TOM POOLEY'S JUDGE

 “This Christain judge is described By Christains  to be Like Christ in Beauty and Charicter.  But let him Be Carful that the Earth does not shake at his Death and the Rocks to Rent and Darkness to Hide the Beautiful sun as it sets” -  T.Pooley

The extreme piety of Judge John Taylor Coleridge is difficult for someone like myself to comprehend.   No doubt there are faithful members of the Church of England today who see the world much as he did but I have not met them.  A non-believer, living in a sceptical Britain, must struggle with the idea that Coleridge’s High Anglican religion was for him the first and overwhelming reality.  Sin was real and the promise of eternal bliss was real, as was the threat of eternal damnation.  The Gospels that recounted the life of Christ were sacred books not to be questioned or doubted.  To his eyes, respect for religion was the first duty of man or woman and Coleridge could no more comprehend the few ‘infidels’ among his contemporaries than they could him.   His own first duty was to love his blessed Saviour, Jesus Christ.   His fundamental Christian approach to the world disturbed few of his professional colleagues, indeed his piety and his reputation as a worthy judge and a good man helped to further his career.  I must confess that I tried first to see him as a hypocrite and the villain of the piece but was soon convinced that there was nothing whatsoever vicious in his character.   If, as I believe , he acted unreasonably in the case of Tom Pooley, he did so convinced of his own virtue and certain that he was doing his best to rescue a poor lost soul in danger of hell-fire.  The more I read his letters and the notes in his private journal and read what others had written about him, the more I concluded he must have been a thoroughly well-meaning man.  It was just a pity about the religion.     

By the year 1857, the Coleridge family of Ottery Saint Mary in Devon had produced many eminent and respectable men, none of whom was more worthy or respectable than Sir John.    This eminence and, in Victorian terms, respectability,  were of relatively recent origin.  The family’s roots were strong but not deep.  The poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had died in 1834 was uncle to Sir John Taylor Coleridge.  He had written his own somewhat quizzical account of his Coleridge ancestry in a letter to his friend and benefactor, Tom Poole, in 1797.   He claimed, tongue in cheek perhaps, though certainly there was in England at that time, a general fear of revolution, to be anxious to mention certain particulars, “as the time may come in which it will be useful to be able to prove myself a genuine sans culotte, my veins uncontaminated with one drop of Gentility.”  “On my father’s side,” Samuel wrote “I can rise no higher than my Grandfather, who was dropped when a child, in the Hundred of Coleridge in the County of Devon; christened, educated, & apprenticed by the parish.”   The implication here is that his paternal grandfather had been a parish child,  which is to say an illegitimate, unwanted child without a name, who had taken the name of the hamlet of, properly, Coldridge, which ironically is how Pooley always spelled the name, as his own.   The letter was later 'edited', understandably but nevertheless inexcusably, within the family to obfuscate any such sinister origin and indeed there possibly was none.   Uncle Samuel was a poet and a romancer and sometimes something of an embarrassment,  

Samuel wrote that his grandfather afterwards became a respectable woollen-draper and that one of the woollen-draper’s sons, John, “received a better education than the others of his Family in consequence of his own exertions, not of his superior advantages. When he was not quite 16 years old, my Grandfather became bankrupt and by a series of misfortunes was reduced to extreme poverty.  My father received the half of his last crown & his blessing and walked off to seek his fortune.  After he had proceeded a few miles, he sate him down on the side of the road, so overwhelmed with painful thoughts that he wept audibly.  A gentleman passed by, who knew him: and enquiring into his distress took my father with him, & settled him in a neighb’ring town as a schoolmaster.  His school increased; and he got money & knowledge: for he commenced a severe and ardent student.  Here too he married his first wife, by whom he had three daughters, all now alive.  While his first wife lived, having scraped up money enough, at the age of 20, he walked to Cambridge, entered at Sidney College, distinguished himself for Hebrew and Mathematics, & might have had a fellowship: if he had not been married.   He returned - his wife died - Judge Buller’s Father gave him the living of Ottery St Mary, & put the present judge to school with him - He married my Mother, by whom he had ten children of whom I am the youngest.”

By 1857, however, the Coleridge family had not only found rather more presentable, ancestors but was firmly established as one of the great Devon families.  Sir John, like most judges had been knighted on his promotion to the bench.  The honour of being knighted, he said, had pleased his wife more than himself, but it was also clearly a milestone on the road to respectability and an honour for his extensive family. 

