Residence in the Abney family.
It was at that period of Watts’ life, when he felt in a very especial
manner his loneliness, and fever and infirmity were reducing him to a
painful sense of abiding weakness, that Sir Thomas and Lady Abney invited
him to spend a week with them at their magnificent house of Theobalds,
in Hertfordshire. He accepted the invitation, and the hosts and their
guest seemed to have been so mutually pleased with each other that Watts
continued in the family until his death, a period of thirty-six years.
Watts must have then been about thirty-eight years of age. Johnson
remarks upon this friendship that “it was a state in which the notions of
patronage and dependence were overpowered by the perception of reciprocal
benefits; it deserves a particular memorial;” and he refers to Dr.
Gibbons’ interesting account, which is, indeed, one of the most pleasant
pieces of his biography, and compels the wish that he had more frequently
broken the monotony of the book by pages so pleasing. The event was one
of those kind providences which those who watch the lives of eminent men,
who have served their generation and the cause of God, will not fail
to perceive. Think of the solitary student, the shrinking, sensitive
man, the modest and fearful spirit who could not command service, and
recoiled from giving trouble, how fearfully life might have dragged
along through a few years of languor and pain, unequal to much service,
unable to gather round him any, or but few, of the comforts of life,
suddenly transferred to all the affluent comforts of this magnificent
abode, to its rooms, capacious and luxurious, the abode of order, and
harmony, and holiness, not only a pious household, but entirely after
the type favoured by the thoughtful guest. There were the rich rural
scenes, the delightful garden, the spreading lawn, and the fragrant and
embowered recess, all wooing the body back to health and the heart to
peace; and although a few years after his entrance into the household Sir
Thomas Abney dies, yet the guest cannot be permitted to depart. The same
affection and respect are continued by Lady Abney and her daughter. Lady
Abney was the sister of the chief friend of Watts’ younger days, Thomas
Gunston; her wealth was very great, and, says Gibbons, “her generosity
and munificence in full proportion.” There must have been a pleasant
fellowship and community of tastes, certainly a fitting harmony of
character; reminding us of Robert Boyle with his sister Lady Ranelagh, or
William Cowper with Mary Unwin; such relationships are very beautiful in
their serene, unselfish character. Beneath the roof of Lady Abney Watts
died. Within two months of his departure to Bunhill Fields, she was taken
to her resting-place in the vaults of Stoke Newington Church. But the
family in which Dr. Watts was for more than half his life an honoured
guest merits some more particular mention.
Sir Thomas Abney was descended from an ancient and respectable family in
Derbyshire. His father was James Abney, Esq., of Wilsley, whose ancestors
had enjoyed that estate upwards of five hundred years. The son came
to the City of London, and appears to have passed through the honours
of Alderman, Sheriff, and Lord Mayor. For the services he rendered to
King William he received the honour of knighthood, and was chosen chief
magistrate some years before his turn. He appears to have had in those
troublesome times great influence in the City, though holding at that
time a strong opinion adverse to the Stuarts. He was chosen in 1701 to
represent it in Parliament; he was a director of the Bank, and president
of St. Thomas’ Hospital; and when, upon the death of the exiled James,
the King of France, Louis XIV., caused the Pretender to be proclaimed
at St. Germains King of Great Britain, and by the recall of the Earl
of Macclesfield war seemed to be unavoidable, Sir Thomas Abney, in the
Court of Common Council, proposed, in opposition to the majority of his
brethren on the bench, an address to William III., declaring that they
would support him against France and the Pretender: it was carried and
transmitted to the King, who was then on the Continent. It is impossible
now to estimate the vigour this imparted to the King’s affairs—it was the
note which roused the nation. It was said that this act of Sir Thomas
Abney served the cause of the King more than if he had raised for him a
million of money.
It is a singular circumstance that although Watts received such marks
of favour from the Abney family, Sir Thomas and Lady Abney do not
appear to have, in the first days of their acquaintance, belonged to
the church of which Watts was pastor. Sir Thomas was a member of that
church during the pastorate of Mr. Caryl, whose daughter was his first
wife. After Mr. Caryl’s death he united himself with the church of which
John Howe was the minister. Nonconformists were at that time, as they
have been frequently since, Lord Mayors of the City, usually complying
by occasional conformity so far as to attend one part of the Sunday
at church, the other at their own place of worship. When Sir Humphrey
Edwin, who was a member of Pinners’ Hall congregation, was Mayor, he
very unwisely caused the regalia of the City to be carried to his
meeting-house, and it created a vehement storm.
