The Gentleman's Daughter (73 page)

MS: sophisticated letters sent to her cousin Mary Warde of Hooton Pagnell, before and after marriage: WYCRO, Bradford, Sp St/6/1/50 (MS span: 1733–46).

William Gossip
(1704–72), Anne Wilmer (d. 1780) and sons

William Gossip's father was a West Riding mercer who had amassed a considerable fortune and died a ‘gentleman’, bequeathing his son land in Hatfield, York and Beverley. William Gossip was educated at Wakefield and later Kirkleatham Grammar School, and Trinity College, Cambridge (1722–9), where he hoped to take the post of college librarian. After Cambridge he decided not to pursue a career in the Church or the wine business, but chose to manage his father's affairs and live as an independent gentleman. In 1730 he became one of the twelve directors and the treasurer of Burlington's glittering York assembly rooms. The next year William Gossip was advantageously married in York Minster to Anne Wilmer, the daughter and co-heir of George Wilmer of York, who brought him further estates in Helmsley, Yorkshire, and Sible Hedingham, Essex, and about two thousand pounds-worth of stock in the South Sea Company. At first the couple lived with William's parents in Petergate, York, and then just his mother Susannah after his father's death in 1733. In 1734 they bought a house in Ogleforth, York, with a coach house fit for six horses, and William Gossip was appointed Justice of the Peace in the same year. In the 1740s the Gossips kept their York town house and tenanted Skelton Hall near York, but by 1756 they had established their growing family at Thorp Arch Hall, designed by the soon-to-be-fashionable architect John Carr (1723–1807). The 1,100 acre estate lay between
York and Leeds, on the River Wharfe, and brought with it the lordship of the manor, and thirty tenants. Gossip's prestige was confirmed by the appointment to the office of deputy lieutenant for the West Riding in 1757. Thereafter, he purchased a post-chaise and took on a postilion-cum-groom. His marriage was exceedingly happy and the couple were painted by Mercier. Anne Gossip bore him eleven children between 1732 and 1745, but, harrowingly, only one outlived her: William (1732–54), George (b. and d. 1734), George (1735–75), John (b. and d. 1734), Ann (b. and d. 1738), boy (still-born 1739), John (1740–51), Wilmer (1742–90), Randall (1743–69), Thomas (1744–76) and Anne (1745–6). Of the boys who survived childhood, William, the eldest, went to Edinburgh University to study medicine (where he died aged twenty-one), while the younger boys George, Randall, Wilmer and Thomas were all apprenticed to hosiers in Leicester. George Gossip, now the heir, proved a sad disappointment to his father: feckless, wrong-headed and indebted, he hurled away his father's good opinion when he secretly married Maria Copley, the daughter of a Halifax mantua-maker, in 1762. He was disinherited for his pains. Thereafter George and Randall left hosiery and went into the army. George Gossip's attempts to follow Clive to India came to nothing and he stayed a lieutenant in the 3rd Regiment of Foot. Eventually the bulk of the Thorp Arch estate passed to Wilmer and subsequently (since he died without issue) to his brother Thomas's children. Thomas Gossip (1744–76), apparently the only steady son, married in 1770 Johanna Cartwright (d. 1825), the daughter and heir of Richard Cartwright of Evington, Co. Leicester, and widow of Richard Cook. They had two sons, William (1770) and Randall (1774).

MS: plentiful family correspondence: WYCRO, Leeds, TA 11/4, 12/3, 18/5, 18/6, 22/1, 13/2. See also G. W. Foster and J. J. Green,
History of the Wilmer Family
(Leeds, 1888), pp. 128–34; Harrison, ‘Thorp Arch Hall, 1749–56’; Harrison, ‘Servants of William Gossip’; Harrison, ‘Gossip Family of Thorp Arch’ (MS span: 1731–1813).

This collection is based on the letters sent to Mrs Elizabeth Greene of Slyne and Miss Margaret Greene, later Mrs Bradley of Slyne. Many of their female correspondents have remained socially anonymous despite exhaustive researches, including Sarah Tatham, of Southampton Street, and later Southall (MS span: 1812–21); Martha Simpson of Walton (MS span: 1770); Eliza Greenhow, Slyne (MS span: 1763); and Lydia Boynton, 55 Burton Crescent, London (MS span: 1820). Other correspondents included the wife of a bankrupt merchant, Mrs Ridsdale of Winsley (MS span: 1813), who also corresponded with the Miss Barcrofts, as well as Anne Wiglesworth of Leeds (MS span: 1790) and Elizabeth Wiglesworth of Townhead (MS span: 1813), both members of the gentry-clerical family discussed in the Barcroft network.

Mrs Margaret Bradley
(née Greene), Slyne, Lancashire

Daughter of Thomas Greene I Esq. of Slyne and Elizabeth Barker of Rampside,
Lancashire. She married Robert Bradley of Slyne and was known to her friends as Peggy.

