A previous article focussed on the large marble monument to Viscount Curzon (1730-1820) by Sir Francis Chantrey. This next monument to his daughter-in-law is also by Chantrey although much smaller. It was described by a contemporary as ‘chaste and elegant’.

Sophia Charlotte Howe was the eldest of three daughters of Admiral Earl Howe. He had no sons and she was allowed to inherit his earlier barony and so became Baroness Howe in her own right.   She married Viscount Curzon’s eldest son Penn Assheton Curzon in 1787 and there are two portraits of her in Penn House by J.W. Walker.

She had two sons and two daughters of whom three died early, aged 3 months, 16 and 29.   Only one son lived on into old age and he became Earl Howe. He was named Richard William Penn and she called him Penn.

A few years ago a small leather-covered notebook was given to me with Memorandums for my dear Penn scratched faintly on the cover. It had been kept by Baroness Howe between 1798 when her husband died, until 1813 when Penn, by then her only surviving son, left her guardianship.   She described it as ‘a kind of journal of every transaction of any moment in which I had been engaged’ on account of the properties of her two young sons.

There are several interesting references to properties in Penn, Penn Street and Holmer Green where she seems to have bought any significant properties which came on the market. Property was a good investment with inheritance tax at only 2½%. Those easily identifiable were:

French School – In 1801, £6,900 for the ‘large building now let to Government for a French School situated at Tylers’ Green in the Parish of Penn’ and she noted that ‘I bought it solely for the accommodation in future of my son.’

Beacon Hill – In 1807, £1,450 for ‘an Estate & Wood situated on the Beacon Hill at Penn’. This was a house and 27 acres where Thatchers Field now stands.   I have a map of the estate with field names.

Pauls Hill – In 1808, £635 for several cottages etc at Penn Church. These must be the cottages in Pauls Hill.

Tylers Green – In 1809, £350 for four cottages & a Blacksmith’s shop at Tylers’ Green. This could be at French Meadow on Elm Road.

The last full entry is a poignant one, ‘Mr Steele signed the Deed in Chancery taking from me the care of both my dear Penn’s Person & his Property.’

She married again in 1812 to Jonathan Wathen Phipps, oculist to George III.  In 1814 he changed his name to Waller and inherited his maternal grand-father’s estates. He was knighted in 1832 and became Sir Jonathan Wathen Waller. The semi-circular stained glass window in the chancel comes from that marriage, and  may have come from their house or chapel.   The window commemorates the battle of Agincourt 1415, where the Duc d’Orleans was captured by Richard Waller. It includes small panels of 16th century Flemish glass and the Howe crest.

Baroness Sophia Charlotte Howe died in 1835 and is buried with Viscount Curzon at Penn.

Transcribed from The Bucks Gazette and Bedford Chronicle Saturday December 12^th, 1835

“The remains of the late Baroness Howe, Lady of Sir Wathen Waller, will be removed for interment this day, from Pope’s Villa, Twickenham, to the family mausoleum at Penn, near Beaconsfield. Her ladyship’s demise was very sudden, as express was sent off to her son, Earl Howe, at Gopsal Hall, in Leicestershire, but three hours before he arrived the Baroness had breathed her last. Her Ladyship was in her 73^rd year. Earl Howe and his three eldest sons remain at Penn House to attend the funeral.”

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter, No.3, April 2008
Photographs © courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS and Micheal G Hardy (Stained Glass panel)

We have so far looked at two monuments by Sir Francis Chantrey (1781-1841), deemed to have been the greatest English sculptor of his generation – the large and finely detailed marbled carving to Viscount Curzon (1730-1820) on the north wall of the chancel and the ‘chaste & elegant’ one to his daughter in law Baroness Howe (1761-1835) on the opposite wall.

There is a third monument by Chantrey on the west wall of the chancel overlooking the choir stalls. It is to the 1st Countess Howe (1800-1836). She was the Lady Harriet Georgiana Brudenell, the second of eight daughters of the Earl of Cardigan and it was her only brother who led the Charge of the Light Brigade at Balaclava in 1854. She was only 20 years old when she married the Hon. Richard Curzon on 19 March 1820, just two days before his grandfather, Viscount Curzon, died and he inherited the viscountcy. A year later he took the additional name of Howe by Royal Licence and at only 24 was created Earl Howe, the title first held by his maternal grandfather, Admiral Howe.

