There is an impressive monument on the east wall of the north transept of Kedleston  Church on the Curzon estate in Derbyshire, erected, according to the inscription, in 1762, by his wife Mary, to a design by Robert Adam. He was the second son of the 2nd Baronet and Sarah Penn and was born in Penn and went to school at Berkhamsted. He unexpectedly inherited the baronetcy in 1727 when his elder brother was thrown from his horse whilst hunting. He also inherited the Penn Manor and proprietorship of Penn Church when his uncle, Roger Penn, died in 1731.

The figures of Sir Nathaniel, his wife and their two sons were carved by John Michael Rysbrack. The inscription records that Sir Nathaniel practiced as a Common lawyer until he was 40 and was also an MP for 30 years. He had three sons, John who died as an infant and is shown on the monument as an angel, Nathaniel, who inherited Kedleston and became Baron Scarsdale, and Assheton, who inherited the Penn estate, and was eventually to become Viscount Curzon.

The deceased is described in flattering terms as might be expected, but a very fond grandfather comes through with the words ‘The Sight of his Children’s Children having fill’d up the measure of all Earthly enjoyments…’. One of the boys is shown holding a book which has the inscription ‘The Holy Bible. The best legacy I can give you for therein are contain’d the Words of Eternal Life’. His wife Mary is described as the daughter of Sir Raphe Assheton Bart of Middleton in Lancashire.

John Michael Rysbrack (1694-1770) came to London from Antwerp in 1720 and soon became the unchallenged head of his profession until challenged by Peter Scheemakers. The Dictionary of British Sculptors records this Kedleston commission as his last monument before he retired.

We saw in a  previous article that Sir Nathaniel, the second son of Sarah Penn, was born in Penn and went to school at Berkhamsted. He unexpectedly inherited the baronetcy in 1727 when his elder brother was thrown from his horse whilst hunting. He also inherited the Penn Manor and proprietorship of Penn Church when his uncle, Roger Penn, died in 1731 and immediately set about ‘modernising’ the church he knew so well.

He may have been encouraged to do this by a fire in the chancel, because according to Sir George Grove, writing in 1886, the chancel was burned down and rebuilt ¹. There is no other record of the fire, but it does explain the very radical alterations made to the chancel by Sir Nathaniel, presumably in 1736, since this is the date above his private side door to the chancel.

Mid 17C drawing of the old Medieval chancel.

The medieval chancel was rebuilt, lengthened by about seven feet and widened to the south by three feet. This explains why you can see outside that the ridge of the chancel roof is offset from the ridge of the nave by about 1½ feet and why, inside, the new round-headed chancel arch is visibly off-centre from the nave roof above.

The three monuments to Roger Penn’s sisters, who were buried between 1719 and 1728, are not centred in the floor of the widened chancel and this is a strong indication that the chancel had not already been widened in medieval times. It would anyway have been very unusual for a medieval chancel to be widened on one side only since this would have put the chancel out of action for months which was not then acceptable. The normal practice was to build the new chancel around the old and so reduce the disruption to a minimum.

A new ‘painted’ east window, showing Christ with two disciples at Emmaus, (by “John Rowell of Wycomb“) was put in. The new chancel became a focus for the very fine 18th and 19th century Curzon and Howe family monuments, nearly all carved from white marble, which fill the chancel walls. We know what the chancel looked like when this reorganisation was completed because we have Henry Ziegler’s watercolour of c.1850 (of which there is a photograph on the cross aisle pillar in the nave). He was drawing master to Queen Adelaide and drew very accurately.

“John Rowell of Wycomb”, by Ambrose Heal, Reading Mercury, 9th July, 1932 (PDF opens in new window)

The window was replaced in 1865 and again in 1931 to accomodate changes in worship style.  See: Altar Arrangements in Penn Church, Part 4.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.40, November 2015 (revised 2021)
Original Photographs © courtesy of Eddie Morton ARPS
Edited composite photographs, Michael G Hardy.

The rebuilding of the chancel by the fourth Sir Nathaniel Curzon, the second son of Sarah Penn, described in the previous article, was only a part of radical and costly alterations to the structure of the church which he knew so well from his boyhood in Penn.

In 1733, the nave roof was raised again, by another three feet, and extended out over the south aisle. The arch between the nave and the chancel was widened, replacing the medieval lancet with the present round-headed chancel arch, and three towering gentry pews blocking the chancel were moved into the south aisle. This was a period when the sermon was all-important. A good view of the preacher was essential and because high box pews were the fashion for gentry families, the preacher had to be placed on the highest level of a three-decker pulpit in order to be visible. The Bible was read from the middle level and the Clerk led the responses for a largely illiterate congregation from the bottom level. Henry Ziegler’s watercolours of c.1850 showed us what it looked like.

