Manchester, and with the other fell upon the King's left on Speen Moor.
The king and the young prince fled on the spur to find safety beneath
the cannon of Donnington, while the Life Guards threw themselves upon
Cromwell's troopers, in a gallant attempt to arrest his advance. Vain
was their devotion. The Ironsides smote them hip and thigh, shattered
their formation, and drove them from the field in headlong flight.
"Their heads all stooping low, their points all in a row,
Like a whirlwind on the trees, like a deluge on the dykes
Our cuirassiers have burst on the ranks of the accurst."
A harder fate befell the second division. Involved among the hedges
and avenues of Dolmans, they were decimated by the fire of the royal
musketeers, furiously charged by the cavalry, and driven off in the
utmost disorder, after sustaining a loss of 500 men. Edmund Ludlow made
a gallant attempt to relieve them, and cover their retreat.
With this last desperate conflict the battle ceased, not to be renewed.
The King drew off, and Manchester showed no disposition to attempt any
further operations against him. The second battle of Newbury was thus
not less hardly fought nor indecisive in its results than was the first.
It is said that the disgust of Cromwell was so great, that it
influenced him, to make his accusation against Manchester, with the
resulting self-denying ordinance, and its remarkable and wide-extending
results.
Mr. Blundell's paper has been closely followed, but the matter
necessarily condensed in this sketch.
Binfield and Easthampstead, 1700-1716, and the Early Years of Alexander
Pope.
BY REV. C.W. PENNY, M.A.
There are few more pleasant and charming country villages in Berkshire
than the two adjoining parishes, whose names stand at the head of this
chapter. The undulating surface of the land, consisting for the most
part of well-wooded and well-watered pastures, and a better soil than
prevails in most of the surrounding heaths, must from the first have
made an agreeable oasis in this part of the old Forest of Windsor.
While their convenient situation, abutting north and south of the
old high road, which ran from Reading past Wokingham to Windsor, and
so to London, brought these secluded villages into touch, not only
with the chief town of the county, but also with the busier life of
the Metropolis. And thus, even two hundred years ago, they were an
attractive place of residence for many old families that have long
since died out and passed away.
The early history of almost every village centres round its church.
And the church at Binfield is no exception to the rule. It lies
embowered with trees at the further end of the village, nestling
against the slope of a steepish hill. And although the ruthless hand
of modern restoration has dealt somewhat hardly both outside and
inside with the fabric itself, yet enough of hoar antiquity remains to
attract the notice of even the most careless visitor. The venerable
but somewhat dumpy tower is built, like those of Warfield and All
Saints', Wokingham, of the conglomerate "puddingstone" of the district,
and bears significant testimony to the scarceness of good building
materials at the date of its erection. For these rugged irregular
fragments must have been collected with infinite pains and labour when
the "iron pan," as it is called, of the surrounding heath country was
broken up, and the land first brought under cultivation.
As we approach the south door, the fine open timbered perpendicular
porch, a feature which is characteristic of the churches of the
neighbourhood, cannot fail to strike the eye. It is of unusual size,
and the carved oak woodwork, black with age, is of superior workmanship.
The interior of the church is full of interest to the antiquary
and the archæologist. For though the roof and arches are low, the
pillars and windows poor, and the general architectural effect mean
and disappointing, yet the floor and walls are crowded with inscribed
and carved gravestones and memorial tablets of no ordinary character.
These, as well as other relics of a bygone age, at once arrest
attention.
To begin with the latter first; on a desk near the pillar as we enter
is a black letter copy of Erasmus's Paraphrase of the Four Gospels,
which at one time was ordered to be provided in every church at the
cost of the parish. The copy is almost perfect, and has been carefully
re-bound.
Then there is what the successive restorations have left of the fine
Jacobean pulpit, with its date, "Ano. Dom. 1628," still upon it; and
beside it, though unhappily upon the wrong side, is the elaborate
hour-glass stand of hammered iron-work, consisting of oak leaves and
acorns, alternately with vine leaves and bunches of grapes, together
with three coats-of-arms, said to be those of the Smiths' and Farriers'
Company. This is probably of the same date as the pulpit, if we may
judge from the very similar iron frame-work which is attached to the
pulpit in Hurst Church, and which bears the date 1636. The pulpit at
Binfield has been sadly mutilated; its pedestal and staircase are gone;
and its massive sounding-board has been relegated to the ignominious
silence and seclusion of the vestry. But, in 1628, it must have been
the handsomest pulpit of its kind in the neighbourhood.
