Devonshire Characters and Strange Events

“I knawed he’d come,” said Froude to Russell after the visit; “but I reckon he’ll never come again: the air of Knowstone be too keen for he.”

One day his lordship ran against Froude in Fore Street of Exeter. The vicar had with him a greyhound, commonly known in Devonshire as a “long dog.” It was on this occasion that the Bishop tackled him for keeping a pack of harriers, as already related. After that said Henry of Exeter, “And pray, Mr. Froude, what manner of dog do you call that?”

“Oh, that’s what volks do call a long dog, my lord, and ef yeu will just shak yeur appern to un, he’ll go like a dart.”

The Weekly Times of Exeter kept an eye on Froude’s doings and misdoings, and published them under the heading of “Knowstone Again.” But Froude was too sly to enable the Bishop to find an occasion to proceed against him; the people of Knowstone were too much afraid of his vengeance to dare to give evidence.

Froude married a Miss Halse, the pretty sister of two well-known yeomen of Anstey. She was quite young enough to have been his daughter, and they had no children – perhaps fortunately. The circumstances of the marriage are said to have been these. Froude had paid Miss Halse some of his insolent attentions, that meant, if they meant anything, a certain contemptuous admiration. The brothers were angry. They invited him to their house, made him drunk, and when drunk sign a paper promising to marry their sister before three months were up or to forfeit £20,000. They took care to have this document well attested, and next morning presented it to Mr. Froude, who had forgotten all about it. He was very angry, blustered, cajoled, tried to laugh it off – all to no purpose. He was constrained to marry her. And he seems to have been really fond of her. Certain it is that she was warmly attached to him, and after his death would speak of him as her “dear departed saint,” which implies a singular misappropriation of terms, and confusion of ideas.

The following story is on the authority of Jack Russell. He had called one day at Knowstone Parsonage, and found Froude sitting over his fire smoking and Mrs. Froude sitting in the corner of the room against the wall. Her husband had his back towards her. Russell was uneasy, and asked if Mrs. Froude was unwell. Froude turned his head over his shoulder, and asked: “Mrs. Froude, be you satisfied or be you not? You know the terms of agreement come to between us when we married, that I were never to be contradicted and disagreed with. If you are not satisfied you can go back to your friends; I don’t care a hang myself whether you stay or whether you go.”

“I am content,” said the lady faintly.

“Very well,” said Froude; “then we’ll have a drop of ale, Jack. Go and fetch us a jug and mugs, madam.”

His harriers were kept in such a wretched, rattle-trap set of kennels that they occasionally broke loose. This occurred on a certain Sunday, and just as Froude was going up into the pulpit the pack went by. He halted with his hand on the rail, turned to the clerk, and said: “That’s Towler giving tongue. Run – he’s got the lead, and will tear the hare to bits.”

Accordingly the clerk left his desk and went forth, and succeeded in securing the hare from the hounds, hunting on their own head. He brought the hare into the church and threw it under his seat till the sermon was done, the blessing given, and the congregation dismissed.

When Froude got old he was forced by the Bishop to have a curate. “I don’t care to keep dogs to do the barking for me, no fye,” said he, “but I can’t help it. You see, I just maintains a rough boy to do the work now, and I sits in the vestry and hears un tell.”

Between services one Sunday, Froude gave his young curate, who was dining with him and some of his farmer friends, too much of his soft but strong ale. He disliked the young fellow, who was a bit of a clown and uncouth, and did it out of malice. The curate, quite ignorant of the headiness of the ale, inadvertently got fuddled.

The conversation turned on a monstrous pig that Froude had killed, and which was hung up in his outhouse, and he invited his guests to accompany him and view the carcase, and estimate the weight. One thought it weighed so many stone, others thought differently. Froude said that it weighed just the same as his curate, who was fat. The rough farmers demurred to the rector’s estimate, and, finding an empty corn-sack, they thrust the intoxicated ecclesiastic into it, and, hanging him up to the end of the beam, shouted with delight as the curate brought the weight down. Meantime the bells were ringing for evensong, but they left the curate hung up in the sack, where he slept uncomfortably. The congregation assembled for service, and waited. Froude would not officiate, and the curate was incapable of doing so.

