The Romance of Old New England Rooftrees | Page 5

he most exorbitantly proposes a whole
hundred pounds a year for himself.... His heart will be broke if his
deanery be not taken from him, and left to your Excellency's disposal. I
discouraged him by the coldness of Courts and Ministers, who will
interpret all this as impossible and a vision; but nothing will do."
The history of Berkeley's reception in London, when he came to urge
his project, shows convincingly the magic of the man's presence and
influence. His conquests spread far and fast. In a generation represented
by Sir Robert Walpole, the scheme met with encouragement from all
sorts of people, subscriptions soon reaching £5,000, and the list of
promoters including even Sir Robert himself. Bermuda became the
fashion among the wits of London, and Bolingbroke wrote to Swift that
he would "gladly exchange Europe for its charms--only not in a
missionary capacity."
But Berkeley was not satisfied with mere subscriptions, and
remembering what Lord Percival had said about the protection and aid
of government he interceded with George the First, and obtained royal
encouragement to hope for a grant of £20,000 to endow the Bermuda
college. During the four years that followed, he lived in London,
negotiating with brokers, and otherwise forwarding his enterprise of
social idealism. With Queen Caroline, consort of George the Second,
he used to dispute two days a week concerning his favourite plan.

At last his patience was rewarded. In September, 1728, we find him at
Greenwich, ready to sail for Rhode Island. "Tomorrow," he writes on
September 3 to Lord Percival, "we sail down the river. Mr. James and
Mr. Dalton go with me; so doth my wife, a daughter of the late Chief
Justice Forster, whom I married since I saw your lordship. I chose her
for her qualities of mind, and her unaffected inclination to books. She
goes with great thankfulness, to live a plain farmer's life, and wear stuff
of her own spinning. I have presented her with a spinning-wheel. Her
fortune was £2,000 originally, but travelling and exchange have
reduced it to less than £1,500 English money. I have placed that, and
about £600 of my own, in South Sea annuities."
Thus in the forty-fourth year of his life, in deep devotion to his Ideal,
and full of glowing visions of a Fifth Empire in the West, Berkeley
sailed for Rhode Island in a "hired ship of two hundred and fifty tons."
The New England Courier of that time gives this picture of his
disembarkation at Newport: "Yesterday there arrived here Dean
Berkeley, of Londonderry. He is a gentleman of middle stature, of an
agreeable, pleasant, and erect aspect. He was ushered into the town
with a great number of gentlemen, to whom he behaved himself after a
very complaisant manner."
[Illustration: WHITEHALL, NEWPORT, R. I.]
So favourably was Berkeley impressed by Newport that he wrote to
Lord Percival: "I should not demur about situating our college here."
And as it turned out, Newport was the place with which Berkeley's
scheme was to be connected in history. For it was there that he lived all
three years of his stay, hopefully awaiting from England the favourable
news that never came.
In loyal remembrance of the palace of his monarchs, he named his
spacious home in the sequestered valley Whitehall. Here he began
domestic life, and became the father of a family. The neighbouring
groves and the cliffs that skirt the coast offered shade and silence and
solitude very soothing to his spirit, and one wonders not that he wrote,
under the projecting rock that still bears his name, "The Minute

Philosopher," one of his most noted works. The friends with whom he
had crossed the ocean went to stay in Boston, but no solicitations could
withdraw him from the quiet of his island home. "After my long fatigue
of business," he told Lord Percival, "this retirement is very agreeable to
me; and my wife loves a country life and books as well as to pass her
time continually and cheerfully without any other conversation than her
husband and the dead." For the wife was a mystic and a quietist.
But though Berkeley waited patiently for developments which should
denote the realisation of his hopes, he waited always in vain. From the
first he had so planned his enterprise that it was at the mercy of Sir
Robert Walpole; and at last came the crisis of the project, with which
the astute financier had never really sympathised. Early in 1730,
Walpole threw off the mask. "If you put the question to me as a
minister," he wrote Lord Percival, "I must and can assure you that the
money shall most undoubtedly be paid--as soon as suits with public
convenience; but if you ask me as a friend whether Dean Berkeley
should