BARHAM: THE AUTHOR OF THE INGOLDSBY LEGENDS

There are coteries, circles inner and outer, in the world of letters, and there have always been. There are some in this time of ours whose members think they are of the giants whose memory the world will not willingly let die. There were other coterie when the nineteenth century was but newly come into its second quarter, when the period that is now known as Early Victorian was in the making, and when the Queen was young. The members of those literary brotherhoods are gone, each one to his place, and the memories of the most of them, of the books they wrote, the jokes they cracked, of their friendships and quarrels, are dim and dusty to-day. The taste in humour and pathos is not the taste of this time, which laughs at the pathos, and finds the humour, when not dull, merely spiteful and vindictive. When you rise from a perusal of Douglas Jerrold's wounding wit, you think him ungenerous and a cad, De Quincey's frolics merely elephantine, Hood's facilities dull, and Leigh Hunt's performances but journalism.

All this is but the foil to show the brilliant humour, the fun, and the truly pathetic note of Richard Harris Barham's writings to better effect. Time has breathed upon the glass through which we see the lives and performances of Barham's contemporaries, and has obscured our view of them; but the author of the Ingoldsby Legends remains, almost alone among that Early Victorian band, as acceptable to-day (nay, perhaps even more acceptable) than he was fifty years ago.

The Ingoldsby Legend will never be allowed to die. Indeed, we live in times when their admirable sanity might well be invoked as a counterblast to modern neurotic conditions, and a healthy revulsion from superstitious revivals. Written at that now historic time when the Ritualistic innovations and tendency towards Roman Catholicism of the new school of theology at Oxford were agitating English thought, they express the common-sense scorn of the healthy mind against the mystification and deceit of the religion that the Reformation pitched, neck and crop, out of England, close upon three hundred and seventy years ago, and for which the large-minded tolerance of to-day is not enough. Domination is its aim, but no mind that can enjoy the mirth and marvels of the Legends has any room for such ghostly pretensions, and their continued popularity is thus, by parity of reasoning, something of an assurance. The Ingoldsby Legends are included in the Index Expurgatorium of Rome.

Superfine critics have in recent years declared that Barham's fun has grown out of date, and that they cannot read him as of old. But your critic commonly speaks only for himself; and moreover, the superfine, who cannot read Dickens, for example, have been sadly flouted of late by the still increasing popular favour of that novelist.

It was in the fertile county of Kent that Barham was born, in the midst of a district that has ever been the cradle of Barhams. Eight miles to the south of the old Cathedral of Canterbury, and near by the Folkestone Road, there lies, secluded in a deep valley, an old-fashioned farmhouse, unpretending enough to the outward glance, but quaint and curious within. This is the old manor house of Tappington Everard, mentioned so often and so familiarly in the Ingoldsby Legend, and for many centuries the home of Richard Harris Barham's ancestors. "Tom Ingoldsby" himself was, indeed, born at Canterbury, near the Cathedral precincts, and first saw the world beneath the shadow of that great Church, of whose glories he was in after years to tell in his own peculiar and inimitable way. His father, made rich by hops, was a man of consideration at Canterbury, and filled an Aldermanic chair with all the dignity that comes of adipose tissue largely developed. He was, in fact and few words, a fat man, and it was probably in reference to him that Tom Ingoldsby, in later years, wrote of the "aldermanic nose" trumpeting in the Cathedral during service.

The Rev. Richard Harris Barham, the self-styled "Thomas Ingoldsby", claimed descent from the De Bearhams, anciently the FitzUrses, whose possessions extended round about Tappington for many miles of this fair county of Kent. He delighted to think that he was descended from one of those four knights who, on that dark December day of 1170, broke in upon the religious quiet of the Cathedral and slaughtered Becket in the north transept. When their crime was wrought the murderers fled, FitzUrse escaping to Ireland, where he is said to have taken the name of MacMahon, the Irish equivalent of his original patronymic, which was just the Norman-Latin for "Bear's Son".

He died an exile, leaving his Manor of Barham to his brother, who, so odious had the name of FitzUrse now become, changed it for an Anglicised variant, and called himself "De Bearham." Eventually the aristocratic prefix "De" fell out of use, and in course of time even Bearham became "Barham."

