BFH: Joseph Boultbee of Coleorton (1700-1789) and the Beaumont Family

Joseph Boultbee of Coleorton (1700 - 1789) and the Beaumont Family

(Written by the Editors)

    Joseph's connection with the Beaumont family and the old Coleorton Hall, briefly referred to by TPB, is a story whose ramifications continued long after his death, indeed into the next century, and also closely involving his only son Joseph.
    It begins in 1757 when Joseph Senior was appointed as land agent to the Beaumont family estate in Leicestershire by Sir George Beaumont, 6th Baronet. In 1760 Joseph was granted a 21 year lease of a Beaumont colliery, farm and woods. This, a large parchment document, has survived in family possession. In the same year he leased Coleorton Hall from Sir George despite its not having been occupied since 1702 and not in a state of good repair. In 1762 Sir George died leaving as heir his surviving son, George, then aged nine, who lived with his mother at their other family home at Dunmow, Essex.
    The former lessee of the colliery had neglected it, the pit shaft was decayed and the mine water-logged. Joseph installed a Newcomen engine to pump out the water and carried out other work also at his own expense. His rent was fixed at £140 a year with output set at 10,000 loads of coal annually. He also took over a second Beaumont colliery at £50 a year rent; this colliery was said to be worth £1000 a year. It was known as the Newbold Field Colliery.
    The local mines together were, however, producing too much coal for the available market. Joseph leased one from Earl Ferrers and, in effect, closed it down, supplying the market with approximately 13,400 loads of coal annually altogether (about 33,600 tons). His mining operations required capital to run them, and in 1771 he was loaned £10,000 by Sir Charles Sedley who had initially borrowed it from Drummond's Bank. By 1777 Sir Charles had repaid the Bank so that we must assume that Joseph had repaid him. Joseph's financial transactions are quite astonishing even today. In 1776 Thomas Noel, 2nd Lord Wentworth, raised a loan of £15,000 from Joseph and a further £5,000, a year later. In contemporary terms these were all enormous sums.
    By 1784, the Beaumont lease of the mines, etc. had been renewed, though only after prolonged negotiations with the Beaumont family lawyer regarding the large difference between the permitted number of coal loads to be extracted and the actual number. The difference was attributed by Joseph to the difficulty of separating extractions from adjoining Beaumont and Boultbee coal seams.
    In 1789 Joseph Senior died and his son Joseph took over the stewardship having long been associated with his father in the management of the estate and collieries. We shall now deal with Joseph the younger's career out of its proper sequence and only here in so far as it relates to the continuation of the Beaumont connection.
    Matters went on as before until 1791 when Sir George, whose interests were primarily artistic and political, visited his Leicestershire estate, probably for the first time. The reason was that a new canal nearby, by facilitating new markets for his coal, would be profitable to him. The state of the Hall must have been a shock for Sir George -- it was in ruins, little was left of its park and the whole estate was in a distressing condition. Subsequent inspections by a surveyor he employed revealed further irregularities; timber had been sold off from the Beaumont woods and brick-making had used clay from deposits on the estate.
    Sir George was then faced with leaving things as they were which provided him with an income of £2,000 a year or resorting to law for compensation. In 1793 Joseph was summoned from Bath to give an account of his stewardship. However, it was not until 1797 that he was dismissed and in the following year legal proceedings for compensation were started by Sir George. The case finally came up in July, 1800, and Joseph was ordered to pay £20,000 as compensation for underpayments. This was not forthcoming, and the case came up again in the Court of Chancery in August, 1802. Joseph appealed unsuccessfully against that part of the verdict being back-dated to his father's time, though he was allowed to hand over one of his own collieries in part payment, the original compensation sum now reduced to some £15,000.
    The whole matter was not finally settled until 1805, the year before Joseph's death, when the Lord Chancellor, Lord Eldon, refused him increased wages or legal costs, though he allowed Sir George interest on under-payments only from 1798. With reference to wages, part of Joseph's defence was that his salary as steward was only £20 a year, the same as that which his father had received for thirty years!

These are the facts of this extraordinary story.