Part 12

On this occasion, too, he seems to have proceeded with his usual despatch; for in October, 1757, we find him once more at Oxford, for the purpose of printing the last-named work. And again, by the spring of the following year, 1758, this too was ready for the public eye.

Having now secured in print the results of so many years' labours, the happy idea occurred to him of presenting to his beloved University the collections of antiquities, natural history, etc., upon which his works were based, and he accordingly deposited them forthwith in the Ashmolean Museum, continuing to send thither from time to time any similar rarities which he discovered. It is scarcely necessary to add that for this generous gift he received the thanks of the University; which, in token of the high appreciation in which they held his talents and his liberality, on the 23rd March, 1766, conferred on him, by diploma, the degree of Doctor of Laws, the highest academical honour which it was in the power of the University to bestow.

But Borlase was now getting an old man, being over seventy years of age. The friends of his youth were dying off; and he was unable to undertake the long antiquarian rambles which had been the delight of his stalwart days. His outdoor amusements began to be restricted to the superintendence (which he seems to have thoroughly enjoyed) of the improvement of the numerous roads which ran through his parish; one of which, it may be mentioned, was the highroad to Penzance, until that which now skirts the shore of the Mount's Bay was substituted for it. His literary labours consisted partly in writing his 'Sacræ Exercitationes,' which were chiefly paraphrases of Ecclesiastes, the Canticles of Solomon, and the Lamentations of Jeremiah--rather for his own pleasure than with any view to publication; and his home recreations were the 'Belles Lettres' and drawing and painting. He did not, however, neglect entirely his old pursuits; for he prepared for the press the new and enlarged edition of his 'Antiquities,' which, as we have seen, was published in 1769; and he busily engaged himself in a similar office for his 'Natural History,' which he did not live to complete. The emendations, however (or rather the principal of them), appeared in the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall for 1875. And during this latter part of his life, as well as during the previous years, he was occupied in collecting materials for a Parochial History of the County, which never saw the light.

His last literary labour was a treatise on the 'Creation and the Deluge,' which contains some ingenious speculations on the nature of earthquakes and submarine upheavals. The beginning of this little work he had actually sent to the press; but a sudden and violent illness in 1771 warned him that he was overtaxing his strength, and he resolved not to go on with the publication. Within two or three months of his death he drew up a short memoir of his life, written in the third person, for his friend Huddesford, which closes in the following happy strain:

'Being now in his seventy-seventh year, very little more can be hoped for by himself or expected by others.

'Having been long accustomed to the confinement of his study, retirement and old age incessantly call upon him with the less terrour; and resignation to his increasing infirmities becomes every day easier and less irksome, till at last he now accounts it among the blessings of long life that it has quieted and extinguished every spark of ambition, and that it enables him to withdraw more and more with some decency from the world; precluding the perhaps well-intended, though rather too frequent visits of civility, in which there is generally more dissipation at all stages of life than real compensation for the waste of time, especially in the days of age.

'In hopes, however, of being not entirely useless as yet, whilst it pleases God to grant him life, most of his present time (as not the least of his pleasures) he allots to the instruction of a dutiful and apprehensive youth, the present companion of his retirement.'

So lived, and so, on the 31st August, 1772, peacefully died, at Ludgvan, Cornwall's 'Nourice of Antiquity,' Dr. William Borlase. He was buried by the side of his wife, near the east end of his own church, on the north side of the altar; and his executor inscribed on his unpretending monument the words:

'Perurbani, perhumani, perquam pii, hujusce parochiæ per annos LII. rectoris desideratissimi, in republica necnon literaria versatissimi. Loquuntur scripta, testantur posteri.'

He had six sons, only two of whom survived him, the Rev. John Borlase and the Rev. George Borlase, Casuistical Professor and Registrar of the University of Cambridge. His son Christopher, a sailor, died of a fever on the coast of Guinea in 1749, and appears to have inherited some of his father's artistic skill.

