Part 9

The latest mention we have of Hugh of Manchester is in connection with his work as an ambassador. He was sent in 1294, in company with William of Gainsburgh, to demand on behalf of Edward III. the restitution of the lands claimed by the English King, but retained by force in the hands of Philip of France. On this appointment Fuller quaintly remarks: “Such who object, that fitter men than friars might have been found for that service, consider not how in that age such mortified men were presumed the most proper persons peaceably to compromise differences between the greatest princes.” There is a graphic account of the embassy in Robert of Brunne’s “Chronicle”:—

“Edward sendis his sond, to France messengers, Frere Hugh of Malmcestre was a Jacobyn, & William of Gaynesburgh was a Cordelyn. Alle þise passid þe se, so com þe erle of Artoys In prison did þam be a seuenyght in Caleys. To Paris siþen þei cam, & þer fond þei þe kyng, þei letter forth þei nam, to trowe þer saying. þis letter of credence þei schewed in his present, Here no þe accordance, what þer sayng ment, Sir Hugh was a man of state, he said as I salle rede, ‘To Prince & to prelate men salle loute & drede, & for lorde dere his biddyng salle men do, To lesse & more in fere haf fayth & treuth also, & for our lord Edward, þat God him saue & se, We toke þis trauaile hard, his bode to bere to þe. He settes þe terme & stage bi vs, whan & why þat he has don homage for Gascoyn plenerley, In forward formed in pes, as was þer acordance, As ȝour ancestres ches of Inglond & of France þei mad a pes final after þer contek, þou has broken it alle, & don him many ille chek. Now at his last goyng, when he to Gascoyn went, Ȝe cette a certeyn þing, at ȝour boþe assent, & þat suld holden be, euer withouten ende, þou brak þat certeynte wickkedly & vnhende Ȝit he biddes þe se, how wrong þou wilt him lede, Bituex him & þe was mad a priue dede, Of Gascoyn certeyn was þat feffement, Forto feffe him ageyn in þat tenement. þi seisyn is well knowen þe days has þou plenere, To restore him his owen, he sent to þe duzepers As lawe wild & right, and couenant was in scrite. Ȝeld it, þou has no right, with wrong holdes it in lite, Ageyn alle maner skille, & ȝit þon ert so grefe. For whilom þon wrote him tille, & cald him in þi brefe, þi kynde, faythfulle & leale of Gascoyn noble duke, þerto þou set þi seal, þat right wilt þou rebuke. Neuer siþen hiderward suilk speche vnte him touched, Werfore our kyng Edward n þouht fulle well has souched. þou holdes him not þi man, no þing holdand of þe, Ne þe þinkes neuer for þan, to mak þe more feaute. Ne hopes to wynne þat land with dynt of douhty knyght Of God he claymes holdand & neuer of no right. At þis tyme is not els of Sir Edward to seye, Bot of Edmunde þat duellis with him als breþer tueye Forbi any oþer with him will hold & be, He is lord & broþer, he certifies þat to þe. þat no man in þis werlde he hifes so mykelle no dredis, Ne with him is none herd so mykelle may help at nedis, For he sees so well ȝour grete controued gile, Ageyn his broþer ilk dele compassed in a while, Reft him his heritage, sais on him felonie, He ȝeldes vp his homage, forsakis þi companie, & þerto alle þe londes, þat he held of þe, & ȝeldes vp alle þe lordes of homage & feaute, Saue þe right þat may falle of our ancestres olde, Vnto þer heires alle to haf and to holde. We er pouer freres, þat haf nought on to lyue, In stede of messengeres, saue condite vs gyue, þorgh þi lond to go in þin auowrie, þat non vs robbe or slo, for þi curteysse.’”

—“Robert of Brunne,” vol. ii., 258, 9, 60.

On receiving the King’s reply and safe conduct,

“þei had redy wending, at Douer þei toke lond & sped þam to þe kyng, at London þei him fond.”

After the conclusion of this embassy we hear no more of Hugh of Manchester. The only additional fact concerning him that is known is that he wrote a “Compendium Theologiæ” and some other works, of which not even the titles have survived.

