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

Thomas Carter owes his appearance in the annals of Holy Trinity to the fact that he was the son-in-law of Daniel Baker & Martha Mellish, the owners of a grand, timber-framed medieval mansion in Penn next to Widmer Pond, known as Tylers Green House, which later became Edmund Burke’s French School.¹

He was a lawyer at Grays Inn in London and came from Wistow in Huntingdonshire².  He married Joanna Baker on 16 June 1737. The marriage was not encouraged by her family, but he was a 41-year-old widower and she was then ‘aged 30 years and a spinster’ and was determined that it should go ahead.  It took place in London without her parents’ knowledge, probably at the Ely House Chapel Holborn.

Thomas Carter’s Marriage Application. (Click to enlarge)

Sadly, the marriage was not a long one and Joanna was buried on the 9th of September 1749, noted in the Holy Trinity Penn register as the wife of Thomas Carter, Meanwhile, her younger sister, Dorothy, had married John Holroyd who was to become the Earl of Sheffield and add the name Baker when he inherited their Penn estate, which he sold in 1769.

The Carters had three daughters, Martha born 1739, Elizabeth born 1742, and Harriet born 1747.  The first two daughters never married and remained part of their father’s household for the rest of their lives.  Harriet married Sir Henry Clinton (1730-1795) in February 1767 at St Georges Hanover Square.  Henry Clinton was a very distinguished soldier who succeeded General William Howe as Commander-in Chief of the British Army during the American War of Independence.³

Harriet died, aged only 25, just eight days after giving birth to her fifth child.  Thomas and his two unmarried daughters then moved into the Clinton family home in Weybridge to take care of the children and where they seem to have lived out their lives.⁴  This accounts for the description of Thomas as ‘of Weybridge’ in the Penn Parish burial register.

All the Carters, except Harriet, were eventually buried in Penn, presumably because Joanna was already buried there, and so it is strange that she is not remembered on the Carter wall memorial. This might be explained by the fact that it was not put up for at least some 70 years after Joanna’s death, when her daughter Elizabeth died in 1817.  Harriet herself rests in the churchyard at Baumber⁵ Nr. Horncastle in Lincolnshire where the Clinton family came from.

This is not the end of Thomas Carter’s story, as his name appears on a “Centre for the Study of the legacies of British Slavery” website set up by University College London. In 1774, Carter purchased two £50 annuities on the lives of his daughter Martha and his grandchildren Augusta (1765-1852) and William Henry Clinton (1769-1846), the children of his youngest daughter, Harriet.  The annuities were secured on a property containing the enslaved people of John Abel Ward on Nevis in the Caribbean.

Later, Augusta was to elope with (and later marry) Henry Dawkins from a Jamaican slave owning family.  In the same year Thomas Carter was also party to a deed with 23 other purchasers of annuities, from Agustin Gwyn secured on the Mount Charles estate and Middleton Pen in Jamaica.

© Ron Saunders May 2022

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

We have seen that John Baker Holroyd, a Baker nephew who was eventually to become Earl of Sheffield, inherited the Baker estate in 1768. He sold the ‘mansion house’ the following year and there was a grand sale of all the contents of the house for which a sale catalogue recorded every room and its contents. This is ‘Tylers Green House’, which nearly 30 years later was to become the French School.

There were 5 rooms on the top floor of the house. The Bleu Garrett, the First Garrett, the Back Garrett, the Nursery Backwards and the Maids Garrett where they kept 32 buckets in case of fire.

The principal bedrooms were known by their colour or furnishings; the Red Damask Chamber which had earlier been the White Room; the Crimson Marine Chamber earlier the Walnut Tree Room; and the Wrought Work Chamber, earlier the Red Room. They all had 4-posters with goose feather mattresses, bolsters and pillows.

