Fielding, having just finished dinner, was enjoying some good claret in the cabin, with his wife and her friend--a cheerful moment, when conversation 'is most agreeable,' when Tom, the captain's general factotum, burst in on them and began, without saying a 'by your leave', to bottle half a hogshead of small beer. After requests and protests, equally unavailing, this functionary found himself, says Fielding, threatened "with having one bottle to pack more than his number, which then happened to stand empty within my reach." Thereupon Tom reported his version of the matter to the captain, who came thundering down to the cabin in a rage that knew no bounds of language or civility. This behaviour from a man who had received not only liberal payment from his passenger for accommodation, but also such frequent stores of fresh provisions that Fielding's private purse had indeed gone some way in maintaining the ship's crew, that passenger justly resented, and to a hasty resolve of quitting the ship by a hoy that should carry him to Dartmouth, he added threats of legal action. The 'most distant sound of law,' however, he tells us, "frightened a man, who had often, I am convinced, heard numbers of cannon roar round him with intrepidity. Nor did he sooner see the hoy approaching the vessel, than he ran down again into the cabin, and his rage being perfectly subsided, he tumbled on his knees, and a little too abjectly implored for mercy. I did not suffer a brave man and an old man, to remain a moment in this posture; but I immediately forgave him." It is this incident that Thackeray chooses to complete his picture of the great novelist; adding that memorable comparison between the "noble spirit and unconquerable generosity" of Fielding, and the lives of many unknown heroes of the sea: "Such a brave and gentle heart, such an intrepid and courageous spirit I love to recognise in the manly the English Harry Fielding."
Within a week of this reconciliation the ship had made such progress southward that the captain 'in the redundancy of his good humour, declared he would go to church at Lisbon on Sunday next' (not the least pleasant of the pictures which Fielding gives us of the privateer is that of his summoning all hands on deck on a Sunday morning and then reading prayers 'with an audible voice'); but again the wind played him false, becalming him near Cape Finisterre. This last calm, however, brought with it sufficient compensation: "tho' our voyage was retarded, we were entertained with a scene which as no one can behold without going to sea, so no one can form an idea of anything equal to it on shore. We were seated on the deck, women and all, in the serenest evening that can be imagined. Not a single cloud presented itself to our view, and the sun himself was the only object which engrossed our whole attention. He did indeed set with a majesty which is incapable of description, with which, while the horizon was yet blazing with glory, our eyes were called off to the opposite part to survey the moon, which was then at full, and which in rising presented us with the second object that this world hath offered to our vision. Compared to these the pageantry of theatres, or splendor of courts, are sights almost below the regard of children."
Four days later, at midnight, the anchor was cast off Lisbon, after a calm and moonlit passage up the Tagus, a passage, Fielding writes, "incredibly pleasant to the women, who remained three hours enjoying it, while I was left to the cooler transports of enjoying their pleasures at second-hand; and yet, cooler as they may be, whoever is totally ignorant of such sensation, is, at the same time, void of all ideas of friendship."
On the day following, the 24th of June, he landed, and that evening enjoyed the long unknown luxury of a good supper, in a kind of coffee-house "very pleasantly situated on the brow of a hill, about a mile from the city, [which] hath a very fine prospect of the River Tajo from Lisbon to the sea." With that pleasant prospect the Voyage closes. Begun as it was to while away the enforced solitude of his cabin, a condition, which no man, he tells us, disliked more than himself and which mortal sickness rendered especially irksome, these pages, some of which "were possibly the production of the most disagreeable hours which ever haunted the author," reveal Fielding to us if not as Mr Lowell has said "with artless inadvertence" at least with perfect fullness. The undimmed gaiety of spirit, the tender affection, the constant desire to remove those evils which he found oppressing his country-men by sea not less than on land, the 'enthusiasm for righteousnes,' the humour of the first of English novelists, burn here as brightly as though the writer were but midway in his life's voyage. The hand that exposed evil in its native loathsomeness in a Blifil and a Wild has not lost its cunning in depicting Mrs Humphreys; the eye that delighted in the green fields of England saw in the southern sunset that which made human creations 'almost below the regard of children.' And to the last the patriotic energies of the author of Pasquin and of the Champion, of the whole hearted social reformer, of the tireless magistrate, knew no relaxation. Page after page of the Voyage justify the passage in which he tells us how "I would indeed have this work, which, if I live to finish it (a matter of no great certainty, if indeed of any great hope to me), will be probably the last I shall ever undertake, to produce some better end than the mere diversion of the reader"; and manifest his desire, here explicitly stated, to finish life "as I have probably lost it, in the service of my country."
We have no knowledge concerning the four months following the last entry in the pages of the Voyage to Lisbon. On October 8, 1754, the end so calmly expected came; and in the beautiful English cemetery, facing the great Basilica of the Heart of Jesus, was laid to rest all that an alien soil could claim of 'our immortal Fielding.'
APPENDIX
[A]
The Hapsburg genealogy
It appears that the Hapsburg descent, formerly claimed by the Denbigh family, must now be abandoned. The arguments against this descent, published by Mr Horace Round, have been accepted by Burke. Further, Dr G. F. Warner permits me to publish his statement that "I have myself seen the documents upon which it [the claim] rests, and found them to be unmistakeable forgeries."
As regards Henry Fielding's family it is interesting to find that his grandfather the Rev. and Hon. John Fielding was not only Canon of Salisbury, and a Doctor of Divinity, but also Archdeacon of Dorsetshire. Canon John Fielding was buried at Salisbury. His son George (Henry Fielding's uncle) was Lt. Colonel of the "Royal Regiment of the Blues," and Groom of the Bed-chamber to Queen Anne and to George II. He is buried in St George's Chapel, Windsor. (J. Nichols. History and Antiquities of Leicestershire. 1810. Vol. iv. pt. i. p. 394.)