TOM POOLEY'S BARRISTER

 

“How was the Christain Counsel that the Christain Clergy employed against me the Son of that Christain Judge?   So what will a father And Son Doe thir Deeds of Toucher and Infamy thir Dying moments will unfold.  For we all know that A Christain Counsel is  trained to Bulley and Gamon And try to make Black is wite And wite is Black.  And the father Says, ‘my Son is verey Cleaver.’ ”   T.  Pooley

Curiously, long before Tom Pooley came into my life, I had formed an opinion of the man who was the Counsel who prosecuted Tom and found him not to my taste.  The great and important church of Saint Mary at Ottery lies not far from my home and, according to Nikolaus Pevsner, who visited it on one of his grumpy days, “lies long and low, somewhat like a big, tired beast.”  I have visited this glorious beast many times and whenever I step inside the church I am overwhelmed by the wonders of this vast, essentially fourteenth century building but I can never leave without being irritated by the decoration of the South Transept.

This is where John Duke Coleridge, caused the whole blessed transept to be “beautified” in 1878 in ostensible memory of, the judge, “the Right Honourable Sir John Taylor Coleridge and Mary his wife,  as "a thanksgiving to God from their reverent and grateful son.”   The whole transept is one great monument but not, I tell myself, a monument to the glory of God nor yet to the judge his father, nor to his mother nor to his own wife, a woman who had little enough to commend her but who is portrayed life sized in marble, a regular catafalque, with two angels at her head and a rather damp otter beneath her naked feet.   Nobody can ignore the roof-high decoration that John Duke commissioned and paid for.  It dominates, although Pevsner, the most celebrated guide to English building, pointedly does not write a word about it.  It is not that I find the polychrome Victorian tiles just a tad lavatorial and, in the context, aesthetically displeasing.   Nor is it that I find the scale of the project creates a disturbing imbalance in that glorious, ancient church.   No, what really irritates me is what seems to me to have been the unbridled megalomania and pretension and arrogance of the first Lord Coleridge.  This was a man, I had long thought, and here I spell out my prejudice, who was as full of himself as an egg is of meat and one who was morbidly proud of himself and his family.

This John Duke Coleridge was the judge’s oldest son. He had also grown up in the literal and metaphorical shadow of Ottery’s church.  That both judge and barrister are John Coleridge can be confusing but in the family they were John Duke and John Taylor. At the time of Tom’s trial John Duke was an ambitious barrister, thirty-seven years old and soon to be elevated to the bench and ultimately, when he became the Lord Chief Justice of England, to be Lord Coleridge.  He was about to be briefed in the case of Regina v. Pooley.   The son was to prosecute the case against the ‘blasphemer’ with the father as the judge.  Neither the Coleridges themselves nor anybody else seems to have been surprised at their being together to try a case, two cases on the day, at the Bodmin Assize.  It was, after all, not the first time that John Duke had pleaded before his father.  It was all in the day’s work.  No gentleman could possibly imagine that either of them would be in any way influenced by the fact of their combination.  Between father and son there was known to be an unusually strong bond of affection but nobody in their right senses, certainly no gentleman, could think for a moment that men of John Taylor’s and John Duke’s calibre could or would act improperly in trying a case at law or in anything else. 

Some time before, however, John Duke had filled his father with the deepest alarm as to his future.    At Eton in 1833, when he was thirteen, young John so much displeased his masters that he was removed from the school.  The Dictionary of National Biography says he was expelled for an unspeakable offence.   His sin, whatever it was, has not been revealed to the world and, frustratingly, that volume of Sir John’s journal which covers this period is missing.  Sir John, however, must have found his offence grievous, for a letter survives in which he writes that his brightest hopes are not only blackened but that he does not know what to do with the child.   “He has made his mother and me more completely wretched,” wrote Sir John, “than ever we were in our lives.”  The father’s reaction to this crisis was to take the boy “to Dyson”.    The Reverend Charles Dyson who had been a college friend of Sir John and also of John Keble and Thomas Arnold, was the Rector of Dogmersfield near Winchfield in Hampshire where he lived with his wife and half-sister, Mary Ann, “three persons who, for nearly thirty years, made the rectory of Dogmersfield the centre of a loving influence, animated by intelligence and guided by wisdom.”   Whatever it was this trio did to restore John Duke to virtue, it seems to have worked and the boy, after some weeks, was returned to Eton where he thrived and succeeded, even to being placed third in the university examinations that took him from Eton to Balliol.

