William Plenderleath on Queen Victoria’s Jubilee
Dear old William Plenderleath, rector of Cherhill 1860-91, generally spoke his mind. Not afraid to criticize the bishop, nor the squire, nor even to moan about his leaving present when he moved on – a chiming marble clock which didn’t – he was nevertheless beloved by his parishioners, and he in turn was devoted to them. From his writings we learn about the ‘Cherhill Gang’ of naked highwaymen; the chapel minister’s daughter who asked to be married in church on a Sunday because it was the only day she could be sure her father would be sober; and the lawyer who, after a successful day seeing his client acquitted, was mugged by him later that evening.
The longest section of his manuscript ‘Memoranda’, eventually published in 2001*, concerns the preparations for, disagreements over, and eventually the undoubted success of Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee celebrations in his village at midsummer 1887. Its climax came at 10 pm (though he was at pains to note that it was two minutes early) when, through a telescope mounted on Oldbury Hill, a beacon was spied on the Malverns nearly 60 miles away. This was the signal for Mrs Plenderleath to set light to Cherhill’s bonfire. Soaked in tar and paraffin, it was fully alight within five minutes and burned with immense fury. And ‘as one looked round upon the masses of people grouped about it,’ he wrote, it ‘would have been worthy of the pencil of a Rembrandt’. From the hilltop they counted seventy other jubilee fires in view, which gradually dimmed over the course of the next hour. Cherhill’s was the best, of course, and was still smouldering the next afternoon.
Plenderleath had mixed feelings. He clearly relished the community celebration, but admitted to being a closet Jacobite, and a month before the jubilee he read a paper to a society of fellow clergy in which he let his feelings be known. ‘Furthermore, little as I admire the character of Queen Victoria, and badly as she appears to me to contrast with any of our former queens regnant . . . , no one of whom would have insulted the Church in the way that our present sovereign delights to do, yet I admit we do owe something to her for preserving her court from those moral scandals . . .’ etc. etc. And when it later transpired that she had not knelt, but sat throughout, for the prayers during the commemoration in Westminster Abbey, he was incensed – ‘an outrageous insult to the Majesty of Heaven’.
His verdict on the celebration strikes a somewhat contemporary chord. ‘A great deal of the enthusiasm evoked had, no doubt, but small concern with loyalty either towards the actual sovereign, or even towards the general principle of monarchy; and many of those who shouted themselves hoarse to the toast of “The Queen” would have greeted with equal plaudits the inauguration of a British Republic. Still, I am inclined to believe that the success of the day’s celebration throughout the whole country has probably excited a material influence upon the fortunes of the dynasty, and has put back the tide of revolution perhaps ten years, or even more.’
~ John Chandler
* J Reis (ed.), Plenderleath’s Memoranda of Cherhill (2001); see also WSA 1121/14; WAM vol. 24, 257-70.