Joseph Hunter

“ Walter Pope, an ingenious man and no mean poet, is not to be charged with over much of the severity and strictness of the Puritan life. The later Pope, however, would not be over forward to reveal his connection with either Dodd or Dr. Walter; else, if he really did descend from one of the many daughters of the Rector of Fawsley, he might have claimed to himself a descent which, on fair evidence, can be traced to the very depths of the antiquity of English families, the Puritan divine being well known to be of the very ancient family of Dodd of Shockledge, in Cheshire. ”

“ In a manuscript lately added to the British Museum (Additional, No. 12,482) a list of persons whom, in 1665, the heralds summoned to appear, or intended to do so, contains the name of “Mr. Turner, of the parish of St. John del Pike, York,” who is unquestionably the Poet’s grandfather. This indifference to the advantage of making a public record of many facts, interesting at least to their posterity, is not peculiar to this family, but deposes rather unfavourably to the taste and judgment of the persons in whom the representation of a family at such a time vested. ”

“ Previously to the time when Sir Thomas Pope made the acquisitions, the greater part of which he disposed of so nobly in the foundation of his college at Oxford, his family made no marriages with the higher gentry. In short, there is nothing to interfere with the probability of the Rector of Thruxton being of a branch of the family, nor anything in it which the Downe family could look upon as degrading. We must not suffer the glare of the coronet to mislead us: we are speaking of times before the Popes were ennobled. ”

“ Literary biography owes much to the Wartons—more than the present writers in this department seem disposed to acknowledge; and it is to a Warton, not Thomas, but his brother, Dr. Joseph Warton, that we owe the hint upon which I have proceeded, and, as I believe, settled the question for ever.
Dr. Warton, we have seen, in his Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 1780, vol. ii., informs us, that he learned from Dr. Bolton, Dean of Carlisle, that he had heard from a Mr. Potenger, a cousin of Pope, that Pope’s grandfather was a clergyman of the Church of England living in Hampshire. ”

“ It has been shown by unimpeachable evidence that Edward Turner, the great-grandfather of Edith Pope, was the son of a substantial citizen of York, who flourished in the reign of King Henry VII.; that, having advanced a step higher in the social scale, he maintained during great part of the reign of Queen Elizabeth the rank of a gentleman, and associated upon a footing of equality with the best of the inhabitants of a city which was then “the glory of the North” ”

“ The descent of the maternal ancestors of the illustrious Poet may be traced to a source whence many families among the present aristocracy of Yorkshire have originally sprung,—the trade or commerce of the city of York. ”

“ The testator gives a life interest in nearly the whole of his estates to his wife Elizabeth; but he does this by means of numerous separate devises, intailing the various parts of his property, after her death, upon his nephews, Thomas Eymis, William Eymis, Richard Eymis, John Eymis, William Thynne, and Sir John Thynne, [Pg 12] Knight, [11] varying the order of succession, and introducing into some of the limitations the names of the younger sons of his nephew, Sir John Thynne, and his brother-in-law, Sir Henry Neville, Knight, and of two or three other persons, of whom Edward Turner is one. ”

“ When Thomas Warton, in the Appendix to the Life of Sir Thomas Pope, the founder of Trinity College, Oxford, and also the founder of the family of Pope, Earls of Downe, with whom [Pg 17] Pope claimed kindred, enters on the consideration of this question, he admits the probability that such a relationship existed, but professes his utter inability to ascend beyond the father, in pursuit of the Poet’s ancestors. The attempt to do so has been made by others, who have brought far less of antiquarianism into literary history than Warton. ”

“ Of Christopher Newton, the father of Thomasine, I can only conjecture that he was the Christopher, son of Miles Newton, of Thorpe in Claro wapentake (by Jane his wife, daughter of Ambrose Beckwith, of Stillingflete) , who was aged one year and three months at the Visitation of 1585. Supposing this Christopher to be Thomasine’s father, which can hardly be doubted, she would be allied, through the Beckwiths, with several of the higher Yorkshire gentry.
William Turner, son of Philip, and nephew and principal heir of Lancelot, is styled by his grandson the Poet, “Esquire.” ”

“ A gentleman by birth, and, doubtless, a lawyer by profession, he was first constituted a member of the Council of the North, and appointed to the important office of its secretary, by the commission under which the Earl of Shrewsbury was made Lord President in the 4th year of King Edward VI. After the accession of Queen Elizabeth, under the commission which appointed the Earl of Rutland Lord President, and under the subsequent commissions issued in that reign, he continued to hold the office of Secretary, and was also Keeper of the Queen’s Signet. ”

“ To place them in the exact order of seniority is out of our [Pg 40] power, though a more thorough search in the Yorkshire parish registers might enable us to do so.
All we can pretend to is to place them in an order approximate to the truth; and I need not apprise the reader that where we have to deal with so large a family, there must be a long interval between the elder and the younger. At the birth of Pope, in 1688, his mother was forty-six, and some of his aunts must have been sixty, or thereabouts.
Christiana is named in her father’s will as the wife of Samuel Cooper. ”

“ In that section of the interesting and valuable tract you have recently given to the world, which treats of the maternal ancestry of Pope, you suggest the possibility of “ascending a generation above” Lancelot Turner, the uncle of William Turner, the Poet’s maternal grandfather. ”

