The Search for God and Guinness

by Stephen Mansfield

  Despite the joys of their newfound faith, the years in India were difficult. The climate, the stress, and the dangers broke their health. He returned home in 1824, sick and exhausted. She returned with him but died two years later, though not before her husband was forced to endure a further humiliation from his brewery relations.

  When John Grattan returned home, the second Arthur felt obligated to put him to work. His younger brother had lost all of his inheritance, after all, and the successful head of the family brewery could not allow the now retired Captain Guinness to become destitute. Arthur sent his brother to Liverpool and told him to take over a Guinness agency at 29 Manesty Lane. With two partners, John was to operate an importing business that was separate from the family’s other business concerns. His task was to import beer, but only as a sideline. The main import was Irish whiskey—and this is where the crisis arose. As an evangelical of his age, Captain Guinness was a teetotaler, a man who drank no alcohol and believed that all men should do likewise. Indeed, he had come to believe that whiskey was a source of evil, a cause of much of the wickedness that plagued the world. He tried to move the business away from beer and whiskey and toward bread and other products that would be healthy, even moral in his view. The scheme failed though. It was whiskey and beer that brought profits, not bread. In less than a year, John resigned from his position, sorry to have disappointed his brother but not wanting to make matters worse.

  John Grattan might well have become a broken man during these days. He felt himself a failure in the army and a failure in business, as well. Then, too, his sons by Susanna, John Grattan (junior) and Arthur Grattan, had yet to prove themselves worthy. The younger John Grattan had even been fired from the brewery for “mixing with degraded company” and then failed to prove himself again after being given a second chance at a branch of the family firm in Bristol. It was a deep disappointment to Captain John, who added this episode to the list of failures that made him increasingly disillusioned about his life. He chose to retire in Cheltenham—“God’s anteroom” for retired Indian Army officers—and took comfort at his Congregational church.

  There was yet much to commend him, though. As Michele Guinness has written in The Genius of Guinness, the best book on the Grattan line,

  In middle age he was still the most handsome of the Guinness brothers, with an erect, military bearing and a strong, dignified face set off by the high collars and cravats he wore. There was no hint of grey in the dark hair, even in the long sideburns, and the only suggestion of the trauma of past years was the unusual pallor of his complexion. His youthful drive and bravado had long burnt out, leaving a shy man who often hid behind spectacles and preferred the simple, solitary pleasures of reading and walking to the high life of Dublin society.

  We tend to forget that there are second acts possible in the lives of most men, that an unchangeable fixity does not always rule human affairs. Many a man who has come to late middle age with despair and disillusionment has found—perhaps in love or work or devotion to a cause— the meaning or fulfillment that eluded him earlier in life. This was certainly the case with Captain John Guinness, who found his happiness in an elegant creature named Jane D’Esterre.

  John Grattan Guinness and Jane Lucretia D’Esterre met at Dublin’s York Street Chapel in 1829. He was a man in late middle age who was disappointed in his meager achievements, who contented himself in scripture reading and time alone. She was distractingly beautiful and it is not hard to understand how she captured the captain’s heart. As Michele Guinness has described her,

  Described in an early biography of O’Connell as “the beautiful Miss Cramer of Dublin,” she looked, according to one of her sons, as if she had been “formed to win admiration and affection . . . waving locks of dark hair falling over a high, fair forehead; the eyes dark brown and bright with intelligence; the eyebrows arched; the nose slightly aquiline; the mouth fairly large with mobile lips full of expression.” She was indeed a beauty, and when she first appeared on the stage of the Theatre Royal, she took Dublin by storm, even catching the attention of the wild poet, Lord Byron.

