The Ray of a New Morning
[i]
Mrs Quincey was selling Greenhay. Her dead husband had strongly advised against such a move until prices improved, but it had been three years since his passing, and a number of factors were pushing her to make a change. ‘No motive existed any longer’ for being near Manchester, ‘so long after the commercial connection with it had ceased’. Greenhay was very expensive to run, as the gardens and grounds alone required at least three labourers. The Quincey estate was producing substantially smaller returns in the hands of the four executors, all of whom were ‘men of honour’, but all of whom were also busy with their own lives.1 And finally, housing prices were not going to improve any time soon, as Britain had entered the French Revolutionary Wars in the year of Quincey’s death, and its involvement in the conflict continued to generate widespread instability.
Greenhay went up for sale by auction on a rainy night in August 1796. Quincey had paid £6000 for the property. There was only one offer, for £2500, and the executors accepted it. Remarkably, one of the two buyers was the socialist and philanthropist Robert Owen, who lived in the house for the next three years, and who passed his honeymoon there. ‘We soon drove into the grounds of Greenheys,’ he recollected, ‘and entering into the house through a part well contrived and neatly arranged as a greenhouse, and the interior being well constructed, furnished, and nicely arranged, both my wife and her servant were uncommonly well pleased.’2
Mrs Quincey soon decamped for Bath, the most elegant of Georgian cities, and one brought clearly into view in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which is set during the years Mrs Quincey and her family lived there. The city is enthusiastically praised by Austen’s heroine Catherine Morland: ‘Here are a variety of amusements, a variety of things to be seen and done … Oh! who can ever be tired of Bath?’ On the look-out for a good address, Mrs Quincey settled on fashionable lodgings at Number 11, North Parade, which she moved into on or just after 13 September. The previous occupant of the house had been Edmund Burke, the great statesman and political thinker, who vigorously opposed the French Revolution, and whose Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) is usually regarded as the epitome of conservatism.3 Revealingly, it was in Bath that Mrs Quincey changed the family surname to ‘De Quincey’, for one of the main reasons she had chosen the city was the many opportunities it provided for her and her children to move in more refined social circles, and her adoption of the genteel prefix ‘De’ was undoubtedly an attempt to smooth their way.
The North Parade lodgings were of course much smaller than Greenhay, and while they seemed ‘on all accounts’ the ‘natural station for a person’ in Mrs De Quincey’s position, the move was a big change for her children.4 In the first instance, she took only Mary, Jane, and Henry – who had been born shortly after his father’s death – down to Bath, leaving Thomas and Richard (‘Pink’) behind in Manchester, where they were placed under the care of Hall, but lived in the home of John Kelsall, Quincey’s former principal clerk and now a successful merchant. In many respects, the following three months were ‘without results’, yet Thomas looked back on them with feelings ‘inexpressibly profound’, for the ‘distinguishing feature’ of the Kelsall household was ‘the spirit of love which … diffused itself through all its members’. Mrs Kelsall was ‘a pretty and amiable young woman’ who treated the servants with respect, who doted on her two-year-old daughter, and who waited eagerly each evening to greet her husband. After the strife and despair of so much of his time at Greenhay, Thomas’s peaceful autumn was ‘a jewelly parenthesis of pathetic happiness – such as emerges but once in any man’s life’.5
In November, the two boys were summoned to join the rest of the family in Bath, where they were soon enrolled as day boarders in the prestigious Bath Grammar School, founded by Royal Charter in 1552, and known today as King Edward’s School. Always competitive when it came to learning, Thomas was dismayed to find that his middling performance in Greek on the entrance exam meant that he was placed with Mr Wilkins, ‘the second master out of four’, rather than with the Reverend Nathaniel Morgan, the Master of the school, and the instructor in charge of the two upper classes. Yet within a month, Thomas’s talent for Latin verse, ‘which had by this time gathered strength and expansion’, placed him on weekly parade before ‘the supreme tribunal of the school’. What is more, as a Grecian Thomas quickly made up lost ground, for he flourished when placed under Morgan, a ‘ripe and good’ scholar, and ‘of all my tutors … the only one whom I loved or reverenced’. By the time he was thirteen years old he wrote Greek ‘with ease’, and Morgan had the pleasure of pointing him out to a stranger as a boy who could ‘harangue an Athenian mob, better than you or I could address an English one’.6
Long starved of attention, Thomas delighted to shine in front of his new schoolmates. Morgan, however, inadvertently caused a backlash against him in the upper-year Latin classes by ‘continually throwing in their teeth the brilliancy of my verses at eleven or twelve’, as compared ‘with theirs at seventeen, eighteen, and even nineteen. One day in the playground an older boy strode up to him and, delivering a blow ‘which was not intended to hurt me, but as a mere formula of introduction, asked me, “What the devil I meant by bolting out of the course, and annoying other people in that manner?’” Thomas was given two choices: either ‘I wrote worse for the future, or else … he would “annihilate” me’. But Thomas had pluck, and he tried even harder on the next exercise, with the result that he brought down ‘double applause’ upon himself. Riled by his defiance, his enemies stepped up their offensive, while Thomas ‘hated and loathed’ the fact that he once again found himself trapped in an ‘eternal feud’, especially as he could not ‘altogether condemn’ the upper boys for despising him as ‘a handle of humiliation’. The battle dragged on for over a year, until Thomas gradually won them over, in part for the ‘splendour’ of his Latin, but in the main for his courage. The ordeal concluded with him writing verses for many of the older boys, a practice which produced an overall decline in his workmanship, for ‘as the subjects given out were the same for the entire class, it was not possible to take so many crops off the ground without starving the quality of all’.7
Thomas had been at Bath Grammar School for just over a year when his brother William contracted typhus fever and died at the London home of his painting instructor, de Loutherbourg.8 Not yet sixteen years old, he was the third sibling Thomas had lost in the past seven years, but in this instance it is difficult to believe that he was very upset. William ‘had controlled, and for years to come would have controlled, the free spontaneous movements of a contemplative dreamer like myself’. The recent battles between Thomas and the older boys at Bath had been a too vivid reminder of what life was like under William’s tyranny. Perhaps there was a spasm of remorse when he heard the news, but Thomas was glad to be free of him: ‘I acknowledge no such tiger for a friend of mine.’9
