The Gentleman's Daughter (5 page)

Robert Parker's premature death in 1758 left her a widow at thirty-two, with three small sons under five. After seven years of widowhood, however, Elizabeth Parker sensationally eloped to Gretna Green with John Shackleton (1744–88) of nearby Stone Edge, Barrowford. This local woollen merchant was an outrageous seventeen years her junior; twenty-one years old to her thirty-eight. By her actions Elizabeth forfeited her brother's society for at least six years and was barred from the Browsholme threshold. Thomas Parker, the son and heir, came into the estate upon his majority in 1775. Despite a mooted career in the church or the army, he took up no profession. Upon his marriage in 1779 to the nineteen-year-old heiress Betty Parker of Newton Hall, Yorkshire, his mother removed definitively to John Shackleton's newly built mansion, Pasture House at Barrowford. At his death in 1788 John Shackleton's will reveals a substantial landowner bequeathing numerous copyhold properties in the Lancashire and freehold lands in the nearby West Riding. Although acreages are not recorded, he had at least thirty-three tenants.
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Elizabeth Shackleton's younger sons turned, like their grandfather before them, to the textile trades in London. To their mother's distress, they were found to lack the intellectual capacity for university and the Church. In 1770, aged fifteen, John was bound as apprentice to a draper on Fleet Street, although Elizabeth Shackleton had first to arrange the sale of a wood to raise the fee. Two years later, with yet more deft accounting, Robin was apprenticed to a wholesale hosier, Mr Plestow of Bishopsgate, London. In May 1779 the two brothers set up together as hosiers in partnership with Mr Plestow amid a shower of blessings from their mother, but John Parker later took the name of Toulson, in order to inherit property in Skipwith, ten miles south of York, from his mother's cousin Jane Walton, née, Toulson. He ended his days as a landed gentleman. Thus, for generations the land/trade ‘boundary’ was crossed and recrossed by individuals in the same family.
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6 Pasture House, near Colne, Lancashire, 1977. This mansion was built for the manufacturer John Shackleton in 1777 in the height of modern fashion. The house exhibits some Palladian effects; the semi-circular windows are thought to resemble those at Chiswick House.

By contrast, the history of the Barcrofts of Noyna throws more light on the links between the gentry and the professions – in this case, the army and the law – and also on the floating status of the unmarried gentlewoman in lodgings. The Miss Barcrofts were the offspring of the prominent barrister John Barcroft of Gisburn and the Lancashire heiress Elizabeth Barcroft.
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At their father's death in 1782, the five Miss Barcofts inherited a meagre one thousand pounds between them and a younger
brother. One sister married a Colne lawyer and another a Colne gentleman, but the three remaining girls never married, vacillating for decades between lodgings and family. By 1834, as spinsters and widows, all the sisters were again living together in middle-aged sisterly society at Park House in Colne.
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The Miss Barcrofts lost both of their brothers in the 1790s. The heir, Captain Ambrose William Barcroft, perished in a shipwreck in 1795, leaving an infant daughter Ellen, who was reared by her Barcroft aunts in Colne. In 1816 the heiress Ellen Barcroft married a second son, Edward Parker, who practised as a solicitor in Selby. In 1832 Edward Parker inherited Alkincoats and Browsholme through his elder childless brother and abandoned the law.
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Here again, the distinction between the gentleman and the professional was far from clear. To what single social category should this family be assigned?

