Damn His Blood

by Peter Moore

  Parker would have been an able candidate for the role. Having concluded his education at Blencow, it is difficult to envisage him returning to labour on the family farm. Rather, as young, erudite and at ease among the gentry, it seems more logical that he would be employed in a sphere where he might use his ability to write and reason. Crucially, too, Parker’s loyalty was beyond question. Since his earliest childhood he had been allied to Surrey: he had grown up with Greystoke Castle hidden, symbolically, just beyond the horizon; his family were dependent on the Howards for their social standing and now he was indebted to Surrey for his education. The young protégé was absorbed into his patron’s inner circle, and most accounts agree that it was a role in which he thrived. They declare that Parker carried out his duties with such cool reserve and careful professionalism that Surrey recalled his contribution for years after.

  In the early 1780s George Parker’s life took its most significant turn. Perhaps fired by his travels and his own latent ambitions, he resolved to leave Cumberland and to journey south to the Midlands to study theology. This he did, and for several years afterwards he resided at St John’s Academy in Warwick, where he served as classical assistant. The move, however, did not mean a total splintering of his relationship with Surrey – who had now become the Duke of Norfolk following the death of his father in 1786. Indeed, the new duke lay behind Parker’s elevation to a curacy in Dorking, one of the Howard family’s parishes. Several years later Parker relocated yet again. It is unclear just what lured him to Oddingley. Perhaps it was the prospect of a sedate community and a reasonable income. Or he may have been tempted by its appealing location so close to Worcester Cathedral, a spiritual, intellectual and administrative centre of the Protestant Church.

  As with Parker’s other appointments, the duke’s influence swirled like a current just beneath the surface. The opening at Oddingley came after Norfolk had appointed Reverend Samuel Commeline – Parker’s predecessor – to another of his parishes, at Hempsted just outside Gloucester. Commeline’s move left Oddingley temporarily vacant and enabled Norfolk to recommend Parker as a replacement to his parliamentary friend and fellow Whig, Lord Foley. It was a typical eighteenth-century transaction, and it concluded in May 1793, when Reverend Parker was presented to his new parishioners by Bishop Hurd of Worcester. George Parker’s unlikely rise from yeoman’s son to country parson was complete.fn1

  Settling into Oddingley in the summer of 1793 Parker had his best years before him, but to his new parishioners he was unknown and untried and he must have been acutely aware that he was an outsider. In this corner of England the locals spoke with a slow, sloping accent. ‘You’ was ‘thee’ or ‘yaw’. ‘Nothing’ was pronounced ‘nought’ and ‘i’ became ‘oi’. Vowels were short and stunted, leaving ‘sheep’ as ‘ship’, and the ‘h’ was often lost altogether giving ‘ighest’ and ‘ill’. Pitt the surveyor remarked that during his time in the district he experienced many other provincialisms: of these, he explained, ‘an occasional visitor can pick up but a few;9 it requires long residence, and much colloquial intercourse with the middle and lower classes’. It was a new code to master, and one that Parker would never consider his own.

  In the years before mass transportation, at least a generation before the railways, Parker’s northern roots, his accent and mannerisms, distinguished him from the other villagers like sand from stone. In the 1790s much of the population of rural Britain was born, raised, lived and died within a handful of miles. Until 1795 wandering vagrants could still be sent back to their home parishes if they were suspected of burdening the poor rate, a law which lent some credence to Adam Smith’s bleak observation that it was more difficult for them ‘to pass through the artificial boundaries of a parish10 than the arm of the sea or a ridge of high mountains’. And while the poor were repelled, other newcomers were often tolerated uneasily.

  Parker’s life in Oddingley began quietly but with steady purpose. His appointment signalled a change for the villagers, who had been so neglected in recent years by their political and spiritual masters. The records show that Reverend Commeline was an absentee clergyman, paying clerical deputies to conduct services on his behalf with a portion of his salary. In the years 1780–92 the signatures of five curates fill the pages of the parish marriage register while Commeline’s does not appear once. Only with Parker’s appointment in 1793 does stability settle on the records.

