From left to right: Mary Chaworth (Lady Armine), Patricius, 3rd Viscount Chaworth, died 1694, Elizabeth Chaworth (Lady Byron).
After this we have no knowledge of the Chaworth family's movements till the marriage of PATRICIUS, 3rd VISCOUNT CHAWORTH, in 1653, to Lady Grace Manners, one of the many daughters of John, 8th Earl of Rutland. The original marriage settlements are still in existence, signed by the bride and bridegroom, the latter being only eighteen years old at the time. Besides the picture of him by Fuller with his sisters, there is another at Annesley in Restoration dress, a genial-looking man, wearing his own long hair, and another at Belvoir. It may be mentioned here that an engraving by Van Gunst exists from a picture by Van Dyck, which latter was, unfortunately, burnt in the fire at Belvoir in 1818; it is named "Patricius, Viscount Chaworth," but this is evidently a mistake for John, as Van Dyck died in 1641, in the childhood of Patricius, and the engraving represents a man of middle age in the dress of Charles I. time. It may not be too fanciful to suppose that it was painted in London in 1638, when John Chaworth presented his father's petition to the King against being made High Sheriff, as we have seen above.
It was probably during the minority of Patricius, the 3rd Viscount, that his house at Wiverton was "slighted" by Cromwell's orders.1 It was entirely pulled down, excepting the gatehouse, which contained two stories over the entrance archway, and is still standing (1905) in good repair, having been incorporated into the modern house. There was a chapel in the original building dedicated to St. Laurence, and a skeleton was dug up in 1888, on the east side of the gatehouse, which may indicate the site of the chapel, but this is mere conjecture.
Lord and Lady Chaworth lived at Annesley after their marriage, and in all probability built the brick and stone terrace there, which has "P.C." in raised letters on a central urn. The drawing room too is panelled in the taste of the Restoration, and on the black marble of the high chimney-piece are scratched some lines of poetry dated Christmas Day, 1669, and signed "Poor Chaworth." The marriage of Patricius and Lady Grace was not a happy one, and many letters are in the Duke of Rutland's collection on the subject of their quarrels.
Under date June 21st, 1658, when the young couple had been married five years, Jeremy Taylor, the great divine, writes from Annesley to the Countess of Rutland, Lady Chaworth's mother, "I have performed thus much of my journey and am at Annesley in my attendance upon your excellent daughter.....Madam, I did according to your Ladyship's commands discourse with my Lady Chaworth.....I find what I ought to have expected, nothing but recognition and acknowledgement of your greatest tenderness, wisdom and affection to her : and for anything that can concern the estate of her own affairs in relation to my Lord Chaworth all things are so well, and he so very loving, and my Lady so perfectly satisfied with his worthy comport towards her, that she really believes herself a very happy person, and is confident it will every day increase. And therefore I humbly conceive that if ever you have noted or heard of any overtures of unkindness between them, your honour will think it fit to take no notice of it, for nothing is so great a security to love as never to remember any unkindness."
In spite of these optimistic views, things did not go smoothly between Lord and Lady Chaworth, though the husband seems to have stood up in defence of his wife's character. An enclosure in a letter to her father, Lord Rutland, dated "Brooke, August 3rd, 1668," is as follows: "To Mr. Allsop. I do hear from good hands, that you should report, that I should speak very ill-favoured things to you at London concerning my wife which I do and will maintain is a dam'd lye. If you said any such thing I would advise you to eat your words immediately, else— by the living God—I'll cram them down your throat with my sword, and that very shortly. If you love yourself, set your hand to the enclosed, else take what follows. So I remain, to serve you—Chaworth."
The following year he sends his mother-in-law, Lady Rutland, "a small taste of a white wild ox from Annesley Park killed by my own hand. I have heard my Lord of Rutland say they were originally his at Beskwood Park."
