not desire Comprehension. Their ministers were petted and made much of
by the well-to-do yeomen and the rich merchants in country and town.
They lived on the fat of the land, snapped up wealthy widows and
bought broad acres. Whereas the needy country parson was hard pressed
to wring the tithes from his parishioners. While the walls of
exclusion of Jericho stood, the rams' horns brayed against them daily,
and seven times on the Sabbath; but so soon as the walls were
prostrate, and every man could go up into the city and take up his
quarters there where he liked, the rams' horns would have to be laid
aside as superfluous lumber.
The King was disappointed and offended. What he did was to prorogue
Convocation for six weeks, and when those six weeks had expired, to
prorogue it again, and many years elapsed before it was again suffered
to assemble.
That Convocation of 1689 saved the Church of England from dissolution
into a formless, gelatinous, and invertebrate mass.
Burnet himself, though disappointed at the time, felt afterwards that
the determination of the Lower House had saved the Church at a time of
crisis. "There was," he says, "a very happy direction of the
providence of God observed in this matter. The Jacobite clergy who
were then under suspension were designing to make a schism in the
Church, whensoever they should be turned out and their places should
be filled up by others. They saw it would not be easy to make a
separation upon a private and personal account; they therefore wished
to be furnished with more specious pretences, and if we had made
alterations in the Rubrics and other parts of the Common Prayer, they
would have pretended that they still stuck to the ancient Church of
England, in opposition to those who were altering it and setting up
new models. And, as I do firmly believe that there is a wise
providence that watches upon human affairs, and directs them--so I
have observed this in many instances relating to the Revolution ... by
all the judgments we could afterwards make, if we had carried a
majority in the Convocation for alterations, they would have done us
more hurt than good."
Burnet was morally and intellectually incapable of seeing that it was
a case of conscience, of _stantis vel cadentis ecclesiæ_, and he
attributed the motives of the recalcitrant clergy to political
prejudice.
On Jane's return to Oxford, he found another opportunity of defending
the Church, by framing the decree of 1690, which condemned the "Naked
Gospel" of Arthur Burge.
Jane had no hopes whatever of preferment from William, if he cared for
it. In 1696 it was even rumoured that the King meditated turning him
out of his professorship, because he had not signed the "Association
for King William." But on Anne's accession, all his fears were at an
end. It would appear from a letter of Atterbury that at Oxford the
University desired to get rid of him, because he neglected giving
lectures on Divinity, and left the work to be discharged by a
subordinate named Smallridge.
In 1703 Bishop Trelawny appointed him to the Chancellorship of Exeter
Cathedral, which he exchanged for the precentorship in 1704, but he
retained his Regius professorship to the end. Undoubtedly it was a
great pleasure to him in the decline of his life to be back in the
West Country.
He resigned the precentorship of Exeter in 1706, and died on the 23rd
February, 1707, at Oxford, and was buried in Christ Church.
The writer of his life in the _Dictionary of National Biography_ sums
up his career with these words: "Jane was a clerical politician of a
low type; Calamy says of him, 'Though fond of the rites and ceremonies
of the Church, he was a Calvinist in the respect of doctrine,' and the
pleasantest thing recorded of him is his kindness shown at Oxford to
the ejected Presbyterian, Thomas Gilbert."
Calamy, as a Dissenter, was prejudiced against Jane; and I do not see
that he was of a low type of polemical cleric--because when he saw
that the theory of government he had embraced would not bear the test
of experience, he had the courage to reject it. Every man is liable to
make mistakes; it is only the brave man who can acknowledge that he
has been mistaken.
Nor was Jane alone. Compton, Bishop of London, and several other
bishops, had appealed to William of Orange to come over and help the
people and the Church of England to be free from a tyrannous and
subversive despotism. The Earl of Danby, under whose administration, and
with his sanction, a law had been proposed, which, if it had passed,
would have excluded from Parliament and office all who refused to
declare on oath that they thought resistance to the King in every case
unlawful--he had seen the mistake as well, and had invited William over.
