The House of Lyme

THE HOUSE OF LYME FROM ITS FOUNDATION TO THE END OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BY THE LADY NEWTON First Published by William Heineman London 1917. Converted by optical character recognition to digital form and edited by Craig Thornber, April 2019 Editor’s Introduction Lady Newton’s House of Lyme, dedicated to her husband, was published first in March 1917 with a second impression in June of the same year. One hundred years later, it continues to be a valuable source of information for National Trust staff and volunteers at Lyme. As it is now out of copyright, I have taken the opportunity to prepare a digital version which can be distributed easily and read on a variety of electronic devices. Optical character recognition is not totally accurate and often letters such as “h” are detected as “li” and vice versa. A capital “I” can easily be confused with a lower case “l” or a number “1” and and a capital “O” with zero. Some spaces are missed, in other places extra spaces are added or punctuation marks are misplaced. Formatting, such as indents, often go awry and marginal dates, page headers and footers become embedded in the main text. As a result, the document first obtained requires careful proof-reading and many small adjustments throughout. I take responsibility for all the typographical errors that remain. I have taken the opportunity to make small alterations in the punctuation where this makes the meaning clearer. Lady Newton indicated footnotes with asterisks, daggers and double daggers. These have been altered to produce a single sequence of numbers, going up to 492. Additional footnotes have been entered where I have information that supplements, clarifies or indeed contradicts Lady Newton’s text. Like many early authors, Lady Newton has Margaret Danyers as the daughter rather than the granddaughter of Sir Thomas Danyers of Crécy fame. She also states that the modifications in the 19th century were designed by Jeffry Wyatville rather than Lewis Wyatt. It is sheer serendipity that I could correctly identify as Thomas Jollie or Jolly, the extruded Nonconformist minister mentioned. He moved at one stage to Wymondhouses, a hamlet near Pendle Hill in Lancashire, which features in my own family history. Lady Newton quotes verbatim from many letters written and received by the family. They are not always easy to read because of their archaic style, idiosyncratic spelling and frequent use of abbreviations. The modern reader might have been better served by seeing a summary of their contents in plain English. The original illustrations have not been included so as to avoid issues of copyright on the painting themselves. Indexing a book of this nature is a long and laborious task, so I have kept Lady Newton’s index and shown where the original pages began throughout the text. Each chapter has a footer showing the range of page numbers covered in that chapter in the original. Lady Newton ends the book with the death of Peter XIII, thereby omitting all mention of Colonel Thomas Peter Legh and his seven illegitimate children and the interesting career of his eldest son, Thomas Legh. In view of this, one must question how objective her account is and whether she has omitted other events or letters which might cast a less than perfect light on earlier members of the family. It is believed that she destroyed documentary evidence on Colonel Legh’s illegitimate children. Lady Newton was not trained as an historian. Lord Newton, in his autobiography, Retrospection, notes that she had the typical Victorian upper- class lady’s accomplishments of speaking French, playing the piano, dancing and horse- riding. As a result, she came to her task as an amateur. If she had aimed at producing an authoritative account, she could have consulted a wider range of sources. She does not pretend to be impartial. Her prejudices show through as a Royalist and an Anglican. Judge Bradshaw of Marple was a friend of the family in the middle of the 17th century and they received letters from him but almost every time Lady Newton mentions him, he comes with the derogatory epithet of “regicide”. Lady Newton’s love of Lyme is admirably described in her beautifully poetic Introduction, as shown below. Lady Newton was probably not aware that the College of Heralds were frequently given false information by the gentry and aristocracy.1 They did this to make invalid claims to titles, honours and lands. Few were more brazen or more easily disproved, than the claim made by Piers Legh VII in 1575 to William Flower, Norroy king-of-arms, who granted the shield of augmentation of honour on the basis that Piers I was the hero of Crécy. Not only was Piers I not born at the time of the battle but the charter of Richard II, under which