Lineage

Abstract

In his ‘Advice to his Descendants’ Sir John Oglander asked,

Wouldest thou feign see me, being dead so many years since? I will give thee my own character. Conceive thou sawest an aged, somewhat corpulent, man of middle stature, with a white beard and somewhat big mustachios, riding in black or some sad-coloured clothes from West Nunwell up to the West Downs, and so over all the Downs to take the air … and to see there his fatting cattle, on a handsome middling black stone-horse, his hair grey and his complexion very sanguine.

This wry verbal portrait in its easy, pastoral setting contrasts markedly with the more public image that Oglander chose to erect in Brading Church. The military and ‘medieval’ effigy that Sir John designed for himself is stiffly formal, pompous in its anachronism. Yet from Oglander’s various reflections in his notebooks and journals we can begin to comprehend this alternative, apparently incongruous, self-presentation.