As Macaulay says: "This theory (of passive obedience) at first
presented itself to the Cavalier as the very opposite of slavish. Its
tendency was to make him not a slave, but a free man and a master. It
exalted him by exalting one whom he regarded as his protector, as his
friend, as the head of his beloved party, and of his more beloved
Church. When Republicans were dominant the Royalist had endured wrongs
and insults which the restoration of the legitimate government had
enabled him to retaliate. Rebellion was therefore associated in his
imagination with subjection and degradation, and monarchical authority
with liberty and ascendancy. It had never crossed his imagination that
a time might come when a King, a Stuart, could prosecute the most
loyal of the clergy and gentry with more than the animosity of the
Rump or the Protector. That time had however arrived. Oppression
speedily did what philosophy and eloquence would have failed to do.
The system of Filmer might have survived the attacks of Locke; but it
never recovered from the death-blow given by James."
Jane changed his opinion indeed, but so did nearly the whole of the
Tory party and of the clergy of the Church.
THE PENNINGTONS
About seven years ago I attended the baptism of some bells for a new
church at Châteaulin, in Brittany. The ceremony was quaint, archaic,
and grotesque. The bells were suspended in the chancel "all of a row,"
dressed in white frocks with pink sashes round their waists. To each
was given god-parents who had to answer for them, and each was
actually baptized, after which each was made to speak for itself. The
ceremony evidently dates from a period when the bell was regarded as
anything but an inanimate object--it had its responsibilities, it did
its duties, it spoke in sonorous tones. The very inscriptions on them
to the present day prescribe something of this character--invest each
bell with a personality, as these:--
I sweetly tolling men do call
To taste of meats to feed the soul.
Also:--
I sound to bid the sick repent,
In hope of life when breath is spent.
As late as last century we find these:--
Both day and night I measure time for all,
To mirth and grief, to church I call.
And this in 1864:--
I toll the funeral knell,
I ring the festal day,
I mark the fleeting hours,
And chime the church to pray.
In the Western Counties bell-ringing was a favourite and delightful
pastime. Parties of ringers went about from parish to parish and rang
on the church bells, very generally for a prize--"a hat laced with
gold." At Launcells, where the bells are of superior sweetness, the
ringers who rang for the accession of George III rang for that of
George IV, there not having been a gap caused by death among them in
sixty years. No songs are so popular and well remembered at
bell-ringers' feasts as those that record the achievements of some who
went before them in the same office. I give one that has never before
been printed, that can be traced back to 1810, but is certainly older.
It relates to the ringers of Egloshayle.
1. Come all you ringers good and grave,
Come listen to my peal,
I'll tell you of five ringers brave
That lived in Egloshayle.
They bear the sway in ring array,
Where'er they chance to go;
Good music of melodious bells,
'Tis their delight to show.
2. The foreman gives the sigan-al,
He steps long with the toe,
He casts his eyes about them all,
And gives the sign to go.
Away they pull, with courage full,
The heart it do revive,
To hear them swing, and music ring,
One, two, three, four, and five.
3. There's Craddock the cordwainer first,
That rings the treble bell;
The second is John Ellery,
And none may him excel;
The third is Pollard, carpenter;
The fourth is Thomas Cleave;
Goodfellow is the tenor man,
That rings them round so brave.
4. They went up to Lanlivery,
They brought away the prize;
And then they went to San-Tudy,
And there they did likewise.
There's Stratton men, S. Mabyn men,
S. Issey and S. Kew,
But we five lads of Egloshayle
Can all the rest outdo.
5. Now, to conclude my merry task,
I' th' Sovereign's health we join;
Stand every man and pass the flask,
And drink his health in wine.
And here's to Craddock, Ellery,
And here's to Thomas Cleave,
To Pollard and the tenor man
That rings them round so brave.
Humphry Craddock died in 1839; John Ellery in 1845, aged 85 years;
John Pollard in 1825, aged 71; Thomas Cleave in 1821, aged 78; John
Goodfellow in 1846, aged 80.
But for bell-ringers there must be bells; and who cast those that have
been in past years and are still pealed so merrily? A great many were
cast by the Penningtons of Lezant, and latterly at Stoke Climsland.
The Penningtons were an ancient family in Bodmin, resident there in
the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Perhaps because not being landed gentry,
perhaps because they could not establish the right, they did not
record their arms or give their pedigree in the Heralds' Visitations.
