The Stuarts, backed by French money, lumbered on with a policy of bread and circuses. The plague and the fire of London did not exactly help maintain a stable government, but the opportunity for overseas expansion grew and people turned their attention to the arts, sciences, colonial adventures and making money. The on off wars with the Dutch intensified but given there had been some political moves to actually unite the Commonwealth of Great Britain with the only other truly godly state, the United Provinces of The Netherlands, it was not long before some clever political manoeuvring at the death of Charles II, brought in William of Orange. This was not quite a unification, but many Dutch financiers entered the country and the price of Tulips and Cheese began to be of great interest.
Ostensibly this was a joint monarchy of William and Mary, Charles’s sister, but William of Orange was the main shaker and mover, that is, him and his boyfriend. Times were liberal, sort of! At least he wasn’t a Catholic. William finished off the wars in Ireland, and opened up the country to the power of Capitalism. Then came in the Hanoverians and England was a very new sort of country: in fact, in 1707 we had a new country entirely! Scotland seeing the financial benefits of Empire much more clearly than the English, united with England, creating the Kingdom of Great Britain. The eighteenth century was thus a new world, and literally with a lot of interest in the New World, where the zealots could go if this state did not suit them.
The Dutch riding in behind William of Orange, reformed not only the management of the Blackwaters of Essex - though it has to be said that it took them over a hundred years from the 1670 plans to the 1793 building of the Blackwater canal - but they did create the Bank of England, setting the scene for massive imperial expansion, and more importantly for Great Baddow, setting the scene for lots of London financiers looking to buy up land to build suitable country piles. Even more so with the plague and the Great Fire of London making city life less attractive. Great Baddow’s farming community had been struggling for years with bad harvests and livestock being plundered by passing military bands, but now came the opportunity to sell off land and get a bit of capital and move on.
Great Baddow’s parish records are full of complaints about broken church windows, leaky roofs, and battered Bibles. Which is as much a sign of a retreat from religion, as it was a sign of the old community breaking up despite the Petres, Mildmays and Paschalls getting lands back that Parliament had requisitioned. But now more pressing matters took a hold of Essex where there were deep resentments of the tithes the church had been demanding from farmers to finance the church.
The Tithe Barn, Great Baddow
The old Tithe Barn in Great Baddow was not placed beside the church to keep the taxman honest; it was so the Vicar could get to the goods quicker and many a vicar was thought to be exploiting his position. Consequently, throughout Essex Tithe Barns were surprisingly flammable. Great Baddow’s Tithe Barn managed to weather the storm, eventually turning into Russell’s Restaurant, named after the builder’s yard it turned into in the 19th century.
With new people arriving in Great Baddow, money began to flow. The peace bonus was being spent on fashion, novels, the Grand Tour, flashy carriages and riotous corrupt elections. One might say that democracy was burgeoning. Though it was a rich man’s democracy and perhaps it still is. Politics used to be all about protecting the ancient land owners’ rights but now it became a way of making money for the urban elites and country squires as well.
With this sudden interest in a London commute, more money was to be made out of toll roads, financed by the Turnpike Trusts that were set up. The trusts were largely financed by local landowners and businessmen who had vested interests in easing their access to the growing cities. Though there were many complaints about the number of horses it took to drag carts and carriages out of the sometimes-knee-deep mud. Tar MacAdam did not solve these issues until the early nineteenth century!
Even so, the Whitechapel to Maldon coach service thrived on roads that made London, in good weather, but a day’s ride away. For ordinary people the coaches were chock full of the unwashed and asthmatic, making clinging to the roof in freezing weathers almost preferable. The Inns did a thriving trade giving these people just a little bit of extra comfort. You could charge a fortune for a hot bath.
The wealthier had a craze for purchasing their own flashier sorts of carriages, with such extras as sprung wheels for a smoother ride, not that that helped with the mud. But many a towny would gather up a group of friends, keen on heading to Essex for some fishing, shooting and oysters. Daniel Defoe in his “Tour Thro’ The Whole Island of Great Britain” published in 1727, said they mostly only caught the “Essex Ague”, which may or may not have been a euphemism for other trades that flourished along well travelled routes.
