People of the Sacred Valley

By Paul Eastham

A former haunt of Druids, Viking invaders and magical sword-wielding Celtic warriors, the historic and mysterious Derwent Valley is a beautiful fragment of England’s ravishing Lake District.

But besides forming part of a glorious Unesco World Heritage Site, the towns and villages along the sixty-mile course of its remarkable river have experienced traumatic events, nurtured great heroes and endured despicable villainy.

People of the Sacred Valley tells of the heavy human price paid for creating of some of the world’s greatest art and literature, nurturing its most dangerous political ideas, guarding the world’s greatest empire, the birth of one of the most significant religions and the battle to build Europe’s biggest conservation organisation, all of which happened in this tiny corner of Britain.

Also among the twenty-one real-life stories in this book:

• A corrupt moneybags accidentally made a town beautiful as he sneakily bought up an election.
• The pioneering doctor gave everything she had to establish a hospital for the poor, only to find her own Government was killing the people she aimed to save.
• An innocent German miner was bludgeoned to death by a jealous Cumbrian mob after he and his Continental colleagues left the local girls swooning.
• A cautious General narrowly escaped a firing squad after he volunteered to carry out a King’s impossible military fantasy.
• A brilliant girl who was savagely beaten by her tyrant father grew up to start the tabloid tradition of woman-hating columnists.
• A lecherous slaveowner’s pretensions to gentility collapsed when two girls he imported for his own pleasure escaped into the night...
People of the Sacred Valley features famous names such as John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Sara Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Hardwicke Rawnsley, Emperor Hadrian, Sheila Fell and Hugh Walpole.
Queen Elizabeth I, William Pitt the Elder, Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, William Hazlitt, John Maynard Keynes and L.S.Lowry play major roles.
It also shines new light on others whose stories have become obscured by time such as William Senhouse, Dame Edith Brown, Eliza Lynn Linton, Richard Graham, Viscount Preston, Sir John Mordaunt, Arthur Pigou, Celia Fiennes, Cumbria’s Viking invaders and ...the barmaid of the Royal Oak Hotel, Keswick.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Paul Eastham
• Release date: Mar 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781005331535

Paul Eastham

Paul Eastham was a journalist for thirty years. In London, he worked for the Times and the Daily Mail. He reported on politics from the House of Commons during fifteen controversial years. That period saw five wars, several corruption scandals and Britain’s historic move towards leaving the EU. He subsequently had a career advising two embattled Government quangos and a pair of struggling children’s charities on public relations. He now lives with his wife Susan in a small Lake District village called Blindcrake. The community dates back three thousand years. Paul has published three paperbacks about the often startling and largely untold history of Cumbria. People of the Sacred Valley is the first to be published as an e-book. The other two are Secrets of the Crooked River and Huge & Mighty Forms which are available by post as printed books.

Book preview

A FLETCHER CHRISTIAN PAPERBACK

First published in Great Britain in 2021

by Fletcher Christian

an imprint of Fletcher Christian Books,

Blindcrake Hall, Blindcrake,

Near Cockermouth CA130QP

Copyright © Paul Eastham

The right of Paul Eastham to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the copyright holder.

Printed by Book Printing UK

Remus House, Coltsfoot Drive, Peterborough,

PE2 9BF.

By the same author:

Secrets of the Crooked River: Hidden Cumbrian Histories

Huge & Mighty Forms

Why Cumbria makes remarkable people.

You can buy them here: www.fletcherchstristianbooks.com

Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Introduction

1. Wicked Jimmy beautifies a town by accident

2. Murder, miners and the penny-pinching Queen

3. William Senhouse and the sprinting slavegirls

4. Edith Brown, Empire and the throwaway babies

5. Percy Shelley: the mugging of a pyrotechnical poet

6. Eliza Lynn Linton: the woman who hated women

7. Wordsworth, the barmaid and the failed painter

8. Hardwicke Rawnsley: housing benefit for aristos

9. The tipsy traitor’s Inglorious Revolution

10. Sara Coleridge, the unfinished masterpiece

11. Roman Empire’s endgame in a back garden

12. John Keats gets sick on Skiddaw

13. Sheila Fell: Rapture in Aspatria

14. How the wary General narrowly dodged the firing squad.

15. Mr and Mrs Hadrian go up the Wall

16. The mystery of the vanishing Vikings

17. Hugh Walpole: the lost novelist of Borrowdale

18. William Wordsworth goes from Hero to Zero

19. The long climb of the plastic bag man

20. Side-saddle with Celia through Westmorland

21. Castlerigg, Cumbrians and the Teutonic Myth

By the same author

Dedication

To Janet, Frances and Susan

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Stephen Kidd at the Moon & Sixpence in Cockermouth for keeping the coffee flowing through the pandemic and also Kitty and Teddy for helping him. John Brian Dawes deserves credit for reading the manuscript of this book more than once and helpfully pointing out its deficiencies. Special thanks go to artist and DJ Marty Strutt for giving me permission to use the image of Fletcher Christian that he created.