But the coat they bore or assumed was a goodly one and simple, and
therefore ancient--_or_, in fesse five lozenges _azure_. Robert
Pennington, of Bodmin, had two sons--John, baptized in 1595, and
Bernard two years later. John married at Bodmin, and had seven sons
baptized there, one of whom was probably the progenitor of the
Penningtons of Lezant and Stoke Climsland. The pedigree of the Exeter
bell-founders of the family has not been made out; but that they
belonged to the stock that sprang up at Bodmin cannot be doubted.
Bernard Pennington, baptized in 1605, was Mayor of Bodmin in 1666, and
was a bell-founder. He died in 1674. His son Christopher Pennington,
baptized 1631, was also a bell-founder. He died in 1696. Christopher's
son of the same name was Mayor of Bodmin in 1726, 1727, and 1733. He
died in 1749. The Penningtons seem to have abandoned the bell-casting
business at the beginning of the nineteenth century; but, as Sir
William Maclean says, "between 1702 and 1818 these popular founders
cast nearly five hundred bells in the county of Devon, and, it is
believed, as many in Cornwall."[14]
There are sixty-six in Devon cast by John Pennington, of Exeter. The
earliest that is dated is at Payhembury, 1635, and the latest 1690 at
Kentisbeare. In 1669 T. P. and I. P. appear together on a bell at
Merton, as if they were partners; and ninety-five bear the trade-mark of
Thomas and John Pennington--large Roman initials with a bell in outline
between. The earliest is found at Eggesford, 1618. Sometimes they
impressed the coin then current. At Ottery S. Mary, 1671, and at S.
Martin's, Exeter, 1675, they used a satirical medal representing a pope
and a king under one face, another representing a cardinal and a bishop.
Besides two generations of Penningtons in Exeter, there was, as
already stated, Christopher Pennington, who cast a bell at Stowford
dated 1710, and one at Philleigh, in Roseland, with C. P. and the
skeleton of a bell between, as did the other Pennington. But his
earliest known is at Fremington, 1702. He was succeeded by FitzAnthony
Pennington, of Lezant, who in 1768, whilst crossing the Tamar in the
Antony ferry with a bell he had cast to be set up at Landulph, was
drowned. He is buried in the tower of Landulph, and on a mural tablet,
beside his age, which was thirty-eight, and the date of his death,
April 30th, 1768, are these lines:--
Tho' boisterous winds and billows sore
Hath toss'd me to and fro,
By God's decree, in spite of both,
I rest now here below.
After his death we have the initials of the three brothers, John,
Christopher, and William. From their head-quarters, first at Lezant
and then at Stoke Climsland, they itinerated through Cornwall and
Devon, casting bells wherever they could find deep clay, and
sufficient bell-metal was provided by the parish that desired to have
a bell in its tower, and generally the bell was cast near the church
for which it was intended.[15]
There are as many as 480 bells by this Cornish family from 1710-1818;
their latest are at Bridgerule and Bovey Tracey, at this last date.
William Pennington, son of the second Christopher, entered Holy Orders
and became vicar of Davidstowe. His progenitors had furnished the
voices calling to church from the village towers, and now this member
sounded within the church also calling to prayer and praise. His son,
William Pennington, purchased the site of the Priory, Bodmin, in 1788,
having rebuilt the house some twenty years previously under a lease.
He was mayor of Bodmin 1764, 1774, 1787, and died without issue in
1789, bequeathing his possessions to his niece Nancy Hosken, daughter
of his sister Susanna, who had married Anthony Hosken, vicar of
Bodmin and rector of Lesneuth. Nancy married Walter Raleigh Gilbert,
one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber, and descended from the ancient
Devonshire family of Compton Castle. As Mr. Gilbert died without
issue, the Priory passed to his brother, and, consequently, wholly
away from the Penningtons.
FOOTNOTES:
[14] _Deanery of Trigg Minor_, I, p. 301.
[15] At S. Breward the bells were cast in a small garden outside the
churchyard fence, since called "Bell garden."
DOCTOR GLYNN-CLOBERY
This amiable and good man was born at Helland, 5th August, 1719, and was
the son of Robert Glynn, by Lucy, fourth daughter of John Clobery, of
Bradstone, in Devon. A singular fatality attended this ancient family,
that possessed a very interesting Elizabethan mansion. John Clobery had
eight daughters and only one son and heir, and that son died without
issue, and only three of the daughters married. Lucy had but the one
son, Robert Glynn, and the fifth daughter, Mary, also only a son; and as
these sons died unmarried, the estate passed to remote connections.
