East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations

The Saxons of East Anglia gave the name of England to this land of ours; but before this time East Anglia had attained, by means of its sons and daughters, to fame far and near. If we may believe Gildas, a Christian church was planted in England in the time of Nero. Claudia, to whom Paul refers in Philippians and Timothy, was a British lady of great wit and greater beauty, celebrated by the poet Martial. She may have been converted by Paul, argued the Rev. Mr. Hollingsworth, a local historian, Rural Dean and Rector of Stowmarket; nor is it at all improbable, he adds, ‘that Claudia, the British beauty, may have been an Iceni, or East Anglian lady, as her brilliant complexion, for which so many in these counties are celebrated, had caused a vivid feeling of sensation and curiosity and envy even among the haughty dames of the imperial city of Rome.’ The Romans were glad to make terms with the Iceni till the unfortunate Boadicea perished in the revolt which she had so rashly raised. The Saxons came after the Romans, and took possession of the land. Saxon proprietors compelled the people, whose lives they spared, to till the very lands on which their fathers had lived under the Roman Government or their own chiefs. Pagan worship was reintroduced; but when Sigberht, the son of Redwald, King of East Anglia, reigned, he sent to France for Christian ministers, and one of them, Felix, a Burgundian, landed at Felixstowe, and there commenced his Christian labours. Felix was held in high repute by the Bishops in other parts of the kingdom. His opinions were quoted and revered. The diocese was large, and the fourth Bishop divided it into two parts, the second Bishop being planted at North Elmham, in Norfolk. In 955 the see was again united, when Erfastus, the twenty-second Bishop, removed to Thetford. A little while after the Bishop’s residence was removed to Norwich, and there it has ever since remained; but the land was not long permitted to remain in peace. In 870 a large party of Danes marched from Lincolnshire into Suffolk, defeated King Edmund, near Hoxne, and, as he would not become an idolater, shot him to death with arrows. Bury St. Edmunds still preserves the name and fame of one of the most illustrious of our Anglo-Saxon martyrs. King Alfred, with a policy worthy of his sagacity, made Guthrum, the Danish governor of Suffolk, a Christian, and continued him in his rule. The Danes in East Anglia were then an immense army, and thus at once they were turned from foes into friends. Guthrum was baptized, and it is to be hoped was all the better for it. At any rate, he returned to Suffolk and divided many of the estates which had been held by Saxon proprietors killed in war. He died in peace, and had a fitting funeral at Hadleigh. The children of those Danish soldiers were dangerous friends, and too frequently betrayed the Saxons. Blood is thicker than water, and as each succeeding band of Danish adventurers landed on our eastern coast, they were welcomed by such followers of Guthrum as had settled in Suffolk as friends and allies. Nevertheless, the Danes found the conquest of the island impossible. Divine Providence, Mr. Hollingsworth tells us, did not suffer the Saxon race to be vanquished by those who were connected with them by blood. Nevertheless, the struggle was long and severe. The two races were equally matched in courage, but the Saxon surpassed his foe in that stern, unyielding endurance which enabled him to resist every defeat and prepare again for the contest. The whole surface of the country became studded with entrenchments, moats, and mounds, within whose line the harassed Saxon defended his property and all he valued in his home. History begins, as far as England is practically concerned, with the Norman Conquest. It was then the Norsemen, blue-eyed, fair-haired, the finest blood in Europe, planted themselves in Norfolk and Suffolk, and brought with them feudalism and civilization. It was in 787 that, according to the Saxon Chronicle, they first reached England; but it was not till William the Conqueror made the land his own that they settled as English lords, and divided between them the land in which their rapacious forefathers had won many a precious treasure.

‘The red gold and the white silverHe covets as a leech does blood,’

wrote an old poet of the Norseman.