But it is remarkable that Mr. Milner, usually very accurate, in his
life of Dr. Watts quotes a paragraph from “The Shortest Way with the
Dissenters,” speaking of it as a piece of High Church vituperation,
apparently unaware that this was the very production of Defoe, the satire
for which he was put in the pillory; Mr. Milner, misled by the heartiness
of the composition, like many of Defoe’s day, came to the conclusion
that it was the work of an enemy to those whose interests the pamphlet
was intended to serve. The paragraph points immediately to Sir Thomas
and his friend Watts, as the reader will perceive by the designations
italicized: “But a lady, Queen Anne, now sits on the throne, who though
sprung from that blood which ye and your forefathers spilt before the
palace-gates, puts on a temper of forgiveness, and, in compassion to your
consciences, is not willing that you should lose the hopes of heaven by
purchasing here on earth. She would have no more Sir Humphreys tempt the
justice of God, by falling from his true worship and giving ear to the
cat-calls and back-pipes at St. Paul’s; would have your _Sir Thomas’s_
keep to their primitive text, and not venture damnation to play at long
spoon and custard for a transitory twelvemonth; and would have your _Sir
Tom_ sing psalms at Highgate Hill, and split texts of Scripture _with
his diminutive figure of a chaplain_, without running the hazard of
qualifying himself to be called a handsome man for riding on horseback
before the City trainbands.”
It may be noticed now how much the interest of King William and the
Hanover succession to the throne of England were served by the Protestant
dissenters of the City of London, and by no one more than by Sir Thomas
Abney. He lived to a good old age, dying at his house at Theobalds in the
year 1722. Nor can we wonder that his friend should pay a high tribute to
his memory in a funeral sermon, and seek to give it a more durable place
in a sketch in his “Miscellaneous Thoughts.”
Theobalds was a fine old palace, and has been celebrated in the verses
of poets and the pages of novelists, and the memoirs of historians; but
no biography of Watts gives any specific account of the magnificent old
building in which he spent the greater number of the years of his life.
It was as much Watts’ home as if it had been his own property; and he
was in the habit of saying his poetical contributions would have been
much more numerous had he, in his early life, been privileged with the
means of retirement among such shades and gardens, and ample grounds.
Theobalds was, and had been, everything that could excite the memory,
or stir or soothe and lull the imagination. Situated a little more than
a mile from Cheshunt, in Hertfordshire, and within an easy ride from
the metropolis, on the borders of Enfield Chase, it possessed a very
remarkable history; it had been the favourite residence of the mighty
Cecil, Lord Burleigh; to this place he fled with eagerness to enjoy his
short intervals of leisure; amidst its shades he planned and plotted
schemes in which the whole future of England’s history was interested;
he laid out immense sums of money upon the grand pile, and kept up
great state with extraordinary magnificence, while he might be seen
ambling along upon a mule through the groves of his magnificent domains,
overlooking his workmen or the parties of pleasure he had gathered around
him. Here, at this old house, Queen Elizabeth had repeatedly rested in
the course of her great progresses. Here, when Burleigh and his mistress
had both passed away, came James I., and held his masques, written by Ben
Jonson, and enjoyed his pleasures. It was in his reign that it was given
up by the Earl of Salisbury to Queen Anne of Denmark, amidst such strange
pageantries of most intemperate folly that Sir John Harington writes,
contrasting the days of James I. with what he remembered of the same
place in the days of Queen Elizabeth, “I never did see such lack of good
order, discretion, and sobriety, as I have now done.”
In Watts’ day there was living in the neighbouring village of Cheshunt
that remarkable man, also a member of Watts’ church. Richard Cromwell,
although, somewhat to shroud himself in obscurity, he usually went by the
name of Mr. Clarke. An eminent novelist[14] has woven into his fiction
very naturally one of the most striking incidents of his story from the
casual meeting of his hero and the son of the Protector on this very
spot, when Cromwell became his host and entertainer. Richard Cromwell
died probably before Watts became a constant resident at Theobalds; and
indeed Cromwell removed from Cheshunt some time before his death.
