Chapter VIII: Part 8

But this Bill roused serious opposition. It was felt by all who had any respect and feeling for the Church, as one in all times from the Apostolic period, who regarded her claim to maintain the same faith, the same Apostolic constitution and the same sacraments, as from the earliest age of the Church, that this Comprehension Bill if it became law must of necessity alienate them from such a body--drenched with Protestantism, till scarcely a tinge of the old wine of Catholicism remained in her; and would leave them no other course open than to shake off the dust of their feet against her and join the Church of Rome, or the Church of the Nonjurors. Most of the bishops who had taken the oaths to William and Mary were placed on the Commission; and with them were joined twenty priests of note. Of these twenty, Tillotson was the most important as expressing the mind and wishes of the King. He was a latitudinarian, without a spark of feeling for historic Christianity. With him went Stillingfleet, Dean of S. Paul's, Sharp, Dean of Norwich, Patrick, Dean of Peterborough, Tenison, Rector of S. Martin's, and Fowler. But conspicuous on the other side were Aldrich, Dean of Christ Church, and Jane, Regius Professor of Divinity at Oxford.

Early in October, 1689, the commissioners assembled in the Jerusalem Chamber. But hardly had they met before Sprat, Bishop of Rochester, started up and denied that the Commission was legal. There was a sharp altercation, violent words were flung about, and Sprat, Jane, and Aldrich withdrew. The strength of the Catholic party was broken, and the rest agreed to sanction nearly all the changes advocated by those who desired to entirely alter the character of the Church.

"They had before them," Burnet tells us, "all the exceptions that either the Puritans before the war, or the Nonconformists since the Restoration, had made to any part of the Church service; they had also many propositions and advices that had been offered, at several times, by many of our bishops and divines upon those heads; matters were well considered and freely and calmly debated; and all digested into an entire correction of everything that seemed liable to any just objection." To guide them, as Burnet admits in his Triennial Visitation Charge of 1704, they were furnished with a great collection of the books and papers in which the Dissenters had at different times set forth their demands. The Commission was prepared to surrender everything. The chanting of psalms, even in cathedrals, was to be done away with. The lessons from the Apocrypha were to be abolished. The Saints' days omitted from the Calendar, the form of absolution altered, remission of sins to be removed from it "as not very intelligible." The cross in baptism, the use of god-parents, the wearing of the surplice were to be optional. Episcopal ordination was not to be required of the Ministry. Kneeling to receive the Holy Communion was left to the choice of the Communicant; the collects, as too concise, were to be blown out with pious bombast.

It is possible that, as Calamy asserts, such alterations as these would have brought over two-thirds of the English Dissenters to the Established Church; but it is certain that it would have driven two-thirds of the members of the Church, lay and clerical, out of her, as having forfeited her claim to be a branch of the Catholic Church, and they would probably have swelled the ranks of the Nonjurors, and made of that communion a body that would have really represented the Church in England.

Owing to the secession of the Nonjurors, sees and benefices had been filled with men who were in sympathy with the views of Tillotson and Burnet, or who were only solicitous to live in the smiles of William. Little resistance, if any, was to be expected from the episcopal bench.

When the Commission had concluded its labours, writs were issued summoning the Convocation of the Province of Canterbury. The clergy were in a ferment throughout England. They thought that the heritage of faith was going to be taken from them. The Toleration Act had removed the disabilities of the Dissenters; they might build their conventicles and preach what and when they liked; why, then, open the doors of the Church to admit them as a flood to swamp the faithful?

When the Declaration of Toleration had been issued by James II, in 1687, removing all disabilities from the Dissenters, on the sole understanding that they should abstain from attacking the Churches of Rome and England, their preachers found that they had nothing to say. They preferred to be under disabilities rather than give up assaults on the Scarlet Woman, Babylon, the Beast, and Prelacy, its shadow.

When Convocation was elected, it became evident to all that the bulk of the priests were against all watering down of the formulas of the Church, her faith, her ritual. The most important office in Convocation was that of Prolocutor of the Lower House. The Prolocutor was to be chosen by the members; Tillotson was proposed by the Protestant party as one whom the King delighted to honour, and who it was well known would be appointed to the Archbishopric of Canterbury when vacant.

On November 20th, Convocation met in Henry VII's Chapel at Westminster. "Compton was in the chair. On the right and left those suffragans of Canterbury who had taken the oath were ranged in gorgeous vestments of scarlet and miniver. Below the table was assembled the crowd of presbyters. Beveridge preached a Latin sermon, in which he warmly eulogized the existing system, and yet declared himself favourable to a moderate reform." In a word, he blew hot and cold with the same breath.

