Burford papers : being letters of Samuel Crisp to his sister at Burford; and other studies of a century (1745-1845)

Front matter

THE

QROSVENOR

GALLERY

Preface

Such unity as these " Studies of a Century " possess is due to all of them, I believe, having been written either to or in a house at Burford, in Oxfordshire, and so I call them all Burford Papers. The letters which form the earlier part of this volume have been most kindly placed at my disposal by Mrs. Edward Egerton Leigh, of Broadwell Manor House, Moreton-in-Marsh, who has also helped me more than I can say by her stores of knowledge about all that belongs to the Leighs and their kindred and friends. The further illustrations which we gain from these letters of Samuel Crisp of the literary circle in which Fanny Burney moved at the time of her first great success will, I hope, be welcomed by all those to whom Dr. Johnson and the Thrales, as well as the author of Evelina, are old friends. I think that the other details, more domestic, of the letters — medical, pecuniary, and the like — are also worth preserving ; and certainly the picture which is given of the writer himself is a delightful one.

The other papers in the book were all (or nearly all) written in the house where Mrs. Gast lived when she received the letters of her brother, Samuel Crisp. I have described different parts of it in the course of the volume.

The letters of Samuel Crisp have never been printed before ; and, of my own sketches, those called " In the Other House," "Some Oxfordshire Jacobites," "A Spanish Court Painter," A Bath Evening," " The Rev.

V

PREFACE

Richard Graves," and " Sydney Smith : A Contrast," are now pubhshed for the first time. The others have appeared, at intervals during the last ten years or more, in The Cornhill Magazine, The Guardian, Literature, The Treasury, and The Pilot, and I desire to express my grateful thanks for permission to reprint them, as also to the proprietors of The Treasury for the use of the three illustrations connected with Sterne. The papers have, for the most part, been considerably altered and added to since they first appeared. Besides the thanks that I owe to Mr. and Mrs. E. Egerton Leigh, I wish to say also how grateful I am to Mr. Coldicott, of Ullenhall, for the help of his wide knowledge of the literature of Barrells and Warwickshire generally ; to Mrs. Tollemache, of Batheaston^ who showed me her interesting house and garden ; and to the friends whose company has enlivened the expeditions for which the writing of these essays has been an excuse? and among them especially to Canon H. C. Beeching, because he has also read my proofs and saved me from several errors.

The period covered by the book is about a hundred years, from " the '45 " to the death of Sydney Smith. None of it seems to me so very far away when I remember that my father's father was born in 1750.

W. H. HUTTON.

The Great House, burford, oxon.

July, 1905.

vi

LIST OF CONTENTS

PAGE

BURFORD PAPERS.

AMONG MY BOOKS.

1. In A Don's Library ...... 95

2. In the Other House ...... loi

3. A Glimpse of the Exili^d Stewarts . . • n>5

5. A Spanish Court Painter . . . . 1J3

7. The Duke of Wellington as a Letter Writer . 139

A WARWICKSHIRE COTERIE.

2. A Pilgrimage Accomplished (i) . . . .162

A CITY OF THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY.

3. The Rev. Richard Graves. . . . . Jio

vii

LIST OF CONTENTS

PAGE

ON THE RELIGION OF A CENTURY.

