Yet I state this dubiously; and, considering how much we know of Dr. Walter Pope and of Bishop Wilkins, find it difficult to reconcile the want of any trace of family connection between them and the Poet, with the supposition that Dr. Walter Pope was half-brother to the London merchant. Perhaps, after all, there were two Alexanders connected with Oxford, and Dr. Walter Pope, the child of the one, father or uncle of the Hampshire clergyman.

It is to be regretted that more has not been preserved of what Mr. Potenger could have told of the Popes, from recollections of the conversations of the maiden aunt, who must have been sister to the Rector of Thruxton; and as she stood, as he informs us, in the same degree of relationship to Pope and to himself, it would follow that the father or mother of Mr. Potenger was issue of another sister or brother of the Rector of Thruxton. This affords hints as to the course which further inquiry should take; but I cannot pass by the indication which this fact affords of the respectability of the Poet’s paternal ancestry: the Potengers of Hampshire and Dorsetshire being descendants of Dr. John Potenger, the celebrated headmaster of the Winchester College School, whose son John Potenger, born in 1647, was Comptroller of the Pipe.[2]

There were certain peculiarities which remove Dodd from the position of one of the crowd of Puritan divines: a certain cheerfulness, hilarity, and also good practical common sense; and certainly his descendant, Dr. Walter Pope, an ingenious man and no mean poet, is not to be charged with over much of the severity and strictness of the Puritan life. The later Pope, however, would not be over forward to reveal his connection with either Dodd or Dr. Walter; else, if he really did descend from one of the many daughters of the Rector of Fawsley, he might have claimed to himself a descent which, on fair evidence, can be traced to the very depths of the antiquity of English families, the Puritan divine being well known to be of the very ancient family of Dodd of Shockledge, in Cheshire. A long account of him is given by Dr. Samuel Clarke.

We are now prepared to enter upon the question of Pope’s descent from a younger son of the family, which was ennobled by the Irish title of Earl of Downe. This was all which he claimed for himself; and I should be unwilling to think him so foolish and disingenuous as to make this assertion without some good grounds; though possibly, if he or his father had collected evidence, they might not have been able to show how specifically they did so descend, with the precision now required by the College of Arms. But probabilities are strongly in favour of the assertion. The title of Earl of Downe did not free the family of Pope from the obscurity in which it had lived till one member of it had become greatly enriched by aiding in the measures which established the Reformation in England. It will be at once perceived, by any one who may look into what is shown respecting them, that Sir Thomas Pope had no grace of ancestry to boast of. His father, whose will we have, is the first of the family of whom anything is known, and the will shows that he was a man of small possessions, living at Deddington, in Oxfordshire. Not that he was quite of the lowest class, as he desires to be buried within the walls of Deddington Church: in fact, he appears to have belonged to the rank of superior yeomanry, families who placed daughters in monasteries and sons in the Church, or sent them to make their fortune in the cities. He made no pretension to the distinction even of a gentleman’s coat-armour; for Sir Thomas Pope, when he had acquired wealth, took a grant from Barker in 1535. Warton has traced his course with some assiduity; but we may compare with what he says the evidence of a person who had good means of knowing Sir Thomas Pope’s circumstances. “He was the son of a poor and mean man in Deddington, in Oxfordshire, within four miles of Banbury, and over against Somerton, and was born there; was brought up, when a boy, as a scribe and clerk by Mr. John Croke, one of the Six Clerks when Wolsey was Chancellor, and so lived with Mr. Croke till after the Suppression. The Lord Audley made a motion to Mr. Croke to help him to some ready and expert clerk, to employ in the King’s service about the Suppression business; and Mr. Croke preferred Thomas Pope unto him, being then his household servant in livery, which was the first step of all his following good fortunes. This Mr. Croke was my wife’s great-grandfather; and I have heard her grandfather, Sir John Croke, often say, that at his christening, Thomas Pope, then his father’s man, carried the bason; and Sir Thomas Pope, by his will, gave this Sir John Croke some of his best raiment as a token of his love unto the house and family.”

Previously to the time when Sir Thomas Pope made the acquisitions, the greater part of which he disposed of so nobly in the foundation of his college at Oxford, his family made no marriages with the higher gentry. In short, there is nothing to interfere with the probability of the Rector of Thruxton being of a branch of the family, nor anything in it which the Downe family could look upon as degrading. We must not suffer the glare of the coronet to mislead us: we are speaking of times before the Popes were ennobled.

The Earls of Downe were one of the many families who rose into distinction out of the spoils of the ancient Church; but the rank given to them, and the wealth they possessed, to say nothing of any personal merit, would be a reasonable defence for Pope to fall back upon under the circumstances. The earldom, we may observe, had long been extinct. The first earl was the son of John Pope of Wroxton, who was brother of Sir Thomas (who left no issue). The dignity was created by Charles I. in 1628, not till then. The first peer was succeeded by his grandson, the second earl, who died at Oxford in 1660. This is the earl of whom Pope speaks, whose daughter and heir married the Earl of Lindsey. The third earl was uncle to the second, and in his son, who died in 1668, the title was lost, having existed for forty years only.

We have Pope’s direct testimony that his ancestors were of Oxfordshire, and we find them about Oxford in the time of Elizabeth. I think I have said sufficient to show that his claim to a distant kindred with the Popes of Wroxton, raised per saltum from the rank of yeomen, is affected with no improbability on the score of disproportion of rank.

The surname of Pope is not uncommon, but chiefly found in the southern counties. No other family of that name, I believe, is ever stated to have claimed consanguinity with the founder of Trinity College and the family of the Earls of Downe.

We proceed now to speak of the Poet’s maternal descent.

II. THE TURNERS.