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 call
To 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 brave
That 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 Egloshayle
Can 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 man
That 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 sore
Hath 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.

FOOTNOTES:

[14] _Deanery of Trigg Minor_, I, p. 301.

[15] At S. Breward the bells were cast in a small garden outside the churchyard fence, since called "Bell garden."

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.

During a year or more Captain Gardiner's efforts to rouse interest in his scheme, sufficient interest to make the money flow, had met with no success. He applied to the Moravian Brethren to take up the mission; they declined. Then he placed the matter before the Scottish Establishment, but the canny Scotchmen would nae think ov it. At last a lady at Cheltenham furnished him with £700, and this, with £300 from his own private purse, formed all the resources on which he acted. As he could not afford to charter a schooner, he had four open boats built for him at Liverpool. Two of these were launches of considerable size, to which he gave the names of the _Speedwell_ and the _Pioneer_; the other two were small dinghies, to be used as tenders or luggage boats.

_the last Person who could converse in the Cornish language?_]

Captain Gardiner now looked about him for enthusiasts like himself to share the perils and the possible glories of spreading the gospel over Terra del Fuego, in which not a cross had been planted nor the Word of God proclaimed.

He secured the services of a surgeon, a missionary, and from Mousehole, near Penzance, drew three sturdy Cornish sailors, or fishermen--John Pearce, John Badcock, and John Davy Bryant--who little knew what risks they ran.

The party left England on September 27th, 1850, in the ship _Ocean Queen_, bound from Liverpool to California, taking with them their boats and six months' provisions. They were landed on the inhospitable foreign shore on the 5th December.

Pinkerton, in his _Modern Geography_, thus graphically describes the scene of their projected labours:--

"A broken series of wintry islands, called Terra del Fuego, from two or more volcanoes which vomit flames amidst the dreary wastes of ice. Terra del Fuego is divided by narrow straits into eleven islands of considerable size. In their zeal for Natural History, Sir Joseph Banks and Doctor Solander had nearly perished amid the snows of this horrible land; but they found a considerable variety of plants. The natives are of a middle stature, with broad flat faces, high cheeks, and flat noses, and they are clothed in the skins of seals. The villages consist of miserable huts in the form of a sugar loaf, and the only food seems to be shell-fish."

The lack of common prudence, of common sense, exhibited by Captain Gardiner is astounding. Here was he, with a party whom he had beguiled to attend him, dropped in this barren country wrapped in snow and fog, without an interpreter, and consequently without the means of communication with the inhabitants should they come across them. From the moment that the sails of the _Ocean Queen_ disappeared behind the rocks on her way to double Cape Horn, the eye of no civilized man ever saw these brave sailors and missionaries alive. All that is known of them has been gathered from the papers subsequently found.

Seven men in all, with four open boats, were left on the most inhospitable coast that could be found, where there is little food to be got, where vegetation is scarce. Their resolution was heroic, but the whole enterprise was madness.

They soon found that the _Pioneer_ leaked. In several short voyages from island to island and from shore to shore they encountered numberless mishaps. The natives were by no means friendly, and as they approached their villages, brandished their weapons and drove them away. At other times the Fuegians simulated friendship, so as to get at the stores and plunder them. During a storm both of the dinghies were lost with all their contents, on which they relied for support for six months. Next they found that they had no gunpowder; it had been left inadvertently in the _Ocean Queen_, so that they had no means of shooting birds or other animals. Then their anchors and spare timber were carried away. As far as we can judge, they seem to have been curiously helpless persons. With clubs they might have killed the sea-elephants, whose flesh would have sustained them and their skins clothed them.

Thus wore away the month of January, 1851, and not the first step had been taken towards acquiring the confidence of the natives. All the time had been spent in a struggle for the maintenance of their own lives. On February 1st the _Pioneer_ was shattered in a storm, and now they had only the _Speedwell_ to voyage in, a vessel whose name mocked their misery.

They all saw now, even the enthusiast Gardiner, that they had embarked on an impossible task, and without further thought of spreading a knowledge of Christianity among the dirty, treacherous, flat-nosed and stupid natives, their only consideration was how they might get away.

Arrangements had been made before starting for sending out to them fresh supplies, but by various unfortunate mischances this had not been done. They turned their eyes vainly eastward; not a sail was seen to raise their hopes.

