APPENDICES.
“LONG” SIR THOMAS ROBINSON.
Sir Thomas was the eldest of the seven sons of William Robinson, of Rokeby, Yorkshire, by his wife, née Anne Walters. He was born and baptized at Rokeby in 1700. After his school-days he made the grand tour, as was the fashion of the day, and then entered the Army. At the death of his father in 1719, he succeeded to the family estates in Yorkshire. At the General Election of 1727 he became M.P. for Morpeth. On October 25, 1728, he was married at Belfreys, in Yorkshire, to Elizabeth, widow of Nicholas, Lord Lechmere, and daughter of Charles Howard, 3rd Earl of Carlisle. Between the years 1725 and 1730 he rebuilt the house at Rokeby, removed the church which stood behind the house and rebuilt it in another spot, he added a stone wall all round the park, made a bridge over the Greta river, and erected an obelisk to his mother’s memory in 1730. All these acts were recorded on two stone piers at the Greta entrance of the park. He planted many trees at Rokeby. He designed the west wing of Castle Howard for his brother-in-law, Lord Carlisle. In 1731 he was made a Baronet of England, with remainder to his brothers. His nickname of “Long” Sir Thomas Robinson was given to him from his great height, and to distinguish him from another Sir Thomas Robinson, a diplomat of note, afterwards created Lord Grantham. These two men were the reverse of each other in appearance, “Long” Sir Thomas being exceptionally tall, and the other very short and fat. One of Lady Townshend’s bon mots about the two was, “Why one should be preferred to the other I can’t imagine, there is but little difference, the one is as broad as the other is long;” and Lord Chesterfield, on being told “Long” Sir Thomas was reported to be “dying by inches,” said, then it would be some time before he was dead. On April 10, 1739, his wife, to whom he was tenderly attached, died at Bath, and was taken to Rokeby and buried under the new church he had erected. A monument was erected to her there. In accordance with Sir Thomas’s will, though he himself was buried at Merton Abbey, Surrey, a cenotaph was placed in Poets’ Corner, Westminster Abbey, to his and his wife’s memory, with medallion portraits of her and himself, and bearing the following inscription:—“To perpetuate his grateful sense of the pleasure he had in the conversation of an accomplished woman, a sincere friend, and an agreeable companion.” They had no children, so the English baronetcy went to his next brother, William.
Sir Thomas was greatly given to hospitality; too much so for his income. On October 22, 1741, he gave a great ball, as Horace Walpole relates, “to a little girl of the Duke of Richmond’s; there are already 200 invited, from miss in a bib and apron to my Lord Chancellor in bib and mace.” The ball began at 8 p.m., and ended at 4 a.m. A few days after Horace Walpole writes, “There were a 197 persons at Sir Thomas’s, and yet it was so well conducted that nobody felt a crowd. He had taken off all his doors, and so separated the old and the young that neither were inconvenienced by the other. The ball began at 8; each man danced one minuet with his partner, and then began country dances. There were four-and-twenty couple, divided into twelve and twelve; each set danced two dances, and then retired into another room, while the other set took their two, and so alternately.... We danced till 4, then had tea and coffee and came home.” A month later he writes about a second ball. What with his numerous entertainments and his building at Rokeby and elsewhere, he became impoverished, and accepted the Governorship of Barbadoes in January, 1742, from which he was recalled in 1747. In Barbadoes he married his second wife, a widow named Salmon, née Booth. She had a considerable fortune, but on her husband’s return to England, she refused to accompany him, preferring Barbadoes. Sir Thomas was intimate with Lord Chesterfield, who made an epigram on him, beginning—
He must have been a bore, for Sir John Hawkins says of him, “Sir Thomas Robinson was a man of the world, or rather of the town, and a great pest to persons of high rank or in office. He was very troublesome to the Earl of Burlington, and when in his visits to him he was told his lordship had gone out, would desire to be admitted to look at a clock, or play with a monkey that was kept in the hall, in hopes of being sent for to the Earl. This he had so frequently done that all the household were tired of him. At length it was concerted amongst the servants that he should receive a summary answer to his usual questions; and accordingly, at his next coming the porter, as soon as he had opened the gate, and without waiting for what he had to say, dismissed him with these words, ‘Sir, his lordship is gone out, the clock stands, and the monkey is dead!’” The Duchess of Portland used to name him to Mrs. Montagu as “your inimitable cousin!”
