TOM POOLEY'S PARSONS.

The decision to have recourse to law taken by the Cornish parsons so as to hunt down and deal with the blasphemer in their midst in the expectation that he would pay for his impiety with hard labour in a Victorian gaol would seem unduly rigorous to today’s mild clergymen even if blasphemy were still a criminal offence.   I have found no indication that any of these parsons were in any sense otherwise vicious, but they hardly seem to have shown that love and charity, that moderation the Anglican Church preaches and has long preached.  Hypocrisy is a widespread human practice and not one limited to clergymen.  Most of us perhaps do not altogether practice what we preach although, as it is clergymen who tend to do more preaching than most, they are more likely to be thought to qualify as dyed in the wool hypocrites.  The parsons of the Church of England in Queen Victoria’s day were given to preaching long sermons from the pulpit and it was an ego-booster and a career-move to preach powerfully and eloquently and to publish one’s sermons for posterity.   Today many thousands of leather-bound books of Victorian sermons written to guide men towards salvation lie in dark corners of libraries and are seldom consulted.  The clergymen of Cornwall in Pooley’s time delivered serious sermons.  They ministered under the authority of the Diocese of Exeter, there was, at that time, no Cornish diocese, and this meant that Pooley’s parsons ministered under the shadow of the infamous Bishop Henry Phillpotts who was, for far too long, from 1830 until 1869, their spiritual overseer.  He saw to it that his clergy preached orthodox and solemn sermons. 

Phillpotts, he still has his apologists today, seems to me to have been the worst kind of prince of any church.  He had no sense of humour and took an almost mediaeval view of his own god given authority. In the name of religion, he furthered his own interests and those of his eighteen children.  In the name of discipline, he made the lives of many whom he met uncomfortable. He had the reputation of being a thug and a bully in gaiters. Anthony Trollope, in Barchester Towers, his tongue most firmly in his cheek, writes how that ideal type of pomposity the archdeacon of Barchester Cathedral, Dr Grantly, has in his study the busts of “the greatest among the great: Chrysostom, St Augustine, Thomas à Becket, Cardinal Wolsey, Archbishop Laud and Dr Phillpotts.”   More trenchantly, Sydney Smith, of happy memory, said of Phillpotts, “I must believe in the Apostolic Succession, there being no other way of accounting for the descent of the Bishop of Exeter from Judas Iscariot.” 

Phillpotts was so much hated by the working people of Exeter that they burned him in effigy on Guy Fawkes Night 1841 while he was hiding in his palace protected from his own people by a troop of yeomanry cavalry.  But it was the Cornish socialist historian, A.L.Rowse, who oiled  Phillpotts with the most vitriol when he wrote that he was: “a nauseating character..., a nasty political pamphleteer who recommended himself thus for ecclesiastical promotion to the Tory reactionaries of before the Reform Bill, who recommended himself still more by marrying Lord Eldon’s niece, a grabber of every scrap of church preferment he could lay hands on to serve his family - he had seven sons in Orders and almost as many sons-in-law; who kept clear of his cathedral city the whole time of the cholera, an oppressor of the poor, who built himself a fine marine villa at Torquay (now the Palace Hotel), from which he administered his diocese and went up to speak in the House of Lords on behalf of every bad cause:  in short a complete Tory.”   It is said that, when in the House, Phillpotts fulminated against every reform of the age in a manner that shocked even his fellow diehards while in his diocese, in the name of reform, he put fear rather than love into the hearts of his clergy.   

In 1848, the Reverend Reginald Hobhouse was already Rector of St Ive, a large parish with a population of miners and quarrymen.   He was, of course, the parson who later, 1n 1857, offered two guineas for evidence against the elusive local blasphemer and whose name appeared at the foot of the “BLASPHEMY” advertisement in the Cornish Times which was the start of Pooley’s troubles.  Hobhouse in 1848 was honoured by being asked to preach to his fellow priests on the occasion of the Ordinary Visitation to Liskeard by his lord bishop, Henry Phillpotts. This was the same honour which, it will be remembered, was thrust upon Robert Scott three years earlier.  Hobhouse, at the time he preached his sermon, was only thirty years old,  He was thirty-nine when Tom Pooley was tried at Bodmin. His sermon was later published at the request of the Clergy and the profits, if any, were to go to the Parish School in Saint Ive.