The two miniatures illustrated are both from Penn House. The first almost certainly dates from the year of her marriage. It was painted by Mrs Anne Mee, who had completed an important commission for George IV in 1814 to paint a series of miniature portraits of fashionable ladies. Her surname is incorrectly shown on the frame as Brudenell-Bruce.

The second miniature was painted c.1823, showing her with her eldest son George Augustus Frederick Louis, later 2nd Earl Howe. She had 10 children by the time she died aged only 36, after what her monument describes as ‘a long and distressing illness’. Her seven boys and three girls all survived into middle or old age with one surviving until 1914. Her eldest daughter married the Duke of Beaufort and her second the Earl of Westmorland.

Queen Adelaide thought she was a strange woman, always ‘saying and doing just what came into her head’, and this view is supported by an anecdote in the Queen’s biography (Queen Adelaide by Mary Hopkirk, Albermarle Press 1946) to which Earl Howe alerted me. She and her husband were traveling by carriage with the King and Queen (King William IV and QueenAdelaide to whom Earl Howe was Lord Chamberlain) on a particularly hot day. Without warning, Lady Howe “first rested her leg on her husband’s knee (to his great confusion) and then stuck it out of the window”.

Nevertheless, her husband seems to have been very fond of her because it was in memory of his young countess that Earl Howe built the first girls’ school in the parish in 1839. It was called a Girls’ Working School and clothed and educated about 36 girls paid for by him with contributions from Queen Adelaide and by several of the principal inhabitants of the parish.

The school-room was the first half of what is now the main church hall and there was a ‘comfortable residence for the Mistress’. The school was designed by Edward Blore (1787-1879), who later designed the front of Buckingham Palace for Queen Victoria.

The Countess’s initials ‘HGH’ and coronet are displayed on the gable and her hatchment hangs in the nave of the church.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter, No.3, June 2008
Photographs courtesy Eddie Morton, ARPS

Addendum: ‘Penn Church School’
Boys joined the girls not long after their school at Church Knoll was closed in 1875, and the building was extended in 1910, to a design by Harrison-Townsend.  The school closed in 1949 for lack of pupils. Miles Green, ‘Mansions and Mud Houses’, 2007, p12.

James Knollis was from Burford in Oxfordshire. He had an Oxford MA and BD, and was a Fellow of Lincoln College from 1795-1815. Besides being resident Vicar of Penn from 1823, he was also perpetual curate of Maidenhead from 1819 until his death. He straightaway built the Old Vicarage for the very considerable sum of £1,400, at his own expense, in 1825, noting that it had ‘Ground floor, 4 rooms, 2 kitchens, 2 pantries; on first floor, 6 bed chambers, 2 dressing rooms and a water closet.’
He also noted that the churchyard had been fenced-in with rails at the charge of the parishioners.

‘The Old Vicarage’
See also ‘A secret passage’

The excitement of two visits by King William and Queen Adelaide, in 1833 and 1835, is recorded in two long letters from his wife, Frances. In her first letter, she records that they received the King and Queen at the Old Vicarage with Earl Howe and his wife. They remained only a short time in the Drawing Room and were then accompanied to the Church for the christening of Adelaide Ida, the Howe’s eldest daughter. After a visit to The Knoll, to admire the view towards Windsor, The King and Queen and Mr Knollis were later entertained to dinner at Penn House.

In 1845, Knollis had to surrender his Penn Street parishioners to Earl Howe’s desire for a new church there, and so when, in 1852, Philip Rose was looking for more parishioners to justify his proposal to build St Margaret’s Church, James Knollis was not in the least inclined to see the process repeated and understandably dug in his toes at the prospect of ceding any more of Penn parish, despite pressure from Earl Howe. Eventually, the beleaguered Mr Knollis offered up only “the 51 households on the Hill” i.e. from Potters Cross up Dog Hill. The final boundaries were not agreed until after his death.

