
Clarissa Trant
In 1831-39 Great Baddow’s Vicar’s wife was Clarissa Trant. Her early life had been full of balls and the scandalous craze of The Waltz. The Times mentioned the scandal of Waltzing at Royal Balls, saying, “We pay a due deference to our superiors in rank but we owe a higher duty to morality!” A sentiment echoed by much of Great Baddow society. Clarissa’s father, Major general Sir Nicholas Trant was called by Wellington, “A very good officer, but as drunken a dog as ever lived”. He’s buried in St Mary’s, and is easily found though like most of the graves, the inscriptions are hard to decipher. He was once governor of Oporto, a job that consisted of entertaining various dignitaries as the post-Napoleon order was established.

Sir Nicholas Trant

Sir Nicholas Trant's grave in St Mary's Churchyard
The family were Irish from Cork and Nicholas Trant was brought up a catholic, though he seems to have swapped religions when he married Sarah Horsingdon, of evangelical persuasion. She died when Clarissa was five. His military career was by all accounts a very adventurous one. As a youth he and his brothers Thomas and Dominic served in the Irish contingent of the pre-revolution French Army.
The brother, Thomas, at 17, was decorated by Louis XVI and made a Chevalier, the star of which, with the hair of Queen Marie Antoinette in it, was pinned on his breast by the Queen herself. He led a ferocious charge “with his sword in his teeth”, against the British in Santa Lucia, West indies, that led to the capitulation of the English Governor. He later on attempted to rescue the French Royal family from the guillotine. It is surprising that a film hasn’t been made about him.
Nicholas Trant’s other brother, Dominic, died in 1782 at the age of 18 fighting on George Washington’s side and was the first person buried in the West Point Cemetery. Yet another brother, Philip Trant, served in HMS Thunderer at the battle of Trafalgar. They did not seem to mind who they were fighting for, so long as they got paid. Which, in the end seems to have become an issue because there are no pension schemes for soldiers of fortune.
With the French Revolution and the death of the French King and Queen, the Irish contingent did a deal and joined the English army. So in 1795 Nicholas Trant was thus sent off to South Africa with the British army. In 1798 he took part in the capture of Minorca. He then fought in the battle of Alexandria in Egypt. He then engaged in many battles in the Peninsular Campaign where he organised Portuguese partisans and engaged in many surprise attacks on the French, one time managing to capture five thousand French prisoners! A feat that got him knighted. He was also made a Knight Commander of the Portuguese order of the Tower and Sword. He eventually left the service with a bullet in his side that plagued him until his death in 1839 in Great Baddow, where he lived in a small house near Clarissa’s vicarage.
With this kind of father and the post war relief, Clarissa spent many a happy hour dancing and conversing with influential men in the six languages that she spoke. And she wrote a detailed diary from the age of fourteen from which we get all this information.

Clarissa Trant's diary
Her brother, Peter Trant was similarly adventurous, serving in South Africa, and also on the staff of General Campbell during the first Anglo-Burmese war 1824-1826. This was a suitably mad venture where the British attempted to install an ousted Sultan back in his rightful place. Unfortunately he died on the boat up the rive and had to be propped up by a couple of sailors, who waved his arm at the awaiting reception committee then whisked him off to the palace to reign until he rotted or at least another suitable candidate could be found. Peter Trant published a book on this called “Trant’s Two Years in Ava”, which received a good acknowledgement from the Duke of Wellington. He also published a travel book “A Journey Through Greece” (1830). He appears also to have reluctantly served in Ireland. Clarissa wrote “Alas! He is surrounded with danger and engaged in a most painful duty, that of fighting against his countrymen!” He appears to have contracted malaria in Burma and suffered bouts of fever from then on. On becoming seriously ill he moved to Great Baddow where he died in 1832.
All this would have made Clarissa a very exotic and interesting character for the average Great Badovian. But just speaking one foreign language was highly suspect, but six, was positively a crime against the natural order of things. And as for dancing waltzes, well that was scandalous!

In Great Baddow Clarissa was probably very constrained and unable to really tell her story without feeling disapproved of. Clarissa hated Great Baddow’s holier than thou ways. She wrote in her diary how she wished for “The luxury of not meeting silk bonnets and remarkably genteel persons at every step!”
She lent herself to this life because, after her father retired, the diplomat’s life discontinued and Clarissa had reached her sell by date. She was in need of a husband, otherwise she would become a penniless old maid. She met John Bramston, on a ferry from Ireland, where she had been visiting relatives. He proposed pretty much instantly. She was reluctant, recovering from an earlier proposal from a Major Cameron, a one-armed military hero, who’s father forbade it because her father had no money. Indeed, there had been quite a number of other suitors who had balked at proposing because, despite her dazzling social set, her family had no money at all! After John Bramston persisting for two years, her Godfather, Lord Mount Sandford, persuaded her that John was an excellent match with his father an MP for Essex. And he was, thankfully, rather dashing in looks, if somewhat earnest, which is probably what worried her.

