Victorian Failure
This Was a Man. By Esme Wingfield-Stratford. (Robert Hale. 15s.) ON the score of achievement the Rev. and Hon. Edward Vesey Bligh, the subject of this memoir and the author of the auto- biographical passages incorporated in it, would scarcely deserve to be recalled to public remembrance. Born in 1829 and educated at Eton and Oxford, he played cricket for the university and for Kent ; for five years he was in the Diplomatic Service ; he toyed with the idea of standing for Parliament ; he took Holy Orders ; he was rector of Rotherfield and, later, vicar of Birling ; and when he was forty-six he retired into private life, serving as chairman of the local Bench. Apart from an interest in ultra Low Church prophecy in the matter of the Second Coming, his retirement was lightened by no intellec- tual pursuits, but he tricycled perilously round the countryside, was devoted to animals, was happy in his family life, and was greatly loved. "God only knows," he wrote in his private journal, "what a failure I have been."
Here, I suspect, is the key to the riddle of his grandson's compila- tion of this book—for failure can be as interesting and memorable as success. Given the circumstances of Edward Bligh's ancestry, the period in which he lived, and his choice of a wife, failure would seem, in retrospect, to have been inevitable. His father, the 5th Earl of Darnley, of Cobham Hall, was a pious young man who died when his younger son was still a boy. His mother, an Irvingite, trembled on the brink of religious mania. From his Bligh forefathers he inherited the family good looks, the family eye for games, personal charm, a strong streak of ambition, a weak nervous system, and a tendency to become too easily discouraged. It may well have been this mixture of strength and weakness that attracted the rising young diplomat to the stately, beautiful and icily reserved Lady Isabel Nevill, daughter of the Earl of Abergavcnny, of Eridge Castle and Birling Manor. Between the Blighs and their neighbours, the Ncvills, there was no love lost, and Lord Aberga- venny—a supreme product of the cult of Victorian aristocratic seclusion—presented the none too welcome suitor with an ultimatum. If he wished to marry Lady Isabel he must leave the Diplomatic Service, take Holy Orders, and accept one of the twenty-four livings that were in the Nevill gift. Mr. Bligh agreed to these curious terms.
His ministry at Rotherfield was a failure. Installed at Birling, under the shadow of his father-in-law's house, he showed a last flicker of purpose and ambition. The new vicar launched boldly out as a Low Church reformer. Lay evangelists, Miss Octavio Jary among them, were imported to preach to the surprised inhabitants of this sleepy little Kentish village. There were conversions and
some edifying death-beds. There was a project for revising the Prayer Book, for driving Ritualists out of the Church of England and for attracting Dissenters into it. But the whole movement was sabotaged by servant trouble. The staff at the vicarage objected to Miss Jary. The Birling Manor servants so far forgot their station as to indulge in lay preaching. Lord and Lady Abergavenny expressed disapproval ; and the great Birling Revival, which was to have lit a lamp which would have illumined all England, fizzled and died. Lady Isabel inherited a fortune on the death of her parents, and the disheartened reformer resigned his living and assumed the role of a benevolent country squire at Fatherwell Hall.
It is as much for its picture of a vanished way of life—life at the incomparably beautiful Cobham Hall and at the incomparably hideous Eridge Castle—as for its analysis of individual failure that this enchantingly illustrated book will appeal to readers who delight in glimpses, sinister and otherwise, below the unruffled surface of
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