THE HOLSE OF LYME.*
LADY NEWTON'S history of Lyme and its occupants will be found indispensable by any one who seeks to understand the life of country gentlemen in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It has the rare combination of importance and charm ; it contains some letters, published for the first time, which English historians will do well not to neglect, and these are embedded in a faithful and living description of manners and customs through two centuries in one of the most glorious of English houses. Lady Newton has fulfilled her task in exactly the right way. By means of bills and notes of expenses—such things as would have seemed dull to an incompetent writer with no historical sense—she has accomplished a veritable reconstruction of certain aspects of life. Take, for instance, the accounts of a journey to London by Richard Legh and his wife in 1663. They went up from Cheshire to spend some time in a hired horse near Great Queen Street, Covent Garden. This expedition (equivalent to our modern going to London for the season) is described in detail, and we gather that Lady Newton is as sensible of the discomfort which even rich people endured in those days as of the imposing appearance of the Lyme household moving by slow stages upon the capital. Even when the party arrived, they entered an unoccupied house only half furnished. As for the cost of various necessaries, we find ourselves wondering whether we would exchange our lot for that of people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when we reflect that, though many things were invidiously cheap, other things which we now judge " neces- sary "—sugar, tea, coffee—were appallingly dear. There is a similar account of a journey of the Legh of the day from Lyme into Lancashire in the eighteenth century, which is also very informing. Such things as these could not have been written if Lady Newton had not the art of making use of trifles without producing trivialities. We have read other efforts in reconstruction, but none more satis- factory than these. The book should keep company with Memoirs cf the Verney Family during the Seventeenth Century. Frances Lady Verney (a sister of Florence Nightingale) and Lady Newton have shown how much can be done by what may be called affectionate research. Enormous patience and industry were needed in each ease to read and collate barely legible writing on tattered paper, but we cannot have too much of this kind of incidental evidence to help and check the historians. The labours of the British Museum, the Record Office, the Camden Society, and the Historical MSS. Commission all taken together do not cover the vast field adequately.
Just as the Verney family papers were discovered in attics or lofts when a member of the Calvert family succeeded to the Verney property, so Lady Newton's discovery was similarly unexpected. The old family letters at Lyme had not been touched for forty years. Lady Newton found them in a fireproof cupboard. Many were almost undecipherable from damp and the gnawings of rats and mice. She set to work to master the Court hand, which was at first almost unintelligible to her, and ultimately came to read Elizabethan writing as easily as the writing of to-day. On some of the letters it was possible still to trace the gold-dust with which • The House of Lyme : from its Foundction to the End of the Eighteenth Century. By Use Lady Newton. London: W. Heinemann. [11 1s. net.] they had been powdered according to the custom of an age which knew not blotting-paper. The family of Legh was, on the whole, just what one would wish the owners of a great house to be ; they fought for their King and were, so to speak, mentioned in despatches at Croky and Agincourt ; they attended Parliament and did much of what we 'should to-day call county work ; they endowed churches and were benefactors on a grand and various scale. If we make a reserva- tion, it is that we should have expected their sturdy good sense to keep clear of Jaeobitism, but they were all and always intense Royalists—Cheshire was a Royalist county—and when William and Mary came to the throne a Legh was counted among the Non- jurors. Their home was built of stone quarried out of the pits in Lyme Park, and the household for centuries was a self-supporting unit. Every member of the family was rooted to the soil whence he had sprung. To the Leghs, as they reveal themselves in the letters; Lymo was " dear Lyme," sweet Lyme." They were never really happy away from it. Lady Newton says that all these people whose wooden features in their portraits—did ever any house contain more portraits than hang at Lyme ?—had meant little to her become real through their letters. Her deeply sympa- thetic touch makes them reel also for us. Well, the present writer cannot help reflecting that it is easy to be in love with Lyme. The highest inhabited house of anything like its size in England, it overlooks wild and splendid country where Cheshire, Lancashire, and Derbyshire meet. It has many features, any one of which would bring fame. To begin with, a considerable part of the interior of the house is of unspoiled Elizabethan architecture. You would not suspect this from the outside, for the outside, which encases the Elizabethan interior, was a gradual accretion of the work of the shadowy John of Padua, of Leoni, of Wyatville, and others, all of them, be it said, doing themselves credit. Let us hope that Lady Newton, when explaining the several periods of this grand building to friends, never suffered the shock experienced by a certain owner of an historical house. This owner, as we think Mr. G. W. E. Russell has related somewhere, had just described at length the various additions which had been made to the house, illustrating typical fashions of architecture, when his friend demanded: " And • who was the architect ? " " Oh, Cubitt ! " snapped the owner in a passion of irony which was no doubt completely wasted. The famous red deer of Lyme Park are still thriving and have lost none of their wildness through the generations. Sonic of their blood probably runs in the tamer deer of Windsor Park, for a Lyme keeper in Queen Anne's reign performed the extraordinary feat of driving twelve brace of stags all the way to Windsor. 'rho white wild cattle of Lymo have unfortunately died out owing to in- breeding. The Chillingham wild cattle alone are numerous enough to withstand this source of weakness. The driving of the deer through a pond that no longer exists was an ancient sport at Lyme, and an exciting episode in connexion with this hunt is mentioned by Sir Walter Scott in the notes to The Lady of the Lake. The Stag Parlour in the house at Lyme is a pictorial shrine for the home of deer. Sir Walter Scott also makes use in Woodstock of one of the best-known features of Lyme—the sliding picture of the Black Prince which conceals a secret recess. The Lyme mastiffs can be traced back as far as the time of Agincourt, and unhappily they too are now threatened with extinction. They are of immense size, being almost as largo as donkeys, and have black ears and muzzles and melting brown eyes that would have extorted Matthew Arnold's " Virgilian cry." In Velazquez's picture of the children of Philip IV. there is a mastiff which was no doubt descended from the pair of Lyme mastiffs presented by James I. to Philip III. in 1604.
