Henry Fielding: A Memoir | Page 3

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