  Parker’s ornate handwriting across the front of Oddingley’s parish records is one of the few tangible traces of his personality

  The Oddingley marriage register comprises one of a tiny number of documents that record life in the parish in the last decade of the eighteenth century. It’s a world for the most part lost to history, and observing it at a distance of more than two centuries is like peering into a darkened room lit only by dim chinks of light. Even so, traces of the new Reverend Parker can be found in these frail records. It is clear that he devoted his time and attention to his new parish, his application shown by the fact that he conducted all the important services himself. Parker’s relish for the job is also suggested by an odd fragment in the marriage register. Hard against the top of the parchment at the front of the book a careful and florid hand has writter, ‘The Marriage Register of Oddingley, from 1756.’ Underneath, with the ardour of an aspiring professional or of a freshly appointed manager keenly marking his new territory, comes in carefully crafted letters: ‘G. Parker, Rector.’

  Inside the calfskin cover of the other surviving parish register – a collection of notes tracking the Church’s business in the parish back into the middle of the seventeenth century – is a more definite sign of Parker. Here the quill begins with the same autograph: ‘G. Parker, Rector.’ The ink is thin and the P of Parker surrounded by dashing loops. Below is a sliver of autobiography, all composed in the third person with the characters slanting confidently to the left: ‘G. Parker was first invited to the rectory of Oddingley by the Ld Tho Foley on the 31 April on the resignation of S Commeline, he being presented by his Grace the Duke of Norfolk to the rectory of Hempstead, Gloucester.’fn2

  It’s a curious and enlightening passage. It is the source which reveals the duke’s role in his preferment, but it is also a throwaway scrap – perhaps penned in the idle hours of a lazy afternoon – that allows us to peer into Parker’s mind. There is pride and satisfaction at his achievement, which he relives in prose, jotting it down like a little victory. But there’s also something more. Why should Parker choose to record it in the parish register? Why should he, so new to the village, affix his signature and several celebratory lines to the head of a book which by then was more than a century old and intended for an utterly different purpose? None of Parker’s predecessors had been driven to such a thing, and it reveals either a calculated assertion of his presence or an unintentional slip of vanity.

  These traces of Parker stem from his first years in Oddingley, which were seemingly his happiest.11 He forged several friendships, one with Reverend Reginald Pyndar of the neighbouring parish of Hadzor, a justice of the peace, and another with Oddingley’s ubiquitous clerk, John Pardoe. In the mid-1790s Parker met and married Mary, a lady from a humble background, and commenced a happy marriage, which produced a daughter in 1799, also called Mary.

  The best account of Parker from this time comes in a memoir written by Benjamin Sanders, a button maker from Bromsgrove who met and befriended him while at Worcester planning his family’s emigration to America. The friendship between Parker and Sanders was brief, lasting just six months, but it was one of significant emotional intensity. Sanders’ recollections must date to the mid-1790s and they show Parker at his best.

  At Worcester I became acquainted with a clergyman,12 in a singular kind of way; we met merely by chance. It is wonderful how, where congeniality of disposition exists, how soon and firmly friendship gets cemented. Such was the case with the gentleman, the Rev. Mr Parker and myself. He had two livings, one at Hoddingley [sic] and another at Dorking, he wa
s a great favourite of the late Duke of Norfolk. We became most confidential friends. He would often hope my wife and I would alter our minds and remain in England, and that he would contribute half his fortune if we would do so, but our minds were fixed. We remained six months in Worcester. I went to Bristol and engaged our passage to New York (Alas! the time was now come for my father and me to part, never to see each other more in this world.) This was a severe trial, it seemed to penetrate to the innermost recesses of my heart; but my friend [Parker] was near me to give me consolation in my present affliction; he was a good and most sincere friend. He proposed to walk with us twelve miles, on the road, he informed me by the way that he should soon get married to a lady after his own disposition – a most amiable one I am certain.

