This was a more serious matter than it at first appears. The money in the Funds was left by Dr. Russell for his daughter and her offspring and could not therefore be touched without authority from Miss Mitford, who was her mother’s sole heir. How then did Dr. Mitford propose to obtain its use? There is only one answer and it is one which involves the integrity which Miss Mitford did not question. Harness’s reply was plain and to the point. “Depend upon it the money shall never be touched with my consent. It was consideration for your future welfare which prevented my father’s consenting to its being sold out some years ago, when you had been persuaded, and wished to persuade him, to your own utter ruin.” [This was during the stressful time at Bertram House when, with the consent of her mother, Miss Mitford wrote to Dr. Harness imploring him to sell out and give her father the use of the money.] “That £3,000 I consider as the sheet-anchor of your independence, if age should ever render literature irksome to you, or infirmity incapacitate you for exertion; and, while your father lives, it shall never stir from its present post in the Funds. After he has ceased (as all fathers must cease) to live, my first object will be to consult with you and my most intelligent money-managing friends, and discover the mode of making the stock most profitable to your comfort, either by annuity or any other mode that may be thought most advisable. Till then—from whatever quarter the proposition may come—I have but one black, blank, unqualified No for my answer. I do not doubt Dr. Mitford’s integrity, but I have not the slightest confidence in his prudence; and I am fully satisfied that if these three thousand and odd hundreds of pounds were placed at his disposal to-day, they would fly the way so many other thousands have gone before them, to-morrow. Excuse me saying this; but I cannot help it.”
This letter stands to the lasting credit of its writer and affords ample proof of his steadfast and unflinching devotion to his trust, failing which the tragedy of Miss Mitford’s life would have been deeper than it was. He alone had the power of drawing out the best that was in Miss Mitford, in getting her to express the moral and spiritual side of her nature. Art, literature, the Drama she could talk and write upon to other people, but it was to William Harness that she would pour out her convictions on the deeper things of life. He sent her a book of his sermons, and although it reached her at midnight (having been conveyed from her friend by Dr. Milman to her father, whom he met at a dinner-party), she sat far into the night, reading and studying it, and inditing a reply at three o’clock in the morning while the mood was hot upon her.
“I have read it through—the second part twice through. That second sermon would have done honour to Shakespeare, and I half expected to find you quoting him. There would be a tacit hypocrisy, a moral cowardice, if I were to stop here, and not to confess, what I think you must suspect, although by no chance do I ever talk about it—that I do not, or rather cannot, believe all that the Church requires. I humbly hope that it is not necessary to do so, and that a devout sense of the mercy of God, and an endeavour, however imperfectly and feebly, to obey the great precepts of justice and kindness, may be accepted in lieu of that entire faith which, in me, will not be commanded. You will not suspect me of thoughtlessness in this matter; neither, I trust, does it spring from intellectual pride. Few persons have a deeper sense of their own weakness; few, indeed, can have so much weakness of character to deplore and to strive against. Do not answer this part of my letter. It has cost me a strong effort to say this to you; but it would have been a concealment amounting to a falsity if I had not, and falsehood must be wrong. Do not notice it; a correspondence of controversy could only end in alienation, and I could not afford to lose my oldest and kindest friend—to break up the close intimacy in which I am so happy and of which I am so proud.” This was in 1829. In the Spring of 1834 her old friend sent another of his printed sermons, which again she read and studied and which drew from her some pronouncements on Disestablishment and Disendowment of the Church and on questions of Social Reform which cannot but be read with interest to-day.