The Barhams held place and power here for centuries, giving their name to the village of Barham, which nestles, embowered in foliage, beneath the bleak and bare expanse of Barham Downs; their estates dropping from them little by little until, in the time of James I., the remaining property was alienated by a Thomas Barham, a nerveless, unworthy descendant of the fierce FitzUrses, who sold it to the Reverend Charles Fotherby, Archdeacon of Canterbury. Thus were the Barhams torn from their native soil and rendered landless.

The adjoining manor of Tappington, next Barham, had been held in 1272 by one Gerrard de Tappington, as one knight's fee. In the reign of Henry VIII. it was purchased by a certain John Boys, who died in 1544, when his son, William Boys, alienated a small portion of the demesne to a person named Verrier, and the manor, with the remainder of the demesne, to one Marsh, to whose descendants it passed until at length sold by Colonel Thomas Marsh to Mr. Thomas Harris, hopfactor of Canterbury, who died in 1729, and whose daughter and sole heiress had, by a singular freak of fate, married a John Barham, bringing him not only the old manor of Tappington, or Tapton Wood, as it has sometimes been styled, as her dower, but also some portions of the long-lost lands of those whom he claimed for ancestors, including the manors of Parmstead (called in olden times Barhamstead).

It will be noted that it was a John Barham—not necessarily one of the Barhams of Tappington—who thus secured the Harris heiress. Kent contains more than one family of the name, but let us hope, for the sake of sentiment, that all Barhams, of whatever district, descend from the original assassin. It would certainly have been a grievous thing to Tom Ingoldsby if he had been compelled to cherish a doubt of the blood-boltered genuineness of his own ancestry. We have, indeed, some slightly different versions of what became of the FitzUrse family. One tells us that a branch lingered long in the neighbourhood of Williton, in Somerset, under their proper name, which became successively corrupted into Fitzour, and Fishour, and at last assumed the common form of Fisher. This is good news for Fishers anxious to assume long descent, even if they have to date from a murderer. Time throws an historic condonation over such things, and many an ambitious person who would not willingly kill a fly, and who would very naturally shrink from owning any connection with a homicidal criminal now on his trial, would glow with pride at an attested family tree springing from that blood-thirsty knight.

Another tales gives the Italian name of Orsini as a variant of FitzUrse. If there be anything in it, then assuredly the notorious Orsini of the infernal machine, who attempted the life of Napoleon III., was a reversion to twelfth century type.

Other Barhams there are known to fame: Henry, surgeon and natural history writer, who died in 1726, and was one of the family of Barhams of Barham Court; and Nicholas Barham, lawyer, of Wadhurst, Sussex, who died in 1577, and was descended from the Barhams of Teston, near Maidstone. Nicholas was ever a favourite Christian name with all branches of the family, and Tom Ingoldsby so named his youngest son—the "Little Boy Ned" of the Legends.

The witty and mirth-provoking Reverend Richard Harris Barham, destined to bear the most distinguished name of all his race, was fourth in descent from the peculiarly fortunate John Barham who wedded the Harris hopfields and the Harris daughter. His father, himself a "Richard Harris" Barham—was that alderman of capacious paunch of whom mention has already been made. He resided at 61, Burgate Street, Canterbury, a large, substantial house of pallid grey brick, plain almost to ugliness outside, but remarkably comfortable and beautifully appointed within, standing at the corner of Canterbury Lane. A brick of the garden wall facing the lane may be observed, scratched lightly with "M. B. 1733."

To this house he had succeeded on the death of his father, Richard Barham, in 1784. He did not very long enjoy the inheritance.

The alderman was of truly aldermanic proportions, for he weighed nineteen stone. Existing portraits of him introduce us to a personage of a more than[Pg 13]
[Pg 14] Falstaffian appearance, and the tale is still told how it was found necessary to widen the doorway at the time of his funeral. For eleven years he lived here; and here it was, December 6th, 1788, that the only child of himself and his housekeeper, Elizabeth Fox, was born.

Elizabeth Fox came from Minster-in-Thanet. A miniature portrait of her shows a fair-haired, bright-eyed woman, with abundant indications of a sunny nature, rich in wit and humour. It is quite clear that it was from his mother Ingoldsby derived his mirthful genius, just as in a companion miniature of himself, painted at the age of six, representing him as a pretty, vivacious little boy with large brown roguish eyes, he bore a striking likeness to her.

