A member of the Jordans Quaker Meeting alerted Earl Howe to the following notice of a sale by a Cardiff auction house:

“An antique Charles II oak chest made to commemorate the marriage in 1671 of Sir Nathaniel Curzon of Kedleston in Derbyshire and Sarah Penn, daughter of William Penn, who founded the U.S. state of Pennsylvania, will be sold in a sale at leading South Wales auctioneers Rogers Jones Co. The sale is on Friday December 5”.

Making the chests was considered a privilege for the carpenter tasked with the commission and great pride went into their construction. Similarly, the more important – and rich – the couple, the more grandiose the chests became. The example to be sold at Rogers Jones is a tour de force of the wood carver’s skill. The chest is estimated conservatively at £700-1,000, but could sell for more.

The heavy oak carcase is embellished on all sides and its lid with romantic and religious symbolism. The profuse carving includes two pairs of confronting dragons and hearts, Christian crosses and anchors representing Faith, Hope and Charity on the pair of panels on the façade, while the lid is decorated with a trio of panelled rosettes. Among a number of inscriptions is one across the front, flanked by the date 1687, which reads ‘We Once Were Two – We Two Made One / We No More Two – Through Life Bee One’. Above and below the panelled rosettes in the lid is an inscription which reads: ‘Comfort One Another And My House Will Serve The Lord’.”

The advertisement for this lovely oak chest is seriously misleading. Sarah Penn was indeed the daughter of William Penn, but he was not William Penn, the Quaker, who founded Pennsylvania. Nor was it a marriage chest since it is dated 1687 and the couple were married sixteen years earlier in 1671. Sir Nathaniel Curzon, the 1st Baronet, died in 1686. At that time, his son Nathaniel and Sarah (neé Penn) were living in Penn and their five sons were at Berkhamsted School. It seems more probable that the chest was a farewell gift to the couple who had inherited a large estate at Kedleston and were leaving Penn.

Sarah was to inherit the Penn Estate and Earl Howe is her direct descendant. The chest is central to his family history and it was therefore very disappointing that his bid for up to £2,000 was not sufficient. This historical information was passed to the auctioneers before the sale, but one wonders whether the purchaser was aware that it had no connection whatsoever with the Quaker or with Pennsylvania.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter, No.38,  January 2015
Photo courtesy of Rogers Jones Co, Auctioneers, Cardiff

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter, No.16, September 2010.
Photographs courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS.

In the centre of the chancel floor at Penn is a typical black Georgian tomb-slab headed by the Penn arms and with the words ‘Here lies the body of Roger Penn Esq. Lord of this Manor, who died, unmarried, March the 17th 1731, in the 55th year of his age‘. Three of his sisters, Henrietta, Martha and Elisabeth Catharina are buried near him.

Roger Penn was the last male heir of the Penn family that had held the Manor of Penn since the 1ih century, probably since the Conquest. An obituary in the Northampton Mercury asserted that ‘he was a gentleman possessed of many excellent qualities of great virtue, extensively charitable to the Poor & kept up the good old English Hospitality‘. A contemporary, Thomas Hearne, the well­known Oxford antiquary and diarist, described him as ‘a very honest gentleman and a very good scholar‘, but reported that he had lived for some considerable time almost altogether in his room, keeping no company, ‘being as it were in a crazed condition‘. John Chenevix Trench, the former Editor of Records of Bucks, must have had this report in mind when he added a footnote to his transcript of the Penn Parish Register to the effect that Roger Penn was feeble-minded, probably because of Down’s syndrome, a result of an elderly mother after 22 years of child-bearing.

On the other hand, we know that Roger Penn was a JP from 1702-4, Sheriff for the County in 1706 at the age of 29, and is recorded presiding over his manor courts appointing clergy and improving the chancel of Penn church. These contradictory descriptions can now be reconciled by another contemporary testimony, that of the Rev. Benjamin Robertshaw whose memoir is held in the Bucks Archaeological Society’s library in Aylesbury. Benjamin Robertshaw succeeded John Bennet as Vicar of Penn from 1716-28, although he continued to live in Amersham where his wife came from and where he was headmaster of the Free School.

Robertshaw’s memoirs, well written and carefully punctuated, include a perceptive account of Roger Penn who was his near contemporary (two years older), and had presented him to the living. They both had an Oxford degree though not at the same college. Robertshaw described ‘my good friend Roger Penn of Penn Esqr.’ as ‘one of the best bred Country-Gentlemen I ever saw‘, well educated with an excellent memory and a particular fondness and understanding for the classics, especially the poets, who he could quote appropriately, at length and with understanding and feeling. He was a delightful conversationalist, ‘to the great delight of all the merry mortals about him‘, and ‘coud admirably adapt himself to all tempers, as well as to all sizes of understanding’.

