CHAPTER NINETEEN
I
IN THE EVENTFUL SUMMER of 1851, while crowds flocked to the Great Exhibition in London and Thomas Marsham settled into his new property in Norfolk, Charles Darwin delivered to his publishers a hefty manuscript, the result of eight years of devoted enquiry into the nature and habits of barnacles. Called A Monograph of the Fossil Lepadidae, or, Pedunculated Cirripedes of Great Britain, it doesn’t sound like the most diverting of works, and wasn’t, but it secured his reputation as a naturalist, and gave him, in the words of one biographer, ‘the authority to speak, when the time was ripe, on variability and transmutation’ – on evolution, in other words. Remarkably, Darwin hadn’t finished with barnacles yet. Three years later he produced a 684-page study of sessile cirripedes and a more modest companion work on the barnacle fossils not mentioned in the first work. ‘I hate a barnacle as no man ever did before,’ he declared upon the conclusion of the work, and it is hard not to sympathize.
Fossil Lepadidae was not a huge seller, but it did no worse than another book published in 1851 – a strange, mystically rambling parable on whale hunting, called simply The Whale. This was a timely book since whales everywhere were being hunted to extinction, but the critics and buying public failed to warm to it, or even understand it. It was too dense and puzzling, too packed with introspection and hard facts. A month later the book came out in America with a different title: Moby-Dick. It did no better there. The book’s failure was a surprise because the author, thirty-two-year-old Herman Melville, had enjoyed great success with two earlier tales of adventure at sea, Typee and Omoo. Moby-Dick, however, never took off in his lifetime. Nor did anything else he wrote. He died all but forgotten in 1891. His last book, Billy Budd, didn’t find a publisher until more than thirty years after his death.
Although it is unlikely that Mr Marsham was acquainted with either Moby-Dick or Fossil Lepadidae, both reflected a fundamental change that had lately overtaken the thinking world: an almost obsessive urge to pin down every stray morsel of discernible fact and give it permanent recognition in print. Fieldwork was now all the rage among gentlemen of a scientific bent. Some went in for geology and the natural sciences. Others became antiquaries. The most adventurous of all sacrificed homely comforts and often years of their lives to explore distant corners of the world. They became – a new word, coined in 1834 – scientists.
Their curiosity and devotion were inexhaustible. No place was too remote or inconvenient, no object unworthy of consideration. This was the era in which the plant hunter Robert Fortune travelled across China disguised as a native gathering information on the growing and processing of tea, when David Livingstone pushed up the Zambezi and into the darkest corners of Africa, when botanical adventurers combed the interiors of North and South America looking for interesting and novel specimens, and when Charles Darwin, just twenty-two years old, set forth as a naturalist on the epic voyage that would change his life, and ours, in ways that no one could then begin to imagine.
Almost nothing Darwin encountered during the five years of the voyage failed to excite his attention. He recorded so many facts and acquired such a wealth of specimens that it took him a decade and a half just to get through the barnacles. Among much else, he collected hundreds of new species of plant, made many important fossil and geological discoveries, developed a widely admired hypothesis to explain the formation of coral atolls, and acquired the materials and insights necessary to create a revolutionary theory of life – not bad going for a young man who, had his father had his way, would instead now be a country parson like our own Mr Marsham, a prospect Darwin dreaded.
One of the ironies of the Beagle voyage was that Darwin was engaged by Captain Robert FitzRoy because he had a background in theology and was expected to find evidence to support a biblical interpretation of history. In persuading Robert Darwin to let Charles go, Josiah Wedgwood had been at pains to stress that ‘the pursuit of natural history . . . is very suitable to a Clergyman’. In the event, the more Darwin saw of the world, the more convinced he became that Earth’s history and dynamics were vastly more protracted and complicated than conventional thinking allowed. His coral atolls theory, for one, required a passage of time far beyond any allowed by biblical timescales, a fact that infuriated the devout and volatile Captain FitzRoy.
Eventually, of course, Darwin devised a theory – survival of the fittest, as we commonly know it; descent with modification, as he called it – that explained the wondrous complexity of living things in a way that didn’t require the intervention of a deity at all. In 1842, six years after the end of his voyage, he sketched out a 230-page summary outlining the theory’s principal elements. Then he did an extraordinary thing: he locked it away in a drawer, and kept it there for the next sixteen years. The subject, he felt, was too hot for public discussion.
