November 2020 Advertiser Article

The year 2020 with all its drama and unprecedented draconian measures to weather a viral infection caused me to reflect on earlier times. One of the saddest aspects of the Gascoigne family of Parlington from the eighteenth century is how, despite their wealth, life dealt them a poor hand of cards. The family line from the birth of Sir Edward Gascoigne (6th Bart) in 1697 – he married, Mary the so called “Hungate Heiress” in 1726, who was only 15 at the time. They lived at Parlington, enlarged the hall and improved the gardens and landscape. Meantime in February 1734 their first child, Mary was welcomed, then in October 1735 a second daughter, Elizabeth was delivered. The family of four became five mid September 1737 with the arrival of a third daughter, Catherine. Nearly four more years elapsed when in July 1741 a first son was born, John. Next another boy, Edward in February 1743 making the family seven in all!

Only three months later in May all the family and servants, along with many trunks and cases, which must have formed a mini wagon train, left Parlington on a dangerous and time consuming, weeks I imagine, journey for Cambrai in northern France. Imagine two coaches and associated horses, carts for luggage and servants, all with wooden wheels and over unmade roads, for two hundred and fifty miles or more to get a sailing ship over the channel to France, and further land travel, from Calais south east to the Nord district . A hazardous journey by any measure! Remember this was a time of great unrest, Catholic families such as the Gascoignes had good reason to be out of the way, as Jacobites were fomenting unrest across the land. I have no knowledge of Sir Edward’s political affiliations but its fair to suppose he would have been worried for his family during that period, so the escape to Cambrai where relatives were already established is logical, but fraught with risk.

After establishing themselves in Cambrai, lastly but not least, Thomas the sixth child was born in March 1745. But they were a family of eight for only a week, as Catherine, (No 3) died on the 14th March aged only seven! John succumbed next in May 1748 aged six, (No 4), and a year later, Elizabeth died (No 2). So the family was then only five, Sir Edward and his wife Mary, the eldest daughter Mary, and her brothers, Edward and Thomas.

There is every reason to believe that Sir Edward would return to Parlington with his family, but fate stepped in again and cut short Edward’s existence aged only fifty in 1750, he died in Cambrai and was buried there. Now down to four, the family was disintegrating, the two boys were aged seven and five and each were given guardians. The eldest child Mary married a William Salvin, in 1753, but was dead by May 1756. Then Lady Gascoigne re-married in 1755 to Jarrard Strickland one of the guardians! The two boys Edward and Thomas spending most of their time in France, until Edward, by then the seventh baronet, died in Paris of smallpox, in June 1762, only seventeen months before his mother died in York in January 1764.

For Thomas, later to become the 8th Baronet, during the entire period from his birth in 1745 to him succeeding his brother Edward, and then his mother passing in 1764, life was surrounded by death. No doubt leaving a scar on his character, tragically he then had to endure the death of his wife a few weeks following the birth of his son in 1786. Then to see that son hideously injured in a hunting accident and die in October 1809. Not surprisingly when Sir Thomas died in February 1810 obituaries in a number of newspapers of the day stated; “The shock occasioned by the premature death of an only son was too violent to be sustained, and the ‘almost broken-hearted parent,’ as he emphatically styled himself, sunk into that grave where all his earthly hopes had so recently been interred.“ He was buried in Barwick in Elmet as had his son Tom.