MS: letters she received from her brothers Thomas and Richard, her son Richard Greene Bradley and Lydia Boynton her daughter-in-law: LRO, DDGr C3 (MS span: 1762–
c.
1821).

Mrs Elizabeth Greene
(née Barker), Slyne, Lancashire (1708–81)

Daughter of George Barker of Rampside, Lancashire, wife of Thomas Greene of Slyne (1681–1762). She had at least six children: Thomas the heir, Margaret, Mary who died in 1746 aged six, George who died in 1758 aged eighteen, William who died in 1762 aged sixteen, and Richard who died in the East Indies in 1776 aged thirty.

MS: letters she received from her son Thomas Greene, LRO, DDGr C1 (MS span: 1765–76).

Mrs Martha Greene
(née Dawson), Gower Street, London (1754–1843)

The Lancastrian widow of Thomas Greene II. Sister-in-law to Mrs Bradley of Slyne, to whom her letters are addressed. Her son Thomas Greene III married the baronet's daughter Henrietta Russell in 1820, and Martha Greene proved a very affectionate mother-in-law as well as grandmother.

MS: LRO, DDGr Box C3 (MS span: 1820–21).

Thomas Greene
, London (1737–1810)

A Lancastrian lawyer based in London, son and heir of Thomas Greene I of Slyne. He was in partnership with Mr Baynes who, at his death in September 1779, left a legacy of fifty pounds and five hundred pounds in a codicil. He wrote from Gray's Inn, Serjeant's Inn and the Inner Temple to his mother and sister in Slyne. In 1792, at a mature fifty-five, he married Martha, the second daughter and co-heir of Edmund Dawson Esq. of Warton, Lancashire.

MS: letters to his mother, sister and brothers, LRO, DDGr C1 (MS span: 1762–79).

Mary Chorley
, of Lancaster (b. 1766)

This motherless girl was raised by her aunts, the Miss Fords. Her father John Chorley of 54 Hanover Street, Liverpool, she saw only intermittently. He was a merchant named in the town's directory in 1774. The fact that the Chorleys and their aunts were on tea-drinking and visiting terms with Lord and Lady Fleming of Rydal and the Wilsons of Dalham Tower indicates that, although Quakers, they were nevertheless
personae gratae
in local polite society.

MS: diaries LPL, MS 8752–5 (MS span: 1776–81).

Mrs Dolly Clayton
of Lostock Hall, Lancashire

Although this gentlewoman lived for most of her married life four miles outside Preston, occasional remarks in her pocket diaries suggest she hailed from Derby-shire.
She enjoyed a wide acquaintance and counted many titled gentry among her friends.

MS: thirty-one pocket diaries within the time-frame of this book: LRO, DDX 510/1–30 (MS span: 1773–1833).

Miss Sarah Ford
, Lancaster, Lancashire

Probably the daughter of the Quaker Mary Chorley and her cousin John Ford. In the 1790s the family were still in contact with the Wilsons of Dalham Tower and the Listers. Like her mother before her, Sarah was educated at home and kept a pocket diary in her girlhood.

MS: four pocket diaries LPL, MS 8756–9 (MS span: 1792–7).

Mrs Abigail Gawthern
(née Frost), Nottingham (1757–1822) The daughter of a Nottingham grocer and tallow-chandler, who in 1783 married a white-lead manufacturer, her cousin Francis Gawthern. They had four children, the two youngest of whom died before the age of three. After her husband's death in 1792, Mrs Gawthern managed the business until her son's majority in 1807. She was registered as a white-lead manufacturer in a Nottingham directory for
c.
1793. She also managed considerable properties in Nottingham and the surrounding countryside, inheriting yet more from her parents in 1801. Mrs Gawthern's circle incorporated both Nottingham manufacturers and Nottinghamshire gentry. Her only surviving daughter Anna married Captain William Sleight of the 100th Regiment of Foot in 1812 in London. Abigail's son Francis abandoned the lead works a year after his majority. In 1812 he married his cousin Mary Frances Marriott of Askham, Yorkshire.

Source: A. Henstock (ed.), ‘The Diary of Abigail Gawthern of Nottingham, 1751–1810’,
Thornton Society Record Series
, 33 (MS span: 1751–1810).

Mrs Anna Larpent
(née Porter), London (1758–?1829)

This woman is far and away the most cosmopolitan figure in this study. The daughter of Sir James Porter, a British diplomat, and a minor European aristocrat, she was born in Pera, Turkey. In 1782 she married the widower John Larpent, who was seventeen years her senior. He was a successful civil servant, and throughout the marriage was the Inspector of Plays in the Office of the Lord Chamberlain. It is clear that Anna Larpent collaborated with her husband on the collection, indexing and censoring of submitted plays. She had sole responsibility for the censorship of Italian opera since she was fluent in the language (as well as French) while her husband was not. Mrs Larpent brought up two children of her own and one stepson. She was a pious, serious-minded Anglican, who was active in good works from soup kitchens to Sunday schools in the early nineteenth century.

