Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin | Page 4

not my design, nor have I the necessary knowledge, to give a
history of this obscure family. But this is an age when genealogy has
taken a new lease of life, and become for the first time a human science;
so that we no longer study it in quest of the Guaith Voeths, but to trace
out some of the secrets of descent and destiny; and as we study, we
think less of Sir Bernard Burke and more of Mr. Galton. Not only do
our character and talents lie upon the anvil and receive their temper
during generations; but the very plot of our life's story unfolds itself on
a scale of centuries, and the biography of the man is only an episode in
the epic of the family. From this point of view I ask the reader's leave
to begin this notice of a remarkable man who was my friend, with the
accession of his great-grandfather, John Jenkin.
This John Jenkin, a grandson of Damaris Kingsley, of the family of
'Westward Ho!' was born in 1727, and married Elizabeth, daughter of
Thomas Frewen, of Church House, Northiam. The Jenkins had now
been long enough intermarrying with their Kentish neighbours to be
Kentish folk themselves in all but name; and with the Frewens in
particular their connection is singularly involved. John and his wife
were each descended in the third degree from another Thomas Frewen,
Vicar of Northiam, and brother to Accepted Frewen, Archbishop of
York. John's mother had married a Frewen for a second husband. And
the last complication was to be added by the Bishop of Chichester's
brother, Charles Buckner, Vice-Admiral of the White, who was twice
married, first to a paternal cousin of Squire John, and second to Anne,
only sister of the Squire's wife, and already the widow of another
Frewen. The reader must bear Mrs. Buckner in mind; it was by means
of that lady that Fleeming Jenkin began life as a poor man. Meanwhile,
the relationship of any Frewen to any Jenkin at the end of these
evolutions presents a problem almost insoluble; and we need not
wonder if Mrs. John, thus exercised in her immediate circle, was in her
old age 'a great genealogist of all Sussex families, and much consulted.'
The names Frewen and Jenkin may almost seem to have been
interchangeable at will; and yet Fate proceeds with such particularity
that it was perhaps on the point of name that the family was ruined.

The John Jenkins had a family of one daughter and five extravagant
and unpractical sons. The eldest, Stephen, entered the Church and held
the living of Salehurst, where he offered, we may hope, an extreme
example of the clergy of the age. He was a handsome figure of a man;
jovial and jocular; fond of his garden, which produced under his care
the finest fruits of the neighbourhood; and like all the family, very
choice in horses. He drove tandem; like Jehu, furiously. His saddle
horse, Captain (for the names of horses are piously preserved in the
family chronicle which I follow), was trained to break into a gallop as
soon as the vicar's foot was thrown across its back; nor would the rein
be drawn in the nine miles between Northiam and the Vicarage door.
Debt was the man's proper element; he used to skulk from arrest in the
chancel of his church; and the speed of Captain may have come
sometimes handy. At an early age this unconventional parson married
his cook, and by her he had two daughters and one son. One of the
daughters died unmarried; the other imitated her father, and married
'imprudently.' The son, still more gallantly continuing the tradition,
entered the army, loaded himself with debt, was forced to sell out, took
refuge in the Marines, and was lost on the Dogger Bank in the war-ship
MINOTAUR. If he did not marry below him, like his father, his sister,
and a certain great-uncle William, it was perhaps because he never
married at all.
The second brother, Thomas, who was employed in the General Post-
Office, followed in all material points the example of Stephen, married
'not very creditably,' and spent all the money he could lay his hands on.
He died without issue; as did the fourth brother, John, who was of weak
intellect and feeble health, and the fifth brother, William, whose brief
career as one of Mrs. Buckner's satellites will fall to be considered later
on. So soon, then, as the MINOTAUR had struck upon the Dogger
Bank, Stowting and the line of the Jenkin family fell on the shoulders
of the third brother, Charles.
Facility and self-indulgence are the family marks; facility (to judge by
these imprudent marriages) being at once their quality and their defect;
but in