“ Pope Tract, p. 31.
[37] At a court held by the lords of the manor of Strensall, in April, 1622, William Turner was called as a copyholder of Towthorpe; and again in April, 1624.
Towthorpe is an insignificant and very secluded village, about four miles north of York, a little off the high road from thence to Sheriff-Hutton. Nothing is now left of the old manor-house; but near to the spot where it may be supposed to have stood, a not uninteresting object still remains, to carry the mind back to the days when Lancelot Turner and his nephew William were the proprietors. ”

“ We must conclude, therefore, that his early death made way for William to become the oldest surviving son of his father, and the heir presumptive of his uncle, who, as we learn from your pages, [25] having no children of his own, ultimately by his will established this nephew in the possession of the bulk of his fortune.
It was but a short time previous to the occurrence of the calamity which deprived Philip Turner of his wife and three of his children, that Lancelot Turner became the owner of Towthorpe. ”

“ Joseph Pope, Redriff.
There can be no reasonable doubt that Alexander is the Poet’s father; and it is worth observation that this is a list of “merchants” properly so called—persons engaged in the higher walks of commerce. The number of the names is about 1770. Hence we must infer that the Poet’s father was not, at that time at least, pursuing any low or mean occupation, but one in which in those days it was not unusual to place the younger sons of gentry, and sometimes even of the nobility of the land. ”

“ In the year 1562, when the corporation of York contemplated making him sheriff, Edward Turner was a married man, and the father of a family. The earliest register book of the parish of Saint Helen Stonegate, which commences in the year 1568, records the baptism of two of his younger children: “Lucy Turner, daughter of Edward Turner, gentleman,” was baptized on the 24th of February, 1569, and a son, named Edward, on the 12th of August, 1570. ”

“ During his long tenure of the influential and lucrative office of Secretary to the Court at York, Mr. Eymis had accumulated great wealth. He appears to have participated largely in the distribution by the crown of the ecclesiastical property in Yorkshire which was confiscated at the Reformation. His estate at Heslington, near York, where he built for his own residence a stately mansion, consisted chiefly of lands which had belonged to the Hospital of Saint Leonard and the Priory of Saint Andrew, two of the religious houses at York. ”

“ It is just possible, though hardly probable, that we may ascend a generation above this Lancelot; for, on January 20, 1626, the will of Robert Turner, of Towthroppe, was proved in the court of the Archbishop of York: its date does not appear. He desires to be buried in the churchyard at Huntingdon. He gives to his son Anthony the two younger oxen, with certain husbandry utensils; to his son Richard the red whie, which came from Stockton; and to his grandchild, William Turner, the little brown whie. He makes his wife and his younger son executors. ”

“ Had he not been a person in good circumstances, and belonging to the higher class of tradesmen, he would scarcely have brought up his son to one of the learned professions. In the year 1553, “Edward Turner, skryvener,” son of Robert Turner, wax-chandler, being entitled by patrimony to be admitted to the city franchise, was duly enrolled upon the register of York freemen.
This Edward Turner was the father of Lancelot Turner; and what you have hazarded as a probable conjecture with regard to the son, [6] is quite true as regards the father: he was connected with the Council of the North ”

“ His inquiries about his ancestors the Turners were less successful. He knew the relationship to Pope, but substitutes for William Turner of York, his contemporary, William Turner of Bilham, near Doncaster, a person of the same rank, but of a totally different family. Mrs. Mawhood may be considered to have remained a Protestant.
Another daughter, who must have been among those early born of this prolific bed, seems to have died before her father, who names in his will, Martha, John, and William Haitfield, as his grandchildren. ”

“ William Gylminge was a vintner,—in modern phrase, a wine-merchant. In the sixteenth century the vintners were among the most opulent of the York tradesmen, no person being permitted to sell wine without having an annual license from the Lord Mayor and Aldermen. ”

“ Editha Pope, aged 93, the last survivor of the children of William Turner, of York, Esq., who, by Thomasine Newton, his wife, had fourteen daughters and three sons, two of which died in the King’s service in the Civil Wars, and the eldest retired into Spain, where he died a general officer. ”

“ The inscription beneath it informs us that this is the effigy of Elizabeth Eymis, widow, late the wife of Thomas Eymis, Esq., deceased, who was one of the gentlewomen of the Queen’s privy chamber, and daughter of Sir Edward Nevill, Knight, one of the privy chamber to King Henry the Eighth. Mrs. Eymis, “the singular good mistress” of Edward Turner, did not long survive him. In her last will, which is dated the 31st of January, 1584-5, she desired, if she died at York or Heslington, to be buried in the Minster of York, nigh her late husband ”

“ Her husband resided at Ardsley, where he had a good estate, which place being near to Worsborough, we are at no loss to account for the connection thus formed, and may refer it to the period when the family were living at Marrow House, especially as we find that the eldest son, William Mawhood, who succeeded them at Ardsley, was born in 1647, being seventy-eight at the time of his death in 1725; many persons descend from him. ”

“ They do not scruple to charge the Lord President of the North himself [33] with being ill affected in religion; and, among other instances, they allege—first, that in the preceding year, the Lord President being certified of divers Spanish ships-of-war upon the coast of Scarborough, his lordship went thither, and took with him the Lord Dunbar, Sir Thomas Metham, and Sir William Alford, and lay at the house of Lord Eure, [34] whom he knew to be a convict recusant, and did, notwithstanding, refuse to disarm him, although he had received letters from the Privy Council to that effect ”