APPENDIX H.
APOCRYPHAL PASSAGES.
Statements that have at various times been published as matters of fact relating to the personal history of the Marquis of Worcester.
1. The Pot-lid Story.—No account of the Marquis’s great discovery has hitherto been considered complete without relating what is usually offered as a traditional anecdote of its origin. The latest publication, in a popular form, occurs in “A History of Wonderful Inventions,” where its interest is enhanced by a neatly executed engraving. It relates that, at the conclusion of the Civil War, the Marquis “hastened over to France, where, after spending some time at the court of the exiled royal family of England, he returned to this country as their secret agent, but being detected, was confined a prisoner in the Tower.” It is said that during this imprisonment, “while he was engaged one day in cooking his own dinner, he observed the lid of the pot was continually being forced upwards by the vapour of the boiling water contained in the vessel. Being a man of thoughtful disposition, and having, moreover, a taste for scientific investigation, he began to reflect on the circumstance, when it occurred to him that the same power which was capable of raising the iron cover of the pot might be applied to a variety of useful purposes; and on obtaining his liberty, he set to work to produce a practical exposition of his ideas on the subject in the shape of an acting machine, which he described in his work”—the “Century.”
Every writer varies this story in its details. Here the compiler, drawing on his imagination, certifies to the Marquis being his own cook, providing his own dinner, and verifies the pot-lid being of iron. Disraeli and others vaguely state it to have been his meal that was being prepared in his presence, saying nothing whether the pot was brass, copper, or iron. The Tower must have had a large supply of these cooking utensils to meet the wants of its prisoners!
The story reminds one of that of the Three Black Crows related by Addison in The Spectator, for like it this “pot-lid” story may after all have originated in some lecture or conversation, in which the speaker indulged his fancy by venturing the statement as what might appear to him a feasible suggestion, and one calculated to render the matter interesting and impressive. Had it happened at all it must have occurred from 1652 to 1654; but the “pot-lid” story, in another form, was current in 1597, when Lord Bacon, in his Essays, alluding to the origin of Inventions, remarks:—“It should seem, that hitherto men are rather beholding to a wild goat for surgerie, or to a nightingale for music, or to the ibis for some part of physic, or to the pot-lid that flew open for artillery, or generally to chance, or anything else, than to logic for the invention of Arts and Sciences.” The third edition of these Essays was published at Oxford in 1633, and from so popular a source it was natural for the vulgar to take the suggestive idea of the “pot-lid” to account for the origin of the steam engine, rather than to assign the birth of that gigantic production to a natural process of inductive reasoning.
2. Unfounded Charge of Forgery.—Thomas Carte, son of the Rev. Samuel Carte, born in Warwickshire, was baptized there by immersion, 23rd of April, 1686. In 1722, being accused of high treason, he fled to France, but returning in 1728–30, he, in 1735, published the third volume of his “Life of the Duke of Ormonde.” Among other matters, Nichols, in his “Literary Anecdotes,” Vol. IX., 1815, observes: “In an unpublished letter to Dr. Z. Grey, dated May 14, 1736, he says—‘I suppose you have read that volume [the 3rd], and seen there the letters relating to the Earl of Glamorgan, who certainly forged every commission he pretended to from the King.[D] I give you his character in the History very justly, but yet too tenderly drawn, because I am naturally unwilling to lay a load on any man’s memory, except I am absolutely forced to it. I intimate (so strongly that nobody of common sense can mistake the thing) that he forged letters and commissions without number; and I could have produced the compiler of the Nuncio’s memoirs in evidence (who had all those commissions before his eyes, and all the papers signed by Glamorgan to the Nuncio), to prove the commissions and letters he pretended to from King Charles absolutely forged; for he says he was perfectly acquainted with Glamorgan’s secretary, and knew his handwriting as well as his own; and all those commissions and letters were wrote in the hand of an Irish priest, who was Glamorgan’s secretary.’”
After further remarks to the same effect, he concludes, “In fine, I have not the least doubt but that Glamorgan forged every pretended power or commission he had; and all of them so fully express his vanity, and are so adapted to his present views (which in most cases could not arise till after he was in Ireland), that they could have no other author but himself. I must observe to you that this letter, being directed to the Nuncio, is the only original of the King’s writing among his papers (for Glamorgan only gave him copies translated of the others); and whatever commission, or other power, instructions, or letters, Glamorgan pretended to the Nuncio to have from the King, must be in a hand agreeable to that which the Nuncio had as an original.”
The Editor properly notes here: “If Glamorgan only gave copies translated of the other commissions, it is no great wonder that they should be written in his secretary’s hand.”