There is still visible evidence on the wall of the nave of the gable roof of a 2-storey medieval porch at the centre of the south aisle which must have remained because there was still enough head room to retain the ‘Little Gallery over against the South door…. being built at the charges of the young men that had learned to sing Psalms’ in 1709.

The present single-storey south porch and vestry were added. In October 1733, the congregation paid for a second wooden gallery over the west door to the tower, to cater for an increasing population. It has since been replaced by the organ.

The newly extended roof over the south aisle had the big disadvantage of blocking the three high- level, southern clerestory windows of the nave, which left the nave in need of more light, particularly near the new public gallery. An 1819 drawing in the British Museum confirms that a larger three-light round-headed window replaced the original smaller 15th century window of which the displaced white clunch stones are still to be seen in the wall. The drawing also shows that the long two-light brick round-headed window, which is still there, was added at a lower level.

The fine medieval tie beams and arch braces of the roof, resting on their stone corbels, were left in place and the heightened roof of the nave allowed the whitewashed Doom, by losing only a few inches of its periphery, to be moved up to its present position in the roof space above the tie beam over the chancel arch. They must have known it was worth keeping.

The Lady Chapel was taken down to window-sill level and rebuilt in brick on the medieval base. There were probably lancet arches between the Lady Chapel and the chancel and the south aisle which were removed at this stage.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.41,  January 2016
Photograph © courtesy of Eddie  Morton

Thomas Penn, one of William Penn the Quaker’s sons, but not himself a Quaker, had a large vault constructed beneath the nave of Penn Church, and four of his children and one of his brother Richard’s, were laid to rest there between February 1753 and June 1766 ². The children’s ages ranged from 7 months to 12 years.
including twins who died six years apart
There was also an unrecorded sixth tiny coffin for a still-born child marked with a ‘P’. The Rev. John Middleton, Vicar of Penn from 1787 to 1808, first came to Penn in March 1766 as the curate to the non-resident Vicar and so would probably have buried the last of the children in the vault.

The ‘Quaker’ vault dug in 1753 (Brian Cullip, 1987)

The Revd Middleton reported in a letter dated August 9th 1802 that, ‘Mr Penn made this Vault altho’ he had no House or Land in the Parish. He wish’d much to make some purchases, but never could effect his purpose. He afterwards purchas’d a house and Estate at Stoke³  near Windsor, where his son at present resides, and where the family are now buried, a few only having been deposited in the Vault at Penn’.⁴  Only a church whose patron and vicar fully accepted the Quaker family’s claim to kinship with the Penn family of the parish, would have allowed him the privilege of such a major and disruptive undertaking.

Entrance to the vault in the north porch when it
as opened in 1987. Steps lead down to the vault.

The existence of the vault was remembered, but its whereabouts and entrance had been forgotten and was not re-discovered until March 1968 during work on the nave floor to cure dampness. The Vicar (Oscar Muspratt) had a hole drilled in the floor of the nave next to the stone memorial slab to William Penn, the first grandchild to be buried in 1753. He lowered a sort of periscope and having seen the vault the hole was enlarged and a camera lowered to take photographs. The entrance to the vault was found in the church porch, the vault entered and inscriptions on the six coffins examined.

Inscribed vault stone put in place in 1987 to mark
the entrance to the vault (Eddie Morton)

The vault was found to be of brick, 30ft x 10ft and 7ft high. It was then dry, but 21 years later, in Feb. 1987. when I visited the vault with Earl Howe, the church architect and verger, it had recently been up to 5 ft deep in water. The wood of the coffins, apart from the lids, had all perished leaving the lead lining.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.50, July 2017

William Penn and Quaker links with Penn Parish, p.25, Miles Green, 2009

Burial Registers and Coffin Inscriptions

WILLIAM son of Thomas Penn Esq.,
Proprietor of Pennsylvania, and Juliana his wife, Feb, 18: 1753
(age on coffin 7 months, date of death Feb, 14)

THOMAS Penn Esq, son of Thomas Penn Esq.,
Proprietor of Pennsylvania, and Juliana his wife, September 13: 1757
(age on coffin 2 years and one month, date of September 5th)

Master WILLIAM Penn, son of Richard Penn Esq.,
and Hannah his wife of the Parish of St. James, Westminster,
Buried Feb. 12: 1760.
(age on coffin 12 years and 8 months, date of death Feb.4)

Master WILLIAM Penn, son of Thomas Penn Esq.,
and Lady Juliana his wife, was buried April 30: 1760
(age on coffin 5 years 9 months and 6 days, date of April 24)

LOUISA HANNAH Penn daughter of the Honble Thomas Penn Esq.,
proprietor of Pennsylvania, June 15: 1766
(age on coffin 9 years 10 months and 19days, date of death June 10)

(unrecorded sixth tiny coffin for a still-born child marked with a ‘P’.)

