Bagehot

by James Grant

  Nobody in Langport, population 1,100 or so, had far to travel to reach any local destination. Hemmed in by hills and wetlands, it was compact, beautiful, and ancient. Romans, Saxons, Danes, and Britons had lived there (at times fighting over it) for 1,600 years. The Chantry Chapel of the Blessed Virgin, locally known as the Hanging Chapel, dated from the thirteenth century. In 1645, Oliver Cromwell’s New Model Army defeated the royalist forces of Charles I at the Battle of Langport. Market days and annual fairs, exciting fixtures of town life, had their origin in the charter that Elizabeth I signed in 1562. A nine-arched medieval bridge crossed the river Parrett, which ran through the center of town and was Langport’s commercial lifeblood. The town was planted at the first ford from the mouth of the river; it’s the point at which the Parrett meets the river Yeo to form a navigable waterway to Bridgwater and to the sea beyond.1

  As a Langport pedestrian of 1826, you could walk the winding main street, called Bow at one end and Cheapside at the other. You could climb Herd’s Hill, overlooking the town from the west, or Langport Hill, which peers down from the east, and pause to absorb the view: to the north, the tower of St. Mary’s church in nearby Huish Episcopi, where members of the Bagehot family sometimes worshipped; to the west, the Burton Pynsent monument, a 140-foot-high tribute to the man who settled a fortune on William Pitt the Elder, the statesman having removed a tax that weighed on his benefactor’s cider business.

  You could look in on the bustling quay, where dockworkers loaded the barges that plied the Parrett to Bridgwater and back. You could walk up the slope leading to All Saints church, with its octagonal tower, its fifteenth-century stained-glass window, and its ornamental “punky dunks,” as the Somerset people called them—not gargoyles, exactly, as a proper gargoyle serves an architectural function. You could not range far into the surrounding flood-prone moors before getting your feet wet. In winter, the wettest part of the year, the townspeople sometimes traversed the streets in rowboats.

  In 1826, the floodwaters were financial. Walter’s father, Thomas Watson Bagehot—Watson to friends and family—was thirty years old when the storm broke. More than an officer of Stuckey’s Bank, he was one of its six partners. This lofty station carried with it an unlimited personal liability. As he earned his pro rata share of the profits of the bank, so was he responsible for his portion of its debts.

  Fearful though the times were, the new father did not despair. Having survived the panic, Stuckey’s stood to gain in prestige, therefore in depositors, and business value.2 There was a second cause for confidence: Watson had married a Stuckey. His wife—Walter’s mother—was a widow named Edith Estlin. Born Edith Stuckey, she was the sister of Vincent Stuckey, chairman of the bank and nephew of Samuel Stuckey, the founder.

  Marriage and money had bound together generations of Stuckeys and Bagehots. Before the bank opened its doors in or about 1770, the families were partners in a shipping business. At the moment, Vincent was a business partner not only of Watson Bagehot but also his father, Robert Codrington Bagehot, grandfather of the newborn Walter. Watson’s sister, Mary, was married to John Stuckey Reynolds, whose mother was Vincent Stuckey’s sister.3 Altogether, Watson’s banking career was probably as safe as any in the midst of Britain’s worst financial upheaval.

  Watson and Edith had married in 1824; she was thirty-eight, he twenty-eight. In Langport, the union was accounted a dynastic inevitability. The townspeople likely banked at Stuckey’s if they banked at all, and not a few of them worked on Stuckey and Bagehot barges, or in the Stuckey and Bagehot salt works. As between the two clans, the keepers of local reputation accounted the Stuckeys the richer, the Bagehots the better bred. A Sir Thomas Bagehot, Master of the Buckhounds to King James I, and a number of generations of major landowners at Prestbury, near present-day Cheltenham, figured in the family history.

  Edith had a quick wit, a sense of fun, good looks, and a volatile personality. She was given to acts of charity—thrusting a £5 note into the hand of a needy visitor, raising funds to build a church for the poor, dispensing smiles and friendship all around, and with none of the condescension that might have been expected from a member of a prominent local family. People loved her—and they pitied her, too, as she was known to be mad.