Introduction

Ihave sometimes been frustrated by the choice of books available in the Lake District. It’s not that there aren’t any good ones - it’s simply that if you want to know more about the people and places, history and culture of Cumbria you have to bury yourself in hefty biographies or thumping great history books. There is nothing wrong with big books or serious reading, of course. But as a humble tourist I had no chance of making a serious dent in either of those types of material during the average two-week holiday, especially when I factored in childcare duties. Otherwise, I had to be satisfied with a few superficial tourist brochures and staccato guidebooks that rarely strayed far from telling me about the usual suspects: Wordsworth and Coleridge, Beatrix Potter and Alfred Wainwright. Then I escaped the toils of London and the mendacious, megalomaniac Fleet Street editors and moved up to the Lakes permanently. It struck me I ought at least to try and fill the gap, however inadequately, and deepen my knowledge of the place I loved in the process. This book brings together scattered information about Cumbrian subjects; building on the project I started with the previous two books, Secrets of The Crooked River and Huge & Mighty Forms. Taking the lovely market town of Cockermouth as the centre for my explorations, I set out to investigate historical events and the life stories of remarkable natives and settlers in an attempt to discover what makes Cumbria unique. I say in my subheading that some of these stories are hidden. In many cases they have been forgotten. I hope by reviving them I have helped explain something about Cumbria and its people. The phrase Sacred Valley in the title of this book refers to the sixty-mile route of the River Derwent that rises on the flanks of England’s highest mountain, Scafell Pike, and enters the Irish Sea at Workington. A lot of oak trees grow along the banks of this famous river. The name Derwent comes from the Celtic word deruenta which means river where oaks grow. The name Druid comes from the Celtic word druwides meaning oak-knower. The oaks are what make the valley sacred. Druids, the religious leaders of the pre-Roman Celts, practised their rites in these oak groves. They harvested mistletoe that grew on the oaks and used the berries to make a painkilling draught used in human sacrifice. They also venerated oaks because of their longevity, something they associated with wisdom and they chose to hold gatherings close to oaks when making important decisions. Oaks were thought to attract lightning, too, and that was considered a sign of favour from the gods. The site of at least one Druidic temple has been identified underneath the 1,000-year-old St Bega’s church on the shore of Bassenthwaite Lake. The unifying element of this book is its geography. The pieces are mostly about events that took place close to the Derwent, or they are about people who were in some way related to this fabulously beautiful and historic place. For the first time in this book, I have provided bibliographies to help you read more about each of the subjects. Writing regional history is pretty unfashionable. The metropolitan chattering classes and our Union Jack waving politicians tend not to be interested in anything that does not obviously contribute to our island story of national greatness. Just as more than half of the news stories in the national newspapers concern London and the South East, mainstream history assumes the national narrative took place in the bottom right-hand corner of England. But, as these pieces show, few counties have had such a profound influence on Britain’s culture and achievements as Cumbria. The Lake District has been essential to my life. At times of sickness and stress the mountains have provided a zone of spiritual renewal and a handy refuge from the office thanks to the poor mobile phone reception. William Wordsworth was plagued by mood swings all his life, particularly after his French Revolution ordeal. He saw the Lakes as a source of consolation. He said nature gave him life and food for future years. But I haven’t set out with a bucket of whitewash. This sparsely populated, violently disputed, mountainous northern border territory isolated from major cities is a place of extremes. Its life veers from the deepest reactionary prejudice and awful suffering to visionary inspiration and revolutionary