NOTES CHAPTER I 1. The first syllable is accented and was originally pronounced to rhyme with "cow"; the tendency recently has been to pronounce it to rhyme with "so"-precisely the same change is seen in the pronunciation of "Bowell": another form of the same name: "Howell", however still retains the original pronunciation. 2. This Thomas Powell had ten children; several sons died in infancy; William died in London; Susannah, born 1686, died 1780, aged 94, and lies buried at Ludlow, Shropshire; John was born at Bank House, circ. 1682 and died 1740 aged 58 or 59. (Powell MSS.) 3. The Dummers seem to have come originally from Devon: they spread over the South of England, including Hampshire. The emigration of the elder Dummer, son of a country gentleman, to London to engage in trade was not without precedent. In the reign of Mary and still more in that of Elizabeth (as is well known) a great number of the younger sons of the landed gentry, the County Families, flocked to London to engage in trade. Some of the best known families at the present time, even among the nobility, trace their origin to London merchants of that period, and in no few instances, the founders were younger sons of gentle families. The "Heralds' Visitation of the City of London" made in 1634 shows that more than half of the chief merchants of London were grandsons of country gentlemen and entitled "to wear coat armour." 4. In addition to the three sons named in the text John, William, and Jeremiah, there were two daughters, Anna who married the Reverend Dr. Pemberton of Boston, and who died, February, 1767, and Susan who married Mr. Symes of Springfield-neither is known to have left issue. William Dummer Powell seems to have been a favourite of his aunt, Mrs. Pemberton-in a letter to him from his mother, Boston, June 13, 1767, Mrs. Powell says: "She frequently mentioned you in her illness with strong marks of effection": and the "buttons taken from her arms after she died" were sent to him "as a pledge of love from your surviving aunt." None of the children of this first John Powell seems to have inherited his gaieté de coeur-they all seem to have been sedate and serious, even solemn; but the brother and sisters of William Dummer Powell and some of his children exhibited an atavistic reversion to type. This "skipping of a generation" is not uncommon in man or animals. William Powell married (1) Miss Bromfield of Boston by whom he had two daughters, one of whom afterwards became Mrs. Mason, and (2) Katherine, daughter of Thomas Goldthwaite and widow of Dr. Silverton Gardner. Jeremiah Powell married but died in 1785 without issue. Both William and Jeremiah Powell were active on the Republican side, the former being implicated in the opposition to the imposition of taxation upon the Colonies by the Home Parliament. The Stamp Act of 1765 was, indeed, repealed in 1766, but the "Townsend Revenue Act" of 1767, 7 Geo. III, c. 46, imposed duties upon paper, painters' colours, glass, and tea-the Colonists resisted, claiming that this was unconstitutional, and an infringement of their rights as being taxation without representation: and since the legal power of the Imperial Parliament to impose the duty was unquestionable, they opposed with the only weapon at their command, non-importation. The Act was repealed as to every article except tea (threepence per pound) in 1770 by the Act, 10 Geo. III, c. 17; and the tax on tea seems to have been retained not for revenue reasons, but rather as an assertion of the right to lay such imposts. The Colonists still resisted: three hundred women of Boston, heads of families, signed an agreement not to drink tea until the duty was repealed: indigenous substitutes were found, raspberry leaves, thyme, &c; and though tea continued to arrive at Boston, there was no sale for it. The East India Company, hard hit, applied to the British Government for relief having then some seventeen million pounds in their warehouses and an Act was passed in 1773, 13 Geo. III, c 44, allowing to the Company a drawback of the full amount of the English duties on exporting their tea to America, the Company to pay the threepenny duty per pound on landing the tea in America. A number of merchants in the Colonies became consignees and agents of the Company in this business, amongst them Richard Clarke and Company, Elisha Hutchinson, Benjamin Faneuil and Joshua Winslow of Boston. The Colonists were still more determined to prevent the importation of the tea, and a large meeting held at the State House, Boston, October 18, 1773, appointed a committee to wait on the consignees in the city and request them to resign their appointment-this committee was not very successful, and another committee of seven was appointed, of whom William Powell was one, to wait on Thomas and Elisha Hutchinsonthe Hutchinsons could not be found. When it said that the other members of the committee were John Hancock, John Pitts, Samuel Adams, Samuel Abbott, Dr. Joseph Warren and Nathaniel Appleton, William Powell's politics and standing in the community become manifestHancock, Adams and Warren were the most prominent of the popular leaders and Warren sealed his faith with his blood at Bunker Hill, June 17, 1775. A committee of correspondence of twenty-one members including William Powell, Samuel Adams, Joseph Warren and other prominent leaders was also appointed to correspond with similar committees at other places. At length, on the night of December 16, 1773, a number of Bostonians, some thirty or thereabouts, disguised themselves as Indians, and threw the tea on board the Company's ships into the harbour-this is the well-known "Boston Tea Party": it is not certain that William Powell took any part in this escapade. Neither G. R. T. Herves in his Retrospect of the Boston Tea Party, New York, 1834, nor Francis S. Drake in his Tea Leaves, Boston, 1884, states that William Powell was present-the latter, however, mentions his name as member of the committees already mentioned. Isaac Winslow Clarke, one of the firm, of Richard Clarke & Co., Con signees and Agents, afterwards married Anne Powell, sister of William Dummer Powell; and his sister, Susannah, married John Singleton Copley the artist, and became the mother of Lord Lyndhurst, Lord Chancellor of Great Britain. Of Jeremiah (or Jeremy) Powell, his nephew William Dummer Powell says: "Jeremiah Powell, my own uncle, was twenty years of the Provincial Council and of such Reputation for Integrity, tho' of the Country Party, that he was included in the King's Mandamus in 1774 and during the war he exercised the office of President of the Council, the Chief Executive Magistrate of the Province, with that honor and humanity as rendered him peculiarly dear to every British prisoner whose Misfortune led him to experience them." 5. The curious incidents of a West India mortgage are of little interest to a Canadian-even to a Canadian lawyer. They are given at length in the text-books, e. g. Fisher on Mortgages, 6th Edit., Sects. 