  Widowed at the age of twenty-eight, Edith brought three sons to her marriage with Bagehot. Vincent, the eldest, was born feeble-minded. A second son died of illness and a third in a carriage accident. Walter was the second child of her second marriage. The first-born, Watson, was three when he died in 1827. A second Watson, called Watty, the son of a widowed naval officer of some family relation, arrived years later to become Walter’s foster brother. Some ascribed Edith’s mental illness to the many deaths she bore. It wasn’t uncommon in those days; of the ten children born to Vincent and Julia Stuckey, eight died young.4

  Edith was an adherent of the Church of England, and few sects were further removed from her conception of true religion than the stripped-down Protestant faith of Walter’s Unitarian father or of her first father-in-law. John Prior Estlin, LLD, was a Unitarian divine who conducted a literary correspondence with Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Robert Southey. John Bishop Estlin, a brother of Edith’s deceased husband, had earlier married Watson Bagehot’s sister Margaret. She died in 1821, after the birth of her first child, Mary Anne. The widowed Estlin, himself a Unitarian, became a famous ophthalmic surgeon, the founder of a charitable dispensary for the treatment of eye disease in Bristol, a writer in support of Christian miracles, and an adherent of temperance, abolition, and religious tolerance. Mary Anne, taking after her father, was likewise a Unitarian, a feminist, and a radical abolitionist, who pressed England’s antislavery organizations to take up the uncompromising ardor of the American radical William Lloyd Garrison.

  A snapshot of life at Bank House was furnished by a visiting cousin, George H. Sawtell, in about the year 1835; Walter was nine, Vincent was twenty-nine. (Watty, a boy about Walter’s age, goes unmentioned.) Recalled Sawtell:

  I was introduced to the scene of [Walter’s] studies which were being conducted (in the room over the entrance door of the Bank House) after a very singular fashion and apparently with a view to induce concentration of thought. He was “doing sums” with about twenty clocks all ticking in unison and striking to the minute around him (such being Vincent Estlin’s whim of the hour), while his mother read “Quentin Durward” in as high a key and as rapidly as was possible, for the benefit of poor Vincent.5

  The head of this manic household was second in command at the bank, a junior partner in the various Stuckey and Bagehot shipping, warehousing, and merchant enterprises. It was he, Watson Bagehot, who could be counted on in directors’ meetings to move that a portion of the bank’s earnings be paid out as bonuses for the employees. Bagehot worked the then customary six days a week. On the seventh day he led Unitarian services in the family parlor. In the few free hours left over, he painted watercolors, carried out landscaping projects, or drove into the surrounding countryside to be alone with his thoughts. From time to time, he served as a school trustee and as the town’s port supervisor. He said that he didn’t mind the occasional bout of illness as good health afforded him so little rest.

  A photographer captured the elder Bagehot in prime middle age. The subject is seated, his left arm slung over the back of the chair, his right leg half-crossed over the left. His face is composed, his posture upright. Evidently he is healthy—indeed, he would outlive his famous son. “Remarkably plodding,” cousin Sawtell called Watson.6 One might rather have judged him overwhelmed. He lived in two shadows, his wife’s at home, his brother-in-law’s at the bank.

  Vincent Stuckey was Langport’s grandee. He planned canals, bestowed gifts, testified before Parliament, maintained a fashionable house in London, gave balls, kept hounds, owned land, manufactured salt, and ran the bank.* A portrait depicts him in muttonchop whiskers. His face is wide, his eyebrows heavy, his torso thick. His eager eyes are those of the young man who, in 1790, a
pproached a high-placed Somerset neighbor out of the blue to ask for an introduction to the prime minister, William Pitt. “Well, I do not see why I should not,” replied Lady Chatham, who happened to be Pitt’s mother. Her letter in hand, Stuckey went to London, presented himself to Pitt, got himself a clerkship at the Treasury, served in positions of increasing responsibility that brought him into personal contact with Pitt and the financial authority William Huskisson, and, after ten years of service, returned to Langport to marry his first cousin, Julia, the youngest daughter of the founding banker, Samuel, in 1801.7 Before long, Vincent was on the Stuckey payroll; by 1807 he was effectively the bank’s senior partner; in 1812, upon Samuel’s death, he became the head of the institution in fact; in 1826, he was made chairman of a merged collection of banks gathered under the corporate banner of Stuckey’s Banking Company.

