As has been said in the previous chapter, Mary Stewkeley, the heiress to her father's properties, married Edward Stawell at Hinton on 20th April 1719, a few weeks before Sir Hugh Stewkeley's death. Edward was the third and youngest son of Ralph Stawell of Cothelstone in Somerset, who had been created Baron Stawell of Somerton by Charles II in 1682, as some compensation for the loyalty and sufferings of his father, Sir John Stawell during the Civil War.
Sir John, who came from a family of great antiquity in Somerset, had indeed suffered grievously in the King's cause, not only materially but also physically. He was mentioned by Lord Clarendon as 'a gentleman of one of the largest estates that any man possessed in the West; who had from the beginning shewed very great affection to the person of the King, and to the government that was settled, both in Church and State'. After the surrender of Exeter in 1646 to the Parliamentarians he was incarcerated, and deprived of his estates which remained in sequestration from 1645 to 1652 when a part was sold. Meanwhile Sir John was condemned to 'perpetual imprisonment'. In 1653, however, the Council of State, being in an indulgent mood, ordered his release from the Tower of London on condition he did not leave the City. During the following years he constantly petitioned for the return of his estates saying that he had lost £30,000 in the King's cause and this surely was penalty enough. These pleas were unavailing, and Sir John remained living in the greatest penury in London, which he was not allowed to leave.
With the Restoration he was naturally freed and his estates were returned to him, but he received no financial recompense from the new sovereign, who indeed was in no position to reward his father's supporters. Nor could his physical sufferings be remedied for his health had deteriorated badly, and little more than a year after the Restoration he died. His son Ralph revived the family fortunes by a prudent second marriage - his first wife died in 1670 - to Abigail Pitt, heiress of the Hartley Wespall estate in Hampshire. There is a handsome monument to her in the church there recording her death in 1692.
Nine years before Abigail's death Ralph Stawell had received a peerage from a grateful monarch as a reward for 'the extraordinary sufferings and eminent merits of Sir John Stawell, of Cothelstone'. There was a great deal more in the citation about Sir John's courage and loyalty, and his 'afflictions and miseries, (being) reduced to the brinke of famine'. The new peer seems to have possessed some of the toughness of his father, for he was bold enough to protest at the cruel treatment meted out to the Duke of Monmouth's supporters. As a reminder that he would be wiser to restrain his views, Judge Jeffries had two of the rebels hung in chains on the gate at Cothelstone.
Lord Stawell died in 1689 leaving three sons, John, William and Edward. John who was 20 at the time of his father's death died four years later, but in this short space of time had almost dissipated the family fortune which his father had so carefully nurtured. His greatest extravagance was the building of a huge house 400 feet in length and 100 feet in depth close to the church at High Ham in Somerset. Now nothing remains of this great edifice, on which over £100,000 was spent, except sundry mounds of earth and some low walling built up of huge squared stones. The greater part of his estates had to be sold to pay for this folly, so that his brother inherited little except the peerage and Cothelstone Manor.
The Stawells, however, were not slow in reviving their fortunes by prudent marriages, and William secured an affluent widow, a certain Mrs. Forster, with whom he acquired the large estate of Aldermaston, on the border of Hampshire and Berkshire. Male heirs, however, again failed, and on William, Lord Stawell's death in 1741, the peerage passed to the third brother, Edward, who, as we have already seen, had obtained for himself a comfortable life by marrying Mary Stewkeley.
Perhaps the ancient Stawell blood was becoming thin, for there is no evidence that any of the three brothers had any particularly good qualities, though judging by the portraits of the two elder, which hang at Hinton, they had been adequately favoured by nature in their appearance; but it must be owned that full-bottomed wigs are inclined to be becoming.
Since one knows little about the lives of the Edward Stawells, and they do not seem to have touched the outer world at any point that has been recorded, it must be supposed that they lived a quiet country life in the old Manor House at Hinton. Honoria Stewkeley, Mary's younger sister, lived with them, but one has the impression that it was not a happy household, and Edward, Lord Stawell, one must conclude, was an unpleasant character. Had he been otherwise it is improbable that the strange happenings which occurred after his death would have been given so sinister an interpretation.
Two children were born to the Stawells, a son, Stewkeley Stawell in 1720, who died of small-pox at Westminster School at the age of 11, and Mary, who was born six years later, and became the heiress of the family.