The earliest letter found at Lyme is elated 1580, and is from the fourth Earl of Derby to Sir Piers Legh. It is very curious to note how Derby in writing to Legit always addresses him as " my faithful servant " and signs himself " your loving master." " At no time," comments Lady Newton, " was rank so much considered and thought of as in the cultured times of Queen Elizabeth." Later she remarks :—
" It is a curious fact that. the clipping and misplacing of It's is not by any means peculiar to modern times. Many instances of this prevail in letters of the Elizabethan and Jacobean period, though as a rule both writing and spelling were better in the six- teenth than in the seventeenth century, when the writing, particu- larly that of the women, was atrocious and the spelling purely phonetic. One gathers from this phonetic spelling that the pro- nunciation of people of the upper classes must closely have re- sembled the dialect of the country people of to-day ; they write me broother,' for instance, for ' my brother,' coon' for ' come,' &c."
The evidence of the truth of this remains to-day, for there are still a few phrases which may be said to ho common to the " territorial " classes and the " lower " classes, but not to exist in between.
We wish we had space to quote much of Lady Newton's recon- struction of the old life. The coldness of the houses —the larger the colder—and their darkness at night must have been depressing and oppressive, or at all events would be SO to u9. But we think one reservation may be made. The black oak which seems to us ,o drink up the light and disseminate darlilless, for all its beauty,
was not always black. New oak is by no means heavy, and after all even the oak of our oldest houses was very light in colour once. In these times it is worth remembering that in the early part of the .seventeenth century potatoes were practically unknown at Lyme, and that sparrows were one of the regular forms of food. Let us also note for our consolation that Mrs. Bold (who had been born a Legh) in 1639 was writing, as though the race of faithful family servants were extinct ! We must be content to refer the reader to the book for these and similar matters.
It is a particular duty to mention the interesting letters from .Bradshawe (the famous first signatory of the death-warrant of Charles I.), the letters about the Third Dutch War, and those about the Popish Plot and Monmouth's rebellion. These are all of genuine historical value. There is also a very curious letter describing the most husband-like concern of Charles IL when the Queen was suddenly taken ill. Bradshaw° was only twenty-one when he wrote to Sir Peter Legh, who was an old man. He asks various favours and speaks of his gratitude. He will be careful " to wrytc it with a pen of brass in the tables of my heart." He was as good as his word, and it was due to his influence that Lyme was spaiad when Bramhall, Adlington, Wythenshawe, and other Cheshire houses . were besieged or sacked in the Civil War. In December, 1632, Bradshaw° wrote :-
" The Proclamations touching residence in London in Eating or dreshing of ffiesh upon the Statute ffish dayes, are very sharplie look't unto : Palmer, a Somersetshire man, was ffyncd in a 10001 for his Abode in London contrary to the former proclamation, & many 10048 are served wth pins out of the Star Chamber & Escheqr to Answer the Breach of tho lave. There are divers Licences purchased for Eating of ffiesh upon ffish dayes : yor Neighbour Mr Stanley of Alderley hath one & it cost him 'P. Cosh- missions for benevolence towards the Repaire of Pestles are corn- ming into all Counties ; the very scaffolding whereof for that purpose is computed to amount to 20,000!."
In 1685 Piers Legh of Bruch was serving in Foversham's Army against the rebel Monmouth. He writes r-
" About 10 days egos(wo had) a very little scirmage at Philips Norton where we thought to have made sure of the Enemy. Ho deceived us in ye night time & .niareht all his army to a towns ye call Frome, & has still been a days march before us. We are now got to ye County Towne in Somersetshire io miles from ye Enemy who is making what fortification he can to a towns called Bridgwater, & if he stayed' there we shall certainly make an end of this troublesome business in a few dayes time. In ye enemies late marches they have been forced to plunder townes for subsistence, he giving them noo pay. Ye last town they pillaged was Wells in Somersetshire, where they got some little amunition the' not much. Ye traitorous villains have defaced most Churches they come near, as shaving PI thro ye orgaines, feeding their horses upon ye Comunion table, & such like rovengefull tricks they have put upon God's house, which thoy are to smart for in a little time. To-morrow if yo enemy stay-es us we are to encamp as near them as possible we can, see we shall force them to Battle or Starve them out."
Finally, we must quote Piers Legh's account of the execution of Monmouth, which he witnessed :-
"Yesterday ye Duke of Monmouth was executed on Tower Hill. He behaved himself verry soldier like uppon ye scaffold. He had with him all ye night before he died ye Bishop of Bathenwells & ye Bishop of Ely, who both waited on him to ye place Of execution, he has made noe speech yt, I hear of, but ye say he did disown his mariage with ye Dutches, being it was a forced marriage, & yt he was precontracted before he knew his Duchess to my Lady Henrietta Wentworth, whom he has lived with for this two last years, as he called it very Chastely, and yt they had committed no sin together because they were man & wife. As he went out of ye Tower he took little notice of his Ditches, but gave his Children his blessing and bid them -be dutyfull to ye King. Severall carriages of prisoners are brought to town this day, who arc to be sent as fast as possible after their leader."
This is the first time that we have seen a soldier-like bearing attributed to Monmouth on the scaffold, and yet Logh's account has the ring of truth.
The illustrations to this deeply interesting book are excellent.
Previous page