Roger Penn, according to Robertshaw, ‘made very shrewd remarks, both upon persons, and things, & was very seldom mistaken in his conjectures.’ He ‘principally loved a generous openness, & ingenuity of heart’ and ‘chose to be, rather than appear godly‘, because he abhorred any pretension, especially ‘trickings & hypocrisy & little narrow soul’d stingy doings‘ of ‘those Saints in countenance, whose practice he did not observe to be more vertuous, than that of their less ostentatious neighbours’. He was ‘a firm Member of the Church Establish’d‘ .

The object of the abhorrence shared by both Robertshaw and his Patron, were Protestant Dissenters and Whigs, or ‘Whigs and infidels’ as described by Robertshaw. The memoir makes it clear that Robertshaw and many of the local gentry were vehement High Church Tories. They were Jacobite sympathisers and greatly resented the Hanoverian George I who had succeeded Anne, the last Stuart sovereign, in 1714. In 1715, Robertshaw preached publicly in favour of James Stuart, the Old Pretender, the Catholic son of James II and he was also chaplain to the Earl of Scarsdale who was arrested as a Jacobite supporter the same year. Since Roger Penn presented Robertshaw as Vicar of Penn in 1716 and they were such good friends, it is fair to assume that they shared a common view.

If Robertshaw had added no more, we would have seen Roger Penn as a paragon of virtue, but perhaps sharing his former Patron’s abhorrence of pretension, he included just six lines to his description that paint a very different picture.

‘He was a very excellent and agreeable Companion, when he was perfectly well, I say when he was perfectly well; because being apt to drink more than did him good, he was sorely afflicted with the Gout by intervals: and either that, or some constitutional Disorder, occasion’d him to be, one while, deeply melancholy; & then again, in the other extreme, tout jour gay, all alacrity, vivacity and action; which vicissitude I observed to attend him, a great part of his life.’

His candid, posthumous account of Roger Penn, in particular his generous conclusion that, ‘In short, few people have less faults, than he had; & much fewer have so many vertues’, would appear to display the same broad­minded generosity of spirit that he ascribed to Roger Penn and helps explain their apparently close friendship across a considerable social divide, The fact that both were childless may have been a further bond.

Robertshaw observed that ‘As he (Roger Penn) was born, so he died, the last of all his Family, in March 1731/2 (i.e. 1732 in modern dating) being buried on the 20th at Penn, near his own Seat in the Middle Isle‘, and noted that ‘The Penns, Hampdens, & Tyrringhams are commonly esteemed the oldest Familys in Bucks‘. He also noted that Roger Penn had died unmarried and intestate and so the Penn Estate had descended through his only married sister Sarah to the Curzon family.

Roger Penn’s three older brothers all died young before he was born and so he grew up always knowing that he was the last male Penn heir. The pressure on him to marry and continue the Penn family line would have been very strong. As a rich and very eligible bachelor he would have had a wide choice of brides and so the decision not to marry against this weight of family expectation must have weighed heavily on him. We can only speculate why this clever, articulate, generous, hospitable, but unstable and tortured man did not wish to marry. He seems to have been a manic depressive and it is also possible that he was a homosexual at a time when it was completely unacceptable. Sodomy was a capital offence for which three men were hanged in 1726.

His last years were marked by great unhappiness. In 1728, his three surviving sisters, some 20 years older than him and effectively surrogate mothers, two of whom were unmarried and probably keeping house for him, all died within months of each other. Robertshaw himself resigned as Vicar of Penn in the same year and went on to be Rector of Amersham. This series of blows may well have been too much for Roger Penn and led to the final descent into ‘a crazed condition’ and his early death, not quite 55. His failure to make a will adds to the evidence of a confused and unhappy last few years.

© Miles Green, 26 December 2003

Daniel Baker wearing a brown cloak and
white stock, painted by the circle of
Jonathan Richardson. Photograph from
Christies sale October 1990.

We leave the Curzon family for the moment to have a close look at a large marble monument on the east end of the north wall of the nave of Penn Church. It hangs above where the organist plays and was put up in memory of Daniel Baker and his wife Barbara. He was a very prosperous  merchant and Alderman of the City of London. They provide an interesting illustration of social mobility in England since their younger daughter, Elizabeth, married Sir John Verney of Claydon, who later became Viscount Fermanagh; their only son was High Sheriff of Buckinghamshire; and their grand-daughter was the mother of an Earl.

Many years ago, in the Greater London Record Office and History Library, I struck gold in finding a cache of his papers which brought him to life and demonstrated both how prosperous he was and his awareness and gratitude for his good fortune. There was a note of a £2,000 dowry he paid when his elder daughter married. This is equivalent to £3.7m today*. There are also examples of his  annual ‘casting up’. By 1690, he was worth £19,591 (equivalent to £37m today) held mostly in ‘howses’ which he leased and in mortgages and loans he had made. After each casting he generally noted how much more he was worth than the previous year and added a verse of his own  composing in thanks to God, such as:

To God I give my hearty thanks, His name be ever prais’d:
Who me from small beginnings, hath, most wonderfully raised

The monument, put up by his three children, says he died in 1700 ‘in hac villa’, ‘in this town or vill’, presumably meaning Penn, but whether he lived here is not known. He does appear in his son’s diary in an entry in 1698 which records walking in the garden with ‘my Dear Father Baker’.

