Throughout her trials Margaret found in Mrs. Cobbold a constant friend, one who never allowed her for a moment to feel forsaken. The letters which passed between her and her former mistress are preserved, and on reading them one cannot but fail to note how in style and diction the maid had been influenced by Mrs. Cobbold. Margaret continued to write from Australia, and her letters are marvellous when one considers her antecedents and lack of early education. She collected specimens to send to her mistress, some of which were presented to the Ipswich Museum. Once more she was able to save life by an act of desperate daring, from which the men shrank, at the time of a flood. At last, according to the story, “John Barry,” who had prospered in the colony, found that she was there, sought her out, and married her. The last letter published in the book is dated June 25th, 1812, and announces her marriage to John Barry. It contains these words: “Should you ever think fit, as you once hinted in your letter to me, to write my history, or to leave it to others to publish, you have my free permission at my decease, whenever that shall take place, to do so. But let my husband’s name be concealed, change it, change it to any other ... for mine and my children’s sake.” She died September 10th, 1841, in the sixty-eighth year of her age.
The book raises problems of exceptional literary interest. In the first place, it was written by a man of unimpeachable character, who wrote with a distinctly religious aim, in view mainly to shew that the heroine after having violated “the laws of God and man” became by “the inculcation of Christian faith and virtue conspicuous for the sincerity of her reformation.” He avers that his narrative is strictly true and based on facts “well known to many persons of the highest respectability still living” and that he himself received the letters he quotes. He has no motive for deviating from his intention to tell the truth except that, as we have seen, Margaret Catchpole desired her married name to be concealed. That the author studiously carried out this natural wish is proved by the fact that a wealthy lady in New South Wales, named Mrs. Reiby, who had left Bury in Lancashire as a girl, was declared to be the true Margaret Catchpole, to her great annoyance, as she naturally had no desire to figure as a “convict heroine.” In 1910 the story of Margaret was dramatised in London and acted by the late Mr. Laurence Irving and his wife. A correspondence thereupon appeared in the East Anglian Daily Times in which it was hinted that Mrs. Reiby, a Staffordshire girl, was transported in 1791 for the same offence of horse stealing.[14]
No one can read the book without perceiving that all the conversations are fictitious. Mr. Cobbold was no Shakespeare, and he makes all his characters talk in the same style as (if report be true) he conversed himself. The whole of the Barry incidents may be fictitious; for if the details given were true, everybody in Suffolk must have known who Margaret’s husband was. The father of Edmund and John “Barry” was the discoverer of crag shells as manure and was a farmer and miller at Levington Hill, the next parish to Nacton. But even then the author may have used pardonable license. Still the last letter of Margaret’s which the author declares he received from his mother cannot be genuine. It is signed Margaret “Barry,” and it says expressly that she was married to the man who had loved her fruitlessly when the family lived at Nacton. In point of fact Margaret never married.
Had the book been a document written many centuries ago, there would be suggested grave doubts whether such a woman ever existed; as it is, the Cobbold family have lived in Ipswich in unbroken succession during the past century; and documents, like the original gaol-delivery in 1797 and the exemption of Mr. Cobbold from any parish offices for arresting the culprit, prove beyond doubt the existence of Margaret Catchpole.
As, however, the subject of these lectures is ‘English social life,’ I shall now give some extracts from the book before me, and from Crabbe’s biography to shew how the peasantry lived in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century.[15]
Even to this day if you enter a harvest field in Suffolk at reaping time you will hear the old Norman French demand for “Largess” and you will be expected to give it. Mr. Cobbold gives in his book a description of a harvest home, many features of which are still remembered. The farmer lodged all the single men in his house, but the married men (known as hinds) lived in the neighbouring cottages. When the last sheaf of corn was conveyed to the stack-yard, the barn was covered with green leaves and the sheaf brought in with shouting and blowing of the harvest horn. The farmer then gave an ample supper to the labourers, and he, his wife, and daughters waited on their guests. The head man of the harvest field acted as “lord of the feast.” The chief song was called “Hallo Largess,” and was in honour of the division of the Largess obtained in harvest time among the reapers. Here is a verse of the song quoted by our author:
“Now the ripening corn
In the sheaves is borne,
And the loaded wain
Bring home the grain.