Devonshire Characters and Strange Events

PETER PINDAR

John Wolcot, who published his poems under the sobriquet of Peter Pindar, was perhaps the most scurrilous poet in a scurrilous age. If this were a book of Minor Worthies of Devon, I should hesitate about admitting one who was in nothing worthy, but possessed wit caustic and cutting. He was as witty and not so coarse as Swift; witty but not so terse as Pope, and also without Pope’s fine touch.

John Wolcot was the fourth child of Alexander Wolcot by Mary Ryder his wife, and was born at Dodbrooke by Kingsbridge, baptized 9 May, 1738. His father was a country surgeon and the son of a surgeon. The Wolcot family was ancient; it had its origin at Wolcot in Thrushelton, where a moor still bears the name of Wollacot from a farm near by; the heiress of the eldest branch carried Wollacot to the family of Bidlake of Bidlake. A junior branch settled at Chagford, where “John Wolcot for his good service in ye Warres had an addition given him to his Armes, on Chief or, a lis betw. 2 Annulets.” One branch had a residence at Butterstone in Hemyock, where it remained for several generations. The lineal descent of John Wolcot, son of Alexander, from the heraldic family of that name has not been made out, but there can be little doubt that he was so descended.

Alexander Wolcot died 14 June, 1751, and John was left to the care of his uncle, John Wolcot, of Fowey. He was educated at the Kingsbridge Grammar School, and afterwards at Liskeard and Bodmin. In or about 1760 he was sent to France for a twelvemonth to acquire French. He does not seem to have been comfortable there, and he retained through life a distaste for the Gallic people: —

It was decided that he should be a surgeon, as had been his father and grandfather before him, and he went in 1762, to London, and lodged with his maternal uncle, Mr. Giddy, of Penzance. In 1764 he returned to his uncle at Fowey, with whom he lived as assistant till 1767. On 8 September of this year he graduated M.D. at Aberdeen.

Wolcot was connected, it is not clear how, with Sir William Trelawny of Trelawny, Bart., and on Sir William’s appointment in 1767 as Governor of Jamaica, Wolcot was, by his influence, appointed to accompany him as physician. Sir William had succeeded to the baronetcy in 1762, on the death of his cousin Sir Harry Trelawny. Sir Harry had married his cousin Letitia, daughter of Sir Jonathan Trelawny, and Sir William married Letitia, daughter of Sir Harry and Letitia. There was a saying —

and when Captain William fell in love with his cousin Letitia he and she knew that their union would be strongly opposed, indeed certainly forbidden, by her parents. Accordingly he prevailed on her to marry him in private, and this was done by her disguising herself in male attire, and being married to him privately one evening in the church, she dressed as a boy.

In Jamaica Wolcot found that there was but little opportunity for him to earn much by his profession, and Sir William proposed to him to take Holy Orders, so that he might appoint him to the rich benefice of S. Anne in the island. Wolcot, without the smallest vocation for Orders, looking only to the monetary value of the living, practically a sinecure, returned home in 1769 and was ordained deacon 24 June in that year, and priest on the following day, by the Bishop of London. Thus equipped he returned to Jamaica in March, 1770, hoping to find the incumbent of S. Anne’s dead – he had left when the man was ailing. But to his vast disgust the rector of S. Anne’s had taken on a new spell of life, and did not at all see his way to vacate the fat benefice to oblige Wolcot. John Wolcot was now given the incumbency of Vere, but lived most of his time in the Governor’s house, leaving a hired deputy to perform the duties of his cure.

Finding that there was little prospect of getting S. Anne’s he threw aside his Orders, reverted to his profession, and was appointed Physician-General to the troops on the island 21 May, 1770. He lived on terms of close friendship with the Trelawny family, where his broad humour, his sarcastic sallies, and his witty stories made him a delightful companion at the table over the wine.