The judge’s father, James, known as ‘The Colonel’ who had been the third of the Rev John’s ten children had married well and  had himself produced  a large family of clever children, six boys and one girl.  Like many another Victorian family, the Coleridges became powerful in the land as a direct consequence of their numbers and their solidarity. Two generations of many clever sons with a remarkably strong sense of duty each to the others, to all their fellow Coleridges and to God, had given rise to a strong family narrative which told how brother after brother had done his duty by the family in times of need in a manly, Christian manner.   

The Ottery Coleridges were not only a large, clever, proud and powerful clan,  they were all strongly religious and they were all staunch Anglicans, with the discomfiting exception of the judge’s second son, Henry, who five years prior to Tom Pooley's trial had deeply pained his father by following Dr Newman and converting to the Roman Catholic faith and by leaving Devon for Rome,  there to enter the Accademia dei Nobili, and to train for the priesthood.  At the time of the Pooley trial he was returning to England to become a Jesuit father.  Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who had died in 1834 had also troubled his pious family.   He had been a tumultuous youth with, in the family’s view, many shortcomings and he disturbed them when he became a man of unorthodox in matters of religion and who was for a time a professed Unitarian.  Sir John had known his famous uncle and had liked him immensely despite the great man’s lack of faith in the Holy Trinity.

There is no doubt that the judge was a much loved and much admired man.  His barrister son wrote of him: “I never knew so good a man -  not one who seemed to me to live by principle and in the presence of Almighty God as he.”   According to his grandson, Sir John was slow and gentle in his talk, balanced and charitable in his judgement and pure and unselfish in all his ways.  Among his many brothers he bore the sobriquet ‘Dulce’ because of his sweet nature.   This family assessment of John Taylor as a man with a remarkably sweet and gentle nature was shared by school and college friends and, later in his life, by colleagues and acquaintances, indeed by all who met him.   He had indeed been compared, ‘in one of the leading reviews’ as George Holyoake had written and Tom Pooley had noted, to Jesus Christ in his character and his beauty.

The judge was through and through a godly man.   He loved God with all his heart and he also knew that the established religion provided stability to the nation and benefits and benefices to its adherents.   He had grown up literally in the shadow of the church of St Mary’s Ottery where his grandfather had been vicar.  Two of his many Coleridge uncles had been clergyman, his two surviving brothers were both clergyman, his first cousin had been a Bishop of Barbados who earlier in his career had been the curate who christened Benjamin Disraeli.   His son, Henry, had been an Anglican clergyman, though now, alas, he was a Roman Catholic priest.   His daughter, Alethea, had married an ambitious clergyman who would soon rise to become a Bishop of Oxford.  His sister Frances was the mother of that unfortunate Bishop of Melanesia, John Coleridge Patteson, who in 1871 would be hatcheted to death by the natives of the Island of Napaku and who would thereby become a martyr and a household name.   All in all, Sir John was about as much imbued with the spirit of Anglicanism as it is possible for a layman to be.

Had he been able to choose his own career Sir John would never have become a lawyer.   He passionately wished to be a clergyman and he never really reconciled himself to his profession.  His ideal in life was to be the parson of a small parish, exercising that authority over his parishioners that he believed had been handed down from the Apostles of Christ.  He would have been happy watching over his flock, saving their souls and ministering to their spiritual needs.   This, however, was not to be.  His father, the Colonel, had set his face like flint against the idea that his clever son should become a clergyman.  He insisted that John would be a lawyer and John had too much respect for his father’s wishes and too great a sense of duty towards the family, and no doubt was also too dependent on the family for funds, to follow his own inclinations.

Needless to say, the judge’s experience of the world had been very different to Tom Pooley’s.  At the time of life when Tom had been labouring in fields and down wells and had been scratching out from seemingly nowhere his own eccentric and imperfect views of the nature of the world and the meaning of life, John Coleridge had been a disciplined scholar and a regular churchgoer, first at Ottery, then at Eton and then, most significantly, at Christ’s Church College at the University of Oxford. 

