Henry Martyn was baptised in the old church of St. Mary, now part of the unfinished cathedral. He was the third of four children. The eldest, a half-brother, John, was born fifteen years before him. The second and fourth were his own sisters, Laura and Sally; the former married Mr. Curgenven, nephew of the Vicar of Lamorran of that name; the latter married a Mr. Pearson. Short-lived as Henry himself proved to be, all three died before him. To both the sisters—and especially to the younger, who proved to be to him at once sister, mother, and spiritual guide to Christ—there are frequent allusions in his Journals and Letters. His mother, named Fleming, and from Ilfracombe, died in the year after his birth, having transmitted her delicate constitution to her children. It was through his father, as well as younger sister, that the higher influences were rained on Henry Martyn. In the wayward and often wilful years before the boy yielded to the power of Christ’s resurrection, the father’s gentleness kept him in the right way, from which any violent opposition would have driven one of proud spirit. A skilled accountant and practical self-trained mathematician, the father encouraged in the boy the study of science, and early introduced him to the great work of Newton. Valuing the higher education as few in England did at that time, John Martyn ever kept before the lad the prospect of a University course. Looking back on these days, and especially on his last visit home before his father’s unexpected death, Henry Martyn wrote when he was eighteen years of age:
The consummate selfishness and exquisite irritability of my mind were displayed in rage, malice, and envy, in pride and vain-glory and contempt of all; in the harshest language to my sister, and even to my father, if he happened to differ from my mind and will. Oh, what an example of patience and mildness was he! I love to think of his excellent qualities, and it is frequently the anguish of my heart that I ever could be so base and wicked as to pain him by the slightest neglect.
Truro was fortunate in its grammar school—‘the Eton of Cornwall’—and in the headmaster of that time, the Rev. Cornelius Cardew, D.D., whose portrait now adorns the city’s council chamber. The visitor who seeks out the old school in Boscawen Street now finds it converted into the ware-room of an ironmonger. All around may still be seen the oak panels on which successive generations of schoolboys cut their names. A pane of glass on which Henry Martyn scratched his name, with a Greek quotation and a Hebrew word, probably on his last visit to the spot before he left England for ever, is reverently preserved in the muniment room of the corporation buildings. There also are the musty folios of the dull history and duller divinity which formed the school library of that uncritical century, but there is no means of tracing the reading of the boys. Into this once lightsome room, adorned only by a wood-carving of the galleon which formed the city arms, was the child Henry Martyn introduced at the age of seven. Dr. Clement Carlyon, who was one of his fellow-pupils, writes of him as ‘a good-humoured plain little fellow, with red eyelids devoid of eyelashes’. But we know from Mrs. Sherwood, when she first met him in India—where his hair, a light brown, was raised from his forehead, which was a remarkably fine one—that although his features were not regular, ‘the expression was so luminous, so intellectual, so affectionate, so beaming with Divine charity, as to absorb the attention of every observer’. His sensitive nature and violent passionateness when roused, at once marked him out as the victim of the older boys. In a happy moment Dr. Cardew put ‘little Henry Martyn’ under the care of one of them, who became his protector, tutor, and friend, not only at school but at college, and had an influence on his spiritual as well as intellectual life next only to that of his father, sister, and Charles Simeon. That ‘upper boy’—named Kempthorne, son of Admiral Kempthorne, of Helston—delighted to recall to his first biographer, Sargent, ‘the position in which he used to sit, the thankful expression of his affectionate countenance, when he happened to be helped out of some difficulty, and a thousand other little incidents of his boyish days.’ This boy-friend ‘had often the happiness of rescuing him from the grasp of oppressors, and has never seen more feeling of gratitude evinced than was shown by him on those occasions.’