As an illustration of Borlase's 'method,' and of his perfervid imagination when he got amongst his native granite rocks, I have thought it would be interesting to cull the following few notes from his 'Scilly Isles':

'On a Carn adjoining the Giant's Castle,' he observes, 'the floor, consisting only of one Rock, must convince us that this _Circle_ was intended for a place of Worship, for it could not serve for a _Sepulchre_; but why the _Quoits_ were hollowed out into _Basons_ (as they are placed in a _Religious Circle_) must have been in some sort or other subservient to the purposes of the _Druid Superstition_.' As regards the 'Rock Basons,' he goes on to say, 'My opinion concerning the use of them you do not want to be informed of; I have always thought that they were designed to receive in their utmost purity the waters of the Heavens for holy uses; but in such doubtful cases let every man think for himself.' A little further on, however, the worthy Doctor's theory as to the extreme purity of the water is somewhat disturbed by his finding some of them inconveniently near the sea; but he is equal to the occasion. 'Though,' he says, 'the spray of the sea so near them on every hand might well be supposed to fill these Basons with salt water, yet I found the water in them to be quite fresh.' Some of these were actually under the sea-level!

In another place, writing of tolmens, the Doctor observes that, though their Cornish name, appropriately enough, signifies a holed stone, yet that was not 'the true Druid name ... for the Druids _probably_ call'd it by the name of one of their Deities as soon as it was ritually consecrated, and most likely by that of _Saturn_.'

He is in doubt whether the furrows which he noticed on certain rocks were channels on the sites of the holy fires of the Druids, made in order to enable the priests the better to collect the sacred embers, or whether they were designed to collect the blood of sacrificed victims for the purposes of divination. But he admits ''tis all mere conjecture.'

And again--a 'canopy rock' with a row of rude stone pillars before it is a 'Druid Seat of Judgment';--in fact, on Borlase's theory, the whole of the Scilly Isles must have been thickly peopled with Druids.

But as the writer in the _Quarterly_ truly observes, 'The Druids have of late years been somewhat rudely dismissed from the shade of their accustomed oaks, and the rock-basons have been proved to be simply the result of the weathering of the granite.'

FOOTNOTES:

[71] At Rospeith, in this parish, according to Davies Gilbert, P.R.S., the last native wolf in England was seen.

[72] The Manor of Borlase-Burgess, formerly the seat of the Borlase family in St. Wenn, 'is said to have been given by William Rufus to a certain Norman who was Lord of Talfer in that country, and whose posterity assumed the name of Borlase.'--(Borlase's MSS.)

[73] At Pendeen lived, in the time of Henry VII., one Richard Pendyne, 'one of the rebels who, under Lord Audley, Flammock, and Joseph,' dismantled Tehidy, the residence of John Basset, then Sheriff of the County, and did much other mischief in the West--an offence which he expiated by losing his estates.

[74] According to Kippis, it was the St. Just living which was subsequently procured through this interest.

[75] Second book of the 'Antiquities of Cornwall.'

[76] Borlase was a bounteous contributor of minerals for the adornment of Pope's grotto, in which the poet fixed his Cornish friend's name in capital letters, formed of crystals; gracefully saying that he had placed them where they would remind him of the donor--'in the shade, but shining.'

[77] The Doctor was one of the old-fashioned Churchmen who dreaded _trop de zèle_, and, probably without much reluctance, issued in his magisterial capacity a warrant to 'apprehend all such able-bodied men as had no lawful calling or sufficient maintenance;' in fact, he was afraid of riots amongst his excitable parishioners. The squabble is recorded in the great Revivalist's journals for the summers of 1784 and 1785. But the end of the affair was that Wesley, having on the first occasion appeared before the Bench at St. Michael's Mount, and on the second having called upon Dr. Borlase himself, at St. Just, in response to the warrant, on the latter occasion found that the Doctor had gone to church--and so the matter ended.

[78] It was his habit to rise at five, and go to bed at nine.

[79] A second edition was published in London in 1769.