Mrs. Stawell died in 1740 and was buried at Hinton, but Lord Stawell, as he became in 1741, remained at Hinton with his sister-in-law Honoria. The latter died in December 1754, and the former four months later. Lord Stawell's death was very sudden and the circumstances have been recorded. He was sitting one April evening in the 'little parlour' at Hinton, the room presumably on the west side of the great hall which had windows facing southward over the park. One pictures him as a red-faced, choleric figure with his foot on a gout-stool, and suffering from a blood pressure much heightened by excessive port drinking. He would have been dressed in the rather shabby snuff-coloured coat which was his usual wear. Suddenly he was attacked by a fit of apoplexy, and after mumbling a few words he remained speechless till he died early next morning. On 19th April his body joined those of his wife's ancestors in the vault beneath the church, thus keeping company with the remains of his sister-in-law which had so lately been placed there.
This, however, was not the end of Lord Stawell's and Honoria's connection with this world, but in order to keep the sequence of dates correct it is necessary, before describing their subsequent behaviour, to follow the lives of Lord Stawell's daughter and her husband.
Five years before her father's death, Mary Stawell had married Henry Legge, the fourth son of the 1st Earl of Dartmouth. He was the only person to live at Hinton who was prominent in the world, the only one, indeed, to earn an entry in the Dictionary of Rational Biography where his achievements fill more than two pages. As a fourth son his patrimony must have been small, and he was under the necessity of making his own way in the world. He was fortunate enough at a fairly early age to catch the eye of Sir Robert Walpole whose private secretary he became.
Unfortunately, however, he incurred the enmity of Horace Walpole, Sir Robert's third son, who dipping his pen in vitriol was able to perpetuate his feelings in print in his Memoir of the Reign of George II. The following are the blistering words:
Legge was a younger son of Lord Dartmouth, who had early turned him into the world to make his fortune, which he pursued with uncommon assiduity of duty. Avarice or flattery, application or ingratitude, nothing came amiss that might raise him on the ruins of either friends or enemies; indeed neither were so to him, but by the proportion of their power. He had been introduced to Sir Robert Walpole by his second son, and soon grew an unmeasurable favourite, till endeavouring to steal his patron's daughter, at which in truth Sir Robert's partiality for him seemed to connive, he was discarded entirely, yet taken care of.
He was, in fact, made Surveyor of the King's Woods and Forests, quite a lucrative post, and in 1740 he entered the House of Commons as member for a Cornish borough, until the following year when he was elected for the borough of Orford in Suffolk which he held for 18 years.
No doubt his marriage to the heiress Mary Stawell in 1750 greatly assisted his position, although she did not receive her full inheritance till five years later. But he had good fortune in another, and perhaps unexpected, direction. Under the will of his father's first cousin, Leonard Bilson, he was bequeathed the estate of Mapledurham near Petersfield on condition that he added the name Bilson to his own: a harmless stipulation which entailed also quartering the Legge arms with the curious shield of the Bilsons which consisted of a Tudor rose 'dimidiated* (divided) with a Pomegranate. The estate was part of the manor of Buriton, the remainder of which Henry Bilson-Legge's son later bought from Edward Gibbon, the historian. It was of Buriton that Gibbon wrote in his autobiography:
My father's residence in Hampshire, where I have passed many light and some heavy hours, was at Buriton near Petersfield. ... If strangers had nothing to see, the inhabitants had little to desire.
With his wife's estates and the Bilson property Henry Bilson-Legge was financially well equipped, and with his astute political brain his success was fairly well assured. It was accepted that he was a shrewd man of business and one of the few in the Commons at that time to have a grasp of commercial affairs. In 1759 he gave up the borough of Orford and was elected for Hampshire where he had become a considerable landowner. In this election he defeated Sir Simeon Stuart whose large property at Hartley Mauditt, near Alton, he and his wife later purchased. A double insult perhaps.
His progress in the political world in support of the Whigs was rapid. After being for some years a Lord of the Treasury, he twice became Chancellor of the Exchequer - in the Duke of Newcastle's administration in 1754 and two years later in the Duke of Devonshire's government. In 1760 his wife was created Baroness Stawell with remainder to their heirs male, the purpose of the grant being to do him an honour, but at the same time to retain his services in the Commons. It was improbable that a man so successful should not have detractors, and Lord Holland in his Memoir has some bitter words for him which bear out, it must be owned, Horace Walpole's views:
He sacrificed ev'ry honest consideration ... to selfish cunning. He has through life no sooner got preferment from one patron, than he look'd to his adversary and probable successor for the preservation or augmentation of it.