Even at seven Henry’s natural cleverness was so apparent that high expectations of his future were formed. Dr. Cardew wrote of his proficiency in the classics as exceeding that of most of his school-fellows, but he was too lively and too careless to apply himself as some did who distanced him. ‘He was of a lively, cheerful temper, and, as I have been told by those who sat near him, appeared to be the idlest among them, being frequently known to go up to his lesson with little or no preparation, as if he had learnt it by intuition.’ The delicacy of his constitution naturally kept him from joining in the rougher games of his fellows. Such was the impression made by his progress at school that, when he was fifteen years of age, not only Dr. Cardew and his father, but many of his father’s friends, urged him to compete for a vacant scholarship of Corpus Christi College, Oxford. With only a letter to the sub-rector of Exeter College, the usual Cornish College, the boy found himself in the great University city. The examiners were divided in opinion as to the result, but a majority gave it in favour of one with whom Henry Martyn was almost equal. Had he become a member of that University at fifteen, with character unformed and knowledge immature or superficial, it is not likely that Oxford would have gained what, at a riper stage, Cambridge fell heir to. His own comment, written afterwards like Augustine’s in the Confessions, was this: ‘The profligate acquaintances I had in Oxford would have introduced me to scenes of debauchery, in which I must, in all probability, from my extreme youth, have sunk for ever.’ He returned to school for two years, to extend his knowledge of the classics. He spent his leisure in shooting, and in reading travels and Lord Chesterfield’s Letters. His early private Journal reflects severely on that time as spent in ‘attributing to a want of taste for mathematics what ought to have been ascribed to idleness; and having his mind in a roving, dissatisfied, restless condition, seeking his chief pleasure in reading and human praise.’
ST. JOHN’S COLLEGE, CAMBRIDGE, IN 1797
In this spirit he began residence in St. John’s College, Cambridge, in the month of October 1797, as a pensioner or unassisted student. To that University he was attracted by Kempthorne, who had been his protector at school, and had just distinguished himself at St. John’s, coming out Senior Wrangler. Alike from the idleness to which he was tempted by other fellow-students who were new to him, and from the variety of study with no other motive than to win glory of men, his friend gradually weaned his fickle and impulsive genius. But for two years he halted between two opinions. He was ever restless because ever dissatisfied with himself, and his want of inward peace only increased the natural irritability of his temper. He indulged in bursts of passion on slight provocation, and sometimes on none at all, save that of an uneasy conscience. Like Clive about the same age, Henry Martyn on one occasion hurled a knife at his friend, Cotterill, who just escaped, leaving it quivering in the panel of the dining-hall. The father and younger sister at home prayerfully watched over him, and by letter sought to guide him. On his periodical visits to Truro he was able at least to report success in his examinations, and at the close of 1799 he came out first, to his father’s delight. The providence of God had made all things ready for the completion of His eighteen years’ work in the convictions and character of Henry Martyn, on his return to college. To him, at the opening of the new century, all things became new.
Cambridge, first of all, had received—unconsciously to its leading men for a time—that new spirit which has ever since identified its University with the aggressive missionary philanthropy of the nineteenth century. For nearly the whole period of Martyn’s life, up to that time, Charles Simeon, the Eton boy, Fellow of King’s College, and Christian gentleman, who had sought the position only that he might preach Christ after the manner of St. Paul, had, from the pulpit of Trinity Church, been silently transforming academic life. He had become the trusted agent of Charles Grant and George Udny, the Bengal civilians who were ready to establish an eight-fold mission in Bengal as soon as he could send out the men. Failing to find these, he had brought about the foundation of the Church Missionary Society on April 12, 1799. Some years before that, Charles Grant exchanged his seat in the Bengal council for one of the ‘chairs’ of the Court of Directors. He became their chairman, and it was to Simeon that he turned for East India chaplains. Cambridge, even more than London itself, had become the centre of the spiritual life of the Church of England.
First among the fellow-students of Henry Martyn, though soon to leave for India when he entered it, was his future friend, Claudius Buchanan, B.A. of 1796 and Fellow of Queen’s College, of which Isaac Milner was president. Magdalene College—which had sent David Brown to Calcutta in 1786, to prepare the way for the other four, who are for ever memorable as ‘the Five Chaplains’—had among its students of the same standing as Martyn, Charles Grant’s two distinguished sons, of whom one became Lord Glenelg and a cabinet minister, and the younger, Robert, was afterwards Governor of Bombay, the still valued hymnologist, and the warm friend of Dr. John Wilson. Thomason—seven years older than Martyn, and induced afterwards, by his example, to become a Bengal chaplain—was Simeon’s curate and substitute in the closing years of the last century, when to Mr. Thornton of Clapham, who had warned him against preaching five sermons a week, as casting the net too often to allow time to mend it, he drew this picture of college life: ‘There are reasons for fearing the mathematical religion which so prevails here. Here, also, is everything that can contribute to the ease and comfort of life. Whatever pampers the appetite and administers fuel to sloth and indolence is to be found in abundance. Nothing is left to want or desire. Here is the danger; this is the horrible precipice.’ Corrie and Dealtry, also of the Five Chaplains, and afterwards first and second Bishops of Madras, were of Martyn’s Cambridge time, the latter graduating before, and the former just after him.