Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary Part 1

Mary Powell & Deborah's Diary.

by Anne Manning.

INTRODUCTION

In the Valhalla of English literature Anne Manning is sure of a little and safe place. Her studies of great men, in which her imagination fills in the hiatus which history has left, are not only literature in themselves, but they are a service to literature: it is quite conceivable that the ordinary reader with no very keen _flair_ for poetry will realise John Milton and appraise him more highly, having read _Mary Powell_ and its sequel, _Deborah's Diary_, than having read _Paradise Lost_. In _The Household of Sir Thomas More_ she had for hero one of the most charming, whimsical, lovable, heroical men G.o.d ever created, by the creation of whose like He puts to shame all that men may accomplish in their literature. In John Milton, whose first wife Mary Powell was, Miss Manning has a hero who, though a supreme poet, was "gey ill to live with," and it is a triumph of her art that she makes us compunctious for the great poet even while we appreciate the difficulties that fell to the lot of his women-kind. John Milton, a Parliament man and a Puritan, married at the age of thirty-four, Mary Powell, a seventeen-year-old girl, the daughter of an Oxfordshire squire, who, with his family, was devoted to the King. It was at one of the bitterest moments of the conflict between King and Parliament, and it was a complication in the affair of the marriage that Mary Powell's father was in debt five hundred pounds to Milton. The marriage took place. Milton and his young wife set up housekeeping in lodgings in Aldersgate Street over against St. Bride's Churchyard, a very different place indeed from Forest Hill, Shotover, by Oxford, Mary Powell's dear country home. They were together barely a month when Mary Powell, on report of her father's illness, had leave to revisit him, being given permission to absent herself from her husband's side from mid-August till Michaelmas. She did not return at Michaelmas; nor for some two years was there a reconciliation between the bride and groom of a month. During those two years Milton published his pamphlet, _On the Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce_, begun while his few-weeks-old bride was still with him. In this pamphlet he states with violence his opinion that a husband should be permitted to put away his wife "for lack of a fit and matchable conversation," which would point to very slender agreement between the girl of seventeen and the poet of thirty-four. This was that Mary Powell, who afterwards bore him four children, who died in childbirth with the youngest, Deborah (of the _Diary)_, and who is consecrated in one of the loveliest and most poignant of English sonnets.

Methought I saw my late-espoused Saint Brought to me like Alkestis from the grave, Whom Jove's great son to her glad husband gave, Rescued from death by force, though pale and faint.

Mine, as whom washed from spot of child-bed taint Purification in the Old Law did save; And such, as yet once more, I trust to have Full sight of her in Heaven without restraint, Came vested all in white, pure as her mind: Her face was veiled, yet to my fancied sight Love, sweetness, goodness, in her person shined So clear, as in no face with more delight.

But oh! as to embrace me she inclined, I waked; she fled; and Day brought back my Night.

It is a far cry from the woman so enshrined to the child of seventeen years who was without "fit and matchable conversation" for her irritable, intolerant poet-husband.

A good many serious writers have conjectured and wondered over this little tragedy of Milton's young married life: but since all must needs be conjecture one is obliged to say that Miss Manning, with her gift of delicate imagination and exquisite writing, has conjectured more excellently than the historians. She does not "play the sedulous ape"

to Milton or Mary Powell: but if one could imagine a gentle and tender Boswell to these two, then Miss Manning has well proved her apt.i.tude for the place. Of Mary Powell she has made a charming creature. The diary of Mary Powell is full of sweet country smells and sights and sounds. Mary Powell herself is as sweet as her flowers, frank, honest, loving and tender. Her diary catches for us all the enchantment of an old garden; we hear Mary Powell's bees buzz in the mignonette and lavender; we see her pleached garden alleys; we loiter with her on the bowling-green, by the fish ponds, in the still-room, the dairy and the pantry. The smell of aromatic box on a hot summer of long ago is in our nostrils. We realise all the personages--the impulsive, hot-headed father; the domineering, indiscreet mother; the cousin, Rose Agnew, and her parson husband; little Kate and Robin of the Royalist household--as well as John Milton and his father, and the two nephews to whom the poet was tutor--and a hard tutor. Miss Manning's delightful humour comes out in the two pragmatical little boys. But Mary herself dominates the picture. She is so much a thing of the country, of gardens and fields, that perforce one is reminded of Sir Thomas Overbury's _Fair and Happy Milkmaid_:--

"She doth all things with so sweet a grace it seems ignorance will not suffer her to do ill, being her mind is to do well. . . . The garden and bee-hive are all her physic and chirugery, and she lives the longer for it. She dares go alone and unfold sheep in the night and fears no manner of ill because she means none: yet to say truth she is never alone, for she is still accompanied by old songs, honest thoughts and prayers, but short ones. . . . Thus lives she, and all her care is that she may die in the spring-time, to have store of flowers stuck upon her winding-sheet."

