THE ANTIQUARY.
REV. DR. WILLIAM BORLASE, F.R.S.,
THE ANTIQUARY.
'In the shade, but shining.'
Pope to Borlase.
The little parish of Ludgvan[71] (or as it is sometimes called, Ludgvan-Lees), on the north shore of the Mount's Bay, can boast of having contributed at least its share to the list of illustrious Cornishmen. Small, remote, and obscure as it is, Ludgvan is one of the places mentioned as the birthplace of Sir Humphry Davy; it was for more than half a century the residence of the subject of this article; and here, too, at Tremenheere, was born one of the most illustrious professors of the healing art that the county has ever produced—himself the friend and medical attendant of Borlase and of Pope—I refer to Dr. William Oliver, of Bath.
That the pursuits of a keen inquirer, endowed with no ordinary powers of observation and considerable artistic talent, should, in such an out-of-the-way corner of England as Ludgvan still is, have been directed towards natural history, and to the megalithic remains of antiquity with which the neighbourhood once abounded, and of which there are still numerous examples, is not to be wondered at. And it cannot be denied that the study of those sciences, both in Cornwall and elsewhere, was materially benefited by the numerous and careful drawings and descriptions of the stone monuments of a mysterious and almost unknown race of men, which it was one of the main objects of Dr. Borlase's learned leisure to investigate and record. Many of these ancient remains have altogether disappeared since his time, and many others have been mutilated or altered; but in the Doctor's volumes such minute descriptions of them have been preserved that the loss of the monuments themselves has been rendered of much less serious importance than would have been the case but for his careful and elaborate records. Of the deductions and suggestions which are appended to those descriptions something will be said hereafter.
But, in accordance with the method adopted in the case of the other Worthies of Cornwall, it is well first to say something of the stock from which Dr. Borlase sprang. A Norman origin is claimed for the family—they are said to have descended from one Taillefer: presumably some connexion of him who is reported to have struck the first blow at the Battle of Hastings. Coming into Cornwall, as, by the way, very few other followers of the Norman Conqueror did, the Borlases seem to have adopted a custom which has always more or less prevailed in the county of merging their own name into that of their place of residence; and here it may be observed that the name of Borlase, supposed by some to mean 'the high green summit,' is still attached to two or three little homesteads in the parish of St. Wenn, three or four miles north-east of St. Columb Major.[72] The direct male line became extinct in the time of Elizabeth, when the coheiresses married a Tonkin and a Bray; and the family does not appear to have risen to any distinction until they moved farther westward, and about the middle of the seventeenth century took up their abode (which is still in the possession of a member of the family) at Pendeen, in the parish of St. Just.
The early Pendeen Borlases seem to have been staunch Royalists, for it seems that one of them assisted his cousin, Colonel Nicholas Borlase, in raising a troop of horse for the King. Of this troop a writer in the Quarterly Review for 1875, quotes the following story:
'Being on one occasion much pressed by the Puritan forces, and making a running fight, he set fire to a large brake of furze in the night, which the enemy taking for the fires made on the approach of the King's army, immediately fled with great precipitation, and left him both bag and baggage, which he seized the next morning.'
By way of comment on these proceedings, Fairfax quartered some of his troopers at Pendeen,—doubtless to the intense annoyance of the owner thereof; and as regards Colonel Nicholas, a letter from Cromwell to Lenthall tells all that I have been able to gather as to that hero's career. It is dated Edinburgh, 13th June, 1651, and asks the Speaker to hasten the hearing of Borlase's case, which seems to have been involved in the conditions of the hurried treaty of Truro, when Hopton surrendered to Fairfax, and terminated the supremacy of the Royal cause in the West country.
The Borlases were not, however, without some sort of barren reward for their faithfulness to the Stuart cause; for Humphry, who was Sheriff of Cornwall during the last two years of the reign of James II., was created a peer by that monarch after his abdication. Under these circumstances he, of course, never enjoyed the title. He sometimes resided at Truthan, in the parish of St. Erme, near Truro, and left his estates to the Borlases of Pendeen.
Dr. Borlase was born at Pendeen, on 2nd February, 1695, the second son of his father, 'John of Pendeen, twice Member of Parliament for St. Ives in Cornwall in the reign of Queen Anne, and Lydia Harris, of Hayne, county Devon, his wife,' a lady descended, so the writer in the Quarterly Review informs us, through the Nevilles and Bouchiers, from Edward III. But the Borlases had also plenty of good Cornish blood in their veins; and amongst other old families of the soil with whom they intermarried may be named their not very distant neighbours, the Godolphins.
