Cornish Characters and Strange Events

The Lower House listened, unstirred, cold and resolute. Dean Shays, put forward by the members favourable to Comprehension, proposed Tillotson; Jane was proposed on the other side. After an animated discussion, Jane was elected by fifty-five votes to twenty-eight.

The Prolocutor was then formally presented to the Bishop of London, and made, according to ancient usage, a Latin oration, in which he eulogized the Church in England as maintaining the faith as delivered to the saints, and as preserving all the marks of the Catholic Church throughout all ages and all the world; and he very plainly declared that no alteration in a downward direction would be tolerated; and he concluded with the significant and well-known words, "Nolumus leges Angliæ mutari."

It soon became evident that the Lower House was absolutely determined not to have the proposed alterations made; but the plan they adopted was to shun the discussion of the recommendations made by the Commissioners, so as not directly to reject what they knew lay very near to the King's heart. With this object they adopted a system of tactics that in the end answered their purpose.

"The law," says Macaulay, "as it had been interpreted during a long course of years, prohibited Convocation from even deliberating on any ecclesiastical ordinance without a previous warrant from the Crown. Such a warrant, sealed with the Great Seal, was brought in form to Henry the Seventh's Chapel by Nottingham. He at the same time delivered a message from the King. His Majesty exhorted the assembly to consider calmly and without prejudice the recommendations of the Commission, and declared that he had nothing in view but the honour and advantage of the Protestant religion in general and of the Church of England in particular.

"The bishops speedily agreed on an address of thanks for the royal message, and requested the concurrence of the Lower House. Jane and his adherents raised objection after objection. First they claimed the privilege of presenting a separate address. When they were forced to waive this claim, they refused to agree to any expressions which implied that the Church of England had any fellowship with any other Protestant community. Amendments and reasons were sent backward and forward. Conferences were held at which Burnet on one side and Jane on the other were the chief speakers. At last, with great difficulty, a compromise was made; and an address, cold and ungracious compared with that which the bishops had framed, was presented to the King in the Banqueting House. He dissembled his vexation, returned a kind answer, and intimated a hope that the assembly would now at length proceed to consider the great question of Comprehension." But this was precisely what they were resolute not to consider. They had made up their minds on the subject already, but they were unwilling to fly too openly in the face of the King. As for trusting the bishops to stand firm on any principle, the Lower House knew that this was not to be expected. When had the bishops of the Established Church, since the Reformation, ever shown firmness and united action on any principle, except once, and that was to oppose general Toleration?

So soon as the clergy were again assembled, a fresh difficulty was started. It was mooted that the Nonjuring bishops had not been summoned, and they were to be regarded as bishops of the Catholic Church quite as certainly as were those nominees of the King who had been intruded into their vacated thrones.

Then it was complained that scurrilous pamphlets were hawked about the streets, and the people were being worked into a temper of opposition to Convocation. It was asked why Convocation should be called together to emasculate the Church, if it was to be suffered to be jeered at by pamphleteers.

Thus passed week after week. Christmas drew nigh. The bishops proposed, during the recess, to have a committee to sit and prepare business. The Lower House rejected the proposal; and it became plain to every one that it was determined not to consider one of the suggested concessions to Protestant prejudice.

Moreover, it soon became evident that the Dissenters themselves did not desire Comprehension. Their ministers were petted and made much of by the well-to-do yeomen and the rich merchants in country and town. They lived on the fat of the land, snapped up wealthy widows and bought broad acres. Whereas the needy country parson was hard pressed to wring the tithes from his parishioners. While the walls of exclusion of Jericho stood, the rams' horns brayed against them daily, and seven times on the Sabbath; but so soon as the walls were prostrate, and every man could go up into the city and take up his quarters there where he liked, the rams' horns would have to be laid aside as superfluous lumber.

The King was disappointed and offended. What he did was to prorogue Convocation for six weeks, and when those six weeks had expired, to prorogue it again, and many years elapsed before it was again suffered to assemble.

That Convocation of 1689 saved the Church of England from dissolution into a formless, gelatinous, and invertebrate mass.

