East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations

As I look into the mirror of the past, I see, alas! but a faded picture of that wonderful banquet in Norwich to celebrate Reform. There was a procession with banners and music, which seemed to me endless, as it toiled along in the dust under the fierce sun of summer, the spectators cheering all the way. There were speeches, I dare say, though no word of them remains; but I have a distinct recollection of peeping into the tents or tent, where the diners were at work, and of receiving from some one or other of them a bit of plum-pudding prepared for that day, which seemed to me of unusual excellence. I have a distinct recollection also of the fireworks in the evening, the first I had ever seen, on the Castle plain, and of the dense crowd that had turned out to see the sight; but I can well remember that I enjoyed myself much, and that I was awfully tired when it was all over.

Another memory also comes to me in connection with the old Dragon, – not of Revelation, but of Norwich – a huge green monster, which was usually kept in St. Andrew’s Hall, and dragged out at the time of city festivities. Men inside of it carried it along the street, and the sight was terrible to see, as it had a ferocious head and a villainous tail, and resembled nothing that is in the heaven above or the earth beneath or the waters under the earth. I fancy, however, since the schoolmaster has gone abroad, that kind of dragon has ceased to roar. I think it was at a Norwich election that I saw it for the first and the only time, and it followed in the procession formed to chair the Members – the Members being seated in gorgeous array on chairs, borne on the heads of people, and every now and then, much to the delight of the mob, though I should imagine very little to his own, the chair, with the Member in it, was tossed up into the air, and by this means it was supposed the general public were able to get a view of their M.P. and to see what manner of man he was. It was in some such way that I, as a lad, realized, as I never else should have done, the red face and the pink-silk stockings of the Hon. Mr. Scarlett, the happy candidate who pretended to enjoy the fun, as with the best grace possible under the circumstances he smiled on the ladies in the windows of the street, as he was borne along and bowed to all. From my recollection of the chairing I saw that time, I am more inclined to admire the activity of Wilberforce, of whom we read, when elected for Hull, ‘When the procession reached his mother’s house, he sprang from the chair, and, presenting himself with surprising quickness at a projecting window – it was that of the nursery in which his childhood had been passed – he addressed the populace with such complete effect that he was afterwards able to decide the election of its successor.’ At Norwich the Hon. Mr. Scarlett did well in not attempting a similar display of agility. Perhaps, however, it is quite as well that we have got rid of the chairing and the humour – Heaven help us! – to which it gave rise on the part of an English mob.

There was a delightful flavour of antiquity about the Norwich of that day – its old fusty chapels and churches, its old bridges and narrow streets. All the people with whom I came into contact on that festival seemed to me well stricken in years. It was not so very long since, old Hornbutton Jack had been seen threading his way along its ancient streets. With a countenance much resembling the portraits of Erasmus, with gray hair hanging about his shoulders, with his hat drawn over his eyes and his hands behind him, as if in deep meditation; John Fransham, the Norwich metaphysician and mathematician, might well excite the curiosity of the casual observer, especially when I add that he was bandy-legged, that he was short of stature, that he wore a green jacket, a broad hat, large shoes, and short worsted stockings. A Norwich weaver had helped to make Fransham a philosopher. Wright said Fransham could discourse well on the nature and fitness of things. He possessed a purely philosophical spirit and a soul well purified from vulgar errors. Fransham made himself famous in his day. There is every reason to believe that he had been for some time tutor to Mr. Windham. He is once recorded to have spent a day with Dr. Parr. Many of his pupils became professional men; with one of them, Dr. Leeds, the reader of Foote’s comedies, if such a one exists, may be acquainted. The tutor and his pupil, as Johnny Macpherson and Dr. Last, were actually exhibited on the stage. But to return to Norwich antiquities. I have a dim memory of some old place where the Dutch and Huguenot refugees were permitted to meet for worship, and even now I can recognise there the possibility of another Sir Thomas Browne – unless the Norwich of my boyhood has undergone the destructive process we love to call improvement – not even disturbed in his quiet study by the storm of civil war, inditing his thoughts as follows: ‘That crystal is nothing else but ice strongly congealed; that a diamond is softened or broken by the blood of a goat; that bays preserve from the mischief of lightning and thunder; that the horse hath no gall; that a kingfisher hanged by the bill showeth where the wind lay; that the flesh of peacocks corrupteth not;’ and so on – questions, it may be, as pertinent as those learnedly discussed in half-crown magazines at the present day.