 This was the Oxford soon to be of the Oxford Movement, the movement espoused by those who felt that the Church of England needed more mystery, more poetry, more beauty in its liturgy.   John Coleridge thought so too.  The Church, it was thought by these ‘Tractarians’ as they came to be called, had become altogether too plain and too protestant.   They longed to burn candles, to swing incense, to intone prayers in the Latin tongue, to hear confessions, to return in short to forms of worship not openly seen in England since before the Reformation.  The Tractarians and those who sympathised with them also wanted for themselves a more personal relationship, a warmer, more loving relationship, with Christ, their blessed saviour and with God Almighty.  The nature of their religion and their own relationship to God became the obsession of the Oxford men of that time and young Coleridge was as infatuated with this search and with this ascent from low church to high church as any of his contemporaries. He, however, could only view with horror, distaste and sorrow those apostates, like his own son, Henry, who had gone too far, who had fallen from the tight-rope of High Anglicanism and ended up in the Roman church. 

At Christ’s Church, when he was an undergraduate of seventeen, the judge had met the fifteen-year old John Keble and the two boys recognised each the other as a truly good man and they became lifelong, like-minded friends.  Coleridge described Keble in a letter to his benefactor John May as “a young man whom I love and honour more than anyone I have met with at the University,” John Keble was to live the life that John Coleridge would have chosen for himself.  He was so apparently a virtuous parish priest that he is remembered as one of the most saintly and unselfish men who ever served the Church of England.   He gave his life, so his story is told, to improve, as he saw it, the morals of the nation.   Inevitably, though, his authority did not go unchallenged.   His undoubted zeal led him to become, as well as being a busy curate, a prolific writer of hymns and religious verses many of which he published as The Christian Year, a book published in 1827.  This book, these books, soon there were two of them, became the most popular volumes of verse of the nineteenth century.  “The superabundance of his piety overflowed into verse” wrote Strachey and quickly gained him a reputation that resulted in him being appointed Professor of Poetry at Oxford.   Although few today read his poetry his reputation is such that an Oxford College bears his name and the Church of England and the Anglican Communion celebrate him as a saint memory with separate feast days. 

It is perhaps difficult for many people nowadays to comprehend the degree to which men like Keble and Coleridge believed in the Scriptures and the extent to which they were concerned with the health of their souls.  To them Paradise was so visible in the mind’s eye that they often spoke and wrote of it.   They professed to live in their hope of a place in heaven.  At College the two young men discussed earnestly the nature of eternal life. They asked themselves, for example, whether there could be a hierarchy imposed on those who attained Paradise.  They could not quite see how eternal life could mean that the commoners might  mix with gentlefolk. 

When, in 1820, John Taylor and Mary Coleridge suffered the loss of their first child, she had lived for only  nine months,  John Keble, still in his twenties, wrote to them in a long letter of intended comfort:   “My dear friends, think as little as you can of yourselves,  but think of the blessed infant whom you presented so few days ago before CHRIST in His earthly temple;  think of her being even now admitted to serve Him in His heavenly temple day and night, and knowing and praising Him better than the greatest saint on earth can do; and though it is nothing in comparison to eternity, yet it is blessing enough to assuage your grief, which, however good and Christian, must confess itself to be but earthly, when you consider that your darling is put into her SAVIOUR’S arms so many years before the time that most of His servants are admitted there, quite safe, quite good, quite happy, and, dare I say it, overflowing with love for you beyond what all your kindness and tenderness could have made her comprehend in the longest life that parents and children can expect to enjoy together here.” 

This remarkable, if mawkish, saintly man was Tom Pooley’s judge’s best friend.   The judge was later, in 1869, to publish a two volume ‘Memoir of the Rev John Keble’ which contains nothing but approbation of the man.  Throughout their lives Keble and Coleridge met whenever they could and corresponded regularly.  Keble was an infrequent visitor to Coleridge’s house and preached at least one sermon in the church at Ottery, and when they were apart ‘Dearest John’ the parson wrote many serious letters to ‘Dearest John’ the lawyer and the lawyer wrote long letters in return and the name of Jesus Christ was never far from the page.  John Keble was the touchstone by which an introspective, less certain John Coleridge measured his own worth and sometimes found himself to be wanting but both men were obsessed with religion and their duty to God and, although they seemed sometimes morbidly introspective and were for ever expressing doubts as to their own worth, they never really doubted  that they, pious Anglican gentlemen, were of the very best kind of men and they had no doubt that they would live and die well and be welcomed into heaven by their Saviour.  They believed they were seriously good men because they were orthodox Christians and that they were serious and good Christians because they were good men.   The very idea of blasphemy stank in their nostrils.

