Part 1: The two Vicars of Penn

Some twenty years ago, I exchanged information with a Mr Bernard Harris about his Penn ancestors.  He has since seen the articles we have put up on the Penn Church website (Google, ‘Penn Church history’) about two earlier Vicars of Penn, the Revd John Middleton, who was Curate then Vicar from 1766 to 1808, and the Revd Benjamin Anderson, his successor from 1808-12.  Mr Harris has now surprised and delighted me by providing photographs of his inherited portraits of the Revd Anderson and his wife Rebecca, probably painted when in his earlier role as Vicar of Little Missenden.

Revd. Benjamin Anderson

Mrs Rebecca Anderson c.1810?

Both were men of particular merit. Revd Middleton left meticulous records of important aspects of the church’s history, in particular the digging of the vault beneath the nave for William Penn the Quaker’s grandchildren, and of another vault beneath the chancel where he reported a foundation date inscription of 1177 (presumably as MCLXXVII).

Revd Anderson was a friend of Edmund Burke’s who described him as ‘a Clergyman of learning and merit ‘, and writing to his friend William Windham, the Secretary at War, he refers to ‘Mr Anderson, a Clergyman at Penn whose Observatory and Experimental apparatus I wished much to show you’.  Mr Anderson had married Rebecca Clarke in 1761 and they were living in Penn near the church long before he became Vicar and so it is tempting to see the tiled turret on the roof of The Knoll as his observatory.

Marriage to Clarke sisters

I had remarked in my earlier article that the two vicars must have been particular friends because Revd Anderson took the service of induction when Revd Middleton became Vicar in 1787 and Bernard Harris was able to confirm that the two vicars were indeed friends and had in fact married sisters, Mary and Rebecca, the two elder daughters of William Clarke Snr (1700-80) who lived at Penn House for many years.

Steward of the Penn Estate

William Clarke was Steward to Assheton Curzon for the Penn Estate. The Penn parish register of burials in 1780 describes William Clarke as a ‘malster, ‘late of Penn House’, and similarly for his wife in 1797.   He was recorded as Steward by 1767 and may have come to Penn in 1756 when Assheton Curzon inherited the estate.  William was followed as Steward by his eldest son, Edward, and probably by another son, Charles (born 1745), who was described as ‘of Penn House’ in 1797.  Charles Garland, a carpenter and one of William’s grandsons was also Steward in the 1830s and 40s.

The  Knoll
Interestingly, another grandson, William Jnr (1778-1847), was living at The Knoll in 1833 when King William IV & Queen Adelaide came to the church as God-parents to one of the Howe’s children.  The Vicar’s wife wrote that after the service, ‘their Majesties then walked to Mr Clarke’s Garden to see the View which was not of course clear’.   The Clarkes therefore seem to have been a very prosperous family and were tenants of the Curzon/Howes, successively in Penn House and The Knoll, for the best part of a century from the 1760s.

View Clarke Family Tree Part 1 as an enlargeable PDF (opens in new window)

Part 2: The Ettys

View Clarke Family Tree Part 2 as an enlargeable PDF (opens in new window)

The Andersons had no children and the Middletons only one, a daughter, Mary, who married the Revd James Etty, Vicar of Whitchurch, in 1796.  She died of ‘Consumption’ at the age of 32 and is buried with her parents in the Middleton vault under the Revd Bennet’s large tombstone just outside the south door of the church .

Her husband died in Whitchurch only a few months later, and his will requested that if he was within 30 miles of the parish of Penn, he wished to be interred ‘in the same vault with my late dear wife Mary’¹.  He appointed the Revd John Middleton, the Revd David Middleton and his brother Littleton Etty, as Guardians of the trust he was leaving for his three-year-old orphaned daughter Elizabeth.  An older daughter had already died in infancy.

Elizabeth (1801-29) survived to adulthood.  Mr Harris thinks she may be the subject of the third portrait although it is labelled ‘Etty Shrimpton’.  An old and broken ring is known in family tradition as ‘Miss Etty’s ring’, with the claim that it was given to her by the King, as thanks for riding with him at Windsor.

There is also a third portrait of a young woman, described as ‘Etty Shrimpton’.

But the dress and hairstyle of this portrait put it in the 1770s/80s and it could be a much younger Mrs Anderson.’