Robert Glynn assumed his mother's name and succeeded to the estates on
the death of his uncle, William Clobery. Robert Glynn was an M.D. and
a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, where he resided. He was a
simple-minded man, and was completely taken in by the Chatterton
forgeries, and for some time strenuously defended them. On which
account Horace Walpole speaks of him with great contempt as "an old
doting physician and Chattertonian at Cambridge." "I neither answer
Dr. Glynn, nor a _poissarde_. Twenty years ago I might have laughed at
both, but they are too small fry, and I am too old to take notice of
them. Besides, when leviathans and crocodiles and alligators tempest
and infest the ocean, I shall not go a-privateering in a cockboat
against a smuggling pinnace." That was in August, 1792.
Dr. Glynn was very fond of seeing young gownsmen at his rooms, and had
tea for them and conversed with them; but he never drank tea himself.
C. Carlyon says: "His custom was to walk about the room and talk most
agreeably upon such topics as he thought likely to interest his
company, which did not often consist of more than two or three
persons. As soon as the tea-table was set in order, and the boiling
water ready for making the infusion, the fragrant herb was taken, not
from an ordinary tea-caddy, but from a packet, consisting of several
envelopes curiously put together, in the centre of which was the tea.
Of this he used, at first, as much as would make a good cup for each
of the party; and, to meet fresh demands, I observed that he
invariably put an additional teaspoonful in the teapot; the excellence
of the beverage, thus prepared, ensuring him custom. He had likewise a
superior knack of supplying each cup with sugar from a considerable
distance, by a jerk of the hand which discharged it from the
sugar-tongs into the cup with unerring certainty, as he continued his
walk around the table, scarcely seeming to stop whilst he performed
these and other requisite evolutions of the entertainment."
Dr. Glynn or Clobery would only eat when his appetite summoned him
imperiously for a meal. A faithful old servant was in constant
attendance upon him, and, whenever his master called out for food, he
was prepared to set before him some plain dish and a pewter of porter.
Nothing would induce the doctor to believe that gout was hereditary.
He once took occasion to mark this with peculiar emphasis, when a
writer signing himself W. A. A. consulted him in his first attack,
then in his nineteenth year. He observed, "My young friend, you call
this gout! Pooh, pooh! You have not yet earned the costly privilege;
you must drink your double hogshead first."
"But my father, sir; it is in my blood by right of inheritance."
His reply was, "You talk nonsense. You may as well tell me you have a
broken leg in your veins by inheritance."
One Sunday morning he met an undergraduate of his acquaintance on his
way to S. Mary's Church, and said to him--
"Well, my master, and whither are you going?"
"I am going to S. Mary's," replied the young gownsman.
"And who is the preacher to-day?"
"I don't know."
"Not know who is the preacher? Then, upon my word, you have no small
merit in taking pot-luck at S. Mary's."
During a long illness the good old doctor attended a poor man, of
whose family party a pert, talkative magpie made one; and as the
patient observed that Dr. Glynn always, when paying a visit, had some
joke with the bird, he thought that perhaps the doctor might like to
possess it. Accordingly, when the poor man was well again, with
overflowing gratitude, but with no money to pay a bill, he thought he
could do no better than make his kind friend a present of the magpie;
and sure enough the prisoner in its cage was conveyed to his rooms in
King's College. There the bearer met with a very kind reception, but
was desired to carry back the bird with him. "I cannot," said the
doctor, "take so good care of it as can you; but I shall consider it
mine, and I entrust it to you to keep for me; and, as long as it
lives, I will pay you half-a-crown weekly for its maintenance."
The anecdote was turned into verse by Mr. Plumtre, and is given in
Gunning's _Reminiscences of Cambridge_. When Dr. Glynn assumed the
name of Clobery he assumed also the Clobery arms--three bats; and no
animal could better symbolize the man, with his curious blindness to
what was obvious to most--that the Chatterton papers were forgeries.
He went down to Bristol on purpose to examine the chest with its MS.
contents. The fact that in one of them the invention of heraldry was
ascribed to Hengest, and that of painted glass to an unknown monk in
the reign of King Edmund, did not disturb his faith. He entered into
vehement controversy with George Steevens, in his endeavour to
establish their genuineness. He waxed hot over it, and it took a good
deal to put Glynn-Clobery out of his usual placidity and coolness.
