Dining-Room, Doddington Hall.
Filling the centre of the south end of the gallery is the striking picture by Sir Joshua Reynolds, in 1762, of Lord and Lady Pollington, later Earl and Countess of Mexborough, in their coronation robes, with their son and heir, John Savile, afterwards second Earl, as a child, between them. She was the youngest of the Delaval family, and is represented as a girl in the family groups below. She married in 1760 John Savile, Lord Pollington, created Earl of Mexborough in 1765, and died in 1821, the last survivor of that generation of her family. The child is represented as reaching up to the coronet which his mother is holding in her hand; and the story is told “that when Reynolds began to paint this picture he tried the effect of setting the coronet on her head, but being dissatisfied with the effect he placed it in her hand. It was shown to the little boy, and he was offered a choice of the crown or an apple. He preferred the former, and within a year inherited it on his father’s death.” In fact, however, his father did not die till 1778, when his son was seventeen, and the anecdote can only be reconciled with dates by supposing it to refer to the child’s succession to the courtesy title of Pollington, when his father became Earl in 1765.
If we pass out at the southern end of the Long Gallery, the well-like back staircase, carried up from the bottom to the top of the house in a projection of the southern wing, will bring us through the southernmost gazebo on to the flat-leaded roof, on which the two other gazeboes open. Here is plainly seen the ground-plan of the house; and by looking over the parapet we may observe the squared leaden spout-heads, most of them bearing the initials and the Ram’s Head crest of Sir John Hussey-Delaval, with the date 1765. A few bear the date 1733, thus going back to the ownership of Mrs. Apreece. Close in front of the Hall, encouraged by its shelter, a broad-leafed magnolia has out-topped the Hall itself, while in the north-west corner stands the great holly, measuring 12 feet round the hole, but with half its massive head now split off by a great storm, 24th March 1895. Tradition says that it once saved the life of a young lady who was pursued to the roof by a too ardent admirer, and who jumped into it from the roof to escape his embraces.
Round the mansion lie its old-fashioned walled gardens, and on the north the orchard with a picturesque group of three gnarled old Spanish chestnuts. Eastward the eye rests on Lincoln, with its houses climbing the steep, crowned by the triple towers of the Minster; and in the nearer foreground are the massive oak-woods of Doddington and Skellingthorpe, the immemorial breeding-place of herons. To the westward the hills of Nottinghamshire rise across the Trent, the hidden course of whose stream is marked only by the clumps of trees at Spalford Bank and Marnham Ferry. Amid such surroundings the great house has stood for full three hundred years, and has sheltered generation after generation of those whose portraits now adorn its walls. Here to all appearance it may stand for three hundred years to come, if only it escapes that doom of fire to which Seaton-Delaval itself and so many other ancient mansions have fallen a prey.
LINCOLNSHIRE FAMILIES
By Rev. Canon Maddison, M.A., F.S.A.
It is quite impossible within the limits of a short paper to give an exhaustive account of the Lincolnshire Families. They can be classified as—1st, Baronial; 2nd, Knightly; 3rd, Gentle.
With the baronial, which includes such names as Darcy, Kyme, de Roos, Trehampton, &c., I do not concern myself. Their pedigrees are given, for the most part, in works of reference. Of the great baronial families I do not think a single one exists at the present day in the male line. The Neviles now seated in Lincolnshire belong to the Nottinghamshire branch of that great family. The Lincolnshire Neviles, which have been a puzzle to genealogists, have long since been extinct.