Henry Martyn : confessor of the faith

Front matter

PRINCETON, N. J.

Purchased by the Hamill Missionary Fund,

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Author's Preface

1 1

For when the second great biography of Henry Martyn was published in 1892 ^ all who had known the man were gone, and the modest family life in Cornwall had left very little trace on the memory of the neighbourhood. Yet under such disadvantages Dr George Smith, who brought to his book a knowledge of India which Sargent could not claim, put into his task a wealth of research which must make it always the standard reference book on Martyn.

There is nothing new in the present little book. The Church has held most of the records for the greater part of a century : Sargent’s “ Life ” ; the great Journal ; ^ then, as Martyn’s generation died, the sidelights from a host of biographies and memoirs of the day ; the Diary of Lydia Grenfell ; ® stray letters and magazine articles published from time to time ; and at last Dr Smith’s great biography in 1892. It is a mass of material, yet with it all there is danger of forgetting a life which is one of the treasures of our spiritual heritage.

For Sargent’s book in the religious language of 1816 is almost strange to the children of another century ; and Dr Smith’s generous copiousness makes his too costly for those of us who count our pence. We shall always turn gratefully to him in the library ; he cannot be superseded : but for those who are poor and busy he may, nay probably he must, be supplemented, as the Church in each generation looks with fresh eyes on the stores of her spiritual

^ Henry Martyn, Saint and Scholar, by George Smith, LL.D.

* Edited by Bishop Samuel WUberforce when Rector of Brighstone, Isle of Wight, 1839.

* Deposited in the Royal Cornish Institute, Truro. Extracts from it were published by a grand-nephew in 1890.

heritage, and catches the glint of fresh colours in the “ variegated ” grace of God.

This is not a new book then, but a re-reading of old records, and that not unaided but with the good help of kind people in Cornwall, Cambridge and London too numerous to mention by name, but who have given generous and ready help in regard to anything and everything in which ignorance or carelessness stood in need. They know that they have my gratitude.

Martyn has never been and never will be the hero of the multitude, but each generation holds some who are his spiritual kindred. Across the lapse of years and blurred by the clumsy transmission of biographers, these will still catch with understanding ears the response of his spirit to the call of Christ.

C. E. P.

July 1922

Contents

Author’s Preface ....

Table of Dates ....

CHAP.

Chapter I I Calcutta Of The Nabobs

I Nabob, noun substantive, [Nobobb, a nobleman, “intbelanj guage of the Mogul’s Kingdom which hath mixt with it much of I the Persian,” Sir T. Herbert. Travels, p. 99.] The title of an i Indian prince ; sometimes applied to Europeans who have ac- ; quired great riches in the East Indies. — Johnson’s English j Dictionary (Ed. 1827).

i The style we prefer is the humdrum. — Traditional answer of Directors of East India Company to an official who asked for guidance in writing despatches.

Words have their day, and the word “ nabob ” has all but passed out of curreney with the passing from English life of the rather pitiable person for whom it stood. But in the last deeades of the eighteenth century no better villain could be desired for stage or story than “ a rich Nabob ” returned from Bengal. Macaulay, who with his sisters burrowed much among the three-volume novels of the eighteenth century, writing in 1840 said,^ “ If any of our readers will take the trouble to search in the dusty recesses of circulating libraries for some novel published sixty years ago, the chance is' that the villain or sub-villain of the story will prove to be a savage old Nabob, with an immense fortune, a tawny complexion, a bad liver and a worse heart.” All but an alien on his native soil, this villain added

1 In the Essay on Clive.

i8 to his other crimes, real or imagined, the crime of differing from his caste. “ For your Nabobs, they are but a kind of outlandish creatures that won’t pass current with us.” ^ What more could comedy or melodrama want ?