originality. For example, this book tells the stories of several women whose sometimes tough Cumbrian life experiences helped make them pioneers. Keswick’s Sara Coleridge opted to live her life to a mere fragment of its potential in order to devote herself to clearing her difficult and remote father, the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, of the charge of plagiarism. Would Crosthwaite’s Elizabeth Lynn Linton have become the inventor of the archetypal ranting, misogynist female columnist that now dominates the Fleet Street tabloids, if she had not been regularly caned and locked up by her Victorian tyrant of a father? The distorted and turbulent landscapes created by the brilliant painter Sheila Fell were influenced by the terrifying religious vision known as The Rapture peddled by the fundamentalist Plymouth Brethren on the doorstep of Sheila’s childhood home in Aspatria. The powerful influence of evangelical Christianity in Cumbria also inspired Whitehaven missionary Dr Edith Brown to create a hospital in India. In the process, she found herself trying to save girl babies from literally being thrown onto rubbish dumps by families who were starving due to the frequent famines caused by Britain’s colonial policies. Celia Fiennes invented Lake District tourism, crossing Westmorland by side-saddle in 1698, producing a highly influential, if acerbic, travelogue. Cumbria has no shortage of villains, either. Possibly the greatest was Sir James Lowther, then Britain’s richest commoner, a man of questionable sanity and enormous political ambition. He made himself dictator of Cockermouth by buying up a controlling majority of the votes, effectively abolishing elections. Yet amid this corrupt process he quite accidentally created one of the most beautiful towns in England. Another monster was Maryport’s William Senhouse, a Barbados sugar planter, who scandalised his neighbours when he imported some of the slave girls he kept for his own pleasure and they tried desperately to escape through Brigham churchyard. We learn how a fire in an historic Workington church revealed powerful evidence of what happened to Cumbria’s Vikings. They invaded the north-west a thousand years ago – and seemed to promptly vanish. Grasmere’s William Wordsworth proves yet again that despite being a great poet he was a lousy man. He passed on some vicious gossip about an ambiguous incident involving a Keswick barmaid to destroy the reputation of a critic he disliked, William Hazlitt. Percy Shelley was knocked out one night by a stranger who was offended by the poet’s revolutionary posturing and his habit of setting off explosions in the back garden of his Keswick holiday home. While making an inspirational climb of Skiddaw, the loveable John Keats suffered the first twinge from the disease that would kill him a thousand days later. Class conflict, xenophobia and murder erupted when the miserly Elizabeth I brought in some German miners to dig up and smelt the copper in Keswick for the cannons she needed to beat the Armada. Hardwicke Rawnsley invented the National Trust, intending to preserve the Lake District’s beautiful countryside. But his brainchild veered off course and ended up providing housing benefit for aristocrats. Tipsy Richard Graham, MP for Cockermouth, turned traitor to try and stop the Glorious Revolution of 1688, with disastrous consequences. The openly gay Roman Emperor Hadrian was humiliated while on a Wall-building trip to Maryport when his frustrated wife Sabina was accused of having an affair. Fed up with being ridiculed by critics and resented by rivals, Hugh Walpole, the bestselling author of Rogue Herries the most famous novel about the Lakes, escaped to Borrowdale, and found fulfilment. The Buttermere-based environmental economist who made us all pay for our plastic bags when out shopping, Arthur Pigou, spent much of his professional life in the shade of his rival, John Maynard Keynes, but not any more. We learn how Cockermouth MP General John Mordaunt narrowly escaped a firing squad when he loyally volunteered to head a King’s madcap military mission. And how William Wordsworth went from Hero to Zero by exchanging the Rights of Man for the Interests of the Lowther Family. Finally, we discover why the magnificent Castlerigg stone circle proves Cumbrian people are not the defeated, marginalised losers the history books would have us believe.

