The Life of John Clare. Frederick Martin
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THE LIFE OF JOHN CLARE.
HELPSTON.
On the borders of the Lincolnshire fens, half-way between Stamford and Peterborough, stands the little village of Helpston. One Helpo, a so-called 'stipendiary knight,' but of whom the old chronicles know nothing beyond the bare title, exercised his craft here in the Norman age, and left his name sticking to the marshy soil. But the ground was alive with human craft and industry long before the Norman knights came prancing into the British Isles. A thousand years before the time of stipendiary Helpo, the Romans built in this neighbourhood their Durobrivae, which station must have been of great importance, judging from the remains, not crushed by the wreck of twenty centuries. Old urns, and coins bearing the impress of many emperors, from Trajan to Valens, are found everywhere below ground, while above the Romans left a yet nobler memento of their sojourn in the shape of good roads. Except the modern iron highways, these old Roman roads form still the chief means of intercommunication at this border of the fen regions. For many generations after Durobrivae had been deserted by the imperial legions, the country went downward in the scale of civilization. Stipendiary and other unhappy knights came in shoals; monks and nuns settled in swarms, like crows, upon the fertile marsh lands; but the number of labouring hands began to decrease as acre after acre got into the possession of mail-clad barons and mitred abbots. The monks, too, vanished in time, as well as the fighting knights; yet the face of the land remained silent and deserted, and has remained so to the present moment. The traveller from the north can see, for thirty miles over the bleak and desolate fen regions, the stately towers of Burleigh Hall—but can see little else beside. All the country, as far as eye can reach, is the property of two or three noble families, dwelling in turreted halls; while the bulk of the population, the wretched tillers of the soil, live, as of old, in mud hovels, in the depth of human ignorance and misery. An aggregate of about a hundred of these hovels, each containing, on the average, some four living beings, forms the village of Helpston. The place, in all probability, is still very much of the same outer aspect which it bore in the time of Helpo, the mystic stipendiary knight.
Helpston consists of two streets, meeting at right angles, the main thoroughfare being formed by the old Roman road from Durobrivae to the north, now full of English mud, and passing by the name of Long Ditch, or High Street. At the meeting of the two streets stands an ancient cross, of octangular form, with crocketed pinnacles, and not far from it, on slightly rising ground, is the parish church, a somewhat unsightly structure, of all styles of architecture, dedicated to St. Botolph. Further down stretch, in unbroken line, the low huts of the farm labourers, in one of which, lying on the High Street, John Clare was born, on the 13th July, 1793. John Clare's parents were among the poorest of the village, as their little cottage was among the narrowest and most wretched of the hundred mud hovels. Originally, at the time when the race of peasant-proprietors had not become quite extinct, a rather roomy tenement, it was broken up into meaner quarters by subsequent landlords, until at last the one house formed a rookery of not less than four human dwellings. In this fourth part of a hut lived the father and mother of John, old Parker Clare and his wife. Poor as were their neighbours, they were poorer than the rest, being both weak and in ill health, and partly dependent upon charity. The very origin of Parker Clare's family was founded in misery and wretchedness. Some thirty years previous to the birth of John, there came into Helpston a big, swaggering fellow, of no particular home, and, as far as could be ascertained, of no particular name: a wanderer over the earth, passing himself off, now for an Irishman, and now for a Scotchman. He had tramped over the greater part of Europe, alternately fighting and playing the fiddle; and being tired awhile of tramping, and footsore and thirsty withal, he resolved to settle for a few weeks, or months, at the quiet little village. The place of schoolmaster happened to be vacant, perhaps had been vacant for years; and the villagers were overjoyed when they heard that this noble stranger, able to play the fiddle, and to drink a gallon of beer at a sitting, would condescend to teach the A B C to their children. So 'Master Parker,' as the great unknown called himself for the nonce, was duly installed schoolmaster of Helpston: The event, taking place sometime about the commencement of the reign of King George the Third, marks the first dawn of the family history of John Clare.
The tramping schoolmaster had not been many days in the village before he made the acquaintance of a pretty young damsel, daughter of the parish-clerk. She came daily to wind the church clock, and for this purpose had to pass through the schoolroom, where sat Master Parker, teaching the A B C and playing the fiddle at intervals. He was as clever with his tongue as with his fiddlestick, the big schoolmaster; and while helping the sweet little maiden to wind the clock in the belfry, he told her wonderful tales of his doings in foreign lands, and of his travels through many countries. And now the old, old story, as ancient as the hills, was played over again once more. It was no very difficult task for the clever tramp to win the heart of the poor village girl; and the rest followed as may be imagined. When spring and summer was gone, and the cold wind came blowing over the fen, the poor little thing told her lover that she was in the way of becoming a mother, and, with tears in her eyes, entreated him to make her his wife. He promised to do so, the tramping schoolmaster; but early the next day he left the village, never to return. Then there was bitter lamentation in the cottage of the parish-clerk; and before the winter was gone, the poor man's daughter brought into the world a little boy, whom she gave her own family name, together with the prefixed one of the unworthy father. Such was the origin of Parker Clare.
What sort of existence this poor son of a poor mother went through, is easily told. Education he had none; of joys of childhood he knew nothing; even his daily allowance of coarse food was insufficient. He thus grew up, weak and in ill-health; but with a cheerful spirit nevertheless. Parker Clare knew more songs than any boy in the village, and his stock of ghost stories and fairy tales was quite inexhaustible. When grown into manhood, and yet not feeling sufficiently strong for the harder labours of the field, he took service as a shepherd, and was employed by his masters to tend their flocks in the neighbourhood, chiefly in the plains north of the village, known as Helpston Heath. In this way, he became acquainted with the herdsman of the adjoining township of Castor, a man named John Stimson, whose cattle was grazing right over the walls of ancient Durobrivae. John Stimson's place was taken, now and then, by his daughter Ann—an occurrence not unwelcome to Parker Clare; and while the sheep were grazing on the borders of Helpo's Heath, and the cattle seeking for sorrel and clover over the graves of Trajan's warriors, the young shepherd and shepherdess talked sweet things to each other, careless of flocks and herds, of English knights and Roman emperors. So it came that one morning Ann told her father that she had promised to marry Parker Clare. Old John Stimson thought it a bad match: 'when poverty comes in at the door, love flies out of the window,' he said, fortified by the wisdom of two score ten. But when was ever such wisdom listened to at eighteen!
The girl resolved to marry her lover with or without leave; and as for Parker Clare, he needed no permission, his mother, dependent for years upon the cold charity of the workhouse, having long ceased to control his doings. Thus it followed that in the autumn of 1792, when Robespierre was ruling France, and William Pitt England, young Parker Clare was married to Ann Stimson of Castor. Seven months after, on the 13th day of July, 1793, Parker Clare's wife was delivered, prematurely, of twins, a boy and a girl. The girl was healthy and strong; but the boy looked weak and sickly in the extreme. It seemed not possible that the boy could live, therefore the mother had him baptized immediately, calling him John, after her father. However, human expectations were not verified in the twin children; the strong girl died in early infancy, while the sickly boy lived—lived to be a poet.
Of Poeta nascitur non fit there never was a truer instance than in the case of John Clare. Impossible to imagine circumstances and scenes apparently more adverse to poetic inspiration than those amidst which John Clare was placed at his birth. His parents were the poorest of the poor; their whole aim of life being engrossed by the one all-absorbing desire to gain food for their daily sustenance. They lived in a narrow wretched hut, low and dark, more like a prison than a human dwelling; and the hut stood in a dark, gloomy plain, covered with stagnant pools of water, and overhung