Salisbury, the fifth son of the first Earl of Desmond of this creation. The canon's third son, Edmond, entered the army, served under Marlborough, and married Sarah Gold or Gould, daughter of a judge of the King's Bench. Their eldest son was Henry, who was born on April 22, 1707, and had an uncertain number of brothers and sisters of the whole blood. After his first wife's death, General Fielding (for he attained that rank) married again. The most remarkable offspring of the first marriage, next to Henry, was his sister Sarah, also a novelist, who wrote David Simple; of the second, John, afterwards Sir John Fielding, who, though blind, succeeded his half-brother as a Bow Street magistrate, and in that office combined an equally honourable record with a longer tenure.Fielding was born at Sharpham Park in Somersetshire, the seat of his
maternal grandfather; but most of his early youth was spent at East
Stour in Dorsetshire, to which his father removed after the judge's
death. He is said to have received his first education under a parson of
the neighbourhood named Oliver, in whom a very uncomplimentary tradition
sees the original of Parson Trulliber. He was then certainly sent to
Eton, where he did not waste his time as regards learning, and made
several valuable friends. But the dates of his entering and leaving
school are alike unknown; and his subsequent sojourn at Leyden for two
years--though there is no reason to doubt it--depends even less upon
any positive documentary evidence. This famous University still had a
great repute as a training school in law, for which profession he was
intended; but the reason why he did not receive the even then far more
usual completion of a public school education by a sojourn at Oxford or
Cambridge may be suspected to be different. It may even have
had something to do with a curious escapade of his about which not very much
is known--an attempt to carry off a pretty heiress of Lyme, named
Sarah Andrew.

Even at Leyden, however, General Fielding seems to have been unable or
unwilling to pay his son's expenses, which must have been far less there
than at an English University; and Henry's return to London in 1728-29
is said to have been due to sheer impecuniosity. When he returned to
England, his father was good enough to make him an allowance of L200
nominal, which appears to have been equivalent to L0 actual. And as
practically nothing is known of him for the next six or seven years,
except the fact of his having worked industriously enough at a large
number of not very good plays of the lighter kind, with a few poems and

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