Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

STIRTLOE HOUSE AND HAMLET 139 records him as still being at Stirtloe, despite his having died in 1737. 1 He left ‘a capital messuage’ to his relation Thomas Merriden, gentleman. In 1743 Merriden, too, died, leaving his estate to be sold and ‘produce’ held in trust for his sister Mary, wife of Colonel William Swan[n], but the house was still unsold at the time of her death in about 1760. Her husband had already died, in 1752: in his will he refers to himself as being ‘of Sturtloe’, suggesting that he and Mary were actually occupying the house. Their son, George Cornelius Swan, was admitted tenancy at the Manorial Court in 1761. He bought more land, and exchanged land in Buckden itself for Buckden Poors farm and house in Stirtloe. In July 1763 the house finally sold for £2608, having been on the market for twenty-six years, and was bought by George Alexander, Esq., the esquire suggesting he was a younger son of the nobility or in the army. George Alexander had just inherited money from an aunt (mainly in East India Stocks). He was thus was able to buy the house and make an advantageous marriage to Mary, eldest daughter of Edward Willoughby of Aspley Hall, Nottinghamshire, in August 1763. It may be no coincidence that the Willoughby family encouraged George to buy Stirtloe House: the Ferrers family, earlier owners, were distant relatives. It may also be no coincidence that Mary’s family home at Aspley had recently undergone an extensive modernisation, and that George set about the modernisation of Stirtloe and its grounds immediately, with all the enthusiasm of a young man about twenty-four years old. In 1765 and 1766 he bought eighteen elms, then sixty-one more elms plus ‘a wide variety of trees’ from Wood and Ingrams Nursery at Brampton—elms were 6p each! It is likely that George Alexander built the compact plan house which still exists today, with a staircase and banister rail dated between 1760 and 1775. Existing classic windows with slender glazing bars and fine glass, a doorway with decorative capitals, pilasters and rectangular tympanum all indicate a date in the second half of the eighteenth century. It also appears to be a remodelled house rather than a new build (see ‘staircase’ earlier). However, George’s enthusiasm was greater than the income from his aunt’s legacy (£20 per year, some East India shares, pictures and plate)! By 1770 he was running out of money and the house was mortgaged to Mary Ferrers (related to the Willoughby family) for £500. By 1774 money problems were mounting and George’s father-in-law took charge of the estate on behalf of the marriage settlement trustees. Perhaps the family stayed at Stirtloe for a couple more years but then they moved to Lewisham, Kent, and the house was let, first to John Wooley and then, in 1780, to Christopher Hobson (see next paragraph). By 1788 George’s wife was dead and his two daughters, Mary Martha and Helena, were probably living with their grandparents in Aspley. Helena married the nephew of the mortgagee, Mary Ferrers, while Mary Martha, a spinster at the time of her death, settled her share of the estate on Helena, reserving an income of £30 a year for her father in Lewisham. There is a wall monument in the church next to Baddesley Clinton House, just south of Birmingham, to Mrs Helena Ferrers, wife of Edward Ferrers, daughter of George Alexander of Stirtloe House, who died in 1840, aged 74 years. What a story these few bare facts suggest with the Alexanders having had advantageous marriages, elegant houses and impoverished fathers, just as in a Jane Austen novel! The twenty-one year lease at £100 p.a. which Christopher Hobson took out in 1780 gives us the first mention of the house under its modern name. It is described as ‘now’ called Stirtloe House, ‘lately in part rebuilt’, with coach houses, stables, cowhouses, brewhouse, slaughter house, orchards, gardens, shrubberies and all other offices, outhouses and buildings. Also included were thirty acres of pasture (some already let to farmers) and, near the house itself, a messuage called ‘The Castle’. This is the only mention of a castle at Stirtloe, but by 1780 it may have been a ruin with land around which gradually became a part of the gardens at Stirtloe House; this would explain the large amount of building foundations barely covered by the paths and grass of today. In view of the lack of any earlier reference to a castle, however, the name may have been fanciful, given to an earth mound, a folly or the ruin (if ruin there was) of an abandoned house or farm building—perhaps one of those destroyed in the great fire of March 1770, when a kitchen- maid burned the entire hamlet to the ground by mistake. 2 Christopher Hobson died in 1791. There is nothing to suggest that any member (married or single) of the Alexander family returned to live in the house, and for the next twenty-four years it was occupied by tenants (or at times unoccupied). We do, however, know two of the tenants of the house during these years: Lancelot Brown 3 and Lawrence Reynolds. 1 Brown occupied it (not necessarily continuously) from the early 1 His wife Eleanor had died in 1734; they are both buried in Buckden churchyard, she under the name of Ellen.. 2 Stirtloe seems to have been peculiarly susceptible to mass conflagration: it is said to have been burned down again in 1790, this time deliberately by ‘malcontents’, which caused fear of an uprising, this being at a time of revolutionary thinking in England, after the French Revolution. 3 1748-1802. Lawyer and MP (for Huntingdon 1784-7 and Huntingdonshire 1792-4); a son of ‘Capability’ Brown.