It is singular to note that the future rector of St. Mary Magdalene in the City of London was as an infant baptised at a church of precisely the same dedication—that of St. Mary Magdalene in Burgate Street, a few doors only removed from his birthplace. The tower only of that church is now standing, the rest having been pulled down in 1871. It is still possible to decipher some of the tablets fixed against the wall of the tower, but exposed to the weather and slowly decaying. There is one to Ingoldsby's grandfather, Richard, who died December 11th, 1784, aged 82, and to his grandmother, Elizabeth Barham, who died October 2nd, 1781, aged 81; and other tablets commemorate his aunts Eliza and Sarah, who died September 26th, 1782, and December 16th, 1784, aged respectively forty-six and forty-four years.

Ingoldsby was only in his seventh year when a very serious thing befell, for his father, the alderman, died in 1795. Those who love their Ingoldsby and everything that was his, as the present writer does, will be interested to know that he was buried at Upper Hardres ("Hards," in the Kentish speech), a small and lonely village, four miles from Canterbury, on the old Stone Street, as you go towards Lympne and Hythe. There, in the village church, high up on the south wall of the nave, the tablet to his memory may be found. What became of Elizabeth Fox is beyond our ken. We are told, in the Life and Letters of Richard Harris Barham, by his son the Reverend Richard Dalton Barham, that she was at the time a confirmed invalid.

To three guardians had been given the administration of the comfortable patrimony of the boy, and by them he was sent to St. Paul's School, then in the City of London. Thence he went to Brasenose, Oxford, leaving the university with a modest B.A., degree in 1811. Meanwhile the villain of the piece had been at work, in the person of a dishonest attorney, one of his guardians, by whose practices his fortune was very seriously reduced. Returning to Canterbury, he seems to have contemplated studying for the law, but quickly relinquished the idea, and prepared himself for the Church. He was admitted to holy orders, and in 1813, in his twenty-fifth year obtained a curacy at Ashford. This was exchanged in the following year for the curacy of the neighbouring village of Westwell. Thus he was fairly launched on his professional career, becoming successively Rector of Snargate and Curate of Warehorne, Minor Canon of St. Paul's and Rector of the united parishes of St. Mary Magdalene with St. Gregory-by-St.-Paul's, and finally, by exchange in 1842, Rector of St. Faith-by-St.-Paul's—a fine mid-nineteenth century specimen of the "squarson." A competent genealogist, an accomplished antiquary, a man of letters, he, by force of his sprightly wit, welded the fragmentary legends of the country—but largely those of his native county of Kent—into those astonishing amalgams of fact and fiction which, published first, from time to time, in Bentley's Miscellany, were collected and issued as the Ingoldsby Legends. It is not the least among the charms of those verses that fact and fiction are so inextricably mixed in them that it needs the learning of the skilled antiquary to sift the one from the other; and so plausible are many of his ostensible citations from old Latin documents, and his fictitious genealogies so interwoven with the names, the marriages and descents of persons, real and imaginary, that an innocent who wrote some years ago to Notes and Queries, desiring further particulars of what he thought to be genuine records, is surely to be excused for his too-ready faith.

The assumed name of "Ingoldsby" is stated by his son to be found in a branch of the family genealogy, but inquiry fails to trace the name in that connection, and it may be said at once that the Kentish Ingoldsbys are entirely figments of Barham's lively imagination. Yorkshire knows a family of that name, of whom Barham probably had never heard anything save their name. He was a man of property, and modestly proud of the descent he claimed, and though by no means rich, his place was among—

He was, in fact, "armigerous", as heralds would say, and the arms of his family were—not those lioncels of the Shurlands impaled with the saltire of the Ingoldsbys, of which we may read in the Legends—but as pictured here. It may be noted that another Barham family—the Barhams of Teston, near Maidstone—bore the three bears for arms, without the distinguishing fesse; and that they are shown thus on an old brass plate in Ashford church, which Ingoldsby must often have seen during his early curacy there.

When, however, he talks of the escutcheons displayed in the great hall of Tappington, charged with the armorial bearings of the family and its connections, he does more than to picturesquely embroider facts. He invents them, and the "old coat" "in which a chevron between three eagles' cuisses sable is blazoned quarterly with the engrailed saltire of the Ingoldsbys"—which Mr. Simpkinson found to be that of "Sir Ingoldsby Bray, temp. Richard I."—is one not known to the Heralds' College.

