The Benevolent Man: A Life of Ralph Allen of Bath [Reprint 2014 ed.] 9780674733824, 9780674733817

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The Benevolent Man A LIFE OF

Ralph Allen of Bath

RALPH

ALLEN

Drawing by William Hoaie, 1758

The Benevolent Man A LIFE OF

Ralph Allen of Bath

BENJAMINS BOYCE

HARVARD

UNIVERSITY

PRESS

Cambridge, Massachusetts

1967

© Copyright 1967 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College All rights reserved Distributed in Great Britain by Oxford University Press, London Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Hyder Edward Rollins Fund Library of Congress Catalog Card Number 67-11667 Printed in the United States of America

Préfacé

Eighteenth-century Englishmen liked to turn away from the ugly realities around them to contemplate the appealing idea of a Benevolent Man, a truly generous, innocent, amiable, Christian gentleman. Though the image may have originated in pictures of the happy man (beatus Ule) encountered by schoolboys in their study of Latin poetry, it had modern support in the Latitudinarian doctrine of good works and in Lord Shaftesbury's optimistic theory of man's natural goodness. In a period of Whiggish cooperation between government and trade it was especially attractive; the wealth accumulating in the hands of the middle classes could be sanctified, and the social order strengthened, by liberal charities. The theme lent itself to delightful variation, Sir Roger de Coverley and Pope's Man of Ross, Parson Adams and Squire Allworthy, Steele's Bevil Jr. and Richardson's Grandison, Goldsmith's Man in Black and Sir William Thornhill and the Vicar of Wakefield, with many others less familiar. Ralph Allen, appearing on the scene, gave historical credibility to the literary fictions, and his contemporaries tended, as his fame spread, to see him as an ideal example of wealthy benevolence and pious goodness. It seems worth one's while to discover what sort of life such a man might in fact lead. Previous discussions of Allen have usually presented him in separate phases — his relationship with Pope, or Fielding, or with the Post Office — yet to discover what the actuality of this particular Benevolent Man was, the story should be told in chronological order, with business and family and literary friends and architecture and politics appearing side by side as in life. The nature of the material creates one problem: though so much of Allen's milieu can be reconstructed, his inner experience can only be guessed at. He did more than anybody else to cause an increase in letter writing; yet his own letters are steadily, excessively, even absurdly laconic and conventionalized. Although his disposition was reserved, exploratory, V

Preface and he was reticent about his own feelings, he delighted in the company of animated talkers and original thinkers. This is therefore a chronicle of a busy, important life and a sociable household. Pope's many letters to and about Allen; the confused and sometimes utterly unreliable memoirs of Richard Jones, Allen's foreman of works, compiled long after Allen's death, when Jones was nearly senile; the more polished and less domestic recollections of Parson Graves of Claverton — these and the reports of his stiff-minded nephew-in-law Warburton are the major bases for interpreting Allen's private attitudes and character. But innumerable glances and opinions scattered about in the writings of other contemporaries and his own business correspondence fill out the picture. I have tried to make it true; Allen prevents one's making it wickedly delightful or psychologically astonishing. A list of persons to whom I have become in various ways obligated during the preparation of this book would be too long to be interesting, though it would assemble just such a company of benevolent characters as Pope and Fielding and Allen would like us to think about — office clerks and a former mayor, bishops and parish priests, officers of Her Majesty's Post Office, expert librarians and archivists everywhere, collectors of manuscripts and curators of museums, matrons of hospitals, descendants of eighteenth-century Bathonians, and learned professors. To this large, generous company I offer my heartiest thanks. Many will be mentioned in footnotes, but several to whom I am especially indebted must be named at once — the late George Sherburn, who at the outset encouraged me with interesting suggestions and provided, in his admirable edition of Pope's correspondence, one of the basic sources for my work; at the General Post Office in London, Mr. E. C. Baker, Archivist, and Mr. G. W . P. Devenport, who cordially facilitated my researches in the Record Room and archives; at St. Bartholomew's Hospital, Dr. Nelly T . M . Kerling, Archivist; the Bishop of Worcester, who kindly granted me permission to see Bishop Hurd's library at Hartlebury Castle, and the Rev. Dr. P. C. Moore, who obligingly opened the library for my exploration; Mr. John Kerslake, Assistant Keeper, National Portrait Gallery; Professors Richmond P. Bond, Oliver W . Ferguson, Louise Hall, Howard Robinson, and George Walton Williams; Mr. Lawrence E . Tanner, Librarian and Keeper of the Muniments, Westminster Abbey; Mr. James M . Osborn and Professor Frederick W . Hilles, both of New Haven, Conn., who generously allowed me to reproduce Ralph Allen letters in their colvi

Preface lections; the Rev. G. R . Polgrean, Vicar of St. Blazey, Cornwall; Mrs. Kathleen Batchelor of the Old Cornwall Society of St. Austell; Mr. T . S. Wragg, Librarian at Chatsworth; the Director and staff of the Bruce Castle Museum, Tottenham. In Bath, assistance was offered without limit on all sides. Mr. William E. Eyles, of the Town Clerk's Office and Muniment Room at the Guildhall, gave me convenient access to Council records and other documents whenever I needed to consult them. At the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases Miss Elizabeth D. Abbott, Matron, made work on the old papers a pleasure; to her and to the Secretary, Mr. H. Bond, I record my very real thanks. At Prior Park College the Rev. Brother R . B. Beattie, President, and more recently the Rev. Brother Cowley, Vice President, received me with the greatest courtesy and hospitality; I am most grateful for the privileges they allowed me in my several visits to Prior Park. Because of the thoughtfulness of Mr. Jasper Huish-Baker I was able to inspect what remains of Ralph Allen's town house. Miss E. J. D. Morrison of Claverton supplied valuable bibliography. Mr. Peter Pagan, Director of the Bath Reference Library and Victoria Art Gallery, Miss Elsie A. Russ and Miss C. M . L. Munday, Assistant Librarians, Miss Carrol Jenkins, and other members of the staff made available the rich resources of the Library with unwearied kindness. My debt to them is very great. Miss Russ, who called my attention to documents I should never have thought to look for, will be the first to see gaps and blunders in my re-creation of eighteenth-century Bath. T o Major Adrian E. Hopkins, authority on postal history, thrice Mayor of Bath, devoted and energetic student of the antiquities and the presentday welfare of his city, and to Mrs. Hopkins, I have the liveliest sense of indebtedness. By explaining laws, opening doors, asking awkward questions, carrying me to manors and graveyards, and performing numerous other services, Major Hopkins did all any one person could to increase my knowledge of my subject. Michael Cunard Allen, Esq., of London and Bowdon, Cheshire, received inquiries about the brother of his ancestor, Philip Allen, with the greatest liberality and helpfulness. He and his parents, the late Reginald Cunard Allen and Mrs. Allen, hospitably allowed me to examine family records, portraits, letters, and other treasures. Amiability and good deeds did not terminate with the eighteenth-century Aliens. And Dorothy M . G. Boyce, who became interested in Ralph Allen early, has walked many miles and scanned many books and manuscripts

vii

Preface

to further our knowledge of his life. Finally, for grants in aid of research I make grateful acknowledgment to the American Council of Learned Societies, to the Cooperative Program in the Humanities of Duke University and the University of North Carolina, and to the Duke University Council on Research. The Clarendon Press, Oxford, has kindly permitted me to include many excerpts from The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, edited by George Sherburn ( 5 vols., 1956). That I am enormously grateful for permission to use and reproduce manuscript material in the British Museum, the Bath Reference Library, Her Majesty's General Post Office, the Bodley, the University of Texas Library, Hartlebury Castle, Penzance Library, and other libraries and archives goes without saying. Thanks are due also to the National Buildings Record, Royal Commission on Historical Monuments, for photographs of Prior Park. In quotations from manuscripts and printed texts, eighteenth-century abbreviations (w: ch and rec:d and M: r and such things) have been expanded or regularized. Modern usage has been followed also in respect to i and /', u and v, and italics. Unless otherwise noted, the place of publication of all works cited is London. B.B.

viii

Contents

I II

The Beginnings: Ralph Allen and Early Bath

1

Introduction to the Post Office, 1712-1720

10

III

Young Businessman and City Father, 1721-1728

24

IV

Stone, Hospitals, Deputy Postmasters, and Money, 17291734

40

The Larger Life: Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite, 1734-1740

56

Prior Park, 1741-1742

98

V VI VII

The End of the Friendship with Pope, 1743-1745

141

VIII

Squire Allen Becomes Squire Allworihy, 1745-1749

163

IX X XI XII

The Ordinary Life of the Famous Mr. Allen, 1750-1153 192 At Three Score Years, 1754-1756

213

The Benevolent Man Supports the Great Commoner, 17571760 237 The Final, Troubled Years, 1761-1764

262

Index

299

ix

Illustrations

Frontispiece: Drawing of Ralph Allen by William Ho are, 1758 Courtesy the Trustees of the British Museum Following page 162 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10.

Portrait of Allen by Johan Van Diest, c. 1728 Courtesy the Mayor of Bath Map of Widcombe, from Thomas Thorpe's Actual Survey of the City of Bath, 1742 Courtesy Bath Reference Library Prior Park, Engraving by Anthony Walker, 1752 Courtesy the British Museum Prior Park, South Front Courtesy National Buildings Record Prior Park, North Front Courtesy National Buildings Record Prior Park: Plan of the Principal Story; Drawing by John Wood, 1737 Courtesy Bath Reference Library Prior Park: Cross-section of the Rooms on the North Front; Drawing by John Wood Courtesy Bath Reference Library Prior Park: The Chapel Courtesy National Buildings Record Prior Park: View from the Portico toward Bath Photograph courtesy T. J. Montgomery Buildings Belonging to Ralph Allen: Drawings on the Survey Map of his Estates in Widcombe, Bathampton, and Claverton Courtesy Bath Reference Library a. Hampton Manor House b. Gardener's House, Prior Park c. Sham Bridge at Serpentine River, Prior Park d. The Lodge, Prior Park e. Gothic Temple in the Woods, Prior Park xi

Illustrations 11. Sham Castle on Bathampton Down Facing Bath Courtesy H. M. Postmaster General 12. Palladian Bridge, Prior Park Courtesy National Buildings Record 13. The Knights of Bay the, or the One Headed Corporation, 1763 Courtesy British Museum 14. Claverton Manor House, Drawing by S. H. Grimm, 1790 Courtesy British Museum 15. Bust of Allen by Prince Hoare, 1757 Photograph Bolwell; Courtesy Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases

xii

The Benevolent Man A LIFE OF

Ralph Allen of Bath

Abbreviations

and Short

Add. MSS. Borlase

Titles

British Museum, Additional Manuscripts Borlase Correspondence in Penzance Library, Morrab Gardens, Penzance Egerton British Museum, Egerton Manuscripts Evans A. W . Evans, Warburton and the Warburtonians. 1932 G.P.O. Archives, General Post Office, St. Martin's-le-Grand, London Jones Richard Jones's autobiographical sketch, transcription by "C. G." (1858) in Bath Reference Library John Nichols, Illustrations of the Literary History of Nichols, Illusi. the Eighteenth Century. 8 vols., 1817-1858 Nichols, Lit. Knee. John Nichols, Literary Anecdotes of the Eighteenth Century. 9 vols., 1812-1815 Peach R. E. M. Peach, The Life and Times of Ralph Allen. 1895 Pitt, Corr. Correspondence of William Pitt, Earl of Catham, ed. W . S. Taylor and J. H. Pringle. 4 vols., 18381840 Pope, Corr. The Correspondence of Alexander Pope, ed. George Sherburn. 5 vols., Oxford, 1956 [Warburton,] Letters from a Late Eminent Prelate, Prelate ed. Richard Hurd. New York, 1809 RAON Ralph Allen's Own Narrative 1720-1761, ed. Adrian E. Hopkins. Postal History Society Special Series No. 8. Bath, 1960 St. Barth. St. Bartholomew's Hospital Manuscripts. The numbers given in footnotes are shelfmarks. Triñers Richard Graves, The Triñers. 1806 Letters from the Reverend Dr. Warburton, Bishop of Gloucester, to the Hon. Charles Yorke, from 1752 Warburton-Yorke to 1770. 1812 John Wood, An Essay towards a Description of Bath, 2d ed. 2 vols., 1749 Wood, Essay

XIV

I Τ he Beginnings: Ralph Allen and Early Bath

Ralph Allen, a self-made man, ought to be introduced without ancestors. His friend Alexander Pope described him as "low-born," and we might leave the matter thus. But two different Cornish towns confidently claim him as a native son, and there are legends about his forebears to be mentioned. On July 24, 1693, Ralph Allen, son of Philip, was baptized in the parish church of St. Columb Major, Cornwall. W e may assume, in view of the extreme care with which parish officers at this time limited the right of christening to recognized members of a parish, that his parents were residents of that town. 1 Ralph's mother was from St. Austell,2 and his father Philip was one of the several children of Reskymer and Gertrude Kete Allen of St. Columb Major. Reskymer was at one time a shopkeeper in that town paying an annual rent of forty-two shillings six pence; 3 in his will, made just before his death in 1689, he called himself "innkeeper." A century later (1797) a tourist in Cornwall, the Rev. John Skinner, was shown a stone cottage on the road from St. Blazey (which is about a dozen miles southwest of St. Columb) to nearby St. Austell in which, he was told, Ralph Allen was born. Because Skinner had formerly lived in a house in Claverton belonging to Allen's estate he was moved to make a drawing of the cottage "as a lesson for industry, since this truly great man, 1 See Arthur J. Jewers, Registers of the Parish of St. Columb Major, Cornwall, from the Year 1539 to 1780 ( 1 8 8 1 ) , p. 78; J. H. Rowe, " T h e Parentage and Ancestry of Ralph Allen," Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, X V I I I ( 1 9 1 0 - 1 1 ) , 3 6 5 373; The Western Independent, Oct. 30, 1955. 2 A. L. Rowse, St. Austell: Church, Town, Parish (St. Austell, Cornwall, 1 9 6 0 ) , p. 33. 3 See letter from Mrs. R . R . Hyde of Feb. 7, 1906, in Bath Reference Library, which draws on the St. Columb parish records. Rowe indicates that Gertrude's family, the Ketes, were of the gentry. Ralph Allen's grandfather Reskymer Allen was the son of Thomas Allen of St. Columb (baptized July, 1 5 9 6 ) , who was the son of John Allen of St. Columb (married Nov., 1594, to Johane T r u s c o t t ) . T h e latter information was kindly supplied by Michael C . Allen with the assistance of the College of Arms.

ι

The Benevolent

Man

without friends, or interest, or even education, beyond that of a common school, was able to push his fortune in the world, and secure the friendship of the great." 4 The cottage, said Skinner, "had nothing to recommend it, beyond other cottages." In 1724 Ralph's father, Philip, owned and occupied property in St. Blazey which he mortgaged to Ralph for £206.® Possibly Philip had purchased the cottage that Skinner commemorated soon after Ralph's birth and moved his family into it. A report from Skinner® that Ralph's father was a "laborer" seems to contradict the assertion, apparently first put into print in 1816, that Philip Allen kept an inn in St. Blazey;7 neither assertion can be documented from contemporary evidence. But if this cottage had once been an inn, it seems not to have been used for that purpose in 1797. Late in 1704, when Ralph was eleven, a post office was established in St. Columb on the new post road from Launceston to Falmouth, and the first postmaster was "Rober Allen." 8 In 1706 and 1707 the postmaster was "Reskemer Allen," until in the latter part of 1707 and up to March 25, 1708, Gertrude Allen assumed the office. On March 26, 1708, Blyth Haycroft began her long incumbency. Just how these Aliens were related to Ralph is not certain. The name "Rober" does not appear in the best available genealogy of Ralph Allen and may be a faulty transcription. Ralph's grandfather died in 1690; so the postmaster Reskemer probably was Ralph's uncle, the oldest son of the elder Reskymer; he, with his wife Gertrude, had been the executor of the will of the elder Reskymer and was his chief heir. Possibly the Reskimer Allen of St. Columb to whom Ralph Allen left an annuity of £20 in a codicil of his will made on July 6, 1763, was a son of this uncle. As for the postmistress Gertrude Allen, she may have been Ralph's aunt, though the sentimental image suggested by Richard 'Add. MSS. 33635, fol. 143. Skinner was undoubtedly the "young gentleman" who showed Richard Graves a "drawing of the house, where Mr. Allen was born"; see Triflers, p. 61. Skinner's colored drawing is in Add. MSS. 33635, fol. 144. "Peach, p. 53. •Add. MSS. 33635, fol. 22. 7 R. Polwhele, The History of Cornwall, IV (1816), 140. Polwhele supplies an unimportant anecdote about Philip's conduct toward an incognito vote-seeker which he says he obtained from a "respectable correspondent." Francis Kilvert, Ralph Allen and Prior Park (1857), p. 5, attributes to the Vicar of St. Blazey the assertion that Philip Allen kept a public house, the Duke William Inn, on the St. Blazey highway. In 1955 the Postal History Society mounted a bronze tablet on a building at 51 St. Austell Road, Biscovey (or St. Blazey), which appears to be the cottage drawn by Skinner but in an altered form. The plaque speaks of the building as "the old Duke William Inn" and "the very early home and traditional birthplace" of Ralph Allen. It was this act of veneration at St. Blazey which caused the St. Columb Parish Council to place on record St. Columb's claim to Allen as a native son. 8 General Accounts for the year ending March 25, 1705, G.P.O. 2

Ralph Allen and Early Bath Graves of the clever and eager child learning the postal business from his grandmother is more appealing, and it could be correct. If we accept that identification we might also assume that it was the grandmother Gertrude Allen who, along with Ralph, invested in the new Avon Navigation stock company in 1724, and that it was she who died and was buried in St. Columb in 1725.9 Philip Allen had at least three children besides Ralph, and Ralph maintained friendly relations with them or their children until his death. His brother Philip, a year younger than he, became his assistant and closest associate in his business enterprises in Bath. His sister Elizabeth in 1722 married William Tucker of St. Blazey. After her death in 1731 and Tucker's second marriage, her children, Gertrude and William Tucker, were to become more or less regular members of Ralph Allen's household. His younger sister Gertrude in 1732 in St. Blazey became the wife of Richard Elliott of St. Austell; to their daughter and her husband, Thomas Daniel of Truro, Allen eventually sent stone from which they built a fine house.10 Although Ralph's father seems to have stayed in Cornwall at least until 1724, when he died in 1728 he was buried in the Abbey Church, Bath. 11 Facts about Ralph Allen's boyhood are few and the legends dubious. W e might ignore the matter entirely if there were not the interesting question of how he so early in life managed to leave Cornwall and in far-away Bath become the postmaster, or deputy postmaster, to use the correct label for the person in charge of a post office. In the "Narrative" of his career in the postal service which he presented to the Postmaster General in 1761 he referred to his having become deputy in Bath in 1710 — at the age of seventeen, that is. But probably this was, rather, the year in which he moved to Bath. The records of the General Post Office in London indicate that he did not become deputy postmaster in Bath until March 26, 1712. The legend that Ralph had worked in his grandmother's post office in St. Columb was first offered in print in Richard Graves's The Triflers in 1805. Graves knew Allen only from 1749 to his death in 1764, and his book was written forty years after Allen's death. But even without personal acquaintance he could have guessed that as a boy Allen had had "a turn for "Registers of the Parish of St. Columb Major, p. 261. T h e "Mansion House" in Prince Street, Truro, still standing. I owe this information and transcriptions of the relevant Allen and Tucker entries in the St. Blazey parish registers to the kindness of the Rev. G. R. Polgrean, M.A., Vicar at St. Blazey. See also W . H. Tregellas, Cornish Worthies ( 1 8 8 4 ) , I, 2 5 - 2 6 . u Registers of the Abbey Church . . . Bath, ed. Arthur J. Jewers ( 1 9 0 0 ) , II, 421. 10

3

The Benevolent

Man

business, a cleverness in arithmetic, and a steadiness of application." Graves explains further that the neat and accurate accounts kept by the boy for his grandmother so much impressed a visiting post-office inspector that he advocated his seeking a larger opportunity, and the boy had then moved to Bath. Perhaps Graves was mixing up with St. Columb the assertion made much later by Allen himself that he had secured his first contract with the Postmaster General partly because of a report turned in by a post-office surveyor who had been struck by the rare faithfulness of his accounts in Bath. An additional explanation of Allen's arrival in Bath comes from the autobiography of his foreman, Richard Jones, written about a dozen years after Allen's death. His statement is that his employer was "brought to Bath by one Sir John Trevelyan, and being a scholar, he was placed to one Mr. Quaish, then Postmaster of all the Cross Posts."

12

But as Quash

was never the deputy at Bath, there is something obscure if not incorrect in Jones's sentence. T h e probability is that Allen first moved from Cornwall to Exeter, 1 3 where Joseph Quash was deputy postmaster as early as 1695 and holder of a monopoly or "farm" of certain parts of the service of the Post Office as early as 1698. Allen perhaps came to Exeter about 1708. He may have had relatives there, for many years later he inherited property in that city. As for Sir John Trevelyan, an important landowner in the neighborhood of Taunton and a member of Parliament from Somerset, his connection with Allen is known only from Jones's remark, but if somehow he had been led to interest himself in the youth from Cornwall, his patronage would have been helpful in either Exeter or Bath. 1 4 T o the latter city Allen moved in 1710 or before, at the age of seventeen or less. There were Aliens in Bath already. One George Allen in 1711 and again in 1713 obtained the right, for a rental of £230, to operate the pumps in the King's Bath and the Hot Bath, receiving the usual fees and gratuities. A John Allen was butcher as well as town crier in 1721 and 1722. But if Ralph was related to any of these people I have not found the evidence. T h e young man's settling in Bath must have been due primarily to opJones, p. 11. " T h i s suggestion was made by Major Adrian E . Hopkins in RAON, pp. 1 2 - 1 3 . 11 Michael C . Allen has proposed to me the following hypothesis to explain the Trevelyan connection. There were Aliens at Bampton, Devon, in the early seventeenth century who bore for arms the same ones as are inscribed on the memorial tablets in the Bathampton church for various relatives of Ralph Allen. Nettlecombe, the Trevelyan family seat, is about thirteen miles from Bampton. Ralph Allen may have been a relative of the Bampton Aliens, who may have been acquainted with Sir John Trevelyan and have called his attention to their promising young kinsman. 13

4

Ralph Allen and Edrly Bath portunities with the postal service. Quash's postal business in the West Country had produced heavy financial burdens, and if Allen was working for him, either he or Allen may have seen an advantage in the young man's departing from Exeter for Bath. In February of 1712 Allen assumed the management of the new cross-road posts at Bath. Mrs. Mary Collins, the deputy there, had not handled cross-road mail and possibly needed help. On March 26 he superseded her as deputy and began receiving a salary.15 Thus in his nineteenth year with an appointment from Her Majesty's Postmaster General he was launched. One may safely guess that he was excited by his new surroundings. The range and éclat of his various achievements before he died would hardly have been possible for a mind lacking imagination or a temperament lacking eagerness. By the time he settled in Bath, the town had begun its much-needed refurbishment; changes were in progress that he was to encourage and implement. Bath was, of course, unique. Possessed of natural springs that poured forth unfailingly day and night, winter and summer, an even flow of the hottest mineral water in Britain (120° Fahrenheit in the King's Bath), the town had a gold mine, and at last the citizens were taking measures to exploit their advantages more suitably. In the previous century several royal persons had honored Bath with a visit, Anne of Denmark (for whom the Queen's Bath was named), Catherine of Braganza, and Mary of Modena (whose Popish presence was memorialized by the erection in the Cross Bath of a tall marble monument with Italianate dome and saints and cupids and cross). In 1692 Princess Anne, accompanied by Prince George and the Duchess of Marlborough, came to Bath. The triumphant style of her return as Queen in 1702 and 1703 filled the town and flooded the environs with temporary lodgers. Bath was a small place confined within walls, its buildings old and crowded together, its resident population perhaps not more than two or three thousand people.16 The streets, though less narrow and dark than those in nearby Bristol, were often muddied by the damp which, said a malicious visitor, had settled there forever — "a City standing in a Hole, and built on a Quagmire." The approaches to the town over the surrounding hills were greatly improved by 1720 so that one could then make the General Accounts 1711-1720, G.P.O. This estimate is based upon T. S. Cotterell, "Life in Bath in the Eighteenth Century," British Architects Conference (Bath, 1928), p. 22, and W . S. Dakers, John Wood & His Times (Bath, 1954), p. 6. John Chamberlayne's Magnae Britanniae ( 1 7 3 2 ) , p. 15, says there were 8000 families in Bath, but this figure must have included all the year's visitors. 15

18

5

The Benevolent

Man

one-hundred-seven-mile trip from London in "a good Glass Coach, with Four Horses" at any time of year. Inside the town, streets were being paved and lighted at night. T h e old Guildhall still stood out in the High Street; close to it was the Abbey Church, its air of sobriety often contradicted by the idle spectators standing at the balustrades of the baths below. T h e Abbey Church, a late Gothic structure whose nave had stood roofless until about 1620, was not wholly devoted to sacred purposes when Allen came to Bath; stalls and sheds built against its north side clogged the passage around it so that the public, moving between the promenade walks to the east and the baths to the west, had become accustomed to using the aisle of the church as a thoroughfare. T h e Abbey Church, complete or incomplete, was not the greatest thing of its kind in Britain, but the hot wells were. In 1710 there were five baths or "cisterns" all within a half-acre triangle starting close to the Abbey Church with the King's and Queen's Baths, the former larger (fiftyseven feet by forty feet) and hotter than the latter, which was filled from it. T h e Queen's Bath, twenty-four feet square, was partially screened from the winds but not as clean as it should be, according to John Wood. 1 7 T h e twenty-foot-square Cross Bath was still cooler. It was protected from the winds by walls on which, at either end, were galleries where "the Company that does not Bathe that day walkes in and lookes over into the bath on their acquaintance and company."

18

This was still the fashionable bath

when Ralph Allen moved to town, and it was of course pleasanter to use in summer than the Hot Bath a few yards away. T h e Leper's Bath, filled by the overflow from the Hot Bath, was for the benefit of poor folk suffering from "leprosy" and scabs and other skin diseases and was only eight feet by ten in size. Perhaps the horses' bath, likewise made by overflow, should also be mentioned in an account of a town so constantly full of travelers. By 1710 the rituals were well established for the entire century. Naked bathing, except for young children, was no longer allowed. People of quality rented the usual costume of fine stiff yellow canvas (the water changed any white cloth to yellow), drawers and waistcoat for men; for ladies a gown "made large with great sleeves like a parsons gown; the water fills it up so that its born off that your shape is not seen."

19

Dur-

" Wood, Essay, II, 263-264. 18 Celia Fiennes, Through England on a Side Saddle In the Time of William and Mary (1888), p. 12. " Ibid., p. 13.

6

Ralph Allen and Early Bath ing his first visit in 1714 Alexander Pope wished that Teresa and Patty Blount were there to charm the gazers by "a moving and easy behaviour in buckram: something betwixt swimming and walking, free enough, yet more modestly-half-naked than you appear any where else." 2 0 One stood in the opaque water or sat up to the neck in one of the little niches built into the walls of the baths, with music playing meanwhile to keep up people's spirits. Male and female guides in and out of the water were available for assistance to the unsteady; one was advised to leave if a fainting-fit threatened. Entrance and exit were by short flights of steps. A little door could be closed behind a person as he climbed out of the bath; the canvas outfit was shed as an attendant flung a flannel garment over the bather, but only a few damp little dressing-rooms were available in which a fire could be lighted. All the baths were open to sky and rain and the westerly winds; to avoid exposure after emergence from the hot waters, the usual practice was to get immediately, wrapped in flannel and "nightgown," into a Bath chair, lined with red baise and curtained in front, and be carried directly to one's lodging, even to one's bed, there to lie between blankets and "sweate some tyme as you please." Near the King's Bath was a pump for pouring hot water on a lame limb or on the head of a victim of palsy. One paid two pence plus a gratuity for a hundred pumpings. Since the Restoration, drinking the waters had come into use, and the closer to the pump one consumed the steaming liquor the less offensive its taste and smell, the "more spiriteous" its quality.21 Captivated by the beneficence of water, the doctors sometimes recommended cold bathing, and in 1707 a plunge bath had been built in a cold mineral well across the river at the foot of Widcombe hill. Ralph Allen may have liked it; many years later he built a cold bath on his estate at the top of that hill. Bathing arrangements being what they were, people naturally liked to lodge close by; this was one reason why the overcrowded town did not more quickly spread out geographically. Directly opposite the Cross Bath was St. John's Hospital, an ancient almshouse intended to house twelve indigent men and women. The City Council in the previous century had permitted someone to add extra rooms and make money out of the institution under a fraudulent lease. Just when Ralph Allen arrived in town an effort to restore the place to its proper function was in progress. In 1726 the enterprising Duke of Chandos secured permission to rebuild the alms" Pope, Com, I, 257. Fiennes, p. 14. According to Wood (Essay, I, 7 0 ) , the hot water brought a gas out of the earth of "exalted Vitriolick Steel." 21

7

Τ he Benevolent

Μαή

house, again with upper stories and a square court of buildings besides; the proximity to the steamy baths more than offset the awkwardness to rich and fortunate people of dwelling above, or next door to, an almshouse. An augury of the imminent building boom was the erection, beginning in 1706, of a row of houses along the gravel walks east of the Abbey Church, with a handsome pavement of stone "for the Company to walk upon." Thatched roofs were being replaced with tile; sash windows were coming in. Already Bath was becoming, in spite of certain discomforts, a delightful holiday resort as well as a place where the most dissimilar ailments — so people said — could be remedied. Beyond the Church were orchards and gardens leading down to the Avon, in which boys swam and fished (and occasionally drowned). According to a petition of 1711, there should be boat traffic with Bristol, the second-largest city in England only a dozen miles away. Though Bristol also had mineral wells, Bath easily surpassed it in possessing the gayest and most fashionable society outside London. The Queen's visits in 1702 and 1703 had put a stamp on Bath. Not only seekers after health thronged in, but also merchants, farmers with goods to sell, gamblers (professional and amateur), beggars, and seekers of fortuneby-marriage of both sexes and all ages. A few years before young Allen settled in Bath, Richard Nash had arrived, the quondam soldier and lawyer who as beau and good-hearted gambler established himself as master of ceremonies in the Guildhall ballroom and the Pump Room and brought some degree of order and decorum into the amusements of the motley, transient crowds. Twenty years older than Allen and a florid sort, he was never to become a favorite with the younger man, though they worked together on important municipal projects. The handsome, arched Pump Room, erected 1704-1706, was in a few years too small for the ever larger company. Furthermore, there was "no Place belonging to it for the Invalids to retire into, when the Waters begin to operate." 22 In a few decades it was replaced with something better. The Guildhall provided insufficient space for dancing and cards; so Harrison's ballroom was built in 1708. For other entertainment during idle hours there were bowling, walking, the puppet-shows, and when Pope was there in 1714, "the Chocolate houses, Raffling Shops, Plays, Medleys, &c." Life had not yet lost its country relaxation. Across the river one could see fields and farming; green, treeless hills, the clouds above them always changing, surrounded the town. Cheddar, Devizes, Wells, and Chippenham were not much more distant than Bristol and made their 23

Wood, Essay, II, 270.

8

Ralph Allen and Early Bath various contributions; Gloucester and Salisbury were not excessively remote from the town that somehow, in spite of accelerating gaieties and a reputation for gambling, continued to attract Deans, Canons, and Bishops. And the road from London was always busy.

9

II Introduction to the Post Office 1712-1720

Half a century after Ralph Allen began working for the Post Office in Bath he calculated that in his lifetime he would have brought to the Postmaster General an increase in revenue of about a million pounds and to the nation a tremendous improvement in the carriage of letters and, consequently, in "the Life of Trade." His postal contracts, he gratefully acknowledged, had generously provided for him and his family. Unusually intelligent, unusually inventive, farsighted, and industrious, he had been capable of recognizing an opportunity and of advancing through and beyond it. As his wealth and dignity increased, his conception of what he might do with his life widened. But it is fair to say that everything of interest in his life was a consequence of his success in the carriage and delivery of mail. During thirty years of generous association with Pope and Fielding, with scholarly clergymen, with distinguished lawyers and doctors and military commanders, with London printers and publishers, with hospital boards and local politicians, with members of the royal family and the Government's chief minister, Allen was steadily attentive to the details of his postal system. Though he seems not to have had the habit of discussing the intricacies of this remarkable enterprise with his friends and his guests, it was none the less his daily preoccupation. In the early eighteenth century a country postmaster (or deputy postmaster, as he was officially called) ordinarily was a tavern keeper, innkeeper, owner of stables, or tradesman of some other sort. The salary allowed him by the Postmaster General in London for receiving, sending out, and delivering letters would be insufficient to support him; the deputy at Bath, for example, was paid only £25 annually. But the deputy possessed the sole right to rent horses to travelers "riding post," and was allowed to pocket the fees from both traveler and the postboy hired to act as his 10

Introduction

to the Post Office

guide. Another inducement to a business person to undertake the often troublesome postal duties, especially at a "stage" where horses and boys ended their run, was that travelers as well as local people would be brought to the door as potential customers for whatever was sold there. A deputy had the privilege of sending and receiving his own letters free, a sizable advantage to some businesses, and he received the gazettes without paying postage. Often, too, he took advantage of vagueness in the postal laws to extract a penny or more as a gratuity for the local delivery of a letter. Each month or quarter he was to report to the Postmaster General the amount of postage taken in by him, which, after certain deductions, he was expected to remit to London. His work could be done well or badly, honestly or otherwise. It was in the correction of illicit withholdings from income due the Government that Ralph Allen saw a route to fortune and public service. Bath had been made a "stage" or end-of-a-run for postboys and horses in 1675-76. 1 Mary Collins had been deputy since 1690 and by 1710 may have established her post office in a surviving fragment of the Norman church of St. Michael near the conjunction of Westgate Street and St. Michael's Lane. 2 This was close to St. John's Hospital and the Cross Bath. It is possible that Mary Collins, a widow when she died in 1720, was connected with an inn or alehouse in or near old St. Michael's. 3 If she was, young Ralph, besides busying himself with mailbags and accounts and post horses, probably had some employment in the sort of business that his grandfather and, it would seem, his father had known. A letter written by him in October, 1712, seven months after he became postmaster, 1 Roger Whitley's Letter-Books, G . P . O . In this sketch of postal matters I am, of course, indebted to Herbert Joyce's History of the Post Office ( 1 8 9 5 ) and to Howard Robinson's The British Post Office: A History (Princeton, 1 9 4 8 ) . 3 This ruined St. Michael's is not to be confused with the St. Michael's Church, also in bad repair, outside the North Gate about which John W o o d had so much to say in his Essay. According to a contemporary Chancery Bill dealing with the scandalous mismanagement of St. John's Hospital, the old St. Michael's chapel was "sometimes turned into an alehouse, and at other times into a post-office"; see Richard Warner, History of Bath (Bath, 1 8 0 1 ) , Appendix, p. 79. ' T h e Minutes of the Bath Council for 1722 include (p. 2 7 9 ) the cancellation of a lease to " W m Collins of this City Innhold: ffrances his wife, and W m Collins his son." In 1719 Mary Collins, widow, held a tenement in Westgate Street, where in 1 6 9 4 (according to Joseph Gilmore's map of 1 6 9 4 ) there had been three inns. Later, after Allen moved his large postal business to his house near the Abbey Green, a tavern and lodging house were operated in a new building erected (in place of a former one?) in St. Michael's Lane next door to the "Old Post House," the residue of St. Michael's Church, for a wine merchant named Carey; see C . H. Collins Baker and Muriel I. Baker, The Life and Circumstances of James Brydges, First Duke of Chandos (Oxford, 1 9 4 9 ) , pp. 323, 326, 328.

11

The Benevolent Man indicates that he was still someone's employee. The letter, addressed to Oswald Hoskyns in London, requests payment on two notes for £52/5/0 to the credit of "my Master." 4 Though in sending the letter he used the franking privilege of his office, he none the less wrote "By my masters orders." His salary as deputy postmaster of £25 was soon to be considerably augmented by that of £110 for handling the cross-road posts plus £20 for two letter-carriers;5 but as the latter two stipends were not recorded in the accounts of the Postmaster General until 1714 and probably were not allowed until then, Allen may have been glad to work for another "Master" until his postal business became better ordered and more profitable. The historic Post Office "Charter" of 1660, although it had left many gaps and ambiguities in the framework of rules for the system, established the basic procedures. 6 For a letter not exceeding one sheet to be carried not more than eighty miles the postage was two pence; distances above eighty miles required more. Two sheets were charged double. The postboy carrying the mail (never under fourteen years of age but often much, much older) was to travel at a speed of five miles per hour, and the deputies, with horses always in readiness, were not to detain the mail more than half an hour between coming and going. They were to unseal and open only the bags for their own town, keeping an account of the money arising from their contents, for the postage on all but "bye-way" letters was paid by the addressee, not the sender. 7 Six main post roads radiated out of London, the North Road through York to Edinburgh; the road to Chester; the road to Bath and Bristol; the West Road to Exeter, Plymouth, and Truro; the Dover Road; and the Ipswich-Yarmouth Road. Subsidiary local routes branched off from many towns on the main post roads. As the bag traveled along the main road or branches, a printed form accompanied it on which the deputy was supposed to record the date and the number of letters passing to or through London (called "country letters") and also those passing along the road from one town to another but neither reaching nor starting in London ' Original in Bath Reference Library. General Accounts, 1711-1720, G.P.O. "An invaluable analysis (entitled "A Generali Survey") of the Post Office made in 1677 by Thomas Gardiner, Controller of the Inland Branch, helps us to understand how the system worked and what some of its weaknesses were. The "Survey" has been edited by Foster W . Bond for the Postal History Society, Special Series No. 5 (Bath, 1958). 7 In a letter to a surveyor Ralph Allen carefully explained that bye letters are "all those that goe not to, or come not from London (or beyond it) that either goe out of [one] Stage, & Branch, or are delivered in it, not being paid for in any other place" (Allen's Instruction Book to Surveyors, 1729-1740, fol. 108, G . P . O . ) . B

12

Introduction

to the Post Office

(called "bye-way" or "bye" or "way" letters). The amount of prepayment for the bye letters and the amount to be collected for the others would be noted on the form. A second ticket or label was to accompany each bag on which the exact hour of receiving and dispatching the mail would be recorded by each deputy along the way. Thus if everyone did his duty — which was too much to expect — there would be a record of everyone's work along the route; the postal service would be reliable and prompt. The deputies (about three hundred in 1713) would have a moderately rewarding business arrangement, and the Postmaster General would collect a large income for the Treasury. But the service was still relatively new and in some ways primitive. Many parts of the country had a lamentably insufficient supply of post offices, and the services where available might be infrequent, irregular as to hour, slow, and, wherever a deputy decided to charge extra for delivery, expensive. People often discovered that they could do better by sending letters by carters or drivers of stagecoaches, though such methods were from time to time declared illegal as defrauding the Government of the income due to it for maintaining a postal system. There were plain inequities caused by the particular layout of the roads. Two towns fairly close together might be served by different main roads, so that mail between them had to travel along one road to London and be sent out from there on another. As the postage increased after eighty miles (and apparently the mileage always ended and recommenced at London), this system might make correspondence between a pair of towns on two different main roads both slower and more expensive than between some other pair (perhaps farther from each other) on one post road. An imaginative and energetic management could, of course, have remedied many of these difficulties and extended the service widely. But the Government continued to regard the Post Office not as a necessary, important service to the nation but as a source of revenue. The Post Office was under the control of the Lords of the Treasury, who late in the seventeenth century inaugurated the custom of appointing two men to act together as "the Postmaster General." The latter, with large salaries, turned over the management of the service to subordinates, but any proposed changes or extensions had to be carried beyond them to the Lords of the Treasury for approval. The best way to avoid levies on their time or intelligence, the Postmasters General must have decided fairly early, was to "farm out" certain parts of the service for a fee to individuals who would bear the risks and take the profits for any new developments. 13

The Benevolent Man The notorious difficulty was the leakage of revenue from the bye-way letters.8 These letters, traveling between two towns on one road, did not reach London and were therefore not subject to the scrutiny usual in the General Post Office. It was easy for country deputies to agree among themselves not to record bye letters and to pocket the postage. Letters going only from one stage to the next could be handled in this way especially well. As early as 1674, Roger Whitley, the assiduous Deputy Postmaster General, was trying to farm the bye letters, no doubt thinking that the various "farmers" could and would keep a closer watch than an occasional inspector from London. But he had the greatest difficulty in securing competent and reliable men to manage this service. A dozen years later the farms had become large enterprises. The most impressive early exploiter of the possibilities was Stephen Bigg, who took a "farm" in 1687 of certain towns in Hertfordshire, Buckinghamshire, and Warwickshire which in 1699 he surrendered in favor of another venture in the neighborhood of Liverpool and Manchester. His contracts for both called for a larger payment to the Government after the first year; in the Liverpool-Manchester contract (£2526 annually) he was to keep only two-thirds of the produce after the first year, the sort of limitation on privacy and profits that Ralph Allen fortunately was able always to avoid in his Post Office contracts. Other men, occasionally in partnership, held large postal farms in various parts of England before 1700, and many localities ignored by the remote Postmaster General profited from these contracts. Some of the farms included the entire postal business of an area at a large rental; some covered only the slippery bye letters. Such projects preceded Ralph Allen's in giving "satisfaction to the people and encouragement to the revenue.9 A very much needed service called cross-road posts seems to have been instituted originally within a farm. The first recorded arrangement was begun in June, 1696, to carry letters between Exeter and Bristol twice weekly in both directions. The two cities, each more than eighty miles from London but only seventy-six miles apart, were on different post roads; by the old scheme a letter from one city to the other would go via London, the postage totaling six pence (three pence to London, three pence from London). The cross-road carriage reduced the postage "Gardiner's Survey, ed. Bond, p. 18. * The phrases are from the Treasury warrant to Stephen Bigg and apply to his twelveyear operation of the Herts, and Bucks, farm. See Calendar of Treasury Books, X V (1933), 396.

Introduction

to the Post Office

to two pence and the time accordingly. This new post was set up by Joseph Quash, deputy in Exeter, and Henry Pine, deputy in Bristol. Because of the probability that Ralph Allen had some early connection, perhaps an informal apprenticeship, with Quash, it behooves one to notice the career of this enterprising man. 10 He reminds one of his contemporary, Daniel Defoe, another projector who could see the possibilities in new business schemes to benefit both entrepreneur and the public, and who plunged into them eagerly but somehow failed to achieve a profitable business for himself with them. Ralph Allen proved to be a more successful projector. When the cross-road post was opened in 1696 from Exeter northward, Quash contracted to farm the bye letters along this route as well as the cross-road letters, paying an annual rental of £140. He seems to have been allowed to keep the proceeds from payments in Exeter but to have passed on to the Treasury the receipts in the intervening towns; he probably paid the deputies a small salary for handling the bye letters and post horses. The amount of mail rapidly increased. Quash's indebtedness to the Treasury at the end of the year (March, 1699) for receipts just from the regular mail was ominously large. In 1700 a long extension of the cross-road post was set up from Bristol to Chester, and Quash's salary was increased by £ 5 0 . n In 1703 still another extension of postal service out of Exeter was inaugurated, this time to Truro by way of Bodmin. By the end of 1704 an office was set up at St. Columb with various members of the Allen family undertaking the duties of deputy postmaster. They must have been aware of Joseph Quash. By March 25, 1706, Quash's annual fee for his farm of the cross-road letters had been increased to the sum of £600, probably either because the territory of his farm was made greater or because his initial contract of £140 had been for a ten-year period now expired.12 He also became, in 1706, Receiver General for Taxes in part of Devon, and would hence1 0 1 have presented a more detailed account of Quash's story, "Joseph Quash, Pioneer of the Cross-Road and Bye Posts," in the Postal History Society Bulletin, No. 122 (Nov.-Dec., 1962), pp. 84-86. The facts are scattered about in Calendar of Treasury Books, Vols. X V , X X I V , X X V I I , X X I X , X X X I I , and in the Treasury Letter Books and General Accounts in G.P.O. u Cal. Treas. Books, X V , 407. " T h e fact that Pine's regular salary was reduced in 1 7 0 3 - 0 4 from £100 to £75 may mean that the cross-road bye letters even at the Chester stage were now put within Quash's farm and that he, rather than the Postmaster General, was paying Pine for this part of his work. But by 1710 Pine's salary was again £100.

15

The Benevolent Man forth be transmitting large sums of money to London in that capacity.13 By 1711 his farm covered all the mail in important towns in Somerset, Devon, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire, Hereford, Oxford, Shropshire, and South Wales. One can imagine that a bright boy good at figures would have been very useful at this point to Quash, whose bookkeeping was — or certainly should have been — elaborate. One can see, too, that in Quash's office a boy might obtain a rare view of how such businesses could be conducted. An important event in the history of the British Post Office was the Act of 1711, which went into effect on June 1. The primary intention of the bill was to obtain a larger revenue for the Government in wartime. Postal rates were raised substantially; for example, a single-sheet letter traveling less than eighty miles was now to cost three pence rather than two. Although the Act says nothing about the established practice of the Postmaster General of farming out large sections of the country to private entrepreneurs, one notices in the General Accounts that all the large farms — nine of them, scattered from Kent to Yorkshire — terminated three months after the Act went into effect, all of them, that is, except Quash's. The small farms of the elusive bye letters were continued. Yet in some way not altogether clear the Post Office Act of 1711 caused Joseph Quash's ruin. The implication of the scattered evidence is that instead of enforcing the new, higher rates for letters he allowed the lucky residents within his sizable domain to continue under the old rates. In 1713 the Post Office sued him for the difference, about £1600 (which he paid), as well as for another debt of £2200. His accounts as Receiver General of Taxes in Devon were also out of order; in 1714 the Receiver General in neighboring Cornwall entered suit for money paid to Quash for remission to London, about £3500. Within five days of the first prosecution on February 13, 1713, Joseph Quash, a bankrupt, absconded. Five years after the crash, still struggling for survival, he begged for a financial allowance in the settlements on the ground that in the years 1707 to 1713 much of the £254,391 remitted by him to the Exchequer had come to him in the form of moidores and had cost him extra to transmit to London. 14 Although much of the evidence for forming a judgment on "Cal. Treas. Books, XXXII, Part 2 (1957), p. 515; Part 2 (1950), p. 138. Of his total rent in 1709, £700 was for the cross-road posts and £100 for the regular bye letters. See Cal. Treas. Books, XXV, Part 1 (1952), pp. cdxx-cdxxi. 14 General Accounts, G.P.O.; RAON, pp. 8-10; Cal. Treas. Books, XXIX, Part 2 (1957), pp. 169, 687; XXVII, Part 1 (1955), p. ccclxxxii, and Part 2 (1955), p. 124; Cal. Treas. Books, XXXII, Part 2, p. 515.