There is a very fine marble memorial in the Lady Chapel of Penn Church to Roger Mather, who was Vicar of Penn for 11 years. The inscription reads, ‘Near this place lies the body of the late Reverend Roger Mather, Clerk eleven years Vicar of this parish, to whom Asheton Curzon Esqr. was Pupil, Patron and Friend. He died the first day of September MDCCLXVIII‘

Assheton Curzon (1730-1820), was Sir Nathaniel Curzon’s second son, a grandson of Sarah Penn. He was given the manor of Penn on marriage in 1756, and he was to hold the proprietorship of Penn church for over sixty years, later becoming Viscount Curzon.

The portrait below, by Arthur Devis (1712-87) was painted in c.1754. Assheton Curzon was then 24 and Roger Mather was 35. Mather was a Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford, a Doctor of Divinity and Oxford’s Public Orator for many years. Assheton Curzon also went to Brasenose where Roger Mather was Tutor to both him and his elder brother. In 1754 he was returned as MP for Clitheroe and he employed Mather to teach him the art of public speaking.

Just as his father’s generation had appointed their Berkhamsted School teacher, John Bennet, as Vicar of Penn, so Assheton Curzon, as soon as he became the Proprietor of Penn church, exercised the same patronage for Roger Mather, who already held the Rectorship of St Mary’s in Whitechapel. The Penn vacancy was held open for him for three years until he could take it up.

Arthur Devis, a Lancashire painter of the Tory squirearchy, was at the height of his popularity. He specialised in informal small-scale portraits in domestic surroundings, known as conversation pieces. The figures have a somewhat doll-like appearance which was very fashionable at the time. This portrait is very unusual in that it uses the idea of a spotlight focusing on the two actors on a stage thus emphasising the aspect of public speaking in which they were engaged.

The sculptor of the monument is regrettably not recorded. The photograph illustrates that it was originally placed on the wall near the centre of the Lady Chapel, a mark of great respect since many of the Penn and Curzon family were buried nearby. It was moved in 2000 to permit the new Millennium arrangements which we see today. I watched two expert Polish craftsmen dismantle it into six separate components and reassemble it further along the same wall. They thought that the grey marble, which weighed 400 lbs, was probably English ‘dove grey’, no longer quarried, and the white marble was Italian ‘Carrara’, from a great quarry near Rome used by Michelangelo.

Assheton Curzon with his Tutor, Revd Dr Roger Mather c. 1754, by Arthur Devis. The portrait was still owned by a descendant of Assheton Curzon when it was sold by Christie’s in 1981. This is a copy of a small colour print from Christie’s catalogue which is framed in Penn House.

© Miles Green,Penn Parish Newsletter No.37, December 2014
Photographs courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS

In 1716, Mary Assheton was 21, the second daughter of Sir Ralph Assheton of  Middleton, Lancashire, and was married that same year to 40 year-old Nathaniel Curzon, Sarah Penn’s second son. This portrait by Charles Jervaise was painted in1727 , and hangs in Penn House.  This was the year when her husband inherited
the baronetcy with the Kedleston and Penn estates after his elder brother was killed in a hunting accident.

Charles Jervaise (or Jervas) studied under Kneller and succeeded him as Court painter in 1723, although Kneller had a poor opinion of his talents. ‘Ah! Mein Gott, if his horse draws no better than he does, then he will never get to his journey’s end.’

The second portrait is of their two surviving children, Nathaniel and Assheton, in c.1738, by Andrea Soldi, which hangs in Kedleston Hall in Derbyshire. Nathaniel (standing) would have been about 12 years old and his brother Assheton, 9. Nathaniel, later 1st Baron Scarsdale, inherited the Kedleston estate and Assheton, later 1st Viscount Curzon, the Penn estate and with it the proprietorship of Penn Church. There is an identical portrait, save that the boys are not wearing ‘Vandyck’ dress, at Parham House in Sussex, the house of one of Assheton Curzon’s sons.

Andrea Soldi (1703-51) from Florence, had begun his career by painting British Turkey merchants in the Levant and it was on their recommendation that he came to England in 1736. He was an immediate success introducing a dash of skill, wit, colour and flair, but he wasted all his money on an extravagant lifestyle and in 1744, at the height of his career, he was imprisoned for debt and his career never really recovered.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.42, March 2016
Photograph © courtesy of Eddie Morton