William & Shelometh’s church charity

Two of the many grandchildren of William Clarke of Penn House, William Jnr (1778-1847) and his sister Shelometh (1782-1858), are commemorated in the church by two painted wooden boards recording their bequests of £100 and £200 respectively, as holdings in stocks to provide income to maintain the Clarke family’s and the Revd Middleton’s tombstones, with any surplus for the benefit of the poor of the parish over the age of seventy.  In 1850, The £300 earned a fixed return of £7 10s pa which was then worth over £600 in today’s purchasing power, but by 1992, when changes in legislation first allowed such small charities to be closed, it was no longer a useful sum and one of my first tasks as Parish Clerk was to arrange for both charities to be closed.

Garland descendants

William Clarke Snr’s youngest daughter, Henrietta, married James Garland (1745-1825) in 1770 and the ninth of their eleven children, was Charles Garland, (1784-1846), a carpenter and the third generation of his family to be Steward for the Penn Estate.  He lived in and probably built Cobblers on Beacon Hill opposite Slades Garage.  He was a fervent Methodist and is likely to have been a strong influence behind building the Primitive Methodist Chapel built in Church Road (East), Tylers Green, in 1840.  He is also claimed to have played a leading part in the building of Penn Street church, completed in 1849 three years after his death.

Charles Garland’s Penn descendants include Walter Carden, who built the garage opposite Slades Garage, now known as Winter’s, and whose parents and grandparents ran The Crown for many years.  Sir Victor Garland, the Australian High Commissioner to London in the 1980s, was Walter’s cousin and the three of us had an enjoyable lunch together – in the Crown of course.  Bernard Harris is also a descendant of Charles Garland, and therefore of William Clarke Snr.

© Miles S Green, 28th February 2022
© Images courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS
© Portraits courtesy Bernard Harris

There is a very fine marble monument to Viscount Curzon on the north wall of the chancel. He inherited Penn Manor in 1756 through his grandmother Sarah Penn while his elder brother inherited Kedleston in Derbyshire. He held the Penn estate, and so appointed the vicars of Penn, for 64 years. He was an MP for a family seat in Clitheroe in Lancashire and seems to have had a very successful career being created Baron Curzon of Penn in 1794 and Viscount in 1802. He married three times with all his wives predeceasing him. His hatchment is on the south wall of the south aisle. He was succeeded by his young grandson whose other grandfather was Admiral Earl Howe.
The monument is by Sir Francis Chantrey (1781-1841) who is deemed to have been the greatest English sculptor of his generation. One of his first commissions, in 1808, was to make four colossal busts for Greenwich Hospital of the four most famous admirals of the time, Duncan, Howe (Earl Howe’s forebear), Nelson and St Vincent.

The son of a carpenter near Sheffield, he was apprenticed to a wood carver and gilder but bought himself out to paint portraits until he could try his fortune in London. He was thus a man of little education and had no training as a sculptor. His manners were rough and his language strong but he had immense natural talent and by the 1820s he had a large and distinguished practice for statues, busts and church monuments. He had an astonishing ability to express in marble the softness of flesh, while at the same time retaining the sense of the bones beneath.

He was the only sculptor to have recorded (and each on several occasions) four successive reigning sovereigns, George III, George IV, William IV and the young Queen Victoria. His work can be seen everywhere, including in Windsor Castle, Buckingham Palace and Westminster Abbey.  There is a fine mounted statue of George IV in Trafalgar Square.

The monument is in a design much favoured by Chantrey showing two weeping women in classical Greek costume looking down at a profile portrait of Viscount Curzon. Above the profile is a large decorative urn embossed with a shield bearing the Curzon coat of arms, differenced with a crescent to show a second son. Above the shield is a  viscount’s coronet surmounted by a popinjay and below the shield is motto below, ‘Let Curzon holde what Curzon helde’. There is a long inscription below the monument which describes his ancestry and his three marriages and their children. The accuracy of the profile can be tested against the portrait of Viscount Curzon in his peer’s robes, painted by Devis in 1818 and now in the ownership of Earl Howe.

See also No 43: Viscount Curzon 1729-1820

The Kedleston Estate

We have seen that Sir Nathaniel Curzon, Sarah Penn’s second son, inherited the baronetcy and both the Kedleston and Penn estates. He had two sons and when he died in 1758, Nathaniel the elder son inherited Kedleston and Assheton, his younger brother, the Penn estate with the proprietorship of Penn Church.

Nathaniel gave the young Robert Adam a free hand and the result is rather more impressive than Buckingham Palace. Ruthless methods were employed. The earlier Queen Anne house was pulled down and the entire village, leaving only the church, was moved half a mile away in order to obtain unobstructed views from the house. This branch of the family still lives at Kedleston and the two branches of the Curzon family are still very much in touch after nearly 300 years, as Earl Howe is a trustee of the Kedleston Estate on behalf of the sons of the late Lord Scarsdale.

