The Big House: The Story of a Country House and its Family

After a few miles’ ride across the top, from where, if the day was a clear one, he would have caught a glimpse of the North Sea glinting to the east, where the source of his wealth, a fleet of ships, plied their trade out of Hull with the Baltic, he came to a dip in the land. Pausing to give his horse a rest, he looked down upon what he had come to see. The village of Sledmere, which lay at the heart of the Kirkby estate, stood in the bottom of the valley straddling a Roman road, which ran from York in the west to Bridlington on the east coast. It had a church and a large mere, a pond used for the common watering of livestock and from which the village got its name, translating literally as ‘pool in the valley’. Little had changed there since 1572 when it was described as consisting of ‘thirty messuages, ten cottages, ten tofts, five dovecots, forty gardens, forty orchards, 1,000 acres of land, 100 acres of meadow, 1,000 acres of pasture, forty acres of wood, 100 acres of heath and furze and … Free Warren.’2 According to Nicholas Manners, a Methodist missionary who had been born there in 1732, its inhabitants were ‘extremely ignorant of religion, wild and wicked’.3 As Richard surveyed the scene below him, his eyes were drawn to a building which stood to the north-west of the village, on rising ground overlooking the mere. This was ‘the manor house of Sledmer upon the Woulds’,4 the home of his recently deceased uncle.

As Richard rode his horse slowly down the hill, memories of his Uncle Mark came flooding back. Daniel Defoe had written of ‘that glorious Head of Commerce, called the Merchant’, and in Hull, they had called Mark Kirkby ‘the Merchant Prince’, for at a time when trade with the Baltic was booming and merchant families were amassing great fortunes, he was the richest of them all. He had bought the land at Sledmere in order to pursue his favourite sport of hunting, and during the season would move into the manor house where he liked to surround himself with his sporting cronies. He was known to be fond of the bottle, a trait which he shared in common with all the squires of the day, and Richard smiled as he recalled the agreement that his uncle had once made with his Coachman, that they should never get drunk the same evening. Instead each should have the privilege on alternate nights. It had not been a success, for on the very first occasion that it had fallen to the Coachman’s turn to be sober and Uncle Mark was indulging himself without restraint at some friend’s house, early in the evening his enjoyment had been disturbed by the entry of his Coachman into the room crying ‘Tak care o’yesell Master, I’se going fast.’5

Richard also remembered an occasion when he had attended a supper given by his uncle for all his tenants and other dependants, at which, owing to the bottle having circulated the table one too many times, the general tenor of the evening had deteriorated and the mirth had become too uproarious. At this point, ‘Old Mark Kirkby’, as he was known in the neighbourhood, had risen somewhat unsteadily to his feet, his florid face beneath its flowing periwig contrasting vividly with his favourite blue velvet coat, and loudly rapped the table crying ‘Mark Kirkby is at home!’ It was evident that to all those gathered round the table this was a well-known signal at which all merriment was to be hushed and the proper decorum restored. However much of a good fellow the Merchant Prince may have been, he did not like his guests to forget their place.

Like Kirkby, the Sykeses were successful merchants. Originally yeoman farmers, they had come from a place called Sykes Dyke, near Carlisle. One of their descendants, William Sykes, had left Cumberland in about 1550 and settled in Leeds where he had set up as a clothier. He could not have timed his arrival better. The town, which is conveniently situated on the borders of the industrial West Riding and the predominantly agricultural North-East, was on the move. The textile industry was expanding rapidly, spreading wealth through the valleys and uplands west and south of the town. Cloth woven in the outlying villages was brought into Leeds to undergo all the various finishing processes and was then marketed by local merchants whose fortunes snowballed. As industry developed the population doubled and by the middle of the seventeenth century Leeds was the epicentre of woollen manufacture. Clothiers and merchants thronged the huge cloth market held on and around Leeds bridge. The town’s inhabitants, wrote Macaulay, ‘boasted loudly of their increasing wealth, and of the immense sales of cloth which took place in the open air on the Bridge. Hundreds, nay thousands of pounds had been paid down in the course of one busy market day.’6 Within two generations the family had accumulated so much money that William’s grandson, Richard, who had risen to being Alderman of Leeds and was the first ‘private gentleman’ in the city to own a carriage,7 was able to leave each of his three daughters the sum of £10,000, a staggering sum for those days, as well as vast estates to his five sons.8