  Here we catch a glimpse of Parker and Sanders together at their parting, two figures suspended in the landscape, almost like characters from a Wordsworth poem. The clean south road stretches out before them. There’s a cool Midland breeze, a roadside inn with its jutting sign, the fingerpost pointing the way to Bristol, the clatter of horses’ hooves, the rattle of the mail or the Birmingham coach with its pack of weary horses pressing on along the turnpike. And among them all this little party of travellers on foot: Parker, perhaps in a cassock or with his Geneva gown billowing, holds a pipe in his right hand and is in deep conversation with Sanders, who is warmly and soberly dressed for the voyage in his greatcoat and heavy leather boots, perhaps gripping a bag of keepsakes or a purse of guineas for the ship’s captain. There is a hint of excitement and an element of sadness as Parker confides his plans to marry. They know that they will never meet again.

  It’s an evocative account and about as close to Parker as one can get. Sanders depicts the young clergyman as a kind-hearted man, easy in the company of friends and capable of inspiring feelings of loyalty and trust. That Parker quickly fashioned a lasting emotional bond with Sanders – a man who was socially beneath him, as a member of the mercantile classes – pleading with him to stay in Worcestershire, comforting him for half a year prior to his departure and then accompanying him on the road for the opening stretch of a journey that would see him cross the Atlantic, evokes the image of a caring, altruistic personality.

  Sanders’ description tallies with other accounts of Parker. For the poor in Oddingley he was an attentive minister, ready to aid them with a glass of brandy, or to care, advise and comfort. He was compassionate enough to forfeit his tithe of milk to the old or the infirm, prompting a labourer, William Chance,13 to declare Parker ‘was good to the poor, and as good a man that ever lived’. Another farmhand, William Colley, echoed this sentiment, claiming, ‘Parker was as good a master to him as ever he had, and that he had never heard any ill of him except from two or three of the large farmers.’

  Such noble qualities manifested themselves in Parker’s friendship with Sanders. Perhaps the clergyman felt a kinship with the button maker, who was about to embark on a voyage of hope just as he had done himself 15 years before. Perhaps his motivation for trying to stop Sanders flowed from regret at his own ambition, or even a mournful longing for the quiet farm and settled life that he had left behind.

  But subtle evidence of Parker’s vanity also escapes from Sanders’ account. Parker tells him that he was a parson of ‘two livings’, one that Sanders incorrectly records as Hoddingley and a second at Dorking. That this was the case is possible. At the turn of the nineteenth century pluralism – the practice of drawing a salary from more than one ecclesiastical living at a time – was rife and a tolerated way for clergymen to top up their annual incomes. There is, however, no evidence that this is the case with Parker, and this detail supports the image of an aspiring man keen to document his successes and perhaps embellish the truth. This suspicion can only be strengthened by Sanders’ mention of ‘his fortune’. Clearly Parker and Sanders had discussed money during their brief friendship and evidently they shared some traits: they were both young, financially ambitious and willing to surrender the emotional ties of their homes and extended families in pursuit of a better existence elsewhere. But although Parker had certainly fared well in life thus far, talk of a fortune in the 1790s was presumptuous, and the lasting image of the two together, walking south along the turnpike road towards Bristol, is one of a pair of able thinkers driven on by ambition and fixed upon their own self-improvement.

  These were the qualities that would shortly drive Parker into a long and exhausting conflict with the Oddingley farmers. For them he had a problem of temperament: a maddening haughtiness that displayed itself at its very worst in his strict collection of the tithe, an ‘eternally vexatious subject’ which entitled Church of England clergymen to a tenth of the produce of the parish farms and formed the majority of their annual income. The tithe dispute deepened as the years passed, and by September 1805 of the seven ratepayers in Oddingley parish only two of them – Old Mr Hardcourt and John Perkins – could still sustain a conversation with Parker. By the rest he was seen as a rapacious swindler who stretched his powers to their furthest limit. The most militant farmers, Thomas Clewes of Netherwood, John Barnett of Pound Farm and Captain Evans of Church Farm, had come to consider each of Parker’s new demands as a test of character they were compelled to resist and challenge at every turn.

