Buckden - a Huntingdonshire Village

STIRTLOE HOUSE AND HAMLET 140 or mid-part of the 1790s until he died there in 1802. In his will, made shortly before his death, he instructed his executors to sell ‘the lease of my house and premises at Stirtloe[...]to best advantage’, together with all his books, plate, linen and furnishings (apart from two portraits of his late wife). Lawrence Reynolds leased the house for a few years, leaving when he inherited a larger estate nearby. A gazetteer of 1808 refers to Stirtloe as ‘the pleasant seat of Laurence Reynolds, Esq. who was High Sheriff of Huntingdonshire in 1806’. (It is reputed that the great landscape designer, Lancelot ‘Capability' Brown, lived at Stirtloe but this is unlikely: confusion may have arisen from the fact that it was for a time the home of his son Lancelot. However, at the time the Alexander family were living at and rebuilding Stirtloe House, ‘Capability’ was living in Fenstanton (where he had bought the Manor in 1767), and may have been asked to advise on the small park, said in 1768 to be a small landscaped garden formed from part of Stirtloe Wood. If so, he may have suggested it to Lancelot as a convenient home.) The house was put up for auction in 1813, when it was described as ‘a substantial, spacious, well built Mansion called Stirtloe House, most delightfully situate at an agreeable distance from the great north road, near the entrance of the village of Buckden, in the County of Huntingdonshire, sixty miles from London, containing numerous chambers and sitting rooms, a spacious entrance hall, well proportioned eating room, library, and dressing room, an excellent kitchen, with all the required attached offices and good cellaring, a capital range of stabling, with coach house and outbuildings of every description, for the complete accommodation of a family of respectability, large productive walled kitchen garden, pleasure grounds, orchards, paddock and closes of rich pasture land, containing altogether about thirty acres’. This must describe the house built by the Alexander family and how wonderful it sounds, but at a very high cost to both George and Mary and their daughters. Despite the auctioneer’s enticing description, the house did not sell. In May 1815, however, it was re-advertised and within two months a sale agreement had been drawn up between the owner, Helena Ferrers (nee Alexander), and John Linton, Esq., of Freiston, Lincolnshire. It was for the ‘Sale of Stirtloe House, outhouses, stables, coachhouses, gardens, several closes of land. 29a adjoining. 7 cottages, gardens and land 1½a, Buckden.’. The property was ‘still mainly copyhold of the Manor of Buckden , with some pieces of freehold’, and the price was £5500. Stirtloe House and the Linton family were about to enter into a union that would last for over one hundred and fifty years. The nineteenth century The Lintons were, however, no strangers to the house. In 1789, John Linton’s sister Mary had married Captain John Brown RN, brother of the Lancelot Brown who became the lessee of Stirtloe. In 1801, John Cary’s map of Huntingdonshire lists the local gentry and their residences, among them John Linton Esq. at Stirtloe House. The following year, only weeks after Lancelot Brown had died, Mary’s husband (now an admiral) is described as being of ‘Stirtloe House, Buckden’. Since this was the time of Nelson and constant sea engagements in the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars with France, it is possible that with John Brown often away at sea John Linton had joined his sister at Stirtloe House. But only temporarily: during this period, other sources still describe him (in 1798, 1804 and 1815) as being ‘of Freiston’, where he was a considerable property owner, reputed to have been one of the first farmers to grow potatoes in the Fens. 2 (There is a confusing document in the Cambridgeshire Archives that appears to show that in 1804, two generations of Lintons were already living in the house, including John himself, his daughter Susanne (about to be married), and his son John junior, a dragoon captain. As John junior did not achieve his captaincy until 1817 and was anyway only eight years old in 1804, this is clearly nonsense. In reality, the document (Susanne’s marriage settlement) dates from 1824, the year she wed in Buckden church.) As well as occasionally keeping his sister company, John Linton may well have been looking for a sizable house away from the damp of the Lincolnshire fens. His descendant, Robert Bruce of Low Farm, believes that John became wealthy through the draining of the fens, purchasing Freiston Priory in 1782 before his marriage in 1790 to Isabella Trollope, a relation of the literary Trollopes. Perhaps Isabella wanted to live nearer to London, to which travel from Buckden was relatively easy with five coaches a day, while for her landowner husband a coach to Boston left every morning at 4.00 a.m. from the George in Huntingdon. As well as John junior and Susanne, there were two other children, Henry and Isabella junior. Admiral Brown died in 1808 and Mary Brown moved away (this is probably when Lawrence Reynolds took on the lease). Mary died in 1834 and is commemorated alongside her husband and his father, mother and brother Lancelot in the chancel of Fenstanton church. By 1813, land around Stirtloe was owned or rented by John Linton, Sir James Duberly, Rev. Maltby (vicar of Buckden), A. Priestly, G. Thornhill, the Lord Bishop of Lincoln, Lawrence Reynolds Esq, and 1 1771-1839 . Irritable lawyer, landed proprietor, militia captain and former student radical. 2 Of course, the description of individuals as ‘of Stirtloe House’ or ‘of Freiston’ doesn’t differentiate between their ownership or tenancy of the property, or those of the gentry with several residences.