While this branch of the family continued to prosper in Leeds, one of Richard’s grandchildren, Daniel, set up in business as a merchant in Hull, seeing the great opportunities that were opening up in the city from its burgeoning trade with the Baltic. Hull, whose port arose around the confluence of the Rivers Hull and Humber, had risen to greatness in medieval times when her proximity to the vast sheep runs of Yorkshire and Lincolnshire had stood her in good stead in the important wool trade. When cloth eventually replaced wool as the major English export, her fortunes had temporarily waned, the London merchants having a virtual monopoly in everything except raw wool, but they had risen rapidly again in the latter half of the seventeenth century with the opening up of direct trade to the Baltic. ‘There is more business done in Hull’, Daniel Defoe had observed in 1724, ‘than in any town of its bigness in Europe … They drive a great trade here to Norway, and to the Baltick, and an important trade to Dantzick, Riga, Narva and Petersburgh; from whence they make large returns in iron, copper, flax, canvas, pot-ashes, Muscovy Linnen and yarn, and other things; all which they get vent for in the country to an exceeding quantity.’9 By the time of his death in 1697, Daniel Sykes’s firm was part of an oligarchy of two or three dozen great merchant houses, which handled most of the goods passing through the port. He had been twice elected Mayor of Hull and had built up a fortune to leave to his son Richard, an equally successful merchant, who in 1704 further consolidated the family’s position by marrying Mary Kirkby, the sister of the Merchant Prince and co-heiress to Sledmere. It was a classic case of trade marrying into land, a formula which was to be behind the building of many of the most important houses in Britain.

Though Richard must have visited Sledmere there is no record of him ever having lived there. It was his eldest son and namesake, born in 1706, who was destined to be the first Sykes to move out of Hull to the country, though not until, like his father and grandfather before him, he had made his name in his native city. The family had recently built a new house in Hull High Street on a site which they had acquired in 1725 and which extended to the river. It is described as having been ‘a fine strong structure, built a little way back, with iron palings in the front. You ascended to the street door by a flight of marble steps.’ It also had a ‘coach house and stables belonging to it with substantial cut stone doorways … reached by a short passage on the opposite side of the street’.10

From here young Richard had immersed himself in the family business. With a fleet of seven ships, two of which were named The Richard and The Sykes, he carried on and expanded the family’s considerable trade with the ports of Scandinavia and the Baltic, exporting mostly large quantities of woollen cloth and importing iron. Swedish iron, which was high-grade, malleable iron, produced under stringent controls from the finest ores, was then regarded as the best in the world. It was considered the only iron fit for steelmaking. A number of firms built up a very great business on the basis of trading in this commodity, of which Sykes & Son became the largest. Richard was made Sheriff of Hull in 1740, and in 1745, when the Young Pretender was leading his rebel army on a gradual procession south, he was appointed Captain of a regiment of volunteers, composed of the chief Merchants of Hull, the purpose of which was ‘to take up arms on His Majesty’s behalf for the common defence of the Town of Kingston upon Hull’. These orders were signed the month after the Battle of Prestonpans, the same month that the Pretender was marching upon Derby and when such a panic prevailed throughout the northern counties that even the Archbishop of York, Dr Herring, thought it his duty to muster and levy troops, to attend Reviews and to urge all country gentlemen to take up arms in defence of the Protestant Religion. In the event of the triumph of the Pretender, Richard Sykes’s signature on such a document would certainly have pointed him out as being worthy of ruinous fines and penalties, and possibly have cost him his head.

These civil troubles were long passed when Richard rode out to his uncle’s house on that October day. He had made his fortune and his reputation, and he was ready for a change. It is quite clear that improvement of his new property was on Richard Sykes’s mind from the very beginning. He was married to Jane Hobman, the daughter of Hesketh Hobman, another important Hull merchant whose family had extensive interests in Danzig, and if he were to bring a wife to live in such a desolate spot, especially one who was used to living in some luxury in their Hull mansion, then he would have to make it worthy of her. No picture exists of the house, which was described variously as a ‘manor house’ and a ‘hall house’, and was probably a gabled Tudor building, which she would certainly have considered old-fashioned. The surrounding landscape was largely treeless, with the exception of the odd orchard and the occasional hedgerow in the vicinity of the village, and so Richard decided to concentrate on planting first.

