Pope: His Descent And Family Connections Part 1

Pope: His Descent and Family Connections.

by Joseph Hunter.

POPE:

HIS DESCENT AND FAMILY CONNECTIONS.

Two persons of n.o.ble birth, who thought themselves insulted in the "Imitation of the First of the Second Book of the Satires of Horace,"

retorted upon the Poet with a severity not wholly undeserved. Unlike Pope, who had dismissed them both in a line or two, they composed their attacks very elaborately, seeking out everything that could offend him,--defects for which he must be held responsible, and those for which no man can justly be so held.

One of these latter points was, want of _birth_. The lines,

Whilst none thy crabbed numbers can endure, Hard as thy heart, and _as thy birth obscure_,

are attributed to the Lady Mary Wortley Montague; but Johnson a.s.signs them to Lord Hervey,[1] who attacked Pope in another poem, in which he makes it a charge that he was a hatter's son, and insults him on the score of the meanness of his family.

These allusions to his origin seem to have galled the Poet more than anything else that was said of him. He was then living in what is called high society, and it was of some importance to him not to be thought meanly bred. Three courses were open to him. He might have a.s.sumed to pa.s.s over the charge as unworthy his notice: he might have claimed it as a merit to have surpa.s.sed his ancestors, and risen to distinction by his own genius, "out of himself drawing his web;" or he might deny the charge altogether. He adopted the last of these courses, and in this he acted wisely and honestly.

When a defence against such a charge is undertaken, there is an advantage in the difficulty of defining that really undefinable quality called _birth_. There is an _absolute_, and a _relative_, want of it. A rich mercantile family may be a good family when compared with persons of the same cla.s.s who have been less successful than they; a family owning a good estate in the country is a good family amongst the neighbours; a race of persons eminent in any of the professions may be called a good family. But place these by the side of the ancient aristocracy of the country, who have maintained this position for centuries, and what are they? and let persons even of acknowledged antiquity and elevation be brought into the company of kings and emperors, or even of the great families of the Continent, and they lose something of their l.u.s.tre:--

A deputy shines bright as doth a king Until a king be by.

Undoubtedly, Pope could not in this respect compare himself with the Pierrepoints and the Herveys; and _to them_ his birth would necessarily appear obscure, if they thought at all about it, and chose to take the unkinder view. But Pope knew that what was _relatively_ true might be _absolutely_ untrue. He therefore took the first opportunity of claiming publicly what in his opinion belonged to him.

In the _Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot_, which was written early in 1733, he speaks of his birth thus:--

Of _gentle blood_ (part shed in honour's cause, While yet in Britain honour had applause) _Each parent_ sprung--

Then follows his touching notice of his father, and of his mother (who was then living, in her ninety-third year), not the less genuine for being written in imitation of Horace. They are handed down for ever as people of

Unspotted names, and venerable long, If there be force in virtue or in song.

To these lines this note is appended:--"Mr. Pope's father was of a gentleman's family in Oxfordshire, the head of which was the Earl of Downe, whose sole heiress married the Earl of Lindsey. His mother was the daughter of William Turner, Esq., of York: she had three brothers, one of whom was killed, another died, in the service of King Charles; the eldest following his fortunes, and becoming a general officer in Spain, left her what estate remained after the sequestrations and forfeitures of her family."

In his more formal reply to his n.o.ble a.s.sailant, he says that his father was a younger brother,--"that he was no mechanic (neither a hatter, nor, which might please your Lordship yet better, a cobler), but in truth of a very honourable family, and my mother of an ancient one."

It happened that while this subject was fresh in the public mind, and within a very few weeks after he had finished his _Epistle to Dr.

Arbuthnot_, the death of his mother occurred. This gave him a fair occasion of publicly a.s.serting his claim to a good position in respect of birth. Accordingly, the following notice, which appeared in the _Gentleman's Magazine_ for June 1733, we cannot doubt came from himself:--"_June 8._ Died Mrs. Editha Pope, aged 93, the last survivor of the children of William Turner, of York, Esq., who, by Thomasine Newton, his wife, had fourteen daughters and three sons, two of which died in the King's service in the Civil Wars, and the eldest retired into Spain, where he died a general officer."