_THE BOSCAWENS._

_THE BOSCAWENS._

A novel feature presents itself in this case to the would-be historian which does not appear, at least to so great an extent, in the cases of certain other distinguished Cornish families. The Killigrews, the Arundells, the Godolphins, and the Grenvilles, for instance, all yielded more than one man of mark deserving of special notice; but this can hardly be said of the family of Boscawen: the interest centres in Admiral the Honourable Edward Boscawen, almost to the exclusion of all his ancestors, and of all his descendants. And he affords another instance, like Opie, of being doubly secure of a niche in the temple of Fame, from his own distinguished career, as well as through the wit and distinguished social qualities of his wife; who, the writer regrets to add, was not--as the majority of her husband's ancestresses, and as those of most distinguished Cornishmen were--a Cornish-woman.

It would probably be of little use now to speculate upon the causes why the Boscawens, for at least five centuries, continued to hold a well-recognised position in the county, acquiring by their judicious marriages into wealthy families vast landed interests in various parts of Cornwall, but chiefly in the vicinities of Buryan and Tregothnan and in the north-western part of the county, doubtless holding their own amongst their fellows, and doing what the world would call their 'duty;' and yet contributing, so far as I can ascertain, scarcely one person whose name is to be found in the usual records of English history until we reach the eighteenth century.

Yet it must be noted that the Boscawens are of very old standing in Cornwall. Hals indeed tells us that the first Boscawen who settled in Cornwall was an Irish gentleman;--and Hals may be right; for he had peculiar facilities for learning the early traditions of the family from the neighbourhood of Fentongollan (the seat of the Halses) to Tregothnan, the seat of the Boscawens; and also from the fact that one member of the family 'Hugh Boscawen, Gent., Master of Arts,' as a labour of love, taught young Hals, and many other youngsters, all that they knew of Latin and Greek in an old school-house in St. Michael Penkivel Church.[80] Nor was the Master of Arts the only member of the family who dispensed information free of charge; for Hals tells us of a Charles Boscawen of Nansavallan who was a barrister-at-law, 'and who made noe further use thereof in his elder years then to councill and assist his friends in all their lawe concerns gratis.' He died in London, without issue; and was Member of Parliament for Truro,--an ancient borough, with which, as we shall see, the Boscawens were intimately connected.

At Boscawen Rose, in the parish of St. Buryan, within a few miles of the Land's End, where the name is still found attached to places in the parish, the first Boscawen is said to have exchanged his Irish patronymic for that of the place where he took up his abode, and which was probably well enough described by its Cornish name, which signifies the Valley of Elder-trees. It is interesting to notice how many of these trees (much esteemed by the old Cornish folk), and almost these alone, still are to be found near the wind-whipped shores of the Land's End.[81]

I find no record of the marriages of the first two or three generations; but in the reign of Edward I. (about 1292), Henry de Boscawen married Hawise Trewoof; and some half century later (1335) John de Boscawen married an heiress, Joan de Tregothnan,[82] thus establishing a connexion between those two names, which has ever since been maintained; for Tregothnan, 'the place of well-wooded valleys,' is still the family seat: it is now the Cornish residence of Evelyn Boscawen, sixth Viscount Falmouth. The present house, a handsome structure, was built by the architect, W. Wilkins, jun., about the year 1815, replacing a more picturesque but smaller and less commodious building.

Intimate relations with the exquisitely wooded banks of the Fal were still further established by the marriage of the son of the aforesaid John Boscawen of Tregothnan with another heiress, named Joan, like his mother, who brought her husband the wealth of the family of Albalanda or Blanchland, in the parish of Kea, on the opposite side of the river to Tregothnan; a place where, according to Lysons, copper was first successfully worked in Cornwall. And, while on this subject, it seems not unworthy of remark that the alliances of the Boscawens and the Albalandas with the families who resided on the Fal and its tributaries were numerous. Rose Albalanda married a William Dangrous of Carclew, in the fifth year of Edward III.; and the heiress of Trenowith, who married Hugh Boscawen, a great grandson of the first-named John, was herself the descendant of ancestors called after Tolverne, Trewarthenick and Tregarrick--names which still belong to places on the shores of the river, or hard by. Nor did the Boscawens neglect to cultivate acquaintance and to intermarry with other Cornish families who made more noise in the world than those to whom we have been referring; for they and the Albalandas also married with Arundell, Bassett, St. Aubyn, Lower, Godolphin, Carminow, and Trevanion.