Yet the nabob-to-be began life much like other small boys of the day, perhaps as one of Squire Roger’s younger sons, for whom were neither family acres nor a family living, or maybe as a son of the rectory, where Parson Brown had word one day from an uncle in Leadenhall Street that he had bespoken a writership in the East India Company for “ poor Charlotte’s boy.” At sixteen such a boy spent his last morning rabbiting with his brother and the dogs in the churchyard spinney, while his mother sobbed her heart out over piles of lavender-scented linen. The coach bore away a ruddy English lad with a smattering of the classics and a capacity for honest affection. Forty years later the countryside would know him again as “ the rich Nabob ” who called for curricles with the airs of a prince, and showed a pitiable disregard for the cost of living and the laws of fox-hunting. “ Why wherever any of them settles, it raises the price of provisions for thirty miles round,” cries the Mayor in Foote’s comedy quoted above ; while Lady Oldham explains to the audience the family embarrassment when “ preceded by all the pomp of Asia, Sir Matthew Mite, from the Indies, came thundering amongst us ; and, profusely scattering the spoils of ruined provinces, corrupted the virtue and alienated the feelings of all the old friends of the family.”

The process to which the nabob-to-be was sub-

^ Foote, The, Nabob, acted at Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 1778 mitted from the moment when the East Indiaman left Tilbury on her voyage of seven or more months is little enough pictured by us now.

“ Such things as I should not want till my arrival I in India were made very large, the Captain saying I should grow very much during the passage,” one of those young “ writers ” tells us.^

We are forgetful of the completeness of exile in ‘ those days of long, slow travel, when often enough it took eighteen months to receive the reply to a letter sent home. We hardly realize the gradual wearing down of standards as home memories grew faint and the physical and moral climate did their enervating work. We are apt to see the India of the Company through the stories of men like Clive, Warren Hastings, or Wellesley the imperious. Such as these could not but be chief actors on any stage. They were men of vivid, restless genius, and of political imagination, in whose actions, good or bad, we find something of “ the grand style.” For men ! of such gifts life is not dull, and through their eyes we see romance.

[ But for the boy of ordinary gifts life in “ the East Indies ” was often a tedious affair. “ The waste of spirits in this cursed country is a disease unconquer- I able, a misery unutterable,” wrote Francis, the archfoe of Warren Hastings. At the age when his brother entered the University our boy was cast upon a Calcutta that had only one carriage road, the dusty “ Course,” and one small theatre, built by subscription and managed by amateur actors, who in their zeal for the drama were apt to undertake parts beyond their power, with the result that * Tmvds in India a Hundred Years Ago, Thomas Twining, 1893.

“ many went to see a tragedy for the express purpose of enjoying a laugh.” ^ He found indeed a little coterie of English hostesses who received every evening, and beyond a doubt were kind to striplings fresh from home. But the balls of Caleutta provided no blushing English maidens for the boy to adore or play with. Ladies he found there of strange deseent and stranger history, and Hieky’s Bengal Gazette, the first English newspaper in India (published Caleutta, 1780), shows plainly enough how the little, bored soeiety looked for the enlivenment of their hard, hot lives to the relish of betting and unsavoury scandal. “ I don’t think the greatest sap at Eton can lead a duller life than this ” Lord Cornwallis wrote to his sehoolboy son, during his first governor-generalship (1786-1795). And our nabob-to-be soon learnt to eeho the sentiments of that industrious and high-minded ehief, and to seek distraetion in arrack punch and heavy dinners or in stables for whieh his salary during his first five years as an “ apprentiee ” was inadequate. But “ a Company’s servant,” as a eontemporary letter tells us, “ will always find numbers ready to support his extravagance ; and it is not uncommon to see writers within a few months after their arrival dashing away on the Course four-in-hand.” ^

The boy’s intereourse with the people of that eastern world, in which his station was a tiny island of European life, would seem to have been of the slightest. Unless he aimed ambitiously at diplomatic tasks — when he studied Persian, the language of eastern court etiquette — ^he did not take seriously

^ Mra Eliza Fay, Original Letters from India, p. 279.

“ Ihid. Letter written on 29th August 1780.