16

Introduction

to the Post

Office

Quash is missing, one imagines that the man who had for so many years been engaged in far-flung business with the Government and with the public was not a deliberate rascal, but rather a projector unequal to the demands of his enormous enterprise. At least in the remarks of Ralph Allen's acquaintances, Richard Jones and Richard Graves, who must have heard of Quash chiefly from Allen, no opprobrious epithets cling to his name. Perhaps Allen was "placed to" Quash, as Jones said, and at Exeter saw his vast dealings from the inside. Or perhaps he encountered the veteran deputy postmaster while handling, in Mrs. Collins's post office, the letters received from and dispatched into Quash's huge network of bye and cross-roads posts. If he actually worked for Quash in Exeter he may have had intimations of approaching disaster and got out. Allen became deputy in Bath in March, 1712, when the older man still appeared to be solvent. Eleven months later, when Quash was prosecuted for debt and deprived of his postal authority, Allen along with a small crowd of deputies in Devon, Somerset, and all the way to Chester, took over the cross-road posts formerly governed by Quash and began earning an extra salary from the Government. Ralph Allen was not yet twenty. From the outset Allen seems to have been more attracted to making money inventively and industriously in business than to the hazardous opportunities in the gaming rooms presided over by Beau Nash. Eventually he too gambled heavily, but the risks he assumed in the Post Office contracts and in his investments in the stone quarries came only after a long period of preparation and education in the details and procedures of a business immediately before him. There are not many events to chronicle in these first years as deputy. But one episode, his loyal service to the King in 1715, can be said to have "made" him. When, upon the death of Anne on August 1, 1714, her German cousin was proclaimed George I of England, there were many people who would have preferred her half brother, James Francis Edward, even though he was a Papist. His followers began to exert themselves actively in his behalf about the time George landed. There were riots in Bristol in October when George was crowned, and plans for an invasion in the neighborhood of Plymouth were being drawn up. The King in July, 1715, approved an Act to protect the country against the rebellion already begun at home and an invasion threatened from abroad. Several important leaders in the West Country were seized in September. 17

The Benevolent Man Bath was the Jacobite capital and arsenal in the West, where Stuart sympathies were strong. At the beginning of October Viscount Windsor's regiment of horse and two troops of dragoons were ordered to march toward Bristol to help suppress what the London Post-Man with marked calmness called "the designs of disaffected People" (October 4 - 6 ) . It was indicative of the seriousness of things that the command of these regiments was given to Major-General George Wade, distinguished as a determined fighter in various kinds of warfare on the Continent. Wade's assignment was a happy stroke for everyone, for the King, whose enemies he routed, for Bath, to whose welfare he became permanently devoted, for the General himself, who found valued friends here, and for Ralph Allen, whose fortune he helped establish. Upon Wade's arrival in Bath, numerous conspirators fled, and others were arrested. Two hundred horses were seized, eleven chests of firearms, three pieces of cannon, a hogshead full of basket-hilt swords, and another of cartouches, "one Mortar, and Moulds to cast Cannon, which had been buried in the Ground." 1 5 Ralph Allen's share in thwarting the insurrection is reported by Richard Graves thus: "having got intelligence of a waggon-load of arms, which was coming up from the West, for the use of the disaffected in this part of England . . . Allen communicated this to general Wade." 1 6 Whether Allen's discovery led to any part of the seizure of arms already mentioned is not certain, but his revelations seem to have been regarded as important. He may have obtained knowledge of Jacobite preparations by looking into suspicious correspondence, something which deputies were allowed to do upon written warrant from a Secretary of State. There is also the possibility that Allen learned of the rebels' movements from his friends and relatives back in Cornwall, where, according to contemporary report, the common people were "ripe for Rebellion." In St. Columb six or seven people publicly proclaimed the Pretender; two were arrested, and a reward of £100 was offered by the Government for capture of the others.17 Ralph Allen by his loyal and effective opposition to the King's enemies established a claim on the Hanoverian government which he was not ashamed to mention thirty-seven years later when asking a favor of the chief minister. Just how the Mayor of Bath, the Aldermen, and Councilmen individu"Cobbett's Parliamentary History of England, VII (1811), 218 η.; A Compleat History Of the Late Rebellion (1716), pp. 32-33; Peter Rae, The History of the Rebellion, 2d etf. (1746), p. 216; The Post-Man, Oct. 18-20, 1715. 11 Compleat History Of the Late Rebellion, p. 33. " Trifters, pp. 62-63. l8

Introduction

to the Post Office

ally felt in this time of division cannot be learned from the discreet minutes of their regular meetings.18 At the end of October the anniversary of the King's coronation was celebrated with sufficient public fervor. The bells were rung for three hours without intermission; a long formal procession included the Mayor, the Mayor Elect, his Excellency General Wade, and a hundred charity-school children; cannon volleys, fireworks, and a ball concluded the exhaustingly loyal day.19 The only evidence in the minutes of the Council that their deliberations ever touched on the political crisis comes in December, 1715, when the Council deprived Josias Priest of his position as organist in the Abbey Church because of a report, soon disproved, that he had spoken disrespectfully of King George. 20 General Wade at this time was a man of forty-two. An Irishman, he had worked his way steadily upward in the army from an ensign's rank in 1690 to that of major-general about a year before his assignment in Somerset. He had fought in Flanders, in Portugal, in Spain. He accumulated a good deal of money along the way, perhaps in part from the usual profits taken by a colonel from the business of outfitting a regiment. In the years from 1715 to 1720 he continued to take an active part in military affairs. More than a military campaigner, he was elected to Parliament from Hindon, Wiltshire, in 1715 to represent the Whigs and seems to have had connections with prominent men in that party. Although a bachelor, he begot four children whom he acknowledged and to whom he left major bequests in his will. He spent time in London, and he grew fond of Bath, and in both cities about 1720 he built handsome houses for himself. He persuaded the fashionable promoter of Palladianism, the Whiggish Earl of Burlington, to design a London house to accommodate a large Rubens cartoon purchased in Flanders. The house, unfortunately, had no space within large enough for the Rubens, which Wade then sold to Sir Robert Walpole. 21 " T h e London Daily Courant for Oct. 11, 1715, printed a letter from the Bath magistrates thanking the King for sending troops to prevent further disorders caused by "Papists, Nonjurors, and other Disaffected Persons." The Flying Post (Oct. 8 - 1 1 ) , however, reported that some members of the Bath Corporation "begg'd and pray'd" for mercy for three Papist "Rogues" who were arrested. 18 The Flying Post, Nov. 1 - 3 , 1715. 20 Priest was perhaps a son of the well-known dancing master of the same name who kept the boarding school for girls in Chelsea at which the Tate-Purcell opera, Dido and Aeneas, was first produced (c. 1 6 8 9 ) . For information about the Priests I am indebted to Selma J. Cohen. T h e Bath Council minutes record the granting of a pension to Mrs. Priest when her husband died in 1 7 2 5 . 21 Horace Walpole's Correspondence with George Montagu, ed. Wilmarth S. Lewis

19

The Benevolent Man His house in Bath, the richly ornamented front of which still survives, was built just northwest of the Abbey Church at the entrance to a narrow street — Wade's Alley — which he caused to be opened up along the north side of the Church at a cost of £300; by clearing a way through the unsightly structures against the Church walls he encouraged people whose way was from the baths to the promenades to walk outdoors instead of through the Church aisles. Allen's acquaintance with Wade, which began in 1715 when Allen impressed the General with his report of treasonable activities, somehow developed into friendship. There is a widely accepted legend, of which the first written mention is in Richard Jones's manuscript, that Allen married an illegitimate daughter of Wade. Richard Graves, repeating gossip almost a century after the putative event, said that the daughter was Miss Erie. But if Allen married such a daughter, it could not have been either the Miss Erie mentioned by that name in Wade's will in 1747 or Emilia, who married in sequence two other men, and the marriage was not known — or not recognized — within Allen's family.22 The notion that Allen married Wade's daughter must be laid aside as interesting and venerable but almost certainly not true. Altogether more plausible is the assertion of Jones that General Wade was Allen's "bond-man to the Government" when in 1720 Allen won his first campaign to secure from the Postmaster General a large "farm" of cross-road letters and bye letters.23 Of course the energetic young deputy postmaster had acquired friends in Bath; some of them were substantial citizens. The identity of three can be inferred from a note in the Pew Book of St. James's Church. Early in 1718 Allen bought of the churchwarden for £4 a pew in the chancel for the span of his own life and the lives of Dr. Richard Bettenson, William Sparrow, mercer, and Arthur Wild, clerk. Dr. Bettenson was a man of some wealth. A dozen years earlier he had donated £100 toward a marble case for the pump in the Pump Room; a year or two after and Ralph S. Brown (New Haven, 1941), I, 56. A drawing of the house appears in Colin Campbell's Vitruvius Britannicus, III (1725), 10. A photograph of Wade's house in Bath can be found in Mowbray A. Green's Eighteenth Century Architecture of Bath (Bath, 1904), Plate III. 22 Elsie A. Russ in Notes and Queries, CXCI (1946), 127-129; C. R. Hudleston in Notes and Queries, CXCII (1947), 282. The inscription on the Allen monument in Claverton Churchyard refers to Elizabeth Holder, who outlived Ralph, as his second wife; and documentary evidence identifies a former wife as Elizabeth Buckeridge; cf. Miss Russ, Notes and Queries, and A. S. Dyer, Notes and Queries, CLXXXIX (1945), 214. 23 That Wade was not his only bondman in 1720 is indicated by Allen's referring to his original guarantors in the plural; see RAON, pp. 22-23. 20

Introduction to the Post Office 1718 he undertook to build a "court" of houses at the south end of town. 24 It is conceivable that Bettenson as well as W a d e supported young Allen's petition for a Post Office contract. W h a t Allen sought when he waited on the Postmaster General in London in 1719 was the exclusive right to control all the cross-road letters in a large area of the West Country (roughly, a triangle with Oxford at the eastern corner, Exeter at the south, and Chester at the north) and the bye-way letters of all England and South Wales. As this would mean keeping track of the money paid in for this huge quantity of mail, supplying salaries for all the deputies involved, and supervising these services everywhere to see that postboys were prompt and postmasters faithful, the undertaking seems incredibly ambitious for a man of twenty-six. The risks and obstacles were as great as they were obvious. T h e potential profits Allen must have imagined to be equally sizable. W h a t special methods he had thought of to assure the collection of his profits he declined, then and ever afterwards, to reveal to the Postmasters General in any detail. But the latter, with less imagination and less technical knowledge than the experienced Bath deputy, regarded the cross-road posts as minor and the bye letters as doomed to be hardly profitable under their own supervision.25 Consequently, six years after the large Post Office farms were terminated, the Postmasters General reversed their policy and gave the largest farm in history to the confident and ingenious young man of Bath. One gathers that during the years since Quash was cashiered Allen had studied postal methods closely. Before the Act of 1711 "reformed" the posts, bye letters had been thrown promiscuously into one large bag which was opened at each stage while "the Deputy, or any inferior Servant of the House" fumbled about for letters that belonged to him and added the new ones. W h a t was worse, to quote Allen's words, It was the constant practice to demand and receive the Postage of all such Letters before they were put into any of the Country Post Offices, Hence (from the general temptation of destroying these Letters for the sake of the Postage) the joynt mischiefs of Embezling the Revenue and interrupting and obstructing the Commerce fell naturely in, to support and inflame one another. 2 6

The dissemination of printed directions and warnings to all the post offices merely taught more men to be dishonest and the dishonest to be " Wood, Essay, I, 231. " See their letter of January 8, 1719/20 (Post Office Treasury Book, April 1715 to Oct. 1724) to the Treasury Commissioners explaining why they recommend accepting Allen's offer. "RAON, p. 16. 21

The Benevolent Man more cautious. Observing what the practices were, Allen recognized the need for a system whereby every deputy would check, and be checked by, every other. Such a system would bring into the Treasury a great deal of money that belonged to it, and by making much surer the delivery of bye letters it would inevitably increase the number of such letters. In Quash's last years the bulk of cross-road letters had grown to be ten times as great as that of the bye letters. Though Allen must have expected the increase in cross-road letters to continue, it was undoubtedly from better management of the bye letters, notoriously "negligent and absurd" in the past, that he thought his chief benefits would come. The Postmasters General to whom he presented his proposal were Charles, first Earl Cornwallis, and the elder James Craggs (a dependent of Marlborough and Lord Sunderland) later notorious in the South Sea Bubble. They granted him the farm partly, he later said,27 because one of the surveyors sent out by them had examined his accounts strictly and found that from the moment he entered upon his office he had faithfully reported all his bye letters. This circumstance, "then pretty singular," had so much impressed the surveyor that he had told the London officers about Allen. The backing of General Wade undoubtedly helped too. The contract, signed on April 12, 1720, and extending for seven years, empowered Allen to take over Quash's old cross-road posts from Exeter to Chester as well as the cross-road posts from all that area to Oxford, some of which had once been farmed by members of the Stephen Bigg family. Though Irish and Scottish mail was excluded, Allen was also to have the carriage and delivery of all bye letters (those "not going or coming from to or through London") for the entire extent of England and Wales. The deputy postmasters and surveyors would be chosen and approved by the Postmaster General, and the amount of their salaries was likewise to be settled in London, Allen supplying the funds to pay them. He agreed that all these mail services would be at least three times a week and at a speed of five miles per hour. Post horses would everywhere be available on a half-hour's notice. The charges would be those set by act of Parliament. Allen would pay an annual fee of £6000 (the previous annual income to the Government from cross-road and bye letters having been estimated at £4000). Whatever cash was left over would be Allen's return on his investment of money, intelligence, unflagging attention, imagination, faith, tact, and courage. Originally he was obliged to submit a detailed yearly account of all sums received and spent. But after 1734, he 27

RAON, p. 18. 22

Introduction

to the Post

Office

later said, this requirement was waived, so that ultimately no one outside the Prior Park office knew exactly what his receipts and disbursements were. In the first quarter of the first year his expenses were £1500 but his receipts were £2946, 28 and the Postmasters General were as delighted as he. At the end of the third year, however, his business was £270 in debt. W h a t the balance was at the end of the seven-year term is not known, though, as we shall see, his other activities in the years 1724-1726 must mean that he was already making a profit. Certainly he was sufficiently encouraged (or sufficiently involved) that in 1727 he asked for a renewal of his contract for another seven years. His scheme had been to improve the national postal system and to increase the income of the Government and himself by compelling the deputies to do their jobs more correctly and more honestly. Only a young man could have had so hopeful a vision or have attempted so assiduously to bring it to realization. 28

Post Office Treasury Book for 1715-1724.

23

III Young Businessman and City Father 1721-1728

After his enormous farm of postal services had been running for a year, on August 26, 1721, Ralph Allen, "Bachelor of the City of Bath," was married at the Charterhouse Chapel in London to Elizabeth Buckeridge, spinster, of nearby St. Bride's parish. 1 She was the daughter of Seaborne Buckeridge, a London merchant who had died twenty years earlier. Before his death Buckeridge had apparently turned over his business to his son, Anthony Rodney Buckeridge. He had given his older daughter, Sarah, a marriage-portion of £500 when she became the wife of Kendall Hudson, and in his will he left one-sixth of his estate to his son, another sixth to his much younger daughter Elizabeth, and the rest to his widow. In local records Anthony Rodney was listed as Esquire and when he died was sheriff of Hertfordshire. Ralph Allen, it would seem, was making a good marriage though not a spectacular one. For a year or two after his marriage the records tell us little about his life. But one can infer something from developments in Bath. In 1722 the City Council, within whose power the choice of Parliamentary representatives lay, elected General George W a d e as one of their two Members. Whether his strikingly handsome house a few yards from the Guildhall was built before or after the election is uncertain, but W a d e and Bath were now publicly allied, much to the satisfaction of both. In 1725 W a d e donated a rich marble altar to the Abbey Church. About this time he was appointed Commander in Chief of the Forces in Scotland, where "disaffected persons" were still numerous. Among the duties laid upon him was the difficult one of disarming the Highland clans. Another project, of his own invention, has perpetuated his name in Scotland — the laying out of much-needed roads between garrisons and barracks, and, in consequence, the building of about forty stone bridges. A busy man with 1

A. S. Dyer, Notes and Queries, CLXXXIX (1945), 214. 24

Young Businessman and City Father numerous appointments of various kinds during these years, he probably spent more time in London than in Bath. In 1724 an important and long-contemplated enterprise got under way, the opening up of a navigable river passage between Bath and the great seaport Bristol. For at least a century progressive-minded Bathonians had seen that carrying goods over the hilly road between the two cities was less economical than transportation on the Avon would be. But a royal patent of 1619 to make the river navigable led to nothing tangible nor did a Parliamentary Act of 1712. There was opposition on all sides — from landowners and farmers who feared the effect on local prices of imported corn, butter, and cheese; from breeders and grazers of pack horses; from mill owners and bakers; and from Bristol innkeepers, who did not want the number of market traders to dwindle. Most determined were the colliers of Somerset and Gloucestershire, who recognized what the arrival by water of superior Shropshire coal might do to them. Long after the Avon river transportation system was completed the colliers continued to threaten and even to damage the waterway.2 It is characteristic of Allen that he should have become involved in so promising an economic venture regardless of the opposition. A Bristol merchant, John Hobbs, deserves credit for putting the scheme into motion. A stock company of thirty-two shares was organized in May, 1724, and Ralph Allen, who already must have had his eye on the ancient local stone quarries, bought one share, as did also his grandmother (or aunt?) Gertrude, his father (or brother?) Philip, his brother-in-law Anthony Rodney Buckeridge, and Mrs. Sarah Hudson, Buckeridge's sister and Allen's sister-in-law. He was made one of the three treasurers of the company. 3 At last on December 15, 1727, the first barge moved from Bristol to Bath, bringing deal boards, pig lead, and meal. In May, 1728, the seventeen-year-old Princess Amelia, having come from London by sedan chair, moved smoothly from Bath to Bristol on a barge especially decorated in her honor. Though at the beginning river travel was uncertain and passengers on the boats sometimes suffered upset into the water, by 1740 there were regularly two passenger boats daily each way. Besides the Post Office and the Avon river project there was something else in 1725 to interest Allen. For a while he thought he was founding a family. In September his wife bore him a son, named George for the King a

T . S. Willan, River Navigation in England 1610-1750 (1936), pp. 25, 46-48; Charles Hadfield, The Canals of Southern England (1955), pp. 39-43. ' Bath Council Minutes for 1728.

25

The Benevolent

Man

or the General. Three months later the child was dead.4 Allen, who later gave hospitality, advice, affection, and his large estate to various nieces and nephews as well as assisting the children of friends and of relatives-in-law, seems never again to have had a child of his own. But in 1725 and 1726 he probably was too busy to brood over this loss. His status was such that in March, 1725, the City Council made him an "Honorary ffreeman of this City" and in July elected him a Councilman. The Corporation of Bath consisted of a Mayor, eight Aldermen, and a Council of twenty, plus the other citizens. The governing group of twentynine men kept tight control over the businesses within the town. Periodically the Council felt obliged to reaffirm a regulation to exclude outsiders from carrying on trade in Bath and thus obtaining income that rightfully belonged to its freemen. As the Council pointed out in 1725, no one could become a freeman without first being apprenticed to a freeman for seven years unless he was a nobleman or was specially elected or was able to pay a substantial fee for the privilege. An ambitious businessman would enjoy important advantages as one of the twenty-nine governors of Bath. He could exert influence over the granting of various monopolies such as the management of the pumps at the baths and the lease to the Avon navigation company. He helped select the schoolmaster and the Abbey organist and the men and women attendants at the baths. During the long period in which Allen was a member, the Council occupied itself especially, as the minutes show, with managing its real estate; the city owned the property on which most of the citizens lived and had their businesses. Leases and rents are not uninteresting, particularly one's own and one's neighbor's and one's competitor's, and the Council supervised them all. Besides requests for new leases (which involved usually "drowning" the unexpired years of the old lease or "exchanging the Lives" of older relatives in favor of younger ones who would want the property longer), the Council had to approve petitions for the right to tap the water lines (a "ffeather of water" from the main pipe from "Berken Hill") and to "make a Gout for carrying the waste water" from a new house to a main sewer. In the records of the Council, family ties and vested interests are plain, and one understands why admission to membership was cause for more than ordinary satisfaction. But Allen's first commitment was to the postal service; it was that, no doubt, that caused him to be absent frequently from the monthly Council meetings during the next two years; during 4

Registers of the Abbey Church

. . . Bath, ed. Jewers, I, 99; II, 418. 26

Young Businessman and City Father 1729, with more important matters on his mind than feathers of water and five-shilling charges, he stayed away altogether. T h e postal contract required of Allen more than even he may have anticipated. If one is to take at face value the complaints of Thomas Gardiner in his "Survey of the Post Office" in 1677 and the provisions of the Post Office Act of 1711, cheating in the management of bye-way letters had been normal for decades. It is no wonder, then, that Allen's new scheme stirred up immediate and stubborn resistance. A group of dishonest deputy postmasters and surveyors used against Allen the argument that his contract to develop cross-road posts would lower the revenues on country letters (those sent to or through London) and thus work to the disadvantage of the Government. 5 On the surface the argument seemed valid, and to provide evidence some of Allen's enemies immediately tried to make the amount of the country-letter revenue seem larger than it really was by sending letters through London that should have gone by cross-road posts; they planned later to restore such mail and its revenue to the cross posts and show thus the harm done by the new contract. One of the leaders of the group, a Colonel Bell, afterwards Controller of the Inland Office, was found guilty of perpetrating frauds in his own office. The probable beneficial effect of Allen's contract on the country letters he had to debate with Cornwallis and Craggs, with the Secretary to the Treasury, and then with the new Postmasters General, Edward Carteret and Galfridus Walpole, making various proposals which for one reason or another were rejected. Time eventually came to his support and demonstrated that, as he had prophesied, his improving his portion of the postal service caused the country letters to increase rather than diminish. But more difficult to win to his view than his skeptical superiors in the Government were the deputies all over the country. One of the changes he required in order to make a more uniform bookkeeping possible was abandonment of the anomalous custom of prepayment of postage on bye letters.® The real problem was to compel each deputy to handle his bye letters in separate bags, reporting always their number and value. Fairly soon after the first contract was signed, Allen set out, accompanied by his servant Henry Lance, to make his own survey "thro' out the Kingdom." S R A O N , pp. 18-19. "Tregellas (Cornish Worthies [1884], I, 5 n.) quotes from the London Gazette (April 16, 1720) an announcement of Allen's farm which explains that prepayment on bye and cross-road letters is not proper except when the letter is directed on board a ship.

27

The Benevolent Man He visited countless places, met the deputies, studied roads and distances, observed actual practice, and acquired the groundwork of his later uncanny familiarity with the geographical and personal intricacies of the whole system. He looked for frauds, of course, and when he spotted them, he said, he "traced them fully and minutely thro' all their windings." 7 His master stroke, resulting from what he had learned by these investigations, was to establish extra checking at "Key Towns," places where main roads and branch roads were intersected by cross-roads and through which it would be hard to pass letters unrecorded. Every deputy, he announced, would check, and be checked by, his fellow deputies. By sending his surveyors to visit the Key Towns and even to reside there for a while, Allen was able to do much to discourage dishonesty. Another of his principal worries was the need of suppressing the longestablished illegal carriage of letters, without payment to the Government, by carriers, stagecoaches, and other conveyances. Rather than punish every one of these wrong-doers — who were in their way, he amiably acknowledged, trying to increase the speed and safety of the carriage of mail — he would put the most notorious under prosecution as "a terror to the rest." "Incredible pains and Labour" were Allen's during these years as he attempted to correct widespread peculation. Even though during the first seven-year term he seems not to have added to the number of cross-road posts or increased the frequency of the service, he must have made progress toward a more orderly and respectable management of the bye letters. The Government, meanwhile, was receiving the unprecedented sum of £6000 annually, and this was more than it deserved in view of the fact that before 1719 the revenue from these letters had been only £3700 rather than £4000 as was erroneously reported. So on July 5, 1727, the Postmasters General, now Edward Carteret and Edward Harrison, "with the greatest readiness" (and with the approval of Sir Robert Walpole, First Lord of the Treasury) signed a contract with him for another seven years on the same terms as before except for the additional proviso that he make improvements on the Dover and Yarmouth roads similar to those achieved in the western and south-western sections of the country. 8 In the meanwhile the Bath Postmaster and Mrs. Allen had acquired a house on the opposite side of the Abbey from General Wade's, with a 7 8

RAON, p. 25.

1 have to thank Major Adrian E. Hopkins for an opportunity to see an original copy of the 1727 contract belonging to Michael C. Allen.

Young

Businessman

and City

Father

garden of their own. The land for the garden was taken from a third of the town's bowling green, and thus Allen brought to an end "Smock Racing and Pig Racing, playing at Foot-Ball and running with the Feet in Bags in that Green," as well as "Grining, Stareing, Scolding, Eating hot Furmety, Laughing, Whistling and Jiging upon the Stage for Rings, Shirts, Smocks, Hats, &c." 9 This, thought some, was progress. Two or three months before Allen's second contract with the Postmasters General was signed he had employed John Wood to design alterations in the house. On the north side an addition was made, presumably to receive the increasing postal business moved here from the old St. Michael's building. But the conjunction of Allen and Wood, two men whose inventive minds moved well together, never ended in a merely utilitarian construction. Allen's house, given an additional story, also acquired a new Palladian front containing blind balustrades, carved festoons, an ornamental pediment, and four giant pilasters surmounted by Corinthian capitals. Whether finally executed by Wood or William Killigrew, the house, Wood later said, was "a Sample for the greatest Magnificence that was ever proposed by me for our City Houses." 10 N o indubitable portrait of John Wood (1704-1754) seems to be known. 11 But the stately and discreet houses that line the streets of Bath and surround the Circus and quietly gaze downward from the Crescents and Combe Down; the air of geometric good sense and Roman dignity in * Wood, Essay, II, 244. 10 Ibid., 245. A photograph of the central block of the house can be seen in Green, Architecture of Bath, Plate XXXI. u An oil portrait of a gentleman with pencil in hand, a stone-crane being represented in the bottom corner of the picture, has been thought to be of John Wood or of his son or of Allen's foreman, Richard Jones; see a cutting, perhaps from a Bath newspaper, laid into a copy of William Gregory and J. Shepherd, Ralph Allen and Prior Park (Bath, 1886), in the Bath Reference Library; also A. Barbara Coates's unpublished thesis, "The Two John Woods" (1946; copy in library of Royal Institute of British Architects), pp. 51-52. Miss Coates attributes the painting to William Hoare. The picture was given to the Royal Literary and Scientific Institution in the latter nineteenth century as a portrait of Wood, but evidence for the attribution is otherwise lacking. The auction catalogue of the contents of Prior Park in 1769 listed a "Portrait of Mr. Padmore, in a painted frame," presumably of John Padmore of Bristol, who perfected the design of the much admired wagons that carried stone from Allen's quarries on Combe Down to the wharf on the river. Perhaps the Bath picture represents neither of the Woods nor Jones but is Allen's portrait of Padmore. No adequate biography of W o o d is available either. But see a note in the Bath Weekly Chronicle, Sept. 9, 1950; T. Sturge Cotterell, Some Notes on John Wood (Bath, 1927); J. P. E. Falconer, "The Family of John Wood," Notes and Queries, CXCIII (1948), 403-408; John Summerson, "John Wood and the English TownPlanning Tradition," in Heavenly Mansions (1949); W . Sydie Dakers, John Wood & His Times (Bath, 1954).

29

The Benevolent Man the designs of buildings brightened by carvings and moldings and finíais that retain a soupçon of the festive air of Andrea Palladio's originals; the richness of continuous but slightly varying tawny-gray-white stone; the inviting Parades on arches above the gardens by the river and the pleasing pattern of straight streets and regular squares opening out in unpredictable sequence with curving atria (a favorite word of Wood's) higher on the hillsides — this is Wood's portrait, and it became known all over England and across the water. Credit for the improvement of the city must be given also to several other builders and architects, including Thomas Greenway, John Strahan, Thomas Baldwin, and especially his own son, the younger John Wood (1728-1781). The latter supplemented and, as far as he could, completed his father's idea of a redesigned, rebuilt, and revivified city. Furthermore, without the fortunate support of men with money, imagination, and a delight in splendid construction — Lord Chandos, Humphrey Thayer, Robert Gay, Ralph Allen — John Wood's abundant energy and especial creativeness would have come to naught so far as Bath is concerned. And without a large supply of oolite, that sufficiently soft and yet sufficiently hard limestone in the hills across the river, Wood's vision of a new Roman city could not have materialized. The hot wells, pouring out an unceasing flow of steamy chalybeate water, I have called Bath's gold mine. The freestone high above it was its silver mine. People transported Bath water to London and other remote places to drink. Bath stone was floated away on the new Avon river way to lend dignity to London and Bristol, Liverpool and Lisbon.12 In Bath the building boom and the upsurge of fashionable resort life came together, and a portrait of John Wood could not be complete unless it disclosed the knack he had for real estate promotion. There was a commercial element in Wood's plans as there certainly was in those of his landowning sponsors, but Wood had less of it than they. The disorderly but delightfully informative Essay on Bath which he somehow found time to put together and publish in 1742 and expand in 1749 is, like Allen's long "Narrative" submitted to the Lords of the Treasury in 1761, an apologia pro vita sua; it is an affecting and justifiably proud record of difficult achievement, and shows the intensity of his devotion to the idea of creating a beautiful and splendid city. For the accomplishment of this grand design Wood knew that a considerable amount of public spirit would be required of everybody. Ralph Allen's interest in rebuilding the city developed, of course, in u

It is Richard Graves who adds Lisbon to the list.

30

Young Businessman and City Father connection with his investing in the Avon waterway and in the stone quarries on Combe Down. What the quarries were like we learn from the detailed account of Dr. Richard Pococke, who visited them in 1750.13 At the top was "a stratum of lime stone about 4 feet deep which seemed to be full of very small shells, the exact form of which are not discernible to the naked eye." In the stratum, two feet deep, below it and in the fourth level a good deal of crystalline spar occurs, and it was from these levels, one guesses, that Allen collected glittering stones to send to Pope for his grotto. In crevices where water runs, stalactites appear; portions of the rock, said Pococke, "shoot like crystals and these the workmen call cockles, and are very beautiful for grottoes." The third level contains "pitching stone with which they pitch [or pave] the streets." But it is the fifth stratum, twenty or thirty feet below the surface, that provides the fine freestone for building. This latter, cut and laid in the air for hardening, is, said Wood, good for small and large ornaments — vases, carvings, balustrades, chimney pieces, obelisks. But also, when no bad stone is clandestinely mixed by the workmen with the good, the freestone is durable, beautiful, and "fit for the Walls of a Palace for the greatest Prince in Europe." 14 Portland stone had, of course, greater fame. The opinion that it was harder than Bath stone Wood thought he had proved to be wrong in an interesting experiment in London in 1728 when he was trying to persuade the Governors of the Greenwich Hospital to build with Allen's stone. Colin Campbell, the well-known architect and author of Vitruvius Britanniens, was on that occasion shown to be unable to tell Portland stone from Bath stone when they were not labeled. The Governors of the Greenwich Hospital turned down Allen's offer, but Wood won his point, or so he thought, against the more famous builder. His great desire to demonstrate "what the Bath Stone wou'd do in Town" had to remain unsatisfied for two more years. Allen's first quarries were on the hilltop not far above the place where he was later to build his mansion. They were about a mile and a half from the River Avon and about four hundred feet above it. The problem of transporting the stone down to his yard and wharf at the foot of the hill he met with characteristically practical ideas. On the road which he constructed from the quarries down to the river, timber tracks were laid, partly on the ground itself and partly over stone supports, and on these ran his a

Travels through England of Dr. Richard Pocoke, ed. J. J. Cartwright, I (1888),

157. 14

W o o d , Essay, II, 425. 31

The Benevolent

Man

"stone-carriages." The notion for the carriages came from the collieries at Newcastle and was worked out in detail by John Padmore of Bristol. 15 As described by the Swiss engineer, Charles de Labelye, to whom Allen himself had shown them, the wagons were made of strong oak planks thirteen feet long and moved on iron wheels with effective locking brakes. They do not now seem remarkable. But Allen was proud of them, and numerous people made notes on these machines, so easily drawn in spite of heavy loads and so easily managed by a single man in the steep descent. Not only were they a novelty in the quarrying business; they provided, Allen told de Labelye, an operational saving in expense (twenty-five per cent, said Wood) that justified running the new quarries.16 Besides this demonstration of mechanical progress Allen's quarrying utilized a "very good and curiously contriv'd Crane" for loading and unloading the wagons, which was shown to the world, as the wagons were, by John T . Desaguliers in his 1734 book in a printed lecture on Compound Engines. The road, wagons, and cranes altogether cost Allen about £10,000, according to Jones. Allen entered "the Free Stone Business with a View of reducing the Price of the Material to encourage the Consumption of it." His plans were as boldly fundamental as those he had adopted for his postal business. To reduce the price of stone he set out to lower the wage rate of masons at the same time he gave them steadier work and a larger income. He built houses for them near the quarries on the Down and also beside the stoneyard on the wharf. Piecework became less common. The price of freestone in Bath dropped by ten per cent, and though Milo Smith fought hard as a rival and the master masons in the vicinity undercut his prices, Allen eventually bought out Smith and continued to sell stone — a great deal of it. But many things of future importance to the city were occurring in the late 1720's, and we have run ahead of our story, particularly in respect to John Wood. In employing him Allen was, as often, doing something courageous and sensible. In 1727 Wood, whose father and brother seem 16 Daniel Defoe, Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain, 4th ed. ( 1 7 4 8 ) , II, 300. 16 De Labelye's description appeared in John T . Desaguliers's Course of Experimental Philosophy, I ( 1 7 3 4 ) , 2 7 4 - 2 7 9 . F o r a photograph of a working model of Allen's stonewagon displayed in the Science Museum, South Kensington, see Proceedings of the Somerset Archaeological and Natural History Society, L X X I V ( 1 9 2 8 ) , 1 5 0 - 1 5 1 . One should notice that W o o d ' s discussion of Allen's quarry operations (II, 4 2 5 ) was published while Allen was still very much alive and still in business.

Young Businessman and City Father to have worked as builders in Bath, 17 was only twenty-three, but like the Deputy Postmaster he had unusual talent which was put to use early. He had recently been captured by Lord Bingley to assist with the construction of one or more Palladian houses in Cavendish Square, London, Bingley having previously built a mansion to the designs of the Italian architect Leoni at Bramham Park in Yorkshire. One of the excitements of the moment was the development of real estate in the area north and west of Piccadilly. Lord Burlington had added an Italianate arcade to his town house. The Duke of Chandos, very rich after eight well-managed years in the Paymaster's Office, had already built the great mansion at Cannons and was now also the possessor of a new house in Cavendish Square. It was in connection with the latter, no doubt, that he became acquainted with Lord Bingley's protégé. An architectural neophyte, Wood must have had sufficient leisure while on occasional visits to Bramham Park to examine suggestive sketches by Palladio, Leoni, and other designers in the books owned by Bingley. Inspired by what he saw there and in London, Wood devised some plans for classicizing the crowded town of Bath. Its narrow streets and the old Tudor style, with plaster-and-timber walls and leaded windows, offended his taste and needed to be supplanted by something of better, more classical design. Though this grand Roman scheme failed to interest the landowners to whom he presented it, he did succeed in attracting one of these men to another plan. So Dr. Robert Gay, the London surgeon who had represented Bath in Parliament from 1719 to 1721, signed a contract with Wood in November, 1726, for laying out a new street on some land held by him. 18 That project languishing, Wood was engaged a few months later by Chandos, who, having recently fallen under the spell of Bath, employed Wood to rebuild the structure of St. John's Hospital to make it the finest lodging house in town. Wood also was planning a large assembly room for Dame Lindsey to be constructed on land near Allen's house belonging to Humphrey Thayer, a wealthy druggist and one-time neighbor of Dr. Gay's in London. While Wood was busy in Bath (and making occasional trips to London to employ craftsmen), an interesting project was undertaken halfway up the hill to Allen's quarries on Combe Down. The old mansion of Widcombe manor was being rebuilt by the younger Philip Bennet, whose mother's family, the Chapmans, had long owned the property. Bennet, 17 18

Dakers, p. 8. C. H. Collins Baker and Muriel I. Baker, Ufe of Chandos, p. 298.

33

The Benevolent

Man

both of whose parents were buried at Mapperton in Dorset, and his wife Ann, from Gloucestershire, had decided to become Bathonians. Their remodeled house had a Palladian façade of sumptuous splendor, complemented by a graceful arrangement within. 19 Sometime later a charming little two-story garden house was built just across the road, Doric and Ionic columns being employed in a design that amusingly conceals a round stone tower of uncertain antiquity presumably related to the venerable church behind it. Allen's foreman Jones said that he supervised the building of the garden house. So the well-descended Bennets and the successful Aliens, both producing fine residences at this time, were becoming acquaintances. Five years later Philip Allen, Ralph's brother and faithful assistant in the post office, married Bennet's sister, and the two chief families of Widcombe were formally united. John Wood's reconstructing of St. John's Hospital into a large lodging house continued on into 1728. This building was the first of a contiguous group of such buildings designed and built by Wood for Lord Chandos, and it set a high standard for architectural style in the city. But the handsome, rather severe façades, as Chandos and Mrs. Anne Phillips, the lessee, repeatedly and bitterly declared, covered a multitude of sins. The partitions were so flimsy that they had to be reconstructed, the roof leaked and had to be replaced in 1730, and some of the floor boards were too thin to be planed decently.20 Worst of all, the Duke had set his heart on having a liberal supply of water closets in his lodging houses, but this newfangled convenience was beyond Wood's command. The pipes he put into Mrs. Phillips's house were of wood only and the construction feeble, with the most lamentable consequences; the whole set had to be abandoned and closed off. In the other buildings Chandos demanded more water closets, and got the same results. Wood, who in the Duke's surviving papers sometimes seems an unconscionable rascal, was undoubtedly the victim of inexperience in costs and of the noble lord's very tightfisted approach to his commercial agreements; Wood cut corners to stay within a too narrow limit of expenditure. Chandos cursed Wood to his face and continued to employ him. Wood was a free spirit; without permission or warning he ran up a little house for himself in the garden of the Duke's building. The Duke, flabbergasted, wrote to Mrs. Phillips in reply to the news; " I cannot " W a l t e r Ison, The 20 Baker and Baker, teriors circulating fifty Matthew Bramble in buildings.

Georgian Buildings of Bath ( 1 9 4 8 ) , pp. 1 2 3 - 1 2 4 . pp. 3 1 1 - 3 1 3 . Perhaps it was iegends about W o o d ' s shoddy inyears later as well as surviving annoyances that caused Smollett's Humphry Clinker to jeer at the flimsy walls of the new Bath

34

Young Businessman and City Father comprehend how he cou'd build himself a house upon my ground." He ordered him to move the house immediately to "somewhere else less offensive." 2 1 A few years later, Chandos, who himself often required forgiveness, agreed to act as godfather to one of Wood's daughters. The commercial, lavish old Duke and the self-made imaginative young designer understood each other. So much construction in Bath of course necessitated more than the usual productivity in the quarries. Allen, who supplied more stone for the renewal of the city than anyone else, began to develop the Hampton Down quarries about 17 30. 22 Those on Combe Down, already in use, were on the crest of a long section of land stretching up the combe which Allen had started acquiring from Mary Wiltshire in 1726. 23 By 1730 the indispensable road to Combe Down for the stone-wagons had been built, though perhaps not perfected, and with permission from the Bennets it had gone right through their Mill Ground and close to their orchard in order that it might take a nearly direct line up the hill. At the same time Bennet, though his new "mansion-house" lay on the more or less parallel road to the east that led up to the Church of St. Thomas à Becket, had opened a short road directly across to the regularly passable wagon road just constructed by Allen. In March, 1730, the Aliens and Philip Bennet signed an indenture making legal and permanent these two new roadways, each family having free use of the other's road for their "horses coaches chariots chairs chaises" and friends and servants.24 In December, 1728, Wood broke ground for the first of the houses in Queen Square, a project connected with the earlier plan of laying out a street on Gay's land. This Square, completed seven years hence, was Wood's first major accomplishment in transforming the crowded medieval town into a modern city with open squares surrounded harmoniously by Palladian façades after the manner — indeed improving upon the manner — of the new, aristocratic section of London. The large open center of the Square was laid out elaborately with limes and elms, walks and balustrades, and in the middle, a basin of water. Slightly higher than the old town, the Square presented on the entire north side what seemed the front of one great stately palace. On the other sides Wood was prevented 21 Baker and Baker, p. 312. T h e facts about Chandos's building problems in this paragraph are all from the Bakers' fascinating chapter based especially on Chandos manuscripts in the Henry E . Huntington Library. 22 The Victoria History of Somerset, ed. W m . Page, II ( 1 9 1 1 ) , 395. 23 See the original indenture in the Bath Reference Library. 34 Peach, pp. 7 8 - 8 1 .

35

The Benevolent Man by the lessees from creating anything so unified or so grand. But the Square was in its way a triumph. W e have been considering the expensive pleasure, the oddly deep pleasure, of designing and producing fine houses. But there were satisfactions for Allen's less wealthy fellow townsmen which also contributed to the slightly feverish spirit of eighteenth-century Bath. In a resort town, public celebrations are de rigueur. Just when the Bathonians started the custom of ringing the Abbey bells on the arrival of substantial visitors I do not know, but it became one cause of the semi-intoxicated tone of the neighborhood of the Pump Room. The accession to the throne of a new King in June, 1727, was marked a few days after the event by civic festivities of "the utmost magnificence," the Bathonians having had, said the envious Bristol News-Paper, "a longer Space of Time to provide Things in due Order." On November 11 the King's birthday was celebrated "in a most distinguished manner," but the Bristol reporter seemed less troubled by envy: Bath had "an Ox roasted whole in the Market-place, which was put into a Dish 12 Foot long, and 6 Foot wide, made on purpose . . . [T]here was a great deal of Money stuck into the Ox as it was roasting, and about 100 rich Stones, &c. which made the Populace so eager to the cutting of it up, that they jumpt over the Gentlemen's Shoulders, some whereof got into the very Dish, and were over shoos in Gravey; one of them being more eager than the rest, was thrust into the Belly of the Ox, and almost smother'd, and the Fat flew about in such a plentiful manner, that the Gentlemen were obliged to quit the Table." 2 5 A Volunteer Company drank healths and paraded about the town several times; in the evening there were more toasts. When eighteen-year-old Princess Amelia came to Bath the next April, she was met outside of town by the new Grenadiers and a crowd of people, inside the gates by the Mayor and Aldermen and perhaps by so prominent a Councilman as Ralph Allen. She stayed as usual in lodgings over the West Gate, not more than a block away from where Wood was erecting the Duke of Chandos's lodging houses. On her birthday an arbor of green boughs was put up in the mead outside the Gate and morris dancers serenaded her for an hour. Then an ox was roasted, speeches were addressed to her, guns and fireworks were discharged. All the day long the heroic young Princess smiled; Bath had never been "so Populous" since it was built and perhaps never so happy. For more genteel people there was a rare treat, a production in May of that recent London hit, The Beggar's 25

Farley's Bristol News-Paper, Nov. 11, 1727.

36

Young Businessman and City Father Opera. Even the rehearsals were attended by "all the Quality," and the Bristol reporter had heard that John Gay himself had coached the actors. All these gaieties as well as the elegant new buildings contributed in their way to give character and a kind of attractiveness to the town which both residents and resorters would appreciate. Bath had also a serious responsibility to the nation, a responsibility that from 1597 to 1714 had been incorporated into a law. By that law the diseased poor folk of England were entitled to use the hot baths of Bath free of charge. After the expiration of the law several philanthropic people had proposed the establishment of a charitable hospital in Bath and had begun collecting money for it. Only small sums were given at first, though impressive names appeared among the list of donors : Dr. Robert Gay, the Duke of St. Albans, Galfridus Walpole (the Postmaster General), Uvedale Price, Sir Richard Steele, General Wade, the Lord President of Scotland, and, in Beau Nash's list, five countesses; the total collection was less than £300. The committee then hopefully hung up its "Scheme" in the Pump Room, with Nash's name at the head followed by the names of Humphrey Thayer, Dr. George Cheyne (already launched as author and physician), Jeremiah Peirce (a surgeon who was to be conspicuous in the Hospital), and eleven others. The plan was to make available the benefits of Bath's hot waters to poor cripples and "lepers" and other sick people for whose particular infirmities these waters were thought to be salutary. Each person would first need to be certified for treatment by a physician or surgeon in his place of residence, and the certification forwarded to the officers of the Hospital in advance. Each person would be required to bring from his home parish the sum of thirty shillings to take care of his return home or, mournful alternative, his burial. The bed and care at the Hospital would be free. And as Bath was traditionally overrun with "Beggars in Shoals" and pretended claimants to pity, the project had as one of its objectives separating the sheep from the goats and driving the goats out of town. Though the plan was excellent, things dragged. Thayer sent word from London that several large contributions would be forthcoming as soon as a site was found, and John Wood in 1727 busied himself in the search. In 1728 Ralph Allen was added to the committee. But two years were to pass before the problems relating to a site could be resolved.26 Another event of 1728 indicated civic self-consciousness of a different sort. General Wade proposed to have portraits painted of the Mayor and each of the Aldermen at his expense, to be hung in the Guildhall, as a 28

Wood, Essay, II, 275-284.

37

The Benevolent

Man

token of his gratitude to the men who had honored him with election to Parliament. 27 The Council, not displeased, voted in December to send a letter of thanks to the General and a request that he sit to have his picture drawn at full length (theirs were to be at three-quarters) at the expense of the Council for display in the Guildhall. The fortunate artist to whom the commission for all this work fell was "Mr. Vandeest," and the Council immediately by general consent agreed to make him an honorary freeman of the city. Johan Van Diest (c. 1680-c. 1760) was the son of the Dutch landscape painter, Adriaen Van Diest, who had spent the last thirty years of his life in England and whose pictures of scenes in the West of England had pleased many. How General Wade discovered Johan is not clear, but Philip Doddridge said Wade brought him to Scotland. Sometime in the 1720's he painted portraits of three other army men, the first Earl Stanhope, the sixth Earl of Strathmore, and Colonel James Gardiner, all of whom like Wade were Whigs. 28 Perhaps the General first encountered him in Bath. In any case, for the present Van Diest was fixed there. Eventually Allen took him into his employ. T h e nine Van Diest portraits of Wade's electors now hanging in the Council Chamber introduce one not very intimately into their company; such a commission would hardly encourage originality. All the gentlemen wear, over their sober brown or gray or dark blue suits, the Councilman's black gown (except the Mayor, whose robe is red); hands and arms are conventionally arranged, though one might suspect a hint of a swagger in young Allen's.29 Thomas Atwood, Jr., who must have been a little younger even than the Postmaster, alone wears his own hair; William Chapman, an elderly representative of the ubiquitous Chapmans, has the most sensitive face. Allen looks out firmly; a trick of Van Diest's of putting a small biographically suggestive scene in the background occurs in the left top corner of the portrait of Allen, where one can see the base of a stone column; at the right is a column surmounted by a capital. In the right lower "According to Farley's Bristol News-Paper of Nov. 18, 1728, the Mayor and Aldermen were to be painted. But among the series of portraits now hanging in the Council Chamber, two represent men who in 1728 were only Councilmen, Thomas Atwood, Jr., and Ralph Allen. 28 Roger de Piles, Art of Painting . . . The Third Edition (n. d.), p. 428; Horace Walpole, Anecdotes of Painting, ed. James Dallaway, III ( 1 8 2 7 ) , 2 6 4 - 2 6 5 ; P. Doddridge, Some Remarkable Passages in the Life of . . . Col. James Gardiner (Boston, Mass., 1748), Appendix; James G. Mann, "Sir John Smythe's Armour in Portraiture," Connoisseur, X C ( 1 9 3 2 ) , 8 8 - 9 7 . a See Plate 1.

