It was at that period of Watts’ life, when he felt in a very especial manner his loneliness, and fever and infirmity were reducing him to a painful sense of abiding weakness, that Sir Thomas and Lady Abney invited him to spend a week with them at their magnificent house of Theobalds, in Hertfordshire. He accepted the invitation, and the hosts and their guest seemed to have been so mutually pleased with each other that Watts continued in the family until his death, a period of thirty-six years. Watts must have then been about thirty-eight years of age. Johnson remarks upon this friendship that “it was a state in which the notions of patronage and dependence were overpowered by the perception of reciprocal benefits; it deserves a particular memorial;” and he refers to Dr. Gibbons’ interesting account, which is, indeed, one of the most pleasant pieces of his biography, and compels the wish that he had more frequently broken the monotony of the book by pages so pleasing. The event was one of those kind providences which those who watch the lives of eminent men, who have served their generation and the cause of God, will not fail to perceive. Think of the solitary student, the shrinking, sensitive man, the modest and fearful spirit who could not command service, and recoiled from giving trouble, how fearfully life might have dragged along through a few years of languor and pain, unequal to much service, unable to gather round him any, or but few, of the comforts of life, suddenly transferred to all the affluent comforts of this magnificent abode, to its rooms, capacious and luxurious, the abode of order, and harmony, and holiness, not only a pious household, but entirely after the type favoured by the thoughtful guest. There were the rich rural scenes, the delightful garden, the spreading lawn, and the fragrant and embowered recess, all wooing the body back to health and the heart to peace; and although a few years after his entrance into the household Sir Thomas Abney dies, yet the guest cannot be permitted to depart. The same affection and respect are continued by Lady Abney and her daughter. Lady Abney was the sister of the chief friend of Watts’ younger days, Thomas Gunston; her wealth was very great, and, says Gibbons, “her generosity and munificence in full proportion.” There must have been a pleasant fellowship and community of tastes, certainly a fitting harmony of character; reminding us of Robert Boyle with his sister Lady Ranelagh, or William Cowper with Mary Unwin; such relationships are very beautiful in their serene, unselfish character. Beneath the roof of Lady Abney Watts died. Within two months of his departure to Bunhill Fields, she was taken to her resting-place in the vaults of Stoke Newington Church. But the family in which Dr. Watts was for more than half his life an honoured guest merits some more particular mention.

Sir Thomas Abney was descended from an ancient and respectable family in Derbyshire. His father was James Abney, Esq., of Wilsley, whose ancestors had enjoyed that estate upwards of five hundred years. The son came to the City of London, and appears to have passed through the honours of Alderman, Sheriff, and Lord Mayor. For the services he rendered to King William he received the honour of knighthood, and was chosen chief magistrate some years before his turn. He appears to have had in those troublesome times great influence in the City, though holding at that time a strong opinion adverse to the Stuarts. He was chosen in 1701 to represent it in Parliament; he was a director of the Bank, and president of St. Thomas’ Hospital; and when, upon the death of the exiled James, the King of France, Louis XIV., caused the Pretender to be proclaimed at St. Germains King of Great Britain, and by the recall of the Earl of Macclesfield war seemed to be unavoidable, Sir Thomas Abney, in the Court of Common Council, proposed, in opposition to the majority of his brethren on the bench, an address to William III., declaring that they would support him against France and the Pretender: it was carried and transmitted to the King, who was then on the Continent. It is impossible now to estimate the vigour this imparted to the King’s affairs—it was the note which roused the nation. It was said that this act of Sir Thomas Abney served the cause of the King more than if he had raised for him a million of money.

It is a singular circumstance that although Watts received such marks of favour from the Abney family, Sir Thomas and Lady Abney do not appear to have, in the first days of their acquaintance, belonged to the church of which Watts was pastor. Sir Thomas was a member of that church during the pastorate of Mr. Caryl, whose daughter was his first wife. After Mr. Caryl’s death he united himself with the church of which John Howe was the minister. Nonconformists were at that time, as they have been frequently since, Lord Mayors of the City, usually complying by occasional conformity so far as to attend one part of the Sunday at church, the other at their own place of worship. When Sir Humphrey Edwin, who was a member of Pinners’ Hall congregation, was Mayor, he very unwisely caused the regalia of the City to be carried to his meeting-house, and it created a vehement storm.

But it is remarkable that Mr. Milner, usually very accurate, in his life of Dr. Watts quotes a paragraph from “The Shortest Way with the Dissenters,” speaking of it as a piece of High Church vituperation, apparently unaware that this was the very production of Defoe, the satire for which he was put in the pillory; Mr. Milner, misled by the heartiness of the composition, like many of Defoe’s day, came to the conclusion that it was the work of an enemy to those whose interests the pamphlet was intended to serve. The paragraph points immediately to Sir Thomas and his friend Watts, as the reader will perceive by the designations italicized: “But a lady, Queen Anne, now sits on the throne, who though sprung from that blood which ye and your forefathers spilt before the palace-gates, puts on a temper of forgiveness, and, in compassion to your consciences, is not willing that you should lose the hopes of heaven by purchasing here on earth. She would have no more Sir Humphreys tempt the justice of God, by falling from his true worship and giving ear to the cat-calls and back-pipes at St. Paul’s; would have your Sir Thomas’s keep to their primitive text, and not venture damnation to play at long spoon and custard for a transitory twelvemonth; and would have your Sir Tom sing psalms at Highgate Hill, and split texts of Scripture with his diminutive figure of a chaplain, without running the hazard of qualifying himself to be called a handsome man for riding on horseback before the City trainbands.”