The months that followed brought the happiness of socialization and broadening horizons. Despite his declared preference for solitude and the country, twelve-year-old Thomas liked Bath, and the more he got to know it, the more he enjoyed it. He went dancing. He drank wine.10 He visited in the famous Pump Room, or took in concerts in the Upper Rooms. Prior Park, a beautiful landscape garden complete with lakes, a grotto, a Palladian bridge, and a mansion, was ‘a place well known to me. We, that is, myself and a schoolfellow, had the privilege of the entrée to the grounds.’ Best of all, Thomas liked to visit Sydney Gardens, which contained a labyrinth that stirred his love of mystery. It was perhaps in games of hide-and-seek with his friends, or during afternoons spent by himself among strangers, that he was struck by how securely he could conceal himself at the heart of the labyrinth. More distressingly, in later years this ‘literal’ form came back to haunt him in abstract shapes, as he sought sanctuary amidst ‘labyrinths of debt, labyrinths of error, labyrinths of metaphysical nonsense’.11
Bath was full of interesting people. Mrs De Quincey’s acquaintance with ‘several leading families’ amongst its sizeable French emigrant community enabled Thomas to gain ‘a large experience of French calligraphy’. At a concert given by the great German soprano Gertrud Elisabeth Mara, one of Thomas’s party pointed out to him the eccentric philosopher and traveller John ‘Walking’ Stewart. In the spring of 1798, Thomas met the British naval officer Sir Sidney Smith, who had recently escaped from a French prison. Thomas and Pink were two of the three Bath Grammar School boys allowed to call on Smith ‘formally, presumably as ‘alumni of the school’ at which he had received his own education. Smith greeted the boys with ‘great kindness’, and then allowed them to accompany him down to the Pump Room, where they burdened him with their ‘worshipful society’, but also shielded him from the embarrassing curiosity of the crowds.12
Talking with a ‘naval hero’ such as Smith gave Thomas his first direct knowledge of Britain’s war with Revolutionary France, and it undoubtedly confirmed him in his detestation of French radicalism, and his growing attachment to virulent forms of British nationalism and British imperialism. To be sure, there was a strong liberal streak in him, as there had been in his father, but in the heady political atmosphere of the 1790s he was deeply swayed by those who argued in favour of the war, and he aligned himself firmly on their side. ‘I had a keen sympathy with the national honour, gloried in the name of Englishman, and had been bred up in a frenzied horror of Jacobinism,’ he recollected. ‘Not having been old enough, at the first outbreak of the French Revolution, to participate (as else, undoubtedly, I should have done) in the golden hopes of its early dawn, my first youthful introduction to foreign politics had been in seasons and circumstances that taught me to approve of all I heard in abhorrence of French excesses, and to worship the name’ of the British Prime Minister William Pitt.13 Sitting with Smith in the Pump Room – to say nothing of living in a house formerly occupied by Edmund Burke – could only have heightened Thomas’s patriotic fervour.
He continued to study hard. Writing formed a central part of his daily routine, as he excelled at his Greek and Latin school exercises, and composed a tragedy ‘on a certain Ethelfrid … who cut the throats of the abbot and all his monks’. Reading, too, absorbed him, and while his favourite books ranged from a beautiful Glasgow reprint of Thomas a Kempis’s De Imitatione Christi to Thomas James Mathias’s celebrated contemporary satire on The Pursuits of Literature, he was the most fully engaged by two recent studies of secret societies: Augustin de Barruel’s Memoirs, Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, and John Robison’s Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe.14 Thomas was disturbed by these sects because of their alleged desire to overthrow Christianity and Monarchy, yet at some level he seems also to have studied them because of his growing sense that he himself belonged to a secret society, to a group of exiles and innocents who were inexplicably chosen to suffer, and who dwelled apart from the commonplace flow of daily life. Interestingly, Thomas’s fascination with secret societies throws into relief the two powerful and often competing interests at the core of his intellect: an Enlightenment-based investment in classicism, and an anti-Enlightenment enthusiasm for mystery, mystification, and disorder. The tension between these two viewpoints produced some of his most characteristic insights, and he rendered it with memorable concision when he summarized his response to Barruel: ‘I believed in [him] by necessity, and yet everywhere my understanding mutinied against his.’15
On 29 January 1799, as Thomas settled into his third year at Bath Grammar School, he was involved in an accident that sent him home for several weeks. A Mr Collins was briefly left in charge of Morgan’s classroom, and when a couple of the boys became rambunctious, he attempted to enforce his authority with the use of a cane, as was routine at the time. But instead of striking his intended target – young Wilbraham – Collins missed and hit Thomas on the head. The blow was not serious enough to prevent him from going on with his lesson, but when he got home his mother promptly sent for a doctor, Mr Grant, who examined his head, shaved the area around the wound, and then bled him with six leeches, a procedure that was repeated the following morning. Thomas, however, did not improve, and for three weeks ‘I neither read, nor wrote, nor talked, nor eat meats, nor went out of the back drawing-room, except when I went to bed.’16
It is difficult to determine the exact nature of this injury. Grant apparently thought that Thomas’s ‘skull had been fractured’, and at one time considered trepanning. But as Thomas later acknowledged, his fears for his head were very largely fears in his head. ‘I doubt whether in reality anything very serious had happened. In fact, I was always under a nervous panic for my head; and certainly exaggerated my internal feelings without meaning to do so; and this misled the medical attendants.’ At issue here seems to be his identification with Elizabeth, and his ongoing grief over her death. He felt certain that hydrocephalus – a condition characterized by enlargement of the skull and atrophy of the brain – had killed her, and as he worried himself about his own head wound, he grew convinced that he was in real danger, as did his mother and his doctors. Months later Thomas ‘fancied that he still suffered’ from the blow, but as one school friend recollected, ‘I think the injury was purely imaginary, and that his pains arose from irritation in his too active and susceptible brain.’17
Confinement at home did not slow his pursuit of knowledge. His mother read to him ‘books past all counting’, including John Hoole’s popular translation of Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, while Thomas himself read John Milton’s Paradise Lost for the first time.18 Further, in a 12 March letter to his older sister Mary, he reported on the arrival of ‘some … new Books’: Sir William Jones’s Asiatic Researches, Samuel Ogden’s Sermons, Joseph and Isaac Milner’s Ecclesiastical History of the Church of Christ, Henry Venn’s The Complete Duty of Man, Samuel Johnson’s The Rambler, and Oliver Goldsmith’s History of England, among others. Thomas may or may not have actually read all of these volumes, but it is easy to see mother and son compiling the order for them. Her piety was deepening under the influence of a new and firm friendship with Hannah More, one of the leading Evangelical writers of the day, while his intelligence was rapidly expanding under a largely self-directed course of reading in literature and history. Thomas closed this letter to Mary by signing himself ‘Tabitha Quincey’, a pseudonym in keeping with the letter’s playful, patronizing and affectionate humour.19 From the start he was intrigued by persona, and he was already experimenting with the ways in which his own identity might be extended and subverted.