38

Young Businessman

and City

Father

comer of the large portrait of Wade one can make out horsemen fighting and behind them a line of buildings. Allen liked that part of the picture; it reappeared later, considerably transformed, on the base of the Wade monument at Prior Park.

39

IV Stone, Hospitals, Deputy Postmasters, and Money 1729-1734

Although defeated in the earlier campaign to sell his Bath stone to the Governors of Greenwich Hospital, in 1730 Allen succeeded in gaining something better, a contract to supply and set up the stonework on the first of four blocks of wards and offices to be built by St. Bartholomew's Hospital. T h e Hospital was in the heart of London, and the designer was Sir James Gibbs, already a leading architect. Allen, pleased and excited by the news of the acceptance of his offer, sent to William Tims, the Chief Clerk at the Hospital, his thanks to be delivered to "those Gentlemen who have caused the publique Introduction of my Stone into London; Pray assure them that their highest expectations shal be fully answer'd by the exactest performance of every tittle which I mention'd when I had the honor to wait upon them." 1 T h e indenture, when it was finally signed on August 14, was between Ralph Allen of Bath on the one hand and on the other hand the Mayor of London, the Governors of the Hospital, and the Commonalty and citizens of London — an impressive party of the second part. Among the two hundred Governors were many distinguished and influential men, including Pope's friends the Earls of Oxford and Orrery, several members of the banking families of Hoare and Child, the Duke of Chandos, and Dr. Gay. T h e prospects must have looked cheerful to the quarry owner. 1 St. Barth., Ha 19/29/5—July 1, 1730. This passage and others are quoted from the original manuscripts by kind permission of the Governors of the Hospital. The decision of the Governors to accept Allen's offer was presumably based upon an expected economy in cost of stone as well as on Allen's charitable disposition. At about this time ( 1 7 3 1 ) , a Mr. Townsend, surveyor, told the vestry of St. Olave's Church in Hart Street, London, that to replace twenty-four feet of the steeple would cost £235 for Bath stone, £255 for Portland stone; see Vestry Minutes in Guildhall Library, MS. 858/1, This infopnation I owe to Professor Louise Hall.

4°

Stone, Hospitals, Deputy Postmasters,

Money

Having learned a good deal already about managing complicated postal business in remote places, Allen may have felt easy about this new venture. But as time went on and he found himself engaged on the second and then the third and then the fourth of the St. Bartholomew structures, he was to encounter more kinds of trouble than he could have imagined. His motives in this project were mixed. H e wished to advertize Bath stone with the hope of selling a great deal of it in London as well as elsewhere. But, as he said twenty-five years later when disenchantment had fallen over his idea of making a fortune that way, h e at the outset had undertaken the building and "calculated the expence with a View of being a considerable Benefactor to a Commendable Charity." 2 Again and again when disparities in charges and in costs appeared in the accounts, he made concessions to the Governors. T h e year before he died h e estimated that his concessions and donations to St. Bartholomew's had amounted to about £2000 — and at the same time h e offered to give £25 more. T h e total probably equaled the sum he gave to his own General Hospital in Bath and was perhaps at least as much as the value of the land he was to deed to the Exeter Hospital. T h e history of this long-sustained part of Allen's business life is instructive to follow in some detail. H e had sent in his proposal on December 4, 1729, basing his estimates on the printed design of the architect. Cubical stone, plain work, molded work, ashlar; plinths, doorways, windows, cornices, gateways; and forty-four vases four feet tall to stand on top of the 50-foot-tall structure; all this h e would quarry in W i d c o m b e and deliver to London. "I will Do, Find, & Set up (according to the foregoing Scantlings & Dimentions) in good Workmanlike manner, T h e Hospital finding Scaffolding & getting leave of the City for my M e n to come & W o r k within their Libertys for the Sum of 1700 Pounds." 3 There was a long wait, and in the meanwhile something of a similarly promising appearance occurred. O n a visit to London in the spring, Allen met the eminent architectural enthusiast, Lord Burlington, in Twickenh a m and told him about the possibilities of Bath stone. His lordship's boldly-designed villa at Chiswick was about finished, b u t its gardens were not. A kinsman wrote to him on May 11, 1730, that one of his employees was about to go to Bath to "pitch upon the stone" for some addition 2 St. Barth., Ha 19/31/19 — March 30, 1756. In documenting material in the manuscripts at St. Bartholomew's Hospital I have added dates to the shelf-numbers only when the text seems to call for that extra information. a St. Barth., Ha 19/7/29.

4*

The Benevolent

Man

4

Burlington was contemplating. On May 20 Allen wrote to Burlington that he was awaiting the draughts for urns for which he would send prices. He congratulated the Earl on his "general service" to the country (for which he had just been awarded the Garter) and added acknowledgments for "this particular kindness which you have been pleased to shew my design by a Publique Introduction of a Stone that wil on easie terms answer the best purposes of building." W h a t came of the transaction is not known. W h e n Allen and Alexander Pope went to call on Lord and Lady Burlington in 1736, they may have seen urns and perhaps other things constructed of Widcombe oolite. At the moment when the news came to Allen that St. Bartholomew's would use his stone on the terms he proposed he was "very much out of Order," and his brother Philip had to write an acknowledgment. 5 Then he had to wait some time for Gibbs to supply detailed plans. W h e n they arrived he found that either they were altered or his estimator had mistaken some of the dimensions in the original printed design. Here we meet the first of his many concessions to the Governors as recorded in the extensive correspondence with Mr. Tims. T h e disparities in cost, he wrote, are "against me, but since 'tis not very considerable I am willing to abide by my first proposal of Seventeen hundred pounds, which is the Lowest Sum that my Surveyor assures me I can undertake the building for without a certain Loss; However since the Governours has acted in so obliging a manner by me as to shew so strong an inclination to cause a Publique introduction of my Stone into London, I wil out of the seventeen hundred pounds make a Compliment of one hundred to the Hospital. If the Governours instead of a parapet wal do chose Rail & Banisters on the top of the building that alteration shal be made without any new charge." If this was satisfactory he asked to have the contract drawn up; the Hospital would pay for the scaffolding and would arrange "Liberty" for ten men from Bath to work in London.® T h e Governors, now desiring speed, requested Allen's immediate presence in London just when his other concerns, he replied, made such a journey "impracticable." But in spite of the great inconvenience he went to London in the middle of August, having again asked for such detailed drawings from Gibbs as would prevent further misunderstandings. 'Burlington MS. 162.2, at Chatsworth. I am indebted to Thomas S. Wragg, Librarian and Keeper, for kind permission to see and quote from this letter and that of May 20, 1730. 5 St. Barth., Ha 1 9 / 2 9 / 1 — June 29, 1730. • St. Barth, Ha 1 9 / 2 9 / 6 — J u l y 18, 1730.

42

Stone, Hospitals, Deputy Postmasters,

Money

The indenture of August 14, 1730, very explicit about Allen's obligations and those of his heirs and assigns, required him to deposit as security for a "full and punctual performance" shares in the Sun Fire Office to the value of £1600. If any of the stonework should "fly crack moulder or decay within the space of thirty years next after the said Building shall be finished," Allen would have to make good the defect at his own cost. He agreed to build any or all of the three other blocks of the projected quadrangle later, on the same terms, if the Governors should so desire. When November came, a small "parcel" of stone had been shipped, and two vessels in Bristol were being loaded with a larger amount. Block freestone rather than wrought stone was being sent. In December he was still waiting for Gibbs's drawings of the ornaments and also for information as to whether his men could work in London "without their ffreedom." In January, 1731, having learned that any laborers in London would need to secure "freedom" at a cost of £30 apiece, he saw that the cost for the eight men he had compromised on would amount to more than the £200 he had offered as a gift. So now another concession: he would reduce his force to seven men and pay for their "Liberty" because he was "determin'd that no part of this Expense shal rest on the Governours." In March he was in London to sign the indenture on those terms, and his faithful employee Biggs was put in charge of the stonework.7 When Allen returned home he found that the affairs of the projected Bath Hospital were becoming active. Dr. Gay and his son had begun the legal processes necessary to their gift of land to the Trustees. In April, 1731, the Trustees decided to print Wood's designs for the building along with a full explanation of the Hospital project in order to elicit subscriptions. Thayer in London and Ralph Allen at the Post Office in Bath were to receive contributions. But the legalism of Lawyer Collibee brought everything to a standstill once more. Nor was the progress on the building of St. Bartholomew's in London what the Governors desired. On June 4 Mr. Tims wrote about the delay to Mr. Allen, who inquired of Mr. Biggs, who blamed Mr. Allabaster, the person in charge of setting the stone. To expedite the work, Allen dispatched a man to assist Allabaster, but the latter merely abused the new ' T h i s Biggs was probably the Richard Biggs who in 1 7 6 3 was signing documents as "Manager of the Stone work" at St. Barth's, and exchanging letters about the job with his brother William, who seemingly was in charge of assembling the stone for transport from Bath. Among the numerous tradesmen subscribing to W o o d ' s book about the new Bristol Exchange (designed by him and built of Allen's stone in 1 7 4 2 - 4 3 ) was William Biggs of Combe, "Freestone Mason"; see A Description of the Exchange of Bristol (Bath, 1 7 4 5 ) .

43

The Benevolent Man arrival, and Allen felt ready to dismiss Allabaster, he was so "blamable." But a friend intervened, and Allen kept the stone-setter. Tims, however, seemed to think it was Biggs's freemasons who were delaying. Determined to prevent the Governors from feeling any dissatisfaction with his men or himself, Allen asked Tims to summon both Biggs and Allabaster together and discover who was at fault; whatever Tims should in consequence recommend he would agree to. By the end of the month the first floor was built, and Allen requested the Hospital Treasurer to pay the £500 due him to James Theobalds, his business agent. The supply of block stone was dwindling, and Allen directed Biggs not to let it be sold to any of the other people in and about London who now wanted Bath stone. By September 2, in spite of Allen's commands, there was not enough. Trusting that the Governors would see how sincerely he had worked to prevent such an "accident as have happen'd," Allen told Tims that four hundred tons were then at sea, of which seventy should arrive immediately. 8 At the beginning of January, 1732, a letter from Tims gave Allen "new pain." Although he had made clear to Biggs and his agent Theobalds that the Hospital was always to come first, extra stone had been needed for work not included in the contract; complete stoppage was only narrowly averted. "I am told," Allen wrote to Tims, "that the Customary Method to adjust Matters of this Nature is for each of the partys to Chuse an Experienced Person & to be determined by their Judgment; But as I began, so I'm determined to finish this Work, with an Entire Confidence in the Governours." So he will pay whatever they or the architect Gibbs or some other capable person thinks proper for the extra work.9 The contracted reimbursement to Allen of £700 was paid in March, but the amount due for the extra work hung in air. At the end of May he asked the President of the Hospital, Sir Richard Brocas (whose wife had been resorting to Bath waters and for whose health Allen expressed good wishes ), to pay the latter sum (£272) to Theobalds. In July, while in Southampton, Allen was dumbfounded to learn that the request had been refused. Theobalds reported the matter to him thus : "I sent to Mr. Gay who says the Hospital wou'd not sell their Stock to pay you because there had been a fall of Late, and that when it advanc'd they wou'd sell; Also that there is a difference of about £30 between their Account and Biggs; in short they trifle strangely." Few things, commented Allen to Tims, "cou'd be more 8 St. Barth., Ha 19/29/14 —Sept. 4, 1731. During the next four months, correspondence between the Bath stone-merchant and St. Bartholomew's seems to have ceased. " St. Barth., Ha 19/29/15-16.

44

Stone, Hospitals, Deputy Postmasters, Money surprising or indeed painful." He asked Tims at the next meeting of the Governors' committee to beg them "fully to Reflect on my Conduct & acquaint me with the Cause of this treatment." 1 0 Delays and uncertainties followed, and as late as December the amount of £72 in the account remained unsettled. Allen finally told the Governors he would rebate to them any part they thought proper of the £72. "Your quickening of the payment of Mr. Biggs own Bill for Work Long finished wil be obliging to me & kind to a person who greatly wants that money." 1 1 By 1730 the Bath Council had come to regard Allen as a kind of banker for them even though he rarely attended their meetings. In June, for instance, they had voted to "take up" from him at Michaelmas £2200 to pay various debts to Aldermen John Ford, John Billing, and other Bathonians. In 1734 General Wade donated five hundred guineas to the Council to be used for "some publick Good and Advantage for this City," and Allen acted as depositary while the Council debated how to use it. In 1735 when the Council fined the Duke of Chandos £80 for having usurped, many years previously, a portion of St. John's Hospital garden for a stairway to his new lodging house, Chandos appealed to Allen (from whom he had bought the stone) to persuade the Council to lessen the fine; Allen apparently did not do so. Allen's financial sagacity, as well as his benevolence and family feeling, was to be exercised during the next dozen years or more in the affairs of his wife's relatives in Ware, just north of London in Hertfordshire. Mrs. Allen's brother, Anthony Rodney Buckeridge, and his wife Ann had their fifth child in June, 1734, a daughter called Elizabeth, perhaps for her aunt Elizabeth Allen. Three months later Anthony Rodney died, having named Ralph Allen to be "Guardian or Trustee" for all his children. At this time only three survived: Margaret Mabella, aged eight (who was to make a very good marriage one day); Lewis, aged six (on whom his uncle at first pinned his hopes); and the infant Elizabeth (who developed into a sickly, saintly girl and died at sixteen). T h e Buckeridges were comfortably prosperous. Besides four shares in the Avon navigation company (worth about £1600), Anthony Rodney owned a "farm and messuages" in Herefordshire and two "tenements or messuages" in Fleet Street, London. Ralph Allen seems to have entered a claim of £800 on his estate on behalf of Anthony Rodney's sisters. Buckeridge's will lists other properties, one of which, the Rectory Manor of " St. Barth., Ha 1 9 / 2 9 / 1 9 . a St. Barth., Ha 1 9 / 2 9 / 2 2 — Dec. 5, 1732.

45

The

Benevolent

Man

W a r e , if not also his other houses and farms in W a r e , came to him with his wife. She was Ann Lewis, granddaughter of Thomas Lewis, Esq., of Westminster, and niece of Margaret Tufton, wife of Sir Richard Tufton of W a r e . Lady Tufton had left Ann the Rectory copyhold, the income from which Buckeridge settled upon her by their marriage articles. At his death he bequeathed all his properties, as well as the Avon navigation stock, to her for her lifetime, and, after that, to their son Lewis. T h e two daughters were to be given £2000 each when they reached the age of twenty-one. Managing the property proved a worry to Mrs. Buckeridge, and she drew on her brother-in-law as well as lawyers and business agents for advice and assistance. Eventually her son Lewis was a worry also. B u t Allen seems always to have remained a valued and patient friend to his first wife's sister-in-law. Only once is there a record of a threatened breach, and in that case "Sister" apologized humbly. 1 2 In 1735, about a year after Anthony Rodney's death, Mrs. Buckeridge See p. 93 below. An account of the relationships and affairs of the Buckeridge family must be pieced together from the wills, on file now at Somerset House, of Anthony Rodney Buckeridge and of his wife's second husband, Edmund Ball; from the Parish Register of St. Mary's, Ware; from the correspondence between Allen and "Sister" now scattered among several collections; from local histories (especially Nathaniel Salmon, The History of Hertfordshire [1728] and Edith M. Hunt, The History of Ware [Hertford, 1946]); and from "Ralph Allen & Buckeridge M.S.S.," a miscellaneous collection of picturesque notes and letters belonging to the Bath Reference Library. Several links in the history I have had to supply by guesswork. Anthony Rodney Buckeridge's "Penrose" farm in Herefordshire and the Fleet Street tenements seem to have come to him from Mr. Pember and/or "Mother Pember," who were, I suspect, his and Mrs. Allen's maternal grandparents. "Sister Hudson," the sister Sarah of Anthony Rodney and Mrs. Elizabeth Allen, was by 1700 married to Kendall Hudson (see her father's will), called Captain Hudson in some of the Buckeridge papers; it was she, no doubt, who, as "Mrs. Sarah Hudson," was mentioned by John Wood (II, 368) along with Anthony Rodney and three Aliens as buying shares in the Avon navigation scheme in 1724. Besides the three children of Anthony Rodney Buckeridge and his wife Ann mentioned above, born respectively in 1726, 1728, and 1734, there had been at least two others, Rodney (baptised on Aug. 7, 1730) and Sarah (baptised on Sept. 24, 1731). The baptism of all but the first of the five is recorded in the Register of St. Mary's. Mrs. Ann Buckeridge (née Lewis) was a niece of Margaret, Lady Tufton, who was married three times — to Sir Richard Tufton, to someone named Farewell, and to Seymour Tredenham. In 1722 she left by will £260 for clothing the poor of Ware and teaching eight children to read. In 1749 Ann Buckeridge, who had by then married Edmund Ball, made a will in which she left £40 to be added to her aunt's bequest; see Victoria History of the County of Hertfordshire, ed. William Page, III (1912), 396. In the central aisle of St. Mary's at the foot of the pulpit one can see Lady Tufton's gravestone as well as that of the pious Elizabeth Buckeridge, Ann's daughter and Mrs. Ralph Allen's niece. φ 12

Stone, Hospitals, Deputy Postmasters,

Money

had a sum of money to invest; Allen suggested that she lend it to John Wood, "a neighbour of mine," as he called him, who for the £1500 would give her a mortgage at five per cent on some ground-rent property in Bath. By 1744 Wood's debt to her reached a total of £2600. 13 In the meanwhile Allen's own investments in Widcombe were increasing steadily and interestingly. Doubtless he liked to ride to the top of the hill to inspect work in his quarries and to see how the new roads were progressing as well as the new houses for the workingmen and their families. These houses had been roofed not with thatch or slate but with flat slabs of stone laid like large shingles. Allen had got the idea from seeing such a roof on a house a few yards from the London road on Bowdon Hill in Wiltshire. The view he would have from the top of Combe Down, on which as yet there were few trees, was superb, whether southward towards Salisbury Plain and the Mendip Hills, or northward over his own narrow valley to the town of Bath laid out below and, far in the distance, to Wales. Having acquired so much property in Widcombe, he would of course become one of the vestry of the parish church (the Church of St. Thomas à Becket, of the Parish of Lyncombe and Widcombe). He signed the Overseers' Book in 1732, and his neighbor Philip Bennet, owner of the finest house in the parish immediately across the road from the church, was also a signer the next year.14 The lucubrations of the motley vestry (one vestryman in 1749 being able to sign only by his mark T ) must have amused the Postmaster occasionally. Yet he would have to take seriously the chronic problems — the tax rate, the distribution of bread, the admissions to the poorhouse. On June 18, 1733, he seems to have agreed with his fellows that Widow Tripp with three children should not be allowed to say that she belonged to Widcombe Parish. It was decided also that the "Woman big with child" lodging at Mr. Woodward's should not add a charge to the parish. But during these years he usually did not attend the meetings of the vestry. Instead the Postmaster must have spent countless hours with endless patience scanning the records of the cross-road posts in the West and of the bye letters of the whole country. How he managed to make so much money out of these portions of the postal service is an interesting question. Between 1720 and 1760 the total " S e e , for this transaction, Allen's letters to her, dated Nov. 3, 1735, and Feb. 9, 1735 [O.S.], now in the collection of James M. Osborn, New Haven, Conn., and also "Ralph Allen & Buckeridge M.S.S." 14 T h e Overseers' Book is now kept in Bath Reference Library.

47

The Benevolent Man volume of mail in England increased enormously, partly because of the establishment of many new branches off the main roads, many new crossroad posts, and faster, more frequent, more reliable service. Both commercial and personal correspondence would be affected. Much of the widespread improvement in the carriage and delivery of mail of all kinds was due to Allen's success in transforming a widely dispersed staff, accustomed to cheating the Government, into a relatively honest and efficient part of the nation's civil service. This change was not effected easily or in a moment. The difficulties lamented by Thomas Gardiner in 1677 were still to be conquered in 1730. Deputy postmasters often confused the several kinds of letters in their records so that money due to Allen was indistinguishable from money due to the General Post Office; and bye letters, on which in some neighborhoods postage was still paid by the sender, were listed indiscriminately with cross-road letters. More serious was the failure of deputies to be accurate in the post bills and vouchers accompanying each bag or to send the bills and vouchers regularly to Allen. His directions to surveyors return again and again to these two "dangerous" practices in various parts of the country. Several warnings were not enough to change the practices of some deputies. The bye letters between Cockermouth and Whitehaven, Allen discovered in 1735, had for several years never been reported at all. In order to remind deputies of honesty, he required them when claiming rebate allowances on "dead letters" (those addressed to unknown people and therefore not collectable) to send him a signed oath as to the correctness of their claims — something which certain deputies omitted on religious grounds and others out of neglect or worse. For example, at Carlisle a great number of dead letters were always reported, and most of them seemed to Allen to be "sham Letters all written by one hand and sent from different parts of the Kingdom." 15 One of Allen's important rules was that every letter should be stamped, when put into the mail, to indicate where it started.16 The deputies were supposed to write on the back of any unstamped letter the post office or "stage" it came from; when they failed to do this, Allen suspected fraud. Another way in which deputies cheated the Government and Allen was ls Allen's Instruction-Book to Surveyors ( 1 7 2 9 - 1 7 4 0 ) , p. 9, in G.P.O. Many of the details in the following pages come from this volume. " On the historical importance of Allen's interest in stamping letters, see Howard Robinson, The British Post Office: A History (Princeton, 1 9 4 8 ) , p. 107.

48

Stone, Hospitals, Deputy

Postmasters,

Money

to include within their own franked personal mail letters which were not theirs and which should have been paid for. This sort of illegal business was very hard to uncover, but one culprit played directly into Allen's hands. In August, 1736, a Lancaster surgeon published a handbook on veterinary matters, and thinking of the hundreds of post horses in England he sent advertisements of the book to all the deputies, instructing them that replies mailed to the deputy at Lancaster would be free. The deputy at Bath — Ralph Allen — being less interested in the welfare of horses than of the Post Office naturally proceeded to investigate. Though the surgeon disclaimed any intent to defraud and Mrs. Hopkins, the Lancaster deputy, sent an oath to the truth of her large claims for personal mail, the evidence was plainly against her, and she was removed from office. Further trouble came from deputies who failed to manage the riding part of the work properly. The deputy at Gosport tolerated "a Careless drunken fellow" as postboy who had lost his bag several times. Closer to home, in May, 1754, the cross-road letters between Bath and Bristol were lost and a month later were found in a field outside town. At Stone one of William Barber's postboys had actually been detected rifling the bags, but Barber refused to regard this episode as serious. The riders hired by the irresponsible Mr. Alwick of Gosport were allowed by their employer such liberty that they could destroy letters without being punished. The deputies at Worcester and at Beudley in 1733 by private agreement had their postboys exchange mails at an alehouse on the road, thus sparing themselves the trouble of opening the bags properly in both offices at recorded hours. Indeed, the deputies could thus leave most of their work to the unsupervised, unbonded postboys. A similar arrangement was discovered at Plymouth in 1734, and the old scheme was again in operation at Worcester and Beudley in 1737. This illegal procedure sometimes caused a delay in delivery; it made accurate bookkeeping difficult and blunders, misplacements, and losses in the bags easy. It must have played havoc with service for travelers who rode post and needed horses and guides. There were signs that postboys rather than the deputy were in charge of the delivery of letters at Wells in 1734, but Allen's inclination in what he called "a tender subject" was to condone the action of these boys because the Wells deputy had been depriving them of "the little perquesits which have been always allowed them of a penny a Letter over and above the postage for dropping of Letters at the Towns and Villages as they pass through." Because Wells unlike its neighbor Bath had a queer preference for quiet, the deputy "will 49

The Benevolent Man not suffer the Riders to blow their Homes as they ride through W e l l s . " Allen carried on long campaigns against certain recalcitrant deputies, and sometimes he was defeated. In his native Cornwall there was Mr. Pennington, deputy at Bodmin. In September, 1734, he owed Allen £60 though the entire annual proceeds from the cross-road and bye letters there were only £40. Pennington's "Securities" had been warned that if the debt were not soon paid, the bond would be put in execution. B u t still no payment from Pennington. So the bond was collected, and Allen hoped to find a better man for the job. T h e records show, however, that in 1735 Pennington was still deputy. In 1736 Allen supposed that the Lords of the Treasury could not tolerate such a man; yet Mr. Pennington lasted at least three years longer. T h e most outrageous case was Mrs. Sarah Wainwright of Ferrybridge, Yorkshire. By 1697 she had been granted part of a large postal "farm," and her name and John Wainwright's move in and out of the records of farms for two or three places in the district for many years. In 1711 and 1712, as indeed long before in 1690, there had been serious complaints about abuses in the Ferrybridge post office, 17 though Mrs. Wainwright had denied the charges and apparently could be neither reformed nor removed. In 1732 Allen said that in spite of the oath taken by all deputies not to open mail she "opens her Dead Letters under a pretence to see from what place they came from and then writes the name of that Stage." He therefore refused to honor her claims for such letters, but the practice continued. In 1734 the merchants of Norwich and vicinity complained that she sent letters to them by way of the country-letter bags to London instead of directly by the cross-road post through Oxton, thus making the postage unnecessarily expensive. At last the old Postmistress died and went to her reward, but her successors in Ferrybridge continued to cause trouble. Allen was sure (writing in 1739) that he had been "greatly injured" by her. 1 8 Reading the letters of instruction sent by Allen to his surveyors, one sees that the two heaviest duties of these men were to investigate suspicious places — always "with tenderness and caution" — and to collect arrears. Tenderness was not usually recommended in the latter duty, for Allen kept books most exactly, and he insisted upon collecting debts, whether of one pound or two shillings or forty pounds fourteen shillings " S e e Roger Whitley's Letter-Books, G.P.O.; Cal. Treets. Books, X X V I , Part 2 ( 1 9 5 4 ) , pp. 285, 301. 18 Allen's Instruction-Book, pp. 67, 147.

50

Stone, Hospitals, Deputy Postmasters,

Money

six pence (as at St. C o l u m b ) . But his principle of operation was to indulge first in repeated chiding and then in threats before finally bringing down an "Execution" on a deputy and his bondsmen. A faulty officer at Salisbury, he says, has defrauded him of £100 in five years, b u t h e will compromise on an immediate payment of £50 and assurances of better performance in the future. 1 9 Part of the secret of his success in his huge business was his practice, made possible by his being a "farmer" rather than the Postmaster General, of rewarding the honest and cooperative and efficient deputies by increases above the fixed salary or by a percentage of the gross intake — one-sixth or one-fifth (Benjamin Bigg) or one-half (at Berwick, where the work was heavy). Even if the Worcester deputy managed his postboys badly, Allen increased his salary in 1737 to encourage him to continue sending his vouchers. T h e system of bonuses was effective, he found. Though Allen had made his original grand circuit of towns and accumulated an amazingly exact knowledge of the whole system, his dependence upon his surveyors was basic; for it was up to them to exercise tact and judgment in one suspected place after another. John Lumley, who as deputy in Abingdon since 1714 and manager of the cross-road post there had learned the postal business from within, was Allen's best surveyor. Though he had had to take time out for seizures of gout (and visits to his children) and traveled widely, he retained the post office in Abingdon at least until 1731. H e was so highly respected for his "industry and exactness" and his record of effecting improvements that in 1742 he was taken over by the General Post Office and located in London. He and his fellow surveyor Mr. Haslam, as also later Mr. Carter and Mr. Robinson, traveled constantly, often settling in a town for a week or more to examine the mails coming and going; thus they checked on the whole neighborhood. Though Allen once bluntly scolded Haslam (March 5, 1735) for sending in a superficial report and not collecting enough arrears to pay his salary, these men were absolute necessities in Allen's system. They in part explain why his contracts produced far more than the £6000 rental; let us hope they regarded their salary — £300 each in 1763 20 — as adequate. Yet Allen furnished the brains and the careful, imaginative bookkeeping that indicated where the system was working and where it was not. It was he, too, who anticipated possible changes in the routing of mail and the need of new post offices. 18 30

Ibid., p. 160. See "Bye and Cross Road Letter Office," p. 19, in G.P.O.

51

The Benevolent Man His care is exemplified in this typical letter of instruction: Bath Oct. 28, 1732 Mr. Haslam. When you have fully acquainted Mr. Lumley with your transactions at York, Leave the care of that Office to him, and set out for Preston in Lancashire, where I am afraid you will find my Business in a good deal of Disorder, for instead of regarding the strict orders that have been given so often, for the carefull conveyance of Bye Letters in distinct divisions in their respective Bags, You'll find them sent in One large Bundle, which destroys the Cheque for discovering frauds, Causes Letters to be lost, and is an Inlet to many other abuses; therefore be sure thoroughly to redress this Evil; by seeing this necessary method restored; Before you leave that Countrey Examine whether any of the Bye Letters from Yorkshire &c. which always ought to be Inserted in the Post Bills & Vouchers at Warrington, are entered in the article of Cross road Letters, because if this is done, 'tis an injury both to me & all the Deputy's from Warrington to Kendale. Lancaster is always complaining on this subject, one of her Letters you will receive under this Cover; At the same time acquaint Mr. Nock that the Gentlemen at Bury in Lancashire complain that instead of sending their Letters through Warrington the usual channel for Conveyance he now sends them to Bolton which puts them to an unnecessary expence, besides other inconveniences; Prevent the Continuance of this fault, receive the Preston Debt, Settle your other Business at that Office, & then collect Wigan & Warrington arrears. Those Officers being always very backward in their remittances, at this Place be very exact into the Inspection of the Business of both Branches, then Go to Knotsford and inform yourself, why the Letters sent through & from that Office to Brereton Green for Nortwich &c. are Lessened, See what they produce while you are there, and then Go to Stone where you will hear further from Your very humble Servant R. Allen21 The man who did more than any other one person in England between 1720 and 1760 to encourage the sending of letters, the one who with practical measures supported the example of Mr. Bickerstaff and Mr. Spectator in teasing people into writing letters, the one who gave the purchasers of numerous manuals of elegant epistolography an increasing opportunity to practice their art — this man was Ralph Allen. His boast to the Lords of the Treasury was, however, not that he had fostered the epistolary art but that he had, by improving postal delivery, benefited commerce and strengthened trade. W h e n one examines the letters to his surveyors by which he accomplished so much one can see, of course, more vigor and dispatch than Addisonian suavity or Popean cleverness. His "Allen's Instruction-Book, pp. 20-21.

Stone, Hospitals, Deputy Postmasters, Money prose is direct, concise, as barren as stone. His highest grace is perhaps the delicacy of his saying once that the conduct of a faulty deputy "makes me Apprehend an Omission." The same phrases — "redress the abuse," "with tenderness and caution" — serve economically year after year for the same occasions. Allen's syntax in respect to agreement of subject and verb — "he have," "affairs cals" — is in these early letters what it was often to be throughout his life, at least in his correspondence. In the matter of correspondence, sufficient unto the purpose is the style thereof. Allen's letters enabled him eventually to become a national figure. Did he ever wish that his letters were better — more exquisite or more eloquent or more witty? The enthusiasm with which he read the volume of Alexander Pope's extraordinary private correspondence issued in 1735 makes one suspect that he did. But he knew what his own talents and needs were. Allen's petition for a second renewal of his contract with the Postmaster General was granted by the Lords of the Treasury on March 22, 1734. The renewal was almost inevitable in view of what he had done to improve not only the cross-road and bye posts but postal service generally. Indeed he later said 22 that the Postmasters General (Thomas Coke, Baron Lovell, and Edward Carteret), recognizing his contribution to the nation's commerce, recommended that he be given the contract for the remainder of his life. Though such a long-term contract could hardly be undertaken by any ministry for so conspicuous and problematical an enterprise, Sir Robert Walpole must have recognized not only Allen's efficiency in his postal business but also his cooperative spirit and his practical good judgment. It would be useful to the Ministry to retain the friendship of this man, especially in Bath where politicians of all colors were frequent visitors. So the lucrative arrangement was continued for Allen, and after 1734 no more annual detailed reports on his business operations were asked for until 1760. But now the debate over the possible interaction of cross-road letters and country letters came to a conclusion: henceforward Allen would be obliged to make up to the Government any diminution in country letters from the highest level reached by them during the past twenty-seven years, namely £17,364. 23 His annual fee would remain £6000. In 1734 also his brother, Philip Allen, assumed the responsibility of deputy in the town of Hungerford, about forty miles eastward on the road to London, to supersede one of the Bigg family, though he seems to have 22 23

RAON, pp. 26, 28. Cal. Treas. Books 1731-34, ed. William A. Shaw (1898), p. 539.

53

The Benevolent Man continued to live in Bath. His salary was to be one-fifth of the proceeds of all letters, the unusually large sum (in 1734) of £315. Philip had been working with Ralph on the latter's business affairs for at least four years; he had consolidated the Allen establishment in Widcombe in February, 1732, by marrying Jane Bennet, the sister of Philip Bennet. 24 They were married not in the little church across the road from her brother's fine house but in another little church, that in Claverton two miles away. By 1734 they had a daughter, Mary — or Molly, as she was later called by the relatives at Prior Park. On November 30, 1734, Philip Allen took the proper step for a sober citizen of buying (from Henry Pitcher, carpenter) a pew for himself, his wife, and his daughter in St. James's Church in Bath, where already Ralph Allen and many other leading residents were established.25 The direction of social change for both Aliens was perceptibly upward. Philip Allen's brother-in-law, Philip Bennet, had the honor in that same year of being elected a Member of Parliament from Shaftesbury in Dorset. Earlier in the year he had been proposed for Bath; Ralph Allen and the Atwoods had voted for him at the Council meeting of April 30, but he was defeated by a small margin. There were other ways by which the residents of Widcombe might gain distinction. William, Prince of Orange, came to Bath late in the winter to take the benefit of the waters before his marriage to Princess Anne. His visit lasted seven weeks, and it was reported in the London Journal (March 2, 1734) as "one continued Scene of Affability, Generosity, and Humanity to all Degrees of Persons." His Majesty went to Combe Down once and then again "to see Mr. Allen's Stone Quarries, and was much pleased in viewing them." He was also taken to see the houses built of Allen's stone by John Wood in the partly finished Queen Square. Wood showed him his designs for completing it, obviously longing for a royal commission.26 A month or two after the royal visit to his quarries Allen was under contract to supply stone to John Sidney, Earl of Leicester. Lord Leicester, since 1731 Constable of the Tower of London, was only a minor politician in Sir Robert Walpole's party, but Allen was doubtless eager to oblige 24 At Philip's marriage Ralph supplied a settlement on him of two annuities of £ 1 0 0 each to be chargeable against Ralph's Lyncombe and W i d c o m b e estate; see Ralph's will in Somerset House. 25 St. James's Pew Book 1 7 1 7 - 1 7 5 6 , now in Bath Reference Library. xLondon Journal, Feb. 16 and 22, 1734; W o o d ' s letter to William Brydges, April 27, 1734, in Bath Reference Library.

54

Stone, Hospitals, Deputy Postmasters, Money him.

27

As was sometimes his custom, Allen had sent along an expert stone-

mason to supervise the construction. B u t he was having serious trouble finding means to ship the stone to London. T h e following letter is another indication that Allen could be generous in his business dealings. My Lord In answer to the obliging Letter which you honoured me with the 1st of this month I have made use of all the different methods which I cou'd conceive to fix a ship to carry your stone, and am greatly concern'd that it is not yet in my power to acquaint you a vessel is secured; upon this question I've offer'd not only to advance the freight but likewise have given an expectation of a protection for the seamen belonging to that ship; and beside the Person usually imploy'd at Bristol I've ever since my return from London constantly dispatch'd others from hence that I can confide in, to assist me, and am now hourly in hopes to succeed. I should be sorry that since Parsons & his partner have behav'd to your satisfaction that at this Juncture they shou'd either quit your work or create an unnecessary charge to you. Therfore I do beg that what Loss they may sustain on this head ('til the stone arrives, or that they have notice from hence that 'tis not in my power to send any) may entirely rest on me, which will plainly shew that I'm truly concern'd for your disappointment & that I am desirous to be Your Lordships most humble & most obedient servant Bath May 1 5 . 1 7 3 4

Ralph Allen2»

27 Allen and Leicester may have become personal acquaintances in 1730 while the latter was lodging in the Chandos Buildings in Bath; see Baker and Baker, Life of Chandos, p. 326. 28 Original in Bath Reference Library. Probably Parsons was either the Robert Parsons of Widcombe, "Free-Stone Mason, and one of the House Carvers of the Exchange," listed among the subscribers to John W o o d ' s Description of the Exchange of Bristol or the " T h o m a s Parsons, Carver, B a t h " whose volume of ink drawings for urns and terms is now in Bath Reference Library.

55

ν The Larger Life: Alexander Pope and Timons Opposite 1734-1740

One of the rewards of living in Augustan England was the chance that one might be celebrated, even painted at full length, in iambic pentameter verse, regular, rhymed, and memorable. T o be sure, this privilege belonged to the wellborn, usually, and not commonly to Post Office projectors. But Ralph Allen was not the usual man, and in spite of his humble origins and not quite Castilian verb forms he had, by the time he was forty, attained distinction. He was rich and had every prospect of growing richer. He had dwelt for more than twenty years in a town frequented by rakes, gamblers, the fashionably debauched and the gaily irresponsible, without losing sobriety or concentration. His acquaintance included Beau Nash, General Wade, and Lord Chandos, all of whom had their moral soft spots; but he also had the considered respect of the Postmaster General and was known to the King's chief minister. By 1734 almost everybody could be expected to appear at Bath. One would notice Lord Chesterfield, Lord Burlington, and the famous Lord Bolingbroke, Pope and Swift and John Gay and Dr. Arbuthnot and George Lyttelton (a writer now, but soon to become Secretary to the Prince of Wales ). Lord Lovell, one-half of his Majesty's Postmaster General, was there in September, 1734, and one can be sure that Allen would not ignore him, especially after his recent flattering recommendation to the Lords of the Treasury of a perpetual contract with Allen. Both men at this time were involved in plans for a great house in the midst of extensive grounds, and Lovell was considering Bath stone for his mansion. Among the female visitors to town was the widowed but not very sedate Mrs. Thomas Pitt with her daughter Ann, to whom her brother William, later the city's most famous representative in Parliament, was sending

56

Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite facetious letters. The Countess of Suffolk, no longer the King's mistress, was in Bath in 1734 — and for some people the evenings would normally conclude with basset and blasphemy.1 How many of these people Allen met or how early he met them one cannot say. But there they all were, year after year, hundreds of fashionable people and famous and clever people (as well as many humble and many disreputable folk), in the lodging houses and Walks, the Pump Room and ballrooms and chocolate-houses near Allen's handsome residence and post office; he could not have escaped seeing them. From watching the throng he could perhaps learn something about taste and elegance. But modesty, integrity, and the habit of treating people decently must have come to him in his youth. Six years previously young Mr. Allen's person had been painted by Van Diest for the Council Room. But in 1734 a much more informative portrait of him was presented to the world in a poem dedicated to the Princess Amelia Sophia Eleanora. Because the poem, Mary Chandler's Description of Bath, was still being reprinted three years after Allen's death and was quoted and pillaged by countless writers on Bath, one may be sure that the image of Ralph Allen there generously portrayed was more widely known than Van Diest's picture. As the poem reveals,2 by 1734 Allen's plans for building a grand mansion on the Widcombe hillside below his quarries were at least partly completed, and Miss Chandler's "Prophetick" account of his gardens proved to be more or less correct. It is especially pleasant to have from the poetess, whose crooked spine, she said, assured her of permanent spinsterhood, a recognition in four lines of the poem of how the Deputy Postmaster's contracts had brought regularity to the mails and happiness to the hearts of separated, anxious lovers. A Description of Bath offers a chronological survey of the history of Bath, a social survey of its pastimes, a medical survey of its baths, a moral survey of what the Bath scene should teach, and a panoramic survey of the town and river and surrounding hills. It terminates in the lines about Ralph Allen. The poetess elsewhere thanked Dr. William Oliver for helping "smooth her Verse" and "improve the Thought" in the Bath piece; 1 Letters of Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield, ed. Bonamy Dobrée ( 1 9 3 2 ) , II, 292. a M y quotations are from the second, enlarged edition printed in London, 1734, for James Leake and J. Gray. An earlier, undated edition, A Description of Bath: A Poem. In a Letter to a Friend, printed in London for Roberts, Jackson, Gray, Leake, and Lobb, may also have appeared in 1734.

57

The Benevolent Man when Oliver had tuned her lyre, "Ev'n Pope approv'd." The modern reader will hardly do less. Hail, mighty Genius! boi π for Great Designs, T'adorn your Country, and to mend the Times; Virtue's Exemplar in degenera te Days, All who love Virtue, love to speak your Praise: You chide the Muse that dares your Virtues own, And, veil'd with Modesty, wou'd live unknown; An honest Muse, no Prostitute for Gain, Int'rest may court her, but shall court in vain: But ever pleas'd to set true Worth in View, Yours shall be seen, and will by All but You. Prophetick here, the Muse shall build thy Seat, Great like thy Soul, in ev'ry Part compleat: On this fa ir Eminence the Fabrick stands, The ñnish'd Labour of a thousand Hands; The Hill, the Dale, the River, Groves, and Fields, Vary the Landscape which thy Prospect yields; Whole Vales of Fruit-trees give our Eyes Delight, Yet scorn alone to gratify the Sight; Beneath the Load the tender Branch shall bend, And the rich Juice regale its Master's Friend. Thy Taste reñn'd appears in yonder Wood, Not Nature tortur'd, but by Art improv'd: Where cover'd Walks with open Vista's meet, An Area here, and there a shady Seat. A thousand Sweets in mingled Odours flow From blooming Flowers, which on the Borders grow. In num'rous Streams the murmuring Waters trill, Uniting all, obedient to thy Will; Till by thy Ait, in one Canal combin'd, They thro' the Wood in various Mazes wind; From thence the foaming Waves fall rap id down, In bold Cascades, and lash the rugged Stone. But here their Fury lost, the calmer Scene Delights the softer Muse, and Soul serene; An ample Bason, Center of the Place, In Lymph transparent holds the scaly Race; Its glassy Face, from ev'ry Ruffle free, Reflects the Image of each neighboring Tree; On which the feather d Choir, melodious, throng. . . . How from the *Mountain's rocky Sides he drew A thousand shining Palaces to view: Temples, and Hospitals in ev'ry Land, * Quarries

58

Alexander Pope and Timon's

Opposite

From Age to Age, his Monuments shall stand. Envy itself shall die, and fickle Fame, When he is dead, do Justice to his Name. . . . Though the poetess has torn the veil of Allen's modesty and proclaimed Virtue's exemplar in a direct address to him who "wou'd live unknown," the reader must applaud the vision; the topics, if not the tone, of her praise seem right. That a poem coming so conspicuously to a climax in praise of a commoner should have been dedicated to the Princess Amelia might at first surprise one. But the Princess, who came to take the waters in Bath in both May and September of this year, had already made known her liking for Bath, and the town had adopted her as its royal favorite. Amelia, beauteous Princess, deign to view What the Muse sings; To You the Song is due: To You, in whom with Joy we see combin'd True Royal Greatness, and a humble Mind. . . . By 1734 Ralph Allen as the town's leading Councilman would have availed himself of opportunities to be presented to her. Besides being dedicated to "beauteous Amelia" the poem contained, placed rather inconspicuously in the middle, a few complimentary lines to "beauteous Anna," Amelia's still plainer sister, who had just acquired a royal (if rather misshapen) husband, the Prince of Orange. When in April the Prince in a second visit brought his bride to Bath, Beau Nash in a characteristic grandiose gesture erected an obelisk, thirty feet tall, in their honor in the newly-named Orange Grove near the Walks. But Amelia, returning to Bath a month later, was given no such testimonial of respect even if the usual birthday celebration was held. Perhaps she found some solace in Mary Chandler's dedication. Readers perusing the lines about Allen and his projected estate at Prior Park might recall the much discussed passage in Pope's Epistle to Lord Burlington (1731) dealing with Timon and his villa. Miss Chandler, one guesses, saw Allen as Timon's opposite. The rich builder of a great country house in Pope's poem is motivated by pride and governed by a desire to display his money and power. My Lord advances with majestic mien, Smit with the mighty pleasure, to be seen. But Allen, "veil'd with Modesty, wou'd live unknown." Timon's contribution to the poor and humble resulted from accident or vanity, but

59

The Benevolent Man Allen is "Virtue's Exemplar in degenerate Days." Because the house at Prior Park was not yet built, no comparison with Timon's cold and stupendous mansion was possible, but Allen's gardens, we see, will be quite unlike Timon's. The "ample Bason" will collect the streams at the foot of Allen's combe in a natural way; but Timon constructed a pond like "an Ocean." In Timon's garden one faces on every side a wall; "No pleasing Intricacies intervene,/ No artful wildness to perplex the scene." At Prior Park, on the contrary, the landscape will be full of variety, covered walks meeting open vistas and streams winding "thro' the Wood in various Mazes." At Timon's villa one starves indoors, and outdoors endless labor has cultivated fruitless and unlifelike trees. At Prior Park, however, there will be fruit trees and vines "to regale its Master's Friend." Pope imagines Timon's frigid buildings as "a labour'd Quarry above ground"; Miss Chandler thinks of the stone from Allen's quarries as producing useful hospitals and temples. In the groves and shrubbery of Timon's villa "The suff'ring eye inverted Nature sees"; at Prior Park woods and flowers, birds and streams display "Not Nature tortured, but by Art improv'd." Timon exemplifies lack of taste and lack of common sense and lack of human sympathy; Allen's "Taste refin'd" is a happy and easy consequence of love of virtue and respect for nature. The poetical milliner's vision of the future Prior Park is most attractive; it undoubtedly lingered in Allen's mind. In September Alexander Pope, now at the height of his fame, made a brief visit to Bath in the company of Lord Bolingbroke. Martha Blount, his intimate friend, was there with Lady Suffolk; she was to kiss the hand of Princess Amelia on the twenty-ninth. Perhaps it was during this gay season that Miss Chandler's poem was shown to the great poet and won his approval. Pope had been an occasional visitor to the spa ever since 1714 and must have encountered Allen by this time.3 If he had not already learned about the latter's plans for gardening on the Widcombe hillside, Mary Chandler's account would have roused his interest in the project. It is probable, too, that the poetess's tribute to the Postmaster's patriotic usefulness, benevolence, integrity, and modesty would strike Pope, who at this moment was engaged on a series of poems satirizing the rich and the lofty for their lack of these very virtues. As for Allen, he seems to have grown weary of the hectic activity and noise in town. The baths and gaming rooms were not far from his house, ' O w e n Ruffhead said that by 1735 the two had "long been acquainted"; see his Life of Alexander Pope ( 1 7 6 9 ) , p. 4 0 6 n.