John Bramston

An elder John Bramston
The Reverend Bramston of St Mary’s was a follower of the Oxford Movement, a movement that wanted more bling and ceremony in the church, and was consequently, shock horror, in favour of Catholics having a vote! Clarissa, for all her wild liberal youth and Irish ancestry, disapproved as did her best friend in Great Baddow, Mrs Crabbe, the wife of the owner of the Brewery. For them the Irish were mostly an uncouth ignorant bunch mired in superstition, i.e. Catholic! Clarissa curiously called herself a “Paddy” and her entire family were very Irish, and on her father’s side, very Catholic, but then distancing herself from them might well have been the reason for her opinion. One does get the impression that her father was not a religious man and had simply gone along with his wife’s protestant ways. Similarly, Clarissa despite being a Vicar’s wife, was lacking in religious fervour or at least the judgemental kind regarding anything but Catholics!
It may be hard to imagine how disliked Catholics were given our enlightened, well, sort of, times. But the sensibilities of present-day Ulstermen were pretty much the same as every community in Scotland and England during the 19th Century. And the troubles in Ireland despite a lot of sympathy from various sectors of British society, and a desire to make things right, also served to bolster much of the prejudice. Needy people get little respect and angry dangerous people engender nothing but fear and loathing. It is a lose lose situation that haunts many politicians attempts to resolve and move on with careers still intact, to loftier heights. These conflicts are the domain of psychopaths and poets and although 1991 was the last time the IRA tried to blow up the British government with a mortar attack on Downing Street, it is not that long ago!
Clarissa may be a self-proclaimed “paddy”, but she wanted to be seen as the fun and generous Irish lady that could seduce all and sweep away the prejudices. Given that Clarissa’s social set were the likes of Lord Mount Sandford and the Pakenham family, of whom Catherine Pakenham was the Duke of Wellington’s wife, not to mention the various members of Portuguese aristocracy who were always inviting them to stay at their grand estates, a friendship with Mrs Crabbe was perhaps more a matter of Clarissa’s graciousness and sense of duty to her husband’s role in Great Baddow society than any deep affection. As the Crabbe’s were owners of a brewery and many a pub, the Crabbes were a bit worldlier than other ladies in the town, though at least as snooty, and Clarissa would have been flattered and amused by Mrs Crabbe’s determination to have her, a “paddy” nontheless, as a best friend. Clarissa probably came over as very lady like to everyone in Great Baddow, a treasure of her kind, and a lot more assured socially than they were; even so it was an odd alliance. But then Clarissa had led a life where she mingled with ruffian soldiers as much as worldly aristocrats. If her diaries are anything to go by, she had an artist’s delight in meeting all sorts.

The Vicarage, Great Baddow
As was common for freshly wed ladies, Clarissa spent most of her time pregnant and losing babies, as was common even two hundred years before this period! When not bedridden she was organizing The District Visiting Society. This group of respectable ladies decided who was a deserving poor and met every Tuesday at the Vicarage to compare notes. Clarissa created a map naming who lived where and who were gentle folk and who were not. Her talents as an artist and observer of human nature would have assured others of her leadership qualities, and given the nature of village life, an object of much jealousy.

Clarissa's map of Great Baddow people
She had a tendency to err on the compassionate side. All the poor of this parish, it seems on reading her diaries, were deserving as far as she was concerned. Clarissa even insisted that a local suicide, Mr Fitch, should get a decent Christian Burial in the Church. He had slit his throat after his wife and children died of consumption. It would have been difficult for the ladies of the village to decide whether her intervention was a lack of moral courage or a display of Christian compassion. They would have whispered disapprovingly to each other about how Clarissa reads French novels and speaks four other languages! Worse still… they were FOREIGN languages!
John Bramston might well have wondered what he had married into. Not only had her father descended upon them, but then her brother turned up and moved in the Vicarage. However, it turns out he was seriously ill. He died of “fever” at 24. Maybe it was malaria but it would have been exacerbated by the cold and damp of the vicarage that had already taken its toll on Clarissa’s own health.
In the end, much to Clarissa’s relief, she and her husband left for the healthier, though hardly less stuffy air of Witham, where unfortunately she died of pleurisy at 44, leaving behind two daughter and a son. Her husband, for all his Oxford Movement fervour, did not follow the founder, John Newman, into the Catholic Church. Instead, he became Dean of Winchester and enjoyed a good career. He remarried in 1846 to Anna Hanbury and had a daughter who went on to found Winchester High School. His granddaughter Clara Luard published Clarissa Trant’s twenty-eight volume journals in 1925.
John Bramston’s main achievement in Great Baddow was the establishment of a church in Galleywood, which proved to be a gathering place for a group of parishioners who became increasingly annoyed at the preference they perceived that Great Baddow’s Parish Council gave to Great Baddow. They called for an independent Galleywood council and it merely took another hundred years before they got their wish. Hurrah!