I

Calctitta of the Nabobs the learning of any oriental language. And when he did take lessons, his teaeher was regarded by this young lord of creation as only another servant of a rather superior grade, “ permitted by many of the more liberal students to enter the apartments without taking off his shoes ; an omission for which the other servants would be severely punished.” ^ Throughout his long years of exile the Company’s English servant may never have experienced the intellectual and spiritual adventure of friendship with an eastern gentleman. When even Sir William Jones, who reached European fame as an orientalist, was yet “ quite unintelligible in Calcutta to any native in any eastern tongue,” it is not surprising that our more ordinary boy never reached converse with the more thoughtful minds of India. “ Portuguese was the ordinary medium of communication between the Europeans and their domestics. . . . Even in Calcutta Portuguese was more commonly used by the servants of the Company and the settlers than the language of the country. . . . Down to so late a period as 1828, the governor of Serampore,^ a Norwegian, received the daily report of his little garrison of thirty sepoys from the native commandant, a native of Oude, in Portuguese.” ®

The ordinary boy’s intercourse with the people of India was limited to business relationships in which he depended much on the clumsy aid of the interpreter, and to his dealings, some of them, alas, deplorable, with what seemed to him at first a vast

' D’Oyley, Eurofean in India, 1813.

* Serampore was a Danish settlement on the Hooghly sixteen miles above Calcutta.

Marshman, History of the Serampore Mission, pp. 21, 22.

* *

and wondrous docile army of servants round his new home — a cringing and salaaming population whose servility tempted him to think them made for his good pleasure. The charge sheet of the Calcutta superintendent of police in 1778 contains the following among similar items :

“ 129. A slave girl of Mr Anderson, Piggy, having run away from her master and being apprehended by the Chowkedar — ordered her five rattans and to be sent to her master.”

So late as 1800 Lord Wellesley, his imagination aflame with the vision of his ideal administrator, was pulled up short by what he knew of the downward, sensuous pull of a servile population. Of English boys sent to up-country stations he writes in unvarnished words that “ sloth, indolence, low debauchery, and vulgarity are too apt to grow on those young men who have been sent at an early age into the interior part of the country and have laid the foundations of their life and manners among the coarse vices and indulgences of those countries.”

John Clark Marshman, who knew his Calcutta as few men knew it, tells the same tale :

The number of English ladies in the country was lamentably small. ... In the days of Warren Hastings (Governor 1772-85) the arrival of a spinster from England was an event, and it was inaugurated by a succession of balls. The great bulk of the Europeans both in and out of the service, lived unmarried with native females, and their leisure was spent in the most deoasing associations. The young civilian was told that one of his first duties was to “ stock a zenana.”

William Macintosh, a political journalist, who

I Calcutta of the Nabobs

I sheltered his possibly libellous attacks on the friends of Warren Hastings under the transparent veil of initials and dashes, published in 1782 an account ^ of “ The Manner in which the Day is commonly spent by an Englishman in Bengal.” Political

i opponents criticizing his book said that he made an unfair use, in writing the sketch, of the hospitality of a plump, good-natured soul who gave him th^ freedom of his Calcutta house. They do not call in question the truthfulness of the picture, "though they would have us remember that there were <7ther more energetic households, and that as a general rule “ the young gentlemen, as soon after their arrival as they can, muster money to buy a liorse, ride a little before daybreak until eight o’clock, then breakfast and go directly to the public offices.” ^ Macintosh’s description must be read with his qwn spelling :

About the hour of seven in the morning, his durvan (porter or door-keeper) opens the gate, and the viranda (gallery) is free to his circars, peons (footmen), har- I carrahs (messengers or spies), chubdars (a kind of constable), houccabadars and consumas (or steward and butler), writers and solicitors. The head-bearer and jemmadar enter the hall, and his bedroom at eight o’clock. A lady quits his side, and is conducted by a private staircase, either to her own apartment, or out of the yard. The moment the master throws his legs out of bed, the whole posse in waiting rush into his room, each making three salams, by bending the body and head very low, and touching the forehead with the inside of the fingers, and the floor with the back part. He condescends;* perhaps, to nod or cast an eye towards the solicitors of his favour and

^ In Ms Travels in Euroft, Asia, and Africa.