  Jane Lucretia D’Esterre-Guinness

  Captain John Guinness

  Yet by the time she met Captain Guinness she was also a woman with a complicated past. She had been married to John D’Esterre, a pork butcher known more for bluster than sense. He was a member of the Dublin Corporation (the organization that governed Dublin City) and when famed Catholic political leader Daniel O’Connell described the city fathers as “beggarly,” D’Esterre took the slight personally and demanded satisfaction. Few took the matter seriously (including O’Connell at first), but D’Esterre would not let the matter die and so his challenge to a duel had to be accepted.

  On February 2, 1815, the Dublin Journal reported the matter with stiff bias.

  Yesterday, at four-o’clock in the evening, a meeting took place at Bishop’s Court, between Mr. D’Esterre, one of the Representatives of the Guild of Merchants in the Common Council of Dublin, and Counselor O’Connell when we lament to say, the former was wounded in the hip. The cause of the quarrel was some insolent words used by Counselor O’Connell at one of the Popish Meetings, as against the Corporation of Dublin. These words Mr. D’Esterre resented, and desiring an explanation, was answered by further insolence, which induced him to press the meeting. Mr. D’Esterre’s wound is considered dangerous: the ball has not been extracted.

  The next day, D’Esterre died, leaving a widow—who knew nothing of the matter until her husband’s body was carried into her house—and two small children.

  She was an exceptional woman, though. Although she took a house in Ecclefechan in the lowlands of Scotland, the distance from Dublin did not distance her from her troubles. One day, as she sat by a river, she fought the temptation to plunge herself into the rushing waters. As the river called to her, she was awakened as from a dream by a plowboy whistling hymns. She watched the youth for a while and then felt convicted that she had sunk so far into self-pity while this simple man maintained such joy in the midst of his labors. She pulled herself together, decided she would not descend, and returned to Dublin to carve out a life as a music teacher. She also found faith in Jesus Christ as she heard a sermon at St. George’s Church, a faith that was deep and transforming and restored her trust when so much trust had been broken in her life. She was still a very attractive woman who might have had an easier life had she acquiesced to any of the offers of marriage that came her way. But she kept herself apart, tended her family, and waited for the timing of her God.

  That timing came when she met Captain Guinness. The two had known their disappointments and their pains, but their love became a salve for old wounds and a cause for a kind of hope neither of them had enjoyed in recent years. They lived primarily at Cheltenham, but also visited Dublin and Clifton with regularity. There were adult children to visit and relatives in the vast Guinness family to consult. In the first five years after their marriage in 1829, theirs was a happy but nomadic life.

  Their story has meaning, if for no other reason than Captain John was the son of the founder of the Guinness clan and brewery. There is also the sheer drama of their lives and the vitality of the faith that saw them in good stead through their hardships. But there is another reason that their journeys are vital to the unfolding Guinness tale and it arrived in 1835. In that year, fifty-two-year-old Captain John Guinness and thirty-eight-year-old Jane D’Esterre Guinness had a son, whose name was Henry. Born in his parents’ latter years—and regarded by them as a token of God’s unceasing grace—Henry Grattan Guinness would become such a firebrand of faith in his time that his name would be mentioned with Dwight L. Moody and Charles Spurgeon as one of the greatest preachers of his age.

  His first twenty years of life did not betray this promise, though. Henry grew up in a community of retired military men and heard often of thrilling adventures in exotic lands, of narrow escapes from strange and dangerous men. These tales worked on his young imaginatio
n, and by the time he turned fourteen—the same year his father died—he had come to regard the life of a brewer as far too dull compared to the life he hoped to live. He spent his days dreaming, roaming the woods, or climbing on nearby castle ruins. When he turned seventeen, he decided to follow his brother, Wyndham, and go to sea.

  Already, though, the seeds of a powerful faith had been planted in his soul. He grew up in a deeply Christian family, with daily prayers, Sunday services, and charity work forming the pillars of life. Though his mind was often elsewhere during many of these devotional times, there was one occasion he recalled with tenderness all his life. His father had asked him to read a favorite passage from the book of Revelation and as Henry did, he remembered . . .

  the light of the street lamp shining in to the quiet room, where we sat together, and the solemn and beautiful imagery of the chapter relating to the New Jerusalem seeming to shed over the scene a purer and loftier light. Though but a child at the time, I think I entered more or less into my father’s profound admiration for the passage, and felt with him the vibration of the soul attuned to eternal realities.

