Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 3.djvu/474

 468

NOTES AND QUERIES. [12 s. in. NOV., 1917,

ment to Mrs. Donnellan (Barbauld, iv. 60), dated Feb. 22, 1752:

" Parson Young sat for Fielding's parson Adams, a man he knew, and only made a little more absurd than he is known to be .... In his ' Tom Jones,' his hero is made a natural child because his own first wife was such."

Hoadly, the then Bishop of Sarum, was probably a man of breadth of mind, who, as Fielding said, " wrote with the pen of an angel" (' Joseph Andrews,' i. 17) ; but can we be brought to believe that the Dean and Chapter would have given their consent to the sepulture, within cathedral walls, of any illegitimate belles ?

6. During his Eton days, from 1719 to 1725, Fielding, by order of the Court of Chancery, spent his holidays at Salisbury in the charge of his maternal grandmother, Lady Gould. In various assessment lists for the relief of the poor Lady Gould's house is included in St. Martin's parish, and is rated as the fourth house from the Joyners' Hall. This ancient Trades Hall, with its still existing Elizabethan frontage, is situate in St. Ann Street, and it seemed to follow that Lady Gould's house was in the same street ; but, as buildings were then unnumbered, and there being no means of determining (in this case) at which end the assessments began, its position could not be located with any certainty.

Miss Frances Baker has been good enough to inform me that she has found yet another note-book of her father, the late Mr. T. H. Baker (supra), and extracts therefrom make it clear that the problem of tracing Lady Gould's house interested him considerably. The conclusion he arrived at was that it stood " in St. Martin's Church Street, between St. Mary's Home and the church."

St. Martin's Church Street runs at right angles to St. Ann Street at its eastern end, and although seven or eight houses now stand between it and the Joyners' Hall, it must be concluded that three only stood on their site in the first quarter of the eighteenth century, and that such as were there had larger gardens, a supposition which details in the assessment lists support. The houses in St. Martin's Church Street, as Naish's ' Survey of Salisbury,' circa 1750, shows, were few, and as Mr. Baker worked out the pedigrees of many of the houses in St. Ann Street, and himself published a history of St. Martin's Church a foundation older than the Cathedral the accuracy of this authority can scarcely be questioned. As a sequence of assessment lists indicate, Lady Gould resided here until her death in 1733.

7. Fielding's birthplace. Fielding's birth- place has been regarded traditionally as Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury ; but Sharpham was the country home of his grandfather, Sir Henry Gould, who, dying in 1710, was laid to rest in the Sharpham chapel of St. Benedict's, Glastonbury. This connexion between Sharpham and St. Bene- dict's not unnaturally suggested that Col. Edmund Feilding's three elder children, Henry, Catherine, and Ursula the three next being born at Stower in Dorset were- baptized at St. Benedict's, and as the- existing registers of that church go no further back than 1 740, it seemed hopeless to obtain confirmation.

A friend now writes me that while engaged in searching the registers of the parish of (not St. Benedict) St. John, Glastonbury,, he has just lighted upon the two following entries :

" Christnings [sic] in 1708 : Catherine, daughter of Edmund Fielding, Esq., and Sarah his wife,, was born July 16 and was baptised Augnst 11."

" Christnings in 1709 : Ursula, daughter of Coll. Edmund Fielding and Sarah his wife, born October the 3 and baptized November the 2."

He then adds :

" A wide hiatus occurs before 1708 ; the register appears not to have been kept for some years. When it begins again in 1708 it is written in a very good, characteristic hand."

A hiatus at this critical point is tantalizing, for a record of Henry Fielding's baptism, if he were in fact born at Sharpham, should appear in 1707. Although the two existing entries will probably be deemed a sufficient corroboration of tradition, the hiatus fitly illustrates a dictum of Mr. Saintsbury :

" Any life of Fielding has to lay its account with a most lavish use of the unsatisfactory words ' doubtless,' ' perhaps,' ' it appears,' and the like. In fact, there are very few writers of anything like equal eminence, at so late a date* respecting whom we have so little trustworthy evidence."

J. PAUL DE CASTRO.

1 Essex Court, Temple, E.G.

STATUES AND MEMORIALS IN THE BRITISH ISLES.

(See 10 S. xi., xii. ; 11 S. i.-xii., passim? 12 S. i. 65, 243,406; ii. 45, 168, 263, 345 ,- iii. 125, 380.)

LOCAL WORTHIES,

JOHN LucASt

Gateshead-on-Tyne. In May, 1903, a statue of Alderman Lucas was unveiled in Saltwell Park. It is of bronze, and was-