Sisters in the Wilderness - Charlotte Gray [6]
Thomas Strickland’s decision to move to a bucolic county north of London and reinvent himself as a country squire was typical of his age—although it probably didn’t seem so to him. In 1803, the country was simmering uncomfortably under George III, the third inadequate Hanoverian monarch in a row. It was also fighting one of the greatest enemies it had ever faced: France’s Napoleon Bonaparte, whose forces challenged the Duke of Wellington on land and Admiral Horatio Nelson at sea. But the preceding century had seen changes in Britain that had shaken the traditions of centuries. Brilliant prime ministers such as Robert Walpole and William Pitt had successfully transferred power from hereditary aristocrats to elected representatives; demand for an extension of the franchise beyond wealthy landowners was starting to build. Robert Clive’s victories in India had established British rule there, and the American War of Independence had eliminated British control of thirteen colonies. There had been a rush of inventions, such as Richard Arkwright’s water-powered spinning machine and James Watt’s steam engine. In 1785 The Times was established; in 1802, the English physicist John Dalton introduced atomic theory into chemistry. As Britain embarked on the new century, it was alive with new thinking, new intellectual movements and a new sense of possibility. It was on the brink of the Industrial Revolution, which would make Britain the wealthiest nation in the world. The social strata were shifting, and there was new room for upward mobility.
In Suffolk, there was a surprising turnover of estates at the top of the social hierarchy as members of a new class—nouveaux riches—bought up old manor houses. The industrialist John Crowley, who owned England’s largest ironworks, in County Durham, two hundred miles north of London, had set himself up in a mansion in the sleepy old Suffolk village of Barking. One of London’s richest malt distillers, Samuel Kent, had settled into a stately hall on the River Lark at Fornham St. Genevieve. The district in which Thomas Strickland decided to set himself up was the Waveney Valley in eastern Suffolk. By late 1803, he was renting Stowe House, a Georgian manor on a hill overlooking the town of Bungay.
Suffolk was attractive to people like Thomas Strickland because the comfortably rounded bulge of land jutting into the North Sea has always been one of the most beautiful corners of England. Suffolk shares with Norfolk, its northern neighbour, vistas of flat fields, scattered villages and meandering streams. The gentle features and wide skies of Suffolk at the time of the Stricklands are best captured on the canvases of two of England’s greatest landscape painters, John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. Curlews endlessly wheel round in the sky; silvery light slants onto still water; yellow fields are spangled with the brilliant vermilion of poppies. In 1803, the county’s most dramatic features were man-made and on a human scale. Inland, there were medieval flint-and-stone churches, and brick windmills with creaking sails. Along the coastline, there were lighthouses to warn North Sea fishing fleets and collier brigs of the shifting sandbanks on the East Anglian shore. Even today, little has changed—Suffolk prides itself on the way it ambles through history, at least a century behind the rest of England.
Five of the Strickland daughters were born by the time the family moved to Suffolk, and Susanna arrived within the first few months. In later years, Catharine was to recall Stowe House as “our Eden,” and to compress memories of every season and childhood delight into her ecstatic descriptions of the house and grounds. “The banks of the stream were lined with sweet purple violets, primroses, and the little sun-bright celandine: from this slender streamlet we children drank the most delicious draughts from Nature’s own chalice, the hollow of our hands, or sipped its pure waters,