  Despite these early stirrings, he went to sea in 1853 and “fell into evil company and evil ways.” He returned home for a visit a year later and was delighted to find that his brother Wyndham was on leave too. Henry was eager to hear of Wyndham’s exotic adventures, but instead heard how his brother found faith in Christ at the urging of a Christian chief mate named Peek. It was all that Wyndham wanted to talk about and the two brothers spoke into the morning hours one night of Jesus Christ and his will for men. Finally, Wyndham fell asleep, but Henry was too stirred of soul to rest. He later said that his brother had painted a “mental vision of moral loveliness such as I had never seen before.” The next morning, the family began noticing that he was changed, that he read devotionals and spent time in prayer.

  The process of transformation was begun but not complete. He went to sea again but became so ill that he was soon put ashore. While recuperating, he began to think about a different career and decided that farming might be just the thing. Soon he found a farmer near Cashel who would take him in and he set himself to learn the planter’s life. Not long after, though, he was out shooting when he badly sprained his ankle. This led to days on his back while he healed and during this time he started contemplating his ways. He regretted his twenty years of aimlessness and began to search the Scriptures for something deeper to define his life. He found it. As he later wrote,

  The future was lighted with hope. The gates of glory and immortality opened to my mental vision and there shone before me an interminable vista of pure and perfect existence in the life to come. It was the marriage of the soul; the union of the creature in appropriating and self-yielding love with Him who is uncreated eternal love.

  He was a man afire. He returned to his mother’s home in Cheltenham and joined her in evangelistic work. He also applied to New College London, in hopes of completing the studies a useful minister would need. But he did so with trepidation. He had already noted the “dampening effect” of formal learning on spiritual zeal and he later recounted how “with many tears I besought God on the night of my admission, walking the streets of the great city, to keep me from backsliding and growing cold about Divine things.” Such concerns were not a basis for academic success and he did not finish his second year.

  He did begin preaching, though, and at this he was an amazing success. On his twenty-first birthday he wrote in his diary that his only passion was “to live preaching and to die preaching; to live and die in the pulpit; to preach to perishing sinners till I drop down dead.” It was as though God heard his prayer. His preaching on the streets drew huge crowds and his reputation for converting sinners spread. He became so effective that in 1857 he was invited to preach at the Moorfields Tabernacle in London, which had been George Whitefield’s ministry home. Again, his messages were attended by great repentance and conversion, so much so that the elders of the church asked the now twenty-one-year-old college dropout if he would become their pastor.

  It was a tempting offer. As successful a preacher as he was, there was little money in it. When he had received a £400 legacy from his uncle Arthur, he gave it to his aging mother. Still, he turned down the tabernacle offer and instead asked the elders to ordain him as an itinerant minister. He thus became a second-generation George Whitefield, and was often compared to the great eighteenth-century evangelist. As Henry departed London and then preached in France, Switzerland, Wales, and Scotland, the fruit was very much the same as Whitefield had produced a century before.

  Finally, though, he returned to Dublin—and to great acclaim. As Michele Guinness has written, the local press took an interest because “Protestant preachers were weighted against each other like professional boxers.” Henry was portrayed as a rival to Spurgeon, which was both silly and embarrassing, for all eminent preachers of the time were described in newspaper accounts with minute detail. Of Henry the Liverpool Mercury had written,

  A modest unassuming young man of twenty-one, of middle stature, wearing a frock coat that reaches to the knees and is buttoned almost up to the neckerchief. Long black hair, parted in the middle, and when the eyes are heaven-directed, reaching to the shoulders, forms the natural background and enclosure of the face, to which it lends a classic or poetic grandeur, intensifying as it does every expression. His language is of the most childlike simplicity.