Whatever Lord Holland's and Horace Walpole's views may have been, Pitt thought highly of him, and spoke of him as:
The child, and deservedly the favourite child, of the Whigs.
and even Horace Walpole admitted that speaking against the tax on plate:Legge alone shone: he entered beyond his usual brevity, into a detail of the nature of coin, exchange, gold, silver, premiums, and the mistaken or real advantages of those manufactures.Financial aptitude was perhaps his strong suit rather than loyalty. He died in 1764, aged 56, and was buried at Hinton where the inscription on his monument, not unexpectedly, presents a happier picture of his, perhaps ambivalent, character. After a fulsome description of his achievements in public life, it continues:
In private life he possessed every amiable and respectable quality;
Great without pride, and good without ostentation;
Humane, benevolent, condescending,
Sincere in his friendship, ardent in his affections
Engaging in his address, instructive in his conversation
Wherein extensive knowledge, just reflection, and exquisite
sentiment, were enforced with all the powers of language,
And enlivened with a peculiar vein of the most striking wit.Indeed in death he clearly shone as a paragon endowed with every virtue of character, and let us suppose it was only political animosity which prompted some of his contemporaries to see him in an unfavourable light.
In the Church Register his burial is recorded on 5th September without comment, and this simple entry without flourish clearly incensed a subsequent rector, who in 1792 wrote the following note on the opposite page:
The Right Honble Henry Bilson-Legge, one of the most upright public characters and able men in the Kingdom; whose death ought not to have been thus entered in the Register equally mentioned by Dr. Durnford with that of his old servant Joseph Silly immediately preceding it.Perhaps Dr. Durnford belong to the Horace Walpole faction.
In his will Henry Bilson-Legge bequeathed to his wife 'Jewels, Plate, Linnen, Furniture, China and Household goods in any of my houses', and all the remainder to his son Henry Stawell Bilson-Legge when 21. His widow was 38 years old at the time of his death, and after a decent pause of four years, she married as his second wife the Earl of Hillsborough, who after her death was created Marquis of Downshire.
Mary Stawell may not have had happy memories of her childhood at Hinton, and it seems that she and her husband seldom came there after her father's death, their visits usually being confined to a few weeks in the autumn for the shooting. Whether these visits were altogether pleasant has not been recorded. In any case after Henry Bilson-Legge's death, Lady Stawell at once decided to let the house. Suitable tenants were soon found in Mr. and Mrs. Ricketts, who with their family moved in in January 1765, the house apparently being let fully furnished, but most of their retainers they brought with them from their house in London.
No place could have been apparently more peaceful or better suited to the bringing up of a family of small children, but almost immediately Mr. and Mrs. Ricketts found that there was something curious, something inexplicable, about the house. Their nights were much disturbed by the sounds of the opening and shutting of doors, and Mrs. Ricketts feared that 'irregularities' were going on amongst the servants. However, inspection by Mr. Ricketts showed that all was in order. Another possible solution was that someone had keys of the house and came in and out at night. Accordingly all the locks were changed, but without effect on the nocturnal noises. Mrs. Ricketts was a woman of great strength of mind, but one senses that the nerves of the household were getting a little on edge, and one wonders whether the unexplained figures they saw on several occasions were not the product of over-excited imaginations. Two different men saw a figure in a snuff-coloured coat, once inside the house and once outside, while the assembled servants sitting in the kitchen saw a tall woman in a dark, rustling silk dress rush through the room and out into the yard, but a man coming in at that moment through the yard had seen no one. It was all very baffling.
However, after a time the manifestations seem to have quietened down a little, and at the end of 1769 Mr. Ricketts left without anxiety to visit his property in Jamaica, leaving his wife with three children and eight servants at Hinton. The relief was not of long duration, and soon the strange sounds began again with renewed vigour. Mrs. Ricketts kept an exact record of all she heard and felt, and included the names of her servants who were all changed from those who had come with her from London. It is this careful account which makes the Hinton ghost story one of the best recorded of the eighteenth century.