Pope had now said all that he proposed to make public; and accordingly we find nothing more concerning his descent in the _Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Alexander Pope, Esquire_, published by William Ayre in 1745, the year after the Poet's death. He might, or might not, have been acquainted with the letter to Curl with the signature P. T., in which a person professing to be well acquainted with Pope's family, undertakes to inform Curl respecting them. This letter has, strangely, been attributed to some actual friend of Pope, and even to the Poet himself writing thus anonymously to Curl, with whom he was at the time in open war. Who P. T.

specifically was, has, perhaps, not been discovered; but that he was a person with whom Curl had unfair dealings respecting the collection of Pope's letters, will be seen in Mr. Ayre's _Memoirs_, p. 300. The information in this letter has been generally received by later writers on the life of Pope, as worthy of the same acceptation which is yielded to the Poet's avowed statements respecting his family; and, undoubtedly, it proceeds from some one who was acquainted with facts in the history of the family a little beyond those which the Poet himself had divulged. To those facts it adds the following:--That Pope's father had an elder brother who studied and died at Oxford: that the father was himself a posthumous child: that he was put to a merchant in Flanders, and acquired a moderate estate by merchandise, which he quitted at the Revolution, and retired to Windsor Forest, where he purchased a small estate: that he married one of the seventeen children of William Turner, Esq., formerly of Burfit Hall, in Yorkshire: and that two of his wife's brothers were killed in the Civil Wars.

The last clause shows the carelessness with which this letter was written. It is evidently copied from what Mr. Pope had himself written; but then Mr. Pope's account of the matter is, that one brother was slain, and the other died, in the service of King Charles the First. To what Mr.

Pope had said of his maternal grandfather, the writer of this letter adds, that he was of Burfit Hall in Yorkshire. "Burfit" is the country people's p.r.o.nunciation of Birthwaite, an old seat of the Yorkshire Baronet family of Burdet. I would not say that he may not have been a temporary inhabitant of this house, but it can have been but a short tenancy by Mr.

Turner, whose far more proper designation was that which Pope had given him, "of York," where he for the most part resided. The seventeen children is but a repet.i.tion of what Pope had himself told us, and which is supported by better evidence than the testimony of this anonymous writer.

That he acquired a fortune by merchandise is doubtless true, though, probably, but a small one; but when he says that the elder Pope had been put to a merchant in Flanders, this is at variance with what we are told by a relation of the family (of whom immediately), that it was to Lisbon that he was sent for the purpose, and that there it was that he became a Roman Catholic. That he was a posthumous child is peculiar to this communication. I think I shall show it to be a little uncertain, supposing that his age at the time of his death is truly stated on his monument: of the brother studying and dying at Oxford, also peculiar to the letter, I have seen nothing to support or to disprove.

This will be sufficient to show that there can be no good reason to attribute this letter to Pope himself, or to any person who had received information from him to be given to the world in this form; and, secondly, that in the points where this communication is at all at variance with what Mr. Pope had himself sanctioned, or professes to carry our information beyond what he had told us, its testimony is to be received, if at all, with great caution.

We may, therefore, be said to receive very little more on this subject from the Poet's contemporaries than what he himself on the one side, and his enemies on the other, chose to communicate. It is quite insufficient for forming a right judgment on the question. There is very little fact, no proof, and no detail. If the point was worth raising at all, it was worth settling: besides that, the curiosity of later times craves more than this, when intent on studying the lives of England's greatest worthies. Dr. Johnson is content to dismiss the subject thus:--"This, and this only, is told by Pope, who is more willing, as I have heard it observed, to show what his father was not, than what he was." But Johnson lived in a century when there was little desire of minute and exact information respecting even the most eminent of our countrymen; and in writing of Pope as of Milton, he has certainly kept himself free from the temptation which besets all biographers, of becoming enamoured of those of whom they write.

The spirit of research, however, was not entirely dormant even in that century. Editors and biographers did look around for anything that would easily present itself: nor can what they observed be said to have been wholly unimportant, for they brought to light one piece of evidence which deserves to be received with the same confidence which the testimony of Pope himself receives at our hands. This comes from a certain Mr.