  As Henry arrived in Ireland in February of 1858, he was met by a flurry of such press reports, including intrusive accounts of the death of his mother’s first husband and of any misdeeds by any member of the Guinness clan. Still, the city was proud of its native son and prouder still that it was a Guinness who now drew international acclaim. Henry’s first appearance on February 8 was described in full in Dublin’s Daily Express.

  He appears to be not more than one and twenty years of age, his figure rather slight, and his features regular and complexion somewhat pale, which, combined with dark hair, worn long and thrown back from the forehead, tend to give him a striking and interesting appearance. In the pulpit his manner is quiet and unaffected, and characterized by an earnest simplicity which forcibly impresses itself on the listener. His gesture is remarkably graceful and appropriate, without the smallest approach to elocutionary display, and in addition to these, his voice is musical and well-modulated.

  Within a week, newspaper accounts shifted from describing the young preacher’s appearance to describing his effect on his audiences. Dublin had seen nothing like it in history. Souls were converted, churches began bulging, and the elite of the city turned out to see what this grandson of Arthur Guinness had to say for his God. Again, the Daily Express:

  He has now delivered nine discourses in this city since his arrival and the interest which he has excited, so far from abating, has daily increased, and will probably continue to do so during the present week . . . Few preachers have ever addressed congregations more select. They consisted of the elite of all denominations, including a considerable number of the Established Clergy. The wealth, the respectability, the cultivated intellect, as well as the evangelical piety of the city, have been represented in a measure unprecedented, we believe, on such an occasion in this country. Judges, members of Parliament, distinguished orators, Fellows of the College, the lights of the various professions, and, to a considerable extent, the rank and fashion of this gay metropolis, have been drawn out to a dissenting chapel which was thronged, even on weekdays, by this new attraction. On Wednesday morning the Lord Lieutenant was present, with the gentlemen of his Excellency’s household; and yesterday morning we observed among the audience the Lord Chancellor, the Lord Justice of Appeal and Baron Pennefather.

  It was as though Dublin could not hold him; he soon moved beyond the city into the rural areas where people were desperate to hear. As one observer wrote,

  Without an exception the welcome he met with in the provinces resembled that in Dublin. Altogether nothing to compare with it
had been known in Ireland within living memory. An announcement that he was to preach was enough to put the population on the move. The largest buildings available for his use failed to accommodate the numbers who thronged to hear him. A tidal-wave of popularity bore him along day after day. The local press everywhere chronicled and commented on his appearances as leading topics of interest.

  Beyond his huge popularity and impact, we should note, too, his simplicity. There was no attempt to stir up emotions, no crafty plan to manipulate the crowd to a fever pitch. Instead, Henry Grattan Guinness simply preached the gospel—calmly, plainly, and with respect for his audiences. The Daily Express confirmed that there was no “cunning exhibition of oratorical fireworks, a dazzling stage effect, or theatrical contrivances to work up a ‘galvanic revival.’” Instead, he was effective because “all his powers, intellectual and moral, are pervaded by a consecrating influence from on high.”

  The public and the press could not have missed the comparisons between Benjamin Lee, the head of the brewery, and the other Guinness who had become the John the Baptist of his age. In his thorough Dark and Light: The Story of the Guinness Family, Derek Wilson captures the contrasts that would have been obvious at the time.

  They represented two elements—religious zeal and commercial flair—which had long jostled together in uncomfortable harness and which had now separated. Henry disdained money; Benjamin was well on his way to becoming a millionaire. The Dublin Guinness drew his wealth from beer; Henry was an advocate of temperance. The evangelist believed in the imminent return of Christ and the establishment of a new order; his cousin had made himself exceedingly comfortable in this world; Henry was the advocate of intense, personal faith; Benjamin represented a religious establishment which his Nonconformist relative could only regard as spiritually moribund.