Burnet himself, though disappointed at the time, felt afterwards that the determination of the Lower House had saved the Church at a time of crisis. "There was," he says, "a very happy direction of the providence of God observed in this matter. The Jacobite clergy who were then under suspension were designing to make a schism in the Church, whensoever they should be turned out and their places should be filled up by others. They saw it would not be easy to make a separation upon a private and personal account; they therefore wished to be furnished with more specious pretences, and if we had made alterations in the Rubrics and other parts of the Common Prayer, they would have pretended that they still stuck to the ancient Church of England, in opposition to those who were altering it and setting up new models. And, as I do firmly believe that there is a wise providence that watches upon human affairs, and directs them – so I have observed this in many instances relating to the Revolution … by all the judgments we could afterwards make, if we had carried a majority in the Convocation for alterations, they would have done us more hurt than good."

Burnet was morally and intellectually incapable of seeing that it was a case of conscience, of stantis vel cadentis ecclesiæ, and he attributed the motives of the recalcitrant clergy to political prejudice.

On Jane's return to Oxford, he found another opportunity of defending the Church, by framing the decree of 1690, which condemned the "Naked Gospel" of Arthur Burge.

Jane had no hopes whatever of preferment from William, if he cared for it. In 1696 it was even rumoured that the King meditated turning him out of his professorship, because he had not signed the "Association for King William." But on Anne's accession, all his fears were at an end. It would appear from a letter of Atterbury that at Oxford the University desired to get rid of him, because he neglected giving lectures on Divinity, and left the work to be discharged by a subordinate named Smallridge.

In 1703 Bishop Trelawny appointed him to the Chancellorship of Exeter Cathedral, which he exchanged for the precentorship in 1704, but he retained his Regius professorship to the end. Undoubtedly it was a great pleasure to him in the decline of his life to be back in the West Country.

He resigned the precentorship of Exeter in 1706, and died on the 23rd February, 1707, at Oxford, and was buried in Christ Church.

The writer of his life in the Dictionary of National Biography sums up his career with these words: "Jane was a clerical politician of a low type; Calamy says of him, 'Though fond of the rites and ceremonies of the Church, he was a Calvinist in the respect of doctrine,' and the pleasantest thing recorded of him is his kindness shown at Oxford to the ejected Presbyterian, Thomas Gilbert."

Calamy, as a Dissenter, was prejudiced against Jane; and I do not see that he was of a low type of polemical cleric – because when he saw that the theory of government he had embraced would not bear the test of experience, he had the courage to reject it. Every man is liable to make mistakes; it is only the brave man who can acknowledge that he has been mistaken.

Nor was Jane alone. Compton, Bishop of London, and several other bishops, had appealed to William of Orange to come over and help the people and the Church of England to be free from a tyrannous and subversive despotism. The Earl of Danby, under whose administration, and with his sanction, a law had been proposed, which, if it had passed, would have excluded from Parliament and office all who refused to declare on oath that they thought resistance to the King in every case unlawful – he had seen the mistake as well, and had invited William over.

As Macaulay says: "This theory (of passive obedience) at first presented itself to the Cavalier as the very opposite of slavish. Its tendency was to make him not a slave, but a free man and a master. It exalted him by exalting one whom he regarded as his protector, as his friend, as the head of his beloved party, and of his more beloved Church. When Republicans were dominant the Royalist had endured wrongs and insults which the restoration of the legitimate government had enabled him to retaliate. Rebellion was therefore associated in his imagination with subjection and degradation, and monarchical authority with liberty and ascendancy. It had never crossed his imagination that a time might come when a King, a Stuart, could prosecute the most loyal of the clergy and gentry with more than the animosity of the Rump or the Protector. That time had however arrived. Oppression speedily did what philosophy and eloquence would have failed to do. The system of Filmer might have survived the attacks of Locke; but it never recovered from the death-blow given by James."

Jane changed his opinion indeed, but so did nearly the whole of the Tory party and of the clergy of the Church.

THE PENNINGTONS

About seven years ago I attended the baptism of some bells for a new church at Châteaulin, in Brittany. The ceremony was quaint, archaic, and grotesque. The bells were suspended in the chancel "all of a row," dressed in white frocks with pink sashes round their waists. To each was given god-parents who had to answer for them, and each was actually baptized, after which each was made to speak for itself. The ceremony evidently dates from a period when the bell was regarded as anything but an inanimate object – it had its responsibilities, it did its duties, it spoke in sonorous tones. The very inscriptions on them to the present day prescribe something of this character – invest each bell with a personality, as these: —

I sweetly tolling men do callTo taste of meats to feed the soul.