The main reception rooms were the Great Parlour, the small Drawing Room, the Dining Room which sat 12 at table, the Large Gallery which might have been the Music Room as there is mention of a spinet, and they played backgammon and draughts in the Little Parlour. In his Study, Daniel Baker had kept an extensive library of over 400 books ranging from religion and philosophy to astronomy (he had 4 telescopes) and gardening and the care of horses. A book called ‘The History of Highwaymen’, is a reminder of the dangers of travel and the many firearms kept in the house included travelling guns, blunderbusses and horseman’s pistols. He was a J.P. and there was a Justices Room where he would have dealt with the cases brought to him at the house, as was then the custom.

Evidence of the constant fear of fire is that there were 24 more buckets kept in the Great Hall which was later big enough to hold 60 French boys and a large assembly of nobility and gentry. There were 15 separate fire places. The Kitchen and Bakehouse were well equipped with Pewter the Best, Pewter the Worst, jacks and wheels, cranes, hooks and spit racks plus great boiling pots to cope with cooking for such a large family on an open fire. The gate bell rang in the Lower Brick Hall where 10 heraldic shields hung. The use of the particular description ‘brick’ suggests that much of the rest of the house was not, but was instead timber-framed with wattle and daub. The precautions against fire would seem to support this view.

Outside there was the Coach House where they kept the post chariot and a coach. The coachman lived above the stables. The Brew House was where the small beer and strong beer was brewed to supplement Daniel Baker’s extensive cellar. There was a ½ acre garden surrounded by a very high brick wall where they grew grapes. There is also mention of an Orchard, a ‘Necessary House’ built of lath and plaster, a large dog kennel, a summer house, a sundial and cucumber frames. The gardener’s equipment included tufting, docking and setting irons and three stone rollers. There was a water engine and a water cart.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.35, July 2014.
Photographs courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS

There is a fine wall monument to Elenor Curzon on the south wall of the chancel in Penn Church, put up by her nephew Assheton Curzon, which extols her piety, charity, friendship and affable nature.

Pevsner describes the monument as ‘Flat urn and oval medallion with profile portrait. Fine quality, unsigned’. It is about six feet high.

She was the youngest daughter of the 2nd Sir Nathaniel Curzon and Sarah Penn, baptized at Kedleston in November 1691, the same year they sold their house in Penn. She was the only one of their children who did not spend their early years in Penn. She died unmarried in 1754 and is buried in Kedleston church near her parents There is a portrait at Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire (No.29 in the Family Corridor) which I suggest is wrongly labelled ‘Elizabeth Curzon by M. Dahl’, and wrongly dated 1703. Elizabeth, according to the National Trust’s own booklet was only 15 or 16 in 1703 and died two years later. The portrait seem to me to be of a young woman in her 20s or 30s and looks very like Elizabeth’s younger sister Elenor as represented in profile at Penn? I make this suggestion having noted four other examples of mistakes in dates and attributions on the Kedleston portraits, but I would welcome other views.

The sculptor may well have used the Kedleston portrait as a model for the Penn profile since her monument was not put up in Penn until 1765, eleven years after she died and nearly fifty years after her youthful portrait. Michael Dahl (1659-1743) was a Swedish portrait painter who lived and worked in London for much of his life.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.36, September 2014
Photographs courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS

A miniature appeared for sale at Dukes Auctioneers’ Spring sale, 5^th April 2023, Lot 42:  The portrait is copied from painting which now hangs in Penn House.

“After MAURICE QUENTIN DE LA TOUR (1704-1788) A PORTRAIT MINIATURE OF CHARLES EDWARD STUART the half-length portrait of Prince Charles in an unmarked yellow metal mount, engraved to the reverse: ‘Portrait of Charles Edwd Stuart, sent by him to Mrs Eleanor Curzon, sister of Sir Nathaniel Curzon, aunt to 1st Lord Scarsdale, & 1st Viscount Curzon. This Lady assisted the Pretender at different times with considerable sums of money.’, in a hinged case, 3.5cm high Provenance: A private Dorset collection of miniatures.”

Updated 7/2/2023: Miles Green, F Howe