Their most famous member was George Nathaniel Curzon who was Viceroy of India from 1899-1905, Leader of the House of Lords and Foreign Secretary, eventually becoming a Marquis, of whom it was said,

My name is George Nathaniel Curzon,
I am a most superior person.
My cheeks are pink, my hair is sleek,
I dine at Blenheim once a week.

See also Viscount Curzon 1729-1820

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.43,  May 2016
Photographs © courtesy Eddie Morton ARPS

The portrait of Assheton Curzon illustrating the previous article was as an old man of near 90, and he is also shown in profile on the fine marble wall monument by Sir Francis Chantry in the chancel of Holy Trinity.

There is also a portrait which was acquired by Earl Howe a few years ago which shows him as a young man, perhaps when he first got married to Esther Hanmer in 1756 and took over the Penn Estate. The portrait is by Thomas Hudson (1701-79), who painted George II and is described as the most successful London portraitist of the mid 1700s.
A wall monument in the chancel of Holy Trinity’s records that Assheton Curzon had to endure the early death of two wives.

He had one son by Esther Hanmer, Penn Assheton Curzon, who, through his mother, was eventually to inherit the Gopsall estate with probably the grandest country house in Leicestershire. Only one surviving portrait of Penn Assheton Curzon is known, as a very young boy. It is by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734-97) who was a very successful landscape and portrait painter known for his use of strong contrasts between light and dark in order to achieve a 3D effect.

He followed the well-trodden familial route via Westminster School and Brasenose College , Oxford, before becoming an MP in family held seats, holding successively Leominster, Clitheroe and Leicestershire from 1784.

He was a strong supporter of William Pitt the Younger who was Prime Minister for 20 years. Earl Howe pointed me to an acerbic description of him in contemporary correspondence as ‘an inactive Member in the House and, out of it, a perfect nuisance.’ ² but to be fair, there is no other evidence for this.

See also Viscount Curzon 1730-1820

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.44,  May 2016
Photographs© courtesy of Eddie Morton ARPS

We have seen that Penn Assheton Curzon, the eldest son of Assheton Curzon, was an MP for family held seats including Leicestershire. There seems to have been a fashion in the 18th-century for using the surnames of maternal forebears as first names for boys. Penn was his great grandmother’s surname and his grandmother was an Assheton. I have come across the same custom with my own 18th century forebears.

In 1787, he married Lady Sophia Charlotte Howe, the eldest daughter of the First Lord of the Admiralty, later Admiral of the Fleet, Richard Viscount Howe. Their eldest son, George Augustus, was born in 1788, but died in his teens, and their second son, rather oddly named Leicester as a compliment to his constituents, was born in 1792, but he died at only 3 months old. They had one daughter, Marianne. Only one child, the third son, lived on into old age to become Earl Howe. He was christened Richard William Penn, although she called him Penn.

Penn Assheton Curzon died in 1797 when still only 40 years old. In 1773, he had inherited through his mother, Esther Hanmer, his uncle Charles Jennens’ Gopsall estate with probably the grandest country house in Leicestershire and his obituary describes him as of Gopsall Park, but nonetheless he was buried in Penn. There was a family vault to which the entrance was by steps down from the centre of the chancel, but it must have been full because a new vault was dug for him under the east end of the chancel which had been extended 60 years earlier. The vault was under where the altar now stands, and the entrance, now bricked up, was outside the east window. The Vicar in 1802, the Rev. John Middleton, was there when the vault was dug and recorded, ‘In digging the Vault, on one of the Foundation Stones the Date of the year 1177 was legible, by which we may conjecture that the Church or rather the Chancel was built….in that year.³

Arabic numerals were not yet in use in Europe in 1177 so the inscription would have been in Latin numerals, MCLXXVII, but the Vicar was an educated man, tutor to ‘several young gentlemen‘, kept meticulous entries in the parish register and would not have thought it worthy of reporting. It is apparently unusual to find a foundation date, but he is a very credible witness.

Some 30 years ago I went into the extended vault with Earl Howe. It was only 4 or 5 feet high with a daunting collection of about a dozen decaying coffins, many with coronets. Bones had fallen out of some of the coffins. The inscriptions on metal plates were corroded but had apparently been recorded some 20 years earlier by the Vicar. We didn’t find the foundation date because in retrospect we were looking in the new section of the vault and should have been looking at the back where it was walled off from the original vault.

© Miles Green, Penn Parish Newsletter No.45,  September 2016
Photographs © courtesy of Eddie Morton ARPS