Also: —

I sound to bid the sick repent,In hope of life when breath is spent.

As late as last century we find these: —

Both day and night I measure time for all,To mirth and grief, to church I call.

And this in 1864: —

I toll the funeral knell,I ring the festal day,I mark the fleeting hours,And chime the church to pray.

In the Western Counties bell-ringing was a favourite and delightful pastime. Parties of ringers went about from parish to parish and rang on the church bells, very generally for a prize – "a hat laced with gold." At Launcells, where the bells are of superior sweetness, the ringers who rang for the accession of George III rang for that of George IV, there not having been a gap caused by death among them in sixty years. No songs are so popular and well remembered at bell-ringers' feasts as those that record the achievements of some who went before them in the same office. I give one that has never before been printed, that can be traced back to 1810, but is certainly older. It relates to the ringers of Egloshayle.

1. Come all you ringers good and grave,Come listen to my peal,I'll tell you of five ringers braveThat lived in Egloshayle.They bear the sway in ring array,Where'er they chance to go;Good music of melodious bells,'Tis their delight to show.2. The foreman gives the sigan-al,He steps long with the toe,He casts his eyes about them all,And gives the sign to go.Away they pull, with courage full,The heart it do revive,To hear them swing, and music ring,One, two, three, four, and five.3. There's Craddock the cordwainer first,That rings the treble bell;The second is John Ellery,And none may him excel;The third is Pollard, carpenter;The fourth is Thomas Cleave;Goodfellow is the tenor man,That rings them round so brave.4. They went up to Lanlivery,They brought away the prize;And then they went to San-Tudy,And there they did likewise.There's Stratton men, S. Mabyn men,S. Issey and S. Kew,But we five lads of EgloshayleCan all the rest outdo.5. Now, to conclude my merry task,I' th' Sovereign's health we join;Stand every man and pass the flask,And drink his health in wine.And here's to Craddock, Ellery,And here's to Thomas Cleave,To Pollard and the tenor manThat rings them round so brave.

Humphry Craddock died in 1839; John Ellery in 1845, aged 85 years; John Pollard in 1825, aged 71; Thomas Cleave in 1821, aged 78; John Goodfellow in 1846, aged 80.

But for bell-ringers there must be bells; and who cast those that have been in past years and are still pealed so merrily? A great many were cast by the Penningtons of Lezant, and latterly at Stoke Climsland. The Penningtons were an ancient family in Bodmin, resident there in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Perhaps because not being landed gentry, perhaps because they could not establish the right, they did not record their arms or give their pedigree in the Heralds' Visitations. But the coat they bore or assumed was a goodly one and simple, and therefore ancient —or, in fesse five lozenges azure. Robert Pennington, of Bodmin, had two sons – John, baptized in 1595, and Bernard two years later. John married at Bodmin, and had seven sons baptized there, one of whom was probably the progenitor of the Penningtons of Lezant and Stoke Climsland. The pedigree of the Exeter bell-founders of the family has not been made out; but that they belonged to the stock that sprang up at Bodmin cannot be doubted.

Bernard Pennington, baptized in 1605, was Mayor of Bodmin in 1666, and was a bell-founder. He died in 1674. His son Christopher Pennington, baptized 1631, was also a bell-founder. He died in 1696. Christopher's son of the same name was Mayor of Bodmin in 1726, 1727, and 1733. He died in 1749. The Penningtons seem to have abandoned the bell-casting business at the beginning of the nineteenth century; but, as Sir William Maclean says, "between 1702 and 1818 these popular founders cast nearly five hundred bells in the county of Devon, and, it is believed, as many in Cornwall."14

There are sixty-six in Devon cast by John Pennington, of Exeter. The earliest that is dated is at Payhembury, 1635, and the latest 1690 at Kentisbeare. In 1669 T. P. and I. P. appear together on a bell at Merton, as if they were partners; and ninety-five bear the trade-mark of Thomas and John Pennington – large Roman initials with a bell in outline between. The earliest is found at Eggesford, 1618. Sometimes they impressed the coin then current. At Ottery S. Mary, 1671, and at S. Martin's, Exeter, 1675, they used a satirical medal representing a pope and a king under one face, another representing a cardinal and a bishop.