And so it happened that John Duke, ”fair-haired and tall and slim, but of stately mien”, so penned the indefatigable versifier, John Campbell Shairp, went up to Balliol  in April 1839 just at the time that the Oxford Movement of counter reformation entered a critical stage.  In Coleridge’s first year John Keble, his godfather and his father’s old friend, came to Oxford to give a lecture which John Duke dutifully attended.  He later had breakfast with Keble and at the breakfast table had the privilege of a personal encounter with John Henry Newman.    Newman was the leading figure in that disturbing movement to restore ritual and mystery to the Anglican church.  He was well known for the effect he had on the scholars around him and his preaching in Saint Mary’s pulpit every Sunday was the talk of the University.   John too felt his influence.  He wrote of his breakfast meeting with Newman to his father: “I never saw so fascinating a man in a quiet way.  He is so mild and so apostolic.  I feel sure I shall be a Newmanite, when I come to be anything, and perhaps sooner than anything else.”  But the key proviso here was the ‘if I become anything.’

John’s Tutor was Archibald Campbell Tait, who had been headmaster of Rugby after Thomas Arnold and would become Archbishop of Canterbury two before Frederick Temple but he also had much to do with the other Balliol Tutor, Robert Scott whom he preferred.  Scott was at this time also the  Rector of Duloe, that same Duloe where, some seventeen years later, Tom wrote his blasphemy.    Coleridge thought Tait was “very uncourteous not a bit of a scholar and altogether...too much of a Don.”  Scott on the other hand was, “ a very jolly bird and the more I know of him. the more I respect and like him.”   John Duke, unlike his brother Henry, did not become a Newmanite nor, one suspects, did he ever become ‘anything’.  

John Duke Coleridge was all his life a man of many interests of which religion was only one.  He was something of a polymath.   His religious feeling was cool and his religious practice perfunctory much to his father’s distress, Religion was for John something to be used and accepted and, although he needed to conform and wished to appear orthodox in his Anglicanism and although, like most of his contemporaries, he attended church and took an interest in religious matters, he found many other things in life of significance and interest.  He kept at a distance from doubts and doubters and had no wish to offend his pious father by expressing any contrary opinions.   Already in his youth he took a keen interest in Art and Literature, although art and literature for him needed to advance the Christian ethos.  His artistic friends, William Butterfield, the architect who ” beautified” the South Transept at Ottery, and William Boxall, the painter were artists of the right sort.  He wrote to his father in his first year, “I wish, if you by chance see a cheap cast of Canova’s Magdalen, you would buy it for me, provided you think it decent (I mean in execution.).”   He read poetry and was himself a maker of verses.   He dabbled in politics, considered himself to be liberal in his Toryism, and was ever a follower of William Ewart Gladstone, another brilliant Oxford scholar.  He was, like Gladstone before him, ‘the star at the Union’, the university debating society, where he already exhibited a voice that was ‘full, clear and exquisitely musical’.  He had argued against the slave trade and taken a generous view of Chartism and the Chartists.  He loved books and collected them.  In later life he was to assemble a great library at Ottery. He loved scenery, the Lakes and the Lake Poets, had a reputation to be a wit and raconteur, wrote widely and well and pulled a good oar.   He was also, it tends nowadays to be overlooked, a linguist, as were all the scholars of the age.  To speak and write Greek and Latin fluently was the first end of education and a sufficient if not necessary qualification of an English ‘gentleman’. 

Among the bright young men John came to know at Balliol there were two budding poets, Matthew Arnold,  the son of Thomas, and Arthur Clough. now chiefly remembered for his short poem, Say not the Struggle Naught availeth, but also the writer of the poem, Through a Glass darkly’ which expressed Clough’s agonising religious doubts. These two poets enjoyed an intense friendship.  They too attended Henry Newman’s seductive sermons but both were to become tortured sceptics later in life.   Arnold’s most famous poem. perhaps after The Scholar-Gipsy, is the glorious Dover Beach in which are the lines:

“The sea of faith/ Was once too at the full,/ And round earth’s shore/Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl’d,/ But now I only hear/ Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” 

In the year that Tom Pooley was tried for blasphemy Arnold was to be elected Oxford’s Professor of Poetry, an election in stark contrast to John Keble’s some twenty-five years earlier.  This, significantly, was the first professorship of poetry at Oxford where the lectures were not delivered in Latin.   In 1861 Clough would die of malaria at Florence aged only forty-two and Matthew Arnold would write a gloomy monody ‘Thrysis’ to commemorate his friend.  The lives of these two men illustrate how, for some Balliol scholars, this was an age of transition from blind faith to serious doubt.  Neither Arnold nor Clough wholly lost faith in God but both certainly lost faith in Anglicanism and struggled to balance their beliefs with their doubts. John Duke Coleridge was of their generation but never gave any indication that he was of their mind.

