Chapter Four
The Home Ground
Despite his wanderings and term-time attendance at Oxford, Gilbert had already taken up his first clerical position. He was ordained deacon in April 1746, and almost immediately became curate to his Uncle Charles at Swarraton, Hampshire. As Gilbert’s stipend was only £20 a year he was presumably required only for Sunday services, and he continued to divide the rest of his time between Oxford and Selborne. Oxford was fifty miles away, but he kept a horse in stables there, and at first seemed quite undeterred by the weekly ride. But he was beginning to visit and stay in Oxford less frequently, and by the end of 1748 had given up his rooms there. In March 1749 he received his full ordination. A couple of weeks later his temporary curacy came to an end and, at the age of almost 30, he found himself out of work and back living in the family house.
Gilbert was never comfortable when he had nothing to do, and it was this partial vacuum that coincided with the beginning of a consuming passion for gardening that was to continue until his death. With his father still seemingly incapable of taking responsibility for the Wakes, Gilbert was effectively head of the household, and from late in 1749 he began serious work on the garden.
The land attached to the Wakes was perfect raw material for a combination of horticultural laboratory and pleasure-ground. Gilbert’s father had done a little to improve its condition, but it was still a rather spartan patch, and lay on a sticky, chalky soil that was exceptionally difficult to cultivate. But it had the advantage of size, and of containing three quite distinct components.1
Nearest to the house was a smallish ornamental garden, with an area of lawn edged with flower borders. A wider border of bulbs lay against the house. Between this garden and the foot of the Hanger lay ‘the Park’, a few acres of meadow and pasture divided up into quite narrow fields by tall hedges. Just to the north of the ornamental garden, and projecting a little into these outer fields, was Baker’s Hill, a curious mound that was probably a glacial relic. The soil on Baker’s Hill was lighter and warmer than the surrounding clays, and this was the site chosen for the orchard, and most of the vegetable and melon beds. The whole estate could be viewed from the Wakes against a backdrop of the Hanger.
On 11 April 1750 Mulso wrote from Sunbury: ‘You are now I suppose to be found, like Cyrus, ranging your Trees, & nursing your Plants,’ and added a greeting that suggests that Gilbert had already admitted his special affection for the birds that visited the parish for the summer. ‘I wish you Joy of ye arrival of ye Swallows & ye Swifts, & ye Nightingales, who have been with us about a week or ten Days … I hope in Return for this important Account You will send me word how your Nurseries go, & the true State of Selbourne Hanger.’2
At times it sounds as if the educated cleric with a sophisticated taste for scenery was just a son of the soil after all. But Gilbert’s fascination with the apparently mundane business of planting trees and raising seedlings wasn’t simply an uncomplicated delight in the growth of things – though there is that, and a sharp botanical curiosity as well. The fact is that the garden had become one of the arenas in which the rapidly changing relationship between nature and humankind was being graphically expressed. On one hand was the idea of human dominance, and of putting nature – in this instance quite literally – in its place; on the other, the new notions of nature as worthy of admiration and celebration, perhaps even as a positive force or contributing partner.
By the beginning of the eighteenth century there had already begun to be moves towards more informal garden styles, and a greater interest in the plants that were used. Both Thomas Addison and Gilbert’s acquaintance, Alexander Pope, were important influences on developing tastes, and scourges of the moribund forms of the old style. Pope had poked brilliant fun at their geometrical beds and trees clipped to the quick in a piece in the Guardian. His essay, entitled ‘A Catalogue of Greens’, purports to be a catalogue for a sale of topiary job lots:
ADAM and EVE in Yew; ADAM a little shatter’d by the fall of the Tree of Knowledge in The Great Storm.
St George in Box; his Arm scarce long enough, but will be in a condition to stick the Dragon by next April.3
In the emerging atmosphere where nature was beginning to be regarded as intrinsically interesting and possibly more benign than had ever been imagined, artificiality was giving way to more subtly ‘natural’ discipline. Gardens – at least those of the wealthy – became show cases for the whole range of current aesthetic fads. Landscapes were construed exactly as if they were paintings, with their wildness artfully conjured into perspectives seen at their best from the house; or, more prosaically, studded with clumps of exotic and ‘curious’ trees. Neo-classical scenes in which cattle grazed among Arcadian groves were pitted against Gothick prospects of hovels and melancholy ruins. (In some places the motif of decay was taken to bizarre extremes. In Vauxhall Gardens there was a precursor of the twentieth-century theme park, a Valley of the Shadow of Death, where coffins replaced the crumbling columns and skulls were scattered among the boulders.)
Much of this excess came out of nothing more substantial than the fashionable posturing of the nation’s rich. Yet, amid all the banter, there was a live issue facing anyone who was concerned with finding ways of looking at, writing about, and perhaps even reshaping nature. There was no question yet of abandoning control, of allowing gardens to go wild. It was more a matter of how humans regarded nature and how this affected their involvement. Was the land a kind of canvas where plants, rocks and even animals could be ordered and disposed as if they were paints? Or did it have, so to speak, a plan of its own which should be respected?
Pope himself abhorred the more extravagant conceits of the landscapers and professed to believe in an ideal state of harmony between nature and humanity. But it would be naïve to see him as a disinterested utopian or an early ecologist. He believed in a rather uncritical way in the moral good of Improvement, just so long as it was guided by Reason and Taste, which in turn must be measured against Nature. Reshaping nature was natural to humans (‘whatever is, is right’); its desirability was simply a question of scale and intention. In practice, Pope’s views are so generalized and so blurred by his neat epigrams that he can be made to support any position. His famous lines in the ‘Epistle to Burlington’ (1731) are so sweetly reasonable that they can be read either as a moral prescription or an exoneration:
In all, let Nature never be forgot …
Consult the Genius of the Place in all That tells the water or to rise, or fall,
Paints as you plant, and as you work, Designs.
