Rural Rides Page 27

  Now, upon the face of the transaction, what harm could this do the community? On the contrary, it must, one would think, do it good; for here was this estate given to a set of landlords who never could quit the spot; who could have no families; who could save no money; who could hold no private property; who could make no will; who must spend all their income at Reigate and near it; who, as was the custom, fed the poor, administered to the sick, and taught some, at least, of the people, gratis. This, upon the face of the thing, seems to be a very good way of disposing of a rich man’s estate.

  ‘Aye, but,’ it is said, ‘he left his estate away from his relations.’ That is not sure, by any means. The contrary is fairly to be presumed. Doubtless, it was the custom for Catholic Priests, before they took their leave of a dying rich man, to advise him to think of the Church and the Poor; that is to say to exhort him to bequeath something to them; and this has been made a monstrous charge against that Church. It is surprising how blind men are, when they have a mind to be blind; what despicable dolts they are, when they desire to be cheated. We, of the Church of England, must have a special deal of good sense and of modesty, to be sure, to rail against the Catholic Church on this account, when our own Common Prayer Book, copied from an act of Parliament, commands our Parsons to do just the same thing!

  Ah! say the Dissenters, and particularly the Unitarians; that queer sect, who will have all the wisdom in the world to themselves; who will believe and won’t believe; who will be Christians and who won’t have a Christ; who will laugh at you, if you believe in the Trinity, and who would (if they could) boil you in oil if you do not believe in the Resurrection: ‘Oh!’ say the Dissenters, ‘we know very well, that your Church Parsons are commanded to get, if they can, dying people to give their money and estates to the Church and the poor, as they call the concern, though the poor, we believe, come in for very little which is got in this way. But, what is your Church? We are the real Christians; and we, upon our souls, never play such tricks; never, no never, terrify old women out of their stockings full of guineas.’ ‘And, as to us,’ say the UNITARIANS, ‘we, the most liberal creatures upon earth; we, whose virtue is indignant at the tricks by which the Monks and Nuns got legacies from dying people to the injury of heirs and other relations; we, who are the really enlightened, the truly consistent, the benevolent, the disinterested, the exclusive patentees of the SALT OF THE EARTH, which is sold only at, or by express permission from our old and original warehouse and manufactory, Essex-street, in the Strand, first street on the left, going from Temple Bar towards Charing Cross; we defy you to show that Unitarian Parsons…’

  Stop your protestations and hear my Reigate anecdote, which, as I said above, brought the recollection of the OLD PRIORY into my head. The readers of the Register heard me, several times, some years ago, mention Mr BARON MASERES, who was, for a great many years, what they call Cursitor Baron of the Exchequer. He lived partly in London and partly at Reigate, for more, I believe, than half a century; and he died, about two years ago, or less, leaving, I am told, more than a quarter of a million of money. The Baron came to see me, in Pall Mall, in 1800. He always came frequently to see me, wherever I was in London; not by any means omitting to come to see me in Newgate, where I was imprisoned for two years, with a thousand pounds fine and seven years heavy bail, for having expressed my indignation at the flogging of Englishmen, in the heart of England, under a guard of German bayonets; and, to Newgate he always came in his wig and gown, in order, as he said, to show his abhorrence of the sentence. I several times passed a week, or more, with the Baron at his house, at Reigate, and might have passed many more, if my time and taste would have permitted me to accept of his invitations. Therefore, I knew the Baron well. He was a most conscientious man; he was when I first knew him, still a very clever man; he retained all his faculties to a very great age; in 1815, I think it was, I got a letter from him, written in a firm hand, correctly as to grammar, and ably as to matter, and he must then have been little short of ninety. He never was a bright man; but had always been a very sensible, just and humane man, and a man too who always cared a great deal for the public good; and he was the only man that I ever heard of, who refused to have his salary augmented, when an augmentation was offered, and when all other such salaries were augmented. I had heard of this: I asked him about it when I saw him again; and he said: ‘There was no work to be added, and I saw no justice in adding to the salary. It must,’ added he, ‘be paid by somebody, and the more I take, the less that somebody must have.’