Mr. Matthews, afterwards Prebendary of Exeter, had been dining at Southmolton in Froude’s company, and Froude undertook to drive him back to Knowstone in his gig, where Mr. Matthews was to sleep the night. Froude had drunk too much, but insisted on driving home himself. At the bottom of the long street the road crosses the river, and the bridge is set on at an angle to the road. The horse was a spirited animal, and was going home. So down the street they went at a spanking pace, and over the bridge with a whir. Froude had fallen asleep already, but Matthews seized the reins and guided the animal, and thus they narrowly escaped destruction.

Froude slept on, and, arriving at Knowstone, Matthews went in to prepare the young wife to get the rector to bed.

“Oh, what is the matter?” cried Mrs. Froude, when she was informed that her husband was not very well, and had better be put to bed. “Oh! dear lamb” – Mrs. Froude was not happy in her choice of descriptive epithets – “dear lamb, are you ill? Oh dear! dear!” “Nonsense,” retorted Froude, “I bain’t ill. I’m only drunk, my dear, that’s all.”

One day he was riding on the quay at Barnstaple, and asked some question of a bargeman in his boat. The fellow gave him a rude answer. Thereupon Froude leaped his horse down into the barge, and thrashed the man.

In the end, Froude gave up doing duty, and retired into a small house in Molland, as more sheltered than Knowstone. In The Maid of Sker, Blackmore represents him as torn to pieces by his hounds. Actually this was not the occasion of his death. Before his parlour window grew a peculiarly handsome trimmed box-tree. Now Froude had done a mean and cruel act to a young farmer near, tricking him out of a considerable sum of money. One night the box-tree was pulled up by the roots and carried away, no one knew whither, or for certain by whom, though the young farmer was suspected of the deed.

Froude raged over the insult; but as he was unable to bring it home, and as his powers were failing, his rage was impotent.

The uprooting of the box-tree apparently precipitated his death. He felt that the awe of him was gone, his control over the neighbourhood was lost. This thought, even more than mortification at not being able to revenge the uprooting of his box-tree, broke him down, and he rapidly sank, intellectually and physically, and died 9 December, 1852.

A little before his death, Jack Babbage, his huntsman, visited him. “Oh, Jack!” said he, “it’s all over with me. I’m going to glory, Jack” – which shows what is the value of assurance on a death-bed.

“Well,” said Babbage, “if the old master be so cock-sure that he’s on that way, I reckon there be a good chance of a snug corner for me.”

There was another parson, if possible, more evil than Froude, whom Blackmore has called Parson Hannaford, but we have had enough specimens of a type of clergy that is, we trust, for ever passed away; but it has gone not without leaving its mark on the present, for it was this sort of parson who drove all the God-fearing people in the parish into dissent. Happily these men were exceptions even in their day, and were not the rule. The bulk of the clergy were worthy men, doing their duty up to their light, the services in the churches not a little dreary; but then, at that time, it was exceptional to find that the country people could read, and therefore sing out a hymn or psalm with one accord as they can now. They preached dull sermons, because their own minds were not clear. But they were kind, they visited their flock, they were charitable, and their families set a good example in the parish, and had immense influence in purifying the moral tone, and they taught in Sunday-schools. I can recall those old days, and I know that men like Froude and Russell were but spots widely scattered over an otherwise white reputation such as the general body of the clergy bore. But that there were such spots none could deny, and in almost every case the Bishop was powerless to eradicate them.

To a farmer said a vicar of Holsworthy, himself one of the disreputable, who thought fit to reprimand him for his conduct, “Go by the light, man, not by the lantern.” To which the farmer replied, “When the lantern is covered with muck, none can see the light.”

For the account I have given of Parson Froude I am indebted partly to the late Prebendary Matthews, rector of Knowstone after Froude, and also to Rev. W. H. Thornton’s Reminiscences of an Old West-country Clergyman, as well to a Froudiana, a collection made by one who intimately knew the neighbourhood and the individuals, and who most kindly placed his collection of anecdotes at my disposal.

The accompanying illustration represents Jack Russell’s port-wine glass with a fox beautifully cut in it, his barometer, which he probably tapped with his knuckles many a time before he started on a day’s hunting, as well as a Chamberlain Worcester tea service, formerly in his possession. All these were bought after his death at Black Torrington at a sale of his effects, by Miss Bernasconi, now Mrs. Arnull, and presented to the publisher, Mr. John Lane, in whose possession they are. Dr. Linnington Ash on the same occasion purchased several mementoes for his Majesty the King – then Prince of Wales – as well as for himself and other friends.