With his recovery fully under way, Mrs De Quincey hired a French tutor for Thomas. But instead of doing his lessons he sat in the window with Pink and Henry and made faces at an old lady who lived across the street. ‘Now, Monsieur Tomma, oh, do be parsuaded! Oh, do be parsuaded!’ cried the tutor. ‘Monsieur Tomma’, however, would not be ‘parsuaded’, and his unruly behaviour continued. When Mrs De Quincey discovered what was going on, she ordered Thomas to call on the old woman and apologize, which he did so handsomely that she afterwards spoke of him as ‘the cleverest and nicest little boy she ever saw’.20 Thomas would certainly have been happy to appease both his mother and their neighbour. One word in the old woman’s praise would have stung, though. Now a teenager, he was increasingly conscious of his physical appearance, and especially of the fact that he was short for his age. He would not have appreciated being referred to as ‘little’.
During the spring, Mrs De Quincey began to consider Thomas’s return to Bath Grammar School. She had some reservations. Thomas and a school friend named Bowes had been involved in some incident that had been at least partially witnessed by Mrs De Quincey’s close friends, Mr and Mrs Pratt. His offence was certainly not flagrant, but his mother reminded him that ‘appearances unfortunately are often all we have to judge of actions by; and those in the particular action in question were really against you’. Her unease was exacerbated when Morgan, his son-in-law and colleague Wilkins, and Bowes’s father called in to enquire after Thomas, and made the fatal mistake of praising him. ‘It illustrates my mother’s moral austerity, that she was shocked at my hearing compliments to my own merits, and was altogether disturbed at what doubtless these gentlemen expected to see received with maternal pride. She declined to let me continue at the Bath School.’21
Though Morgan expressed ‘great indignation’ at Mrs De Quincey’s decision, and Thomas deeply resented it, she was unmoved. By June he was a student at a school in the nearby village of Winkfield (now Wingfield) in Wiltshire, as were ‘Pink and Hal’.22 For Mrs De Quincey, ‘the chief recommendation’ of the school ‘lay in the religious character of the master’, the Reverend Edward Spencer. For Thomas, however, the new school was a decided step downward. Not only was Spencer a ‘blockhead, who was in a perpetual panic, lest I should expose his ignorance’, but Thomas was now a very big fish in a tiny pond of only thirty students. ‘The consequence was that my powers entirely flagged, my mind became quite dormant in comparison of what it was at Bath Grammar School. I had no one to praise me, to spur me on, or to help me.’23
Yet despite these reservations, Thomas benefited far more from Winkfield than he remembered. He grew much closer to Pink, who inspired in him ‘great affection’, and who played Paris to his Ulysses in organized marches between ‘a Grecian and a Trojan band’.24 He was singled out as a ‘special favourite’ by Spencer’s daughters, and with them and some of his schoolmates he set up a ‘periodical work’ called The Observer, for which he wrote a series of ‘clever, funny things’, including a spirited response to a challenge issued by a neighbouring school:
Since Ames’s skinny school has dared
To challenge Spencer’s boys,
We thus to them bold answer give
To prove ourselves ‘no toys’.
Full thirty hardy boys are we,
As brave as e’er was known;
We will nor threats nor dangers mind
To make you change your tone!25
Most impressively, while a student at Winkfield, Thomas entered a competition in The Monthly Preceptor, or Juvenile Library to translate two set passages, one from Cicero and the other from Horace. His translation of Cicero placed seventh and was not published, but his translation of Horace placed third and was:
Send me to dreary barren lands
Where never summer zephyrs play,
Where never sun dissolves the bands
Of ice away:
Send me again to scorching realms
Where not one cot affords a seat,
And where no shady pines or elms
Keep off the heat.26
The radical essayist and poet Leigh Hunt, Thomas’s senior by ten months and then a student at Christ’s Hospital, came first in the Horace competition, and the distinguished historian George Ormerod second. But Thomas later had the satisfaction of hearing that several people considered his rendering the finest of the three. At fourteen years old he was in print, and ‘for the first time in my life, I found myself somewhat in the situation of a “lion”’.27
[ii]
He called it ‘the greatest event in the unfolding of my own mind’. In ‘about the year 1799’ he read a manuscript copy of William Wordsworth’s short poem ‘We Are Seven’ in Bath during one of his school holidays. Shortly thereafter he read the Lyrical Ballads (1798), the joint and anonymous publication of Wordsworth and his close friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In these poems Thomas instantly identified ‘“the ray of a new morning”, and an absolute revelation of untrodden worlds, teeming with power and beauty, as yet unsuspected amongst men’.28 At just fifteen years old, his remarkable recognition of Coleridge and Wordsworth as two of the predominant literary and cultural voices of his age dramatically altered the course of his life.
What attracted him to the Lyrical Ballads? The title points to a paradox, for ‘lyric’ suggests introspection and emotion, while ‘ballad’ implies action and story. The collection itself focuses on feeling, and most often when it has reached the extremes of confusion, passion, or despair. Coleridge contributed ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’ and three other shorter works, while Wordsworth published nineteen poems in the volume, including ‘We Are Seven, ‘Anecdote for Fathers’, ‘Goody Blake and Harry Gill’, ‘Simon Lee’, ‘The Last of the Flock’, ‘The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman’, and ‘Lines Written a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey’. Taken as a whole, the poetry of the Lyrical Ballads breaks decisively from the heroic couplet, the verse form most readily associated with the poetry of the eighteenth century, and instead uses straightforward (or ‘simple’) language to explore the relationship between humankind and the natural world, and to give voice to the plight of people who have been dismissed by their society as odd or insignificant. Characteristically, ‘Her eyes are wild, her head is bare’, writes Wordsworth in ‘The Mad Mother’:
The sun has burnt her coal-black hair,
Her eye-brows have a rusty stain,
And she came far from over the main.