Casimir de Genouillac, who was one of the boys at the French School in Penn, left the school in 1808, aged 17, with only 12 guineas to see him on his way, and eked out a living as a teacher in small schools around Penn. He had to endure the widespread, indiscriminating and sometimes violent hatred of all things French and Catholic. “No Jews, no wooden shoes, no Popery” was a popular cry of the day. He was also permanently in debt and at times despaired for his future, but eventually found a more agreeable post, at a small school near Newbury, under the Rev. James Knollis who became a good friend, long before he was to become Vicar of Penn.

In 1814, Napoleon was exiled to Elba and Casimir was at last able to return to France. Not long after his return, James Knollis wrote to Casimir to report that ‘As to the peace, there were great rejoicings everywhere and there was plum pudding at Newbury drawn by oxen and boiled by steam, 28 feet long.’ He wrote again the following year after Waterloo, ‘Let us now pray that the two finest nations in the world may not be permitted to ruin first each other, and ultimately themselves.’ Truly glad will I be to see you – and whenever you like to come over and can do so – let this be your invitation!‘

His widow Frances Knollis, lived in The Knoll behind the church, for 20 years after he died.

© Miles Green,Penn Parish Newsletter No.49, March 2017
Photographs courtesy of Eddie Morton ARPS

We have already noted that In 1845, the Revd James Knollis had to surrender parishioners to allow Earl Howe’s desire for a new church at Penn Street, and again, in 1852, when Philip Rose was looking for more Penn parishioners to justify his proposal to build St Margaret’s Church. The reason for all this church-building was a widespread view that the Anglican church was in a bad way. Churches were often in a poor state of repair and held staid Prayer Book services, with few hymns, long theological sermons and seating arrangements with pew rents which reflected a rigid social pecking order.

One of the corbels supporting the nave roof in Penn Church, dating from c.1400. It is a medieval Bishop thought to be St Hugh of Lincoln. Photograph by Eddie Morton. St Hugh was Bishop 1186­1200. A French nobleman, he was an exemplary bishop and is the Patron Saint of the sick, shoemakers, and swans.

The second Sir Philip Rose, recalling his boyhood in the 1840s, remembered Penn Church, “It was a dreary old Church in those days with richly cobwebbed windows in the corners of which huge spiders lurked and a Service as dreary as the Church, the spiders being much more interesting than the sermons:’ He also remembered the church in London to which they used to go. ” Twice every Sunday to Church ….. And woe betide any servant who did not put in an appearance …. .It was bad for any of us who did not remember the text of the long sermon when we got home. No music, toys or games were allowed on Sunday, and cards were looked upon as the ‘devil’s plaything’, and were under no circumstances to be allowed in the house.”

St. Hugh

Sir George Grove, Editor of the Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and the first director of the Royal College of Music from its foundation in 1883, whose father came from Penn, remembered the Church of England in 1830 as having been, “a mass of deadness and stiff dullness. The old Wesleyan Evangelical movement had died down and the clergy were a body without a soul”.

Inspired by the Oxford Movement, the Anglican Church instituted radical reforms. The diocese of Lincoln, which had stretched unchanged from the Humber to the Thames, was split up and henceforth Penn was to come under the Bishop of Oxford. 106 churches were built in the new diocese of Oxford during the time of the first new Bishop, Samuel Wilberforce, between 1845 and 1869, including those at Tylers Green, Penn Street and Hazlemere. Churches all over the country were encouraged to restore the medieval arrangements of the Decorated period (c.1280-1380). A good deal of unnecessary damage was done to many old churches and Penn Church did not escape, as we shall see when the next Vicar arrives in 1860.

Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.51, September 2017

The stained glass window in the tower also depicts St Hugh and sits in the lancet window in the tower, of c.1325 in memory of a parishioner who died in 1946. Photograph by Michael G. Hardy from the ‘Stained Glass of Buckinghamshire Churches‘ website.

Sir George Grove

I stayed for a Sunday lately at Penn, the home of my ancestors for many generations.  A little Buckinghamshire village which has been practically unchanged for the last two hundred years. Penn stands in a triangle between Beaconsfield, Amersham and High Wycombe; and as its name implies, it is the highest land in that part of the county. One part of it is still called Beacon Hill; and the fires anciently lighted thereon are said to have been visible at sea. It is the height that has been its safeguard against innovation. The railway station is Loudwater; and from that it is a steepish gradient of some three miles to the village.

