Amongst the celebrities of the medical profession, who have left no memorial behind them more durable or better known than their wills in Doctors' Commons, was Messenger Monsey, the great-grandfather of our ex-Chancellor, Lord Cranworth.
We do not know whether his Lordship is aware of his descent from the eccentric physician. Possibly he is not, for the Monseys, though not altogether of a plebeian stock, were little calculated to throw éclat over the genealogy of a patrician house.
Messenger Monsey, who used with a good deal of unnecessary noise to declare his contempt of the ancestral honours which he in reality possessed, loved to tell of the humble origin of his family. The first Duke of Leeds delighted in boasting of his lucky progenitor, Jack Osborn, the shop lad, who rescued his master's daughter from a watery grave, in the Thames, and won her hand away from a host of noble suitors, who wanted—literally, the young lady's pin-money. She was the only child of a wealthy pinmaker carrying on his business on London Bridge, and the jolly old fellow, instead of disdaining to bestow his heiress on a 'prentice, exclaimed, "Jack won her, and he shall wear her!" Dr. Monsey, in the hey-day of his social fame, told his friends that the first of his ancestors of any note was a baker, and a retail dealer in hops. At a critical point of this worthy man's career, when hops were "down" and feathers were "up," to raise a small sum of money for immediate use he ripped open his beds, sold the feathers, and stuffed the tick with unsaleable hops. Soon a change in the market occurred, and once more operating on the couches used by himself and children, he sold the hops at a profit, and bought back the feathers. "That's the way, sir, by which my family hopped from obscurity!" the doctor would conclude.
We have reason for thinking that this ancestor was the physician's great-grandfather. As is usually found to be the case, where a man thinks lightly of the advantages of birth, Messenger was by no means of despicable extraction. His grandfather was a man of considerable property, and married Elizabeth Messenger, co-heir of Thomas Messenger, lord of Whitwell Manor, in the county of Norfolk, a gentleman by birth and position; and his father, the Rev. Robert Monsey, a Norfolk rector, married Mary, the daughter of Roger Clopton, rector of Downham. Of the antiquity and importance of the Cloptons amongst the gentle families of England this is no place to speak; but further particulars relative to the Monsey pedigree may be found by the curious in Bloomfield's "History of Norfolk." On such a descent a Celt would persuade himself that he represented kings and rulers. Monsey, like Sydney Smith after him, preferred to cover the whole question with jolly, manly ridicule, and put it out of sight.
Messenger Monsey was born in 1693, and received in early life an excellent education; for though his father at the Revolution threw his lot in with the nonjurors, and forfeited his living, the worthy clergyman had a sufficient paternal estate to enable him to rear his only child without any painful considerations of cost. After spending five years at St. Mary's Hall, Cambridge, Messenger studied physic for some time under Sir Benjamin Wrench, at Norwich. Starting on his own account, he practised for a while at Bury St. Edmunds, in Suffolk, but with little success. He worked hard, and yet never managed in that prosperous and beautiful country town to earn more than three hundred guineas in the same year. If we examined into the successes of medical celebrities, we should find in a great majority of cases fortune was won by the aspirant either annexing himself to, and gliding into the confidence of, a powerful clique, or else by his being through some lucky accident thrown in the way of a patron. Monsey's rise was of the latter sort. He was still at Bury, with nothing before him but the prospect of working all his days as a country doctor, when Lord Godolphin, son of Queen Anne's Lord Treasurer, and grandson of the great Duke of Marlborough, was seized, on the road to Newmarket, with an attack of apoplexy. Bury was the nearest point where medical assistance could be obtained. Monsey was summoned, and so fascinated his patient with his conversational powers that his Lordship invited him to London, and induced him to relinquish his country practice.
From that time Monsey's fortune was made. He became to the Whigs very much what, in the previous generation, Radcliffe had been to the Tories. Sir Robert Walpole genuinely loved him, seizing every opportunity to enjoy his society, and never doing anything for him; and Lord Chesterfield was amongst the most zealous trumpeters of his medical skill. Lively, sagacious, well-read, and brutally sarcastic, he had for a while a society reputation for wit scarcely inferior to Swift's; and he lived amongst men well able to judge of wit. Garrick and he were for many years intimate friends, until, in a contest of jokes, each of the two brilliant men lost his temper, and they parted like Roland and Sir Leoline—never to meet again. Garrick probably would have kept his temper under any other form of ridicule, but he never ceased to resent Monsey's reflection on his avarice to the Bishop of Sodor and Man.
"Garrick is going to quit the stage," observed the Bishop.
"That he'll never do," answered Monsey, making use of a Norfolk proverb, "so long as he knows a guinea is cross on one side and pile on the other."
This speech was never forgiven. Lord Bath endeavoured to effect a reconciliation between the divided friends, but his amiable intention was of no avail.
"I thank you," said Monsey; "but why will your Lordship trouble yourself with the squabbles of a Merry Andrew and quack doctor?"