She has a baby on her arm,
Or else she were alone.29
Why did this poetry have such an immense impact on Thomas? One reason was its thoroughgoing challenge to his mother’s Evangelicalism, especially in its emphasis on doubt (as opposed to moral certainties), its celebration of the vision of the child (as opposed to expectations of subservience and duty), and its insistence on the value of an education directed by ‘the loveliness and the wonders of the world before us’ (as opposed to education delivered in dogmatic and institutional forms).30 Further, the volume’s cast of convicts, exiles, idiot boys, and female vagrants was deeply congruent with Thomas’s compassion for pariahs like Sarah and Mary Hall, and further complicated that divide in his sympathies between the value of the individual and the privileges of rank.31 Finally, Coleridge and Wordsworth, in their shared fascination with obstinacy, grief, and solitude, must at times have seemed to Thomas to be speaking directly to him, legitimizing the sorrows of his past experience, and offering him strategies for self-preservation that – for the first time in the six years since Elizabeth’s death – provided both solace and hope.32 In ‘We Are Seven’, death visits but does not divide a family. In ‘The Ancyent Marinere’, ‘strange power of speech’ is used both to mollify and exploit a soul in extremis. In ‘Tintern Abbey’, a brother’s love for his ‘dear, dear sister’ is as vital as Thomas knew such a love to be.33
Over the course of the ensuing months, Thomas planned a number of literary projects clearly indebted to his understanding of the Lyrical Ballads. One was a ‘poetic and pathetic ballad reciting the wanderings of two young children (brother and sister) and their falling asleep on a frosty – moonlight night among the lanes … and so perishing’. Another was a ‘Pathetic poem describing the emotions (strange and wild) of a man dying on a rock in the sea … which he had swum to from a shipwreck … within sight of his native cottage and his paternal hills’. A third was ‘An ode, in which two angels or spirits were to meet in the middle of the Atlantic’.34 None of these projects seems to have come to fruition, but all three show Thomas reading himself into the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge in ways that were repeatedly to shape his literary aspirations and many self-representations.
Issues of self-representation were also at the heart of another decision that Thomas made at this time. It is unclear to what extent his mother ever adopted the signature ‘De Quincey’. Certainly in Bath she instructed her children to use the name, and she herself no doubt employed it for a couple of years when she thought that it would be an advantage to do so. But by early 1800 – at least in all her extant letters to Thomas – she is signing herself plain ‘Quincey’, and that was the name she used for the rest of her life, having apparently come to accept the argument of her friend Mrs Pratt, and perhaps of Hannah More as well, that ‘the use of the “De” was a worldly vanity which she ought to lay aside’ as incompatible with her religious views.35
Thomas’s response to his mother’s decision is highly revealing. From her Evangelicalism he took a belief in the educative power of suffering, a commitment to anxious self-scrutiny, and a fascination with sin and guilt. But much of her piety he found simple-minded and disingenuous, and when she made the decision to revert permanently to ‘Quincey’, he refused to follow her, retaining the ‘De’ for the rest of his life.36 Beginning in 1800, she wrote to him as ‘Thomas Quincey’ and signed herself ‘E. Quincey’, while he responded by addressing her as ‘Mrs Quincey’, but signing himself ‘Thomas de Quincey’.37 As his own sense of self grew stronger, it was the clearest sign of his intention to mark himself out and off from his mother.
[iii]
In the early summer of 1800, as Thomas neared the end of his first year at Winkfield, he received an invitation to holiday in Ireland with a new friend. Lord Westport (later the second Marquess of Sligo) was the only son of Lord Altamont, an Irish peer who owned an estate in County Mayo, and who seems to have had some contact with Thomas’s father during one of his many buying trips to Ireland.38 Westport is best known as the boon companion of Lord Byron, who travelled with him in Greece, and who hailed him as ‘the Marchesa’ for his lasciviousness and extravagance. ‘Sligo has told me some things, that ought to set you and me by the ears, but they shan’t, and as a proof of it, I wont tell you what they are till we meet,’ Byron wrote tantalizingly to John Cam Hobhouse on 29 July 1810.39 Back in the spring of 1799, however, when Thomas first met him, Westport was an eleven-year-old Eton schoolboy on holiday in Bath who was not only ‘very nice’ to Thomas, but who – crucially for Thomas’s ease – was ‘about my size’. There was a two and a half year difference in their ages, so the plan was that Thomas would accompany Westport, not so much as a friend, but as an older companion whose learning, manners, and eloquence might guide and even inspire the younger boy.40 Mrs Quincey’s hard climbing on the social ladders of Bath was paying dividends.
Westport’s private tutor, the Reverend Thomas Grace, was pleased that the two boys would be travelling together, for he had chaperoned Westport in Bath when they had first met, and he already thought ‘very highly’ of Thomas.41 The same, however, cannot be said of Westport’s mother. Lady Altamont had never met Thomas, but she was deeply suspicious of him, not because his social standing was much lower than her son’s, but because she shared Mrs Quincey’s distrust of his precocity. ‘I do not like the Expression quoted by Grace out of Quincy’s Letter which leads me to judge of Him very differently from what Mr Grace does,’ she wrote snippily to her husband. ‘I mean the words “My Mind is more athirst for knowledge than ever”. You know I hate canting of every sort & from that in corroboration of some other circumstances which I have heard from Westport such as His attempting to write a Book at his Age … I am rather inclined to think Quincy is a Pedant which I think is as disgusting in a Child as Methodism in a Man.’42 Pedantry was a charge often levelled at him, but there can be little doubt that Thomas was eager to distinguish himself intellectually, and that he had talked of producing a book, perhaps one that included the poetry he had projected along the lines of the Lyrical Ballads. Lord Altamont’s response to his wife is not known, but her objections to Thomas were not enough to upend the holiday plans, and on Monday, 14 July 1800, he boarded an early-morning coach in Bath and journeyed the twelve hours to Eton.43
Westport and Grace did not greet him on his arrival, as they had already set off for a fête given at nearby Frogmore, the Queen’s country retreat at Windsor. They left instructions for him on their whereabouts, though, and he soon joined them at the party, where he and Westport stayed ‘a little in the Ball-room’ and then walked ‘about the Gardens’ with ‘Lord Percy (the Duke of Northumberland’s son)’. A short time later Thomas’s mother discovered that he had gone to the royal gathering without first going to his rooms and changing his clothes. She was horrified. ‘I certainly did go there in my travelling Dress,’ he confessed to her, ‘but then my travelling Dress was a very good one (much better than what Lord Westport had on) and my Boots were cleaned.’44 Thomas was undoubtedly exhilarated at the thought of holidaying away from home for the first time. But his mother still had a close eye on him.