Appearing in Paris one day at a dinner in his hunting suit of green and gold, and booted and spurred, a French abbé asked who he was, and, on being told his name, and looking at his attire, inquired if he was Robinson Crusoe. His house at Whitehall he sold to Lord Lincoln, and he afterwards lived at Prospect Place, Chelsea. He bought the gardens once belonging to Lord Ranelagh, and, with other shareholders, erected the Rotunda in 1741–42. This place of amusement lasted for quite forty years; the site of it is in the gardens of Chelsea Hospital.
At the Coronation of George III. Sir Thomas, probably from his great height and majestic presence, was chosen to represent the mock Duke of Normandy and Acquitaine, the kings of England still pretending to own those provinces.
In 1769 he sold the estate of Rokeby, Yorks, to John Saurey Morritt, the father of Sir Walter Scott’s friend. The Rokeby estate had been in the possession of the Robinsons 160 years. On March 3, 1777, Sir Thomas Robinson died at his house in Prospect Place, Chelsea, at the age of seventy-six.
SANDLEFORD PRIORY, BERKS.
Sandleford Priory was founded for Austin Canons by Geoffrey, 4th Count of Perche, and his wife, Matilda of Saxony, grand-daughter of Henry II. of England, and niece of King Richard Cœur de Lion, and King John, before the year 1205. The town and manor of Newbury, in Berkshire, were bestowed on the first Count of Perche, who accompanied the Conqueror to England. The Priory was dedicated to the Virgin Mary and St. John the Baptist. A dispute arising between the Prior and Richard Beauchamp, Bishop of Salisbury and Dean of Windsor about 1480, the religious forsook the house, and King Edward IV. allowed the Priory to be annexed to the Chapel of St. George’s, Windsor. In the Ayscough Register, folio 50, will be found an account of irregular and scandalous behaviour of the Prior of that period, which probably was the cause of the disruption. The Priory now formed a parcel of the properties of the Dean and Canons of Windsor, and it is stated by the commissioners of Henry VIII. (vide c. 3, Henry VIII.) to be worth £10 annually.
In the reign of James I. Sandleford was declared to be a separate parish from Newbury, and not subject to tithes which had hitherto been paid to the Rector of Newbury. After this a commutation was made that the lessee of the house paid £8 a year to the Rector of Newbury, and for that sum had a pew in perpetuity. It is stated that after this award the chapel of the Priory was allowed to fall into decay. This chapel was separate from the house, and continued to be so till 1781–2, when Mrs. Montagu employed Wyatt to build her an octagonal drawing-room with ante-chambers, which united the house and the chapel. Long previous to this it was used as a bedroom or bedrooms, and in the Montagu manuscripts Hannah More and others are described as sleeping in the chapel bedroom when the rest of the house was occupied. At the beginning of the eighteenth century the lessees of Sandleford were the Pitt Rivers of Strathfieldsaye, and they were succeeded by the Montagu family as early as 1730, or perhaps earlier. At any rate, at that date Mr. Edward Montagu was resident there, and as his mother, née Sarah Rogers, lived with him (as is shown by a letter of 1733 which I possess), it is possible Mr. Charles Montagu had been lessee before his son. He died in 1721. At what period the chapel was dismantled I have no record, but it may have been done by order of the Dean and Canons of Windsor before their letting it as a residence. Elias Ashmole, the great antiquarian, who died in 1692, describes the chapel as he saw it, and says, “Upon the first ascent of steps towards the high altar lyes a freestone tomb of a knight in mail, cross-legged, with a deep shield on his left arm, and seeming to draw his sword, his feet resting on a dragon. Written on the west wall is a Latin inscription.” In a paper belonging to my uncle, the last Baron Rokeby, it is stated the inscription was “written on the north wall of the chapel, but more anciently on the west wall.”