  Vincent didn’t just go looking for money; money also seemed to go looking for him. Sometime after his return to Langport, he found that a certain Squire Stuckey of Branscombe, in the county of Devon, had remembered him in his will. Vincent was no relation of the deceased but had rather dropped by to introduce himself, one Stuckey to another. The visitor charmed the squire, and vice versa, and the two stayed in touch. Vincent called the unexpected bequest—a life interest in two of the squire’s estates—his “shower of prosperity.” He pumped the proceeds into his bank.

  All doted on little Walter. According to the loving testimony of his paternal grandmother, the newborn was a “large, handsome fellow who can already make the nursery ring with his strong voice, tho he is generally quiet.” Before long, it wasn’t the boy’s voice but his eyes that excited comment—“large, wild, fiery, black,” as they struck one observer years later.8

  It was clear from early on that Walter was different. At age four or five he was starting to write. At six, he was complaining that he had read the covers off his copy of Daily Food for Christians, a collection of 365 meditations. As children’s literature was scarce, the eager pupil was directed to Sir Walter Scott and Charles Dickens.9 When he was seven, Walter was writing poetry. His father commended him on this feat in a letter dated June 17, the day before the anniversary of the Battle of Waterloo. To mark the famous victory, Watson presented the boy with a sword and asked him to ponder: “How would you have liked living at Brussels when the cannons began to roar and the soldiers were summoned to the field?”10

  Edith Bagehot knew some Greek, read voraciously in English, and self-published some devotional verse. The elder Bagehot was a sturdy reader and possessed an extraordinary memory—he could “quote chapter and verse, any part of the Bible you can name,” Edith boasted. Both parents were determined to give their precocious son the schooling which they had not had. “Every day,” the father wrote to his boy, “I feel how much I have lost in not having had such an education as I wish to give you, and you need not therefore fear that anything will be wanting on my part to secure to you its advantages.”11

  At the age of eight or nine Walter began attending classes at the Langport Grammar School under the more than capable master, William Quekett. At age twelve, he was writing extracurricular essays for his father on topics including the Battle of Marathon, St. Augustine, and Julius Caesar. The thirteen-year-old student had read the Aeneid (in Latin, of course), among other works of Virgil. He had conquered some mathematics and probably read some Wordsworth; master Quekett and the poet had been schoolfellows. Some hint of the high quality of Quekett’s teaching is evident in the lives of his own four sons, two of whom achieved eminence in science, with John, a histologist, becoming a member of the Royal Society; another in the clergy; and a fourth achieving, if not eminence, then competence, in finance, as the secretary of Stuckey’s Bank.12

  Langport was a scrum of contending Christian faiths when Walter was going to school. More than one family was split as the Bagehots were, with adherents of the established church lined up against dissenters. Walter, attending Unitarian services with his father in the morning and Anglican services with his mother in the afternoon, favored the Church of England. The town made room for Baptists, Wesleyans, Plymouth Brothers and Sisters, and members of the Home Missionary Society. It set a place for heathens, too. “From time immemorial,” contended James Moreton, a dissenting minister, “Langport was a stronghold of the powers of darkness, proverbial for ignorance of spiritual things, prejudice and wickedness.”13

  Be that as it may, the market town was putting aside some of its eighteenth-century folkways. Walter was born too late to partake in the bull-, bear-, and badger-baiting, pugilism, backsword play, sword-and-dagger contests, and dueling that had delighted earlier and rougher generations of townspeople.14 Still, drunks spent time in the stocks, and people turned out for the festive “Hang Fair Days” in nearby Ilchester. Changed was the composition of the crowds. When the trapdoor opened under the feet of the condemned, fewer spectators of the Bagehot and Stuckey social stratum were likely to be cheering.15