Long before Darwin came along, however, people were already finding things that didn’t accord with orthodox beliefs. One of the first such finds, in fact, was just a few miles down the road from the Old Rectory in the village of Hoxne, where in the late 1790s a wealthy landowner and antiquary named John Frere discovered a cache of flint tools lying alongside the bones of long-extinct animals, suggesting a coexistence that wasn’t supposed to happen. In a letter to the Society of Antiquaries in London, he reported that the tools were made by people who ‘had not the use of metals . . . [which] may tempt us to refer them to a very remote period indeed’. This was an exceedingly keen insight for the time – too keen, in fact, and it was almost completely ignored. The secretary of the society thanked him for his ‘curious and most interesting communication’, and, for the next forty years or so, that was the end of the matter.*
But then others began finding tools and ancient bones in puzzling proximity. In a cave near Torquay in Devon, Father John MacEnery, a Catholic priest and amateur excavator, uncovered more or less incontrovertible evidence that humans had hunted mammoths and other creatures now extinct. MacEnery found this idea so uncomfortably at odds with biblical precepts that he kept his findings to himself. Then a French customs officer named Jacques Boucher de Perthes found bones and tools together on the Somme plain and wrote a long and influential work, Celtic and Antediluvian Antiquities, which attracted international attention. At much the same time, William Pengelly, an English headmaster, re-examined MacEnery’s cave and another in nearby Brixham and announced the findings that MacEnery was too distraught to share. So by mid-century it was becoming increasingly evident that Earth possessed not just a lot of history, but what would come to be known as prehistory, though that word wouldn’t be coined until 1871. It is telling that these ideas were so radical that there weren’t yet even words for them.
Then in the early summer of 1858, from Asia, Alfred Russel Wallace famously dropped a bombshell into Darwin’s lap. He sent him the draft of an essay, ‘On the Tendency of Varieties to Depart Indefinitely from the Original Type’. It was Darwin’s own theory, innocently and independently arrived at. ‘I never saw a more striking coincidence,’ Darwin wrote. ‘If Wallace had my manuscript sketch written out in 1842, he could not have made a better short abstract.’
Protocol required Darwin to step aside and allow Wallace full credit for the theory, but Darwin couldn’t bring himself to make such a noble gesture. The theory meant too much to him. A complicating factor at this time was that his son Charles, aged eighteen months, was gravely ill with scarlet fever. Despite this, Darwin found time to dash off letters to his most eminent scientific friends, and they helped him to contrive a solution. It was agreed that Joseph Hooker and Charles Lyell would present summaries of both papers to a meeting of the Linnean Society in London, giving Darwin and Wallace joint priority for the new theory. This they duly did on 1 July 1858. Wallace, far away in Asia, knew nothing of these machinations. Darwin didn’t attend because on that day he and his wife were burying their son.
Darwin immediately set to work expanding his sketch into a full-length book, and in November 1859 it was published as On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. It was an immediate bestseller. It is almost impossible now to imagine how much Darwin’s theory unsettled the intellectual world, or how desperately many people wished it not to be correct. Darwin himself remarked to a friend that writing his book felt ‘like confessing to a murder’.
Many devout people simply couldn’t accept that the Earth was as ancient and randomly enlivened as all the new ideas indicated. One leading naturalist, Philip Henry Gosse, produced a somewhat desperate alternative theory called ‘prochronism’ in which he suggested that God had merely made the Earth look old, to give people of inquisitive minds more interesting things to wonder over. Even fossils, Gosse insisted, had been planted in the rocks by God during his busy week of Creation.
Gradually, however, educated people came to accept that the world was not just older than biblically supposed, but much more complicated, imperfect and confused. Naturally, all this undermined the confident basis on which clergymen like Mr Marsham operated. In terms of their pre-eminence, it was the beginning of the end.
In their enthusiasm to unearth treasures, many of the new breed of investigators perpetrated some fairly appalling damage. Artefacts were dug from the soil ‘like potatoes’, in the words of one alarmed observer. In Norfolk, members of the new Norfolk and Norwich Archaeological Society – founded shortly before Mr Marsham took up his position in our parish – stripped well over a hundred burial mounds, a good portion of the county total, without leaving any record of what they had found or how it was arrayed, to the despair of later generations of scholars.
There is a certain obvious and painful irony in the thought that just as Britons were discovering their past, they were simultaneously destroying a good part of it. Perhaps no one better exemplified this new breed of rapacious collector than William Greenwell (1820–1918), canon of Durham Cathedral, whom we met much earlier as the inventor of Greenwell’s glory, the celebrated (among those who celebrate such things) trout fly. In the course of a long career, Greenwell built up an extraordinary assemblage of artefacts ‘by gift, by purchase and by felony’, in the words of one historian. He single-handedly excavated – though ‘devoured’ might be the better word – 443 burial mounds all across England. His methods could be described as keen but slapdash. He left virtually no notes or records, so it is often all but impossible to know what came from where.