Landscape gardening was all the rage at the time, largely due to the influence of a local man, William Kent, whose family came from Bridlington. The son of a coachman, he had as a young man spent a number of years painting and studying art in Italy, where he had fallen under the spell of the works of Claude Lorrain and Salvator Rosa, whose depictions of the Italian landscape showed a nature that had been improved or ‘methodised’. On his return to England in 1716, under the patronage of the Earl of Burlington, he worked as a painter and architect, and passed on to fashionable society his enthusiasm for all things Italian. He became the oracle on matters of taste and his influence was soon widely felt when he took up designing gardens in 1730. ‘He leaped the fence,’ wrote Horace Walpole, ‘and saw that all nature was a garden. He felt the delicious contrast of hill and valley changing imperceptibly into each other, tasted the beauty of the gentle swell, or concave scoop, and remarked how loose groves crowned an easy eminence with happy ornament.’11

Richard’s designs were, to begin with, on a relatively modest scale, being confined to the planting of an Avenue radiating out from the house on either side of the Mere. To assist him in carrying out this scheme he employed a firm of nurserymen from Pontefract called Perfects, which had its origins in the local industry of liquorice growing. John Perfect, an ex-mayor of Pontefract and ‘a Person well known in the North for his Skill in Nurseries and Planting of all Kinds’,12 had worked on designs for the gardens at another Yorkshire house, Nostell Priory, as well as supplying plants to Harewood and other mansions in the neighbourhood. There was another factor that might have played its part in swinging him the job and that was, as Richard commented to a neighbour in December, 1749, ‘Mr Perfect likes this Air very well.’13

Mr Perfect soon found his employer to be an impatient man, wanting his Avenue to be planted and then appear as if by magic. Richard was annoyed when the first consignment of trees turned out to be too small, Perfect having miscalculated the depth of the soil where they were to be planted, and he immediately ordered much larger ones. ‘I have planted some Beeches sixteen feet high,’ he wrote on 2 February 1750, ‘which I Expect will answer at the end of my Avenue, and the firrs will be larger than we first talked of as we find the soil much better than expected.’14 He delighted in the planting of his trees and in the period 1749–1750 is known to have planted 20,000 Beech, Sycamore, Wych Elm and Chestnut.15 The completed Avenue, a great and almost triangular belt of trees, enclosed a hundred acres of parkland. At its southern end the focal point was a gap in the peripheral belt in which a gate was set. At the northern end there was the Mere and the House, which Richard intended to rebuild.

Though his wife was the catalyst for all this work, scarcely had the project begun when tragedy struck. In the autumn of 1750, Jane fell ill. In spite of being sent by Richard to one of the best physicians in London, Dr James Munro, a man of ‘great Experience and knowledge’,16 she did not improve. In June of the following year, Jane’s brother, Randolph Hobman, wrote to Richard from Danzig, thanking him for a melancholy gift, ‘the Wearing Apparel which you was pleased to be ordered to be distributed between my Wife and Sister here’. He added ‘My Wife … assures me as long as it may please God to spare her life, she will wear those things in a most grateful acknowledgement of your Brotherly Love … as also in a continual remembrance of my most dear beloved Sister deceased.’17 Jane was forty-seven years old and she died childless.

After her death, Richard immersed himself in the building of his new house and on 17 June 1751 recorded the starting date with one short line written in his pocket book: ‘Laid the first Stone of the new house at Sledmere.’18 As to the actual position of the house, a contemporary witness, one Richard Kirkby, stated that ‘Richard Sykes … built the present Mansion house at Sledmire near the Plot of Ground where the Old House stood.’19 Richard himself made virtually no mention of the building of the house in his letters, apart from the occasional order for materials. ‘Please to send first a sample of two sizes of your Mortice Brass Joints for Doors,’ he wrote to Richard Pardoe & Son, on 9 June, 1752, ‘as also of iron, and your lowest prices of each sort with Screws proper for Screwing them fast, and the price of them. As the Doors are eight feet high, I have some thoughts of having three Joints to a door.’20 Others have him asking for ‘thousand four foot pail boards and please to let them be very good ones’, and ‘two Baggs of Nails such as you sent me last for pailing 15,000 of 6d, 40,000 of 3d and 10,000 of 2d Sprigs as all these sorts are greatly wanted’.21

As work on the new house progressed, Richard turned his attention once again to the landscape, and with the help of Mr Perfect set to work planning a garden. According to Richard Kirkby, whose family were tenants of the estate, ‘in order to make out Buildings, Gardens, Lawns and other necessary Conveniences to the New House, he took the old Pond or Marr into the ground called the Lawn, which then might contain an acre and upwards and before that Time laid open to the York, Malton and Scarborough roads … he also removed a Hill called Green Hill, along the North and South side of which the Roads went to York and Malton and to the Church, and inclosed the Hill and both the Roads within this Lawn by a Brick Wall.’22 This brick wall, which remains today, was in fact an elaborate form of ha-ha, with triangular, rectangular and semicircular buttresses, which marked the end of the garden. At either end were quite grand pavilions, long since gone, which faced up towards the house, each consisting of three buildings and a yard. To complete the scheme there was a general clearance of all enclosures or buildings that might spoil the view up the Avenue from the House.