With a member of the last-named family John Borlase seems to have had an altercation one day in church, the particulars of which are set forth in his victim's petition to Parliament as follows, viz.:
'Honoured Sirs,
'Life, the precious tenet of mankind, forceth me to inform your honours that Sunday, the 26th February, 1709, in full view of most of the congregation of Maddern, John Borlase, one of Her Majesty's Justices of the Peace, did wilfully break the peace by striking me almost to the ground with his staff, and if not timely prevented by one Paul Tonkin, he would have been striking me again. He did at the same time highly threaten me, with Chritr. Harris, Esq., Jane his wife, and John his son. Mr. Harris ordered his servant to beat me. Of the truth of the above information I am ready to give my corroboration. Humbly craving the Honble. Speaker and House of Commons not to skreene such daring offenders, but to give me leave to prosecute them as the law directs, is the humble prayer of, Hond. Sirs,
'Your in all humility and duty,
'Ffrances Godolphin.'
What this poor gentleman had done to deserve the 'Justice's justice' thus summarily inflicted on him, observes the writer in the Quarterly Review, from whom I quote this letter, there and then, in the midst as it seems of divine service, and by the occupant of the next pew, we are left to conjecture.
Pendeen[73] is a house of unusual interest in this part of Cornwall, where, indeed, primæval remains abound, but where are few examples—save small and (with one or two exceptions) not particularly interesting churches—of mediæval and later architecture. It is now occupied as a farmhouse, but was formerly a place of much more importance. Substantially built of native granite, the structure was evidently designed for the occupation of some prosperous man; and its ground-plot indicates that it was so traced as to be capable of some sort of defence against marauders. In one of the bedrooms—most probably that in which William Borlase first saw the light—are some curious figures on the wall, of which a sketch is preserved by the writer.
But it is not so much to the house itself as to its surroundings that we must look for what were probably the determining circumstances of Borlase's career. He was in the very heart of the cromlehs, the cliff-castles, the weird stone-circles, and the huge monoliths of a forgotten race; and, close to the house, there was a long and mysterious double cave—a vau or ogou—which, we can but believe, must have excited an inquiring child's awe-struck interest. We are indebted chiefly to himself for the little that we know of his early days; and this information is derived from a modest autobiographical sketch which he drew up in 1772, when seventy-seven years old, for his friend Huddesford, the Curator of the Ashmolean Museum, at Oxford, an institution to which Borlase contributed nearly the whole of his collections of natural history and antiquities.
His first school seems to have been at the nearest town, Penzance; and of him his master said what so many a master has said of many another apt but dreamy and indolent scholar, who was nevertheless destined afterwards to distinguish himself, that 'he could learn, but would not.' Thence he went, in 1709, under the tuition of the Rev. Mr. Bedford, at Plymouth, where he seems to have profited more by the instruction which he received. It has also been supposed that he was educated partly at Tiverton School. In March, 1712-13 he was entered, Cornish fashion, at Exeter College, Oxford, and here he took his B.A. and M.A. degrees in due course; was in 1719 ordained deacon; and in 1720, priest.
Dr. Borlase gives the following picture of the Oxford of his days:
'When I was at Oxford in the year 1715, we—I mean pupils, tutors, barbers, shoe-cleaners, and bed-makers—minded nothing but Politics; the Muse stood neglected; nay meat and drink, balls and ladies, had all reason to complain in their turns that we minded Scotland and Preston more than the humane, softer, and more delicate entertainments of Genius and Philosophy. This was a most unhappy time, and I have often lamented it.' And he concludes with the strong Conservative opinion: 'If I can see anything in our English history, 'tis that the poor nation is always the worse for alterations, tho' particular persons may be the better, that is, the richer or more powerful.'
His amusing description of a journey home from the University with Sir John St. Aubyn, in 1722, is given hereafter in the chapter on that family.