SAMUEL PROUT

Has full justice been done to Samuel Prout, the artist? I doubt it. True that Ruskin recognized his great merits, but the public generally has not acknowledged, indeed, has not realized, the revolution in taste due mainly to this shy, unassertive man.

What man in his century had dreamed, before Prout issued his sketches, that there was exquisite beauty in old English cottages? He arose at a time when attention was being drawn to Gothic architecture, and there was a growing recognition of its merits in cathedral, church, and mansion. Architects with tape and foot-rule measured and planned, with lead-tape took mouldings. They learned the principles of Gothic and Tudor architecture. They gathered and studied details. But the soul, the spirit escaped them. When they undertook to design and build new churches and mansions, they turned out very poor, uninteresting stuff. Rickman erected the new courts of St. John’s College, Cambridge, a monstrous pile of ugliness, bad even in its details. Blore built the chapel of Marlborough College, a horror, now happily transformed. Sir Gilbert Scott designed numerous churches, all of borrowed detail, and all utterly uninteresting. It was the same on the Continent. In France, Viollet le Duc studied throughout France, knew the purest French styles intimately, but could produce nothing good himself. It was the same with Heideloff in Germany. The inspiration of the Gothic or medieval soul escaped them. It was not to be caught with tape and rule. Their buildings proved correct in many cases, but all cold, unimpressive, and uninteresting. But Prout caught the spirit. He did not measure and scale, but he drew with the breath of the genius of olden time fanning his heart.

And the cottage! Churches and mansions were erected by the new Gothic school throughout the land; they were accepted, but did not please. But no one thought of the cottage, unless it was to be a lodge at a gate. Rows of hideous dwellings for the artisan and the labourer continued to be erected, with tall, lanky doors, a fanlight over them, lean windows, no gables, nothing picturesque about them.

Jerrybuilders covered the suburbs of our towns with their repulsive dwellings, their only idea of decoration being elaborate hip-knobs and ridge tiles. Retired tradesmen and farmers built their residences, disfiguring the countryside with square blocks, a door in the face, a window on each side, and three windows in the upper story, the roof pinched together from all four sides, and two chimneys standing up like donkey’s ears, one on each side of the face. Not till this century, with the creation of the garden city, has Prout’s idea of the dwelling for artisan and labourer, as a thing of beauty, been carried out.

Samuel Prout was born at Plymouth 17 September, 1783. The Prouts were a respectable Cornish family of St. Stephen’s by Launceston, and an heiress of Grenville had married a Prout, and the sister and coheiress a Cary. The family has laid claim to the arms of Prouse of Gidleigh, but can prove no connexion.

Samuel was educated at the Plymouth Grammar School, under the eccentric, worthy Dr. Bidlake, who had an eye for the picturesque, and delighted in taking out his young pupils, Prout and Benjamin Haydon, on holidays for long walks into the country, and pointing out to them scenes of beauty. Dr. Bidlake was, moreover, a bit of a poet, as poets went in those days. He was a good and kindly man, and endeared himself to his pupils.

Prout’s mother was a daughter of a Mr. Cater, an enterprising Plymouth shipping venturer.

Samuel was a delicate boy. One hot autumn day he was out nutting when he was discovered by a farmer lying moaning under a hedge, with his hands to his head. He had been prostrated by sunstroke, and he was carried home in a state of insensibility. From that day forward he was subject to violent attacks of headache, returning at short intervals, and preventing him from sticking to business. Indeed, a week seldom passed without his being confined to his room for a day or two, unable to raise his head from the pillow, and refusing all food. Speaking in later years of his life-long infirmity, he says: “Up to this hour I have to endure a great fight of afflictions; can I therefore be sufficiently thankful for the merciful gift of a buoyant spirit?”