On the floor of the sacrarium is a small brass, a half-length figure
of a priest, represented with a stunted beard, and the apparels of
the amice and albe ornamented with quatrefoils. Underneath is this
inscription in Norman French:--
Water de Annesfordhe gist icy,
dieu de sa alme eit mercy.
It is one of the oldest brasses in the kingdom, for the said "Water"
was rector of Binfield in 1361. Another remarkable fact about it is,
that out of the seven inscriptions of this church recorded in 1664-6 by
E. Ashmole in his "Antiquities of Berks," this is the only one which
has survived the successive restorations. The other six have entirely
gone.
[Illustration: BINFIELD CHURCH.]
Immediately in front of the altar the floor is composed of a row
of six black marble gravestones, each of which has a coat-of-arms
elaborately sculptured at the head. That nearest to the centre is to
the memory of Henry, fifth and last Earl of Stirling, of whose family
we shall have more to say presently. The remaining five are remarkable
as being all of them apparently placed to the memory of Papists who
lived in the reign of Charles the II. Indeed, one of them, that,
namely, nearest the north aisle, in memory of William Blount, "who dyed
in the 21st yeare of his Age on ye 9th of May, 1671," has the letters,
"C.A.P.D." engraved at the bottom in large capitals, which stand for
the well-known pre-Reformation prayer, "_Cujus Animae Propicietur
Deus_." And it is clear from the names of those commemorated in the
other inscriptions that towards the end of Charles the II.'s reign
there was a little colony of Papists residing at Binfield.
One of the oldest of these Roman Catholic families was that of
Dancastle or Dancaster. They had been lords of the Manor of Binfield
since the time of Elizabeth; and a member of the family, John
Dancaster, had been rector of Binfield as far back as 1435. The
gravestone in the chancel is to the memory of another member, also
John Dancaster, who died in 1680, aged eighty-four. And from the
coat-of-arms at the head of it: _Az._, a ball of wild fire _Or._,
impaling, _Sa._, three lions passant in bend _Arg._, between two
double cottises of the last, we are able to identify him as the "John
Doncastle of Welhouse" in Ashmole's "Pedigrees of Berks," who married
Mary, daughter of the Hon. John Browne, younger brother of Anthony,
second Viscount Montague. About five years before his death, he and his
neighbour, Mr. Gabriel Yonge, with his wife Elizabeth, whose gravestone
comes next, were excommunicated by the then rector of Binfield, most
probably for the non-payment of tithes or other ecclesiastical dues.
In an "Alphabetical List of the Recusants in the County of Berks," who
entered the annual value of their estates for the purpose of being
double taxed, pursuant to an Act passed in 1715, John Dancastle,
probably the son of the above John Dancastle, is assessed at £234 10s.,
and his son, Francis Dancastle, at £1 17s. _per annum_. While to the
south wall of Binfield Church is affixed a tablet which records the
final extinction of the race. It was erected in memory of yet another
John Dancastle, "the last of a respectable and ancient family, who
after patiently enduring the most excruciating pains of the Gout,
without intermission for upwards of sixteen years, obtained a happy
release, and passed to a country where grief, sorrow, and pain are no
more, Jany 29th, 1780. Aged 53 years. R.I.P."
The chief interest in the Dancastle family for us lies in the fact
that it was owing to them that the poet, Alexander Pope, came to live
at Binfield. About the year 1700, the representatives of this family
at Binfield were two brothers, named Thomas and John. Very little is
known about them except what may be gathered incidentally from the
correspondence of Pope. It is believed that they lived at the Manor
House at Binfield, and that it was owing to the friendship between
Alexander Pope the elder and John Dancastle that the former was induced
to settle at Binfield in 1700, when his son, the future poet, was just
twelve years of age. After the migration to Binfield, the similarity of
their tastes, for both were passionately fond of gardening, no doubt
increased the intimacy; and we find that John Dancastle was the first
witness to the elder Pope's will.
