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

In my last article I promised a translation of the Latin inscription of the very fine marble monument on the north wall near the back of the nave which commemorates Daniel and Barbara Baker:

This monument both to herself and to her meritorious husband Daniel Baker (whose family’s ancient roots originate in the county of Kent) was placed here at the instruction of [his wife] Martha of the Mellish family, from Bligh in the county of Nottingham.

After 41 years lived generously and honourably in this parish with his most gentle spouse he departed this life in the year 1727.

His wife, being a fine and visible exemplar of piety towards God and of love towards her family, survived until the year 1753.
In the course of a happy marriage she was delivered of nine sons and eight daughters four of whom were snatched from her at a tender age; the rest attaining long life of no less distinction than that of their parents.

By one of those unpredictable turns of fortune that characterise human affairs [it fell to] the only surviving male heir and scion of that numerous issue John Baker Holroyd of Sheffield Place in the County of Sussex to fulfil the instructions of his grandmother by erecting this monument in the year 1770.

Jean Rollason

This translation was worked on both by Earl Howe and by my good friend, Jean Rollason, who died suddenly last month. She had read Latin and Greek at London University, taught them at Wycombe Abbey, and so was well-qualified and always willing to contribute precision and polish to my always erroneous drafts. She also took part in several historical presentations in the church, most recently in the one on William Penn the Quaker for the Octocentenary. After a moving funeral service she was laid to rest with her husband in the graveyard. She is a great loss.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.31, November 2013

Daniel Baker’s leather-covered diary brings him and his family vividly to life. He was a deeply religious man with an unshakeable and enviable faith in God and he kept a diary to record the times when he had no doubt that he had 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”.

The diary records many such deliverances, including when two of his children nearly fell out of an attic window; when his coachman was drunk and fell off the coach, the horses bolted and Daniel Baker had to leap out leaving his wife inside; when his kitchen chimney caught fire. They are too long to repeat here, but the following brief accounts give a flavour of the diary:

Horse & rider stuck in the mire
– “On the 8th of June 1691 I & my Mare fell in a deep Slough, no one being with me & for some time stuck so deep in the stiff mire that neither I nor my Mare could gett out; at last it pleased God to bring mee out without any help from man for which great and distinguishing Mercy I desire to Bless His Holy Name”.

Son choked by a copper farthing
– “My Dear Daniel that is living had liked to have been choked with a copper farthing (which stuck in his throat) on October 3d 1690.
The Lord be praised for this signal and extraordinary Mercy in delivering my child from that imminent danger he was then in; & for suffering him to bring it up of his Accord which was reckoned next to Miracle by all them that heard of it.”

Dragged by his stirrup across the Common
– “In March 1705. I had a very fiery bay guelding; & as I was all alone rideing him in the Common. I light just to go into a field of Mr Shrimpton’s to see some lambs I had there, which I hyrd the keeping for; & as I was getting up again on my horses back he flounced and flung mee; and my foot was in the stirrop, & I down upon my back. and could hardly gett my leg out of the same: but thro’ much difficulty at last I did it: and away he did run; and none were able to catch him. & twas gods great mercy, I had not been killed: The Lord be Praised for this deliverance allso: and my wife was at this very time in the straw, & then lay in of her 15th child; & what sad news must it have been to her: to have heard of my being killed….”

(Note: despite being almost continually in labour with 15 children in 18 years, his wife lived to the age of 85, long outliving her husband).

A great miry hole
– “Coming from London in a very dark night all alone and my horse fell in a great miry hole”.

A runaway horse
– “and run over a great dog which flung both mee and my horse down in a great cart rack or hole in which there was water and killed the dogg… but I am sensible I deserved it… for I had then drunk too much wine with my friends.”

© Miles Green March, Penn Parish Newsletter No.33, 2014
Photograph courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS

Earlier articles have examined the information to be found from the two impressive Baker family monuments on the wall of the nave, but there are many affectionate and interesting family letters in the archives in Aylesbury, reporting on their busy social life, and the problems of the day.

For instance, this charming letter from Sarah at 16 to her 21 year-old brother John in London

Penny Post was a century away. Letters went then
via Postmaster Inn Keepers along a few post roads

“March ye 8th the Clock past Seven 1711
Dear Brother,
Lest you should think I have forgot you quite I am resolved now to you I’ll write tho’ all I have to say is that I’me well knowing no more at present for to tell being in haste I cannot fill my paper but am your humble servant Sarah Baker Accept my Service as it is your Due
I shall expect an answer soon from you.”             