But, naturally, at College he also enjoyed the friendship of Frederick Temple and the companionship of many others who would rise in the English Church and of those who, like Henry Newman and Henry James Coleridge, his brilliant younger brother, also at Oxford in the forties, would shock their friends by becoming Roman Catholic priests.  John Duke’s friendships were many and various but were not as intense as those of his father had been and the name of Christ which was frequent in his father’s letters seldom if ever appeared in his correspondence.   He was stronger and more independent in character than his father and was replete with all the virtues, except perhaps charity towards those, and they were legion, whom he considered his inferiors. 

John Duke Coleridge never doubted that he was a gentleman from a good family.  After Oxford he was always conscious that he sprang from the same mould as the father he loved and admired:  Ottery, Eton and Oxford.  At all three he had performed brilliantly. He was, however, tougher and more clever than his father and, although a conscientious observer of religious form, he continued to lack his father’s fundamental Christian outlook.   This didn’t mean that he failed to take an interest in the great religious drama that was being played out at Oxford but he was not so much interested in the dogma as in the politics of the schism.   When, for example, in 1844, the University wanted to strip the Tractarian, William George Ward , of his degrees and expel him from Oxford,  John Duke, who was in London, wrote to his father to try to prevent this from happening.  He wrote: “Could not you, now, or Gladstone, or someone of acknowledged moderation, suggest to the Heads to be quiet and not stir up a storm which even they might be sorry for?  You see, expelling a man is such an uncommonly strong thing to do - it has never or hardly ever, I believe, been done except to Atheists and people like that.” 

It was enough for John Duke to be a good Christian and not an atheist or someone like that and he never aspired to his father’s passion for religion and the Anglican Church.  Unlike Sir John, he had never seriously wanted to be a clergyman although, like most of his friends, he had considered the idea, but he practised law with none of Sir John’s reservations or regrets and, as he wrote to his father later in life, he was “naturally indisposed to faith...religion being with me an affair of the will.”   The Law, however, fitted him like a glove.  He had been argumentative and persuasive from childhood.  From childhood too he had been very ambitious and his father had been ambitious for him. On the very day of his birth the proud father had written in his journal, “The Lord Chancellor for 1865 made his appearance this morning about 6,” This was an uncannily close prediction but it was not until 1880 that John Duke was to become Lord Chief Justice of England.   He was not to become Lord Chancellor.  His father, the judge, who had died in 1876, thus missed his son’s ultimate triumph by only four years.

The year of Thomas Pooley's trial, 1857, saw John Duke a well-respected barrister who had been on Circuit for ten years  and had been a married man for twelve.  He had a young family, two sons and a daughter.   His life had been much about earning money.  He had to fight for briefs and he counted his guineas as they came.  At first other barristers were more successful than he and he complained in his regular letters to his father of a shortage of briefs, but little by little he found work and, although in the course of these years he had secured a healthy income, his progress had not been without cares and struggles.   He had eked out his income, such was the adaptability of his genius,  by writing reviews for the London Guardian,  The Christian Remembrancer, and  The Edinburgh Review.  He had reviewed works by Currer Bell,  who was not yet identified as Charlotte Bronte, and work by Charlotte Yonge, Charles Kingsley, his friend, Matthew Arnold, and others.  He had even taken, for a while, the sub editorship of The Guardian.  His reviews reveal him as one unable to escape from the Victorian orthodoxy that required that all literature and art should reflect ‘Christian’ values and ideals.  In the review which he wrote in 1854 of Matthew Arnold’s  Poems,  he writes:    “The art that has no relevancy to actual life,  the passing by God’s truth and the facts of man’s nature as if they had no existence,  the art that does not seek to ennoble and purify, and help us in our life-long struggle with sin and evil,  however beautiful, however outwardly serene and majestic, is false and poor and contemptible.  It is not worth the serious intention of a man in earnest.  All noble and true and manly Art is concerned with God’s glory and man’s true benefit.”   