It may be noticed now how much the interest of King William and the Hanover succession to the throne of England were served by the Protestant dissenters of the City of London, and by no one more than by Sir Thomas Abney. He lived to a good old age, dying at his house at Theobalds in the year 1722. Nor can we wonder that his friend should pay a high tribute to his memory in a funeral sermon, and seek to give it a more durable place in a sketch in his “Miscellaneous Thoughts.”

Theobalds was a fine old palace, and has been celebrated in the verses of poets and the pages of novelists, and the memoirs of historians; but no biography of Watts gives any specific account of the magnificent old building in which he spent the greater number of the years of his life. It was as much Watts’ home as if it had been his own property; and he was in the habit of saying his poetical contributions would have been much more numerous had he, in his early life, been privileged with the means of retirement among such shades and gardens, and ample grounds. Theobalds was, and had been, everything that could excite the memory, or stir or soothe and lull the imagination. Situated a little more than a mile from Cheshunt, in Hertfordshire, and within an easy ride from the metropolis, on the borders of Enfield Chase, it possessed a very remarkable history; it had been the favourite residence of the mighty Cecil, Lord Burleigh; to this place he fled with eagerness to enjoy his short intervals of leisure; amidst its shades he planned and plotted schemes in which the whole future of England’s history was interested; he laid out immense sums of money upon the grand pile, and kept up great state with extraordinary magnificence, while he might be seen ambling along upon a mule through the groves of his magnificent domains, overlooking his workmen or the parties of pleasure he had gathered around him. Here, at this old house, Queen Elizabeth had repeatedly rested in the course of her great progresses. Here, when Burleigh and his mistress had both passed away, came James I., and held his masques, written by Ben Jonson, and enjoyed his pleasures. It was in his reign that it was given up by the Earl of Salisbury to Queen Anne of Denmark, amidst such strange pageantries of most intemperate folly that Sir John Harington writes, contrasting the days of James I. with what he remembered of the same place in the days of Queen Elizabeth, “I never did see such lack of good order, discretion, and sobriety, as I have now done.”

In Watts’ day there was living in the neighbouring village of Cheshunt that remarkable man, also a member of Watts’ church. Richard Cromwell, although, somewhat to shroud himself in obscurity, he usually went by the name of Mr. Clarke. An eminent novelist[14] has woven into his fiction very naturally one of the most striking incidents of his story from the casual meeting of his hero and the son of the Protector on this very spot, when Cromwell became his host and entertainer. Richard Cromwell died probably before Watts became a constant resident at Theobalds; and indeed Cromwell removed from Cheshunt some time before his death.

Cheshunt churchyard once contained a number of inscriptions upon the tombs from the pen of the poet; most of them have probably long been obliterated, but two or three have been snatched from oblivion; an inscription for the tomb of Thomas Pickard, Esq., citizen of London, who died suddenly, probably a member of Watts’ church:

Another epitaph:

The following lines were not long since in existence, written upon a ceiling dial at a western window of Theobalds:

There was another, indeed there appear to have been several; it was the taste of the times to line the avenues with these moralities in verse:

If we are able to discriminate Watts in his various abodes here and at Stoke Newington, certainly it is not his biographers we have to thank for it. They have jumbled up his residences in a very heterogeneous fashion, and leave us very much in doubt whether their descriptions of his rooms apply to his earlier or later abode. Assuredly he lived in a mansion large enough for him. One of the smallest of mortals, he had one of the largest homes. We can readily believe that good Sir Thomas was very well pleased from such a pile to deliver up a suite of apartments to such a guest. His own rooms were a kind of true literary hermitage, adorned with paintings from his own pencil, and his collection of portraits of eminent persons he had known, or great contemporaries he admired; at the entrance of his study on the outside were the fine lines from the first book of Horace’s satires, in which he denounces the faithless friend: “He who reviles his absent friend, who does not defend him while another defames him, who aims at the groundless jeers of people, and the reputation of a wit, who can feign things not seen, who cannot keep secrets, he is the rancorous man.” The spaces within, where there were no shelves, were filled up with prints of distinguished friends, or eminent persons. Of course, there was a spacious old Elizabethan fireplace, panelled on either side, and in each panel an inscription from the beloved Horace. On the one side:

And on the other:

There we are permitted to fancy him. Such were his haunts among those pleasant and sequestered shades, and such was his home. His rooms well arranged and tasteful, as one biographer has depicted them. The lute and the telescope on the same table with the Bible, a treatise on logic in one hand, and hymns and spiritual songs in the other. Few writers in our language seem to suggest a finer illustration of the mingled powers of faith and reason.

With so small a family what a silent household it must have seemed, sustained in its grand and memorable stateliness. There passed what we may believe to have been the happiest years of Watts’ life, amidst scenes inviting to rest, and with little to disturb the equanimity of his quiet spirit, receiving and reflecting its own peace, peace not to be disturbed even by much bodily restlessness and pain. Those numerous allusions in his hymns to the wakeful hours of night were not mere poetic fancies, “the comforts of my nights” were not unneeded; for many years he knew little of sleep, except such as could be obtained by medicine; intense mental application, working upon a weak and nervous constitution, brought about the consequences of insomnia, or sleeplessness yet his mind seems to have been too calm, too equally balanced, and too completely under the control of highest principles, ever to know such agitations as shake to their centre some poetic natures. Even public agitations did hot disturb him much. Almost the severest trial he knew was the vehement and intolerant persecution he sustained from the tongue and pen of Thomas Bradbury; but to him we may refer in subsequent pages.