Besides two generations of Penningtons in Exeter, there was, as already stated, Christopher Pennington, who cast a bell at Stowford dated 1710, and one at Philleigh, in Roseland, with C. P. and the skeleton of a bell between, as did the other Pennington. But his earliest known is at Fremington, 1702. He was succeeded by FitzAnthony Pennington, of Lezant, who in 1768, whilst crossing the Tamar in the Antony ferry with a bell he had cast to be set up at Landulph, was drowned. He is buried in the tower of Landulph, and on a mural tablet, beside his age, which was thirty-eight, and the date of his death, April 30th, 1768, are these lines: —

Tho' boisterous winds and billows soreHath toss'd me to and fro,By God's decree, in spite of both,I rest now here below.

After his death we have the initials of the three brothers, John, Christopher, and William. From their head-quarters, first at Lezant and then at Stoke Climsland, they itinerated through Cornwall and Devon, casting bells wherever they could find deep clay, and sufficient bell-metal was provided by the parish that desired to have a bell in its tower, and generally the bell was cast near the church for which it was intended.15

There are as many as 480 bells by this Cornish family from 1710-1818; their latest are at Bridgerule and Bovey Tracey, at this last date.

William Pennington, son of the second Christopher, entered Holy Orders and became vicar of Davidstowe. His progenitors had furnished the voices calling to church from the village towers, and now this member sounded within the church also calling to prayer and praise. His son, William Pennington, purchased the site of the Priory, Bodmin, in 1788, having rebuilt the house some twenty years previously under a lease. He was mayor of Bodmin 1764, 1774, 1787, and died without issue in 1789, bequeathing his possessions to his niece Nancy Hosken, daughter of his sister Susanna, who had married Anthony Hosken, vicar of Bodmin and rector of Lesneuth. Nancy married Walter Raleigh Gilbert, one of the gentlemen of the bedchamber, and descended from the ancient Devonshire family of Compton Castle. As Mr. Gilbert died without issue, the Priory passed to his brother, and, consequently, wholly away from the Penningtons.

DOCTOR GLYNN-CLOBERY

This amiable and good man was born at Helland, 5th August, 1719, and was the son of Robert Glynn, by Lucy, fourth daughter of John Clobery, of Bradstone, in Devon. A singular fatality attended this ancient family, that possessed a very interesting Elizabethan mansion. John Clobery had eight daughters and only one son and heir, and that son died without issue, and only three of the daughters married. Lucy had but the one son, Robert Glynn, and the fifth daughter, Mary, also only a son; and as these sons died unmarried, the estate passed to remote connections.

Robert Glynn assumed his mother's name and succeeded to the estates on the death of his uncle, William Clobery. Robert Glynn was an M.D. and a Fellow of King's College, Cambridge, where he resided. He was a simple-minded man, and was completely taken in by the Chatterton forgeries, and for some time strenuously defended them. On which account Horace Walpole speaks of him with great contempt as "an old doting physician and Chattertonian at Cambridge." "I neither answer Dr. Glynn, nor a poissarde. Twenty years ago I might have laughed at both, but they are too small fry, and I am too old to take notice of them. Besides, when leviathans and crocodiles and alligators tempest and infest the ocean, I shall not go a-privateering in a cockboat against a smuggling pinnace." That was in August, 1792.

Dr. Glynn was very fond of seeing young gownsmen at his rooms, and had tea for them and conversed with them; but he never drank tea himself. C. Carlyon says: "His custom was to walk about the room and talk most agreeably upon such topics as he thought likely to interest his company, which did not often consist of more than two or three persons. As soon as the tea-table was set in order, and the boiling water ready for making the infusion, the fragrant herb was taken, not from an ordinary tea-caddy, but from a packet, consisting of several envelopes curiously put together, in the centre of which was the tea. Of this he used, at first, as much as would make a good cup for each of the party; and, to meet fresh demands, I observed that he invariably put an additional teaspoonful in the teapot; the excellence of the beverage, thus prepared, ensuring him custom. He had likewise a superior knack of supplying each cup with sugar from a considerable distance, by a jerk of the hand which discharged it from the sugar-tongs into the cup with unerring certainty, as he continued his walk around the table, scarcely seeming to stop whilst he performed these and other requisite evolutions of the entertainment."

