| “Ere Hawke did bang Mounseer Conflang You sent us beef and beer; Now Mounseer’s beat We’ve nought to eat, Since you have nought to fear.” |
Hawke returned to England in January 1760 and had no further service at sea. He was not made a peer till the 20th of May 1776, and then only as Baron Hawke of Towton. From 1776 to 1771 he was first lord of the Admiralty. His administration was much criticized, perhaps more from party spirit than because of its real defects. Whatever his relations with Lord Chatham may have been he was no favourite with Chatham’s partizans. It is very credible that, having spent all his life at sea, his faculty did not show in the uncongenial life of the shore. As an admiral at sea and on his own element Hawke has had no superior. It is true that he was not put to the test of having to meet opponents of equal strength and efficiency, but then neither has any other British admiral since the Dutch wars of the 17th century. On his death on the 17th of October 1781 his title passed to his son, Martin Bladen (1744-1805), and it is still held by his descendants, the 7th Baron (b. 1860) being best known as a great Yorkshire cricketer.
There is a portrait of Hawke in the Painted Hall at Greenwich. His Life by Montagu Burrows (1883) has superseded all other authorities; it is supplemented in a few early particulars by Sir J. K. Laughton’s article in the Dict. Nat. Biog. (1891).
HAWKER, ROBERT STEPHEN (1803-1874), English antiquary and poet, was born at Stoke Damerel, Devonshire, on the 3rd of December 1803. His father, Jacob Stephen Hawker, was at that time a doctor, but afterwards curate and vicar of Stratton, Cornwall. Robert was sent to Liskeard grammar school, and when he was about sixteen was apprenticed to a solicitor. He was soon removed to Cheltenham grammar school, and in April 1823 matriculated at Pembroke College, Oxford. In the same year he married Charlotte I’Ans, a lady much older than himself. On returning to Oxford he migrated to Magdalen Hall, where he graduated in 1828, having already won the Newdigate prize for poetry in 1827. He became vicar of Morwenstow, a village on the north Cornish coast, in 1834. Hawker described the bulk of his parishioners as a “mixed multitude of smugglers, wreckers and dissenters of various hues.” He was himself a high churchman, and carried things with a high hand in his parish, but was much beloved by his people. He was a man of great originality, and numerous stories were told of his striking sayings and eccentric conduct. He was the original of Mortimer Collins’s Canon Tremaine in Sweet and Twenty. His first wife died in 1863, and in 1864 he married Pauline Kuczynski, daughter of a Polish exile. He died in Plymouth on the 15th of August 1875. Before his death he was formally received into the Roman Catholic Church, a proceeding which aroused a bitter newspaper controversy. The best of his poems is The Quest of the Sangraal: Chant the First (Exeter, 1864). Among his Cornish Ballads (1869) the most famous is on “Trelawny,” the refrain of which, “And shall Trelawny die,” &c., he declared to be an old Cornish saying.
See The Vicar of Morwenstow (1875; later and corrected editions, 1876 and 1886), by the Rev. S. Baring-Gould, which was severely criticized by Hawker’s friend, W. Maskell, in the Athenaeum (March 26, 1876); Memorials of the late Robert Stephen Hawker (1876), by the late Dr F. G. Lee. These were superseded in 1905 by The Life and Letters of R. S. Hawker, by his son-in-law, C. E. Byles, which contains a bibliography of his works, now very valuable to collectors. See also Boase and Courtney, Bibliotheca Cornubiensis. His Poetical Works (1879) and his Prose Works (1893) were edited by J. G. Godwin. Another edition of his Poetical Works (1899) has a preface and bibliography by Alfred Wallis, and a complete edition of his poems by C. E. Byles, with the title Cornish Ballads and other Poems, appeared in 1904.
HAWKERS and PEDLARS, the designation of itinerant dealers who convey their goods from place to place to sell. The word “hawker” seems to have come into English from the Ger. Höker or Dutch heuker in the early 16th century. In an act of 1533 (25 Henry VIII. c. 9, § 6) we find “Sundry evill disposed persons which commonly beane called haukers ... buying and selling of Brasse and Pewter.” The earlier word for such an itinerant dealer is “huckster,” which is found in 1200. “For that they have turned God’s house intill hucksteress bothe” (Ormulum, 15,817). The base of the two words is the same, and is probably to be referred to German hocken, to squat, crouch; cf. “hucklebone,” the hip-bone; and the hawkers or hucksters were so called either because they stooped under their packs, or squatted at booths in markets, &c. Another derivation finds the origin in the Dutch hock, a hole, corner. It may be noticed that the termination of “huckster” is feminine; though there are examples of its application to women it was always applied indiscriminately to either sex.
“Pedlar” occurs much earlier than the verbal form “to peddle,” which is therefore a derivative from the substantive. The origin is to be found in the still older word “pedder,” one who carries about goods for sale in a “ped,” a basket or hamper. This is now only used dialectically and in Scotland. In the Ancren Riwle (c. 1225), peoddare is found with the meaning of “pedlar,” though the Promptorium parvulorum (c. 1440) defines it as calathasius, i.e. a maker of panniers or baskets.
The French term for a hawker or pedlar of books, colporteur (col, neck, porter, to carry), has been adopted by the Bible Society and other English religious bodies as a name for itinerant vendors and distributors of Bibles and other religious literature.