John Tincroft, bachelor and benedict

by George E. Sargent

The head of the other branch was a gentleman of small means in the Weald of Sussex, who lived a retired life, and, being of a contemplative and studious turn of mind, cultivated letters partly for the love, and partly for the gain of them. The gains were not very great, but they were sufficient to enable him to hold up his head a little higher in the world than otherwise he could have done. This gentleman was a widower, with an only son, at the time when Tincroft House was sent begging, as it were, for a new owner. This only son was but two or three years old, and was the John Tincroft of our history.

IL took a long time to prove that the Sussex Tincrofts were a shade nearer in relationship to the intestate than the Yorkshire Tincrofts. And before this was established, as it eventually was, the estate had been thrown into Chancery, and the Sussex claimant was dead, leaving his boy, as we have before explained, with a Chancery suit, and money in the funds to no large amount, in the guardianship of a distant relative, Mr. Rackstraw, who was a London merchant. Of the boy's subsequent up-bringing, enough has already been written.

It may be supposed that the way would now have been clear for the guardian of John Tincroft to enter into undisputed possession of the property on the orphan boy's behalf. But it was not so. It was necessary next to prove that he was the lineal and legitimate descendant of a certain Ebenezer Tincroft, the head of the Sussex branch, who died some century or more before the suit was commenced, and whose monument, sacred to his memory, as "Armiger," may probably remain on the interior walls of Saddlebrook Church to this day. To prove this right by succession, search had to be made in registers of baptisms, marriages, and burials from that time forward, in the archives of Saddlebrook Church and elsewhere.

For some time these researches, though abundantly tedious and costly, were prosecuted on the whole successfully, when, all at once, a gap was discovered which seemed to defy legal filling up. This gap in the line of descent occurred in the case of John Tincroft's own father, who could not be proved ever to have had a proper hereditary right to the name he bore.

Of course he had lived, nobody questioned that; and there were many living who had always known him as Josiah Tincroft, once of Saddlebrook, and then of Leanacre, or Linacre, the Weald, where he lived till he died. But as to his legal status as the son of his own father, there was none to declare it. Registers were searched in vain to find what was wanted to be found. His own and his father's marriages were duly recorded in that bright book of fate, the marriage register. And so were the two several burials in the darker record, which lay side by side with it in the old worm-eaten, iron-bound, double-locked chest, in the vestry of Saddlebrook Church.

Also the baptism of Makepeace Tincroft, the grandfather of our John, was duly recorded in the register devoted to this use. But that of Josiah, who was supposed to have been brought into this world some thirty years before he died, was nowhere to be found. The former investigations, together with this fatal hitch, as it seemed to be, had delayed the Chancery suit so long, that from boyhood our John Tincroft, the hapless claimant, had advanced to youth, and from youth to manhood, finding himself much nearer to the end of his fortune than to the fulfilment of his hopes.

Now, the solution of the enigma of the non-appearance of Josiah's name in the baptismal register was, no doubt, easy enough. His father, Makepeace, somewhat early in life, had walked over from church to chapel, or, to use the terms then in vogue in that part of the country, from steeple-house to meeting-house. In other words, he had become a Dissenter. This might not much have mattered, perhaps, because Dissenters, or, at least, some Dissenters, have, and then had, their registers in connection with their places of worship, as well as Churchmen; and the baptism of an infant or a child, though by the hands of an Independent pastor, if duly registered and sworn to, would probably have fulfilled all legal purposes. But—alas!—in becoming a Dissenter, Makepeace Tincroft had become a Baptist also; and Baptists do not baptize infants at all.

How, then, was it to be proved that Josiah Tincroft, as he had always been called, had ever had any legal existence? There was no proof of baptism, which indeed had never been administered. Ergo, there was no proof that he had ever been properly brought into the world.

Very lately, however—that is, only a week or two before the summons reached John Tincroft from Mr. Roundhand, this lawyer stumbled over a tin box full of old letters, memoranda, and other useless documents once belonging to his old friend Josiah (for John Tincroft's father and Roundhand had been personal friends, which had led to the business being placed in his hands).

In turning over these papers, with no expectation of obtaining any help from them, he came upon a slip of parchment very yellow with age, with a "This is to certify" printed in fair German text, as the commencement of a declaration in a lawyer-like written hand, that Josiah Tincroft, the lawful fruit of marriage between Makepeace Tincroft, gentleman, of Saddlebrook, and Susannah, his wife, was born on such and such a day in January, in such and such a year, in attestation or corroboration of which the beholder was invited to witness the hands, first of John Batts, the medical attendant, and then of Elizabeth Foold, the nurse, in their respective handwritings—the first bold and large and firm, the second crabbed and laboured, but both written with ink much faded by age. The date was some fifty years or more back.