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Unto Us a Son Is Born who looks more like a fine boy of a year and a half than one of a half an hour old. You have now therefore another brother whom I hope to see you in the course of the next month nursing. My dear Cecil has had an excellent good time of it and appears likely to do very well—Eliza is weeping for joy; and her dear affectionate heart makes her think it the most wonderfully lovely babe that ever was born—I will leave it to others, when they can find time, to tell you what sort of an old fool I am–
Thus a delighted John Thelwall wrote to his daughter Sara, on August 4, 1831, on the
birth of his son Weymouth Birkbeck, who seems almost to have attempted to catch up
with his father before he was an hour old.
Sixty-seven years old at Weymouth’s birth, John Thelwall may have felt himself an
“old fool,” but he was still an enthusiastic political agitator and orator. In the
letter announcing the birth, he informs Sara that “alternations of public exertions,
a little tuition and much propensity to enjoy the long forbidden charm of quiet
study” have preoccupied him over the previous weeks. Those public exertions included
his work as a leader of the St. Mary le Bone and St. Pancras parish committee, in
support of the Political Union of the Working Classes (Place sec. 23). The following
October he was to play an important role in the successful organisation of a huge
procession of the union’s members, involving tens of thousands of disaffected
supporters of the first Reform Bill from all the parishes in London who marched
through the city in protest at its defeat by the House of Lords (Place sec. 23). One
of the reforms Thelwall had supported as early as 1795, the religious and political
emancipation of Irish Catholics,
The religious toleration that had always marked the work of John Thelwall (catholic
in the sense of liberal and broad-minded) would shape the lives of his sons in very
different ways. Though there is little evidence that he ever converted, his marriage
to Henrietta Cecil Boyle in 1817 indicates a softening in his earlier staunch
atheism.
Growing up in the Church that his stepbrother so fiercely attacked, Weymouth
Thelwall’s nature combined Algernon’s restlessness and Hampden’s practicality with
the many-minded creativity of their common sire. Only three years old when his father
died, he and his mother were left almost destitute, dependent upon Hampden and other
relatives and friends.
The little we know of Weymouth’s schooldays comes from the drama critic Percy Hetherington Fitzgerald in his
And what odd types there were! Such was Thelwall, son of the great Radical agitator and elocutionist, the friend of Charles Lamb. There was a son of Thelwall’s “speaker” and I must say he inherited the parental gift and could declaim with great tragic feeling. I remember his spending weeks carving a Roman head on a piece of stone with a penknife, and a clever performance it was. (Fitzgerald 41)More ominously in the light of later events, Weymouth was also the “money taker” for bets made on the students’ cricket matches, one of which was the cause of a rift between Fitzgerald and Thelwall when a school-wide political feud was running based on divisions of loyalty during the land league agitation.
Upon his departure from Stonyhurst in 1847-48, Weymouth Thelwall immediately joined
the Foreign Office. In 1859, whilst working as a clerk in the War Office, he married
Marian Wrather, firstly in a Catholic and then in an Anglican Church; and a daughter,
Edith Fanny Thelwall, was born in 1862.
Weymouth’s misfortunes were compounded by the death of his mother, announced in
At Windsor in great distress, Mrs Thelwall, widow of John Thelwall, so well known for the part he took in the political struggles at the end of the last century, and who was tried for high treason and acquitted. (“Deaths” 529)Her death occurred in February, just two months after Weymouth’s bankruptcy hearing, in a squalid little backstreet, Grove Place, where the cost of unfurnished rooms was in the order of four shillings a week. This was a huge step down for the beautiful and talented woman who had once welcomed London literati to Thelwall’s gracious house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields, boasting “a capital grand piano,” fine paintings and prints, a library of over six thousand books and quality mahogany furniture, all of which, along with the valuable lease, had been put up for auction in 1820 (“Sales” 4). Cecil’s death certificate, signed by Weymouth, states that she died “of general decay,” which perhaps makes her obituary an indictment of those who had declined to offer a pension to John Thelwall in later life, when the fruits of the reform movement’s early struggles were beginning to be enjoyed by those who had often resisted them, including those who had caused Weymouth to be dismissed.
Yet with the rakish resilience of Thelwall’s genius, Incubus, in his play
But it was not only in his amorous, artistic and theatrical passions that Weymouth
revived the spirit of his father. During this same period, he travelled in Norway and
contributed notes to the Norwegian Tourist Club, giving details of an intrepid trek
across a glacial valley in extremely harsh weather, and an account of a visit to the
Voring waterfall (“Notes and Suggestions” 104-06). Here the son of the Peripatetic
has succeeded the youthful actor, and the painter of words also begins to flourish.