Greenwell’s one compensating virtue was that he introduced the resplendently named Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers to the magic of archaeology. Pitt Rivers is memorable for two things: as one of the most important of early archaeologists and the nastiest of men. We have met him in passing already in this volume. He was the formidable figure who insisted his wife should be cremated. (‘Damn it, woman, you shall burn’ was his cheery catchphrase.) He came from an interesting family, some of whose members we have also encountered before, notably two great-aunts of his who could fairly be described as firecrackers. The first, Penelope, married Viscount Ligonier of Clonmell. It was she, you may recall, who had an affair with an Italian count, then ran off with her footman. The second was the young woman who married Peter Beckford, but fell disastrously in love with his cousin William, builder of Fonthill Abbey. Both were the daughters of George Pitt, first Baron Rivers, from whom our Pitt Rivers took both halves of his name.
Augustus Pitt Rivers was a large and intimidating figure with a fiery temper at the end of a very short fuse who presided imperiously over an estate of 27,000 acres called Rushmore, near Salisbury. He was notoriously mean-spirited. Once his wife invited local villagers to Rushmore for a Christmas party, and was heartbroken when no one turned up. What she didn’t know was that her husband, learning of her plans, had sent a servant to padlock the estate gates.
He was capable of the most sudden and disproportionate violence. After banishing one of his sons from the estate for some untold infraction, he forbade his other children to have any contact with him. But one daughter, Alice, took pity on her brother and met him at the estate edge to pass him some money. Learning of this, Pitt Rivers intercepted Alice as she returned to the house and beat her to the ground with her own riding crop.
Pitt Rivers’s particular speciality – a kind of hobby, it would seem – was evicting aged tenants. On one occasion he served notice on a man and his crippled wife, both in their eighties. When they begged him to reconsider as they had no living relatives and nowhere to go, he responded briskly: ‘I was extremely sorry to get your letter & to see how much you disliked leaving Hinton. To be brief I feel my duties to the property necessitate my occupying the house as soon as possible.’ The couple were forthwith ejected, though in fact Pitt Rivers never moved in and, according to his biographer, Mark Bowden, almost certainly never intended to.*
For all his personal shortcomings, Pitt Rivers was an outstanding archaeologist – indeed, was one of the fathers of modern archaeology. He brought method and rigour to the field. He carefully labelled shards of pottery and other fragments at a time when that was not routinely done. The idea of organizing archaeological finds into a systematic sequence – a process known as typology – was his invention. Unusually, he was less interested in glittering treasure than in the objects of everyday life – beakers, combs, decorative beads and the like – which had mostly gone undervalued theretofore. He also brought to archaeology a devotion to precision. He invented a device called a craniometer, which could make very exact measurements of human skulls. After his death, his collection of artefacts formed the foundation of the great Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford.
Thanks in large part to Pitt Rivers’s exacting methodology, by the second half of the nineteenth century archaeology was becoming more like a science and less like a treasure hunt, and the more careless excesses of the early antiquaries were becoming a thing of the past. In the wider world, however, destruction was getting worse. Practically all the ancient monuments in Britain were in private hands and no law compelled owners to look after them. Stories abounded of people destroying artefacts, either because they found them a nuisance or failed to appreciate their rarity. In Orkney, a farmer at Stenness, not far from Skara Brae, demolished a prehistoric megalith known as the Stone of Odin because it was in his way when he ploughed, and was about to start on the now-famous Stones of Stenness when horrified islanders persuaded him to desist.
Even something as peerless as Stonehenge was astoundingly insecure. Visitors commonly carved their names in the stones or chipped off pieces to take away as souvenirs. One man was found banging away on a sarsen with a sledgehammer. In the early 1870s, the London and South-Western Railway announced plans to run a line right through the heart of the Stonehenge site. When people complained, a railway official countered that Stonehenge was ‘entirely out of repair, and not the slightest use to anyone now’.
Clearly, Britain’s ancient heritage needed a saviour. Enter one of the most extraordinary fellows of that extraordinary age. His name was John Lubbock and it is remarkable that he is not better known. It would be hard to name any figure who did more useful things in more fields and won less lasting fame for it.
The son of a wealthy banker, Lubbock grew up as a neighbour of Charles Darwin in Kent. He played with Darwin’s children and was constantly in and out of the Darwin house. He had a gift for natural history, which endeared him to the great man. The two spent many hours together in Darwin’s study looking at specimens in matching microscopes. At one point when Darwin was depressed, young Lubbock was the only visitor he would receive.