Cheshunt churchyard once contained a number of inscriptions upon the
tombs from the pen of the poet; most of them have probably long been
obliterated, but two or three have been snatched from oblivion; an
inscription for the tomb of Thomas Pickard, Esq., citizen of London, who
died suddenly, probably a member of Watts’ church:
A soul prepared needs no delays,
The summons comes, the saint obeys;
Swift was his flight and short the road,
He closed his eyes and saw his God.
His flesh rests here till Jesus come
And claims the treasure from the tomb.
Another epitaph:
Beneath this stone Death’s prisoner lies.
That stone shall move, the prisoner rise
When Jesus with Almighty word
Calls His dead saints to meet their Lord.
The following lines were not long since in existence, written upon a
ceiling dial at a western window of Theobalds:
Little sun upon the ceiling
Ever moving, ever stealing
Moments, minutes, hours away;
May no shade forbid thy shining
While the heavenly sun declining
Calls us to improve the day.
There was another, indeed there appear to have been several; it was the
taste of the times to line the avenues with these moralities in verse:
Thus steal the silent hours away,
The sun thus hastes to reach the sea,
And men to mingle with their clay.
Thus light and shade divide the year,
Thus till the last great day appear
And shut the starry theatre.
If we are able to discriminate Watts in his various abodes here and at
Stoke Newington, certainly it is not his biographers we have to thank for
it. They have jumbled up his residences in a very heterogeneous fashion,
and leave us very much in doubt whether their descriptions of his rooms
apply to his earlier or later abode. Assuredly he lived in a mansion
large enough for him. One of the smallest of mortals, he had one of the
largest homes. We can readily believe that good Sir Thomas was very well
pleased from such a pile to deliver up a suite of apartments to such a
guest. His own rooms were a kind of true literary hermitage, adorned with
paintings from his own pencil, and his collection of portraits of eminent
persons he had known, or great contemporaries he admired; at the entrance
of his study on the outside were the fine lines from the first book of
Horace’s satires, in which he denounces the faithless friend: “He who
reviles his absent friend, who does not defend him while another defames
him, who aims at the groundless jeers of people, and the reputation of a
wit, who can feign things not seen, who cannot keep secrets, he is the
rancorous man.” The spaces within, where there were no shelves, were
filled up with prints of distinguished friends, or eminent persons. Of
course, there was a spacious old Elizabethan fireplace, panelled on
either side, and in each panel an inscription from the beloved Horace. On
the one side:
Locus est pluribus umbris.
And on the other:
Quis me dolorum propria dignabitor umbra.
There we are permitted to fancy him. Such were his haunts among those
pleasant and sequestered shades, and such was his home. His rooms well
arranged and tasteful, as one biographer has depicted them. The lute and
the telescope on the same table with the Bible, a treatise on logic in
one hand, and hymns and spiritual songs in the other. Few writers in our
language seem to suggest a finer illustration of the mingled powers of
faith and reason.
With so small a family what a silent household it must have seemed,
sustained in its grand and memorable stateliness. There passed what we
may believe to have been the happiest years of Watts’ life, amidst scenes
inviting to rest, and with little to disturb the equanimity of his quiet
spirit, receiving and reflecting its own peace, peace not to be disturbed
even by much bodily restlessness and pain. Those numerous allusions in
his hymns to the wakeful hours of night were not mere poetic fancies,
“the comforts of my nights” were not unneeded; for many years he knew
little of sleep, except such as could be obtained by medicine; intense
mental application, working upon a weak and nervous constitution, brought
about the consequences of insomnia, or sleeplessness yet his mind seems
to have been too calm, too equally balanced, and too completely under
the control of highest principles, ever to know such agitations as shake
to their centre some poetic natures. Even public agitations did hot
disturb him much. Almost the severest trial he knew was the vehement and
intolerant persecution he sustained from the tongue and pen of Thomas
Bradbury; but to him we may refer in subsequent pages.
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