His description of the valley, reached only after an heroic attempt to overcome the
dangers of a hostile environment, recalls the mix of touristic sublime and
socio-scientific pragmatism that characterized his father’s groundbreaking pedestrian
excursions: The beauties of this magnificent foss are now by no means
appreciated, as visitors are obliged to rush at it from Viig, reaching it tired
and taking the chance of seeing it at its best or its worst according to the mercy
of the weather or the guides. I saw it with a 3/4 rainbow spanning the whole mist
filled chasm, and nothing could exceed its poetic grandeur. The payments &c.
for guides ought also to be regulated . . . . (105-06)
Like his father’s
mock-heroic Peripatetic dangling from cliff tops and battlements, Weymouth presents
himself as a bold and occasionally reckless adventurer rather than merely a tourist,
then undercuts his heroism by drawing attention to his failures (his ascent of the
Justedal Glacier was left unfinished because he forgot to wear nailed boots). He also
makes practical “suggestions” for “improvements” for the benefit of tourists, such as
chiselled-out footholds, stepping stones, and cromlech-style route markers
(107-08).
While Weymouth was in Norway, back in London Helena danced, touring much of England with her troupe of “Hungarian” dancers and receiving good reviews. The reason that this is known is rather surprising. There is a fine leather-bound folio in the Foreign Office archives containing over forty pages of correspondence on the
Weymouth had written to the Foreign Office in September 1875, extremely worried
about his “niece, Miss Helen Fielding” who was taken to Moscow by a Mr Becker
of whom I have not heard very pleasing accounts. I know her to be entirely without
money and therefore request that a telegram be sent to ask the Vice Consul to
ascertain her whereabouts and her safety and asking the assistance of the foreign
office in paying for her passage home and those of her troupe as may need it. (At
my expense of course).
In due course a telegram and letters flew between Moscow and Nizhniy
Novgorod, between Lord Derby and his senior civil servants, and between the said
Helena and a special agent who was sent from Moscow to “find her out.” She refused to
return to England as she had found “engagements for the Winter,” but two of her
troupe wished to do so, and she said she would be obliged if they could be
repatriated under the distressed British subjects scheme. The problem was that
Weymouth objected to paying for the (obviously delighted) agent sent to accompany
these “helpless girls” on their perilous winter journey to the coast, and despite the
Vice Consul’s protests he did not pay. Eventually a court order for prosecution
issued from the Treasury and an agreement was reached in which he promised payment of
the £61 by a bill drawn on the proprietor of the
In the “Helena Fielding” affair and its African aftermath, we see the complicated conjunction of international trade and travel, colonial bureaucracy, artistic entrepreneurship and sheer, stubborn recklessness that would shape the final chapter in the curious life of Weymouth Thelwall. Though now an additional motive for his African journey was to pay for Helena’s expenses, he seems to have had the trip in mind for some time, possibly inspired in part by the heroic example of David Livingstone, whose immensely popular travels, themselves displaying the same mix of commercial and cultural enterprise, had ended with his death in 1873, followed by a huge state funeral at Westminster Abbey (Ross 247). In addition to his contract with the
Besides my main artistic purpose, I am fitting myself to make the most of my journey in a scientific sense, by making natural history collections, taking observations so I intend to lose sight of nothing, and if there is any probability of my being able to communicate with and succour Stanley or Cameron, I should be glad to attempt it . . . . I do not propose to do anything very great in the way of exploration and travel, in this my first attempt in Africa; but I shall do all I find myself able to do, and I hope to make it the foundation of further systematic, and self supporting travels, of which the scientific and philanthropic results may be really valuable.He closes this letter by saying he has just received a letter from Captain Burton,
by which I see I may meet him at Zanzibar and have the advantage of his council and experience.To see a son of John Thelwall associating himself with Morton Stanley (the journalist who had done so much to create Livingstone’s heroic reputation) and Richard Burton (the heroic but rakish scholar-explorer who captivated the Victorian imagination while challenging Victorian pieties), underlines the connection between the romantic idealism of the early nineteenth century and the colonial and commercial explorations and exploitations to which it gave birth. Just as Stanley gravitated to Livingstone, so Thelwall intends to “succour” Stanley, one in a long line of peripatetic journalist-adventurers belatedly following in the footsteps of charismatic father/brother-figures, whose quest leads them into the moral quagmire of ambitions, expectations, opportunities, and disillusionments that was colonial Africa.See W. B. Thelwall’s letter to Sir Harry Rawlinson of Dec. 15, 1875.