This was the inscription:—
As to the monument, it has been stated to have been that of the founder, Geoffrey, Count of Perche; but as he died in France at the siege of Acre, it is more likely to have been his son Thomas, Earl of Perche, who died at the battle of Lincoln in 1217; or else it is quite possible that it might be one of the Earls Marshal of Pembroke, as at the death of Thomas, Earl de Perche, his uncle William, Bishop of Chalons, seems to have claimed the property and sold it to William, 2nd Earl Marshal. Anyhow, not a trace of this monument is now to be found. And it would be very interesting to ascertain if it was removed to the Temple church, where the other Earls Marshal of Pembroke are buried and a very similar monument exists; but this is only my surmise. Behind the chapel, when Mrs. Montagu made her alterations in house and garden in 1780 to 1782 with the designs of Wyatt and “Capability Browne,” a number of skulls and bones were found, and, with the characteristic irreverence of the eighteenth century, were buried in what is now called “Monkey Lane,” near Newbury. The present library was originally the refectory. In 1836 Edward, 5th Baron Rokeby, parted with the lease of Sandleford to Mr. William Chatteris, who eventually, in 1875, enfranchised the property from the Dean and Canons of Windsor, and, dying a widower and without issue, he left Sandleford to his second wife’s nephew Mr. Alpin Macgregor. Mrs. Chatteris was the second daughter of Admiral Sir Thomas Hardy, the friend of Nelson. Mrs. Myers, who has a lease of Sandleford now, will not use the chapel as a dining-room. Hannah More, writing in 1784, whilst staying at Sandleford, says, “There is an irregular beauty and greatness in the new buildings, and in the cathedral aisles which open to the great Gothic window (alluding to the east end of the chapel, still all glass), which is exceedingly agreeable to the imagination. It is solemn without being sad, and Gothic without being gloomy.”
DENTON HALL, NEAR NEWCASTLE-ON-TYNE, NORTHUMBERLAND.
The history of Denton Hall dates from the ancient Britons, and a burial-place of theirs, with an urn and bones, was found near the Roman wall within a quarter of a mile from the hall. It subsequently became the site of a Roman camp, which was occupied by a garrison of Hadrian’s soldiers, and a wall was built to keep out the Picts and Scots. Of the Roman relics there still exist an altar dedicated to Jupiter, and several carved stones, and in Mrs. Montagu’s time many Roman coins and objects were discovered. In No. 7, Vol. 2, of the Proceedings of Antiquaries of Newcastle-on-Tyne, 1885, Mr. W. Aubone Hoyle, then living with his brother at the hall, writes, “A little to the south-west stood a chapel, of which a baptismal font remains and a few sculptured stones; adjoining these was a burial-ground, which is now included in the garden. An incised slab, with a memorial cross and sword, was found here some years ago, as well as some large stone coffins; and a cist of ancient British times, containing a funeral urn. The chapel was removed shortly after the Reformation. The earliest record we have of the occupants is of a family of the name of Denton, in the tenth century, who continued to hold lands here and in the neighbourhood, and also at Newcastle.”
The Widdringtons seem to have succeeded the Dentons, and Mr. Hoyle continues, “The manor of Denton, saving these rents paid to the Widdringtons, had been, in 1380, granted to the Prior and Convent of Tynemouth, and was used by them as a country residence or grange. Tradition relates that they had an underground passage leading from Denton to their residence at Benwell Tower. The present building was probably erected by them at the beginning of the sixteenth century—1503 being the date of erection. The Roman wall skirting its grounds appears to have supplied the materials, as most of the stones are of the Roman type. The roof was formed of flags fastened with pins made of sheep bones. These have gradually been done away with until only a few courses remain, and the flags have been replaced by tiles. At the Dissolution in 1539, the Widdringtons lost their interest in Denton, and the Erringtons appear.”
The Erringtons being Jacobites, Mr. Hoyle continues, “Their loyalty to the Stuarts cost them their estates, which now passed to a family of Rogers, related to the Earl of Sandwich.” As has been shown in this book, Mr. Edward Montagu, at the death of his cousin, Mr. Rogers, became owner, to quote his wife’s words, “of Denton; Mr. Montagu has half the estate by descent, a share by testamentary disposition, and a part by purchase.” At the death of Mrs. Montagu in 1800, the estate passed into the possession of her nephew and adopted son, Matthew Montagu, afterwards 4th Baron Rokeby, who let the hall to Mr. Richard Hoyle, and his descendants occupied the house till 1889. Henry, 6th Baron Rokeby, dying in 1883, left the estate of Denton to his grandson, Lord Henry Paulet, now 16th Marquis of Winchester, who in 1886 sold the whole estate. The hall was bought by Mr. John Henderson, of Allendale, who resold it to Mr. William Andrew I’Anson, the present owner. The Denton ghost, called “Old Silky” by the miners, one of the most authentic on record, is a beneficent spirit, for she is said on various occasions to have warned the miners against coal-damp. A song about her is still sung, I am told, in Newcastle, but hitherto I have failed to obtain it, or to discover who “Silky” was. A further account of her can be read in Ingram’s “Haunted Homes,” under “Denton Hall.”