The Evelyn connection starts when the Horninghold estate was settled upon John Pretyman and his wife Margaret on their marriage in 1649. John Pretyman was the uncle of Mary Evelyn (b. 1632) on her mother’s side, who in turn was the wife of the diarist and courtier John Evelyn (1620-1706). Evelyn remained a staunch Royalist throughout the Commonwealth and this loyalty paid dividends upon the Restoration.

The Evelyns came to stay at the Manor House in Horninghold in August 1654 as a stop-over on their travels around England. John, the sophisticated London intellectual, then in his mid-thirties, was not enamoured by what he saw, writing on 4th August: ‘Hence, riding through a considerable part of Leicestershire, an open, rich, but unpleasant country, we came late in the evening to Horninghold, a seat of my wife's uncle’.

Three days later he adds: ‘Went to Uppingham, the shire town of Rutland, pretty and well built of stone, which is a rarity in that part of England, where most of the rural parishes are but of mud; and the people living as wretchedly as in the most impoverished parts of France, which they much resemble, being idle and sluttish. The country (especially Leicestershire) much in common; the gentry free drinkers’. Evelyn also ‘went a setting and hawking, where we had tolerable sport’.