However, the parish needed a school and so those who could afford to do so sent their children to the New School House – to distinguish it from the Old School House of Richard’s predecessor – and paid Richard to teach them. That did not mean, though, that they took the Lowers into their inner hearts or councils.

For the first few months at least, Richard and Mary were probably much too occupied in discovering each other to worry about their neighbours. Within three months of her marriage, Mary was pregnant. The baby was born on April 30^th, 1804 – a girl. They name her Selina. Six days later Selina was dead. She was buried on the south side of Chiddingly Church, near to the Jeffrays Chapel. By July Mary was pregnant again. Another girl, Phillis, was born to her on April 12^th, 1805. Phillis lived for just twenty-one days. She was buried next to Selina. By August Mary had started her third pregnancy. This time a boy, Ebonezer, was born – on May 19^th, 1806. He died the same day. He was buried alongside his sisters.

Three births, three deaths! How could a marriage undertaken so hopefully before God have started so calamitously? Emotionally the young couple were shattered. At every crisis in his life, Richard turned to the Bible, in which he believed fundamentally and literally. He did not write his Meditation on Psalm LXI, Verse 2^nd until 1815, but surely its first verse expressed the depths of his sorrow when the third baby died on May 19^th, 1806:

Father of thy chosen race,
    Assist Thy feeble child to pray,
Display the glories if Thy grace,
    Nor from his breathings turn away;
When my heart is o’erwhelmed with a torrent of grief,
    Shew pity, great God, and attend to my cry;
Vouchsafe Thy right mercy and grant me relief:
    “Lead me to the Rock that is higher than I.”

Within six weeks Mary was pregnant again – and this time the child survived. Born on March 20^th, 1807, Martha Oxley Lower was baptised at the Heathfield Independent Chapel on April 21^st.

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