  He did not save money for money’s sake. He saved it because his habits would not let him spend it. He kept a house in Rathbone Place, chambers in the Temple, and his very pretty place at Reigate. He was by no means stingy, but his scale and habits were cheap. Then, consider, too, a bachelor of nearly a hundred years old. His father left him a fortune, his brother (who also died a very old bachelor), left him another; and the money lay in the funds, and it went on doubling itself over and over again, till it became that immense mass which we have seen above, and which, when the Baron was making his will, he had neither Catholic priest nor Protestant parson to exhort him to leave to the church and the poor, instead of his relations; though, as we shall presently see, he had somebody else to whom to leave his great heap of money.

  The Baron was a most implacable enemy of the Catholics, as Catholics. There was rather a peculiar reason for this, his grandfather having been a French Hugonot and having fled with his children to England, at the time of the revocation of the Edict of Nantz. The Baron was a very humane man; his humanity made him assist to support the French emigrant priests; but, at the same time, he caused Sir Richard Musgrave’s book against the Irish Catholics to be published at his own expense. He and I never agreed upon this subject; and this subject was, with him, a vital one. He had no asperity in his nature; he was naturally all gentleness and benevolence; and, therefore, he never resented what I said to him on this subject (and which nobody else ever, I believe, ventured to say to him): but, he did not like it; and he liked it the less because I certainly beat him in the argument. However this was long before he visited me in Newgate: and it never produced (though the dispute was frequently revived) any difference in his conduct towards me, which was uniformly friendly to the last time I saw him before his memory was gone.

  There was great excuse for the Baron. From his very birth he had been taught to hate and abhor the Catholic religion. He had been told, that his father and mother had been driven out of France by the Catholics: and there was that mother dinning this in his ears, and all manner of horrible stories along with it, during all the tender years of his life. In short, the prejudice made part of his very frame. In the year 1803, in August, I think it was, I had gone down to his house on a Friday, and was there on a Sunday. After dinner he and I and his brother walked to the PRIORY, as is still called the mansion house, in the dell at Reigate, which is now occupied by LORD EASTNOR, and in which a Mr BIRKET, I think, then lived. After coming away from the PRIORY, the Baron (whose native place was Betchworth, about two or three miles from Reigate) who knew the history of every house and every thing else in this part of the country, began to tell me why the place was called the Priory. From this he came to the superstition and dark ignorance that induced people to found monasteries; and he dwelt particularly on the injustice to heirs and relations; and he went on, in the usual Protestant strain, and with all the bitterness of which he was capable, against those crafty priests, who thus plundered families by means of the influence which they had over people in their dotage, or who were naturally weak-minded.

  Alas! poor Baron! he does not seem to have at all foreseen what was to become of his own money! What would he have said to me, if I had answered his observations by predicting, that HE would give his great mass of money to a little parson for that parson’s own private use; leave only a mere pittance to his own relations; leave the little parson his house in which we were then sitting (along with all his other real property); that th
e little parson would come into the house and take possession; and that his own relations (two nieces) would walk out! Yet, all this has actually taken place, and that, too, after the poor old Baron’s four score years of jokes about the tricks of Popish priests, practised, in the dark ages, upon the ignorant and superstitious people of Reigate.

  When I first knew the Baron he was a staunch Church of England man. He went to church every Sunday once, at least. He used to take me to Reigate church; and I observed, that he was very well versed in his prayer book. But, a decisive proof of his zeal as a Church of England man is, that he settled an annual sum on the incumbent of Reigate, in order to induce him to preach, or pray (I forget which), in the church, twice on a Sunday, instead of once; and, in case this additional preaching, or praying, were not performed in Reigate church, the annuity was to go (and sometimes it does now go) to the poor of an adjoining parish, and not to those of Reigate, lest I suppose, the parson, the overseers, and other rate-payers, might happen to think that the Baron’s annuity would be better laid out in food for the bodies than for the souls of the poor; or, in other words, lest the money should be taken annually and added to the poor-rates to ease the purses of the farmers.

