Tooke, whose real name was Horne, was born in 1736, the son of a poulterer. At twenty-four years of age he became a clergyman, and was appointed to the living of New Brentford, which he held until 1773, when, clearly seeing how grievously he had missed his vocation, he studied for the Bar. Thereafter his life was one long series of battles, hotly contested in Parliament, in newspapers, books and pamphlets, and on platforms. He was in general a wrong-headed, as well as a hot-headed, politician; but he was sane enough to oppose the American War when King and Government were so mad as to provoke and continue it. Describing the Americans killed and wounded by the troops at Lexington and Concord as “murdered,” he was the victim of a Government prosecution for libel, and was imprisoned for twelve months and fined £200. He took—no! that will not do—he “assumed” the name of Tooke in 1782, in compliment to his friend William Tooke, who then resided here in this delightful old country house of Purley. The idea seems to have been for them to live together in amity, and that William Tooke, the elder of the two, should leave his property to his friend. But quarrels arose long before that, and Horne at his friend’s death received only £500, while other disputed points arose, leading to bitter law-suits.
In 1801 he was Member of Parliament for Old Sarum; but how he reconciled the representation of that rottenest of rotten boroughs with his profession of reforming Whig does not appear.
He was a many-sided man, of fierce energies and strong prejudices, but a scholar. While his political pamphlets are forgotten, his “ΕΠΕΑ ΠΤΕΡΟΕΝΤΑ; or, the Diversions of Purley,” which is not really a book of sports, is still remembered for its philological learning. It is a disquisition on the affinities of prepositions, the relationships of conjunctions, and the intimacies of other parts of speech. His other diversions appear to have been less reputable, for he was the father of one illegitimate son and two daughters.
His intention was to have been buried in the grounds of Purley House, but when he died, in 1812, at Wimbledon, his mortal coil was laid to rest at Ealing; and so it chanced that the vault he had constructed in his garden remained, after all, untenanted, with the unfinished epitaph:
JOHN HORNE TOOKE,
Late Proprietor and now Occupier
of this spot,
was born in June 1736,
Died in
Aged years,
Contented and Grateful.
Purley House is still standing, though considerably altered, and presents few features reminiscent of the eighteenth-century politician, and fewer still of the Puritan Bradshaw, the regicide, who once resided here. It stands in the midst of tall elms, and looks as far removed from political dissensions as may well be imagined, its trim lawn and trellised walls overgrown in summer by a tangle of greenery.
But suburban expansion has at last reached Tooke’s rural retreat from political strife, and the estate is now “developed,” with roads driven through and streets of villas planned, leaving only the old house and some few acres of gardens around it.