Pope, His Descent and Family Connections: Facts and Conjectures — John Shaqi
Pope, His Descent and Family Connections: Facts and ConjecturesHunter, Joseph
History
Pope, His Descent and Family Connections: Facts and Conjectures
Hunter, Joseph
Poets, English -- 18th century -- Family relationships; Pope family; Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744 -- Family; Turner family
Of the two Turners, who died in the service of King Charles I., we have no
account even of their names. The other son, named William, left England to
serve in the Spanish army, which was also the course taken by one of the
young Rockleys of Worsborough, his "coetanean," and probably his friend.
He rose in that service to be what Pope calls "a general officer"; which
distinction, if it gave him rank like that of a general in the English
service, was one that, in such a controversy, Pope was undoubtedly
entitled to put forward as an honour to the family. I lament that more has
not been discovered concerning him, and more particularly that we have not
even that slender piece of autobiography, his will. We know, however, that
he retained to the time of his death some portion of the family property,
and left it to his sister, Edith Pope, perhaps then the sole survivor.
Of the fourteen daughters, it would seem that some may have died in
infancy or in very early life. The General used to speak of his _ten_
sisters, and to compare them with the five wise and five foolish virgins,
that is, five Roman Catholics, and five of the English Protestant Church;
but which, in his opinion, were the wise, and which the foolish, does not
appear in the family tradition preserved by John Charles Brooke, Somerset
Herald, who was descended of one of them.
To place them in the exact order of seniority is out of our power, though
a more thorough search in the Yorkshire parish registers might enable us
to do so.
All we can pretend to is to place them in an order approximate to the
truth; and I need not apprise the reader that where we have to deal with
so large a family, there must be a long interval between the elder and the
younger. At the birth of Pope, in 1688, his mother was forty-six, and some
of his aunts must have been sixty, or thereabouts.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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