Behind that farcical "Mr. Simpkinson, from Bath," lurks a real person, and one not unknown to those who have read Britton and Brayley books on Cathedral antiquities. John Britton, the original of Simpkinson, was, equally with his contemporary Barham, an antiquary and genealogist of accomplishment, and a herald of repute. Barham would not have allowed as much, for there was, it would seem, a certain amount of ill-feeling between the two, which resulted in the satirical passages relating to "Mr. Simpkinson" to be met with in the pages of the Ingoldsby Legends. They tell us that he was, among other things, "an influential member of the Antiquarian Society, to whose 'Beauties of Bagnigge Wells' he had been a liberal subscriber"; and that "his inaugural essay on the President's cocked-hat was considered a miracle of erudition; and his account of the earliest application of gilding to gingerbread a masterpiece of antiquarian research." In all this one finds something of that rapier-thrust of satire, that mordant wit which comes of personal rivalry; and the heartfelt scorn of a man who loved architecture, and was, indeed, a member of the first ArchÆological Institute, but who whole-heartedly resented the introduction of picnic parties into archÆological excursions, and revolted at popularising architecture and antiquarian research by brake parties, in which the popping of champagne corks punctuated the remarks of speakers holding forth on the architectural features of buildings in a style sufficiently picturesque and simple to hold the attention of the ladies. Those who have found how unconquerable is the indifference of the public to these things will appreciate to the fullest extent the feelings of Tom Ingoldsby, while yet reserving some meed of admiration for John Britton's labours, which did much to advance the slow-growing knowledge of Gothic architecture in the first half of the century. His work may halt somewhat, his architectural knowledge be something piecemeal and uninformed with inner light; but by his labours many others were led to pursue the study of ecclesiastical art.

But the humour with which Barham surrounded "Mr. Simpkinson's" doings took no count of his accomplishments, as may be seen in the excursion to "Bolsover Priory", narrated in "The Spectre of Tappington". "Bolsover Priory", said Mr. Simpkinson, "was founded in the reign of Henry VI. about the beginning of the eleventh century. Hugh de Bolsover had accompanied that monarch to the Holy Land, in the expedition undertaken by way of penance for the murder of his young nephews in the Tower. Upon the dissolution of the monasteries, the veteran was enfeoffed in the lands and manor, to which he gave his own name of Bolsover, or Bee-Owls-Over (by corruption Bolsover)—a Bee in chief over Three Owls, all proper, being the armorial ensigns borne by this distinguished crusader at the siege of Acre."

Thus far Simpkinson. Now Barham turns, with good effect, on the ignorant sightseers to whom ruins are just a curiosity and nothing more.

"'Ah! that was Sir Sidney Smith,' said Mr. Peters; 'I've heard tell of him, and all about Mrs. Partington, and—'

"'P., be quiet, and don't expose yourself!' sharply interrupted his lady. P. was silenced, and betook himself to the bottled stout.

"'These lands,' continued the antiquary, 'were held in grand sergeantry by the presentation of three white owls and a pot of honey——'

"'Lassy me! how nice!' said Miss Julia. Mr. Peters licked his lips.

"'Pray give me leave, my dear—owls and honey, whenever the king should come a-rat-catching in this part of the country.'

"'Rat-catching!' ejaculated the Squire, pausing abruptly in the mastication of a drum-stick.

"'To be sure, my dear sir; don't you remember that rats once came under the forest laws—a minor species of venison? "Rats and mice, and such small deer," eh?—Shakespeare, you know. Our ancestors ate rats; and owls, you know, are capital mousers——'

"'I seen a howl,' said Mr. Peters."

"Bolsover Priory" is one of those few places mentioned by Ingoldsby that have not been identified with any real place in Kent. It might have been taken to mean the ruins of the Preceptory at Swingfield Minnis, some two miles from Tappington, had not Barham expressly said, in his prefatory notes to the "Witches' Frolic," that they were not the same.

The literary landmarks associated with Barham's residence in London are readily traced. On leaving Kent in 1821 to take up his residence in London, he, for a time, rented the upper part of the house, still standing, No. 51, Great Queen Street, Holborn. There his eldest surviving daughter, Caroline Frances Barham, afterwards Lady Bond, was born, July 22nd, 1823. In 1824, following his appointment to the rectorship of St. Mary Magdalene, the family removed to a house numbered "4" on the south side of St. Paul's churchyard, and there remained until 1839, when an exchange was made to a house in Amen Corner, Paternoster Row—the first house through the gateway—by arrangement with Sydney Smith, who was leaving it to reside in Green Street, Mayfair.