The next morning Grace drove Thomas and Westport to London in an open carriage, winding along rural lanes and by-roads for as long as possible, before falling in with ‘the tumult and the agitation’, which grew continually until they reached the heart of the city, where all Thomas could remember of his initial impression was ‘one monotonous awe and blind sense of mysterious grandeur and Babylonian confusion’. The two boys had only a few hours to themselves, and decided to visit St Paul’s Cathedral. They were both deeply impressed by the building, and Thomas especially by the Whispering Gallery, a circular structure running round inside the base of the dome which is famous for its ability to carry a whisper from one part of the wall to any other part of the wall at almost its original volume. Thomas, however, remembered the wall as being capable of amplifying sound, for when Westport whispered ‘a solemn but not acceptable truth’, Thomas claimed that it reached him ‘as a deafening menace in tempestuous uproars’.45 This cannot be accurate, but Thomas was not about to let physical fact impede imaginative truth, and in his memory Westport’s whisper became a powerful metaphor of quiet circumstances surging into dangerous tumult.
After rejoining Grace, Thomas and Westport were taken to Porter’s Lodge, near St Albans, in Hertfordshire, where they were received by Lady Howe (Westport’s grandmother), Lady Altamont, and George Douglas, the sixteenth Earl of Morton. Lady Altamont left no record of this meeting with Thomas, but certainly his recollections of it suggest that she was persuaded to abandon her initial mistrust of him. Lord Morton, the ‘only gentleman who appeared at the dinner table’, somehow knew of the recent competition in The Monthly Preceptor, and ‘protested loudly’ that Thomas’s translation of Horace should have placed first, not third. Morton’s high opinion ‘elated’ a boy who was so anxious for such praise at home, and greatly influenced both Lady Howe and Lady Altamont, so that Thomas ‘came, not only to wear the laurel in their estimation, but also with the advantageous addition of having suffered some injustice’.46
The boys returned to Eton the following evening, and Thomas spent the next day writing letters, before he and Westport attended another royal party. Thomas was for a time bewitched by the sight of so many famous people who had hitherto been only ‘great ideas’ in his ‘childish thoughts’, but soon it was only the beauty of the music, coupled with the ‘affecting … spectacle of men and women floating through the mazes of a dance’, that saved him from ‘so monstrous an indecorum as yawning’. After nearly four hours the boys fled the party, tossing their hats up into the air as they emerged into the open highroad.47
The next night – Friday night – was far more exciting, for Westport and Thomas went to the Windsor Theatre. Thomas knew full well that his mother would disapprove of such an entertainment, but before word got back to her, he wrote to explain exactly why he had gone.
Lord Westport came to me and desired me to go with him to the play. I tried to escape by saying that I had letters to write (which in fact I had); however, as he seemed much disappointed at not going on the last evening of his being near a playhouse, and as he declared he would not go without me, I consented at length to accompany him … But be assured, my dear mother, I would not have done this for all the world if I could have helped it, had I no other reason for avoiding public amusements than the earnest desire of obliging and obeying you.48
Thomas hoped this explanation would pre-empt his mother’s pious protests, but he seems also to have offered it with his tongue partially lodged in his cheek. He could not ignore her, but neither was he terribly interested in following her rules. His response in this instance was to do what he wanted, and then pay lip service to her religiosity. His frustration with her expectations was edging its way closer and closer to the surface.
Early Saturday morning, 19 July, Thomas and Westport set off for Ireland to visit Westport’s father, Lord Altamont. The first day they travelled one hundred and three miles on their route to Birmingham, passing through Oxford (which Thomas liked ‘very much … from the very little I saw of it’) and Stratford (where Thomas ‘visited the house in which Shakespeare was born’).49 The next day they went a further seventy miles, crossing in the afternoon from England up into Wales, the road through which ‘was much finer than anything I have ever seen or ever expected to see. From Oswestry to Llangollen was the first remarkably beautiful stage.’ After spending the night at Corwen, they journeyed on the third day a final seventy miles, reaching Holyhead at ten o’clock on Monday evening, though it was Tuesday before Lord Altamont’s servants arrived, and Wednesday at midnight before the two boys boarded the packet for Ireland.50
The crossing contained a memorable incident. One of their fellow passengers was ‘a woman of rank’ named Elizabeth, Marchioness Conyngham, best known later as the last mistress of George IV, but at that time about thirty years old, married with three young children, and very pretty. Thomas met her on Thursday morning. She was in her travelling coach, which had been ‘unslung from the “carriage” (by which is technically meant the wheels and the perch), and placed upon deck. This she used as a place of retreat from the sun during the day, and as a resting-place at night.’ Lady Conyngham saw Thomas sitting on the deck reading and called him over to her window, ‘where she talked with me for about five minutes, and then made me come into the coach, and stay the remainder of the day with her. She conversed with me for above eight hours’, and ‘seemed a very sensible woman’. That night was ‘very sultry’ and Thomas and Westport, ‘suffering from the oppression of the cabin’, decided to sleep on deck. Both were just at the point of falling asleep when they were awoken by ‘a stealthy tread’ nearby. A man was stealing towards Lady Conyngham’s coach. Their first thought was ‘to raise an alarm, scarcely doubting’ that his purpose was robbery. ‘But, to our astonishment, we saw the coach-door silently swing open under a touch from within. All was as silent as a dream; the figure entered, the door closed, and we were left to interpret the case as we might.’ The two lovers had no idea that their secret tryst had been observed, and the next morning Thomas saw ‘the lovely lady … looking as beautiful, and hardly less innocent, than an angel’.51 The contrast between how she looked in the day and what she had done at night shocked him. Up to this point, he had led a fairly sheltered existence, but on the deck that evening Thomas got a glimpse of a side of adult life that he had not seen before, and he was old enough now to understand what it all meant. As he neared his fifteenth birthday, he was leaving his boyhood behind.
[iv]
The packet dropped anchor in ‘the famous bay of Dublin’ some time near six in the morning, and after a boat was manned to put the passengers on shore at Dunleary (now Dún Laoghaire), the boys travelled directly to the city, where at ‘nine o’clock precisely’ they entered the breakfast room at No. 9 Sackville Street, the townhouse of Lord Altamont. Father and son, who had not seen each other in three years, paid one half-minute down ‘as a tribute to the sanctities of the case’, before Altamont turned to Thomas with a ‘courteous welcome’ that removed any unpleasant sense of him as ‘an intruder’.52
The boys quickly fell into a routine, though Thomas’s description of it clearly owes a great deal to the fact that he is writing to his mother.
