Oddities of John Horne Tooke
The life of this strange person may almost be said to have been commenced with a joke. He was the son of a poulterer, named John Horne, in Newport Street, Westminster; or, as he told his schoolfellows, his father was “a turkey merchant.” He was educated for the Church, according to his father’s wish, and took orders for the bar.
What Tooke thought of the former profession may be seen in a letter of his to Wilkes, whose acquaintance he made in Paris in 1765, and to whom he thus wrote:—“You are now entering into correspondence with a parson, and I am greatly apprehensive lest that title should disgust; but give me leave to assure you, I am not ordained a hypocrite. It is true I have suffered the infectious hand of a bishop to be waved over me, whose imposition, like the sop given to Judas, is only a signal for the devil to enter. I hope I have escaped the contagion; and, if I have not, if you should at any time discover the black spot under the tongue, pray kindly assist me to conquer the prejudices of education and profession.”
Tooke was, upon one occasion, memorably outwitted by Wilkes, who was then sheriff of London and Middlesex. Tooke had challenged Wilkes, who sent him the following cutting reply:—“Sir, I do not think it my business to cut the throat of every desperado that may be tired of his life; but as I am at present High Sheriff of the City of London, it may happen that I shall shortly have an opportunity of attending you in my official capacity, in which case I will answer for it that you shall have no ground to complain of my endeavours to serve you.” We agree with Mr. Colton, in his Lacon, that the above retort is a masterpiece of its kind.
The violence of Tooke’s political predilections, perhaps, was heightened by an accidental circumstance in his early life. His father, the poulterer, had for his neighbour, Frederick, Prince of Wales, at Leicester House, who most unceremoniously had cut through the wall of Horne’s garden a doorway, as an outlet towards Newport Market, for the convenience of the Prince’s domestics. But the poulterer and his son resisted the encroachment, and triumphed over the heir-apparent to the English crown, and had the obnoxious doorway removed, and the wall reinstated. This victory, it is reasonable to suppose, fanned the political aspirations of Horne Tooke.
For many years Tooke was the terror of judges, ministers of state, and all constituted authorities. When put on trial for his life (for treason), “so far from being moved by his dangerous position, he was never in more buoyant spirits. His wit and humour had often before been exhibited in Courts of Justice; but never had they been so brilliant as on this occasion. Erskine had been at his request assigned to him as counsel; but he himself undertook some of the most important duties of his advocate, cross-examining the witnesses for the Crown, objecting to evidence, and even arguing points of law. If his life had really been in jeopardy, such a course would have been perilous and rash in the highest degree; but nobody in court, except, perhaps, the Attorney and Solicitor-General, thought there was the slightest chance of an adverse verdict. The prisoner led off the proceedings by a series of preliminary jokes, which were highly successful. When placed in the dock, he cast a glance up at the ventilators of the hall, shivered, and expressed a wish that their lordships would be so good as to get the business over quickly as he was afraid of catching cold. When arraigned, and asked by the officer of the court in the usual form, how he would be tried? he answered, ‘I would be tried by God and my country—but——’ and looked sarcastically round the court. Presently he made an application to be allowed a seat by his counsel; and entered upon an amusing altercation with the judge, as to whether his request should be granted as an indulgence or as a right. The result was that he consented to take his place by the side of Erskine as a matter of favour. In the midst of the merriment occasioned by these sallies, the Solicitor-General opened the case for the Crown.”42
His change of name to John Horne Tooke is thus explained. At the time when he was rising into celebrity, the estate of Purley, near Godstone, in Surrey, belonged to Mr. William Tooke, one of the four friends who joined in supplying him with an income, while, after resigning the vicarage of New Brentford, he studied for the law. One of Tooke’s richer neighbours, having failed in wresting from him his manorial rights by a lawsuit, had applied to parliament and nearly succeeded in effecting his purpose by means of an inclosure bill, which would have greatly depreciated the Purley estate. Tooke despondingly confided his apprehensions to Horne, who resolved at once to avert the blow, which he did in a bold and very singular manner. The third reading of the bill was to take place the next day, and Horne immediately wrote a violent libel on the Speaker of the House of Commons in reference to it, and obtained its insertion in the Public Advertiser. As might be expected, the first parliamentary proceeding next day was the appearance of the adventurous libeller in the custody of the Serjeant-at-Arms. When called upon for his defence, he delivered a most remarkable speech, in which he pointed out the injustice of the bill in question with so much success, that not only was it reconsidered, and the clauses which affected his friend’s property expunged, but resolutions were passed by the House to prevent the possibility in future of such bills being smuggled through parliament without due investigation. In gratitude for this important service, Mr. Tooke, who had no family, made Horne his heir; on his death in 1803, the latter became proprietor of Purley, and, as one of the conditions of inheritance, added the name of Tooke to his own, and from this time was known as John Horne Tooke. His celebrated Diversions of Purley was named in compliment to the residence of the author’s friend.
Mr. Tooke’s Sunday dinners at his villa on Wimbledon Common were very festive gatherings. So early as eleven in the morning, some of the guests might be descried crossing the green in a diagonal direction; while others took a more circuitous route along the great road, with a view of calling at the mansion formerly occupied by the Duke of Newcastle while Prime Minister, but then the residence of Sir Francis Burdett. For many years a coach-and-four, with Mr. Bosville and two or three friends, punctually arrived within a few minutes of two o’clock. At four, the dinner was usually served in the parlour looking on the Common; and the servant having announced the dinner, the company passed through the hall, the chairs of which were crowded with great-coats, hats, &c., and took their seats without any ceremony, each usually placing himself in his proper situation. During dinner, the host’s colloquial powers were called forth into action: indeed, although he possessed an excellent appetite, and partook freely of almost everything before him, yet he found ample time for his gibes and jokes, which seemed to act as so many corroborants, at once strengthening and improving the appetites of his guests.
