Tag Archives: Francis Sadler

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest

Skeletons in the cupboard

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This week I have been pondering the issue of skeletons in the family cupboard and our attitudes towards them.

I had been exploring the history of West Horsley Place in Surrey, recently in the news when it was inherited by Bamber Gascoigne but which belonged to my maternal grandfather’s family for over a century and a half until it was sold to Lord Crewe in 1921.

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West Horsley Place c.1840

In the process I came across my mother’s great uncle and his wife Daisy Oliphant who lived at West Horsley at the beginning of the twentieth century.

Curious about her, and thankful her name was relatively unusual, I tracked her back only to discover that her father, who was a journalist and foreign editor of the Morning Chronicle, appeared to have left his wife and first family to live with a young Scottish actress who in turn had left her husband. Now they would simply have divorced their first spouses and remarried, but divorce was expensive and socially frowned upon, and simply living as if married was cheaper and more convenient. The arrangement cannot have been too acrimonious since some of the first family turn up as witnesses to the weddings of the second.

In the records of Wills, and sometimes on death records, you may find a clue to such an arrangement where the person in question is shown with two surnames, for example in this case ‘Catherine Bland or Oliphant’. Her maiden name of MacNab was discovered because when she moved south to live with William Oliphant her mother came too and was present in a census record!

Sometimes the use of two surnames on a record may indicate that the person was illegitimate and the record is giving the surname both of the birth mother and the acknowledged father. But be careful about making such assumptions without further evidence. Particularly in more recent records the use of two surnames for a woman may simply indicate that a previous husband had died.

I enjoy uncovering these little histories in my family, but I am conscious that not everyone is pleased to find out that an ancestor was illegitimate, or left his wife, went bankrupt or worse still engaged in criminal activity. Therefore when I am asked to help find out about someone else’s family history it does occasionally present an ethical dilemma.

If someone contacts me because they are searching for a long lost living relative, and I happen to discover who that person is what should I do with that information? Does the other party want to discover they have an unknown sibling? In that particular case I was saved having to make the decision as the people in question found each other by another route.

Most people now seem to be relatively comfortable with the notion that an ancestor was illegitimate, or fell upon hard times and entered the workhouse, or was unfortunate enough to become mentally ill and was consigned to an asylum. Distance lends a certain objectivity and we no longer regard birth out of wedlock or mental illness as the stigmas they once were.

Even in the nineteenth century illegitimacy was sometimes glossed over. I recently had a conversation on the Facebook group Jamaica Colonial Heritage Society about the family of the distinguished geologist Sir Henry De La Beche whose father and uncle had changed the family name from Beach in 1790 in what may well have been a spurious attempt to claim Norman inheritance.

Halse Hall Great House

Halse Hall Great House today

Thomas Beach from Wiltshire married Helen Hynes in Jamaica in 1755 and hence acquired the Halse Hall plantations via her mother Jennet Guthrie’s first marriage to Francis Sadler.  Thomas and Helen had at least four children – Thomas, Jannet, John Hynes and Rose Sadler of whom only Thomas and John survived to change their surname.

Unless Sir Henry’s father Thomas De La Beche was married twice (which is of course possible) it appears that Sir Henry was probably illegitimate and his parents married only about a year after his birth. Thomas De La Beche had a minor career in the army until he inherited the Jamaican plantations and he died in Jamaica in the summer of 1801. His widow then took five year-old Henry back to England, surviving shipwreck on the way.

When Henry grew up he married Letitia Smith and they had one daughter, Elizabeth, named presumably after his mother. The marriage was not a success and while Henry was on a geological trip abroad his wife had an affair with Henry Wyndham, son of the Earl of Egremont, and they separated, the separation being made legal in 1828.

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Sir Henry De La Beche (The National Museum of Wales / Amgueddfa Cymru)

It must have been evident to most people that Sir Henry’s daughter Rosalie who was born in 1834 was not his wife’s child. However when Rosalie died young, not long after her father, the press notice referred to her as his youngest daughter. She had lived in his household for a number of years and was on perfectly friendly terms with her married half-sister Elizabeth. Her probate record refers to her as Rosalie Torre Gay or De La Beche so it is reasonable to suppose that her mother’s surname was Gay, but I have not found a baptism record, and her birth occurred before civil registration.

It is unlikely, I hope, that any modern descendant of the De La Beche family will be offended by these discoveries, however in the context of the joint histories of Jamaica and Great Britain a difficult issue can arise. Some people are absolutely delighted to discover they have mixed ancestry but I know of at least one case of someone who when presented with irrefutable evidence of black Jamaican inheritance absolutely denied its truth.

It became clear to me as I gradually became acquainted with the history of 18th-century Jamaica and the way in which the mixed race descendants of the Plantocracy were often absorbed into mainstream British society, that sometimes these origins were consciously obscured and sometimes they were simply forgotten.

