Henry Fielding: A Memoir | Page 8

and reside with ye Lady Gould their Grandmother that
they may not be under the influence of ye Defendant Fielding's Wife,
who appeared to be a papist." [7]
So Lady Gould, for all her seventy years, won her case at every point.
And Colonel Edmund Fielding did not only lose the guardianship of his
six children, and the administration of their estate. For there was, we
learn, in court, during the hearing, one Mrs Cottington, the plaintiffs
aunt, "alleadging that there was a debt of £700 due from ye Defendant
Fielding to her"; which debt she offered should be applied for the
benefit of her nephews and nieces. Whereupon the court ordered that if
Mrs Cottington proved the same, a Master in Chancery should purchase
therewith lands to be settled for the "Infants" in like manner as the trust
estate.
It may be only a coincidence, but £700 is the sum specifically
mentioned in the proceedings brought by Colonel Fielding in October
1722, five months after the loss of his Chancery suit, against the
cardsharper, Robert Midford, who was then apparently threatening him
with outlawry for the recovery of the gambling debt begun, as we have
seen, at Princes' Coffee-house six years before. Had the colonel
borrowed the £700 from Mrs Cottington, with intent to discharge those
debts; and, on being brought to law by her (on her nephews' and nieces'
behalf) for that debt, did it occur to him to escape from the clutches of
the psuedo "Captain" Midford by pleading, as he now does in this Bill
of 1722, that he "was tricked," and also "that gaming is illegal"? The
latter plea has something of unconscious humour in the mouth of a
gentleman who had lately lost £500 at faro. With this last echo of the
coffee-house of St James's, and of the colonel's financial difficulties,
that brave soldier, if somewhat reckless gambler, the Hon. Edmund
Fielding vanishes from sight, as far as the life of his eldest son is
concerned.
At the triumphant conclusion of his grandmother's suit Henry Fielding
would be just fifteen years of age, and it is impossible not to wonder
what side he took in these spirited family conflicts. No evidence,
however, on such points appears in the dry legal documents; and all

that we have for guide as to the effect in this impressionable time of his
boyhood of the long months of contest, and of his strictly ordered
holidays with his grandmother, is the declaration on the one hand that
"filial piety ... his nearest relations agree was a shining part of his
character," and on the other, the undeniably strong Protestant bias that
appears in his writing. Of his aunt, Mrs Cottington, we get one later
glimpse, when in 1723 she is made his trustee, in place of his uncle,
Davidge Gould, Mrs Cottington being then resident in Salisbury. At the
end of the following year, however, in December 1724, Davidge Gould
resumes his trusteeship, and with the record of that fact the disclosures
yielded by these ancient parchments as to Henry Fielding's stormy
boyhood come to an end.
From these records it becomes possible to gain some idea of the
surroundings of the great novelist's early youth. Before his mother's
death, indeed, when he was a boy of eleven, we already knew him as
suffering the rough jurisdiction of his Trulliberian tutor, Parson Oliver
of Motcombe village, and perhaps as under the wise and kindly
guidance of the good scholar-parson, who was later to win the affection
and respect of thousands of readers under the name of "Parson Adams."
But now, for the first time, we learn of the disastrous second marriage
by which Colonel Fielding, within two years of his first wife's death,
placed a lady of at least disputable social standing at the head of his
household, and one, moreover, whose Faith roused the bitter religious
animosities of that day. What wonder that the old Lady Gould strove
fiercely to remove Henry Fielding, and his sisters and young brother,
from East Stour, when a Madame Rasa was installed in her daughter's
place. And accordingly, as we have seen, even before the conclusion of
the suit, Henry was provisionally ordered by the Court of Chancery to
spend his holidays with his grandmother. Fielding would then be
fourteen years old; and the judge's decision six months later that future
holidays should be passed with Lady Gould, away from the influence
of the second Mrs Fielding, doubtless severed the lad's connection with
his dubious stepmother for the next six years. His home life, then,
during the latter part of his Eton schooling would be under Lady
Gould's care; and was probably spent at Salisbury.

Of his Eton life, from his entrance at the school, when twelve years old,
we know practically nothing.