Paul Eastham,

Blindcrake,

September 2021.

1

Wicked Jimmy beautifies a town by accident

Nobody can say precisely when the mysterious expression as quick as Jack Robinson was first used in England. But it seems to have entered everyday speech in or around 1756. That was when a curious advertisement appeared on a noticeboard outside Cockermouth’s Moot, or town, Hall. Odd things happened after this announcement went up. And in the years that followed if you said someone did something before you can say Jack Robinson it meant they were quick or cunning in thought or deed.

This story took place when British public life had plunged into deep pit of rottenness and corruption. It’s about how one man’s almost insane lust for power made him test the limits of legality. He grabbed political control of much of Cumberland and Westmorland and he effectively abolished free elections there. He literally bought the right to decide who the local MPs should be for about half a century. And he was helped to do this by a crafty and devious man named Jack, or John, Robinson. Yet their chicanery produced one outcome they did not intend - they accidentally created one of the country’s most beautiful places. It has often puzzled visitors how the small market town of Cockermouth managed to acquire more than 200 listed buildings and earned the distinction of being named one of Britain’s fifty-one Gem Towns by the highly influential Council for British Archaeology.

A Gem Town is one whose layout, street plan, historic buildings and urban quality are considered particularly splendid and precious. The quality of Cockermouth’s streetscape is recognised by the most eminent experts. For example, the renowned architectural historian Nicklaus Pevsner praised the swagger of the town’s key buildings in the Cumberland and Westmorland edition of his magnificent Buildings of England survey. Yes, one of the most disgusting, fraudulent and outrageous abuses of the British democratic system inadvertently created a beauty spot.

The mysterious advertisement mentioned earlier was published in April 1756 on the wall of Cockermouth’s moot hall, a Tudor era building that once stood at the castle end of the marketplace but which was sadly demolished in 1829 because it was allegedly in the way. This handsome stone structure with its trio of arched alcoves on either side was the administrative centre of the town. It served as the main court building for Cockermouth and five local communities, Brigham, Clifton, Dean, Eaglesfield and Greysouthen. It was exactly the right place to post a communication if you wished to reach the movers and shakers. The notice reminded the 278 overwhelmingly male property holders who were entitled to vote in Parliamentary elections of their rights and their value.

The advertisement advised readers to only ever sell these rights in the best interests of the town - and only to the highest bidder. It was a heavy hint that someone was prepared to pay a lot of money if they acted wisely. It was a seductive, timely and successful wheeze. The issue of who had the right to vote was a complex matter in the 18th Century. In the period between the accession of George I in August 1714 and the Great Reform Bill of 1832, the rules about who could cast a ballot varied a lot depending on whether you lived in a corporation, freeman, university, a scot and lot or even a potwalloper borough. Cockermouth, as it happens, was yet another type - a burgage borough. This was a place where only people who owned a burgage plot, which usually consisted of a house on a long strip of land with a narrow frontage onto the street at one end, could exercise their franchise. Burgage holders usually paid an annual fee to a lord, a bishop or a king. Being wealthy enough to be a burgage holder entitled you to cast a ballot for an MP, or in the case of Cockermouth, two MPs. Cockermouth was one of a select group of Parliamentary boroughs that had received a Royal Charter giving it the right to send two members to Parliament, a privilege that was abolished in 1950. The special thing about burgages is the votes that came with them were legally private property and they could be bought and sold. It was this peculiarity that was so attractive to the authors of the anonymous advertisement.

But who was offering all this money - and why? The British then as now were not typically obsessed with politics. Cockermouth’s prosperous middle class residents were too busy making money from tanning, hat making, milling, fulling, auctioneering and the general commercial and agricultural trade of a market town to get fixated on events in distant Westminster which was up to twelve days away by stagecoach even in the summer.

Just like today, people didn’t necessarily follow the nuances all that closely. Most people in the Georgian era thought the parties, the Whigs and the Tories, were as bad as each other. However, for any remote rural community there were not all that many sources of entertainment. Locals would not turn their noses up at the traditional excitement of hustings where candidates for parliamentary elections would speak to and, very often, bribe voters. Election agents working for the candidates would be sure to meet these expectations by organising banquets, feasts and tavern dinners where, surrounded by food and drink, members of the electorate would spend the day in the company of candidates for Parliament. Amid the festivities, the agents would ply the guests with money and free booze in return for their votes. But this time it became clear that what was happening that April in Cockermouth was a bit more than the usual treating of electors. By using the power of a large amount of money someone was bent on buying up all the votes of the small electorate in order to gain unrepresentative influence in or, indeed, total political control, of the constituency. The mystery man wanted to create what came to be known as a rotten or pocket borough.

The rottenest borough in England at that time was Dunwich in Suffolk. There, a mere eight voters returned two MPs, even though most of the 15th Century town had been submerged under the North Sea for two hundred years. An even more lamentable example was the constituency of Old Sarum in Wiltshire, an uninhabited hill that until 1832 also elected two Members of Parliament. Cockermouth in the middle of the 18th century was not the handsome, architecturally distinguished place it is today. Back then it still looked medieval, with most of the buildings on either side of Cocker Bridge standing no higher than two stories with thatched roofs, timber and plaster walls. They looked like the rather squat Percy House Gallery, or the little cottage that houses the National Trust’s reception foyer at Wordsworth House. On the day the advertisement appeared, Cockermouth consisted of just Market Place, Main Street, Kirkgate and St Helens Street. Given the regularity of flooding, the town burghers had not built anything on the banks of the Derwent River.