Let us take, as an illustration of the county, a Norfolk family. In Westminster Abbey there is monument to Sir Thomas Fowell Buxton, who was buried in the ruined chancel of the little church at Overstrand, near Northrepps, ‘a droll, irregular, unconventional-looking place,’ as Caroline Fox calls it, where he loved at all times to live, and where he retired to die. The family from which Sir Thomas descended resided, about the middle of the sixteenth century, at Sudbury, in Suffolk. It was while at Earlham that he made his début as a public speaker at one of the earlier meetings of the Norfolk Bible Society. In the winter of 1817 he went over to France with some of the Gurneys and the Rev. Francis Cunningham, who was anxious to establish a Bible Society in Paris. He was also anxious to inquire into the way in which the gaols at Antwerp and Ghent were conducted. On his return he examined minutely into the state of the London gaols, and, to use his own expression, his inquiries developed a system of folly and wickedness which surpassed belief. In the following year he published a work entitled ‘An Inquiry whether Crime be Produced or Prevented by our Present System of Penal Discipline,’ which ran through six editions, and tended powerfully to create a proper public feeling on the subject. In 1819 we find him in Parliament seconding Sir James Mackintosh in his efforts to promote a reform of our criminal law – then the most sanguinary in Europe. One of his earliest efforts was to get the House to abolish the burning of widows in India; and in 1821 he received from Wilberforce the command to relieve him of a responsibility too heavy for his advancing years and infirmities – the care of the slave: a holy enterprise for which Mr. Buxton had been qualifying himself by careful thought and study, and which he was spared to carry to a successful end. At first he resided at Cromer Hall, an old seat of the Windham family, which no longer exists, having been pulled down and replaced by a modern residence. It was situated about a quarter of a mile from the sea, but sheltered from the north winds by closely surrounding hills and woods, and with its old buttresses, gables, and porches clothed with roses and jessamine, and its famed lawn, where the pheasants came down to feed, had a peculiar character of picturesque simplicity. The interior corresponded with its external appearance, and had little of the regularity of modern building. One attic chamber was walled up, with no entrance save through the window: and at different times large pits were discovered under the floor or in the thick walls – used, it was supposed, in old times by the smugglers of the coast. There is much picturesque scenery around Cromer, and large parties were often made up for excursions to Sherringham – one of the most beautiful spots in all the eastern counties, to the wooded dells of Felbrigg and Runton, or to the rough heath ground by the beach beacon. One who was a frequent guest at Cromer Hall wrote: ‘I wish I could describe the impression made upon me by the extraordinary power of interesting and stimulating others which was possessed by Sir Fowell Buxton some thirty years ago. In my own case it was like having powers of thinking, powers of feeling, and, above all, the love of true poetry suddenly aroused within me, which, though I had possessed them before, had been till then unused. From Locke “On the Human Understanding,” to “William of Deloraine, good at need,” he woke up in me the sleeping principle of taste, and, in giving me such objects of pursuit, has added immeasurably to the happiness of my life.’ On a Sunday afternoon, we are told, his large dining-hall was filled with a miscellaneous audience of fishermen and neighbours, as well as of his own household, to whom he would read the Bible, commenting on it at the same time. Very simple and beautiful seems to us that far-away Norfolk life; except that his hospitalities were more bounded by want of room, his life at Northrepps was much the same as it had been at Cromer Hall. It is one of the pleasures of my life that I have heard Sir Thomas speak. In modern England the influence of the Buxton family and name is yet a power.

Having already alluded to the Windhams and Felbrigg, it remains to say that the last of that illustrious line died in 1810. Felbrigg was purchased by the Windhams as far back as 1461. The public life of Windham, the statesman, may be considered as having commenced in 1783, when he undertook the office of Principal Secretary to Lord Northington, who was appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland. The great Marquis of Lansdowne, when he was last at Felbrigg, in 1861, said Mr. Windham had the best Parliamentary address of any man he had ever seen, which was enhanced by the grace of his person and the dignity of his manners. Still more glowing was the testimony borne to Mr. Windham by Earl Grey when he heard of his death. A mere glance at his diary is sufficient to convince us that Windham, when in London, mixed with the first men and women of his time. The late Lord Chief Justice Scarlett, on being asked by his son-in-law to name the very best speech he had heard during his life, and that which he thought most worthy of study, answered, without hesitation, ‘Windham’s speech on the Law of Evidence.’ In a conversation with Lord Palmerston, Pitt observed of Windham: ‘Nothing can be so well-meaning or eloquent as he is. His speeches are the finest productions possible of warm imagination and fancy.’ In 1800 we read in the Malmesbury Diaries that old George III. had meant Windham to be his First Minister. As a friend of Burke and Johnson, Windham’s name will not easily fade away. It is to him we owe the most pathetic account of the closing hours of the Monarch of Bolt Court.

