Two persons of noble 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 assigns 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 assumed to pass
over the charge as unworthy his notice: he might have claimed it as a
merit to have surpassed 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 class 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 lustre:--
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 noble assailant, 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 asserting 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
pronunciation 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 repetition 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.