freedom, he sometimes came out with strange things which people
took to be marks of genius. But as his boisterousness diminishes, so
do his apparent gifts, and all that is now left is a great love of study.
You will see him and judge him similarly. It is true that my mother
has written some very harsh things, and that my fear of being
contradicted by her and of the many problems she might cause me
encouraged me to come to England—something I had long had the
intention of doing—in order to be free and undisturbed: those are
the things I need in order to be able to continue to supervise my
son’s studies. Besides, my mother is extremely embittered where I
am concerned, and she will take anyone who happens to be present
into her confidence on the matter: I am afraid my son might be one
of that number, and would lose the trust I want him to have in me.
The best thing I could do for her sake and mine was to go away
until she had got over her grievance about me, so that I could enjoy
the freedom I feel I need. It’s not too much to ask at 55 years of age
to be allowed to oversee my own son’s education. I regret very
much not being with my mother and not looking after her as I have
for so long, but she has grown tired of my marks of attachment and
respect, and in order to justify her present conduct she finds fault in
me and accuses me of having secret plans and projects which exist
only in her imagination. It hurts me a lot, but after having done
everything I could to dispel the fears she says she has, the only
thing left for me has been to give up and leave, doing rightly or
wrongly the thing which I had intended to do. I wrote to tell my
mother that I was going to England, but she refused to open the
letter.^70Juste had a friend who in 1780 was a Fellow and Senior Dean of Arts at
Magdalen College, Nathaniel Bridges (1750–1834),^71 and he perhaps
hoped that, possibly with Bridges’s help, Benjamin would find a tutor who
would help him to pick up the English language quickly. Benjamin was
never to matriculate at Oxford: even if Juste had secretly hoped that his
son might begin studying at the University at this early stage, it would
very soon have become clear to him that, despite his uncommon mental
powers, Benjamin could not compete with students who were two or more
years older than him, and of course still less in a language, English, which
he was only beginning to acquire. Father and son spent only late June to
August 1780 in Oxford, during which time Benjamin took English
lessons: they then returned to Holland, reaching The Hague in early
September. However they were now accompanied by a young Englishman
Benjamin constant 36