Penn consists of a street about half a mile long, a school, a chapel, a few houses and cottages on each side, and, at the further or eastern end, the Church, the blacksmith’s shop and the Institute, which is almost the only modern thing in the place. On either side of the street are some of most delightful fields in England, and thence you may have unrivalled views.

It was in the Church that I found my greatest pleasure. The chancel was burned down many years ago¹, and was rebuilt (apparently on its ample foundations) in brick, without any attempt at architecture; but the nave, with a south aisle, two large roomy porches and a low tower, massive with large spreading buttresses, all of the fourteenth century at latest, remain pretty much as they always were. The churchyard is large, with many graves, and most of them turfy hillocks. The vicar is aged², and somewhat feeble in voice; but he is quite in character with the whole scene. He reads the lesson like a scholar and a gentleman with most appropriate delivery. It was a pleasure to listen to him. His sermon too! — I reflected how differently I would have listened to it thirty or even twenty years ago, when I had more enthusiasm and less patience and thought more of my own ideas than the feelings of others. This is a confession, but it may not be without its use. I now heard and was satisfied with good sound sense and quiet expression, where before I should have wanted originality and emphasis.

But it was the prayers that touched me the most; for a very different thing it is to say your prayers in an old Church, its walls seeming to enclose an atmosphere of the past, and in a modern one built a quarter of a century ago. In the old Church the presence of our forefathers seems to linger, and the the voice of their supplications to be not quite stilled. The very walls seem to be concious of the oft-repeated ritual and to be sanctified by it. Bits of old tracery peep out like archaic words and phrases in the liturgy. Even the change in style and of the wording on the monuments are like the changes in the Prayer book and in harmony wih them.

The south aisle of my old Church was built later than the rest, and the two clerestory windows which it covers, and which once lighted the nave, still remain there, above the plain honest arches, without their glass, but otherwise sharp and firm, exactly as they were at first.

Zeigler painting 1850, showing old box pews

I sat in a large pew — square with very narrow seats , and with faded maroon curtains round it, which, if I were the squire, I think I should remove. Opposite, in the end wall of the aisle, was a monument, a vase of oval Roman form, delicately sculptured in gray marble, and setting forth that it was in memory of “Roger Mather³, clerk, eleven years vicar of this parish, to whom Asheton Curzon, Esq., was pupil, patron and friend.” How characteristic! The form of the monument, the character of the letters, the turn of the inscription, all spoke plainly of the eighteenth century.

Curzon was one of the great people of the place, and he and Mather, like Walpole and Gray, probably travelled in Italy togther. It is not “whose pupil, patron, friend” — that would have imported a certain familiarity into the phrase; but “to whom Asheton Curzon, Esq.,” etc., this giving all due pre-eminence to the great man! The music was unpretending and good, and the lovely hymn, “The Saints of God”, must have sunk into many a heart beside my own. At such times those whom one has lost, and those whom one is about to lose, take entire possession of the mind, and lift it into another and higher sphere.

After Church we walked into the parsonage and looked at the grand old yew tree, which I have seen on more than one spring smoke like an altar, and which first taught me the meaning of Tennyson’s lines:

O brother, I have seen this yew tree smoke.
Spring after spring, for half a hundred years

On one occasion the old clerk of Penn Church was ill, and the vicar brought in his stable-man to collect the offertory on a sacrament Sunday. The man did not know his way about the Church, and at first missed the square pew of which I spoke. Going back, he returned with the occupant’s half-crown, but could not make the parson understand where he had got it; till at last, pointing with his thumb over his shoulder, he whispered, “From the gentleman in the loose box, sir”.

The Bucks Herald, Saturday, October 2, 1886 [From the St. James’ Gazette]

First published in St James’s Gazette on 27 Sep 1886, written by Sir George Grove who inherited his older brother Thomas’ Penn estate in 1897 (see Mansions and mudhouses p.16), and it was apparently repeated in Sir George’s 1897 Reminiscences.  He wrote it after a visit to his brother, noting it was “so spoiled by the editor that I hardly care to own it”, but a very full biography by Charles L. Graves, The Life of Sir George Grove  (1903), describes the article as ‘one of the most charming pieces ever written by Grove, recapturing much of the  spirit of Addison, anecdotal, and touched with a sense of sadness over a lost world and forsaken ideals.’ 