MS: HL, HM 31201,
XVII
, 1773–87, Anna Margaretta Larpent's Methodized Journal; HM 31201, Mrs Larpent's Diary,
I
, 1790–95,
III
, 1799–1800,
VIII
, 1810–13,
XI
, 1820–21. See also G. Larpent,
Turkey its History and Progress from the journals and Correspondence of Sir James Porter
… (1851),
I
, pp. 3–14; L. W. Conolly,
The Censorship of English Drama
(San Marino, Ca., 1976), pp. 4–7,
34–5, 42–5, 81, 109–13, 154–9; Conolly, ‘Censor's Wife at the Theatre’; Brewer, ‘Reconstructing the Reader’ (MS span: 1773–1821).

Beatrix Lister
of Marshfield, Settle, Yorkshire (b. 1749)

Only surviving daughter of Thomas Lister of Gisburn Park (1723–61), MP for Clitheroe, and Beatrix Hulton (1723–74). Sister to Thomas Lister (1752–1826), the future Baron Ribblesdale, MP for Clitheroe 1773–90, and High Sheriff for Yorkshire in 1795. She had a reputation for accomplished elegance, which reached the pages of the
Gentleman's Magazine
, 65 (1795), p. 82. In 1777 she married John Parker of Browsholme (1749–97), and thereby became niece by marriage to Elizabeth Shackleton. John Parker was MP for Clitheroe 1780–82 (he resigned his seat to settle a dispute between the Lister and Curzon factions) and bow bearer of Bowland Forest in the Duchy of Lancaster 1794–7. His obituary of 1797 drew attention to his rententive memory and ‘the hereditary characteristick of Browsholm – a boundless hospitality’, see
Gentleman's Magazine
, 67 (1797), p. 612. They set up married life at Beatrix's elegant villa, Marshfield House in Settle, where she remained until 1811. She bore eight children between 1779 and 1790, six of whom survived infancy. The Parker and Lister families had long been close social and political allies, they reputedly shared Jacobite sympathies and together dominated the borough of Clitheroe. Elizabeth Shackleton was a regular visitor to Gisburn Park throughout her lifetime; the Listers were regular consumers of the famous Alkincoats rabies medicine; Beatrix's uncle Nathaniel Lister (MP for Clitheroe 1761–73) kept Elizabeth supplied with franks (a form of free postage enjoyed by MPs) for years; and her diary records that she maintained a correspondence with Beatrix Lister and her mother, although none of these letters has survived. However, the strong links between Browsholme and Gisburn Park were jeopardized in 1789. In that year, the families quarrelled over Thomas Lister's marriage to an Irish heiress, Rebecca Fielding. Beatrix reputedly slighted her sister-in-law and thereby precipitated ‘the Parker Scandal’. Like Elizabeth Shackleton, the Parkers of Marshfield and the Listers of Gisburn were customers of Gillows of Lancaster.

MS: YAS, MD 335/95 (1768–75), letters from Mrs Beatrix Lister and Miss Beatrix Lister, Marshfield, to Thomas Lister, Brasenose College, Oxford, and London; YAS, MD 335/80, letters concerning ‘the Parker Scandal’; LRO, DDB/74/6 (n.d.), ‘Poem given me by Mrs Parker of Marshfield’. Consider also the letters Beatrix wrote to her cousin by marriage, Thomas Parker of Alkincoats, LRO, DDB/72/ 859, 916, 930, 937, 951. For furniture accounts, see YAS, MD 335/11 (17) (MS span: 1786–9).

Betty Parker
(née Parker) of Newton (1757–1808)

Betty was the only daughter of Edward Parker of Newton Hall, Co. York, and Elizabeth Goulbourne of Manchester. Betty was the heiress of John Goulbourne of Manchester. She married Thomas Parker of Alkincoats in Manchester in June 1779 and bore him at least seven children, of whom five survived childhood. She suffered at least one miscarriage.

MS: two of her letters survive, one in the Whitaker collection, the other in the
Parker collection among her husband's papers, see respectively LRO, DDWh/4/18, and LRO, DDB/72/839 (MS span:
c.
1790–93).

Eliza Parker
of Alkincoats, Colne, Lancashire (1781–1842)

Only surviving daughter of Thomas and Betty Parker of Alkincoats and Newton. Sister of Edward Parker of Selby. She married Captain John Atherton of the 6th Foot Regiment. In her twenties, in Preston, she knew and discussed many of the individuals in the Whitaker network, e.g. the Horrockses, Addisons and St Clares. MS: ten letters LRO, DDB/72/683–92 (MS span: 1796–1813).