It was at Christmas of this year, 1669, that the verses mentioned were written by Lord Chaworth on a chimney-piece at Annesley. His wife had left him to live in London, and he seems to have consoled himself by a romantic affection for his first cousin, Juliana, daughter of Sir Erasmus de la Fountaine, of Kirby Belers, Leicestershire. The lines run as follows:—
"Alas, I find my poor heart will prove
Too small a vessel for o'erflowing love,
Which makes me wish thine eyes so bright had never shinde,
Or that thou had'st bin from thy cradle blinde.—Poor Chaworth.""Juliana de la Pountaine
Is more worth than a gould mountaine.
The name above
Is her you love.—Chaworth."
Whether this lady was the mother of the son to whom Lord Chaworth left all his property, we have no knowledge. She eventually married Sir John Tracy, of Stanway.
In the Belvoir papers a letter is given from Lord Chaworth to his wife, Lady Chaworth, at Lord Roos' (her brother's) house in Great Queen Street, dated June, 1670, requesting her to come to him, and offering to "receive her with respect and affection," but her letters to her brother continue to be written from London, so that probably this was the last effort at reconciliation."2
The only legitimate child, Juliana Chaworth, married Lord Meath, but is not mentioned in her father's will, and all his landed property passed, at his death in 1694, to his son, PATRICIUS CHAWORTH, then at Cambridge and aged twenty-one.
Lady Grace, after her long-forsaken husband's death, married Sir William Langhorne, and died in 1700.
Patricius married Elizabeth Pole, of Heage, in Derbyshire, and had by her a very large family. He died in 1719, and was succeeded by his eldest son, PATRICIUS CHAWORTH, born 1700. His wife was Anne, the daughter of Mr. Levinz, of Grove, near Retford, whose arms appear on two settles still in the hall at Annesley. There were two sons of this marriage, Patricius and William. They lost their father early, he dying at the age of thirty-one, and the eldest boy followed him at eleven years old. A picture in the style of Wooton evidently represents the two boys with their mother, and a running footman holding a led horse in a park, with a temple in the background. The two boys, in scarlet-laced coats and powdered hair, are playing with a dog and a fawn. The features of one boy are unmistakeably those of the later portrait of WILLIAM CHAWORTH, born 1726 and killed by Lord Byron in a duel in January, 1765. The particulars of this affair, for which Lord Byron was tried by the House of Lords, have often been discussed, and the real cause of it has never been discovered. The Star and Garter tavern, in Pall Mall, was the scene of the encounter, and William Chaworth lived just long enough to make a will, providing for a lady who was very dear to him, and in whose house, in Berkeley Row, he died. He was buried at Annesley on 5th Feb., 1765. The rapiers, with which the fatal duel was fought, are preserved at Annesley and Newstead. Mr. Chaworth's, a handsome silver hilted one, was taken away from the scene of action by Mr. Sherwin, one of the gentlemen of the Nottinghamshire Club, and presented by his descendant, John Sherwin Gregory, of Harlaxton, to Mr. Chaworth's great-great-nephew, the owner of Annesley, in 1860.3
This victim of the duel was unmarried, and had power to bequeath his estates, which passed, by his will, to his first cousin and namesake, WILLIAM CHAWORTH, the son of his uncle, William Chaworth, R.N., and then a minor. He died in 1771 at Liege, in Belgium, aged twenty-five, after his marriage to Miss Jane Thoakston, of Ripon, in Yorkshire. Leaving no child, the property came next to his father, WILLIAM CHAWORTH, Captain R.N., whose marriage I have not been able to trace. He enjoyed the estate between the reigns of his two sons, William and George. There was evidently some enmity between Captain Chaworth and his nephew, the duellist, for the latter begins his will by leaving him £10 to buy a suit of clothes, "which is all I intend he shall ever inherit from me." However, things turned out otherwise, and Captain Chaworth lived at Annesley from 1771 till 1784, when he died at an advanced age.