* Captain J. Price, Some Observations on a late Publication entitled ‘ Travels in Asia,” 1783.

protection. In about half-an-hour after undoing and taking off his long drawers, a clean shirt, breeches, stockings and slippers, are put upon his body, thighs, legs and feet, without any greater exertion on his part than if he were a statue. The barber enters, shaves him, cuts his nails, and cleans his ears. The chillumjee and ewer are brought by a servant, whose duty it is, who pours water upon his hands to wash his hands and face, and presents a towel.

The superior then walks in state to his breakfasting parlour in his waistcoat ; is seated ; the consumah makes and pours out his tea, and presents him with a plate of bread or toast. The hair-dresser comes behind, and begins his occuj^ation while the houccabadar softly slips the upper end of the snake or tube of the houcca into his hand. While the hair-dresser is doing his duty, the gentleman is eating, sipping, and smoaking by turns. By and by his banian presents himself with humble salams, and advances somewhat more forward than the other attendants. If any of the solicitors are of eminence they are honoured with chairs.

These ceremonies are, continued perhaps till ten o’clock ; when, attended by his cavalcade, he is conducted to his palanquin, and preceded by eight to twelve chubdars, harcarrahs and peons with the insignia of their professions, and their livery distinguished by the colour of their turbans and cumberbands (a long muslin belt wrapt round the waist) they move off at a quick amble ; the set of bearers, consisting of eight generally relieve each other, with alertness, and without incommoding the master. If he has visits to make, his peons lead and direct the bearers ; and if business renders his presence only necessary, he shews himself, and pursues his other engagements until two o’clock, when he and his company sit down, perfectly at ease in point of dress and address, to a good dinner,^ each attended by his

* Mrs Eliza Fay gives an account to her sister at home of the daily dinner in her Calcutta home, a household of only moderate means, in the summer of 1780. She and her husband dined on “ a soup, a roast fowl, curry and rice, a mutton pie, a forequarter of lamb, a rice

! CalciUta of the Nabobs

j own servant. And the moment the glasses are introduced, regardless of the company of ladies, the houccabadars enter, each with a houcca, and presents the tube to his master, watching behind and blowing the fire the whole time.^ As it is expected that they shall return to supper, at four o’clock they begin to withdraw without ceremony, and step into their palanquins ; so that in a few minutes, the master is left to go into his bedroom, when he is instantly undressed to his shirt, and his long drawers put on ; and he lies down on his bed, where he sleeps till about seven or eight o’clock : then the former ceremony is repeated, and clean linen of every kind, as in the i morning, is administered ; his houccabadar presents the tube to his hand, he is placed at the tea table, and his hair-dresser performs his duty as before. After tea, he puts on a handsome coat, and pays visits of ceremony to the ladies : ^ returns a little before ten o’clock, supper being served at ten. The com- ; pany keep together till between twelve and one in the morning, preserving great sobriety and decency ; and when they depart, our hero is conducted to his bedroom, where he finds a female companion, to amuse him until the hour of seven or eight next morning.

The record gives rise to many reflections, among them one as to the comparative modernness of the habit of the daily tub.® It must be remembered

pudding, tarts, very good cheese, fresh churned butter, fine bread, excellent Madeira.” This tiffin was eaten without ice. There were giants in those days !

1 If ladies were present it was considered a delicate compliment for a beau to whip from his pocket a silver mouthpiece, fix it to his hookah and offer it to the lady at his side.

* Mrs Ehza Fay again enlightens us as to the ways of that almost forgotten little world. “ Formal visits are paid in the evening,” she tells her sister. “ Glentlemen call to pay their respects and if asked to put down their hats, it is considered as an invitation to supper.”

