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