The title of Hobhouse’s sermon was ‘Ministerial Watchfulness’ and the text he chose for the occasion was from Hebrews xiii 17: “Obey them that have rule over you, and submit yourselves, for they watch for your souls, as they that must give account,  that they may do it with joy and not with grief:  for that is unprofitable to you.”   It was a thundering good sermon for the challenging times and it, no doubt impressed the bishop himself, but gobbets of it, in the light of future events, must seem less than sincere. Hobhouse began by describing, without pulling any punches, the parlous state in which the Church of England found herself.

“...in the divided state of our flocks;  in the miserably low tone of morality which pervades them,  in the hostile attacks upon the Church, which even those who profess most attachment to her are fain to yield to; in the ubiquity and still growing rifeness of schism;  in the evil report which ourselves as a class bear among the common people; in the strong and increasing ascendancy gained over them by teachers untaught and ministers self-ordained: - in all these things which affect our daily life,  let us endeavour to see the strongest inducements to ministerial watchfulness, to godly zeal, to strict self-denial, to a scrupulous observance of our ordination vows, to an earnest and anxious care lest in anything we should give “offence” and so the ministry be blamed.”

The sermon sounded a call to virtuous action but whether the comfortable Cornish clergy at his feet, with their glebes and their tithes and their pleasant homes and their good living, their extra-parochial hobbies and amusements and, above all, their self-righteous complacency, were listening to him is hard to know.  Later, however, was thundered out a passage that Tom Pooley might have found ironic had he read it after his trial and his trials.  Hobhouse was intent on reminding the assembled clerics in his congregation, in a manner that they might not forget it, of their duty towards lost souls.  And what was our Tom if not that?  It was Tom himself who was later to describe how “Clergymen say that they are the shepherds and have care of all men’s souls.”  It had not seemed to him, from experience, to have been the case.  “Let them pause on this” he wrote “if their judgement is true.”    In 1848 Hobhouse preached as follows:

“From the Tamar to the Fowey, from the sea to the moor, not a soul that breathes in all that living mass but one of us must give account of that soul to God.  We were set to watch it; we must say why it went astray, and whether we endeavoured to claim it.   Did we reprove it, rebuke it, exhort it; and that with all long suffering?  Did we advise with it, reason with it, show it its danger; and that with reasonable and unseasonable perseverance?  We were sit to minister grace unto it; were we careful so to minister, both in the word and the sacrament, that it should be drawn towards them, not repelled?  But perhaps that soul withdrew itself from our guidance, and spurned the ministry which Christ and his Church hath committed to us.   Are we certain that it was from no fault of our own that this was so?  No error in our conversation, no blot on our character which gave offence, though it may be unjustly, to a brother perhaps over weak?  Or the undeniable lethargy which there has been in years past, may not that have operated to produce an undue excitement as a reaction, if not a judgement.” 

Nine years later it seemed that Tom Pooley’s parsons were not too alarmed about the state of Tom Pooley’s soul and rather more concerned that their spiritual authority was being challenged.  It might have been thought by them that in Tom’s case the soul was way beyond redemption but for a soul to be beyond redemption is supposed to be doctrinally impossible. We are all fallible and it is hardly surprising that sometimes men and women allow their good intentions to lag behind their performance and to let self-interest distort their view of the world, but the tragedy here was that Tom was all his life yearning for someone to have a conversation with him.   “The Christian judge took me to task about my impious course of conduct.  Now it is my duty to ask this learned judge whether it was not his duty to ask of me whether I did believe there was an Almighty or not.”  Not that Tom would have given ground to any parson easily as the ‘drunken’ chaplain in Bodmin Gaol discovered, but with ‘reasonable and unseasonable perseverance’ who knows? 

