Knowle Hall
He had arrived at Knowle through a line in which the male heirs had repeatedly failed to materialise. The manors descended to Wilson through five generations from Ben Palmer’s aunt Elizabeth Palmer to Ann Doley, through Elizabeth Sheppard and Jane Harries, to Jane’s son the Reverend William Richard Wilson, who lost his life in a hunting accident, and finally to the Squire himself. The complexity of the inheritance was recorded in Wilson’s quartered arms, published in Burke’s Landed Gentry in 1846 with a shield of six quarters and an escutcheon of pretence for his wife Louisa Editha Le Hunte, a heraldic heiress from a County Wexford family. A second version of the arms, recorded in Wilsons of Etton and Knowle (1926), displays fifteen quarters - an elaborate reconstruction of a family reaching back, through generations of heraldic heiresses. The first quarter came with Jane’s husband, Captain William Richard Wilson, who had served in the Seven Years War.
Motto: FORTITER ET FIDELITER (boldly and faithfully)
What Wilson inherited in 1831 at Knowle was an estate whose principal house had been described, the year before his father’s death, as a common farmhouse of no great significance. The description appeared in a New and Compendious History of the County of Warwick, published in 1830, which noted that Knowle Hall presented the remains of a mansion or manor house worthy of the historian’s notice - without the author knowing quite what its history was. The Inigo Jones attribution had been forgotten. Fragments of the Greville arms lay undiscovered in the grounds. But beneath the farmhouse lay something older still: archaeological excavations in the 1990s and 2000s found evidence of occupation on the moated site dating to the first half of the thirteenth century, with documentary records placing a settlement at Knowle as early as 1194. The moat that had once marked the hall’s status in the landscape survived as earthwork, invisible to casual observation.
Wilson, described by those who knew him as wildly extravagant, a man who seemed to make and lose fortunes at will, was not minded to leave things as he found them. He had the old hall largely pulled down in 1836 and commissioned a new building in the Italianate style. The old hall was described in a letter dated January 20th, 1834 by Thomas Warde, “one fond of Antiquity”, after hearing of Wilson’s intention to take down the floors and “the magnificent ceilings”. “These ceilings the late Earl of Warwick so often regretted that they were not in Warwick Castle and so did the late Mr. Lewis who wished they were at Malvern… I hope you will not be persuaded to remove these costly beautiful remains and such grand ornaments in the House and the two Noble Massive Oak Stair Cases… and the Oak Wainscot in the hall which is so elaborately ornamented”. Wilson’s brother thought Knowle Hall was quite reparable. Neither opinion swayed the Squire.
With the hall down and nothing yet to replace it, he lodged where he could. In 1838 the Squire sat for the sporting painter John Ferneley Senior, portrayed on horseback on a horse called Go Easy, a commission in the tradition of the great Leicestershire hunting portraits. The portrait captures his sporting obsession and a life spent on horseback crossing other people’s lands. When he came to Knowle to shoot, he would put up at the Greswolde Arms Inn, later taking up residence at Sheldon Rectory in Sheldon - “the only thing to be obtained” near Knowle - before leasing Olton Hall from his cousin. Olton, like Knowle, provided good stabling for his horses, but no kennels for his hounds. The new Knowle Hall, begun in the early 1840s, was described in the late 1840s as a classical house set amidst terraced gardens, its galleried hall complete with painted decoration and white marble statuary. It was not finished.
The building project came on top of other building repairs, planting and draining that Wilson pursued, “getting up a head of game” on his Warwickshire lands. Capital was needed and Wilson’s remaining land holdings were being sold off. The last feudal tenants of Diddington had become freeholders: William Whitehouse, possibly the last copyhold tenant of the manor, had died in 1824. His daughter Ann married Edward Barford, and by 1841 the couple held the freehold of Mouldings Green Farm and the remaining lands south of Shadow Brook. The Manor of Diddington survived as a reputed manor - a title without territory, its copyhold dissolved, its courts long since silent. Wilson sold the Knowle Hall estate in 1849 to Robert Emilius Wilson (no relation) who completed the building over the following decade, leaving the third storey of the original design unbuilt. The hall as it stands today, Grade II* listed, is Robert Emilius Wilson’s completion of Squire Gumley’s abandoned ambition.
Wilson disposed of the four manors along with all of his Warwickshire property, retaining estates in Pembrokeshire and Carmarthenshire for a time, borrowing large sums from the government to drain these lands. On Wednesday, March 24th, 1852 he left Liverpool for New York on board the ‘Baltic’, travelling as W. H. Williams. He returned home briefly in 1858 to sign documents relating to the sale of the estates and did not return again until 1868. In Illinois he had met with some success farming on a small scale and lived his final years in England, dying in Dulwich in 1887. His autobiography was edited by his nephew and published in 1924 under the title Green Peas at Christmas.
The wife and children he left behind did not find life easier. His son and heir, Captain William Hazelrigg Le Hunt Wilson, had settled near Paris. As papers reported in 1861, his wife Barbara was charged with bigamy, the prosecution alleging she had married the Captain while her first husband Jonathan Gotobed was still alive. The defence argued that Gotobed’s own prior marriage in Canada made his union with Barbara invalid. Letters from Captain Wilson himself declared his conviction that his wife was innocent. His mother Louisa, however, crossed to Paris and allegedly caused her son’s arrest for debt, his release conditional on withdrawing his protection from Barbara - who was described by defence counsel as never having been well treated by the Wilson family, her origins in trade rather than in the landed gentry her husband represented. The family’s solicitor withheld Barbara’s marriage settlement of £200 a year, leaving her without means.
When she appeared at the Central Criminal Court in June 1862, fashionably dressed and described as formerly of the theatrical profession, a witness who had travelled from Canada proved that Gotobed had lived with another woman as his wife before his marriage to Barbara. The jury acquitted her immediately. The judge went further, refusing to let the prosecution’s costs be paid from public funds on the grounds that the case had not been brought to further the ends of justice. It was a plain statement that the court considered the prosecution improper, yet the matter did not rest there. Twelve years later in 1874, shortly after Barbara came into a legacy of ten thousand pounds, Captain Wilson petitioned the Divorce Court, and on June 20 the marriage was declared null and void.
The manors Ben Palmer had acquired a century before, separated from their landholdings and with diminished rights, were not inherited but sold, passing from Squire Gumley Wilson to a new lord, a new family and a new chapter in their history.
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