For myself I think that family skeletons should be brought out of the closet and re-clothed in the stories of their lives. It is a way of honouring those who went before and reclaiming them from the dust of history.

 

 

Biographies, Genealogy, General Interest, London Life

The Genealogical Jigsaw Puzzle

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St Mary Aldermanbury before the Blitz

 

It is always very satisfying when another piece of the genealogical jigsaw puzzle slots into place, and this is what happened following the item I wrote last time about Robert Fotherby, who gave his body to science.

I already had a copy of his Will and decided now was the time to transcribe it and to remind myself why I knew anything about him in the first place. I had in fact come across him in the Will of John Rose of Cotterstock (c.1696-1736), which is one of those documents that is a real treasure trove. John Rose had no children and left a number of legacies to his cousins before making over his estate which included holdings in Jamaica to his nephew, then a minor, on condition that he change his name from John Pate to John Pate Rose – which in due course he did.

He listed the following cousins – Robert Fotherby and his wife Frances; Mary Stileman; Martha Milner; Thomas Bush; Thomas Pain the Elder of Oundle, and his sons John and Thomas; Rose Fuller and Francis Sadler both of Jamaica; and the widowed Mary Smith of Leicester. He left a number of charitable legacies and money for his servants as well as, intriguingly since I don’t know what the connection was, Fifty pounds to be equally divided between the two Sons of Thomas King late of Spanish Town in Jamaica aforesaid Dancing Master deceased to be paid them in Jamaica money. Whether John Rose had ever visited his estates in Jamaica, which were being managed by Francis Sadler, is not recorded. You can read the Will in full here.

To unpick all these relationships we need to go back to the early days of settlement in Jamaica when the sons of Thomas Rose of Mickleton decided that their future lay there. The eldest brother William, an apothecary, remained in London acting to some extent as family banker; Dr Fulke Rose and his brothers Thomas and Francis patented land in Jamaica; John Rose pursued a career as a merchant based mainly in London, trading goods and convicts into the island (although one of his daughters was born in Jamaica). There was also a sister Elizabeth Rose, possibly married in 1679 to Richard Phelps in Jamaica, and later to a man called Milner, finally in 1699 back in London to a widower called William Bush with whom she had several children.

So we can de-code the cousins of John Rose of Cotterstock, whose father was William Rose the Apothecary, as follows: Mary Stileman was a daughter of John Rose the merchant and you can read more about her here. Her son from her second marriage was Francis Sadler. Martha Milner was a daughter of Elizabeth Rose, and Thomas Bush was Martha’s half-brother. Rose Fuller was a grandson of Fulke Rose and as a young man he went to Jamaica to manage the estates belonging to the Fuller and Isted families.

That was as far as I had got until I looked again at Robert Fotherby and discovered a marriage licence allegation on Ancestry for an intended wedding to the widowed Frances Charnock ‘aged upwards of thirty years’, in 1732.  Frances Rose had buried her daughters Elizabeth and Mary in the parish of St John Jamaica in August and October 1720, and her husband Dr John Charnock in September ten years later. Their deaths are recorded in a monumental inscription (Lawrence Archer, p.313).  Returning to England she remarried and had, it is to be hoped, ten happy years with Robert Fotherby. That he was very fond of her is evidenced by the care he showed in providing for Elizabeth Lambe, who had been her companion, and perhaps her nurse in her last illness.

Frances was buried on the 2nd of March 1741/42 at St Mary Aldermanbury in the City of London, where her mother Elizabeth had been buried in 1735 and her infant niece Elizabeth Serocold (daughter of Martha Rose) was buried in 1716. The church was destroyed by enemy action in 1940, but in 1969 when the site was to be redeveloped the stones were sold and the church was rebuilt in Fulton, Missouri, USA as the National Churchill Museum.

So of this extensive list of cousins, all apparently relations of the Rose family, I am left with Thomas Pain and his sons who I suspect were closely related to John Rose’s wife Elizabeth (one of the witnesses to her Will was a Thomas Payne) and Mrs Mary Smith of Leicester.

I did not hold out much hope of finding Mrs Mary Smith though my guess is that she was also a member of the Pain family. However I then discovered that in 1758 the Bank of Smith and Payne was established in London’s Lombard Street. John Payne, the founding partner, and a Chairman of the East India Company, was a nephew of the Thomas Payne of Oundle mentioned in the Will of John Rose of Cotterstock. Both the Smith and Pain/Paine/Payne families had connections with Wigston near Leicester.

John Paine of Oundle, son of Thomas the Elder, was buried  in the church of St Peter, Oundle on the 23rd of July 1801, aged eighty-one, at which time his younger brother Thomas and sister-in-law Sarah were still alive.

 

As a postscript: John Pate did obtain a private Act of Parliament in 1744 to change his name to John Pate Rose. He went on to have three daughters with Martha Henn, but I am not clear whether he was married to her. Hannah Bella born in 1753 died young. His daughters Letitia and Sophia born in 1751 and 1752 both married within a month of each other in 1784, each couple being witnesses at the others’ wedding – Letitia to the widowed Sir George Booth and Sophia to the Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne with whom she had a daughter Margaret.

