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They are, however, probably Cromwellian and not Elizabethan. We know very little of what happened to the Stracheys during the Civil War, for at the crisis of the conflict John Strachey was only a boy. He was born in 1634 and therefore was only twenty-six at the end of the Commonwealth, and would have been only fifteen years old at the time of the King's execution.
He was a member of the 'Cosmopolitan'; he belonged also to 'The Club' and to the 'Literary Society, and he heartily enjoyed meeting distinguished contemporaries. In 1874 he paid a visit to his friends the Stracheys, who had taken for the summer a house at Anaverna, near Ravensdale, Co. Louth, in Ireland. He liked it so much that he resolved to become their successor.
The most curious thing is that the style, instead of being a mass of cloudy affectation, is simple, flowing, and natural. To me, especially, all this is most captivating. The account of Mrs. Montagu, Coleridge, the Bullers, the Stracheys, &c. revives a thousand recollections.
Thanks to Clive there are still Stracheys at Sutton and I am here to tell the tale. In those days twelve thousand pounds was a very big sum of money indeed to an impecunious country gentleman, and a considerable sum even to a man as rich as Clive. The modern equivalent would be over £30,000. But Clive was not a man who hesitated to do things in a big way, and he was well repaid.
In 1873 he meditated building a house on the Kenmare River, but in the course of that summer he went to visit Sir John Strachey, who was then living at Anaverna House, at Ravensdale in County Louth. The Stracheys left it not long after, and we went there for the first time in 1875.
Clive, one might almost say, was the patron saint of the family, and some day I hope to make a further and better collection of legends in regard to him and other relations and connections of my family with India. But first I must explain why we Stracheys regard Clive as our patron saint.
Even when reduced to reasonable limits, the picture will not fit the majority of English country-houses and country gentlemen. In the first place, the Stracheys could not afford the type of life depicted by the novelists and satirists, and, in the second place, they had not the opportunity.
He also devoted himself with the greatest enthusiasm to the improvement of the house and grounds. For many years before the Stracheys' short tenancy it had been unoccupied, and the grounds of which there were about seventy acres were at first very much overgrown, especially with laurels, which, when neglected, grow in that country in almost disgusting luxuriance.
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