Events, however, were at hand, which helped to determine Crabbe’s immediate future.  Early in 1784 the Duke of Rutland became Lord Lieutenant of Ireland.  The appointment had been made some time before, and it had been decided that Crabbe was not to be on the Castle staff.  His son expresses no surprise at this decision, and makes of it no grievance.  The duke and the chaplain parted excellent friends.  Crabbe and his wife were to remain at Belvoir as long as it suited their convenience, and the duke undertook that he would not forget him as regarded future preferment.  On the strength of these offers, Crabbe and Miss Elmy wore married in December 1783, in the parish church of Beccles, where Miss Elmy’s mother resided, and a few weeks later took up their abode in the rooms assigned them at Belvoir Castle.

As Miss Elmy had lived for many years with her uncle and aunt, Mr. and Mrs. John Tovell, at Parham, and moreover as this rural inland village played a considerable part in the development of Crabbe’s poetical faculty, it may be well to quote his son’s graphic account of the domestic circumstances of Miss Elmy’s relatives.  Mr. Tovell was, like Mr. Hathaway, “a substantial yeoman,” for he owned an estate of some eight hundred a year, to some share of which, as the Tovells had lost their only child, Miss Elmy would certainly in due course succeed.  The Tovells’ house at Parham, which has been long ago pulled down, and rebuilt as Paritam Lodge, on very different lines, was of ample size, with its moat, so common a feature of the homestead in the eastern counties, “rookery, dove-cot, and fish-ponds”; but the surroundings were those of the ordinary farmhouse, for Mr. Tovell himself cultivated part of his estate.

“The drawing-room, a corresponding dining-parlour, and a handsome sleeping apartment upstairs, were all tabooed ground, and made use of on great and solemn occasions only—­such as rent-days, and an occasional visit with which Mr. Tovell was honoured by a neighbouring peer.  At all other times the family and their visitors lived entirely in the old-fashioned kitchen along with the servants.  My great-uncle occupied an armchair, or, in attacks of gout, a couch on one side of a large open chimney....  At a very early hour in the morning the alarum called the maids, and their mistress also; and if the former were tardy, a louder alarum, and more formidable, was heard chiding their delay—­not that scolding was peculiar to any occasion; it regularly ran on through all the day, like bells on harness, inspiriting the work, whether it were done well or ill.”  In the annotated volume of the son’s memoir which belonged to Edward FitzGerald, the writer added the following detail as to his great-aunt’s temper and methods:—­“A wench whom Mrs. Tovell had pursued with something weightier than invective—­a ladle, I think—­whimpered out ‘If an angel from Hiv’n were to come mawther’” (Suffolk for girl) “‘to missus, she wouldn’t give no satisfaction.’”