 

 

Jamaican Life

The Maroon War settlement of 1739

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Cudjoe and Colonel Guthrie under Cudjoe’s cotton tree

The escaped slaves of Jamaica had one big advantage over slaves in many other places, that the geography of the island provided them with areas where they could hide and live with much less fear of discovery.  The original Maroons were freed or runaway Spanish slaves, whose name is thought to come from the Spanish word cimarrón, meaning wild or untamed.  Over time two main areas of Maroon settlement developed, the Trelawney Maroons lived in an area around Maroon Town and Accompong in the Cockpit country, and the Windward Maroons lived on the northern slopes of the Blue Mountains.

The territory occupied by the Maroons was ideally suited to guerrilla warfare, although that name for the technique would not be used until the time of the Peninsular War at the end of the 18th century.  Led by an extremely able commander called Cudjoe, with his brothers Accompong and Johnny in the West, and sub-chiefs Quao and Cuffee in the East, the Maroons avoided open fights preferring ambush.  Camouflaged from head to foot in leaves, surprise and their accurate shooting often brought them quick victory after which they would melt back into the woods to prepare another attack.

Various armed attempts to subdue them were made by British troops and in 1734 a Captain Stoddart led a party that attacked and destroyed Nanny Town in the Blue Mountains.  The town was never resettled and even now is believed to be haunted by the ghosts of those who died.  Nanny the Maroon chieftainess after whom the place was named is now a National Hero of Jamaica.  Although the Maroons had suffered severely under this attack many escaped, some to build a new village further inland and others removed to the Cockpit area of Trelawney.

Maroon raids increased and so did the fear of the colonists that they would encourage a mass uprising of slaves on the plantations, where they now outnumbered white settlers by about 14 to 1.  The Jamaican Assembly voted money for a large-scale campaign and the Maroons found themselves in a desperate situation, however the government did not realise this and, eager to end the fighting, they sent Colonel James Guthrie with a detachment of militia, and Lieutenant Francis Sadler with a party of soldiers, to seek out Cudjoe and offer him favourable terms for a peace.`

The negotiators exchanged hats as a sign of friendship, as depicted above, and the treaty was agreed on 1 March 1739 beneath a large cotton tree, afterwards known as Cudjoe’s Tree.  Under the settlement Cudjoe and his followers were all to be free, and any slaves who had joined them were given the choice of remaining with the Maroons or returning to their masters.  It would be interesting to know if any did, somehow I doubt it!  A land grant was made to the Maroons of 1500 acres in Trelawney, where they would have hunting rights and it was agreed “That they shall have liberty to plant the said lands with coffee, cocoa, ginger, tobacco, and cotton, and to breed cattle, hogs, goats, or any other flock, and dispose of the produce or increase of the said commodities to the inhabitants of this island”.

In addition Cudjoe and his followers were to assist the British in pursuing any remaining rebels and in the case of foreign invasion they would assist the British against the invader and in return would receive their protection.  The Maroons agreed not to harbour runaway slaves but to return them for a reward of ten shillings per slave.  Cudjoe himself was given the right to dispense justice within his community and the succession was assured, naming Accompong, Johnny, Quao and Cuffee, and after their deaths such leaders as might be appointed by the Governor.  The Maroons were required to build and maintain a road to Trelawney Town, and four white persons were to be nominated to live with the Maroons in order to facilitate communication with the government.

Following the agreement with the Maroons the Jamaican assembly rewarded several negroes who had assisted the authorities to bring about the peace.  Three men named Cuffee, Sambo, and Quashey were manumised and their owners were compensated to the value of £40 per man; and two women called Venus and Affiba were also freed with their owners being paid £30 for each.

One further consequence of the events leading to the peace was the award of £1500 to Guthrie (who however died in June 1739) and £600 to Francis Sadler who subsequently received land grants totalling 1200 acres which formed the basis of the Montpelier estate.  When Francis Sadler married Colonel Guthrie’s widowed daughter Janet Hynes in 1742 he extended the Montpelier estate still further.  This Francis Sadler, who took the name Francis Sadler Hals when he inherited Halse Hall from his half brother, was the son of Mary Rose whose life in Jamaica has already been described on this website.

So successful was the peace agreement of 1739 that it lasted for more than fifty years.

The full text of the agreement and the subsequent Act of the Jamaican Assembly can be found here.

 

A note about the picture: When I first saw the picture of Colonel Guthrie and Cudjoe I thought it an attempt to belittle the latter with a caricature. However he was described at the time as being very short and squat with a large lump of flesh on his back, and a strange wild manner. He dressed in a tattered old blue coat, white knee breeches, a head tie and a small round hat. His gun was an old Spanish musket with powder and shot, and he carried a machete worn in a leather holster.