A Political Biography of Alexander Pope

Pat Rogers

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Edition: 1
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317315544
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This is the first study to assess the entire career of Alexander Pope(1688–1744) in relation to the political issues of his time.

PART I: WILLIAM AND ANNE, 1688–1714

1 NATURE AND NURTURE

Like most of us, Alexander Pope was formed both by his family and by a broader environment. His genetic inheritance, as the child of quite elderly parents, merged with the effects of his upbringing, which took place first in the heart of London, then briefly in the outlying village (as it then was) of Hammersmith, and finally in the rural seclusion of Windsor Forest. Over the years the young man joined a set of wider communities, each of which had its own particular religious, social and geographic base. These separate influences combined to make him by the age of twenty-five essentially the man he would remain. Equally they contributed a great deal to the character of his poetry, and to the nature of the writer that he ultimately became.

1

Unspotted Names! and memorable long,

If there be Force in Virtue, or in Song.

Of gentle Blood (part shed in Honour’s Cause,

While yet in Britain Honour had Applause)

Each Parent sprung.

Epistle to Arbuthnot (TE, vol. 4, p. 126)

Once upon a time – it now seems very distant – people generally cared more about the obligations of children than the responsibilities of parents. As a dutiful son, Alexander Pope felt a strong sense of filial respect. His lifelong behaviour shows that he loved his father and mother, and strove to be a proud and worthy offspring. On the face of things they were ordinary enough, and they certainly could not have anticipated that their child would make such a mark in the world. From his father, the younger Pope took not just his name but a deep commitment to the values of the principled recusant community, who were forced to give up so much because of their loyalty to their Catholic faith. We know less of his mother, and since she lived her days entirely in the domestic sphere it is likely that she embodied for Alexander qualities of Christian charity, homely virtue and simple piety. In her later years he saw her as a beacon in his life, or more precisely a lighted taper, as in a letter to Lady Mary Wortley Montagu around 1718:

I have yet a Mother of great age and infirmitys, whose last precarious days of life I am now attending, with such a solemn pious kind of officiousness, as a melancholy Recluse watches the last risings and fallings of a dying Taper.

(Corr., vol. 1, p. 469)

This phrase, as Maynard Mack pointed out,¹ must go back to a line in the Apocrypha. It reads in the Douai Bible version Ecclesiasticus 26:22: ‘As the lamp shining upon the holy candlestick, so is the beauty of the face in a ripe age’. Pope remained devoted to his mother for as long as she lived, citing her objections as a prime reason why he could never convert to Anglicanism. She even pretended to find his ministrations to her in old age unduly burdensome, as Magdalen Rackett reported: ‘Mrs Pope complain’d that most Children plagu’d their Parents with Neglect; that he did so much with perpetually teasing [irritating] her with his Over-fondness and Care’.² When Edith died peacefully just short of her ninetieth birthday, her son described the bedside scene with a pardonable hint of exaggeration: ‘It wou’d afford the finest Image of a Saint expir’d, that ever Painting drew’ (Corr., vol. 3, p. 374).

Edith, or Editha, Pope (1643–1733) came from a family long settled in York, as one of probably sixteen children who were born to William Turner (1597–1665) and his wife Thomasine, née Newton (1604–81).³ She was christened at Worsborough, Yorkshire, on 18 June 1643. This was a village near Barnsley, in a part of this largely unindustrialized county that was already known for coal mining and metalwork. Daniel Defoe gave the place a miss, with just a reference in passing to

a Town call’d Black Barnsley, eminent still for the working in Iron and Steel; and indeed the very Town looks as black and smoaky as if they were all Smiths that liv’d in it; tho’ it is not, I suppose, call’d Black Barnsley on that Account, but for the black Hue or Colour of the Moors, which being covered with Heath, (or Heather, as ’tis called in that Country) look all black, like Bagshot Heath, near Windsor.⁴

Pope made a single trip to York, doubtless in part as a sentimental journey to his mother’s old home, but he does not appear to have relished an encounter with Black Barnsley. It would have been a reasonably familiar landscape, since his sister lived on the edge of Bagshot Heath, and he had to cross this notoriously dangerous stretch of the highway when travelling between London and Berkshire.

