The Warden (29 page)

Here he performs afternoon service every Sunday, and administers the Sacrament once in every three months. His audience is not large; and, had they been so, he could not have accommodated them: but enough come to fill his six pews, and on the front seat of those devoted to the poor is always to be seen our old friend Mr Bunce, decently arrayed in his bedesman's gown.

Mr Harding is still precentor of Barchester; and it is very rarely the case that those who attend the Sunday morning service miss the gratification of hearing him chant the litany, as no other man in England can do it. He is neither a discontented nor an unhappy man; he still inhabits the lodgings to which he went on leaving the hospital, but he now has them to himself. Three months after
that time Eleanor became Mrs Bold, and of course removed to her husband's house.

There were some difficulties to be got over on the occasion of her marriage. The archdeacon, who could not so soon overcome his grief, would not be persuaded to grace the ceremony with his presence, but he allowed his wife and children to be there. The marriage took place at the palace, and the bishop himself officiated. It was the last occasion on which he ever did so; and, though he still lives, it is not probable that he will ever do so again.

Not long after the marriage, perhaps six months, when Eleanor's bridal-honours were fading, and persons were beginning to call her Mrs Bold without twittering, the archdeacon consented to meet John Bold at a dinner-party, and since that time they have become almost friends. The archdeacon firmly believes that his brother-in-law was, as a bachelor, an infidel, an unbeliever in the great truths of our religion; but that matrimony has opened his eyes, as it has those of others. And Bold is equally inclined to think that time has softened the asperities of the archdeacon's character. Friends though they are, they do not often revert to the feud of the hospital.

Mr Harding, we say, is not an unhappy man; he keeps his lodgings, but they are of little use to him, except as being the one spot on earth which he calls his own. His time is spent chiefly at his daughter's or at the palace; he is never left alone, even should he wish to be so; and within a twelvemonth of Eleanor's marriage his determination to live at his own lodging had been so far broken through and abandoned, that he consented to have his violoncello permanently removed to his daughter's house.

Every other day a message is brought to him from the bishop. ‘The bishop's compliments, and his lordship is not very well today, and he hopes Mr Harding will dine with him.' This bulletin as to the old man's health is a myth; for though he is over eighty he is never ill, and will probably die some day, as a spark goes out, gradually and without a struggle. Mr Harding does dine with him very often, which means going to the palace at three and remaining till ten; and whenever he does not the bishop whines, and says that the port wine is corked, and complains that nobody attends to him, and frets himself off to bed an hour before his time.

It was long before the people of Barchester forgot to call Mr Harding by his long well-known name of Warden. It had become so customary to say Mr Warden, that it was not easily dropped. ‘No, no,' he always says when so addressed, ‘not warden now, only precentor.'

THE END

1.
Quoted in Michael Sadleir,
Trollope: A Commentary
(Constable, 1927), p.
152
.

2.
Sadleir,
Trollope: A Commentary
, pp.
56–7
.

3.
Trudy Bliss (ed.),
Thomas Carlyle: Letters to His Wife
(Gollancz, 1953), p. 381; letter of 27 July 1865.

4.
Partial Portraits
(Macmillan, 1888), pp.
100–101
.

5.
Anthony Trollope and His Contemporaries
(Longman, 1972), p.
138
.

6.
I am indebted for these details of the St Cross case to R. B. Martin's account of it in
Enter Rumour: Four Early Victorian Scandals
(Faber, 1962), pp.
137–84
.

7.
Quoted in R. C. M. Arnold,
The Whiston Matter
(Hart-Davis, 1961), p.
193
.

8.
Anthony Trollope: His Work, Associates and Literary Originals
(The Bodley Head, 1913), p.
103
.

9.
‘
The Times
Correspondent and
The Warden', Nineteenth-Century Fiction,
XXI, 1967, pp. 325–36.

10.
The Novels of Anthony Trollope
(Clarendon Press,1977), p.
97
.

11.
The New Zealander, ed. N. John Hall (Clarendon Press, 1972), p.
35
. The circulation figures are those quoted by Professor Hall on p.
42
of his edition, and come from W. T. Coggeshall,
The Newspaper Record
(Philadelphia, 1856).