I and Westport rise at various times between ½ past 4 and 6. I read the Bible before Breakfast and Lord Westport writes Copies and ciphers. We breakfast with Lord Altamont, then read again, then ride and bathe till about 2 or 3 o’clock, when we dine … In the afternoon I read and write, and Westport plays with his Cousins. At about 7 o’clock we sup on Bread and Milk and Fruit, (which is also our Breakfast) and at 9 go to bed.53
During the periods of writing and reading, Thomas was working on his Greek, teaching Latin to Westport, and speaking French with one of Westport’s tutors, so that ‘I am considerably improved, I think, in that Language, and am able to speak it with great ease’. His favourite books of the time revealed his wide-ranging intellectual tastes, and included Mungo Park’s Travels into the Interior Districts of Africa (1799), Jacques Mallet du Pan’s History of the Destruction of the Helvetic Union and Liberty (1799), and Samuel Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), which ‘has been my bosom-friend ever since I left Bath’. ‘I am very well indeed’, he wrote in closing, ‘owing principally, I suppose, to the Change of Air, Sea-bathing, and drinking Tea.’54
One week after their arrival – on 1 August 1800 – the boys went with Altamont to the House of Lords to witness the historic passage of the Act of Union. Two years earlier, Irish Roman Catholics seeking parliamentary reform and complete Catholic emancipation had been brutally put down by British troops, first at a critical battle on Vinegar Hill in County Wexford, and then at Ballinamuck in County Longford, where a French landing had arrived too late to assist the insurgents and was defeated within a week. The Prime Minister, William Pitt, responded to the unrest by uniting the parliaments of Great Britain and Ireland, which he also hoped would strengthen British security against the French. Altamont was a staunch supporter of the Union, though Thomas often suspected that he harboured a rebelliousness that would not have been ‘displeased’ had ‘some great popular violence’ compelled the two Houses ‘to perpetuate themselves’. When the Union Act was read out that day in the House of Lords, however, Thomas remembered distinctly that ‘no audible expression, no buzz, nor murmur, nor susurrus even, testified the feelings which, doubtless, lay rankling in many bosoms’. The next day Thomas returned to the House of Lords to witness the election of twenty-eight Irish peers – ‘Lord Altamont is one of them’ – to the British House of Lords. How could Pitt have managed it, he later wondered; how could he have ‘prevailed on all these hereditary legislators and heads of patrician houses to renounce so easily, with nothing worth the name of a struggle … the very brightest jewel in their coronets’?55
Altamont had been made a Knight of the Order of the Blue Ribbon ‘as a reward for his parliamentary votes’, and on 11 August he and five others were honoured at an installation ceremony in St Patrick’s Cathedral. ‘The day was suffocatingly hot’, Thomas reported, but the spectacle was splendid. Westport and Thomas sat with Lord Castlereagh, the Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, and future British foreign secretary. ‘Each of the 6 Knights were arrayed (besides their usual Clothes) in 37 yards of blue Sattin lined with as many of white!! Every Knight had 3 Esquires who were dressed like himself, except that their Robes were white lined with blue.’ ‘God Save the King’ was performed ‘by the Band within, accompanied by the Soldiers without, in the finest and most hair-making-to-stand-erect manner I ever heard’. The ceremony concluded at three o’clock, and was followed by ‘a grand dinner at the Castle’. Thomas, however, had ‘no Inclination to see half a hundred Lords stuffing and getting drunk’, and gave his dinner ticket away. After returning to Sackville Street, he retired to bed about ten o’clock, but was kept awake for ‘a couple of hours’ by ‘very loud Huzzaings’. He was told the next morning that it was a ‘Mob who had collected’ in the street and ‘made Bon-fires to congratulate’ Altamont on ‘having been made a Knight’.56
After nearly three weeks in Dublin, Altamont, Westport, and Thomas travelled to Westport House in County Mayo. The first stage of their journey took them to Tullamore via canal boat, and was marked by a second adventure involving Thomas and a woman. One of their fellow passengers was a snobbish bluestocking who was delighted to meet Westport, but openly contemptuous of Thomas, whom she berated as defective ‘in all those advantages of title, fortune, and expectation which so brilliantly distinguished my friend’. For two hours Thomas ‘stood the worst of this bright lady’s feud’, before two women emerged from below deck, and joined in the conversation. One was the widowed Elizabeth Jemima Hay, the Countess of Errol, and the other one of her sisters, most probably the youngest, Margaret Blake, who quickly discerned what was going on, and used her rank and beauty to shield Thomas. With his replies ‘no longer stifled in noise and laughter’, he was able to display his ‘immense reading’ and ‘vast command of words’, which he ‘threw out, as from a cornucopia … trivial enough, perhaps, as I might now think, but the more intelligible to my present circle’. Soon the offensive woman retreated and Thomas and Westport were left to converse with Margaret, whom Thomas stared at so intently that he made her blush. Previously, he had known women only ‘in their infirmities and their unamiable aspects, or else in those sterner relations which made them objects of ungenial and uncompanionable feelings’. Now first it struck him ‘that life might owe half its attractions and all its graces to female companionship’. What Lady Conyngham had roused, Margaret Blake confirmed. Thereafter Thomas was ‘an altered creature’.57
They reached Tullamore at eight o’clock in the evening, and determined to spend the night with Lord Tullamore at nearby Charleville, which they journeyed to in a chaise that was ‘almost breaking down, full of holes, and so small that I was obliged to sit on Lord Altamont’s knee’.58 Back on the road by six the following morning, the party travelled by chaise and phaeton, and while an accident with one of the phaeton wheels forced them into a blacksmith’s shop for repairs, they had by nine that evening reached Tuam, where they stayed for two nights with the archbishop.