6o

Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite and Lilliput Alley, just beyond the post-office wing, must have echoed much of the time with the comings and goings of postboys, post horses, and countless out-of-town visitors eager for mail. Furthermore, whatever his health had been formerly, he was now made conscious of mortality. A severe attack of "colic" struck him during a visit to London (as a similar one did his sister-in-law Buckeridge; and "Sister Hudson" was consulting Dr. Joshua Ward about her health). So by June, 1735, he had moved out of his handsome house in town and taken up residence in Widcombe. 4 T h e Bath Post Office remained in Lilliput Alley, perhaps already supervised by Philip Allen. Just where in Widcombe the Ralph Aliens settled cannot be stated, but at least some possibilities should be mentioned. 5 As Allen already owned much of Combe Down and of the sloping land to the north, it would seem likely that somewhere on the property he was acquiring (603 acres by 1741) he would find a tolerably habitable house for use until he could build his mansion. In 1742 there was, half-way up the road from the Bennets' manor house to the Prior Park mansion, something labeled Park House, which on Thomas Thorpe's map® looks sizable enough to be a residence. Still higher up the hill, but east of the Prior Park gardens, Thorpe located a large two-building residence called "the Lodge." Both places appear to be on the edge of the Prior Park estate. W h e n Pope was visiting Allen in 1739 he spoke of Allen's house as high above Bath and near the newly-discovered Lyncomb Spa. Both "Park House" and "the Lodge" would seem to have been not more than a mile from that spring, and one may assume that the Aliens in 1739 were living in the same 4 See a letter from Allen to "Dear Sister," dated June 21, 1735, from "Widcombe near Bath," laid into a grangerized copy of Spence's Anecdotes now in the possession of James M. Osborn. The fact that a letter to "Sister" of Nov. 3 (also in the possession of Mr. Osborn) and another of Dec. 6 (now in the Bath Reference Library) are subscribed merely from "Bath" indicates, no doubt, that as Allen remained the deputy at Bath, he would pick up mail there when he was in town. 5 The notion proposed by Peach (p. 7 6 ) that Allen took up residence in the Holders' Hampton Manor House about this time is untenable; Peach was not aware that Allen's wife at this date was not Elizabeth Holder but Elizabeth Buckeridge. There is no reason to think, either, that the Aliens had been invited by the Bennets to live with them in their "New House" in Widcombe. A third possibility suggested to me by Miss C. M. L. Munday of the Bath Reference Library is that the Aliens lived in a house which is depicted as near a stone-wagon road in an undated, unlabeled drawing by George Speren and etched by I. Pinchbeck. The drawing, probably one of Speren's many designs for fans, does not match any of the houses portrayed at the foot of the later enormous "Survey" of Allen's manors (see pp. 115-116, 220 below). Furthermore, the maps do not indicate the presence of any sizable house close to Allen's wagon-road on its eastern side as the Speren house would seem to be. "An Actual Survey of the City of Bath . . . and of Five Miles Round. See Plate 2.

6i

The Benevolent

Man

dwelling they had chosen in 1735. Not until 1741 was the Prior Park mansion ready for occupancy.7 Allen was now forty-two, wealthy, solidly established in two quite dissimilar businesses, known to at least two members of the royal family, and possessed of the favor of the King's powerful servants, General Wade and Sir Robert Walpole. His splendid estate was beginning to take shape in Widcombe. All he needed, it would seem, was an heir, a family; but that, ever since 1725, had been denied him. There were nephews and nieces, however, and Allen began to take notice of them. While on a trip to London in June the Aliens must have had a visit with their recently widowed sister-in-law, Mrs. Buckeridge. Writing to her on June 21 from Widcombe Allen sent "Our services" to "Mr. Lewy," her son Lewis who had reached the interesting age of seven. Perhaps when the Aliens returned to Widcombe they were greeted by two other young folk, Gertrude and William Tucker, aged eight and seven, Allen's niece and nephew from St. Blazey. They were the surviving children of Allen's sister, Elizabeth. She had died in 1731.8 Whether the children had already become a part of the Aliens' household is not certain, but that something like adoption of them was in Allen's mind is suggested by a note in the Pew Book of St. James's Church in Bath. Four days before he sent greetings to nephew Lewy in Ware he had paid thirty shillings to the churchwarden to add "the Lives of William Tucker Allen, and Gertrude Tucker, his Nephew and Neece in the Seat marked No. 14 in the Chancel" already belonging to the Aliens.9 Perhaps young William was given the name Allen here only to distinguish him from a probably humbler "William Tucker the younger," who owned a seat in the gallery and in December of the next year was to sell a place in it to another William Tucker. Whatever the significance ' Pope, Corr., IV, 206, 344. T h e difficulty in settling the question is compounded by puzzling variations among the maps of the period. In the printed Survey of 1742, Park House is smaller than the Lodge. In the huge ink-drawn "Survey" of Allen's manors made not before 1758 the building that presumably is Park House seems very large, and where the Lodge should be, only a very small building is indicated; yet at the foot of the huge "Survey" the building drawn as " T h e Lodge" looks spacious and conspicuous. T o add to the confusion, Richard Jones recalled that before 1769 Gertrude Warburton had had torn down a Gothic building in the Lodge field. If Pope stayed in so striking a place as the 1758 " L o d g e " (see Plate lO.d) he would probably have mentioned it in the letters he wrote while visiting the Aliens. 8 T h e marriage of Elizabeth Allen and William Tucker is recorded in the Register of St. Blazey for Feb. 25, 1722. Their daughter Gertrude was baptized on Feb. 11, 1 7 2 6 / 2 7 , and William on Dec. 26, 1 7 2 8 . Elizabeth Allen Tucker was buried on Nov. 17, 1731. For this information I am indebted to the Rev. G. R . Polgrean, Vicar. • T h e Pew Book for 1 7 1 7 - 1 7 5 6 in Bath Reference Library.

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Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite of the name in the Pew Book, Billy and Gatty were officially beginning their long and fortunate connection with their Widcombe uncle. Their father in St. Blazey married for the third time nine months after his son and daughter were listed in the Bath church records, and he appears to have had two more children by his third wife, Frances Brigman Tucker. W e hear no more of him, but of the spirited children of his dead wife Elizabeth we shall hear much. Mary Chandler's poem had without warning catapulted the postmaster and quarry owner into literature. A year after the publication of her pen portrait another event drew him further into the world of books, first as fascinated reader and then, more characteristically, as eager entrepreneur. I refer to the volume published by Edmund Curii in 1735, Mr.

Pope's Literary Correspondence For Thirty Years; from 1704 to 1735, Being, A Collection of Letters, Which passed between him and Several Eminent Persons. One feature of Allen's personality that endears him to the biographer is his simple and unspoiled respect for books and their authors. T h e first author we know he "collected" was John Norris of Bemerton, whose Practical Treatise concerning Humility may have had a shaping influence on his character by stressing the virtue that, so far as Miss Chandler and Pope were concerned, should justify Allen's fame. Reading maketh the man. Another of Norris's works, his Essay Towards the Theory of the Ideal or Intelligible World, an abstruse discussion of metaphysics and religion partly derived from the ideas of Nicolas Malebranche, has defeated some of us, but the twenty-one-year-old Deputy Postmaster carefully inscribed "Ralph Allen's Book 1714" inside the cover of his copy, and with the devotion to small detail that helped make him rich he put into the margins of the pages the corrections requested in the "Errata" list. 10 So far, at least, he mastered this solemn work. His debut as an acknowledged patron of published literature Allen seems to have made in 1730. In that year Nathaniel Hooke's translation of Andrew Ramsay's Travels of Cyrus appeared, a handsome large quarto made additionally impressive by a long list of subscribers including "Ralph Allen, Esq." Dr. George Cheyne also subscribed, for the good reason " A l l e n ' s inscribed copies of A Practical Treatise ( 1 7 0 7 ) and of the Essay ( 2 vols., 1 7 0 1 - 1 7 0 4 ) are in the Hurd Library at Hartlebury Castle. In the address " T o the Reader" in the Practical Treatise concerning Humility Norris alludes to " M r . Allen's B o o k " on this subject which he had once read; one would like to know if Ralph Allen thought he had some connection with the pious tradesman, William Allen, whose Practical Discourse of Humility. By W . A . appeared in 1681.

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The Benevolent Man that the translating was done under his roof in Bath. 11 Ramsay's romantic and didactic "history," composed with aid from Xenophon's Cyropaedia, Fénelon's Télémaque, and numerous other books, would furnish agreeable refreshment to Mr. Allen after a day's labor over postal accounts. Young Cyrus is no Tom Jones, but he is taught, as Tom is, that ingratitude is one of the blackest sins, and his story has its amusing aspects. Allen's next subscription was to John T. Desaguliers's Course of Experimental Philosophy (1734), but for a reason not very literary: the account, with drawings, of his stone-wagons and cranes that he had given to the Swiss engineer, de Labelye, was to be printed here, and any blushes caused by the poetical milliner's eulogy, published almost simultaneously, would fade as Allen imagined engineers and businessmen all over the country gratefully studying his practical designs. In connection with Allen's widening relations with authors and their works it should be noticed that James Leake's popular bookshop with its pleasant bow window was only across the garden and beyond the wall from Allen's town house. Leake, a one-time Londoner, was an opinionated, ignorant coxcomb, if we accept the comic description of him made by the fifth Earl of Orrery or the overheated comments on him addressed by Dr. Cheyne to Samuel Richardson, the London printer who had married Leake's sister.12 But Allen seems to have found Leake useful and companionable. About a year after Allen picked up Pope's Letters, probably in Leake's shop, the Postmaster and the bookseller were in London together. There is every reason to understand Allen's delight in the much-heralded collection of Pope's Letters, issued early in the summer of 1735. W e may take, first, the explanation (and diction) of a contemporary: though Allen had long been acquainted with Pope "and admired him for the excellence of his genius, yet the asperity of his satirical pieces was so repugnant to the softness and suavity of that worthy man's disposition, that it in some degree estranged him from his intimacy. But no sooner had he read over our author's letters, than he loved him for the goodness and virtues of his heart." 13 The image of the poet as an amiable, patient, 11

Nichols, Lit. Knee., II, 607-609. "See Orrery Papers, ed. Countess of Cork and Orrery (1903), I, 99; The Letters of Doctor George Cheyne to Samuel Richardson, ed. Charles F. Mullett (Columbia, Missouri, 1943), pp. 46-47. 13 Ruffhead, Life of Pope, p. 406 n., drawing undoubtedly on Warburton. See also William Warburton's footnote in his edition of Pope's Works (1751), IX, 312: "Mr. Allen's friendship with the Author was contracted on the sight of his Letters, which gave the former the highest opinion of the other's general benevolence and goodness of heart."

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Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite benevolent man, often misunderstood and sometimes victimized by the malicious, is clearly suggested. Allen would see many revelations of the innocence and loftiness of Pope's real nature. "The utmost Point of my Desires in my present State, terminates in the Society and Good-will of worthy Men," as he says to Sir William Trumbull. Evil attacks on him do not disturb him; "an honest Mind is not in the power of any dishonest one." The volume set forth repeatedly, by example as well as declaration, the poet's "ruling passion" (in Ruffhead's phrase) for liberal and intelligent friendships (and extended friendly visits) with good men; it presented a pattern for the relationship soon to develop so rewardingly between Allen and Pope. Significant for Allen's friendship with the Catholic poet were the passages in which the latter expressed his determination to transcend religious superstition and bias, his dislike of party divisions in the nation, and his theory that variety of opinion in religion and politics should be received as part of "the beautiful order of Nature in her Variations." To Allen, who when he was not surveying the recalcitrant deputies of the country was confronted by the motley Bath crowd of gamblers, politicians, and worldly clerics, Pope's doctrine of optimistic tolerance must have looked sensible. The fact is that he had already developed it for himself. Many other things in the Letters would come home to him with particular force. Thus a passing allusion to Gay's unimportant squib on the tax bill of William Lowndes, the Secretary to the Treasury, would mean something more to Allen, who had had a good deal of trouble with that man in working out his Post Office contract. Also, the stoic exhortations of the valetudinarian poet to a correspondent to rise above pain and the threat of death might as well have been addressed to Allen, for he was beginning to know chronic suffering from colic and gravel, and his wife may already have fallen ill of the sickness that in a few months was to end her life. Furthermore, he was now committed to making great plantings at Prior Park, and Pope's letters contained interesting allusions to gardens and gardening. The correspondence naturally included constant talk about literature and literary society. This was just such talk as in his life Allen had missed and in the future would enjoy. But most significant of all the causes of Allen's interest, the volume consisted of letters. For fifteen years he had been working hard and planning ingeniously to extend and improve and speed the carriage of letters in England. Correspondence, as he felt obliged to point out every seven

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The Benevolent Man years to the Lords of the Treasury, is "the Life of Trade." Miss Chandler had seen a more romantic value in "the kind Return" of the faithful postboy. By 1735 Allen must himself have penned the equivalent of several volumes of letters, though such as only a particular surveyor would care to read. In the elegance and shimmering gilt of Pope's wit and in the graceful ease with which variation of mood and shift of subject are accomplished in these personal communications Allen would see the final justification for his career, past, present, and future. Charmed by the volume and informed by gossip or Pope's printed advertisements that the published collection was neither correct nor complete, Ralph Allen took one of his characteristic bold plunges and proposed to the most eminent poet in England that he be allowed to pay for a new, authentic edition of his letters.14 Allen must have broached the idea to Pope by letter sometime between June, 1735, and late March, 1736. But during that nine-month period Allen had something else very much on his mind, the construction of a splendid estate in Widcombe. There is no reason to doubt that the shrewd, quiet, ambitious, thoughtful Deputy Postmaster knew that the most eminent poet in England was also a recognized authority on gardens and on taste and might save him from the blunders (there was no threat of the sins) portrayed in the poet's Epistle to Lord Burlington. Mr. Pope's friendship would be a boon to him. The year began badly. On January 7, 1736, Allen was kept from the meeting of the City Council by sickness. Nine other members were also absent, as it happened, and the faithful men who attended, feeling that certain members of the Council had caused "great Inconvenience" by "neglecting to do their Duty," adopted a resolution to fine members five shillings for each unexcused absence. Allen was "absent thro' sickness" again on the twentieth (and on March 20, May 15, and, for other reasons, not infrequently thereafter); the fine bothered him less than the circumstances. "I thank God," he wrote to his sister-in-law on January 24, "that I'm now much recover'd from my late relapse but my wife have been for some time & still continues very weak." Writing to Mrs. Buckeridge again on February 9 about her loan to John Wood, he adds: "I'm sorry to tel you that your sister continues very ill." 15 How much longer Mrs. Allen 11 For Warburton's statement, reliable because made from Allen's house in Allen's lifetime, that the latter "offered to print the Letters at his own expence," see Warburton's edition of Pope's Works ( 1 7 5 1 ) , IX, 313 n. 15 Both letters are in the Osborn collection.

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Alexander Pope and Timon's

Opposite

lived is not known, her burial not being recorded in any of the Bath parishes. Allen's surviving letters make no mention of her. H e was not given to dwelling on personal troubles in his letters, b u t Pope was, and there is no allusion by him to this bereavement. It seems likely, therefore, that Mrs. Allen died in February or March, 1736, before the two men had begun their correspondence. Perhaps to turn his mind to other thoughts and also because by now he probably had written to Pope about his idea, Allen during a trip to London at the beginning of April called on the celebrated poet at his villa in Twickenham and discussed the idea of his subsidizing a correct edition of the poet's letters. O n April 7 Pope sent a letter to him — the earliest of their correspondence to survive — thanking him for his "very kind Visit, and yet more for the Extreme Zeal and Friendship you manifested to me on occasion of my Letters, in so warm a Desire that I should be justified even during my life." 16 Allen had been disturbed either by Curll's slanderous charges against Pope or by Pope's diffidence about pushing into print his own private correspondence or perhaps by both, and he longed for a book that would be reliably Pope's and free of the unpleasant allegations and unsettling mysteries that clung to the 1735 editions. During the visit Allen had told Pope of his "Schemes," of which Pope hoped Allen would enjoy the planning "& then the Execution, & then the Completion." W h a t the schemes were can be inferred from Pope's next letter (April 30), written either after a hasty return visit to Allen in Bath 1 7 or after an exchange of letters not now extant. Allen was planning not merely the construction of a great house b u t also the acquisition of proper pictures to adorn it. Although the latter concern might seem premature since at this date only the large westward "offices" — stables, hay house, coach house, granaries, and pigeon house — were under construction, the explanation may be that Allen had now taken the artist Van Diest under his wing and wished to line up some employment for him after the completion of the altarpiece for Prior Park on which he was engaged. T h e alliance between postmaster and poet burgeoned speedily. By April 30 Pope had talked to various people and obtained permission from at least one of them for V a n Diest to make a copy of a painting. Allen held the popular notion expressed in the Tatler (No. 209) that " Pope, Con., IV, 9. " S e e the last paragraph of Pope's letter to Orrery of April 16 {Con.,

67

IV, 1 1 ) .

Τhe Benevolent Man pictures ought to be as much moral as aesthetic in effect. Pope's letter strengthened that belief; "A Man not only shews his Taste but his Virtue, in the Choice of such Ornaments : And whatever Example most strikes us, we may reasonably imagine may have an influence upon others, so that the History itself (if wellchosen) upon a Rich-mans Walls, is very often a better lesson than any he could teach by his Conversation." 18 Four large pictures, Pope thought, would best ornament the central hall of the future mansion. The first two subjects proposed by Allen were approved by his mentor as soon as he found that they had been treated by eminent painters — "the Discovery of Joseph to his Brethren" and Scipio's resignation of the captive maiden to her betrothed lover. But of Allen's next two suggestions — "Jonathan with the Circumstance of shooting his Arrow" and "the Action of Scipio's drawing his Sword" — the former could be found depicted only as an illustration in a book, and the latter had to be rejected at once as too difficult. Instead of the latter, Pope proposed something by the elegant painter Nicolas Poussin, his Death of Germanicus, which had long been available in Guillaume Chasteau's engraving.19 Lord Chandos had once debated buying Gerard Lairesse's Death of Germanicus,20 and it is conceivable that Allen had heard of these pictures before Pope proposed the idea. In any case the mentor's suggestion was adopted; Allen's household was to gaze, year after year, in good spirits and in bad, at the dying Germanicus as well as at the more comfortable spectacle of Joseph and his brethren. Van Diest began work in London very soon copying one of these pictures. In July Pope called on him, and, with the authority of a one-time pupil of the fashionable portrait painter Charles Jervas, he "made a small Alteration" in Van Diest's canvas. He would have many opportunities later to consider this stroke of his own brush. During the summer of 1736 Pope and Allen corresponded about the proposed edition of the letters. Pope could not allow his new friend to bear all the financial burden but instead would issue proposals for an edition by subscription with a requirement of a minimum of four hundred subscriptions. In July Allen sent Pope fifty-two guineas to subscribe for fifty copies of the volume, which, it seems likely, Leake had agreed to take off his hands. 21 18

Pope, Con., IV, 13. "Pope, Corr., IV, 13, 20. See pp. 104-112 below for further discussion of Pope's suggestions and Allen's pictures. See Baker and Baker, Life of Chandos, p. 78. * Pope, Corr., IV, 23 n.

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Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite Allen's health was bad again in July, and his physicians advised a journey. Also there was news from London that workmen were now tearing down the buildings in King Street to provide space for a second wing of St. Bartholomew's Hospital. So in two or three weeks Allen journeyed to London, partly in response to Pope's urgent invitation that he come and look over possible additions to the projected volume of letters. While in Twickenham he was treated to an acquaintance with Pope's "Prayer," as yet unpublished: Father of All, in ev'ry Age, In ev'ry Clime ador'd, By saint, by savage, and by Sage Jehovah, Jove, or Lord! . . 22 Such liberal doctrine would appeal to Allen, and its eighth stanza — "Save me alike from foolish Pride" — began with the ideal of religious humility taught by his early favorite, John Norris. Another interesting feature of the visit was that Pope took him to call on the Earl and Countess of Burlington, either in Piccadilly or, more likely, in Chiswick, where their villa offered its delights. Allen had met Burlington some years before and probably had sold him stone as well as helping him secure some urns of his own design. This may have been Allen's first visit to the new villa, so different in size and situation and atmosphere from Timon's villa in Pope's Epistle to Lord Burlington and so different, too, in those respects from what Allen was building in Widcombe. Burlington's (and William Kent's) taste was regarded by many as supreme. But his rich wall coverings of blue velvet and green velvet and red, his brightly gilded moldings and over-mantels, his pagan statues, and his lavishly paneled and painted ceilings were too much for Allen. They were not imitated at Prior Park. In London, or when he reached home, Allen wrote out a proposal for covering the second wing of St. Bartholomew's. It must have departed considerably from the terms of the contract which he had so happily signed in 1730, but the Governors held him to the terms of the original agreement. Writing on August 14 to state his acquiescence, he begged for exact specifications if the new wing was to differ in any way from the first; he wanted everything clarified at the outset so that there would be no "disagreement or misunderstanding between the Governours and my self when the work is finished." 2 3 Tims told him to send on the stone 23 The text is quoted from that sent to Allen in September; see Robert W . Rogers, "Alexander Pope's Universal Prayer," / E G P , LIV ( 1 9 5 5 ) , 6 1 9 - 6 2 0 . a St. Barth., Ha 1 9 / 3 0 / 5 .

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The Benevolent Man as well as the name of the workman in charge. Then again there was a long delay. If a shadow of disillusionment had fallen over Allen's notions of the desirability of working with London builders, this had not happened in respect to the opportunities at home in Bath. He was still in harmonious association with John Wood, who was ever cheerful and inventive when a site was to be filled. His plans for the city were far from complete, and he was eager to have more and more new residents to fill out the streets and squares he had envisaged. In 1736 Leake printed a large map of the city "Copied from the Original Survey of Mr. John Wood of Bath Architect." Printed in the spaces outside the oval containing the map of the city was the irrepressible but reasonable Mr. Wood's invitation to the world to come enjoy what Bath offered — a good municipal government, the bronze head of Apollo (as he thought) dug up in Stall Street in 1728, Mr. Leake's bookshop, the assembly rooms, the obelisk in the Orange Grove, Mr. Allen's crane for loading stone on barges ("A Masterpiece of Mechanism"), and the chance to buy stone from him "for a fourth less than heretofore." "For the Convenience of Builders, Mr. Wood intends, very soon, to set up a Deal Yard . . . in which Persons may be supply'd with the best of Norway goods . . . and for their Encouragement, shall be directed in the Use & Choice of their Materials; from whence great Advantages will arise (at least ten Pounds in every hundred) to the Buyer." There was something of Benvenuto Cellini, something of the modern Chamber of Commerce, in this man. During the fall Allen sent some money to Pope to be given anonymously to Nathaniel Hooke, who was working on his Roman History. The amount was larger than that which he had subscribed openly towards the publication of Hooke's Travels of Cyrus in 1730, but Pope failed to understand why Allen should be so secretive. Writing from the estate near Southampton of the late third Earl of Peterborough, Pope told Allen he was using some of his stone in ornamenting the Countess's gardens. She as well as the Earl and Countess of Burlington was soon to be in Bath, and Allen, he assumed, would wish to be helpful to them all there.24 A fourth "person of quality" to whom the Postmaster had to give attention at this time was the Duke of Devonshire, who had requested the establishment of new postal service between Chesterfield and Manchester. Though M Pope, Con., IV, 36-37, 41. Allen appears to have been drawn by Pope in 1736 into subscribing to the 2d edition of Stephen Duck's Poems; see James M. Osborn, "Spence, Natural Genius and Pope," PQ, X L V ( 1 9 6 6 ) , 132 n.

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Alexander Pope and Timon's

Opposite

Allen's surveyor reported that the prospects of profit in such an extension were not great, Allen recommended the institution of the new service.25 Family concerns were on Allen's mind. Sister Buckeridge and young Lewy had been extremely ill, he himself was "but very indifferent," and Sister Hudson, presumably in Bath or Widcombe, was "much worse." Yet he could report the good news that the Newton Bridge over the Avon northwest of town was built and that the investment his sister-in-law had in the Avon navigation, threatened by action of "the Bristol people," would again pay dividends.26 The bridge, built by Allen for a specified sum in order to prevent careless construction by someone else, was two hundred three feet in length and was modeled, said Wood, on one of Palladio's designs. But its height in the middle was dangerously great, and Wood deplored such an ignorant application of a good design. There is a gap in the surviving correspondence of Allen and Pope from November, 1736, to May of the next year, and only occasionally do the Council minutes record his attendance. The cause seems plain: on March 24, 1737, "Ralph Allen of Bath, Somersetshire and Elizabeth Holder of the same place" were married in London in the new and much admired church of St. Martin-in-the-Fields.27 Allen was forty-three and his bride about thirty-nine; they had rejected the idea of a conspicuous wedding in the great Abbey Church or of a crowded, rustic ceremony in the little Church of St. Nicholas close to the Holder home in Bathampton. Instead they chose the éclat of being married, perhaps unobserved, in the increasingly fashionable West End of London in the handsome new church designed by James Gibbs, with whom Allen had been working in the building of the wings for St. Bartholomew's Hospital. The marriage service was read by likeable Dr. Zachary Pearce. Ralph Allen appears later to have had some acquaintance with Pearce's father-in-law, a rich distiller of Holbom named Adams;28 it is possible that the Aliens chose to be married at St. Martin's because Pearce, vicar there, was already an acquaintance of Allen's. On the previous day the Governors of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, perhaps with Ralph Allen waiting in the corridor, had confirmed a resolution x "Ralph Allen's Instruction Book," Aug. and Dec., 1736, in G.P.O. Joyce (History of the Post Office, pp. 1 6 6 - 1 6 7 ) thinks Allen received no credit from Devonshire for this expensive service. x This is my interpretation of a paragraph in Allen's letter to Sister Buckeridge of Nov. 17, 1736. T h e letter is in the collection of Frederick W . Hilles, New Haven, Conn., to whom I am indebted for an opportunity to see it. 27 Parish Register, St. Martin-in-the-Fields. 28 See below, p. 7 6 .

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The Benevolent Man to carry on the building of a twelve-ward wing "with all expedition." 29 That the Governors needed to confirm the resolution seven months after the brick foundations for the wing were laid might strike a novice with alarm. But by now the Bath stone merchant had an extensive experience not only with the patient procedures necessary in a large-scale business but also with the peculiar backward and sideward motions required for progress forward in charitable enterprises. Besides, he was thinking of the next day's solemnity. His bride was the daughter of Richard Holder, of the Merchant Taylors' Company in London, who in 1701 had purchased Hampton Manor House; her brother Charles, twenty-four years older than she, was now the nominal owner of the Manor. Apparently the Holders surrendered certain property rights to Allen, and his ownership of the Manor was to become complete by purchase in 1742.30 The ancient stone house in which the new Mrs. Allen probably had spent most of her life stood in low land on the Avon about two-and-a-half miles northeast of Bath. Modest in size and style, it contained at least one feature of unusual interest, an old carved-wood mantel for the living-room fireplace. Beside the fire stood, on either side, the figure of a savage wearing little except a ruff; in the upper section, extending three or four feet above the fireplace, stood Adam and Eve, with St. George and the dragon between them. 31 This work, crude but vigorous in execution, would bring delight to a child's mind and perhaps some amusement to Mr. Allen and Miss Holder as, contracted in marriage, they contemplated Adam and Eve in the firelight. But after the marriage the couple lived in Widcombe. During 1737 the basement story of Prior Park was being built. This was the central unit in the long, slightly semicircular line of stone structures to be placed across the hillside on one of its upper terraces.32 Already one could see M

The Old Whig: or, The Consistent Protestant, March 24, 1736/37. For this information one must depend on Peach, pp. 71-73, who had access to papers that have since vanished, and also on the Bassett Papers, mentioned below, p. 145 n. 81 When the house was obligingly shown to me in 1958, the upper part of the carving was stowed away in an attic. Bryan Little, Bath Portrait (Bristol, 1961), opposite p. 23, shows an "Elizabethan Fireplace" in the Abbey Church House that has similar heavy carving. 22 A picturesque legend, recorded by Walter H. Tregellas (Cornish Worthies, I, 20-22), relates that, when Allen first asked Wood to design the mansion, Allen's conception was so grand that Wood doubted his ability to pay for it, whereupon Allen led him into the room where he kept his money and opened chest after chest full of guineas; Wood was reassured. But the story is not a little improbable. Wood had been building with Allen's stone for years and must have been aware of his large enterprises. Nor was Wood the sort to be in the least frightened by large ideas. 80

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the Offices" at the western end, one hundred seventy-two feet long on the front and containing six horse stables, three coach houses, a hay house, a large pigeon house, granary, and much else. John Wood at Allen's request had traveled as far as Ponty Pool in Monmouthshire to see the stables of the wealthy Whig manufacturer and M. P., John Hanbury, which Allen wished to copy.33 The original design for the Prior Park "Offices" called for a timber roof covered with Cornish slate, but the quarry owner, with either pedantic consistency or a commercial eye, resolved "at all Hazards to make use of nothing but Stone for a Covering for this Wing." There was to have been a Doric "Tetrastyle Frontispiece," and Wood regretted later that this part of the design had not been kept. As for the stone roofing, this was, as has already been said, a result of Allen's having been fascinated by the thin-slab stone roofing on a house which he had passed in Wiltshire on his numerous trips to and from London. The pretty, modestly Palladian little porters' lodges at the top and bottom entrances to his grounds were (and still are) roofed in this way. Already one could admire the striking "Pavilion" for coaches to stop under, placed midway between mansion and offices. A high-arched portecochere forty feet wide, entirely built of wrought freestone, it rose to a pyramidal roof surmounted by an octagonal domed turret, terminating above in "a Base, Ball, Balluster and Vane" sixty feet above the ground. One knew when one had arrived at Prior Park! The upper section was again for pigeons, a special delight of the owner's, one might guess, and they were "magnificently Housed." If a "Beautiful Habitation is really an Allurement to this Species of Birds, as some pretend, Mr. Allen's pigeons will, in all Probability," wrote Wood, "never desert their present Place of Abode." In the third great pile of stone the new Mrs. Allen contemplated the foundation of her future home. That she was of an especially contemplative nature is not certain, but most brides of thirty-nine have some thoughtfulness. Ten years later she seemed a suitable recipient of the dedication of a scholarly six-volume edition of Shakespeare, and no other eighteenth-century lady so far as I know attained that dignity. Later events suggest that Mrs. Allen had a sense of home, reasonably sociable instincts, a becoming modesty but no fear of important people, and a certain positiveness with the presumptuous. 34 Her husband had moved from his ** Hanbury was the father of the witty poet, Charles Hanbury Williams. See Wood, II, 427-429, for the material in this and the next paragraph. "The only descriptions of Mrs. Allen that I have found are Warburton's in his dedication to her of his Shakespeare (see p. 175 below) and Samuel Derrick's in a 73

The Benevolent Man country origins toward the grandeur of Prior Park by way of a very handsome town house of Wood's design. Elizabeth Holder Allen had come from a moderate-sized old-fashioned house, and yet she also had seen the splendid rise of neoclassical architecture in Bath. No one who likes new houses and fine houses could look unmoved at the elegant and precise drawings presented by Wood for "Mr. Allen's House and Offices at Widcomb near Bath As it was first Designed." 35 In his Essay Wood later explained that 800 tons of freestone in large blocks underlay the basement, which was one hundred forty-seven feet in length and, including the portico-projection, eighty feet in breadth. Off the narrow passageway running from end to end in the basement were to be a servants' hall, housekeeper's room, butler's room, a room for the footmen, a wine vault, a strong-beer cellar and a small-beer cellar, a laundry, bakehouse, kitchen, scullery, larder, pantry, milk room, a dairy and its scullery. Undeterred by the fiasco of wooden plumbing in the Duke of Chandos's buildings ten years before, Wood planned a room "for Water Closets, if such Conveniences should be wanting within the Body of the House." The walls, floor, and ceiling (twelve feet high) were all to be of finished stone; and fireplaces, carved stone ornaments, friezes, and plenty of windows were to make this Stereobata, to use Wood's splendid label, livable for the domestic servants as well as architecturally impressive. Mrs. Allen would have to wait some years for the completion of a house built in this substantial fashion. In May the long awaited authentic edition of Pope's Letters had been issued, and on the fourteenth Pope wrote Allen to say that he wanted to present Allen, Mrs. Allen, and, "If you will," General Wade each with special copies printed on very fine royal paper quarto size. He also politely offered congratulations on the recent marriage and regretted Allen's "late Indisposition." If Allen had liked the 1735 Letters, the new volume of Letters of Mr. Alexander Pope, And Several of his Friends . . . MDCCXXXVII should have pleased him still more. For one thing, several gay references to illicit amours and two scraps of indecent verse had been deleted — wisely, if Pope was to seem the serious ethical poet. The ethical weightiness of the volume was notably increased by the inclusion of two new sets of letters, letter of 1 7 6 3 (Letters Written from Leverpoole [1767], II, 9 4 ) , who says she was "low, with grey hair, of a very pleasing address, and a countenance that prejudices you much in her favour." A portrait belonging to Mrs. Reginald C . Allen done by Thomas Hudson of a middle-aged woman is listed in the family inventory as of "Miss E a r l , " but I imagine it represents, rather, Elizabeth Holder Allen. " Now in Bath Reference Library. See Plates 6 and 7.

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one between the poet and Robert Digby and the other between the poet and Bishop Atterbury, who had been banished in 1722 after being implicated in a plot to restore James Stuart, the Catholic Pretender. The latter correspondence Pope had doctored very carefully to cover up the Jacobite's errors in conduct and in opinion. One of the letters allowed Pope to make public his own religious history and to declare himself to be not a Papist, not a Roman Catholic, but "a true Catholick." Precisely what the theological implications of that oracular assertion were it would require a Warburton to reveal; but Allen and other Protestant readers no doubt took it as something comfortably British. One consequence of the gift of a handsome copy of the Letters to Mrs. Allen was an invitation to her husband's friend to visit them so that she too might become his friend, but Pope was, he regretted, promised to "persons of higher Rank." At that point sickness attacked Allen once more. Also he learned that the work of constructing the second wing of St. Bartholomew's had at last got under way again. Presumably things went more peacefully this time; at least no such bundle of troubled correspondence between Allen and the Hospital secretary survives for this business as for the previous construction. In August Pope wrote that he had cleared his social calendar and could come to Widcombe and be totally at the service of Mr. and Mrs. Allen. Bespeaking the use of their coach to bring him from Tedbury, he arrived early in September for a brief and relatively uneventful visit. In October, seven months after their marriage at St. Martin's, the Aliens returned to London and had some hours with Pope, though he was not very well just then. Back in Widcombe in November, Allen was finding his marriage a success. Relishing his good fortune, he naturally thought, in his expanding gratitude, of the clergyman who had performed the marriage rites. So he asked Pope 36 to deliver to Dr. Pearce one of the two specially printed sets of his Works (containing the Letters) which the poet had said were intended for the Aliens. On December 17 Allen got around to writing to Pearce about the gift and about his private happiness. So personal a revelation as the letter contains is unique in his surviving correspondence. "You have," he said, convey'd to me more Blessings then is in my power to Express, my hopes at first you may perhaps remember were great, but without troubling of you with any particulars, I can justly say, and I think right to tel you, that Her whole Employment have been in Her Duty to a Supreme Being & an uninterupted 39

Pope, Con., IV, 89.

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The Benevolent Man Endeavour to Highten my Happiness; I fancy that [it] will be more satisfactory for you to hear this now, then at first, tho I don't offer this pleasing circumstance as the least escape for a blamable delay. My Friend Mr Pope have been so kind as to make me a Compliment of two Sets of the three Volumes of his works in Royal paper which are [not] to be bought, one of those Sets I have given to Geni. Wade, and you I think have the justest claim to the other. Therfore I have desired it to be sent to your House & do now beg your acceptance of it. I hear Mr Adams's family are pretty wel, we are stil in the Country without a wish to leave it, but must the next week go down to Bath for this winter which I fancy wil be our last. Our Sincere Services attends you & Mrs Pearce.37 Only from this letter does one hear of Allen's returning from his Widcombe residence to Bath for the wintry season. As will appear, this custom — if it had become that — was abandoned by 1739. The death on December 9, 1737, of Allen's and Wood's old friend, Humphrey Thayer, precipitated a crisis in the affairs of the Bath Hospital committee and involved Allen in a great deal of business for the next few weeks. T h e trustees met on December 22 to choose a successor to their treasurer Thayer. Other business was Dr. Oliver's offer, which was accepted, of a piece of property for the proposed building. Immediate opposition developed, and a week later the action was rescinded. Instead it was decided to take an offer of the old theatre and the land adjacent. 38 While Wood was adjusting his designs to fit this land, the trustees composed an advertisement which Nash carried to London for insertion in the newspapers. Allen advised him to have 7000 copies printed; he also told him to see that the newspapers placed the announcement immediately after "Foreign News," for "we are apprehensive that as it now stands 'twill be slightly pass'd over by some, and not read by others." Allen also wrote to the printer, Samuel Richardson, explaining how to paragraph the announcement. In March Allen arrived in London carrying a bill to the new Treasurer, Benjamin Hoare, for the £379 which he had obtained from the executor of Thayer's estate. 39 Probably at the same time he went to 87 Westminster Abbey MSS. 64310-64311. I am indebted to Lawrence E. Tanner, Keeper of the Muniments and Library of the Abbey, for calling this letter to my attention and to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey for kind permission to quote from it. Mr. Tanner informs me that the three volumes given by Allen to Pearce are now in the Abbey Library along with a fourth volume given to Pearce by Pope himself. Pearce became Dean of Westminster Abbey in 1756. The Adams family referred to in the letter would be relatives of Mrs. Pearce; see Dictionary of National Biography under "Zachary Pearce." 88 Wood, Essay, II, 275-288. " For many of these details see the "Book of the Copys of Letters of the Trustees of the new General Hospital," now preserved at the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases.

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Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite talk to Biggs about progress at St. Bartholomew's. Allen had become a Governor of that hospital early in the year. To assist with the Bath Hospital he had already bound himself to supply, free of expense, "all wrought free Stones Paving Stones Wall Stones and Lime" for its building. Subscriptions began to pour in. By April 24 more than £4000 was subscribed, and on July 6, 1738, the cornerstone was laid by the Hon. William Pulteney. It is possible that there had been another cause in 1737, not mentioned by Wood, to goad the trustees of the Hospital scheme into action. This was the appearance of a satiric poem, The Diseases of Bath, issued in London by one of the publishers of The Description of Bath. But the anonymous author was no poetical milliner, if one may judge by his mood and material. The town, its climate, its murderous physicians, its nineteen greedy apothecaries, and its filthy baths are damned with gusto and convincing particularities. W e read of the fogs of Bath, of its . . . Streets ne'er clean. A trifling Mayor;40 a squabbling Corporation; A sharking People, scum of all the Nation. Colds, agues, catarrhs abound, "The small-pox lurking here in ambuscade,/ Treach'rously mantled, not to hinder trade." Surgeon Peirce, in spite of his freedom from greed, has filled churchyards, and so has "Big, blust'ring Cheyne," whose prescriptions his patients have often misinterpreted to their own fatal disadvantage. But the worst feature of the town is the dangerous, revolting filthiness of the baths and even of the drinking glasses. What the Mayor, Aldermen, and doctors, the latter so ambiguously assailed, thought of the poem one can easily imagine. As for Allen and his friend Dr. Oliver, their withers were unwrung except in the condemnation of an irresponsible governing group. Unfortunately this was not the last of the printed declarations that the baths of Bath needed cleaning up. While Allen was in London in March (1738) he had gone out to Twickenham to see his friend there and learned about a very old woman whom Pope had encountered lurking at the far end of his garden and to whom he had given a half guinea. Allen automatically left a guinea for her, and this largesse produced "Rapture" and an impromptu revelation of her need. Pope, as he explained in a letter of April 28, was grateful to Allen for giving him a chance to maintain henceforth a small charity of his own. Pope had, one imagines, a great deal to learn from Allen, whose tem" Richard Maltravers, Mayor until Sept., 1737, was followed by James Atwood.

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The Benevolent Man perament in many ways was so unlike his own. Pope found it hard not to put everything on paper. It was a natural pleasure to express in writing his ideas about himself and his admiration for others. A writer likes to communicate. Involuted compliments, not just because of the example of Vincent Voiture and Mme. de Sévigné, came from his pen as readily as did also, when he was angered, irony and stinging epithet. Allen on the contrary wrote as compactly as possible and with hardly a hint about his deeper feelings. He did mention, though briefly, his illnesses, including the headaches that Pope could only too well appreciate, and on his birthday he thanked Heaven for his blessings, including the new friendship. But subjective elaboration was impossible. Though his laconic letters must sometimes have baffled Pope, the poet could never have suspected him of flattery or innuendo or pretentiousness. On one occasion Pope was moved to attempt, in replying to Allen's "Six hearty Lines," to write in "as plain a manner." He managed to produce a few short declarative statements of the Postmaster's sort: "I do really wish myself with you; I know not how to be so; I am afraid I cannot get so near you as within fourscore miles, this Summer; My Infirmities increase ev'ry year: Tho my Spirit be prompt; my Flesh is weak. I have two great Tasks on my hands. . . . " 4 1 But before the latter sentence was finished it had wandered off into metaphor and involved rhythms. The poet could not write like the Postmaster. Pope's new friend could give him other lessons. The poet's great achievements — the Rape of the Lock, the Homer, the Dunciad, his recent Letters — were planned, plotted, modified, talked about, concealed, revealed, revised, and re-examined. Yet Allen opened waterways, bought quarries and sold stone, controlled a vast section of the country's postal service, laid out a large estate, and survived from one marriage into a second without, it would seem, much talk to his friends about his affairs. His numerous benefactions to relatives, poor people, sick people, and hospitals were made in the same practical, unheralded manner. That he could have lived so successful a life, surrounded by accumulating signs of wealth and favor, without consciousness of his rise is of course unthinkable. But his disposition was reticent, and the lesson of humility which at the age of twenty he encountered in the pages of John Norris was one he did not forget. Both friends were now finding themselves in acquaintance with the loftiest people of the nation. Allen's quietness in the midst 11

Pope, Con., IV, 108

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Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite of growing splendor must have interested Pope more than it would a man of temperament more like Allen's own. So when the poet was working on another of his imitations of Horace's satires and once more was castigating the cynical corruption and worldliness of the society that governed England he saw he had a new example of virtue to place in contrast with evil men. His letter of April 28 had more purpose than to report to Allen on the old woman they had befriended. "Pray tell me," Pope continues, "if you have any Objection to my putting Your Name into a Poem of mine, (incidentally, not at all going out of the way for it) provided I say something of you which most people would take ill, for example, that you are no Man of high birth or quality? You must be perfectly free with me on this, as on any, nay on Every, other Occasion." 42 Allen, who, "veil'd in Modesty," had been celebrated at length in Miss Chandler's poem, could hardly object now to "incidental" mention by a much more famous poet, though he may have been curious to see why his lack of distinguished ancestry needed attention. What Pope's letter gave no hint of was that the poem in which he would compliment his friend would particularize its satire on unworthiness and corruption in high places by reference to Walpole and the late Queen Caroline. Almost before Allen could send a reply, the poem was out. One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight appeared in May. In it Pope introduced a compliment to the "worthy Youth," George Lyttelton, and, nearer the end of his contrast of virtue and vice, the following passage: Let modest Foster, if he will, excell Ten Metropolitans in preaching well; A simple Quaker, or a Quaker's Wife, Out-do Landaffe, in Doctrine — yea, in Life; Let low-bo in Allen, with an aukward Shame, Do good by stealth, and blush to find it Fame. Virtue may chu se the high or low Degree, 'Tis just alike to Virtue, and to me. By introducing Allen's name into a satire that honored the Prince of Wales and his Secretary and condemned Walpole, Pope was quietly drawing his rich friend into the aura of the Opposition — as quite possibly he had been trying to do in conversation at any time during the previous two years. At the moment his superiors, the Postmasters Gen12

Ibid., 9 ? .

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The Benevolent Man era1, were Edward Carteret and Lord Lovell, both of whom had been Walpole men, Lovell being conspicuously so still. It is unlikely that Allen would think he could serve his country better by joining the Opposition than by continuing his efforts to improve postal delivery all over England. Princess Amelia, who was not fond of the Prince of Wales, had a prior claim on Allen's loyalties, and so did the Walpole ministry. When the leaders of the younger branch of the Opposition — Lyttelton and his Prince, Chesterfield, Pitt, and others — assembled in Bath in October, the City Council, with Allen present, inevitably voted to bestow the freedom of the city upon the Prince. About this time, too, Pope enclosed in a letter to the Bath Postmaster a very political letter to the Prince's Secretary, packed full of Bolingbroke's guidance for the opposition to Walpole, and Allen obligingly delivered the dangerous document to Lyttelton. 43 But there is no evidence that he ever joined the Prince's faction even privately. How well Allen liked Pope's poem it would be interesting to learn. At least it was not salted with the grossness which would have made certain parts of the satires "repugnant to the softness and suavity" of his nature. If Pope had placed him in the not very flattering company of an Anabaptist lecturer, an itinerant female Quaker preacher, and a poor Welsh bishop — all well-meaning people but hardly first-rate — at least the point was clear as to the nature of Allen's merit. Pope continued praising Allen in his letters to him. "I really Esteem you as a Friend to all Virtue & an Impartial Christian," he wrote in June, 1736. "The sentiments you express upon the Anniversary of your birthday shew you a Good Man" (July, 1737). "[Y]our Heart is always right, whatever your Body may be" (April, 1738). "So much higher is my Respect for Virtue than for Title," wrote Pope two months later, that if he were to express to Allen his daily thought of him he would become troublesome. Seven months after One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight was published, Pope wrote: "I have found a Virtue in You more, than I certainly knew before, till I had made Experiment of it: I mean Humility: I must therfore in justice to my own Conscience of it, bear Testimony to it, and change the Epithet I first gave you, of Low-Born to Humble. I shall take care to do you the justice to tell every body, this Change was not made at yours, or at any Friends Request for you: but my own Knowledge you merited it." 44 And thereafter the line in the poem always began: "Let humble Allen. . . ." " Ibid., 142-145.

