Pope, His Descent and Family Connections: Facts and Conjectures

by Joseph Hunter

Pope speaks rather magniloquently of the cause of the decline, telling us that “his mother inherited what estate remained after the sequestrations and forfeitures of her family.” We are bound to accept this statement; but, in the printed list of compounders, the name of this Mr. Turner does not appear, and I have seen no evidence of any sequestration. In comparing the wills of Lancelot and William, we must not forget that Lancelot’s was made at the close of a life passed without children, and William’s after he had portioned some of his fourteen daughters, and had others still remaining in his house.

These children of his grandfather were the only relatives of Pope in the preceding generation with whom he appears to have kept up much acquaintance; and after he became distinguished in the world, no particular intimacy existed between him and them. We must except, however, his mother, for whom he entertained the highest respect and affection; and who, he says, had lived with him from the time of his birth, to her death at the age of ninety-three. She survived, as we may easily believe, all her brothers and sisters; and of these it now remains to give such an account as the few memorials of them which have fallen under my notice enable me. They are in no respect interesting except as they are connected with the life of Pope, whom it is no exaggeration to designate one of the greatest names among Englishmen, standing, in his own department, with Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden,—men of whom, and whose connections, men now desire to know all that can be known.

Of the two Turners, who died in the service of King Charles I., we have no account even of their names. The other son, named William, left England to serve in the Spanish army, which was also the course taken by one of the young Rockleys of Worsborough, his “coetanean,” and probably his friend. He rose in that service to be what Pope calls “a general officer”; which distinction, if it gave him rank like that of a general in the English service, was one that, in such a controversy, Pope was undoubtedly entitled to put forward as an honour to the family. I lament that more has not been discovered concerning him, and more particularly that we have not even that slender piece of autobiography, his will. We know, however, that he retained to the time of his death some portion of the family property, and left it to his sister, Edith Pope, perhaps then the sole survivor.

Of the fourteen daughters, it would seem that some may have died in infancy or in very early life. The General used to speak of his ten sisters, and to compare them with the five wise and five foolish virgins, that is, five Roman Catholics, and five of the English Protestant Church; but which, in his opinion, were the wise, and which the foolish, does not appear in the family tradition preserved by John Charles Brooke, Somerset Herald, who was descended of one of them.

To place them in the exact order of seniority is out of our power, though a more thorough search in the Yorkshire parish registers might enable us to do so.

All we can pretend to is to place them in an order approximate to the truth; and I need not apprise the reader that where we have to deal with so large a family, there must be a long interval between the elder and the younger. At the birth of Pope, in 1688, his mother was forty-six, and some of his aunts must have been sixty, or thereabouts.

Christiana is named in her father’s will as the wife of Samuel Cooper. She may be presumed to have been one of the elder daughters, her husband having been born in 1609. He was the famous miniature-painter of the name, and was also noted for his skill in music. His father was a professed musician, as we are informed by Aubrey, in his Natural History of Wiltshire. His science may possibly have introduced him to the family of Thomasine Turner, to whom, as we have seen, some song-books were bequeathed by her uncle. Walpole knew of Cooper’s marriage, and tells us that he lived long in France and Holland; also, that he died in London, on May 5, 1672, at the age of sixty-three, and was buried in St. Pancras Church. All this may be true; but when he says—“I have a drawing of Pope’s father as he lay dead in his bed, by his brother-in-law, Cooper, which had belonged to Mr. Pope,” he must be mistaken, as Pope’s father outlived Cooper many years. More probably it was of Pope’s grandfather, and Cooper’s father-in-law, William Turner. Walpole further informs us that the widow of Cooper received a pension from the Court of France, for whom her husband painted several pieces on a larger scale than he usually adopted.

Mrs. Cooper survived her husband many years. We are indebted to Mr. Carruthers for notes of her will, which was made on the 16th of May, 1693, and proved on the 28th of August following. She desires to be decently buried in the Church of St. Pancras, as near to her dear husband as may be. She leaves legacies to her sisters, Elizabeth Turner, Alice Mawhood, and Mary Turner; also to her sisters Mace (not Marc, as printed by Mr. Carruthers) and Jane Smith. To her sister Pope she leaves her mother’s picture,—(what has become of this?)—a broad piece of gold to her brothers Mace, Calvert, Pope, and Smith; to her nephew and godson, Alexander Pope (then five years old), a china dish with a silver foot, and instruments which had been used by her husband in his art; and, after the death of her sister, Elizabeth Turner, all her books, pictures, and medals. She makes her nephew, Samuel Mawhood, citizen and fishmonger, her sole executor.

It appears that there is or was a monument in the Church of St. Pancras to the memory of the Coopers, with arms of Cooper impaling those usually assigned to the name of Turner.

Mrs. Cooper was one of the five Roman Catholics. It seems probable, though Walpole does not state it, that Cooper was originally a musician by profession, as his father was, who is better known by his Italianized name Coporario.