Upon reaching adulthood, Lubbock followed his father into banking, but his heart was in science. He was a tireless, if slightly eccentric, experimenter. Once he spent three months trying to teach his dog to read. Developing an interest in archaeology, he learned Danish because Denmark was then the world leader in the field. He had a particular interest in insects, and kept a colony of bees in his sitting room, the better to study their habits. In 1886 he discovered the pauropods – one of the family of tiny, and previously unsuspected, mites mentioned in our earlier discussion of household creatures. Since, as we have seen, many mites weren’t noticed by science at all until the middle of the twentieth century, to identify a family of them in 1886 was a signal achievement, particularly for a banker whose scientific pursuits were limited to evenings and weekends. No less significant was his study of the variability of nervous systems in insects, which lent important support to Darwin and his idea of descent with modification just at a time when Darwin really needed it.
As well as being a banker and keen entomologist, Lubbock was also a distinguished archaeologist, trustee of the British Museum, Member of Parliament, vice-chancellor (or head) of London University, and author of popular books, among rather a lot else. As an archaeologist, he coined the terms ‘palaeolithic’, ‘mesolithic’ and ‘neolithic’, and was one of the first to use the handy new word ‘prehistoric’. As a politician and Member of Parliament for the Liberal Party, he became a champion of the working man. He introduced legislation to limit the hours worked in shops to ten hours a day, and in 1871 he pushed through – virtually single-handedly – the Bank Holidays Act, which introduced the breathtakingly radical idea of a paid secular holiday for workers.* It is almost impossible now to imagine what excitement this caused. Before Lubbock’s new law, most employees were excused from work on Good Friday, Christmas Day or Boxing Day (but not generally both) and Sundays, and that was it. The idea of having a bonus day off – and in summer at that – was almost too thrilling to bear. Lubbock was widely agreed to be the most popular man in England and bank holidays for a long time were affectionately known as ‘St Lubbock’s days’. No one in his age would ever have supposed that his name would one day be forgotten.
SIR JOHN LUBBOCK, M.P., F.R.S.
HOW DOTH THE BANKING BUSY BEE
IMPROVE HIS SHINING HOURS
BY STUDYING ON BANK HOLIDAYS
STRANGE INSECTS AND WILD FLOWERS!
Punch cartoon of John Lubbock, architect of the Bank Holidays Act and the Ancient Monuments Protection Act.
But it is for one other innovation that Lubbock is of importance to us here: the preservation of ancient monuments. In 1872 Lubbock learned from a rector in rural Wiltshire that a big chunk of Avebury, an ancient circle of stones considerably larger than Stonehenge (though not so picturesquely composed), was about to be cleared away for new housing. Lubbock bought the threatened land, along with two other ancient monuments nearby, West Kennet Long Barrow and Silbury Hill (an enormous manmade mound – the largest in Europe), but clearly he couldn’t protect every worthy thing that grew threatened, so he began to press for legislation to safeguard historic treasures. Achieving this ambition was not nearly as straightforward as common sense would suggest it ought to be because the ruling Tories under Benjamin Disraeli saw it as an egregious assault on property rights. The idea of giving a government functionary the right to come on to the land of a person of superior caste and start telling him how to manage his estate was preposterous – outrageous. Lubbock persevered, however, and in 1882, under the new Liberal government of William Ewart Gladstone, he managed to push through Parliament the Ancient Monuments Protection Act – a landmark piece of legislation if ever there was one.
Because the protection of monuments was such a sensitive issue, it was agreed that the first Inspector of Ancient Monuments should be someone landowners could respect, ideally a large landowner himself. It so happened that Lubbock knew just the person – the man who was about to become his new father-in-law, none other than Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers.
Their relationship through marriage must have been as surprising to them as it is to us. For one thing, the two men were nearly the same age. It just happened that the recently widowed Lubbock met Pitt Rivers’s daughter Alice on a weekend stay at Castle Howard in the early 1880s. Lubbock was nearly fifty, Alice just eighteen. What caused a spark between them is beyond plausible guessing, but they were married soon afterwards. It wasn’t an outstandingly happy marriage. She was younger than some of his children, which made for awkward relationships, and appears to have had little interest in his work, but the one certainty is that life with Lubbock was better than being beaten to the ground with a riding crop.
Whether Lubbock was unaware of Pitt Rivers’s brutality to Alice or was simply prepared to overlook it – and little says more of the age than that either was possible – he and Pitt Rivers had a happy working relationship, no doubt because they had so many interests in common. As Inspector of Ancient Monuments, Pitt Rivers’s powers were not spectacular. His brief was to identify important monuments that might be endangered, and to offer to take them into state care if the owner wished. Although this would relieve owners of the cost of maintaining sites, most baulked because it was such an unprecedented step to cede control of any part of one’s estate. Even Lubbock hesitated before relinquishing Silbury Hill. The act carefully excluded houses, castles and ecclesiastical structures. All that left was prehistoric monuments. The Office of Works provided Pitt Rivers with almost no money – half of his budget one year was spent on putting a low fence around a single burial mound – and in 1890 it removed his salary altogether, thereafter merely covering his expenses. Even then it asked him to stop ‘touting’ for more monuments.