" Ibid., 144-145.

So

Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite W e need not take as a serious anomaly the humble man's willingness to read in letter after letter from Pope that he was a good man, a humane man, "a Man of Worth," a man of virtue. John Norris taught that we should "think of our selves as we are, neither higher nor lower, neither better nor worse." Blindness to our attainments would prevent our improving on them. Humility is a virtue "when a Man sees the height upon which he stands, and yet grows not giddy with it" because he knows whence all merit comes. "For though by the Grace and Bounty of God we are something, yet of our selves we are nothing." 45 As praise came to Allen from one person after another, his religion assisted his good sense in keeping him from giddiness. Besides, as he must have noticed, when Pope approved of people he liked to make his view known. If Allen eventually left off blushing, we need not conclude that he had fallen into irreligious vanity or more than the normal complacence that supports us all. From July at least into October Allen played host to Nathaniel Hooke, the first volume of whose Roman History, dedicated to Pope, appeared this year (1738). Allen liked the quiet scholar's conversation. During the next summer (1739) he took him on a little journey into Wales, and they "lay some Nights in the cleanest & best Cottage in the World with excellent Provisions, under a Hill on the Margin of the Severne." 46 One wonders, incidentally, if the Roman historian walked down the hill from the Aliens' house to see what the recent digging for the new hospital had disclosed to the delighted eyes of John Wood. The latter gentleman had discovered there, he proudly recorded, "the Vestigia of Part of the Praetorium" of the large Roman camp that once lay where Bath stands. Under the southwest corner "we found Wheat, the evident Marks of the Market which was always kept next to the Praetorium." 47 Here too he saw sections of an ancient mosaic pavement, a portion of which with his usual imagination he caused to be preserved in situ. Wood's classical scholarship, based upon Palladio and thence on Vitruvius as well as on Polybius, Tacitus, Suetonius, and John Toland, was speculative and tendentious. He could accept whatever was useful to prove that the early Britons were the Hyperboreans mentioned by Diodorus Siculus and that the founder of Bath, King Bladud, was no other than Abaris, the priest of Apollo and a pupil of Pythagoras.48 Nathaniel Hooke also was a tendenA Practical Treatise concerning Humility, pp. 4, 13-14. 47 Essay, I, 170-171. " Pope, Con., I V , 204. " S e e p. 136 below. 48

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tious historian but as Papist had his own set of mysteries and legends to ponder. In spite of their common interest in ancient Romans, one imagines that Hooke would have listened to Allen's learned architect with some astonishment and alarm. As for Allen, he doubtless listened to both of them with pleasure and an open mind. If they argued, they would be preparing him for the time when that irrefragable controversialist, William Warburton, would move into his household and dogmatize learnedly on still different aspects of antiquity. And all such talk would be a pleasant change from the never-ending problems of regulating the cross-road and bye posts. It was in 1738, we should remind ourselves, that Henry Bracken and Mrs. Hopkins, collaborators in a plan to cheat Allen by sending advertisements free in the mails, were brought to justice. It was in July of 1739 that he had enough evidence to know that he had been "greatly injured" by the incorrigible deputy postmistress of Ferrybridge. And, irritation of another sort, in the past January Miss Chandler in her capacity of shopkeeping milliner had encroached upon and damaged the city wall in plain disobedience to the orders of the Corporation. In none of Pope's letters in these months is there any allusion to the companion piece to "Allen's poem," One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight. Dialogue II, issued in July only two months after the other. The second poem suggests more clearly Pope's sympathy with the Opposition, for it honors by name most of the important members of the group, from Pulteney to "All-accomplish'd" Bolingbroke. Here too is Pope's revolting picture of Westphalian hogs. Allen may have sighed with relief that it was not in this piece that the famous poet had chosen to immortalize him. In the middle of the summer (1738) Sister Buckeridge took a second husband, Edmund Ball, Esq., of the Exchequer. In a marriage settlement dated July 4 Ball transferred to four trustees (one of whom was Ralph Allen) capital stock in the Bank of England of the value of £5600, the income from which would go to the Balls' housekeeping. He had other valuable investments.49 But "Sister" was to continue to consult Allen from time to time about her own property. In August he arranged, in order to oblige Pope, to have eight bottles of Bath water dispatched weekly to Twickenham for the benefit of the poet's guest, Lord Bolingbroke. Pope now often closed his letters to Allen with special compliments to his wife. In November he sent thanks to them both for their gift of guinea hens, oil, wine, and the Bristol water " See his will, proved in 1744, now at Somerset House.

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which he was now taking. He troubled Allen with an order for six stone urns of his own design. In the following spring he in turn sent a gift — a puppy-descendant of his dog Bounce, and the Great Dane infant could "but just lap milk." Allen probably knew that the Prince of Wales and four noble lords had been similarly honored by Bounce's owner. A more curious gift from Pope to his friend (who had got established in life by exposing a Jacobite plot) was the great folio Bible with gilt clasps given to Pope by Bishop Atterbury when exiled from England for Jacobite plotting.50 Though the presentation seems outrageously ironic, we may suppose that the chapel wing of Prior Park was now rising, that the large volume was thought of a size to rest handsomely on the desk there, and that Allen regarded the book, whatever its former owner's beliefs and sins, as still the Holy Bible. Throughout 1739 Pope continued to have an important place in Allen's life, adding friends to his circle in pleasant ways and also making levies on the quarry owner's staff and his benevolence. In February the poet was hoping that the Aliens would spend a few days with him. Perhaps they did so. Again in April he proposed a visit to Twickenham in spite of Mrs. Allen's "Love of Quiet join'd to an unfashionable Taste of the Country." In the same month the Aliens entertained in Widcombe Pope's invaluable friend and legal advisor, William Fortescue. He liked the Aliens just as Pope had expected. Twice in the spring and summer Allen dispatched his expert mason Biggs to do stonework in Twickenham. The bill for his labors never reached Pope, who therefore rebuked Allen for paying for, and thus encouraging, his "Superfluities." As he was in the habit of asking his friend for occasional contributions to charitable projects (such as for an annual gift of ten pounds to the wretched Richard Savage), he was embarrassed by Allen's intervention in his contract with Biggs. Earlier in the year, on completion of the north and south wings of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, Allen's fourscore shares of Sun Fire stock deposited in 1730 as security were returned to him, and his personal bond for £3200 was accepted for the remaining part of his contract. If Richard Jones's somewhat frail memory can be trusted, the Hospital should now have paid Allen £3950 for stone and lime and labor. His stone would soon " O n March 30, 1739, Pope added to Atterbury's inscription in the volume his own: " A . Pope Radulpho Allen, Viro de se atque omnibus hominibus bene merito, in usum Sacelli sui Widcombiensis Dedit." See George Sherburn's presentation copy in the Harvard College Library of The Letters of Pope to Atterbury, ed. John G. Nichols ( 1 8 5 9 ) , for notes made in 1 8 5 9 relating to this Bible, which had been inherited by the fourth Viscount Hawarden from Allen's niece's heirs.

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be needed also in Bath for the houses that John Wood was contracting to build along a terrace walk raised on arches above the low land beside the river. The plan had to be worked out carefully to satisfy the Duke of Kingston, to whom the land belonged, as well as Ralph Allen and James Leake, whose post office and book shop were contiguous to Wood's proposed "Forum." By September, 1740, Wood had five hundred feet of houses along the Grand Parade (nowadays called the North Parade) ready for roofing.51 Meanwhile in 1739 Wood's building for the Bath Hospital advanced toward a second story. Allen, who seems to have become the executive officer and final authority in all Hospital business, secured help from Samuel Richardson in advertising the need for donations52 and was involved in necessary, belated motions to obtain Parliamentary authority for incorporation. But during the spring and summer of 1739 there was more going on in Bath than the building of sewers, Parades, and a hospital for the care of sick and crippled bodies. Hysteria came to town on Tuesday, April 10, with the arrival on horseback from Bristol of the Rev. John Wesley. Souls, not bodies, were now to be saved in Bath. Paroxysms and faintings and shoutings that increasingly overcame Wesley's listeners marked in the poor creatures the departure of Satan and the descent of Grace. At five o'clock on that first Tuesday in a meadow visible from Queen Square the marvelous visitor "offered to about a thousand souls the free grace of God," and at seven he preached in Gracious Street. 53 The next morning there were two thousand people in the meadow to hear him. Though he then returned to his headquarters in Bristol, he reappeared periodically, usually after a fortnight's interval, to preach to large crowds and, of course, to threaten the reputation of Bath as a cheerful, fashionable, easy-going spa. On one occasion he dared to hold forth in the Ham below the Walks where everyone would see the assembled crowd, and "several fine gay things" from the Pump Room joined with them for the sport of it. Though Wesley's concern was chiefly for the poor and ignorant, the Monarch of Bath appreciated the danger to his kingdom as did many other Bathonians. So one day in June he forced his way through the people to Egerton 3647, fol. 9 1 ; W o o d , Essay, II, 2 4 7 - 2 4 8 . " I n a letter to Allen of Feb. 6, 1739, Richardson explained how he was placing the advertisements; see original in Royal National Hospital, Bath. In the Daily Gazetteer for Feb. 3 the announcement constitutes the leading article. 53 John Wesley's Journal, ed. Ν. Curnock, "Standard Edition" (London, n. d . ) , II, 177. 51

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Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite tell Wesley that he was disobeying the law against conventicles. But the preacher quickly silenced and defeated the champion of the worldly and wicked. Such, at least, was his boast. 54 As Methodist enthusiasm increased, so did the alarm of civil and church authorities in Bristol and Bath. The preachers were barred from one spot after another. T h e prosperous Quaker, Richard Merchant, who had allowed Wesley to use some of his land in Widcombe, eventually felt obliged to forbid further use of his property because the crowds damaged his trees and "stole things out of his ground," and the neighbors, including possibly the Aliens, were very much annoyed. In due course Wesley was drawn to save souls in other communities, and the excitement died down. If the townsfolk or visitors were in important ways affected by the words of the self-acknowledged agent of God's mysterious purposes, the record of these changes is lacking. Cards and dances continued in the Rooms. Ralph Allen attended the meeting of the vestry of the Widcombe Church on July 2 and approved the motion to require all who sold beer within the parish to give "security" to indemnify the parish against losses. W i t h Methodists about, provoking mobs to hysteric fits and incidental larceny, the modest Anglicans prepared for the worst that beer could do. Meanwhile the lives of sensible people went on as before. Sir Thomas Lyttelton (George's father) at Hagley in Worcestershire was waiting for a stone column from Allen's quarries to ornament his garden, where one saw displayed "the greatest taste of any spot in the world"! 5 5 Pope's Jacobite friend, the witty young Viscount Cornbury, called on Allen and was extremely pleased with him and with the beginnings of the Prior Park mansion. Early in July Allen heard from Dr. Pearce of his having been appointed Dean of Winchester, and Allen thought of calling on him there in August when he would be en route to Southampton to meet Pope at Lady Peterborough's. 56 During August, Nathanial Hooke enjoyed a rest with the Aliens and then moved on to Twickenham. The Aliens' household may regularly by this time have included the two Tucker children. When on September 25 Allen took care of the somehow neglected formality of adding "the life of Elizabeth his present W i f e " to the record of his ownership of a pew in St. James's Church, he saw to it that " W m , Tucker Allen his Nephew & Gertrude Tucker his Neice" were kept on the books. In London, meanwhile, Pope had promised to call on Van Diest Journal, II, 214. Nash's version of this encounter is not recorded. " P o p e , Corr., IV, 190; Thomas Martyn, The English Connoisseur ( 1 7 6 6 ) , I, 62. M Westminster Abbey MS. 64311 — l e t t e r from Allen to Pearce of July 16, 1739; Pope, Corr., IV, 190. 51

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to see how he was progressing with the pictures for Prior Park. The painter was having difficulty securing other commissions, apparently, and a month later (Oct. 8, 1739) Dr. Oliver wrote him that he should abandon "dull insipid face-painting" and exercise his art on the grim terrors, skirmishes, sieges, tents, and batteries of war. One cannot be sure that the doctor was being serious in his lyrical outburst.57 In November Pope arrived at the Aliens' house for a visit that was to last for three months. Suffering from an old stomach complaint, he first tried the waters at Bristol, then those of Bath, keeping in reserve, if all else failed, those of a recently discovered spring in Lyncombe near the Aliens' residence. He soon found that he was very happy in his friends' household. They always allowed him as much privacy and freedom as he wished when he stayed with them, and he had more quiet there, he told Lyttelton, than he had experienced for a long while. Bounce's large puppy he was used to. The house was comfortable and somewhat isolated, and though the Aliens were hospitable they were not yet at Prior Park, and their style of living was not so grand or populous as it was to be later. Pope was busy with his work, and the Deputy Postmaster had his work also. But they seem to have relaxed completely in each other's company, and each was then at his best. W e hear about it from a frequent caller, Dr. Oliver. Writing on January 14, [1740], to his Cornish cousin, the Rev. William Borlase, Oliver said that Pope was the freest, humblest, most entertaining Creature you ever met with; He has sojourned these two months with our great Countryman Mr. Allen, at his country House, who needed only this lasting Testimony of so honourable, and distinguished a Friendship to deliver his Name in the most amiable light to Posterity. They are extremely happy in each other; the one feeling great Joy in the good Heart, and Strong Sense of his truly generous Host, while the other, with the most pleasing Attention, drinks in Rivers of Knowledge continually flowing from the Lipps of his delightful Stranger. They are much alone, and quite happy in each other, but they are so kind as to say that I do not interrupt them when I make a third for an hour or two, which I believe you will not imagine to be very seldome.68 What did they talk about? Many things, of course. But Oliver's letter introduces us to one subject: rock, stone, Allen's quarries, and Pope's grotto back in Twickenham. While in Bristol Pope had been very conscious of the dramatic gorge with its rocks, "huge Shaggy Marbles, some in Pope, Con., IV, 195; Quarterly Review, C X X X I X ( 1 8 7 5 ) , 387. "Borlase, I, fol. 119. This and other quotations from the Borlase Correspondence appear by kind permission of President J. Herbert Sleeman and the other officers of the Library and with the assistance of Mrs. M. Harvey, Librarian. m

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Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite Points, some in Caverns, hanging all over & under them in a thousand shapes" and in shades of red, white, green, blue, and yellow. He wrote to Martha Blount about these things, and he must have talked to his host and Oliver about them. An owner of quarries, one imagines, would in turn mention the remarkable colored stone and crystals and stalactites that could be seen in the Combe Down caverns. Allen had been thinking about stone. Because the winter was very cold and colliers and weavers were out of work, he had just opened up a new quarry to give employment to many men from all the parishes round about. The new works were open from the top rather than being cut in horizontally like a mine as the dangerous older ones were.®9 No doubt Pope, like the Prince of Orange six years before, went to look into these rocky caverns, where could be seen, besides more striking effects, such odd formations as fossil snail shells encrusted with crystal.60 The third member of the conversational trio, Dr. Oliver, owned neither quarry nor grotto, but he possessed in his favorite relative Borlase an authority on the rock formations of Cornwall. These two gentlemen were interesting in themselves. Both men were born in Cornwall, like Allen; all three were about the same age. Oliver seems to have been a nephew of the first Dr. William Oliver whose Practical Dissertation on Bath Waters (1707) sometimes brought undeserved credit to the younger doctor. The latter, educated at Cambridge and Leyden, first practised in Plymouth. According to one account the exposure of gross errors in an early medical essay of his printed in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society caused his departure from Plymouth.61 By 1730 he had begun practice in Bath. Later he was to publish a pastoral elegy and two more medical works, none very impressive. Mary Chandler, who said she owed her life to him as well as valuable help with her poems, was one among many who liked him for his cheerfulness, his honesty, his civilized personality.62 By 1740 he was well established, married, an active worker for the new Hospital, and interested in books and painting and architecture. Possessed of a slight literary flair himself, he was excited now by a chance to enjoy the company of the greatest poet in England. Pope, Con., I V , 2 2 1 ; W o o d , Essay, II, 4 2 5 . See the drawing of this oddity from Allen's quarry in William Borlase's Natural History of Cornwall (Oxford, 1 7 5 8 ) , p. 128 n. and Plate X X X I I . "Western Antiquary, V I I (June 1 8 8 7 ) , 8. " I n Borlase, I, fol. 121, is a long portrait in verse by a Miss Gregor that makes him attractive as a reasonable, moderate man. M

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The Benevolent Man His kinsman, Borlase, an Oxford graduate and a country clergyman, was more genuinely a man of science than Oliver. His appetite for laborious research was insatiable, and he would, said his teasing kinsman, "prefer the Exuvia of one Periwinkle, found on the top of an high inland Mountain, to six live Lobsters just taken out of the Sea."

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H e was a painter,

an archaeologist, a genealogist, a student of heraldry, a classical scholar, and an indefatigable letter writer besides. In 1730, troubled by rheumatism, he had taken the waters at Bath under the care of Dr. Oliver. W h e t h e r he met Allen then is not certain. Like Oliver he knew the painter V a n Diest, whom he introduced to the use of crayons. 64 Oliver admired his kinsman and wrote delightful letters to him. In turn Borlase sent information and advice and, when it was requested, a corrected version of the inscription to go on Nash's obelisk in honor of the Prince of Orange. Borlase, who had descended into caves in quest of geological knowledge, came to mind when Oliver heard Pope describing his grotto. T h e grotto which the poet had built in Twickenham in the underground passage connecting his house with his garden across the road was something that he imagined he had pretty well completed fifteen years before. T h e n it had been an amusing creation, partly resembling the traditional nymphaeum of the ancient poets, cool and quiet and dreamy, and partly a modern toy with various mirrors to produce optical illusions and a hanging alabaster lamp to cast flickering gleams over the shells and ferns and dripping water. B u t now Bristol and W i d c o m b e gave Pope a new conception: the grotto should become a truly natural place and interest visitors, as a genuine cavern in the rocks might, for the colors and formations nature produces under ground. If M r . Pope's sophisticated taste was helping the Aliens' house and garden to become handsome, so the rocks of M r . Allen's native Cornwall and adopted Somerset would improve the appearance and logic of the poet's grotto. T h e problem was to obtain attractive and appropriate stone and some instruction for its proper placement. Dr. Oliver proposed that he consult a specialist — Borlase — and at once wrote to ask his kinsman to send to the great poet three or four tons of "the finest Spar, Mundick, Copper and T i n Ores," to be paid for by Oliver. T h e stones were all to be of subterranean varieties and very beautiful. 6 5 "" Borlase, I, fol. I l l — O l i v e r ' s letter of Sept. 5, 1 7 3 8 . Forty volumes of Borlase's correspondence survive, much being of a learned sort; see Quarterly Review, C X X X I X (1875), 367-395. " T h u s at least I interpret a scribbled sentence in Oliver's letter of March 7, 1734, in the Borlase Correspondence. œ Borlase, I, fol. 119, letter of Dec. 13, 1 7 3 9 .

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Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite Christmas passed quietly for the Aliens and their guest. Mrs. Allen saw to it that he had what he needed to eat and drink; bottles of cider and Bristol water and wine stood on the table, and meals came at regular hours, much to the benefit of the visiting bachelor. To help him keep track of these uneventful days she gave him an almanac, which he carried home with him. There was a special little green chair to fit his small figure.66 At leisure he worked on his poems, wrote letters and read, went to Bath to see Dr. Cheyne and to dine with Dr. Arbuthnot's daughter. One of his letters was to that clergyman, William Warburton, whose unexpected defense of the Essay on Man in a learned periodical the year before had given Pope mixed feelings of alarm and gratitude — alarm that his gentlemanly religious thoughts should be analyzed by a learned theologian, gratitude that Warburton had proved his poem not to be antagonistic to revealed religion as the Swiss logician Crousaz had asserted. Friends had written to Pope about Warburton's championing him, and we can be sure he mentioned this matter to his host; if Allen had learned to love Pope from reading his letters, from Warburton's analysis he would derive reassurance and respect for his guest's religious views. Though Pope had planned to leave the Aliens early in January they begged him to stay longer, arguing that they needed more help with laying out the gardens; the Postmaster would then carry him to London in his coach.67 On the fourteenth Pope breakfasted in Westgate Street with Dr. Oliver. Borlase, he had learned, was already packing beautiful and unusual pieces of rock to send to Twickenham, and Pope wanted to know how the various kinds of spar and mundic and marble should be placed to duplicate the stratified patterns of nature. Taking a piece of Oliver's stationery he drew a careful picture for Borlase of the floor plan of his fifty-foot-long grotto.68 By this time it was agreed that Allen would supply Somerset stones to combine with those from Cornwall. Pope remained in Widcombe another fortnight. The postal accounts, more troublesome than usual, were occupying Mr. Allen's time. He had been busy, too, quietly dispensing help and charity during the icy weather. He "suffers no misery near him," wrote Pope to Fortescue. "Whoever is lame, or any way disabled, he gives weekly allowances to the wife or Pope, Con., IV, 235, 229. " Ibid., 217. Sometime during the visit they planted elms on both sides of the lawn at Prior Park (IV, 2 3 9 ) . 08 This drawing from one of the letters in the Penzance Library is reproduced in my essay, "Mr. Pope, in Bath, Improves the Design of his Grotto," in Restoration and Eighteenth-Century Literature: Essays in Honor of Alan D. McKillop, ed. Carroll Camden, Rice University Semicentennial Publications (Chicago, 1 9 6 3 ) , pp. 143-153. M

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The Benevolent Man children: Besides large supplies of other kinds to other Poor. God made this Man rich, to shame the Great; and wise, to humble the learned. I envy none of you in Town the Honours you may have received at Court, or from the Higher Powers: I have passed this Christmas with the Most Noble Man of England." 69 Early in February (1740) Allen carried his accounts to London, accompanied by Pope and, with thoughtfulness for his frail companion, the surgeon Jerry Peirce. He stopped to have another look at the grotto and to greet Hooke. Pope wrote a thank-you note to the Olivers, one of the prettiest epistles he ever composed.70 Upon Allen's safe return to Widcombe, he set his men to shipping more rock to Twickenham. During Pope's stay with the Aliens he had learned about an expert mason and builder named Omer who had worked for John Wood before Allen employed him; Pope now wished to "borrow" him, and Allen had to explain that he could not spare him then. When in March Oliver was invited to dinner "upon the Hill" he expected to see Pope's little green chair and would try to imagine Pope in it. In April the Aliens sent to the poet cider, bottled Bristol water, spar, and alabaster, and the ship bearing these things from Somerset bore the name The Happy Couple, which made Pope think the Aliens must be its owners.71 The Fortescues were in Bath, and so was Mrs. Borlase, the latter of course under the care of Dr. Oliver. In May the trustees of the General Hospital met, for soon they would be receiving patients. Following their principle of having a small, select staff, they chose Oliver, Edward Harrington, and Alexander Rayner to be the physicians, Jeremiah Peirce to be surgeon. But neither Oliver nor Allen was allowed to forget Pope's various needs. Thinking that the Aliens would soon be moving into their great house, the poet served notice in a letter of May 15 that he hoped to occupy the room at the end of the long gallery in September. Van Diest, he reported, had finished an excellent portrait of Hooke (presumably paid for by Allen) and would be in Widcombe in the fall where Pope meant to sit to him. Though Allen was not feeling well he replied promptly to the poet's letter and received a hurried rejoinder the ostensible concern of which was stone and Mr. Omer.72 The chief reason for Pope's note, however, was to ® Pope, Con., IV, 219, 2 2 1 - 2 2 2 . 70 Ibid, 227. 71 Ibid., 230, 235; letter from W o o d to William Brydges of April 27, 1734, now in the Bath Reference Library. 71 Pope, Con., IV, 245, a letter of May 27 [1740].

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Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite inquire if the packet he had sent to Swift's friend, Samuel Gerrard, apparently by way of Allen's messenger, had reached him before he left Bath for Ireland. The packet was crucial. It contained an anonymous printing of the correspondence of Pope and Jonathan Swift, a printing that had resulted from a great deal of contrivance on Pope's part and would be, after still more plotting and protesting and accusing, the basis of the edition of that correspondence published in 1741. Pope had not wanted anyone — Gerrard or Swift or Swift's harassed relatives or the publishers — to know that he himself was responsible for the printing or for the mysterious delivery of the packet to Gerrard. But Ralph Allen knew at least where the package originated, and he kept the secret. Several years earlier he must have learned that there was a Pope-Swift correspondence that was not included in the 1735 Letters. But the poet's explanation of why he went to so much labor of concealment and tried to mislead so many people in such complicated ways may at first have puzzled his honest friend. Allen knew of Pope's efforts, at first unsuccessful, to have the original copies of his letters to Swift returned to him. In a letter in October Pope told Allen that Swift in the obstinacy and foolishness of old age had given the correspondence to a Dublin bookseller without Pope's permission, that the Dean and the bookseller had recently agreed to submit to Pope a preliminary copy for revision, and that Pope was afraid to accept the proposal lest the wretched bookseller should say Pope had revised it. "But as to your apprehension," writes Pope, "that any Suspicion may arise of my own being any way consenting or concernd in it, I have the pleasure to tell you, the whole thing is so Circumstanced, & so plain, that it can never be the Case." 73 Pope summarizes the entire plot against him — a plot mostly of his own contriving — and asks Allen for advice, hoping no doubt that, now as before, Allen would urge him to issue a properly authorized edition of his good and useful epistles. Ralph Allen was not simple. Nor would his guiding principle of humility have taught him that a famous man should go through contortions of objection before allowing his letters to be printed; John Norris emphasized the distinction between true and pretended modesty. Though Swift and his guardian-housekeeper Mrs. Whiteway and the Dublin bookseller saw through the hoax of the clandestine printing, Lord Orrery seemingly did not, Gerrard did not, and others also listened sympathetically to the poet's tale of imaginary woe. In 1736 Allen had observed from the outside Pope's struggle over the publication of his letters; he must have seen him then as ™ Ibid., 274. See also pp. 69, 83, 273.

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the victim of irresponsible friends and remorseless publishers. Now he was to some extent on the inside and yet was expected to maintain the same view. Allen appears to have been constitutionally generous toward other people and other kinds of people. But it is unnecessary to suppose that no cloudlets of skepticism ever entered his mind as Pope went on protesting too much. After four years Allen must have begun to understand, and allow, the vagaries in the personality of his interesting and stimulating friend. His patience, later events suggest, could embrace more in the poet's conduct than could Mrs. Allen's. He had other things to think about. He had been consulted on the possibility of supplying stone for the Exchange and Market to be built in Bristol, and at the end of May he sent Mr. Omer to tell the committee that he would be willing to do so. On June 3 the Common Council voted to accept his offer.74 Then he could send Omer to Twickenham to help with the grotto briefly. While Omer was at hand the poet plied him with "a hundred questions" concerning the Prior Park mansion and the plantings. He learned also that Allen's chief clerk, Samuel Prynn, and Betty Cadwallador were being married. Pope's hasty facetiousness about the marriage in his letter of June 17 did not strike quite the proper note. Allen, like the great rich man of genuine humility in Norris's treatise, could "descend to an easie and familiar Converse with a Person of a mean and inferiour Condition." 7 5 He gave Prynn considerable responsibility, and he honored him eventually by hanging a half-length portrait of him in the Blue Parlor along with another of General Wade. Pope also wrote, since he knew the Aliens were looking forward to attending a "Review" at the military camp near Newbury, that he wished they would travel a little farther for "a day or two's Look" at his grotto. Allen's second marriage had not obliterated some burdens from his first. Sister Ball's children were sometimes a problem, and Allen's attempts to be friendly and helpful did not always succeed. W h a t he had or had not done, what their mother had said about it to Mrs. Allen, can only be guessed from the following exchange, which the reader shall have, unlike Pope's letters, unrevised. "My wife," wrote Allen to Sister Ball on June 9, 71 Information concerning Allen's dealings about the Exchange is drawn from the "Minute-Book of the Committee for building an Exchange and Market, 1 7 3 8 - 1 7 5 0 , " in the Bristol Archives Office. I am indebted to Elizabeth Ralph, City Archivist, for extracting the relevant facts. T o p e , Corr., IV, 247, 253. Prynn and Elizabeth Cadwallador of W i d c o m b e were married on May 22 in Claverton; see Register Book of the Parish of Claverton; Norris, Practical Treatise concerning Humility, p. 156.

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Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite "have given me a particular account of what pass'd between you & her relating to the children & I need not ad what she heard here must have given us a great deal of uneasiness, however shall enter no farther on that disagreeable subject by letter, and upon the whole do think it may be stil proper enough for Lewy to come at the time we desired him." His sister-in-law replied as follows at the foot of his epistle. Deear Brouther June ye 28 j am vary Much consarnd to find by youre letter that you seeam to take sumthing ill of mee wich j doo ashour you I never Gave caws for nor was it even posabel for mee to doo or say any thing to the discradid of you whome from a more than twenty years acquintance and as j have allways thought the strongest frandship j am shure it is imposabel for any body to speeak more in praise of you then my self and that becaus j know you caunnot bee ["flatired" is here crossed out] to much comended for the goode you doo in ganaral if at any time j foand fault with the childrens . . . [illegible] a nowes it was wan my had was bad and j thought j mought take the Liberty of speeaking as j war related and so much alder that j never could speeak so foran from my hart as to make the least reflacton one you or any body that belongs to you too bleve j hop this and what j said to my sister will leave no roum for sispison.76 W h e t h e r Lewis, now aged twelve, did visit his uncle and aunt at this time I cannot say. In mid-July the Aliens heard again from their "Grottofying" friend, to whom they had just sent another cargo of stone. H e reported that he had recently talked to V a n Diest about the statues for their library; " W e are quite agreed now about Moses & St Paul; & I hope we shall be as much of one accord concerning Homer & Socrates." At the end of the summer M r . and Mrs. Allen presumably made their long-planned visit to Newbury. In October Allen suffered a serious attack of illness, as Pope heard from Miss Arbuthnot whom the Aliens were befriending during her stay in Bath. 7 7 So the poet offered to come to visit him within a week, trusting that he could persuade Hooke or V a n Diest (if the latter was well enough) to ride beside him in the coach; he was now too frail in various parts of his anatomy to endure much tumbling about on rough roads without someone literally to lean on. So Allen sent his chariot and servants to meet his friend at Newbury. B u t neither Hooke nor V a n Diest could make the trip with Pope, and, besides, his presence was required in London for another fortnight to attend his sister's chancery business. So Pope was not at ™ From the originals in the possession of James M. Osborn, with whose kind permission I print them. " Pope, Corr., IV, 290.

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The Benevolent Man Newbury, quite to the bewilderment of the waiting servants and rather to the annoyance, one gathers, of the recuperating Mr. Allen. The letter sent by Pope to explain the disappointment could hardly have made his friend feel much happier, for it insisted that Allen had completely misread the poet's (not entirely clear) promises: "had you been III," wrote Pope, underlining his words, "& in any respect wanted or wish'd my Coming," he would have dropped everything and gone.78 Pope's conscience, however, seems not to have been quite easy. So in a letter written a few days after the previous somewhat ill-tempered one he again apologized for the trouble he had caused and listed, with additions, the several reasons for the postponement of his visit. Now he thought he should be able to reach Bath without troubling to have the Allen chariot sent to meet him. Apparently the Aliens did not reply to this letter. Perhaps their ardor had cooled. Perhaps Mrs. Allen recalled the queer threat, so complacently phrased in one of his July letters, that as he had little strength left, he would die either in Twickenham or at Lord Bolingbroke's or in their house. Perhaps both Aliens were sufficiently occupied with the building problems of the great house. So Pope, a man of determination no matter how near his end, wrote on December 2 after a silent fortnight to ask if Allen was ill. Without waiting for a reply he proposed that if it were not inconvenient to his hosts, he and George Arbuthnot would arrive in Newbury by noon on the thirteenth, where he hoped the Allen chariot would, after all, be waiting for him. The Aliens must have sent a hospitable reply; Pope arrived at their door at about the time he had suggested. He busied himself composing several letters to send off to Lord Orrery as part of his prolonged skirmishing to get the Swift correspondence into print in just the form he wished without even a rumor that he "had been privy to this Affair." Very likely the Aliens had been given the same version, and with at least as many details, as he mailed to Orrery on December 30. But however vexed he was — or was not — by the progress of this affair, Pope was not too much preoccupied with it to talk about his grotto, especially to Dr. Oliver. On Christmas Day (1740), the doctor wrote to his kinsman in Cornwall : the "divine Bard did me the honour to breakfast with me this morning, as the first Visit he has made in this Town since his coming to sojourn with our great Countryman, at whose House he arrived last week, and has ever since been confin'd within doors by the ™ Ibid., 2 9 2 - 2 9 3 .

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Alexander Pope and Timon's Opposite Severe Snow." Four days later the poet was back in the doctor's study and drew another sketch for him of the floor plan of the grotto, revealing how much had been done in a year with the abundant contributions of stone from Allen and Borlase. The place had been extended and transformed not only in materials but also in pattern; the quarry owner and the Cornish geologist had taught him to "imitate Nature" here as he had done in his poems. The grotto, whatever its bizarre incongruities, presented "Natures works under ground." 8 0 Just before the Aliens' guest arrived in Widcombe, another of Mr. Allen's acquaintances had quietly published a work that astonished everybody and fairly quickly lifted its author out of the obscurity of the printing trade into general fame. On November 6, 1740, appeared Pamela: or, Virtue Rewarded. In a Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young Damsel to her Parents. Now first Published In order to cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in the Minds of the Youth of Both Sexes. It was a curious and absorbing affair, telling the story of an intelligent, attractive housemaid, caught, as girls not infrequently were, in the power of an upper-class employer but determined to retain her individuality, her comfortable place, and her chastity. The situation was predictable, but Mr. Richardson's treatment was not. There was compelling vividness in the depiction of the experiences of the ambitious, physically responsive, but conventionally pious girl. A kind of nervous excitement pervaded the work, and not unnaturally in view of the vaporish, anxious condition from which Richardson had been suffering during 1739 and 1740.81 Probably it was James Leake who provided copies of his brother-in-law's new work for the two gentlemen in Widcombe, and both of them, the sophisticated moralist-poet and the self-made businessman, found it delightful and admirable. That such an impressive affair could be built out of letters would especially impress the Deputy Postmaster. Leake reported to Richardson that both Pope and Allen had spoken very highly in its praise; "they will not bear any faults to be mentioned in the story; I believe they have read it twice a-piece at least." 82 In January, 1741, Allen was at last elected by the Bath Council to be 79

" Original in Borlase. 60 See my detailed discussion mentioned in note 68 above. 81 See Letters from Cheyne to Richardson, passim. M Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Anna L. Barbauld ( 1 8 0 4 ) , I, lix. T h e letter, printed here without date, must have been written in late January or early February; see Cheyne's letter to Richardson of Feb. 12, 1741, in which Cheyne also quotes Pope's praises of Pamela.

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one of its eight Aldermen. Thereafter he made greater effort to attend Council meetings, perhaps for other than merely local reasons. His contract with the Postmaster General would need renewing before July, and it would not be disadvantageous for Allen to be able to indicate to the ministry that as Alderman he would probably have still greater influence in the choice of Parliamentary representatives from Bath. In composing his petition for a third renewal of the contract he emphasized the factors that would justify a continuation of his monopoly without an increase in the rental fee. As must have been evident to an unprejudiced inquirer, the improvement in Allen's part of the postal system had benefited the entire service without cost to the Postmaster General. Furthermore, the action of the House of Commons in 1735 in sustaining the franking privileges of its members and countless other officials had assured a continuing, deep cut into his receipts. The Lords of the Treasury acknowledged this difficulty — to move ahead of our story — when they considered his petition; but though the franks in the previous year had increased by £6000 over those of the year before, all the Treasury could do on this point, it said, was to grant Allen the right, if the burden became intolerable, of resigning the contract on six months' notice. When on March 5, 1741, the Treasury warrant was issued renewing the agreement with Allen for another seven years, it was stipulated that his rent would remain the same (£6000 per year) but that he should "settle and support at his own charge a post and conveyance of letters six days in every week instead of the present three days between London, Cambridge, Lynn, Norwich, and Yarmouth; and likewise from London to Bath, Bristol, and Gloucester, and the intermediate towns." 8 3 He seems to have been content with those terms. Walpole was still the First Lord of the Treasury; the Postmasters General were still Lord Lovell and, in place of the late Edward Carteret, Sir John Eyles, a London Alderman who also served as Director of the Bank and of the East India Company. These men and the Bath Alderman would all understand each other and know what to expect of their contract. To revert to February, Allen probably carried his petition to the Postmaster General with him at the same time he conveyed Pope back to 83 Cd. Treas. Books, 1739-1741, ed. W . A. Shaw ( 1 9 0 1 ) , pp. 445, 4 4 9 - 4 5 0 . It is not uninteresting to see that probably at the time Allen was composing his complaint about the loss to him through the abuse of the franking privilege, Pope was utilizing his advantage as Allen's guest to send out personal letters marked "Free/R: Allen"; see Pope, Con., IV, 335. Howard Robinson's discussion of the franking problem is illuminating; see his British Post Office, pp. 113-116.

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London in his coach. Before Pope left Bath he had written out for Oliver a corrected version of his little poem on his grotto. It contained the two obscure lines which Oliver had ventured to tell the poet were "dark" and which Pope, not at the moment but soon afterward, decided to discard. The poem had been written as early as September, 84 but when, or if, he showed it to the Aliens is not known. Because it introduced in elegiac strains the image of three of Walpole's most powerful enemies, Lord Bolingbroke, Sir William Wyndham, and the Earl of Marchmont, sitting in the grotto and sighing over the state of the nation, it would not in that way have appealed greatly to the presumably loyal ministerial Postmaster who had contributed so much of the stone. The final couplet, even when read a hundred miles away from the grotto's damp coolness, might have given Allen an unexpected chill : Let Such, Such only tread this Sacred Floor, W h o dares to love their Country and be poor. 84 Pope, Con., IV, 262. For the various versions see Twickenham Edition of Pope, VI, Minor Poems, ed. Norman Ault and John Butt (1954), pp. 382-385. The "corrected" version is from Oliver's letter of Feb. 16, [1741], in Borlase.

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Prior Park 1741-1742

"Yon Mansion, where true taste with grandeur meets" (Bath and It's Environs, 1775) In the late spring of 1741, after seven years of planning, landscaping, and building, Ralph Allen with his wife moved into Prior Park. Although the buildings of the eastward wing were still unfinished, the lawns above and below the mansion and the firs, elms, and other plantings on the barren hillsides had been started in the previous years. The central house stood forth, large and well proportioned (147 feet by 55 feet), its Corinthian-temple portico adding solemnity to the semicircular line of creamycolored arcades, pavilions, and offices ultimately stretching for a thousand feet across an upper level of Allen's long, narrow amphitheatre of ground. The site was magnificent, and John Wood's skill and taste in adapting the Palladian mode had not proved unworthy. There is, characteristically, no surviving record of what the feelings were of Ralph and Elizabeth Allen as they undertook ordinary living in so extraordinary a house. Pope like numerous other writers spoke of the tranquillity, the unpretentious but thoughtful hospitality and human kindness to be found at Prior Park. Allen's quiet, sturdy nature was not awed or altered by the stateliness of walls and columns or by the grandeur of the prospect. John Wood may have been accurate in saying that the initial impulse to build so lavish and conspicuous an establishment came to Allen from pique when Colin Campbell caused the rejection of Bath stone for Greenwich Hospital. Allen may have then resolved to exhibit the virtues of Bath stone "to much greater Advantage, and in much greater Variety of Uses than it had ever appeared in any other Structure." 1 He had, however, already decided to build a house near the Combe Down quarries, and the likelihood is that, at a time when many peers and rich businessmen were 1

Wood, Essay, II, 427.

Prior Park building splendid country seats, Allen would do the same. Lord Lovell, Postmaster General and thus Allen's superior-in-command, began the foundations for Holkham Hall, that magnificent mansion in Norfolk, in the year Allen was starting work on his estate, and Lovell moved into a wing of Holkham in the year the Aliens settled at Prior Park. Though Holkham was built of a local yellowish brick, originally his Lordship and his advisors Burlington and William Kent had wanted Bath stone, "in deference to its fine yellow tinct," for the external facing. Lovell did, however, import from Bath (from the deputy's quarries, no doubt) the stone for an obelisk and temple.2 The general pattern agreed on by Allen and his architect was the popular one, a central house with out-flying wings set forward by connecting arcades. Palladio had supplied the basic plan, James Gibbs's Book of Architecture (1728) suggested several adaptations, and Colin Campbell's versions for Walpole (Houghton Hall, Norfolk) and for the banker Henry Hoare (Stourhead, not far away in Dorset) Allen probably had seen. The particular inspiration for his house, however, seems to have been Wanstead, in Essex, but in its original design rather than as built. The property of another banker, Sir Robert Child, Wanstead was also the work of Colin Campbell, who placed both the original design and two modifications conspicuously in the first volume of his not inconspicuous Vitruvius Britannicus (1717). But whatever Wood's debt to Campbell's design, he insisted he had surpassed his proud predecessor: the stone columns of the portico at Prior Park exceeded those at Wanstead by an inch-and-a-half in the diameter; Wood's building presented a "juster Hexastyle Porticoe" than that at Wanstead which Campbell boasted of as "the first yet practised in this manner in the Kingdom"; 3 and the great wings of Wood's plan came into solid existence whereas Campbell's extensions and end towers (in the third design) remained on paper. Much has happened to Prior Park since it was built. A fearful fire gutted the mansion in 1836. The adaptation of the estate in the nineteenth century to the purposes of a religious college transformed much of the westward wing. The proportions of the pavilion and offices in the east wing appear to have been altered also, though because the two eighteenthcentury drawings of Prior Park that include the east wing4 do not agree 2 See Matthew Brettingham, The Plans, Elevations and Sections, of Holkham (1773), Preface; James Lees-Milne, Earls of Creation ( 1 9 6 2 ) , pp. 247, 251. * Wood, Essay, II, 432; Vitruvius Britannicus, I, 4. * In Anthony Walker's drawing (Plate 3) the east pavilion matches that (with porte-cochere) on the west. In Thomas Heame's drawing (original in Bath Reference

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in the details of fenestration and proportion, one cannot be sure of what was originally built. T h e lightness and the odd variations of scale to be seen in several of Palladio's domestic designs W o o d managed to suggest in his plan, though later changes have obliterated these features. Both fronts, the entrance façade on the south and the portico overlooking the descent toward Bath on the north, were strict and stately, the entrance façade even austere. On the garden side the portico had no exit to the lawns below; instead of the monumental sequence of stairs that today descend to a terrace and then curve to a lower road, there was just the solid, unbroken rusticated wall with an effect of reserve, of Roman strength and control which the window moldings and Corinthian capitals would enrich but not weaken. 5 In Wood's drawings rectangular broken staircases descend from the portico on each side (as they did in fact on the entrance side of Burlington's villa at Chiswick and, in straight descent, from the similar portico on the south front of Holkham). By omitting the stairs Allen denied his house, on the garden side, the festive, sociable air that Burlington so happily took over from Palladio. W h e n Allen and W o o d first talked about plans for the estate they were both ambitious businessmen. Fifteen years later in the pages of the second edition of his Essay W o o d revealed to what a degree they, or at least he, had regarded the proposed building as a commercial venture. Visitors to see the grand affair were anticipated, and W o o d was retained by Allen for a five-year period as an expert to furnish estimates and advice to those who might thereafter wish to build with his stone. T h e original, deliberately eclectic plans called for a spreading Tuscan roof for the stables, a display of the several orders of architecture "in all their Glory" on the façades of the various units, and, connecting the central house with the eastward wing, a winding gallery of columns, pedestals, and vases, "as Specimens of such Kind of Things to recommend the Sale of them."

6

Because the entire pile would be so extensive, W o o d planned continual variation of detail and style, within Palladian limits, from building to building and even from one side to the next in the central structure; potential customers would proceed from the Doric stables through Ionic gallery and beautifully solid basement to "stupendous" Corinthian portico, Library) the east pavilion loolcs higher, with ordinary windows. Hearne's drawing, engraved by W . W a t t s in 1784, was issued as "Prior Park in Somersetshire, the Seat of Mrs. Smith," after Gertrude Warburton had become Mrs. Martin Stafford Smith. • See Bryan Little, The Building of Bath ( 1 9 4 7 ) , p. 77. ' W o o d , Essay, II, 4 3 2 . lOO

Prior Park thence via more elegant Corinthian to the chapel, where spectators would see Corinthian in greater magnificence, with cherubim and palm trees placed alternately to suggest "the manner in which King Solomon finished the Inside of his Temple at Jerusalem." 7 But Solomon's temple was not rebuilt within Allen's chapel. There were, indeed, many departures from the original designs as Prior Park was built; and these changes, moving in the direction of simplicity, Wood frequently alluded to in his published description of the place. Allen, one gathers, rejected some of Wood's schemes for commercial display in the ornamentation. Wood said almost nothing about the eastern wing, on the construction of which he was perhaps not actively engaged. Richard Jones in his confused, rambling autobiography said that he built the first story of Prior Park "under the direction of Mr. Wood" and that "the rest was carried on by me till the house was completed," after which Allen "ordered me to make drawings for to extend his buildings longer [i.e., to the east], which was carried on with great success." 8 Jones claimed credit for himself for an improbably vast amount of work in Bath and elsewhere, and his language suggests that his role was variously that of clerk, draftsman, builder, surveyor, architect. His senile boasting, taken with Wood's silence on the subject of the east wing, has been understood by more than one writer to mean that Allen and Wood quarreled and that Wood had no more to do with the Prior Park estate. This may be the correct interpretation, but I doubt it. Jones could not have been competent to complete the design for Prior Park (or to have invented Bennet's charming summer house). Rather, he may have completed the drawings for what remained to be done in accordance with Wood's ideas. Wood, busily engaged in 1740 in putting up a row of houses in the Grand Parade, may have left Jones to supervise the completion of the upper floors of Prior Park. If he quarreled, about 1739 or 1740, with his old friend and frequent collaborator, the quarrel was not too bitter to prevent his devoting considerable space in his 1749 book to Allen's developing his quarries and the masons' business, to Allen's services in promoting the Bath Hospital, and to Allen's town house and his Widcombe estate. Wood's inventive and urgent temperament had caused disagreements with Lord Chandos and with Dr. Gay, but he continued to work with them. If he and Allen at any time came to a parting of their ways, he none the less regarded Prior Park as one of his chefs d'oeuvre and Allen's contribution to Bath as valuable. 7

Ibid., 4 3 3 .

