Henry Fielding: A Memoir | Page 8

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. From the absence of his name on the college lists, it may be inferred that he was an Oppidan. It is said that he gave "distinguished proofs of strong and peculiar parts"; and that he left the school with a good reputation as a classical scholar. And it is not surprising to learn that here, as he himself tells us, his vigorous energies made acquaintance with that 'birchen altar' at which most of the best blood in England has been disciplined. "And thou," he cries, "O Learning (for without thy Assistance nothing pure, nothing correct, can Genius produce) do thou guide my Pen. Thee, in thy favourite Fields, where the limpid gently rolling Thames washes thy Etonian banks, in early Youth I have worshipped. To thee at thy birchen Altar, with