The social mingling that characterized genteel society also came to embrace the families of at least some of the wealthier factory-masters of the area. The Horrocks cotton dynasty hailed from the Bolton area in southern Lancashire. John Horrocks began his career in textiles as a master putting out raw cotton to hand-spinners in the vicinity of Bolton. (Quaint tradition has it that he employed his three younger sisters winding yarn on paltry pay, and when they struck for better wages he bought them off with new silk dresses.) In January 1791 he rented a small warehouse in Preston and began manufacturing muslin, leaving his elder brother Samuel in control of the Edgeworth business. Thereafter, his Preston enterprise developed very rapidly. By 1798 he had erected six factories, a hundred workmen's cottages in New Preston and had established a London office. Phenomenal success crowned his efforts – the business made a profit of £55,000 in 1799 alone – enabling him to enrich his kinsmen whom he integrated into the enterprise. At his premature death in 1804, at the age of thirty-six, John Horrocks left an estate worth £150,000.
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Backed by their glorious wealth, the Horrockses sought to entrench themselves socially and politically. In 1796 John Horrocks unsuccessfully contested Lord Stanley's seat in the parliamentary election of that year; in 1798 he became a captain in the Royal Preston volunteer force; in 1801 he established his young family at Penwortham Lodge, his specially commissioned mansion overlooking the Ribble a mile outside the town; and in 1802, by virtue of an electoral pact with the Whig Earl of Derby, he achieved the status of Member of Parliament. In the same year his brother Samuel Horrocks became Mayor of Preston. Traditionally seen as the more stolid brother, Samuel Horrocks nevertheless consolidated the business, served as MP for Preston from 1804 to 1826, and erected a fashionable neo-classical mansion in the town to house his large family.
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The
marriages of the Horrocks offspring illuminate the social choices of the ‘Cottontots’: John's son Peter abandoned business and married into the Kent gentry. Of Samuel's brood, Sam, the son and heir, followed commercial convention and married the daughter of his father's business partner. The younger sisters moved in the outer orbit of the Lake Poets, and eventually married into the professions. The eldest daughter, Eliza Horrocks, married into the county gentry, wedding Charles Whitaker of Simonstone in I812 – an officer and a gentleman. Well pleased with the match, Samuel Horrocks made a settlement of three thousand pounds in his daughter's favour, and Whitaker installed his bride at Roefield, a handsome town house in Clitheroe on the banks of the River Edisford.
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Although, in a famous (and possibly apocryphal) anecdote, one prominent resident found Preston ‘no longer a fitt place for a gentleman to live in’ when John Horrocks was served before him at the fish market, the Horrocks family could hardly claim to have been shunned by a snobbish county, given their marriages and political successes.
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If a cultural war was being waged, then half the county was shamelessly fraternizing with the enemy.

Relations between land, trade and the professions were not, of course, simply a matter of intermarriage, but also of daily social interactions. A similar pattern of interpenetration emerges in the everyday social world revealed in diaries and letters. Elizabeth Shackleton's diaries record in fastidious detail her daily encounters with friends, neighbours, business associates, social inferiors and kin over a nineteen-year period. To analyse her social contacts, two years have been selected, documented by five diaries. The three diaries for 1773 reveal Elizabeth Shackleton's social life when mistress of Alkincoats, Colne, and the two diaries devoted to 1780 illuminate her social calendar when living at Pasture House, Barrowford (see Table 1, p. 394).
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One of the striking features of Elizabeth Shackleton's social interactions is the heavy preponderance of her kin. Well over a third of social occasions and exchanges involved family members. Kin were particularly prominent at dinner-parties, in gift exchanges and in correspondence (almost half of all the letters Elizabeth Shackleton sent or received were from or to her kin). The majority of contacts with her kin involved her sons.
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Only a tiny number of diary entries record contacts with her brother and sister-in-law, Edward and Barbara Parker of Browsholme, a pattern explained by Edward Parker's disapproval of his sister's second marriage, and the resulting social punishment visited on her in particular.
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Given Edward Parker's chilly treatment of his sister, the enhanced significance of wider kin is hardly surprising. Of Elizabeth's wider kin, the physician's widow
Ann Pellet maintained greater claims to gentility than schoolmaster's wife Bessy Ramsden, although both were the daughters of London merchants and both married into the professions.
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But the majority of Elizabeth Shackleton's blood kin belonged to the gentry both in the opinion of her contemporaries and by the standards of current historical investigation. Of the sixteen individuals related to Elizabeth Shackleton who encountered her or corresponded with her in 1773 and 1780, four were engaged in trade and three associated with the professions, while the remaining nine drew their income principally from land.