2. Two Eighteenth Century Bishops . . . 245

3. The Commemoration of John Wesley and his

Journal .258

5. The Religion of Dr. Johnson .... 277

6. Some Memories of George Crabbe (i) . . 282

8. Sydney Smith : A Contrast .... 303 Index .......... 315 vili

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

1. The Great House, Burford, 1905 . . Frontispiece

2. Burford a hundred years ago (from The

Antiquarian Itinerary, 18 16) . . facing page 6

3. Burford Priory a hundred years ago (from

Skelton's Oxfordshire, 1823) . . . 20

4. In the Great House, Burford, 1905 . . 121

5. Richard Graves (from the portrait by Gains-

6. In Claverton Village, 1905 (from a photo-

graph by the Author) . . • ,,215

7. Laurence Sterne (from the portrait by Rey-

8. Sterne's Pulpit (from a photograph by the

9. Shandy Hall (from a photograph by the Author) ,, „ 276

IX

Think, listener, that I had the luck to stand, A while ago, within a flowery land, Fair beyond words ; that thence I brought away Some blossoms that before my footsteps lay. Not plucked by me, not over-fresh or bright ; Yet, since they minded me of that delight. Within the pages of this book I laid Their tender petals, there in peace to fade. Dry are they now, and void of all their scent And lovely colour, yet what once was meant By these dull stains, some men may yet descry As dead upon the quivering leaves they lie.

Behold them here, and mock me if you will, But yet believe no scorn of men can kill My love of that fair land wherefrom they came. Where midst the grass their petals once did flame.

William Morris.

X

B

I. THE TOWN.

A LAND of forest, and downs, and little streams, now sluggish and deep, now shallow and swift. That is the country between the royal lands of Wychwood, where first King Edward saw Elizabeth Wydville, and where Queen Elizabeth and King James hunted, and whence, till within living memory at the disafforesting, the Bishops of Winchester had bucks each year, which they would give to Oxford colleges of which they were visitors. It lies between these forest lands, whose past is still preserved in the local " assarts," where the very meaning of the name has been forgotten, and the valleys of Windrush, and Lech, and stripling Thames. That is the country, still unknown to railways, but through which the great coach road runs from London, which of all others in these far-away lands, seem to have lost all the fame it had a hundred years ago. Then there were great heroes and great families, and yeomen of gentle birth, and old ladies — as we shall sec — in touch with the London life. Yearly there came down crowds of fashionable folk to the races ; still an old gentleman remembers being held up by his father to see George IV go by. Daily there passed the flying coach, and not rarely royal persons would hurry by in their carriages to drink the waters of Cheltenham — " which," as the old testator says in Money, " nearly gave me my death." When agriculture ceased to be a mine of wealth, and when the railways passed the district by ; when the forest had been thrown open for a large part of its area, and when trees had all along the high ground been cut down recklessly to enlarge the arable fields; when at last the coaches ceased to run and the great families began to sell their properties or live away from them, when in " the Agrarian Revolution " the old small families, armigeri many of them and college-bred, died out or sank in the social scale, the old life passed away ; and the nineteenth century before it had covered thirty years saw a very different society from what the eighteenth had known. The past remained only in memory, sometimes memory of grim and cruel deeds. On a lonely patch of ground stands an old Jacobean house, typical of the beautiful Cotswold building, but now unroofed and forlorn, where men still tell that children were born and buried whose mothers fled secretly from London and returned again, never to tell of what the Cotswold lands kept safe. In one village hall a highwayman lived and kept great state till the London runners unearthed him. Such are among the memories ; and imagination runs riot among the rustics, who tell what their great-grandparents saw.

If the life has changed, the buildings remain, and the style of the whole district has a beauty and a character of its own. So we in the Cotswolds — and others outside, too — have at last begun to rediscover. And, indeed, there is no more cheering feature of the new-time interest in old things than the rediscovery of the beauty of old house-buildings. How well we remember, long after the care for old churches was revived among us, the days when an old house was thought uncomfortable, unfashionable, and fit only to be swept away. How many a worthy clergyman restored his old church and pulled down his old house. How very few there are now left of the fine old parsonages which were standing two centuries ago. And it was not till so many of the houses and buildings of the olden days were destroyed that we discovered how far more convenient, as well as stronger, they were than the new ; and we are only just beginning to awake to the fact that they were also far more beautiful.