As if this were not enough of Christian friendship, another of John’s Oxford best loved acquaintances had been Thomas Arnold, later to be the headmaster of Rugby School was a man who , like Keble, was celebrated for his religious zeal, Arnold had died young in 1842.  Like most public-schoolmasters of the time, he had, as a matter of course, taken Holy Orders and the warmth of his religiosity was perhaps best defined by the observation of A.C. Benson that  he was  “A man who could burst into tears at his own dinner-table on hearing a comparison made between St. Paul and St. John to the detriment of the latter.”   It was said to be impossible to disregard the peculiar feeling of love and adoration which Arnold entertained towards our Lord Jesus Christ.  According to Lytton Strachey, one of his former pupils remembered to his dying day his reproof of some boys who behaved badly during prayers,  “Nowhere,” said Dr Arnold,  “nowhere is Satan’s work more evidently manifest than in turning holy things to ridicule.” 

Doctor Arnold in his teenage years believed himself to be indebted to both Coleridge and Keble, they were both some years older than he, for resolving grievous doubts that he was entertaining with regard to various ‘proofs’ of Holy Scripture.  These doubts were afflicting him at Oriel College where he was on the brink of doubting important articles of faith.  He was thinking ‘distressing thoughts’ and had confided as much to Keble.   Keble wrote to Coleridge:  “The subject of these distressing thoughts is that most awful one on which all very inquisitive reasoning minds are, I believe, most liable to such temptation - I mean the doctrine of the blessed Trinity .  Do not start, my dear Coleridge; I do not believe that Arnold has any serious scruples of the understanding about it,  but it is a defect of his mind that he cannot get rid of certain feelings of objections.”    

Sir John rose to the challenge of patching up the defects of Tom Arnold’s mind and he was evidently of some assistance in restoring Arnold’s faith in God, three in one, and retaining him in the career that gave “Black Tom.” to Rugby and Tom Brown’s Schooldays to the world.   Arnold later claimed, in a letter to Coleridge, to have been much influenced by him.  In 1840 the headmaster, five years younger,  wrote to the judge  :   “I believe that no man’s mind has ever been more consciously influenced by others than mine has been in the course of my life from the time that I first met you at Corpus.”   By this time, however, although Coleridge had managed to stay friends with both of them, Arnold and Keble were no longer speaking to each other.  The reason why two such old friends had quarrelled was, naturally enough, their religious views.   Arnold had become too decidedly ‘Broad Church’ to please Keble and, presto!, their friendship was at an end.

Sir John was now sixty-seven.  He was travelling the Circuit for the seventy-fifth time and was looking forward to retiring from the bench after some twenty-two years’ honourable service.   He had been known as a fair and gentle judge and his reputation meant much to him.  He loved his family home and there he had cared for his invalid wife, Mary, with whom he had raised two boys and two girls.   He had for some time not been altogether happy with the responsibilities  that attached to his work and he had come to dislike the constant travelling.  Singularly, he had, only a few years before and at the time of his son Henry’s conversion to the Church of Rome, seriously considered fulfilling his early ambition by resigning from the bench to take orders and becoming a humble Anglican chaplain ministering at the chapel-of-ease that he had founded and endowed at Alfington, a hamlet near Ottery.

This prospective change was in the main a reaction to his desperate disappointment that his son Henry, for whose sake the chapel and schoolhouse at Alfington had been founded, had left the Anglican fold.  At the time he made it clear that in view of his son’s apostacy he, John Coleridge, ‘wanted to give as strong a testimony as he could personally to the Church of England.’    A sceptical view of the matter might be that he had expended much time and money establishing this cosy living for his son.  He had chosen an architect and it must have been galling to see effort and expense wasted.  He naturally had consulted Keble about this important matter and Keble had sent him his opinion at length, concluding that, yes, it would be the better course for Coleridge to take Holy Orders “and may a great blessing attend you”,  but in the end the judge  decided to forgo the blessing and stick to his life as a layman and to see out his time as a judge. 

And now Sir John was travelling to Bodmin where he would have to deal with the blasphemer, Tom Pooley, In 1876, the barrister son wrote about the judge his father,:  “If he was angry, and he was sometimes,  it was because something on principle was assailed, or he thought so.”  The judge was about to be made angry, very angry indeed.  His great love, his blessed Jesus Christ , was being mocked by an ignorant peasant.  Tom Pooley in his hope for a judge who was not a Christian, a judge who might spare him,  was doomed to bitter disappointment.