8

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Jones, p. 17.

The Benevolent Man Allen had ignored — and who would not who owned his beautiful combe? — the warning of John Norris that humility lives at the bottom of the hill,9 but he had not forgotten the mistakes of Timon, so brightly sketched in Pope's poem. Something there is more needful than Expence, And something previous ev'n to Taste — 'tis Sense. If Allen's house was high above the town, his visitors need not "thro' the length of yon hot Terrace sweat" and drag themselves "up ten steep slopes" to enter his door, for the door was, as a matter of fact, not at the top of his great slope but on a level drive on the other side of the house and could be reached from the carefully graded stone-wagon road. The long arcades were backed by a wall to prevent one's "shiv'ring at a breeze." The statues were made of stone, not of trees, and natural springs kept the fountains and cascades flowing. Wood was justly proud of the solid construction of the mansion. The walls were erected, both inside and out, of blocks of freestone in equal courses, the upper stories resting on basement arches that are still handsome, and the whole kept firm and secure by 800 tons of large blocks of freestone buried as a foundation. The ground floor, entered from the level of the drive on the south, was divided by a broad hall extending across the house to the portico.10 On the left were the dining room, the drawing room, a great staircase and a private one, and a large bedroom with dressing room. On the right were a parlor, a study, a back stairs, and the capacious chapel extending up into the floor above with a gallery across the rear. The ceilings of the other rooms on the ground floor were sixteen feet high. On the floor above were five bedrooms (their ceilings twelve feet high) with a variety of anterooms, dressing rooms, and closets, the chapel balcony, and an astonishing gallery extending for ninety feet across the front of the house and commanding the finest view over Widcombe and Bath. On the fourth level, half hidden on the outside by a continuous balustrade, were the garret rooms for the lesser servants. To give them light and "a Prospect," 'Prdctical Treatise concerning Humility ( 1 7 0 7 ) , p. 147. 1 0 My account of the interior of the mansion follows, as far as possible, W o o d ' s drawings and his text. But I am exceedingly grateful to the Rev. Brother R . B. Beattie, formerly President of Prior Park College, and to the Rev. Brother Cowley, Vice President, for kindly and hospitably enabling me to see the house, from basement to dormitories, on more than one occasion. 102

Prior Park Wood and Allen went so far as to break the entablature with little windows on the south and west sides of the house. 11 These splendid rooms of stone — what did they look like when Pope visited the Aliens and secured invitations for Warburton and Miss Blount? when Warburton, installed there as nephew-in-law, invited his friends, the Lord Chancellor's son and the Rev. Mr. Hurd? when Samuel Richardson or Henry Fielding came for dinner? when Count Stanislaus Poniatowski, the future King of Poland, was a guest, and William Pitt and David Garrick? or when the Princess Amelia borrowed the house for ten days? Of the fixed decoration of Prior Park only the chapel retains enough to let us see today what the room may have been originally. The rest is gone. Fortunately, however, we have Wood's paragraphs of concise description and the precious sheets containing his delicate drawings for "the four Front Rooms . . . As they were Originally Designed to be Built and Finished with Free-Stone" and his sectional drawings for the stair hall and chapel. 12 Though hardly a picture and not any piece of sculpture can now be positively identified as having once belonged in Prior Park in Allen's lifetime, Pope's letters to him suggest plainly what kinds of things were being chosen. Also, Dr. Richard Pococke, a professional tourist visiting Prior Park in 1754, recorded facts, nowhere else surviving, about the long gallery. Furthermore, because Allen's niece and heir, Gertrude Warburton, felt obliged to move out of the great house in 1769 and melt down its contents into cash, there is a catalogue of the furnishings offered for sale by auction at that time. 13 Of course the look of things when the Aliens began living at Prior Park in 1741 and the decor and furnishings twenty-eight years later would not have been entirely the same. None the less, I propose to take an imaginary tour of some of the rooms, trying to visualize what visitors saw in the mansion of the good Mr. Allen. Originally the rooms were finished in freestone. In the central hall, about fifty feet long and half as wide, the walls were ornamented, as Wood's "Section" shows, with Corinthian pilasters, pretty carved festoons and heads between the capitals, and well-framed panels below.14 This delicate stone carving has vanished, but a good idea of its elegance and charm may be gained from the surviving stone festoons lightly carved in 11 See Mowbray A. Green, Eighteenth Century Architecture of Bath, Plate L V I , for an illustration of how dormers later made possible the blocking up of most of these windows on the south side. u See the volume of W o o d ' s drawings in Bath Reference Library. By kind permission, some of these drawings are reproduced in Plates 6, 7. 13 See a copy in Bath Reference Library. 14 See Plate 7.

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the gallery of the tearoom in Bath's Assembly Rooms. Obviously there was greater restraint in Allen's moldings and mantels and ceilings than in those Kent had fashioned for Lord Burlington's villa or was soon to fashion for Lord Lovell's Holkham. As early as 1736, it will be remembered, Allen and Pope had begun selecting subjects for four pictures for the central hall. W h e n Pope found satisfactory depictions of the subjects, Van Diest was to make copies "in Chiaro oscuro" simulating "a Basso Relievo." 15 This style of silvery gray and sepia was to be seen along the halls and staircases at Hampton Court, Holkham, and elsewhere. Allen and Pope had agreed quickly on two subjects — Scipio's continent rejection of the beautiful captive maiden, and Joseph's revealing himself to his brothers — and then after some debate they had settled upon Poussin's Death of Germanicus for a third choice. 18 Whether or not the original selections were actually all copied by Van Diest and hung in Allen's hall cannot be said. Though the 1769 auction catalogue lists no pictures for the hall, it mentions a "Joseph and his brethren" and a "death of Germanicus" in the drawing room. No doubt the Warburtons reserved some pieces from the auction. Thus William Hoare's portrait of Pope, painted about 1739 or 1740,17 which eventually rested in Bishop Hurd's library at Hartlebury Castle, may have come from Prior Park, as did many other things in his librar)'; but it was not included in the auction. The idea adopted by Allen and his mentor that the pictures should be equally divided between classical and Biblical history is not surprising, nor is the assumption that they should offer moral stimulation. One notices that both men were content to have copies, not originals, of the work of great painters. Allen might compete with Burlington and Walpole and Lovell and Child in stone and in taste; but his fortune was not sufficient, he must have realized, to allow him to become a collector. George Vertue and Horace Walpole therefore felt it unnecessary to include Prior Park in their tours of country houses. T h e subjects Allen was considering for the hall pictures and for two others which he eventually owned had excellent contemporary authority. The episode of Scipio Africanus's continence, related by Livy (XXVI, 50), seems to have had wide appeal — the romantic and exemplary story of u

Pope, Corr., IV, 13. "Ibid., 13, 20. An unidentified painting belonging to a Mr. Morrice was also to be copied by Van Diest (IV, 13). "See William K, Wirosatt, The Porträts of Alexander Pope (New Haven, 1965), pp. 289-291, 104

Prior Park how Scipio, finding the beautiful virgin among his captives at Carthaginia, instead of ravishing her returned her to Allucius, her betrothed, along with the ransom gold as a wedding present. Allen could have encountered the story in Toiler No. 58 or in his friend Hooke's Roman History; a play and an opera (by Handel) had also celebrated it. But he may have known also that Sir Robert Walpole owned Poussin's Continence of Scipio.16 Still more interesting, when the Postmaster General, Lord Lo veil, was in Bath in 1734 he may have mentioned to Allen the fact that in Rome as a young fellow he had commissioned Giuseppe Chiari to paint a large picture of the episode with himself (then merely T o m Coke) in the attractive role of Allucius. 19 Pope mentioned none of these precedents in his letters but spoke of Burlington's Continence of Scipio, done by Sebastiano and Marco Ricci, the artists who had recently spent several years working in England. They painted the subject surprisingly often, though always with some differences — a version for Parma, another in Florence, a relatively small oil for Burlington (now at Chatsworth), a larger one probably already at Hampton Court, and still another large version, the history of which is unknown. 20 A few weeks after recommending Burlington's Ricci, Pope wrote Allen that Sir Paul Methuen, a London collector and good friend of General Wade, was reported to own a "Sketch" of Pietro da Cortona's Scipio and the Captive; in a somewhat sophomoric turn, Pope added: "I believe [it] is more expressive than that of Ricci, as Pietro is famous for Expression." 21 If Ralph Allen had a Scipio picture in his hall it would have afforded the pleasure of recognition to many people including Warburton, who mentioned that hero in his disquisition on the hero of the Dunciad, and Lord Chesterfield, who put the episode into one of his countless educational letters to his son. In an age of rakes, professional and amateur, fictional and actual, Scipio drew all eyes. Passing through the large hall, 22 one entered the "Blue Parlor" at the 18 See Horace Walpole's MS. Catalogue of his father's pictures in 1736, now in the Morgan Library. I am indebted to A. Dayle Wallace for information about the catalogue. 18 Lees-Milne, p. 258. 20 It now belongs to the North Carolina Museum of Art in Raleigh. T h e picture was sold at Christie's on July 14, 1950, as having come from Admiral Hall, South Ash, Cornwall, but what its earlier history was or how it got to Cornwall or whether it ever hung in Prior Park I cannot discover. " Pope, Con., IV, 20. The picture was listed for Methuen's Grosvenor Street house in a 1760 catalogue reprinted in Thomas Martyn's The English Connoisseur (1766), II, 29. 22 At some time between 1749, the date of the second edition of Wood's Essay, and

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The Benevolent Man right on the front of the house. The stone walls were finished in chaste Ionic style, though after a few years, as Wood complained in 1749, the stone ornamentation in this room and in the dining room was cut off and wood paneling substituted. Richard Pococke in 1754 found most of the rooms wainscoted with oak, but one room had gumwood walls, closetextured and looking something like "the pale kind of cedar." 2 3 This "Depredation" of the stone-carving was brought about, one gathers, by the quarry owner himself, governed now by taste, not trade. To the Blue Parlor most visitors were probably brought first, and they would see a half-length portrait of Allen's great friend and patron, the famous General George Wade, hanging "in an elegant carv'd frame." 24 They would also observe (in later years if not in 1741) a portrait of another valued friend, Samuel Prynn, Allen's trusted secretary for many years. The hangings in the room as well as the covering of a sofa and six "back stool chairs" were of blue silk damask. A Turkey carpet eighteen feet by eleven, a pair of large sconce-glasses in carved frames, a large mahogany table, and a "neat mahogany writing table, with fret-work feet and border" helped furnish the room. Two fine black-and-yellow marble tables gave it a little grandeur. In the dining room the carved stone decoration was apparently the most lavish in the house, and one can understand Wood's distress when it was all supplanted by wooden wainscoting. The windows were hung with festoons of green mixed damask, but the ten mahogany chairs were upholstered in horsehair and brass-nailed. In addition to a "bottle cistern" (or wine-cooler) in the mahogany cupboard, the room boasted a beautiful large cistern of Bristol marble. Three marble tables along the walls, two pier glasses in "pediment" frames, and at least two pictures added to the ornamentation. Again the pictures are worth noticing, not least because so many people came to dine in this room who might notice pictures. In a painted frame one saw depicted "The Fable of the Fowls plucking the end of the century a considerable change was made in the hall. The four pairs of columns supporting the ceiling were respaced, and a square opening was made in the center of the ceiling to carry that part of the room upward into the second story. The result, Graves declared (Triflers, p. 6 4 ) , was to reduce the number and size of the bedrooms and to render them unpleasantly dark. Perhaps this feature was one cause of Richard Warner's saying (An Historical and Descriptive Account of Bath [Bath, 1802], p. 135) that the interior of Prior Park lacked the majesty of the exterior; "everything is little, dark, and inconvenient." At some time after the publication of Mowbray Green's book in 1904 the ceiling of the hall was closed again. 33 Travels through England, II ( 1 8 8 9 ) , 36. 24 Information about the furnishings of Prior Park is drawn from the catalogue of the auction in 1769.

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Prior Park the Crow of his borrow'd feathers." The moral would seem to have been learned by honest Ralph Allen (who owned Norris on humility) long before 1741, and whatever the jutting flaws in the character of his favorite, William Warburton, the feathers flaunted by that fearful controversialist were either his own or of acknowledged origins. Richard Hurd, later a frequent guest at Prior Park, remarked that he often thought of this fable, "so well told in Mr. Allen's picture." 25 One hopes that when Samuel Richardson dined at Prior Park with some of the first characters in the kingdom he was not too nervous to observe the picture; one hopes, further, that someone took occasion to mention his recent volume, Aesop's Fables With Instructive Morals and Reflections, wherein the same fable of the "Daw and Borrow'd Feathers" was included. In the Holborne Museum of Art in Bath at the present time are handsome plates and a cup and saucer of Chelsea porcelain decorated with motifs from Aesop, and there are also two upright Chelsea pieces of the fox and the grapes and of the fox and the cat. The Aliens' "elegant table service of the Chelsea porcelaine" was finely enameled with birds and flowers rather than with Aesop's animals, but one must understand that the moralistic mode of decoration need not be without charm or relegated to the nursery. Henry Fielding dined at Prior Park often, we are told, and though the moral lessons he taught were acted out by human figures, they often involved the comedy of borrowed feathers. In Joseph Andrews, indeed, he said his aim was to illustrate vanity, which "puts us on affecting false Characters, in order to purchase Applause," and hypocrisy, which "sets us on an Endeavour to avoid Censure by concealing our Vices under an Appearance of their opposite Virtues." The other picture listed for the dining room in the auction catalogue, a copy of Raphael's Holy Family, would be welcome and perhaps not remarkable in any room. But the interesting fact is that a Raphael Holy Family was to be seen in the houses of two of Allen's Whig superiors, Lord Lovell and Sir Robert Walpole, 26 both of whom also owned a painting of the continence of Scipio. If Allen's dining room in the 1740's contained only these two pictures, such restraint as well as the naturalness and simplicity of the choice may have been in the back of Fielding's mind when in Tom Jones (VIII, i) he said of Allen that "his House, his Furniture, . . . his Table, his private Hospitality . . . all denoted the "Prelate, p. 171. "See A Six Weeks Tour through the Southern Counties (1768) and Horace Walpole's MS. Catalogue.

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The Benevolent Man Mind from which they flowed, and were all intrinsically rich and noble, without Tinsel, or external Ostentation." If one places beside this passage of heartfelt gratitude and respect the author's earlier ridicule in the Vernoniad of Walpole's "heaps of ill-got pictures" and of the clumsiness and want of taste in the "expenses of great men," one may have a still clearer notion of the impression Prior Park made on visitors who had been entertained in various other great houses. The amount of china and glassware that accumulated on the shelves of the house engages the housekeeping imagination: 140 octagon plates; 100 tea cups (not to mention chocolate cups and butter cups); 50 plates and 100 pieces of ornamental china in the hall passage; 110 pieces of glassware in the housekeeper's room; a china tea-set of 57 pieces, and a porcelain set of 40; 6 dozen plates and innumerable serving dishes, mugs, and jars; 50 oblong dishes; cupboardfuls of teapots, china shells and leaves, tureens and sauce boats; in addition, the service of enameled and gilded Chelsea porcelain. It is hard to remember, in the midst of all this (and I have omitted 50 pewter plates and quantities of broken china in the basement rooms), that Warburton was abstemious about food and that Allen, suffering chronically from headaches and gravel, followed one of Dr. Cheyne's diets, at least for a time. But Charles Yorke, a very welcome guest of the Aliens, was a gourmand and fat, and in 1759 Warburton referred to the "sybaritic" dinners at Prior Park. Let us move from the lessons and terrors of the dining room into the drawing room. Larger than the two previous rooms, the drawing room was not mentioned by Wood as finished in stone. Like the parlor it was hung with blue silk damask, but needlework covered the sofa, two settees, and the six armchairs. A "beautiful Axminster carpet" (19 feet by 15), a pair of "exceeding fine tables" of verd antique marble on carved frames, a pair of carved and silvered candelabra, a pair of cut glass girandoles for double lights on carved Chinese stands, and two sconce-glasses in carved frames helped furnish the room. In 1769 there were more pictures here than elsewhere. "Joseph and his brethren" in a carved frame was presumably a copy by Van Diest of the print which Pope admired of Eustache Le Sueur's painting of the discovery of Joseph to his brothers.27 Ralph Allen, now accustomed to helping his less fortunate relatives, may have sensed a parallel. He may have been attracted to the subject also by Wood's solemn fancy that Joseph was a contemporary of the Hyperboreans or Britons who established their collegiate society at Bath, Stonehenge, and " Pope, Corr., IV, 20.

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elsewhere in the Southwest. The picture of "The death of Germanicus," also in a carved frame, probably was Van Diest's version of Poussin's painting, "that admirable piece for Expression" recommended to Allen by Pope in 1736. Though the original remained in Italy, various copies and engravings of it were available. Pope's friend, the elder Jonathan Richardson, had a copy by G. Passari, and the younger Jonathan Richardson in his published Account (1722) of the works of art he had seen in Italy placed a detailed examination of this painting first among his analyses. So though the subject of death-by-poison of the great military hero was painful, the picture, Pope and Allen would learn from Richardson, deserved their admiration. The round arches and fine moldings of stone in the apartments surrounding Poussin's Germanicus would be interestingly harmonious with the similar walls and arches in Allen's stone house. To some observers British character appears to owe much to a deliberate tradition of stoicism. It was perhaps this ideal of conduct rather than any urging from Pope that caused the presence in Allen's drawing room of a picture with a still more horrendous subject, "Mutius Scaevola, in a carved frame." According to the legend related by Livy (II, 12), and by Mr. Hooke in his Roman History, one Gaius Mucius tried unsuccessfully to kill the Etruscan king, Lars Porsena, when the latter was besieging Rome. Brought before Porsena, Mucius claimed membership in a band of three hundred noble Roman youths who had vowed to destroy him. Threatened with torture, Mucius thrust his hand into the altar fire and — so the legend says — watched it burn. Porsena, impressed, released Mucius, who thereafter was "Scaevola" (Left-Handed). He persuaded Porsena to make peace with Rome. A painting of this subject ornamented the dwelling of the Prince of Wales in 1749,29 but it strikes a modern reader as more suitable for opera, as indeed it was so presented in 1721, the music by Amadei, Bononcini, and Handel. A different sort of impulse caused the displaying in this room of four landscapes by an artist named Ross.30 One offered a view of Mt. Edgecombe on the south coast of Allen's native Cornwall, and two others were 28

28 W o o d , Choir Gaure, Vulgarly Called Stonehenge (Oxford, 1 7 4 7 ) , pp. 9, 2 1 . " George Vertue, Note Books, Walpole Society, X X I I (Oxford University Press, 1 9 3 4 ) , 152. 30 Possibly this was " M r . Joshua Ross, Guilder, and Frame-maker, in B a t h , " listed among the numerous craftsmen and tradesmen who subscribed to John W o o d ' s Description of the Exchange of Bristol ( 1 7 4 5 ) . A Thomas Ross is known for a portrait of William Shenstone which was engraved in 1738. Knowledge of the latter Ross I owe to John Ingamells, Assistant Keeper, Department of Art, National Museum of Wales, Cardiff.

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The Benevolent Man views of Chepstow on the Welsh border. Some years earlier John Wood had designed a bridge for Chepstow and may have interested his friend thus in that picturesque town. The fourth of Ross's pieces was "A view of the brass mill and one arch bridge at Tiverton." The latter spot may have been the old town Tiverton north of Exeter. But I find it hard not to connect with Allen's picture, perhaps as a preliminary sketch, an anonymous colored drawing, now in the British Museum,81 entitled "A View at Twiverton near Bath," a very mild little scene containing a onearch bridge, a building beyond a hedge, and in the distance a large square chimney pouring out smoke. After contemplating the trials of Joseph, Germanicus, and Mucius the Left-Handed, Allen's friends might enjoy an agreeable respite in Ross's West Country landscapes. At the other end of the house John Wood's light and dignified chapel can still be seen, with a rounded apse for the altar, a gallery upstairs at the rear, a fine Venetian window above on the left wall and, at least in Wood's designs, a matching Venetian space above the entrance on the right, intended for a pipe organ. The columns and pilasters of the groundfloor level were elegantly Ionic; in the upper section they were Corinthian and slightly more lavish. Some pretty stucco ornamentation in the ceiling of the gallery has fortunately survived to suggest what the entire ceiling probably contained. The talented Francini brothers may have worked here as they did in Wood's Queen Square.32 One can be sure that Allen's ceiling had no resemblance to that in Timon's chapel, Where spraw] the Saints of Verrio or Laguerre, On gilded clouds in fair expansion lie. The altar, however, displayed a painting of the ascension in subdued chiaroscuro, one of the first works commissioned of Van Diest by Allen.33 It was for use in this chapel that Pope had given to his friend the great folio Bible with gilt clasps presented to him by Bishop Atterbury. W e go next up the stairs to admire the spectacular gallery, ninety feet long under a 20-foot-high ceiling, which Wood proposed to finish in stone "with all the Elegance and Beauty that could possibly be given Map Room, K.XXXVIII.32.A. Suggested by Little, The Building of Bath, p. 77. See Plate 8. " Pope, Con., IV, 13. J. S. Roche in his History of Prior Park College ( 1 9 3 1 ) , p. 149, speaks of this work as a fresco, but the chapel was not built in 1736 when Van Diest was painting the picture. Roche draws from the Western Mercury and Somerset Herald (Jan. 19, 1929) a report from a visitor to Prior Park soon after the fire of 1836 who said that the central painting still survived as well as two side paintings of St. Peter and the Virgin. Today Van Diest's work is not visible. 81 M

HO

Prior Park to Works in the Corinthian Dress." 3 4 But if the original design was executed in stone, the handsomely framed panels were soon covered by bookcases to make the "secret library" which Pococke saw in 1754. It was "secret" because the book shelves were covered by doors "on which the Philosophers, &c., are painted, opening to the books of the sciences in which they excell'd." Whose fancy invented this rather Italian library is not recorded, but Pope was probably in on the planning, for he in April, 1741, had borrowed Van Diest to paint "one or two things of a Grotesque kind" for his own house though Van Diest was then very busy in London on pictures for Allen that Pope believed would "suit well enough with the rest" he had done in Allen's gallery.35 A year previously Pope had been assisting in the problem of obtaining appropriate statues for that room. Moses and St. Paul, Homer and Socrates were the subjects (again half classical, half Biblical) chosen by Allen and his mentor, and Pope was to work with Van Diest in selecting the manner or attitude. In July, 1740, he told Allen they had at last reached an agreement for the Moses and St. Paul. But when in July, 1741, Pope wrote about statues, he mentioned a head of Sir Walter Raleigh (apparently proposed by Allen and approved by Pope), the last of four (Milton being the third), all of which were the work of a sculptor who seems to have been Roubiliac. Allen was now buying originals, though Roubiliac's great talent was only just beginning to be recognized, and Allen paid £20 for each bust. 36 No doubt he was aware that the Prince of Wales had given Pope marble busts of Spenser, Shakespeare, Dryden, and Milton carved by Roubiliac and wanted to have something similar in his own house. A conspicuous statue of Moses was placed outside the house. There were no fashionable nudes standing in the long gallery, it seems certain, although Burlington's little villa displayed a nude Apollo and Mercury and Venus, and Pope's walls were graced by chiaroscuro paintings of statues of Hercules, Venus, and Apollo. One could admire, however, with no danger to one's modesty, a Turkey carpet of the unprecedented length of twenty-three yards. T h e furniture of the gallery included two steel stoves, twelve mahogany stools with veneered seats, Essay, II, 433. See Plate 7. Pope, Corr., IV, 340, 343. Ibid., 360. Roubiliac created two different busts of Milton of which several copies were made. But there seems to be no known bust of Raleigh by him; see Katherine A. Esdaile, The Life and Works of Louis François Roubiliac ( 1 9 2 8 ) . Possibly some of Allen's statues were made by John or Henry Cheere, for whom Roubiliac worked in his earlier years. M

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four leather armchairs, two easy chairs and cushions in yellow damask and gold brocade, and, happily, a "mahogany library steps, and stool, with horse hair seat." The other rooms upstairs need not detain us long. The room at the end of the gallery was furnished as a study in 1769 and contained a crimson moreen French elbow chair, perhaps the one in which Arthur Pond's portrait (1757) represents Allen as sitting. The auction catalogue suggests that the bedrooms were handsomely and comfortably furnished. In the bedroom with the green mixed damask hangings and upholstery there were six "heads," one in crayon, one in oil, and four by Isaac Gösset in wax. The latter no doubt included the wax medallion portraits by Gösset of Allen and Charles Yorke that later hung in Bishop Hurd's library. One bedchamber had hangings and upholstery in crimson silk damask; another, in blue silk damask. After the west wing and mansion were completed, the pavilion, offices, and arcade on the east side were built. The pavilion became, said Graves, a "favourite apartment with Mr. Allen, where he often breakfasted or drank tea, with his most intimate friends." 37 In it was a bedchamber with dressing room containing eight back-stool chairs covered with printed linen and five painted armchairs with quilted canvas seats. T h e bed-livingroom idea was fostered by a "neat mahogany press bedstead, with brass wired front, in imitation of a book case." Also there was an octagon room with yellow silk damask on the stools and festoons of shell flowers about a fancy chimney mirror. A third room, called the Print Room in the catalogue, had a stove, eight walnut and leather chairs, three tables of mahogany and two of black and yellow marble. T h e auctioneer unfortunately did not mention what prints and pictures hung in this seemingly attractive building. Perhaps some of the portraits of family and friends were here, including the picture of Nathaniel Hooke by Van Diest that Pope admired. An attractive little painting by Thomas Gainsborough of the "Edge of a W o o d with Cottage and Distant Figures" may have hung here before Allen died, for Gainsborough settled in Bath in 1759.38 T h e park laid out by Allen above and below the long line of buildings " Trifters, pp. 6 4 - 6 5 . " T h i s painting, which is reproduced in Ellis Waterhouse's Gainsborough (1958), Plate 56, now belongs to H. W . J. Ferrand of Hartley Wintney, Hampshire. Mr. Ferrand has obligingly explained to me that the picture, along with some furniture and silver, came into his possession by a sequence of ownership starting with the second wife of Gertrude Warburton's second husband; an early manuscript inventory, now lost, traced the pieces back to Prior Park.

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Prior Park measured slightly less than half a mile at the top and, narrowing somewhat, terminated about half a mile down the hill. The top eastern corner was ridged and ditched by the Wansdyke, the ancient British defense work that cuts across Somerset. Springs issued from the ground in various places, and the shape of the combe had already created a pond below Allen's estate where one Gibbs had his mill. The raptures with which Mary Chandler described the plan for the estate in 1734 reappear in later accounts; nature and art joined together so happily there that one may think of Prior Park as a fulfillment of Pope's pictured ideals in the Epistle to Lord Burlington: Consult the Genius of the Place in all; That tells the Waters or to rise, or fall, Or helps th' ambitious Hill the heav'ns to scale, Or scoops in circling theatres the Vale, Calls in the Country, catches opening glades, Joins willing woods, and varies shades from shades, Now breaks, or now directs, th' intending Lines; Paints as you plant, and, as you work, designs. Though the effect achieved at Prior Park by 1760 was much more artificial than that of today, the design none the less was an agreeable compromise between the grand architectural manner of a Roman garden and the new English notion of pleasant lawns, naturalistic groves of trees, serpentine rivers and gravel paths. Pope and Allen modified the treeless landscape of the hills above Bath by planting elms (they had been abundant in St. Columb) and so many firs (55,146 according to Richard Jones) that eventually an evergreen forest covered the downs for several miles. On the natural terrace above the house (on the hill named Camalodunum, said Wood, to honor the British god of war, Camalos) a memorial statue was placed to honor George Wade, brave warrior for four English monarchs, Parliamentary Member for Bath. Wade, who before he died in 1748 had been given the titles of Field Marshal and Commander in Chief of the British forces in Flanders and then in England, was represented by a figure wearing Roman garb and holding a truncheon.39 Beneath the statue on the four sides of the base were stone panels, about three feet square, depicting in high relief the works Wade had carried out in Scotland. The panels, with delicate little figures of men dynamiting rock, of deer in the woods, of a coach and six winding up a new road, of a wayfarer about to cross one of Wade's finest stone bridges, " Samuel Derrick, Letters (1767), II, 97.

"3

The Benevolent Man were at least picturesque if also, because of a total indifference to the relative size of objects, naïve and amusing. No doubt Van Diest designed them; the carving was done by "a foreigner, one Mathison."

40

Above the

statue another terrace was used for the deer park. On the hillside below the house and wings the landscape gardener's opportunities were delightful. Level ground near the buildings allowed for chicken yards and guinea fowl. W i t h the help of one of Lord Burlington's experts and the advice of Pope's gardener John Serle, Allen built a greenhouse and started to grow pineapples. 41 T h e edges of the little valley to right and left were tastefully planted with trees. W e can read about it all in the 1748 version of Defoe's Tour, probably from the pen of the novelist Richardson. T h e gardens below the mansion consisted of two terraces and two slopes, with winding Walks made through a little Coppice opening to the Westward of those Slopes; but all these are adorned with Vases, and other Ornaments, in Stone-work; and the Affluence of Water is so great, that it is received in three different places, after many little agreeable Falls, at the Head of one of which is a Statue of Moses down to the Knees, in an Attitude expressive of the Admiration he must have been in after striking the Rock, and seeing the Water gush out of it. The winding Walks were made with great Labour; and, tho' no broader than for two or three to walk abreast, yet in some places they appear with little cliffs on one Side, and with small Precipices on the other. T h e cascade below the statue of Moses fell for twenty feet. 4 2 As the water accumulated it formed a little serpentine stream over which there was a "Sham Bridge" designed by Pope in a style, neither pure Palladian nor pure rustic, that was reminiscent of the rustic-classical oddities in the Twickenham garden. 43 T h e statue of Moses striking the rock was said in 1742 to be "a pretty Allusion to [Allen's] producing all his Works from the Stone Quarry in his Neighborhood," 4 4 but this interpretation seems a little indelicate. As soon as Warburton, author of the much discussed Divine Legation of 40 See Commonplace Book of Thomas Parsons of Bath (c. 1 8 0 3 ) , "Anecdotes of the late Ralph Allen . . . taken from fragments in the Manuscript of the late Rd. Jones," p. 180, now in the collection of James M. Osborn. Battered by time, the panels survive and are mounted on the wall of the stairway passage in the Mansion of Prior Park College. 11 Pope, Con., IV, 118, 422, 429. " Pococke, Travels, II, 153. The description of the gardens just quoted is from Defoe's Tour ( 1 7 4 8 ) , II, 301-302. See below, p. 129. " I t was Graves (Triflers, p. 6 5 ) who said Pope designed a fictitious bridge for the serpentine river. I assume it was the "Sham Bridge at the Serpentine River" shown on the large "Survey." See Plate lO.c.

" Defoe's Tour (1742), p. 266.

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Moses, became a resident of Prior Park the statue must have been understood by many as a flattering companion piece to the figure of General Wade on the other side of the mansion. Actually the subject of this objet d'art, as of many others inside the house, may have been suggested to Allen by what he had seen, or heard about, in other great houses, particularly the houses of certain important Whigs. In Walpole's Downing Street residence hung Poussin's Moses Striking the Rock, of which Claude Dubose's engraving was published in 1741. The subject was painted three or four times by the popular Riccis, one version being at Hampton Court.46 It was for the pedestal of Allen's statue of Moses, very likely, that Pope was asked in 1741 to supply an inscription.46 Like other men who have experienced the teasing pleasure of building a fine house, Allen did not wish to stop there. So sooner or later a number of smaller structures were to be seen at various points on his growing estate. The pair of attractive little two-story houses designed in Palladian style by John Wood for porters' lodges must have been built fairly early. The grotto which Mrs. Allen had begun building in 1740 was expected by Pope to be of the sort he was then favoring, a naturalistic rock cavern rather than an artificial thing like "those Bawbles most Ladies affect." 47 Yet one wonders. In 1931 there survived a stone grotto, then known as "Pope's Grotto," containing the grave of a dog — no doubt, that given Allen by Pope. But a print of about 1785 shows a building at Prior Park labeled "The Grotto" which has an open portico, Gothic arches, and a flat, crenellated roof line. The same building is represented in a line drawing on the earlier large "Survey" of Allen's estate as the "Gothic Temple in the Woods." 48 Gothic grottoes were considered picturesque. At Richmond Queen Caroline had built something called Merlin's Cave wherein Palladian symmetry, a Gothic door and buttresses, and four or five highpeaked roofs of heavy thatch were forced into unnatural cohabitation by a design of William Kent.49 W e need not be surprised, therefore, to learn that in Allen's grounds another of the amusements to the stroller's eye was a small octagonal structure of rough stone with a pointed roof of thatch. " O t t o Grantoff, Nicolas Poussin Sein Werk und Sein Leben (Munich, 1914), II, 172; Sir Anthony Blunt in Burlington Magazine, L X X X V I I I ( 1 9 4 6 ) , 267. " S o I interpret Allen's jotting on the back of Pope's letter (Corr., IV, 3 6 0 ) . " Pope, Con., IV, 254. " See Plate lO.e. See Roche, A History of Prior Park College, p. 20, and, for the 1785 print, A. M. Broadley's collection, "The Friendship of Pope . . . and Allen," I, 57, in Bath Reference Library. " S e e Beverly S. Allen, Tides in English Taste (Cambridge, Mass., 1 9 3 7 ) , II, 1 3 5 136.

"5

The Benevolent

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Knowing that Mrs. Allen eventually lost enthusiasm for her husband's friend Pope and his demanding, complacent ways, we are at liberty to guess that she finally pleased herself by building what she knew Pope would have forbidden. To the northeast of the main buildings Allen erected a good-looking two-story house for his gardener, who, necessarily a man of taste, deserved something superior. As sketched on the "Survey" map, the house had a bay window and fenestration of a Tudor sort.50 The gardener for whom this pleasant house was built was probably Isaac Dodsley, in Allen's employ from at least 1741 to 1764 when Allen died, leaving him a bequest of £100. Brother to the well-known London publisher Robert Dodsley, Isaac may have been of interest to the bookish visitors to Prior Park. The salary he received (about £60 per year by 1764) plus the use of the new house must have made him comfortable. By 1764 he had saved £520 in the form of a bond from his employer.51 After the death of Pope in 1744 Isaac had the society and assistance of another expert gardener, John Serle, whose achievements Allen had observed at Twickenham and whom, with his family, Allen moved to Widcombe. Perhaps he was already installed there when in 1745 his interesting Plan of Mr. Pope's Garden was published by Isaac's brother. The booklet made clear, in its room-by-room account of the stone ornament in Pope's grotto, how very generous Serle's new employer had been to his former employer, the famous poet. Whether indoors or strolling on the lawns, visitors to Prior Park might now hope for artistic glints and literary intimations. The master's pleasure in putting up new buildings and landscape decorations of stone was to continue for many years. When at the end of the decade Henry Fielding again alluded in print to Prior Park, he added a compliment to the gardens. Ingenious travelers, he wrote, proportion their stays at any place "to the Beauties, Elegancies, and Curiosi50 See Plate lO.b. Graves (Triflers, p. 6 5 ) refers to the house as "Gothic." It was, he said, "really a comfortable and elegant dwelling for a small genteel family; and lately has been rented by many people of fortune; particularly since the idea of happiness attached to that of a cottage." It is probable that the gardener's house, very much made over in the nineteenth century, survives as Priory House, a private dwelling not far from the east wing of Prior Park in a northeasterly direction. T h e legend that Allen built the house for his steward from stones from the medieval Priory buildings near the fishpond at the foot of the hill (cf. Roche, History of Prior Park College, pp. 8, 1 8 ) must be viewed with some skepticism. There is a drawing by S. H. Grimm (Add. MSS. 1 5 5 4 7 , fol. 8 1 ) , dated July, 1789, which seems to represent the gardener's house, but with an extensive surrounding terrace not indicated in the drawing on the "Survey." 51 F o r purposes of comparison I note that Allen's seemingly important foreman Richard Jones had a salary of £ 4 5 per year. For these facts see " T h e General Account of the Personal Estate of Ralph Allen Esqr. Deceased," now preserved in the Guildhall, Bath.

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Prior Park ties, which it affords. At Eshur, at Stowe, at Wilton, at Eastbury, and at Prior's Park, Days are too short for the ravished Imagination; while we admire the wondrous Power of Art in improving Nature. In some of these, Art chiefly engages our Admiration; in others, Nature and Art contend for our Applause; but in the last, the former seems to triumph. Here Nature appears in her richest Attire, and Art dressed with the modestest Simplicity, attends its benignant Mistress. Here Nature indeed pours forth the choicest Treasures which she hath lavished on this World; and here H u m a n Nature presents you with an Object which can be only exceeded in the other." T h e house and gardens of lowborn Ralph Allen could now bear comparison with what was offered at the grand country estates of Henry Pelham, Lord Cobham, the Earl of Pembroke, and George Bubb Dodington, all eminent W h i g servants of the King and the nation. 52 T h e Aliens moved into Prior Park in May or June, 1741. W h i l e Mrs. Allen coped with the problems of settling so large a house, Mr. Allen would have to give some thought to other affairs. Walpole's management of the Spanish war was then very unpopular. T h e Opposition, making use of that widespread dissatisfaction, were trying to terminate his long personal rule in the Government. There was to be, in consequence, a general election during the summer. Allen had been granted a renewal of his Post Office contract earlier in the year, and he would be expected to manifest his gratitude to the First Lord of the Treasury in appropriate ways. In Bath, where the Council possessed the right to elect members of Parliament, the choice was made early, on May 15. Perhaps it was Allen who suggested for the second Member ( W a d e remaining the first) his neighbor in Widcombe, Philip Bennet. In 1734 Bennet had been proposed to the Council for the same honor, but, having been rejected by them, he secured election in Shaftesbury. 53 H e was, in 1741, a widower for the second time; his sister was the wife of Ralph Allen's brother Philip and lived in Ralph's town house. Whatever his previous political coloration, it seems safe to guess that Bennet would now understand and adopt Allen's points of view. Probably, too, Allen exerted himself to see that he would be elected this time. O n e might well wonder if this period of political tension in the Gov52 Tom Jones, XI, ix. Henry Pelham's estate, Esher, was in Surrey. Stowe was the famous estate in Buckinghamshire belonging to Pope's friend, Sir William Temple, Viscount Cobham. Wilton House, the venerable mansion of the Earls of Pembroke, is near Salisbury, and Dodington's Eastbury was near Weymouth. 63 Peach, p. 209.

ny

The Benevolent Man ernment was upsetting to Allen, whose large income and spacious way of life were dependent upon the unusual monopoly granted to him by the Commissioners of the Treasury. It is imaginable that he like many other observers of the times really expected Walpole to retain control and continue in authority. But if Walpole were somehow defeated, Allen possessed a firm friend in Lord Lovell, one of the Postmasters General since 1733, who seemed to be very well established in his lucrative office (and would, in fact, retain it until his death in 1759). But regardless of what happened to Walpole and Lovell, there was Field Marshal Wade, still so much a comfort to the King that in a few months he would be drawn into the Privy Council. As long as Wade lived — he was now sixty-eight — Allen could rely on his very powerful support. As a last resort, if a great shift in the Ministry occurred, Allen must have felt that he could use as a trump card a reminder of his services to the Crown against the Jacobites in 1715.84 If Walpole were defeated, the new administration would not necessarily be hostile to the Bath businessman. George Lyttelton, one of the quieter and steadier members of the Opposition, was at the present moment telling Pope that he hoped for the esteem of honest men like Ralph Allen and regretted that he could not see him more often and cultivate his friendship as he wished to do. 65 Chesterfield, another of Walpole's firm enemies, was by this time a prominent Bathonian, and he had worked with Allen on the Hospital project. The two most conspicuous leaders of the Opposition, Lord Carteret and William Pulteney, Allen may not have been able to count among his good friends. Yet Pulteney had been invited to lay the cornerstone of the Hospital in 1738, and Lord Carteret's uncle, Edward Carteret, a Postmaster General from 1721 to his death in 1739, had agreed with Lovell that Allen "shou'd have their best support and encouragement for the management of this Branch [the cross-road and bye posts] for the remainder of his Life." Ββ Furthermore, as the most influential man in a city Council that elected two members of Parliament Allen doubtless supposed that his good will would be sought after by any ministry. Meanwhile the masons at the quarries above Prior Park were still cutting stone, the wagons were still carrying it down the hill past Mr. Bennet's "See below, pp. 208-209. A letter of Nov. 7, 1741; see Pope, Con., IV, 368. R A O N , p. 26. Though these words are Allen's, one need not doubt the representation of the Postmaster General's sentiments. 58 M

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Prior Park road, and the men at the quay kept swinging it out on Mr. Allen's expensive cranes to the barges in the Avon. The cornerstone of the Bristol Exchange had been laid in March, and from Widcombe to Bristol went, from time to time during the next two years, not only many tons of cut stone but also William Biggs, one of Allen's chief masons, and other members of the building trades in Bath and Widcombe. 57 But in Twickenham Pope needed some of Allen's "rude Stones to build a sort of ruinous Arch" at the entry to his grotto. In July the queer rocks arrived, looking worm-eaten and ancient. 58 Along with them Allen sent square-cut stone for the portico. Then Pope asked for the services of Biggs's brother, who with a helper worked for him for three or four weeks. In Bath from July to November the quarry owner was furnishing ashlar, block stone, and foundation stone for the new church in St. Michael's parish outside the city walls, bearing half the cost himself.59 During the summer and fall Allen and Pope maintained an active correspondence. Social matters enliven Pope's letters, and there are also the poet's less pleasurable requests to Allen to investigate, through his postal connections, whether Pope's ungrateful pensioner, Richard Savage, was collecting his small dole. Gifts of pineapples went from Twickenham to Widcombe; cider, Bristol water, and Bath stone moved in the opposite direction. Nathaniel Hooke's son needed a career, and his father thought of the army; because Hooke was too modest to ask Allen to speak to General Wade in the son's behalf, Pope did so. The pretty counterpoise among privileged folk of favors granted and favors asked continued: Allen made the request of his patron the elected Member of Parliament; the General received young Hooke and promised to try to help; the distinguished poet then asked the influential Mr. Allen if he should call on the venerable General in person to express thanks. 60 Samuel Richardson's success with his bold venture, Pamela, had proved to be much greater — and more troublesome — than he could have imagined. Interlopers threatened to produce sequels, imitations, and parodies. So to protect his brain child from dishonor and also, he said, to secure profits for his family of flesh-and-blood daughters he composed a second " See Wood, A Description of the Exchange at Bristol; many artisans and tradesmen involved in the building subscribed to the volume. M Serie (A Plan of Mr. Pope's Garden, p. 5) says that some of these rocks were "full of Holes, other like Honey-combs, which came from Ralph Allen's, Esq." In the southeast corner of the grounds of Prior Park one can still see rocks of this sort. " T h e bill, including an item of the £37/10/0 donated by Allen, can be seen in the Sydney Sydenham Scrapbook in Bath Reference Library. "Pope, Con., IV, 344, 353, 358. H9

The Benevolent Man part, an account of Pamela's married life "In her Exalted Condition." A cautious and shrewd man, he was developing the habit of seeking comment on his writings for purposes of improving them and of learning what the public wanted or could accept. Because Allen had expressed high approval of Pamela Richardson sent him two sheets of the continuation for whatever "kind Corrections" he might care to suggest. After waiting a month in vain for their return Richardson put his manuscript to press. At the end of September, however, Allen surprised him with a communication praising one or two of the letters submitted, offering a hint for a "genteel and generous Dismission" of the horrid Mrs. Jewkes, and objecting mildly to something among the testimonials in the Preface. Richardson then thanked his friend for the suggestions even if they could not be used in the first printing. The notion about Mrs. Jewkes he could not incorporate, for it would have destroyed one of the moral lessons intended. Allen wanted Pamela's "Gratitude and Thankfulness to the Supreme Being" kept up, and Richardson hoped that when his friendly critic read the new work he would feel satisfied on this score. For, as Richardson very politely said, he would "rather have [Allen's] Approbation, in any serious, pious, or beneficent Turn, than that of Hundreds; since such wou'd be the approbation of a Gentleman, the constant Tenor of whose Life distinguishes in him a Rectitude of Thinking and a Benevolence of Mind, equal at least, to all that the 4 Volumes of Pamela can pretend to inculcate." 61 Richardson had printed advertisements for the Bath Hospital and knew a good deal about Allen's labors for that charity. It is interesting to observe that the image of Ralph Allen in Richardson's mind was similar to Fielding's later conception of judicious, generous Squire Allworthy. Both authors, one notices, spoke handsome praise to Allen with some confidence that it would not offend. In October (1741) Mr. and Mrs. Allen went to London, perhaps for business reasons as well as for a sight of what Van Diest and Roubiliac had accomplished. They were guests of Pope in Twickenham for a day or two and saw the now finished grotto; also they seem to have conversed with Miss Blount, George Arbuthnot, and his sister. About the twentieth they set out for Widcombe, carrying their host with them. It was to be his first stay at Prior Park — in the room at the end of the gallery, maybe, ™Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. John Carroll (Oxford, 1 9 6 4 ) , p. 51. T h e two sheets sent to Allen were probably the same as those (the first two signatures) sent to James Leake in August; see William M . Sale, Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographical Record (New Haven, 1 9 3 6 ) , p. 28. I am indebted to Mr. Carroll for information about Richardson's unpublished correspondence. 120

Prior Park which he had asked for a year too soon. T h e visit was to have important consequences. T h e Aliens made their friend feel very much at home, and he settled down for a long happy stay. Regular meals, regular hours for retiring, quietness, escape from the vice and folly of the outside world — these he greatly appreciated. Professing to ignore the grave state of the nation, he amused himself and satisfied Lyttelton's urgent request for another "Moral Song" by working on a poem which he had already mentioned to William Warburton. Earlier in the fall he had revealed to the latter gentleman his desire for a "General Edition" of all his verses which would contain a commentary by none other than Warburton himself. To this flattering suggestion the clergyman scholar seems to have acquiesced promptly, and the two men had much to talk over. Pope's host had heard of Warburton, as most of the poet's intimates had after his unexpected public defense of the Essay on Man against the attack of Crousaz in 1739.®2 It would be natural for Pope to speak now of his plans as it would be for Allen, sensing Pope's needs, to issue an invitation to Warburton for a visit. Pope's letter to Warburton on November 12 is informative: I am here in more Leisure than I can possibly enjoy even in my own house, Vacare Literis. It is at this place that Your Exhortations may be most effectual to make me resume the Studies I have almost laid aside by perpetual Avocations & Dissipations. If it were practicable for you to pass a Month or six weeks from home, it is here I could wish to be with you, and if you would attend to the continuation of your own Noble Work, or unbend to the idle Amusement of commenting upon a Poet . . . . In either case This Place & This House would be an Inviolable Asylum to you from all you would desire to avoid in so public a Scene as Bath. The worthy Man who is the Master of it invites you in the strongest terms, & is one, who would treat you with Love and Veneration, rather than what the World calls Civility and Regard. He is sincerer and Plainer than almost any Man now in this world, Antiquis Moribus. If the Waters of the Bath may be Serviceable to your Complaints, (as I believe from what you have told me of them) no Opportunity can ever be better. . . . You'l want no Servant here, your Room will be next to mine, and one Man will serve us. Here is a Library, and a Gallery ninety foot long to walk in & a Coach whenever you would take the air with me. . . . Mr Aliens house (where I am, & hope you may be) is less than 2 miles from Bath, but his Brother the Postmaster lives at Bath, and takes care of the Letters to me. 63 ω Warburton's defense of Pope's Essay appeared as a series of five essays in the History of the Works of the Learned, beginning in Dec., 1738. T h e five essays, with a sixth, were issued as A Vindication of Mr. Pope's Essay on Man ( 1 7 4 0 ) . 63 Pope, Con., IV, 370-371.

