The husband and wife each supplied in character that in which the other was wanting. In Rowland was seen a remarkable combination of the strong qualities of each parent. His father, however, had a two-fold influence on his character. Almost as much as he nourished his intellect and one side of his moral nature by sympathy, so he increased another side by the strong feeling of antipathy that he unconsciously raised. The son was shocked with his father’s want both of method and steady persistence, with the easy way in which he often set on one side matters that troubled him, and with the complacency with which he still regarded his theories, however much they were buffeted and bruised by practice. Here Rowland set before him his mother’s best qualities. He had, indeed, received them in large measure from nature, but he cultivated them from his earliest youth with a steadiness that never fell off or wearied. He went, perhaps, into the opposite extreme of that which he shunned, and gained a certain rigidity of character which at times appeared to be excessive.
I have seen a letter from his mother’s brother, Bailie Lea, written years ago to one of his nieces, in which he recalls, he says, “times, some seventy years ago, long before any of you were born.” He describes with some humour how he had helped young Tom Hill in his courtship. He adds, “The happy hour began to draw nigh, the gown was bought, made, and fitted on; the knot tied, the work was done, and it speaks for itself in every quarter of the globe.” With honest and just pride in his sister, the old man adds, “But Tom Hill could not have accomplished the half of what appears with any other woman for a wife than Sally Lea.” Certainly Rowland Hill always believed that he himself could not have accomplished the half of what he did had he not had such a mother. I know not whether my grandfather had any rivals. A charming story that is told of his old age leads me to think that he must have had at least one. His wife, when they had been married close on fifty years, one day called him, with a Birmingham plainness of speech, “An old fool!” A child who was staying in the house overheard him, as he left the room and slowly went up the stairs, muttering to himself, “Humph! she called me an old fool—an old fool!” Then he stopped, and was silent for a few moments, till suddenly rubbing his hands together, he exclaimed, “A lucky dog I was to get her, though!” His memory had carried him back full fifty years, before the ring was bought and the gown made, when young Tom Hill had still to win the heart and hand of Sarah Lea. A few years after her death he was one day missing. Some hours passed by, and nothing could be heard of the aged man who numbered now his fourscore years and four. At length he was seen trudging slowly homewards. He had gone on foot full five miles to his wife’s grave, and on foot he was making his way back.
His marriage had been delayed for a short time by the riots in which the chapels of the dissenters, and many of their houses, were burnt to the ground by a brutal Church-and-King mob. With several of his companions he had hurried off to defend the house of their revered pastor, but their services were unhappily declined. Priestley declared that it was the duty of a Christian minister to submit to persecution. The rest of the story of this eventful scene I shall tell in the words of his eldest son:—
“His companions went away, perhaps to escort their good pastor and his family, whose lives would not have been secure against the ruffians coming to demolish their home and property. My father barred the doors, closed the shutters, made fast the house as securely as he could against the expected rioters, and then awaited their arrival. He has often described to me how he walked to and fro in the darkened rooms, chafing under the restriction which had been put on him and his friends. He was present when the mob broke in, and witnessed the plunder and destruction, and the incendiary fire by which the outrage was consummated. Lingering near the house, he saw a working man fill his apron with shoes, with which he made off. My father followed him, and, as soon as the thief was alone, collared him, and dragged him to the gaol, where he had the mortification to witness the man quietly relieved of his booty, and then suffered to depart, the keeper informing my father that he had had orders to take in no prisoners that night! The mob, which had begun by attacking dissenters as public enemies, burning down their chapels and their houses, and making spoil of their goods, soon expanded their views, and gave unmistakable signs that the distinction between dissenter and churchman had had its hour, and was to be superseded in favour of the doctrine now so well known, ‘La propriété, c’est un vol.’ When matters came to this pass the magistrates swore-in special constables. My father was one of this body; and, like his comrades, compendiously armed with half a mop-stick by way of truncheon, he marched with them to the defence of Baskerville House, in Birmingham, which was under attack by the mob. The special constables at first drove all before them, in spite of the immense disparity of numbers; but after a time, becoming separated in the mêlée, they sustained a total defeat. Some were very severely bruised, and one died of the injuries which he received in the fight. My father, although not conscious at the time of having received a blow, could not the next morning raise his arm. He was always of opinion that if they had had a flag, or some signal of that kind, round which they could have rallied, the fortune of the day would have been reversed.”