Amongst his papers there is a note from a ‘Scrivener’ in 1693 asking if he was interested in purchasing a  Buckinghamshire estate consisting of five small farms totaling 537 acres for £196, with a further 55 acres of woodland at 7s 6d (£750 today) per acre. He could of course readily afford the purchase and the fact that he had kept the papers suggests he may well have bought the estate.

When he died he was ‘lamented by men of Goodwill‘ in the City and was buried at Penn. Unfortunately there is a gap in the parish registers at just that time, but the monument records that husband and wife were buried together and her burial at Penn ten years later is recorded in the register.

* See a useful website ‘Measuring Worth’ on the Economic History Service using both average earnings and RPI. I have used the average earnings figure which is always much higher than the RPI comparison.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.28,  November 2012
Photographs courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS

My previous article looked at Daniel Baker, the extraordinarily prosperous London merchant remembered on this monument on the north east nave wall of Penn Church. The monument also remembers his wife, Barbara, and this is a portrait of her attributed to a follower of Jacob Huysmans who was a Flemish portrait painter, one of the fashionable painters at the court of Charles II. It was one of eight Baker portraits put up for sale by Christie’s in 1990. The expected price was £2-4,000.

She is dressed in black and may have been in mourning for her husband who died in 1700. The coat-of-arms on the portrait combines her own family arms with those of the Baker family although neither had been recognised by the College of Arms. The claim to a coat-of-arms was important in those days, particularly to a family rapidly ascending the social scale.

Barbara Baker had one son, Daniel, and two daughters, Sarah and Elizabeth, who both married interesting people. Sarah was married to Narcissus Luttrell, a historian and MP who wrote a unique diary covering parliamentary and national affairs from 1678 to 1714 and had one of the most impressive libraries of his day. Her youngest child, Elizabeth, was married to Sir John Verney of Claydon, who later became Viscount Fermanagh. She was his third wife and over 30 years younger than him. She was described as kind, sensible and so well educated that she embarrassed the older generation whose spelling was ‘flavoured to taste’. She was buried in Penn in 1737 and Lipscomb’s History of 1847 records that there was an ‘atchievement’ (i.e. a hatchment) displaying her Arms on the north wall of the nave. This is no longer there and was probably removed when wall space was reduced by the discovery of more windows when the exterior roughcast was taken off in 1955. Claydon, near Buckingham, is now owned by the National Trust.

Barbara Baker’s will was written in 1701 and gives each family £30 for mourning. She gave Elizabeth £100 ‘for her own separate use’ and various items of furniture and silver. The nine children of her son Daniel were each given £300 (for the boys) and £500 (more for the girls for their dowry  perhaps) to be ‘hoarded up by their father’ and paid ‘with interest and profits’ when they were 21, or for the girls, when they married.

She gave £5 ‘to the poor of the parish of Penn where she desires to be buried’ and a further £5 ‘to be buried in linnen, whereby £5 more will accrew to the said poor’. Her son Daniel was her sole  executor and received the bulk of the estate. When considering the amounts of these bequests we should bear in mind that the modern equivalent of £5 in terms of average earnings seems to be an astronomical £10,000, and so £500 is £1million.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.29, January 2013
Photos courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS

The previous two articles in this monument series looked at Daniel and Barbara Baker who are commemorated on the large marble wall monument above the organ keyboard. They had three children and their only son was another Daniel, who like his father, was a very prosperous London merchant and alderman. In 1691 he purchased Sir Nathaniel Curzon’s recently renovated and enlarged mansion house facing the common by Widmer Pond.

When he bought the house he was 32 years old, married to Martha Mellish, and already had five children with 11 more to come. Three had died in infancy when his brother-in-law heartlessly remarked, ‘He hath a Baker’s Dozen still living – eight Girls and Five Boyes.’ Despite having 16 children in 20 years Martha Baker lived to the age of 84. Her portrait, by Alan Ramsay, shows her in 1739 when she was 71.

Daniel went on to become a JP and a High Sheriff of Bucks in 1721/22. His sister married Lord Fermanagh from Claydon and his sons went to Eton and Cambridge. There are many family letters which give a flavour of those times which we can touch on in the next article.

He was a deeply religious man and kept a diary to record the times when he narrowly escaped disaster but for the Grace of God, or in his own words, ‘for fear I should forget these Remarkable Favours (which I am apt to do) I thought fitt to put them down’. His portrait is by John Closterman and shows him aged about 30 when he started to keep his diary. He is wearing a grey coat and white stock.

They are remembered on the marble monument near the back of the nave on the north wall. We shall be translating its Latin inscription to see what it tells us in another article.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.30, September 2013