In the summer of 1770 she noted that when 'lying in the yellow bedchamber' - a room in the centre of the north side of the house - 'I plainly heard the footsteps of a man, with plodding step, walking towards the foot of my bed.' She sprang out of bed and rushed into the adjoining nursery and returned with the nurse and a light, but there was no one to be found. This alarming sort of manifestation was repeated not only in her room but also in the room of her maid who also stated that she heard 'dismal groans and fluttering' round her bed. Another strange sound was 'a hollow murmuring that seemed to possess the whole house; it was independent of wind, being equally heard on the calmest nights'.
Disturbing noises continued almost nightly though they varied in degree and also in style. One night, for example, the front door was heard to slam with such violence that Mrs. Ricketts' bedroom above the hall shook 'perceivably'. But 'upon examining the door it was found fast locked and bolted as usual'. As the summer advanced the disturbances became more intolerable. 'They began before I went to bed, and with intermissions were heard till after broad day in the morning.' Human voices now joined the general cacophony: 'a shrill female voice would begin, and then two others with deeper and manlike tone seemed to join in the discourse'. One night when in her bedroom, where her maid also slept, she had a particularly terrifying experience: (I heard the most loud, deep tremendous noise, which seemed to rush and fall with infinite velocity and force on the lobby floor.' This was instantly followed by 'a shrill and dreadful shriek . . . repeated three or four times'.
The situation was clearly getting out of hand and Mrs. Rickett's health, and no doubt that of her maids, was beginning to suffer. The continued absence of her husband robbed her of her natural support, but fortunately just as matters were becoming desperate, her brother Admiral Jervis, later Earl of St. Vincent, sailed into Portsmouth and from that place came to stay at Hinton. The story in all its alarming details was told to him, and he decided to sit up for several nights with a friend, Mr. Luttrell, expecting no doubt that the manifestation were due to some human agency, and that they would capture any malefactors bold enough to carry on their nocturnal activities. The two watchers settled down for the night in different rooms, but before an hour or two had passed the usual sounds of footsteps and banging doors were heard in passages and lobbies. They immediately rushed out of their respective rooms, pistols in hand, to find nothing except each other. The Hinton ghosts, indeed, were not ones to be discouraged by a distinguished sailor and his friend.
Admiral Jervis insisted that his sister and her family should leave the haunted house as soon as possible, and they soon moved to Wolvesey at Winchester, which was offered to them by the Bishop. Soon after she took a house in London, but she did not lose her connection with Hinton, for on Mr. Ricketts' return to England they rented the 'Parsonage' for two years since they were anxious to keep the farm at Hinton which they had leased. In November 1771 Admiral Jervis wrote to Mrs. Ricketts:
My dear sister's comfortable letter dated Wolsey Sept. 2nd. ... I never was more rejoiced at any event than I am to know you are retired from Hinton and that you are likely to get rid of it entirely on such favourable terms, at the same time I highly approve your attention to Lady Stawell.A month later he wrote again, on this occasion from Pisa:
I wait impatiently for the revealment of this Hinton unsearchable Business and beg you will be particular in every circumstance.His sister's situation was obviously always in his mind, and early in the following year he wrote:
The Duke (of Gloucester) frequently asks if I have heard any more of the Hinton mystery and interests himself greatly in your sufferings which I most ardently wish may soon be put an end to by a manifest discovery of the cause of your disturbance.By April 1772 the family had moved to London and the Rectory had been rented, for the Admiral's letter from Rome of that date is addressed to Curzon Street:
The addition of expense in renting the Parsonage House is not to be put into competition with your peace of mind.No 'revealment' was ever forthcoming in spite of the offer of a reward of £100 made by Lady Stawell and Mr. Ricketts jointly to anyone who could solve the mystery. There is no record that any attempt was made to exorcize the house, and it is surprising that Mrs. Ricketts, who had an extensive acquaintance amongst the bench of bishops, did not call in one of these heavyweights to attack the ghosts.
