Unfortunately, this entry is not an autograph: all the other entries on the page which contains it are, as the Keeper of the Archives informs me, in the same handwriting. The Oxford University Calendar for 1823 gives (p. 275) our author's names in this form and sequence: James Willoughby Gordon Gill. This form and order are repeated in the Oxford University Calendar for the years 1824 and 1825. In the alphabetical index to the Calendar for 1823-1824-1825 this Pembroke undergraduate is entered as: Gill, James G. W. As the editors of the semi-official Calendar derive their information from the College authorities, we may take it that, from 1822 to 1825 inclusive, the future author passed as James Gill at Pembroke, and amongst those who knew him best. It cannot be supposed that the Master and Fellows of Pembroke made a wrong return for three consecutive years, nor that they wilfully reversed the order of Gill's Christian names with the express object of annoying him. Had they done either of these things, Gill was the very man to protest energetically: his conduct in later years snows that he was punctilious in these matters. However, it is right to bear in mind that the Matricula Book gives Gill's Christian names in the same order as they appear on his title-pages. I have failed to obtain any details of his career at Pembroke. Mr. Wood, the present Librarian at Pembroke, states that there is "no proper record" of the Commoners at that College in Gill's time. On this point I have only to say that the poet Thomas Lovell Beddoes was in residence at Pembroke with Gill, and that information concerning Beddoes's undergraduate days is apparently not lacking. Possibly more careful research might discover some trace of Gill at Oxford. He seems to have taken no degree, and to have left no memory or tradition at Pembroke. He himself tells us (A Tractate on Language, First Edition, p. iii) that when at Oxford "he formed an acquaintance with a gentleman of considerable erudition, but not of either University, who had made the English tongue his peculiar care." To this association we owe A Tractate on Language, and, perhaps, the peculiarities of style which Gill afterwards developed. But, in the latter respect, a serious responsibility may attach to Milton; for, in his Tractate, Gill refers to the poet and laments (p. 224) that, at the period of which he speaks, "the Allegro and Penseroso were confined to the closets of the judicious." The inference is that Gill modelled his diction on both these poems.
His name disappears from the Oxford University Calendar in 1826. He visited Mexico in 1832 (History of Wraysbury, p. 49), and perhaps during this journey he picked up a queer smattering of Spanish. On August 29, 1839, he married "Anne Elizabeth, daughter of Sir Edward Bowyer-Smijth, Bt.," and this seems to have given a new direction to what he calls his "studious tendencies."
The founder of his wife's family was plain William Smith, who died in 1626; this William Smith's son developed into Thomas Smyth, and died a baronet in 1668; Sir Thomas Smyth's great-great-grandson, the seventh baronet, was known as Sir William Smijth, and died in 1823. Gill's father-in-law,—Vicar of Camberwell and Chaplain to George IV.—was the ninth baronet. On June 10, 1839, he assumed the name of Bowyer by royal license, and was styled Sir Edward Bowyer-Smijth. In this the Vicar was practically following the lead of his younger brother, a captain in the 10th Hussars, who assumed the name of Windham by royal license at Toulouse on May 22, 1823, and thenceforth signed himself Joseph Smijth-Windham. The contagion infected Gill.
After his marriage to Miss Bowyer-Smijth, third daughter of the ninth baronet, Gill became a diligent student of genealogy, heraldry and county-history. It might be excessive to say that he was attacked by the folie des grandeurs; but he does appear to have felt that, since the Smiths had blossomed into Bowyer-Smijths and Smijth-Windhams, a man of his ability was bound to do something of the same kind for the ancient house of Gill. And something was done: a great deal, in fact. The first-fruits of Gill's enterprise are garnered in The genealogy of the family of Gylle, or Gill, of Hertfordshire, Essex and Kent, illustrated by wills and other documents which he printed in 1842. At this first stage he acted with praiseworthy caution, signing his pamphlet with the initials G. G. If he was ever known by so vulgar a name as James—the name of the patron-saint of Spain—he had evidently got rid of it by 1842. At Pembroke in 1823 his initials were J. G. W. G., according to the Oxford University Calendar: nineteen years later they were G. G. This advancement passed unnoticed, and the delighted investigator continued his researches. These were so successful that, according to Gill's shy confession wrung from him long afterwards, "as the old annals, parish registers, tombs, wills. &c., wrote our name Gyll, we, by sign manual, returned to that orthography in 1844": (see Notes and Queries, March 24, 1866, vol. ix., p. 250). The English of this avowal is bad, but the meaning is clear. Henceforward Gill is transfigured into Gyll. These easy victories led him to enlarge his plan of campaign, and thus we find in the 1846 edition of Burke's Landed Gentry the pedigree of the family of Gyll of Wyrardisbury, which contains the statement that on October 13, 1794, the head of the house (of the Gylls of Wyrardisbury), "William Gyll, Esquire, Captain 2nd Regiment Life Guards, and Equerry to H. R. H. the Duke of Sussex" married "Lady Harriet Flemyng, only child of the Right Hon. Hamilton Flemyng, last Earl of Wigtoun, and had issue" our author, and other children with whom we are not concerned here.
