Origin of the Browning Family --Robert Browning's Grandfather --His position and Character --His first and second Marriage --Unkindness towards his eldest Son,Robert Browning's Father --Alleged Infusion of West Indian Blood through Robert Browning's Grandmother --Existing Evidence against it --The Grandmother's Portrait.
A belief was current in Mr.Browning's lifetime that he had Jewish blood in his veins.It received outward support from certain accidents of his life,from his known interest in the Hebrew language and literature,from his friendship for various members of the Jewish community in London.
It might well have yielded to the fact of his never claiming the kinship,which could not have existed without his knowledge,and which,if he had known it,he would,by reason of these very sympathies,have been the last person to disavow.The results of more recent and more systematic inquiry have shown the belief to be unfounded.
Our poet sprang,on the father's side,from an obscure or,as family tradition asserts,a decayed branch,of an Anglo-Saxon stock settled,at an early period of our history,in the south,and probably also south-west,of England.A line of Brownings owned the manors of Melbury-Sampford and Melbury-Osmond,in north-west Dorsetshire;their last representative disappeared --or was believed to do so --in the time of Henry VII.,their manors passing into the hands of the Earls of Ilchester,who still hold them.The name occurs after 1542in different parts of the country:in two cases with the affix of 'esquire',in two also,though not in both coincidently,within twenty miles of Pentridge,where the first distinct traces of the poet's family appear.
Its cradle,as he called it,was Woodyates,in the parish of Pentridge,on the Wiltshire confines of Dorsetshire;and there his ancestors,of the third and fourth generations,held,as we understand,a modest but independent social position.
This fragment of history,if we may so call it,accords better with our impression of Mr.Browning's genius than could any pedigree which more palpably connected him with the 'knightly'and 'squirely'families whose name he bore.It supplies the strong roots of English national life to which we instinctively refer it.Both the vivid originality of that genius and its healthy assimilative power stamp it as,in some sense,the product of virgin soil;and although the varied elements which entered into its growth were racial as well as cultural,and inherited as well as absorbed,the evidence of its strong natural or physical basis remains undisturbed.
Mr.Browning,for his own part,maintained a neutral attitude in the matter.
He neither claimed nor disclaimed the more remote genealogical past which had presented itself as a certainty to some older members of his family.
He preserved the old framed coat-of-arms handed down to him from his grandfather;and used,without misgiving as to his right to do so,a signet-ring engraved from it,the gift of a favourite uncle,in years gone by.But,so long as he was young,he had no reason to think about his ancestors;and,when he was old,he had no reason to care about them;he knew himself to be,in every possible case,the most important fact in his family history.
Roi ne suis,ni Prince aussi,Suis le seigneur de Conti,he wrote,a few years back,to a friend who had incidentally questioned him about it.
Our immediate knowledge of the family begins with Mr.Browning's grandfather,also a Robert Browning,who obtained through Lord Shaftesbury's influence a clerkship in the Bank of England,and entered on it when barely twenty,in 1769.He served fifty years,and rose to the position of Principal of the Bank Stock Office,then an important one,and which brought him into contact with the leading financiers of the day.
He became also a lieutenant in the Honourable Artillery Company,and took part in the defence of the Bank in the Gordon Riots of 1789.
He was an able,energetic,and worldly man:an Englishman,very much of the provincial type;his literary tastes being limited to the Bible and 'Tom Jones',both of which he is said to have read through once a year.He possessed a handsome person and,probably,a vigorous constitution,since he lived to the age of eighty-four,though frequently tormented by gout;a circumstance which may help to account for his not having seen much of his grandchildren,the poet and his sister;we are indeed told that he particularly dreaded the lively boy's vicinity to his afflicted foot.He married,in 1778,Margaret,daughter of a Mr.Tittle by his marriage with Miss Seymour;and who was born in the West Indies and had inherited property there.
They had three children:Robert,the poet's father;a daughter,who lived an uneventful life and plays no part in the family history;and another son who died an infant.The Creole mother died also when her eldest boy was only seven years old,and passed out of his memory in all but an indistinct impression of having seen her lying in her coffin.
Five years later the widower married a Miss Smith,who gave him a large family.