Sir Cloudesley Shovel may well claim to be one of Norfolk’s heroes. Born in an obscure village, an apprentice to a shoemaker, he obtained rank and fame as one of Queen Anne’s most honoured Admirals. It is denied that he was in very humble circumstances, and it is a fact that his original letters were so well worded as to indicate that he had received a fair education. At any rate, he went to sea at ten years old with his friend Sir John Hadough; and although not a cabin-boy in the modern acceptation of that term, he undertook his captain’s errands, swimming on one occasion through the enemy’s fire with some despatches for a distant ship, carrying the papers in his mouth, displaying a courage worthy of admiration. He distinguished himself in the Battle of Bantry Bay. As an enemy of France and Spain, he triumphed in many a fierce fight. Returning home flushed with victory, his ship and all on board were lost on the Scilly Isles in an October gale. Some uncertainty hangs over his last moments. It is asserted that he swam to shore alive, and that he was put to death for the sake of his ring of emeralds and diamonds. An ancient woman is stated to have confessed as much. For the honour of human nature, we would fain believe the story to be untrue. A still greater Norfolk hero was Lord Nelson, who is buried in St. Paul’s Cathedral. ‘My principle,’ said Nelson, on one occasion, ‘is to assist in driving the French to the devil, and in restoring peace and happiness to mankind.’ Whether he succeeded as regards the former we are not in a position to state; but peace and happiness, alas! are still far from being the common property of mankind. The rectory house at Burnham Thorpe, where Nelson was born, exists no longer. Sir Cloudesley Shovel lived in a castellated stone house in the small agricultural village of Cockthorpe, originally fortified as a defence against the incursions of smugglers. A room in this house, entered by a doorway arched over with stone, is shown, which is still called by the villagers Sir Cloudesley’s drawing-room.

A chapter might be written about the Norfolk Cokes. Sir Edward Coke, the great lawyer, was buried at Tittleshale, in Norfolk. The well-known Coke, the distinguished agriculturist, inhabited that splendid Holkham, the fame of which exists in our day. It was begun by Lord Leicester in 1734, and finished by his Countess in 1764. Blomefield, the well-known Norfolk historian, speaks of it as a noble, stately, and sumptuous palace. Lord Coke and Lord Burlington were men of similar tastes and pursuits, and were diligent students of classical and Italian art. The Holkham Library still contains treasures rich and rare. Many of the latter formed part of the library of Sir Edward Coke; the title-page of the first edition of the ‘Novum Organum,’ published in 1620, bears the design of a ship passing through the Pillars of Hercules into an undulating sea. The Holkham copy is adorned by the inscription, ‘Ex dono auctoris.’

Above the ship, in the handwriting of Coke, is the couplet:

‘It deserveth not to be read in schools,But to be freighted in the ship of fools.’

Thomas Shadwell, the Poet Laureate and historiographer of William III., was a Norfolk man. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. It is said by Noble that he was an honest man. Of course he was. Chalmers accuses him of indecent conversation, or Lord Rochester would not have said that he had more wit and humour than any other poet. I am afraid he confers little honour on his native county. ‘Others,’ wrote Dryden in one of his satires,

‘To some faint meaning make pretence,But Shadwell never deviates into sense.’

Sir Robert Walpole, who saved England from wooden shoes and slavery, was of a Norfolk family, yet flourishing; as are the Townshends, to whom we owe the introduction of the turnip. Norfolk also can boast of Sir Thomas Gresham and Sir Francis Walsingham. In Norfolk was born that ‘great oracle of law, patron of the Church, and glory of England,’ as Camden calls him, Sir Henry Spelman. At Bickling, in the same county, was born that ill-starred Anne Boleyn, of whom it is written that

‘Love could teach a monarch to be wise,And Gospel light first beamed from Boleyn’s eyes.’

In the same neighbourhood, also, was born John Baconthorpe, the resolute doctor, of whom Pantias Pansa has written: ‘This one resolute doctor has furnished the Christian religion with armour against the Jews stronger than that of Vulcan.’ Pansa was a Norfolk man, and so was the great botanist Sir W. Hooker.

Who has not heard of Lynn, in Norfolk, where, when Eugene Aram was the usher,

‘Four-and-twenty happy boysCame bounding out of school’?