Although Gilbert greatly admired Pope, he was never guilty of this kind of evasion or generalization, because his focus was always on the particulars of the natural world. Yet he can hardly have failed to be influenced by Pope’s ideas, especially by his wit and his refusal to make a rigid distinction between the works of man and the works of nature. When it came to gardening, Gilbert found nothing incongruous about building picturesque arbours at the same time as observing minutely the germination of seeds.
In 1751 he began recording the results of his activity in what he christened The Garden Kalendar.4 Books with similar titles had been published before this, notably Philip Miller’s The Gardener’s Kalendar (1732) and Richard Bradley’s The Gentleman and Gardener’s Kalendar (1731) but these were all prescriptive instructions as to what should be planted, pruned or picked on this or that day of the year. Gilbert’s Kalendar differed in being an account of what he had done – the sowings and flowerings, the yields and failed crops, and, towering over them all, the effects of the weather. He began to make his entries on loose quarto sheets on 7 January, and as he outlined the sowing of ‘two rows of early Spanish beans’ in what was to remain a bold, straightforward and legible hand, he was beginning one of the very first horticultural documentaries.
The work in that first year was quite prodigious. Throughout what turned out to be one of the most drenching springs in living memory he was planting out the borders and the beds on Baker’s Hill. Vegetables were the first focus of his enthusiasm. He grew more than forty different varieties, including artichokes, endives, mustard and cress, white broccoli, skirret and scorzonera, marrowfat peas, ‘a remarkable long leek’, squashes, cucumbers, all manner of lettuces, and ‘a small crop of onions under Kelsey’s Hedge for picklers’. There were more experimental vegetables, too, including maize, wild rice and potatoes. And in April 1751 he sowed a large bed of sea-kale, whose seed he had gathered from the Devon beaches when he was visiting Nathan Wells. Sea-kale was not brought into general cultivation for another forty years, when it was popularized by a near neighbour of White’s, William Curtis of Alton.
Gilbert’s efforts weren’t directed solely towards vegetables. In the borders close to the house were planted crown imperials, crocuses and pinks. Vines and roses scrambled over the walls and the grass walks leading to the orchard and vegetable beds were edged with tulips, wallflowers and columbines. Even greater concentrations of flowers were bedded out in one of the Park fields, in what Gilbert called ‘basons’. These were large circular pits specially dug in the sticky clay and filled with manure and the rich loam which was brought up from the woods and wet meadows near Dorton. Some basons were reserved for annual flowers – love-in-a-mist, marigolds, marvels of Peru – but most were used for clumps of more stately perennials, such as holly-hocks or martagon lilies, and native wild flowers, like foxgloves and St John’s-worts, which had been transplanted from the Hanger.
How much of the garden work did Gilbert do himself, in the sense of actually wielding the spade? Not all, that is certain. There are many specific references in the Kalendar (and subsequent journals) to people from the village who helped out in one way or another. Some were useful because of particular skills. John Breckhurst planted trees. Will Tanner, the shoemaker’s son, was a crack shot, and was brought in to dispose of birds which were supposedly damaging the fruit crops. Goody Hampton was employed as a ‘weeding woman’ in the summer months. She appears to have been a doughty worker, ‘and indeed, excepting that she wears petticoats and now and then has a child, you would think her a man.’ Less frequently, John Carpenter’s wife also helped with the weeding. Other villagers such as Larby, Thomas Benham and John Carpenter himself were hired at day rates when there was extensive digging or hedge-cutting to do, and to help shift the immense quantities of manure that were used on the hot-beds. Presiding over them all was Gilbert’s loyal retainer Thomas Hoar, who acted as his groom, gardener, scientific assistant and general handyman for forty years. He was a bachelor and slept at the Wakes, and would keep the journals up and write letters about events in Selborne when Gilbert was away. In the garden and in his treatment of plants and animals Thomas showed a delicacy and concern that is more than just a reflection of his employer’s own sensitivity. Gilbert often mentions, with respect, the gentle way he would clear trees and shrubs of snow, or pick insects off the fruit bushes by hand, and his affection and care for Timothy the tortoise. But it’s clear from a number of specific references, and the familiar tone of his descriptions, that Gilbert was personally and actively involved in most of what was being done in the garden – especially when it came to melons, which above all other products of the plant world held Gilbert’s attention during the 1750s.
Melons seemed to hold a fascination for most gardeners in the eighteenth century. Philip Miller, whose exhaustive and influential Gardener’s Dictionary was Gilbert’s chief reference book (he bought copies in both 1747 and 1753) gave four of his considerable pages to them, and remarked: ‘there is not any Plant cultivated in the Kitchen-Garden, which the Gardeners near London have a greater Ambition to produce early and in Plenty.’5 It sounds a rather modish custom from this note, and there certainly is a sense in which melons were an embodiment of eighteenth-century enthusiasms. They were exotic, knobbly enough at times to the point of being fashionably grotesque, and repaid hard work and technical ingenuity with enormous productivity.
Gilbert had been infatuated by melons for some years. After his attack of smallpox in 1748 his Oriel friend John Scrope wrote a bizarre satirical verse called ‘Metamorphosis’, which envisaged Gilbert bloated by fever into the very substance of his obsession:
Corycius long admired (a curious swain!)