Pitt Rivers died in 1900. In eighteen years, he managed to list (or ‘schedule’, as the parlance has it) just forty-three monuments, barely over two a year. (The number of scheduled ancient monuments today is over 19,000.) But he had helped to set two immeasurably important precedents – that ancient things are precious enough to protect and that owners of ancient monuments have a duty to look after them. These policies weren’t always enforced with much rigour in his day, but the principles embedded in them were crucial, and they inspired others to take additional protective actions. The Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, led by the designer William Morris, was founded in 1877, and the National Trust followed in 1895. At last British monuments began to enjoy some measure of formal protection.
Risks continued, however. Stonehenge remained in private hands, and the owner, Sir Edmund Antrobus, refused to listen to government advice or even have inspectors on his land. Around the turn of the century it was reported that an anonymous buyer was interested in shipping the stones to America to re-erect as a tourist attraction somewhere out west. Had Antrobus accepted such an offer, there was nothing in law anyone could do to stop him. Nor indeed for many years was there anyone willing to try. For ten years after Pitt Rivers’s death, the position of Inspector of Ancient Monuments was left vacant to save funds.
II
Even as all this was unfolding, life in the British countryside was being severely reshaped by an event that is little remembered now, but was one of the most economically catastrophic in modern British history: the agricultural depression of the 1870s, when harvests were abysmal in seven years out of ten. This time, however, farmers and landowners couldn’t compensate by raising prices, as they always had in the past, because now they faced vigorous competition from overseas. America in particular had become a vast agricultural machine. Thanks to the McCormick reaper and other large, clattery implements, America’s prairies had become devastatingly productive. Between 1872 and 1902, American wheat production increased by 700 per cent. In the same period, British wheat production fell by more than 40 per cent.
Prices collapsed too. Wheat, barley, oats, bacon, pork, mutton and lamb all roughly halved in value during the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Wool dropped from 28 shillings per fourteen-pound bundle to just 12. Thousands of tenant farmers were ruined. More than one hundred thousand farmers and farmworkers left the land. Fields stood idle. Rents went unpaid. Nowhere was there any prospect of relief. Country churches became conspicuously empty as parish rolls shrank. Those worshippers who remained were poorer than ever. It wasn’t a great time to be a country clergyman. It never would be again.
At the height of the agricultural crisis, the British government under the Liberals did an odd thing. It invented a tax designed to punish a class of people who were already suffering severely and had done nothing in particular to cause the current troubles. The class was large landowners. The tax was death duties. Life was about to change utterly for thousands of people, including our own Mr Marsham.
The designer of the new tax was Sir William George Granville Venables Vernon Harcourt, the chancellor of the exchequer, a man who seems not to have been liked much by anyone at any point in his life, including his own family. Known familiarly, if not altogether affectionately, as ‘Jumbo’ because of his magnificent rotundity, Harcourt was an unlikely persecutor of the landed classes since he was one of them himself. The Harcourt family home was Nuneham Park in Oxfordshire, which we have visited in this book already. Nuneham, you may remember, was where an earlier Harcourt reconfigured the estate but failed to recollect where the old village well had been, fell into it and drowned. For as long as there had been Tories, the Harcourts had numbered themselves among them, so William’s joining of the Liberals was seen within his family as the darkest treachery. Even Liberals were startled by his tax. Lord Rosebery, the prime minister (who was himself a big landowner), wondered if some relief should at least be granted in those cases where two inheritors died in quick succession. It would be harsh, Rosebery thought, to tax an estate a second time before the legatee had had a chance to rebuild the family finances. Harcourt, however, refused all appeals for concessions.
That Harcourt stood almost no chance of inheriting his own family property no doubt coloured his principles. In fact, to his presumed surprise, he did inherit it when his elder brother’s son died suddenly, but heirlessly, in the spring of 1904. Harcourt didn’t get to enjoy his good fortune long, however. He expired six months later himself, which meant that his heirs were among the first to be taxed twice over in exactly the way that Rosebery had feared and he had dismissed. Life doesn’t often get much neater than that.
