Self Help by Samuel Smiles (desktop ebook reader txt) 📖

CHAPTER VII—INDUSTRY AND THE PEERAGE

“He either fears his fate too much,

Or his deserts are small,

That dares not put it to the touch,

To gain or lose it all.”—Marquis of Montrose.

 

“He hath put down the mighty from their seats; and exalted them of

low degree.”—St. Luke.

 

We have already referred to some illustrious Commoners raised from

humble to elevated positions by the power of application and

industry; and we might point to even the Peerage itself as

affording equally instructive examples. One reason why the Peerage

of England has succeeded so well in holding its own, arises from

the fact that, unlike the peerages of other countries, it has been

fed, from time to time, by the best industrial blood of the

country—the very “liver, heart, and brain of Britain.” Like the

fabled Antaeus, it has been invigorated and refreshed by touching

its mother earth, and mingling with that most ancient order of

nobility—the working order.

 

The blood of all men flows from equally remote sources; and though

some are unable to trace their line directly beyond their

grandfathers, all are nevertheless justified in placing at the head

of their pedigree the great progenitors of the race, as Lord

Chesterfield did when he wrote, “ADAM de Stanhope—EVE de

Stanhope.” No class is ever long stationary. The mighty fall, and

the humble are exalted. New families take the place of the old,

who disappear among the ranks of the common people. Burke’s

‘Vicissitudes of Families’ strikingly exhibit this rise and fall of

families, and show that the misfortunes which overtake the rich and

noble are greater in proportion than those which overwhelm the

poor. This author points out that of the twenty-five barons

selected to enforce the observance of Magna Charta, there is not

now in the House of Peers a single male descendant. Civil wars and

rebellions ruined many of the old nobility and dispersed their

families. Yet their descendants in many cases survive, and are to

be found among the ranks of the people. Fuller wrote in his

‘Worthies,’ that “some who justly hold the surnames of Bohuns,

Mortimers, and Plantagenets, are hid in the heap of common men.”

Thus Burke shows that two of the lineal descendants of the Earl of

Kent, sixth son of Edward I., were discovered in a butcher and a

toll-gatherer; that the great grandson of Margaret Plantagenet,

daughter of the Duke of Clarance, sank to the condition of a

cobbler at Newport, in Shropshire; and that among the lineal

descendants of the Duke of Gloucester, son of Edward III., was the

late sexton of St George’s, Hanover Square. It is understood that

the lineal descendant of Simon de Montfort, England’s premier

baron, is a saddler in Tooley Street. One of the descendants of

the “Proud Percys,” a claimant of the title of Duke of

Northumberland, was a Dublin trunk-maker; and not many years since

one of the claimants for the title of Earl of Perth presented

himself in the person of a labourer in a Northumberland coal-pit.

Hugh Miller, when working as a stonemason near Edinburgh, was

served by a hodman, who was one of the numerous claimants for the

earldom of Crauford—all that was wanted to establish his claim

being a missing marriage certificate; and while the work was going

on, the cry resounded from the walls many times in the day, of—

“John, Yearl Crauford, bring us anither hod o’lime.” One of Oliver

Cromwell’s great grandsons was a grocer on Snow Hill, and others of

his descendants died in great poverty. Many barons of proud names

and titles have perished, like the sloth, upon their family tree,

after eating up all the leaves; while others have been overtaken by

adversities which they have been unable to retrieve, and sunk at

last into poverty and obscurity. Such are the mutabilities of rank

and fortune.

 

The great bulk of our peerage is comparatively modern, so far as

the titles go; but it is not the less noble that it has been

recruited to so large an extent from the ranks of honourable

industry. In olden times, the wealth and commerce of London,

conducted as it was by energetic and enterprising men, was a

prolific source of peerages. Thus, the earldom of Cornwallis was

founded by Thomas Cornwallis, the Cheapside merchant; that of Essex

by William Capel, the draper; and that of Craven by William Craven,

the merchant tailor. The modern Earl of Warwick is not descended

from the “King-maker,” but from William Greville, the woolstapler;

whilst the modern dukes of Northumberland find their head, not in

the Percies, but in Hugh Smithson, a respectable London apothecary.

The founders of the families of Dartmouth, Radnor, Ducie, and

Pomfret, were respectively a skinner, a silk manufacturer, a

merchant tailor, and a Calais merchant; whilst the founders of the

peerages of Tankerville, Dormer, and Coventry, were mercers. The

ancestors of Earl Romney, and Lord Dudley and Ward, were goldsmiths

and jewellers; and Lord Dacres was a banker in the reign of Charles

I., as Lord Overstone is in that of Queen Victoria. Edward

Osborne, the founder of the Dukedom of Leeds, was apprentice to

William Hewet, a rich clothworker on London Bridge, whose only

daughter he courageously rescued from drowning, by leaping into the

Thames after her, and eventually married. Among other peerages

founded by trade are those of Fitzwilliam, Leigh, Petre, Cowper,

Darnley, Hill, and Carrington. The founders of the houses of Foley

and Normanby were remarkable men in many respects, and, as

furnishing striking examples of energy of character, the story of

their lives is worthy of preservation.

 

The father of Richard Foley, the founder of the family, was a small

yeoman living in the neighbourhood of Stourbridge in the time of

Charles I. That place was then the centre of the iron manufacture

of the midland districts, and Richard was brought up to work at one

of the branches of the trade—that of nail-making. He was thus a

daily observer of the great labour and loss of time caused by the

clumsy process then adopted for dividing the rods of iron in the

manufacture of nails. It appeared that the Stourbridge nailers

were gradually losing their trade in consequence of the importation

of nails from Sweden, by which they were undersold in the market.

It became known that the Swedes were enabled to make their nails so

much cheaper, by the use of splitting mills and machinery, which

had completely superseded the laborious process of preparing the

rods for nail-making then practised in England.

 

Richard Foley, having ascertained this much, determined to make

himself master of the new process. He suddenly disappeared from

the neighbourhood of Stourbridge, and was not heard of for several

years. No one knew whither he had gone, not even his own family;

for he had not informed them of his intention, lest he should fail.

He had little or no money in his pocket, but contrived to get to

Hull, where he engaged himself on board a ship bound for a Swedish

port, and worked his passage there. The only article of property

which he possessed was his fiddle, and on landing in Sweden he

begged and fiddled his way to the Dannemora mines, near Upsala. He

was a capital musician, as well as a pleasant fellow, and soon

ingratiated himself with the iron-workers. He was received into

the works, to every part of which he had access; and he seized the

opportunity thus afforded him of storing his mind with

observations, and mastering, as he thought, the mechanism of iron

splitting. After a continued stay for this purpose, he suddenly

disappeared from amongst his kind friends the miners—no one knew

whither.

 

Returned to England, he communicated the results of his voyage to

Mr. Knight and another person at Stourbridge, who had sufficient

confidence in him to advance the requisite funds for the purpose of

erecting buildings and machinery for splitting iron by the new

process. But when set to work, to the great vexation and

disappointment of all, and especially of Richard Foley, it was

found that the machinery would not act—at all events it would not

split the bars of iron. Again Foley disappeared. It was thought

that shame and mortification at his failure had driven him away for

ever. Not so! Foley had determined to master this secret of iron-splitting, and he would yet do it. He had again set out for

Sweden, accompanied by his fiddle as before, and found his way to

the iron works, where he was joyfully welcomed by the miners; and,

to make sure of their fiddler, they this time lodged him in the

very splitting-mill itself. There was such an apparent absence of

intelligence about the man, except in fiddle-playing, that the

miners entertained no suspicions as to the object of their

minstrel, whom they thus enabled to attain the very end and aim of

his life. He now carefully examined the works, and soon discovered

the cause of his failure. He made drawings or tracings of the

machinery as well as he could, though this was a branch of art

quite new to him; and after remaining at the place long enough to

enable him to verify his observations, and to impress the

mechanical arrangements clearly and vividly on his mind, he again

left the miners, reached a Swedish port, and took ship for England.

A man of such purpose could not but succeed. Arrived amongst his

surprised friends, he now completed his arrangements, and the

results were entirely successful. By his skill and his industry he

soon laid the foundations of a large fortune, at the same time that

he restored the business of an extensive district. He himself

continued, during his life, to carry on his trade, aiding and

encouraging all works of benevolence in his neighbourhood. He

founded and endowed a school at Stourbridge; and his son Thomas (a

great benefactor of Kidderminster), who was High Sheriff of

Worcestershire in the time of “The Rump,” founded and endowed an

hospital, still in existence, for the free education of children at

Old Swinford. All the early Foleys were Puritans. Richard Baxter

seems to have been on familiar and intimate terms with various

members of the family, and makes frequent mention of them in his

‘Life and Times.’ Thomas Foley, when appointed high sheriff of the

county, requested Baxter to preach the customary sermon before him;

and Baxter in his ‘Life’ speaks of him as “of so just and blameless

dealing, that all men he ever had to do with magnified his great

integrity and honesty, which were questioned by none.” The family

was ennobled in the reign of Charles the Second.

 

William Phipps, the founder of the Mulgrave or Normanby family, was

a man quite as remarkable in his way as Richard Foley. His father

was a gunsmith—a robust Englishman settled at Woolwich, in Maine,

then forming part of our English colonies in America. He was born

in 1651, one of a family of not fewer than twenty-six children (of

whom twenty-one were sons), whose only fortune lay in their stout

hearts and strong arms. William seems to have had a dash of the

Danish-sea blood in his veins, and did not take kindly to the quiet

life of a shepherd in which he spent his early years. By nature

bold and adventurous, he longed to become a sailor and roam through

the world. He sought to join some ship; but not being able to find

one, he apprenticed himself to a shipbuilder, with whom he

thoroughly learnt his trade, acquiring the arts of reading and

writing during his leisure hours. Having completed his

apprenticeship and removed to Boston, he wooed and married a widow

of some