VII. 6. 1604. July. Aug. was, nor the circumstances of her parents; neither when In all that relates to Alice Barnham the writers of 7. More than a year ago, in writing to his cousin Cecil, Bacon mentioned his having found a handsome maiden to his mind. She loved him and he loved her. But her mother, a widow and again a wife, having made two good matches for herself, has set her heart on making great alliances for her girls. In part to please her, still more to glorify his bride, Bacon waits and toils that he may lay at her feet a settled fortune and a more splendid name. The family into which-when he can steal an hour from the courts of law and the pursuits of science-he goes a-courting, and in which he is now an accepted lover, consists of four girls, their pretty mother, and a bold, 7. Bacon to Cecil, July 3, 1603; Notes on the Pakington Family in Wotton's Baronetage, ed. by Kimber and Johnson, i. 180. Wotton's account was derived from a MS. History of Sir John Pakington written by the Rev. Mr. Tomkins, a Prebendary of Worcester, preserved in Wotton's time at Westwood Park. The MS. is now lost. 1604. handsome, heady stepfather of fifty-six: a group of persons VII. 7. notable from their private stories, and of romantic interest from their loves and feuds with the philosopher, and from the part they must have had in shaping his views of the felicities and infelicities of domestic life. 8. The four young girls are the orphan daughters of Benedict Barnham, merchant of Cheapside and alderman of his ward; an honest fellow, who gave his wife a good lift in the world, and left his children to take their chance of rising among men who, with all their sins, are never blind to the merits of women blessed with youth, loveliness, and wealth. Alice is the first to fall in love; but the three hoydens who now romp around her, and perhaps get many a hug and kiss from her famous lover, will soon be in their turns followed for their bright eyes and brighter gold. Elizabeth will marry Mervin Touchet, Earl of Castlehaven, that miserable wretch who, when his first young wife, the hoyden of to-day, is in her grave, will expiate on the block the foulest crime ever charged against an English peer. The two little things now playing at Alice's knee will become, in due time, Lady Constable and Lady Soames. The mother of these girls was a daughter of Humphrey Smith, of Cheapside, silkman to the Queen. Eager, lovely, and aspiring, she won the alderman of her ward -an admirable city match; but she meant and means to rise yet higher in the world, and heaven has given her the strength to fight her way. Of the four husbands whom she has made, or has still to make, the happiest of their sex, each is to be in his turn a loftier one than 8. Wotton, i. 180-186; Nash's History of Worcestershire, i. 352; Collins' Peerage, art. Audley.' Aug. 1604. Aug. VII. 8. the last. She has buried a citizen. She will, in turn, bury her knight. She will then marry a baron, and, on his death, an earl. Barnham was her early choice. When he left her with the four girls and a great estate, Sir John Pakington, of Hampton Lovet, ancestor of that Worcestershire baronet who is said to have sat to Addison for the portrait of Sir Roger de Coverley, proffered to console her with his hearty affection and his good old name. The widow was not perverse. If she wept for the dear alderman of Cheapside, it was in a coach emblazoned with the mullets and wheatsheafs, and with a handsome and jovial knight at her side. 9. Sir John has been a father to the four girls; for if rough and ready, apt to quarrel and quick to strike, he has a gentle and manly heart. A gentleman with due pride in his long line and his broad lands, in his length of leg and width of chest, he is known at Christchurch and on Richmond-green as Lusty Pakington; and the good old Queen, who liked to see a man a Man, made him, for his brave looks, a Knight of the Bath. A great swimmer, an adroit swordsman, few who can help it ever care to wait the shock of his hasty temper or his vigorous thrust. The great man of his country-side, he sends his buck for the judges' table at assizes, and has his name put first on every commission from the Crown, whether the shire is called to raise forces against Spain, build lighthouses in the Bristol Channel, or provide for the wants of sick and disabled troops; but when orders from the Crown 9. Council Reg., Aug. 24, 1600, June 6, Oct. 13, 1601; Wotton, i. 180; The Camden Society's Miscellany, iv. 50. There is a portrait of Sir John at Westwood Park. My impressions of him are mainly derived from a multitude of private papers preserved at Westwood, free access to which I owe to the obliging courtesies of the Right Hon. Sir John Pakington, Bart., his descendant and successor. 1604. Aug. oppose his own particular humour, as they sometimes VII. 9. do, he quietly puts them in the fire. The Privy Council has to be rather plain and rough with the jovial knight. Once he laid a wager to swim against three stout gallants from Westminster to London-bridge; but the Queen forbade the match, lest some of the fools should get drowned. He has a passion for building and digging on a princely scale. He buys a whole forest of trees for his salt-pits and for the great house which he is building at Westwood Park, and he sinks a great farm of a hundred acres under water that he may have room to swim and fish. Debt catches the generous spendthrift in its claws; and that which could not force him into meanness, lures him, at the age of fifty, into love. When maddened by duns, he swore to be free of such rogues, even if he had to give up London, and live on bread and verjuice. News that Sir John was going to forsake the town, to sell horses and dogs, and, for the time to come, live on his own estate, shoot in the woods round Hampton Lovet, and stick to the sessions of Worcester, as his father and grandfather had done before him, soon got wing; when sixty stout gentlemen and yeomen of the shire, his friends and tenants, seated in their own saddles, pricked up to London, and waited for him at the palace-gates while he went in to bid the Queen adieu. Sorry to miss so fine a gentleman from her court, Elizabeth gave him an estate in Suffolk, worth from eight to nine hundred pounds a year, traitor's land. Off he spurred to take possession; but, on gaining the door of his new house, he found there a mourning lady with her children in despair. In place of kicking them out into the street, he ran away himself, nor ever rested in his bed till he got the Queen to take back her gift and bestow it on the weeping lady and her little brood. When of 1604. Aug. VII. 9. a good friend in the city whispered in his ear the name of widow Barnham, the great affectionate fellow, wanting to dig and build, and having no objection to four pretty girls to romp with him and love him, as they were sure to do, dashed into Cheapside, told his bashful little tale, and the young widow, wooed for the second time in her life, said Yes. 10. A brood of Pakingtons has joined the brood of Barnhams-Mary, Ann, and John their names. Mary will live to become Lady Brook; Ann first to become Lady Ferrars, then Countess of Chesterfield; Jack will be the first baronet of his line; and his son, Jack also, will be the famous cavalier who sacrificed so much for Charles the First, and who married Lady Dorothy, the friend of Hammond, and the reputed author of The Whole Duty of Man.' The Barnhams and Pakingtons keep house together; in summer-time at Hampton Lovet, among the oaks and apple-trees; in term and sessions, when the world rides up to town, they hire a lodging in the Strand, over against the door of the Savoy church. Their home is in Worcestershire a big stone house, in a wooded dell, close by Hampton-brook, and at the foot of Hornsgrove-hill: a pile with flanking wings, a trim parterre in front, and five huge lanterns on the roof, from which nothing can be seen save the square plain tower of the village church, the clasping zone of wood, and now and then a curl of ascending smoke from the Droitwich salt-pans. Near a mile from Hampton Lovet lie the ruins of an ancient abbey, which may possibly have been the scene 10. I derive these details from the Westwood MSS., the stained glasses of Hampton Lovet church, and personal inspection of the localities, with the valuable aid of Sir John and Lady Pakington. |