It was in that old town Fanny Burney, the friend of Mrs. Thrale and Dr. Johnson, the author of novels like ‘Evelina,’ which people even read nowadays, was born on the 13th of June, 1752. She grew up low of stature, of a brown complexion. One of her friends called her the dove, which she thought was from the colour of her eyes – a greenish-gray; her last editor thinks it must have been from their kind expression. She was very short-sighted, like her father. In her portrait, taken at the age of thirty, merriment seems latent behind a demure look. At any rate, her countenance was what might be called a speaking one. ‘Poor Fanny!’ said her father, ‘her face tells what she thinks, whether she will or no. I long to see her honest face once more.’ ‘Poor Fanny’ lived to a good old age, and her gossiping diary is a mine of wealth as regards the Royal Family, and Johnson, and Mrs. Thrale, and the cleverest men and women of her time.

Thomas Bilney, one of our Protestant martyrs, was a Norfolk man. It was a Norfolk knight, Sir Thomas Erpingham, who gave signal for the archers at Agincourt. Shakespeare refers to him in his ‘King Henry V.’ as follows:

‘King. – Good-morrow, old Sir Thomas Erpingham;A good soft pillow for that good white headWere better than a churlish turf of France.‘Erp. – Not so, my liege; this lodging likes me better,Since I may say, now lie I like a king.’

Many East Anglians helped to win the battle of Agincourt. The Earl of Kimberley still bears Agincourt on his shield.

Let us now pass over into Suffolk. It is worth asking how Suffolk came to earn the nickname of Silly Suffolk. ‘Silly,’ say the learned, is derived from the German selig, meaning ‘holy or blessed,’ and is said to have been applied to Suffolk on account of the number of beautiful churches it contains; Suffolk, at any rate, is silly no longer. In the present day it shows to advantage, if we may judge by the enterprise and public spirit of such a town as Ipswich, for instance. Not long since, as I landed on the docks at Hamburg, I had the pleasure of seeing some dozen or more steam ploughs and agricultural implements waiting to be transported into the interior. The ploughs and implements bore well-known Suffolk names, such as Garrett and Sons or Ransomes, Sims and Jefferies, and were open manifestations of Suffolk skill and energy, and ability to hold its own against all comers. Amongst the women of the present generation, where are to be met the superiors of Mrs. Garrett Anderson or of Mrs. Fawcett, widow of the distinguished statesman, and mother of a sweet girl-graduate who has beaten all the men at her University? I was the other day at Haverhill, where Mr. D. Gurteen still lives to enjoy, at the ripe old age of eighty-three, the fruits of an energy on his part which has raised Haverhill from a village of paupers into a flourishing community, whose manufactures are to be met with all over the land. One day, as I was walking along Gray’s Inn Road, a fine, well-built man stopped me to ask me if I remembered him. When he mentioned his name I did directly. He was of the poorest of the poor in his home at Wrentham. He had done well in London. ‘You know, sir,’ he said, ‘how poor our family was. Well, I had enough of poverty, and I made up my mind to come to London and be either a man or a mouse.’

In the London of to-day the heads of some of our greatest establishments are Suffolk men. We all know the stately pile in Holborn, once Meekings’, now Wallis’s, where all the world and his wife go to buy. Mr. Wallis hails from Stowmarket, and the man who fits up London shops in the most tasty style, Mr. Sage, of Gray’s Inn Road, was a Suffolk carpenter, who, when out of work, with his last guinea got some cards printed, one of which got him a job, which ultimately led on to fame and fortune.

No, Suffolk has long ceased to be silly. It must have deserved the title in the days which I can remember when a Conservative M.P., amidst enthusiastic cheering, at Ipswich, intimated that it was quite as well the sun and moon were placed high up in the heavens, else

‘Some reforming assWould soon propose to pluck them downAnd light the world with gas.’