Interestingly, the man called Jack or John Robinson mentioned at the beginning of this chapter came from another riverside borough, Appleby-in-Westmoreland. Like Cockermouth, Appleby had a castle, market and grammar school, a fine main street, Boroughgate, and it also returned two members to Parliament. The Robinsons were a solid, community-minded, prominent and successful family in Appleby. John’s father, Charles Robinson, a prosperous merchant, had been an alderman and Mayor of the town on and off for 30 years. The family sent sons into the professions, the Church and the Navy.

Only seven miles away in Maulds Meaburn was the seat of the ancient, wealthy and ambitious landowning family, the Lowthers, who traced back their origins to before the Norman invasion. By the fourteenth century the Lowthers had accumulated extensive estates in return for fighting for the King, including the lordship of numerous manors in Westmorland and Cumberland. Thanks to this influence, various family members had, by the seventeenth century, become baronets.

John Jack Robinson, Charles’s eldest son, was born in August 1727. John went to Appleby grammar school, but only until the age of 17 when he was articled to his aunt’s husband, the Sockbridge solicitor, Richard Wordsworth, the poet William Wordsworth’s grandfather. Richard was in poor health and the strain of his stressful job was showing on his face. He was the Lowthers’ land manager, law agent and steward. Once qualified in 1751 John became joint steward. The extraordinarily diligent, efficient and persistent younger man saw his opportunity and showed himself a highly resourceful and ingenious architect of Lowther schemes. When Richard died in 1760 John slid smoothly into the role of sole steward of Lowther’s rapidly expanding empire. It was the first step in a career that would see John become a rich landowner in his own right, marry into the aristocracy, become a senior Government Minister and a favourite of George III. In the process he would also earn a reputation as an unscrupulous and cynical political fixer acquiring several undesirable nicknames such as the dirty attorney and rat-catcher Robinson.

In 1756, the already notorious Sir James Lowther was 21. He had just inherited immense wealth from his cousin, the 4th and last Baronet of Whitehaven, including the town (the first planned town in England), harbour, a flourishing trade with Ireland, the American colonies and coal mines producing annual profits worth about £2.5 million (2020). Lowther was on his way to becoming England’s richest commoner. But James had no interest in luxury or showing off his wealth - he ran around in a rusty carriage and lived on in the leaky shell of his stately home Lowther Hall after it had mostly burned down. He was too mean to spend out on a new one. Instead, he devoted his enormous fortune to the obsessive pursuit of political power. In time, he also attracted some colourful sobriquets including Wicked Jimmy, Jemmy Grasp-all and, when he was raised to the peerage as the 1st Earl of Lonsdale, the Bad Earl because of his phenomenal ruthlessness and miserliness. The biographer Reverend Richard Carlyle commented in 1861 that he was truly a madman, though too rich to be confined. Jimmy immediately started leaning on the eager-to-please Robinson for ideas on how he was to acquire the political leverage he avidly desired.

As his wily man of business John helped Jimmy draw up a clever strategy. It was to use his master’s virtually unlimited financial power to exploit the opportunities that Britain’s ramshackle system of Parliamentary representation presented to anyone unethical and rich enough to grasp them. Together, they set about seizing control over the entire political system of Cumberland and Westmorland by purchasing and leasing landed estates and manors across the two counties. Eventually Lowther would control nine Parliamentary seats.

In Cockermouth residents confirmed their right to vote in parliamentary elections by presenting the deeds of their burgage plot to the mayor. To a burgage-holder a vote was an asset, rather like a herd of cows or a string of pearls that could be sold at will. But to a rich man seeking power they represented valuable tokens in the political game. Buying up enough of these votes bestowed the ability to effectively appoint MPs to the House of Commons without having to risk the uncertainty of fighting proper democratic elections. This gave the rich person disproportionate influence over what legislation was passed by Parliament and who got into the Cabinet. Wicked Jimmy reached the peak of his influence after he was able to parachute the future Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger as MP for his rotten borough of Appleby in 1781 without the bother of a contested election.

