interestingfacts3

The Lennox Connection

by Gillian Picken

When I did my DA 301 project in 1994 I chose as my subject "Patterns of Servant Keeping in a Rural Victorian Village". The village in question was Tongham in Surrey where I was brought up and as is customary when I had finished my project I had material left over. I have been using this to write a series of articles for the Tongham parish magazine and this is one of them based on my researches into some of the interconnected gentry families who have lived in the village. It was prompted by the recent dramatisation of Stella Tillyard's best seller "Aristocrats" on BBC 1 on Sunday evenings.

The series followed the loves and fortunes of the four Lennox sisters - Caroline, Emily, Louisa and Sarah daughters of the second Duke of Richmond and great -granddaughters of England's "Merry Monarch", Charles II. Lady Sarah Lennox the youngest of these four sisters was an instant social success when she arrived in London from Ireland in 1759 and was courted by King George III. The romance did not prosper, he married the German Princess Charlotte and Sarah made a disastrous marriage to Charles Bunbury which ended in scandal and divorce.

What readers of the parish magazine in Tongham might not have known however is that there is a Lady Sarah Lennox buried in Tongham churchyard. This Lady Sarah was the daughter of Charles Lennox, fourth Duke of Richmond who had succeeded his uncle the third Duke, (brother of the Lennox sisters) in 1806 so Sarah was thus the great niece of the Sarah Lennox in the TV. series. The Tongham Sarah was born in 1792 and in 1815 after the battle of Waterloo and during the occupation of Paris by the victorious British troops after the defeat of Napoleon she married Sir Peregrine Maitland. Sarah's mother the Duchess of Richmond gave the famous ball in Brussels on the eve of Waterloo which was featured in another TV. serialisation of Thackeray's "Vanity Fair".

General Maitland, who is also buried in Tongham churchyard commanded the 1st Guards Brigade (composed of the 1st and 3rd Battalions Grenadier Guards - each a thousand strong) at the battles of Quatre Bras (16th June) and at Waterloo, 18th June 1815. It was in the final stages of that battle when the French Imperial Guard had approached the British Line to within twenty yards that the Duke of Wellington said to Maitland "Now Maitland, now's your time". The Guards, lowering their bayonets rushed forward and hurled their enemies before them. It was this incident which attributed to Wellington the words "Up Guards and at them". The Duke himself said that his words probably were "Stand up Guards" and that then he gave the order to attack. There is a picture of this historic scene (somewhat romanticised) in the National Army Museum in Chelsea.

Sarah and Peregrine had several children who are also buried in Tongham churchyard. Their son Charles Brownlow Lennox Maitland became a soldier like his father, served in the Crimean War, retiring as a General in 1886. His younger brother Horatio Arthur Lennox Maitland (named for Wellington and Nelson) lived from the eighteen eighties at Tongham Manor (in The Street where there are now council flats) and later at "The Elms" (also now demolished) in Manor Road, Tongham. He became an Admiral, his name is listed on the memorial plaque on the Village Hall and he died in 1904. Another brother George died in infancy.

Of their three daughters two married. Charlotte Caroline Maitland married John George Turnbull of the Indian Civil Service and lived on the Hogs Back at Whiteways. Sarah Maitland their eldest daughter married Lieut. General Thomas Bowes Foster. Sarah Maitland's eldest daughter Susan married the Rev. Charles Garbett, the first vicar of Tongham and they lived at Tongham vicarage. Susan was thirty years younger than her husband Charles who was a widower of sixty with a grown up family when she married him in 1873. Despite the disparity in their age they were extremely happy and devoted to one another. They had five children: Cyril, Basil, Clement, Leonard and Elsie. There is a memorial to Basil Garbett in Tongham church as he was accidentally drowned in India in July 1900. Cyril Foster Garbett became Archbishop of York and died in 1955. Had the Archbishop lived to enjoy the peerage conferred upon him on his retirement and gazetted in the New Year's Honours List of 1956 he was to have taken the title "Lord Garbett of Tongham".

Most of the information in this article was taken from Howard Cole's book "A Surrey Village and its Church" published in the 1970's and now sadly out of print. Use was also made of Stella Tillyard's book "Aristocrats" and Charles Smyth's biography "Cyril Foster Garbett: Archbishop of York" (published 1959).