According to George Lipscomb's History and Antiquities of the County of Buckingham (London, 1847, vol. iv., p. 605, n. 1.), it was on December 17, 1844, that "Her Majesty was pleased ... to permit the family of Gyll of Wyrardisbury, to resume the ancient orthography of their name." The enthusiastic Gyll (as we must now call him) interpreted the privilege in a generous fashion. It galled the patrician to think that his grandfather had been a lowly alderman, and to know that this lamentable fact was on record at Wraysbury. There were epitaphs in Wraysbury Church describing his grandfather as "Alderman of the City of London"; describing his father as "only son of Alderman Gill"; describing his aunt, Mrs. Paxton, as "daughter of William Gill, Esq., Alderman of the City of London." Our Gyll had all these odious references to the aldermanship removed; in their stead he introduced more high-sounding phrases; he interpolated the statement that his grandfather was "of the family of Gyll of Wyddial, Herts"; and on all three monuments he took it upon himself to change Gill into Gyll. The changes were made clumsily and unintelligently, but one cannot have everything. Gordon Gyll was indefatigable in his pious work, and, within three years, he somehow induced Lipscomb (op. cit., vol. iv., p. 604) to insert a pedigree connecting the family of "Gyll of Buckland and Wyddial Hall, co. Herts, Yeoveny Hall, co. Middlesex, and Wyrardisbury Hall, co. Bucks," with certain Gylls established in Cambridgeshire during the reign of Edward I. It is impossible not to admire the calm courage with which the still, strong man swept facts, tombstones, epitaphs, and obstacle's of all kinds from the path of his nobility.
His proceedings passed unnoticed during fourteen happy years. At last attention was drawn to them in Notes and Queries (May 11, 1861, p. 365) by a correspondent who signed himself "A Stationer." "A Stationer" remarked sarcastically on the erasure of all references to the aldermanship from the monuments in Wraysbury Church, noted that the dead Gills had been glorified into Gylls, deplored Gordon Gyll's ingratitude towards the ancestors to whom he owed everything, censured Gyll's conduct as "silly," and protested against such tampering as improper. The editor of Notes and Queries supported "A Stationer's" view on the ground that monuments had hitherto been accepted as testimony in suits at law, and that their evidential value would be completely destroyed if Gyll's example were generally followed. Gyll put on his finest county manner, and replied in an incoherent letter (Notes and Queries, May 26, 1861, p. 414) which breathes the haughty spirit of a great territorial chieftain. He denounced the insolence of "A Stationer" in daring to criticize "a county family," branded the intruder as a "tradesman," a "miserable citizen critic," and pitied the poor soul's "confined education." But he failed to explain his conduct satisfactorily, and laid himself open to the taunts of Dr. J. Alexander (Notes and Queries, June 8, 1861, p. 452), who declared that Gyll had "proved himself unable to write English, and ignorant of some of the simplest rules of composition." Dr. Alexander added that,—if a licence obtained in 1844 could justify changing the spelling of the name of a man who died in 1798,—by parity of reasoning, "had the worthy alderman accepted the proferred baronetcy, all his ancestors would, ipso facto, become baronets. I believe China is the only country where this practice obtains." In the same number of Notes and Queries, "A Stationer" returned to the subject, and posed a number of very awkward questions. "Are the Gylls really a county family? And when did they become so? Has any member of the house ever filled the office of Knight of the shire, or even that of sheriff for the county of Buckingham?" And, after reproaching Gyll for his repudiation of his hard-working grandfather, "A Stationer" ended by assuring the proud squire that "the Stationers of London have a more grateful recollection of their quondam brothers and benefactors—for benefactors they were to a very unequal extent. From Alderman Wright, the Stationers received 2000l. 4 per cents.: from Alderman Gill (who left a fortune of £300,000) 30s. a year to be added to Cator's dinner. However, their portraits are still to be seen in the counting-house of the Company, placed in one frame, side by side. "Par nobile fratrum!" Gyll dashed off a reply which the editor of Notes and Queries (June 29, 1861, p. 520) declined to insert: "as we desire to avoid as much as possible any intermixture of personal matters into this important question." At this the blood of all the Gylls boiled in the veins of Gordon Willoughby James. He was not to be put off by a timorous journalist, and he secured the insertion in Notes and Queries (July 27, 1861, p. 74) of an illiterate letter which, says the editor, "we have printed ... exactly as it stands in the original." The letter seems to have been written under the influence of deep emotion, for the aristocratic Gyll twice speaks of his grandfather as a "party." He demanded an ample apology, and ended with the announcement that "if I do not hear from you I shall send the family lawyer to meet the charge." Gyll did not obtain the apology, did not attempt to answer "A Stationer's" string of questions, did not accept the editor's offer to print the suppressed letter, did not "send the family lawyer to meet the charge." In fact he did nothing that he threatened to do, and nothing that he was asked to do. If he consulted his solicitor, the latter probably joined with the editor and told him not to make a fool of himself.
