SECTION IV.

OF THE MARRIAGE OF THE CLERGY.

On this head Mr. Macaulay favours us with a very special account, reaching backwards and stretching forwards over nearly two centuries: in the course of it he is pleased to insinuate that about the time of James II.'s accession (the time of which his history treats) the wives of chaplains had not much better claim to morality than to station, and he carries this accusation forward into the reign of George the Second:

"Perhaps after some years of service he was presented to a living sufficient to support him: but he often found it necessary to purchase his preferment by a species of simony, which furnished an inexhaustible subject of pleasantry to three or four generations of scoffers. With his cure he was expected to take a wife. The wife had ordinarily been in the patron's service; AND IT WAS WELL IF SHE WAS NOT SUSPECTED OF STANDING TOO HIGH IN THE PATRON'S FAVOUR. Indeed the nature of the matrimonial connections which the clergymen of that age were in the habit of forming is the most certain indication of the place which the order held in the social system. An Oxonian, writing a few months after the death of Charles the Second, complained bitterly, not only that the country attorney and the country apothecary looked down with disdain on the country clergyman, but that one of the lessons most earnestly inculcated on every girl of honourable family was to give no encouragement to a lover in orders, and that, if any young lady forgot this precept, she was almost as much disgraced as by an illicit amour. * Clarendon, who assuredly bore no ill will to the

"A causidico, medicastro, ipsaque artificum farragine, ecclesiæ rector aut vicarius contemnitur et fit ludibrio. Gentis et familiæ nitor sacris ordi

Church, mentions it as a sign of the confusion of ranks which the great rebellion had produced, that some damsels of noble families had bestowed themselves on divines.* A waiting woman was generally considered as the most suitable helpmate for a parson. Queen Elizabeth, as head of the Church, had given what seemed to be a formal sanction to this prejudice, by issuing special orders that no clergyman should presume to marry a servant girl, without the consent of her master or mistress.† During several generations accordingly the relation between priests and handmaidens was a theme for endless jest; nor would it be easy to find, in the comedy of the seventeenth century, a single instance of a clergyman who wins a spouse above the rank of a cook. Even so late as the time of George the Second, the keenest of all observers of life and manners, himself a priest, remarked that, in a great household, the chaplain was the resource of a lady's maid whose character had been blown upon, and who was therefore forced to give up hopes of catching the steward.||"-Macaulay's History of England, vol. I. pp. 328, 329.

Mr. Macaulay's charge is two-fold; or rather there is one insinuation and one charge. Let us take the former first:

I. Now where is the proof to warrant this insinuation of want of chastity anywhere near the time of which he is writing? whence is it derived? Until a certain discovery was made, it gave me the greatest perplexity to conjecture. A very grave charge this is to be made against the wives of a large proportion of the Clergy. But in vain did I try to find

nibus pollutus censetur: fœminisque natalitio insignibus unicum inculcatur sæpius præceptum, ne modestiæ naufragium faciant, aut, (quod idem auribus tam delicatulis sonat,) ne clerico se nuptas dari patiantur.-Anglica Notitia, by T. Wood, of New College, Oxford, 1686.

* Clarendon's Life, ii. 21.

+ See the Injunctions of 1559, in Bishop Sparrow's Collection. Jeremy Collier, in his Essay on Pride, speaks of this injunction with a bitterness which proves that his own pride had not been effectually tamed.

Roger and Abigail in Fletcher's Scornful Lady, Bull and the Nurse in Vanbrugh's Relapse, Smirk and Susan in Shadwell's Lancashire Witches, are instances.

Swift's Directions to Servants. [Mr. Macaulay's Notes].

out by which of his authorities he intended it to be substantiated; for it was most evident that he had something in his eye when he wrote, "even so late as the time of George the Second" Dean Swift made some remark or other. It was of course impossible to know what weight was to be attached to the evidence against the chaplains' wives towards the end of the seventeenth century, till it was previously determined what that evidence was. The reader however may perhaps discover by the concluding chapter; and he may find too that the form of the insinuation has been altered in such a manner that Swift's authority seems to confirm it.