The last remnants of Forest Hill, Mary Powell's home, were pulled down in 1854. A visitor to it three years before its demolition tells us:--

"Still the rose, the sweet-brier and the eglantine are reddest beneath its cas.e.m.e.nts; the c.o.c.k at its barn-door may be seen from any of the windows. . . . In the kitchen, with its vast hearth and overhanging chimney, we discovered tokens of the good living for which the old manor-house was famous in its day. . . . The garden, in its ma.s.sive wall, ornamental gateway and old sun-dial, retains some traces of its manorial dignities." The house indeed is gone, but the sweet country remains, the verdant slopes and the lanes with their hedges full of sweet-brier that stretch out towards Oxford. And there is the church in which Mary Powell prayed. I should have liked to quote another of Miss Manning's biographers, the Rev. Dr. Hutton, who tells us of old walls partly built into the farmhouse that now stands there, and of the old walnut trees in the farmyard, and in a field hard by the spring of which John Milton may have tasted, and the church on the hill, and the distant Chilterns.

Milton's cottage at Chalfont St. Giles's is happily still in a good state of preservation, although Chalfont and its neighbourhood have suffered a sea-change even since Dr. Hutton wrote, a decade ago. All that quiet corner of the world, for so long green and secluded,--a "deare secret greennesse"--has now had the light of the world let in upon it. Motor-cars whizz through that Quaker country; money-making Londoners hurry away from it of mornings, trudge home of evenings, bag in hand; the jerry-builder is in the land, and the dust of much traffic lies upon the rose and eglantine wherewith Milton's eyes were delighted. The works of our hands often mock us by their durability.

Years and ages and centuries after the busy brain and the feeling heart are dust, the houses built with hands stand up to taunt our mortality.

Yet the works of the mind remain. Though Forest Hill be only a party-wall, and Chalfont a suburb of London, the Forest Hill of Mary Powell, the Chalfont of Milton, yet live for us in Anne Manning's delightful pages.

Miss Manning did not wish her _Life_ to be written, but we do get some glimpses of her real self from herself in a chance page here and there of her reminiscences.

Here is one such glimpse:--

"I must confess I have never been able to write comfortably when music was going on. I think I have always written to most purpose coming in fresh from a morning walk when the larks were singing and lambs bleating and distant c.o.c.ks in farmyards crowing, and a distant dog barking to an echo which answered his voice, and when the hedges and banks were full of wild flowers with quaint and pretty names.

"Next to that, I have found the best time soon after early tea, when my companions were all in the garden, and likely to remain there till moonlight."

Not very much by way of a literary portrait, and yet one can fill it in for oneself, can place her in old-world Reigate, fast, alas! becoming over-built and over-populated like all the rest of the country over which falls the ever-lengthening London shadow. As one ponders upon Forest Hill for Mary Powell's sake--is not Shotover as dear a name as Shottery?--and Chalfont for Milton's sake, one thinks on Reigate surrounded by its hills for Anne Manning's sake, and keeps the place in one's heart.

_Mary Powell_, with its sequel, _Deborah's Diary_--Deborah was the young thing whom to bring into the world Mary Powell died--is one of the most fragrant books in English literature. One thinks of it side by side with John Evelyn's _Mrs. G.o.dolphin_. Miss Manning had a beautiful style--a style given to her to reconstruct an idyll of old-world sweetness. Limpid as flowing water, with a thought of syllabubs and new-made hay in it, it is a perpetual delight. This mid-Victorian, dark-haired lady, with the aquiline nose and high colour, although she may not have looked it, possessed a charming style, in which tenderness, seriousness, gaiety, humour, poetry, appear in the happiest atmosphere of sweetness and light.

KATHARINE TYNAN.