Altamont had by this time clearly grown proud of Thomas. On the road he ‘had often urged me to translate’ another Horatian ode, and ‘we had amused ourselves in drawing up a pompous dedication to the Marquis himself with which I was to publish it’. In addition, on their second evening with the archbishop, Altamont desired Thomas to show his translation from the Monthly Preceptor to an assembled company, so Thomas wrote it out from memory and handed it to a Mr Murray, who read it aloud. The following morning Altamont and his party left very early ‘to avoid being pressed by the Arch-Bishop to stay another day’, and after a breakfast on the road at Ballinrobe, they reached Westport House at three o’clock in the afternoon on Saturday, 16 August.59 The entire journey had been, for Thomas, a trip towards County Mayo, but also back in time. ‘Here were old libraries, old butlers, and old customs, that seemed all alike to belong to the era of Cromwell, or even an earlier era than his; whilst the ancient names, to one who had some acquaintance with the great events of Irish history, often strengthened the illusion.’60
Thomas enjoyed his new surroundings immensely, from the ‘very large and handsome’ house to the ‘fine Deer Park… containing nearly 300 Acres’. His schedule was busy, if aristocratic, and consisted of ‘Reading, Hunting, Riding, Shooting, bathing, and Sea excursions’, with the daily rides of sixteen or seventeen miles enabling him to see ‘almost everything worth seeing in this most romantic Country’. One week after his arrival he climbed ‘the famous Croagh Patrick … from which may be seen a great part of Connaught. When I was at the Summit I thought of the lines about Shakespeare looking abroad from some high Cliff and enjoying the elemental War. Beneath us indeed was a most tremendous War of the Elements, whilst we were as calm and serene as possible. To our left we saw Clew Bay and the vast Atlantic.’61
It was the Irish Rebellion of 1798, however, that most fully captured Thomas’s imagination. As far as he could tell, the English had used ‘the amplifying, and the Irish the diminishing hyperbole’ in their discussions of the conflict, for while the former broadcast ‘horrid Accounts of Murders and Battles and Robberies’, the latter spoke of ‘merely straggling Banditti’ who ‘unroofed a few Cabbins, and took away some Cattle’.62 Spurred on by his love of history and his fascination with secret societies, Thomas tried to piece together his own version of events, as he was in a neighbourhood which only two years earlier had been ‘the very centre of the final military operations’, and he had the opportunity to speak to many people ‘who had personally participated’ in the ‘tragic incidents of the era’. No doubt the trouble was brought closest to him when he learned that ‘the French and the Rebels’ had ‘twice been in possession’ of Westport House, where they had ‘made off with the best Books’ and left ‘memorials even in our bedrooms’. One Westport family friend also swore to it that several of the current workers on the estate were ‘active boys from Vinegar Hill’.63
In his reminiscences, Thomas remembered staying at Westport House for three or four months. In fact, he was there for just over three weeks.64 Setting out on Monday, 8 September, he and Westport made their way back to Dublin, and then took the packet across to Parkgate in Cheshire, where they caught the coach to Birmingham and said goodbye. Westport was for Eton. Thomas had been expecting to return to Bath, but had been ‘directed, in Dublin, to inquire at the Birmingham Post-Office for a letter’ which would guide his motions, and from which he learned that he should continue on to Laxton in Northamptonshire to join his sister Mary, who was visiting at the home of an old family friend. There was, however, no Northamptonshire coach until the following day, and so Thomas resigned himself to several hours in ‘gloomy, noisy, and, at that time, dirty Birmingham’. He checked in at the Hen and Chickens and spent a restless night, kept awake until two or three in the morning by those who were retiring to bed, and then about three by those who were being rounded up for early-morning travel by the porters, one of whom accidentally blundered into Thomas’s room ‘with that appalling, “Now, sir, the horses are coming out”’.65
[v]
As he boarded the coach, Thomas was full of emotion. Miss Watson, now Lady Carbery, was the old family friend expecting him in Northamptonshire. Thomas had known her for most of his life, as she used to visit often at The Farm and Greenhay in the company of her guardian, Mrs Schreiber. In 1792, she had married George Evans, Lord Carbery, and in early 1800 the couple lived for a time in Milsom Street, Bath, where they saw a good deal of Mrs Quincey, under whose tutelage Lady Carbery became a zealous convert to ‘Evangelical Christianity’. It is perhaps for this reason that, when Lady Carbery returned to the family estate at Laxton, Mrs Quincey followed her, taking up residence with Mrs Schreiber, who lived at nearby Tixover, and whose health was now failing.66 Beautiful, wealthy, and intellectual, Lady Carbery had always taken an interest in Thomas, and he was anxious to see her again.
At the same time, his spirits were weighed down by a pressing question regarding his future: where was he going to go to school? Mother and son had been debating the question across his weeks in Ireland. Winkfield, he insisted, was too small and too easy, an argument Mrs Quincey seems to have been content to accept. Eton, where she wanted to send him, seems genuinely to have frightened him, and he attempted to turn her from this scheme with accounts that were clearly exaggerated, but that played directly to her religious preoccupations. ‘Westport, I remember at Bath to have possessed one of the most amicable Dispositions I ever knew. It is now in ruins.’ Yet with all his ‘Debauchery, Intemperance, and swearing, I hear with Astonishment’ that he is ‘reckoned quite virtuous at Eton’. Worse still, Thomas had heard tales of a vicious pack mentality. ‘You may judge of the Discipline of the School when I tell you that a week ago they beat an old Porter (in the defiance of the Masters, some of whom were standing by and hardly trying to prevent them) with such brutality that his life I hear, is despaired of. – My situation, as a Boy on the foundation would be still more miserable.’ Why not a return to Bath Grammar School? Mrs Quincey had concerns about the way the school was conducted, but Thomas had been happy there, and he urged her to agree to this option. The ‘Plan’ at Bath ‘every one allows to be incomparable. It is a very great Improvement, I think, on the Eton Method … In short every thing you desire me I will do and only ask for this one thing, to go to the Grammar School.’67
Yet even as he wrote these words, Thomas recognized that the bigger issue was not which school he would attend, but the revulsion he felt at going to school at all. ‘For more than a year, everything connected with schools and the business of schools had been growing more and more hateful to me.’ During his recent holiday he had been ‘in the midst of glittering saloons, at times also in the midst of society the most fascinating’, talking, and drinking, and sightseeing with aristocrats from London to Dublin and beyond, and this was not to mention the time he had spent in the society of beautiful women. ‘My whole mind was rushing in like a cataract, forcing channels for itself and for the new tastes which it introduced.’ He simply could not go back to the petty, puerile society of schoolboys. It was a joke, an injustice, a degradation. ‘I … felt very much as in the middle ages must have felt some victim of evil destiny, inheritor of a false fleeting prosperity, that suddenly in a moment of time, by signs blazing out past all concealment on his forehead, was detected as a leper.’68
