Richard Cobbold - The History of Margaret Catchpole, a Suffolk Girl

Elizabeth Cobbold was in the habit of saying that when she married her husband she found no books in the house except Bibles and account-books.

Brewing was such good business in those days that John Cobbold was able to give to each of his two youngest sons (twenty-first and twenty-second children) a University education, and to buy for each of them a church living worth £1,000 a year.

Richard Cobbold was educated at Bury St. Edmunds and at Caius College, Cambridge, was destined for the Church, and when he married he was a curate in Ipswich 4 4 At the Tower Church. He lived at St. Margaret’s Green. , but his father obtained for him the living of Wortham, near Diss, where he was Rector from 1825 until his death in 1877. He was also rural dean of Hartismere. Several years after celebrating his golden wedding – Dr. Spencer Cobbold informs me – he and his wife died within a day or two of each other; the survivor did not know the other was gone; both were buried at the same time. Of the three sons who survived, one became Rector of Hollesley, another was the father of the well-known amateur footballer, W. N. Cobbold, and the third was the Fellow of the Royal Society, to whom I have already referred, and to whose son I am indebted for so many interesting facts.

That Richard Cobbold was not particularly honoured in his own country may be gathered from many quarters. One writer speaks of his “little vanities, his amusing egotisms, and his good natured pomposity”. It was clearly not Suffolk that helped to make his fame, if we may accept one of the few printed references to him that I have been able to find: —

I confess I never knew a Suffolk man at home or abroad who would take any pride in being the fellow countryman of this clerical novel-writer; but in different parts of England I have seen reason to believe that our division of the eastern counties has a place in the minds of many thousands of people only by reason of the Rev. Richard Cobbold and his works, that the ancient town of Ipswich, which we hail from as if it were a niche in the temple of fame, has never been heard of except as the scene of some of the chief adventures of Margaret Catchpole. 5 5 Public Men of Ipswich and East Suffolk , by Richard Gowing. Ipswich: W. J. Scopes, 1875.

Other books are assigned to our author in the catalogues, but I doubt if one of them survives other than Margaret Catchpole , which not only survives, but is really a classic in its way. One story, indeed, Freston Tower , held the public for a time almost as well as the present book, but I imagine it has ceased to command the attention even of the most remote village library, where indeed it was long ago worn threadbare. 6 6 The following books by Richard Cobbold are in the British Museum Library: — Essentially our author is a man of one book, and many adventitious circumstances helped him here. It was no small thing that the heroine should actually have been a native of the very district in which the writer lived. She was not merely a vivid tradition of his boyhood, but had been in the service of his mother and had stolen from his father the horse that gave her so unpleasant a notoriety. Here was a romance ready to hand, which needed but to be set down in passably good writing to attract attention. It might have been worse written than it was by this worthy clergyman and would still have secured readers. How much is truth and how much is fiction in the story will never be known. If Mr. Cobbold had an abundance of documents about this girl Margaret Catchpole and her affairs, inherited from his parents, he must have destroyed them. He claims in the course of the story that, as Margaret three times saved the life of a member of Mr. Cobbold’s family, it is not surprising that the records of her life should be so strictly preserved among them. But these records do not appear to exist any longer. It is doubtful if they ever did exist. The author probably worked from family traditions rather than from documents. He possessed, in addition, a genuine imaginative faculty.

Such documents as do exist do not amount to enough to justify the author’s declaration that here is “a perfectly true narrative". Mr. Frank Woolnough, of Ipswich 7 7 The Secretary of the Borough of Ipswich Museum and Free Library. , courteously informs me that a letter by Margaret Catchpole, written only a few days before she sailed to Australia, and the lyre bird that she sent to her mistress about a year after her arrival, are the two curiosities of the Museum most eagerly inquired after by strangers. Here is the letter in question: —

i am sorrey i have to inform you this Bad newes that i am going away on wedensday next or thursday at the Longest so i hav taken the Liberty my good Ladey of trobling you with a few Lines as it will Be the Larst time i ever shall trobell you in this sorrofoll Confinement my sorrows are very grat to think i must Be Banished out of my owen Countreay and from all my Dearest friendes for ever it is very hard inded for any one to think on it and much moor for me to enduer the hardship of it honred madam i should Be very happey to see you on tuesday Befor i Leve englent if it is not to much trobbell for you for i am in grat confushon my self now my sorrowes are dobbled i must humbly Beg on your Goodness to Consider me a Littell trifell of monney it wold Be a very Grat Comfort to your poor

How small a matter a sentence of death for horse-stealing was counted in the closing years of the eighteenth century may be gathered from the fact that the contemporary newspaper report of 1797 runs only to five lines, as follows: —

"Margaret Catchpole, for stealing a coach horse, belonging to John Cobbold, Esq., of Ipswich (with whom she formerly lived as a servant), which she rode from thence to London in about 10 hours, dressed in man’s apparel, and having there offered it for sale was detected.”

Undoubtedly one of the characteristics of the book that give it so permanent a place in literature is the circumstance that it preserves for us a glimpse of the cruel criminal law of the eighteenth century. Hanging for small offences went on for years after this, until, indeed, public opinion was revolted by the case of the young married woman who in Ludgate Hill lifted a piece of cloth from the counter. She hesitated and then put it down again. But she had been seen, and was arrested, tried, condemned, and hanged, although it was clearly proved that her husband had been seized by a press-gang and that her babe cried for bread. After this time came a reaction against the death penalty for theft. Margaret, then, was more fortunate than that unhappy woman and than the more celebrated Deacon Brodie, who was hanged in Edinburgh, the city which he had adorned as a Councillor, for a house-breaking theft which brought him four pounds or less. She doubtless owed her escape to the powerful influence of the Cobbolds. 8 8 The punishment of death for horse-stealing was abolished in 1832, but in 1833 a little boy of nine who pushed a stick through a cracked window and pulled out some painters’ colours worth twopence was sentenced to death. Since 1838 no person has been hanged in England for any offence other than murder. See Spencer Walpole’s History of England from the Conclusion of the Great War in 1815 .

Margaret Catchpole is the classic novel of Suffolk. That county of soothing landscape and bracing sea has produced greater books; it has given us more interesting authors than Richard Cobbold. Within its borders were written the many fine poems of George Crabbe, the many attractive letters of Edward Fitz Gerald. The remarkable paraphrase from the Persian known to all the English speaking world as The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám was composed here. But, although many latter-day novelists have laid their scenes in these pleasant places, made memorable by the art of Constable, not one has secured so fascinating a topic or so world-wide an audience. Margaret Catchpole is one of the few heroines of fiction of whom one loves to remember that she was real flesh and blood.