The wealth and beauties of Pomona’s reign;
The vegetable world engrossed his heart,
His garden lingering nature help’d by art;
Where in the smoking beds high heap’d appear Salads and mushrooms thro’ the various year.
But of each species sprung from seed or root,
The swelling melon was his favourite fruit;
Other productions kindled some delight In his fond soul, but here he doted quite.
When others wisely to the grot retreat,
And seek a friendly shelter from the heat,
Anxious and stooping o’er his treasure, low Poring he kneels, and thinks he sees it grow.
One day when Phoebus scorch’d the gaping plain, Striving to rise at length he strove in vain,
Fix’d to the spot, exchang’d his shape and name,
A melon turned and what he view’d became.
Ovid would tell you how his roughen’d face*
Retains the network and the fretty grace;
His skin and bones compose the tougher rind;
His flesh compressed retains its name and kind;
Shrunk are his veins, and empty’d of their blood,
Which in the centre forms a plenteous flood.6
By the mid-1750s melon growing had become the major industry of the Wakes garden. The hot-bed (usually referred to grandly as the ‘melon ground’ and itself still something of a novelty in English gardens) was at its maximum 45 feet long and had some 30 cart-loads of dung dug into it annually. And each year, as he began the long ritual of preparing the beds and nursing these temperamental fruits through to maturity, Gilbert seems to have become locked in some personal struggle with the rigours and vagaries of the eighteenth-century climate. His melons hung in a precarious balance between succumbing to mildew or freezing to death and, later, between baking and flooding. The more they were threatened by frost or rain, the more he responded with elaborate concoctions of manure and oak tan-bark, deep digging, and scientific ingenuity.
The details were recorded in minute and enthralling detail in the Kalendar, and there are times during the 1750s (as there were to be increasingly through his life) when one has the feeling that the diaries are not just recording his daily life but in some sense driving it, that the work was being done – and done so deftly – because it had the momentum of a good narrative. There is not much to be gained by asking why he began writing a diary of this kind in the first place. He was inquisitive by temperament, and acutely sensitive to the influence of moment and place. For the present, it will suffice to say that the style of his writing begins to echo more and more the rhythms of his daily life.
A few of the entries from the melon saga for 1758 will give a feeling of the operation. There are more than sixty mentions of the melons and their hot-beds in this year, and it must count as the peak of his enthusiasm. It was also the year he noted in his account book 13s 8d spent in a single day on hired help for deepening the beds, and the year in which he built an extraordinary piped ventilation system for them.7
Jan 17. Finished an earth-house in the melon-ground. It is worked in a circular shape with rods & coped over with the same, & then well thatched: is nine feet over & eight feet high: & has room to hold a good Quantity of mould & a man at work without any inconvenience.
Mar 4–6. Plunged nine melon-pots in the ten-frame, & three in the other frame. Contrived some wooden bottoms to the pots to make the earth turn-out more easily … Sowed one melon seed from that curious Melon [a Cantaloup] brought from Waverley in 1756, in each of the twelve pots Bed heats well.
Mar 18: Melons up some in every pot; they look healthy, & grow apace.
Mar 21: Great snow all the day, & most part of the night; which went off the next day in a stinking, wet fog. Very trying weather for Hot-beds.
April 1: Unusual sunny, scorching weather for a week past. The heat drew the forward Cucumbers, notwithstanding they were constantly shaded; and would have spoiled the melons … had not the pots been raised.
April 13: Worked-up a nine-light melon-bed with 18 good dung-carts of fresh, hot dung, & 80 bushels of fresh tan. I had made this bed just a week before, only two days after the materials were brought in; but finding it to heat violently I ordered it to be pulled to pieces, & cast back again, that it might spend it’s violent Heat.
April 16: So fierce a frost with a South-wind as to freeze the steam which run out in water from between the panes of ye Melon-frames into long Icicles on the Edges of the lights.
April 21: Found the melon-bed so hot still that I did not trust the plants out of the pots. Earthed the bed all over an inch thick to keep down the steam, which in the night had spoiled three of the plants. Bored some holes very deep in the back of the bed to let out the violent Heat.
June 6: Earth’d the hand-glass melons the first time … The plants are strong, & produce plenty of wood; but are strangely blistered in their second leaves by being exposed to the fierce sun while the night-dew was on them.
July 15: Found on my return from Dene about thirteen brace of Cantaleupes set; some very large. Plants in vast vigour with leaves near a foot in Diameter.
Aug 22: Cut the first Cantaleupe, the largest of the Crop: weighed 3pds: 5 oun: & half. It proved perfectly delicate, dry, & firm [despite] the unfavourable weather ever since the time of setting.
Sept 7: Eat a very delicate Cantaleupe: it had a bottle-nose, & grew close to the stem. Sav’d the seed.
Sept 12: Held a Cantaleupe-feast at the Hermitage: cut-up a brace & an half of fruit among 14 people. Weather very fine ever since the ninth.
