Returning from Southampton, Isaac Watts entered the family of Sir John Hartopp, the first of those two influential friends whose names will always be associated with his own; it was October 15th, 1696, he being then twenty-two years of age, when he went to reside with him. Within the memory of some of the old inhabitants of Stoke Newington there stood on the north side of Church Street the remains of a red brick house, with large casement windows; once they were all handsomely painted, and bore the arms of Fleetwood, Hartopp, and Cook. But no one of these later generations saw that old mansion in all its original greatness. In later years it came to be divided into houses, and parts of it drifted down from the abode of statesmen to the boarding-school for young ladies. Still it retained even to its close, traditionary relics and reminiscences of the old days of its pride and importance. On the ceilings of its principal rooms were the remains of the arms of the Lord General Fleetwood; and in the upper part there was a little door concealed by hangings, through which the persecuted Nonconformist passed into a place of safety and concealment, in the days of Charles II. The old house was built towards the close of the reign of Elizabeth, so that even at the period when it comes before our readers it was ancient. It was purchased by Charles Fleetwood, Lord General of the army of the Commonwealth, and under Cromwell one of the Council of State. It is quite unnecessary here to dwell upon his transient importance and power; he was one of the last of those remarkable men in that singular interregnum of our history, and the very last after the resignation of Richard Cromwell who held some of the shadows of the departed substance of greatness. He spent the remainder of his days in the mansion of Stoke Newington before his final departure for Bunhill Fields. To this place, in time succeeded Sir John Hartopp, by his wife Elizabeth Fleetwood, a grand-daughter of the General; and to this old red brick building, with its secret chambers and armorial casements and ceilings, Isaac Watts came as a tutor in the family.

Sir John Hartopp was not a mere city knight, and indeed city knighthoods meant much more in those days than now. He was of an old Leicestershire family of Dalby Parva, in the register books of which place the name is written Hartrupte. The family was able to trace a very interesting history back to the time of Richard II.; the baronetcy dated from the time of James I., and the family received considerable honours from Charles I., and, what is more to the purpose of the present memoir, it was in his house that Richard Baxter planned, if he did not partly write, “The Saint’s Everlasting Rest.” Sir John Hartopp, the friend of Watts, was born at the commencement of the Civil Wars. In his early youth the whole of his neighbourhood was alive with marchings and counter-marchings. Buckminster was the place of the family residence, and the steeple of the parish church was used as a watch-tower for reconnoitring. The house was alive and perpetually on the guard against the incursions of the Cavaliers. Sir Edward Hartopp, the first baronet, died at the commencement of the Protectorate of Cromwell, and was buried at Buckminster; his son, the father of Sir John, died a short time previous to the Restoration, and about this time we find the family removed to London and settled at Stoke Newington. Sir John became an eminent Nonconformist; as he cast in his lot among the Independents, he was a member of the Church of Dr. Owen, with whom he maintained a very close and intimate friendship; and there is in the library of the New College, in St. John’s Wood, a volume of the sermons of Owen, very carefully written down after hearing them, copied, probably for use in the family, in Sir John’s handwriting. Many of Dr. Owen’s manuscripts came into his possession upon his decease, and were contributed by him to the complete collection of the Doctor’s sermons.

Sir John Hartopp was an ardent and active patriot. He was three times chosen representative for his native county of Leicestershire. In 1671 he was high sheriff, and he afterwards distinguished himself by his earnest advocacy of the Bill of Exclusion to bar the Duke of York’s succession to the throne. He became the subject of much persecution, and paid in fines apparently the larger portion of £7,000. He died in 1722, when the affairs of the nation had long, through the active exertions of such men as he was, settled themselves into comparative tranquillity and prosperity. Watts preached in his memory his sermon “On the Happiness of Separate Spirits made Perfect,” and he dwells at some length upon certain personal characteristics, from which we gather that Sir John was an accomplished man, with a taste for universal learning, and the pursuit of knowledge in various forms—mathematics in his younger days, and astronomy in his old age; keeping alive his early knowledge of Greek for an intelligent acquaintance with the New Testament, and so late in life as at the age of fifty entering upon the study of Hebrew. His house became the refuge of the oppressed, while by some happy disposition of Providence he himself was saved from those more severe and painful persecutions to which so many were not only exposed but subjected. His ardent attachment to Dr. Owen assures us of the temper and character of his religious convictions, and altogether he shines out before us as one of those beautiful and luminous examples and illustrations of the men to whom our country owes so much. So far as we can gather from what is left on record of him, he appears to have been a true Christian gentleman, a fine harmonious combination of characteristics blending in him the severity of high principle with a gentle and tenderly affectionate nature.