Scarcely anything is known for certain of the family history of
the Popes before the settlement at Binfield, except that Pope's
grandfather was a clergyman of the Church of England, and that he
placed his son, the poet's father, with a merchant at Lisbon, where he
became a convert to the Church of Rome. On his return to England, he
seems to have been unsuccessful in his business affairs. Hearne, the
antiquary, speaks of him (_Diary_, July 18th, 1729) as a "poor ignorant
man, a tanner;" and elsewhere as "a sort of broken merchant," who had
been "said to be a mechanic, a hatter, a farmer, nay, a bankrupt." But
these were probably the false libels which were levelled against the
son in after years in revenge for his keen and bitter satire.
It is now generally agreed that Mr. Pope, senior, was a linen draper
in London at the time his son was born; and whatever may have been his
success or want of success in that business, we know that, in 1700, he
bought a small estate and house at Binfield, where he resided for the
next sixteen years. He had an income, so Hearne tells us, of between
three and four hundred a year.
The house can now hardly be said to exist. Pope himself described it
as:--
"My paternal cell,
A little house with trees a-row,
And like its master very low;"
where the retired merchant employed his time chiefly in the cultivation
of his garden, and as his son said;--
"Plants cauliflowers, and boasts to rear
The earliest melons of the year."
But successive owners have so pulled down and rebuilt it, that nothing
now remains of the original house except one room, which tradition
says was the poet's study. There is an engraving of this in E. Jesse's
"Favorite Haunts and Rural Studies," published by J. Murray in 1847 (p.
90). The present house, formerly known as Pope's Wood, is now called
Arthurstone, and belongs to J.W. Macnabb, Esq.
There is no doubt that besides the Dancastles and the other Papist
families at Binfield, there were numerous Roman Catholics settled in
the neighbourhood. In particular we find that Pope often visited,
and was intimate with, the Blounts, of Mapledurham; the Carylls, of
Ladyholt; and the Englefields, of Whiteknights. At the house of the
last, he used to meet Wycherly, who introduced him to London life, and
Miss Arabella Fermor, the heroine of the "Rape of the Lock." But it
is not a little remarkable that the Popes at Binfield appear to have
associated exclusively with their Roman Catholic friends. Throughout
the whole of Pope's letters there does not appear a single allusion to
the other county families that were undoubtedly residing at Binfield at
this time, and whose gravestones cover a goodly portion of the floor of
the church; for instance, the two branches of the Lee family and the
Alexanders, Earls of Stirling.
Here then, from the age of twelve, the poet grew up a solitary,
precocious child. He had indeed a half-sister, Magdalen, the only child
of Mr. Pope's first wife. But she was a good deal, at least ten or
twelve years, older than her brother, and at this time, or soon after,
was married to a Mr. Rackett, and lived at Hall Grove, on Bagshot
Heath. For a short time, a few months only after the settlement at
Binfield he was placed under the charge of a priest, the fourth that
had taught him in succession. "This," he says, "was all the teaching I
ever had, and, God knows, it extended a very little way."
His parents indulged his every whim, and accordingly the boy spent
his mornings in desultory reading, ranging freely and widely at will
through English, Italian, and Latin literature. In the afternoons he
wandered alone amidst the surrounding woods, and fed his imagination
with musings upon the studies of the morning, or feasted his eyes with
the beautiful landscape around him. In particular he is known to have
haunted a grove of noble beech trees, still called Pope's Wood, which
grew about half-a-mile from his father's house. On one of these was
cut the words "_Here Pope sang_;" and for many years the letters were
annually refreshed by the care of a lady residing near Wokingham. This
tree was blown down in a gale, and the words were carved anew upon the
next tree; but when this also fell some years ago the inscription was
not renewed.[6]
Every evening on his return home the "marvellous boy" committed
to paper the results of his communing with the Muses in the leafy
grove. In this way he composed and wrote out many juvenile verses,
amongst others an epic poem of more than four thousand lines, which
in after years his matured taste consigned to the flames. So close an
application, combined with complete isolation from all companionship of
children of his own age, was certain in the end to affect disastrously
his mental constitution as well as his bodily health. Accordingly we
find that he never shook off the morbid self-consciousness which his
solitary childhood had developed in him. And there is no doubt that
his singular propensity to tricks and plots, which increased upon him
with increasing age, even to the end of his life, was fostered by the
atmosphere of evasion and deceit, in which, owing to the severe penal
laws against Papists, he was necessarily brought up, and which in his
case was never corrected by the wholesome training, if rough experience
of a public school.