Lady Stawell, who by this time had married her second husband Lord Hillsborough, apparently raised no objection to the surrender of the lease, and one wonders whether, during her visits to Hinton during her first husband's life-time, she had perhaps been subjected to these supernatural disturbances. Lady Hillsborough died in 1780 and her coffin joined that of her first husband in the vault at Hinton. She left an only son to succeed to her property and to her title of Stawell. The sinister Manor House must have remained practically deserted, except for the ghosts. But not entirely, seemingly, for my grandmother made the following note at the end of a printed record of the ghost story:
My mother-in-law [Lady Sherborne] remembers when about 6 years old [c. 1786] while staying at Hinton being awoke in the night and carried down to the Rectory as the noises were so great Lady Stawell could not remain in the house.A house so uninhabitable was clearly useless, and also no doubt was falling into disrepair, so in 1793 Lord Stawell decided to pull it down and rebuild on a slightly different site. When the house was demolished a box was found under one of the floors. In the box was a small skull optimistically said to be that of a monkey. In any case it was at once removed by the Steward of the estate, and nothing was heard of it again; but the find was taken as proof of a story that had long circulated in the neighbourhood that the ghosts were those of Edward, Lord Stawell and his sister-in-law, Honoria Stewkeley, and that they had done away with a little bastard that they had produced between them. But the truth will never be known.
The last years of the Tudor house were the saddest that Hinton has ever known. The sinister, deserted building with its surroundings, probably barely maintained, must have presented a spectacle of the utmost gloom to those who came to worship in the little church, which was only separated from it by a few yards. Perhaps it was a warning of the effects of wickedness, and so an inducement to piety, but in any case the condition of the house inevitably presented a dismal contrast to its appearance when it was inhabited by the prosperous Stewkeleys and their large families in the early years of the century.
Henry Stawell Bilson-Legge succeeded on his mother's death as the and Baron Stawell of the second creation. He was an only child, born in 1757, seven years after his parents' marriage. In his portrait by Daniel Gardner, painted when he was about 20, he appears as a handsome and agreeable-looking young man. But Gardner's popularity as a portrait painter stemmed no doubt from his ability to impart to his sitters a high degree of grace and beauty, while at the same time presenting a fairly close likeness. It was a useful gift, shared by a number of the fashionable portrait painters of the latter part of the eighteenth century.
In this picture Henry, Lord Stawell, stands in a woodland glade and is elegantly dressed in a crimson coat, with black breeches and white stockings, while his powdered hair is tied back behind his head. In his right hand he holds a tricorn hat, and his left rests on the head of a dog which appears to be a cross between a wolf and a jackal. Gardner's flattery and gift for portraiture evidently did not extend to animals. This was Henry as a young man: I had also a portrait, painted when he was about 60 years old, a cheap likeness, I would say, perhaps done by some itinerant artist. He was no Dorian Gray. The well-cut features, which Gardner had observed, had disappeared into a round fleshy face, in which were set small, cunning-looking eyes. The powdered hair had diminished to some sparse strands, and the whole head seemed to have sunk into the shoulders without perceptible neck. Neither the quality of the painting nor the character portrayed made it a pleasant work, and one wonders that the sitter did not destroy it. However, it was one of the less regretted losses in the flames of 1960.
It seems probable that the itinerant artist had come nearer to the character of his sitter than the accomplished Daniel Gardner, unless 40 years of life had made a radical change, for Henry Stawell does not appear to have been an amiable person. He was a friend of some intimacy of the Prince Regent, though this might have been as much to his credit as the reverse, but the lawsuits and quarrels in which he seems constantly to have been engaged with people of all ranks hardly suggests that he was particularly agreeable.
A typical case is mentioned by Gilbert White in his Natural History of Selborne in connection with Alice Holt Forest, the Rangership of which Lord Stawell had inherited from his mother, and the timber in which he claimed as his own:
The poor of the parishes of Binsted and Frinsham, Bentley and Kingsley, assert that it (the lop and top) belongs to them; and, assembling in a riotous manner, have actually taken it all away. .. . Forty-five of these people his Lordship has served with actions.It must be owned that Lord Stawell had the Law on his side, for in the grant of the Rangership from the Crown to his mother in 1766, and later confirmed to himself, it was expressly stated that the rights included:
To have and to take all beasts or animals attached or taken within the said forest or chase, by any of the foresters there and all manner of wood blown or thrown down by the wind and all dead wood etc and housebote and firebote.The two last mysterious words indicate, I think, timber suitable for repairs to buildings and firewood, so that the villagers had little justification for their claim, but in any case it would have been more gracious to give way - at no personal expense - to his poor neighbours; but charity was apparently not one of Henry Stawell's qualities. His passion was hunting, and for this pursuit the Rangership of the Forest was particularly propitious. Thus he lived for a great part of his life either at the Great Lodge in the Forest or a few miles away at a house called Marelands close to the village of Bentley. His hounds he kept at the Great Lodge and there also he had his stud of racehorses with which he had considerable success, on one occasion winning the Derby with his horse Bliicher.
