Welsh Journals

In his portrait (at Woolley Park, Wantage Michael Wroughton) he looks quick and clever but just a little bit sly. As well as being rich and a scholar, he was also inventive; at Camberley, near Hawley, he built a Tower a 'Folly' now known as 'the Camberley Obelisk,' on top of which he rigged an apparatus with which he conversed by heliograph with his friend, Sir Francis Dashwood, 28 miles away at West Wycombe Park in Buckinghamshire. John I died in 1786, aged 65. He was a member of the 'Hell-Fire Club'; his best friend, Sir Francis Dashwood, was founder and 'Abbot' and the 'Abbot's' Chair from Med- menham Abbey is in the hall at Hughenden Manor; Sir John Dashwood-King, half- brother to Sir Francis, was another close friend and a trustee of John Norris' will; the Chesterfield family, to whom Hughenden had belonged in earlier times, were friends; and both Sir John Dashwood-King and Lord Chesterfield's son, Sir William Stanhope, were members of the 'Hell-Fire Club' 'Inner Circle.' John Norris in his will left £ 5,000 to Magdalen College 'to complete the New Buildings.' (Magdalen College never completed the New Buildings. Mr. Leach, the late Curator of Tenby Museum, says in his excellent little book on Charles Norris, that Charles' mother was Catherine Lynch, daughter of a Dean of Canterbury and granddaughter of an Archbishop, and divorced wife of Henry Knight. This information is published in the Archaeologia Cambrensis of 1853. There is no truth in this; I have checked in Kentish Pedigrees, and the Sir John Norris who married Catherine Lynch is not of our family. I have also read John I's will, at Somerset House, where he sets down the facts of his children's birth. He left £ 200 a year to 'Deborah Busby, my housekeeper,' at Hughenden, and states that the annuity is to continue even if 'she should happen to marry'. John stated plainly in this will that Deborah was the mother of his children; there were five of them, and three grew up Elizabeth, fifteen when her father died, married Richard Bevan, a barrister; John II, then aged twelve, who eventually inherited all the property; and Charles, who was about six. Whether it is moie-or less respectable to be descended from a divorced granddaughter of and Archbishop of Canterbury she'd been brought up to know better! or from an unmarried housekeeper who may not have known better, it is hard to say. John I had a cousin on his mother's side, Ellen, Countess Conyngham. She was widowed and childless, and was very kind to John's young children. So John I, in his will, left Hughenden Manor and all its contents for the use of Lady Conyngham for her life, in the care of trustees, and on her death in 1816, John II inherited everything, entailed on his heirs under his father's will. My father told me that Lady Conyngham brought the children up at Hughenden, and treated them as her own. John and Charles, and their sister Elizabeth, were at school in Islington when young, and from there the boys went on to Eton. John II at some period seems to have been at school at St. Omer, in France. Both boys went up to Christ Church, Oxford, where John took a degree, but for some reason Charles left after a year, and got a commission in the Dragoon Guards. In those days 'younger sons' often came off badly, but John was generous to young Charles. In 1817 after he came into his estate, he settled £ 13,000 on him, and evidently, after this date, shared with him some more of the family fortune; it has been said, altogether £ 60,000. John II and Charles reverted to the old, respectable pattern. Both married. John married Louisa Douglas and had nine daughters no sons and Charles married Sarah Saunders and they had four sons, seven daughters and two still-born children. Seven of John's daughters grew up and married, and they have now literally hundreds of descendants living today. Many still live in 'stately homes', and there are some famous names among them; the wife of 'R.A.B.' Butler; the indomitable Lady Lees, who learned to use a cine camera to make lovely and successful Gospel Films, and herself runs a snack-bar, at her manor gates in Dorset, to raise funds for this project; her sister,