Notably this Cotswold land is a land of small houses, such as poor folk may live in, but such as to-day rich folk cannot surpass for beauty and fitness. The characteristic

THE TOWN work is everywhere, in all this district, of the grey stone which comes from the plentiful quarries, and which has no superior for strength and durability if it is used within the area from which it is hewn. Mainly this is true of the Cotswolds, but they may be made architecturally not unfairly, in spite of pure geography, to stretch into Northamptonshire and Worcestershire, where the general character of the building is varied by the introduction of rows or layers of red ironstone at regular intervals in the limestone walls, or by the addition of wood and plaster fronts here and there. The main work is always due to the nature of the stone found in the local quarries : sometimes it is found in large blocks, sometimes in thin layers, and the walls show this at once by the alteration of the method adopted. The general effect, however, is still much the same ; it is one of strong, solid greyness. The stone, says Mr. Dawber truly (in his Old Cottages, Farmhouses, and other Stone Buildings in the Cotswold District) " is usually quarried from about April to October, after which the quarries are closed for the winter months. It is generally obtained by clearing away the upper layers of inferior stone and loose brash, though sometimes it is mined for, as most of the Bath stones are. When first quarried it is rather yellow in tone, but [it] becomes bleached by exposure, and is quickly covered with Hchens, for which it seems to have a peculiar attraction. It is an admirable weather stone, as much old work in the district testifies."

The country covered by the style includes few towns of any size to-day. The best known are Cirencester, Painswick, Northleach, Burford, Chipping Campden : and Broadway, Bibury, Lechlade, and other villages of more or less importance belong to the area. Practically — with some ridiculous modern examples of preference for the far less useful brick — the " whole district is essentially a stone one " in its buildings. The houses are in almost every case the work of two periods of prosperity — the first that of the wool industry, which was the great source of wealth to the towns I have mentioned, and, indeed, to the whole district of which they form part ; and, secondly, of the agriculture which to a considerable extent replaced the wool as a source of wealth in the seventeenth century.

The buildings are very different from those which the nineteenth century erected. In the first place, they are essentially harmonious, rather than contrasting, with the natural scenery : the soft mellow grey seems especially attuned to the long stretches of bare blue and brown which you see as you stand on a high point, and look over valleys and hills, in surprising variety, for miles of view towards the horizon. In the soft shadows of the narrow lanes and closebuilt villages of Warwickshire something more abrupt and striking in the style of building is seemly, but on the Cotswolds the sharp airs, the sense of freedom and breadth, contrast to break the dominant thought. All there is plain and very simple : the chief features are the exquisite proportion, the absence of ornament other than conventional and traditionary, the mark of dignity and quietness in strength. The beauty of the grey walls culminates in the steep-pitched roofs, always of stone slates, graduated from the eaves to the ridge, and having a plain stone crest at the top.

Such is the land into which we are to be brought. And the special district is one in which the Cotswold style culminates, and the house we come to is one in which an architectural style of larger scope and history adopts in a manner the local methods and shows how well it can harmonize with a style so diverse.

In the valley of the Windrush, seven miles above Witney and eighteen miles from Oxford, has stood for at least twelve hundred years the ancient town of Bur ford. It was there, in 752, that Cuthraed with his West Saxons defeated iEthelbald of Mercia, and brought the boundary of Wessex north of the Thames. Plot, in his delightful Natural History of Oxfordshire, and Kennett, in The Parochial Antiquities of Amhrosden, believe that the custom of carrying a mimic dragon up and down the town on Midsummer eve — a custom that is now dead, but may be revived — dates back to this time, and was a memory of the dragon of Wessex. Certainly, there is a ridge above the

THE TOWN town still called Battle Edge, with a round clump of firs on it, doubtless a barrow, which looks long backward into history. In story, urban and territorial, there are great historic connexions for town and guild and church. Many notable names in English story have their links with the town : Gilbert de Clare, Earl of Gloucester ; Hugh le Despencer ; the Neviles — and notably the King-maker ; Edmund Harman, King Henry VHI's barber, a worthy member of the College of Surgeons ; Sir Lawrence Tanfield, Chief Baron of the Exchequer under Elizabeth and James I ; his eccentric daughter, the wife of Henry Carey, Viscount Falkland ; and then the great Lucius himself, who sold the property to William Lenthall, Speaker of the Long Parliament. The house in which these later personages dwelt was built by Sir Lawrence Tanfield, and there James I visited him ; Lenthall added a private chapel. He died in 1662, and his son, Sir John, succeeded, whom Anthony Wood calls " The grand Braggadochio and Lyar of the age he lived in " ; and so the family went on to the times of which we are to speak.