As a boy, I was chiefly familiar with Norwich crapes and bombazines and Norwich shawls, which at that time were making quite a sensation in the fashionable world. It was at a later time that I came to hear of Old Crome and the Norwich school. Of him writes Mr. Wedmore, that ‘he died in a substantial square-built house, in what was a good street then, in the parish of St. George, Colegate, having begun as a workman, and ended as a bourgeois. He was a simple man, of genial company. To the end of his life he used to go of an evening to the public-house as to an informal club. In the privileged bar-parlour, behind the taps and glasses, he sat with his friends and the shopkeepers, talking of local things. But it is not to be supposed that because his life was from end to end a humble one, though prosperous even outwardly after its kind, Crome was deprived of the companionship most fitted to his genius, the stimulus that he most needed. The very existence of the Norwich Society of Artists settles that question. The local men hung on his words; he knew that he was not only making pictures, but a school. And in the quietness of a provincial city a coterie had been formed of men bent on the pursuit of an honest and homely art, and of these he was the chief.’ Dying, his last words were, ‘Hobbema, oh, Hobbema, how I loved thee!’ In my young days Mr. John Sell Cotman chiefly represented Norwich, although in later times he became connected with King’s College, London. A lady writes to me: ‘I think it was in the summer of 1842 Mr. Cotman came down to Norwich to visit his son John, who at that time was occupying a house on St. Bennet’s Road. He visited us at Thorpe several times, and was unusually well and in good spirits, with sketchbook or folio always in hand. His father and sisters, too, were then living in a small house at Thorpe, and from the balcony of their house, which looked over the valley of the Wensum, he made one of his last interesting sketches, twelve of which, after his death, the following year, were selected by his sons for publication.’

Evelyn gives us a pleasant picture of Norwich when he went there ‘to see that famous scholar and physitian, Dr. T. Browne, author of the “Religio Medici” and “Vulgar Errors,” etc., now lately knighted.’ Evelyn continues: ‘Next morning I went to see Sir Thomas Browne, with whom I had corresponded by letter, though I had never seen him before, his whole house and garden being a Paradise and cabinet of rarities, and that of the best collection, especially medals, books, plants and natural things. Amongst other curiosities, Sir Thomas has a collection of all the eggs of all the foule and birds he could procure; that country, especially the promonotary of Norfolck, being frequented, as he said, by severall kinds, which seldom or never go further into the land, as cranes, storkes, eagles, and a variety of water-foule. He led me to see all the remarkable places of this ancient citty, being one of the largest and certainly, after London, one of the noblest of England, for its venerable cathedrall, number of stately churches, cleannesse of the streetes and building of flints so exquisitely headed and squared, as I was much astonished at; but he told me they had lost the art of squaring the flints, in which at one time they so much excelled, and of which the churches, best houses, and walls are built.’ Further, Evelyn tells us: ‘The suburbs are large, the prospect sweete with other amenities, not omitting the flower-gardens, in which all the inhabitants excel. The fabric of stuffs brings a vast trade to this populous towne.’

Long has Norwich rejoiced in clever people. In the life of William Taylor, one of her most distinguished sons, we have a formidable array of illustrious Norwich personages, in whom, alas! at the present time the world takes no interest. Sir James Edward Smith, founder and first President of the Linnæan Society, ought not to be forgotten. Of Taylor himself Mackintosh wrote: ‘I can still trace William Taylor by his Armenian dress, gliding through the crowd in Annual Reviews, Monthly Magazines, Athenæums, etc., rousing the stupid public by paradox, or correcting it by useful and seasonable truth. It is true that he does not speak the Armenian or any other tongue but the Taylorian, but I am so fond of his vigour and originality, that for his sake I have studied and learned the language. As the Hebrew is studied by one book, so is the Taylorian by me for another. He never deigns to write to me, but in print I doubt whether he has many readers who so much understand, relish, and tolerate him, for which he ought to reward me by some of his manuscript esoteries.’ More may be said of William Taylor. It was he who made Walter Scott a poet. Taylor’s spirited translation of Burger’s ‘Leonore’ with the two well-known lines —

‘Tramp, tramp along the land they rode,Splash, splash along the sea,’

opened up to Scott a field in which for a time he won fame and wealth.