Given the bias towards land among Elizabeth Shackleton's kin and their central role in her social life, it is hardly surprising that well over a third of all Elizabeth Shackleton's social encounters embraced at least one individual from the landed gentry. However, even when her kin are excluded, the gentry still figure prominently. Elizabeth Shackleton's entire corpus of diaries and letters testify to (at the very least) a nodding acquaintance with every established landed family in north-east Lancashire, though not all of them register in the two years selected. Moreover, confirming genteel status for spinsters and widows is difficult, so a total of twenty families is almost certainly an underestimate of Elizabeth Shackleton's gentry frienships. Of course, a snapshot of two years, while showing where Elizabeth's warmest relationships lay, will not of its nature demonstrate the breadth of her acquaintance, but by ranking gentry families according to the frequency of contact, the key players in Elizabeth Shackleton's social life emerge. Her close circle was made up of well-established neighbouring families, such as the reputable Waltons of Marsden Hall and the aspiring Cunliffes of Wycoller; and Yorkshire families such as the foxhunting Wiglesworths of Townhead and the elegant Listers of Gisburn Park. Her outer circle included grand county families like the Townleys of Royle and the Starkies of Huntroyde, with whom she enjoyed only very occasional personal contact, although her sons were regularly invited to their dinner-tables.
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But what place did such families occupy in landed society as a whole? Clearly, they all lacked titles. (The Listers were ennobled in 1794, after her death, as a consequence of the political manoeuvrings of the Portland Whigs.) Elizabeth Shackleton was not on visiting terms with noble families, not even with the holders of lesser titles such as knights or baronets. This absence may have been a function of locale, as baronets were thin on the ground in north-east Lancashire, but it also reflects on her wealth and status. Progressive downward mobility through both her marriages distanced her from her brother Edward Parker of Browsholme and his exalted associates. As the heir of ‘a truly ancient and respectable family’ living in an ‘old magnificent chateau, an extensive
and venerable pile’, as the
Gentleman's Magazine
eulogized, Edward Parker enjoyed great standing in the wider county and the north, as well as in his immediate neighbourhood. He married the daughter of a baronet, ‘a prudent choice … to keep up the dignity of his family which few in this Giddy Age thinks of’, and was thus related in the female line to the nobility of Yorkshire, Westmoreland and Cheshire. Both Edward Parker and his son John were listed on the Commission of the Peace (the official register of eligible men from which the magistracy was drawn) for the West Riding of Yorkshire, while John Parker became MP for Clitheroe in 1780. Edward Parker's was certainly the milieu of the greater gentry, while his sister's social horizons were, by comparison, decidedly parochial.
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Nevertheless, most of the gentlemen of Elizabeth Shackleton's acquaintance held some county office. Thirteen of the twenty gentry households, outside her kin, who graced the pages of her social calendar in the years 1773 and 1780, had menfolk listed on the Commissions of the Peace for Lancashire, or Yorkshire, or both. The minimum property qualification for this office was landed property worth at least a hundred pounds per annum, the basic threshold of gentry status according to Robert Walpole in political debate in 1732.
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However only six of these families, the Butlers, Claytons, Ferrands, Pattens, Townleys and Waltons, produced a Deputy-Lieutenant for their county, an office which carried the higher property qualification of two hundred pounds per annum and greater social prestige, and again only six of the families, the Claytons, Starkies, Townleys, Pattens, Waltons and Parkers of Cuerdon, boasted an officer in the militia.
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Similarly, those who were registered as having five or more male servants in the servant tax returns for 1780 were drawn from the same group of prominent county families: the Listers, Claytons, Starkies, Townleys, Pattens, Waltons and Parkers of Cuerdon. The remainder of Elizabeth Shackleton's gentry acquaintance were taxed on only a couple of servants, or escaped the tax altogether – a full seven households evaded the commissioner.
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A good number of Elizabeth Shackleton's gentry circle, indeed many of those to whom she was closest, fell below the more demanding thresholds of gentry substance.