Life of William Carey | Page 5

ancestor of two ennobled houses long since
extinct--the Earls of Dover and the Earls of Monmouth. A third peerage
won by the Careys has been made historic by the patriotic counsels and
self-sacrificing fate of Viscount Falkland, whose representative was
Governor of Bombay for a time. Two of the heroic Falkland's
descendants, aged ladies, addressed a pathetic letter to Parliament about
the time that the great missionary died, praying that they might not be
doomed to starvation by being deprived of a crown pension of £80 a
year. The older branch of the Careys also had fallen on evil times, and
it became extinct while the future missionary was yet four years old.
The seventh lord was a weaver when he succeeded to the title, and he
died childless. The eighth was a Dutchman who had to be naturalised,
and he was the last. The Careys fell lower still. One of them bore to the
brilliant and reckless Marquis of Halifax, Henry Carey, who wrote one
of the few English ballads that live. Another, the poet's granddaughter,
was the mother of Edmund Kean, and he at first was known by her
name on the stage.
At that time when the weaver became the lord the grandfather of the
missionary was parish clerk and first schoolmaster of the village of
Paulerspury, eleven miles south of Northampton, and near the ancient
posting town of Towcester, on the old Roman road from London to
Chester. The free school was at the east or "church end" of the village,
which, after crossing the old Watling Street, straggles for a mile over a
sluggish burn to the "Pury end." One son, Thomas, had enlisted and
was in Canada. Edmund Carey, the second, set up the loom on which
he wove the woollen cloth known as "tammy," in a two-storied cottage.
There his eldest child, WILLIAM, was born, and lived for six years till
his father was appointed schoolmaster, when the family removed to the
free schoolhouse. The cottage was demolished in 1854 by one Richard
Linnell, who placed on the still meaner structure now occupying the
site the memorial slab that guides many visitors to the spot. The
schoolhouse, in which William Carey spent the eight most important
years of his childhood till he was fourteen, and the school made way
for the present pretty buildings.

The village surroundings and the country scenery coloured the whole of
the boy's after life, and did much to make him the first agricultural
improver and naturalist of Bengal, which he became. The lordship of
Pirie, as it was called by Gitda, its Saxon owner, was given by the
Conqueror, with much else, to his natural son, William Peverel, as we
see from the Domesday survey. His descendants passed it on to Robert
de Paveli, whence its present name, but in Carey's time it was held by
the second Earl Bathurst, who was Lord Chancellor. Up to the very
schoolhouse came the royal forest of Whittlebury, its walks leading
north to the woods of Salcey, of Yardley Chase and Rockingham, from
the beeches which give Buckingham its name. Carey must have often
sat under the Queen's Oak, still venerable in its riven form, where
Edward IV., when hunting, first saw Elizabeth, unhappy mother of the
two princes murdered in the Tower. The silent robbery of the people's
rights called "inclosures" has done much, before and since Carey's time,
to sweep away or shut up the woodlands. The country may be less
beautiful, while the population has grown so that Paulerspury has now
nearly double the eight hundred inhabitants of a century ago. But its
oolitic hills, gently swelling to above 700 feet, and the valleys of the
many rivers which flow from this central watershed, west and east, are
covered with fat vegetation almost equally divided between grass and
corn, with green crops. The many large estates are rich in gardens and
orchards. The farmers, chiefly on small holdings, are famous for their
shorthorns and Leicester sheep. Except for the rapidly-developing
production of iron from the Lias, begun by the Romans, there is but one
manufacture--that of shoes. It is now centred by modern machinery and
labour arrangements in Northampton itself, which has 24,000
shoemakers, and in the other towns, but a century ago the craft was
common to every hamlet. For botany and agriculture, however,
Northamptonshire was the finest county in England, and young Carey
had trodden many a mile of it, as boy and man, before he left home for
ever for Bengal.
Two unfinished autobiographical sketches, written from India at the
request of Fuller and of Ryland, and letters of his youngest sister Mary,
his favourite "Polly" who survived him, have preserved for us in still
vivid characters the details of the early training of William Carey.