_April_ 1908

Bibliography

The following is a complete list of her published works:--

The Household of Sir Thomas More, 1851; Queen Phillippa's Golden Booke, 1851; The Colloquies of Edward Osborne, Citizen and Clothworker of London, 1852; The Drawing-room Table Book, 1852; Cherry and Violet, a Tale of the Great Plague, 1853; The Provocations of Madame Palissy, 1853; Chronicles of Merry England, 1854; Claude the Colporteur, 1854; The Hill Side, 1854; Jack and the Tanner of Wymondham, 1854; Adventures of Haroun al Raschid, 1855; Maiden and Married Life of Mary Powell, afterwards Mistress Milton, 1855; Old Chelsea Bun-House, 1855; Some Account of Mrs. Clarinda Singlehart, 1855; A Sabbath at Home, 1855; Ta.s.so and Leonora, 1856; The Week of Darkness, 1856; Lives of Good Servants, 1857; The Good Old Times, 1857; Helen and Olga, a Russian Tale, 1857; The Year Nine: a Tale of the Tyrol, 1858; The Ladies of Bever Hollow, 1858; Poplar House Academy, 1859; Deborah's Diary, 1859; The Story of Italy, 1859; Village Belles, 1859; Town and Forest, 1860; The Day of Small Things, 1860; Family Pictures, 1861; Chronicle of Ethelfled, 1861; A n.o.ble Purpose n.o.bly Won, 1862; Meadowleigh, 1863; Bessy's Money, 1863; The d.u.c.h.ess of Tragetto, 1863; The Interrupted Wedding: a Hungarian Tale, 1864; Belforest: a Tale, 1865; Selvaggio: a Tale of Italian Country Life, 1865; The Masque at Ludlow, and other Romanesques, 1866; The Lincolnshire Tragedy (Pa.s.sages in the life of Anne Askewe), 1866; Miss Biddy Frobisher: a Salt-water Story, 1866; The Cottage History of England, 1867; Jacques Bonneval, 1868; Diana's Crescent, 1868; The Spanish Barber, 1869; One Trip More, 1870; Margaret More's Tagebuch, 1870; Compton Friars, 1872; The Lady of Limited Income, 1872; Lord Harry Bellair, 1874; Monk's Norton, 1874; Heroes of the Desert (Moffat, Livingstone, etc.), 1875; An Idyll of the Alps, 1876.

LIFE.--C. M. Yonge, Women Novelists of Queen Victoria's Reign, 1897.

THE MAIDEN AND MARRIED LIFE

OF

MARY POWELL

AFTERWARDS MISTRESS MILTON

JOURNALL

_Forest Hill, Oxon, May 1st, 1643_.

. . . Seventeenth Birthdaye. A Gypsie Woman at the Gate woulde faine have tolde my Fortune; but _Mother_ chased her away, saying she had doubtlesse harboured in some of the low Houses in _Oxford_, and mighte bring us the Plague. Coulde have cried for Vexation; she had promised to tell me the Colour of my Husband's Eyes; but _Mother_ says she believes I shall never have one, I am soe sillie. _Father_ gave me a gold Piece. Dear _Mother_ is chafed, methinks, touching this Debt of five hundred Pounds, which _Father_ says he knows not how to pay.

Indeed, he sayd, overnighte, his whole personal Estate amounts to but five hundred Pounds, his Timber and Wood to four hundred more, or thereabouts; and the t.i.thes and Messuages of _Whateley_ are no great Matter, being mortgaged for about as much moore, and he hath lent Sights of Money to them that won't pay, so 'tis hard to be thus prest.

Poor _Father_! 'twas good of him to give me this gold Piece.

_May 2nd, 1643_.

Cousin _Rose_ married to Master _Roger Agnew_. Present, _Father, Mother_, and _Brother_ of _Rose_. _Father, Mother, d.i.c.k, Bob, Harry_, and I; Squire _Paice_ and his Daughter _Audrey_; an olde Aunt of Master _Roger's_, and one of his Cousins, a stiffe-backed Man with large Eares, and such a long Nose! Cousin _Rose_ looked bewtifulle--pitie so faire a Girl should marry so olde a Man--'tis thoughte he wants not manie Years of fifty.

_May 7th, 1643_.

New Misfortunes in the Poultrie Yarde. Poor _Mother's_ Loyalty cannot stand the Demands for her best Chickens, Ducklings, etc., for the Use of his Majesty's Officers since the King hath beene in _Oxford_. She accuseth my _Father_ of having beene wonne over by a few faire Speeches to be more of a Royalist than his natural Temper inclineth him to; which, of course, he will not admit.

_May 8th, 1643_.

Whole Day taken up in a Visit to _Rose_, now a Week married, and growne quite matronlie already. We reached _Sheepscote_ about an Hour before Noone. A long, broade, strait Walke of green Turf, planted with Hollyoaks, Sunflowers, etc., and some earlier Flowers alreadie in Bloom, led up to the rusticall Porch of a truly farm-like House, with low gable Roofs, a long lattice Window on either Side the Doore, and three Cas.e.m.e.nts above. Such, and no more, is _Rose's_ House! But she is happy, for she came running forthe, soe soone as she hearde _Clover's_ Feet, and helped me from my Saddle all smiling, tho' she had not expected to see us. We had Curds and Creame; and she wished it were the Time of Strawberries, for she sayd they had large Beds; and then my _Father_ and the Boys went forthe to looke for Master _Agnew_.

Then _Rose_ took me up to her Chamber, singing as she went; and the long, low Room was sweet with Flowers. Sayd I, "_Rose_, to be Mistress of this pretty Cottage, 'twere hardlie amisse to marry a Man as olde as Master _Roger_." "Olde!" quoth she, "deare _Moll_, you must not deeme him olde; why, he is but fortytwo; and am not I twenty-three?" She lookt soe earneste and hurte, that I coulde not but falle a laughing.

_May 9th, 1643_.