The Knox Brothers. Penelope Fitzgerald
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than the sword.
In 1844 Frances Reynolds was a girl of twenty, short, slight and dignified, with fair hair and complexion and a sweet smile of a kind unknown among the gloomy Ulster farms and linen-sheds, a smile which she bequeathed to her descendants. George Knox, on the other hand, was the kind of Irishman who, like Samuel Beckett’s Watt, “had never smiled, but thought that he knew how it was done.” They were married that winter, in the church at Cuddalore, a handsome couple whose charm and influence were long remembered in Madras. In 1855 they returned to England, bringing with them a “fine family” of four sons and three daughters.
George had no intention of returning to Edentrellick, and for a while they were travelers, passing from one curacy to another. York was the place the children remembered best, and how their father, preaching at St. John’s by candlelight, put all the candles out, during a flight of eloquence, with a sweep of his pudding-bag sleeve, so that the church was left in darkness. In 1857 he was appointed Association Secretary of the Church Missionary Society, and they settled at Waddon, then a village, near Croydon. The house was not really large enough. The three elder boys slept together, the youngest, Lindsey, downstairs in the pantry. Edmund, the second son, who showed early scholastic promise, had to “get up” his lessons in the corner of his mother’s room, and witnessed, in fear and reverence, his mother’s daily prayers, as she struggled out loud to submit her will to God. But if there was overcrowding, nobody had time to worry about it. Everyone was hard at it, family and servants alike; if nothing else offered, there was sewing and poultry-keeping, though half the eggs had to be set aside to sell for the Missions. “There was no talk of slavery,” Edmund wrote. “Industry was the normal condition of rational beings, and idleness a dangerous sin. That principle ruled throughout the household.”
After her eighth confinement, it is true, Frances took to the life of a semi-invalid, but from her sofa she supervised every detail of the housekeeping. Between Ulster thrift and Quaker sobriety the economy was amazingly narrow. Only one piece of bread-and-butter was allowed—after that, dry bread only. Clothes were the subject of the deepest embarrassment. The boys were dressed in tartan tunics of seemingly indestructible material, handed down from one to another, or “a shapeless garment intended to represent a lounge coat.” The girls could only pray that fashion would come round full circle so that people would not laugh at their appearance in the street. Fortunately, perhaps, they went out very little, and at the neighbors’ parties they had to leave before the dancing, passing, with glances of acute regret, the loaded supper-table. The Knoxes, who for years had led the spacious social life of mid-Victorian India, now “kept no company.” Neither did they take seaside holidays, or, indeed, any holidays at all. Books were severely restricted, novels forbidden, and the father, who chose all his sons’ school prizes, would not hear of Ruskin, who tended to unmanly self-pity.
If George was becoming as tyrannous as his own father before him, it was out of an obsession which his whole family understood. At all costs, he must save them from hell-fire, and keep them on the narrow path of Low Church Anglicanism where he himself walked. Parents in those days did not dispute in public, and whatever Frances suffered when she heard, at a distance, the savage discipline and floggings that went on behind the study door, she was never seen to disagree with him. The boys, in time, made their own protest. Frederick, the third son, bit his father through the hand during a whipping, whereupon George, the eldest, threatened to run away unless the punishment stopped. But hardship never destroys a family if the parents share it, and all the children did well. The girls, it is true, never had much opportunity to meet any company and never married, but Ellen, without opposition from her father, won her way to Oxford and became Principal of Havergal College, Toronto. And as their parents grew old the children, as a natural thing, and without resentment for their hard upbringing, helped to support them.
Edmund, the industrious second son, who was to be the father of the four Knox brothers, was a stoutly built boy, with a native cheerfulness which was difficult to subdue. Of all the family he was the most profoundly influenced by the spiritual life of his mother. Her Quaker gift of prayer remained with him as he was gradually drawn toward the Evangelicals; what that meant, he has explained himself. First and foremost, the conviction that God loved him, “as an actual fact, that must take first place in my life.” There was no real division between the unseen and the seen. Secondly, to look at the Bible as a personal message from God to the individual soul, “and to read it daily with a resolve to hear what God had to say to me that day—I must find words that were meant for me.” Thirdly, to value the Sacraments of Baptism and the Lord’s Supper, which was celebrated by the Evangelicals only rarely, perhaps once a month. This faith survived even the natural doubting-time of adolescence. “When the testing came, and when I heard the question put to my soul, ‘Wilt thou also go away?’ I was able to see that unfaith could not satisfy my deepest needs.”
Meanwhile, Edmund was determined not to be a “burden.” He was justifiably proud of the fact that (apart from the railway fares and the indestructible clothing) his education cost his father only one shilling. This was for the tip traditionally given to the porter by a new boy at St. Paul’s School. Once this shilling was paid, scholarships covered everything. In later years he became a stout supporter of free education.
Edmund, entering in 1857, was an excellent classical scholar, but although the discipline at St. Paul’s was considered mild—largely owing to the absent-mindedness of the High Master—every boy had to expect to be beaten every day. The beatings were administered on both moral and social grounds: the “old Adam” had to be driven out of them, and they had to be “hardened” to face a competitive world. For the same reason, Latin and Greek were made doubly difficult because the grammar-books themselves were printed in Latin. At St. Paul’s there were no organized games, no “team spirit” to assist in the hardening process. The boys’ free time was spent in the streets or on the muddy foreshore of the Thames.
After “hardening” came “forming,” when the University was supposed to give a young man’s character its final shape. When, in 1865, Edmund went up to Corpus, Oxford was spiritually in low water. The loss of Newman was still felt, and the aftermath of Tractarianism lingered. “Several other combatants of the great fray,” he recalled, “were familiar in the street and at University sermons—the ferret-like Dr. Hawkins, the elephantine Ben Symons, the statuesque Plumtree, the dapper Wynter, the caustic and ingenious Mark Pattison.” But even these alarming figures, even Pusey himself, seemed weary; and the vacuum created was in danger of being filled by a liberal spirit of anti-clericalism, determined to remove power, once and for all, from the hands of the Church. This did not frighten young Edmund. If the new spirit meant that fellowships would be open to everyone, if it blew into musty corners, then he welcomed it. If it denied God, he would fight it.
Corpus itself was a pious and respectable college. It was nothing for the men to study, as Edmund often did, from four in the afternoon till two in the morning, sustained by cups of strong tea, and be ready, after a cold bath, for chapel at seven-thirty. On Sunday they put on black coats and top hats for their walk in the country. At first, to be sure, Edmund felt somewhat lonely, sitting, uncouth and penniless, in his room, hearing the steps of visitors go up the stairs, never for him. But, being naturally sociable, he looked out, and made friends. The company of his mother and sisters he certainly missed, and he went so far as to give up a course of lectures on the Greek Testament to go every week after evening service to a professor’s drawing room where he could spend a precious hour “in the society of ladies.” But he had much to do, and had found a firm ally in F. J. Chavasse (later the great Bishop of Liverpool), “a little man, almost deformed,” but full of inward fire. With Chavasse, he could make headway, in the name of Evangelicalism, against the indifference of the University. “A dull life, do you say?” he wrote. “Well, we did not find it so.” In his second year he told his father that he wished to be ordained.
George Knox had not forgotten how he fought this battle on his own account, but his concern for his children’s success, as well as their salvation, by now amounted to a mania. If Edmund was to enter the Church, he must start as something better than a curate; he must either get first-class honors, which would lead to a University appointment, or renounce the idea, and go into the Indian Civil Service.
All turned on the final examinations, Greats in 1868, Law