However (though it does not strictly fall within the present enquiry) we will consider whether Swift is good proof of such immoralities being frequent during George the Second's reign.

Mr. Macaulay has truly given the substance of Swift's remarks and perhaps it may be advisable to carry the quotation forward into the first sentence of the following paragraph, at which (for obvious reasons) we are compelled to stop.

"I must caution you (the waiting-maid) particularly against my lord's eldest son: if you are dexterous enough, it's odds that you may draw him in to marry you and make you a lady."-Swift's Directions to Servants: Works, vol. XVI. p. 185 (Lond. 1784).

Now surely if Swift is good proof that chaplains were in the habit of marrying such waiting-maids as have been mentioned, he is equally good proof that a waiting-maid had little difficulty in gaining my lord's eldest son. No one however (I suppose) will pretend that such marriages were then common in high life; and no one (I should have thought) would consider such an authority to be legitimate testimony of the ordinary marriages of clergymen at any period.

II. Having dispatched the charge of immorality, let us proceed to examine that of vulgarity.

The first authority belongs to the sixteenth century, a period which does not properly enter into the present enquiry. One thing is certain, that the condition of the Clergy was much improved afterwards in the time of Charles II., for the fact is agreed upon between Eachard and his opponent, to say nothing of other reasons for so thinking. It follows therefore that we cannot safely argue from the time of Elizabeth to the time of Charles II. But in truth Mr. Macaulay has overstrained the inference from Elizabeth's Injunctions. There is much less speciality about them than his account would lead us to suppose: she provides that a clergyman shall not marry any manner of woman-not merely a waiting-woman-without leave had either from her parents or her relations, or in default of these, the master and mistress where she serveth. The whole passage given at large will prevent the necessity of further comment on that point:

"Item. Although there be no prohibition by the Word of God, nor any example of the primitive Church, but that the priests and ministers of the Church may lawfully, for the avoiding of fornication, have an honest and sober wife, and that for the same purpose the same was, by Act of Parliament in the time of our dear brother King Edward the Sixth, made lawful; whereupon a great number of the Clergy of this realm were then married, and so yet continue: yet because there hath grown offence and some slander to the Church, by lack of discreet and sober behaviour in many ministers of the Church, both in choosing of their wives and in undiscreet living with them, the remedy whereof is necessary to be sought; it is thought therefore very necessary that no manner of priest or deacon shall hereafter take to his wife any manner of woman without the advice and allowance first had upon good examination by the bishop of the same diocese and two justices of the peace of the same shire dwelling next to the

place where the same woman hath made her most abode before her marriage, nor without the good will of the parents of the said woman, if she have any living, or two of the next of her kinsfolks, or for lack of knowledge of such, of her master or mistress where she serveth. And before she shall be contracted in any place, he shall make a good and certain proof thereof to the minister, or to the congregation assembled for that purpose, which shall be upon some holy-day where divers may be present. And if any shall do otherwise, that then they shall not be permitted to minister either the word or the Sacraments of the Church, nor shall be capable of any ecclesiastical benefice, and for the manner of marriages of any bishops, the same shall be allowed and approved by the metropolitan of the province, and also by such Commissioners as the Queen's Majesty thereunto shall appoint, and if any Master or Dean, or any Head of any College shall purpose to marry, the same shall not be allowed but by such to whom the visitation of the same doth properly belong, who shall in any wise provide that the same tend not to the hindrance of their house."-Sparrow's Collection of Articles, pp. 71, 72 (Lond. 1661).

Yet, though from the low condition of the Clergy at that period (which appears elsewhere in the Injunctions) there is every probability that low marriages were then not uncommon, I am inclined to think it may reasonably admit of some doubt whether very much could be inferred to that effect from the provisions of this injunction. The following passage of Heber's Life of Taylor will explain my meaning:

"In the time of our ancestors, the interval between the domestics and the other members of a family was by no means so great, nor fenced with so harsh and impenetrable a barrier, as in the present days of luxury and excessive refinement. As the highest rank of subjects was elevated then at a greater height than they now are above the most considerable private gentry, so the latter constituted a far more efficient link in the great chain of society, and a far casier gradation existed between the nobles and that class of men from whom their own domestics were taken. There was,