John Robinson was a shrewd judge of human nature and, coming from an identical Cumbrian background to the townspeople, he understood very well the appeal that receiving a large dollop of unearned money would have on the tiny group of Cockermouth electors. His clerks knew and mixed every day with many of them personally. It is not difficult to imagine Robinson smoothly button-holing men in the town’s many pubs, charming them at social gatherings, beguiling them and their wives over drinks and dinner at his fine grace-and-favour Georgian residence (now known as Wordsworth House), the most socially desirable address in town. After much patience, energy, persuasion, organisation and many bottles of wine, Robinson pulled off the deals that his spiky, oddball boss could never have achieved. He bought 134, just less than half of the 278 burgages for £58,060, (2020: £8million) which was a vast sum then, and it is an indication of how badly Lowther wanted the two Parliamentary seats at a time when a by-election was imminent. A note from Robinson to Lowther dated April 15, 1756 described how he did not simply rely on the burgage buy-up to ensure victory. He also laid on lavish entertainments to ensure the remaining free voters came over to Lowther’s side, writing: There are 7 houses fixed for the entertainment of your friends…

Robinson wrote that The Globe, the town’s main hotel, had been hired for entertaining voters, as had Mr Dixon’s restaurant where he had laid on unlimited supplies of food and drink. In addition, the handsome house on Main Street that used to be owned by the late John Lucock (Wordsworth House) would be opened to offer fine dining to elite Cockermouth residents.

The note went on to describe how 130 electors were to be entertained at an ordinary (a restaurant) supplied with 10 dozen bottles of wine and proportionable punch and ale. Another 100 voters were to be split between two other eating houses: one of them allowed 4 dozen of Wine and punch and ale, and the other ale and punch proportionable. The note concluded by detailing the treats being laid on for the more plebeian townsfolk to deter them from invading and disrupting the more opulent entertainments provided for the better-off electors:

It is proposed also to have 13 other houses for taking off the lower class as may be from the better houses... besides likewise some ale from the other houses for the mob. These means it is hoped may lessen the expense at the great houses where it is hard to run high by the rabble getting in and stealing and carrying off all the liquor they could…

The scheme worked. Lowther took over the constituency. By the time the March 1761 General Election came along Lowther was in an unassailable position since he had by then purchased a majority of the votes in Cockermouth, owning 158 burgages. He didn’t strictly need to bribe anyone anymore. But Robinson rolled out the same amount of drink anyway to ensure there was no fuss about the fact that Lowther had bought the election. The tactic paid off - the Lowther nominees, Charles Jenkinson (who later became Lord Liverpool and father of the Prime Minister behind the 1819 Peterloo Massacre) and Sir John Mordaunt (who sold several burgages to Lowther), were both safely returned. Thanks to his burgage scam Lowther had between 1745 and 1761 acquired an enormous amount of property in Cockermouth. Yet the voting rights were the real prize. He did not want the real estate. Lowther leaned on John Robinson to execute the second half of the plan - which was to lease the properties back to their original owners. According to a brilliant piece of research by Michael Baron for the Lorton & Derwent Fells Local History Society, Robinson succeeded in renting back at least 200 houses and commercial buildings on 999-year leases from June 23 1761. He placed no restrictions on how the tenants could use the buildings or on what sort of alterations they could make. He set the ridiculously low rent of a shilling a year. All this happened only four months after the General Election and it smells strongly as if Lowther’s canny agent had offered burgage holders an unrefusable deal: if my man gets elected, you get to your property back plus a lump sum of money that is more than the place is worth. Today this transaction would be a criminal offence. But instead of going to jail, Lowther was elevated to the peerage as the first Earl of Lonsdale, showered with viscountcies and baronies. What Robinson had done was effectively to hand property owners a wad of money for, effectively, nothing (except their birthright). Naturally, this gave residents an incentive to upgrade their poky medieval cottages. But instead of installing new kitchens and bathrooms as we might do, they upcycled their thatched, wood-framed homes into smart Georgian townhouses with all mod cons.

The townspeople took their lead from Mr Lucock’s ostentatious house, one that was built in Georgian style in 1745 with 16 tall front windows and a stone portico. Building stone and slate for roofing was available from local quarries. The town’s marvellous windfall did not arrive free from complications. A revealing letter passed between two of Lowther’s associates in 1787. It reveals that, typically, even at this crucial moment, Lowther tried to get away with buying some of the votes on credit. The letter reads: "Sir