On 2 January, 1752, Richard received a welcome letter from George Crowle, one of the MPs for Hull and a commissioner for the Navy Office. ‘I am at this moment come from Court,’ he wrote, ‘and I should not have forgiven myself if I slip’t the first opportunity of acquainting you what was hinted me by a person in power, that it is almost determined upon in Council to appoint you High Sheriff of Yorkshire this Year. I heard you mentioned with great honor.’23 The appointment came through in the spring and he was soon busying himself with all the details of taking up his new post, such as organising his livery – ‘the High Sheriff’s Livery is blew faced with red, the jacket red, white and green, gold coloured lace on the hatts … the expence of furnishing one man and hors with the livery for two assizes is this year Sixteen Shillings, som years are more and som less’,24 appointing a Chaplain – one applicant whom he turned down was the Revd Lawrence Sterne, soon to become the acclaimed author of Tristram Shandy – and dealing with approaches from various tradesmen. Amongst the latter was a curious letter endorsed ‘my Lady Elizabeth Burdet, 16 Jan., 1752’ in which she stated that she was the widow of Sir Francis Burdet of Braithwaite in the West Riding, who had invested and lost his entire fortune in the South Sea Scheme, the notorious ‘Bubble’. After Sir Francis’s death Lady Elizabeth had been obliged to take up the Coal Trade. She begged his permission to allow her to supply the Judges’ lodgings with coal: ‘our applications has been for ye Quality & Gentry not hoping for any regard from ye low sort of persons’.25

Richard’s appointment as High Sheriff was indicative of the high esteem in which he was held, a fact which was further borne out in August of the following year when the Prime Minister himself, the Right Hon. Henry Pelham, wrote to him to try and persuade him to stand as MP for Hull. They had met in Scarborough, then a fashionable spa in which it was said ‘earls, marquesses and dukes’ could be found ‘as thick as berries on hedges’,26 and where Pelham was indulging in the popular pastimes of drinking the waters and outdoor bathing. ‘There is no man I should wish to see more in Parliament than yourself,’ he told him, ‘and indeed the unreserved civilities I have received from your countrymen must always make me partial to Yorkshire …’27 Richard declined, and the position was taken up by Lord Robert Manners, Pelham’s brother-in-law, who put Sykes’s refusal to stand down to his preoccupation with Sledmere. ‘Till Sledmere is quite completed,’ he wrote to him, ‘the delight you take in that pretty place I dare say will not let you stop your hand, but afford you daily employment & the most delightful amusement. I hope all your improvements there answer your most sanguine expectations.’28

The real reason, however, that Richard was never able to take up a serious career in politics was that he suffered from very poor health. This already interfered with his position as High Sheriff. ‘Your Lordship I am afraid will think me remiss,’ he wrote to Sir Thomas Parker, one of the Assize Judges, on 6 June, 1752, ‘in not acknowledging the receipt of your kind favour till now but … I have been chiefly confined to my Bed by a Sharpe fitt of the Gout, the pain of which I thank God is greatly abated and if no relapse think I may flatter myself with the pleasure of attending your Bro: Judges at the Ensuing assizes in person.’29

Gout, which was the common enemy of the country gentleman, was caused mostly, and certainly in Richard’s case, by an excessive

fondness for Port.

Yes, one Failing he has, I recollect that

He prefers his Old Port to a Velvet ‘Old Hat’

wrote his younger brother, the Revd Mark ‘Parson’ Sykes, in a poem he entitled ‘Verses in praise of my Brother’.30 The size of Richard’s appetite for Port is made clear in one of many similar letters to Robert Norris, one of his shipping agents. ‘When you have any extraordinary Pipe of Old Red Port Wine, let me know and will take sixty or seventy Gallons of it, but will have it drawn into bottles with you and well corked any time betwixt now and the latter end of April.’31 Among the daily dining, supping and drinking companions listed by Richard in his pocket books are numerous parsons who shared his enjoyment, such as Parson Ferrit, Parson Morice and Parson Lazenby, but none more so than his own chaplain, a drunken old clergyman by the name of Parson Paul. ‘Parson Paul and the tenants of Sledmire dined with me,’ he recorded on Christmas Day, 1752; then on Boxing Day, ‘Parson Paul supp’d with me’, and on the following day, ‘Ditto breakfast with me and returned home’, no doubt much the worse for wear.32