Footnote 10:

The authorities for the biography of Hugone de Maincestre are Dugdale’s “History of Warwickshire,” p. 763; Gregson’s “Fragments,” p. 235; Baines’s “History of Lancashire,” vol. ii., pp. 193, 356; vol. iv., p. 826; “Nicholas: Trivet Annales,” 1845 (and in Daccher, _Spicil. Vet. Scrip._, tom. viii.); “Robert of Brunne’s Rhyming Chronicle;” Hibbert-Ware’s “Foundations of Manchester;” “Pits de Angliæ Scriptoribus;” “Bale de Scriptoribus Britannicis,” cent. v., num. 62; Fuller’s “Worthies of England.” If the reader desires to see an example of the method of building without bricks, he may with advantage consult the notice of Hugh of Manchester in Edwin Butterworth’s “Biography of Eminent Natives of Manchester.”

Footnote 11:

_Vultus_ is here translated literally. The metaphor is one frequently used, and is a reference to John x., 14.

Mrs. Fletcher in Lancashire.

In the autobiography of Mrs. Fletcher, who was for many years a conspicuous figure in Edinburgh society, there are some interesting references to Lancashire people.

Eliza Dawson was born at Tadcaster in 1770, and came of good yeoman stock, from whom she inherited a steady-going Liberalism that equally avoided the extremes of “divine right” either of kings or mobs. The beauty and good nature of the girl attracted admiration even in her school days, and she had to reduce several worthy young men to temporary despair by the rejection of their proposals of marriage. Mr. Fletcher, who became her husband, was twenty years her senior, and fell in love with her because she realized his ideal of Sophia Western in “Tom Jones”! He was a well-known Edinburgh lawyer, and in her new home she met Scott, Jeffery, and Brougham. Later she made the acquaintance of Wordsworth, Southey, Arnold, Lafeyette, Mrs. Gaskell, Mazzini, Kossuth, and a variety of other distinguished persons. Her husband died in 1838, but she survived for thirty years. Her latter days were spent at Grasmere, where she died in 1858. The impression made by this gifted woman upon those with whom she came in contact is vividly shown by the description which Margaret Fuller has left of her. “Seventy-six years have passed over her head, only to prove in her the truth of my theory that we need never grow old. She was ‘brought up’ in the animated and intellectual circle of Edinburgh, in youth an apt disciple, in her prime a bright ornament of that society. She had been an only child, a cherished wife, an adored mother, unspoiled by love in any of these relations, because that love was founded on knowledge. In childhood she had warmly sympathised in the spirit that animated the American Revolution, and Washington had been her hero; later, the interest of her husband in every struggle for freedom had cherished her own. She had known in the course of her long life many eminent men, and sympathised now in the triumph of the people over the corn laws, as she had in the American victories, with as much ardour as when a girl, though with a wiser mind. Her eye was full of light, her manner and gesture of dignity; her voice rich, sonorous, and finely modulated; her tide of talk marked by candour and justice, showing in every sentence her ripe experience and her noble genial nature. Dear to memory will be the sight of her in the beautiful seclusion of her home among the mountains, a picturesque, flower-wreathed dwelling, where affection, tranquillity, and wisdom were the gods of the hearth to whom was offered no vain oblation. Grant us more such women, time! Grant to men to reverence, to seek for such!”

She owed much of her religious feeling to the influence of the Rev. John Clowes. “It was in the winter of 1788 that I met, at the house of the Misses Hutton (two excellent maiden ladies) at Tadcaster, the Rev. John Clowes, rector of St. John’s Church, in Manchester. The bond between these pious and primitive old ladies and Mr. Clowes was, I believe, their mutual admiration of the writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Although I could not participate in their enthusiasm for that visionary writer, I think it was from Mr. Clowes’s conversation and writings that I first became interested in the spiritual sense of true religion, or, in other words, felt its experimental truth; and I wish here to preserve the following transcript of the conversation which I made from memory after passing the evening with Mr. Clowes at Miss Hutton’s. Several ladies, some of the Methodist persuasion, were present. His views have always appeared to me to contain much of the true spirit of Christianity. Being asked his opinion of Mr. Law’s works, Mr. Clowes said, ‘I read them, madam, with great diligence and much affection, and I found that they tended to produce a pure, holy, and peaceable frame of mind, but I found likewise that they disqualified a man for the duty of his calling. I could not even go to perform my duty in the church without finding something to disturb me. This made me conjecture that all was not right in Mr. Law’s doctrine, and I conceive it to be this: that it is admirably suited for the contemplative but not for the active life of man, inasmuch as it does not bring the outward man into entire subjection to the inner man, for man has two lives, or two beings, in his very best state while on earth.’... When asked what he conceived to be the state of the blessed, he replied in a calm, but animated tone of voice, ‘I conceive the state of the blessed to be a total forgetfulness or absence of _self_, and to consist in beholding the good and happiness of others, so that every individual will enjoy the whole happiness of heaven.’... Every man is according to his own desire, for assuredly the Lord wills the good and happiness of all His creatures. If a man says he desires to be better, and that he is unhappy because his desire is not fulfilled, let not that man be impatient; he has begun to bear his cross, and if he bears it patiently, humbly waiting for a better state, he will certainly obtain his desire. The good he did, because he saw it was commanded, will soon be his delight; and to delight in good is the temper and disposition of angels.”

