Shy to illumine,’
stands Newman’s early friend, Richard Hurrell Froude, the lost Pleiad of the Oxford Movement. Akin to some others, names earlier and later, ‘which carry a perfume in the mention,’ he left little to prove and approve himself. Such as he, in the pageant of eternity, are not the tallest harvesters with the most recognisable sheaves. Like Crichton and Falkland and Pergolesi, like Arthur Hallam and Henri Perreyve, he is known to history as it were by a smiling semi-private hint, or a sort of May-orchard coronal which the wind has no power to scatter, rather than by virtue of any personal innings in the complex game of life. He was a mere man of genius. His inheritance was richly varied: of mental currents possible in one cross-bred island, there could hardly be a more spirited blend. ‘The thinkers of the West,’ as an analytic pen has lately written,[6] ‘reveal a certain practical sagacity, a determination
to see things clearly, a hatred of cant and shams, a certain “positive” tendency which is one of the notes of purely English thought.’ Exact in the wider application, the sentence has an almost startling appropriateness when it is narrowed down to fit the one ‘thinker of the West’ (not in Mr. Ellis’s lists) with whom these pages deal. Never to maunder, never to mince matters, never to pet an illusion, never to lay down arms while there are ‘cant and shams’ to fight,—all that is very Devonian; and Hurrell Froude, true at every point, was true Devon in this. His ancestral Speddings, on the other hand, had imagination and a love of letters, and were ironic and opinionative after another fashion. They had also, for generation after generation, as an unexpected corollary, a strong turn for science, and even for mechanical science, as the less bookish Froudes, to offset their hard common sense, were restless and romantic lovers of the open air and of the sea. The shy, critical, solitary, but ardent and adventurous character which belonged not only to our particular Fellow of Oriel, but in some measure to all his nearest kindred, seems to have been inherited equally from the contrasted streams which ran in their blood. All Hurrell’s religiousness, all his poetry and fire and penetrative thought, came straight from his beautiful and highly intelligent mother, whom he lost just as he really came to know her, and whom he worshipped during the rest of his life. His stature, colour, and expression, as also his delicacy of constitution, he received through her.
The Speddings were Anglo-Irish, migrating during the sixteenth century to Scotland, then, early in James II.’s time, to Cumberland. John Spedding and his wife Margaret were seated at Armathwaite Hall, in Bassenthwaite parish, Keswick, when their second daughter Margaret, afterwards Mrs. Froude, was born in 1774. Her elder sister Mary, her brothers John, James, Anthony, and William (in order of their age), comprised with her, her father’s family; and she was but seven when he died. Armathwaite Hall was left in the hands of trustees, who so wasted it that when John Spedding, the son, came of age he found his patrimony gone, and resolved to leave the country to join the army, then in the thick of the
Peninsular War. Meanwhile, four miles away, at the head of Bassenthwaite Lake lay Mirehouse, the owner of which was Thomas Story, Esquire, a bachelor, attached to his Spedding neighbours. In the most opportune and romantic way, he made young John Spedding his heir, just in time to prevent his self-imposed exile, and in 1802 died, and was succeeded by him in the estate. It was thus that the Speddings, who had occupied Armathwaite Hall for over a century, came ultimately to live at the other end of the Lake. John Spedding married Miss Sarah Gibson of Newcastle. They lived to old age, and had a numerous issue. James Spedding, the distinguished scholar, the intimate friend of Tennyson, and leader of the famous Cambridge set ‘The Apostles,’ known afterwards in the world of letters as the vindicator of Bacon, was their third son. He spent most of his life (1808-1881) at Mirehouse, and is buried not far away, in the old churchyard of Bassenthwaite. He and his knew all the Froudes well; visits were constantly interchanged; and it was he who introduced James Anthony Froude, his cousin, and brother-in-law at one remove, as it were, to Carlyle. For James Spedding’s eldest brother, Thomas Story Spedding, married his cousin Phillis Froude, the second daughter of the household at Dartington.