*
The melon feast was an indication of the way in which gardening, for Gilbert, was not some isolated, academic pursuit but a central part of the celebration of his native ground, and an exceptionally sociable business too. Many of his plants were presents from friends and neighbours. A guelder rose came from John Berriman, artichokes and Hypericums from the vicar. There are five different sources for plants and seeds mentioned in the first dozen entries in The Garden Kalendar. Gilbert was also in touch with a wide network of professional gardeners and merchants. In 1756 he purchased a collection of conifers from Williamson and Co. of Kensington, who had issued their first catalogue only that year, and who went on to become one of the suppliers to Kew Gardens.8 Gilbert also had plants from the foremost gardener of his day, Philip Miller, Fellow of the Royal Society, author of The Gardeners Dictionary and curator of the Chelsea Physic Garden for half the eighteenth century. And, when he was visiting Oxford, he often took the opportunity to bring back a few specimens or seeds from the Botanic Garden.
But, gardening excepted, his life had begun to narrow a little since he vacated his rooms at Oxford in 1748. Only two temporary curacies had come his way in four years: his term at Swarraton that ended in 1748 and a short period as curate-in-charge of Selborne while the incumbent, Dr Bristow, was ill. He took up this last position in October 1751 and, for the duration, moved a hundred yards across Selborne street to live in the vicarage. Mulso, who had recently taken the living of Sunbury and become engaged to Miss Jenny Young, congratulated him on his appointment, and encouraged him in the sermon-writing now to be one of his duties:
I hear that You are snug at the Vicarage; where it is to be presumed that You are preparing Something for ye World. Sermons or Satyrs must come fm Him, who has left the world. The latter will be ye Effect of his Contempt of It; the former (the better Part) his charity to & Pity of it. I had rather therefore that you was employed in ye latter.9 [He means the charity and pity.]
It is worth noting, in the light of the frequent assumption that Gilbert’s deepest regret was that he could never be vicar of Selborne, that it was at precisely the moment when he was occupying that position (albeit temporarily) and spending the winter in the spacious house where he was born, that he felt the pull of Oxford again. He had been informed that it was the turn of Oriel College to fill the office of Junior Proctor, and that he could have an option on the post. It was unusual for a non-resident to be offered such an opportunity, and Gilbert had no hesitation in taking it up. He resigned the Selborne curacy and took up his Proctorial office on 8 April 1752.
The Proctors’ duties are neither very demanding nor very glamorous. They have responsibility for maintaining discipline among members of the University and officiating at certain formal occasions. There are a few apocryphal stories about Gilbert playing the diligent university policeman, including one which supposedly involved the chastising of a worse-for-wear Edward Gibbon, then at Magdalen College; but the attraction of the appointment for him was simply that he had an excuse for living in Oxford again, and being paid for it into the bargain. Mulso was not entirely sure he had done the right thing in accepting the constraints of this ‘honourable Clog’, but, as usual, he gave his support, and underlined it with yet another fanciful Scheme:
I think You have paid the University a great Compliment in accepting of the Sleeves; for as I take your Genius, You are rather Atticus than Tully… and the green Retreats (for they begin now to be the green Retreats) of Selbourne afford more serious Pleasure to your contemplative Mind than ye frequentis Plausus Theatri can to your Ambition. I have a longing Desire to see You in your new Station; but then I want to bring in each Hand a Girl … How prettily would they adjust ye Sleeve, & give a more rakish Air than suits the Academic Form, how would they admire ye Tuft, & how would they fancy the Flap!10
Gilbert was not quite such a committed contemplative as Mulso sometimes liked to imagine; enjoying the nonsense of cutting a dash in academic finery was just as much a part of his character. His purchases of clothes and food and entertainments in the early 1750s suggest a man who had a well-developed facility for adopting a style of life appropriate to wherever he was at the time.11 In Selborne he lived frugally, with few inessential expenses beyond provisions for his pony Mouse and help for the garden. In Oxford he was the thoroughgoing man about town, buying ‘a feather-top’d grizzle wig’ and ‘Norway-Doe gloves’. He had his crest engraved on a set of ‘large polished tea spoons’ and treated the Oriel Masters of Arts to a huge box of biscuits. He went to concerts, gambled at cards (and usually lost), played chess and usually won. His taste in food – at least when it came to luxuries – was sophisticated and rather modern. He had a penchant for lobsters, oysters and crabs, olives and almonds, Seville oranges and baskets of strawberries, and he purchased a great number of salads from the Botanic Garden. (On 16 August 1752 he catered for both present and future appetites, and added to an order of ‘Spinage-seed, garlick, & half a Gallon of Mazagon Beans from Mason ye Garden’r’ two ripe melons for a shilling.)
But this seemingly healthy diet didn’t entirely make up for the outdoor life he had left behind in Selborne, when there was scarcely a day he didn’t walk or work in the garden, and in the autumn of 1752 he had his ‘mens room’ fitted with a dumb-bell. This wasn’t the weighted bar of modern gyms, but it had much the same function. It was, almost literally, a soundless bell – a flywheel with a weight and a rope attached, the user alternately pulling at the rope and being lifted into the air.
Gilbert’s friends and relatives paid him frequent visits during his year as Proctor, and he enjoyed showing them the sights. His sister Becky dropped in on her way to Rutland, was whisked off to see the Radcliffe Camera and Great Tom (the famous bell in Christ Church) and entertained to a choral concert in the evening. Benjamin (then 27) travelled up with his future wife, Anne (‘Nanny’) Yalden, daughter of the Vicar of Newton Valence, accompanied by her brother Will as chaperon.* (Ben brought six bottles of olives up from London, for which Gilbert repaid him the considerable sum of fifteen shillings.) They stayed a whole week and took in visits to the University Museum and Magdalen College and trips out to landscape gardens at Blenheim and Stowe. The Mulsos came for a holiday in August and Gilbert broke his summer vacation in Selborne to play host. ‘We all agree that the Proctor understands how to give ye most agreable Turn to every Thing,’ wrote grateful Mulso a few days later, ‘& to improve every Scheme of Tast.’ Thomas White called in occasionally, and young Henry White was permanently about, having himself been in residence at Oriel since the autumn of 1749.