Reginald Hobhouse was known to be rigidly orthodox in religion and, like his bishop, narrowly conservative in politics.  He was a man with good connections; his father had been an under-secretary at the Home Office; his brothers were to become, the one, Edmund, a bishop, the other, Arthur, a judge.   Reginald himself was to rise to be, in 1877, Archdeacon of Bodmin.   The two worthy families, the Hobhouses and the Coleridges, were known to each other.   Reginald had been at Eton at the same time as John Duke Coleridge and the lawyer brother was at both Eton and Balliol at the same time as him.  In 1842 young John had written from Oxford to his father: “(Arthur) Hobhouse is kindness itself, and, I believe, does all he can for me, and in the way of invitations to common-room and the like he is most bountiful.”   There is plenty of scope for theories that communications might have passed between Coleridges and Hobhouses on the subject of the blasphemer of Liskeard though there is altogether no evidence of any such collusion and indeed, as has been noted before, this sort of connivance would have made little or no difference to Pooley’s fate.  

Reginald Hobhouse was to be the father of two remarkable and celebrated children, not yet born at the time of Pooley’s trial:   Emily Hobhouse, the formidable campaigner who was to become a thorn in the flesh of the Establishment at the time of the Boer War and Leonard Trelawny Hobhouse, the philosopher and sociologist.   Leonard was to write of his father: “He was for us all an incarnation of justice and iron rectitude. His sole guide was duty, for us as for himself.”

Another of the challenges faced by the Church of England in these difficult years was to seek to justify to the world and particularly to her own less fortunate parsons the unjustifiable difference in the value of Church livings.   Poor clergymen, whose income was often less than fifty pounds a year, did much the same job as wealthy clergymen whose income was often ten times as much, sometimes much more.   Many of the clergy held plural benefices but none of Tom’s parsons, although they were all men of substance, seem so to have benefited nor were they unduly absent from their parishes.

Paul Bush’s parish of Duloe yielded the largest salary, six hundred and ninety pounds a year.  He was a wealthy man in his own right   but he also had, in Duloe, a glebe of seventy acres and a fine house.   He was thirty-four when he gave evidence against Tom and had been Rector of Duloe for seven years having come to Cornwall from Rutlandshire to succeed Robert Scott.  His wife was Avarilla, a wealthy descendant of Oliver Cromwell, and the Bushes had started what was to be a large family.

St Ive and Duloe are some eight miles apart on more or less equidistant and opposite sides of Liskeard.  Reginald Hobhouse and Paul Bush although not near neighbours, would have met on church business in the town and no doubt discussed the disturbing blasphemous messages that led Hobhouse to advertise.  Tom Pooley considered Paul Bush to be his arch-enemy and, in his later writings, liked to refer to him as Paul, Judas Iscariot, Bush.   This was because it was Bush who had given evidence against him in the Bodmin Court.  There is, however, is no reason to suppose that Pooley and Bush had ever met before the trial or that Bush had any more reason to persecute ’Tom than had the other local clergy.  Bush was vilified by some Freethinkers who, after Tom’s trial, thought Tom’s sentence excessive and the story was circulated that it might have been Paul Bush who had refused to bury Tom’s little son and that Tom’s chalking on his gate was a personal act of revenge against him.  There is, however, no evidence for this and it seems unlikely to be the case as there would have been no reason for Tom to seek burial in Duloe, four miles away from his home.  Tom wrote his messages wherever he wandered and wherever he wanted and it would seem to have been pure chance that led him to Parson Bush’s gate where he was caught in the act.  The gate, in any case, was so far away from the rectory that Tom almost certainly did not associate it with the Reverend Bush or the church in Duloe.  

What did somewhat damn Paul Bush and lay him open to a charge of vindictiveness was the ‘un-Christian’ tone of the letter that he sent to the London Guardian immediately after the trial, which, as we have seen, was polemical and unnecessarily triumphant.  He was, however, possibly sincere in his belief that he had struck a worthy blow for the Church and against blasphemers.  John Duke Coleridge wrote in Fraser’s Magazine, and there is no reason to doubt him, that Mr Bush was no more than the nominal prosecutor who “allowed his name to be made use of.”  but that “the prosecution was the result of the general feeling of disgust and annoyance in the neighbourhood at Pooley’s proceedings.”   Indeed whereas Hobhouse acted deliberately to put an end to Pooley’s blasphemy, Bush’s actions seem to be in reaction to the singular coincidence that Tom was seen to write on his gate. This was surely the truth of the matter but it is clear that Bush, himself, at least initially, was eager to claim a leading role in bringing Tom Pooley to justice. Perhaps because he hoped thereby to find favour with fellow clergy and with his redoubtable Bishop. 