To which John replied with a long poem which ends:

“Therefore when you write again, Write humble prose, Which greater love, tho less invention shows.”

A fierce patriotism is evident in a letter from 21 year old Ann Baker to the same brother, John, in 1707.

“We are all here concerned at the news of the invasion by the pretended Prince of Wales, but our Country is so well affected to her majesty and bear so mortall a hatred to the French that they will spend the last drop of their blood in defence of their Queen and religion rather than tamely yield to the usurper. I hope God will protect her sacred majesty and give success to her armies and bring all our enemies to destruction.”

And from John Baker in 1716:

“We have a current report here that the Pretender is landed in Scotland….Stocks are falling upon this report. The Streets are so very bad in London that we have severall Coaches overturned every day and severall full of ladies! by which means we have an opportunity of helping them out and seeing the Colour their stockings are of. We have all passed the Thames from Westminster to Lambeth on foot, it is soe cold that I can scarce hold my Pen.”

In a letter from Daniel Baker to Lord Fermanagh, in 1723, we hear him deploring a problem very familiar to all of us today.

“Many extravagant Persons make such vast falls of timber and such utter destitution among their woods, that in time we shall have but little or none left in the Kingdom.”

Agreements made in 1740 with Sir Nathaniel Curzon, as lord of the Manor of Penn, and, in 1745, with Sir Francis Dashwood as lord of the Manor of Bassetsbury in Chepping Wycombe, allowed the Bakers to plant trees on the common or ‘waste’ in front of their house, anywhere between Potters Cross and what is now the gate to Rayners School, as well as 200 yards west across the common to ‘the gravel pits’. This is likely to have been when the elm trees were first planted that gave Elm Road its name. Some of them survived until struck down by Dutch Elm disease in 1977. The agreements also allowed the Bakers to stock with fish, ‘that part of Pond called Great Widmore Pond adjacent to the said Mansion House’ and an earlier agreement, in 1726, spoke of ‘Carp, Tench or other Fish’.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.32,  January 2014
Photographs courtesy: Eddie Morton ARPS

Dorothy Holroyd

The inscription on the marble monument on the wall of the nave at the back of the church tells us that Daniel Baker died in 1727 (Old Style) after 41 years in the parish, and Martha Baker died in 1753, aged 85, having delivered no less than 17 children – nine sons and eight daughters. Four of her surviving sons inherited the estate in turn, but none had any children and the estate eventually passed via their youngest daughter, Dorothy Holroyd (portrait), to her son, John Baker Holroyd, who, as the inscription tells us, put up the monument in 1770 to fulfill the instructions of his grandmother, Martha Baker.

John Baker Holroyd was eventually to become Earl of Sheffield, a government minister and Privy Councillor. He was 33 when he inherited the Baker estate in 1768 and added their name to his own. He sold the house the following year and bought Sheffield Place is Sussex. There was a grand sale of all the contents of the house for which the sale catalogue survives and is well worth a closer look, but first let us consider our own important legacy from the Baker family’s presence in Penn for the best part of a century.

In 1726, Daniel Baker obtained an agreement from the lord of Bassetsbury Manor to ‘rail and beautify’ the common by ‘planting elm or other trees in Walks, Rows, Knolls or Clumps’ on the ‘Wast Ground of Tylering Green’ – in effect to create a park in front of the mansion house. Similar agreements in 1740 and 1745 with the manors of first Penn then Bassetsbury, allowed his son to plant trees extending as far as ‘Potters Lane Bottom‘; and up beyond ‘Great Widmore Pond’, which he was allowed to stock with ‘Carp, Tench or other Fish’.

The 1761 Rocque map shows four rows of trees in front of the house, but they stop far short of Potters Cross, probably because the first enclosure on the Front Common had already been made by the future owner of the Old Bell House in 1746. The elm trees which gave Elm Road its name were finally cut down in 1977. It was only these agreements for the benefit of the mansion house, which the Bakers often called ‘Tylers Green House‘, that had prevented encroachment and building on the common opposite and so bequeathed to us our open common and pond as well as the elm trees.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.34, March 2014
Photographs courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS