February at Norton Conyers. "We are guardians of the past to benefit the future"*

Norton Conyers house, near Ripon, N. Yorks 

© Norton Conyers

Friday 1st February 1946:

"Left Womersley for Ripon. … At 2.30 reached Norton Conyers, a sunny, pleasant house facing due south across a wide expanse of open park towards Ripon and framed in a broad background of expanding trees.  The south front has several curved Jacobean gables and is roughcast, which gives it a somewhat naked appearance.  The last Graham baronet stripped off the roughcast to reveal red brick, but soon replaced it when he experienced the damp.  Lady Graham, mother of the present baronet, received me.  A capable, outspoken and blunt woman, which whom before I left I made friends, but to start with was hostile.  She manages the property of some 18,000 acres for her son….
Charlotte Bronte stayed here [1839] and made it the scene of Rochester's house in Jane Eyre.  A lunatic Lady Graham was once incarcerated in an attic room I was shown.  

The staircase to the attics, blocked up in the 1880s*

© The Telegraph newspaper

"The entrance hall is filled with portraits of Grahams.  There is a large Ferneley of a meet of the Quorn outside Quenby.  The portraits include a Zoffany group, a Battoni, a Hudson, a Romney. There is a wide Jacobean oak staircase.  On one tread near the top a large knot of wood is shown.  It resembles a horse's hoof, reputedly of the horse which planted it here before collapsing, having borne its master twenty miles home badly [mortally] wounded after the Battle of Marston Moor."

The Jacobean staircase and portraits.

© Norton Conyers

"On the stairs a small Zoffany of the housekeeper who was to murder one of the Grahams.  Upstairs an oak panelled room with double four-poster bed in which Charles I slept.  Lady Graham told me that both Charles I and James stayed in this room.  In the garden are some lead figures and urns of the eighteenth century.  Lady Graham had a long talk with me afterwards and said she wanted to endow the house with some private money of her own, but I was not to tell her son this."

Caves of Ice  James Lees-Milne, 1946

*Sir James Graham's words.  The blocked staircase to the attic room was uncovered in 2004, during the 30 hands-on years Sir James and Lady Graham spent restoring Norton Conyers.  Lady Graham said then that:
 "the house has a very strong presence.  It reveals it secrets grudgingly, so we have to work hard".  

Nearly 70 years after Lees-Milne's visit, the story of Norton Conyers' secrets was told by Stuart Penney in The Telegraph, May 2005. 

"And a few friends, and many books,…" Abraham Cowley

Abraham Cowley,  Sir Peter Lely, 1666-67
© National Portrait Gallery

Highly regarded in the seventeenth century, there are portraits of Cowley in several Oxford and Cambridge Colleges, and he was buried in pomp in Westminster Abbey. His reputation as a poet dwindled in later centuries, but he should also be remembered for his influence amongst those who founded the Royal Society; his Proposition for the Advancement of Learning was published in 1661 and he and his friend John Evelyn shared their interest in botany. 

THE WISH

"Well then! I now do plainly see

This busy world and I shall ne'er agree.

The very honey of all earthly joy

Does of all meats the soonest cloy;

And they, methinks, deserve my pity

Who for it can endure the stings,

The crowd, and buzz, and murmurings,

Of this great hive, the city.

"Ah, yet, ere I descend to the grave,

May I a small house and large garden have;

And a few friends, and many books, both true,

Both wise, and both delightful too!

And since love ne'er will from me flee,

A Mistress moderately fair,

And good as guardian angels are,

Only beloved and loving me.

"O fountains! when in you shall I

Myself eased of unpeaceful thoughts espy?

O fields, O woods!  when, when shall I be made

The happy tenant of your shade?

Here's the spring-head of Pleasure's flood:

Here's wealthy Nature's treasury,

Where all the riches lie that she

Has coin'd and stamp'd for good.

"Pride and ambition here

Only in far-fetch'd metaphors appear;

Here naught but winds can hurtful murmurs scatter,

And naught but Echo flatter.

The gods, when they descended, hither

From heaven did always choose their way:

And therefore may we boldly say

That 'tis the way too thither.

"How happy here should I

And one dear She live, and embracing die!

She who is all the world, and can exclude

In deserts solitude.

I should have then this only fear: 

Lest men, when they my pleasures see,

Should hither throng to live like me,

And so make a city here." 

Abraham Cowley,  1618-1667.  

Cowley was a staunch Royalist, carrying secret letters between Henrietta-Maria from exile in France and Charles I.   Having lived through the political and religious upheaval under Charles I, Cromwell  and Charles II, it is not surprising that Cowley echoes Virgil and Horace in his picture of a quiet rural life (although he never married).  But for the modern reader, Andrew Marvell says it so much better.