It is evidence of the good sense of Christians throughout the Kingdom that neither Christian clergy nor Christian laity rallied to Paul Bush’s call to litigate against blasphemers, indeed there was a Church and a Christian reaction to the severity of Tom’s sentence. In September, for example, one ‘R M’, a professed Christian, donated half-a-crown to the Pooley fund and wrote to The Reasoner: “Had he (Pooley) been sentenced twenty-one months to school instead of the gaol, it would have been much more in the spirit of Christianity; such as ‘Love your enemies,’ ‘Bless them that curse you.’  Mr Justice Coleridge, before he sits on the bench as a judge, goes to the house of worship and there places himself in the shape of a prisoner at the bar, calling prayerfully on his judge to ‘Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us.’  From there he goes to his bench where he becomes a judge himself.  A prisoner is brought before him in the person of Thomas Pooley, and now mark, does he forgive him his trespass?  No; but twenty-one months to gaol.”   Another anonymous Christian had written to The Penzance and West Cornwall Gazette: “...being an Englishman, I could not but blush for the laws of my country, and being a Christian I could not but grieve that such means should have been adopted to uphold my religion...the verdict and the sentence were little in accordance with Christian principles.”

The other two parsons whom, by name, we know to have been involved with the trials of Tom Pooley are the Reverend James Glencross who signed the summons and the Reverend Arthur Tatham who was one of the two magistrates who committed Tom to Bodmin Gaol.   The other magistrate at the petty sessions, ir will be remembered, was a layman, a former High Sheriff of Cornwall named Francis Howell.   Holyoake made much of the complicity, as he saw it, of so many clergy magistrates, and Tom, probably taking his cue from Holyoake’s pamphlet has no good word to say of “clergy magistrates where no justice is to be had.”     There is, however, no reason to suppose that either of these clergymen would have acted differently if they had been lay magistrates.  Glencross, who was the curate at Tideford, would have been obliged to sign the summons in any case and Arthur Tatham, who was Rector at Boconnoc with Broadoak, was routinely hearing cases at Trecan Gate.  No doubt the knowledge that other clergymen had gone to some trouble to lay Pooley by the heels might well have influenced his judgement but there was probably no cabal of black-coated clerics baying for Tom Pooley’s blood. 

The last glimpse that we have of the parsons’ relationship with Tom is the most curious.   His daughter, Mary, wrote to George Holyoake on the day that Tom arrived home from the Asylum in December 1857.   Her letter is jubilant, as might be expected, but she adds one teasing sentence: “Several clergymen have already been in, Mr Bush for one, Mr Hobhouse for another and Mr Tatham too.”  Now, what business did these three or more busy clergymen have with Tom Pooley in his humble home in Moon’s Court!  Did they come singly or arrive in a body!  How were they received! What was said!   Mary gives us no further clues. O to have been a fly on the tenement wall!  Certainly they did not offer charity in any material form.  Mary had in the same letter complained that “No one in Liskeard has ever offered one farthing yet.” Nor is it likely that they were belatedly concerned about Tom’s spiritual welfare.  It is impossible to know the spirit in which these men of the cloth approached the man whose life they had so disrupted. It is most probable they came to warn Pooley not to take to his old ways and to threaten him with dire consequences but how strange that they should have thought it suitable to do this.  Their visit must have required some organising.  The need must have seemed urgent.  Perhaps the words “you will be sent back where you came from.” were used.  Certainly these words haunted Tom and were, more than once to be used by him in his later writings   The clergymen, however, do not seem unduly to have upset the Pooleys.  Mary does not complain of them nor does she give any clue as to the purpose of their visit.

Tom’s clergymen, like so many West Country parsons, lived long lives.  Nearly all of them outlasted Tom and Mary Pooley. No doubt they worked hard, sermonising and christening and marrying and burying and attending to a host of parochial matters,  but Tom Pooley did not love them.