Rehabilitation of an eighteenth-century roué

Abstract

The parish church of Ashbourne, Derbyshire, is famous chiefly for its medieval monuments to the Cockayne family and for Thomas Banks’s effigy of Penelope Boothby. It also boasts, however, a wall tablet by Sir Richard Westmacott commemorating George Errington, senior (died 1769) and junior (died 1795), barristers of the Inns of Court, erected by the latter’s son George Henry Errington. Both of the men commemorated left clear instructions requesting a simple funeral. This article examines the lavish funeral which was nevertheless ordered by the younger George Errington’s executors and explores George Henry Errington’s motivation for commissioning the monument commemorating his father and grandfather. Family papers allow us to reconstruct the detailed expenditure on what was by any standards an extremely expensive funeral and to draw comparisons with similarly ostentatious funerals of the period discussed by scholars. The article will argue that both the funeral and the monument represented an attempt to restore the family’s reputation which had been damaged by the younger George Errington’s irregular personal life which had attracted public attention. By commemorating his father and grandfather together George Henry Errington may have hoped to focus attention on his grandfather’s distinguished legal career and draw attention away from his father’s more chequered life. The ties of association of the Errington family, in London and in Derbyshire, illuminate the social networks of a professional family and lend their experience a wider interest. The article also looks at the wall tablet within the context of Westmacott’s career and oeuvre and uses Errington family correspondence to suggest a revised date for the commissioning of the monument.