Death duties in Harcourt’s time were a comparatively modest 8 per cent on estates valued at £1 million or more, but they proved to be such a reliable source of revenue, and so popular with the millions who didn’t have to pay them, that they were raised again and again until by the eve of the Second World War they stood at 60 per cent – a level that would make even the richest eyes water. At the same time, income taxes were raised repeatedly and other new taxes invented – an Undeveloped Land Duty, an Incremental Value Duty, a Super Tax – all of which fell disproportionately on those with a lot of land and plummy accents. For the upper classes the twentieth century became, in the words of David Cannadine, a time ‘of encircling gloom’.
Most lived within a semi-permanent state of crisis. When things got really bad – when a roof needed replacing or a tax demand hit the mat – disaster could generally be staved off by selling heirlooms. Paintings, tapestries, jewels, books, porcelain, silver plate, rare stamps, whatever would attract a reasonable price poured out of English stately homes and into museums or the hands of foreigners. This was the age in which Henry Clay Folger bought every Shakespeare First Folio he could lay hands on and George Washington Vanderbilt bought treasures enough to fill his 250-room Biltmore mansion, when men like Andrew Mellon, Henry Clay Frick and J. P. Morgan acquired Old Masters by the wagonload, and William Randolph Hearst acquired almost anything else that was going.
There was hardly a great house in Britain that didn’t yield something at some point. The Howards at Castle Howard relinquished 110 Old Masters and more than a thousand rare books. At Blenheim Palace, the dukes of Marlborough sold stacks of paintings, including eighteen works by Rubens and more than a dozen by Van Dyck, before belatedly discovering the financial attractiveness of marrying rich Americans. The fabulously rich Duke of Hamilton sold nearly £400,000 worth of glittery oddments in 1882, then returned a few years later to sell some £250,000 more. For many, the great auction houses of London assumed something of the qualities of pawn shops.
When the owners had sold everything of value from walls and floors, they sometimes sold the walls and floors, too. A room with all its fittings was extracted from Wingerworth Hall in Derbyshire and inserted into the St Louis Art Museum. A Grinling Gibbons staircase was removed from Cassiobury Park in Hertfordshire and re-erected in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Sometimes entire houses went, as with Agecroft Hall, a handsome Tudor manor in Lancashire, which was taken to pieces, packed into numbered crates and shipped to Richmond, Virginia, where it was reassembled and still proudly stands.
Very occasionally there was some good in all the hardship. The heirs of Sir Edmund Antrobus, unable to maintain his estate, put it on the market in 1915. A local businessman and racehorse breeder named Sir Cecil Chubb bought Stonehenge for £6,600 – roughly £300,000 in today’s money, so not a trifling sum – and very generously gave it to the nation, making it safe at last.
Such happy outcomes were exceptional, however. For many hundreds of country houses there was no salvation, and the sad fate was decline and eventual demolition. Almost all the losses were unfortunate. Some were little short of scandalous. Streatlam Castle, once one of the finest homes in County Durham, was given to the Territorial Army, which used it, amazingly, for target practice. Aston Clinton, a nineteenth-century house of vast and exuberant charm once owned by the Rothschilds, was bought by Buckinghamshire County Council and torn down to make way for a soulless vocational training centre. So low did the fortunes of stately homes sink that one in Lincolnshire reportedly was bought by a film company just so that it could burn it down for the climactic scene of a movie.
Nowhere was entirely safe, it seems. Even Chiswick House, a landmark building by any measure, was nearly lost. For a time it was a lunatic asylum, but by the 1950s it was empty and listed for demolition. Fortunately, enough sense prevailed to save it, and it is now in the safe care of English Heritage, a public body. The National Trust rescued some two hundred other houses over the course of the century, and a few survived by turning themselves into tourist attractions – not always entirely smoothly at first. A grandmother at one stately home, Simon Jenkins relates, refused to leave one of the rooms whenever there was horse-racing on the television. ‘She was voted the best exhibit,’ Jenkins adds. Many other large houses found new lives as schools, clinics or other institutions. Sir William Harcourt’s Nuneham Park spent much of the twentieth century as a training centre for the Royal Air Force. (It is now a religious retreat.)
Hundreds more, however, were unceremoniously whisked away. By the 1950s, the peak period of destruction, stately homes were disappearing at the rate of about two a week. Exactly how many great houses went altogether is unknown. In 1974, the Victoria & Albert Museum in London staged a celebrated exhibition, ‘The Destruction of the Country House’, in which it surveyed the enormous loss of stately homes in the previous century. Altogether the curators, Marcus Binney and John Harris, counted 1,116 great houses lost, but further research raised that number to 1,600 even before the exhibition was over, and the figure now is generally put at about 2,000 – a painfully substantial number bearing in mind that these were some of the handsomest, jauntiest, most striking, ambitious, influential and patently cherishable residences ever erected on the planet.