Potenger, who called himself a cousin of Pope. He gave the information to Dr. Bolton, who was Dean of Carlisle, who communicated it to Dr. Joseph Warton, from whom we receive it. His information was to this effect:--That the Poet's grandfather was a clergyman in Hampshire: that the Poet's father was the younger of two sons, and was sent to Lisbon to be placed in a mercantile house: that there he left the Church of England and became a Roman Catholic: that he knew nothing of the "fine pedigree"

which his cousin Pope set up, and that as to a descent from the Earls of Downe, he was confident no such descent could be proved, for if it had been so, he must have heard of it from a maiden aunt, who stood in the same degree of relationship to Pope and to himself, who was a great genealogist, excessively fond of talking of her family, and who most certainly, therefore, would have spoken of this descent if it were so.

This is the substance of Mr. Potenger's valuable information, as it has been received and incorporated by Roscoe and others of the late writers on the life of Pope. Mr. Potenger, however, in one respect does some injustice to the Poet's memory. Mr. Pope nowhere says that he descended of an Earl of Downe, but only that he was of the same family as that from which the Earl of Downe sprang; which is quite a different thing, and probably true.

My own researches have done something to enable me to extend the very limited information we possess on this subject: not much, perhaps, it will be thought, but it will be sound as far as it goes, and will be presented in the simple guise of truth, with no intention of unduly magnifying or unfairly weakening the claim set up by the Poet himself. He having made the claim to be "of gentle blood," beside the interest which belongs to the question as part of the Poet's history, his truthfulness and honour may be said to be involved in it, points of even more importance than his wonderful moral sagacity, and the unrivalled felicity of his numbers.

I treat of the two families apart.

I. THE POPES.

Alexander Pope, the Poet's father, if he was seventy-four or seventy-five at the time of his death in 1717, may be presumed to have been born in 1641 or 1642. He was a younger son, and is said by P. T. to have been a posthumous child, and that while his elder brother, who inherited the larger share of the family property, was sent to Oxford, where he died, he was brought up to commerce. It has never been shown by whom this arrangement was made, for before his birth, his father (of whom afterwards), according to the letter to Curl, was dead: and if not dead, he died when his son was quite an infant. All accounts agree that he was sent abroad to complete his mercantile education--an expensive course, which of itself shows that he was of no very mean stock, and that, though the younger son of a widow, his relatives had the means of giving him a fair start in life.

There are, as we have seen, two opposing accounts from persons who professed to know the facts respecting the place to which he was sent, one stating it to be Flanders, the other, with more of probability, Lisbon, with the additional information, that at Lisbon he joined the Roman Catholic Church, or that there, at least, was laid the foundation of the change in his religious profession. From that time there is a blank in his history till his thirty-fifth year, 1677, when he was living in Broad Street, London, where many of the princ.i.p.al merchants of the time resided or carried on their business. This we learn from a 12mo volume, printed for Samuel Lee in that year, ent.i.tled _A Collection of the Names of the Merchants living in and about the City of London_. Books of this kind are of some rarity, being by most persons thought worthless and are destroyed, when superseded by others of a later date. I have a copy which has survived the general wreck, and has been long in my possession. I copy from it the names of three Popes who occur in the list:--

JAMES POPE, Abchurch Lane.

ALEXANDER POPE, Broad Street.

JOSEPH POPE, Redriff.

There can be no reasonable doubt that Alexander is the Poet's father; and it is worth observation that this is a list of "merchants" properly so called--persons engaged in the higher walks of commerce. The number of the names is about 1770. Hence we must infer that the Poet's father was not, at that time at least, pursuing any low or mean occupation, but one in which in those days it was not unusual to place the younger sons of gentry, and sometimes even of the n.o.bility of the land.

He was then, or very soon after, married, not to the mother of his celebrated son, but to a former wife, whose name was Magdalen, but whose surname is at present unknown. This is a recent discovery of some one whose curiosity has led him to consult the register of St. Benet Fink, the parish in which part of Broad Street is situated, where this entry was found:--"1679, August 12. bur. Magdalen, wife of Alexander Pope." She left him one child, a daughter named Magdalen, afterwards Mrs. Racket, whose sons were the Poet's heirs.