Despite a history of murder and plague, The Whitehorse Inn became a well recommended stopover on the way to Chelmsford, Colchester, and Maldon. If you were not in the business of mending coaches, refurbishing saddles, shoeing horses, and ripping off passing strangers with no knowledge of local prices, you might chance your luck by rushing the coaches and offering your services at sixpence a pop to carry bags, clean shoes and arrange guns and guides for whatever sort of expedition a young buck with too much money might look like they were on. Local village youths had their favourite spots for this and would fight off anyone muscling in on their act. Travel then, with the odd highwayman, could be a lot more exciting than one expected or wished for. Dick Turpin, it has to be remembered, was an Essex lad.
Those pretty Paschall Girls were still here, only a little more desperate for a good marriage now that their family fortunes had declined. But with the advent of pleasure estates in Essex that never made money from the land but from trade and finance, there were plenty of people passing through with introductory letters from seemingly important people. Local gentry with unmarried daughters were all too willing to entertain such characters by displaying their quaint village ways on the one hand, and the superior education of their daughters on the other.
Hylands House, Chelmsford
Baddow Park House
John Verney, Viscount of Fermanagh, an MP and brother of the Mayor of London, had a son: Ralph. And Ralph had an “aunt”, that is, a family friend, Mary Eure, who married Henry Pugh, a Great Baddow Clergyman at St Mary’s, and she told him all about these Paschall girls. Henry Pugh was both a clergyman and a lawyer and business associate of John Verney, where Mary Eure was the daughter of William Eure, 4th Baron Eure. This was the sort of grapevine by which suitable marriages emerged when there was no such a thing as dating. The aim was less about love and affection and more a matter of connecting up notable families, and in this case, notable Essex families, which is always good for the finances! And in fact, the Verney’s had an earlier connection to the Paschalls in the shape of Edmund Verney who 78 years earlier in 1638 married another Katherine Paschall but was killed in 1642 fighting for the King at the Battle of Edgehill.
When Ralph saw these Paschalls, he agreed that they were very agreeable. His family then went into negotiation mode and began wondering if the Paschalls were a tad provincial and too much in decline. Even so, despite some very sniffy correspondence that can be found in the biography of the Verney family (The Verneys: A True Story of Love, War, and Madness in Seventeenth-Century England) about the suitability of anything more than a passing association with this family, in 1716 Ralph married Catherine Paschall, daughter of Henry Paschall of Baddow Hall. Her father Henry, died in 1727 and her sister, Mary, married a John Stone of Brightwell Oxfordshire, who I am sure was also a fine catch if lacking in noble titles.
Ralph went on to be a Whig MP for Amersham 1717-1727 then inherited the title of Lord Viscount of Fermanagh and in 1743 became Earl Verney, both Irish peerages, so he could continue to serve as an MP, this time for Wendover 1741-1752 when he died. Catherine died still relatively young by today’s standards in 1748 and they had two daughters and two sons. One daughter, Mary was raised to the peerage in her own right.
With these very good marriages and the death of Henry Paschall, Baddow Hall was sold to Jacob Houblon and the advowson of St Mary’s remained in the hands of Anne Percival, the widow of Henry Paschall who moved to Clatford, Wiltshire. Baddow Hall was now rented out to various families and lost its status as the residence of the Lords of The Manor. And as one can see in the photo it was hardly on the sort of grand scale that would have impressed the Verneys. If the Paschall girls were not somewhat classy, they might have merely bagged some local farmer struggling to find a decent breed of pig with a good profit margin.
In 1836 the newspapers were advertising the sale of the Baddow Hall, now billed as a comfortable family home with rooms for servants with a walled in garden with or without stable and chaise house… one suspects “comfortable” meant ramshackle. Over the eighteenth and nineteenth century we find various names attached to the place: the McLachlan, Greene, and Gilmore families. One finds their names on the streets in the housing estate that was built where it used to be. And one finds them attending Parish meetings and hosting teas for charities and such, well into the 20th Century.