He describes the garden at the back of this house as "containing three polyanthus roots, a real tree, a brown box border, a snuff-coloured jessamine, a shrub which is either a dwarf acacia or an overgrown gooseberry bush, eight broken bottles, and a tortoise-shell tom-cat asleep in the sunniest corner, with a wide and extensive prospect of the back of the 'Oxford Arms,' and a fine hanging wood (the 'new drop' at Newgate) in the distance."

But the sprightly wit, the sound common-sense, the good-natured satire, were doomed to early extinction. It was in the prime of life, and when he might well have looked forward to further consolidating and extending the fame his genius had already brought, that the blow fell which laid him low. He had already, some twenty years earlier, suffered some slight temporary trouble with a sensitive throat, and although in general a robust man, was in that respect peculiarly liable to the weather. It happened, unfortunately, that he was present as a spectator at the opening by the Queen of the new Royal Exchange, October 28th, 1844. It was a bleak day, and, sitting at an open window in Cheapside placed at his disposal by a friend, he caught a chill from whose effects he never recovered. The evil was a stubborn inflammation of the throat, which clung to him throughout the winter, and by degrees reduced the strong man to an alarmingly weak condition. In the February of 1845 he was induced to visit Bath, in the hope of recovery in that mild atmosphere, but an imprudent return to London in the treacherous month of March, in order to attend a meeting of the ArchÆological Association, aggravated the malady. Still, that strong physique struggled against illness, and he once more partly recovered, only to be again laid low by a cold caught at an April vestry meeting in St. Paul's. It was, however, not merely an exaggerated susceptibility to cold that by this time dogged his every excursion into the open air, but the grossly mistaken treatment of his medical man, who had inflamed the malady by applying caustic to the uvula. At the beginning of May, although reduced almost to the condition of a helpless child by his sufferings, he was taken again to the west; this time to Clifton, near Bristol. Unhappily, the local practitioner who was called in to attend him was by no means a properly qualified man, and on hearing of the mistaken treatment already followed, could think of nothing better than to continue it. It is not remarkable, under the circumstances, that he experienced no relief from the climate of Clifton, but grew steadily weaker. It was a sad time, for his wife was simultaneously laid low with illness. Everything devolved upon his daughter, Frances, then only in her twentieth year, for his son Dick was away in Cambridgeshire, doing duty as a clergyman.

The dying man—for the truth could be no longer disguised—kept a spirit of the supremest cheerfulness and Christian courage. His humorous verses on the incidents of his distressing illness—originally composed as replies to the inquiries of anxious friends and afterwards published in the collection of Ingoldsby Lyrics as "The Bulletin," are no whit inferior to the productions of his careless health.

When recovery at Clifton seemed hopeless, he was removed again to London, to the house he had occupied for the last six years, and made a grim joke as they assisted him into the house, on the appropriateness of his being brought at that juncture to Amen Corner. A few days he lay there, life ebbing away from sheer weakness; his mind still clear, and divided between making the most careful disposition of his property and fond memories of that "little boy Ned" who had died, untimely, some years before. It was then he wrote that last poem, the beautiful "As I Laye a-thynkynge," printed at the end of all editions of the Ingoldsby Legends as "The Last Lines of Thomas Ingoldsby." There is not, to my mind, anything more exquisitely beautiful and pathetic in the gorgeous roll of English literature than the seven stanzas of the swan-song of this master of humour and pathos. It is wholly for themselves, and not by reason of reading into them the special circumstances under which they were written, that so sweeping a judgment is made. That they have never been properly recognised is due to the Wardour Street antiquity of their spelling, and still more to that strange insistence which ordains that the accepted wit and humourist must always be "funny" or go unacknowledged. It is a strange penalty; one that would seek to deprive the humourist of all human emotions save that of laughter, and so make him that reproach of honest men—a cynic.

It was on June 17th, 1845, that Barham died, untimely, before the completion of his fifty-seventh year. He was buried in the vaults of his former church, St. Mary Magdalene, Old Fish Street Hill, one of those half-deserted city churches built by Sir Christopher Wren after the Great Fire of London. There he might have lain until now, but for the fire of December 2nd, 1886, which destroyed the building. For at least four years the blackened and roofless ruins stood, fronting Knightrider Street, and then they were removed, to make way for warehouses. The contents of the vaults were at the same time dispersed, the remains of Tom Ingoldsby being removed to Kensal Green Cemetery, while the tablet to his memory was appropriately transferred to St. Paul's, where, in the crypt, it may still be seen.