In the year 1808, during a visit to Lancashire, her friend, Miss Kennedy, made her acquainted with the family of Mr. Greg, at Quarry Bank. “We stayed a week with them, and admired the cultivation of mind and refinement of manners which Mrs. Greg preserved in the midst of a money-making and somewhat unpolished community of merchants and manufacturers. Mr. Greg, too, was most gentlemanly and hospitable, and surrounded by eleven clever and well-educated children. I thought them the happiest family group I had ever seen. Miss Kennedy also took me to visit her friends, the Rathbone family, at Green Bank, near Liverpool, and we there met Mr. Roscoe, the elegant-minded author of the ‘Life of Lorenzo de’ Medici.’ Mr. Roscoe took us to his beautiful residence at Ollerton Hall, and charmed us by the good taste of his varied and agreeable powers of conversation. He had been returned member for Liverpool during the Whig Ministry of 1806, and both he and Mr. Rathbone had taken a decided part in the cause of the abolition of the slave trade. We were taken to see the last ship which had sailed from the port of Liverpool for trade in human beings. It was then undergoing a change for the stowage of other goods than those wretched negroes who had formerly been crammed in the space between decks not more than four feet high. The iron hooks remained to which they had been chained. It was a sickening sight,—but those chains were broken. We stayed some days at Green Bank, where we enjoyed the society of the venerable William Rathbone, the zealous friend of civil and religious liberty. It was he, and Mr. Roscoe, and Dr. Currie, who by their personal influence and exertions established the first literary and philosophical society at Liverpool, and induced their fellow-townsmen to think and feel that there were other objects besides making money which ought to occupy the time and thoughts of reasonable beings.”

Mr. W. E. Forster, on a visit to Mrs. Fletcher, brought with him “Mary Barton,” which had then only just appeared, and was still anonymous. Mrs. Fletcher says:—“We were at once struck with its power and pathos, and it was with infinite pleasure I heard that it was written by the daughter of one whom I both loved and reverenced in my early married life in Edinburgh, so that I had a two-fold pleasure in making Mrs. Gaskell’s acquaintance through Miss M. Beever, who knew her at Manchester, and who told me that she always asked about me with interest.”

She visited Liverpool again in February, 1848, where Mrs. Rathbone, of Green Bank, introduced her to that worthy Irishwoman, “Catharine of Liverpool,” whose history is one of the romances of poverty.[12]

In 1851 she was in Manchester, and after dining with Mrs. Gaskell, went to hear Kossuth in the Free Trade Hall. She was delighted with the orator, pleased with the crowd, who considerately made way for the white-haired old gentlewoman, and impressed by the interest in foreign politics shown by “this great town of Manchester.” Next morning at breakfast she met Thomas Wright, the prison philanthropist, then a hale man of sixty-six.

Her autobiography was edited by her daughter, Lady Richardson, and published in 1875 by Edmondston & Douglas. Another edition appeared in the United States in 1883.

Mrs. Fletcher had not only ability, but the subtler gift of sympathy. She had an instinctive feeling for that which was beautiful alike in the spheres of literature and morals.

Footnote 12:

An interesting account of this benevolent woman is given in “Chambers’s Miscellany,” 1872, vol. iv., No. 50.

Manchester and the First Reform Agitation.