“I was invited,” said he, “to sup with a rich planter and his wife. During the repast, my friend desired a female slave in waiting to mix some toddy, on which the black girl, in her peculiar way, asked him if it was ‘to be drinkey for dry, or drinkey for drunkey.’ When our supper was ended, and our water being exhausted, the planter sent his wife a short distance from the house for a fresh supply. The thunder and lightning being excessive during her absence, I said to him, ‘Why did you not send that girl (the slave) for water on such a night as this, instead of exposing your wife to the storm?’ ‘Oh, no,’ replied he, ‘that would never do. That slave cost me forty pounds.’”

Miss Anne Trelawny was not a little simple and credulous, and Wolcot delighted in hoaxing her. On one occasion, he informed her that a cherub had been caught in the Blue Mountains, and had been put in a cage with a parrot. Before morning, unhappily, the parrot had pecked out the eyes of the poor cherub, all which the lady believed as an indisputable fact. “The Nymph of Tauris,” which was printed in the Annual Register for 1773, was written by Wolcot on the death of this young lady, which occurred in Jamaica.

Sir William Trelawny also died in Jamaica on 11 December, 1772, whereupon Wolcot obtained leave from the new Governor, Dalling, 20 February, 1773, to return to England, accompanying Lady Trelawny, and it was thought not improbable by some that the lady would dry her tears and take Wolcot as her second husband, but death put an end to this scheme, if ever entertained, as she died in the month of August ensuing.

Dr. Wolcot had now entirely dropped his clerical character. He settled at Truro, where he established himself with a view to practising as a doctor. His peculiar treatment, which consisted in giving his fever patients doses of cold water, and his openly proclaimed opinion that a physician did more harm than good by cupping, bleeding, clystering, and by the administration of boluses and draughts, as also that the only good he could effect was by nudging on Dame Nature in the back when slow in recovering the sick, raised a storm against him among his fellow practitioners, and involved him in disputes. Polwhele speaks highly of his medical abilities. “I can say with truth that he had the credit not only of a skilful, but of a benevolent physician. In fevers, he was uncommonly successful. From consumption many were rescued by his hand who had been given up as irrecoverable. As a physician he prescribed medicines; he did more, he examined them, not trusting to the apothecary; and sometimes detected with indignation a cheap medicine substituted for a costly one. He was no favourite with the apothecaries and druggists of the place; but his merit, bearing all before it, showed the impotence of their resentment.”

He quarrelled also with the Corporation of Truro, and when that body attempted to avenge the lampoons he had written upon their vindictive management in planting parish apprentices on him, he removed to Helston in 1779, leaving behind him a characteristic letter: “Gentlemen, your Blunderbuss has missed fire. – Yours, John Wolcot.”

At Truro he had been allowed to drop in occasionally at Polwhele, but the old Mr. Polwhele was always uneasy with him at table, lest he should launch out into gross and unseemly jests and tales.

From Helston he moved to Exeter, practising, but meeting there with small success. At Exeter he made the acquaintance of William Jackson, the organist of the cathedral, and composer, and for him he wrote songs to set to music.

Owing to the success of his songs, Wolcot shifted to London in 1778, to devote himself wholly to the Muse. He took with him young Opie, whose abilities he had recognized; and it really was a token of great good nature that he endured the society of that “unlicked cub of a Carpenter Opie,” as Polwhele calls him, “who was seen now ludicrously exhibited by his keeper, Wolcot, – a wild animal of St. Agnes, caught among the tin works. Not to pick his teeth with a fork at dinner-time, nor at breakfast to ‘clap his vingers’ into the sugar-basin, etc., were instructions of Wolcot at a subsequent stage of Opie’s life when breakfast-rooms and saloons and drawing-rooms were thrown open to his excellence.

“At his first setting out at Falmouth, where it was Wolcot’s pride to exhibit him, he collected upwards of thirty guineas; and Wolcot was one day surprised to see him rolling about on the floor, where a quantity of money lay scattered. ‘See here (says Opie), here be I, rolling in gold.’”