Baddow Hall
The McLachlan's were also related to the Bullens, the later iteration of the Boleyn name, and set up The Chelmsford Bank after the local bank had failed. All of which indicates that money and power spent a long time in the hands of much the same people, no doubt through judicious breeding strategies learned from farming practices. Poverty was seen, strangely by the more compassionate, as genetic rather than a moral defect. Good breeding was everything. Those however who had risen above their mongrel backgrounds considered it a moral defect.
The Paschalls thus went the way of history and the Houblon family came to the fore. Jacob Houblon, now the proud owner of Baddow Hall, was a member of an enormous dynasty of London Merchants and was nephew of the first Governor of the Bank of England as portrayed on a fifty-pound note.
Pitt Place, Great Baddow
Given the slave trading origins of much of the wealth flooding into the UK in the 18th century, these good protestants from Huguenot stock, hankered after respectability and high walled estates with solid security in place. So, they bought up Hallingbury Place, a suitable mansion pulled down in the 1920’s, to become country squires, and acquired other lands which nourished their political ambitions.
From 1735 to 1768 Jacob was the Tory MP for Colchester and John Houblon followed in his father’s footsteps. Jacob and John were notably against parliamentary reform and Catholic emancipation. They were also terrible on the hustings and noted for not speaking in the House of Commons. Except John did speak once, only to be shouted down when trying to defend the appointment of a friend, George Rose, as treasurer of the Navy. The 18th Century commons was a robust affair and duals were not unknown right into the 1820s when even the Duke of Wellington fought a dual! So, speaking out of turn took a lot of guts or a lot of stupidity.
The Houblons had a long history of association with the navy and back in the day Samuel Pepys had been helped financially whenever they needed the Royal Navy to lend them a Naval ship for their trading requirements. Even so, they were keen Church of England men, and being a big family, Essex ended up with quite a few of the lesser Houblons as local vicars. The Church was very keen on recruiting such men of means. A parsonage and a private income fuelled many a career in the arts in these times. A collection of poems and sermons sometimes rose to literary heights, though most did not. Great Baddow fostered little in this area, but it was not without its stars, as we shall discover when we come to Clarissa Bramston. Art or no art, this was the road to a religious revival and is why the Vicarage now looked like it does today, all very much the part that Alexander Barclay would have approved of.
Great Baddow was also beginning to look the part as well. The country might well have been in turmoil as Bonnie Prince Charlie was on the rampage and heading towards London with a bunch of angry Scotsmen, but in 1746 the big news in Great Baddow was that a mansion was being built on the site of Lord Petres 15th Century building called “Vynezerd”, which became The Vinyards. It was now owned by the Tyrell family who built the house. It was later on in the 19th Century purchased by the Bullens and underwent significant renovations with the addition of a new wing, a ballroom, and large landscaped garden and of course, a vineyard!
In the 18th Century the High Street began to be lined with high brick walls to keep out cattle, angry Scotsmen, and otherwise unwanted intruders. At the end of the road at Rothmans, there was the slaughter house and cattle market, which meant that farmers regularly drove their herds down the road to the fields near today’s Rothmans BnB. And as for the name Rothmans, 17th Century Court records feature a William Rothman, Inn Keeper, who I suspect the present Bed and Breakfast establishment that you can see on the right is named after. Hurrah! I think…
The History of Great Baddow
Chapter 1. Origins.Chapter 2. The Saxons.
Chapter 3. The Normans.
Chapter 4. The Name's De Baddow, Hugh De Baddow.
Chapter 5. The End of Feudalism.
Chapter 6. The Rise of the Gentry.
Chapter 7. The Civil War.
Chapter 8. The Rise of Money.
Chapter 9. The Publican Revolution.
Chapter 10. The Rise of the Genteel.
Chapter 11. Death and Religion.
Chapter 12. Battling the Bad in Baddow.
Chapter 13. A Happy Ending.
Chapter 14. The End of an Era.
Chapter 15. The Finale.
Chapter 16. Conclusion.