Some of the men became ill with scurvy, and the boats were used as hospitals, the men that were sound retiring to caverns. A few fish and fowl were caught, and eggs were procured. So March and April dragged along; and then the Antarctic winter began, adding snow and ice to their other troubles. What herbs to gather, how the natives protected themselves against scurvy, does not seem to have occurred to these unfortunates. They sat and shivered and lamented their fate and lost all hope. From the middle of May they were all put on short allowance, owing to the rapid disappearance of the supply of food they had brought ashore. At the end of June, Badcock, one of the Mousehole men, died, worn out with scurvy. There is an entry in Gardiner's diary, about the end of June, enumerating the provisions still left, and among them were "six mice," concerning which he wrote: "The mention of this last item in our list of provisions may startle some of our friends should it ever reach their ears; but circumstanced as we are, we partake of them with a relish; they are very tender, and taste like rabbit." A solitary penguin, a dead fox, a half-devoured fish thrown up on the shore--all were welcomed by the half-starved men. When August came, the strength of the entire party was well-nigh at an end. A few garden-seeds were made into a soup, and mussel-broth was served out to the invalids. Captain Gardiner himself lived on mussels for a fortnight, and then, as this disagreed with him, was compelled to give up the diet. He would have lain down and died of starvation had he not found a vegetable that he could eat, and on this he rallied for a while.

On the 23rd, Erwin, a boatman, died, exhausted by hunger and disease. On the 26th, Bryant, the second Mousehole man, expired. Pearce, the remaining boatman, went nearly mad at the loss of his companions and the hopelessness of the outlook. Mr. Maidment, the missionary, had just strength sufficient to dig a grave in which to bury the two poor fellows. He then made a pair of crutches with two sticks, on which Captain Gardiner might lean when walking. He lived in the cavern, and tried to hobble down to those who were in the _Speedwell_, but his strength was not equal to the task, and he had to retire to his cave.

Maidment was the next to succumb, on September 2nd. Pearce, and Williams the surgeon, were in the _Speedwell_, and it was as much as they could do to obtain a few shell-fish for themselves; but they soon lay down and died. When Gardiner also yielded up the ghost is not known, but he had strength to make an entry in his diary on the 6th; there is none on the 7th.

On the 21st January, 1852, H.M.S. _Dido_ arrived at Terra del Fuego and found the remains of this unhappy party of religious enthusiasts. The first thing seen was a direction scrawled on a rock; then a boat lying on the beach of a small river; then the unburied bodies of Captain Gardiner and the missionary Maidment; then a packet of papers and books; then the scattered remains of another boat, with part of her gear and various articles of clothing; then two more corpses; and lastly the graves of the rest of the party.

"Their remains," wrote Captain Morshead, of the _Dido_, "were collected together and buried close to the spot, and the funeral service read by Lieutenant Underwood. A short inscription was placed on the rock near his own text; the colours of the boats and ships were struck half-mast, and three volleys of musketry were the only tribute of respect I could pay to the lofty-minded man and his devoted companions."

DOLLY PENTREATH

Much has been written about Dolly Pentreath, but little is known of her uneventful life. That little may be summed up in few words.

Her maiden name was Jeffery, and when she was a child her parents and all about her spoke the Cornish language. Drew, in his _History of Cornwall_, quoting Daines Barrington, says: "She does indeed talk Cornish as readily as others do English, being bred up from a child to know no other language; nor could she (if we may believe her) talk a word of English before she was past twenty years of age."

In the year 1768 the Hon. Daines Barrington, brother of Captain, afterwards Admiral, Barrington, went into Cornwall to ascertain whether the Cornish language had entirely ceased to be spoken, or not, and in a letter written to John Lloyd, F.S.A., a few years after, viz. on March 31, 1773, he gives the following as the result of his journey:--

"I set out from Penzance, with the landlord of the principal inn for my guide, towards Sennen, or the most western point; and when I approached the village I said that there must probably be some remains of the language in those parts if anywhere, as the village was in the road to no place whatever, and the only ale-house announced itself to be the last in England.

"My guide, however, told me that I should be disappointed, but that if I would ride about ten miles about on my return to Penzance he would conduct me to a village called Mousehole, on the western side of Mount's Bay, where there was an old woman, called Dolly Pentreath, who could speak Cornish fluently. While we were travelling together towards Mousehole I inquired how he knew that this woman spoke Cornish; when he informed me that he frequently went from Penzance to Mousehole to buy fish, which were sold by her; and that when he did not offer her a price that was satisfactory, she grumbled to some other old women in an unknown tongue, which he concluded, therefore, to be Cornish.

