Do you believe in universal truths? Admonitions, beliefs, or even morality tales passed down through families like so much well-worn linen? The Bard once said that all the world's a stage and we mortals merely players. If you subscribe to that, as many amongst us do, then the misbegotten life of Randolph Bentham Rutledge could have been termed a comedy to some and a tragedy to others, depending upon one's point of view. To his partners in debauchery, it was a comedy, so long as the money held out. To his wife, his children, and his debtors, it was a tragedy, and one with far too many curtain calls. But the gentleman himself (and one must use this term loosely) once laughingly declared that his life was really just one great farce, and it was appropriately titled The Rake’s Progress—or would have been, had the title not been snatched up by some proselytizing cartoonist who was most likely fated to sink into the swamp of literary obscurity.
The family saga really began long ago, some eighty years prior to the arrival of William the Conqueror, when an ambitious peasant from the market town of Chipping Campden heaped his worldly goods onto a creaky old ox-cart and set out on a journey deep into the countryside. Posterity knows not the reason for this adventure, taken as it was during a time when most Saxon peasants would live cradle to coffin in one place. But we know he did not go far—just twenty miles south as the crow flies—and yet the distance was to alter his family’s fortunes forever.
The traveler was called John of Campden. And legend says that when he reached the verdant valley of the River Coln, he paused on a swath of bottomland which rolled out to meet the wolds like a lush green carpet. There he unharnessed his ox, unloaded his cart, and sank the first of many spades deep into the fertile earth. And thus began his family’s climb toward that lofty stratum of blue-blooded rural gentry.
How a simple Saxon came by such a fine property, whether by honest labor, clever deceit, or perhaps even a shrewd marriage, we know not. But throughout the many centuries which followed, his descendants labored hard and long to build sturdy cottages, tidy villages, and powerful wool churches, so called because their every keystone and candlestick had been paid for by that common currency of the Cotswolds. Sheep.
Six centuries later—long after the Campdens had somehow lost a p and become the Camdens—yet another John came along with yet another grand plan. He used his wool money to build a fine manor house on the very site where legend held that his ancestor had stuck his first fateful spade into the earth. This house was built, as were all such houses of its time and place, of butter-brown stone, and it was so symmetrical, so exquisite, and so grandly and perfectly proportioned that the villagers stood in awe, as well they should have done. With its crenellated bays and steep, soaring roofs, and the parish church of St. Michael the Archangel standing quite literally in its shadow, Chalcote Court evoked the wealth, power, and influence which this ambitious family had so assiduously acquired.
But the tides of fortune and the wheels of history were destined to turn against the Camden family.