Enter the Richardson family

While Samuel Wesley and I were caught up in this ecstatic musical crucifixion, I was aware of a young tall bearded man standing at the back of the communal room, who was clearly absorbed in our playing.  However, his body language was a mixture of enraptured admiration and intense anger focussed on the disturbed man holding me in his hands.  This was Isaac Richardson, the landlord of ‘The Black Swan’ public house in North Walsham, here visiting his mother, Judith Richardson.

(Register of death 1842, Judith Richardson, St Michael’s Church, Swanton Abbott)

Isaac had long suspected Samuel Wesley of being the father of his ten-year-old son, Thomas!  Isaac had been fully aware that Esther Thirtle, whom he married in 1823, had given birth to two children before they had ‘tied the knot’, but the identity of the father(s) was uncertain.  He knew it was possible that he, Isaac, might be the father of little Esther, who had been born in 1820; – but Thomas, born in December 1817 when his mother was 27, and at a time when Isaac had not yet met Esther, was another matter!

(Thomas Thirtle 1851 Census)

Young Thomas was known as Thomas William Thirtle, but interestingly over the years, Isaac had sensed a hint, a spark of emotion, a certain ‘frizzante’ reaction, whenever the words Wesley or Wesleyan had been mentioned in Esther’s hearing.  ‘Should he not have been Thomas Wesley Thirtle?’, he had speculated! 

He knew that Esther had been at Norwich Cathedral with a chapel-going school friend and heard Samuel Wesley play the Organ during the Norwich and Norfolk Festival early in 1817, an event which attracted huge national interest at the time. ‘Was this the occasion of their illicit liaison, or even worse?’ he asked himself. ‘Had she at least caught Wesley’s roving and mentally unbalanced eye?’  After all, we do know that during the Festival, Wesley suffered his first major mental breakdown, and he was taken to this same Bethel Hospital for a short spell, before returning home to his wife and children in London.

(A later photo taken at the Norwich Triennial Festival, outside Norwich Cathedral)

Now, with all that in the background, we must move on to the moment I truly won’t forget!

Wesley and I finished our extraordinary performance of J S Bach’s ‘Chaconne’.  After rapturous and enthusiastic applause by the inmates, Sir George invited Wesley to join him for a walk in the Hospital garden, leaving me and my Tubbs Bow shut securely in my case in the communal room. 

Isaac now had his chance to exact his revenge; he quickly grabbed me, taking me on horse-back straight to ‘The Black Swan’ in North Walsham, 15 miles away.

(The Black Swan, c 1897)

I had now been ‘grabbed’ twice, once by the great Ludwig van Beethoven, (who had died just 3 months previously) and now by a north Norfolk publican with the name of Isaac Richardson!  And there is something to ‘say’ about ‘being taken hold of’ in such ways.  Please know that my voice, my sound, is severely affected by the ‘way’ I am handled. In my experience this has been proved time and time again over the years!  With both Beethoven and Richardson, I felt violated to a certain degree, and my self-expression was affected accordingly.  In contrast, when I am lovingly taken into the arms of a player, such as Schleiermacher or Wesley, or my late-lamented Johann Salomon, my sound quality is enhanced a hundredfold. In later years, I came to appreciate that in the world of theology (as well as music) – careful but thorough-going and critical approaches to the Bible or Christian doctrine – a great deal depends on the ‘way’ the criticism is handled and expressed.

(That’s me! From Thomas Kennedy)

If, for example, Schleiermacher’s historical criticism is thought to be an ‘attack’ or ‘violation’ of tradition, then the nuances and resonances of his ‘stimmung’ will not be readily heard or understood.  How many bitter arguments between Enlightenment men (yes, usually men) and Romantics, between conservative ‘evangelicals’ and ‘liberals’, between Catholics and Protestants, between dogmatic purists and ‘free-thinkers’, between authoritative clerics and passionate reformers, might have been avoided if their approaches had not been aggressively ‘grabbing’ or violent.  Criticism, even if it is scathing or ‘hard-hitting’, should be given with grace. 

This is the voice I prefer to have, sounding and resonating from my body!