Here, at times, were to be seen men of rank and mechanics, sitting in social converse; persons of ample fortune, and those completely ruined by the prosecutions of the Attorney-General. On one side was to be seen, perhaps, the learned Professor of an University, replete with Greek and Latin, and panting to display his learned lore, indignant at being obliged to chatter with his neighbour, a member of the Common Council, about city politics. Next to these would sit a man of letters and a banker, between whom it was difficult to settle the agio of conversation, the one being full of the present state of the money-market, the other bursting to display his knowledge of all books, except those of account alone!
Tooke took delight in praising his daughters, which he sometimes did by those equivocatory falsehoods which were one of his principal pleasures. Of the eldest he said, “All the beer brewed in this house is that young lady’s brewing.” It would have been equally true to say, all the hogs killed in this house were of that young lady’s killing; for they brewed no beer. When a member of the Constitutional Society, he would frequently utter sentences, the first part of which would have subjected him to death by the law, but for the salvo that followed; and the more violent they were, thus contrasted and equivocatory, the greater was his triumph.
When Tooke was justifying to the Commissioners his return of income under 60l. a-year, one of those gentlemen, dissatisfied with the explanation, hastily said, “Mr. Tooke, I do not understand you.” “Very possibly,” replied the sarcastic citizen; “but as you have not half the understanding of other men, you should have double the patience.”
Horne Tooke told Mr. Rogers that in his early days a friend gave him a letter of introduction to D’Alembert, at Paris. Dressed à-la-mode, he presented the letter, and was very courteously received by D’Alembert, who talked to him about operas, comedies, suppers, &c. Tooke had expected conversation on very different topics, and was greatly disappointed. When he took leave, he was followed by a gentleman in a plain suit, who had been in the room during his interview with D’Alembert, and who had perceived his chagrin. “D’Alembert,” said the gentleman, “supposed from your gay apparel that you were merely a petit maître.” The gentleman was David Hume. On his next visit to D’Alembert, Tooke’s dress was altogether different, and so was the conversation.
Tooke’s literal kind of wit—set off, as tradition recounts, by a courteous manner and by imperturbable coolness—is not ill shown in the following:—“‘Power,’ said Lord —— to Tooke, ‘should follow property.’ ‘Very well,’ he replied, ‘then we will take the property from you, and the power shall follow it....’” “‘Now, young man, as you are settled in town,’ said my uncle, ‘I would advise you to take a wife.’ ‘With all my heart, sir; whose wife shall I take?’” It is a trait of manners that the “Rev. Mr. Horne” must have been a young clergyman at the time of this conversation; he did not, as is well known, take the name of Tooke till a later period. We have a trace, too, of his philological acuteness in Mr. Rogers’s Memorandum Book:—“An illiterate people are most tenacious of their language. In traffic, the seller learns that of the buyer before the buyer learns his. A bull in the field, when brought to town and cut up in the market, becomes bœuf, beef; a calf, veal; a sheep, mouton; a pig, pork;—because there the Norman purchased, and the seller soon learnt his terms; while the peasantry retained their own.” It is not surprising that a sharp logical wit should be an acute interpreter of language.
In the year 1811, a most flagrant depredation was committed in Mr. Tooke’s house at Wimbledon, by a collector of taxes, who daringly carried away a silver tea and sugar-caddy, the value of which amounted in weight in silver to at least twenty times more than the sum demanded, for a tax which Tooke declared he would never pay. Instructions were given to an attorney for replevying the goods; but the tax-collector, by the advice of a friend, returned the tea-caddy, and the man declaring he had a large family, Tooke treated him very kindly, and the matter was allowed to drop.
Mr. Tooke’s health had been a long time before his decease in a declining state; but his humour and eccentricity remained in full force to the last; and even in the gripe of death his serenity never forsook him. While he was speechless and considered insensible, Sir Francis Burdett, who was present with a few more friends, prepared a cordial for him, which the medical attendants declared to be of no avail, but which the baronet persisted in offering, and raising up the patient for that purpose, when Mr. Tooke perceiving who offered the draught, drank it off with a smile, and in a few minutes expired, on March 18th, 1812, at his house at Wimbledon. He was put into a strong elm shell. The coffin was made from the heart of a solid oak, cut down for the purpose. It measured six feet one inch in length; in breadth at the shoulders, two feet two inches; depth at the head, two feet six inches; and the depth at the feet, two feet four inches. This great depth of coffin was necessary in consequence of the contraction of the body of the deceased.
A tomb had long been prepared for Mr. Tooke in his garden at Wimbledon, in which it was his desire to have been buried; but this, after his decease, being opposed by his daughters and an aunt of theirs, his remains were conveyed in a hearse and six to Ealing, in Middlesex; attended by three mourning-coaches, containing Sir Francis Burdett and several other political and literary friends. His remains were interred according to the rites and ceremonies of the Church of England, otherwise, it was his desire that no funeral service should be read over his body, but that six poor men should have a guinea each to bear him to the vault in his garden. He rests in a vault, inclosed with iron railings, and bearing this inscription:—“John Horne Tooke, late of Wimbledon, author of the Diversions of Purley, was born June, 1736, and died March 18th, 1812, contented and grateful.”