The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 09Stevenson, Robert Louis
General
The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition, Vol. 09
Stevenson, Robert Louis
English literature -- 19th century
This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of
"Westward Ho!" was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of
Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam. The Jenkins had now been long
enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be Kentish folk
themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in particular their
connection is singularly involved. John and his wife were each descended
in the third degree from another Thomas Frewen, Vicar of Northiam, and
brother to Accepted Frewen, Archbishop of York. John's mother had
married a Frewen for a second husband. And the last complication was to
be added by the Bishop of Chichester's brother, Charles Buckner,
Vice-Admiral of the White, who was twice married, first to a paternal
cousin of Squire John, and second to Anne, only sister of the Squire's
wife, and already the widow of another Frewen. The reader must bear Mrs.
Buckner in mind; it was by means of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began
life as a poor man. Meanwhile, the relationship of any Frewen to any
Jenkin at the end of these evolutions presents a problem almost
insoluble; and we need not wonder if Mrs. John, thus exercised in her
immediate circle, was in her old age "a great genealogist of all Sussex
families, and much consulted." The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost
seem to have been interchangeable at will; and yet Fate proceeds with
such particularity that it was perhaps on the point of name the family
was ruined.
The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant and
unpractical sons. The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and held the
living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an extreme example
of the clergy of the age. He was a handsome figure of a man; jovial and
jocular; fond of his garden, which produced under his care the finest
fruits of the neighbourhood; and, like all the family, very choice in
horses. He drove tandem; like Jehu, furiously. His saddle-horse, Captain
(for the names of horses are piously preserved in the family chronicle
which I follow), was trained to break into a gallop as soon as the
vicar's foot was thrown across its back; nor would the rein be drawn in
the nine miles between Northiam and the Vicarage door. Debt was the
man's proper element; he used to skulk from arrest in the chancel of
his church; and the speed of Captain may have come sometimes handy. At
an early age this unconventional parson married his cook, and by her he
had two daughters and one son. One of the daughters died unmarried; the
other imitated her father, and married "imprudently." The son, still
more gallantly continuing the tradition, entered the army, loaded
himself with debt, was forced to sell out, took refuge in the Marines,
and was lost on the Dogger Bank in the war-ship _Minotaur_. If he did
not marry below him, like his father, his sister, and a certain
great-uncle William, it was perhaps because he never married at all.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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