Hants.

2. On November 23, 1633, he compounded for the first fruits of the prebend of Middleton.

3. And on May 23, 1639, for the first fruits of the prebend of Ichen-Abbots.

As he held Thruxton till his death, he must be considered in the light of a clergyman possessed of good preferment, in fact, as belonging to the superior class of the clergy in the diocese of Winchester.

Thruxton is a rectory in the neighbourhood of Andover; and Ichen-Abbots is in Bountesborough hundred, a few miles north of Winchester. Why this living and Middleton are called prebends, the only livings in the county so designated, we shall know better when the labours of some sufficient topographer have been directed upon Hampshire.

The next step was to ascertain whether anything respecting himself or his family could be found at Thruxton; and in this inquiry I received the most obliging attention from the officiating minister, who examined the church and went through the register to see whether any memorial existed of persons of the name of Pope. The result was less satisfactory than I had hoped: for it appears that there is no memorial of him in the church, and the register supplies us with no information touching himself or family, except the following entry amongst the burials:—

“1645. February 21.—Alexander Pope, minister of Thruxton, was buried.”

This, however, is of value. It shows us that he held not his living long, about fourteen years; that he probably died in middle life; and that his son Alexander, the merchant, could have been no more than a very young child when he lost his parent. It does not show us that he was actually a posthumous child; but then there is a possibility that the inscription on his monument, which is expressed in too general terms, may not be strictly correct in setting forth his age at the time of his death. However, the difference is not great between his being literally a posthumous child, and an infant of two or three years old when he lost his father.

But it may be asked, since Pope must have known perfectly well the name and highly respectable position in life of his grandfather, why he did not come boldly forward and claim to be descended of a clergyman born in the reign of Elizabeth, and dying in the prime of life, when occupying so good a position? It would have been a more sufficient answer to the taunt of obscure birth, and have shown to the world his descent, if not from a great, yet from a cultivated, ancestry.

It is, perhaps, idle to attempt to divine the cause, but it is no unreasonable conjecture that here his religious, or rather ecclesiastical, opinions came into play, and that he, a Roman Catholic, would not regard with the same satisfaction as others would, a descent from a Protestant clergyman, a married priest, nor would be over solicitous that others should know, on his authority, that his father was the offspring of such an unhallowed union—that is, as he would esteem it.

But what if it should turn out that this clergyman was not only a Protestant minister possessed of considerable preferment, but that he also belonged to that section of the Church of England which was the most remote from the Church of Rome, and which held it in especial abhorrence? That he was either the son-in-law or the grandson of one who is always placed in the first rank of the Puritan ministers of the reign of Elizabeth, the noted and long-lived John Dodd, of Fawsley, in Northamptonshire?

I shall first state a few well-established matters of fact, and then the probable inferences to be drawn from them.

I refer, first, to the will of Robert Barcroft, of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, D.D., made on the 29th of April, 1627. He gives “to his godson, John Wilkins, Zanchi’s Works, so many as I have, to be delivered to his father-in-law, Mr. Alexander Pope, for his use.” Wilkins was then a boy; and Wood informs us (Ath. Oxon. ii. 105) that he was the son of a Walter Wilkins, a goldsmith of Oxford, and that his mother was one of the daughters of Dodd of Fawsley, where Wilkins was born. Further, that Wilkins was uterine brother to Dr. Walter Pope, who, in his Life of Bishop Seth Ward, speaks of this relationship. Wilkins was the Bishop of Chester of that name, and one of the founders of the Royal Society.

Wood appears not to have known, any more than his informant Aubrey, that Alexander was the name of Pope, the father-in-law (which here means stepfather) of Wilkins; and neither has Dr. Walter Pope, Aubrey, or Anthony Wood, told us anything about him. The question is, Was this Alexander Pope, of Dr. Barcroft’s will, the Alexander Pope who died rector of Thruxton? Was he the father of the rector, or was there, in 1627, two Alexander Popes, both clergymen connected with Oxford, but not nearly connected with each other? A little further light, which possibly the records of the University of Oxford might supply, may enable some one to dispose of these questions. All I at present venture to say is, that the probabilities seem to incline in favour of the supposition that the Alexander Pope who was instituted to the rectory of Thruxton in 1631, is the Alexander Pope named in Dr. Barcroft’s will in 1627, and consequently the Alexander Pope who married the widow of Walter Wilkins. But then I should propose a further conjecture (in questions such as these we must allow conjectures, and bear to hear of probabilities), that there was a second marriage of the Rector of Thruxton, of which the Poet’s father was the issue, and that Dr. Walter Pope, the poet and miscellaneous writer, was the offspring of the first marriage.

Yet I state this dubiously; and, considering how much we know of Dr. Walter Pope and of Bishop Wilkins, find it difficult to reconcile the want of any trace of family connection between them and the Poet, with the supposition that Dr. Walter Pope was half-brother to the London merchant. Perhaps, after all, there were two Alexanders connected with Oxford, and Dr. Walter Pope, the child of the one, father or uncle of the Hampshire clergyman.

It is to be regretted that more has not been preserved of what Mr. Potenger could have told of the Popes, from recollections of the conversations of the maiden aunt, who must have been sister to the Rector of Thruxton; and as she stood, as he informs us, in the same degree of relationship to Pope and to himself, it would follow that the father or mother of Mr. Potenger was issue of another sister or brother of the Rector of Thruxton. This affords hints as to the course which further inquiry should take; but I cannot pass by the indication which this fact affords of the respectability of the Poet’s paternal ancestry: the Potengers of Hampshire and Dorsetshire being descendants of Dr. John Potenger, the celebrated headmaster of the Winchester College School, whose son John Potenger, born in 1647, was Comptroller of the Pipe.[2]

There were certain peculiarities which remove Dodd from the position of one of the crowd of Puritan divines: a certain cheerfulness, hilarity, and also good practical common sense; and certainly his descendant, Dr. Walter Pope, an ingenious man and no mean poet, is not to be charged with over much of the severity and strictness of the Puritan life. The later Pope, however, would not be over forward to reveal his connection with either Dodd or Dr. Walter; else, if he really did descend from one of the many daughters of the Rector of Fawsley, he might have claimed to himself a descent which, on fair evidence, can be traced to the very depths of the antiquity of English families, the Puritan divine being well known to