III
So that was the situation for Mr Marsham and his century as they headed jointly towards their closing years. From the perspective of domesticity, there has never been a more interesting or eventful time. Private life was completely transformed in the nineteenth century – socially, intellectually, technologically, hygienically, sartorially, sexually and in almost any other respect that could be made into an adverb. Mr Marsham was born (in 1822) into a world that was still essentially medieval – a place of candlelight, medicinal leeches, travel at walking pace, news from afar that was always weeks or months old – and lived to see the introduction of one marvel after another: steamships and speeding trains, telegraphy, photography, anaesthesia, indoor plumbing, gas lighting, antisepsis in medicine, refrigeration, telephones, electric lights, recorded music, cars and planes, skyscrapers, motion pictures, radio, and literally tens of thousands of tiny things more, from mass-produced bars of soap to push-along lawnmowers.
It is almost impossible to conceive just how much radical day-today change people were exposed to in the nineteenth century, particularly in the second half. Even something as elemental as the weekend was brand new. The term is not recorded in English before 1879, when it appears in the magazine Notes & Queries in the sentence: ‘In Staffordshire, if a person leaves home at the end of his week’s work on the Saturday afternoon to spend the evening of Saturday and the following Sunday with friends at a distance, he is said to be spending his weekend at So-and-so.’ Even then, clearly, it only signified Saturday afternoon and Sunday, and then only for certain people. Not until the 1890s did it become universally understood, if not yet universally enjoyed, but an entitlement to relaxation was unquestionably on its way.
The irony in all this is that just as the world was getting more agreeable for most people – more brilliantly lit, more reliably plumbed, more leisured and pampered and gaudily entertaining – it was quietly falling apart for the likes of Mr Marsham. The agricultural crisis that began in the 1870s and ran on almost indefinitely was as palpably challenging to country parsons as it was to the wealthy landowners on whom they depended, and it was doubly difficult for those whose family wealth was tied to the land, as Mr Marsham’s was.
By 1900, a parson’s earnings were much less than half in real terms what they had been fifty years before. Crockford’s Clerical Directory of 1903 bleakly recorded that a ‘considerable section’ of the clergy now lived at a level of ‘bare subsistence’. A Reverend F. J. Bleasby, it further noted, had made 470 unsuccessful applications for a curacy, and finally, in humbling defeat, had entered a workhouse. The well-off parson was resoundingly and irremediably a thing of the past.
The rambling parsonages that had once made the life of a country clergyman commodious and agreeable were now for many just vast and leaky burdens. Many twentieth-century clergy, coming from more modest backgrounds and struggling on much reduced incomes, couldn’t afford to maintain such spacious properties. A Mrs Lucy Burnett, wife of a country vicar in Yorkshire, plaintively explained to a church commission in 1933 just how big was the vicarage that she had to manage: ‘If you played a brass band in my kitchen I don’t think you could hear it in the drawing room,’ she said. The responsibility for interior improvements fell to the incumbents, but increasingly they were too impoverished to effect any. ‘Many a parsonage has passed twenty, thirty, even fifty years without any redecoration at all,’ Alan Savidge wrote in a history of parsonages in 1964.
The simplest solution for the Church was to sell off the troublesome parsonages, and to build something smaller nearby. The Church of England Commissioners, the officials in charge of these disposals, were not always the most astute of businesspeople, it must be said. Anthony Jennings, in The Old Rectory (2009), notes how in 1983 they sold just over three hundred parsonages at an average price of £64,000, but spent an average of £76,000 on building much inferior replacements.
Of the 13,000 parsonages that existed in 1900, just 900 are still in Church of England ownership today. Our rectory was sold into private hands in 1978. (I don’t know for how much.) Its history as a rectory lasted 127 years, during which time it was home to eight clergy. Curiously, all seven later rectors stayed longer in the house than the shadowy figure who built it. Thomas Marsham departed in 1861, after just ten years, to take up a new post as rector of Saxlingham, a position of almost exactly equal obscurity in a village twenty miles to the north, near the sea.
Why he built himself such a substantial house is a question that can now never be answered. Perhaps he hoped to impress some delightful young woman of his acquaintance, but she declined him and married another. Perhaps she did choose him, but died before they could wed. Both outcomes were common enough in the mid-nineteenth century and either would explain some of the rectory’s design mysteries, such as the presence of a nursery and the vague femininity of the plum room, though nothing we can suggest can now ever be more than a guess. All that can be said is that whatever happiness he found in life it was not within the bounds of marriage.
