Part 5

She was born at Nacton, a village not far from Ipswich, on what was then a somewhat desolate heath on the north bank of the Orwell. Her father was head ploughman to a farmer named Denton, a well-known breeder of Suffolk cart horses. From childhood she was known as a good rider, and she obtained her first place as a servant by catching a very spirited pony of Mr. Denton’s, whose wife was taken suddenly ill, and riding at a gallop to the town and through the streets crowded on a market day to fetch the doctor. As she had not had time to saddle or bridle her steed, she rode him bareback with a halter to guide him--a really remarkable feat for a child of fourteen. As she grew up, she found a suitor in a clever sailor named William Laud, originally a boat builder, who had been a pupil in navigation, says the author, under a Mr. Crabbe, a brother of the poet’s.[12] Laud’s education and abilities seem to have been above his station in life, and had he been able to keep straight he would have risen to the command of a merchant ship, and possibly even to officer’s rank in the Royal Navy. As it was, he attached himself to a man named Bargood, an unscrupulous employer of smugglers, and became one of the leaders of that highly organized body which in the war with France was bent on defrauding the revenue. Laud’s influence was singularly bad for the Catchpole family. Two brothers came to a bad end, another enlisted and disappeared for years, and the whole household fell under suspicion of being in league with the smugglers.

Now comes the undoubted fiction in the story. Margaret Catchpole particularly requested that her husband’s name should be concealed, if her adventures were ever published, in order that her children might not know she had been a convict. Consequently we must assume that the honest lover called John Barry of Levington, the parish next to Nacton, is fictitious, and probably that he and his brother Edward are introduced to heighten the romance.[13] Anyhow, in the story Laud was severely wounded by John’s brother Edward, who commanded the preventive men on Felixstow Beach, and was supposed to have been killed. Margaret nursed Laud in his concealment into convalescence; and later on when she was in service at a Mrs. Wake’s he attempted to carry her off by violence. She was, however, protected by the faithful John Barry and a strange old fisherman nicknamed Robinson Crusoe. John Barry was seriously wounded. On his recovery he proposed to Margaret, who refused him; and, in desperation, the rejected lover emigrated to the Colony of New South Wales, Australia.

In May, 1793, Margaret entered into service with Mrs. Cobbold of the Cliff, Ipswich. The house still stands adjoining the well-known brewery on the shore of the river Orwell. Even to this day it lies at the fringe of the business part of Ipswich, at the end of the docks and quays; beyond it is country and the well-wooded banks of the beautiful river. The girl was under-nursemaid, and also helped the cook in the evening. She soon manifested exceptional abilities; for not only did she learn all the lessons which the children had to prepare, but on three occasions she saved the life of members of Mrs. Cobbold’s large family. She rescued two little boys, George and Frederick (the latter my grandfather), from the fall of a wall, which would inevitably have crushed them; she saved another, Henry, in Ipswich, when he had fallen into deep water; and when an older boy, named William, had gone alone down the Orwell to shoot ducks and his boat had been overturned, it was by her courage and resource that the lad was recovered in a state of insensibility. On the latter occasion Laud reappears suddenly. He had been pressed into the Navy and was now necessarily leading a more reputable life, and Margaret could avow her partiality for her lover without shame. In 1794 Laud fought in Lord Howe’s victory of the 1st of June and apparently distinguished himself highly in the action, being one of the crew entrusted with bringing home a valuable prize. In the story Laud is represented as a man naturally with good impulses, but weak and unstable; and the villain of the piece is the sailor who was Laud’s mate in his smuggling days--one Luff.

Luff was determined to get Laud back to the smuggling business; Laud, on the contrary, desired to lead a virtuous life with Margaret. Accordingly, when he was free of the navy, he brought his prize money and left it at Mr. Cobbold’s house, but Margaret, who had now become cook and had got into trouble by entertaining too many sailors, refused to see her lover--of course not knowing it was he. Luff then turned up, and, as she refused to give him information about Laud, threw her into a well from which she was rescued with difficulty. Luff was killed soon after in a desperate encounter with the preventive men, and from what Margaret’s brother Edward could gather Luff had murdered Laud. Margaret did not believe it; but her conduct became so unsatisfactory from grief and disappointment that Mrs. Cobbold, despite all she had done for the family, was compelled to dismiss her from her service. Laud in the meantime had reformed and settled down as a boat builder, and on his uncle’s death he came into the business. But the habit of smuggling was too strong, and he returned to his old courses. This brings us to the tragedy. Margaret has heard that Laud is alive from an old servant of the Cobbolds. She longs for an explanation and is determined to see him. Instead of consulting any of her reputable friends she goes to Ipswich and is persuaded that Laud is in London waiting for her there. Even a letter from him is produced expressing his readiness to marry her if she would join him. This clumsy fraud was devised by a man named Cook in order to induce Margaret, whose fame as a rider was known to him, to steal a horse from Mr. Cobbold, and to ride him up to London. Regardless of the consequences, Margaret took her old master’s best horse, named Rochford, and rode him to London, seventy miles, in eight hours. Of course the loss of the horse was known at once, and handbills were issued offering a reward. Margaret, dressed as a groom, was arrested soon after her arrival in London, and sent back to Ipswich to be tried at the Assizes. On August 9, 1797, she pleaded guilty at Bury St. Edmunds and was condemned to death. Her crime was then considered a most serious one, but she made a very favourable impression, and the witnesses for character gave such good testimony that the judge commuted the death sentence to one of transportation for seven years. For three years Margaret remained in Ipswich gaol; and it is probable that her sentence would have been remitted altogether but for what ensued.