Wolcot had never cared for his profession of medicine, and he was glad to shake it off. And now young Opie was ready for making his way in Town. Wolcot had first become acquainted with the young painter at the house of Mr. Zankwell, at Mithian, in 1775; he took him to his own house at Truro, provided the necessary material, gave him instructions and advice, for Wolcot himself handled the brush and palette, and when fully satisfied with the developing genius of Opie, persuaded him to move with him to London in 1781. An agreement was entered into between him and his protégé, by which both were to share equally in the profits made by the artist by the sale of his pictures. This was not an arrangement likely to last. Wolcot very highly estimated, and justly so, the advantage he had been to Opie, not only in providing for his artistic training, but also by getting him orders in Town; but Opie, as his fame grew, and his prices rose, was reluctant to continue the bargain and halve his profits with Wolcot. The origin of the quarrel is sometimes attributed to Opie’s having passed disparaging criticism on some of Wolcot’s paintings; but this was, if it took place, only one element in the contention that caused a final breach. Wolcot had indeed laid the foundation of Opie’s success, by introducing him to Mrs. Boscawen, and extolling his merits in verse.

In 1782 appeared “Lyric Odes to the Royal Academy, by Peter Pindar, Esq., a distant relative of the Poet of Thebes, and Laureat of the Academy.” They were clever and discriminating. Wolcot recognized the splendid genius of Sir Joshua Reynolds, and the merits of Gainsborough and Wilson. He made merry over a picture by Gainsborough in the Academy that year; but it was good-humouredly done.

The success of these lyrics was immediate, and induced Wolcot to continue the publication in 1783, 1785, and 1786. Having hit out at the Academicians and finding that this paid, he now struck at higher game. He knew that any miserable back-stairs gossip about the King and the Court would be greedily devoured. There was in London and in the country a sentiment of Jacobitism. The cause of the Stuarts was dead as Herod, but the prejudice against the House of Hanover continued strong. The German proclivities of George I and George II, who never liked England and the English, had alienated even those who sympathized with the claims of the House of Hanover. The simple life of George III, without state, with little dignity, and so homely as not to appeal to the imagination of the people, served as an admirable field for ridicule. There is not any evidence that Peter Pindar personally hated the King, and that his politics were anti-Hanoverian or anti-royal. He attacked the King and Court because he knew it would pay – that was his main inducement, another was equally unworthy. He hoped that the Government would give him some sinecure office, or some bribe in money to silence his slanderous tongue.

He began his assault on the private life of the King in the Lousiad, a poem in five cantos, the first four published in 1785, and the last in 1795. The subject was disgusting. It turned upon the King having discovered a specially nasty parasitical insect on his plate, and on thereupon ordering the shaving of the heads of his cooks and scullions, grooms of the kitchen, servants of the pantry, etc., to the number of fifty-one. A young man in the kitchen, John Bear, refusing to submit to this indignity, was dismissed his place.

The subject was inexhaustible, and these attacks on Royalty sold and brought in much money. Accordingly he worked indefatigably at it. He was supplied with plenty of information by the favourites of the Prince of Wales, who himself relished these attacks upon his father.

Peter Pindar jeered at the King’s little note-book in which he dotted down his observations.

Peter Pindar scoffed at the parsimony of George III. He scoffed at his personal appearance, his simple tastes, his attempt to enforce respect for the Sunday, his admiration for the music of Handel, above all his patronage of Benjamin West.

Let the Court, the fashionables, the vulgar populace admire West and purchase his wretched pictures, Peter will have none of him or of them. Then he tells an amusing tale of a Toper and the Flies. A group of topers sat about the table drinking punch. Flies joined the party, sipped the grog, fell by hundreds into the bowl.

The Queen had removed the cartoons of Raphael from Hampton Court to St. James’s, and had them cut down so as to fit the place which she designed them to occupy. This exasperated Peter to the last degree: it reminded him of a cutting story. In the last war the French prisoners died by scores, and the Mayor of Plymouth to accommodate a first cousin, a carpenter, gave him a contract for their coffins. The carpenter, thinking to save some pence on each coffin, made every one too short; and so as to accommodate the dead to the receptacles made for them, cut off the heads of the deceased prisoners and tucked them en chapeau bas under their arms.