A caustic reference to Lord Stawell, which shows little love or respect, was made by the Vicar of Bentley in 1793:
My noble neighbour, Lord S., has lately taken it into his head to act as Justice of the Peace, but before he is qualified to enter upon the execution of his office he is, by Act of Parliament, obliged to give public testimony of his faith by receiving the Sacrement of the Lord's Supper in the face of the congregation. He made his appearance this morning.He married when he was 22, and, one hopes, still looking like the Gardner portrait, Mary Curzon, daughter of Viscount Curzon of Penn, who was then 19. One has the impression that they were both difficult people. The tradition that Lord Stawell demolished the house on his property at Hartley Mauditt because his wife wished to live in it, hardly suggests a very harmonious menage.
They had, however, two children, a daughter Mary, born a year after their marriage, who was my great-grandmother, and a son Henry who, in the tradition of the heirs of the Stewkeleys, Stawells and Legges, died at the age of three years and was buried in the vault at Hinton. Lord Stawell held only one public office, that of 'Patent Surveyor of the Customs in the Port of London'. What exactly this indicated I do not know, but I would suppose it was a well-paid sinecure - perhaps obtained for him by his father.
Whatever Henry Stawell's shortcomings, and nature seems to have provided him with rather more than the normal ration, I feel grateful to him on two counts. Firstly for having bought some attractive silver of good late eighteenth-century design, part of which, engraved with an 'S' surmounted by a coronet, has descended into my possession; and secondly, and far more important, for having built in 1793 the house which forms the nucleus of the building in which I am now writing. It is not so much for what he built, for that was fairly commonplace, but for where he built it. The choice of site, indeed, shows great perception.
The haunted Tudor house, as has already been said, stood next the church on the very crest of the low ridge, where it was fully exposed to every wind that blew across this rather windswept county. The new site lay 60 yards or so to the south so that trees planted on the north and east sides provide shelter from the coldest winds, while by turning the house very slightly to the west of due south it not only gets almost all possible sunshine, but also stands at that point from which the landscape composes most happily.
Whether these considerations were in Lord Stawell's mind when he chose the new site, or whether he merely wished to leave the piece of ground on which his ancestors had made so great a nuisance of themselves, it is impossible to say, but whatever the reason my gratitude remains. There is one small drawback to the slight change of aspect: it has meant that the three features which still survive from the Tudor house are on a different axis to the present building. These features are the kitchen garden, the stables, and the remains of the old lime avenue which extended southward from the front door. It cannot be said that this is a great drawback, but it entails, for example, the drive, which my parents made down to the main road in the valley on the north, approaching the house at a somewhat oblique angle although running parallel with the kitchen-garden wall.
The stables, which are the oldest building surviving at Hinton, may perhaps be allowed to receive a short reference here. In their present appearance - a long brick building with a tiled roof, and a tall central doorway flanked on either side by three casement windows - they would seem to date from about 1700. But the southern end in which the ceiling is supported by massive ships' timbers must date from an earlier period, and it is probable that an existing stable was enlarged by Sir Hugh Stewkeley, who made his addition into one modest composition with the old and built a rudimentary pediment over the central door to give the building a little style.
When I was young the stables were, of course, well filled with horses. At the north end, in a roomy loose box, was my father's hunter already more or less in retirement, then came two modern loose boxes for the children's ponies, while the two carriage horses had agreeable rooms in other parts of the building. This left two stalls for any visiting horses, in which the original arrangements for feeding survived - iron mangers and wooden racks into which hay could be pushed down from the loft above. At the south end of the block was the coachhouse which contained a brougham, two waggonettes - large and small - a dogcart or two, and what I think was known as a governess cart in which we children took our outings under the supervision, indeed, of a governess. This was quite a modest set-up for the period; in a horsy household the installation would have been far greater.