But Gyll had no idea of abandoning his pretensions, and he renewed them with abundant details in his History of Wraysbury, a quarto which contains more than its title implies. He is not content to note (p. 153) that "occasionally those dreary landmarks in the vast desert of human misery, called Coroner's inquests, arise in Wraysbury." He also proves, to his own satisfaction, that "the family of Ghyll, Gyll, Gylle, Gille, Gill, for it is recorded in all these ways, is derived from that one which resided in the North, temp. Edward the Confessor, 1041, at Gille's Land in Cumberland" (p. 99), and that "in 1278 Walter le Gille served as a juryman at Tonbridge" (p. 98). The arms of the Gylls are duly given: "Sable, two chevrons argent, each charged with three mullets of the field, on a dexter Canton, or; a lion passant at guard, gules. Also Lozenges or and vert; a lion rampant at guard, gules." Heralds whom I have consulted have jeered at the Gyll escutcheon, but I cannot bring myself to give their ribald remarks in print. Apparently, the main purpose of the History of Wraysbury is to shew that the Gylls (with a y) are very Superior Persons, and that the Gills (with an i) are People of No Importance. Gyll admits that the latter produced a worthy man in the person of John Gill, "a Baptist divine"; and the historian, when writing of his poor relations (p. 125), emphasizes the fact that John Gill was not an Anabaptist. Anabaptists were evidently an inferior set.
It will be seen that Gyll traced back his pedigree to a period earlier than the Norman Conquest: six centuries before his wife's ancestors (then known as Smith) were first heard of. It was a great achievement and henceforth no Gyll need fear to look a Bowring-Smijth in the face. And Gyll's ambition grew. He could not prove that he was the child of a baronet, and, in so much, he was in a position of social inferiority to his wife. But he did the next best thing by declaring that, if he was not the son of a baronet, he easily might have been. In his History of Wraysbury, he states (p. 97) that his grandfather was Lord Mayor of London when George III. went to St Paul's to give thanks for his recovery from his first attack of insanity, that the usual patent "was prepared and announced in all the public papers, 18th and 19th April, 1789, to create him a Baronet, which is usual when the King honours the city on any great occasion, but the profered advancement was not accepted for family reasons. Nor was the claim revived until his son "William Gyll, Captain 2nd Life Guards, who had in 1803 at his own expense raised two troops of cavalry at the threat of invasion, solicited the favour which his father had injudiciously declined, when he too unfortunately died prematurely, and the expected honour has not since been conferred." This is a repetition of a favourite phrase: for Lipscomb (op. cit., vol. iv., p. 605, n. 3) states that the younger William Gyll "unfortunately died suddenly, and the expected honour has not since been conferred." One can guess the source of Lipscomb's information.
I regret to say that Gyll throws all the blame for this catastrophe on his grandmother, as may be seen by an intemperate foot-note which follows the passage just quoted from the History of Wraysbury: "His (the Lord Mayor's) wife Mary induced him to forego the honour, because there was a son by his first wife, who only survived a few years and died unmarried. Women may be very affectionate but not discreet. They have a fibre more in their hearts, and a cell less in their brains than men." This is most improper, no doubt. Still, great allowance should be made for the exasperation of a man who longed to be a baronet's son, who might have been one, and who was not.
Gyll had certainly played his part gallantly. Considering the material that he had to use, he worked wonders. He had (perhaps) transformed himself from James to Gordon; he had (unquestionably) evolved from Gill to Gyll. He had wiped out the horrid memory of the aldermanship, and had buried the old stationer's shop miles beneath the ground-floor of limbo. And there is testimony to his social triumphs in the list of subscribers that precedes his History of Wraysbury, which is dedicated "by permission" to the late Prince Consort. Among the subscribers were two dukes, two earls, five barons, ten baronets: and these great personages were followed by Mr. Disraeli, Mr. Milner Gibson, the Dean of Windsor, the Provost of Eton, and other commoners of distinction.