He set up to be a poet. His Seatonian prize poem on the "Day of
Judgment" was thought much of at the time. Previously Christopher
Smart had won the prize over and over again. Glynn wrested the laurels
from him. This is not saying much; his poem was not much better, and
not at all worse, than the general run of these prize poems. But it
had the advantage of pleasing, and has been repeatedly republished,
and has even obtained for the old doctor a niche in the temple of
Poesy--a notice in a _Biographical Dictionary of Poets_.
He died at Cambridge on February 8th, 1800, and at his own desire was
buried at midnight in King's College Chapel.
THREE MEN OF MOUSEHOLE
In the year 1849, Captain Allen Gardiner, an intrepid sailor and a
religious enthusiast, formed the plan of converting the natives of
Terra del Fuego and of Patagonia. He knew nothing of their language or
habits, nothing indeed of their land. He was, however, possessed with
the idea that he was called to be an apostle of those bleak and
fog-wrapped regions. Of all inhabited spots on the earth, the Terra
del Fuego is the most miserable. Cold, whirlwinds and tempests of snow
and hail, frozen fogs with but rare glimpses of sunshine, form its
climate; and the natives are utterly barbarous, apparently the
refugees from the Continent, driven out of the somewhat less desolate
peninsula of Patagonia by the giants that now possess it, and in their
misery sinking to the lowest depths to which man can descend.
During a year or more Captain Gardiner's efforts to rouse interest in
his scheme, sufficient interest to make the money flow, had met with no
success. He applied to the Moravian Brethren to take up the mission;
they declined. Then he placed the matter before the Scottish
Establishment, but the canny Scotchmen would nae think ov it. At last a
lady at Cheltenham furnished him with £700, and this, with £300 from his
own private purse, formed all the resources on which he acted. As he
could not afford to charter a schooner, he had four open boats built for
him at Liverpool. Two of these were launches of considerable size, to
which he gave the names of the _Speedwell_ and the _Pioneer_; the other
two were small dinghies, to be used as tenders or luggage boats.
[Illustration: DOROTHY PENTREATH of MOUSEHOLE in CORNWALL
_the last Person who could converse in the Cornish language?_]
Captain Gardiner now looked about him for enthusiasts like himself to
share the perils and the possible glories of spreading the gospel over
Terra del Fuego, in which not a cross had been planted nor the Word of
God proclaimed.
He secured the services of a surgeon, a missionary, and from
Mousehole, near Penzance, drew three sturdy Cornish sailors, or
fishermen--John Pearce, John Badcock, and John Davy Bryant--who little
knew what risks they ran.
The party left England on September 27th, 1850, in the ship _Ocean
Queen_, bound from Liverpool to California, taking with them their
boats and six months' provisions. They were landed on the inhospitable
foreign shore on the 5th December.
Pinkerton, in his _Modern Geography_, thus graphically describes the
scene of their projected labours:--
"A broken series of wintry islands, called Terra del Fuego, from two
or more volcanoes which vomit flames amidst the dreary wastes of ice.
Terra del Fuego is divided by narrow straits into eleven islands of
considerable size. In their zeal for Natural History, Sir Joseph Banks
and Doctor Solander had nearly perished amid the snows of this
horrible land; but they found a considerable variety of plants. The
natives are of a middle stature, with broad flat faces, high cheeks,
and flat noses, and they are clothed in the skins of seals. The
villages consist of miserable huts in the form of a sugar loaf, and
the only food seems to be shell-fish."
The lack of common prudence, of common sense, exhibited by Captain
Gardiner is astounding. Here was he, with a party whom he had
beguiled to attend him, dropped in this barren country wrapped in snow
and fog, without an interpreter, and consequently without the means of
communication with the inhabitants should they come across them. From
the moment that the sails of the _Ocean Queen_ disappeared behind the
rocks on her way to double Cape Horn, the eye of no civilized man ever
saw these brave sailors and missionaries alive. All that is known of
them has been gathered from the papers subsequently found.
Seven men in all, with four open boats, were left on the most
inhospitable coast that could be found, where there is little food to
be got, where vegetation is scarce. Their resolution was heroic, but
the whole enterprise was madness.