Though one might be tempted to smile at these exploits, the subsequent Gout is an extremely painful condition, in which excess uric acid crystals are deposited in the joints of the big toe, the ankle and the knee, causing protuberant swelling and acute attacks of pain. ‘The victim goes to bed and sleeps in good health,’ wrote Dr Thomas Sydenham, who himself suffered from the disease. ‘About two o’clock in the morning he is awakened by a severe pain in the great toe … so exquisite is the feeling of the part affected that it cannot bear the weight of the bedclothes nor the jar of a person walking in the room. The night is passed in torture.’33 The condition was caused not so much by the ingestion of alcohol, but by the fact that the port was contaminated with lead, regular doses of which can induce the disease. The contamination came either from the port having been stored in lead lined casks or from contact with leaded pewter drinking vessels.

Gout plagued Richard’s life. ‘The Top of my Great Toe,’ he wrote to his doctor on 11 October, 1759, ‘began again to be inflamed and uneasy at night … I bathed it with Brandy … and continued to do so twice a day. Monday night it was very much inflamed and painful and kept me awake all night.… Wednesday morning pressing of the flesh of the toe close to the nail, there issued out white matter. I bathed my toe with Brandy …’34 There were times when the pain was quite devastating. ‘I am now confined to my chamber in the Gout,’ he wrote to Dorothy Luck, the wife of one of his tenants, on 30 December, 1753, ‘and have been very much afflicted therewith for these twelve months past (which prevented me coming to see you as I intended) in such a degree that life has become a burden and not worth desiring even amongst the abundance of the Riches of this World which God Almighty has been pleased to entrust to my care.’35

To cure him of his afflictions, he had entrusted himself into the care of a certain Dr Chambers, whose practice was in the nearby town of Beverley. Though Gout was the worst of these, and self-inflicted, he was plagued by other illnesses, the minutest details of which were communicated to the doctor in a series of almost daily letters. They included the ‘Scorbutick disorder’36, endless colds (‘coughed much and my lungs wheezing like a Broken Winded Horse …’),37 toothache (‘I have had a very great pain in my Teeth Gums and Roof of my mouth much Swelled as well as on the right side of my face’,38) piles (‘my piles are yet very troublesome but not so much Heat or Inflamation about the Fundament’),39 and very unpleasant rashes (‘my Wife tells me my back and shoulders are full of red and blue spots with an itching and my armpits full of scurf’).40 In return the good doctor kept him well supplied with a battery of different remedies. There were Physick, the Electuary, Asthmatic Elixir, Virgin Wax Sallet Oil, Camomile Tea, Saline Julep, the Spring Potage, Sassafras, Mr Bolton’s Ointment, Rhubarb Tea, Apozem and Basilicon to name a few. Richard lapped them up. ‘I have pursued Dr Chambers directions hitherto in every respect,’ he wrote to his brother Joseph in September, 1759, ‘and am now waiting for what more he may please to send me.’41

All indications are that the new house at Sledmere was completed by the end of 1753 and Richard was certainly living there the following summer, for in August he advertised for a butler. ‘I yesterday received your favour of the 23rd,’ he wrote to a friend, Thomas Sidall, ‘informing me you have heard of a Butler that you think will do for me. I want one and such a one as is not fickle as I do not love to see new faces. I beg you will not only be particular in your inquiry if good natured, for I can’t brook with an ill temper or impertinent answers … As I can’t shave myself he must shave as he will chiefly attend me wherever I go.’42 The annual salary was £15. 2s. and William Shawe, who was hired to fill the post, was to find himself working in a household of twelve. His fellow servants were listed along with their wages by Richard in his pocket book for 1756 as ‘Sam Hirst, my Coachman. Wages £12. 12s.; Edward Guthrie, my Gardiner. Wages £16. 16s.; Mary Brocklesby, my Housekeeper. Wages £8. 8s.; Thomas Porter, my Groom. Wages £5. 5s. 8d.; James Wellbank, my Postilion. Wages £3. 3s.; Mary Mitchell, my Chamber Maid. Wages £3. 3s.; Mary Banks, my Chamber Maid. Wages £3. 0s.; Susanna Anderson, my Cook Maid. Wages £4. 0s.; Mary Thornton, my Dairy Maid, Wages £3. 5s.; and Robert Collings, Odd Man. Wages £3. 3s.’43