The Holyhead Journal: Text and Commentary
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Appendix A The Holyhead Journal: Text and Commentary The Holyhead Journal begins with Swift, his manservant Wat and an unnamed hired guide setting off from Elizabeth Kenna’s Chester inn, the Golden Faulcon, in Northgate, then riding seven miles to Penarlag/Hawarden in Flintshire, pausing there at a roadside house for refreshment and then continuing along the post road—probably via Holywell and St Asaph—to Rhuddlan, the fortress town located at the lowest fording place on the river Clwyd, a little over half way between Hawarden and Conwy. [Holyhead Journal] Friday, at 11 in the morning I left Chester. It was Sept. 22d 1727. I bated at a blind ale-house 7 miles from Chester. I thence rode to Ridland; in all 22 miles. I lay there, had bad meat, and tolerable wine. I left Ridland a quar- ter after 4 morn. on Saturday, stopt on Penmenmawr,1 examined about my sign verses; the Inn is to be on t’other side therefore the verses to be changed. I bait- ed at Conway, the Guide going to anothr Inn, the Maid of the old Inn saw me in the street, and said that was my House she knew me; there I dined, and send for Ned Holland; a Squire famous for being mentioned in Mr Lyndsay’s Verses to Davy Morice.2 I there again to saw Hooks Tomb, who was the 41st Child of 1 Unless he doubled back to Conwy, which is unlikely given his haste, Swift’s narrative is disor- dered at this point. Heading along the coast westwards, Penmaenmawr comes after Conwy not before it. The Penmaenmawr Inn was on the Bangor side and another inn, unnamed, was 1¼ miles over on the Conway side (John Watson, Gentleman’s and Citizens Almanack, 1769, p. 107). The Belfast News Letter for 10-13 December 1793 records the small alehouse on the Conway side, previously kept by a Mrs Evans (The Traveller’s Companion, from Holyhead to London 1793, p. 43) as the one Swift called at and which carried two sets of his couplets (‘which still remains on each side of the sign board’). On the way down from Penmaenmawr heading for Bangor, ‘Now the hill you’re safely over / Drink—your spirits to recover’ and on the way up to Penmaenmawr heading for Conwy: ‘Before you venture o’er to pass / Take here a good refreshing glass.’ 2 Edward Holland of Plas Berw (1675-1734), eldest son of the Holland family, owners of Conwy castle and most of the town, a bailiff/magistrate whose family home was an imposing, several-storeyed stone house called ‘Plas Isa,’ on the site now occupied by the Town Hall and very close to Swift’s inn and the town stocks: see W. Bezant Lowe, The Heart of Northern Wales, 2 vols (Llanfairfechan, 1912), I, 224, 240, 345 and 472-75. In 1705 he was one of the two Alderman’s deputies in Conwy. The verses to Davy Morice have not been traced, but their © Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 2020 | doi:10.30965/9783846765753_013 Clive Probyn - 9783846765753 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 08:00:13PM via free access 262 Appendix A his Mother, and had himself 27 Children; he dyed about 1638.3 There is a nota bene that one of his posterity new furbishd up the Inscription. I had read in A. Bp Williams Life4 that he was buryed in an obscure Church in north Wales. I enquired, and heard it was at [ ] Church5 within a mile of Bangor, whither I was going; I went to the Church, the Guide grumbling; I saw the Tomb with his Statue kneeling (in marble). It began thus: [Hospes lege et relege quod in hoc obscuro sacello non expectares. Hic jacet omnium Praesulum celeberrimus.]6 I came to Bangor, and crossed the Ferry a mile from it, where there is an Inn, author was probably Robert Lindsay, Dublin resident, chief legal advisor to the proctor of St Patrick’s Cathedral in 1722, and Justice of the Common Pleas in 1733. Lindsay’s father- in-law was John Morris (Morice?) of Belville, co. Tyrone. Lindsay advised Swift on legal matters during the campaign against Walpole and William Wood in the Drapier’s Letters. For Lindsay’s poetry, see his Paulus (1728), Swift’s The Answer and Dialogue between an eminent lawyer and Dr Swift (1730), where Lindsay plays the Arbuthnot role to Swift’s Pope, in a poem similar to the Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735). See Poems, II, 488-91. Lindsay was one of nine executors of Swift’s 1737 will, along with Drs Delany and Helsham. 