The only one of the brothers conspicuously absent was John. He had followed Gilbert to Oxford and entered Corpus Christi College in 1746, but had later been sent down for some unspecified variety of disorderly conduct. He had been allowed to take orders, but was preoccupied at this time (or so his family believed) in digging the new Zig-zag track up the Hanger. Working on this sticky and perilous slope must have seemed an appropriate way of making amends for his Oxford indiscretions. But with hindsight there is a lingering suspicion that the subscriptions he was soliciting from Gilbert and other members of the family were being put to quite a different use.
*
Attempting to piece together a pattern of life from the evidence of account books is an exercise as deeply and hopelessly immersed in speculation as an archaeological dig. There are a few shards of certainty and mounds of possibility. A shilling ‘lost at commerce’. Sixpence for ‘mending a frock’. Hints and puzzles. Then frequent small payments to ‘Mrs Croke’s man’ – and suddenly the girl that Gilbert had been so fond of ten years before, Mrs Croke’s daughter Jenny, drifts back into view. Indeed Mulso’s sisters (who must have met her during their August trip) were
quite clear that the affair between You & One Jenny is quite serious … but You was so grave wth me in the Post Chaise that I dare not add to their Opinion any thing but my Applause of the Lady. However that be, I dare say that She is very instrumental in soft’ning the Rigour of your Oxford Confinement, & often prevents your forgetting family Life.12
But as to the nature of their relationship there is nothing more than suggestive clues. The payments to Mrs Croke’s manservant were probably simply tips, paid when Gilbert visited her house and haberdashery, but they may have been rewards for a messenger. The considerable bill he settled with Mrs Croke at the close of 1752 for his official velvet sleeves and silk trimmings, for suits and waistcoats and ‘20 yards of blue check’d linen’ for curtains (it came to £36.15s, almost a third of his proctorial earnings) may have been an entirely necessary expenditure, yet, spent all at one shop, it may conceivably have been an attempt to curry favour with Jenny’s mother. But what was happening between the tantalizing lines of the entries for 25 and 26 October?
Spent in Journey from Selborn to Oxon in a post-chaise with Jenny Croke … … 01 03 11
Gave Jenny Croke a round China-turene, being prevented paying for ye post-chaise … … 01 16 0413
Had Jenny been to stay with Gilbert in Selborne or was she more prosaically delivering Oxford rents to Grandmother White? What transpired during the journey to prevent Gilbert paying his fare, and earned Jenny a soup tureen as a reward? Knowing Gilbert’s usual reaction to coach travel and his taste for black humour, it is tempting to think that this was, in the most literal sense, a sick joke. There was Gilbert, prostrate with nausea and giddiness, unable even to settle with the coachman, and there was this competent 30-year-old woman taking care of everything. She wouldn’t hear of being paid back with cash, of course, and so next day, Gilbert buys her this unambiguous memento of the trip and his ‘cascading’ …
*
Gilbert’s year as a Proctor came to an end in May 1753, and almost immediately he set out on the road again, visiting London and Sunbury during the remainder of May and June. In July he had a bout of ‘inward heat’ – probably a premonitory attack of the gout that was to trouble him in later life – and set off for a seven-week sojourn at the Hot Wells at Bristol. But he was not so ill that he couldn’t pun with Mulso, linking his condition with the name of his old friend and sparky intellectual sparring partner, Hecky: ‘My Uncle laugh’d heartily at your Hectic Heat,’ Mulso replied, ‘& my Aunt said that half such a Joke was a serious Proposal, & we laugh’d before hand at the Fright we suppose You in at ye reading of this, by which You find that You have drawn yourself into a Praemunire.’14
Gilbert was remarkably free of illness by the standards of his day. Mulso, on the other hand, was scarcely ever well. He was only in his early thirties but already had the demeanour and failing constitution of an ageing invalid. He suffered from disabling migraines, piles, gout, arthritis and vague, idiosyncratic ‘fits’. A walk in a cool September evening laid him up in bed for a week with a swollen face. When he was eventually married he found the pains of his wife’s labour too much to bear, and retired with ‘a violent Headach and Hysteric Complaint’. His general health wasn’t helped by the large daily doses of the potent (and occasionally addictive) herb valerian that he took as a sedative. ‘From your Heights of Health You look down on me, & pity me … ’ he wrote to Gilbert. ‘I envy You your bold Flights, your Eagle Ranges; but see You deserve them. I am a poor sculking Quail, whose very Love-Song is plaintive.’15 In fact Gilbert did not really pity Mulso at all. He suspected that his friend was caught in a vicious circle of inactivity, malingering and malaise, and needed ‘crisping’. He recommended a more energetic outdoor life, preferably on horseback. But when Mulso asked him to procure a suitable horse, Gilbert couldn’t resist a jape at his friend’s expense, and delivered a pony (nicknamed Grub) that was ‘intolerably shabby … He is so broken-winded & wheezes so bad that my Heart Ache will do me more Harm than ye Air Good.’