His father, finding him unsuited for any other profession, allowed him to follow his artistic bent, but he was chiefly self-taught. He made friends with young Opie, who painted his portrait. Another was Ambrose Bowden Johns, born in Plymouth in 1776. He had been a bookseller, but his passion was for landscape art, and he gave up his business to become a painter. Johns had the advantage of age and experience, and he was able to give Prout much good advice. Noticing that his young friend loved chiefly to draw old houses and architectural scraps, he urged him to devote himself especially to that line, and not to cultivate landscape and figure drawing. Boats Samuel ever delighted in, and sketched them excellently.

“Thenceforth,” to quote Ruskin, “Prout devoted himself to ivy-mantled bridges, mossy water-mills, and rock-built cottages.”

But he knew nothing of perspective, and his drawings were sadly inaccurate in this respect. He himself wrote in after years, as the result of his own experience: “Perspective is generally considered a dry and distasteful study, and a prejudice exists with many against everything like geometrical drawings; but without a knowledge of its rules no object can be properly delineated, and their application alone prevents absurdities and secures symmetry and truth.”

The Earl of Mount Edgcumbe took notice of the intelligent, sensitive boy, and detected that there was talent in him. He invited him to Mount Edgcumbe House to see and examine for himself the paintings and pictures there; and the Earl became so interested in the young artist, and would have him so frequently with him, that Samuel at last acquired the nickname of “the Earl’s puppy dog.”

Samuel Prout was also passionately fond of music, and learned to play on the organ, the piano, and the flute. In early days, when not out sketching by himself or with Dr. Bidlake or Haydon, he would steal to St. Andrew’s to play the organ, at that time the only organ in the town.

Meanwhile, on every sunny day, when the soft south wind breathed, Samuel, pencil and sketch-book in hand, strayed about the villages round Plymouth, and made his sketches, not of bold architectural structures, but of cottages and little bits of street scenery. He loved the old wall where the granite blocks were irregularly jointed, and saxifrage, sedum, and wallflower had rooted themselves in the interstices. He loved to stray by the seashore or to wander about Sutton Pool and the Barbican and draw the ships and fishing smacks he saw there. At the time when he was young, Plymouth abounded in quaint old houses that had been inhabited by its great merchants, with overhanging gables and mullioned windows. These are now almost all gone.

On returning from one of his wanderings, he called on Mr. Johns with his portfolio in his hand. Johns asked him how many sketches he had made and what success he had met with. Prout, bursting into tears and wringing his hands with grief, replied: “Oh, Mr. Johns, I shall never make a painter as long as I live.”

Johns then turned over his collection of sketches, and noticing the power shown in the drawing of old cottages and mills, said, “If you won’t make a landscape painter, you will make a painter of architecture, and I recommend you to stick to that.” Encouraged by this, he went away rejoicing that there was still a field open to him in Art.

Whilst still quite a lad, accident made him acquainted with John Britton, who was passing through Plymouth on his way into Cornwall, collecting materials for his Beauties of England and Wales, begun in 1801, and carried on to 1818. Immediately after Prout’s death, Britton published an account of his first acquaintance with him in the Art Journal for 1852. He says that he first saw Samuel Prout, “a pretty, timid boy,” at Dr. Bidlake’s school, and that Prout occasionally accompanied his drawing master, S. Williams, to Bickleigh Vale, and made sketches of the rude cottages and bits of rock scenery he found there.

These Britton saw and liked, and proposed to Prout to take him with himself into Cornwall, paying all his expenses, that the lad might make for him the drawings he required. Samuel gladly consented, and the two started for St. Germans through a heavy fall of snow, and put up at a wretched inn there. “The object of visiting the place,” says Britton, “was to draw and describe the old parish church, which is within the grounds of the seat of Port Eliot, belonging to Lord Eliot. Prout’s first task was to make a sketch of the west end of this building, which is of early Norman architecture, with two towers, one of which is square, the other octagonal. Between these is a large semicircular doorway, with several receding arches, but there is very little of other detail. My young artist was, however, sadly embarrassed, not knowing where to begin, how to settle the perspective or determine the relative proportions of the heights and widths of parts. He continued before the building for four or five hours, and at last his sketch was so inaccurate in proportion and detail that it was unfit for engraving.” In fact, Britton had set the poor lad a task for which he was wholly incompetent. Next morning Prout began another sketch, and persevered in it in spite of the cold and discouragement nearly all the day, but the result was again a failure.