At the same time his intense application, untempered by any distraction
of games or amusements, produced its natural results in a constitution
by nature weakly, and began by the time he was sixteen years of
age seriously to affect his health. He tried many physicians to no
purpose, and finding himself daily growing worse thought he had not
long to live. He therefore calmly sat down and wrote to take leave
of all his friends. Amongst others he sent a last farewell to the
Abbé Southcote, who lived near Abingdon. The Abbé, thinking that
Pope's malady was mental rather than physical, went to his friend
Dr. Radcliffe, the famous physician of Oxford, and described to him
the boy's condition. Armed with full directions the Abbé hastened to
Binfield, to enforce with all the ardour of friendship the doctors
chief prescriptions--strict diet, less study and a daily ride in the
open air.
In this way Pope, while riding in the Forest, began first to meet, then
to know, and finally to be intimate with the squire of the neighbouring
village. Easthampstead Park was at this time occupied by the veteran
statesman, Sir William Trumbull, Knt. He had lived abroad for many
years as ambassador, first at Paris and then at Constantinople. On his
return home he had been appointed Secretary of State to William III.,
and now quite recently, in 1697, he had resigned all his appointments
and had retired to end his days peacefully at home.
At this time he was a widower, his first wife, Lady Elizabeth, the
daughter of Sir Charles Cotterell, having died in July, 1704. He soon
after married Lady Judith Alexander, youngest daughter of Henry, 4th
Earl of Stirling, who at that time was residing at Binfield, though in
what house is not now known. Sir William was then almost seventy years
of age, having been born apparently about the year 1636, and had no
children. And thus it is easy to understand how the forlorn old man,
riding often no doubt in the direction of Binfield in search of his
second wife, frequently met the invalid poet as he left home in search
of health, through the devious maze of drives in Windsor Forest, on
which even then he was meditating to write a poem.
Long residence in France and Turkey had no doubt made Trumbull a
citizen of the world. His capacious mind would have no room in it for
the prejudices against Papists, which in England at that time were very
strong, and in country districts banished them from ordinary society.
[Illustration: EAST HAMPSTEAD CHURCH.]
Nor was the discrepancy of their years, seventy and seventeen, any bar
to their growing friendship. Like all solitary children, especially
the children of aged parents, Pope, even when a boy, seems always to
have preferred the company and friendship of elderly men. Another link
too was doubtless their mutual incapacity for shooting and hunting,
then, as now, the ordinary pursuits of country gentlemen. Sir William
Trumbull's long absence from England throughout his youth (for he
was educated at Montpellier, in France, during the troubles of the
Commonwealth) and in middle life, when he was engaged in the service of
his country abroad, indisposed him as an old man to begin a new kind of
life, and Pope's crooked frame and feeble health forbad him altogether
to join in such sports. In 1705 he wrote to his friend Wycherly:--
"Ours are a sort of inoffensive people, who neither have sense nor
pretend to any, but enjoy a jovial kind of dulness. They are commonly
known in the world by the name of honest, civil gentlemen. They live
much as they ride, at random--a kind of hunting life, pursuing with
earnestness and hazard something not worth the catching; never in the
way nor out of it. I cannot but prefer solitude to the company of all
these." ...
And in another letter he wrote to his friend Cromwell in the same
strain:--
"I assure you I am looked upon in the neighbourhood for a very sober
and well-disposed person, no great hunter indeed, but a great esteemer
of that noble sport, and only unhappy in my want of constitution for
that and drinking. They all say 'tis pity I am so sickly, and I think
'tis a pity they are so healthy; but I say nothing that may destroy
their good opinion of me."
Besides this, an additional link in the chain which united the two
friends was the similarity of their tastes in literature. Sir William
Trumbull, who, in his early days, had been Fellow of All Souls'
College, Oxford, had kept up his scholarship, and retained to the last
day of his life his early fondness for Greek and Latin authors.
The results of this friendship were of immense advantage to Pope.