Two years after he was ordained priest, and (his father having bought for him the next presentation) he was presented to the living of Ludgvan, by Charles, first Duke of Bolton, through the influence, as Nichols inaccurately tells us, of Sir William Morice, of Werrington—a family with whom the St. Aubyns intermarried. This living he held for fifty-two years.[74]
When Borlase settled in his Rectory, the retired situation of the place did not altogether prevent his indulging in the mild social dissipations of the neighbourhood; notably there was a bowling-green club, formed in 1719, which proved an agreeable means of meeting with his friends, and afforded Mr. Gwavas—one of the latest writers in the old Cornish language, and a member of the party—an opportunity of composing a set of verses in Cornish in honour of the foundation of the club.
There can be little doubt, from what we know of his surroundings and proclivities, that Borlase was already making notes of the neighbouring antiquities, and dipping into his favourite authorities—the best of the day—for information, which he was afterwards to apply in a somewhat too speculative manner, to his pet subject—the Druids. He seems to have relied mainly for this purpose upon several passages in Julius Cæsar, Pliny, Elias Schedius de Diis Germanis, Smith's 'Syntagma de Druidis;' a collection of the French and German writers in Frickius de Druidis, Sheringham, Sammes, Montfaucon, Mons. Martin's 'Religion of the Ancient Gauls,' Toland's 'History of the Druids,' Rowland's 'Mona Illustrata,' Dr. Stukeley in his 'Stonehenge and Abury,' and Keysler in his 'Antiquities.'[75]
His method was to examine, and especially to survey and to draw carefully the old weather-beaten stone structures of Cornwall; being convinced, as he says, 'of the necessity of copying the original monuments,' and 'offering something to the public which their undeniable properties suggested.' We shall, however, I think, presently see that, in endeavouring to carry out this method, the worthy antiquary was rather prone to do that which so many other investigators have done—namely, to see that which he wished to see.
Fortunately for him, and for the records of the 'Cornish Antiquities,' when he married (as he did in 1724) Anne Smith, the daughter of the then Rector of Camborne and Illogan—'peramatæ, amanti, amabili,' as he wrote for her epitaph—he found a partner who (again to use his own words) took 'more than her part of the domestic cares,' in order that he might the better prosecute his antiquarian researches. The marriage ceremony was performed by his elder brother the Rev. Walter Borlase, LL.D., of Castle Horneck (the seat of the family on their removing from Pendeen, about a century and a half ago), afterwards Vice-Warden of the Stannaries from 1761 to 1776.
Although he lived to a very ripe old age, his health seems to have somewhat failed him for a time in 1730; and he accordingly repaired to Bath, as the waters were then in high repute for maladies such as his, in order to be under the care of his friend Dr. Oliver, who happily cured him, and gave him 'a new lease of life.' There can be little doubt that this excursion was also of great importance in another way; for it was here, and at this time, that he made the acquaintance of Pope,[76] of Ralph Allen, and of many other well-known characters in the literary and scientific world, who afterwards became his correspondents. His clever pencil was also employed during his sojourn at Bath in designing the obelisk in Orange Grove—so named after the Prince of Orange—another of those persons who credited the renowned Bath waters with the power of renewing their youth.
In 1732 Dr. Borlase's elder brother, Walter, died; and thereupon the subject of this memoir had the Vicarage of St. Just added to his previous preferment. This second living he held for the long period of forty years. The two places were not so far apart (only about twelve miles) as to preclude his giving attention to both cures; and indeed those biographers who have written of Borlase (notably Chalmers), state that his performance of his clerical duties was highly praiseworthy, being marked with 'the most rigid punctuality and exemplary dignity.' At St. Just, a populous mining parish, his congregation often consisted of 1,000 persons on a Sunday morning, and 500 in the afternoon. This, too, it must be remembered, was at a time when Churchmanship generally was at a very low ebb in Cornwall, and needed Wesley's trumpet-call to arouse it.[77]
Notwithstanding his increased responsibilities, Borlase did not neglect his antiquarian and scientific studies, nor his out-of-door pursuits of gardening and planting, for which the mild air of Ludgvan was highly favourable. In fact, at this period he seems to have 'entered upon the study of Druid learning' with renewed fervour. His chief companions were Sir John St. Aubyn of St. Michael's Mount hard by, and the Rev. Edward Collins of St. Erth, the latter of whom appears to have joined in nearly all his rambles, and not to have failed to administer occasionally 'the salutary censure of a friend;' for, as Borlase himself tells us, he found Mr. Collins a useful 'check in some disquisitions.'