A little information has come to light on Edith’s eldest sister Christiana as a result of her marriage to Samuel Cooper (1609–72), the greatest English miniature painter of the seventeenth century. Edith had three brothers, but none of them survived into her son’s lifetime. She may have left York before her mother’s death. At some date following June 1684 she married the widower Alexander Pope senior. Her only child was the poet, born in 1688. Like many members of the Turner family, she adhered to the Catholic faith. After the death of her husband in 1717, she continued to live with her son and moved to Twickenham in 1719. By this time, with her health infirm, she received the loving care of her son. She suffered from intermittent fevers and from jaundice. Sometimes in his absence she was attended by Martha Blount. From the later 1720s she spent her life as an almost permanent invalid. In October 1730, after a fall into the fire at home, her clothes were set in flames, but luckily she escaped burns and made a slow recovery (see Chapter 8). At this stage Pope feared that she was on the point of death, but again her resilient constitution saw her through. She was, however, lapsing into some form of senile dementia.

We can trace back Pope’s ancestry for several generations on both sides. His maternal ancestors, the Turners, have been located as early as the fifteenth century. The family was settled around York until shortly before the poet’s day. Its members had hovered between Catholic and Protestant faiths for several generations: some of Edith’s siblings clung to the Roman Catholic faith, while others were Protestants. In the Epistle to Arbuthnot Pope paid a warm tribute to his parents, quoted as the epigraph above. The gentle blood that he claimed his family had shed refers to the death of two of Edith’s brothers, who took up the royalist cause in the Civil War. It appears that Edith inherited most of the family’s money, including some possibly left by another brother who is said to have become a general in the Spanish army. However, there are signs that this fortune had been steadily depleted in the first half of Mrs Pope’s life.

The most famous individual on either side of the family tree was the painter Samuel Cooper, who as we have seen married Pope’s maternal aunt. The young man did not know any of his uncles, but Christiana Cooper, his godmother, survived until he was almost five and bequeathed him a painted china dish, and (subject to a life interest on the part of her sister Elizabeth) her books, pictures and medals, ‘set in gold or otherwise’.⁵ In turn, Elizabeth Turner lived until he reached manhood: a spinster, she seems to have lived with the Popes, and she must have been the ‘old aunt’ who taught the boy to read (Anecdotes, vol. 1, p. 8). Another sister, Jane, survived until after Christiana’s death in 1693. From his aunt Alice descended a family, the Mawhoods, with whom Pope later had some contact. In the poet’s own lifetime, he would forge his most significant contacts with the family of his half-sister Magdalen Rackett.

Alexander Pope, senior (1646–1717), father of the poet, worked as an import-export merchant dealing in ‘Hollands’, that is, Flemish lace. On the paternal side, the Popes derived from Hampshire and most if not all adhered to the reformed religion. Alexander’s great-grandfather kept an inn at Andover, in the north of the county, and the publican’s son became an Anglican clergyman who served in the parish of Thruxton in Hampshire, close to Andover. The merchant was the posthumous child of the clergyman Alexander I (d. 1646), who had married Dorothy Pine (d. 1670). Meanwhile a sister, Mary (1636–94), became the second wife of another man of the church, Rev. Ambrose Staveley, rector of Pangbourne, Berkshire. Ambrose died a matter of weeks after young Alexander was born, so there cannot have been any first-hand contact between the two. But as Mary Staveley lived on for another six years, she may have been known to the poet – the family seat of his close friends the Blounts lay at Mapledurham, barely two miles away on the other side of the Thames from Pangbourne. Family relations had apparently been good: in 1676 Anne Staveley, a daughter of the vicar by his first wife, left considerable bequests to her step-mother and step-uncle. She also remembered William Pope, a brother who came between Mary and Alexander. After the death of Alexander I, his widow Dorothy had moved a fairly short distance to Micheldever, on the other side of Andover, where her father also served as a parson in the Church of England. These facts show how solidly rooted the Popes were in the adjoining counties of Hampshire and Berkshire, and how many ties they had to the clergy.