To revert to the elder generation—Margaret Spedding, her own mother’s namesake, born, as we have seen, in 1774, was dearly loved at home for seven and twenty years; at that somewhat mature age (as it was considered in 1802), she married the Rev. Robert Hurrell Froude, Rector of Dartington in Devonshire. His own people were not less interesting, and even more ancient, than hers. Hurrells, an armigerous family, and Froudes, rising yeomen from Kent, had struck deep and wide roots in Devon soil at least as early as the reign of Elizabeth. The second of these was probably a place-name, though there are those who derive it from the Icelandic frod, wise, not from the likelier Celtic ffrwd, a rushing stream.[7] We find the race numerous and active, and settled chiefly about
Kingston, and about Modbury, where in the year of Culloden, Richard Hurrell, gentleman, was married to Mistress Phillis[8] Collings. Their daughter, Phillis Hurrell, became the wife of Robert ffroud of Walkhampton, third son of John, to whom descended the Modbury manors of Edmerston and Gutsford; these two lived at Aveton Giffard, and are buried there in the Parish Church, where their monuments still exist. ‘Robert ffroud Armiger’ died young, four years after his marriage, which had for issue one son, and three daughters. Phillis the widow, a person of strong character, lived on for sixty-six years longer, and saw the grave opened, or opening, for nearly all her brilliant and fated grandchildren. Her babes, left fatherless in 1770, were Mary, Margaret, and Elizabeth; her son Robert Hurrell was a posthumous child. The latter was to rise to more than local eminence, known throughout an exceptionally long life as Rector of Dartington, and from 1820 on, as Archdeacon of Totnes in the diocese of Exeter.[9] He matriculated at Oriel College, Oxford, in January 1788, aged seventeen, and in due course, in 1795, proceeded Master of Arts. He came from Denbury, of which he was already Incumbent, to his new parish of Dartington, in 1799. Many children were born in Dartington Parsonage to him and to Margaret Spedding his wife, of whom Richard Hurrell Froude, named for his paternal grandfather Richard Hurrell of Modbury, was the eldest. His birth was on March 25, 1803. Certain critics who disliked the aroma, real or imaginary, of the Oxford Movement, seemed to harbour, in after years, a special grudge against Hurrell for his Marian circumstances. It was, as it were, piling offence on offence that he entered the world on the Feast of the Annunciation, and consciously, votively belonged to the College of S. Mary at Oxford. He was privately baptized at home, and with his next brother, carried up the hill to be received in the ancient Church at the Hall gates (again S. Mary’s), on the 17th of April, 1805. Hurrell seems to have been from the first a stormy sort of child,
handsome, and odd, and adored by his relatives. Like the young Persians in their national prime, he learned ‘to ride, and to speak truth.’ He was sent early to the Free School at Ottery S. Mary, where he lived in his master’s house. This was the Rev. George May Coleridge, nephew of that poet who has made classic the lovely neighbourhood to all readers of English. He survived until 1847, dear to all the Froudes. (Perhaps it is not generally known that Mr. James Anthony Froude, then in deacon’s orders, was responsible for Mr. Coleridge’s funeral sermon at S. Mary Church, Torquay.) Hurrell was as happy at his first School as a dreamy rebel boy always subject to moods and to home-sickness could well be. Everything was done, at any rate, to keep him happy. His own memories of the green village, with its great minster and its bright stream, seem to have been pleasant ones. A lady who was but a young child during his last months at Dartington recalls his frank smile at drawing in a lottery a picture of Ottery Church, which she had coveted, lotteries not being abhorred then, as now, by Christian folk. Had the winner known of the little girl’s envy, he would certainly have parted with his treasure on the spot; for he was a born de-collector. Hurrell began, almost as soon as he could hold a pen, to draw well, and to write agreeable letters. At thirteen he was sent to Eton. A year or two before, that is, in or about 1814, he sat for his portrait to that lovable interesting man and capable artist, William Brockedon, Archdeacon Froude’s particular protégé and most grateful friend.[10] It may have been begun as one of many thank-offerings; for some reason, it was left unfinished. Brockedon was a patient person, by all accounts. Perhaps wild little Master Froude, for all his innocent looks, may have been, in the immortal words of Pet Marjorie, ‘whot human nature cant indure.’ The Archdeacon, too, was critical, and thought his friend happiest in sketch-work, and that to finish, with him, was, sometimes, to over-refine. Who could have foreseen that the abandoned canvas was long to take on
unique accidental value to persons then unborn who should be interested in his sitter? For though that childish sitter was to live over a score of years longer, and endear himself to men of a certain school of thought for ever, there was no discoverable hand but William Brockedon’s to tell them how he looked. There was not known until the other day a single other portrait, not so much as a silhouette, of a draughtsman associated with so many, both at home and at College, who could draw.