But if the " ruling family " had often changed, the church was the most enduring feature of Burford, and still is. A splendid edifice, incorporating work that is Norman, Early English, Decorated, Perpendicular, and the late Jacobean, it remains a history in little of the town's properous days. In the middle of the eighteenth century it had high pews and higher galleries, and was mapped out among the townsfolk with an extraordinary precision. The old chantry chapel, dedicated probably to S. Peter, was turned into a family pew for the lord of the manor ; but the pulpit from which Oliver Cromwell had addressed the Levellers in 1649, and the font on which one of his unfortunate captives had cut his name, still remained unharmed. Monuments were plentiful on the walls, but the finest, the quaint Italian painted marble, sculptured, memorial of the Tanfields, occupied a whole chapel to itself. k Burford was, at the time of which we are to speak, no doubt not very active, or polemic, in its religion. It was in the time of Francis Potter (1734-1746) as vicar, that John

Wesley paid his first visit to the town, which he thus records in his Journal : —

Wed., Oct. 3, 1739. — " After leaving Oxford, about six in the evening I came to Burford ; and at seven preached to, it was judged, twelve or fifteen hundred people, on ' Christ made unto us wisdom, and righteousness, and sanctification, and redemption.* Finding many approved of what they had heard, that they might not rest in that approbation, I explained, an hour or two after, the holiness of a Christian ; and in the morning I showed the way to this holiness, by giving both the false and the true answer to that important question, ' What must I do to be saved ? "*

He preached again at Burford, " about eleven," on his way from Oxford to Tiverton, November 15, 1739, and again on his way back on December 6. Again, on January 7, 1740 (1741), he preached, and early in the next year, after a visit to Mr. Gambold (of whom more anon), at Stanton Harcourt, on February 18, 1741 (1742), " walked on to Burford, on Thursday to Mamsbury, and the next day to Bristol," not too tired, it may be guessed, to preach at any of these places.

Early in the next century (1804) I find a reference in a local paper showing the growth of dissent. Mr. Francis KnoUys was vicar, and Mrs. Cast (the chief lady of my tale) was dead. So long as she was alive, so far as I can judge, the Church which she so lovingly served was " in possession " at Burford.

" The same day a neat place of worship, for Dissenters of the Independent denomination, was opened at Burford, in Oxfordshire. In the morning, Mr. Coles, of Bourton, preached from Ps. cxxii. 7-9 ; and Mr. Hinton, of Oxford, in the afternoon, from Isa. Ixii. 6 ; Mr. Cobbin, of Banbury ; Mr. Hughes, of Battersea ; and Mr. Williams, of Fairford, engaged in prayer. — The cause of religion formerly flourished at this place ; and it is sincerely hoped a revival will be experienced. Mr. Smith, the pastor, labours also in the

THE TOWN adjacent villages. Seventeen neighbouring ministers, and several respectable members of their churches were present ; and a pleasing solemnity rested on the services of the day."

The lady who received the letters we are to print was preserved from this. She was a plain Church woman.

Hard by the church stood, and stands, the Grammar School. Perhaps it never flourished more than in the eighteenth century, when it taught a Prime Minister and a court painter ; but it flourishes still.

The good houses in the town were not few. There were several famous coaching inns, some of venerable antiquity, some of modern design, to meet the demand of the coaching world — The Lamb, The Bear, The Ramping Cat (a name which humourised the town badge of a leopard rampant). The Bird in Hand, and The Bull, the last famous for the company it held when the races were run — the great races which made Burford's fame in that century more than anything else. Among the private houses was one beautiful building in late classical style in the High street, which survives, transmogrified, the residence then of a small squire. It was not alone in dignity. And it is of another, in outward appearance perhaps more dignified still, that our tale is to be told, which comes from Burford a century and a half ago.