To a Devonshire man one of the most amusing compositions of Peter Pindar is an account of the royal visit to Exeter in 1788, supposed to be written by a farmer of Moreton Hampstead to his sister Nan: —

On the occasion of the visit of the King, Queen, and the Royal Princesses, the Bishop of Exeter, John Ross, begged to be excused the honour of entertaining Majesty – the palace was not roomy enough, he was infirm, and so on; accordingly their Royal Highnesses were received by Dean Buller at the Deanery. Ross seems to have been a screw, and he dreaded the expense of entertaining Royalty. It was said of him that when his clergy were entertained by him there was no wine on the table, and they begged to be allowed to taste “his charming water.” The King and Royal Family went to the cathedral for Morning Prayer, after which Dean Buller showed them over the church; the King looked about

Wolcot adds in a note that the King actually did make this observation at Exeter, as well as at Salisbury some years later.

The royal entry into the city is most humorously described, and Mr. Rolle’s active attention to the King is hit off: —

It had been hoped that the King would make the round of the city and visit the Guildhall and Castle, but he declined to do this. The Mayor and Alderman had proposed a sumptuous repast at the Guildhall for His Majesty, but he declined to attend, much to their disappointment.

There is a rollicking swing about the whole composition, which keeps the narrative going like the steady onward pace of a racing eight-oar.

The conclusion at which Jan Ploughshare arrives is vastly droll: —

But among offensive things written on George III, perhaps the most offensive is his “Letter from Brother Peter to Brother Tom,” in which he contrasts the Prince of Wales with his father. In this and in his “Expostulary Odes” he treats the vices of the Prince as virtues – an obvious bid made for his favour. The good old King’s homely ways are drawn in the Letter with a pen dipped in gall, whereas it is plunged in honey for the Prince.

Peter Pindar spared few. Pitt he hated, because he had not bribed him; Sir Joseph Banks, Boswell – fair game – Hannah More, Bishop Porteus, who had ventured in a sermon to speak highly of Hannah; James Bruce, and many another.

To Lady Mount Edgcumbe he wrote a consolatory stanza on the death of her favourite pig.

In 1793, Wolcot sold the copyright of his public works to J. Walker for an annuity of £200, and it was stipulated that any future work should be offered to the same publisher.

On this occasion he craftily overreached the publisher. When Walker made the proposition to the doctor by letter it was with an offer of an annuity of two hundred pounds. Wolcot replied by appointing the publisher to call on him, that day week. He received him in deshabille, even in his nightcap; and, from having purposely abstained from shaving for four days, together with the naturally cadaverous complexion, his appearance was unhealthy; added to which, he assumed a hollow sepulchral cough. Walker had determined not to make any advance on the sum he had named, but when the doctor was again taken with a fit of coughing he was induced to make it two hundred and fifty pounds. This Wolcot peremptorily refused, and was seized with an attack of coughing that nearly suffocated him. The publisher, thinking it impossible that he could last long, agreed to make the annuity three hundred. But some time after, Pitt having passed a Bill through both Houses to restrain such libellous writings as those of Peter Pindar, the publisher, considering that the restraint thereby imposed would militate against his profits, filed a bill in Chancery against him, and got the sum reduced to two hundred. Wolcot was furious, and vowed vengeance against Walker, which he eventually accomplished, by living nearly twenty years afterwards.

But he presently met his match, William Gifford, also a Devonshire man; in his “Anti-Jacobin,” Gifford fell upon the poet, and in a review of his life called him “his disgustful subject, the profligate reviler of his Sovereign and impious blasphemer of his God.” Peter Pindar was quite unable to stand his ground against Gifford, whose “Epistle to Peter Pindar” was savage and caustic in the extreme (1800).

Wolcot was so infuriated that he sought to meet Gifford. They happened to meet in Wright’s shop in Piccadilly in the same year in which the epistle had appeared. A scuffle ensued, in which Wolcot was the aggressor, and got the worst of it. Peter retaliated with “A Cut at a Cobbler,” but it fell flat.