The reform agitation began in Manchester in 1792, and its history is instructive and too little known by the present generation. The town, which was heartily Republican in the Civil Wars, was as heartily Jacobite in the earlier part of the eighteenth century, and in its closing years was dominated by the sworn friends of intolerance and privilege. The vainly proposed repeal in 1789 of the Corporation and Test Acts, by which the Nonconformists were excluded from all municipal offices, led to the formation in Manchester of a “Church and King Club,” whose members showed their loyalty by deep potations and their piety by wearing buttons which bore a representation of the “Old Church.” An era of bitter party feeling now set in. Those who were Dissenters, those who were suspected of thinking that Manchester and other important manufacturing towns should be represented in Parliament, those who ventured to regard the sale of pocket-boroughs as a scandal, those who hinted that any improvement was possible in the constitution of a Parliament that was notoriously non-representative and that included many members who owed their position to improper and corrupt influences, were marked out for social ostracism and persecution. The Liberals of that day banded themselves together and formed the Manchester Constitutional Society, which in May, 1792, set forth as one of its objects that “members of the House of Commons should owe their seats to the good opinion and free suffrage of the people at large, and not to the prostituted votes of venal and corrupt boroughs.” The Government immediately issued a proclamation against “wicked and seditious writings,” and called upon the magistrates to take rigorous action. The King’s birthday was celebrated by illuminations, and the partisans of the “glorious Constitution,” which denied them the rights of citizenship, tore up a couple of the trees growing in St. Ann’s Square, and tried to batter down the gates of the Unitarian chapels in Cross Street and Mosley Street. The publicans were warned that their licences would be forfeited if they allowed any gatherings of the reformers upon their premises. No less than 186 of them signed an agreement to that effect, and in some of the taverns was a conspicuous announcement, “No Jacobins admitted here.” The war with France was hailed with delight by the adherents to the old order, and was deeply deprecated by the reformers. A man of great talent, Thomas Cooper, issued an address on the evils of war, and this, with other dissuasives, appeared in the _Manchester Herald_, a newspaper which the reformers had started. Encouraged by the authorities of the town, a drunken mob attacked the printing office and sacked it. The Rev. J. Griffith declared that he would not act against the rioters if called upon to do so, and a special constable offered the mob a guinea for “every Jacobin’s house that they pulled down.” A friend of the printer’s applied to the constable for help, and was answered by a threat of being kicked out of the place. The leader of the reformers was Mr. Thomas Walker, and his house also was selected for attack. He and his friends defended the place with firearms. The conduct of the rioters was defended by Wyndham in the House of Commons, and a prosecution was instituted, not against the law-breakers, but against Mr. Walker. He had firearms in his possession, and therefore he had “obtained arms to wage war against the King.” The case came on at the Lancaster Spring Assizes, but the principal witness proved himself to be a shuffling perjurer, and Law, afterwards Lord Ellenborough, saw the matter to be so hopeless that he threw up the case. Thomas Cooper left the town for America, where he obtained high distinction as a chemist, jurist, and political economist. The reformers were helpless and almost hopeless. The war fever had seized the nation; the right of public meeting and the freedom of the press were the subject of constant attack. The law against seditious assemblies was used as a means of prohibiting any public expression of disapprobation of the state of the Constitution or the acts of the Government. It was denounced by Charles James Fox, and a very whimsical protest was made against it in Manchester, which is thus described in a newspaper of the time:—“On Monday evening (28th December, 1796), the members of the Manchester Thinking Club commenced their first mental operation by beginning to think, or in other words, submitting themselves like good subjects to a constitutional dumbness. The number of thinkers assembled was not less than 300, and many of the thoughtful actually came from Liverpool, Stockport, and other remote places to witness this novel spectacle. The members were all muzzled, and such an imposing silence prevailed for one hour as would have done honour to the best thinkers that ever adorned assemblies of a more dignified nature. The word ‘Mum’ appeared in large characters on every muzzle, and except a seditious sigh or a treasonable groan that occasionally broke forth, ‘Mum’ was literally the order of the night.” Here is an advertisement of the meetings of the “Thinking Club”:—“The members of this truly constitutional Society continue to meet for the intellectual purpose of silent contemplation every Thursday evening, at the Coopers’ Arms, Cateaton Street, where strong constitutional muzzles are provided at the door by Citizen Avery, tailor to the swinish multitude. The questions still to be thought of are: Is man really a thinking animal or not? and if he is, as thinking is rather a troublesome operation of the mind, ought he not to be thankful that his betters kindly think for him? The chair to be taken at half-past seven. Thinking to begin precisely at eight.”