Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great: A Sketch of the Life of Henry Fielding
General Edmund Fielding, after having ?eshed his maiden sword in Flanders, and reddened his first Spurs with battle blood upon the continent, married, at the age of thirty, Sarah Gould, the daughter of an honest and thrifty knight, Sir Henry Gould, of Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury, in Somerset. Sir Henry was one of the judges of the King's Bench, and had a handsome fortune and kept up a good estate. When the young soldier married into his family he also came to live in it in the intervals of his campaigns, and it was in the house of his grandfather that, on April 22, 1707, the novelist, Henry Fielding, saluted with his first baby cry the great world in which he was to play his heroic part.
In 1710 Sir Henry Gould died, and his household was broken up. By his will, made in March, 1706, Sir Henry left his daughter which was to be invested in the purchase either of a Church or College lease, or of lands of Inheritance, for her sole use, her husband having nothing to do With it, which would seem to indicate that the wise old knight had a distrust of his military, and possibly impecunious, son-in-law. This money was to come to her children at the death of Mrs. Fielding, and was no unimportant part of the family estate while the good lady was yet alive. Three thousand pounds in those comparatively primitive days meant quite as much as the quadrupled sum means in our waste ful and extravagant time.
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