on the ink. In one passage in this book, a grieving father wrote with his own tears, his silvery grey words now scarcely legible on the page.

      In part, this book is a journey around that manuscript England, poking about in the national attic, but twinned to paper is another substance just as central to the life of the gentry and in constant dialogue with it: earth. This is a book about land, or at least about the meeting of land and paper. There is nothing mysterious or mystical about this. For most of English history, land was the principal means of production. Land was the national industry. Even as late as 1730,² three-quarters of the population derived their livelihood from it and half was directly engaged in farming. By 1800 that proportion had dropped to a third, by 1850 to a fifth, by 1900 a tenth, by 1970 a fortieth and by 2000 a hundredth. Our distance from the realities of land is the biggest obstacle we have in empathizing with the past. We no longer have an intuitive understanding of the centrality of the cultivated earth to the life systems of England, land not only as a way of growing food but for the gentry a source of income, in the form of rent, or the sale of produce grown and sold; and as a supremely secure asset, safer than houses. For the seventeenth-century political theorist James Harrington, ‘the Foundation of Property be in Land: but if in Money, lightly come, lightly go’.³

      Land was also more than money. On the frontispiece of The English Gentlewoman, Richard Brathwait’s 1631 etiquette book for ladies, his ideal pupil is depicted with a motto floating beside her, saying, ‘Grace my guide, Glory my goale.’ But in The English Gentleman, published the year before, his touchstones are ‘Pes in terris, spes in caelis’ (Feet on the lands, hope in the heavens). Land was the foundation for this life and in some ways a foreshadowing of the life to come. It was the realm through which landowners could extend their presence into a seductive display, a theatre in which they could perform,