a hardheaded Ulster business sense, George acquired a sugar plantation and later recommended himself to the Governor, General Nugent, who was of illegitimate birth and always ready to help those who helped themselves. He returned to Ireland only once in the next ten years, to marry Laetitia Greenfield, the daughter of Angel Atkinson, of the Moneymore branch. Angel, who wrote that she was “waiting till it was God’s pleasure to dismiss her soul from its frail habitation”, was sickly, and George no doubt hoped, when she died, to inherit some more of the Knox property. Back in London, he set up as a merchant in Henrietta Street. The next prospects were to be the begetting of a numerous family, and the Moneymore inheritance. But everything went amiss: the property passed to a cousin, and Laetitia proved as delicate as her mother. She bore two sons—George in 1814, Alexander in 1818—then died, a few days later, of childbed fever.
To the four-year-old elder son it was a cruel shock. One of his books survives, a little leather-bound Tasso from his schooldays, with a Latin inscription: “This book was my mother’s, my loved, my long-lost mother’s.” The words come as something of a surprise in the history of the shrewd and so far dislikeable family. With poor Laetitia, the Knoxes acquired the beginnings of tenderheartedness.
Against all expectation, young George’s father turned away from him and lavished all his affection on the second son, who had innocently caused his mother’s death. What was left of the West Indian properties was settled on Alexander; everything was for Alexander.
Tempers blazed high when George refused to sit under a Presbyterian minister. His mother had been an Anglican, and so would he be. He went on to read for Holy Orders, and in 1837 was a totally penniless curate when General Nugent kindly intervened once again, and offered him a chaplaincy in the service of the East India Company. Once arrived in India, George asked for no further patronage or “interest”. Even though the great John and Henry Lawrence were his cousins—their mother was a Laetitia Knox from Prehen—he never applied to them, believing, in the words of John Bunyan, that “every tub should stand on its own bottom”.
His calling in Madras was not that of a missionary, but of chaplain to the English community. At first he inspired fear, a “black” Ulsterman, forceful as a soldier, whose heart was kept hidden. It was thought that he was more than fortunate to meet and win his future wife, Frances Reynolds.
Frances was of Quaker descent. The Reynolds family were reputable linen-bleachers at Beddington in Surrey, pious, discreet and thriving; but her father, Thomas Reynolds, was not a successful business man. He was drawn to impracticable schemes. As a very young man he had been sent to Paris by George IV to fetch back a mysterious “Miss Jones”, supposedly the daughter of Mrs Fitzherbert, who spoke much of her “rights”, and bequeathed to the Reynoldses a tiny pair of “royal” scissors. Later on Thomas eloped to Gretna Green with his bride, Sophia Daniell, after bribing her maid with the present of a workbox. After his marriage he gave up the bleaching business altogether and went to Cambridge to study medicine, though with no intention of practising. The result of all this airy dreaming was that his two daughters felt obliged to go out as governesses. To avert this fate the Curzons, who were distant connections, offered to take them to India, but the girls refused, “fearing the worldliness of the society into which they would be thrown.” “There were very tender consciences,” Frances’s son wrote, “in the borderland where Quakerism and Evangelicalism met.” Eventually the Daniells paid for the passages to India, and Frances and Mary Ann set off, their boxes full of dove-grey and sober brown dresses. They took with them, also, a copy of Keble’s Christian Year, something more intensely and romantically devotional than the Meeting House could offer.
Mary Ann might have been supposed to do the better of the two, for she eventually married the Hon. David Arbuthnott; but in later years she horrified her family by announcing that she and all her children were to be received as Roman Catholics. This meant that the sisters could never meet or communicate again, and both of them accepted this, in spite of the intense grief it caused. It was a division sharper 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 travellers, 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 neighbours’ 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