In the mid-1750s there is scarcely a letter from Mulso that does not dwell at some length on the multifarious ailments endured by himself or his family (his ‘Set of Crocks’ as he called them) and at times Gilbert’s patience with this concentrated hypochondria appears to flag. Certainly his letters to Mulso became less frequent, and this was another cause for complaint from Sunbury. ‘Am I to suppose that your Life has in it a great deal of Sameness, or a great Variety, that You are so bad a Correspondent? … by your Description of your own Way of Life [you] must have Leizure Hours in plenty.’16 Mulso’s slight pique – it was never real disgruntlement – was probably unwarranted, but there were times when he was genuinely and seriously ill, and on these occasions Gilbert’s inattentiveness probably had more complicated causes. He was under stress himself, trying not very successfully to find a place and a position that suited him, and the infrequency with which he visited his friend may have been part of a growing tendency to cling, for security, to familiar places. In fact his affection for Selborne was not so much a fixed, inherent quality, as something which seemed to grow in proportion to the lengthening list of jobbing curacies he occupied; and it would be oversimplifying matters to see it as the major obstruction to his settling down. He had three different positions in as many years. In September 1753 he took over the curacy of Durley, near Bishop’s Waltham, Hampshire. He had lodgings at the vicarage for £20 a year, but with only Sunday services to attend to, was able to commute the twenty miles to and from Selborne on Mouse. He kept up this position for a year and a half, and in May 1755 took up another curacy in West Dean, near Salisbury, Wiltshire. This appointment was through personal contact: West Dean was one of the livings of Edmund Yalden, vicar of Newton Valence. This time Gilbert was more than thirty miles from Selborne and was forced to spend some time in the parish. He did a little desultory exploration. He went truffle hunting, and visited Stonehenge, where he watched the jackdaws nesting in the gaps between the great stones. But he was far from happy. In June 1751 he broke off his duties for another seven weeks in the Hot Wells at Bristol. In the autumn of 1755 he began helping Mr Yalden in Newton Valence as well as West Dean. By December he was finding his increased duties irksome, and some time early in 1756 he resigned from the West Dean position.
From the end of February the Garden Kalendar, which had been almost dormant for the past ten months, was taken up again with a new vigour and warmth, and began to be entered on an almost daily basis. And to Gilbert’s continuing interest in melons and vegetables was added a growing passion for flowers and for landscaping. That spring he began to build a range of bizarre follies and conceits in the fields below the Hanger. The ideas were partly prompted by the theories and example of the pioneering landscaper, William Kent, but most seemed more like tongue-in-cheek parodies of his suggestions. In May Gilbert had two huge vases (once oil jars) set up on nine-foot-tall pedestals, in conspicuous positions in the Park. He cut a vista through the tall hedges in the outer field, ranging six gates so that they would be seen as receding images, one within the other, and terminating in a figure of Hercules, twelve feet high, painted on a board. Goodness knows what Pope would have made of it, but Mulso, attempting to conjure up the scene in his mind’s eye, managed to find the right note of perplexed delight:
You see me wth my hand over my Brows & retiring to the prescribed Distancs, I wave my head about, & take them in with a critical Survey …
I believe the gaining of six Gates one above another in Perspective is full as new, as it is agreable; Missy desires me to tell You that She is charmed with this happy Circumstance; a Six Bar Gate in the Country being One of her favourite Coups d’Oeils; but to have Six at once ye happiness of a Century.17
By this time the Zig-zag track had also been completed, but not without leaving a sour aftertaste. The idea was John White’s, and he had begun soliciting contributions towards the project in September 1752. Most of the work was done during the winter of that year, and in a few more years the track was well enough established to be decorated with ‘obelisks’ – fancifully rugged pieces of sandstone rock carted from Woolmer Forest. The southern end of the Hanger was much less wooded then, and the Zig-zag became a landmark visible from many parts of the village.
Successful though John’s scheme was, the rest of his life was proving as turbulent and difficult as his spell at Oxford. Somehow – by gambling or simply incautious management of his affairs – he had managed to fall disastrously into debt. With no money to speak of beyond the small change he had collected for work on the Hanger and an income of £40 a year (chiefly from occasional clerical duties in Barnet and London) he borrowed money indiscriminately from friends and relations. His rather lame excuse was that ‘An expectation of relief from my Father flattered me with a view of requiting these obligations soon, till he affectionately informed me how little it was in his power.’ One of his debtors, Dr Bristow, the Vicar of Selborne, then threatened to sue him, and to prevent a scandal, John was rapidly packed off overseas. Some time during the early part of 1756 he became Chaplain to the Garrison at Gibraltar. He was virtually ostracized by his family, and, from the autumn of 1756, did not hear a word from any of them for nearly two years – in fact, not until the death of his father, the news of which he first learned in unfortunate circumstances while browsing through a paper in a coffee-house.18
Gibraltar seemed to settle John down a little. He had been married to Barbara Freeman not long before his departure, and they had a son, Jack, in 1757. Soon John began to emulate his elder brother and take a serious interest in the natural history of Gibraltar. But he never entirely lost the slightly unstable edge to his character. The guilt and resentment he felt about his relations with his family went very deep and were to flare up again much later in his life.19
*
In 1756 there was another important change in the circumstances of one of Gilbert’s circle. After eleven years of engagement that at times had proved an obvious strain, John Mulso was married to Jenny Young. It was a sudden decision, brought about by a disturbing incident. Jenny had been travelling back to London after visiting Mulso in Sunbury. There had been exceptionally heavy rains, and just at the edge of the town her driver, trying to avoid floodwater, had overturned the coach into the Thames. Jenny and her companion escaped with no more than mild shock and a thorough drenching, but Mulso had been frightened out of his wits. So had Jenny’s father, who was a widower and had apparently been one of the chief obstructions to their marrying earlier. Rather than put his daughter to any further risk from travelling between London and Sunbury, he gave his consent to the marriage, on the understanding that he could come and live with the couple till his death. John and Jenny were made man and wife on 18 May 1756, less than four weeks after the accident.