  A transportation hub, Langport had the sights and sounds to entrance a little boy. Stuckey–Bagehot barges moved goods to and from Bridgwater. At Langport, the cargo was unloaded and piled on to waiting horse-drawn carts, which could line the length of Bow and Cheapside. The London–Taunton–Barnstaple coach changed horses next to the family quarters at Bank House.16 The mail coaches pounded up to the Langport Arms. Returning from a season in London, Vincent Stuckey would sweep into town in his carriage with postilion.17

  Not long after Walter’s birth, his town-dwelling paternal grandparents built a higher and drier house on Herd’s Hill, a two-story Regency-style villa set on spreading grounds. Walter loved to play there. Whacking his sword this way and that, he annihilated his enemies (the heaps of dead resembling weeds and flowers). He moved with his parents into Herd’s Hill upon his grandfather’s death in 1836, Watson taking care to transplant a prized mulberry tree from the Bank House yard.

  In some visible ways, young Walter was an ordinary boy. He delighted in climbing trees and running around the observation deck of the Pynsent monument with his mother watching below, her heart in her mouth. Riding since the age of four, he thrilled to hunt; on horseback, he was accounted something of a daredevil.

  In other respects, Walter was not so much a boy as a miniature middle-aged man. He complained of a weak chest, nervous strain, headaches, and the none-too-extreme heat of the Langport summers. And it was no ordinary boy who marveled that Dr. Johnson preferred “Goldsmith’s history of Greece to any composition of Robertson or Hume.”18

  Walter went as far in the Langport Grammar School as Mr. Quekett could take him. In 1839, at the age of thirteen, his parents enrolled him in Bristol College, founded eight years earlier by Unitarian freethinkers. That fact commended the place to Watson Bagehot, who knew Bristol as the home of a thriving Stuckey’s office. Edith Bagehot judged the city heretical,19 though there was one mitigating factor: Dr. James Prichard, a renowned anthropologist and physician, was on the college’s faculty. Prichard was married to Anne Maria Estlin, a daughter of her first father-in-law. The scholar, a kind of brother-in-law, was an Anglican.

  Bristol College offered instruction in science—a rarity in secondary-school curricula of the day—as well as the classics; optional was the teaching of doctrine of the Church of England. The school’s Unitarian progenitors could see that the times were changing. Popular pressure for the expansion of the electoral franchise crystallized the Great Reform Act of 1832. In and out of Parliament, there was agitation for a reapportionment of political power away from the old landed interests and in favor of the rising commercial classes, well represented in Bristol—and, indeed, at Herd’s Hill in Langport.

  The reformers were not mistaken in their reading of English political currents. The year 1832 brought not only landmark reform but also the famous Bristol riots, an explosion of popular fury against the English ruling classes, both political and ecclesiastical. Mobs attacked the cathedral and burned the bishop’s house. In the aftermath, four alleged ring
leaders were tried and condemned to death. Ten thousand citizens signed a petition for clemency, in vain.20

  Perhaps Walter’s mind was elsewhere. Besides classics, he studied Hebrew, German, and mathematics. Under the instruction of Dr. Prichard, he was exposed to the exciting new doctrine of evolution. “I dined at the Prichard’s a day or too ago,” the rapt pupil reported home. “The Doctor had two friends there talking about the Arrow-headed character and the monuments of Pentapolis, and the way of manufacturing cloth in the South Seas.”21

  “Work as hard as you can, but be modest,” his father admonished him, “for to be so is a great charm in boys, and the more so, the cleverer they are.” Try as Walter might, there was no hiding what lay behind those burning black eyes. He counted only a few of his thirty-odd classmates as his intellectual equals. He scorned the others, calling them the “mob,” and they returned the compliment. “I was carried out just now to play with some of the other boys,” Walter reported to Langport from what seems the early phase of his school career:

  I wanted to do my mathematics and to mug China; but they took me out, and because I would not play when I got out there, tied me up to the railings and corked me as hard as they could with a ball which made me play whether or no. They very often beg me to come out, when they have not enough to make up their game; and it is hard to spoil their game; and if I do; I get a kick every now and then; and sometimes a blow for every time I open my mouth. It is not at all a pleasant thing to be on bad terms with any of one’s schoolfellows, much more with all. This has prevented me from doing as much mathematics with Mr. Bromly lately as before.22