The next event (after another period marked by no incidents with which we are acquainted) is his marriage with Edith Turner, his second wife. This may be presumed to have taken place in 1686 or 1687, the only child, the Poet, having been born in May or June, 1688. Authorities differ respecting the day, and also the place, one naming Lombard Street, another Cheapside. The father had, therefore, changed his residence, but was still living among the trading aristocracy, and we have no reason to believe that he had receded from his original position of a London merchant.

He acquired some additional property, perhaps considerable, with his wife Edith. She seems to have been the favourite of her brother, the "general officer in Spain," whatever that phrase may denote,--for Pope says, she inherited from him what remained of the fortunes of the family, and it must have been from him that the elder Alexander Pope acquired the valuable interest he possessed in the manor of Ruston, near Scarborough.

They were both of mature age at their marriage. Fixing the time in 1686, he would be, according to his monumental inscription, forty-five, and she forty-four. This change in his position had doubtless something to do with his retirement from business very soon after the Revolution,--perhaps as much as his disgust at the political change which had taken place, or his love of retirement, the motives usually a.s.signed for the step he took.

He did not immediately establish himself in his retreat at Binfield, for Mr. Roscoe in his Life of the Poet informs us, that he lived for a while at Kensington. No long interval, however, appears to have elapsed between his final departure from London, and his settlement on a small estate which he bought at Binfield, which is on Windsor Forest, two or three miles from the town of Wokingham.

Commerce has its vicissitudes, and the Poet's father may have had sensible proof of this obvious fact. But there is no evidence, as far as we yet know, that he was ever "unfortunate" in his commercial career. That he did not attain to great wealth, like many of his contemporaries, is certain; but neither did he, like some others of a more adventurous disposition, sink into despondency. When one of Pope's enemies taunted him with being the son of a person who had been a bankrupt, he calls it a "pitiful untruth," and this at a time when there were many persons living who must have known if it had been so, and many others who would have been glad to propagate the libel. Hearne, who disliked Pope, inserted in his private note-book, for future use if necessary, that his father was "a sort of broken merchant." The truth probably is, that he saved something in his business, and added to it by his marriage; and it is certain that he was able to live for many years an easy disengaged life, and at his death to leave his son 300 or 400 a year.

He made his will on February 9, 1710. I take a few notes of it from Mr.

Carruthers's recent publication. He gives to his wife Edith the furniture of her chamber, her rings and jewels, and 20: To his son-in-law Charles Racket and his daughter Magdalen his wife, 5 each, for mourning: All else, including rent-charge out of the manor of Ruston, in Yorkshire, together with lands at Binfield, and at Winsham, in Surrey, to his son Alexander Pope, whom he makes executor. He died in 1717, and the will was proved on the 8th of November in that year.

So far I have had little to do but to repeat what has been previously told by others. But now we come to the question, Who was the Poet's grandfather, the merchant's father? This question, hitherto unresolved, I propose to answer.

When Thomas Warton, in the Appendix to the Life of Sir Thomas Pope, the founder of Trinity College, Oxford, and also the founder of the family of Pope, Earls of Downe, with whom Pope claimed kindred, enters on the consideration of this question, he admits the probability that such a relationship existed, but professes his utter inability to ascend beyond the father, in pursuit of the Poet's ancestors. The attempt to do so has been made by others, who have brought far less of antiquarianism into literary history than Warton. Mr. Carruthers can find no trace of him. And it may be stated generally, that no one has (publicly at least) made any approach to the determination of the question. Yet this was plainly the first step to be taken in any investigation of the Poet's claim to be of "gentle blood." Literary biography owes much to the Wartons--more than the present writers in this department seem disposed to acknowledge; and it is to a Warton, not Thomas, but his brother, Dr. Joseph Warton, that we owe the hint upon which I have proceeded, and, as I believe, settled the question for ever.

Dr. Warton, we have seen, in his _Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope_, 1780, vol. ii., informs us, that he learned from Dr. Bolton, Dean of Carlisle, that he had heard from a Mr. Potenger, a cousin of Pope, that Pope's grandfather was _a clergyman of the Church of England living in Hampshire_.

This has been accepted by Mr. Roscoe, and others who have written on the life of Pope since 1780; but, though attempts have been made, no one has. .h.i.therto succeeded in establishing the truth of Mr. Potenger's statement, by singling him out from amongst the Hampshire clergy of his time, and showing his position.