525, 1791. Speaking generally, the mortgagees are allowed to stipulate that the proceeds of the mortgaged estates shall be consigned to and sold by them and that they shall be allowed ac ommission and certain other casual advantages. The actual receipt of consignments, the sale, &c., were very often left to agents; and the bankruptcy of the agent and consequent ruin, or at least impoverishment, of the mortgagee was no uncommon occurrence. 6. Powell calls his maternal grandfather "Suetonius", but the form "Sweton" appears to be proper. Powell says that the "son and heir" of Sir Suetonius assumed the title; but this is but one instance in many of inaccuracies to be found in the manuscripts of his later years. While incapable of untruth and exceedingly careful of literal accuracy, so that his statements made until after (say) his retirement from the Bench in 1825, may be relied upon, he in later manuscripts was guilty of a number of mistaken statements, some trivial and apparently mere inadvertencies or lapsus calami, others of greater importance. I should perhaps say that I have carefully checked his statements at every stage of his life with contemporary documents wherever that was possible for me. Powell's grandfather, Sir Sweton Grant of Dalvey, was the third Baronet succeeding his cousin, Sir Ludovic, in 1710: he did not assume the title and died without male issue (Burke says "d. s. p." but the "proles" here is of course male issue.) He was succeeded by Sir Patrick Grant, his first cousin twice removed, and he, in 1755, by his son who is the Sir Alexander Grant spoken of by Powell in several places and by his mother in a letter to him from Boston, June 13, 1767. Sir Alexander's wife, also spoken of with gratitude by Mrs. Powell for her kindness to her son, was the second wife, Margaret, daughter of Alexander Grant of Auchterblair. This Sir Alexander Grant the fifth Baronet was the son of Sir Patrick Grant and Lydia Mackintosh; he died in 1772 and was succeeded by Sir Ludovic and he by Sir Alexander in 1780. Sir Alexander Grant, the celebrated Principal of the University of Edinburgh, was the tenth Baronet. See Burke's Peerage and Baronetage, 69th. Edit., p. 744. 7. The original spelling is "Tollemache"; this became "Tolmach", "Tallmadge", "Tallmage", and "Talmage"-the spelling in the text is that almost always used by Powell. 8. The Revd. Jonathan Travers was the chief manager of the school. 9. His being sent to Holland was due to the advice of John Grant, a business friend of his father's and apparently a relative of his mother's; and his father was then on his behalf "looking to an Interest in the Mercantile House of Sir Alexander Grant-Holland being then considered the School for merchants. There I acquired a little more than the French Language with sufficient Dutch and Arithmetic to qualify me for the East; but in the Society of two Ladies, sisters from Vevey in whose House I lodged acquired a Taste for French Literature and concurrently for the Roman Classics." These two ladies were no doubt the wife and sister-in-law of Mr. Bevois. 10. This Earl of Erroll (or Errol) was James, the 15th Earl of Errol and son of the well-known Earl of Kilmarnock, who was executed in 1746 for his share in the rebellion of 1745. This Earl's wife was the heiress of the Earldom of Erroll; they had issue, James, the 15th Earl of Erroll; and Charles Boyd, who having become engaged in the affair of '45, escaped to France and returning died at Edinburgh in 1782 left this son, the "chum" of Powell and one daughter. Another son of the Countess of Kilmarnock was William Boyd, who was a Naval Officer in the service of King George II at the time of his father's execution. 11. A letter is preserved written by John Powell to Mr. William Reeve, a merchant in Bristol, England, concerning a scandalous story that he had not paid a large debt he owed to one Reeve a Merchant at Bristol and that he was to be arrested in Boston for it. This story had been told by one of the pupils at the school as coming from Mr. Reeve: and it caused the lad Powell to be shunned by all. The boy wrote to his mother, July 24, 1769; and the father wrote from Boston, October 12, 1769, to Reeve saying that it was a "false, cruel and Scandalous and wicked accusation", as Reeve knew-and added "I not only expect but Require from you as a Gentleman without Delay to write Sir A. Grant and the Rev. Mr. Travers fully the truth of this matter and oblige the boy whoever he is to make full and Publick acknowledgment in the School to my Son and to Relieve my Boy from the Pain and anguish and Shame and disgrace he has suffered by a Forged Lye." (Powell MSS.). 12. John Powell, William Dummer Powell's father, had rather poor health some of the correspondence hints at the cause being too much port, but this may be unjust; and, in any cause, those were the days of heavy drinking and the teetotaler was an object of pity as a weakling or of contempt as a hypocrite. His wife writing from Boston, June 13, 1767 to William Dummer Powell, her son, then at school at Tunbridge, says: "Your good & worthy papa has been ill this six month & for some part of the time dangerously so, indeed my dear I have been greatly distresst for you and my other Children. Yours Could not have been a Common loss for such tender fathers are rare even to the best Children. I thank the almighty there is at present hopes of his recovery if not to a perfect health to a tolerable state of ease. Oh my son much is expected much required of you to fulfill the injunction of a father who hopes and believes you may in time represent him to his family. Could I my Child but make you sensible of the gratitude of your good papa expresst to heaven when he lay as he imagind on the bed of death for blessing him with Children who promist to prove men and women of virtue it would not only raise the most tender |