Thus tranquilly passed away some fifteen years of this quiet and uneventful, but busy life,[78] until circumstances again brought him into contact with that outer world of larger and more learned minds which 'do mostly congregate in cities.' In 1748 he went to Exeter, to be present at the ordination of his eldest son. Here he was introduced to the Dean of Exeter, the Rev. Dr. Charles Lyttelton, afterwards Bishop of Carlisle, and the first President of the Society of Antiquaries. And it is not a little curious to note, by the way, that Dr. Lyttelton's successor as Dean of Exeter, Jeremiah Milles, of Duloe in Cornwall, also succeeded his predecessor in the Deanery in the distinguished post of President of the Antiquaries. It can readily be believed that new sources of intellectual enjoyment opened up with an acquaintance with such men as these. They forthwith became correspondents; and to their names were added, either about this time or at other periods of Borlase's life, those of Linnæus, Gronov of Leyden, Stukeley, Atterbury (Bishop of Rochester), Browne Willis, Pococke (Bishop of Ossory), Thomas Pennant, and Ellis, the author of the 'Corallines.' The library at Castle Horneck contains upwards of forty volumes in MS. of Borlase's Correspondence and Notes.
One of the fruits of Borlase's visit to Exeter was the production of his first essay (or 'Exercise' as it was termed) for the 'Philosophical Transactions.' This appeared in 1749. It was the first scientific account of any of the Cornish minerals; and was entitled 'Spar, and Sparry Productions, called Cornish Diamonds.' This was considered of sufficient merit to secure his election as Fellow of the Royal Society, an honour which was conferred upon him on his visit to London in the following year. Many other contributions followed, nineteen in all; chiefly on subjects connected with meteorology and natural phenomena, and one paper of an antiquarian character. They are catalogued in the 'Biographia Britannica,' vol. ii., p. 425.
But the time had now arrived when Borlase felt himself strong enough to invite the attention of the world to more considerable works from his pen and pencil. And first he turned his attention to grouping and arranging the results of his archæological researches, the publication of which, by subscription, he set about accomplishing. It was not, however, until 1753 that he saw his way clear to taking the MSS. of his 'Cornish Antiquities' with him to Oxford—preferring that city to London for two reasons, the first of which we can easily understand, viz., its greater retirement; but the second is one which sounds strange to modern ears, because of the 'more ready access to books.' So great was his diligence, and that of his engravers, that the work, in folio, with its numerous illustrations, was published at Oxford in February of the following year, 1754;[79] and the indefatigable author at once returned to Cornwall in order to arrange the materials for his next great work, the 'Natural History' of his native county. Meanwhile, in 1756, appeared his account of the Scilly Islands, an enlargement of one of his papers in the 'Philosophical Transactions,' and a work of which Dr. Johnson wrote in the Literary Review that 'This is one of the most pleasing and elegant pieces of local inquiry that our country has produced.'
On this occasion, too, he seems to have proceeded with his usual despatch; for in October, 1757, we find him once more at Oxford, for the purpose of printing the last-named work. And again, by the spring of the following year, 1758, this too was ready for the public eye.
Having now secured in print the results of so many years' labours, the happy idea occurred to him of presenting to his beloved University the collections of antiquities, natural history, etc., upon which his works were based, and he accordingly deposited them forthwith in the Ashmolean Museum, continuing to send thither from time to time any similar rarities which he discovered. It is scarcely necessary to add that for this generous gift he received the thanks of the University; which, in token of the high appreciation in which they held his talents and his liberality, on the 23rd March, 1766, conferred on him, by diploma, the degree of Doctor of Laws, the highest academical honour which it was in the power of the University to bestow.
But Borlase was now getting an old man, being over seventy years of age. The friends of his youth were dying off; and he was unable to undertake the long antiquarian rambles which had been the delight of his stalwart days. His outdoor amusements began to be restricted to the superintendence (which he seems to have thoroughly enjoyed) of the improvement of the numerous roads which ran through his parish; one of which, it may be mentioned, was the highroad to Penzance, until that which now skirts the shore of the Mount's Bay was substituted for it. His literary labours consisted partly in writing his 'Sacræ Exercitationes,' which were chiefly paraphrases of Ecclesiastes, the Canticles of Solomon, and the Lamentations of Jeremiah—rather for his own pleasure than with any view to publication; and his home recreations were the 'Belles Lettres' and drawing and painting. He did not, however, neglect entirely his old pursuits; for he prepared for the press the new and enlarged edition of his 'Antiquities,' which, as we have seen, was published in 1769; and he busily engaged himself in a similar office for his 'Natural History,' which he did not live to complete. The emendations, however (or rather the principal of them), appeared in the Journal of the Royal Institution of Cornwall for 1875. And during this latter part of his life, as well as during the previous years, he was occupied in collecting materials for a Parochial History of the County, which never saw the light.