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The Benevolent Man Warburton accepted the invitation, and Pope sent further suggestions: When you are in London, I beg a line from you, in which pray tell us what day you shall arrive at Bath by the Coach? that we may send to meet you & bring you hither. Be pleasd to go, when you arrive, to the Post Master's house in Bath, where you shall find a Coach: and your Chamber here ready aired &c. with all possible care. You will owe me a real Obligation by being made acquainted with the Master of this House; and by sharing with me, what I think one of the chief Satisfactions of my Life, His Friendship.84 Raised above Bath and the rest of the world and stimulated by the presence of the learned Warburton, Pope must have worked hard and well, for the "Widcombe Poem" (as he once called the fourth book of the Dunciad) was ready for publication in March. The New Dunciad, to use the title of its first printing, is one of Pope's finest satires. Much of its contents suggests not Widcombe but the literary and intellectual concerns of London, Cambridge, and Oxford — scoffing at Sir Thomas Hanmer's Shakespeare, polished attacks on faulty school-methods and the errors of the classical scholar Richard Bentley, sketches of the flower-fancier and the lepidopterist, and the gorgeous vision of a wasteful Grand Tour. But Prior Park approved of neither debauchery nor freethinking, and what the poem said on these subjects would be impressive to Ralph Allen. The conversation at Prior Park in December and January, with Pope and Warburton and Allen all for different reasons exerting their best manners — this one would like to have heard. Pope's quality Allen was used to, but what would he think of the Rev. Mr. Warburton? One may hazard a guess on the basis of Warburton's effect the year before on a young correspondent, Charles Yorke at Cambridge, whom he had not previously met. Warburton had come to the university town directly from his fortnight in Twickenham, his first visit there, and he spoke to Yorke about Pope "in strains of rapturous commendation." Yorke was awed by his middle-aged visitor; his "memory is prodigious, and his fancy is enchanting," and the fluency of his conversation surprises. He is, wrote Charles to his brother Philip, "a genius of so high a rank, that, unable to contain himself within the narrow limits of ordinary capacities . . . he strikes frequently into the province of paradox"; he "spurns the dull earth, and soars above the skies." 65 Charles was only a youth of eighteen, exceedingly bright and exceedingly studious, but not yet very much distanced Ibid., 373. ® Quoted in George Harris's Life of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke (1847), I, 477. M

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Prior Park by a sense of humor. Perhaps Allen's first impression of Warburton's talk would be about the same; for he too was highly intelligent, still educating himself, and a ready admirer of learning. William Warburton is one of the least loved men in English literary history and for reasons which are perfectly valid. A "rather tall, robust, large-boned man," 67 trained originally as an attorney and endowed with a superbly capacious mind, retentive memory, and voracious appetite for knowledge, he had not the discipline of accuracy that one likes to imagine a university would have provided nor the grace and restraint that money and good society sometimes create. A self-taught, coarse-grained, hardworking man, he cultivated his mind and his opportunities ambitiously, even fiercely. Flattery, a simple tool, he learned how to use early and never abandoned. The cutting edge, the trumpet, the bludgeon, and the nasty simile he could also manipulate and often did. He was not, when the events of the past clashed with the needs of the present, always strictly honest. To save himself in 1757 he could totally deny the facts of 1727, slandering his one-time friend, Mat Concanen, in the process.68 He could say in 1740 that he "never was of any Party except the Love of my Country may be called a Party," 6 9 forgetting that in 1727 when petitioning the Duke of Newcastle for a more lucrative church he had told that powerful politician that he and his friends "declared our selves in your service" without bartering for terms; he was, he had written to the Duke, not last in inclination or ability to "praise our Constitution, & the glorious Patriot that so eminently adorns & defends it." 7 0 68

Ralph Allen would not have had, in 1741, much acquaintance with the growing supply of scornful attacks on Warburton's theology, his scholarship, his logic, and his manners, nor would he have seen the arrogant assertions and smashing rejoinders in Warburton's pages that often added frenzy to the intellectual disagreements of his many critics. In a way that somehow reminds one of Pope, Warburton was given to saying that his disposition was averse to quarreling — and that he was intended to be a declared and mortal enemy of religious infidelity.71 But in private company Allen's new acquaintance could be genial, witty, and cheerfully " M y opinion is based on the set of letters from young Yorke to Warburton in 1740 and subsequent years in Add. MSS. 3 5 4 0 4 . 67 Thomas Newton, Works ( 1 7 8 2 ) , I, 116. 68 F o r this episode see Egerton 1955, fols. 1 - 2 , and Evans, pp. 2 0 - 2 6 . 70 Add. MSS. 32731, fol. 2 3 3 . ® Pope, Corr., IV, 2 3 8 n. 71 Egerton 1952, fol. 36.

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The Benevolent Man acquiescent. His letters to friends were abundant and often affable. The evidence that people found him wrong piles up like a small mountain, but no one seems to have found him trite, uninventive, sentimental, unintelligent, stuffy, or dull. In appreciative company he was at his best, and Ralph Allen was very appreciative, being an incorrigible admirer of brains and talent. If Warburton was ever to profit from a happy conjunction of his own talent and the friendly predisposition of his companions, now was the ideal occasion. He came to Prior Park in bad health and good temper. The Bath doctors advised, for the "bilious indigestion" from which he had long suffered, that he drink the waters. So his hosts arranged to have water hot from the pump brought up the hill every morning for him to drink in bed. Mr. Allen, "that good man," seeing how much Warburton was benefited by the treatment, extracted from him before he left Prior Park a promise to return at the first opportunity.72 The visit was fruitful for all concerned. When, early in January, 1742, Pope and Warburton in Allen's coach set out through the snow for London, the poem was written and the commentator's duty explored, the new visitor's health was improved and his prospects were advanced, and the host had acquired, as things turned out, a lifelong friend and companion. Sometime during 1742 Pope made a present to Allen of three little volumes — a Juvenal and Persius (Leyden, 1664), a Horace (Poemata . . . Alexander Cuningamius [London, 1721], and Alexander Cunningham's Animadversiones, in Richardi Bentleii Notas et Emendationes ad Q. Horatium Flaccum (1721 ). The gift seems odd, for it is unlikely that Ralph Allen was equal to much reading in Latin poetry. But one can imagine that as he listened to Pope's remarks on the satire he was writing and to Warburton's discussion of the commentary he was to furnish for the Essay on Man and the other poems, Allen wished he knew Horace and Juvenal. Perhaps Pope had brought the volumes to Widcombe for his own use and then left them behind to be added to the library in the long gallery. The poet had already put his name inside the cover of the Horace; in all three volumes Allen wrote the words, "The Gift of Alexander Pope Esqr to Ralph Allen." 7 3 The crucial event for the nation in February, 1742, was the resignation ™ See Letters to and from the Rev. Philip Doddridge, ed. Thomas Stedman (Shrewsbury, 1790), pp. 184-185. 73 The words "in 1742" are inscribed in the Horace and the Juvenal. The volumes are now in the Bishop of Worcester's library at Hartlebury Castle as part of Richard Hurd's purchase from Warburton's estate.

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Prior Park of office by Sir Robert Walpole, who, faced by a hostile majority in the Commons, retired to private life. Many of his own group, like the Pelhams, continued in office, but Carteret now became Secretary of State and the Earl of Wilmington was given Walpole's place as First Lord of the Treasury. As the next months passed, the prominent members of the Opposition — Pulteney, Carteret, Lyttelton, Chesterfield, the rising William Pitt — gained greater authority, but Henry Pelham and his brother, the very rich Duke of Newcastle, also augmented their strength, soon overshadowing the others. Ralph Allen from 1719 to the present moment had been, at least ostensibly, a supporter of the Ministry, and his Post Office contracts had been approved by the First Lord of the Treasury. Now though one particular First Lord had gone, his contract had survived, and he was still a supporter of the King's ministry. His life seems to have gone on pretty much as before. Later in February, however, his habitual modesty must have been startled by what was printed in a new book, an anonymous novel called The His-

tory of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, And of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams. Halfway through the work (III, i) the author, who was Henry Fielding, distinguished between the usual run of "high people" and the few exceptions, including one peer no less elevated by Nature than by Fortune . . . adorned with Greatness, enriched with Knowledge, and embellished with Genius. I have seen this Man relieve with Generosity, while he hath conversed with Freedom, and be to the one Person a Patron and a Companion. I could name a Commoner raised higher above the Multitude by superiour Talents, than is in the power of his Prince to exalt him; whose Behaviour to those he hath obliged is more amiable than the Obligation itself, and who is so great a Master of Affability, that if he could divest himself of an inherent Greatness in his Manner, would often make the lowest of his Acquaintance forget who was the Master of that Palace, in which they are so courteously entertained. These are Pictures which must be, I believe, known: I declare they are taken from the Life, nor are intended to exceed it. Fielding was speaking of the two Bathonians, Lord Chesterfield and Ralph Allen. T o Allen he returned a few chapters later (III, iv) in the long disquisition offered by Joseph Andrews on the normal lack of charity in men. Here again there is an exception. Says Joseph, I have heard 'Squire Pope, the great Poet, at my Lady's Table, tell Stories of a Man that lived at a Place called Ross, and another at the Bath, one Al Al I forget his Name, but it is in the Book of Verses. This Gentleman 125

The Benevolent Man hath built up a stately House too, which the 'Squire likes very well; but his Charity is seen farther than his House, tho' it stands on a Hill, ay, and brings him more Honour. It was his Charity that put him upon the Book, where the 'Squire says he puts all those who deserve it. Allen, being human, must have been touched in 1734 by the eulogy in Miss Chandler's poem and again in 1738 by the compliment in Squire Pope's satire. But Fielding's praise was warmer than Pope's, and it was placed amidst more appealing surroundings. W h o would not think it good fortune to be honored in a work of such extraordinary invention, wit, serious morality, and gay humor? One ponders what the experience must have been for Allen of finding himself praised so openly in a novel of such compelling strength and charm. But with no words from him and only his continued hospitality and benefactions to indicate his response, the biographer should turn instead to the question of how the compliments happened to appear in Fielding's book in 1742. The implication of the former of the two passages quoted is plain enough : Allen already had in some way assisted Fielding and at least once had played host to him at Prior Park. In view of Allen's later known kindnesses to the writer, to his sister, and to his children we may assume that the implied relationship of genuinely benevolent patron and genuinely grateful author had begun before the book appeared. How desperately Fielding needed help in the winter of 1741-42, almost conquered by worry over poverty and the illness of his wife and daughter, can be read in the Preface to his Miscellanies. Then, if ever, he was in circumstances likely to affect Allen's charitable disposition. But if Allen had meant to do good by stealth, Fielding did not permit his generosity to remain hidden. Just when the two men had become known to each other is a matter of interesting uncertainty. Since June, 1740, when Fielding was admitted to the bar, he had been assigned to ride the western circuit, which included Salisbury, Taunton, Wells, and Bristol; almost inevitably he would have passed through Bath more than once. It is possible that he first visited Prior Park in December, 1741, when Squire Pope and Mr. Warburton were there. It was in December, 1741, according to Fielding, that his travellers in "A Journey from this World to the Next" 74 began the journey that acquainted them with the road to Goodness, which though flowery and charming, displayed only a single handsome building, one that greatly resembled "a certain House by the Bath" (Chapter V ) . Later in their travels they heard Virgil acknowledge the soundness of Warburton's dis74

Published in Fielding's Miscellanies (1743), II.

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Prior Park covery of Eleusinian mysteries in Virgil's sixth Book, and they heard Livy commend the judicious Roman History of Allen's protégé, Nathaniel Hooke. The publication of Joseph Andrews immediately after the fall of Walpole calls attention to another matter for speculation: did Fielding come into Allen's acquaintance as a foe or as a friend of the departed minister? During the previous fifteen years while Allen had been growing rich by means of a contract with Walpole's ministry, Fielding had been growing famous by attacking it. His satiric stage-burlesques in the Haymarket had so offended the Government as to bring down the Censorship Act of 1737; but barred in effect from the theatre, he had carried on his war with Walpole in the pages of a newspaper, The Champion, which had been running since 1739, and in a poem, The Vernoniad, issued in January, 1741. If Allen extended charity to him before February, 1741, he could hardly have been unaware of the writer's well-established reputation as an enemy of Walpole. Allen's situation was such by that time, however, as to permit him some ease of mind in respect to ministerial politics. On the other hand, if it was not until later in the year that Allen offered hospitality and aid to Fielding, he may have understood that the unfortunate author was now disposed to work for Walpole instead of against him. By June or even earlier Fielding seems to have suffered disenchantment with Pulteney and Carteret and to have decided that the Opposition was motivated by more selfish allegiances than to liberty and honest government.75 In December, 1741, when Walpole's fate was already shaped, Fielding published a remarkable defense of that minister entitled The Opposition: A Vision. So at that point Allen, long a recipient of favors from Walpole, could comfortably have justified his friendliness to Fielding by pointing to that pamphlet. Regardless of what Allen understood Fielding's political attachment to be when he befriended him, the likelihood is that his attention was called to the author by either Lyttelton or Chesterfield, both members of the Opposition. Lyttelton had been an acquaintance of Fielding's since their school days at Eton, and to both men Fielding had addressed compliments on the score of their defense of political liberty. Because Allen and Chesterfield were praised together in Joseph Andrews and Allen and Lyttelton in the dedication of Tom Jones, it is easy to think of the novelist as owing the friendship of Allen to one of these mutual friends. 76 See Martin C. Battestin, "Fielding's Changing Politics," PQ, X X X I X (1960), 4 7 - 4 8 ; Henry K. Miller, Essays on Fielding's Miscellanies (Princeton, 1961), p. 191 n.

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The Benevolent Man But Fielding, a native of Somerset, could have become known to Allen through various other connections. Bath was not a foreign city to him. When in 1734 he and Charlotte Cradock of Salisbury eloped, they were married in the village church of Charlcombe just outside Bath, Fielding putting himself down as of St. James's Parish, Bath. He knew that by pretending membership in St. James's, where substantial folk like the Aliens were communicants, he would seem respectable. Sarah Fielding, Henry's intellectual sister, may have settled in Bath as early as 1739 and have introduced her brother to Allen, though documentary support for this idea is wanting.76 Perhaps Sarah's and Henry's uncle, Davidge Gould of Sharpham Park near Glastonbury, and their cousin, Henry Gould, were already practising law occasionally in Bath. Four years later the vestry of Widcombe church, of which Ralph Allen was a member, thought of engaging "Councellor [Henry] Gould" to help them rid the parish of a disreputable family (named, alas, Allen). It has been suggested too, that Pope introduced Fielding to Allen, though it is not clear that Pope and the novelist were acquainted at this date.77 Another person who later (if not also now) knew both Fielding and Allen well was Robert Henley of The Grange, Hampshire. An ebullient fellow, he liked Bath and courted a wife there in the summer of 1742. He and his brother Anthony subscribed to Fielding's Miscellanies, and in 1747 Robert was chosen by Allen and the rest of the Bath Council to be their representative, with General Wade, in Parliament. One more possibility for bringing Allen and the novelist together is the witty writer Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, an Etonian friend of Fielding's who subscribed to the Miscellanies. It was to the country seat of Sir Charles's father that Allen had dispatched John Wood ten years earlier to obtain a model for the Prior Park stables. With so many mutual acquaintances, the hospitable squire and the impecunious clever writer were almost certain to meet sooner or later. How much Allen knew of Fielding's previous life and literary work when the latter ventured publicly to claim him as a patron cannot be discovered. Allen's business took him to London many times during the years when Fielding's plays were being acted. But there are no signs that Allen " S e e R . Ε . M . Peach, Historic Houses in Bath, Second Series ( 1 8 8 4 ) , p. 32. Local tradition (and now a tablet on the wall) asserts that Sarah lived in a cottage in Church Lane lent to her by Allen, though one would suppose that Bennet was the owner of that particular spot of ground. F . Homes Dudden speaks of the tradition as if it were fact in his Henry Fielding: His Life, Works, and Times (Oxford, 1 9 5 2 ) , I, 4 1 3 . 77 S. J. Sackett, "Fielding and Pope," Notes and Queries, N . S. V I ( 1 9 5 9 ) , 2 0 0 204.

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Prior Park was a theatregoer, and the licentiousness of many of the plays that Fielding depended upon for a living would have discouraged attendance from a man of Allen's decorousness. He might, however, have read with relish many of Fielding's extensive contributions to the Champion during previous months. But whatever the bad things he heard about Fielding's bawdy plays and his unrestrained political journalism, Allen would be willing to ignore much in his case, as he had in Pope's, out of respect for great talent and goodness of heart. In May a new edition of Defoe's Tour Thro' the Whole Island of Great Britain appeared, and the section on Bath had been rewritten, probably by Samuel Richardson. The "Works and Inventions" of "the worthy, charitable, and pious Ralph Allen, Esq." in Widcombe are said to be, next to the hot wells, "better worth the Attention of the Curious, than anything in Bath." 78 His quarrying activities, his wharf, his remarkable wagons, and his sending stone via the Avon to St. Bartholomew's Hospital are all duly celebrated before the author moves on to extol Allen's "very magnificent House," his chapel, and his gardens, which are described with assistance from Mary Chandler's poetic rhapsody. Inaccurately but flatteringly the author identifies Allen as the one "who first invented the Cross-Post." Within the year Allen had received public praise, it seems, from the two foremost authors of prose fiction of his period. Fielding had already been a guest of the Aliens, and though Graves gives 1752 as the date for Richardson's being invited to dine at Prior Park, he was probably welcome there now. A year later (May 21, 1743) the Rev. Samuel Lobb informed Richardson by letter: "Our much esteemed friends, Mr. and Mrs. Allen, desired me to send you their best compliments, and to Mrs. Richardson, of whom Mrs. Allen speaks with great respect and goodliking." 79 Bath was making a bid, about this time, for wider fame as a spa and tourist resort. Beau Nash in 1742 guided the unofficial senate of the Pump Room and Assembly Rooms into adopting a set of eleven Articles to govern the beheavior of the crowds (pleasantly called "persons of fashion") frequenting those places. These droll, sensible rules were supported by the more famous unwritten edicts against aprons and swords and spurs in the public rooms and helped improve the tone of the ex™ Defoe's Tour, 3d ed. ( 1 7 4 2 ) , II, 257, 265. For Richardson's part in this work see Sale, Samuel Richardson: A Bibliographical Record, pp. 39-40. ™ Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Barbauld, I, 175.

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The Benevolent Man ceedingly mixed society. Pump Room crowds probably had few chances to show their manners to the Aliens; yet any efforts to civilize the town and increase its prosperity would of course gratify its distinguished Alderman. He also would have been obliged to Richardson for his remarks in the Tour about the handsome appearance of the new buildings and the cheapness of Bath stone, about Leake's establishment ("one of the finest Booksellers Shops in Europe" — a brother-in-law's impartial judgment), about the recent prohibition of many kinds of gambling, and about Nash's excellent regulation of decorum. As Allen perhaps knew, the long paragraph on the "hot, milky, soft, salutiferous Beverage, called Bath water," of which one source was said to be his stone-quarry, was written for Richardson by his physician, George Cheyne. But Allen would hardly have been delighted to see the printed complaints about the "Narrowness of Spirit" and overmastering greed of the citizens and the town's indifferent maintenance of the baths. The Tour mentioned the Hospital building as nearly finished and Allen as the "chief Benefactor" of the project. On May 18, in fact, the official opening occurred, no doubt with ceremonies that would bring together in Wood's new structure the architect himself (who had donated many plans and drafts), Lord Chesterfield, Ralph and Philip Allen, Dr. Oliver, Beau Nash, the painter William Hoare, and other Governors of the institution. Allen was elected President to supersede General Wade. At once regulations to assure that applications for admission came only from such invalids and cripples as might be expected to benefit from Bath waters were printed and distributed throughout the nation. The previously adopted rules governing appointments to the medical staff were liberalized so that Archibald Cleland, a surgeon recommended to Allen by Pope, might be added to the staff. To say that Allen soon regretted that appointment is putting the matter mildly. Dr. David Hartley, who settled in Bath in May, was soon active in the Hospital and a friend of Allen's. That he ultimately became distinguished for a book presenting his theory of associationist psychology may indicate anew Allen's preference for the society of men with original minds and superior endowments. While the Hospital was at last getting started, business worries developed for Allen in connection with his agreement to deliver stone for the Bristol Exchange. The committee for the new building had asked him earlier in the month to send weekly as much above fifty tons as pos80

80 T h e rules were printed in two versions in W o o d ' s 412-413.

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Essay

( 1 7 4 9 ) , pp.

248-249,

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sible, something he said he could not do. Speedier delivery by the barges might help, and Allen sent Prynn to talk to their owner. The latter, however, put the blame on the Bristol merchants whose Keynsham works periodically lowered the river level so far that his barges could not reach the quay. If these men would only give him regular notice of their schedule he could deliver as much as sixty tons a week. Presumably the deliveries came faster thereafter. In 1742 the Corporation of Bristol paid Allen £1030/15/0 for freestone, a sum which would take care of one-sixth of his annual rent to the Post Office.81 As the summer moved on through June and July, Allen and Pope corresponded about the former's plans for a trip to London and the latter's desire to visit Bath afterward. There had been a recurrence of Allen's prolonged headaches in May, but perhaps before he left town in August they had moderated. What he did variously to preserve his health we learn from a series of letters written at this time by Dr. Cheyne to another of his patients, nervous and depressed Samuel Richardson. Cheyne urged the novelist-business man to continue on a diet of vegetables, milk, bread, and water (but no meat), relieved only occasionally by light beer. He was also to exercise his body by bowling and by using his new mechanical hobbyhorse. These activities, wrote Cheyne, "are an excellent Diversion. I wish you could persuade yourself to learn and delight in Billiards; . . . it is a charming, manly Diversion. . . . Your Wife, your Daughters, your Acquaintance, or any one might be brought to be Company. . . . [I]t has done Mr. Allen more Service than any one Thing except his Diet." 82 If Allen's diet was what Dr. Cheyne prescribed for Richardson and countless others, he may have accepted also the regimen of plentiful mustard seed, frequent vomits, and bloodletting four times a year. The cold baths recommended by Cheyne he undoubtedly took, for he built a little "Cold Bath" of stone near his mansion. By 1750 he had begun the tradition of spending a month or more at Weymouth in the late summer, where the family and guests customarily took to the waves. Another seeker after health-by-water, Henry Fielding, and probably his ailing wife, came to Bath sometime in 1742, possibly after the summer assizes. In the Pump Room one day he wrote some flattering verses to 81 Information from the Minute Book of the Committee for Building the Exchange was kindly supplied by Elizabeth Ralph, City Archivist in Bristol. 82 Letters of Doctor George Cheyne to Samuel Richardson, ed. Mullet, p. 109. Mrs. Richmond P. Bond kindly called my attention to this passage. Cheyne, though serious about religion, was not a Wesleyite and could accept billiards as the Methodists could not; see Luke Tyerman, The Oxford Methodists (1873), p. 209.

The Benevolent Man Miss H- - - and," presumably the future wife of his friend Robert Henley.88 If Allen was in Widcombe when the author came to Bath, undoubtedly he would have been at home to him. In that event one would like to know what, if anything, was said about Sarah, the old Duchess of Marlborough, and the little pamphleteering war she had recently provoked. Nathaniel Hooke's labors for her had produced an appropriately biased Account of the Conduct of the Dowager Duchess of Marlborough followed by the large reward of money to him that Pope and Allen had hoped for. But Hooke's defense of the Duke and Duchess elicited several replies against which in turn Fielding had hastily composed A Full Vindication of the Duchess Dowager of Marlborough. In August the old lady, led into it by Hooke or Pope, sent an "Order" to Allen for some bucks, and he — boldly — had replied through Pope that he could send only one. Pope informed the great lady that had Allen not been attended by his family he would have stopped in Windsor Forest to pay his thanks for the honor of her commands. In spite of what Pope told the great Duchess about Allen's pleasure in receiving her order, the owner of a new deer park may have wished for notice of some other sort. In August (1742) the Aliens carried out their plan for a trip to London. They spent a day or two at Pope's house, then moved into London, then left London to go elsewhere briefly (perhaps to see Sister Ball in Ware), returned to the city where Pope joined them, and then visited in Twickenham for three days. When they set out for home at the end of the month they carried the agreeable Mr. Warburton with them. Allen was now both his patron and his "Worthy Friend," as Warburton told the world in the dedication to Allen of a new version of his defense of the Essay on Man.8* Though the dedication is flattering enough — Allen is said to illustrate in his own life the "divine Philosophy of Universal Benevolence" presented in the poem — Warburton had toned down the original phrasing to eliminate what Pope had told him would offend Allen's "Modesty, or rather, his real humility." 85 There is no evidence that Allen regarded the close collaboration of Pope and Warburton as in any way strange. Though very different in temperament and in background, the two men were both intensely interested in books and they had both written about religion. To be sure, the poet was 83 The verses were published in the first volume of his Miscellanies (1743). See also Dudden, I, 407 n.; Miller, pp. 136-137. 84 A Critical and Philosophical Commentary on Mr. Pope's Essay on Man, issued early in August, 1742. œ Pope, Coir., IV, 410, 412, 400.

lp

Prior Park a professed Catholic and Warburton a staunch champion of the Church of England. Allen probably did not know that many of Pope's intimates supposed him to be a deist.86 He likewise would be unaware of the report that once upon a time Warburton had written a treatise to prove the Essay on Man to be "atheism, spinosaism, deism, hobbism, fatalism, materialism, & what not." 8 7 The clergyman's coming to the defense — and very loud praise — of the poem would, consequently, not seem odd to Allen even if it did to the half-hostile world of letters. The reasons offered by the distinguished poet and the controversial theologian to explain their agreement to serve each other have a degree of plausibility even if we today can think of others not quite so honorable. As Warburton rode westward with the Aliens in August (1742) and then comfortably stayed on at Prior Park through September and most of October, his host seems to have liked him increasingly. He could ask him the questions about religion and moral conduct that interested him. W e can eavesdrop on a part of one of their previous conversations and guess what some of the rest would be. In the remarks addressed to Allen in the Dedication of the Commentary on Mr. Pope's Essay Warburton speaks of free will as something a plain man is conscious of through reflecting on what happens in his own mind. From this consciousness, writes Warburton, "(as I think, Sir, I have had the Pleasure to observe to you in our Conversations on these Subjects) Freedom of Will may be demonstrated to all but the downright Atheist." An impression of this sort on a man's mind, "made by Reflexion, [is] as strong as any of those made by Sensation." The rest of the passage suggests that Allen and Warburton in their talks enjoyed mixing Lockian psychology with pious speculations on God's intentions for man. Though Warburton published direct insults to freethinkers and Jews and preached in the Prior Park chapel against Roman Catholicism, he and his host, like their occasional table companion Fielding, seem to have allowed enough latitude in religion to put moral conduct above Anglican forms and ceremonies. The more general the terms of communion are, wrote Warburton, "and the wider the Bottom is made, (consistent with the well being of a Society) the wiser 86 On the difficult question of Pope's intention in the Essay on Man, and on the matter of Warburton's association with Pope see Maynard Mack's Introduction in his edition of the Essay, Twickenham Edition, IILi (London and New Haven, 1 9 5 0 - 5 1 ) ; Evans, pp. 71-88, 89; Robert W . Rogers, Major Satires of Alexander Pope (Urbana, III, 1955), Chapter V . 87 The Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley, Surtees Society, I ( 1 8 8 2 ) , 127.

J

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The Benevolent Man 88

and juster" is the Church. Less theoretically Allen was "a zealous man for the Church of England," said his employee Jones, "and kept close to it, and so made all his servants about him do the same." While the Aliens supplied the visitor with potations of hot Bath water and the simple food that his long habit of abstinence required, he regaled his auditors, one infers, with plentiful disquisitions of an edifying nature. Contemporaries of Allen spoke of his enlargement of mind, achieved without deliberate application to books. Probably the main ideas offered in Warburton's recent publications were made familiar to Allen in their conversations, especially his defense of the Church of England on the basis of its usefulness to society (rather than its truth) and his most famous theory, so artificially and ingeniously argued, that the law of Moses lacked the conception of a future state and yet was divinely inspired. The really impressive novelty in Warburton's thinking, the perception that religious ideas evolve,89 Allen may not have been in a position to recognize. Perhaps he also failed to sense the folly, spotted by Bishop Francis Hare, of Warburton's forcing solutions to complex, living issues by resorting to tricky deductive logic. Allen had so arranged his life that no part of it could usurp him for long. From the theological wonders of his visitor's discourses he would be drawn away occasionally by the demands of quarries and post office. In addition, the Bath Corporation chose this year — the fiftieth of his life — to elect him mayor of the city. After proper warning he was formally chosen at a Council meeting on September 27 to serve for the next twelve months. He had been moderately regular at meetings in the previous year, but now he would be unable to avoid taking a part in all decisions. A fortnight after his election the Council turned to a chronic problem, the unsatisfactory condition of the baths. The city chamberlain had drawn up a plan for improvements which called for building two or more "slips" or entrances into the Hot Bath as well as constructing another "dry pump" for those bathing just an arm or leg. A parlor at the Queen's Bath should be converted into a slip. A pump was needed in Westgate to keep the street clean. Mayor Allen's regime was starting well. Probably he was behind the action of the vestry of Widcombe Church two months later of erecting night lamps near the bridge and in Holloway, a not very good neighborhood. In October the Council adopted some new bylaws. Some of Allen's days were full of "Mayoralty business" down in the town, as M The Alliance between Church and State (1736), p. 38. " Evans, p. 65, drawing on Neville Figgis.

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Pope reported during his short visit in November, but he gave Pope the impression that he went there as infrequently as possible. The Mayor of Bath would be expected to have an opinion on the latest publication of the town's foremost architect, John Wood, whose designs had gone into both of Allen's fine residences. Wood's Essay Towards a Description of the City of Bath90 revealed his devotion to the town, its pleasant situation, and its summer airs. He was enthralled, too, by the view of Roman and pre-Roman Britain opened to his busy imagination by its legends and records. Having been introduced early in his manhood to the possibilities of Renaissance design in architecture, he was a sincere neoclassicist and hence, as it happened, a champion of the fashionable mode. The original vision of a Bath rebuilt to "vie with the famous City of Vicenza, in Italy, when in its highest Pitch of Glory, by the excellent Art of the celebrated Andrea Palladio" was Wood's alone. Unlike the Earls of Burlington and Pembroke and Lord Lovell, he had neither family nor wealth to help him realize his visions. Yet in sixteen years he had achieved so much that in the pages of his Essay he frankly boasted of what had been accomplished, particularly in Queen Square. A prospectus and advertisement, Wood's book invited people of taste, whether rich or of moderate circumstances, to move to Bath and enjoy its opportunities. Thus far, the Mayor could only applaud and be grateful. But Wood's vision of the future city gave no place to the selfishness and greed of men. In disgust at past offenses he spoke out like Squire Pope, but he went farther in chastising particular offenders — the man, unnamed but probably known, who cut off water from the central basin in Queen Square by digging a vault across the street in violation of his contract; another man who, in spite of an agreement, prevented the transforming of St. James's Triangle into a noble place like Queen Square; and a former mayor who successfully opposed the enlargement of the Pump Room out of fear that it would threaten his son's contiguous coffee-house. Wood also scolded the Council for rejecting proposals to improve the approaches to the Queen's Bath. Allen had had long experience with obstacles of this sort, but his way was quietly to work around them. Dreams are important, Wood declared, and the great Abbey, built in response to Bishop Oliver King's dream, testifies to that fact in a splendid way. Yet why, asked Wood, should the workmen, in adding a second ladder to the west front of the building, have made the angels "look like " Bath, printed by Thomas Boddely for W . Frederick, Part I, 1742; Part II, 1743.

135

The Benevolent Man so many Bats clung against the Wall" instead of being portrayed stepping downward sensibly from one rung to another? Taking up the too familiar complaint that the bathing arrangements were unsatisfactory, he called the entrance slips to the King's Bath "Cells for the Dead" and lamented that the walls of the pools were "incrusted with Dirt and Nastiness." Cutting close to the Mayor's preserves, Wood noted that the stipend of the cleric of Widcombe Church was only £12. He also deplored the separation in the masons' trade in Bath of the freemasons, who cut and shaped the stone at the quarry, from the rough masons, who, putting it into use in buildings, handled it carelessly later, with the result that joints and mouldings often lacked neatness and precision. (Perhaps the fact that Allen liked to send his own mason along with the stone he sold means that he saw some truth in Wood's complaint.) The frankness of such remarks as these scattered about in Wood's valuable publication must have troubled the Mayor and the other city fathers. One notices that in this first edition of the work Allen is never mentioned though Wade and Dr. Gay and Thayer and Dr. Cheyne and the dealer in stone, Milo Smith, and several other leading citizens are. Whether this silence was out of respect for Allen's well-advertised modesty or out of annoyance at him one can only guess. If ever the two men quarreled, this was perhaps the time, before or after the issuing of the book. But in the greatly expanded version of the Essay published seven years later Wood gave plentiful honor to Allen's services and his two houses. Wood's original intention for his book on Bath was to make it a description of the prehistoric British works there to match the essays he contemplated writing on the primitive remains at Stonehenge and Stanton Drew, and the first part of the Essay is devoted to antiquity. Drawing on the usual sources for archaeologists in his day, Wood took from John Toland the notion that the Hyperborean island mentioned by the ancients was British and that Abaris, the Hyperborean priest of Apollo who conversed with Pythagoras, was a Celtic Druid.91 Wood's exciting addition to this prehistory was the identification of Toland's Abaris with King m "Specimen of the Critical History of the Celtic Religion" in A Collection of Several Pieces of Mr. John Toland ( 1 7 2 6 ) , pp. 1 5 4 ^ 1 8 1 . W o o d provided for readers of Choir Gaure and the second edition of the Essay a full-length engraving of AbarisBladud, drawn by the capable portrait painter, William Hoare. If one compares this picture with three previous pictures of Druid priests printed by Aylett Sammes ( 1 6 7 6 ) , Henry Rowlands ( 1 7 2 3 ) , and Stukeley ( 1 7 2 3 ) one will see a family likeness; but W o o d persuaded Hoare to give Bladud rather oriental clothes (to suit Abaris), a bow rather than an oak staff, and in the background a classical sort of temple. I believe this was Hoare's only portrait of a fifth-century sitter. T h e other pictures of Druids are reproduced in Stuart Piggott, William Stukeley (Oxford, 1 9 5 0 ) , Plate V .

i36

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Bladud, the noble and magical founder of Bath in 480 B.C. Abaris-Bladud was a great temple-builder, and Wood's remarks might have reminded his readers of the book published by him the year before, The Origin of Building: or, the Plagiarism of the Heathens Detected. The impossible idea there presented that Greek art was derived from the Hebrews had been accepted by better scholars than he, and it may have appealed to Allen. Though Allen left school too early to get much training in that necessary part of a gentleman's intellectual experience, classical antiquity, he now had four friends who regarded themselves as in various ways authoritative in that field. None of the four — Pope, Warburton, Hooke, Wood — could claim university training, but all were publishing their learning, and the first three were frequent visitors under his roof, sometimes two or more at a time. One cannot but wonder what sort of education Allen derived from them all. Though Wood's books, including his report on his investigations of Stonehenge published five years later,92 may strike a modern reader as at least half mad in some passages, they are no more absurd than those of the other archaeologists of his day. Many years later Warburton told his former crony, William Stukeley, that Wood was "a great Fool, & not less a Knave, to my knowledge. He wrote a most ridiculous Book of Architecture." 93 But Warburton had once owned a copy of Wood's important source, Toland, and gave it to Stukeley, an eminent antiquary, who developed his own theory about the British Druids — that they were a Phoenician colony and "of Abraham's religion intirely." 94 Warburton had been enthusiastic about Stukeley's work in 1733 but later spoke of him as "a compound of simplicity, drollery, absurdity, ingenuity, superstition." 95 In another place Warburton jeered at the scholar Roger Gale, who in turn had told Stukeley that Wood's Essay was "a silly pack of stuff." Stukeley (to complete our circle) said that he found Warburton's theories untenable and that Warburton, like other great geniuses, "has all sense but common sense." 96 The opinions about all this held by the Roman historian Hooke and by Pope, the famous translator of Homer, we need not consider. But there must have been times when the ancient learning and modern assurance of Allen's visitors drove him to the reasonable sanctuary of his post office. M

Choir Gaure, Vulgarly called Stonehenge (1747). Bodleian Library, MS. English Letters, d. 35, fol. 65. In Choir Gaure (pp. 27-28) Wood objected to Stukeley's work on Stonehenge. 94 Quoted in Piggott, p. 119. 85 Nichols, Lit. Anee., II, 20, 60. M Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley, I, 129. M

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None the less he was glad to have such interesting people about. Early in October, soon after he became Mayor, he sent his chariot part way to London to bring Pope to Widcombe. Warburton was there, and Pope wanted to talk to him about a new edition of the Dunciad in which there would be additional footnotes that in comic profusion would supply needed information, barbs for his enemies, and parodies of false learning. W i t h an irony that Warburton seems to have missed, Pope thought him capable of supplying acid commentary and dull learning easily. So his assistance was sought and obtained. Two days before he left Prior Park, on Sunday, October 24, Allen's clerical guest preached in the Abbey a sermon "For Promoting the Charity and Subscription Towards the General Hospital." His text — "Let your light so shine before men that they may see your good works, and glorify your Father, which is in Heaven" — was chosen to stimulate donations to Mr. Allen's hospital. W h e n the sermon was printed it was dedicated to Ralph Allen and the other Governors of the institution. W e are not only excited to this illustrious Act of Charity by the strong Call of Justice; we are still warmlier urged by the sweeter and more pathetic Voice of Gratitude; . . . For to the Poor it is that we are immediately, and almost solely, indebted for every Advantage of Ease and Pleasure, which improved and refined Society affords, (Advantages we are but too apt to esteem as the greatest Blessing of Society) it being by their incessant Toil and Labour that these Elegancies are procured for us; while all the Reward they have in Return for becoming Benefactors to the Great and Wealthy, is but the hard and scanty Support of a miserable Being; a Being, only less miserable than that which their haughty Masters themselves must have been content to lead, in a State unassisted by the Sweat and Ingenuity of the Labourer and Artificer. But when we consider further, That the numerous Maladies of these our distressed Brethren, for which the Bath Waters are so salutary, are chiefly contracted in our Service, in an incessant Application of all their Faculties to the Suppliai of our imaginary, and, therefore, endless Wants and Conveniences, how much higher ought our Acknowledgments to arise! For toiling, in Pursuit of the Commodities of Life, some are confined to the pestilential Damp of Mines; while others are exposed to all the Rage of elementary and solar Fires: These, subject to every various Inclemency of distempered Air; and those to the rotten Humidity of Fens, or the corrosive Vapours of salt Waters. Here, a too sedentary Occupation viciâtes the torpid Fluids; and there, a too violent destroys the overstretched Tone of the Solids. In some the baleful Materials, employed or worked upon, strike with acute Distempers; in others, the very Manner of Working brings on chronical: So that the Shop of the Artificer may be truly styled the Warehouse of Death. 97 "A Sermon Preached at the Abbey-Church at Bath . . . October 24, 1742 . . . By Mr. Warburton (Bath, 1742), pp. 20-22.

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Prior Park Warburton's sociological thoughtfulness in the sermon is an interesting variation on Allen's often-mentioned generosity to the poor people of his neighborhood. T h e warmth of the appeal may have owed something to the fact that at this time W a r b u r t o n ' s sister's husband suffered a complete loss in his business; the sister and her children were moved into his house, sharing his "small revenue." O n October 26 h e set out for London, suffering en route an accident to his leg that caused him trouble for many weeks. But the visit at the Aliens' house had given the country clergyman a new vision of h u m a n excellence — wealth and domestic splendor supporting good sense, benevolence, and piety. H e was not the first or last to be astonished by the simple goodness at Prior Park. Sending a copy of the Bath sermon to Dr. Zachary Pearce in December, W a r b u r t o n explained that the Hospital "but for M r Allen's singular zeal & charity in it's support would b e b u t in a bad condition. A M a n that providence seems to have shewn the W o r l d for no other end b u t to inform them what blessings it could bestow upon them would they study to deserve them." 98 Two months later the impression was still strong, as he revealed to Philip Doddridge. I got home a little before Christmas, after a charming philosophical retirement in a palace with Mr. Pope and Mr. Allen for two or three months. The gentleman I mentioned last is, I verily believe, the greatest private character that ever appeared in any age of the world. You see his munificence to the Bath Hospital. This is but a small part of his charities, and charity but a small part of his virtues. I have studied his character even maliciously, to find where his weakness lies: but have studied in vain. W h e n I know it, the world shall know it too for the consolation of the envious; especially as I suspect it will prove to be only a partiality he has entertained for m e . " Pope continued at Prior Park for another m o n t h and one day was taken to see Mrs. Allen's former home, the H a m p t o n manor house surrounded by peaceful meadows and fields. Allen had recently acquired full title to the manor, and his brother-in-law Charles Holder had moved to some other habitation in the village. Because the house was only three or four miles from Prior Park, Mrs. Allen was resolved that it should be occupied only by someone she and her husband would like for a neighbor. Pope, with or without encouragement from his hostess, thought of the place as perfect for Martha Blount, who greatly needed peace and independence, 08 Warburton's letter is in Westminster Abbey Muniments, No. 64787. It was kindly called to my attention by the Librarian, Lawrence E. Tanner. w Letters to and from Doddridge, pp. 202-203. J

39

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but if the house was not claimed by her he liked it well enough, he said, to occupy it himself. As he perhaps anticipated, the lease of his villa in Twickenham came up for sale just when he arrived there in December, and he wrote to Allen rather pointedly about the uncertainty of his wanting to remain there. It seems likely that the Aliens at this time were not rejecting the possibility of Pope's renting the Hampton house. Both guests were gone before the commencement of the holiday season, which Pope had more than once spent in the Aliens' house. He sent wishes for a merry Christmas to Mr. and Mrs. Allen and Mr. John Chapman, their chaplain, to Miss Bounce their dog, and to "Mrs. Gatty," their fifteen-year-old niece.100 If Gertrude Tucker, the motherless girl who had lived with them a good deal during the past eight years, had made an impression on the author of the Dunciad, had she also interested the fortyfour-year-old preacher Warburton? He was to marry her less than four years later. 100

Pope, Con., IV, 432.

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VII The End of the Friendship with Pope 1743-1745 T h e remaining six months of Ralph Allen's first half-century — January to June, 1743 — appear to have passed without striking incidents or serious worries. His wealth was large and presumably secure; his splendid mansion had been domesticated (even the does in the deer park above the house had fawns ) ; and he could luxuriate in efforts to make other people happy. Not until later in the year would he discover the pain that can follow such efforts. "Your Letters," said Pope in April, give me the truest pleasure as they constantly tell me your own satisfactions, & make me witness to those Blessings you injoy, which are the Desert & the Reward of Virtue. May you possess them always, & diffuse them on all round you. Your Resolution of increasing Mr Warb.'s happiness, by securing him in Independency, is as high a joy to me (to say all in one word) as it is to yourself, & will be to Him; who I see by a Letter Ive just receivd is making himself happy with one kindness you have done him, while you are preparing another he knows not of.1 The kindness done to Mr. Warburton was doubtless financial, a gift of money in some fashion as acknowledgment for the dedication of his Criti-

cal and Philosophical

Commentary on Mr. Pope's Essay on Man. But

Allen's admiration for Warburton went beyond a dedicatee's conventional respect, and if he was not already trying to obtain a higher post in the Church for his new clerical friend he may have been joining Pope in exerting pressure on appropriate people to secure from Oxford the Doctor of Divinity degree for him. The next paragraph in Pope's letter mentions another expenditure, £20 sent by means of Pope and a second intermediary to Henry Fielding in payment for "the Books" Allen had subscribed for. Pope was referring to Fielding's three-volume Miscellanies, just issued. Because the long list of 1

Pope, Corr., IV, 452. 141

The Benevolent Man subscribers printed in the first edition does not include Allen's name, one infers that his subscription was anonymous. 2 He must already have thanked the author tangibly for the complimentary allusions in Joseph Andrews; probably the present subscription was elicited by thought of the grave troubles which Fielding had been enduring. Pope informed Allen that "a pretty Compliment" on Prior Park appeared in the second volume. It occurs in the fifth chapter of "A Journey from this World to the Next" where the dead travelers learn that on the road to Greatness one might see several noble palaces but on the road to Goodness there is "scarce a handsome Building, save one greatly resembling a certain House by the Bath." A unifying theme in the Miscellanies is the important difference between worldly greatness and moral goodness, illustrated by references to the few men who possess both goodness and greatness — the second Duke of Richmond, Chesterfield, Dodington, the second Duke of Argyle, Lyttelton, and Lord Carteret. Fielding's placing Prior Park as a "palace" on the road to Goodness would of course allow the reader to suppose that Allen was somewhat like those other men. The fact that the long, ironic "Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great" which made up the third volume might seem an attack on Sir Robert Walpole in spite of Fielding's disclaimer of any desire to "particularize any Individual" in the satire would at this date give no concern to Allen. The Government — and the control of Post Office contracts — was now in the hands of other men, several of whom were complimented in the present volumes. Mr. and Mrs. Allen's good nature extended itself in other directions. They sent Pope two easy chairs and some delicious oysters. Now that he was ill again, Pope recalled how Mrs. Allen had nursed him on a former occasion. In March he informed the Aliens that Martha Blount would soon be accepting their invitation to visit at Prior Park; he and Warburton would come whenever the Aliens wished, and George Arbuthnot and his sister would follow.8 One gets the impression that the medical fraternity of Bath, a large and on the whole unusually cultivated group for so small a town, sup2

The conjecture of Henry K. Miller (Essays on Fielding's Miscellanies, p. 25) that Leake's subscription for twelve sets covered Allen's seems unsatisfactory. Had Allen meant to work through that channel, he would probably have done so directly as he by this time was on intimate terms with Leake. Neither Pope nor Oliver nor Warburton subscribed. It is noticeable that few Bath names appear in Fielding's list — only the Duke of Kingston, Lord Chesterfield, Dr. Thomas Brewster, and Dr. Edward Harrington. 3 Pope, Corr., IV, 449, 450, 452-453.