His earliest published poems, _The Pastorals_, modelled on Virgil's
Eclogues, were first submitted to and discussed with Trumbull, as
they rode together about the Forest, and the first Pastoral with much
propriety was dedicated to his venerable friend. It was Trumbull who
first suggested to Pope that he should undertake the translation of the
Iliad, and thereby laid the foundation of his affluence. But far more
than this, when the poet first went to London, and seemed, under the
guidance of the old reprobate Wycherly, to be falling into evil ways,
it was Trumbull who implored him to retrace his steps. "I now come,"
he wrote, "to what is of vast moment, I mean the preservation of your
health, and beg of you earnestly to get out of all tavern company, and
fly away from it _tanquam ex incendio_." As long as Pope remained at
Binfield, their friendship was warm and unabated. In striking contrast
with every other intimacy between Pope and his friends no coldness
or quarrel ever arose between them. In April, 1716, the Popes left
Binfield and removed to Chiswick, and in the following December Sir
William Trumbull died.
To return; in the meanwhile the elder Pope devoted himself to
gardening, in the art of which, as we have seen, he was no mean
proficient. A rival in the same pursuit was his friend, Mr. John
Dancastle. And we find amongst the poet's correspondence a letter from
Sir William Trumbull thanking Pope's father for sending him a present
of "hartichokes" of superior size and excellence; and in another letter
Mr. John Dancastle excuses himself, after the Popes had left, for
not being able to procure them "some white Strabery plants" such as
apparently the elder Pope had reared in the old garden at Binfield.
While the father was thus occupied in gardening, the son was gradually
creeping into notice as a poet. His early poems and shorter pieces
appeared at first in Tonson's or Lintot's "Miscellanies," or the
"Spectator," and similar publications. But as he became more widely
known, Pope ventured on independent publication by the then usual mode
of introducing new works, namely by subscription. In this way his fine
poems the _Essay on Criticism_, _Windsor Forest_, and the _Rape of the
Lock_, all written and composed at Binfield, appeared successively in
1711, 1713, and 1714.
The first of these poems should be mentioned for two reasons. It led to
Pope's first introduction to London life, when he made the acquaintance
of the famous wits of the period, Steele, Addison, Gay, and Swift. And
it also was the cause of the first of those literary quarrels in which
Pope's talent for satire henceforth involved him more or less as long
as he lived. Resenting some adverse criticism of his _Pastorals_, he
inserted in the _Essay on Criticism_ the following lines:--
"'Twere well might critics still their freedom take,
But Appius reddens at each word you speak,
And stares tremendous with a threatening eye
Like some fierce tyrant in old tapestry."
John Dennis, the writer thus lampooned as "Appius," retorted in a prose
pamphlet, in which he described his assailant as a "hunch-backed toad,"
and went on to say: "If you have a mind to inquire between Sunninghill
and Oakingham for a young, short, squab gentleman, an eternal writer
of amorous pastoral madrigals and the very bow of the god of love, you
will be soon directed to him. And pray, as soon as you have taken a
survey of him, tell me whether he is a proper author to make personal
reflections."
In his poem _Windsor Forest_ it was natural that Pope should
commemorate his friendship and intercourse with Sir William Trumbull,
by describing in graceful verse the peaceful occupations of his aged
friend's declining years.
"Happy [the man], who to these shades retires,
Whom Nature charms, and whom the Muse inspires:
Whom humbler joys of home-felt quiet please,
Successive study, exercise, and ease.
He gathers health from herbs the forest yields,
And of their fragrant physic spoils the fields;
* * * * *
Now marks the course of rolling orbs on high;
O'er figured worlds now travels with his eye;
Of ancient writ unlocks the learned store,
Consults the dead, and lives past ages o'er.
* * * * *
Or looks on heaven with more than mortal eyes,
Bids his free soul expatiate in the skies,
Amid her kindred stars familiar roam,
Survey the region, and confess her home!
Such was the life great Scipio once admired,
Thus Atticus, and Trumbal thus retired."
Of the _Rape of the Lock_ it will suffice to say that even now some
critics reckon it as Pope's masterpiece. As a specimen of the Mock
Heroic Epic Poem it has no rival in the English language. Here it
chiefly concerns us as a true and lifelike picture of fashionable
manners prevailing in country houses in the reign of Queen Anne.