  It did not, I dare say, occur to the poor Baron (when he was making this settlement), that he was now giving money to make a church parson put up additional prayers, though he had, all his lifetime, been laughing at those, who, in the dark ages, gave money, for this purpose, to Catholic priests. Nor did it, I dare say, occur, to the Baron, that, in his contingent settlement of the annuity on the poor of an adjoining parish, he as good as declared his opinion, that he distrusted the piety of the parson, the overseers, the churchwardens, and, indeed, of all the people of Reigate: yes, at the very moment that he was providing additional prayers for them, he in the very same parchment, put a provision, which clearly showed that he was thoroughly convinced that they, overseers, churchwardens, people, parson and all, loved money better than prayers.

  What was this, then? Was it hypocrisy; was it ostentation? No: mistake. The Baron thought that those who could not go to church in the morning ought to have an opportunity of going in the afternoon. He was aware of the power of money; but, when he came to make his obligatory clause, he was compelled to do that which reflected great discredit on the very church and religion, which it was his object to honour and uphold.

  However, the Baron was a staunch churchman as this fact clearly proves: several years he had become what they call an Unitarian. The first time (I think) that I perceived this, was in 1812. He came to see me in Newgate, and he soon began to talk about religion, which had not been much his habit. He went on at a great rate, laughing about the Trinity, and I remember that he repeated the Unitarian distich, which makes a joke of the idea of there being a devil, and which they all repeat to you, and at the same time laugh and look as cunning and as priggish as jack-daws; just as if they were wiser than all the rest in the world! I hate to hear the conceited and disgusting prigs, seeming to take it for granted, that they only are wise, because others believe in the incarnation, without being able to reconcile it to reason. The prigs don’t consider, that there is no more reason for the resurrection than for the incarnation; and yet having taken it into their heads to come up again, they would murder you, if they dared, if you were to deny the resurrection. I do most heartily despise this priggish set for their conceit and impudence; but, seeing that they want reason for the incarnation; seeing that they will have effects, here, ascribed to none but usual causes, let me put a question or two to them.

  1. Whence comes the white clover, that comes up and covers all the ground, in America, where hard-wood trees, after standing for thousands of years, have been burnt down?

  2. Whence come (in similar cases as to self-woods) the hurtle-berries in some places, and the raspberries in others?

  3. Whence come fish in new made places where no fish have ever been put?

  4. What causes horse-hair to become living things?

  5. What causes frogs to come in drops of rain, or those drops of rain to turn to frogs, the moment they are on the earth?

  6. What causes musquitoes to come in rain water caught in a glass, covered over immediately with oil paper, tied down and so kept till full of these winged torments?

  7. What causes flounders, real little flat fish, brown on one side, white on the other, mouth side-ways, with tail, fins, and all, leaping alive, in the INSIDE of a rotten sheep’s and of every rotten sheep’s, LIVER?

  There, prigs; answer these questions. Fifty might be given you; but these are enough. Answer these. I suppose you will not deny the facts? They are all notoriously true. The last, which of itself would be quite enough for you, will be attested on oath, if you like it, by any farmer, ploughman, and shepherd, in England. Answer this question 7, or hold your conceited gabble about the ‘impossibility’ of that which I need not here name.

  Men of sense do not attempt to discover that which it is impossible, to discover. They leave things pretty much as they find them; and take care, at least, not to make changes of any sort, without very evident necessity. The poor Baron, however, appeared to be quite eaten up with his ‘rational Christianity’. He talked like a man who has made a discovery of his own. He seemed as pleased as I, when I was a boy, used to be, when I had just found a rabbit’s stop, or a black-bird’s nest full of young ones. I do not recollect what I said upon this occasion. It is most likely that I said nothing in contradiction to him. I saw the Baron many times after this, but I never talked with him about religion.