Of Mrs. Taylor, wife of the grandson of the eminent Hebraist, Mackintosh declared that she was the Madame Roland of Norwich. We owe to her Mrs. Austen and Lady Duff Gordon. Mr. Reeve, the translator of De Tocqueville’s ‘Democracy,’ has preserved the memory of his father, Dr. Henry Reeve, by the republication of his ‘Journal of a Tour on the Continent.’ Let me also mention that Dr. Caius, the founder of Caius College, Cambridge, was a Norwich man.

To Noncons Norwich offers peculiar attractions. We have in Dr. Williams’s library ‘The Order of the Prophesie in Norwich’; and Robinson, the leader of the Pilgrim Fathers, had a Norwich charge. Even in a later day some of the Norwich divines had a godly zeal for freedom, worthy of Milton himself, and on which the Pilgrim Fathers would have smiled approval. It is told of Mark Wilks, the brother of Matthew, and the grandfather of our London Mark Wilks, that when a deputation went from Norwich during the Thelwall and Horne Tooke trials, when, if the Castlereagh gang had had their will, there would have been found a short and easy way with the Dissenters, and came back on the Sunday morning, entering the place after the service had commenced, that he called out, ‘What’s the news?’ as he saw them enter. ‘Acquitted,’ was the reply. ‘Thank God!’ said the parson, as they all joined in singing

‘Praise God from whom all blessings flow.’

It is a fact that Wilks’s first sermon in the Countess of Huntingdon’s Chapel at Norwich was from the text, ‘There is a lad here with five barley loaves and a few small fishes.’ Let me tell another story, this time in connection with that Old Meeting which has so much to attract the visitor at Norwich. It had a grand old man, William Youngman, amongst its supporters; I see him now, with his choleric face, his full fat figure, his black knee-breeches and silk stockings, his gold-headed cane. He was an author, a learned man, as well as a Norwich merchant, the very Aristarchus of Dissent – a kind-hearted, hospitable man withal, if my boyish experience may be relied on. One Sunday there came to preach in the Old Meeting a young man named Halley from London, who lived to be honoured as few of our Dissenting D.D.’s have been. He was young, and he felt nervous as he looked from the pulpit on the austere critic in his great square pew just beneath. Well, thought the young preacher, a sermon on keeping the Sabbath will be safe, and he selected that for his morning discourse. The service over, up comes the grand old man. ‘The next time, young man, you preach, preach on something you understand;’ and, having said so, he bought a pennyworth of apples of a woman in the street, leaving the young man to digest his remarks as best he could. Again the service was to be carried on. The young man was in the pulpit, the grand old man below. There was singing and prayer, but no sermon, the young man having bolted after opening the service. I like better the picture of Norwich I get in Sir James Mackintosh’s Life, where Basil Montague tells us how he and Mackintosh, when travelling the Norfolk circuit, always hastened to Norwich to spend their evenings in the circle of which Mrs. Taylor was the attraction and the centre. The wife of a Norwich tradesman, we see her sitting sewing and talking in the midst of her family, the companion of philosophers, who compared her to Lucy Hutchinson, and a model wife. Far away in India Sir James writes to her: ‘I know the value of your letters. They rouse my mind on subjects which interest us in common – friends, children, literature, and life. Their moral tone cheers and braces me. I ought to be made permanently happy by contemplating a mind like yours; which seems more exclusively to derive its gratifications from its duties than almost any other.’ It was in the Norwich Octagon that these Taylors worshipped. Their Unitarianism seemed to have affected them more favourably than it did Harriet Martineau, whose family also attended there. I remember Edward Taylor, who was the Gresham Professor of Music. But theologically, I presume, the palm of excellence in connection with the Octagon is to be awarded to Dr. Taylor, the great Hebrew scholar. He wrote to old Newton: ‘I have been looking through my Bible, and can’t find your doctrine of the Atonement.’ ‘Last night I could not see to get into bed,’ replied old Newton, ‘because I found I had my extinguisher on the candle. Take off the extinguisher, and then you will see.’

Leaving theology, let us get up on the gray old castle, which is to be turned into a museum, and look round on the city lying at our feet. Would you have a finer view? Cross the Yare and walk up the new road (made by the unemployed one hard winter) to Mousehold Heath, and after you have done thinking of Kitt’s rebellion – an agrarian one, by-the-bye, and worth thinking about just at this time – and of the Lollards, who were burnt just under you, look across to the city in the valley, with its heights all round, more resembling the Holy City, so travellers say, than any other city in the world. In the foreground is the cathedral, right beyond rises the castle on the hill; church spires, warehouses, public buildings, private dwellings, manufactories, chimneys’ smoke, complete the landscape fringed by the green of the distant hills. There are a hundred thousand people there – to be preached to and saved.

