The other day I visited for the first time (in the opulent indifference
of one who could see it any time) the stately tomb of the first
Pepperrell, who came from Cornwall to these coasts, and settled finally
at Kittery Point. He laid there the foundations of the greatest fortune
in colonial New England, which revolutionary New England seized and
dispersed, as I cannot but feel, a little ruthlessly. In my personal
quality I am of course averse to all great fortunes; and in my civic
capacity I am a patriot. But still I feel a sort of grace in wealth a
century old, and if I could now have my way, I would not have had their
possessions reft from those kindly Pepperrells, who could hardly help
being loyal to the fountain of their baronial honors. Sir William,
indeed; had helped, more than any other man, to bring the people who
despoiled him to a national consciousness. If he did not imagine, he
mainly managed the plucky New England expedition against Louisbourg at
Cape Breton a half century before the War of Independence; and his
splendid success in rending that stronghold from the French taught the
colonists that they were Americans, and need be Englishmen no longer than
they liked. His soldiers were of the stamp of all succeeding American
armies, and his leadership was of the neighborly and fatherly sort
natural to an amiable man who knew most of them personally. He was
already the richest man in America, and his grateful king made him a
baronet; but he came contentedly back to Kittery, and took up his old
life in a region where he had the comfortable consideration of an
unrivalled magnate. He built himself the dignified mansion which still
stands across the way from the post-office on Kittery Point, within an
easy stone’s cast of the far older house, where his father wedded Margery
Bray, when he came, a thrifty young Welsh fisherman, from the Isles of
Shoals, and established his family on Kittery. The Bray house had been
the finest in the region a hundred years before the Pepperrell mansion
was built; it still remembers its consequence in the panelling and
wainscoting of the large, square parlor where the young people were
married and in the elaborate staircase cramped into the little, square
hall; and the Bray fortune helped materially to swell the wealth of the
Pepperrells.
I do not know that I should care now to have a man able to ride thirty
miles on his own land; but I do not mind Sir William’s having done it
here a hundred and fifty years ago; and I wish the confiscations had left
his family, say, about a mile of it. They could now, indeed, enjoy it
only in the collateral branches, for all Sir William’s line is extinct.
The splendid mansion which he built his daughter is in alien hands, and
the fine old house which Lady Pepperrell built herself after his death
belongs to the remotest of kinsmen. A group of these, the descendants of
a prolific sister of the baronet, meets every year at Kittery Point as
the Pepperrell Association, and, in a tent hard by the little grove of
drooping spruces which shade the admirable renaissance cenotaph of Sir
William’s father, cherishes the family memories with due American
“proceedings.”