Piers and Margaret were given Lyme, specifically mentions that it was a reward for the deeds of Sir Thomas Danyers. The Danyers, who subsequently became known as the Daniels, were close neighbours of the Leicesters of Tabley. Sir Peter Leicester compiled his Cheshire Antiquities, published in 1673, based on examining the charters, wills and marriage settlements contained in his various neighbours’ muniment rooms. Throughout her book, Lady Newton makes no reference to the two major histories of Cheshire that were available in her time. East Cheshire Past and Present by J. P. Earwaker, published in 1877 and the revised and enlarged edition of The History of the County Palatine and City of Chester, incorporated with a republication of King's Vale Royal and Leycester's Cheshire Antiquities, by George Ormerod published in 1882. Had she consulted the latter work, then on page 473 of Volume 1 she would have read in the section on the Danyers family that Margaret Danyers was the daughter of Sir Thomas Danyers the younger and Isabel Baggiley. This was taken from Sir Peter Leicester’s work on the area of Over Tabley. However, Ormerod himself, on page 676 of Volume 3, which covers the Leghs of Lyme, has Sir Thomas Danyers senior marrying Isabel Baggiley whereas he married Margaret of Tabley. Lady Newton might have availed herself also of four great series of learned journals about the region produced by the Chetham Society, the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society, The Record Society of Lancashire and Cheshire and The Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, all of which began long before she was writing. These comments apart, one has to admire Lady Newton for the immense amount of work that was required to assemble the book and her diligence in mastering the handwriting of the Elizabethan and Stuart Periods. As one who has transcribed parish registers from the early seventeenth century onwards, I know how challenging it can be. Craig Thornber Macclesfield, 2019 1 The Lancashire Visitations were four, viz., Thomas Benoit’s or Benalt’s, 1533; William Flower’s, 1567; Richard St. George’s, 1613; and Sir William Dugdale’s, 1664-5. As the Leghs had an estate in South Lancashire they would have been called upon to give details of their ancestry to justify their use of arms. Details of all the Lancashire Visitations have been published by the Chetham Society. Lady Newton’s Prefatory Note A local antiquary of considerable learning, W. Beamont, printed in 1876, I believe for private circulation A History of the House of Lyme2. Although the present work is the result of researches which are entirely independent, I have not scrupled to avail myself of Mr. Beamont’s monograph, which was dedicated to my father-in-law the late William John Legh, M.P. for South Lancashire and East Cheshire, and afterwards first Lord Newton, whenever we were dealing with the same documents. I have to thank the executors of the late Mrs. Beamont for permission to quote from this work and from her husband’s History of Warrington3 published in 1849. I have to thank Mr. F. Madan and the authorities of Brasenose College, Oxford, for permission to quote from Mr. G. H. Wakeling’s History of Brasenose College, 1603-1660. Mr. Madan also gave me very kind help in other ways. The Master of St. John’s College, Cambridge, and Dr. J. Bass Mullinger have very courteously examined for me the records of their college. My thanks are also due to Mr. John Henry Master, who is a direct descendant of Elizabeth Legh, Lady Master, for permission to quote from some of the papers in her possession, and Major Darby Griffiths – a descendant of the Chicheleys – has kindly allowed me access his family papers. I am indebted to the Dean of Manchester for kindly granting me permission to make the necessary transcripts from the Raines Manuscripts in the Library of Chetham’s Hospital and to Mr. C. W. Sutton for and the authorities of the Chetham Society for a similar service. The Rev. Edwin Bedford, Rector of St. George the Martyr Church, Queen Square, has courteously examined for me his parish registers. From my friends, the present Lord Egerton of Tatton and the Duchess of Buckingham and Chandos I have received kind help, which is acknowledged in the text. To my brother-in-law, Sir Edward Ridley, I am indebted for advice dealing with the very early history. Last, but by no means least, my most sincere thanks and gratitude I owe to my good friend Mr. Edmunde Gosse. Without his never-failing help and encouragement this history would scarcely have been begun and would certainly never have been completed. E. N. Lyme, Christmas 1916 2 This is the subject of one of my earlier projects, produced in digital form in 2013.

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