We may at least hope that his relationship with his devoted housekeeper Miss Worm had some measure of warmth and affection, however awkwardly expressed. It was almost certainly the longest relationship of either of their lives. When Miss Worm died in 1899 at the age of seventy-six she had been his housekeeper for over half a century. In that same year the Marsham family estate at Stratton Strawless was sold in fifteen lots, presumably because no one could be found to buy it whole. The sale marked the end of four hundred years of prominence for the Marsham family in the county. Today all that remains as a reminder of that is a pub called the Marsham Arms in the nearby village of Hevingham.
Mr Marsham lived on for not quite six years more. He died in a retirement home in a nearby village in 1905. He was eighty-three years old and, apart from time away for schooling, had lived the whole of his life on Norfolk soil, within an area just slightly more than twenty miles across.
IV
We started here in the attic – a long time ago now, it seems – when I clambered up through the loft hatch to look for the source of a leak. (It turned out to be a slipped tile that was allowing rain through.) There, you may recall, I discovered a door that led out on to a space on the roof giving a view of the countryside. The other day, I hauled myself back up there for the first time since I began work on the book. I wondered vaguely if I would see the world differently now that I know a little about Mr Marsham and the circumstances in which he lived.
In fact, no. What was surprising to me was not how much the world below had changed since Mr Marsham’s day but how little. A resurrected Mr Marsham obviously would be struck by some novelties – cars speeding along a road in the middle distance, a helicopter passing noisily overhead – but mostly he would gaze upon a landscape that was seemingly timeless and utterly familiar.
That air of permanence is of course a deception. It isn’t that the landscape isn’t changing, but just changing too slowly to be noticed, even over the course of 160 years or so. Go back far enough and you would see plenty of change. Travel five hundred years backwards and there would be almost nothing familiar except the church, a few hedgerows and field shapes and the dawdling line of some of the roads. Go a bit further than that and you might see the Roman fellow who dropped the phallic pendant with which we began the book. Go way back – to 400,000 years ago, say – and you would find lions, elephants and other exotic fauna grazing on arid plains. These were the creatures that left the bones that so fascinated early antiquaries like John Frere at nearby Hoxne. The site of his find is too distant to be seen from our roof, but the bones he collected could easily have come from animals that once grazed on our land.
Remarkably, what brought those animals to this part of the world was a climate just three degrees centigrade or so warmer than today. There are people alive now who will live in a Britain that warm again. Whether it will be a parched Serengeti or a verdant paradise of home-grown wines and year-round fruit is beyond the scope of this book to guess. What is certain is that it will be a very different place, and one to which future humans will have to adjust at something much faster than a geological pace.
One of the things not visible from our rooftop is how much energy and other inputs we require now to provide us with the ease and convenience that we have all come to expect in our lives. It’s a lot – a shocking amount. Of the total energy produced on Earth since the Industrial Revolution began, half has been consumed in the last twenty years. Disproportionately it was consumed by us in the rich world; we are an exceedingly privileged fraction.
Today it takes the average citizen of Tanzania almost a year to produce the same volume of carbon emissions as is effortlessly generated every two and a half days by a European, or every twenty-eight hours by an American. We are, in short, able to live as we do because we use resources at hundreds of times the rate of most of the planet’s other citizens. One day – and don’t expect it to be a distant day – many of those six billion or so less well off people are bound to demand to have what we have, and to get it as easily as we got it, and that will require more resources than this planet can easily, or even conceivably, yield.
The greatest possible irony would be if in our endless quest to fill our lives with comfort and happiness we created a world that had neither. But that of course would be another book.
* A hundred years later when the significance of the find was finally realized, a geological period was named the Hoxnian after the village where Frere made his discovery.
* Pitt Rivers’s eldest son, Alexander, seems to have inherited his father’s affection for tormenting tenants. One, a man of previously mild character, was so driven to despair by young Alexander that he wrote ‘BLACKGUARD LANDLORD’ with weedkiller in large letters across the Rushmore lawn. Alexander sued for libel and was awarded token damages of one shilling, but rejoiced in the fact that the trial costs had reduced the tenant to destitution. Pitt Rivers’s other eight children seem mostly to have been pretty decent. George – the one banished from the estate and thus the inadvertent cause of his sister’s beating – became a successful inventor with a particular interest in electric lighting. He demonstrated an incandescent bulb at the Paris Exhibition of 1881 that was deemed the equal of anything produced by Edison or Swan.
* The name ‘bank holiday’ was an odd one, and Lubbock never really explained why he elected to call it that instead of ‘national holiday’ or ‘workers’ holiday’ or something similarly descriptive. It is sometimes suggested that he meant the holiday only for bank workers, but that is not so. It was always intended for all.