He who married Elizabeth St. Aubyn for his first wife was one Richard Boscawen, who paid a fine of five pounds rather than undergo the expensive ceremony of being made a Knight of the Bath at the coronation of Henry VII., possibly because he was an old man, and dreaded a long journey to the metropolis, for he died four years afterwards, in 1489. His grandson, Hugh, who by the way married Phelip, a daughter of the fine old Cornish family of Carminow, now extinct, paid a similar fine of four marks at the coronation of Queen Mary; for what reason I know not. In the 'Bayliff of Blackmore' there is a long story of his being outwitted by a family in Truro; but the course pursued by these Boscawens, as narrated in that curious MS., was not unusual in those days. With the great-grandson of the last-named Hugh, himself bearing the same Christian name, commences, so far as I am aware, a more particular connexion of the family with the ancient borough, now the city, of Truro, where the principal street (formerly two streets, then bearing other names, but now thrown into one) is still called after them, 'Boscawen.' He was chosen Knight of the Shire for Cornwall in 1626; and Edward, his fifth son, who represented Tregony in Parliament, was one of the leading members of the House of Commons, temp. Charles II. This Hugh, who was 'Chief of the Coat Armour' at the Heralds' Visitation of Cornwall in 1620, was likewise in that year Recorder of the Borough. He had three sons: Hugh,[83] of whom nothing seems to be known except that he married a Clinton; Edward, a rich Turkey merchant, who was a Member of Parliament, temp. Charles II., and died at Trefusis, a lovely place overlooking the waters of Falmouth Harbour; and Nicholas, who joined the Parliamentary army (a rare thing, by the way, for a Cornish gentleman to do) with a troop raised from among his own tenantry. But the military career of Nicholas Boscawen (how terminated I have not been able to ascertain) must have been a short one; for, when only twenty-two years of age and unmarried, he was buried in Westminster Abbey, whence his remains were removed some fifteen years afterwards, at the Restoration, to be flung into a common pit in St. Margaret's churchyard.

We now approach that part of the family history when the individual members cannot be quite so rapidly dismissed from notice.

The only son of Edward Boscawen (the Turkey merchant) and Jael Godolphin was another Hugh; who, like his father and uncles, seems to have been no friend to the Stuarts, and to have assisted in bringing to England William III. This no doubt explains his being made Captain of St. Mawes Castle, Warden of the Stannaries, Steward of the Duchy of Cornwall in the room of Francis Godolphin, Viscount Rialton; Comptroller of the Household; a Privy Councillor; and finally, in 1720, his being ennobled by the titles of Baron Boscawen Rose and Viscount Falmouth. He was also Vice-Treasurer of Ireland, a post which he resigned the year of his death. He several times, before gaining his title, sat for Cornwall in Parliament; but gave up all his appointments except that of Warden of the Stannaries, on the defeat of the Excise Scheme.

Hugh Boscawen seems to have been quite carried away by his political zeal, for he was foremost in arresting, or trying to arrest, any, even of his old friends, who were suspected of holding high monarchical principles; amongst whom may be named Sir Richard Vyvyan, of Trelowarren, and, as we have already seen,[84] Mr. Basset, of Tehidy. He died of an apoplexy, at Trefusis, in 1734, having married, in 1700, Charlotte Godfrey, a niece of the great Duke of Marlborough, by whom he had eighteen children, eight sons and ten daughters.

The second Viscount of the same name seems, though of a kind and gentle disposition, not to have possessed a very brilliant intellect. Davies Gilbert tells the story of him that he is said to have mistaken the phrase, 'Optat ephippia _Bos_,' for the Latin of his own name; and that he always confounded Horace Walpole with the Roman poet whose name is so familiar to us. Probably a somewhat unattractive sort of man, for his wife often threatened, so Mrs. Delany says, that she 'wou'd part with my lord.'