_From a drawing by Captain Tremenhere_]

"When we reached Mousehole I desired to be introduced as a person who had laid a wager that there was not one who could converse in Cornish; upon which Dolly Pentreath spoke in an angry tone for two or three minutes, and in a language which sounded very like Welsh. The hut in which she lived was in a very narrow lane, opposite to two rather better houses, at the doors of which two other women stood, who were advanced in years, and who I observed were laughing at what Dolly said to me.

"Upon this I asked them whether she had not been abusing me; to which they answered, 'Very heartily,' and because I had supposed she could not speak Cornish.

"I then said that they must be able to talk the language; to which they answered that they could not speak it readily, but that they understood it, being only ten or twelve years younger than Dolly Pentreath.

"I continued nine or ten days in Cornwall after this, but found that my friends whom I had left to the eastward continued as incredulous almost as they were before about these last remains of the Cornish language, because, among other reasons, Dr. Borlase had supposed, in his _Natural History of the County_, that it had entirely ceased to be spoken. It was also urged that, as he lived within four or five miles of the old woman at Mousehole, he consequently must have heard of so singular a thing as her continuing to use the vernacular tongue.

"I had scarcely said or thought anything more about this matter till last summer (1772), having mentioned it to some Cornish people, I found that they could not credit that any person had existed within these few years who could speak their native language; and therefore, though I imagined there was but a small chance of Dolly Pentreath continuing to live, yet I wrote to the President, then in Devonshire, to desire that he would make some inquiry with regard to her; and he was so obliging as to procure me information from a gentleman whose house was within three miles of Mousehole, a considerable part of whose letter I subjoin.

"'Dolly Pentreath is short of stature, and bends very much with old age, being in her eighty-seventh year, so lusty, however, as to walk hither to Castle Horneck, about three miles, in bad weather, in the morning and back again. She is somewhat deaf, but her intellect seemingly not impaired; has a memory so good, that she remembers perfectly well, that about four or five years ago at Mousehole, where she lives, she was sent for by a gentleman, who, being a stranger, had a curiosity to hear the Cornish language, which she was famed for retaining and speaking fluently, and that the innkeeper where the gentleman came from attended him.

("This gentleman," says Daines Barrington, "was myself; however, I did not presume to send for her, but waited upon her.")

"'She does, indeed, talk Cornish as readily as others do English, being bred up from a child to know no other language; nor could she (if we may believe her) talk a word of English before she was past twenty years of age, as, her father being a fisherman, she was sent with fish to Penzance at twelve years old, and sold them in the Cornish language, which the inhabitants in general, even the gentry, did then well understand. She is positive, however, that there is neither in Mousehole, nor in any other part of the county, any other person who knows anything of it, or, at least, can converse in it. She is poor, and maintained partly by the parish, and partly by fortune-telling and gabbling Cornish.'

"I have thus," continued Mr. Barrington, "thought it right to lay before the Society (the Society of Antiquaries) this account of the last sparks of the Cornish tongue, and cannot but think that a linguist who understands Welsh might still pick up a more complete vocabulary of the Cornish than we are yet possessed of, especially as the two neighbours of this old woman (Dolly Pentreath), whom I had occasion to mention, are not now above seventy-seven or seventy-eight years of age, and were healthy when I saw them; so that the whole does not depend on the life of this Cornish sybil, as she is willing to insinuate."

It is matter of profound regret that no Welshman did visit Dolly, who lived for four years after Mr. Barrington's letter, which was written in 1773, for she died December 26th, 1777.

Drew says: "She was buried in the churchyard of the parish of Paul, in which parish, Mousehole, the place of her residence, is situated. Her epitaph is both in Cornish and English."

Coth Doll Pentreath cans ha Deau;
Marow ha kledyz ed Paul plêa:--
Na ed an Egloz, gan pobel brâs,
Bes ed Egloz-hay coth Dolly es.

Old Doll Pentreath, one hundred aged and two,
Deceased, and buried in Paul parish too:--
Not in the Church, with people great and high,
But in the Churchyard doth old Dolly lie!

This epitaph, written by Mr. Tomson, of Truro, was never inscribed on her tombstone, for no tombstone was set up to her memory at the time of her death. The stone now erected, and standing in the churchyard wall and not near her grave, was set up by Prince Louis Lucien Bonaparte in 1860, and contains two errors. It runs: "Here lieth interred Dorothy Pentreath, who died in 1778." In the first place she does not lie where is the stone, and in the second place she died 1777, on December 26th, and was buried on the following day.