® D’Oyley’s Eurofean in India, published thirty years later, tells us that three or four pots of cold water were sometimes thrown over the master’s head to brace him before dressing for dinner.

that the Englishmen who suffered themselves to be dressed and carried like luxurious dolls were living in a Bengal where the swing punkah was yet unknown ^ and from which there was no escape to a hill station. Yet even so, one whose daily life is here described has travelled far in spirit, and his mother’s seven-or-eight-months’-old letters must strike a wistful note when she writes in her Italian hand to tell of little Fanny’s first ball and the moss rosebuds in her hair.

No one can read the despatches to the India House without realizing that in the great affairs of the Company many men must have lived more laborious lives than this. Yet it is significant that the lively author of the description quoted above felt impelled to no further comment than the remark that “ with no greater exertions than these do the Company’s servants amass the most splendid fortunes.”

One is forced to the conclusion that, with the great exceptions of high-minded men like Cornwallis, Shore, Wellesley, or Grant, the latter eighteenth century had settled down quite complacently to regard “ the East Indies ” as a gold mine.

There is more of the spirit of the counter than one likes to confess among “ The Honourable the Court of Directors for the affairs of the United Company of Merchants of England trading to the East Indies ” Auspicio Regis et Senatus Anglice. They were decorously anxious for dividends. Warren Hastings was appointed to Bengal for his good management of warehouses in Madras, and his first business was to make Bengal pay. The Directors suffered many a financial tremor in the days of the ^ It was still a novelty in 1801.

patrician Wellesley “ who endeavoured in redun- I dantly eloquent despatches to reconcile his deeds I with the pacific tone of his instructions.” ^ They felt that creator of great schemes and enterprises to be an ornament to their administration, but how expensive an ornament ! Small wonder if their servants caught their spirit. Sir Harry Verelst i; described the English in Bengal as “a colony of j merchants, governed by laws and influenced by principles merely commercial.” ^

We looked no further than the provision of the Com- ; pany’s investment. We sought advantages to our f trade, with the ingenuity, I may add the selfishness of merchants. . . . All our servants and dependents were trained and educated in the same notions ; the ; credit of a good bargain was the utmost scope of their ; ambition.

Little guessed that old, bourgeois Calcutta of the j merchants that she was the stage set for a drama of spiritual adventure. Yet so it was. The saints were coming to town. As when a Christian man first trod the forum^of some lustful Roman city, and his spirit, fain of the eternal beauty, felt the unclean life around him to be “ earthly, sensual, devilish ” ; or as when two brothers of St Francis, their hearts singing with the beauty of poverty for Christ, first visited the greedy court of an Italian merchant prince, so when men who had caught the spirit of Christ first touched the sordid life of old Calcutta, there followed struggle and the hardness of moral choice in many lives.

They came in the rather prosaic garb of chaplains

* A. F. Pollard, History of England.

* Letter to Council of Fort William, December 1709.

of the East India Company : in matters of taste, men of their day, with a power of enjoying if not of produeing “ poetieal effusions” that leave us cold, and a habit in penitent moments of describing them-, selves as “ contemptible and wretched worms,” But behind the high neck-cloths and the language of eighteenth-century religious diaries we find the infallible marks of the friends of Jesus.

The precursor and father of the little group arrived when Calcutta was sweltering in the hot weather of 1786, with his wife and a baby born at sea. The Company had sent for “ a clergyman and a married man ” to take charge of their new Military Orphan Asylum. The Reverend David Brown who responded to their call was the son of a Yorkshire farm-house, who brought to his Calcutta home, along with a solid classical education, a certain wholesome shrewdness, and the tradition of hearty and generous hospitality. Through twenty-five years of service with only one fortnight of furlough he kept the countryman’s fresh colouring. He was no pallid saint. But Calcutta found in that Yorkshireman a spirit that was strange to her.

When he discovered that he was to have the charge of five hundred orphans instead of the forty-five of whom he had been told, and that the salary was considerably less than had been represented, he accepted the situation with the remark in his diary that “ since a larger field of usefulness was thus opened to my view, I regretted not the diminution of salary.” ^ This Yorkshireman must be reckoned with. He had a disconcerting habit of continual reference to a standard that Calcutta had forgotten.