Yet he was not without shrewdness, and had some political influence. Votes which overthrew Sir Robert Walpole were carried against the Minister by his losing the majority of the Scotch and Cornish boroughs; the latter of which were managed by Lord Falmouth and Thomas Pitt. Indeed, the second Viscount Falmouth, like so many others of his contemporaries, was a great dealer in boroughs. It is of him that Dodington tells the story, that he went to the Minister to ask him a favour, which the latter seemed unwilling to grant; upon which Lord Falmouth said, 'Remember, sir, _we_ are _seven_!' And Dover says that Lord Cowper resigned the Bedchamber on the 'Beefeaters' being given to Lord Falmouth:--'The latter, who is powerful in elections, insisted on having it; the other had nothing but a promise from the King, which the Ministry had already twice forced him to break.'

He was also Yeoman of the Guard to George II., and in 1745, according to Chauncey, raised a regiment at his own expense to serve against the Scotch rebels; and he had such influence in Cornwall that 6,387 persons joined an association, the members of which bound themselves to appear armed in the best manner they could, under his command, to defend the King and the Government. Mrs. Thomson, in her 'Memoirs of Viscountess Sandon,' tells us how the second Viscount's wife, H. C. M. Russell, _née_ Smith, was in desperate straits to get herself appointed a Lady of the Bedchamber, and wrote the most pressing letters to Mrs. Clayton on the subject. In one she says that she could not sleep a wink all night for thinking of it!

His brother Nicholas went to Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, took holy orders, and on the Duke of Newcastle's visit to the University, as Chancellor, was created a D.D. He was appointed a King's Chaplain, and 'Dean' of Buryan in 1756, Rector of St. Mabyn and of St. Michael Penkivel in 1774, and a Prebendary of Westminster in 1777. The only remarkable thing about him seems to have been his appointment as 'Dean' of Buryan, the exact significance of which dignity it is difficult to discover, though it is said that this 'Deanery' had jurisdiction over three parishes, and the probate of wills therein, and that there were three prebends attached to it; it is not uninteresting to note this tendency in a member of the Boscawen family to 'hark back to their early St. Buryan haunts.[85] His wife, Mrs. Hatton, was, I believe, the widow of a linendraper in Newgate Street.

There was another brother, John--a Major-General in the army;--and the 4th son of the second Viscount, the Hon. George Boscawen, was another military member of the family; he was present at the battles of Dettingen and Fontenoy, and represented Truro in Parliament from 1761 to 1764. His daughter, Mary, maid-of-honour to the Princess Charlotte, wrote a memoir of the Princess.

William Boscawen, younger son of the above General George Boscawen, was educated at Eton, where he became a great favourite of Dr. Barnard. He became a Gentleman Commoner of Exeter College, and on settling in London studied law under a Cornish lawyer, Mr. Justice Buller, about 1770, and went the Western Circuit. William Boscawen does not appear to have taken his degree at Oxford; but Wordsworth, in his 'Scholæ Academicæ,' points out that it was not unusual during the last century, and at the commencement of the present, for gentlemen intending for the law to leave the University without taking a degree. He published two or three law treatises, was a Commissioner in Bankruptcy, and in 1785 he was made a Commissioner of the Victualling Office. By his marriage with Charlotte Ibbetson he had five daughters. He was much attached to literary pursuits, and translated, first the 'Odes,' 'Epodes,' and 'Carmen Seculare' of Horace, then the 'Satires,' 'Epistles,' and 'Art of Poetry;'--and in many respects his translation was considered superior to Francis's. He was much indebted for his 'notes' to Dr. Foster, of Eton College. In 1801, he published some original poems and other works. A friend who met him in the Strand a few days before his death noticed that he was looking very ill; and on the 8th May, 1811, he died of asthma, at Little Chelsea. He was of an affectionate and benevolent disposition; and the Literary Fund he considered almost as his own child, writing the annual verses for it till within five years of his death.

A contemporary critic says of his literary productions, that if in them 'he does not take a lead among his contemporaries, he at least discovers an elegant taste, a poetical mind, and a correct versification.' 'Could his character be truly drawn, it would exhibit a consummate picture of everything that is amiable and estimable in human nature.' 'Incapable of _being_ an enemy, it was never known that he had one; and his friends were as numerous as his virtues.'