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The End of the Friendship with Pope plied part of the Aliens' circle of intimate friends. But Dr. Oliver, especially attentive during Pope's visits in 1739 and 1740, had now been superseded, at least for professional calls, by Dr. David Hartley, who had been practising in Bath only during the past year. A pious man of philosophical bent and original ideas who believed that "Benevolence is the best means of obtaining private happiness," 4 he would probably offer a more serious sort of conversation than did the bubbling and versifying Dr. Oliver. George Cheyne, the well-known specialist in diets, had also been Allen's doctor formerly. Like Hartley a writer, he had produced books combining medicine, metaphysics, and spiritual theory according to a recipe all his own, and people of intellectual attainments often thought him pretentious and absurd.5 Now he had reached the end of his colorful career. When he was dying (April 12) his wife sent in haste for Dr. Hartley but could not reach him because he was then at Prior Park.® This, if indeed he knew it, must have distressed Allen. Three months before his death Dr. Cheyne had sent to Samuel Richardson an urgent recommendation that he come to try the cool chalybeate waters of the newly discovered Lyncombe Spa near Prior Park. The connections between Cheyne, Richardson, and Leake afford another view of the Aliens among their friends. There was a bookseller in Bath named Samuel Lobb who had been one of the co-publishers with Leake of Mary Chandler's Description of Bath. He was related to the Rev. Samuel Lobb, rector of Hungerford Farley. The clerical Lobbs invited the Leakes, Aliens, and Olivers to the christening of a son at this time. Lobb, writing to Richardson about the great event, reported that the Aliens sent greetings to him and that Mrs. Allen speaks "with great respect and good-liking" of the novelist's wife.7 In April the Aliens expected to have a visit from the first Mrs. Allen's sister-in-law, who was now, by her second marriage, Mrs. Ball. Allen was still helping with the details of her loan to John Wood and advising also on the management of her first husband's estate in Herefordshire. She was not used to traveling; so Allen advised her to plan to spend four days 4 F r o m his letter to John Lister of Dec. 2, 1736; see Hartley's Various Conjectures on the Perception . . . of Ideas, trans. R . E . A. Palmer and ed. Martin Kallich, Augustan Reprint Society, No. 7 7 - 7 8 (Los Angeles, 1 9 5 9 ) , p. iii. 5 Chesterfield in 1 7 3 9 told Lyttelton he had been reading one of Cheyne's odd medical works, which he found laughable. Cheyne "snarls louder, grins fiercer, and is more sublimely mad than when you saw h i m " (Letters of Chesterfield, ed. Dobrée, II, 3 5 8 ) . ' Letters of Cheyne to Richardson, ed. Mullett, p. 130. * Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, ed. Barbauld, I, 175. T h e letter is dated May 21, 1 7 4 3 .

Hi

The Benevolent Man en route from Ware to Bath, and he would send a servant to the "Horse & Jockey" five miles from town to guide her to Prior Park.8 The necessary background for these several benevolent and sociable enterprises remained the same — the cross-road and bye posts, the quarries, and the Bath Corporation. No doubt it was the Post Office that drew Allen to London for a fortnight in January.9 His term as Mayor would continue until the end of September; his mind in consequence had to be fixed from time to time on taxes and leases, building-plans and feathers of water, the celebration of royal anniversaries and the granting of "freedom of the city" to carefully selected tradesmen and distinguished visitors. He was supplying stone for the house of one William Robinson and sent him a bill for it in March for £38. John Wood's building for the Exchange in Bristol was nearing completion, and Allen's receipts during 1743 from the Bristol Corporation totalled £1327/6/5. As the proceeds from his businesses were paid in, he continued to add to his holdings of land. In 1741 Thomas Thorp, a surveyor, had been employed to make a plan of Allen's estate in the parishes of Widcombe and Combe, with a book of "Reference" listing every piece of property in it, often identified by its former owner. In 1742 Thorp published An Actual Survey of the City of Bath . . . and of Five Miles Round, a fine large map with careful designation of buildings, woods, roads and with identification of houses and owners in Widcombe. A list of subscribers was printed on the sheet, with "Ralph Allen Esq." at the head and with the names among others of Philip Allen, Richard Marchant (the Quaker banker), the two John Woods, Nash, William and James Biggs, Lord Chesterfield, and even 8 See Allen's letters to her, dated April 9, July 14, August 9, and her letter to him of July 19, all belonging to Bath Reference Library. ' Pope, Corr., IV, 4 3 5 . After the present work had gone to press, Roy M . Wiles's volume, Freshest Advices: Early Provincial Newspapers in England (Columbus, Ohio, 1 9 6 5 ) , p. 118, called attention to still another aspect of Allen's development of the postal service. Andrew Hooke in the tenth issue of his Bristol Oracle, and Country Intelligencer (May 14, 1 7 4 3 ) announced proudly that, wishing to make his paper the most useful of all the country newspapers in the three kingdoms, he had obtained "from the Proprietor of the Cross-Post, Ralph Allen, Esq; a Gentleman of distinguished Character for publick and private Virtue, the free Use of his Mails; under whose Patronage, which of itself is a sufficient Credit to the Paper, 'tis at present circulated thro' all the Towns Westward and Northward from Exeter to Liverpool, and as soon as Correspondencies can be settled, will be extended, on every side, an Hundred Miles round" (copy in Bristol Public Libraries). Unfortunately there was another side to Allen's increasing prominence. As "Post-Master of B a t h e " he had to endure the indignity of praise in one of the verse pieces in an indecent book published by Edmund Curii this year as A Short Description of the Roads . . . to that Delightful Country called Merryland; see Peter Murray Hill's Catalogue No. 82 ( 1 9 6 2 ) , # 1 3 .

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The End of the Friendship with Pope Alexander Pope, who as frequent visitor to the city wished to have a copy of the map. Now, in 1743, Allen had Thorp make a survey of Hampton Manor, which in the previous year he had finally taken over completely from the Holders.10 The Widcombe and Combe lands listed in the 1741 "Reference" book embraced downs, paddocks, bowling alleys, quarry grounds, highways (fourteen acres of them), a brew-house and malting office, rows of houses, and other occupied properties; they amounted to 603 acres. But additions written into the book by Allen eventually raised the figure to 897 acres. By the time of his death a good many sheep, cattle, hogs and several yoke of oxen belonged to him, and his farming produced quantities of wheat and still more barley.11 The Hampton manor, in which Mrs. Allen's brother Charles Holder seems still to have occupied a house and garden, included the "Mansion," the Down and the Warren, the parsonage and poorhouse and many farms. In the 1743 "Survey" it amounted to 985 acres. Besides all this there was the large town house close to the Abbey. He could well afford the expense, when June brought milder weather, to drive in his coach to Twickenham to fetch back his next house guest, Mr. Pope. And if Mr. Warburton was not already in Widcombe, he must have been carried there, late in June or early in July, along with Pope in the coach. 12 The Aliens undoubtedly had looked forward to a renewal of the happiness enjoyed the previous fall when the good-natured poet and the erudite, affable clergyman had stayed with them for two months. The present visit began happily; Pope early in July wrote to Lord Marchmont that he had never been more at ease in his life. Yet he was seriously ill with asthma, had to undergo bloodletting, and could not walk upstairs or " J o h n W o o d ' s son and successor, John, was born in 1728 and died in 1781. In the Post Office Museum, Bruce Castle, Tottenham, Middlesex, there is a bundle of "Bassett's Papers as respects Prior Park and Bassett Pedigree," assembled by Bassett heirs early in the nineteenth century for the purpose of pushing a claim of ownership on Allen's Prior Park, Bathampton, and Claverton estates. Among the materials, some factual and some fantastic, one comes upon the assertion (fol. 2 0 ) that Charles Holder conveyed Bathampton Manor to Allen "according to Report for Nothing and in a fit of Drunkenness which he had been purposely kept in at London for 6 weeks." Nowhere else has any such lurid charge against Allen been recorded. Peach, pp. 7 1 - 7 2 , who had access to papers that seem to have vanished, argues that the Holders were heavily in debt and that Allen gradually assumed their debts and the ownership of the Manor. 11 Allen's "Reference" Book is in Bath Reference Library. For his property and produce in 1764 see "General Account of the Personal Estate of Ralph Allen," now in the Guildhall. " Pope, Corr., IV, 4 5 5 , 4 5 7 .

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uphill. If, as he had once requested, he was ensconced in the room at the end of the long gallery, that part of the house must have seemed a little like an infirmary. One can understand why Allen, thinking especially of Pope's precarious condition, put his foot down and forbade Pope's carrying out the plan to which he had previously won Allen's unwilling agreement — that Pope and George Arbuthnot should set up "Joint-Housekeeping" in the unoccupied Manor House in Bathampton. Allen insisted, rather, that Pope and Arbuthnot and Warburton should all stay at Prior Park. W h e n the poet protested that Arbuthnot would not be willing to come to Bath if he knew of the changed arrangements, Allen told him not to reveal them to his friend; when he arrived, Allen would win him over to staying in Widcombe. But Pope felt bound to warn Arbuthnot ahead of time. A less positive and less witty man than his father, Arbuthnot may have felt that he would not be entirely at ease in the company at Prior Park, and as Warburton later revealed a distinctly scornful view of him as unimportant and uninteresting, Arbuthnot may already have taken a dislike to his host's newest friend. 14 Just what happened in the late summer at Prior Park must be imagined on the basis of the various reports of the unhappy members of the party. 16 Arbuthnot duly arrived, without his sister, determined not to be the Aliens' guest for more than two or three days. Then Martha Blount came, apparently expecting that her visit, which the Aliens had more than once proposed, would be for some little time even though it was part of a journey which she was taking with Elizabeth, Lady Gerard, to Bristol. Miss Blount, now a woman of fifty-three, seems a problematical personality. Pope declared, in the clever and handsome Epistle to a Lady (1735) addressed to her, that she was blessed with cheerfulness, steady temper, and good humor. But as one reads some of her letters and some of Pope's, one is inclined to imagine her to be altogether the opposite — nervous, unsteady, without self-confidence, emotional, often dejected. Soon after her arrival at Prior Park uneasiness was felt, and the men — Pope, Allen, Warburton — later agreed in manly fashion on one point, 18

Ibid., 459, 461. " See below, p. 207. The fact that Pope a few months later wrote to Warburton that Arbuthnot, then his guest, sent to the other "his very particular Services" (Coir., IV, 475 ) does not eliminate the possibility of a basic lack of sympathy. 15 George Sherburn's annotations on the relevant letters in his edition of Pope's Correspondence constitute the fullest and most plausible reconstruction. My account is in part based upon his.

ΐφ

The End of the Friendship with Pope that the trouble began with the women. Mrs. Allen and Miss Blount developed (in Allen's phrase as quoted by Pope) a "mutual dissatisfaction." 16 Mrs. Allen treated Pope rudely but Warburton "with double complaisance" (in order to make clearer the Aliens' dissatisfaction with Pope, as Miss Blount interpreted the episode 17 ). Miss Blount grew angry and urged Pope to leave, to go make his promised visit to Lord Bathurst, and then to return to Bristol where she would be. T h e poet, already in bad health, was stunned and depressed by what he saw happening. He spoke some plain words to Allen, told Warburton "he flatterd," and abruptly and in a strained atmosphere departed for Cirencester. Arbuthnot moved on to Bristol. Miss Blount packed her belongings. How matters went thereafter she described in a letter to Pope. I hope you are well. I am not. My spirits are quite down, tho they should not. for these people deserve so much to be dispised, one should do nothing but Laugh. I packed up all my things yesterday, the servants knew it, Mr & Mrs Allen, never said a word, nor so much as asked me how I went or where, or when, in short from every one of them much greater inhumanity than I could conceive any body could shew. Mr Warburton takes no notice of me. tis most wonderfull. they have not one of 'em named your name, nor drank your health since you went, they talk to one another without putting me at all in the conversation. Lord Archibald is come to Lincombe, I was to have gone this morning, in his coach, but unluckily he keeps it here. I shall go and contrive something with 'em to day. for I do really think, these people would shove me out, if I did not go, soon. I would run all inconveniences, & drink the waters, if I thought they would do me good, my present state is deplorable. I'll get out of it, as soon, and as well as I can.18 After a stay that must have lasted at least ten days the unfortunate lady departed from Prior Park. As she was leaving she took "a little bawble, that hung to her W a t c h , " and gave it to Gertrude Tucker, "the only Person in the House, that had been civil to her." 19 T h e house party had been worse than a fiasco, and of the quartet of Popean visitors only Warburton stayed on, triumphantly in possession of rich Mr. Allen's friendship. He must have been as glad as the Aliens to be rid of Pope's difficult inamorata. Her hosts probably never saw her again. Pope passed through Bath about two weeks later after brief stays in 16

Pope, Con., IV, 510. "Joseph Spence, Anecdotes, Observations, and Characters, ed. S. W . Singer (1820), pp. 358-359. For Pope's accounts, see Con., IV, 463-466. 18 Pope, Con., IV, 462. "Lord Archibald" was probably the ninth Duke of Hamilton. 19 Her words, many years after the event, to William Mason, quoted in Duncan C. Tovey, Gray and His Friends (Cambridge, 1890), p. 281. 1

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Cirencester and Bristol; but he spent the night with Dr. Oliver, not letting the Aliens know that he was in town. One result of the episode for Warburton was an inveterate dislike for Miss Blount, who had been an intimate part of Pope's existence long before he entered it. Life at Prior Park, so often described by visitors as tranquil and good and happy, could not of course have been always just that. The latesummer quarrel of 1743 soon became notorious, the departed guests revealing their discontents to their acquaintances. Pope went so far as to tell the dangerous Duchess of Marlborough, who had asked for, and received, gifts of bucks from Allen, that her letter to Pope had been opened by someone at Prior Park. Whose version of the story should one believe? Pope's easiest explanation of the trouble was that Mrs. Allen had been upset by the "designs" he and George Arbuthnot had on the Bathampton residence for their housekeeping venture. He had more than once alluded to the house as very suitable for a permanent residence for Miss Blount. Because it had been the home of Mrs. Allen and her father she might understandably have felt "some Jealousy" when these outsiders made such pressing claims on it. Allen, as Pope realized, thought of the place as "a kind of Villa, to change to, & pass now & then a Day at it in private." 20 If he lent it to Pope he would be expected to lend it to others. But there was something else, as Pope easily suspected. Martha Blount, careful to preserve her reputation in a censorious world, always refused to make any journeys in the same coach with Pope. But people would talk. One of the talkers, eventually if not also immediately, was Gertrude Tucker, at the time of Miss Blount's visit a girl of sixteen. Many years later she recalled that while the visitors were at Prior Park she lay "in the next room to Pope, & that every Morning between 6 & 7 o'clock, Mrs Blount usd to come into his Chamber, when she heard them talk earnestly together for a long time. & that when they came down to breakfast, Mrs Β : usd alys to ask him how he had rested that night." 2 1 Just after leaving Prior Park Pope alluded in his troubled letter to Martha Blount to "Listeners at doors." Gertrude, a lively and sharp-witted girl, might naturally comment to her aunt on what she had observed. Pope's guessing that Mrs. Allen had had "some very unjust & bad thing suggested to her" about Miss Blount 22 fits uncannily well with Gertrude's story, though at the time Miss Blount could have had no suspicions of the girl. She must have had wry thoughts when, three years afterward, she learned 20 22

Pope, Con·., IV, 461. Pope, Corr., IV, 464, 510.

* Tovey, Gray and His Friends, p. 281.

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that the seemingly friendly "Child" had become the bride of the hostile Mr. Warburton. From Warburton's friend, Bishop Thomas Newton, comes another explanation of the trouble at Prior Park, by way of the professional collector of gossip, Thomas Birch. On October 27, 1744, Birch passed on to his correspondent and patron, Philip Yorke, the following anecdote: T h e Bishop of Bristol explain'd to me last Sunday at D i n n e r the true Origin of the Dispute between M r . Pope & M r . Allen, which he had from the mouth of the latter. It was simply this, that Miss Blount insisting upon going publicly in that Gentleman's Coach to the Mass-House at B a t h , he desir'd to be excus'd, because, as it was the Year of his Mayoralty of that City, it might give Offence; tho' at the same time he offer'd the C o a c h , on condition she would go the back W a y , & leave it at some little Distance. 2 3

The story is likely enough and one that both Allen and Warburton might be happy to use to cover up less comfortable matters. But Allen's sister thought the quarrel had been between her sister-in-law and "insolent" Miss Blount. 24 It is pleasant to think that there were, besides the elderly, ailing, and angry guests at Prior Park, some younger and brighter spirits about the place. Gertrude's brother William, now fourteen, was probably spending his August holiday from school at his uncle's house. One can believe that a boy would enjoy being there. T h e far-extended buildings would provide retreats and adventures as would the great expanse of lawn below with its waterfalls, streams, and ponds. T h e Aliens owned horses and coaches, a hayloft and barn and remarkable dovecot, guinea fowl and a deer park. There were twenty or more servants to get acquainted with indoors and out, and the quarries were not far away. Fifteen-year-old Lewis Buckeridge from Ware joined his cousins-by-marriage at Prior Park and remained there until the middle of September. Mr. Allen, writing to the boy's mother a day or two after his departure, said: "Lewy left us wel on Thursday morning and I hope gets safe to you this evening. His behaviour during his whole stay with us was so right that instead of any sort of complaint we 23 Add MSS. 35396, fols. 275-276; quoted by Rogers, The Major Satires of Alexander Pope, p. 101 n. 21 See R. Polwhele, Biographical Sketches in Cornwall (Truro, 1831), I, 11-12, for elderly Mrs. Elliott's recollections of Pope's visits to Prior Park forty years before. There is perhaps support for the other explanation, Miss Blount's defiant Catholicism, in a letter addressed to her by the priest of the Catholic chapel in Bath in 1747; he speaks of "that remarkable instance of the true Catholic spirit" displayed by her on some particular evening. See Robert Carruthers, Life of Alexander Pope ( 1 8 5 7 ) , p. 378 n.

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The Benevolent Man shal be glad to see him at his intervals of schooling as often as he with your approbation shal be inclinable to come to us." 26 Warburton had already left. But Allen was not without other concerns. Reading the London Evening Post one day early in July he had been astonished to see a news item about the building of a third wing for St. Bartholomew's Hospital, a matter about which he had been told nothing. On the sixteenth he sent a letter to Mr. Tims to inquire if someone else were supplying the stone. Actually the Governors as early as in March had resolved to add the wing, and now Tims replied to Allen with an immediate request that he provide stone and other materials as before. But times had changed, as had his view of the desirability of persuading Londoners to build with Bath stone. He felt obliged, none the less, to go on with the old contract even if neither he nor the Governors in making the original agreement had had any thoughts of what a war might create in the way of problems for them. Like Walpole, Allen seems not to have been eager to have fighting with Spain or France. But the war had come. Supplying stone in London, Allen recognized, would be "very Expensive," for costs had been pushed up; "the Exceeding in freight only wil Create a Loss to me of near five hundred Pounds." 2 6 His hardest task would be to secure shipping. At the end of August, two or three weeks after the departure of Miss Blount, Allen heard from Pope, who had decided to resume relations with his Widcombe hosts. At the same time the poet sent a letter to Dr. Oliver, thanking him for his kindness and his medicines and asking him to explain to Mr. Allen why Pope hadn't been able to call on him during his "half-afternoon" in Bath. Allen replied by having one of his cross-posts surveyors, Mr. Haslem, deliver four hampers of Bristol water to Pope — a pointed gesture of good will. Pope's next letter asked for information about the movements of Warburton, and one understands why he felt willing to desert Miss Blount to the extent of patching up matters with those whom she regarded as her (and his) enemies. The poet and his necessary editor-commentator met in London early in September to resume work on their large enterprise. Friendship with the famous Mr. Pope, as Allen well knew, entailed some inconveniences; the poor man's crazy carcass made them unavoidable. But that was not all. The poet's eager and intense nature, always 26 28

Letter of Sept. 16, 1743, to "Sister," now in the collection of James M . Osborn. St. Barth., Ha 1 9 / 3 1 / 3 - 4 — July 16 and 30.

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conceiving plans and plots for the future, sometimes produced an aura of uncertainty and nerves — thoughts of human success and human failure and the possibilities and degradations of deception. Allen in 1740 had heard a great deal about Pope's partly invented difficulties with Dean Swift and his relatives and publishers; the Postmaster had had a small part in that campaign. He knew, too, about Pope's disreputable pensioner, Richard Savage, and was used to complying with Pope's requests that he have his post-office men take charge of the payments, thus screening Pope. At some hazard to his Post Office contract and his whole career, Allen in 1738 had delivered to Lyttelton at Pope's request a letter of advice about strengthening the Opposition to Allen's superior, Walpole. The Aliens had been hospitable and helpful to many of the poet's friends. Now one of the favors requested of the charitable Mr. Allen by Pope, the appointment to the staff of the Bath Hospital of Archibald Cleland, was to produce for Allen not merely an excessively disagreeable personal encounter but also, for the first time in his prosperous and happy life, a public accusation that he was an evil influence, that he was responsible for "illegal despotism . . . flagrant iniquity, and cruel oppression." 2 7 John Brinsden, a patient of Cleland's who thought he owed his life to him, had asked Pope to recommend Cleland to Allen for an Assistant Surgeon's appointment. Allen obtained a loosening of the rules for staff appointments so that Cleland might be accepted. Now, on September 7, 1743, more than a year later a committee of the Governors, presided over by Allen, met to listen to charges against Cleland that he had made medical examinations of Mary Hook and Mary Hudson, patients of Dr. Alexander Raynor and Dr. Oliver respectively, without the permission of those doctors and that the examinations were of an "indecent" sort. The committee voted to suspend Cleland and bar him from visiting patients until after further consideration at the next general meeting. T o that meeting (September 21) two doctors from Cheltenham came to testify that the women Hook and Hudson were whores and that any allegations or oaths of theirs would be worthless. After an angry and quarrelsome discussion the seventeen Governors present, with Dr. Oliver in the chair, voted unanimously that Cleland was guilty of a misdemeanor and then, thirteen to four, they voted to dismiss him. 28 27 A review, probably by Tobias Smollett, of William Baylies's Historical Review of the Rise . . . of the General Hospital, in the Critical Review for Dec., 1 7 5 8 . 28 Lewis M . Knapp, who gives a useful account of the affair, thinks the charges against Cleland were "trumped up." See his Tobias Smollett: Doctor of Men and Manners (Princeton, 1 9 4 9 ) , pp. 1 4 6 - 1 4 9 . See also the Committee Book of the General Hospital

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The Benevolent Man Cleland quickly published a vivid, persuasive account of the whole affair called An Appeal to the Publick (1743), making the conduct of the staff and the Governors, especially Allen, look extremely unethical and uncharitable. A different version, a defensive one, was commissioned by the Governors and approved on November 2. Chesterfield, luckily out of town during the crisis, was sent a copy of the manuscript which convinced him, he said, of the Tightness of the Governors' decision; as President he approved the manuscript for publication, but at his request there was no mention of his name in it. Early in 1744 Leake, one of the Governors voting for Cleland's dismissal, issued A Short Vindication of the Proceedings of the Governors . . . In Relation to Mr. Archibald Cleland, and then W . Frederick, Leake's rival, published A Full Vindication of Mr. Cleland's Appeal, probably written by Cleland. At least three other pamphlets, in 1744 and 1748, continued to air the controversy and Allen's part in it. Almost from the moment of Cleland's appointment Allen appears to have regarded him as unsuitable or incompetent, and when he told Pope of this view Pope revealed that he suspected Brinsden of having overvalued him.29 The case against Cleland published by the Governors was that he should not have examined another doctor's patient without informing him and without reporting what he discovered. Cleland's defense, as reported by the Governors, was that he was seeking an improved method for treating fits, "hitherto understood but very imperfectly: . . . That he was satisfied this could not be acquired without frequent Examinations, . . . both in the Fits, and out of them; and that he was unwilling to communicate his Scheme to the Physicians, Men of Superior Learning, 'till he should have made some farther Advances in it." He had guessed that Hook was with child and hoped to prevent her imposing on the Hospital. He acknowledged that "he had been to blame, in not communicating his Proceedings to the Physicians and Surgeons, under whose care the Patients were." 30 Thus stated, the case appears simple, and one might suppose that, if retained on the staff, Cleland would never have repeated those errors. The case as stated by Cleland (and rejected seriatim by the Governors) is more complex. A basic charge made by him in his published defense was and the "Book of the Copys of Letters of the Trustees of the new General Hospital," now in the archives of the Royal National Hospital for Rheumatic Diseases, Bath. a Pope, Con., IV, 405 — July 19, 1742. 30 A Short Vindication, pp. 16-17.

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The End of the Friendship with Pope that the management of the baths and of the Hospital was indifferent, unprogressive, designed less to improve the care and treatment of the sick than to assure a small group of physicians, surgeons, and apothecaries of an easy, lucrative practise. Whatever else he had done that offended, Cleland declared that it was his honestly spoken suggestions for making Bath water "more useful and efficacious" that had ruined him. 31 According to Tobias Smollett when he attacked the medical oligarchy of Bath nine years later, Cleland had proposed building a vapor bath, a moderated and exclusive bath, and a new design for bath chairs that had since been adopted.32 The doctors feared that he, "an Alien in Bath," had schemes to divert their profits. "So dangerous is it for a Man to attempt any Improvements in his Profession, where the Interests of Others are concern'd." 3 3 The latter charge the Governors in their printed defense did not meet, and perhaps it was exaggerated. Yet criticism of the arrangements for using the hot springs had been published in 1737 ( T h e Diseases of Bath), in 1742 (in Wood's Essay towards a Description of Bath), and would be repeated more than once later. Mayor Allen had begun his term in 1742— 43 with some efforts to improve the pumping arrangements and to add slips into the Hot Bath and Queen's Bath. Cleland, it appears, wanted more drastic changes. But the published case against Archibald Cleland emphasized the illegality and impropriety of his examining the sexual organs of two sick whores with the hope of learning more about fits and pregnancy, and this delectable business, accompanied by a multitude of charges and countercharges, occupied a group of the Governors during the two recorded meetings and created cabals, whisperings, and a sequence of printed discussions. At the meeting on September 21 Walter Chapman reminded the other Governors of their regular system of having two of their group circulate through the building daily to hear complaints and observe the housekeeping. Leake, Raynor, David Hartley, Beau Nash, and Philip Allen had been among those serving as House Visitors during July and August, but they had recorded in the Visitors Book (as perhaps Allen had discovered) only such complaints as that the beer was bad, a lamp was broken, a close-stool was needed, and the men patients sometimes went into the baths naked. When Chapman raised the question about House Visitors, Ralph Allen (according to Cleland) declared "That this was of no Use " An Appeal to the Publick, p. 40. 82 An Essay on the External Use of Water . . . With Particular Remarks upon the present Method of using the Mineral Waters at Bath ( 1 7 5 2 ) , pp. 7 5 - 7 7 . 33 An Appeal, p. 40.

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to the present Case . . . and that this Notion tended only to stifle the whole Enquiry." Going through the Visitors Book was only one of several possible ways of proceeding, continued Allen, "And if he, (Mr. Chapman) cou'd say nothing more to the Purpose, he had better say Nothing." 34 Hartley accused Chapman of having a "bad Design" in his question; but his reason, Chapman said, was only to learn from whence the complaint had come since it plainly had not come from the two women. The Rev. Mr. Stevenson objected to "the indecent Treatment Mr. Chapman had received"; so Dr. Oliver and Dr. Hartley begged his pardon.35 Cleland requested that Ann Hughes and Elizabeth Dowdy be allowed to be witnesses for him, but Allen cut them off for offering mere hearsay. Mr. Purlewent, acting as scribe, would not take down some parts of the testimony. During the discussion, Cleland learned that it was Allen who had, with uncertain authority, issued the command that Cleland was not to be allowed to speak to any nurses or patients. As for rules and the "Orders" of the Hospital, Allen declared that he would break them at any time in order "to come to the Truth of an Accusation." He heartily wished, he said, to find Cleland "unjustly accused, that he might have the Pleasure to join in publishing his Innocence." 36 Other matters, anatomical, procedural, legal, and logical, were brought into the debate. When the final vote was taken, there were only seventeen Governors present out of a board of one hundred six.37 Of the thirteen voting for his dismissal, six were plainly dependents of Allen's, Cleland thought, and obliged to vote with him — his brother Philip, his bookseller Leake, his private chaplain John Chapman, his attorney and steward Purlewent, his apothecary James Grist, and his friendly physician Hartley. Walter Chapman and Bennet Stevenson, two of those voting for a reprimand rather than dismissal, quickly resigned from the Board. To the Cleland affair we owe the most precise report we have of the spoken words and particular behavior of Ralph Allen in any public meeting, and we see the energy and dispatch with which he could handle business. He might on occasion lose his temper, it seems, but not his control. Fighting to sustain the honorable reputation of the Hospital to which he had donated stone and money in liberal amounts and for which he had loyally worked for many years, he may this time have taken advantage of a weak enemy; one cannot feel certain that in the complex and unpleasant Ibid., p. 12. Cleland, A Full Vindication of Mr. Cleland's Appeal (1744), p. 14. 30 A Short Vindication, p. 9. " A Full Vindication, p. 13. 31

35

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The End of the Friendship

with Pope

turmoil absolute justice was achieved for the accused. Somehow one suspects that if Cleland was really driven by "indecent" impulses, the evidence against him would have piled up more flagrantly; he seems foolish, not vicious. But he had threatened the laboriously established regime, and the regime expelled him. After the meeting of September 21, as Mr. Allen mounted W i d c o m b e Hill, he could not have possessed much of the tranquil happiness and peace of mind that were said by his friends to be characteristic of him. Perhaps he took comfort in the thought that after six more days he would shed the duties of the Mayor's office. After so ugly a wrangle one wonders if he went over to Bristol to take part in the procession and celebration held that same day to mark the opening of the Exchange, the splendid structure covered with gleaming creamy stone from his quarries. By mid-October he was extremely sick with an inflammatory fever. T h e likelihood that the visitors in August and the Cleland affair in September had worn him out is strengthened by the assertion of Pope, made at this time, that Allen was often disordered in health by troubles in the lives of the people he esteemed. 3 8 By October 25 he was out of danger though very weak. T h e receipt of a copy of the new edition of the Dunciad,

with Col-

ley Cibber supplanting Lewis Theobald as the contemptible hero and with Warburton's parody of scholarship, would hardly be the thing to lighten the spirit of a sick man. Nor would the letters with which Pope now began to favor him necessarily contribute to his recovery or his peace of mind. O n October 30 Pope wrote thus : I was beginning to fear you a little unkind, in not giving me a line in so long a time as since my Letter: But I check'd that thought, & entertaind another Apprehension, that you might be ill, or relaps'd into that Indisposition which Mr Hook had told me attackd you while he was with you, but of which he assurd me you was recoverd when he left you. Last post I received the Account from Mr Warburton, that you have been extremely ill of an Inflammatory Fever, of which he had but Just heard from your dark that you are got quite out of danger, but still very weak. He made no doubt I had heard it, but says, he hopes I did not, till the danger was over; knowing the Pain it would have given me. Indeed he judges very truely, and I ought to thank all those about you for saving me from that Pain, tho' if they are so ignorant of my Concern for you, as to think it more necessary to give any man else an account of you, rather than me; I am not much obliged to them. I will venture to say my Esteem & affection for you are so very well known to all the world besides, by my constant & warm Declarations of them, that every Acquaintance I had at Bath must have concluded I knew of your Condition, or would infallibly M

Pope, Corr., IV, 477, 479.

*55

The Benevolent Man have writ me word of it. I will answer for Dr Hartley, Dr Oliver, Mr Pearse, Lord Bathurst & several others, that this was their thought. . . . I now thank God, sincerely & from my heart, for the Removal of your Danger, and I hope for the Continuance of a Life so important to those who depend on your Charity, & to him who values your Friendship. I desire to have a more particular & Satisfactory account of how you proceed, than is due to any one that loves you less: if it be a trouble to yourself, pray let any other hand afford it me; or I shall apply to some of those I have named above, for an account, without which I cannot really be content. May God have you in his Protection, now & for ever! & pray believe you have not a Friend who is more faithfully Yours. / A. Pope 39 Mrs. Allen, one notices, receives no mention. Allen's clerk, Samuel Prynn, wrote in reply that Allen had just had a relapse and needed to be watched even at night. So Pope wrote again (November 8 ) to express his concern, adding an upsetting allusion to the recent drowning of Sir Erasmus Philips, whom Allen esteemed. O n the seventeenth he wrote once more and oddly revealed that Dr. Hartley had recently sent him a letter without once mentioning Allen and his illness; so, Pope says, he has himself dispatched a request to Dr. Oliver for news of Allen. This time Pope comes around to inserting good wishes for Mrs. Allen. Indeed she needed them, for she now had fallen ill. B u t Allen was at last able to write and in his letter intimated that he supposed Pope wished to preserve not only the appearance but also the real essence of their friendship. T o this Pope replied enthusiastically, including the assertion that he desired Mrs. Allen's recovery "with all the sincerity in the world." He enclosed within the cover of the letter to his sick and troubled friend a surprising communication which had just come from Dr. Oliver. W h a t hostile act or allegation of Oliver's the letter revealed is not known, but Pope was betraying the confidence of one friend and host to another friend and host. "Your own Judgment," wrote Pope to Allen, "will tell you, what Use, or whether you would make any use of it? I know you are unwilling to use any man hardly, if this be true. Or if it b e only wrong headed in him, you'd probably set him right — I have no Correspondence with him, and will either take notice of it, or not, as you direct."

40

Allen was reminded of the unpleasant matter in a second letter

Ibid, 4 7 6 - 4 7 7 . " Ibid, 486. There is probably no connection between Oliver's "wrong headedness" about Allen and a draft of Oliver's on Messrs Colcbrooke & C o , London, for payment of £50 to Thomas Goulding, dated Nov. 2, 1743, which is endorsed by Goulding and Ralph Allen. See the draft among the Allen and Buckeridge MSS. in the Bath Reference Library. 39

156

The End of the Friendship with Pope from Pope, accompanied by a small sermon. Pope is sure Allen would never wrong Oliver or anyone else [Miss Blount?] "unless it were upon some Mis-information, or Mistake." A few plain words spoken truthfully and frankly ("as I dare say yours always will be") would take care of the matter. Allen and he, Pope thinks, know Oliver's charitable nature and must forgive those things in his nature they cannot mend. The poet no doubt meant well to both friends, but Allen, concerned for his wife's recovery and his own, may have wished that Pope could mend his own nature and his addiction to plots and counterplots. None the less, Allen did eventually speak to Oliver about the latter's "Discontent," and though Oliver was naturally disturbed by Pope's betrayal, he was of a sanguine and affectionate nature and harbored no serious resentment against either of his friends. In the meanwhile he had become an admirer and intimate of Warburton even if he confessed later to his kinsman Borlase that Warburton's promised annotations on Pope's Essay on Criticism would probably not be valuable.41 By the end of the year (1743) Mrs. Allen as well as her husband was recovering health, and he could turn his attention to the problem of shipping stone in wartime. The dearth of carriers was so serious that in order to send stone to St. Bartholomew's Hospital he had to purchase "part of a Large Ship." That would enable him, he wrote to Tims, to "send a sufficient quantity to Build the first Story of the third Pile before the end of the next Summer, & to finish that Building by the end of the Summer that follows the next." 4 2 After another bout of sickness for Mrs. Allen, the two made a trip to London in the latter part of March, staying for a fortnight at a Mrs. Van Elson's in Covent Garden, where Warburton joined them. The Aliens stopped in Twickenham for dinner with Pope and were persuaded to spend the night with him. The next morning (Good Friday) Pope reopened with Allen the whole matter of the quarrel at Prior Park and tried to force him to admit that he and his wife were responsible for it and bore some ill will toward him and Miss Blount. Whether Pope was driven by a deathbed passion for the truth or merely by an unpleasant impulse, he got nothing from his guest beyond a firm insistence that his wife and Pope's friend had had a "mutual Misunderstanding." Writing afterward to Miss Blount about the conversation, Pope said Mrs. Allen's behavior toward him was "a little shy." One notices that in the few letters Pope was yet to write to Borlase, letter of March, 1744. " St. Barth., Ha 19/31/5 — Jan. 7 , 1 7 4 3 O.S.

a

»57

The Benevolent Man Allen he was mindful to express great esteem for her though he had, after the quarrel, told Miss Blount that Mrs. Allen was "a Minx, & an impertinent one." Warburton soon followed the Aliens to Prior Park.43 Pope died on May 30, 1744. Warburton hurried back to London for the funeral and also, no doubt, to learn in what status legally the will had placed him as editor. All was well. To Warburton Pope bequeathed the rights to "all such of my works already printed, as he hath written, or shall write commentaries or notes upon, and which I have not otherwise disposed of, or alienated; and all the profits which shall arise after my death from such editions as he shall publish without future alterations." 44 The poet's disposition of his property, with many special bequests, was of general interest. Bathonians could read about them in the Journal for June 18. To Serle, his gardener, who with his family was soon to take up residence on Allen's estate, Pope left £100; but the poet's bequest to Bath's leading citizen, the Journal for some reason did not mention. Besides leaving the major part of his library of printed books to Allen and Warburton (as if he anticipated that the two friends might soon be living under one roof), Pope ordered his executors to pay Allen the sum of £150, this being "to the best of my calculation, the account of what I have received from him; partly for my own, and partly for charitable uses." According to Lord Orrery, speaking as an intimate friend of Pope's not even mentioned in the will, Allen was "extremely enraged" at this legacy because of "the manner in which it is given." 45 According to Ruffhead, who must have been relying on Warburton, Allen smiled when he saw the sum specified and remarked, "Poor Mr. Pope was always a bad accomptant." 4 6 It is not improbable that Allen was surprised by the bequest. Besides the cost of all the stone he had sent to Twickenham and the wages paid to Omer and others when they worked for Pope, he had supplied a coach and servants for many of Pope's journeys from Newbury, he had contributed toward the cost of publication of the 1737 Letters, and he had been free with money in numerous ways to assist his friend.47 To be re" Pope, Con., IV, 509, 515, 510-511, 464. " Ruffhead, Life of Alexander Pope, p. 546. " L e t t e r to David Mallet of July 14; see Works of Alexander Tope, ed. W . Elwin and W . J. Courthope, VIII ( 1 8 7 2 ) , 523. " Ruffhead, p. 547 n. Ruffhead's saying that Allen accepted the legacy because the residuary legatee was Miss Blount was probably a piece of double malice inspired by Warburton. " See, for example, Pope, Con., IV, 217, 398.

158

The End of the Friendship with Pope paid in cash for all his generosity was probably the last of Allen's expectations or desires. But to have Pope suggest to all the world that the man who was celebrated for his philanthropies had given him so little might well offend or embarrass him. Others besides Orrery spoke of the oddity of the bequest. Martha Blount said she had tried in vain to persuade Pope to omit it. On the other hand the Warburtons were quoted as saying that Miss Blount had required Pope to insert that item. In any case, Pope's estate included among many financial papers a bond of Ralph Allen, dated June 25, 1743, for £2000 and a bill of exchange for £50.48 Allen certainly had been of use in Pope's business affairs. The Bath Journal during the next two months kept Pope's friends and admirers aware of their loss by printing elegiac effusions in verse. In June Allen had another death to think about, that of Edmund Ball, the second husband of his first wife's sister-in-law. Because Allen had been one of the four trustees for the £5600 reserved by Ball's marriage settlement for his wife, Allen may have had to take part in settling the estate. "Sister" would have the interest from the trust as before, but in the will Ball made certain that, later as well as now, much of his property would go to his "loving Nephew Abraham Acworth," who was one of the chief clerks in the Exchequer.49 To the three young Buckeridges Ball left £10 apiece, but he may have had reason to expect that his nephew Abraham, inheriting much of his estate, and his stepdaughter Mabella Buckeridge would soon (April, 1745) be married. Mrs. Ball still had £2600 out on loan to John Wood of Bath. Allen, affected by these recent sad events, took account of his own mortality and in June, 1744, made a list of the charities he meant to engage in during the next twelve months — "If I should Live so Long" : to the Bath Hospital £450, to St. Bartholomew's £300, to the quarry surgeon £50, to Mrs. Fielding £20, and others to a total of £1500.BO The gift to Sarah Fielding, if she is the one meant, may indicate that Allen was aware of her recently published novel, The Adventures of David Simple, which dealt with man's strange propensity for deception and cruelty. She wrote the book, as her brother's "Advertisement to the Reader" explained, because of the "Distress of her Circumstances." 48

See Birch's letter to Philip Yorke on June 9 in Add. MSS. 35396, fol. 198; Spence, Anecdotes, p. 358; Tovey, p. 282; Carruthers, Life of Pope, p. 456. It is worth noting that when Allen died, a loan of £127/18/0 was outstanding to William Pitt, to whom he was leaving £1000 in his will. This debt, like any such small debt of Pope's, Allen probably did not desire to have repaid. "London Magazine, XIV (May, 1745), 255. Ball's will is at Somerset House. 50 Peach, p. 120.

159

The Benevolent

Man

As a matter of fact, Henry was in trouble, too, but of a different sort. His beloved wife was very ill, and in the fall he brought her to Bath, where she died in November. Ralph Allen's heart was probably touched by these distresses. W h e n he went to the July meeting of the vestry of the Widcombe church he approved giving money to two poor men and putting out "Sherlocke's" child as an apprentice; but he also agreed that Isaac Collet and John Hale should be turned out of the poorhouse at once. Squire Allen like Squire Allworthy had to face moral stringencies. In July, too, Allen had the pleasure of receiving at Prior Park the distinguished astronomer, the Earl of Macclesfield, introduced by Dr. Zachary Pearce. Macclesfield was charmed, he told the latter, by the "free & easy & therefore kind" way in which he was received. 51 About this time Allen regretfully decided that he would have to break his engagement to supply stone for the third wing of St. Bartholomew's Hospital; delivery of the stone would be ruinously slow and expensive. "For tho the Hospital had a Claim for Protecting the Seamen from being Press'd, and made use of their Influence, the Expense first in waiting for a Convoy from the Downs to Portsmouth, Staying there for a Second from thence to Plymouth, for a third from that Port to Scilly, and a fourth from Scilly to Milfordhaven, and the men running from the Vessel to Privateers at Bristol, the Ship which at other times easily made three, cou'd now hardly make one Voyage in a Year" — these expenses would be too heavy, and five years might be needed for the delivery. So he proposed to the Governors that they build with other materials, in which event he would, over and above the losses which he had already sustained, contribute £200 in money towards the third wing and £300 later toward the fourth. 52 Allen thought that Captain W a d e would soon be carrying to London the stone already cut for the Hospital with the purpose of selling it to others in the city. But two months later Wade's ship had not left Bristol, "first for want of Men, most of his haveing quitted him for the Privateers, and since for want of Convoy." But even if W a d e should finally carry to London the stone that the third wing would need, the extra wartime costs, excluding the cost of the stone and of its being put on the building, would be about what his total payment was for the second wing. So he hoped 51

The letter from George Parker, 2d Earl of Macclesfield, to Pearce of Aug. 11, 1744, is in the Library of Westminster Abbey. I am indebted to Lawrence E. Tanner, Librarian, for knowledge of this letter. 52 See Allen's résumé in letter of Feb. 7, 1746 (St. Barth., Ha 1 9 / 3 0 / 7 ) ; letter of Aug. 4, 1744 (Ha 1 9 / 3 1 / 6 ) .

160

The End of the Friendship with Pope that the Governors would release him. For their reply he had to wait many months. In the meantime Henry Pelham had become First Lord of the Treasury; Allen's friends Lyttelton and Chesterfield were in the Government; old General Wade, though suffering from asthma, was Commander in Chief of the armies abroad. The King was eager to prosecute the war, but it is hard to believe that Allen was. In September when Lyttelton hoped to call on Allen at Prior Park, he and Warburton were away "upon a tour." 53 Not all of Allen's worries were as remote as London or even Bristol. In October A Full Vindication of Mr. Cleland's Appeal revived the old scandal with new charges — against Dr. Hartley for spreading false rumors, against Dr. Oliver for prevarication, and against both for ignorance in medical matters. Cleland did not mean to be defeated and deprived of his profession. But he was in turn assailed in A Letter to Mr. Archibald Cleland (1744), a learned, legalistic, and at times facetious pamphlet probably written by Warburton. It defended Ralph Allen against Cleland's specific charges by a blanket reply: Allen is "one of the greatest private Characters that perhaps ever arose in any Age or Country," and he is "an Ornament to human Nature." By this time he had learned not to blush at either praise or blame connected with the Cleland affair. The winter season moved along more quietly, and Christmas was again without the company of Mr. Pope at Prior Park. General Wade in January gave £500 to the city of Bath to be used toward making various improvements, particularly in the shambles. Before many months had passed he was recalled from the Continent and, after a period of rest at his home in London, was dispatched to Scotland as Commander in Chief of His Majesty's forces there. Perhaps Allen saw him before he moved northward. In October the city magistrates drank healths to his success as well as to the King's.54 Having received no reply from the Governors of St. Bartholomew's to his petition for release from his contract, Allen on April 30 had written again to emphasize the difficulty of sending stone. Were he able to send it, he estimated that the cost to him would be about £1300 above the stipulated reimbursement. He was relieved a month later to learn that the Governors would not proceed with the building at present.65 Perhaps a notion of using up some of the stone already quarried for St. BartholoK Selection from Unpublished Papers of . . . William Kilvert ( 1 8 4 1 ) , p. 208. H Bath Journal, Feb. 4, Oct. 7 and 14, 1745. M St. Barth., Ha 1 9 / 3 0 / 7 .

161

Warburton,

ed.

Francis

The Benevolent

Man

mew's caused Allen to undertake, for a fixed sum, the construction this year of the Newton Bridge across the Avon just outside Bath. The bridge, two hundred three feet in length, arched upward fifteen feet at the halfway point, so that, though made from a Palladian design, it was both terrifying and dangerous.66 Allen's services to his fellow townsmen were required in another fashion about the same time. The Duke of Kingston was drawing up an indenture with Richard Marchant and John Wood relating to some meadow ground in the Ham or lowlands beside the river. The boundary lines were in dispute as was the proper amount of rent to be paid. The three men decided to leave the settling of both questions to Mr. Allen.67 66 So at least said Wood in his Essay, II, 372. " Egerton 3647, fol. 107.

IÓ2

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Portrait of Allen by Johan Van Diest, c.1728

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