However, the career of Alexander II took a completely different turn. He went into business in London with William, and is said to have completed his apprenticeship by 1669, when his mother divided between her sons the considerable sum of £1,000 to give them a good start.⁶ If so, he must still have adhered to the Protestant faith at this date. He may have spent time pursuing his trading career in either Lisbon or more likely Flanders. By 1671 he had come back to London and lodged for the next two years at least in the parish of St Bennet Fink, a huddle of just eight streets and alleys which clustered around the newly restored church in Threadneedle Street. A document in 1675 places him in Broad Street, which ran into the same road a little way up from the Royal Exchange: part of this thoroughfare lay in the parish of St Bennet. Within three years he had become a householder, with a wife, boy (a short-lived son) and a certain Mary – who is most likely Mary Beach, the child’s wet-nurse. She performed the same function when little Alexander was born, ten years later, and stayed with the family right up to her death in 1725. After his first wife Magdalen died, he went into lodgings again with a neighbour, having presumably left his daughter and Mary with the Staveleys in Pangbourne. Thus far the archives, scanty as they are, are sufficient to indicate an orthodox progress in commercial life, with a gradually increasing position in the community until he met with a reverse in the loss of Magdalen.⁷ He conducted much of his trade with the American colonies.

We know very little about the elder Pope’s first wife, except that she passed away in August 1679 and was buried at St Bennet Fink’s church on 1 September. Possibly she died in giving birth to her daughter, the poet’s half-sister Magdalen, later Rackett (d. 1749). The couple had two children: as well as the girl, there was a boy named after his father, who died at an early age in August 1682. This time the burial took place at Pangbourne, conducted by Ambrose Staveley, brother-in-law of the child’s father. It may be, as Mack has speculated, that the bereaved husband left the two infants in the care of the Staveley family while he carried on his business and looked for a new wife.⁸ In any case, at some date after June 1684 the widower entered into matrimony once more. His bride, Edith Turner, was over forty by the time of the marriage.

A hiatus then appears in the records. We pick up traces of Alexander senior in the summer of his son’s birth, when the ratebooks show him again as a ‘landlord’ in the Lombard Street precinct. After the ascent of William and Mary to the throne, he was listed in a roll of declared papists, now a suspect group, as a ‘merchant’ in the parish of St Edmund, the church that stood physically nearest to his son’s birthplace in Plough Court. In 1690 the rating assessment describes him as a papist and as ‘unfree’, that is not a member of a City guild who had been ‘freed’ after completing his apprenticeship. He has a wife, two children and three servants. The assessment of just over one guinea (£1.05) indicates that he was levied at the double rate imposed on Catholics.

After he had established a cosy fortune of something like £10,000, Pope senior was able to retire in 1688. One motive for this action seems to have been a quarrel with his brother William, although a more likely reason for his abrupt exit may lie in the political realities of the day, caused by ‘the immediate crackdown of William and Mary’s government on London papists’.⁹ By this time he had taken up residence in Plough Court in the City, where his famous son was born in the year of his retirement.

The elder Pope seems to have become pretty thoroughly urbanized, with his concerns focused chiefly on the trading world. Indeed, he might well have stayed in London for the remainder of his retirement, which lasted almost thirty years, had not government legislation forced his hand. After the Revolution of 1688, papists endured a series of restrictive measures imposed by parliament. Eventually the Popes made a token compliance with the Ten Mile Act and moved out from the City to Hammersmith, west of London. This was their home from the summer of 1692 until the end of the decade. As we shall shortly see, Mr Pope later acquired a house at Binfield in Berkshire from his son-in-law, Magdalen’s husband Charles Rackett. The family moved out to the country around 1700 and remained there until around April 1716, when further anti-Catholic measures led the family to settle at Chiswick. By the standards of the time, this was an itinerant way of life. In following the writer’s career, we shall be able to observe how this pattern of disruption helped to form his view of recent history, as well as opening up different vistas on which his poetic imagination could feed. In this sense the personal was always political for Alexander junior.