The line between the Romantic peripatetic and the Victorian explorer is deepened by the curious coincidence that among the groups whose support Weymouth sought for his African adventure were Scottish dissenters whose mission was built on the same progressive educational foundations that John Thelwall had helped lay. Weymouth wrote to the Livingstonia committee of the Free Church of Scotland, which with the support of several wealthy Glasgow industrialists had established their first Livingstonia mission station at Lake Nyassa in 1875, in honour of Livingstone’s dream of educating and converting the African tribes he encountered, and of eradicating slavery by setting up “industrial” educational missions. In this endeavour, Livingstone drew on his own background as a working-class boy whose self-education was capped by his studies at Anderson’s College in Glasgow (Ross 11-13). Founded in 1796, this institution was the home of George Birkbeck’s famous mechanics’ classes of 1800-04, which after 1823 grew into the mechanics’ institute movement that did so much to shape the British system of colonial education and industry (Kelly 26-36). This was the very institution that John Thelwall visited in 1804, where he and Birkbeck discussed the “operations and cooperations” that led to the founding of his own Institute (Letter to Anderson). Indeed, Thelwall’s lifelong friendship with Birkbeck is honoured in the middle name of his son. Thus in his very identity, Weymouth embodies the principles that Victorian colonialism inherited from Romantic radicalism.
Weymouth’s letters to the Livingstonia Committee also show the complex and morally ambivalent geopolitical realities, commercial interests and religious tensions in which this idealistic and progressive effort was tangled. For in one letter he proposes “to bring 20 sniders [rifles] with me, and to form a well armed little party, as fast as I can find trustworthy men,” adding that he has been a very “zealous Sergeant of volunteers, having gone through the Hythe course, and hold[s] a certificate of qualification as Sergeant instructor of musketry.” Moreover, he is not “without hope that the presence of a Roman Catholic well accredited by his own ecclesiastical superiors may have a valuable effect on the Portuguese there, as showing the united earnestness of all Britain in this business” (
Thelwall got the answer he was looking for from the Livingstonia Committee; urged to join a reinforcement party travelling to the Cape, he gladly agreed, eager to “acquaint himself with all the members of the party” and to “share equitably in all expenses of transport etc. up to the arrival at the Nyassa Station” (
Weymouth Thelwall sailed from London on the
He is an agreeable, plausible man but I fear not a good one . . . . I wish he could be shipped home as if he goes on ordering goods without any means of paying for them he will give the place a bad name. (Stewart, Letter to Duff)Stewart’s nephew, the civil engineer James Stewart, recorded in his published journal for January 1878 that Thelwall’s visit to the Established Church of Scotland’s Blantyre Mission in the Shire Highlands had made a bad impression. Stewart had been “distinctly told not to trust him.” According to Stewart, “Thelwall seemed dissatisfied about something but made no complaint. He left without saying goodbye” (
Published accounts refer merely to a hunting accident. Thelwall tried to save
ammunition by finishing off a wounded baboon with his rifle butt. The force of the
blow, however, discharged the second bullet into his chest. The Livingstonia mission
journal, however, goes into more detail in a report given by the native porters who
had been with him. It tells a tale of isolation and probable despair. Whatever funds
Thelwall had begun with and stores he may have managed to buy initially, he was at
this stage unable to secure porters, who worked for lengths of calico cloth. He had
been travelling for about nine days out of the Livingstonia mission, in March 1878,
when he camped a day’s march from a village: Further particulars from the men
are to the effect that all went well until Mangombi’s village was reached. From
that time forward Mr Thelwall appeared in a desponding state of mind. When he
rested he buried his face in his hands and generally kept muttering to himself.
His appetite seemed to fail him and he subsisted chiefly on native beer and wine.
He became less active than formerly seldom rising before ten o’clock.
According to the men, he had risen shortly before noon and, not delaying to
dress (his blood-stained shirt was submitted as evidence), had armed himself and one
of his men with rifles and another with a fowling piece. They had then set off a
hundred yards to the foot of a hill to hunt baboons. Reading between the lines, it
appears that Thelwall may have been lacking stores, and from the account given by the
two Stewarts it is possible that he was not given much assistance at Blantyre. But
one must also suspect that Thelwall may have pondered taking his own life.
After his death, his followers trekked back to “Mponda’s village” on the lake where they were given a canoe to return by. They transported Thelwall’s body back there during a storm, but were refused permission to bury it until they paid the chief, Mponda, with Thelwall’s supplies of gunpowder and wine. He was buried some distance from the village (now a town in central Malawi) under a great baobab tree. Robert Laws, the leader of Livingstonia, later pulled down a Union Jack marking the grave, saying Mponda would use it on one of his raids (Livingstone 133-34). Thus, the last direct descendant of John Thelwall lies in an unmarked grave, even further off the beaten track of British history than his father’s gravesite in Bath, itself long-forgotten until Steve Poole’s recent restoration campaign. It is a far cry from the national honours paid to Livingstone, who had profited from the reforms that John Thelwall, without recognition, had helped to institute.
