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 among lepers. After a while, he was admitted without opposition wherever he went. He was a holy man.
In 1851 his betrothed, Miss Mary Anne Jansen, courageously came out to Calcutta to marry him. She was the daughter of a merchant of Dutch origin who had married one of the Quaker Lloyds of Birmingham, the faithful friends of Charles Lamb. The Jansens were wealthy, which of course was of no importance at all to Mary Anne’s husband, but, since he was never likely to save a penny, it was just as well. Their first children were born in India, the fourth one in the garrison at Agra during the Mutiny. Mrs French watched the furniture of the British community floating downstream by the light of their burning houses; the Professor of English Literature was shot, and his horse and carriage flung into the compound. Thomas French, however, refused to enter the fort unless he had permission to bring his native Christians in with him. When this was granted he appeared carrying a large bag, which contained, not valuables, but his Arabic dictionary.
It was the end of his work in Agra, but in 1862 he returned to India, shrunken, ill, leaving his wife and children behind him, but unable to feel at peace in England. “The more I am borne away from you, the more my thoughts travel towards you,” he wrote to Mary Anne as his train left London Bridge, but there were more tongues to learn and untold millions to reach, even though in the Moslem regions to which he was bound he was lucky to make five converts in a year. His appointment was now as Principal of the college at Lahore, but in the vacations he travelled tirelessly over the mountains, first to the wild districts of the North-West Frontier, then to Kashmir, studying Hebrew and Pushtu on muleback, arriving with his shabby books and luggage, often too weak to wind up his own watch. He had become deeply interested in both Hindu and Moslem asceticism, his ambition now being to understand the mind of Indian religion and to present Christianity “without losing a grain, yet measuredly and gradually as the people can bear it.” At the same time, he had become increasingly impatient of the doctrinal quarrels within the Church itself. Small wonder that the Church Missionary Society were growing somewhat doubtful of their broad-minded servant.
Why did he do it? The Jansens pressed him to come home to his family, and “I must feel the objections of my father-in-law,” he wrote, “but I could not abandon the work without a farther trial of it.” Today he would certainly be asked: why not leave these people to their own beliefs? Why press on them something they did not ask for and do not want? To this his reply would be: “The viewing of the unseen world instead of the visible things of time—this cannot be a shallow matter; it must be deep or not at all—no halves in such a business.”
French’s only vanity was in the management of his tea-things on his journeys; when his mule fell and broke the cup, he taught himself to drink out of the spout. The study of languages was not vanity, but a way of bearing witness. It was his ambition to revise the Urdu and Hindustani Prayer Books, and to translate the Scriptures into Pushtu. This work was in hand when, after a terrible attack of fever, he returned to England and to Oxford in the spring of 1874. In June, Edmund Knox offered the rose he had bought on the station platform to Ellen.
No one among his Ulster forebears would have offered the rose, which was a measure of how much sentiment and heart could now find expression in the Knox family. It must have been with some misgivings that Ellen, with her sister as chaperon, went to pay her first visit to Edmund’s parents, but this, fortunately, was less formidable than it would have been a few years earlier. George and Frances Knox, with their four unmarried daughters, had moved to the vicarage of Exton, in Rutland. Although the children of the parish were told “always to think what Mr Knox told me not to do”, his habitual fires had sunk, and Frances had quite reverted to the easy ways of her girlhood. She sat in her room, the Lavender Room, still dressed in Quaker grey, but wrapped in Indian shawls, serene, and much loved by the neighbourhood. Edmund and Ellen were allowed to walk in the garden by themselves, and, according to Edmund’s diary, “had a profitable talk in the summer-house”.
Two years later, in 1876, Merton amended its statutes to allow four married fellows, and the wedding took place in the spring of 1878. Dr French, though with much regret, could not be present; he had been appointed Bishop of Lahore, a diocese of some twenty million souls, with only a thousand native Christians. Letters arrived from snowy hills and mud huts, from the famine area, from the battlefront of the Afghan War, where he refused to call the Afghans God’s enemies, and aroused criticism after our defeat at Maiwand by praying for “friends, lovers, orphans and widows”. “I did strike out ‘lovers,’ ” he said, “but put it in again.” But it was not till he received a telegram in April 1879, telling him of the birth of his first grandchild, Ethel Knox, that he began, for the first time, to feel old.
In 1884 Edmund and Ellen left Oxford for their first parish, Kibworth in Leicestershire. By that time they had four children, and two more were born to them there. Ethel was followed by Edmund George Valpy (1881); Winifred Frances (1882); Alfred Dillwyn (1884); Wilfred Lawrence (1886); and Ronald Arbuthnott (1888). Family affection dictated all the names. Dillwyn was the name of Frances’s grandmother, Lawrence was Bishop French’s younger brother, Arbuthnott recalled the sister from whom Frances had been so cruelly divided when she joined the Church of Rome.
Kibworth Rectory might have been designed and built to bring up a large family. All the children were so happy there that in later years they could cure themselves of sleeplessness simply by imagining that they were back at Kibworth. They had their own cow in the pasture, their own rookery in the elms, and, best of all, the railway ran past the bottom of the garden, and the dark red engines of the Midland line could be observed five times daily. The Knoxes were passionate railway children. True, people said that the drains were bad at Kibworth, but who cared? They were completely safe in the large nursery at the top of the back stairs, looking down into the kitchen garden, where in memory it was always summer, with the victoria plums ripening on the south wall. Their father mounted his stout horse, Doctor, to set off on his parish visits, and their dearly loved mother waved from an upper window.
The pack of children fell into distinct