2

Like (probably) Daniel Defoe and (barely) John Keats, but unlike other authors of the Cockney school, Pope was born within the sound of Bow Bells. He came into the world near the heart of the ‘square mile’, during the same year that his father retired from his business as a linen merchant, 1688.¹⁰ No evidence has come to light showing that the elder Pope served an apprenticeship or gained his freedom. Even if he did, as a converted Catholic, Alexander senior would have found great difficulty in swearing the oath of loyalty to the monarch, as freemen were required to do: within six months of the birth of the new son, William of Orange had landed at Torbay and within three more he had accepted the throne along with his wife Mary. By that time Mr Pope had given up trade, having made a competent fortune.

He had run his business from a narrow four-storey house at the foot of Plough Court, looking towards the eastern end of Lombard Street, long known as a hub of banking, close to where it meets Gracechurch Street. The area had been devastated in the Great Fire, and the Popes’ plain but sturdy brick home must have dated from the period of reconstruction. Despite heavy damage sustained in the Blitz, Plough Court itself remains as a covered alleyway, about sixty yards long, running south to Lombard Court. Tradition has it that the Popes rented no. 2, a house which survived into the middle of the nineteenth century. Soon after it was occupied by Salem Osgood, a Quaker who also worked in the drapery trade. This property passed in 1715 to the Bevan family, who became one of the leading pharmaceutical firms in the capital. They too were Quakers, and also mainstays of the anti-slavery movement. The character of the area at this period in this era is well conveyed in John Strype’s edition (1720) of The Survey of London:

But now for the South side of Lombard Street. Betwixt Grasschurch Street and St. Clements Lane, are these Courts and Alleys, viz. White Hart Court, which hath a Passage through an Entry, into another Court so called, which leadeth into Grasschurch Street, a Place well inhabited by Wholesale Dealers, and most by Quakers, where they have their Meeting-house … Plough Yard hath a good Free Stone Pavement, and the Houses well built and inhabited. Three Kings Court, well inhabited by Wholesale Dealers and others.¹¹

If not exactly an upscale area, it was a busy, prosperous part of town, where the ambitious could pursue their goals in life. Sadly for Alexander and his family, after 1688 these opportunities existed only in an attenuated form, if at all, for people like them.

The Popes’ residence lay just a short walk from the newly rebuilt Royal Exchange, as well as from East India House, and not much further from the historic centre of municipal affairs, the Guildhall. In 1694–5 the newly founded Bank of England would open its doors first at Mercers’ Hall and then at Grocers’ Hall, off Poultry, both close to the Exchange and a comfortable step from Plough Court. (Only in 1734 would the Bank acquire its more famous location in Threadneedle Street.) Further along Lombard Street to the west came the General Post Office, overseeing a significant sector of mercantile communications, and next door from 1691 Lloyd’s coffee-shop, the home of the growing insurance industry. Across the road lay the entrance to Exchange Alley, which was to achieve a dubious fame as the epicentre of speculative activity at the time of the South Sea Bubble. Pope senior would not live to see that event or the erection of the new South Sea House in Threadneedle Street, though he would have known the old structure on this site. His son, an investor in the company, undoubtedly grew familiar with both buildings. Taken together, these institutions constituted the main locus of the Financial Revolution, a series of developments which dominated City life during the lifetime of Alexander Pope junior. They would feature prominently in his poetry of the 1730s, as we shall see in Chapter 8. The symbolism of this topographic connection seems all too neat.

In this house young Alexander spent the first four or five years of his life. The property stood across the road from Plough Court, in the small parish of St Edmund the King, which Chris...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Dates and Quotations
• Sources
• Introduction
• Part I: William and Anne, 1688–1714
• Part II: George I, 1714–27
• Part III: George II, 1727–44
• Epilogue: After Walpole
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index