Through the family keyhole

The Field Book of Country Houses and Their Owners by Hugh MontgomeryMassingberd (Webb & Bower, £16.95).
David Twiston Davies
FOR a generation which has seen Catholic historians concentrating on the urban middle classes in recusant times, Hugh MontgomeryMassingberd's book contains a useful reminder of how much we owe to the landed families who remained loyal to the Faith.
The 40 families and their seats presented here had suffered more than half a century of economic decline, socialist legislation and lack of any serious champions when he began to portray them in the old Field magazine in 1984.
But it is not hard to recognise an added layer of resistance in the half-dozen Catholic squires whose ancestors had experienced the threat of persecution, double taxation and varying degrees of social ostracism since the Tudors.
Much of their survival, of course, was the result of studied discretion, though these profiles contain references to the Pilgrimage of Grace and outings in support of the wrongfully dismissed Stuarts that indicate more aggressive instincts. With the turn of the tide at the French Revolution, the Welds produced the first English cardinal for more than 200 years, the Fotheringhams of Murthly built the first Catholic chapel in Scotland since the Reformation while the O'Conors of Clonalis, Co Roscommon, were able to take pride in a kinsman who became the first Catholic to stand for the American presidency.
None of Mr MontgomeryMassingberd's families could be said to have enjoyed untroubled luxury. Large houses need expensive overhauls every generation, and the hard-pressed wife who wonders if her husband's family exists for the sake of the house, rather than the other way round no doubt speaks for many others.
The author wisely makes no attempt to analyse the relationship that can exist between families and their seats, to which the excellent colour photographs here attest. Whereas newer owners look as if they have just disembarked from a commuter train others, such as the Eystons whose links with Hendred Hall, Oxfordshire, go back to the 1440s, are impossible to imagine elsewhere.
This book's strength is its celebration of family not The
Family so beloved by politicians and bureaucrats — but of individual collections of related people who may turn out game wardens in Kenya, prime ministers in New Zealand or simpler souls given to calling "Greta Garbo, Great Garbo" to their pigs at home or boasting of their prowess as bath baritones.
It is gratifying that while some have given up since these articles were written, an increasing number of younger owners have been willing to look outside agriculture to ensure their survival, often with remarkable success. Despair, after all, is reprehensible even when it is fed by a state dedicated to a uniform search for materialism.
David Twiston Davies is a colleague of the author on The Daily Telegraph.