Henry Fielding: a Memoir Including Newly Discovered Letters and Records with Illustrations from Contemporary Prints

Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, on the 22nd of April 1707. His birth-room, a room known as the Harlequin Chamber, looked out over the roof of a building which once was the private chapel of the abbots of Glastonbury; for Sharpham Park possessed no mean history. Built in the sixteenth century by that distinguished prelate, scholar, and courtier Abbot Richard Beere, the house had boasted its chapel, hall, parlour, chambers, storehouses and offices; its fishponds and orchards; and a park in which might be kept some four hundred head of deer. It was in this fair demesne that the aged, pious, and benevolent Abbot Whiting, Abbot Richard's successor, was seized by the king's commissioners, and summarily hung, drawn, and quartered on the top of the neighbouring Tor Hill. Sharpham thereupon "devolved" upon the crown; but the old house remained, standing in peaceful seclusion where the pleasant slope of Polden Hill overlooks the Somersetshire moors, till the birth of the 'father of the English Novel' brought a lasting distinction to the domestic buildings of Abbot Beere. In the accompanying print, published in 1826, the little window of the Harlequin Chamber may be seen, above the low roofs of the abbots' chapel.

That Henry Fielding should have been born among buildings raised by Benedictine hands is not incongruous; for no man ever more heartily preached and practised the virtue of open-handed charity; none was more ready to scourge the vices of arrogance, cruelty and avarice; no English novelist has left us brighter pictures of innocence and goodness. And it was surely a happy stroke of that capricious Fortune to whom Fielding so often refers, to allot a Harlequin Chamber for the birth of the author of nineteen comedies; and yet more appropriate to the robust genius of the Comic Epic was the accident that placed on the wall, beneath the window of his birth-room, a jovial jest in stone. For here some sixteenth-century humorist had displayed the arms of Abbot Beere in the form of a convivial rebus or riddle--to wit, a cross and two beer flagons.

Soon after the Civil Wars, Sharpham passed into the hands of the 'respectable family' of Gould. By the Goulds the house was considerably enlarged; and, at the beginning of the eighteenth century, was in the possession of a distinguished member of the family, Sir Henry Gould, Knight, and Judge of the King's Bench. Sir Henry had but two children, a son Davidge Gould, and a daughter Sarah. This only daughter married a well-born young soldier, the Hon. Edmund Fielding; a marriage which, according to family assertions, was without the consent of her parents and "contrary to their good likeing." [1] And it was in the old home of the Somersetshire Goulds that the eldest son of this marriage, Henry Fielding, was born.

Thus on the side of his mother, Sarah Gould, Fielding belonged to just that class of well-established country squires whom later he was to immortalise in the beautiful and benevolent figure of Squire Allworthy, and in the boisterous, brutal, honest Western. And the description of Squire Allworthy's "venerable" house, with its air of grandeur "that struck you with awe," its position on the sheltered slope of a hill enjoying "a most charming prospect of the valley beneath," its surroundings of a wild and beautiful park, well-watered meadows fed with sheep, the ivy-grown ruins of an old abbey, and far-off hills and sea, preserves, doubtless, the features of the ancient and stately domain owned by the novelist's grandfather.

If it was to the 'respectable' Goulds that Fielding owed many of his rural and administrative characteristics, such as that practical zeal and ability which made him so excellent a magistrate, it is in the family of his father that we find indications of those especial qualities of vigour, of courage, of the generous and tolerant outlook of the well-born man of the world, that characterise Henry Fielding. And it is also in these Fielding ancestors that something of the reputed wildness of their brilliant kinsman may be detected.

For in her wilful choice of Edmund Fielding for a husband, Sir Henry Gould's only daughter brought, assuredly, a disturbing element into the quiet Somersetshire home. The young man was of distinguished birth, even if he was not, as once asserted, of the blood royal of the Hapsburgs. [2] His ancestor, Sir John Fielding, had received a knighthood for bravery in the French wars of the fourteenth century. A Sir Everard Fielding led a Lancastrian army during the Wars of the Roses. Sir William, created Earl of Denbigh, fell fighting for the king in the Civil Wars, where, says Clarendon, "he engaged with singular courage in all enterprises of danger"; a phrase which recalls the description of Henry Fielding "that difficulties only roused him to struggle through them with a peculiar spirit and magnanimity." Lord Denbigh fell, covered with wounds, when fighting as a volunteer in Prince Rupert's troop; while his eldest son, Basil, then a mere youth, fought as hotly for the Parliament. Lord Denbigh's second son, who like his father was a devoted loyalist, received a peerage, being created Earl of Desmond; and two of his sons figure in a wild and tragic story preserved by Pepys. "In our street," says the Diarist, writing in 1667, "at the Three Tuns Tavern I find a great hubbub; and what was it but two brothers had fallen out and one killed the other. And who s'd. they be but the two Fieldings; one whereof, Bazill, was page to my Lady Sandwich; and he hath killed the other, himself being very drunk, and so is sent to Newgate." It was a brother of these unhappy youths, John Fielding, a royal chaplain and Canon of Salisbury, who by his marriage with a Somersetshire lady, became father of Edmund Fielding.

Such was Henry Fielding's ancestry, and it cannot be too much insisted on that, throughout all the vicissitudes of his life, he was ever a man of breeding, no less than a man of wit. "His manners were so gentlemanly," said his friend Mrs Hussey, "that even with the lower classes with which he frequently condescended to chat, such as Sir Roger de Coverley's old friends, the Vauxhall watermen, they seldom outstepped the limits of propriety." And a similar recognition comes from the hand of a great, and not too friendly, critic. To "the very last days of his life," wrote Thackeray, "he retained a grandeur of air, and although worn down by disease his aspect and presence imposed respect on the people around him."

This Denbigh ancestry recalls a pleasant example of Fielding's wit, preserved in a story told by his son, and recorded in the pages of that voluminous eighteenth-century anecdotist, John Nichols. "Henry Fielding," says Nichols, "being once in company with the Earl of Denbigh, and the conversation's turning on Fielding's being of the Denbigh family, the Earl asked the reason why they spelt their names differently; the Earl's family doing it with the E first (Feilding), and Mr Henry Fielding with the I first (Fielding). 'I cannot tell, my Lord,' answered Harry, 'except it be that my branch of the family were the first that knew how to spell.'"