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 principal merchants of the time resided
or carried on their business. This we learn from a 12mo volume, printed
for Samuel Lee in that year, entitled _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destroyed, when superseded by others of a later date.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 nobility 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 assigned 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 L300 or L400 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 L20: To his son-in-law Charles
Racket and his daughter Magdalen his wife, L5 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
hitherto 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.
In looking over the list of beneficed clergymen in the county of Hants, in
the period within which he lived, presented to us by the Book of
Compositions for First Fruits, I find _only one person of the name of
Pope_, and his name was Alexander. This of itself would be sufficient to
support Mr. Potenger's account; and to set before us the person for whom
search has before been unsuccessfully made. Then as to his residence and
position in the Church, we find in these books of Compositions:--
1. On the 31st of January, 1631, Alexander Pope compounded for the first
fruits of the rectory of Thruxton, in the county of Hants.
2. On November 23, 1633, he compounded for the first fruits of the prebend
of Middleton.
3. And on May 23, 1639, for the first fruits of the prebend of
Ichen-Abbots.
As he held Thruxton till his death, he must be considered in the light of
a clergyman possessed of good preferment, in fact, as belonging to the
superior class of the clergy in the diocese of Winchester.
Thruxton is a rectory in the neighbourhood of Andover; and Ichen-Abbots is
in Bountesborough hundred, a few miles north of Winchester. Why this
living and Middleton are called prebends, the only livings in the county
so designated, we shall know better when the labours of some sufficient
topographer have been directed upon Hampshire.
The next step was to ascertain whether anything respecting himself or his
family could be found at Thruxton; and in this inquiry I received the most
obliging attention from the officiating minister, who examined the church
and went through the register to see whether any memorial existed of
persons of the name of Pope. The result was less satisfactory than I had
hoped: for it appears that there is no memorial of him in the church, and
the register supplies us with no information touching himself or family,
except the following entry amongst the burials:--
"1645. February 21.--Alexander Pope, minister of Thruxton, was buried."
This, however, is of value. It shows us that he held not his living long,
about fourteen years; that he probably died in middle life; and that his
son Alexander, the merchant, could have been no more than a very young
child when he lost his parent. It does not show us that he was actually a
posthumous child; but then there is a possibility that the inscription on
his monument, which is expressed in too general terms, may not be strictly
correct in setting forth his age at the time of his death. However, the
difference is not great between his being literally a posthumous child,
and an infant of two or three years old when he lost his father.
But it may be asked, since Pope must have known perfectly well the name
and highly respectable position in life of his grandfather, why he did not
come boldly forward and claim to be descended of a clergyman born in the
reign of Elizabeth, and dying in the prime of life, when occupying so good
a position? It would have been a more sufficient answer to the taunt of
obscure birth, and have shown to the world his descent, if not from a
great, yet from a cultivated, ancestry.
It is, perhaps, idle to attempt to divine the cause, but it is no
unreasonable conjecture that here his religious, or rather ecclesiastical,
opinions came into play, and that he, a Roman Catholic, would not regard
with the same satisfaction as others would, a descent from a Protestant
clergyman, _a married priest_, nor would be over solicitous that others
should know, on his authority, that his father was the offspring of such
an unhallowed union--that is, as he would esteem it.
But what if it should turn out that this clergyman was not only a
Protestant minister possessed of considerable preferment, but that he also
belonged to that section of the Church of England which was the most
remote from the Church of Rome, and which held it in especial abhorrence?
That he was either the son-in-law or the grandson of one who is always
placed in the first rank of the Puritan ministers of the reign of
Elizabeth, the noted and long-lived John Dodd, of Fawsley, in
Northamptonshire?
I shall first state a few well-established matters of fact, and then the
probable inferences to be drawn from them.
I refer, first, to the will of Robert Barcroft, of Corpus Christi College,
Oxford, D.D., made on the 29th of April, 1627. He gives "to his godson,
John Wilkins, Zanchi's Works, so many as I have, to be delivered to his
father-in-law, Mr. Alexander Pope, for his use." Wilkins was then a boy;
and Wood informs us (_Ath. Oxon._ ii. 105) that he was the son of a Walter
Wilkins, a goldsmith of Oxford, and that his mother was one of the
daughters of Dodd of Fawsley, where Wilkins was born. Further, that
Wilkins was uterine brother to Dr. Walter Pope, who, in his _Life of
Bishop Seth Ward_, speaks of this relationship. Wilkins was the Bishop of
Chester of that name, and one of the founders of the Royal Society.
Wood appears not to have known, any more than his informant Aubrey, that
Alexander was the name of Pope, the father-in-law (which here means
stepfather) of Wilkins; and neither has Dr. Walter Pope, Aubrey, or
Anthony Wood, told us anything about him. The question is, Was _this_
Alexander Pope, of Dr. Barcroft's will, the Alexander Pope who died rector
of Thruxton? Was he the father of the rector, or was there, in 1627, two
Alexander Popes, both clergymen connected with Oxford, but not nearly
connected with each other? A little further light, which possibly the
records of the University of Oxford might supply, may enable some one to
dispose of these questions. All I at present venture to say is, that the
probabilities seem to incline in favour of the supposition that the
Alexander Pope who was instituted to the rectory of Thruxton in 1631, is
the Alexander Pope named in Dr. Barcroft's will in 1627, and consequently
the Alexander Pope who married the widow of Walter Wilkins. But then I
should propose a further conjecture (in questions such as these we must
allow conjectures, and bear to hear of probabilities), that there was a
second marriage of the Rector of Thruxton, of which the Poet's father was
the issue, and that Dr. Walter Pope, the poet and miscellaneous writer,
was the offspring of the first marriage.
Yet I state this dubiously; and, considering how much we know of Dr.