The blow that he had received was at all events so severe that his marriage had to be put off for a fortnight. For three or four years the young couple lived at Birmingham.[17] They then removed to Kidderminster, where Rowland was born in the freehold house that had belonged to three generations of his family.[18] It was not, however, to remain long in his father’s hands. The French war ruined the manufacture in which he had engaged, and in the great straits to which he was before long reduced, he was able to retain nothing of his small inheritance. He left Kidderminster, and removed to Wolverhampton, where he found employment. His salary however was so small that it was only by means of the severest thrift that he managed to keep his head above water. It was in the stern school of poverty that Rowland was brought up from his earliest years. Like Garrick, he was “bred in a family whose study was to make four pence do as much as others made four pence half-penny do.”
THE BIRTH-PLACE OF SIR ROWLAND HILL, KIDDERMINSTER.
His father had taken an old farm-house, called Horsehills, that stood about a mile from Wolverhampton. It had long been empty, and the rent was so low that at first it excited his suspicions. It was not till he had signed the lease that he was informed that the house was haunted. He cared much about a low rent, and nothing about ghosts. On such terms he would have been only too glad to find a haunted house each time he changed his place of abode. He lived here till Rowland was seven years old. When the child had become a man of eighty he put on record many of the memories that he still retained of this home of his early days. Here it was that they were living during the terrible dearth of 1800, of which for many a year, men, he says, could hardly talk without a shudder. He could remember how one day during this famine when they were dining on bread and butter and lettuce, a beggar came to the door. His mother took from the dish one of the slices and sent it to the man. He refused it because there was not butter enough for him. The half-starved people took to plundering the fields of the potatoes, and the owners, in order to secure them, set about to dig them up and store them. Late rains, moreover, had followed the hot weather, and the roots had begun to sprout. Rowland writes, “I remember that when our crop of late potatoes was dug up, we children were set to spread them over the floor of the only room that could be spared. It was one of the parlours.” Likely enough they were thus brought into the house as a safer place against the rioters than any outhouse. Bread riots broke out. Most of the judges declaimed on the winter circuits against the forestallers. “A violent clamour was excited against corn-dealers and farmers, which being joined in by the mob, artificial scarcity became the cry. Farmers were threatened, and their barns and ricks in many places were set on fire.”[19] One band of rioters came to Horsehills, thinking no doubt that, as it was a farm-house, the occupier was a farmer. “The house was entered, and a demand made for bread; but the poor fellows, hungry as they doubtless were, listened to explanations; and upon one of them saying, ‘Oh, come away; look at the missis how bad her (she) looks,’ they all quietly withdrew.” I have heard my father say that so terrible had been the dearth, and so painful were the memories it raised, that they had all come to look upon bread as something holy. Once, when a mere child, he had seen a play-fellow wantonly waste a piece of bread by throwing it about. He was seized with alarm lest some terrible judgment from Heaven should come, not only upon the one guilty person, but upon all who were in his company. He feared lest the roof might fall down upon them. It may have been during this time of famine that Rowland, for the first time in his life, and perhaps for the last time, wished to go into debt. He was one day telling me how slowly and painfully he had, in his boyhood, saved up his money in order to buy useful articles of which he stood in need. I asked him whether he had never been tempted by the pastrycook. “No,” he answered; but yet, he added with a smile, according to a story that was told of him, he once had been. He had gone, when a very little child, to a woman who kept a stall in Wolverhampton market-place, and had asked her to let him have a half-penny-worth of sweets on trust. When she refused, he then begged her to lend him a half-penny, with which he would buy the sweets.