Thomas’s mind swam with these gloomy thoughts as he wound his way ‘by some intolerable old coach’ to Stamford, and then took a chaise down to Laxton. He reached the house just as the dinner bell was ringing for the first time, and was greeted in the portico by his sister Mary, who told him that Lady Carbery wished to see him as soon as he arrived. Hastening to her rooms, Thomas learned from her that she had two other guests, Lord and Lady Massey, a young and happily married Irish couple who were ‘domesticated at Laxton’ because of ‘pecuniary embarrassments’ in Ireland. As Lord Carbery was absent at his Limerick estate, might Thomas take upon himself the task of entertaining Lord Massey, as the time hung heavily upon him ‘during the long couple of hours through which the custom of those times bound a man to the dinner-table after the disappearance of the ladies’. Delighted to have the opportunity of obliging Lady Carbery, and of continuing to socialize amongst adults, Thomas dashed to his rooms, took a hot bath, and ‘at the second summons of the dinner-bell … descended a new creature to the drawing-room’, ready to fulfil his role as deputy host.69
He did so admirably. Aided by ‘three or four glasses of wine, to call back the golden spirits which were now so often deserting me’, Thomas talked to Lord Massey of hunting, horses and stables, Ireland, and Laxton, before moving on to Lord Carbery’s superb library, where ‘on rainy days, and often enough one had occasion to say through rainy weeks’, it provided a ‘delightful resource … to both of us’. On evenings, however, when Lady Carbery and Lady Massey chose to go visiting among the neighbouring aristocrats, Lord Massey always remained at home, while Thomas was given the task of chaperoning the two women. His delight in this role may well be imagined, and in the after-dinner hours he had the additional pleasure of listening to the assembled company of men praising the two women. ‘Lady Massey universally carried off the palm of unlimited homage. Lady Carbery was a regular beauty, and publicly known for such; both were fine figures, and apparently not older than 26; but in her Irish friend people felt something more thoroughly artless and feminine – for the masculine understanding of Lady Carbery in some way communicated its commanding expression to her deportment.’70
During his many morning and evening calls with Lady Carbery, Thomas was particularly struck by two very different local nobles. One was John Henry Manners, fifth Duke of Rutland, who conducted himself like someone ‘fitted to uphold the honour of his ancient house’, and whose magnificent home at Belvoir Castle inspired Thomas with ‘respect for the English nobility’. The other was Henry Cecil, first Marquess of Exeter. Thomas had been eager to meet him, before Lady Carbery drily offered him advice: ‘moderate your anxiety … I believe you will find his splendour approachable’. It turned out that Thomas found no splendour at all. ‘In this Lord Exeter I saw repeated instances of blank superciliousness … unmitigated by courtesy.’ His ‘after-dinner conversation’ was ‘exquisite’ in its ‘imbecility’, while his ‘talk was not of oxen, but of an animal not greatly superior in interest – viz., himself’.71
At some point that autumn, on the suggestion of Mrs Quincey, Lady Carbery sent for the renowned Manchester physician White in the hope that he might be able to bring some relief to Mrs Schreiber, as her health was not improving. Thomas of course already knew White as the family doctor who had looked after him as a child, and who – more meaningfully – had performed the postmortem operation on Elizabeth’s skull. White attended Mrs Schreiber at Tixover, but resided during his visit at Laxton, where he and Thomas rode together, and met daily at breakfast and dinner. ‘Greatly I profited by this intimacy,’ declared Thomas, his polish and erudition once more gaining him entry into the adult world.72 No degree of intimacy, however, seems likely to have prevailed upon him to broach the subject that must often have been in his mind: White’s familiarity with Elizabeth’s life and death.
Lady Carbery appears to have been intent on turning Thomas into a country gentleman, and ensuring that he attained ‘such accomplishments as were usually possessed by the men of her circle’. For two hours every day he took riding lessons from one of her principal grooms, and for many weeks he accompanied her zealous gamekeeper into the Laxton woods, and did his best to become a good shot.73 Yet while he delighted to oblige her, Thomas was also very keen to help her. Lady Carbery was moving deeper and deeper into an evangelical enthusiasm of a ‘gloomy … Calvinistic’ cast, and she sought his guidance in the cultivation of ‘religious knowledge in an intellectual way’. Thomas was not widely read in theology, but he applied himself to the area with great aplomb, and soon claimed to be making discoveries that were ‘profoundly just’, while his thorough knowledge of Greek gave him insights into the New Testament that convinced Lady Carbery that she too needed to learn that language. After persuading Lady Massey and Mary to join them in their studies, the four rode over to Stamford one morning, and ‘astounded the bookseller’s apprentice by ordering four copies of the Clarendon Press Greek Testament’ to be sent down ‘by the mail-coach without delay’. Mary and Lady Massey quickly lost interest in the project, but Lady Carbery ‘became expert in the original language of the New Testament’, and Thomas encouraged her to read Herodotus as a supplementary pursuit. At this juncture, however, Lord Carbery suddenly returned from Ireland, and his patronizing attitude towards his wife’s intellectual endeavours led to the defeat of Thomas’s plans to broaden their studies in Greek.74
For several weeks Mrs Quincey and Thomas had met at Tixover, where they had doubtless pursued the question of his education. By early November, she had discussed the issue at length with his guardians and reached a decision: Thomas would be sent to Manchester Grammar School. He probably pleaded for Bath right to the end, but three central factors sold his mother on Manchester. One, Thomas would once again be near the most energetic of his guardians, Hall, who already had three of his own children at the school. Two, he would be close to Kelsall, who still managed part of the Quincey estate, and whose household had provided such a happy interlude for Thomas four years earlier. And three, students who attended Manchester Grammar School for three consecutive years were eligible for a bursary at Brasenose College, Oxford, totalling £50 a year. This money, coupled with his £150 patrimony, would enable Thomas to raise his allowance near to the sum thought reasonable for a student to lead a comfortable life at Oxford.75
No amount of explanation or rationalizing, however, removed the ‘sickening oppression’ Thomas felt when his mother announced her decision. He knew she was not one to change her mind, and while he had no doubt hoped that Lady Carbery’s affection for him would lead her to intercede on his behalf, her deep religious ties to his mother carried the day and she urged him to submit. Thomas’s fate ‘in the worst shape’ he had anticipated was thus ‘solemnly and definitively settled’. He looked on his seven weeks at Laxton as ‘the happiest of my childish life’, but when the time came, he bid a sad goodbye to Lady Carbery, and passed through the Laxton gates on his way to Manchester. ‘Misgivingly I went forwards’, he recalled, ‘feeling for ever that, through clouds of thick darkness, I was continually nearing a danger, or was myself perhaps wilfully provoking a trial, before which my constitutional despondency would cause me to lie down without a struggle.’76 Thomas’s concerns were only partially justified. A trial was coming, but he would not lie down before it. Rebellion was in his heart.