Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin | Page 5

the case of Charles, a man of exceptional beauty and sweetness
both of face and disposition, the family fault had quite grown to be a
virtue, and we find him in consequence the drudge and milk-cow of his
relatives. Born in 1766, Charles served at sea in his youth, and smelt

both salt water and powder. The Jenkins had inclined hitherto, as far as
I can make out, to the land service. Stephen's son had been a soldier;
William (fourth of Stowting) had been an officer of the unhappy
Braddock's in America, where, by the way, he owned and afterwards
sold an estate on the James River, called, after the parental seat; of
which I should like well to hear if it still bears the name. It was
probably by the influence of Captain Buckner, already connected with
the family by his first marriage, that Charles Jenkin turned his mind in
the direction of the navy; and it was in Buckner's own ship, the
PROTHEE, 64, that the lad made his only campaign. It was in the days
of Rodney's war, when the PROTHEE, we read, captured two large
privateers to windward of Barbadoes, and was 'materially and
distinguishedly engaged' in both the actions with De Grasse. While at
sea Charles kept a journal, and made strange archaic pilot-book
sketches, part plan, part elevation, some of which survive for the
amusement of posterity. He did a good deal of surveying, so that here
we may perhaps lay our finger on the beginning of Fleeming's
education as an engineer. What is still more strange, among the relics
of the handsome midshipman and his stay in the gun-room of the
PROTHEE, I find a code of signals graphically represented, for all the
world as it would have been done by his grandson.
On the declaration of peace, Charles, because he had suffered from
scurvy, received his mother's orders to retire; and he was not the man to
refuse a request, far less to disobey a command. Thereupon he turned
farmer, a trade he was to practice on a large scale; and we find him
married to a Miss Schirr, a woman of some fortune, the daughter of a
London merchant. Stephen, the not very reverend, was still alive,
galloping about the country or skulking in his chancel. It does not
appear whether he let or sold the paternal manor to Charles; one or
other, it must have been; and the sailor- farmer settled at Stowting, with
his wife, his mother, his unmarried sister, and his sick brother John.
Out of the six people of whom his nearest family consisted, three were
in his own house, and two others (the horse-leeches, Stephen and
Thomas) he appears to have continued to assist with more amiability
than wisdom. He hunted, belonged to the Yeomanry, owned famous
horses, Maggie and Lucy, the latter coveted by royalty itself. 'Lord
Rokeby, his neighbour, called him kinsman,' writes my artless

chronicler, 'and altogether life was very cheery.' At Stowting his three
sons, John, Charles, and Thomas Frewen, and his younger daughter,
Anna, were all born to him; and the reader should here be told that it is
through the report of this second Charles (born 1801) that he has been
looking on at these confused passages of family history.
In the year 1805 the ruin of the Jenkins was begun. It was the work of a
fallacious lady already mentioned, Aunt Anne Frewen, a sister of Mrs.
John. Twice married, first to her cousin Charles Frewen, clerk to the
Court of Chancery, Brunswick Herald, and Usher of the Black Rod,
and secondly to Admiral Buckner, she was denied issue in both beds,
and being very rich - she died worth about 60,000L., mostly in land -
she was in perpetual quest of an heir. The mirage of this fortune hung
before successive members of the Jenkin family until her death in 1825,
when it dissolved and left the latest Alnaschar face to face with
bankruptcy. The grandniece, Stephen's daughter, the one who had not
'married imprudently,' appears to have been the first; for she was taken
abroad by the golden aunt, and died in her care at Ghent in 1792. Next
she adopted William, the youngest of the five nephews; took him
abroad with her - it seems as if that were in the formula; was shut up
with him in Paris by the Revolution; brought him back to Windsor, and
got him a place in the King's Body-Guard, where he attracted the notice
of George III. by his proficiency in German. In 1797, being on guard at
St. James's Palace, William took a cold which carried him off; and
Aunt Anne was once more left heirless. Lastly, in 1805, perhaps moved
by the Admiral, who had a kindness for his