By the
mid-Eighteenth Century, Ranns owned many brewing and innkeeping establishments
– a lucrative business to be in at a time when the Coaching Era was at its
height. Another of Thomas Kennedy’s sons (see my post on him on this blog), George
Kennedy, who is noted in local records as Maltster – and elsewhere as surgeon -
at the end of the 1700s, is documented as buying brewing and innkeeping
properties in Birmingham together with numbers of Ranns. It can be argued from this evidence that
there is a general family alliance between the Kennedy and Rann families – and
families operated very much in this way,
doing business as a collective.
What is also becoming evident in this picture is the happy coexistence
of the Established Church and the Innkeeping and Brewing Industry. Lichfield was noted for its ale which was
considered to be both very strong and of excellent flavour by such as James
Boswell, as has already been noted.
Revd. John
Rann is a mystery in his own right. His
father Joseph was from Birmingham. John
grew up during the controversial reign of William III and matriculated at
Trinity College Oxford in 1703 aged 17, in Queen Anne’s reign, at a time when
it was a hotbed of old Toryism. Five
years later he received his Bachelor of Arts degree. Oxford was commonly believed to be a nest of
Jacobitism, as indeed was the Church of
England in general. Most aristocratic
English Jacobites had no serious intentions of taking up arms against the
ruling Royal House. They would simply
grumble amongst themselves about the Whig government and dissipate their
energies hunting, shooting and
drinking. Rann was no aristocrat. The
Ranns were tradespeople so he would have felt the scorn of the sons of the
upper classes whilst at University.
 |
| Portrait believed to be of John Rann |
Early in his
career, John Rann testified in 1710 against an incumbent of the position of
Headmaster of the King Edward VI School in Birmingham who was perceived in the
town as being an extreme Whig. The
headmaster in question was said to have stated that Cromwell was right to
execute King Charles, among other
inflammatory statements. He was joined
at this tribunal by Joseph Rann who appears to be recognised as a kinsman – and
was certainly familiar to the young clergyman.
Thus the Ranns were shown by this time as Tories, having some years before been in the vanguard
of Parliamentarianism. The evidence is that
this was true of most of the inhabitants of Birmingham. The Ranns all testified to have attended the
Birmingham School, though Joseph Rann
said he had moved his son to Lichfield Grammar School in protest at his son’s
excessive workload.
There were
plenty of Tories, indeed many correspondents with the Jacobite Court, among the
Establishment at this time. A
contemporary of John Rann’s at Oxford was Lord Mansfield, a famous QC who later became Lord
Chancellor. He was of the Murrays of
Scone, a family elevated to nobility by James I and VI. Lord Mansfield went so far as to visit Paris
and convey his respects to the Chevalier De St George, but ultimately the pursuit of career and
prosperity took him on the high road to the woolsack, unlike his brother who had joined the
intriguers, adventurers and diehards at
the Stuart cabinet in exile at St Germain in France. The Duke of Marlborough himself kept in
regular contact with St Germain, just in case.
According to Owen’s History of Shrewsbury, written in 1800, all the
squires in Shropshire were Jacobite, and
Mary Alden Hopkins in her book ‘Doctor Johnson’s Lichfield’ holds that the
gentry in the region of Lichfield were similarly inclined (though she actually
refers to them as ‘Jacobins’ - the term given to French revolutionaries from forty
years later!)
The purpose
of the great universities of the period was chiefly to produce clergy for the
Church of England. Oxford and Cambridge
controlled huge numbers of the ‘livings’ (as positions in parishes were known)
and the staff held ecclesiastical offices which meant that they must remain
celibate – a situation directly inherited from the old Roman Catholic ideal of
priesthood. Few lectures were delivered
at the universities and little learning
was acquired from these grandees. If the
students chose to spend their time reading then it was a matter of personal
choice. What mattered was that a student
acquired social connections which would increase the numbers of livings and
therefore his future prosperity. The
students mostly spent their time in drinking, gambling and loose living. This had been the situation for centuries and
few saw any reason for a change.
Whatever his
feelings towards learning or the Chevalier,
Reverend John Rann successfully pursued his career in the Church, acquiring multiple livings in the Black
Country. He is said by different sources
to be Vicar of several parishes in the West Midlands, apart from Rushall and Coldmore in
Walsall, West Bromwich, Wolverhampton
and is also mentioned in connection with Wednesbury. The more careerist churchmen collected
livings through the patronage of local lords, and often amassed large salaries
as a result. However John Rann was not always the canniest of operators.
He was
appointed incumbent of West Bromwich in 1710 but left in 1743 after a lengthy
but “unsatisfactory and troubled ministry”. It was in
that year that as vicar of All Saints Church West Bromwich John Rann, when
apparently very drunk, rode his horse through an open air meeting being
addressed by John Wesley (who was also an Oxford man) using "unseemly
words". By doing this he seems to
have alienated the Earl. This did not
affect his other livings, the patrons of
whom seem to have approved of his raid on Wesley. He continued to officiate at
Rushall where the church accounts of 1732 bear his signature, and a letter in the possession of the family
shows he was there in 1770. The tithes
of Walsall were in the gift of the Dolphin family of Shenstone.