12.
On liberty,
ed. Gertrude Himmelfarb (Penguin, 1974), Chapter III, p.
131
.

13.
The Moral Trollope
(Ohio University Press, 1971), p.
40
.

14.
Partial Portraits
, p.
113
.

1
(p. 1).
the bishop, dean, and canons
: The bishop is the spiritual head of a diocese, or administrative district, of the Church of England and has his throne (from the Latin ‘cathedra') in the cathedral. Next in power to him is the dean, who is head of the cathedral chapter and responsible for the conduct of services in the cathedral. The chapter is a semi-collegiate body of clergymen, called canons, supposedly resident in the cathedral close and attached in the first instance to the cathedral, although, before the ecclesiastical reforms of the Victorian period, absenteeism and pluralism (the holding of more than one living) were common. A minor canon is responsible for the singing of the services but is not usually a member of the chapter.

2
(p. 1).
precentor of the cathedral
: The clergyman in charge of the singing of the choir in a cathedral. In the older cathedrals he ranked second to the dean.

3
(p. 2).
that office being, as is not usual, in the bishop's gift
: Because the precentor is a member of the chapter and would normally be appointed by the dean and chapter.

4
(p. 2).
wool-stapler… wool-carders
: A wool-stapler is a merchant who bought wool, graded it, and sold it to the manufacturer; a wool-card is an instrument like a hairbrush, with which wool-carders combed the wool.

5
(p. 2).
bedesmen
: Persons maintained in an almshouse, in return for which they had to pray (telling their ‘beads') for the soul of the benefactor.

6
(p. 3).
see
: Literally the seat (from Latin ‘sedes') of the bishop, hence the place where the cathedral is situated. The bishop holds the see of Barchester, although geographically its ‘wide episcopal domains' are coextensive with the diocese.

7
(p. 4).
making a sum of sixty-two pounds eleven shillings and four-pence
: Trollope's arithmetic here is wildly out: twopence a day to twelve bedesmen for a year of 365 days amounts to £36.10s. in predecimal currency. For an amusing and ingenious account of how this error might have come about see Angela Milne, ‘The Great Trollope Mystery',
Punch
, 9 July 1980, pp. 56–8.

8
(p. 5).
the Elysium of Mr Harding's dwelling
: Elysium was the home of the blessed dead in Greek mythology.

9
(p. 5).
scandalizes… by a black neck-handkerchief
: Because the normal colour would be white. It is characteristic of Mr Harding to be as little ostentatious in his clerical appearance as possible, in contrast to Archdeacon Grantly.

10
(p. 6).
Purcell, Crotch, and Nares
: Henry Purcell (1659?–95), William Crotch (1775–1847), and John Nares (1715–83) were all English composers and organists.

11
(p. 6).
faute de mieux
: For want of a better.

1
(p. 7).
well-known case of the Hospital of St Cross
: The Winchester almshouse where the wealthy Earl of Guilford (not Guildford, as Trollope spells it throughout) had been Master, or warden, since 1808, combining it with other livings which gave him a princely income. This contemporary scandal is fully discussed in the Introduction.

2
(p. 7).
the struggles of Mr Whiston
: The Rev. Robert Whiston (1808–1895), Headmaster of the Rochester Cathedral Grammar School from 1842 to 1877. His ‘struggles' refer to his attempts to persuade the chapter to provide adequate maintenance for four Exhibitioners at university, and free board and lodging for twenty cathedral scholars, as the cathedral statutes stipulated. After publishing his pamphlet
Cathedral Trusts and Their Fulfilment
(1849), Whiston was dismissed, but reinstated in 1852 after lengthy legal proceedings. Again, this topical issue is discussed in the Introduction.

3
(p. 7). ‘
Sacerdos
': ‘Priest'.

4
(p. 11).
Danton
: Georges Danton (1759–94), prominent member of the Jacobin Club, the most radical and egalitarian group of revolutionaries during the French Revolution. He was a powerful speaker, and defended himself eloquently against the charge of betraying the republic when brought to trial by Robespierre.

5
(p. 11).
Argus
: A hundred-eyed giant in Greek mythology.