Like his father’s, Thelwall’s fate was in some part sealed by his refusal to conform to contemporary pieties and proprieties. None of the missionaries who mention him seems to have had a good word for him, and this may have been partly due to his Catholicism. Edward Young, the first Livingstonia expeditionary leader and captain of the mission’s
—save only—must I say it—with one exception; for an individual who had arrived out from England with this missionary detachment of labourers in Christ’s field felt himself debarred by conscientious scruples from doing as we did. (Young 238)This “individual” was obviously Weymouth, but Young cannot even give his name. Like his father, Weymouth is almost erased from history. Yet tellingly, the liberty of conscience for which the Thelwall name has always stood, lives on in this record.
There is very little information about what actually did come out of Thelwall’s African expedition. There are numerous records of the specimens he sent back: butterflies, lizards and plants, including some listed with his name in the catalogues of the British Museum and several journals of the time. Some paintings too may survive, though it is difficult to know which, if any, of the watercolours that anchor his continuing reputation as a minor English artist were among the effects sold in the months after his death. Like his father’s, Weymouth’s archive has been scattered and lost (and this includes any mementoes of his father’s that he may have carried with him). And yet, while neither name, nor goods, nor even an epitaph lives on, Weymouth Birkbeck Thelwall may have had a broader influence than we realize, in part through his very Catholicism (in both senses of the word).
While the Scottish missionaries disapproved of his manner and morals, there is some evidence that Weymouth Thelwall found friends or at least sympathizers among Catholics in Africa. He is mentioned specifically as having influenced the setting-up of the first Jesuit missionary station in central Africa after he had “a long conversation” with Bishop James Ricards in Cape Town on his way to the Lake Nyassa mission station in 1876. Ricards wrote to Father Alfred Weld, another old Stonyhurst boy, enthusing about a plan of sending missionary priests to Lake Nyassa, which had apparently been Thelwall’s suggestion (Dachs and Rea 17). Likewise Frederick, Baron Lugard, gives Thelwall a measure of sympathy in an account written ten years after Thelwall’s death, by which time, as one of the few and first Europeans on Lake Nyassa, his story must have become part of local history. Lugard probably heard of him from Laws, with whom he stayed whilst leading an expeditionary force of natives for the newly formed African Lakes Company against Arab slave traders intent on driving out the merchants who had settled there. The tone is almost wistful. “On Nyassa poor Thelwall shot one [baboon] and was immediately attacked by the drove” (Lugard 271). This is not what happened according to the Livingstonia Mission journal, but it suggests that the story had already taken on a certain romantic, larger-than-life allure. Lugard appears to have had little time for the missionaries in general, but he does extol the virtues of Laws, whose kindliness and literary tastes are acknowledged. Laws had been absent from Livingstonia for some time when Thelwall died, and he heard of his death as he passed Mponda’s village, where Miller, one of the station’s Scottish artisans, had gone to see to his remaining goods. As they approached on the steamer Miller shouted from the shore, “Thelwall shot himself by accident.” Laws then set off for Thelwall’s grave. These “goods,” whatever they were, were sold at Livingstonia for fifty-eight pounds, five shillings and five pence in 1878, and the money was sent to Thelwall’s widow Marian, who signed a receipt in 1880 (
Re-reading Conrad’s Marlow relating the story of Mr. Kurtz in
Reading Weymouth’s story and thinking of Conrad’s Kurtz, I was reminded too of Wordsworth’s
think of a citizen in a toga—perhaps too much dice, you know—coming out here in the train of some prefect, or tax-gatherer, or trader, even, to mend his fortunes. Land in a swamp, march through the woods, and in some inland post feel the savagery, the utter savagery had closed around him. (33)
This is one of the passages highlighted in John Thelwall’s own copy ofSo the wide waters open to the power, The will, the instincts, and appointed needs Of Britain, do invite her to cast off Her swarms, and in succession send them forth; Bound to establish new communities On every shore whose aspect favours hope Or bold adventure; promising to skill And perseverance their deserved reward. (9.375-82)
An interesting conversion (says The London “Tablet,” March 28) took place last week. Mrs Thelwall, widow of the well-known water-colour artist, Weymouth Thelwall, was received into the church by the Rev. Father Coventry O.S.M. of the Fulham Priory. Mrs Thelwall is herself a connection of Sir Walter Scott’s family, and her husband was the youngest son of the celebrated John Thelwall, the Reformer, who together with Horne Tooke and Hardy was tried for high treason in 1795. This conversion offers a curious instance of the links of history. John Thelwall, the new convert’s father-in-law, was the friend of Coleridge, Lamb, Hazlitt and Condorcet, and yet here is the daughter in law living and hale at the dawn of the twentieth century. No man, in his time, did more to advance Catholic Emancipation than John Thelwall, and, by a curious coincidence, his son died a Catholic, and his grandchild is a pious Catholic, whose influence has brought her mother into the fold. (“Returning to the Fold”)
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---.
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