Laud was now smuggling on a large scale. He was deeply concerned with an affair in which two preventive men were beaten and thrown into the sea at Southwold for reporting that they had seen forty carts and horses ready to take a cargo which was to be “run” near Dunwich. A reward of £100 for his apprehension was offered in the newspapers on March 2d, 1799. Shortly after this 880 gallons of gin were seized and the guilt of smuggling it brought home to Laud. All his property was confiscated and he was given a year’s imprisonment and sentenced to pay £100. He was committed to Ipswich gaol, and would have to stay there after his sentence had expired till the fine was paid. Of course Margaret, whose good conduct had made her practically free of the prison, discovered that her lover was an inmate; and, as she had kept intact the prize money he had given her, she was able to give him the means of obtaining his liberation at the end of his year’s imprisonment. Laud persuaded her to try to escape and join him, and the way she did this is one of the most extraordinary in her romantic career. The wall of the prison was twenty-five feet high and protected at the top with iron spikes. Margaret succeeded in getting a flower stand, which placed endways raised her to within thirteen feet of the top. She had made herself a garment like a shepherd’s smock and a pair of trousers so as to be unincumbered in her movements. By casting a clothes-line over the _chevaux-de-frise_ on the top of the wall she managed to climb up to the iron spikes. Then, lowering the line on the other side, she turned over between the revolving spikes and let herself down on the opposite side. She and Laud made for a place called Sudbourn; but were overtaken on the beach where, after a desperate fight, Laud was killed by Edward Barry, and Margaret arrested and taken back to the gaol.

It was one of the strange anomalies of the cruel law of that age that whereas ruffians like Cook, and desperados like Laud escaped the capital sentence, comparatively innocent persons were hanged without mercy. For a reprieved person to escape from prison was death, and, though Margaret was ignorant of the terrible penalty which she had incurred, there seemed no hope of her meeting with any further leniency. She was again brought before the same judge, Lord Chief Baron Sir Archibald Macdonald, who had condemned her in August, 1797, on the third day of the same month in 1800. Again she pleaded guilty, and when the judge condemned her in very stern language she made a short speech accepting his sentence, which impressed everyone present in the court house. Her eloquence and her whole demeanour profoundly impressed the judge, and again he obtained power to respite her, sentencing her this time to lifelong transportation.

Throughout her trials Margaret found in Mrs. Cobbold a constant friend, one who never allowed her for a moment to feel forsaken. The letters which passed between her and her former mistress are preserved, and on reading them one cannot but fail to note how in style and diction the maid had been influenced by Mrs. Cobbold. Margaret continued to write from Australia, and her letters are marvellous when one considers her antecedents and lack of early education. She collected specimens to send to her mistress, some of which were presented to the Ipswich Museum. Once more she was able to save life by an act of desperate daring, from which the men shrank, at the time of a flood. At last, according to the story, “John Barry,” who had prospered in the colony, found that she was there, sought her out, and married her. The last letter published in the book is dated June 25th, 1812, and announces her marriage to John Barry. It contains these words: “Should you ever think fit, as you once hinted in your letter to me, to write my history, or to leave it to others to publish, you have my free permission at my decease, whenever that shall take place, to do so. But let my husband’s name be concealed, change it, change it to any other ... for mine and my children’s sake.” She died September 10th, 1841, in the sixty-eighth year of her age.

