“To that virtue which for a series of years resisted oppression”

In 1784 Sir Thomas Gascoigne, baronet, got serious about one of the principal responsibilities of a titled British gentleman: producing an heir to inherit his estate, centered at Parlington Hall in Yorkshire.

In November of that year he married the young widow Lady Mary (Shuttleworth) Turner, becoming stepfather to her children by Sir Charles Turner, a York politician. In January 1786 the couple’s first son, Thomas Charles Gascoigne, arrived. Sadly, only a month later, Lady Mary departed at age thirty-four.

Sir Thomas Gascoigne had been commissioning plans for a new mansion, having stone hauled in from his quarries. According to tradition, after his wife died he decided instead to use that stone to build a memorial.

Except it didn’t turn out to be a memorial to a lost wife. Instead, it was a triumphal arch modeled on the Arch of Constantine, which Sir Thomas had seen in his travels to Rome. The architect, Thomas Leverton, had exhibited plans for such an arch as early as 1781.

The triumph this arch commemorated was the 1783 Treaty of Paris with America. It thus implicitly praised the Rockinghamite Whig faction in Parliament that had pushed to end the war (including Sir Thomas Gascoigne himself).

Originally, according to archived plans, Sir Thomas wanted this statement on the structure:

To that virtue which for a series of years resisted oppression and by a glorious race rescued its country and millions from slavery

That was deemed too long to be visible in the available space and edited down to:

Liberty in N. America Triumphant MDCCLXXXIII

The result is Britain’s first and biggest monument to the American War for Independence. The Parlington Arch still stands on a hill in Yorkshire, though Parlington Hall fell down over the 1900s.

As for Sir Thomas Gascoigne, he continued his aristocratic life. He stayed wealthy by developing the coal mines on his land, as did his son and heir. However, Thomas Charles Gascoigne died in a hunting accident in 1809, and Sir Thomas passed away four months after his son in February 1810.

The baronetcy therefore died with them. Their properties descended to Lady Mary’s descendants by her first husband on condition that those lines took the Gascoigne name.

How to Become the Member from Thirsk

Under the subject of “Eighteenth-century British aristocrats are not like us,” I’ve been looking into the life of Thomas Gascoigne (1745-1810).

Gascoigne was born not in Britain but in a convent at Cambrai in northern France. He was the third son of Sir Edward Gascoigne, baronet, and his wife. The Gascoignes were Catholic and had long ties to that convent, which was part of the English Benedictine Congregation.

Thomas grew up in France, educated by monks at Douai. In 1762, when he was sixteen years old, his older brother died, and he succeeded to the baronetcy. From then on he was Sir Thomas Gascoigne, baronet.

To prepare for his responsibilities as an estate owner, the teenager was sent to Paris for more schooling, visited Britain for the first time, and in 1764 embarked on a Grand Tour of southern Europe.

That travel ended abruptly in March 1765 when, it appears, a traveling companion killed a coachman in Rome and young Sir Thomas was peripherally involved. He had to hurry back to England, though his connections secured a papal pardon later in the year.

For the next decade Sir Thomas Gascoigne settled into life as a British gentleman. He developed his estates, including the usual improvements: scientific gardening, breeding race horses, funding coal mines, founding a spa. He had a romance with Barbara Montgomery (1757-1788), one of the three sisters Joshua Reynolds painted as “Three Ladies Adorning a Term of Hymen” in 1773.

By 1774 it was safe to visit Europe again, and Sir Thomas spent the rest of the decade outside Britain. He traveled with the author Henry Swinburne, paying most of the bills. During those years Britain declared war on France and Spain, but that doesn’t appear to have greatly affected Sir Thomas’s movements because he was traveling in Catholic circles. His faith kept him out of the British government, after all.

That all changed soon after Sir Thomas Gascoigne returned to his seat in the middle of 1779. He decided to get involved in politics. As a baronet, he had inherited a title but not a peerage, so he wasn’t in the House of Lords and could run for the House of Commons. However, the law barred him from Parliament as a Catholic.

On the king’s birthday in June 1780, therefore, Sir Thomas Gascoigne renounced his Catholicism before the Archbishop of Canterbury. (He never stopped supporting Catholic missions.) Three months later, he entered Parliament as the member from Thirsk, a seat recently purchased by the Marquess of Rockingham for his faction of Whigs. Later he represented Malton and Arundel.

As a Rockinghamite, Sir Thomas opposed continuing the war in America and supported some electoral reforms. Within the larger Whig faction he favored Charles James Fox over the younger William Pitt, which left him once again excluded from power after 1784.

TOMORROW: Sir Thomas Gascoigne’s mark on history.