It would be interesting to see what light a man of penetration, who, like the late Sir Francis Galton, had made a scientific study of the principles of heredity, could throw upon the somewhat extraordinary lineage of Algernon Swinburne. The poet himself was inclined to dwell on the notable character of his parentage on both sides, and to claim to be the efflorescence of two tough and redoubtable races. It is, however, clear that whatever their adventures had been neither the Swinburnes nor the Ashburnhams had produced a poet or a scholar before. They were pure types of the aristocratic class in its moods for producing sportsmen, soldiers, and county magnates. The traveller Henry Swinburne (17431803) was the sole member of either family who had sought distinction with his pen. This detachment from letters must be dwelt upon, because it was an object of constant interest to the poet himself, who took a considerable pride in the supposed chivalry and violence of his forbears. In a letter to Stedman, in 1875, after expatiating on the deeds of his ancestors, he wrote with a certain complacency, "I think you will allow that when this race chose at last to produce a poet, it would have been at least remarkable if he had been content to write nothing but hymns and idylls for clergymen and young ladies to read out in chapels and drawing-rooms." 1 There had been, indeed, nothing idyllic in the history of the Swinburnes, an ancient Border clan of the county of Northumberland. According to family tradition, which the poet accepted, "there was a Swinburne peerage, but it has been dormant or forfeit since the thirteenth or fourteenth century." Less shadowy is a Sir Adam de Swinburne of the reign of Edward II., a man-at-arms whose grandson, or other descendant, lost Swinburne Castle, but became lord of Chollerton and Capheaton. While the Percys lived in semiroyal state at Wrassil, in Yorkshire, the Swinburnes had charge of their vast Northumbrian possessions; from a MS. document of 22 Henry VII., I learn that in that year George Swinburne was master-forester to Henry, fifth Earl of Northumberland (1477-1527). After romantic adventures which the poet loved to recite, the family settled at Capheaton in the beginning of the reign of Elizabeth, and has resided there ever since. In 1660 a baronetcy was conferred on John Swinburne "virum, patrimonio censu et morum probitate spectabilem," and has survived to our day. Three successive baronets married wives of royal descent. During Algernon's childhood and early manhood, his grandfather, Sir John 1 Mrs. Disney Leith supplies, however, a warning word—"Algernon had a very bad head for genealogies." Swinburne, was head of the house, and this very remarkable man did more than any other person to awaken the proclivities and moral temperament of the poet. From his turbulent grandfather he inherited his republicanism, his impatience of restraint, his love of violent exercise, and from both families his elaborate and ceremonious courtesy. Sir John Swinburne, who had been born in 1762, was a link with the eighteenth century more than half-way down the nineteenth, for he lived to enter his ninety-ninth year, and to die in 1860. From his grandson's recollections of him a quotation may be pertinent: Born and brought up in France, his father (I believe) a naturalized Frenchman (we were all Catholic and Jacobite rebels and exiles) and his mother a lady of the house of Polignac1 . . . my grandfather never left France till called away at twenty-five on the falling in of such English estates (about half the original quantity) as confiscation had left to a family which in every Catholic rebellion from the days of my own Queen Mary to those of Charles Edward had given their blood like water and their lands like dust for the Stuarts. I assume that his Catholicism sat lightly upon a young man who in the age of Voltaire had enjoyed the personal friendship of Mirabeau. He was (of course on the ultra-Liberal side) one of the most extreme politicians as well as one of the hardest riders and the best artpatrons of his time. . . . It was said that the two maddest things in the north country were his horse and himself. . . . He was the friend of the great Turner, of Mulready, and of many lesser artists: I wish to God he 1 Mrs. Disney Leith considers that in claiming this descent the poet made a mistake. Miss Isabel Swinburne (who died, the last survivor of the Admiral's children, on the 5th of November 1915) thought that her brother may have heard his grandfather talk vaguely of French connections, and misunderstood the nature of them. |