3 The gravestone of Nicholas Hookes, erstwhile Conwy postmaster, is set in the chancel floor of the twelfth century Cistercian abbey church of St Mary and All Saints, Conwy and had been a tourist site well before Swift’s visit: see John Dunton, Life and Errors of John Dunton (1705), p. 568. The inscription reads: ‘Here lyeth ye body of Nich’s Hookes of Conway Gen who was ye 41ST child of his father Wm Hookes Esq by Alice his wife and ye father of 27 children who died ye 20 day March 1637. NB This stone was revived in ye year 1720 att ye charge of John Hookes Esq and since by Thos Bradney and W Archer Esq.’ 4 John Williams (1582-1650), Lord Chancellor 1621-5 and Archbishop of York 1641-50, one of those ten ‘Men of great Parts … apt to go out of the common road, by the Quickness of their Imagination,’ along with Bacon, Laud, Strafford, Clarendon, Shaftesbury, Buckingham, Bolingbroke, Robert Harley, Somers (and, we might add, Swift himself): Swift to Bolingbroke, 19 December 1719, Correspondence, II, 316. Williams’s 28-line Latin inscription ends, as Swift’s would do, with an address to the traveller: ‘Abi viator’ (Go, traveller’). His monument, erected by his nephew and heir Sir Griffith Williams, was flanked by the archbishop’s helmet and spurs on a nearby bracket (only the bracket remains today in situ, on the south wall of the chancel). As an armoured archbishop, Williams took up the King’s cause in the Civil War, financed and directed the defence of Conwy castle, but then changed sides and helped the Parliamentarians take both castle and town. The standard biography was by Williams’s chaplain and epitaph writer, Dr John Hacket, Scrinia Reserata: A Memorial offer’d to the Great Deservings of John Williams, D.D. (1693), but Swift may have read the more recent biography by Ambrose Philips, The Life of John Williams (Cambridge, 1700 and 1703: epitaph given on pp. 237-8) or John Le Neve’s The Lives and Characters … of all the Protestant Bishops (1720: see Part I, 225-6). 5 Llandegai (left blank in the manuscript). 6 Swift is in the parish church of St Tegai, Llandegai. The full Latin text is found in Hacket and Philips. ‘Take notice and consider, stranger, that in this obscure and unexpected place is to be found John Williams the most distinguished of priests …’ Clive Probyn - 9783846765753 Downloaded from Brill.com09/26/2021 08:00:13PM via free access The Holyhead Journal 263 which if it be well kept will break Bangor.7 There I lay; it was 22 miles from Holyhead. I was on horseback at 4 in the morning, resolving to be at Church at Holyhead, but to shew Wat8 Owen Tudors Tomb at Penmany.9 We passt the place (being a little out of the way) by the Guides knavery, who had no mind to stay. I was now so weary with riding, that I was forced to stop at Langueveny, 7 miles from the Ferry, and rest 2 hours. Then I went on very weary, but in a few miles more, Watt’s horse lost his two fore-shoes, so the Horse was forced to limp after us. The Guide was less concerned than I. In a few miles more, my Horse lost a fore-shoe; and could not go on the rocky ways. I walked above 2 miles to spare him. It was Sunday, and no Smith to be got. At last there was a Smith in the way; we left the Guide to shoe the horses, and walked to a hedge Inn 3 miles from Holyhead; There I stayd an hour, with no ale to be drunk, a Boat offered, and I went by Sea and Sayl in it to Holyhead. The guide came about the same time.10 I dined with my an old Inkeeper, Mrs Welch,11 about 3, on a Loyn of mutton, very good, but the worst ale in the world, and no wine, for the day before I came here, a vast number went to Ireld after having drank out all the wine. There was stale beer, and I tryd Stella’s a receit of Oyster shells 7 The Cambria inn dated from 1688 and was located at Porthaethwy, on Anglesey: Helen Ramage, Portraits of an Island: Eighteenth Century Anglesey (Llangefni, 1987: 2nd edn, 2001), p. 35. 8 Swift uses ‘Wat’ six times and ‘Watt’ four times in the Journal. His inconsistency is pre- served here in the Journal but elsewhere I refer to him as Wat, as did Gay and Pope in their letter responding to Sheridan’s account of Swift’s journey (Correspondence, III, 135). 9 Owain ap Maredudd ap Tudor (c. 1400-1461), Welsh courtier and nationalist, warrior prince and master of guerilla warfare, founder of the Tudor dynasty and a much my- thologised figure. He was captured by the Yorkist forces and beheaded after the battle of Mortimer’s Cross, Herefordshire, and his body buried in a chapel of Greyfriar’s Church, Hereford.