But, by 1857,  John Duke no longer needed to write reviews.  He had come to be fully occupied with legal matters and two years before had secured his financial position by being appointed to the Recordership of Portsmouth.  He had since been busied with important cases here and there in the South West.  These cases in Cornwall, particularly this blasphemy case must have seemed small-fry to him but he was no doubt delighted to be able to be with his father at Bodmin for the bond between this father and this son was always so strong that it was remarked upon. 

John Duke Coleridge himself wrote about his relationship with his father, “I lived with him in an intimacy uncommon between father and son - an intimacy prolonged till I was long past middle life and he a very old man.”  This ‘intimacy’ was both the cause and consequence of great interdependence.  When they were apart they wrote regularly to each other.  John Taylor was often “dearest Pops” and John Duke, “dearest Johnnie”.  For eight years after becoming a lawyer John Duke had the somewhat tedious advantage of accompanying his father as marshal on his various circuits. His early marriage did nothing to abate this intimacy. 

In 1843, John Duke visited, at Niton on the Isle of Wight, his friend, John Billingsley Seymour, who had been with him at Eton and at Oxford and who was dying of consumption,  and there  he met  his friend’s youngest sister, Jane Fortescue Seymour and fell in love with her at first sight and wrote verses about her:  “Joy to thee! Joy to thee! beautiful maiden!  Is thy heart free?”   It was!, and in 1845, now aged twenty-four, John Duke married his Jane.  His father was loath to lose him and conceived the idea that he and his wife and John Duke and his bride should all live together in the same houses either in London or at Ottery.  They did not box and cox but, as often as not, moved together from London to Devon for the vacations or as work required.  The father wrote in his journal, “My dear boy is married, to a sweet, simple and sensible girl. They are to live with us at present, and that is a trial for us all,  if we are wise we shall find it a source of great happiness, and I pray to God that we may have that wisdom.”  It seems that all of them were sufficiently wise for the arrangement to persist until death.

Although in the courtroom the barrister sat beneath the judge, between Sir John and his son at home the relationship had become rather the other way around.   Sometimes the interactions between father and son are reminiscent of those of the old Bishop Grantly in Trollope’s Barchester Novels and his son, the Archdeacon, Theophilus Grantly.  The barrister, who was more worldly than the judge was given to advising, encouraging and warning his more diffident father.   Sir John’s habit of trying always to take a ‘Christian’ view of people and events infuriated John Duke who believed his father was all too liable to be weak and self-effacing.  In 1854, for example, when Sir John had been named as a Parliamentary Commissioner on a Commission to reform the college statutes at Oxford he had been unfairly attacked in the House of Commons by a Mr Mangles who believed Sir John was too ‘high church’ for the job, we find John Duke writing to his father: “Jane tells me you are annoyed about the House of Commons attack and have written to offer to resign.   I don’t wonder at your being annoyed…but if I had been you I should have made up my mind to this kind of thing when I took the office...I don’t mean to say, of course, that all this makes a blackguard attack less disagreeable but it makes it, I think,  a thing to be borne rather as a matter of course and not one that you ought to feel hurt or pained by.  Still less ought it, I think, to lead you to think of giving up your position.”   On the same subject the son lectures the father thus: “I hope and earnestly trust you will not with your own hand give such an opportunity to a pack of scoundrels, nor yourself damage a reputation which is spotless if you don’t stain it.”  

In 1853, the year of the Achilli v. Newman trial,  Sir John had written these words in his private journal,  “Only may I be preserved from ostentation or hard judging. Indeed I am conscious to myself of so many foul, so many mean and unworthy thoughts, that I cannot have a high opinion of myself and I find it really hard to think or speak very hardly of others, even in their crimes.  This is one point in which my dear boy and I never agree, He is vexed with me when I refuse to go along with him in his vehement and harsh judgements of others.”   It was a remarkable father and son relationship and one that was advantageous to both.  Nevertheless, when, at Bodmin, it came to judging Tom Pooley, a blasphemer, it was the father who was strong in his opinion and the son who would have liked to have moderated the father’s anger.   Certainly, if he had known the history and character of these two worthy and pious men who held his fate in their hands, Pooley might well have been forgiven for thinking that the Christian Bible Tyrants were gathering to persecute and to destroy him