The Knox Brothers. Richard Holmes
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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 honours, 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 and Modern History in 1869. While he waited for the results, he wrote to his sister Emily, “visions of every conceivable class came before me, and I was absolutely wretched.” The results came, and Chavasse wrote: “Thank God, thank God, dear old boy, that you have got a First—the sight of the class list took a load off my heart. I was dreaming all night that you had got a Third. I feel now how faithless I had been to mistrust God … I am glad for your father’s sake—above all I am glad for the sake of Evangelical religion in Oxford. No answer is needed: I should not expect a letter—nay I shall be vexed if I get one.” The President of Corpus offered Edmund the Cobbe Prize of £3 5s, “if I cared to take it, which of course I was not loth to do.” It enabled him to buy “a new suit of clothing” to receive his honours.
Edmund was ordained in 1870, by which time he had already been elected a Fellow of Merton. He was assured of three hundred pounds a year for the rest of his life, as long as he did not acquire extensive landed property (a very remote contingency), and as long as he did not marry.
Hard work, academic success, faith, endurance—these were the keys to the future. But Edmund had inherited from the Reynolds family something quite beyond his father’s capacity—the ability to enjoy himself. With his round parson’s hat at the mercy of the winds, he took to tricycling and spun across the Christ Church Meadows; on vacation in Scotland he learned to love the Highland scenery, never, as far as he could remember, having seen mountains before; “croquet,” he wrote, “had but a passing hold on me; it came in while I was still a boy,” but he introduced jeu de paume and lawn tennis, both of which he played pretty badly, into the quadrangle at Merton. On weekdays, too, he began to read novels—Jane Austen and Trollope. And he was living in one of the oldest and most picturesque colleges in Oxford, “its Common-room panelled with oak, lit by candles in silver candlesticks, heated by a noble fire.” These things were luxury, but he could not avoid the feeling that it was wrong for a man to have them at the start of his life. They should be earned and worked for, and nothing that he had done so far seemed enough. As Tutor, and later Dean, of Merton, he threw his considerable weight into the battle for sobriety and wholesome religious instruction. For example it had become, as he put it, “the habit of the idle to smash the windows of the new buildings with stones or with small loaves left over from meals.” From his method of dealing with this and other problems he became known as Hard Knocks. At the same time, he took on an unpaid curacy in the poorest parish in Oxford. He was in sole charge there, one long hot summer, when smallpox raged through the district. He improvised as best he could. There were no hospitals in Oxford then for infectious diseases.
But what about “the society of ladies”? The young Tutor who was not permitted, by statute, to marry, and who had contemplated, though not taken, a vow of celibacy, found that he had fallen in love. A new rector had come to the church of St Ebbe’s, near Christ Church Meadows—a missionary who was recuperating, somewhat unwillingly, in England from illness and over-fatigue on his Indian journeys. His name was Thomas French, and Edmund had met him before, when he had come for a time to Croydon. The eldest daughter, Ellen Penelope, was twenty years old, delicate in health and appearance, with elegant straight features. She was well educated, musical, seemed never to think of herself—but then, nor did anyone else in Dr French’s household. Almost at once Edmund “formed an attachment”.
He was returning from a summer parish outing. There were roses for sale on the Oxford station platform. On an impulse he bought one, and offered it to Ellen. If she accepted it, he would try his fate. Ellen took it. He did not know that on her first morning in Oxford she had felt a premonition when she had seen him, quite by chance, walking up Keble Terrace. She had thought, “That is my future husband.”
Thomas Valpy French was a saint, holy in the noblest sense of the word, and as exasperating as all saints. A poor judge of character, he always believed the best of everyone, in spite of repeated disappointments, and was so generous that his friends did not dare mention their wants, for fear of his ruining himself. Edmund Knox, in those Oxford days, “would gladly have sat at his feet”. His wife yearned to have him at home more often, but could never regret his calling.
The Frenches were a family of Norman descent, originally the de Freynes, and Thomas’s father, the Rev. Peter French, inexplicably known as “Goosefair” French, was a comfortable clergyman with good connections. His mother had been a Dillwyn from Wales, and he had married the daughter of Dr Richard Valpy, the headmaster of Reading School. The Frenches lived in the spacious vicarage of Holy Trinity, Burton-on-Trent, with a prosperous brewery round the corner. How did their son, with easy prospects in front of him, come to end his life in a lonely sand-strewn grave at Muscat, “on the edge of nowhere”?
At Rugby, Thomas French was a fine classical scholar, who had had “much to bear” during his schooldays because of his lack of guile. There was in fact a terrible simplicity about him. The urgent command of Christ, at the end of St Matthew, to “preach the truth to all nations”, came to him first at Oxford; then, like his contemporaries, he had to pray for a right choice between Africa, India and the new industrial cities. He went to India. From then onward his life was a reckless sacrifice of the body and a broadening of the mind. “The Padri Sahib,” said the Punjabis pityingly, “wears himself out and leaves no water in the well.”
French arrived in Calcutta in 1850, and began the intensive study of Indian languages which made him known as the “seven-tongued Padri”. But the swarming poverty struck him like a blow. He gave away his stipend, cut down his meals to a handful of rice, and “set his face” against being dressed by a bearer.
His first appointment from the Church Missionary Society was to St John’s College, Agra, a Christian school which he founded himself. He knew perfectly well that his unruly Hindu pupils only attended in the hope of getting Government jobs, and at first was pained by the “power of repulsion” they showed, but gradually their minds opened to him. They found that their headmaster was a fakir—like St Paul, as he pointed out—who could be seen after school in the marketplace, seated on a heap of melons, taking part in disputes and preaching contests, or reading the Bible