The book raises problems of exceptional literary interest. In the first place, it was written by a man of unimpeachable character, who wrote with a distinctly religious aim, in view mainly to shew that the heroine after having violated “the laws of God and man” became by “the inculcation of Christian faith and virtue conspicuous for the sincerity of her reformation.” He avers that his narrative is strictly true and based on facts “well known to many persons of the highest respectability still living” and that he himself received the letters he quotes. He has no motive for deviating from his intention to tell the truth except that, as we have seen, Margaret Catchpole desired her married name to be concealed. That the author studiously carried out this natural wish is proved by the fact that a wealthy lady in New South Wales, named Mrs. Reiby, who had left Bury in Lancashire as a girl, was declared to be the true Margaret Catchpole, to her great annoyance, as she naturally had no desire to figure as a “convict heroine.” In 1910 the story of Margaret was dramatised in London and acted by the late Mr. Laurence Irving and his wife. A correspondence thereupon appeared in the _East Anglian Daily Times_ in which it was hinted that Mrs. Reiby, a Staffordshire girl, was transported in 1791 for the same offence of horse stealing.[14]

No one can read the book without perceiving that all the conversations are fictitious. Mr. Cobbold was no Shakespeare, and he makes all his characters talk in the same style as (if report be true) he conversed himself. The whole of the Barry incidents may be fictitious; for if the details given were true, everybody in Suffolk must have known who Margaret’s husband was. The father of Edmund and John “Barry” was the discoverer of crag shells as manure and was a farmer and miller at Levington Hill, the next parish to Nacton. But even then the author may have used pardonable license. Still the last letter of Margaret’s which the author declares he received from his mother cannot be genuine. It is signed Margaret “Barry,” and it says expressly that she was married to the man who had loved her fruitlessly when the family lived at Nacton. In point of fact Margaret never married.

Had the book been a document written many centuries ago, there would be suggested grave doubts whether such a woman ever existed; as it is, the Cobbold family have lived in Ipswich in unbroken succession during the past century; and documents, like the original gaol-delivery in 1797 and the exemption of Mr. Cobbold from any parish offices for arresting the culprit, prove beyond doubt the existence of Margaret Catchpole.

As, however, the subject of these lectures is ‘English social life,’ I shall now give some extracts from the book before me, and from Crabbe’s biography to shew how the peasantry lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.[15]

Even to this day if you enter a harvest field in Suffolk at reaping time you will hear the old Norman French demand for “_Largess_” and you will be expected to give it. Mr. Cobbold gives in his book a description of a harvest home, many features of which are still remembered. The farmer lodged all the single men in his house, but the married men (known as hinds) lived in the neighbouring cottages. When the last sheaf of corn was conveyed to the stack-yard, the barn was covered with green leaves and the sheaf brought in with shouting and blowing of the harvest horn. The farmer then gave an ample supper to the labourers, and he, his wife, and daughters waited on their guests. The head man of the harvest field acted as “lord of the feast.” The chief song was called “Hallo Largess,” and was in honour of the division of the Largess obtained in harvest time among the reapers. Here is a verse of the song quoted by our author:

“Now the ripening corn In the sheaves is borne, And the loaded wain Bring home the grain. The merry, merry reapers sing And jocund shouts the happy harvest hind Hallo Large, Hallo Large, Hallo Largess.”

“At evening when the work of the day is over,” to quote from “Margaret Catchpole,” “all the men collect in a circle, and Hallo, that is cry, “Largess.” Three times they say in a low tone, “Hallo Large! Hallo Large! Hallo Large!” and all, hand in hand, bow their heads almost to the ground; but after the third monotonous yet sonorous junction, they lift up their heads, and, with one burst of their voices, cry out “Gess.” I cannot help wondering whether this semi-barbarous custom which prevailed in Suffolk survive in those marvellous yells in which the exuberant spirits of youth in the highly civilized universities of America now find a vent.

Allusion has been made to the superstition of the East Anglian peasantry, and a most interesting example is given in Thomas Colson, better known in Ipswich as Robinson Crusoe, the fisherman on the Orwell. He had built a boat for himself of the strangest materials and was constantly at work on the river. His skill was wonderful, and he is described as a perfect fisherman, quiet, steady, active, and thoughtful. In character he was singularly benevolent, never refusing to help anyone in distress. To quote Mr. Cobbold: “The writer of these pages knew Colson well. He has often as a boy been in a boat with him, and always found him kind and gentle.”

The old man’s mania was probably only an exaggeration of the belief of his time or at any rate of his youth. He was a firm believer in wizards and witchcraft. He fancied himself surrounded by evil spirits. He knew their names, their propensities, how they afflicted men, and his great study was to prevent their malign influence. His trust in charms was absolute, and his whole body was hung with amulets, rings, bones of horses, verses, etc., each of which he declared to be efficacious against a certain spirit. If he lost one of his many charms, he believed himself specially liable to attack by the demon, against whom it was a prophylactic. That he had learned much from folklore is evident from the fact that though often questioned about the different demons who tormented him, he never deviated from his ordinary account of them; and no one ever found him tripping as to their names or attributes. Though subject to hallucinations, he must have learned his demonology somewhere; and there seems to me little doubt that among the less educated folk in East Anglia there was, down to the end of the eighteenth century, a belief and a knowledge of the different powers of evil little different from that of the Middle Ages or the days when witchcraft was dreaded by all the inhabitants of England of every class.[16]