Sir John Hartopp, as we have seen, became by marriage connected with the family of Cromwell; he married Elizabeth, one of the daughters of the Lord General Fleetwood, and his sister married a son of the old general—thus there was a double connection. When Fleetwood’s house was first built in the village of Stoke Newington it must have been a stately mansion. In his day it was probably divided, and had all the characteristics of the old mansions of the earlier part of the seventeenth century. Hither the General retired after the Restoration, and here, singularly enough, he was permitted to pass his days in tranquil obscurity. He died while Watts was studying at the adjoining academy. Watts no doubt knew the old Ironside, for he was on terms of close intimacy with his son, Smith Fleetwood. Such were some of the collateral connections of the Hartopp family. And there was another. Sir Nathaniel Gould, to whom Watts inscribes a poem, who married Frances, the daughter of Sir John and Lady Hartopp. Such was the circle in which it appears he moved to and fro with a pleasant and indulged affability. All of these people were members of the church over which Dr. Owen had presided, and of which Watts was hereafter, and shortly, to be minister. It was no doubt owing to the intimacy he sustained with all these eminent persons, that he by-and-bye received the invitation to become their pastor, in which relation he preached a funeral sermon, as we have seen, for Sir John, so also for Lady Hartopp, and Lady Gould, of whom he remarks, “I would copy a line from that most beautiful elegy of David, and apply it here with more justice than the Psalmist could to Saul and Jonathan, ‘Lovely and pleasant were they in their lives, and in their death they were not divided,’ silent were they and retired from the world, and unknown except to their intimate friends; humble they were and averse to public show and noise, nor will I disturb their graves by making them the subject of public praise.”

It was a house full of daughters and two sons. Two had already gone to the family vault, and one—born the year of Watts’ entrance into the family—was soon to follow. But there were nine daughters in the household; of these two had died before the days of Watts’ residence, seven survived; these were Helen, and Mary, and Martha, and Elizabeth, and a second Anne, and Bridget, and Dorothy, and Frances. Was Watts their tutor? It was a dangerous neighbourhood for a young man, amidst all those bright glances and radiant young faces in the Puritan household; perhaps the danger had been greater had there been fewer of them. Fancy indulges herself in picturing the life of the young student there. As we have seen, Frances married Sir Nathaniel Gould, and died in 1711, six days after her mother, Lady Hartopp. The other six daughters all lived and died unmarried in the family home. How solitary, one thinks, the last of that bright circle must have felt, dying there in 1764, sixty-two years after Watts first took up his abode among them.

Isaac Watts entered the family as the tutor of the future baronet, and many of those pieces which he afterwards gave to the world were the productions of this time, many of his “Miscellaneous Thoughts,” the chief portions of his “Logic,” and probably much of his “Improvement of the Mind.” We have said already he furnishes, like John Calvin and some others, an instance of a singular prematurity of intelligence, not however interfering, as is so frequently the case, with future eminence, usefulness, and advancement.

Here, then, was for some time Watts’ home. He studied hard and diligently, drawing forth and putting into shape the results of previous years of scholarship. Behind the house there were extensive gardens and remarkably fine trees, and especially a noble cedar, said to have been planted by General Fleetwood, concerning which Robinson tells a singular story: That long years ago a scythe had been hung up in the fork of the tree, and was left there unnoticed and untouched until years after it was discovered, the body of the tree having completely overgrown it and enclosed the blade so fast that it could not be removed. “And,” says Robinson, “it is at this day to be seen, the point of the blade on the one side, and the end on the other.”[8]

The young man to whom Watts was tutor died at the age of thirty-five. He had succeeded his father in the baronetcy. Watts had given to him a noble training. Upon the publication of his “Logic” it was dedicated to him, and the writer reminds him that it had been prepared for him to assist his early studies. Some of the most animating verses in the “Lyrics” are addressed to him, and many other scholastic pieces also were prepared for his pupil while residing at Stoke Newington. Amidst the shades of its trees were written many of those essays so pleasing to read now, his “Miscellaneous Thoughts” and “Juvenile Relics.” Here the young man was indeed training himself as well as teaching his pupil, when we remember that many, if not most, of his hymns had already been written at Southampton, and that his “Institutes of Logic” and his whole method of thought were matured and written here; truly he appears to have been an industrious athlete. Neither egotism nor egoism seems to shadow his studies by any morbid self-consciousness, or any wondering dreams as to what his future destiny might be. He appears to have been one to whom faith and duty were sufficient. He had found his Saviour, and he believed; he had his work to do, and he wrought at it like a living conscience. By-and-by he left the old house which had yet a singular history. His pupil was very wealthy, and he appears to have given during his life, and to have left upon his death a maintenance, with the family mansion, to his six maiden sisters. There they lived, and there they died; and it is remarkable, as has been already said, that one of them died in 1764, aged eighty-one, ninety years, as the church register shows, after the death of a young sister in 1674, the year in which Watts was born; this, we may be sure, was throughout his life one of the houses he would frequently revisit, and renew his impressions of youthful days amidst its elm and cedar shades. Gradually all the members of the family dropped away, each in turn gathered one by one, till one and all were re-united in the vaults of Stoke Newington Church. But we are stepping on too fast for our life of Watts, whose more obvious and active career was all before him yet.