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

There were even the equivalent of today’s fast-food outlets. The historian Robert Southey, a pupil at Westminster not long after the Sykes brothers, described visiting a pastrycook’s shop one bitterly cold winter’s morning and inquiring of the proprietress as to why she and her fellow tradesmen kept their windows open during such severe weather. ‘She told me,’ he recalled, ‘that were she to close it, her receipts would be lessened forty or fifty shillings a day – so many were the persons who took up buns or biscuits as they passed by and threw their pence in, not allowing themselves time to enter. Was there ever so indefatigable a people!’ It was no doubt at just such a place that young Tatton would have bought his tarts.

While Tatton worked in the solicitor’s office in Lincoln’s Inn Fields during the day, after hours he busied himself exploring all the varied pleasures that London had to offer a seventeen-year-old boy. On 9 March, for example, only a short time after he had taken up his new post, he paid 3s. for ‘Seeing the Wild Beasts at Exeter Change’. Menageries were at the time a popular diversion for people from all walks of life, most of whom would only have seen wild animals in pictures. The most famous was the one in the Tower of London, where lions and occasionally other species had been kept for the King since medieval times. Visiting it in April, 1787, Thomas Pennant saw ‘a leopard of a quite unknown species, brought from Bengal. It was wholly black, but the hair was marked on the back, sides, and neck with round clusters of small spots, of a glossy and most intense black … Here were also two tigers.’15

The Exeter Change in the Strand was the eighteenth-century equivalent of a shopping mall, with various shops lining the walks around a central staircase. It was on four floors, and one of the rooms on the upper floor, the walls of which were painted with appropriate jungle scenery, was traditionally let to a menagerie. Tatton saw an entertainment called Pidman’s Exhibition of Wild Beasts, which consisted of a variety show followed by a viewing of various helpless animals kept in cages. Byron visited the Exeter Change in 1812. ‘Such a conversazione!’ he remarked in his journal. ‘There was a “hippopotamus”, like Lord Liverpool in the face; and the “Ursine Sloth” hath the very voice and manner of my valet – but the tiger talked too much. The elephant took and gave me my money again; took off my hat; opened a door; trunked a whip; and behaved so well that I wish he was my butler.’16 Unfortunately, Tatton’s evening was slightly marred. ‘Lost out of my pocket 5s.,’ he noted, though in later entries, when he was more experienced, he wrote simply ‘Had my pocket picked.’

Other entertainments he appears to have particularly enjoyed included frequent trips to the theatre. ‘At the Lyceum. 1s. 6d.,’ he wrote on 13 March, where he would have been treated to a performance of The Wags, by Charles Dibdin, a pot-pourri of anecdotes and gossip, interspersed with sea songs. After the show, he then took a ‘coach to the Playhouse. 2s. 6d.’, either the Drury Lane Theatre or the Haymarket, to watch a play by Sheridan. He went to ‘Merlin’s Museum’ on 17 March, Westminster Abbey on 13 April, and on 3 May, ‘took a Coach to a rout’, one of those evening rendezvous in public rooms, where people drank tea and walked up and down gossiping. In June he paid his shilling to visit the celebrated Vauxhall Gardens on the south bank of the Thames. On any night in these elaborate pleasure gardens, laid out with walks, statues and tableaux, he could listen to one of several orchestras, watch dazzling fireworks, dance if he wished to, and take supper in a gaily painted alcove.

When he was not being a tourist, Tatton spent some of his spare time ‘at Johnson’s School’, and ‘the Boxing School’. Owing to the patronage of the sport by the Prince of Wales and his cronies, prize fighting had begun to attract the attention of men of substance and respectability. Fighters sprung up who were more sophisticated than the thugs who had represented the sport in fairground boxing booths, and who brought with them a more elegant and scientific technique. One of these men was Tom Johnson, whose most famous fight was with a seventeen stone, six foot two inches giant from Birmingham called Isaac Perrins, who had issued a challenge to fight anyone for £500. The fight, which took place in October, 1789, ended in victory for Johnson, who was three stone lighter than his opponent, though it took him one-and-a-quarter hours and sixty-five rounds to achieve it. His backer, a Mr Bullock, won £20,000 on the contest, and gave Johnson £1,000, part of which he used to set up his own boxing school. Such establishments became popular with the young gentlemen of the day, and the lessons would have given confidence to Tatton who, though tall, was of a somewhat skinny physique and had a rather thin, squeaky voice.

The man who was to teach Tatton the most valuable lessons was ‘Gentleman’ John Jackson, a man of almost perfect physique, who was said to be ‘the best-made man of a generation of very well-made men’.17 Though he only fought in the ring three times, on the last occasion beating the reigning champion, Dan Mendoza, in ten minutes, he made a deep and lasting impression on all who saw him. ‘His style of boxing,’ wrote Lord Knebworth, a historian of the sport, ‘was elegant and easy, and he was particularly light and quick on his feet. His judgement of distance, so important in boxing, was unsurpassed, and his blows, which were terrific in their force, were delivered so fast that they were said to be perceptible in their effect alone.’18 He too set up a school in rooms at 13 Old Bond Street, and it was here that Tatton attended. The Revd M. Morris, who knew the Sykes family well in later years, told a story in his Reminiscences, of how the young Tatton ‘once got his father to go to London to see a great fight on some sort of stage. On reaching the appointed spot the father, to his surprise, saw his son appear as one of the combatants, whereupon he instantly took his departure.’19

In August Tatton set out on a visit to Sledmere. ‘Took a place in the York Coach,’ he noted on 19 August. He paid a down payment of £1. 5s., which represented half of the fare. He paid the other half when he left two days later. Long before dawn, a hackney coach, price 2s., collected him and his trunk from his lodgings and took him to the White Horse Inn, Fetter Lane, in time to catch the 5.00 a.m. York Highflyer. He would also have had the choice of either the Royal Mail, which left from the Bull and Mouth Inn, St Martins-le-Grand, or the Mercury, from the Saracen’s Head, Snow Hill. Thirty years previously, such a trip, a distance of 200 miles up the Great North Road, would have taken three days in the summer and four in winter. The coach boarded by Tatton did the same journey in thirty-one hours.20

The time the journey took reflected the advances in the state of England’s roads, which had taken place in the latter half of the eighteenth century. ‘The great improvements which, within the memory of man, 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 …’25

The Revd Harper 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 be killed by an assassin.