THE WILLEY SQUIRE.
Squire Forester—His Instincts and Tendencies—Atmosphere of the Times
favourable for their Development—Thackeray’s Opinion—Style of
Hunting—Dawn of the Golden Age of Fox-hunting, &c.
IT will be seen that around Willey and Willey Hall, associations crowd
which serve to make the place a household word and Squire Forester a man
of mark with modern sportsmen and future Nimrods, at any rate if we
consent to regard the Squire’s characteristics as outcrops of the
instincts of an ancient stock. Descended from an ancestry so associated
with forest sports and pursuits, he was like a moving plant which
receives its nourishment from the air, and he lived chiefly through his
senses. He was waylaid, as it were, on life’s path by hereditary
tendencies, and his career was chequered by indulgences which, read in
the light of the present day, look different from what they then did,
when at court and in the country there were many to keep him in
countenance. At any rate, Squire Forester lived in what may be called
the dawn of the golden age of fox-hunting. We say dawn, because although
Lord Arundel kept a pack of hounds some time between 1690 and 1700, and
Sir John Tyrwhitt and Charles Pelham, Esq., did so in 1713, yet as Lord
Wilton, in his “Sports and Pursuits of the English” states, the first
real pack of foxhounds was established in the West of England about 1730.
It was a period when, for various reasons, a reaction in favour of the
manly sports of England’s earlier days had set in, one being the
discovery that those distinguished for such sports were they who assisted
most in winning on the battle-fields of the Continent the victories which
made the British arms so renowned. Then, as now, it was found that they
led to the development of the physical frame—sometimes to the removal of
absolute maladies, and supplied the raw material of manliness out of
which heroes are made—a view which the Duke of Wellington in some measure
confirmed by the remark that the best officers he had under him during
the Peninsular War were those whom he discovered to be bold riders to
hounds. Lord Wilton, in his book just quoted, goes still further, by
contending that “the greatness and glory of Great Britain are in no
slight degree attributable to her national sports and pastimes.”
That such sports contributed to the jollity and rollicking fun which
distinguished the time in which Squire Forester lived, there can be
little doubt. In his “Four Georges,” Thackeray gives it as his opinion,
that “the England of our ancestors was a merrier England than the island
we inhabit,” and that the people, high and low, amused themselves very
much more. “One hundred and twenty years ago,” he says, “every town had
its fair, and every village its wake. The old poets have sung a hundred
jolly ditties about great cudgel playings, famous grinnings through
horse-collars, great Maypole meetings, and morris-dances. The girls used
to run races, clad in very light attire; and the kind gentry and good
parsons thought no shame in looking on.” He adds, “I have calculated the
manner in which statesmen and persons of condition passed their time; and
what with drinking and dining, and supping and cards, wonder how they
managed to get through their business at all.” That they did manage to
work, and to get through a considerable amount of it, is quite clear; and
probably they did so with all the more ease in consequence of the
amusement which often came first, as in the case of “Naughty idle Bobby,”
as Clive was called when a boy; and not less so in that of Pitt, who did
so much to develop that spirit of patriotism of which we boast. It was a
remark of Addison, that “those who have searched most into human nature
observe that nothing so much shows the nobleness of the soul as that its
felicity consists in action;” and that “every man has such an active
principle in him that he will find out something to employ himself upon
in whatever place or state he is posted.”
[Picture: The Old Squire]
Those familiar with the _Spectator_ will remember that he represents
himself to have become so enamoured of the chase, that in his letters
from the country he says: “I intend to hunt twice a week during my stay
with Sir Roger, and shall prescribe the moderate use of this exercise to
all my country friends as the best kind of physic for mending a bad
constitution and preserving a good one.” He concludes with the following
quotation from Dryden:—
“The first physicians by debauch were made;
Excess began, and sloth sustains the trade:
By chase our long-liv’d fathers earned their food;
Toil strung their arms and purified their blood.”
But a country squire of Mr. Forester’s day even more pithily and quaintly
expresses himself as to the advantages to be derived from out-door
sports:—“Those useful hours that our fathers employed on horseback in the
fields,” he says, “are lost to their posterity between a stinking pair of
sheets. Balls and operas, assemblies and masquerades, so exhaust the
spirits of the puny creatures over-night, that yawning and chocolate are
the main labours and entertainments of the morning. The important
affairs of barber, milliner, perfumer, and looking-glass, are their
employ till the call to dinner, and the bottle or gaming table demand the
tedious hours that intervene before the return of the evening
assignations. What wonder, then, if such busy, trifling, effeminate
mortals are heard to swear they have no notion of venturing their bodies
out-of-doors in the cold air in the morning? I have laughed heartily to
see such delicate smock-faced animals judiciously interrupting their
pinches of snuff with dull jokes upon fox-hunters; and foppishly
declaiming against an art they know no more of than they do of Greek. It
cannot be expected they should speak well of a toil they dare not
undertake; or that the fine things should be fit to work without doors,
which are of the taylor’s creation.”