From
T Braithwaite Esq
“The Sparrow”
West Docks
Liverpool
Lancashire

To
The Right Honourable Lord Hethelwaite
Grand House
Hethelwaite
West Riding

Dated 14th Day of the Month

Your Grace,

I would to thank you sincerely for your most kind invitation that I received from you a week since to your garden party on the 15th inst, to celebrate the launching of your new Formal Gardens of Roses, Exotic Perennials and Annual Flower Beds, including Box-hedged Maze, Water Fountains and especially the initial filling of the new Ornamental Lake to the immediate rear of your recently refurbished Grand House.

Regrettably, Your Grace, I must inform you that my wife Ethel and I are unable to attend at your new garden launch because we are setting sail on the early tide of the 15th for our new life on the western fringes of the free colonies situated across the Atlantic Ocean.

I can speak for myself and the majority of your former tenants, as most are our fellow passengers, as we look forward to swapping the lives of toiling as your poor tenants to the fresh challenges of carving new and vastly larger acreages of freehold farms and what they locally call ranches out of the New Territories in the mid-west Wilderness we expect to find there.

By coincidence, at the very same time that your kind invitations arrived, the General Letter Office delivered to the village Post Office the Parliamentary Proclamation posters announcing the Act of Enclosure of Hethelwaite Common Pasture, where we, and all your former tenants, have previously enjoyed the freedom and ancient rights of grazing our livestock for centuries, the enclosed area to become a vast lake next to the formal gardens that your esteemed Gardener, who was formerly feted for his formal laying out of the Royal Gardens at the King’s Palace in Westminster, has worked on both your gardens and engineering the dam intended to divert water from the river to feed your new lake, these last two years and five months.

Well, we were too busy to reply straight away to your kind invitation until this late hour. After all, it takes a great deal of effort to move all our chattels from the designated-for-imminent-drowning hovels that we rented from you, our flooded fields and commons that will soon be unable to bear fruit, crops or graze our livestock upon ever again, that we felt we might not take the trouble to unload our laden carts until we reached the docks on the night before your planned garden party.

Before packing up our goods and chattels, however, we tenant farmers all agreed as one that, as there was little point in striving to work fields which would fail to reap a reward before harvest time, ever since the Spring, when your Enclosure Bill was first read in the Commons, instead of ploughing those fields we bent our labour into creating and almost completing a separate and secret dam far upstream from the one constructed by your Gardener’s Water Engineer, one that would divert a greater portion of the river (we estimate the quantity of water displaced to be increased by a factor of ten), using the very same excellent techniques demonstrated so boastfully by your Gardener’s Water Engineer.

A couple of your former tenants and their families, who have decided to remain in England and secured excellent alternative tenancies elsewhere in the Country, are, as I write this respectful but negative reply to your invitation, completing the finishing touches to that dam and opening up the broad diverting channel at dawn on the morning of your garden party.

Using the calculations quoted by your Gardener’s Water Engineer, we believe you will be extremely grateful that you have already converted your former attics into servants’ living quarters with additional fenestrations punctuating the original tiled roofline of your Grand House to provide their bedrooms with daylight thus saving expensive candles adding to the household running costs.

Don’t worry about inconveniencing your house servants when the waters arrive, Your Grace, every single one of your servants are sailing with us, so you will have somewhere to keep dry when the first two stories of your Grand House become home to the rainbow trout intended to stock your new lake. You should be able to enjoy the sport to angle and net the little creatures directly from your new attic windows.

So, do enjoy your garden party, or should I say pool party.

Your humble servant,

Thomas Braithwaite Esq