His last literary labour was a treatise on the 'Creation and the Deluge,' which contains some ingenious speculations on the nature of earthquakes and submarine upheavals. The beginning of this little work he had actually sent to the press; but a sudden and violent illness in 1771 warned him that he was overtaxing his strength, and he resolved not to go on with the publication. Within two or three months of his death he drew up a short memoir of his life, written in the third person, for his friend Huddesford, which closes in the following happy strain:
'Being now in his seventy-seventh year, very little more can be hoped for by himself or expected by others.
'Having been long accustomed to the confinement of his study, retirement and old age incessantly call upon him with the less terrour; and resignation to his increasing infirmities becomes every day easier and less irksome, till at last he now accounts it among the blessings of long life that it has quieted and extinguished every spark of ambition, and that it enables him to withdraw more and more with some decency from the world; precluding the perhaps well-intended, though rather too frequent visits of civility, in which there is generally more dissipation at all stages of life than real compensation for the waste of time, especially in the days of age.
'In hopes, however, of being not entirely useless as yet, whilst it pleases God to grant him life, most of his present time (as not the least of his pleasures) he allots to the instruction of a dutiful and apprehensive youth, the present companion of his retirement.'
So lived, and so, on the 31st August, 1772, peacefully died, at Ludgvan, Cornwall's 'Nourice of Antiquity,' Dr. William Borlase. He was buried by the side of his wife, near the east end of his own church, on the north side of the altar; and his executor inscribed on his unpretending monument the words:
'Perurbani, perhumani, perquam pii,
hujusce parochiæ per annos LII.
rectoris desideratissimi,
in republica necnon literaria versatissimi.
Loquuntur scripta,
testantur posteri.'
He had six sons, only two of whom survived him, the Rev. John Borlase and the Rev. George Borlase, Casuistical Professor and Registrar of the University of Cambridge. His son Christopher, a sailor, died of a fever on the coast of Guinea in 1749, and appears to have inherited some of his father's artistic skill.
As an illustration of Borlase's 'method,' and of his perfervid imagination when he got amongst his native granite rocks, I have thought it would be interesting to cull the following few notes from his 'Scilly Isles':
'On a Carn adjoining the Giant's Castle,' he observes, 'the floor, consisting only of one Rock, must convince us that this Circle was intended for a place of Worship, for it could not serve for a Sepulchre; but why the Quoits were hollowed out into Basons (as they are placed in a Religious Circle) must have been in some sort or other subservient to the purposes of the Druid Superstition.' As regards the 'Rock Basons,' he goes on to say, 'My opinion concerning the use of them you do not want to be informed of; I have always thought that they were designed to receive in their utmost purity the waters of the Heavens for holy uses; but in such doubtful cases let every man think for himself.' A little further on, however, the worthy Doctor's theory as to the extreme purity of the water is somewhat disturbed by his finding some of them inconveniently near the sea; but he is equal to the occasion. 'Though,' he says, 'the spray of the sea so near them on every hand might well be supposed to fill these Basons with salt water, yet I found the water in them to be quite fresh.' Some of these were actually under the sea-level!
In another place, writing of tolmens, the Doctor observes that, though their Cornish name, appropriately enough, signifies a holed stone, yet that was not 'the true Druid name ... for the Druids probably call'd it by the name of one of their Deities as soon as it was ritually consecrated, and most likely by that of Saturn.'
He is in doubt whether the furrows which he noticed on certain rocks were channels on the sites of the holy fires of the Druids, made in order to enable the priests the better to collect the sacred embers, or whether they were designed to collect the blood of sacrificed victims for the purposes of divination. But he admits ''tis all mere conjecture.'
And again—a 'canopy rock' with a row of rude stone pillars before it is a 'Druid Seat of Judgment';—in fact, on Borlase's theory, the whole of the Scilly Isles must have been thickly peopled with Druids.
But as the writer in the Quarterly truly observes, 'The Druids have of late years been somewhat rudely dismissed from the shade of their accustomed oaks, and the rock-basons have been proved to be simply the result of the weathering of the granite.'
