The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees

by Mary Caroline Crawford

The New England Courier of that time gives this picture of his disembarkation at Newport: "Yesterday there arrived here Dean Berkeley, of Londonderry. He is a gentleman of middle stature, of an agreeable, pleasant, and erect aspect. He was ushered into the town with a great number of gentlemen, to whom he behaved himself after a very complaisant manner."

WHITEHALL, NEWPORT, R. I.

So favourably was Berkeley impressed by Newport that he wrote to Lord Percival: "I should not demur about situating our college here." And as it turned out, Newport was the place with which Berkeley's scheme was to be connected in history. For it was there that he lived all three years of his stay, hopefully awaiting from England the favourable news that never came.

In loyal remembrance of the palace of his monarchs, he named his spacious home in the sequestered valley Whitehall. Here he began domestic life, and became the father of a family. The neighbouring groves and the cliffs that skirt the coast offered shade and silence and solitude very soothing to his spirit, and one wonders not that he wrote, under the projecting rock that still bears his name, "The Minute Philosopher," one of his most noted works. The friends with whom he had crossed the ocean went to stay in Boston, but no solicitations could withdraw him from the quiet of his island home. "After my long fatigue of business," he told Lord Percival, "this retirement is very agreeable to me; and my wife loves a country life and books as well as to pass her time continually and cheerfully without any other conversation than her husband and the dead." For the wife was a mystic and a quietist.

But though Berkeley waited patiently for developments which should denote the realisation of his hopes, he waited always in vain. From the first he had so planned his enterprise that it was at the mercy of Sir Robert Walpole; and at last came the crisis of the project, with which the astute financier had never really sympathised. Early in 1730, Walpole threw off the mask. "If you put the question to me as a minister," he wrote Lord Percival, "I must and can assure you that the money shall most undoubtedly be paid—as soon as suits with public convenience; but if you ask me as a friend whether Dean Berkeley should continue in America, expecting the payment of £200,000, I advise him by all means to return to Europe, and to give up his present expectations."

When acquainted by his friend Percival with this frank statement, Berkeley accepted the blow as a philosopher should. Brave and resolutely patient, he prepared for departure. His books he left as a gift to the library of Yale College, and his farm of Whitehall was made over to the same institution, to found three scholarships for the encouragement of Greek and Latin study. His visit was thus far from being barren of results. He supplied a decided stimulus to higher education in the colonies, in that he gave out counsel and help to the men already working for the cause of learning in the new country. And he helped to form in Newport a philosophical reunion, the effects of which were long felt.

In the autumn of 1731 he sailed from Boston for London, where he arrived in January of the next year. There a bishopric and twenty years of useful and honourable labour awaited him. He died at Oxford, whence he had removed from his see at Cloyne, on Sunday evening, January 14, 1753, while reading aloud to his family the burial service portion of Corinthians. He was buried in the Cathedral of Christ Church.

Of the traces he left at Newport, there still remain, beside the house, a chair in which he was wont to write, a few books and papers, the organ presented by him to Trinity Church, the big family portrait, by Smibert—and the little grave in Trinity churchyard, where, on the south side of the Kay monument, sleeps "Lucia Berkeley, obiit., the fifth of September, 1731." Moreover the memory of the man's beautiful, unselfish life pervades this section of Rhode Island, and the story of his sweetness and patience under a keen and unexpected disappointment furnishes one of the most satisfying pages in our early history.

The life of Berkeley is indeed greater than anything that he did, and one wonders not as one explores the young preacher's noble and endearing character that the distraught Vanessa fastened upon him, though she knew him only by reputation, as one who would make it his sacred duty to do all in his power to set her memory right in a censorious world.