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Lords in 1788 for cruelty and extortion, Jane’s half-cousin, Phila Walter, heard the famous orators, Sheridan, Burke and Fox, at his trial. The dramatist Richard Brinsley Sheridan spoke so low he could not be heard, Edmund Burke was so hot and hasty he could not be understood, and every word spoken by Charles James Fox (famous leader of the Whig opposition to the Tory Prime Minister William Pitt) was distinct, but offensive to Phila in being hostile to Warren Hastings. Hastings was eventually cleared after a trial lasting seven years.
    Possibly George Austen offered to educate Warren Hastings’s boy himself. Neither the child nor old Mrs Leigh, Cassandra’s mother, survived long. Jane Austen never knew her grandparents. Cassandra grieved as much for little George Hastings, who lived with them for only six months, as if he had been her own child, though she soon became pregnant herself.
    Saul Hancock had predicted accurately that George would ‘find it easier to get a family than provide for them’. George and Cassandra did get a family, almost at the rate of a baby every year, and were soon in debt. His income fluctuated from year to year and was never more than £600. Later he had a small pension but was never well off. George borrowed the then substantial sum of £865 from his rich brother-in-law James Leigh-Perrot four years after his marriage, when he already had three children. George managed to pay back only £20 of the loan because he was helping his sister Philadelphia. In 1772, when there were four children, he borrowed another £300 which he did succeed in paying off, thanks to Uncle Francis.
    Two years before Jane Austen was born Uncle Francis bought him the adjoining parish of Deane, a mile and a half away, worth another £110 a year. George’s combined parishes held only about 300 people. Surprisingly, there were no professed Dissenters or Roman Catholics. The Ashe living, also in the gift of Uncle Francis, was taken by the Revd Dr Richard Russell. Later Uncle Francis sold the presentation of Ashe to another rich kind uncle, Benjamin Langlois, who gave the living to
his
nephew, the Revd Isaac Peter George Lefroy, whose wife, Anne, became a dear friend of Jane Austen. Mr Austen, like other hard-pressed clergymen in the period, took in boy pupils. Today the parishes of Steventon, Ashe, Deane and North Waltham are combined under one rector who earns a single stipend.
    Although the parishioners were so few, George and his wife were far from being a gentleman and lady of leisure. They had to be largely self-sufficient in feeding themselves, their children and servants. Mrs Austen took charge of the poultry and the dairy, making butter and cheese. Bread was baked and beer brewed at home. When there was honey, the Austens made mead. Sometimes George received rent money from land owned by the Austen family. He was trustee of an estate in Antigua, like the one owned by Sir Thomas Bertram in
Mansfield Park
. There were to be eight children, Jane the seventh.
    The Austens were a devoted couple and George missed his wife sorely when she visited her sister Jane, Mrs Edward Cooper. Mrs Austen’s reaction on getting home was one of relief. She complained that she had been ‘hurried’ while in London. It was a sad place; I would not live in it on any account; one has not time to do one’s duty either to God or to man,’ she wrote later.
    In the same letter she recorded that she was pleased with her little Alderney cow, who made more butter than they could use, and had just bought another. Mrs Austen liked country life and grew her own vegetables, wearing an old green smock frock like a labourer’s, when digging up potatoes. In those days potatoes were something of a luxury in England. A tenant’s wife visiting the parsonage had never seen them before. When Mrs Austen suggested that the visitor should plant them in her own garden, the woman replied, No, no; they are all very well for you gentry, but they must be