6
(p. 12).
shovel hat
: A broad-brimmed hat, turned up at the sides and resembling a shovel in shape, worn by Anglican clergymen.

7
(p. 12).
robe de nuit
: Nightgown.

8
(p. 12).
bishops without their aprons
: An apron is part of the official dress of a bishop.

9
(p. 12).
dishabille
: Undress.

10
(p. 13).
it is as an archdeacon that he shines
: An archdeacon is nominated by the bishop and presides over a part of the diocese, the archdeaconry, in which he is expected to supervise the clergy and ecclesiastical property. In his short book
Clergymen of the Church of England
(1866), Trollope describes an archdeacon as ‘a bishop in little' (p. 45).

11
(p. 14).
to forgive his brother even seven times
: See Luke vi, 29: ‘And unto him that smiteth thee on the one cheek offer also the other; and him that taketh away thy cloke forbid not to take thy coat also'; and Matthew xviii, 21–2: ‘Then came Peter to him, and said, Lord, how oft shall my brother sin against me, and I forgive him? till seven times? Jesus saith unto him, I say not unto thee, Until seven times: but, Until seventy times seven.'

12
(p. 14).
the sacrilegious doings of Lord John Russell
: (1792–1878), Whig politician and advocate of political and ecclesiastical reform. Anticlerical, hostile to the Anglo-Catholic doctrines of the Oxford Movement (see Chapter 15, note 19), and favourable to liberal theology, Russell's conduct during his periods as Home Secretary (1835–9) and Prime Minister (1846–52) won him the distrust of conservative High Churchmen like Archdeacon Grantly. He was in favour of appropriating the surplus revenues of the Established Church in Ireland to finance social reform there, he supported the redistribution of revenues within the Church of England, and in 1850 he set up a Royal Commission of inquiry into the condition of Oxford University, at that time a stronghold of the High Church party.

13
(p. 15).
protégée
: One protected, aided or supported by another.

14
(p. 17).
six and eightpence
: One third of a pound in pre-decimal currency, the standard rate at the time for a simple legal transaction.

1
(p. 18).
St Cecilia
: Roman martyr and patron saint of music.

2
(pp. 19–20).
constitutional visitor
: i.e. the clergyman appointed under the terms of John Hiram's will to supervise the running of the hospital and correct abuses.

3
(p. 20).
favourite little bit of Bishop's
: Henry Rowley Bishop (1786–1855), English composer and conductor. He was the first British musician to be knighted, in 1842.

4
(p. 22).
pony-chair
: Light two-wheeled carriage similar to a chaise, here drawn by ponies.

5
(p. 23).
appanage
: A perquisite; piece of preferment hereditarily in the gift of the Bishop of Barchester.

6
(p. 27).
distribute all tithes… cowls, sandals, and sackcloth!
: The bishop's comically exaggerated fears envisage an assault on the privileged position of the Church of England: the distribution of tithes, the tenth part of the produce or income of a parish originally levied for support of the Anglican Church and clergy, to nonconformists; the abolition of the ‘sacred bench' of bishops in the House of Lords; and the proscription of the traditional clerical dress of shovel hats (see Chapter 2, note 6) and the lawn, or fine linen sleeves of the bishop's robe. The ‘cowls, sandals, and sackcloth' are the dress of monastic orders, suppressed by an unenforced Act of Parliament dating from Queen Elizabeth's reign.

1
(p. 28). ‘
fiat justitia ruat cœlum
': ‘Let justice be done, though the heavens should fall'.

2
(p. 29).
non compos mentis
: Not of sound mind.

3
(p. 34).
by goles
: By golly.

1
(p. 37).
he's in the house
: i.e. the House of Commons.

2
(p. 37).
that scoundrel Horseman about the Bishop of Beverly's income
: Edward Horsman (1807–76), one of the Established Church's fiercest critics in the House of Commons. He attacked Lord John Russell's ecclesiastical policy (see Chapter 2, note 12) as being too favourable to the bishops, and in 1847 moved a vote of censure on the Ecclesiastical Commissioners. Beverley was an old Anglo-Saxon see, but no longer occupied by an Anglican bishop.