Walter Pope and of Bishop Wilkins, find it difficult to reconcile the want
of any trace of family connection between them and the Poet, with the
supposition that Dr. Walter Pope was half-brother to the London merchant.
Perhaps, after all, there were two Alexanders connected with Oxford, and
Dr. Walter Pope, the child of the one, father or uncle of the Hampshire
clergyman.
It is to be regretted that more has not been preserved of what Mr.
Potenger could have told of the Popes, from recollections of the
conversations of the maiden aunt, who must have been sister to the Rector
of Thruxton; and as she stood, as he informs us, in the same degree of
relationship to Pope and to himself, it would follow that the father or
mother of Mr. Potenger was issue of another sister or brother of the
Rector of Thruxton. This affords hints as to the course which further
inquiry should take; but I cannot pass by the indication which this fact
affords of the respectability of the Poet's paternal ancestry: the
Potengers of Hampshire and Dorsetshire being descendants of Dr. John
Potenger, the celebrated headmaster of the Winchester College School,
whose son John Potenger, born in 1647, was Comptroller of the Pipe.[2]
There were certain peculiarities which remove Dodd from the position of
one of the crowd of Puritan divines: a certain cheerfulness, hilarity, and
also good practical common sense; and certainly his descendant, Dr. Walter
Pope, an ingenious man and no mean poet, is not to be charged with over
much of the severity and strictness of the Puritan life. The later Pope,
however, would not be over forward to reveal his connection with either
Dodd or Dr. Walter; else, if he really did descend from one of the many
daughters of the Rector of Fawsley, he might have claimed to himself a
descent which, on fair evidence, can be traced to the very depths of the
antiquity of English families, the Puritan divine being well known to be
of the very ancient family of Dodd of Shockledge, in Cheshire. A long
account of him is given by Dr. Samuel Clarke.
We are now prepared to enter upon the question of Pope's descent from a
younger son of the family, which was ennobled by the Irish title of Earl
of Downe. This was all which he claimed for himself; and I should be
unwilling to think him so foolish and disingenuous as to make this
assertion without some good grounds; though possibly, if he or his father
had collected evidence, they might not have been able to show how
specifically they did so descend, with the precision now required by the
College of Arms. But probabilities are strongly in favour of the
assertion. The title of Earl of Downe did not free the family of Pope from
the obscurity in which it had lived till one member of it had become
greatly enriched by aiding in the measures which established the
Reformation in England. It will be at once perceived, by any one who may
look into what is shown respecting them, that Sir Thomas Pope had no grace
of ancestry to boast of. His father, whose will we have, is the first of
the family of whom anything is known, and the will shows that he was a man
of small possessions, living at Deddington, in Oxfordshire. Not that he
was quite of the lowest class, as he desires to be buried within the walls
of Deddington Church: in fact, he appears to have belonged to the rank of
superior yeomanry, families who placed daughters in monasteries and sons
in the Church, or sent them to make their fortune in the cities. He made
no pretension to the distinction even of a gentleman's coat-armour; for
Sir Thomas Pope, when he had acquired wealth, took a grant from Barker in
1535. Warton has traced his course with some assiduity; but we may compare
with what he says the evidence of a person who had good means of knowing
Sir Thomas Pope's circumstances. "He was the son of a poor and mean man in
Deddington, in Oxfordshire, within four miles of Banbury, and over
against Somerton, and was born there; was brought up, when a boy, as a
scribe and clerk by Mr. John Croke, one of the Six Clerks when Wolsey was
Chancellor, and so lived with Mr. Croke till after the Suppression. The
Lord Audley made a motion to Mr. Croke to help him to some ready and
expert clerk, to employ in the King's service about the Suppression
business; and Mr. Croke preferred Thomas Pope unto him, being then his
household servant in livery, which was the first step of all his following
good fortunes. This Mr. Croke was my wife's great-grandfather; and I have
heard her grandfather, Sir John Croke, often say, that at his christening,
Thomas Pope, then his father's man, carried the bason; and Sir Thomas
Pope, by his will, gave this Sir John Croke some of his best raiment as a
token of his love unto the house and family."
Previously to the time when Sir Thomas Pope made the acquisitions, the
greater part of which he disposed of so nobly in the foundation of his
college at Oxford, his family made no marriages with the higher gentry. In
short, there is nothing to interfere with the probability of the Rector of
Thruxton being of a branch of the family, nor anything in it which the
Downe family could look upon as degrading. We must not suffer the glare of
the coronet to mislead us: we are speaking of times before the Popes were
ennobled.
The Earls of Downe were one of the many families who rose into distinction
out of the spoils of the ancient Church; but the rank given to them, and
the wealth they possessed, to say nothing of any personal merit, would be
a reasonable defence for Pope to fall back upon under the circumstances.
The earldom, we may observe, had long been extinct. The first earl was the
son of John Pope of Wroxton, who was brother of Sir Thomas (who left no
issue). The dignity was created by Charles I. in 1628, not till then. The
first peer was succeeded by his grandson, the second earl, who died at
Oxford in 1660. This is the earl of whom Pope speaks, whose daughter and
heir married the Earl of Lindsey. The third earl was uncle to the second,
and in his son, who died in 1668, the title was lost, having existed for
forty years only.
We have Pope's direct testimony that his ancestors were of Oxfordshire,
and we find them about Oxford in the time of Elizabeth. I think I have
said sufficient to show that his claim to a distant kindred with the Popes
of Wroxton, raised _per saltum_ from the rank of yeomen, is affected with
no improbability on the score of disproportion of rank.
The surname of Pope is not uncommon, but chiefly found in the southern
counties. No other family of that name, I believe, is ever stated to have
claimed consanguinity with the founder of Trinity College and the family
of the Earls of Downe.
We proceed now to speak of the Poet's maternal descent.