Connected with an old house in this old town a large packet of letters has lately come to light. They belong to a family famous in literature, the family of the Daddy Crisp who was so kind to Fanny Burney, and they deal, several of them, with a time when her fame was at its height.

II. THE PEOPLE.

The people, the house, the letters, — we may well take them one by one.

And first the family. Samuel Crisp was a man of letters and of fashion who in 1754 produced at Drury Lane his tragedy of Virginia, when Garrick himself played Virginius and Mrs. Gibber Virginia. That, for the world, was his title to fame, for the play, if it was not a first-rate success, was much talked of, and was published in the same year by Tonson. To his friends Grisp was known as a man of fortune and good temper, who had already spent some time travelling abroad, and had settled, or seemed to settle, recently in a " villa " by the Thames and become the friend of peeresses and blue-stockings, of actors and men of learning. He was never married, and he had no brothers. He had, however, five sisters, four of whom come more or less into the letters he has left us. The eldest, it seems, was Anne, who never married, and who bore in the family the nickname of " Scrip." The second was Mary, who married a Mr. Phesant. The third, Martha, died quite young, in 1727. The letters show her to have been a quaint, charming girl. The fourth, Sophia, married a Dutch merchant, Philip Gast of Rotterdam, on August 18, 1724. At that time her residence is given as Canterbury, and she had the distinction of being married by " Nicholas Brady, lecturer of Glapham." The youngest, Theodosia, was Mrs. Lloyd. It seems that probably after her parents' death, and when her brother was travelling abroad, Mrs. Anne Grisp — Mrs. she is always called, though, as Mrs. Delany says, " she has vowed to live and die a virgin " — settled at Burford, Oxfordshire. She thus was within eleven miles of her kinsman, Mr. Grisp, " the eminent lawyer of Chipping Norton," whose daughter was the first wife of Bishop Talbot, the father of the Lord Chancellor, who was the patron of Thomson and lived at Great Harrington, little more than three miles from Burford, on the Gloucestershire border. In earlier days Mrs. Delany, then Mary Granville, had lived near Chipping Campden — which again is but twenty miles from Burford — and she had formed, it seems, no very high opinion of Anne's wits, for when she compares the two sisters she reports, as we shall see, from a friend, that Mrs. Gast " is very ordinary in her appearance, but an excellent creature, and far superior to our old acquaintance in understanding."

Mrs. Delany in one of her letters tells a tale from which this description comes, and which shows us the two sisters very quaintly.

" I must tell you a story of our old friend Nanny Crisp, though it cost me half a sheet more of paper. She has a sister Gast,^ younger by several years than herself, who has been abroad, and is a widow in very bad circumstances. Mrs. Bernard, who told me the story, says she is very ordinary in her appearance, but an excellent creature, and far superior to our old acquaintance in understanding. A sister of Mrs. Bernard's was asked by a gentleman of a very good estate who has only one daughter (a child), if she could recommend a wife to him who was qualified to make him a good companion, and to educate his daughter ; she immediately thought of Mrs. Gast, as he neither insisted on youth, beauty, nor fortune. She told him she could recommend just such a person, who would make him a happy man. (They were at this time at Oxford, Nanny Crisp and her sister at Burford) ; it was agreed that Mrs. Price should carry him there to breakfast ; she did accordingly, and what do you think happened ? He falls in love with Crisp, and will not hear of Mrs. Gast ! but Crisp had vowed to live and die a virgin and will not admit of any addresses."

For several years Mrs. Gast lived in Southern France, at

^ The printed copy says Gough, obviously a mistake. Life^ etc., of Mrs. Delany, vol. iii., p. 52, Series I.