Sir George Grove (13 August 1820 – 28 May 1900) was a member of the Grove family who lived at Watercraft and Stonehouse in Church Road, Penn. Their name is re­corded in the earliest tax return of 1332. He inherited the Grove family estate in 1897 and his descendants held it until they sold up in 1953.  In 1883 he became the first director of the Royal College of Music and between 1878 and 1889 he compiled and published a magisterial four volume Dictionary of Music and Musicians which has been the standard reference work for the musical world ever since. It was an enormous achievement and has been updated many times. The most recent edition, just published and known as New Grove II, takes up 29 volumes and 25 million words.
Apart from his distinction as a musicologist he was also an archaeologist, lexicographer, educator and author.   Arthur Sullivan was a very close friend and was godfather to his third son Arthur, born in 1864. Arthur Sullivan is popularly supposed to have written “The Lost Chord” and “Onward Christian Soldiers” in the summerhouse of Watercroft. (Miles Green, 2001)

The next Vicar was John Grainger who was to be in office for 38 years. He had a Cambridge degree and was evidently interested in the history of his parish contributing an informative paper on the subject to Records of Bucks (Vol V, pp.271 et seq.). He presumably implemented many of the changes encouraged by the Oxford Movement, designed to shake the Church of England out of what was perceived to be its 18th-century lethargy. They advocated brighter and livelier services, elaborate ritual, vestments, surplices, choirs, crosses and candlesticks, lecterns and even incense, few of which had been seen since the Reformation three centuries earlier. Elsewhere, these changes were often accompanied by bitter controversy and accusations of popery. In some parts of the country, preaching in a surplice or having a cross and candlesticks on the altar were enough to start a riot. Penn was never so extreme and the parish register records the wearing of a surplice as early as 1707 and the gift of a brass branch candlestick in 1749.

HB Zeigler painting, of interior ca.1850

Hymns Ancient and Modern were first published in 1861, replacing metrical psalms announced by the parish clerk in many churches. It was often at this stage that organs were introduced to replace village musicians in the gallery and the earliest surviving churchwardens’ accounts for Penn, which run from 1857, show that an organ had already been installed by 1859, standing at the west end of the nave. It was worked by bellows and an annual payment was made for ‘organ blowing’.

We are on firmer ground in recording the structural changes introduced by the new Vicar, again inspired by the Oxford movement with the aim of restoring the appearance and arrangements of the church to their ideal of the medieval Decorated period (c.1280-1380). The new Vicar recorded in 1863 that ‘the interior was to a certain extent restored’, and listed the changes that had been made. Fortunately, our mainly 14th century nave and tower were seen as ‘correct’, but significant changes were made.

• The 18th century public gallery, which had been put up on the west wall of the nave by public subscription in 1733, was removed.
• The small choir gallery over the south door, put up in 1703, was removed. It had been paid for by the enthusiastic band of young men with their musical instruments, ‘that had learned to sing psalms’. We know that Sir George Grove’s father had had played the hautboy* in Penn church as a youth in the 1780s and 90s , but the gallery was no longer needed with an organ.
• The two-storey medieval south porch, with its side walls arched across the south aisle, which had provided the headroom for the choir gallery, was taken down. Judging by the ‘modern’ smoothness of the plaster, this removal resulted in a partial collapse of the central arch of the south aisle below the central clerestory window.
• The three–decker pulpit and any remaining covered private pews for the gentry families, some 7 ½ foot high, blocking both the central aisle of the nave and the chancel itself, which were noted in the 1637 Visitation, were removed.
• The east wall of the chancel, which had been completely rebuilt in brick with a new east window in the 1730s, was rebuilt with the knapped black flints fashionable at the time, and a more suitably Gothic east window was installed.

* A hautboy was an older form of oboe, often played with violin and bassoon

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.52, October 2017.
Photograph courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS