Westbury-Bristol-London 1743-1759

The “Sketch of the Life of the Author” opens with the statement “I was born the 21st of May, 1743, in the decayed town of Westbury, in the county of Wilts.”[1] Westbury was a “decayed town” throughout Edwards’s lifetime. One of the centres of the Wiltshire cloth industry in the 17th century, the town fell into decline after 1720. [2] An anonymous letter sent in 1739 to Lord Harrington, Secretary of State for the North, reported that trade in Westbury was in a dire state, and that the poor were much oppressed by the rich clothiers. Two of those rich clothiers, unnamed but identifiable as the brothers John and Thomas Phipps (1681-1747), were accused of forcing their workers to “take truck” (the pernicious system whereby labour was paid in goods instead of money), and of building a private prison. Thomas Phipps was the grandfather of Martha Phipps whom Edwards was to marry in 1774. Westbury was also a “decayed town” in another (now obsolete) sense of the term, meaning a rotten or pocket borough. Its electorate consisted of 69 holders of burgages (land rented annually) who returned two members to parliament. In 1774, when Edwards’s uncle Nathaniel Bayly was elected for the borough, 65 of the burgages were owned by Willoughby Bertie, 4th Earl of Abingdon, who later contrived by various means to gain undisputed control of the borough.[3]  When William Cobbett rode through the town twenty years later he saw Westbury’s industrial decay as a reflection of its political character, calling it “a nasty odious rotten-borough, a really rotten place. It has cloth-factories in it and they seem to be ready to tumble down as well as many of the houses. God’s curse seems to be upon most of these rotten-boroughs.” [4]

Edwards was the eldest child of Bryan Edwards, Maltster, who married Elizabeth Bayly of Westbury, Wilts, in 1742. [5] Edwards-Bayly pedigree The Sketch continues: “My father inherited a small paternal estate, in the neighbourhood, of about £.100 per annum; which proving but a scanty maintenance for a large family, he undertook, without any knowledge of the business, as I have been informed, to deal in corn and malt, but with very little success. He died in 1756, leaving my excellent mother, and six children, in distressed circumstances.”

Edwards’s father died in fact on 30 June 1758.[6] He left seven children. “1756” may have been a compositor’s error, since Edwards died before the Sketch was printed. He presumably did not count himself as one of the “children” because he was then fifteen years old, at boarding school in Bristol and hence not a direct burden on his mother. More seriously misleading is the statement that his father inherited a “small paternal estate”, a phrase with strong literary resonances in the 18th century. Readers would instantly have recognized an allusion to paterna rura (“small paternal field” in Dryden’s translation) from Horace’s famous Epode 2. The second epode was familiar in Latin to schoolboys and hugely popular in English through translations and imitations (Edwards included a translation made by his own brother in Poems, 1792): it projected an idealised image of an honest farmer, contentedly cultivating his father’s land, far from the base world of commerce.[7] Records of the Edwards family reveal a different, more mundane story.

Edwards’s grandfather was Nicholas Edwards, maltster, of Priory estate, in the manor of Westbury. The manor belonged to the Dean and Chapter of Westminster Abbey who in 1702 granted Nicholas Edwards copyhold tenure of a malt house with forty acres of land. Such tenancies were transferable, so Bryan Edwards senior could in a qualified sense be said to have “inherited a small paternal estate” on Nicholas’s death in 1743.[8] Except that he didn’t. Nicholas bequeathed “all that pasture [and] arable Land belonging to the Malt House being Forty Acres more or Less for the term I have to come upon it” to his son-in-law, John Whittaker, leaving only “my Silver Tobacco Box” to his son.[9]

It is highly unlikely that Edwards was deliberately misrepresenting his father’s history: he probably never knew it exactly. He was a baby when his grandfather Nicholas died, still a child at the time of Bryan senior’s death, and appears to have had little or no contact with his paternal family in later life. But the notion that they belonged to the landed gentry was not entirely baseless. The wills of both Nicholas and Bryan Edwards senior carried armorial seals; Nicholas’s is indecipherable but Bryan senior’s showed a lion rampant.[10] A right to arms, and the title of esquire that went with it, was a recognized sign of gentility. The title was not used by either father or son in their wills, but it was evidently a source of pride in Bryan senior’s family.  The title of “Esq” is used in his memorial inscription, and Bryan junior had a bookplate engraved in about 1760 with an elaborate crest showing a lion rampant above his name, “Bryan Edwards Esq’r”.

The reason why Nicholas Edwards virtually disinherited his son may have been that he objected to his marriage to Elizabeth Bayly because she came from a dissenting family. Protestant dissent had been strong in Westbury since the 1660s when Philip Hunton, vicar of Westbury, was ejected from his living under the Act of Uniformity (1662) but continued to preach, and was granted a license as an Independent in 1672. A bequest in his will enabled the Westbury Independents to build their first meeting house in the town.[11] He also left £25 each to his ‘Trusty Friends’ and overseers of his will, Thomas Phipps and Zachary Bayly, Clothiers, to be distributed to at their discretion to poor ministers or preachers.[12] This Zachary Bayly (1613-1702), Elizabeth Bayly’s great-grandfather, was a loyal member of the Independent congregation in Westbury.[13] Her maternal grandfather, Peter Lee, was also a dissenter: he and William Bayly were involved in the establishment of the first Independent church in Warminster in 1720.[14]  The Independents flourished in Westbury: by 1725 they numbered 800, including “some of Westbury’s most influential inhabitants”. A dispute with the minister in 1751 led to the withdrawal of some of the members and the establishment of a second congregation in Westbury, but Elizabeth and her sister Mary remained members of the Old Meeting House (later the Old Congregational Chapel). [15]

Edwards’s education was consistent with his family’s religious beliefs. According to the Sketch, he was placed by his father at a school kept by a dissenting minister in Bristol, William Foot, “of whom I remember enough, to believe that he was both a learned and good man, but by a strange absurdity, he was forbidden to teach me Latin and Greek, and directed to confine my studies to writing, arithmetick, and the English grammar.” Edwards acknowledged that nevertheless his years at the school were not entirely wasted: although he acquired “but very little learning”, he received a good training in “correct and elegant composition”. Local history confirms Edwards’s impression of the schoolmaster’s academic abilities. William Foot (1707-82) was educated at dissenting academies in Stratford-upon-Avon and Taunton; in 1736 he became minister of a General Baptist chapel in Bristol and “opened a classical school on St. Michael’s Hill which he conducted with increasing reputation during many years.” His character was “distinguished by ardent piety, genuine benevolence” and “innocent simplicity”, and as a teacher he was regarded by his pupils with the highest respect.[16]

Ten or eleven was the usual age for starting at a grammar school, so Bryan would have been at Foot’s establishment from 1753/54 until 1758, when “my uncle (on my father’s death) took me under his protection”. This uncle, Zachary Bayly, a wealthy merchant living in Jamaica, took charge of his nephew’s education through “his agent in Bristol”. The agent considered him “neglected by Mr. Foot” and sent him to a French boarding school in Bristol where he “soon obtained the French language”. But he cannot have remained there for long because in 1759 Nathaniel Bayly, Zachary’s younger brother and his business partner in Jamaica, returned to England, “and settling in London, took me to reside with him, in a high and elegant style of life.” Bryan did not get on well with his uncle however: “his conduct towards me, was such, as not to inspire me with much respect: he perceived it; and soon after, in the latter end of the same year, sent me to Jamaica.” There he was taken under the wing of Zachary Bayly who proved to be “the reverse, in every possible circumstance, of his brother.”[17]

[1] History, Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, 3rd edn (London, 1801), 1. ix-xiv. He was probably baptized in the Congregational church to which his mother belonged, but 18th-century baptismal records of Westbury URC do not survive.

[2] “Westbury: Industry and Trade”, in A History of the County of Wiltshire: Volume 8, Warminster, Westbury and Whorwellsdown Hundreds (London, 1965), British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/wilts/vol8.

[3] The House of Commons 1754-1790, Sir Louis Namier and John Brooke (London, 1985), 1.420, www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1754-1790/constituencies/westbury

[4] Cobbett, Rural Rides, ed. Ian Dyck (London, 2001), Rural Rides, 320.

[5] Devizes St Johns marriage register 1741/2, Wiltshire and Swindon Archives.

[6] “Bryant Edwards Esq.” Transcription no. 31750, Westbury URC: Wiltshire Family History Society. The memorial, erected after 1803 by the only surviving daughter, Elizabeth Clutterbuck, is no longer visible in the church.

[7] See Maren-Sofie Røstvig, The Happy Man: studies in the metamorphoses of a classical ideal, 2 vols (New York, 1954-58); Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (London, 1973), 18.

[8] Grateful acknowledgments to Matthew Payne, Keeper of the Muniments, Westminster Abbey, for information from manorial court rolls.

[9] Will of Nicholas Edwards, proved 12 July 1743: Wiltshire and Swindon Archives P25/1743/11.

[10] Charles Evans, Notes & Queries (June 1958), 253.

[11] “Westbury: Protestant Nonconformity”, in A History of the County of Wiltshire: Volume 8, Warminster, Westbury and Whorwellsdown Hundreds (London, 1965), pp.181-85. www.british-history.ac.uk/vch/wilts/vol8/pp181-185. J.T. Peacey, “Philip Hunton”, ODNB.

[12] Will of Philip Hunton, 29 June 1682: East Sussex Record Office DUN 6/12.

[13] Will of Zachary Baily, Clothier, NA Prob 11/478, 2 Oct 1704.

[14] Henry M. Gunn, The History of Nonconformity in Warminster (Warminster, 2003), 49-50.

[15] Will of Mary Bayly, NA Prob 11/1046, 8 Oct 1778.

[16] John Evans, The History of Bristol, civil and ecclesiastical (Bristol, 1816), 2. 326-328; see also the Surman Index Online.

[17] “Sketch”, History (1801), 1. x-xii.