I have been shown a quaint brick house at Basford, which Captain Chaworth is said to have built for his brothers and sisters when he inherited Annesley, and the burials of Mary and Cassandra Chaworth, "of Basford," probably were those of these sisters.
GEORGE CHAWORTH, who succeeded his father in 1784, married Anne Bainbridge, the daughter of a farmer and grand-daughter of a clergyman. She had relations of the name of Radford, and a niece, Anne Radford, was brought up with her daughter and only child, Mary Ann Chaworth, born in 1786, and widely known as Byron's Mary. George Chaworth was particularly fond of ringing the church bells at Annesley, tradition says, but little more has been recorded of him. He presented a silver cup to his friend and tenant, Joseph Marriott, of Cropwell and Wiverton, shortly before his death at Abergavenny, in Wales, where he and Mr. Marriott were staying together in 1791. The cup is still in the possession of Mr. Richard Marriott, of the Grange, Cropwell Butler, together with the letter announcing Mr. Chaworth's death.
His daughter,aged five, MARY ANN CHAWORTH, "the last of a time-honoured race," as Byron says, came into possession of the estates that had descended through so many generations, and conveyed them, in 1805, to her husband, John Musters, of Colwick.4 Their great-grandson, the present John Patricius Chaworth Musters, is now their owner. Edwalton, the oldest property, came from the De Alfreton heiress; Wiverton, from Alice de Caltoft; and Annesley from Alice, the daughter and heiress of John de Annesley.
Mrs. Musters, the last Chaworth, died in February, 1832, at Wiverton, three months after the Reform Riots at Nottingham, when the mob attacked Colwick, and Mrs. Musters, then an invalid, was carried into the shrubbery, while the house was being wrecked and her bedroom set on fire. The poor lady rallied, after being brought to Wiverton, and wrote an interesting letter on family matters to her married daughter, Mrs. Hamond, in Norfolk. In the course of the letter she incidentally gives a description of her own character, which, as so much has been written about her, in connection with Lord Byron, may be worth insertion here. Speaking of her younger daughter, the same who carried her out of the house during the riots, she says, "I hope if I am not worse, to part with my dear Sophy to you for a short visit, but indeed I do feel (independent of my fears which are at times distressing) such a blank that I find how dear she is to me. I must say she is very like what your own little mother" (meaning herself) "once was, and is still in a certain degree. Soon led, easily pleased, very hasty and very relenting, with a heart, I think, moulded in a warm and affectionate fashion."
Mary Ann Chaworth, aged 19. Born 1786; married John Musters, of Colwick, 1805 died 1832. (From a miniature in the possession of Mrs. Musters.)
In less than a fortnight after writing this Mrs. Musters died, in her 46th year, and was buried at Colwick, where a graceful marble monument in the church was raised to her memory. She left a family of four sons and three daughters, now all passed away. Her eldest child and namesake, Mary Ann, mentioned in a letter to Lord Byron as "the one whom you saw," died in 1900 in her 94th year. Mrs. Musters' youngest son, Charles, a midshipman in the Navy, died in South America while under Admiral Fitzroy's command, about the same time as his mother, so that neither knew of the other's death. Mrs. Musters' husband survived her till 1849, and their eldest son having predeceased his father, the estates passed to the grandson, John Chaworth Musters, born 1838, died 1887, father of the present owner (1905), JOHN PATRICIUS CHAWORTH MUSTERS, born 1860.
(1) Evelyn mentions it in 1654 as "an
handsom seate belonging to my Lord Chaworth."
(2) Lord Chaworth is remembered in the old Church at Annesley by a partition
between the western arch and the tower, on which is a large coat of arms
with " P. C. 1684 " in plaster. We also owe to him a sundial on
the west wall of the house, dated 1691.
(3) There is a small full-length portrait, on a small scale, of William Chaworth,
a fine looking man, with a remarkably good figure and carriage.
(4) I have been told that Mr. Musters and Miss Chaworth first met at West
Bridgford, in the house now the property of Mr. Heymann.