The living of
West Bromwich was in the gift of the Earl of Dartmouth, whose grand family seat was near Birmingham. The Earl who appointed Rann
to West Bromwich was the son of the notorious Jacobite George Legge. He had commanded the regiment that escorted
The Duke of Monmouth to his fateful meeting with James II after the failed
Rebellion that bore the name of that illegitimate son of Charles II. Legge commanded the Navy under James and had
been high in the Senior Service, and
close associate of Samuel Pepys the diarist, during the reign of Charles II
when James had commanded the Navy.
Dartmouth had refused to conduct the heir to France on principle, when the crown was already starting to slip
from the Stuart King. However he was
removed as head of the Navy when William of Orange took the throne. He used his influence in the Navy to conspire
on behalf of his former Jacobites, one
of the most highly-placed Jacobite sympathisers of all. He paid for this by being clapped in the
Tower when one of those plots fell apart,
and there he died, still
protesting his utter hatred of Frenchmen.
The Earl who succeeded him was exiled from political life by William of
Orange but upon the death of the Dutchman became a faithful servant to Queen
Anne’s governments. He retired when
George I succeeded the last of the Stuart monarchs. He was not the Jacobite stalwart that his
father was, but he was certainly a Tory
and showed no love of the House of
Hanover.
The future
2nd Earl of Dartmouth, Viscount
Lewisham, Baron Dartmouth of Dartmouth, William Legge (1731 – 1801) was growing up at the time when
John Rann was chaplain to the Earl. The
2nd Earl was to become sometime First Lord of Trade, Lord Privy Seal (or Minister Without
Portfolio), Lord Steward and crucially
Colonial Secretary during the period 1772-1776. The Earl was also stepbrother
of Lord North, the British Prime
Minister during the Revolutionary War period,
who acceded to the post in 1770.
Dartmouth was appointed to the government because of his family
relationship to North, though Dartmouth was a supporter of Rockingham – whom
North detested. ‘Brother’ Legge was a
Methodist, though he was too young to
have been behind Rann’s swift departure from the living of West Bromwich after
the incident with Wesley. Rann was
evidently a man with wide political connections some of which he probably
cultivated whilst he was chaplain to the old Earl – particularly Lord North,
whom he would have known during his lordship’s childhood and formative years.
The Reverend
John Rann himself made a most distinguished marriage with Damaris also known as
Mary, the beautiful dark-haired daughter of John Dolphin of the elegant Moss
Manor, in Shenstone,
which still lies on the road between Lichfield and Walsall. Shenstone was favoured as a coaching halt
because it allowed coaches on the Watling Street route to bypass the narrower
and somewhat tortuous roads in and out of Lichfield. The Dolphin family had inherited Moss Manor
from a branch of the Stanley family at the beginning of the 1600s. The Dolphin family had been based in Yardley
apparently as long as it had existed - it is
now swallowed up by Birmingham but back then it was a village in open
countryside. They had been noted landowners and cattle farmers in that area
since Norman times. When Reverend John
Rann died at a great age he was commemorated in marble along with his wife
among the Dolphin Family memorials in the Parish Church in Rushall. The name Dolphin was adopted during the 1400s
– Stebbing Shaw says that previously they had the name of Swanshurst – also the
name of the house in Birmingham that remained in the family until the
1800s. The Swanshursts were involved in
a legal controversy with local villeins during the 1200s when he had attempted
to enclose some land up to that time regarded as commons. Their feudal overlords were the Earls of
Warwick. The existence to this day among
the possessions of some of the Kennedy family of some elegant and opulent
portraits of these 17-18th century Dolphins testifies to their
wealth and power.
Around 1745 when he was rector of West
Bromwich, one of John Rann’s several daughters fell for a young man who claimed
to be the heir of a very rich man in another town. She gave him her gold watch.
Rann was reluctant to upset the father so he went along with it. However his
son-in-law, an attorney, investigated and at length found that the suitor was
actually a tailor's son who looked very like the heir who had just died of
smallpox. They intercepted a letter the young man had asked to be posted which
had details of his plot in it, whereby he was planning to help himself to her
dowry then scarper. The trickster was marched off to gaol but the Rann's
daughter never got her watch back. The whole tale was related in a love letter
from a man in Wolverhampton to his intended in Leek. The story was widespread
in the tea rooms of the Black Country at that time according to the
narrator. No doubt the embarrassment of
the Parson was equalled by fury that he was the subject of gossip for miles
around.
John Rann had
other children, one of whom, Joseph, went on to be Vicar of Coventry, and who wrote a six volume edition, with
commentary, of William Shakespeare’s works.
Clearly John Rann was able to pass on a love of literature and drama to
his family though some critics have accused Joseph of unimaginativeness in his
commentary.
One daughter
of John Rann named Mary – possibly the one duped by the tailors son - went on
to marry an attorney at law from near Shrewsbury named Illedge Maddox of whom more here.
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