In 1776 Mr. Barrington presented a letter to the Royal Society of Antiquaries written in Cornish and in English, by William Bodener, a fisherman of Mousehole. This man asserted that at that date there were still four or five persons in Mousehole who could talk Cornish.

In 1777, the year of Dolly's death, Mr. Barrington found another Cornishman named John Nancarrow, of Marazion, aged forty-five years, able to speak Cornish. John Nancarrow said that "in his youth he had learned the language from the country people, and could thus hold a conversation in it; and that another, a native of Truro, was at that time also acquainted with the Cornish language, and like himself was able to converse in it."

This last is supposed to be the Mr. Tomson who wrote the epitaph for Dolly Pentreath which was never set up.

In Hitchens' and Drew's _History of Cornwall_, it is said: "The Cornish language was current in a part of the South Hams in the time of Edward I (1272-1307). Long after this it was common on the banks of the Tamar, and in Cornwall it was universally spoken.

"But it was not till towards the conclusion of the reign of Henry VIII (1509-47) that the English language had found its way into any of the Cornish churches. Before this time the Cornish language was the established vehicle of communication.

"Dr. Moreman, a native of Southill, but vicar of Menheniot, was the first who taught the inhabitants of this parish the Lord's Prayer, the Creed, and the Ten Commandments in the English tongue; and this was not done till just about the time that Henry VIII closed his reign. From this fact one inference is obvious, which is, that if the inhabitants of Menheniot knew nothing more of the English than what was thus learnt from the vicar of the parish, the Cornish must have prevailed among them at that time ... and as the English language in its progress travelled from east to west, we may reasonably conclude that about this time it had not penetrated far into the county, as Menheniot lies towards its eastern quarter.

"From the time the liturgy was established in the Cornish churches in the English language, the Cornish tongue rapidly declined.

"Hence Mr. Carew, who published his _Survey of Cornwall_ in 1602, notices the almost total extirpation of the language in his days. He says, 'The principal love and knowledge of this language liveth in Dr. Kennall the civilian, and with him lyeth buried; for the English speech doth still encroach upon it and hath driven the same into the uttermost skirts of the shire. Most of the inhabitants can speak no word of Cornish; but few are ignorant of the English; and yet some so affect their airs, as to a stranger they will not speak it; for if meeting them by chance you inquire the way, or any such matter, your answer shall be, "_Meea naurdua cowzasourzneck?_" (I can speak no Saxonage).'

"Carew's _Survey_ was soon followed by that of Norden, by whom we are informed that the Cornish language was chiefly confined to the western hundreds of the county, particularly to Penwith and Kirrier, and yet (which is to be marveyled) though the husband and wife, parents and children, masters and servants, etc., naturally communicate in their native language, yet there is none of them in a manner but is able to converse with a stranger in the English tongue, unless it be some obscure people who seldom confer with the better sort. But it seemeth, however, that in a few years the Cornish will be by little and little abandoned."

The Cornish was, however, so well spoken in the parish of Feock by the old inhabitants till about the year 1640, "that Mr. William Jackman, the then vicar, and chaplain also of Pendennis Castle, at the siege thereof by the Parliament army, was forced for divers years to administer the sacrament to the communicants in the Cornish tongue, because the aged people did not well understand the English, as he himself often told me," says Hals.

So late as 1650 the Cornish language was currently spoken in the parishes of Paul and S. Just; the fisherwomen and market-women in the former, and the tinner in the latter, for the most part conversing in their old vernacular tongue; and Mr. Scawen says that in 1678 the Rev. F. Robinson, rector of Landewednack, "preached a sermon to his parishioners in the Cornish language only."

Had the Bible been translated, had even the English Prayer-book been rendered into Cornish, the language would have lived on. It is due to a large extent to this--the translation into Welsh--that in Wales their ancient language has maintained itself.

The editors of the _Bibliotheca Cornubiensis_ state that Dorothy Jeffery, daughter of Nicolas Pentreath, was baptized at Paul 17th May, 1714; and they conclude that she was the Dolly Pentreath who died in 1777, and that her age accordingly was sixty-three and not one hundred and two.

But this is a mistake. Dolly was a Jeffery by birth and married a Pentreath.

A story is told of Dolly in Mr. J. Henry Harris's _Cornish Saints and Sinners_, "as current in Mousehole, but whether true or well conceived it is not possible for me to say."