Then Britton travelled on with him to Probus, and set him to draw the wonderful sculptured tower of that church, the richest piece of work of the kind in the west of England. It is built of elvan and is not merely sculptured throughout, but has pinnacled buttresses with crockets and finials. Prout worked hard at this all day, and though Britton accepted the drawing, it was bad. “The poor fellow cried, and was really distressed, and I felt as acutely as he possibly could, for I had calculated on having a pleasing companion upon a dreary journey, and also to obtain some correct and satisfactory sketches. On proceeding further, we had occasion to visit certain druidical monuments, vast rocks, monastic wells, and stone crosses on the moors north of Liskeard. Some of these objects my young friend delineated with smartness and tolerable accuracy. We proceeded on to St. Austell, and thence to Ruan-Lanyhorne, where we found comfortable quarters in the house of the Rev. John Whitaker, the historian of Manchester, and author of several other literary works. Prout, during his stay at Ruan, made five or six pleasing and truly picturesque sketches, one of which included the church, the parsonage, some cottages mixing with trees, the water of the river Fal, the moors in the distance, and a fisherman’s ragged cot in the foreground, raised against and mixing with a mass of rocks; also a broken boat, with net, sails, etc., in the foreground.” The next halting place was Truro, and there Prout made a sketch of the church and the houses about it. But here again he was embarrassed with the mullioned windows and the general perspective, and was particularly troubled with the iron railings that surrounded the church. Here they parted; Britton went forward on his way to Penzance and the Land’s End, and Prout was sent back, a poor disheartened lad, who felt that he had missed his vocation, by coach to Plymouth. But the disappointment did Samuel good. He had learned in what his weakness lay, and he resolved to labour hard to acquire the rudiments of perspective.

In May, 1802, he sent Britton several sketches of Launceston, Tavistock, Okehampton Castle, and other places, showing a considerable advance in his powers, and some of these were engraved. Britton saw enough to convince himself that Prout had exceptional genius for catching the spirit of architectural work, and that all he required was technical training, and he sent for him to London, kindly undertaking to give him a room and food in his house in Wilderness Row, Camberwell, whilst prosecuting his studies in Town. Here he remained for about two years, and was introduced to Northcote and Benjamin West, the latter of whom gave him valuable hints on the management of chiaroscuro, and Prout often recurred to his meeting with West and to the utility his advice had been to him. In 1803 and 1804 Britton sent Prout into Cambridge, Essex, and Wiltshire to make sketches and studies of buildings. Some of these were engraved in his Beauties, and others in Architectural Antiquities, 1835.

In the year 1805, Prout returned to Plymouth mainly on account of his health and his headaches, which unfitted him for prosecuting his studies with ease and energy.

He had in the previous year sent his first picture to the Royal Academy, and he was for the next ten years an occasional exhibitor, his subjects being mainly views in Devonshire and coast scenes. His simple drawings, says Mr. Ruskin, were made for the middle classes, even for the second order of the middle classes.

“The great people always bought Canaletti, not Prout. There was no quality in the bright little water-colours which could look other than pert in ghostly corridors and petty in halls of state; but they gave an unquestionable tone of liberal-mindedness to a suburban villa, and were the cheerfullest possible decoration for a moderate-sized breakfast parlour opening on a nicely-mown lawn. Their liveliness even rose, on occasion, to the charity of beautifying the narrow chambers of those whom business or fixed habit retained in the obscurity of London itself.”

After about six years of earnest work in Devon, he returned to London and took up his abode in Brixton, and three years after he married (1810) Elizabeth Gillespie. There were pleasant meetings in town with his fellow Plymothians. Haydon was there full of enthusiasm and enormous self-confidence, and Eastlake, who had already made his mark and was rapidly rising into fame; an occasional visit was made to the surly Northcote, but from him little encouragement was to be obtained. To maintain himself, Prout gave lessons in drawing, and sent pictures to the Watercolour Society, and succeeded in selling them. In 1816, Ackermann published his Studies in parts, executed in the then new art of lithography. This was followed by Progressive Fragments, Rudiments of Landscape, and other collections of instructive drawings. How perfectly Prout mastered the technicalities of lithography may be seen by some of his late works on tinted paper, with introduction of white, as, for instance, his Hints on Light and Shade, etc., published in 1838. In the introduction to that he tells his own experience.