The abruptness with which his best friend abandoned his bachelorhood may have made Gilbert more aware of the insecurity and singularity of his own life. At any rate, after Mulso’s wedding a chain of events only partly beyond his control was set in motion that took Gilbert to the nearest approximation to a crisis that he encountered in his life.
In the mid-fifties Gilbert began casting round aimlessly, and at times almost recklessly, for a place that suited him. There were further spells assisting at Selborne and West Dean, and he wondered if he might, after all, be able to put up with the Wiltshire living. There was talk of a position in the Isle of Wight, the mere thought of which made Mulso feel seasick. Then an opportunity came up through his Oriel connections. The perpetual curacy of one of the College’s preferments, the parish of Moreton Pinkney in Northamptonshire, became vacant and was offered to Gilbert, as a Senior Fellow. He agreed to take it on, provided he did not have to be a resident there and could put in a deputy.
But he still regarded a situation in Oxford as being the ideal solution to his problem. He liked the city, the academic atmosphere, the civilized and cultured life that was available to a don. He liked the fact the he would be rewarded rather better than he would be for occupying a draughty and isolated rectory somewhere in middle England. The long vacations, too, meant that he could still spend much of the year in Selborne. So, when the Provost of Oriel, Dr Walter Hodges, died in January 1757, Gilbert, nervously hoping his seniority in the College would see him through, decided to become a candidate for the post. He was not successful, and, in the election of 27 January, Chardin Musgrave was chosen. Musgrave had been an acquaintance of Gilbert’s since their undergraduate days together, but as the correspondence with Mulso hints, there was little love lost between them. Gilbert felt bitter about Musgrave’s appointment, and thought him quite unsuitable for the post of Provost. Musgrave for his part regarded Gilbert as rather unscrupulous, in being both a non-resident Fellow and, it now seemed, a potentially non-resident curate. When Musgrave confirmed Gilbert’s appointment to Moreton Pinkney in October 1757, he added a proviso in his memorandum book, unusual in that residence had never before been demanded for this preferment, but effectively making Gilbert appear a supporter of sinecures and an opponent of reform: ‘Dec 15. Moreton Pinkney given to Mr White as Senior Fellow, tho’ without his intentions of serving it, not choosing to waive his claim … but [I] agreed for the future that in any of the Tenable preferments Preference shall be given to any Fellow who will undertake to serve the cure, before a Senior who would put in a Deputy.’20
Gilbert’s health began to deteriorate soon after his disappointment in the election for Provost and for once it was Mulso’s turn to act as confidant and medical adviser. But his housemasterly prescription – cold baths and self-discipline – was no more understanding or helpful than Gilbert’s panacea of horse-riding:
And now, my dear Friend, what can be the matter wth You? for Mrs. Mulso and Myself think your Case, as You state it, unaccountable: You are not ill but in your Limbs, no Affection of the Spirits, & yet Blisters, Valerian & Assa Foetida: If any thing of this Sort remains, be a Man of a more constant Courage than your poor Friend has been, &, after Leave obtained to get into the Cold Bath, persevere in it.21
Whenever Gilbert sank below his usual level of self-confidence and activity, Mulso became concerned about his lack of a secure berth. ‘Curate or not Curate still I find You will travell; a restless Animal you will still be ’till I find You squatted down in a Fat Goose Living,’ he wrote, with the slightest shake of the head, on 12 May 1757. By the middle of the next year, just after the vicar of Selborne, Dr Bristow, had died, he was moved to elegiac tones about the possibility of his friend and Selborne itself falling from grace:
I beg of you to contrive to get a great Estate, to be enabled to live on at Selbourne, to be the Friend of the Poor who have now lost one & may in a few Years lose another [Gilbert’s father]; & prevent that Sweet Place, which is already sunk from a great Town to a Village, from decaying into the very Den of Poverty & Misery: Capable as it certainly is of the highest Improvements, & of being one of the most enchanting Spots in England.22
Unhappily Mulso’s prediction about Gilbert’s father proved accurate, and John White senior died on 29 September 1758. The news soon reached Oxford, and those who made up the anti-White faction at Oriel assumed that Gilbert had come into a wealthy inheritance and was duty bound to quit his Fellowship. Chardin Musgrave made a note in the Provost’s memorandum book that he had ‘hinted to Mr White’s friends that I was ignorant what his circumstances really were, but suppose his Estate incompatible’. It is important to understand that there were real feelings of resentment, and quite possibly jealousy, among certain sections of the College. The legend of White as a self-interested pluralist survived at Oriel for more than a century, and was spelled out with undiluted venom in an essay on the college published in 1891:
Gilbert White, of Selborne, among the fellows of Oriel at this period has left the most lasting name, yet his college history is in curious contrast to the reputation which is popularly attached to him. Instead of being, as is often supposed, the model clergyman residing in his cure, and interested in all the concerns of the parish in which his duty lay, he was, from a College point of view, a rich, sinecure, pluralist non-resident. He held his Fellowship for fifty years, 1743–1793, during which period he was out of residence, except for the year 1752–3, when the Proctorship fell to the College turn, and he came up to take it. In 1757 he similarly asserted his right to take and hold with his fellowship the small college living of Moreton Pinkney, Northants, with the avowed intention of not residing. Even at that time the conscience of the College was shocked at this proposal and the claim only reluctantly admitted. White continued to enjoy the emoluments of his Fellowship and of his College living while he resided on his patrimonial estate at Selborne, and, although it was much doubted whether his fortune did not exceed the amount allowed by the Statutes, he acted on the maxim that anything can be held by a man who can hold his tongue, and he continued to enjoy his Fellowship and his living till his death.23
This is an extraordinary level of acrimony to have persisted for over 130 years, and it is fair to assume that it had become magnified in the telling. But the College was being perfectly reasonable in taking precautions against its Fellowships being retained by those that had no real need of them. Gilbert saw their opposition in a very different light though. He felt he was being victimized, and insisted that Oriel must take his word about his still meagre circumstances, and permit him to hang on to his Fellowship.