1 Memorial of the Rev. David Brown, 1816, p. 298.

“ I now sit down in a house of my own,” he wrote, 1 ■ “ but my good Master had not where to lay His head. I • . . . He emptied Himself of all and was literally j the poorest of men.”

i His habit of reference to another standard led j!^ David Brown to do strange things. He found in ; the city an ugly and at that time glaring building L known as “The Red Church” (now “The Old Mission Church,” Mission Row), built sixteen years before his coming at the private expense of a Danish missionary, and still the only Church in Bengal. ^ Calcutta society affirmed that “ by Gad, the place is only fit for stable-boys and low Portuguese.” Church-going was not modish, and Sunday was the i day for races. Moreover it was impossible to go j to Church without considerable ceremony. “ If you were a person of fashion yet did not choose to go to Church in your yellow chariot, you would arrive in a neat sedan chair, gleaming with black lacquer. You brought at least seven servants with you, — four chair-bearers, two running footmen with spears and one parasol bearer. ^ A lady told David Brown that “ she had been more than twelve years a resident of Calcutta, and twice married ; but it had been out of her power in all that time to go to Church, because she had never had an offer from any beau to escort her there and hand her to a pew.”

The very small group of very mixed parentage that looked to “ the Red Church ” for help, was now without a shepherd, and David Brown “ thought of those with whom his Divine Master associated ”

^ But another was then a-building and was consecrated in June 1787 as St John’s Church, now generally known as “ The old Cathedral.”

* Hyde, The Parish of Bengal, p. 190.

and offered himself as unsalaried chaplain. Calcutta sniffed, but in spite of herself was drawn to the bighearted man who never took a baptism or a marriage service without a deep human emotion that could not be altogether hidden from the men and women he had come to serve.

Like draws to like, and David Brown had not been many days in Caleutta before he was asked to dine with the “ Senior Merchant ” of the Company and formd a friend.

Charles Grant^ later to be celebrated in the Councils of the East India Company “ for an understanding large enough to embrace, without confusion, the entire range and the intricate combinations of their whole civil and military policy, and for nerves which set fatigue at defiance,” ^ was a Highland Scot whose father had been fighting for the Stuarts at Culloden at the very hour of his birth. He was known in Calcutta as a man long of limb and long of face, his sagacious countenance under massive brows singularly steadfast and immovable, but softening when he glanced at the adorable wife whom he had brought to India as a bride of seventeen, an apt musician and a charming dancer. She made his house a home of rare delight and gave him two baby girls, loved by both parents with the almost desperate affection that surrounds the delicate babes of a household in the tropics. The head of the house for all his home affections followed the ordinary standards of Calcutta society, and the one shadow in the household was cast by the master’s gambling debts which piled up far higher than his means of payment.

Then, with dreadful suddenness, the light went out

^ Sir James Stephen, Essays in Ecclesiastical Biography.

from their home as, within a few days, first one little daughter and then the other was carried off by smallpox, and the twenty-year-old mother was left distraught with grief, springing up now and then in the belief that she was waking from a nightmare and would find her babies in their nursery, only to suffer her first agony over again when she reached the empty room.

To the father’s conscience it seemed “ a judgment from heaven ” on his selfish and worldly courses. Atonement must be made. In agony of soul he broke through his lifelong reserve and went to Dr Kiernander the old Danish missionary who had built the Red Church. “ I found him lying on the couch. My anxious enquiries as to what I could do to be saved appeared to embarrass and confuse him exceedingly ; and when I left him the perspiration was running from his face in consequence, as it appeared to me, of his mental distress.” ^ Charles Grant came away from the only religious specialist within his ken, as rhiserable as he went. It was his young wife who brought him peace. She noticed, even in her own sorrow, his heavy spiritual anxiety and turned to search such good books as she had, for help for both of them. In the New Testament she found the way of peace and wrote her Charles a letter to tell of her discovery ;