“It is a very able and conciliatory plea for the Church. My opinion (if an insignificant woman may presume to give one) is, that certain reforms ought to be; that very gross cases of pluralities should be abolished (it is too sweeping, I think, to say all pluralities); that some few of the clergy are too rich, and that a great many are too poor; but (although not holding all her doctrines) I heartily agree with you that, as an establishment, the Church ought to remain; for, to say nothing of the frightful precedent of sweeping away property, a precedent which would not stop there, the country would be over-run with fanatics, and, in the rural districts especially, a clergyman (provided he be not a magistrate) is generally, in worldly, as well as spiritual matters, a great comfort to the poor. But our wise legislators never think of the rural districts—never. They legislate against gin-shops, which are the evil of great towns, and encourage beer-shops, which are the pest of the country, the cause of half the poverty and three-fourths of the demoralization. But the Church must be (as many of her members are) wisely tolerant; bishops must not wage war with theatres, nor rectors with a Sunday evening game of cricket. If they take up the arms of the Puritans, the Puritans will beat them.”
The reference in this letter to rectors and Sunday cricket is most interesting in view of the fact that only a few miles away, in the village of Eversley, there had just arrived a new curate who, as time went on, became the rector; and who, among other things, shocked some of his clerical brethren by actually encouraging manly sports, such as cricket and quoits, on the village green in the intervals between the Sunday services. His name was Charles Kingsley and he was destined to be numbered among the very dear friends of Miss Mitford in her declining days.
The refusal—the just refusal—of William Harness to entertain Dr. Mitford’s idea regarding money matters, somewhat upset the latter’s calculations, besides causing him to be more importunate in his demands on his daughter. There were, of course, certain sums coming in regularly from the various magazines, but these were not sufficient, and so both father and daughter decided to take a bold risk and endeavour to produce the prohibited play of Charles the First at some theatre where the jurisdiction of the Lord Chamberlain did not operate.
Dr. Mitford took the manuscript with him to London in the May of 1834, where, by the kindness of Mr. T. J. Serle—a noted playwright and actor—he was introduced to Mr. Abbott, who, having left Covent Garden Theatre and become Manager of the Victoria Theatre in the Waterloo Road, was a likely person to take up the project. Mr. Abbott immediately accepted the play and was extremely liberal in his terms—£200 to be paid down and a fourth share of the profits if the play ran for a certain number of nights. The negotiations were somewhat prolonged, but by the end of June the whole matter had been arranged and Miss Mitford went to town to superintend the rehearsals. The play was produced in July, with Mr. Cathcart in the cast and with the prologue both written and spoken by Mr. Serle. It was a great success, despite the drawbacks attendant on its production in a minor theatre on the Surrey side of the Thames. Writing to her friend Miss Jephson, the delighted author said:—“The papers will of course have told you that both I and my actor have been successful ... the thing is admirably got up, the theatre beautiful, and Cathcart’s acting refined, intellectual, powerful and commanding beyond anything I ever witnessed.... They make a real queen of me, and would certainly demolish my humility, if I were happy enough to be humble, though I feel that over-praise, over-estimation, is a far more humbling thing—a thing that sends you back on your own mind to ask, ‘Have I deserved this?’ than anything else that can be. For the first ten days I spent on an average from four to six hours every morning in the Victoria Theatre, at hard scolding, for the play has been entirely got up by me; then I dined out amongst twenty or thirty eminent strangers every evening. Since that I have been to operas and to pictures, and held a sort of drawing-room every morning; so that I am so worn out, as to have, for three days out of the last four, fainted dead away between four and five o’clock, a fine-lady trick which I never played before, and which teaches me I must return, as soon as I can, into the country, to write another play and run again the same round of fatigue, excitement and pleasure. After all, my primary object is, and has been, to establish Mr. Cathcart.”
Mary Russell Mitford.
(From a drawing by F. R. Say, 1837.)
Although the Duke of Devonshire could not agree to licence the play, he was not averse to accepting its Dedication to himself, acknowledging it in a very gracious note to the author. Thus, set on their feet once more, the little household pursued a normal course of existence. The Doctor went to London and his daughter plodded, exhausted and overdone, at her new book, which was to be called Belford Regis and be descriptive of life and character in a country town—Belford Regis being, of course, none other than the adjacent town of Reading.