  The fallout from the quarrel was profound. Parishioners were caught between the factions: forced to choose between their spiritual leader and their employers, whom they were dependent on for subsistence. Previous years had been pockmarked by furious arguments, outbursts of violence and poisonous court cases. The situation had been exacerbated by the absence of a local squire who may have mediated between the parties, by Commeline’s absence, which had enabled the farmers to cultivate their independence, and by the fact that Parker was an outsider. The two parties were further separated by politics, with Reverend Parker’s ties to the Duke of Norfolk and Thomas Foley connecting him with the Whig cause in a countryside which remained overwhelmingly and staunchly Tory.

  Politics mattered during the 1790s. The French Revolution had fed a reformist movement in England which cleaved the country in two, with loyal Church and King enthusiasts,14 known as scrats, rising in noisy patriotic opposition to revolutionary sympathisers branded either Painites (after Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man) or Jacobins. This split dominated Parker’s first years in Oddingley, and was only soothed when the French Republic veered away from its early ideals and Bonaparte appeared as a common enemy. Divisions and uncertainties endured, however, and since the failure of the Treaty of Amiens in 1803 the Worcestershire countryside had throbbed with news about the renewed French war. Fears of a brutal English revolution had long simmered, with Robert Southey grimly confessing, ‘I believe that revolution inevitably must come,15 and in its most fearful shape.’ By the end of September 1805 parishioners in Oddingley were feeling the same anxieties as those in other corners of the United Kingdom. They were determined and nervous, patriotic yet on edge.

  Britain had been sustained throughout the war years by the career of Admiral Lord Nelson. His great victories at Cape St Vincent, the Battle of the Nile and the Battle of Copenhagen had become a source of national pride, a symbol of British courage, brazen skill and daring. Excited crowds had swarmed the streets during his brief visit to Worcester in 1802, where he had been granted the freedom of the city and had Copenhagen Street named in his honour. Three years later with Britain once again at war, the Worcester Herald had spent the summer months following his pursuit of the French fleet of Admiral Villeneuve across the Atlantic.

  Nelson had returned in late August, but there still remained a prospect of the French and Spanish fleets breaking out from their blockaded ports and massing in the English Channel. On Sunday 15 September Nelson was dispatched on what was to be his final mission from Portsmouth in the Victory. The newspapers reported that the admiral had sailed before a light breeze and at sunset was off Christchurch, to the west of the needles. At nightfall fog had come down and he was gone.16

  Al
l England followed developments, but locally there were other concerns. Many believed the country was being subverted by an organised network of French spies and conspirators. In Worcestershire a slew of robberies had been noticed and there were concerns over the rising number of animal thefts. Perhaps the worst indicator that the countryside was becoming more dangerous was the growing number of footpads and highwaymen who worked the county’s rural lanes. Particular attention had been given to the fate of a butcher named John Hilcox, who had been apprehended on his way northwards from Bristol the previous year ‘by a genteel-dressed man,17 mounted on a bay horse’ who had troubled him for his money and then shot him through the head.

  Then, on 28 September 1805, Berrow’s Worcester Journal carried a piece concerning the discovery of a concealed subterranean den in the Trench Wood, a thick oak and ash wood which sprawled across the long parish boundary between Oddingley and neighbouring Crowle.

  The following extraordinary and interesting discovery18 was made … in Trench Wood, near Oddingley, in this county. As a boy was gathering nuts among some bushes, at that place, his foot suddenly slipped into a hole, and he lost his shoe … Not being able to recover it, he informed a person of circumstance, who came to the place, upon searching the hole he found that the sides were covered with soot; this, of course, induced him to search further, and, upon clearing away some moss, he discovered a door in the ground … large enough for a man to descend through, and, a few feet further, some clay steps, which led to an apartment being about six feet square; the covering was made of black poles running across, which were closely covered on the outside with moss and bushes: it had also a fireplace and one small seat: in it were found some meat, which appeared to have been lately dressed [and] some cheeses.