The primitive character of rural life at a comparatively late period is seen in the admirable description of Mr. Tovell’s house in the Life of the Poet Crabbe, written by his son, which fully attests the accuracy of his younger contemporary--Mr. Cobbold. Mr. Tovell, whose property Mrs. Crabbe inherited, was a yeoman farmer possessed of a very considerable freehold property whose income, £800 ($4000), for those days was considerable. A landowner of such comparative wealth in the eighteenth century might well aspire to a place among the gentry of the county, but Mr. Tovell possessed a sturdy independence which forbade him taking any position in which he might feel himself ill at ease. A yeoman he was by education and such he was determined to remain: “Jack,” he said, “will never make a gentleman.” Nevertheless, says Mr. Crabbe, he possessed a native dignity of his own. The following is a description of his and his worthy wife’s menage at Parham. I quote somewhat at length.

“His house was large and the surrounding moat, the rookery, the ancient dovecot, and the well-stored fishponds were such as might have suited a gentleman’s seat of some consequence; but one side of the house immediately overlooked the farm-yard, full of all sorts of domestic animals and the scene of constant bustle and noise. On entering the house, there was nothing at first sight to remind one of the farm: a spacious hall paved with black and white marble, etc., etc. But the drawing room, a corresponding dining parlour, and a handsome sleeping apartment upstairs, were all _tabooed_ ground and made use of on great and solemn occasions only--such as rent days and an occasional visit with which Mr. Tovell was honoured by a neighbouring peer. At all other times the family and their visitors lived entirely in the old-fashioned kitchen along with the servants. My great-uncle occupied an arm chair.... Mrs. Tovell sat at a small table on which, in the evening stood one small candle in an iron candlestick...; in winter a noble block of wood, sometimes the whole circumference of a pollard, threw its comfortable warmth and cheerful blaze over the whole apartment.

“At a very early hour in the morning, the alarm called the maids and their mistress also:... After the important business of the dairy and a hasty breakfast, their respective employments were again resumed: that which the mistress took for her especial privilege being the scrubbing of the floors of the state-apartments.”

Once a new servant was found doing this, and thus spoke the good lady: “_You_ wash such floors as these? Give me the brush this instant and troop to the scullery and wash that, madam.... As true as G--d’s in heaven, here comes Lord Rochford to call on Mr. Tovell. Here, take my mantle (a blue woollen apron), and I’ll go to the door.”

The family dined together--the heads sat at the old kitchen table--the maids at a side table, called a bouter, the farm men stood in the scullery. With the principals at the table any stranger who happened to come in dined, even if he was a travelling ratcatcher, tinker, or farrier. “My father,” Mr. Crabbe goes on to say, “well describes in the ‘Widow’s Tale,’ my mother’s situation when living in her younger days at Parham:

“But when the men beside their stations took, The maidens with them, and with these the cook; When one huge wooden bowl before them stood, Filled with huge balls of farinaceous food; With bacon, mass saline! where never lean Beneath the brown and bristly rind was seen: When from a single horn the party drew Their copious draughts of heavy ale and new; When the coarse cloth, she said, with many a stain, Soil’d by rude hands who cut and came again; She could not breathe, but, with a heavy sigh, Reined the fair neck, and shut the offended eye; She minced the sanguine flesh in pastimes fine And wondered much to see the _creatures_ dine.”

Then Mr. Crabbe goes on to describe Mr. Tovell’s cronies, who came after dinner, and enjoyed their punch, prosperous farmers or wealthy yeomen like himself. Their talk was at times too much for Mrs. Tovell, who withdrew; but “the servants, being considered much in the same point of view as the animals dozing on the hearth, remained.”

The life of Crabbe the poet as told by his son is an admirable piece of biography, and the Rev. George Crabbe, junr., was to my mind at least as good a realist in prose as his father in poetry. I wonder if I am right in conjecturing that you in New England had at the same time old farmers not very unlike Mr. Tovell who lived in prosperous simplicity like the old Suffolk Yeoman, rough in manner, coarse in expression, and blunt in sensibility, yet with an honest independence of character which redeemed much which to our eyes may seem repulsive.[17]

But the object of my remarks in this lecture has been to endeavour to give you an idea of what England, or part of it, was like about 1800; because I have another side of the picture to shew in my next lecture. The primitive simplicity of the peasant and the farmer was doomed to disappear, and the process had already begun. Still, side by side with a luxurious civilisation there were many traces of a roughness belonging to an early period in human development. To bring these facts into light, I do not think that the choice of my native county of Suffolk is a bad one.