On the west side of the stable building was the harness-room with windows looking out on to the stable yard. This was the particular preserve of the coachman and the grooms, and all others were encouraged to keep out. The coachman was a strong believer in the strap for exercising discipline on his sons of whom the younger, Tommy, was particularly obstreperous. The necessary correction often took place in the harness-room where straps were conveniently at hand, and shrill cries would echo into the yard. But I do not think Tommy was much hurt as he would emerge after the operation a trifle flushed but looking quite cheerful.
While the Tudor house existed the stable buildings lay at right angles and to the south-west of it; when the Georgian house rose on the site further south the stables came to the north-west and were at a slightly obtuse angle to it. And thus it remains as the house is today.
The new house was simple and straightforward. It was solidly built in a pale yellow brick and was fairly spacious, but it would seem that Lord Stawell expended little money on elaborate decoration. It consisted of a square block with a pedimented doorway on the north with a single window on either side. On the south there were five windows on the ground and first floor while behind the parapet which ran round the house were dormer windows in the mansard roof. These details I know from a very few surviving photographs taken by my grandmother about 1860 and also from the aquatint of the Hampshire Hunt, which is dated 1819 and shows the house in the background. On the west of the main block was a long wing containing kitchens and so forth, and also a brewhouse, but neither the photographs nor the aquatint show these buildings very clearly. Although my father lived in the house for some years when he was young, he had no precise memory of how it was planned. On the east side there was apparently a double drawing-room divided by folding doors and with windows south and east, and the remainder of the south front was taken up by the dining-room. The staircase seems to have risen on the west side of the front hall, and beyond the stair was a small room facing north. On the two floors above there must have been nine or ten bedrooms.
It was the sort of house, indeed, which is now looked on as 'desirable', for without being large it must have had a certain dignity, and once the service arrangements in the wing had been curtailed would have been very workable. The contents of the Tudor house, such as survived, were presumably transferred to the new building, and Lord Stawell, like his father, used it rather occasionally when he came to shoot over the estate.
In 1820 Henry, Lord Stawell, died at his house in Grosvenor Place in London, and with him the peerage expired for the second time. It can hardly be said that any of the men who had held the peerage, with the exception of the first, had possessed either worth or distinction. Like his predecessors he was buried at Hinton, the last to enter the vault under the chancel. He was the fifth owner of Hinton to be buried there since Sir Hugh Stewkeley had been interred in 1642, while the majority of widows and a great number of children had joined their respective spouses and parents, so that the crowd must be considerable. It is curious that however neglectful of Hinton they may have been in their lives, they remained faithful to it in death.
Lord Stawell's will, or rather the codicils, are revealing. The will, dated I2th September 1810, contains no surprises. All the properties which his father had inherited from Leonard Bilson, and which seem to have included Marelands near Bentley, as well as Mapledurham, near Petersfield, went under the entail to the son of his uncle Heneage Legge, and all the remainder of his property was bequeathed to his daughter, and only surviving child, Mary, wife of John Dutton.
All this was highly correct and proper; but on the same day he made a codicil leaving an annuity of £200 to Elizabeth Crowe of No. 9 Vauxhall Walk, Lambeth. A generous gesture to an old servant, one kindly thinks, until one finds that two years later Mrs. Hodges, who appears to have neither Christian name nor address, is to receive a princely annuity of £400 with all her debts paid. By the same codicil Mrs. Moseley receives £1,000 'as a mark of the great regard and pure friendship I bear her'. In 1816 Jane Evans of Fulham is rewarded with £300 a year ' and all my Exchequer Bills'. And lastly a year before he died ' Facimia Groves, my personal servant now living with me', is bequeathed an annuity of £100. It is pleasant to know that the women who cherished him during his declining years were so handsomely provided for. It cannot have been an altogether agreeable occupation, and one trusts he was equally lavish to them in life.
On the death of her brother at the age of three years, Mary Legge had become an extremely eligible young woman, and as she grew up, came to be known appropriately as 'the Hampshire Heiress'. The properties she inherited from her father must have extended to between 10,000 and 15,000 acres. In addition to Hinton, there were the Hartley Mauditt and Kingsley estates near Alton, Timsbury and Michelmersh near Romsey, and Bedhampton near Havant. Also there was a property at Wootton Courtney in Somerset, which had remained in the family from the time of the Stewkeleys. Of all these properties, Hinton was the smallest, and is the only one which has survived the depredations of death duties and other difficulties.