This is another in my occasional series of posts about the Regency miniaturist William Wood and his sitters. This time, the curious tale of Sandford Peacocke…
Sandford Peacocke sat for William Wood in April 1801, and the resulting miniature is among the most vibrant that Wood painted. Sandford strikes a strong pose, his keen gaze turned to his right. A carefully tied white cravat and turned-down shirt points appear above a black-green coat. Wood noted his “averted eye” and “West Indian complexion”, adding that the coat “has the most excellent effect”.(1)
The miniature, now in the Cleveland Museum of Art, gives little hint of the trouble Sandford would cause. His life reveals a man with a remarkable talent for rubbing people up the wrong way.
Sandford was the third son of Sir Marmaduke Peacocke of Cavendish Square. His parents were first cousins, both Peacockes, although Sandford’s first name reflects older ties to another family, the Sandfords of Reeves Hall. He had six brothers, all of whom were senior military officers. Generals, a vice admiral and a lieutenant-colonel. Sandford, though, held no such rank.(2)
Lady Maria Nugent, journal writer and wife of General George Nugent, met Sandford in Jamaica in January 1802. It was shortly after Sandford’s marriage to Amelia Apreece and he was working with the Jamaica Custom House at the time.
Their first encounter made little impression, but three weeks later, Sandford asked Maria for what she considered an extraordinary favour. Sandford first told her that his brother had been General Nugent’s aide-de-camp in Ireland, and then, confident of the close bond he had established, he clumsily took his chance.
Taking “the liberty of a friend”, he asked whether General Nugent might endorse a bill for more than £3,000, over £300,000 in today’s money. Maria described it sarcastically as a “modest request”, writing simply: “Decline his proof of friendship”.(3)
Despite her reservations about Sandford, Maria grew closer to Amelia. The following winter, the Peacockes joined the Nugents at their home, where Amelia fell ill. Maria sympathised with her, but gave a final, damning verdict on Sandford:
‘She, poor thing, was so unwell that she was obliged to remain in my room all the morning. She told me her story, and I really feel for her very much. She is lady-like, and well informed, and appears to be perfectly thrown away upon an unfeeling, speculating, foolish man, to say the least of him.’
Five years later, Sandford and Amelia were in Malta, where he was working as deputy barrack master under his elder brother George. In 1810, Sandford travelled to Tripoli to visit his sister and her husband, William Wass Langford, the British consul general. It was a prickly visit, during which Sandford asked his brother-in-law to appoint him as Vice-Consul, which Langford refused.
Sandford turned to intrigue, his eye apparently on a larger prize. According to Langford, Sandford worked with the American consul to turn the Pasha of Tripoli against him and encouraged him to submit a complaint. Langford wrote to Lord Liverpool, in an attempt to keep his job.
Langford’s opinion of Sandford was as damning as that of Lady Nugent. Sandford had travelled to Tripoli to “escape his English creditors”, he said, and was pursuing a “Machiavellian Scheme” to replace him as Consul:
“I doubt not but this Mr Peacocke is, through the interest of his wife, the only daughter of Sir Thomas Apprice, still exerting himself to obtain this Consulship, and for which no individual in the world is more unfit”.(4)
Sandford’s scheming brought his brother-in-law’s tenure as consul in Tripoli to an end, but he failed in his efforts to replace him. He remained in Malta and served as barrack master for two years, after his brother George’s departure.
By the 1820s, Sandford and Amelia were back in London, settled in Chelsea. Earlier attempts at personal enrichment had been thwarted, but the real wealth lay closer by, in Amelia’s family.
Amelia was the only daughter of Sir Hussey Apreece of Washingley Hall. Since the death of her father in 1833, the family’s enormous wealth was in the hands of Amelia’s only surviving (legitimate) brother, Sir Thomas George Apreece, who became known as the ‘Mad Baronet’.(5)
A bitter dispute erupted between brother and sister in the mid-1830s. At its centre was a relatively modest sum of £2,000. Sandford and Amelia believed she was due £6,000 under her late father’s marriage settlement. Thomas believed the figure to be £4,000. The dispute over the difference went to the Roll’s Court, where Lord Langdale found in Amelia’s favour and ordered that Thomas pay the additional £2,000. It was a victory, but a poisoned one.(6)
Sir Thomas died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound in January 1843. Only afterwards did Sandford and Amelia discover that Thomas had made his will in the summer of 1836, while their dispute was raging. On the day he collected it from his legal advisor, he had it executed at a nearby Fleet Street hatter’s. He left the entirety of the Apreece fortune to St George’s Hospital: the family seat at Washingley, the many estates, and his personal wealth. The estate was valued at more than £300,000, equivalent to more than £30 million today.(7)
Amelia challenged the will in court, providing what the Sun called “a rich harvest for the legal profession”. The court heard evidence of his eccentric behaviour: his long night-time walks from Blackheath to London in the pouring rain, his dirty, unsanitary habits, and something he had called his “Fact Book”, filled with nearly five hundred newspaper reports of murders, violent suicides and dreadful accidents. Her team placed the greatest weight on the will itself, and the apparent madness of his giant bequest to an institution with which he “was very little acquainted”.(8)
In reply, Amelia’s earlier successful claim for £2,000 was now turned against her. Having already provided for her, the argument went, there was no reason for her brother to leave anything further to his childless, elder sister.
Sandford died in January 1848, a year before Amelia’s final appeal was rejected. The hospital’s trustees eventually offered her a financial settlement, which she reluctantly accepted. The will was proved in 1849, after which Washingley Hall and several thousand acres of land were sold at auction.
Sandford’s own will was unremarkable, notable only for one final glimpse of the relationship which had survived everything else: his description of the long-suffering Amelia as ‘my dearest and most excellent wife’.
Notes:
(1) Sandford: Cleveland Museum of Art (The Edward B. Greene Collection, 1942.1159)
(2) Sandford spent much of his early adult life in Jamaica, although doing what is unclear. He claimed while renegotiating a marriage settlement to be the owner of the Somerset Pen plantation, but this may have been one of his dubious attempts at self-advancement. Later references to an 1801 marriage settlement show trustees requesting evidence that he owned the Somerset Pen estate and plantation, but whether this was the case is harder to ascertain.[ii]
(3) Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805 (Philip Wright, ed.). The University of the West Indies Press.
(4) The letters and reports of British Consular and diplomatic — Sara ElGaddari, quoting TNA FO 76/7.
(5) The Apreece family seat was in the old county of Huntingdonshire, now part of Cambridgeshire. The Apreece family owned large estates across Huntingdonshire, Lincolnshire, Essex and Northamptonshire, and proudly claimed ancestors knighted by Queen Elizabeth and estates in the family since the reign of Henry VII.
(6) Morning Herald, Friday 21 July 1837
(7) Morning Chronicle, Saturday 7 January 1843 (quoting the Kentish Observer). Thomas’s violent suicide was reported by the Morning Chronicle with particularly brutal Victorian vividness: ‘The unfortunate deceased had literally blown his head to pieces – his teeth and portions of the brain being scattered about the room’.
(8) Sun, Monday 28 July 1845
(9) All fee book references relate to V&A. Memorandum of miniatures painted and finished by William Wood, vols. 1-3 (MSL/1944/433-435)
