The present house of Thoresby, which stands about a quarter of a mile from the site of its cold and damp predecessor, was built between 1864 and 1874. It is in the modern Elizabethan style, its walls of stone quarried at Steetley, some miles away, and is surrounded by a rich and beautiful park where may be seen many magnificent beeches and firs and oaks. The mansion is rich in art treasures, and may be counted amongst the most luxuriously furnished in the country; and the pleasure gardens are stately and beautiful.
Fine herds of deer wander among the bracken and heath, and the trees are haunted with happy squirrels. The park is thirteen miles in circumference, and near the house the little River Meden spreads out into a singularly picturesque lake, diversified with toy islands. The Thoresby of to-day possesses an atmosphere of tranquil splendour: in its neighbourhood one has some difficulty in evoking lively pictures of the celebrated folk who inhabited its predecessors.
The great woman of Thoresby was Lady Mary Wortley Montague, who spent there the greater part of her youth. The house in her time was a plain and uninteresting building of red brick. This was destroyed by fire in 1745. From the record by Sir Harbottle Grimston of his tour in the autumn of 1768, we find that—more than twenty years afterwards—the new hall was not completed. Sir Harbottle writes: "This parke excels the others much in beauty, having a very good turf, which in this country is very much wanting. The house, which is not nearly finished, is rather adapted for convenience than magnificence. It is fronted by a rising lawn, on the top of which is a very fine wood. On one side a noble piece of water, which supplies a cascade behind the house: the other side of this house is beautified by plantations." Horace Walpole found this hall dull, since he declared that "Merry Sherwood is a triste region, and wants a race of outlaws to enliven it, and as Duchess Robin Hood has left her country, it has little chance of recovering its ancient glory". This was obviously written after the famous Duchess of Kingston had departed on her Continental tour.
Before me lie a pair of tiny shoes of sea-green silk, shot with an undertone of flesh colour. For at least a century these were in the possession of a yeoman family in the neighbourhood of Wortley village. The toes are pointed, the heels high, and on the lappets are frayed marks where the pins of the jewelled buckles pierced the fabric. The insteps do not belie the tradition that a kitten could lie beneath the arch of the wearer's naked foot, for they are so high that it seems as if the blue blood of the Pierreponts were accompanied with physical deformity.
These are relics of Lady Mary, and were probably left at her husband's heritage of Wharncliffe, in Yorkshire, when the first happiness of her married life had come to an end, and before she became engaged in those famous travels which, by their result—the introduction of inoculation for the smallpox—raised her even to a greater eminence than that given by her intellectual ability.
She was born of a family that had already produced two men of splendid genius, whose names are written in golden letters in the annals of literature: Beaumont, the dramatist, who wrote, in collaboration with his friend Fletcher, some plays that are considered by our best critics as inferior only to Shakespeare's, was related by his mother to the Pierreponts of the Elizabethan age; and Henry Fielding, the novelist, was Lady Mary's second cousin. She is said to have written in her copy of Tom Jones as fine a tribute to an author's power as could be desired—simply the words Ne plus ultra. Villiers, the notorious Duke of Buckingham, whose end served Pope for some of his best satirical verse, was also of the same stock.
THORESBY
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