Sarum - Edward Rutherfurd [508]
Not that the close was perfect. In the graveyard round the cathedral, the broad acres of lawn were thoroughly unkempt. After a heavy rain the place looked as though a herd of cows had marched through it; the ditches round the old belfry stank; it was perhaps to be regretted that Mr Brown the sexton used to sell beer in the belfry, and when Mr Henry Fielding the author had recently occupied the small house near Mr Harris’s young Adam Shockley could remember with delight the echoes of the rowdy parties that had emanated at all hours from that little house and which so amused his father and shocked his mother and the other ladies of the close.
But this did not matter. The elegance of the eighteenth century was robust and common sense.
There was plenty in Salisbury, from the suspected adultery of one of the canons, to the rich, pungent and variegated smells in the streets to remind Adam that life had its seamy side as well.
Sarum was unchanging. The great cathedral with its dominating spire spoke more eloquently than any words for the security of the Church of England. The Settlement that had brought the Hanoverians to England guaranteed its easy ascendancy. The Test Act ensured that any man wanting public office must swear the oath of loyalty to the English Church – and if Protestant dissenters were released from this obligation each year by a special indemnity, the principle remained and the troublesome Catholics were denied any office.
True, there were other religious voices at Sarum: a community of Quakers at Wilton, Wesleyans, who had heard the great John Wesley himself preach on Salisbury Plain, Deists, who believed that God would reward a good man’s life regardless of his church, and even the occasional Jew. It did not greatly matter. Whatever men’s private opinions might be, whatever sects might be tolerated, the placid Church of England ruled and was unmoved.
Sarum was independent. The government of England might be in the hands of the great Whig oligarchs close to the king – men like Walpole and after him the Duke of Newcastle and his brother – but still half the House of Commons consisted of the solid country members who mostly called themselves Tories, and who cared not a rap what the king or his ministers thought of them. These were the men that Sarum sent. For the county, as before, the local gentry stood – the Goddard or Long families usually in the north, Wyndham or Penruddock in the south. There was Wilton, for the Herbert interest. And in Salisbury, the burgesses sent independent gentlemen of their own choice. Recently, they had taken to sending as one of their members one of the family of a rich turkey merchant named Bouverie who had bought the great estate south of the town beside the ancient forest of Clarendon. But they did so because he gave generously to the town. Even a Herbert could not interfere with the Salisbury election.
Then there was Old Sarum: still deserted: an empty, windswept, grassy mound overlooking the little village of Stratford-sub-Castle in the Avon valley below. The ancient pocket borough still had, nominally, eight electors with the right to send members to Parliament and the custom was for them to meet by a tree below the