  Before the summer of 1822, I had not seen him for a year or two, perhaps. But, in July of that year, on a very hot day, I was going down Rathbone Place, and, happening to cast my eye on the Baron’s house, I knocked at the door to ask how he was. His man servant came to the door, and told me that his master was at dinner. ‘Well,’ said I, ‘never mind; give my best respects to him.’ But, the servant (who had always been with him since I knew him) begged me to come in, for that he was sure his master would be glad to see me. I thought, as it was likely that I might never see him again, I would go in. The servant announced me, and the Baron said, ‘Beg him to walk in.’ In I went, and there I found the Baron at dinner; but not quite alone; nor without spiritual as well as carnal and vegetable nourishment before him: for, there, on the opposite side of his vis-a-vis dining table, sat that nice, neat, straight, prim piece of mortality, commonly called the REVEREND ROBERT FELLOWES, who was the Chaplain to the unfortunate Queen until Mr Alderman Wood’s son came to supply his place, and who was now, I could clearly see, in a fair way enough. I had dined, and so I let them dine on. The Baron was become quite a child, or worse, as to mind, though he ate as heartily as I ever saw him, and he was always a great eater. When his servant said, ‘Here is Mr Cobbett, Sir;’ he said, ‘How do you do, Sir? I have read much of your writings, Sir; but never had the pleasure to see your person before.’ After a time I made him recollect me; but, he, directly after, being about to relate something about America, turned towards me, and said, ‘Were you ever in America, Sir?’ But, I must mention one proof of the state of his mind. Mr FELLOWES asked me about the news from Ireland, where the people were then in a state of starvation (1822), and I answering that, it was likely that many of them would actually be starved to death, the Baron, quitting his green goose and green pease, turned to me and said, ‘Starved, Sir! Why don’t they go to the parish?’ ‘Why,’ said I, ‘you know, Sir, that there are no poor-rates in Ireland.’ Upon this he exclaimed, ‘What! no poor-rates in Ireland? Why not? I did not know that; I can’t think how that can be.’ And then he rambled on in a childish sort of way.

  At the end of about half an hour, or, it might be more, I shook hands with the poor old Baron for the last time, well convinced that I should never see him again, and not less convinced, that I had seen his heir. He died in about a year or so afterwards, left to his own family about 20,000/., and to his ghostly guide, the HOLY ROBERT FELLOWES, all the rest of his immense fo
rtune, which, as I have been told, amounts to more than a quarter of a million of money.

  Now, the public will recollect that, while Mr FELLOWES was at the Queen’s, he was, in the public papers, charged with being an Unitarian, at the same time that he officiated as her chaplain. It is also well known, that he never publicly contradicted this. It is, besides, the general belief at Reigate. However, this we know well, that he is a parson, of one sort or the other, and that he is not a Catholic priest. That is enough for me. I see this poor, foolish old man leaving a monstrous mass of money to this little Protestant parson, whom he had not even known more, I believe, than about three or four years. When the will was made I cannot say. I know nothing at all about that. I am supposing that all was perfectly fair; that the Baron had his senses when he made his will; that he clearly meant to do that which he did. But, then, I must insist, that, if he had left the money to a Catholic priest, to be by him expended on the endowment of a convent, wherein to say masses and to feed and teach the poor, it would have been a more sensible and public-spirited part in the Baron, much more beneficial to the town and environs of Reigate, and beyond all measure more honourable to his own memory.

  Chilworth, Friday Evening, 21st Oct. 1825

  It has been very fine to-day. Yesterday morning there was snow on Reigate Hill, enough to look white from where we were in the valley. We set off about half past one o’clock, and came all down the valley, through Buckland, Betchworth, Dorking, Sheer and Aldbury, to this place. Very few prettier rides in England, and the weather beautifully fine. There are more meeting-houses than churches in the vale, and I have heard of no less than five people, in this vale, who have gone crazy on account of religion.