Windham was rather hard on the Norwich of his day. In his diary, in 1798, he records a visit to Norwich, of which city he was the representative. On October 9 he dined at the Swan – ‘dinner, like the sessions dinner, but ball in the evening distinguished by the presence of Mrs. Siddons.’ On the 10th he dined at the Bishop’s – ‘A party, of, I suppose, fifty, chiefly clergy. I felt the same enjoyment that I frequently do at large dinners – they afford, in general, what never fails to be pleasant – solitude in a crowd.’ On the 11th he writes: ‘Dined with sheriffs at King’s Head. Robinson, the late sheriff, was there, and much as he may be below his own opinion of himself, he is more to talk to than the generality of those who are found on those occasions. I could not help reflecting on the very low state of talents or understanding in those who compose the whole, nearly, of the society of Norwich. The French are surely a more enlightened and polished people.’ Perhaps Windham would have fared better had he dined with some of the leading Dissenters. Few of the clergy of East Anglia at that time would have been fitting company for the friend of Johnson and Burke. In Norwich, Mr. Windham often managed to make himself unpopular. For instance, towards the end of the session of 1788, Mr. Windham called the attention of Government to a requisition from France, which was then suffering the greatest distress from a scarcity of grain. The object of this requisition was to be supplied with 20,000 sacks of flour from this country. So small a boon ought, he thought, to be granted from motives of humanity; but a Committee of the House of Commons having decided against it, the Ministers, though they professed themselves disposed to afford the relief sought for, could not, after such a decision, undertake to grant it upon their own responsibility. The leading part which Mr. Windham took in favour of this requisition occasioned, amongst some of his constituents at Norwich, considerable clamour. He allayed the storm by a private letter addressed to those citizens of Norwich who were most likely to be affected by a rise in the price of provisions; but the fact that Norwich should thus have backed up the inhuman policy of refusing food to France showed how strong at that time was the force of passion, and how hard it is to break down hereditary animosity. As a further illustration of manners and habits of the East Anglian clergy, let me mention that when, in 1778, Windham made the speech which pointed him out to be a man of marked ability in connection with the call made on the country for carrying on the American War, one of the Canons of the cathedral, and a great supporter of the war, exclaimed: ‘D – n him! I could cut his tongue out!’

In my young days, in serious circles, there was no name dearer than that of Joseph Gurney – a fine-looking man with a musical voice, always ready to aid with money, or in other ways, all that was right and good, or what seemed to him such. In the ‘Memorials of a Quaker Lady’ he is described thus: ‘He sat on the end seat of the first cross-form, and both preached and supplicated. I was very much struck with him. His fine person, his beautiful dark, glossy hair, his intelligent, benign, and truly amiable countenance, made a deep impression upon me. And as he noticed me most kindly, as I was introduced to him by Elizabeth Fry, as the little girl his sister Priscilla wanted to bring to England, I felt myself greatly honoured.’ The Gurneys have an ancient lineage, and had their home in Gourney, in Upper Normandy. One of them, of course, fought in the ranks of the winners at the battle of Hastings. Another was a crusader. Another had done good service at Acre, as a follower of Richard of the Lion Heart. When the main line came to an end, one branch settled in Norfolk. Gurney’s Bank at Norwich was one of the institutions of the city, and was as famous in my day as at a later time was the great house of Overend and Gurney, which, when it fell, created a panic in financial circles all the world over.

