We have thus accounted for twelve of the fourteen daughters. The remaining two we may well believe died in infancy or early youth.
Whatever excellent qualities Edith may have possessed, it would seem that her literary education was not much superior to that of other young ladies of her time, and inferior to that of many. This is proved by a letter of hers, the only one I believe that is known, printed in the Additions to the Works of Alexander Pope, Esq., 1776, vol. ii. p. 96.[5]
The people of York seem not to have been without a due sense of the honour done to their city in having had the mother of so great a man residing among them in her youth. In some verses addressed to Lady Irwin, a daughter of the Earl of Carlisle, these lines occur:—
York lent us Pope by th’ mother’s side:
But from th’ paternal, this our pride
Gives Castle Howard: say which here
Illumines most the natal sphere.
On the whole, then, it will appear that Pope descended of a clerical family, the members of it being much connected with the University of Oxford; but that at present we can trace him only to a person of his own name, who was rector of Thruxton and prebendary (if the incumbents are so called) of Middleton and Ichen-Abbots, in the diocese of Winchester: that these, being rather conspicuous pieces of preferment, place him in the higher rank of the clergy of his time, and seem to be but the beginning of the offices he would have held in the Church, had he not died in rather early life, and had not the changes at that time imminent, stopped him in his course:—that, though we cannot ascend beyond him on evidence that would bear a close examination, there is strong presumptive evidence that he was either identical or nearly connected with an Alexander Pope of Oxford, the friend of Dr. Barcroft, and the son-in-law of the famous John Dodd of Fawsley, and the father of Dr. Walter Pope, the Gresham Professor, the Poet, and the miscellaneous writer, who was half-brother of Dr. John Wilkins, the Bishop of Chester, who married a sister of the Protector Cromwell:—that there is no reason to believe, on account of disparity of rank, that he was not of the same stock as the Popes, Earls of Downe, but, on the contrary, that nothing can be more probable than that the family tradition was correct, which delivered thus much and no more:—that his Oxfordshire ancestors did spring, as the Earl of Downe did, from people of small account living at Deddington, near Banbury.
And that, on his mother’s side, he sprang from persons who had possessed land of their own at Towthorpe, in the North Riding of Yorkshire, from perhaps an early period, but who, from the time of Elizabeth were lords of the manor:—that one of them who died in the reign of James I. was an opulent person, and intimate with some of the principal families in the county:—that he left the greater part of his possessions to his nephew, William Turner, the Poet’s grandfather:—that in his hands the family estate did not receive any material additions, and perhaps rather decayed:—that he had the charge of not fewer than seventeen children, nearly all of whom grew to man and woman’s estate:—that of the sons, two died during the Civil Wars, in which one of them was slain, and the other went abroad and served in the Spanish army, and at his death gave property, not very inconsiderable remains of the family estate, to Edith Pope, his favourite sister.
And that, this being the case, there is nothing of exaggeration or of boasting, when the Poet has to meet the charge of being of obscure birth, in asserting that he sprang “of gentle blood.”
London; F. Pickton, Printer, Perry’s Place, 29, Oxford Street.
BY THE SAME AUTHOR.