It was a vain hope, given the level of rivalry in the college. Even Mulso could not understand why Gilbert seemed so reluctant to back up his assertions with a clear and open statement about his financial position. In November 1758 he wrote a friendly but cautionary note to Gilbert reminding him of the purpose of Fellowships and urging him to do nothing that might alienate the Oriel Fellows still further:
Tho’ I have talked with your Brother Ben: and wth Mr. Cane, I can form at present no Judgement upon what Plea You can keep your Fellowship wth your Estate, so that I cannot give advice of any Value to your present Purposes. I cannot but conclude from my Knowledge of You, that the Reasons must appear very strong to You; & that You could not be tempted by Interest to do anything contrary to the Statutes of the University, or of your particular Society; and not only so, but that You can never forget that Fellowships are a sort of temporary Establishments for men of good Learning and small Fortunes, ’till their Merits or some fortunate Turn pushes them into ye World, and enables them to relinquish to Men under the same Predicament.24
Some time during that month Gilbert did make a private representation to the Provost in which he set down the precise nature of his circumstances. The letter, a draft of which came to light early this century, includes the following:
As to the freehold Patrimony to which I am entitled by my Father’s decease I am very certain that the clear yearly income, upon which I depend from it, will fall short of the sum above supposed compatible by ye Visitor’s determination £66.13.4 … And I am certain that the income arising from my freehold-land will fall considerably short of what I am entitled to receive in virtue of my Fellowship.25
The Provost (though obviously not all the Fellows) seemed satisfied by Gilbert’s plea that he was indeed a man of ‘good Learning and small Fortune’ and was therefore entitled to retain his Fellowship. He said as much to Mulso when the two met while strolling in St James’s Park the following February: ‘he said it was in your own breast to keep or leave your Fellowship; for Nobody meant to turn You out if You did not choose it Yourself. ’
From the evidence that is now available it looks as if Gilbert was being perfectly correct in insisting that he had not come into anything remotely resembling a fortune on his father’s death. The pattern of inheritance in the family was, as we have already seen, murky, idiosyncratic and complex, but at the beginning of this century Rashleigh Holt-White examined the wills and deeds and published a thorough account in his Life and Letters.26 In essence the situation seems to have been as follows.
Most of the money in the family was on Gilbert’s mother’s side, and what little came down through the Whites themselves had completely bypassed Gilbert’s father, John. Gilbert senior had left his estate, including the Wakes, to his wife Rebekah. After that it was to pass not to their eldest son, John, but to their youngest daughter, Elizabeth. But this bequest must have come to maturity on Elizabeth’s marriage in 1730 to her cousin Charles White, since she died in 1753, two years before her mother. They had no children, and the Wakes therefore passed into Charles’s hands for the remainder of his life. John’s sole inheritance was a fifth of Rebekah’s property, which amounted to little more than a share in the rent from some cottages in Oxford.
So, far from bequeathing patrimony, John did not even have the family house to leave to Gilbert. What Gilbert did inherit, in a very qualified way, was what had been left by his mother (and notionally held by her husband until his death). This consisted of a number of small farms in the southern counties, which were subject to various mortgages and charges. Most of these were immediately sold to provide the younger White children’s portions of the bequest. The one property Gilbert did retain was Woodhouse farm at Harting, which at this time produced a rent of £34 per annum. The Farringdon curacy brought in a little over £30 a year, and the income from the curacy at Moreton Pinkney about the same. His properties in Selborne amounted to a maximum annual value (at his death) of £28.27 So Gilbert’s total annual income from sources other than his Fellowship (which earned on average about £100 a year) was at this time almost certainly little more than £100.
The mystery, therefore, is why Gilbert took such pains to keep this information confidential, to the extent of ensuring that his private note to the Provost was not kept in the college archives. The only plausible explanation is the one suggested by Anthony Rye, that it was done to shield Gilbert’s father from public scandal. John was in his thirties when Gilbert senior effectively disinherited him. Whether this was, as cause or effect, connected with the personality problems that became evident in his middle years can only be guessed at. But the story would probably have come to light if Gilbert had been less discreet with his disclosures. It’s extremely doubtful if it would ever have been more than a minor piece of college gossip, but for Gilbert, who valued his position at Oriel so highly, that would have been a quite sufficient deterrent.
* Scrope’s footnote: ‘by the smallpox’.
* The Whites’ relations with the Yaldens are a good example of what a very close circle family and friends formed. Benjamin married Anne in 1753. When she died, he remarried, at the age of 61, her father’s widow Mary. Meanwhile Thomas White had married, in 1758, the widow of William Yalden (Anne’s brother).