Pope, His Descent and Family Connections: Facts and Conjectures

by Joseph Hunter

It happened that while this subject was fresh in the public mind, and within a very few weeks after he had finished his Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot, the death of his mother occurred. This gave him a fair occasion of publicly asserting his claim to a good position in respect of birth. Accordingly, the following notice, which appeared in the Gentleman’s Magazine for June 1733, we cannot doubt came from himself:—“June 8. Died Mrs. Editha Pope, aged 93, the last survivor of the children of William Turner, of York, Esq., who, by Thomasine Newton, his wife, had fourteen daughters and three sons, two of which died in the King’s service in the Civil Wars, and the eldest retired into Spain, where he died a general officer.”

Pope had now said all that he proposed to make public; and accordingly we find nothing more concerning his descent in the Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Alexander Pope, Esquire, published by William Ayre in 1745, the year after the Poet’s death. He might, or might not, have been acquainted with the letter to Curl with the signature P. T., in which a person professing to be well acquainted with Pope’s family, undertakes to inform Curl respecting them. This letter has, strangely, been attributed to some actual friend of Pope, and even to the Poet himself writing thus anonymously to Curl, with whom he was at the time in open war. Who P. T. specifically was, has, perhaps, not been discovered; but that he was a person with whom Curl had unfair dealings respecting the collection of Pope’s letters, will be seen in Mr. Ayre’s Memoirs, p. 300. The information in this letter has been generally received by later writers on the life of Pope, as worthy of the same acceptation which is yielded to the Poet’s avowed statements respecting his family; and, undoubtedly, it proceeds from some one who was acquainted with facts in the history of the family a little beyond those which the Poet himself had divulged. To those facts it adds the following:—That Pope’s father had an elder brother who studied and died at Oxford: that the father was himself a posthumous child: that he was put to a merchant in Flanders, and acquired a moderate estate by merchandise, which he quitted at the Revolution, and retired to Windsor Forest, where he purchased a small estate: that he married one of the seventeen children of William Turner, Esq., formerly of Burfit Hall, in Yorkshire: and that two of his wife’s brothers were killed in the Civil Wars.

The last clause shows the carelessness with which this letter was written. It is evidently copied from what Mr. Pope had himself written; but then Mr. Pope’s account of the matter is, that one brother was slain, and the other died, in the service of King Charles the First. To what Mr. Pope had said of his maternal grandfather, the writer of this letter adds, that he was of Burfit Hall in Yorkshire. “Burfit” is the country people’s pronunciation of Birthwaite, an old seat of the Yorkshire Baronet family of Burdet. I would not say that he may not have been a temporary inhabitant of this house, but it can have been but a short tenancy by Mr. Turner, whose far more proper designation was that which Pope had given him, “of York,” where he for the most part resided. The seventeen children is but a repetition of what Pope had himself told us, and which is supported by better evidence than the testimony of this anonymous writer. That he acquired a fortune by merchandise is doubtless true, though, probably, but a small one; but when he says that the elder Pope had been put to a merchant in Flanders, this is at variance with what we are told by a relation of the family (of whom immediately), that it was to Lisbon that he was sent for the purpose, and that there it was that he became a Roman Catholic. That he was a posthumous child is peculiar to this communication. I think I shall show it to be a little uncertain, supposing that his age at the time of his death is truly stated on his monument: of the brother studying and dying at Oxford, also peculiar to the letter, I have seen nothing to support or to disprove.

This will be sufficient to show that there can be no good reason to attribute this letter to Pope himself, or to any person who had received information from him to be given to the world in this form; and, secondly, that in the points where this communication is at all at variance with what Mr. Pope had himself sanctioned, or professes to carry our information beyond what he had told us, its testimony is to be received, if at all, with great caution.

We may, therefore, be said to receive very little more on this subject from the Poet’s contemporaries than what he himself on the one side, and his enemies on the other, chose to communicate. It is quite insufficient for forming a right judgment on the question. There is very little fact, no proof, and no detail. If the point was worth raising at all, it was worth settling: besides that, the curiosity of later times craves more than this, when intent on studying the lives of England’s greatest worthies. Dr. Johnson is content to dismiss the subject thus:—“This, and this only, is told by Pope, who is more willing, as I have heard it observed, to show what his father was not, than what he was.” But Johnson lived in a century when there was little desire of minute and exact information respecting even the most eminent of our countrymen; and in writing of Pope as of Milton, he has certainly kept himself free from the temptation which besets all biographers, of becoming enamoured of those of whom they write.

The spirit of research, however, was not entirely dormant even in that century. Editors and biographers did look around for anything that would easily present itself: nor can what they observed be said to have been wholly unimportant, for they brought to light one piece of evidence which deserves to be received with the same confidence which the testimony of Pope himself receives at our hands. This comes from a certain Mr. Potenger, who called himself a cousin of Pope. He gave the information to Dr. Bolton, who was Dean of Carlisle, who communicated it to Dr. Joseph Warton, from whom we receive it. His information was to this effect:—That the Poet’s grandfather was a clergyman in Hampshire: that the Poet’s father was the younger of two sons, and was sent to Lisbon to be placed in a mercantile house: that there he left the Church of England and became a Roman Catholic: that he knew nothing of the “fine pedigree” which his cousin Pope set up, and that as to a descent from the Earls of Downe, he was confident no such descent could be proved, for if it had been so, he must have heard of it from a maiden aunt, who stood in the same degree of relationship to Pope and to himself, who was a great genealogist, excessively fond of talking of her family, and who most certainly, therefore, would have spoken of this descent if it were so. This is the substance of Mr. Potenger’s valuable information, as it has been received and incorporated by Roscoe and others of the late writers on the life of Pope. Mr. Potenger, however, in one respect does some injustice to the Poet’s memory. Mr. Pope nowhere says that he descended of an Earl of Downe, but only that he was of the same family as that from which the Earl of Downe sprang; which is quite a different thing, and probably true.

My own researches have done something to enable me to extend the very limited information we possess on this subject: not much, perhaps, it will be thought, but it will be sound as far as it goes, and will be presented in the simple guise of truth, with no intention of unduly magnifying or unfairly weakening the claim set up by the Poet himself. He having made the claim to be “of gentle blood,” beside the interest which belongs to the question as part of the Poet’s history, his truthfulness and honour may be said to be involved in it, points of even more importance than his wonderful moral sagacity, and the unrivalled felicity of his numbers.

I treat of the two families apart.

I. THE POPES.

Alexander Pope, the Poet’s father, if he was seventy-four or seventy-five at the time of his death in 1717, may be presumed to have been born in 1641 or 1642. He was a younger son, and is said by P. T. to have been a posthumous child, and that while his elder brother, who inherited the larger share of the family property, was sent to Oxford, where he died, he was brought up to commerce. It has never been shown by whom this arrangement was made, for before his birth, his father (of whom afterwards), according to the letter to Curl, was dead: and if not dead, he died when his son was quite an infant. All accounts agree that he was sent abroad to complete his mercantile education—an expensive course, which of itself shows that he was of no very mean stock, and that, though the younger son of a widow, his relatives had the means of giving him a fair start in life.