At Earlham, the home of the Gurneys, we learn how much may be done by a family, and how widespread its influence for good or evil may become. Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton certainly stands foremost, not alone amongst the East Anglians, but the philanthropists of later years. At the age of sixteen young Buxton went to Earlham as a guest. His biographer writes: ‘They received him as one of themselves, early appreciating his masterly, though still uncultivated mind; while, on his side, their cordial and encouraging welcome seemed to draw out all his latent powers. He at once joined with them in reading and study, and from this visit may be dated a remarkable change in the whole tone of his character; he received a stimulus not merely in the acquisition of knowledge, but in the formation of studious habits and intellectual tastes. Nor could the same influence fail of extending to the refinement of his disposition and manners.’ At that time Norwich – the Buxtons being witnesses – was distinguished for good society, and Earlham was celebrated for its hospitality. Mr. Gurney, the father, belonged to the Society of Friends, but his family was not brought up with any strict regard to its peculiarities. He put little restraint on their domestic amusements, and music and dancing were among their favourite recreations. The third daughter, Mrs. Fry, had, indeed, united herself more closely with the Society of Friends; but her example had not then been followed by any of her brothers and sisters. ‘I know,’ wrote Sir Thomas, in later years, ‘no blessing of a temporal nature – and it is not only temporal – for which I ought to render so many thanks as my connection with the Earlham family. It has given a colour to my life. Its influence was most positive, and pregnant with good at that critical period between school and manhood. They were eager to improve; I caught the infection. I was resolved to please them, and in the college at Dublin, at a distance from all my friends and all control, their influence and the desire to please them kept me hard at my books, and sweetened the task they gave. The distinctions I gained at college (little valuable as distinctions, but valuable because habits of industry, perseverance and resolution were necessary to attain them) – these boyish distinctions were exclusively the result of the animating passion in my mind to carry back to them the prizes which they prompted and enabled me to win.’

Wilberforce, when he was staying at Lowestoft in 1816, wrote: ‘I am still full of Earlham and its excellent inhabitants. One of our great astronomers stated it as probable there may be stars whose light has been travelling to us from the Creation, and has not yet reached our little planet. In the Earlham family a new constellation has broken in upon us, for which you must invent a name, as you are fond of star-gazing, and if it indicates a little monstrosity (as they are apt to give the collection of stars the names of strange creatures – dragons, bears, etc.), the various stars of which the Earlham assemblage is made,’ continues Wilberforce, ‘will include also much to be respected and loved.’ At that time Mrs. Opie was one of the Norwich stars. Caroline Fox, who went to dine with her described her as in great force and really jolly. ‘She is enthusiastic about Father Mathew, reads Dickens voraciously, takes to Carlyle, but thinks his appearance rather against him – talks much and with great spirit of people, but never ill-naturedly.’

‘Norwich,’ as described by Camden, ‘on account of its wealth, populousness, neatness of buildings, beautiful churches, with the number of them – for it has a matter of fifty parishes – as also the industry of its citizens, loyalty to their Prince, is to be reckoned among the most considerable cities in Britain. It was fortified with walls that have a great many turrets and eleven gates.’ Camden, quoting one writer after another, adds the eulogy of Andrew Johnston, a Scotchman, as follows:

‘A town whose stately piles and happy seatHer citizens and strangers both delight;Whose tedious siege and plunder made her bearIn Norman battles an unhappy share,And feel the sad effects of dreadful war.These storms o’erblown, now blest with constant peace,She saw her riches and her trade increase.State here by wealth, by beauty yet undone,How blest if vain excess be yet unknown!So fully is she from herself suppliedThat England while she stands can never want a head.’

From Norwich went Robinson to help to build up in Amsterdam that Church of the Pilgrim Fathers which was to be in its turn the mother of a great Republic such as the world had never seen. He has been styled the Father of Modern Congregationalism; be that as it may, when he bade farewell in that quaint old harbour, Delfhaven – which looks as if not a brick or a building had been touched since – he was doing a work from which neither himself nor those who stood with him could ever have expected such wonderful results. That emigration to Holland in Wren’s time was a great loss of money and men to England, and was an indication of Nonconformist strength which wise Churchmen would have conciliated rather than driven to extremities. ‘In sooth it was,’ wrote Heylin, ‘that the people in many great trading towns which were near the sea, having long been discharged of the bond of ceremonies, no sooner came to hear the least noise of a conformity, but they began to spurn against it; and when they found that all their striving was in vain, that they had lost the comfort of their lecturers and that their ministers began to shrink at the very name of a visitation, it was no hard matter for those ministers and lecturers to persuade them to remove their dwellings and transport their trades.’ ‘The sun of heaven,’ say they, ‘doth shine as comfortably in other places; the Sun of Righteousness much brighter.’ ‘Better to go and dwell in Goshen, find it where we can, than tarry in the midst of such an Egyptian darkness as is now falling on the land.’ One of the preachers who gave that advice and acted in accordance with it was William Bridge, M.A. Against him Wren was so furious that he fled to Holland and settled down as one of the pastors of the church at Rotterdam. In 1643 we find him pastor of the church at Norwich and Yarmouth, and one of the Assembly of Divines. In 1644 the church was separated – a part meeting at Yarmouth and a part at Norwich. This was done on the advice of Mr. John Phillip, of Wrentham – a godly minister of great influence in his denomination in his day.