Dr. Glynn or Clobery would only eat when his appetite summoned him imperiously for a meal. A faithful old servant was in constant attendance upon him, and, whenever his master called out for food, he was prepared to set before him some plain dish and a pewter of porter.

Nothing would induce the doctor to believe that gout was hereditary. He once took occasion to mark this with peculiar emphasis, when a writer signing himself W. A. A. consulted him in his first attack, then in his nineteenth year. He observed, "My young friend, you call this gout! Pooh, pooh! You have not yet earned the costly privilege; you must drink your double hogshead first."

"But my father, sir; it is in my blood by right of inheritance."

His reply was, "You talk nonsense. You may as well tell me you have a broken leg in your veins by inheritance."

One Sunday morning he met an undergraduate of his acquaintance on his way to S. Mary's Church, and said to him —

"Well, my master, and whither are you going?"

"I am going to S. Mary's," replied the young gownsman.

"And who is the preacher to-day?"

"I don't know."

"Not know who is the preacher? Then, upon my word, you have no small merit in taking pot-luck at S. Mary's."

During a long illness the good old doctor attended a poor man, of whose family party a pert, talkative magpie made one; and as the patient observed that Dr. Glynn always, when paying a visit, had some joke with the bird, he thought that perhaps the doctor might like to possess it. Accordingly, when the poor man was well again, with overflowing gratitude, but with no money to pay a bill, he thought he could do no better than make his kind friend a present of the magpie; and sure enough the prisoner in its cage was conveyed to his rooms in King's College. There the bearer met with a very kind reception, but was desired to carry back the bird with him. "I cannot," said the doctor, "take so good care of it as can you; but I shall consider it mine, and I entrust it to you to keep for me; and, as long as it lives, I will pay you half-a-crown weekly for its maintenance."

The anecdote was turned into verse by Mr. Plumtre, and is given in Gunning's Reminiscences of Cambridge. When Dr. Glynn assumed the name of Clobery he assumed also the Clobery arms – three bats; and no animal could better symbolize the man, with his curious blindness to what was obvious to most – that the Chatterton papers were forgeries. He went down to Bristol on purpose to examine the chest with its MS. contents. The fact that in one of them the invention of heraldry was ascribed to Hengest, and that of painted glass to an unknown monk in the reign of King Edmund, did not disturb his faith. He entered into vehement controversy with George Steevens, in his endeavour to establish their genuineness. He waxed hot over it, and it took a good deal to put Glynn-Clobery out of his usual placidity and coolness.

He set up to be a poet. His Seatonian prize poem on the "Day of Judgment" was thought much of at the time. Previously Christopher Smart had won the prize over and over again. Glynn wrested the laurels from him. This is not saying much; his poem was not much better, and not at all worse, than the general run of these prize poems. But it had the advantage of pleasing, and has been repeatedly republished, and has even obtained for the old doctor a niche in the temple of Poesy – a notice in a Biographical Dictionary of Poets.

He died at Cambridge on February 8th, 1800, and at his own desire was buried at midnight in King's College Chapel.

THREE MEN OF MOUSEHOLE

In the year 1849, Captain Allen Gardiner, an intrepid sailor and a religious enthusiast, formed the plan of converting the natives of Terra del Fuego and of Patagonia. He knew nothing of their language or habits, nothing indeed of their land. He was, however, possessed with the idea that he was called to be an apostle of those bleak and fog-wrapped regions. Of all inhabited spots on the earth, the Terra del Fuego is the most miserable. Cold, whirlwinds and tempests of snow and hail, frozen fogs with but rare glimpses of sunshine, form its climate; and the natives are utterly barbarous, apparently the refugees from the Continent, driven out of the somewhat less desolate peninsula of Patagonia by the giants that now possess it, and in their misery sinking to the lowest depths to which man can descend.