One of the oddest, most attractive, and most original women of the last century was Elizabeth Simpson, a Suffolk girl, who ran away from her home, where she was never taught anything, at the age of sixteen, to make her fortune, and to win fame. In both cases she succeeded, though not so soon as she could have wished. Failing to touch the hard heart of the manager of the Norwich Theatre, a Welshman of the name of Griffiths, she packed up her things in a bandbox, and, good-looking and audacious, landed herself on the Holborn pavement. ‘By the time you receive this,’ she wrote to her mother, ‘I shall leave Standingfield perhaps for ever. You are surprised, but be not uneasy; believe the step I have undertaken is indiscreet, but by no means criminal, unless I sin by not acquainting you with it. I now endure every pang, am not lost to every feeling, on thus quitting the tenderest and best of parents, I would say most beloved, too, but cannot prove my affection, yet time may. To that I must submit my hope of retaining your regard. The censures of the world I despise, as the most worthy incur the reproaches of that. Should I ever think you will wish to hear from me I will write.’ A pretty, unprotected, unknown girl of sixteen, in London, had, we can well believe, no easy time of it. Strangers followed her in the street, people insulted her in the theatre, suspicious landladies looked her up. Happily, a brother-in-law met her in a penniless state and took her home. Unhappily, at his house she met Inchbald, an indifferent and badly-paid actor. They were immediately married, and the girl rejoiced to think that she was an actress, and about to realize the ambition of her youth. It was no small part which the Suffolk girl felt herself qualified to fill. On the 4th of September, 1772, she made her début as Cordelia to her husband’s Lear. In 1821 Mrs. Inchbald, famed for her ‘simple story,’ which took the town by storm, was buried in Kensington Churchyard. But before she got there she had to endure much. At that time theatrical performers were much worse paid than they are now, when, as Mr. Irving tells us, any decent-looking young man, with a good suit of clothes, can command his five or six pounds a week. Mrs. Inchbald and her husband had to drink of the cup of poverty, and its consequent degradation, to the dregs. On one occasion they took it into their heads to go to France, believing that they could make money – he by painting, she by writing. The scheme, as was to be expected, did not answer, and they were landed on their return somewhere near Brighton, in the September of 1776, literally without a crust of bread. On one occasion it was stated that they dined off raw turnips, stolen from a field as they wandered past. Next year, however, the world began to mend so far as they were concerned.

At Manchester they met the Siddonses and J. P. Kemble, and one result of that meeting was peace and prosperity. At this time also the lady’s husband died, and that was no great loss, as the lady was far too independent for a wife. Yet, if the great Kemble had proposed to her, as she used to tell Fanny Kemble, she would have jumped at him. To the last her habits of life were most penurious. She spent nothing on dress, she was indifferent in the matter of eating and drinking, and when she was making as much as from £500 to £900 by a new play, in order to save a trifle she would sit in the depth of winter without a fire. Only fancy any of our later lady-novelists thus ascetic and self-denying. The idea is absurd. She was to the last what Godwin described her, a mixture of lady and milkmaid. And yet the lady had ambition. She had an idea that she might be Lady Bunbury. However, she marred her chance, at the same time missing a rich Mr. Glover, who offered a marriage settlement of £500 a year. Mrs. Inchbald, however, well knew how to take care of herself. No one better. She had learned the art in rather a hard school, and, besides, she knew how to take care of her poor relations. None of her sisters seem to have done well, and she had to aid them all.

Sudbury was the birthplace of that William Enfield, whose ‘Speaker’ was the terror and delight of more than one generation of England’s ingenuous youth. Lord Chancellor Thurlow, of the rugged eyebrows and the savage look, and fellow-clerk with the poet Cowper, was born at Ashfield, an obscure village not far off. Robert Bloomfield, who wrote the ‘Farmer’s Boy,’ came from Honington, where his mother kept a village school, and where he became a shoemaker. Capel Loft, an amiable gentleman of literary sympathies and pursuits, and Bloomfield’s warmest friend, resided at Troston Hall, in the immediate neighbourhood of Honington. At one time there was no writer better known than John Lydgate, called the Monk of Bury, born at the village of Lydgate, in 1380. ‘His language,’ writes a learned critic, ‘is much less obsolete than Chaucer’s, and a great deal more harmonious.’ Stephen Gardener, Bishop of Winchester, and an enemy to the Reformation, was born at Bury. At Trinity St. Martin lived Thomas Cavendish, the second Englishman who sailed round the globe. Admiral Broke, memorable for his capture of the Chesapeake, when we were at war with America, was born at Nacton. The great non-juring Archbishop Sancroft was born at Fressingfield, where he retired to die, and where he is buried under a handsome monument. The great scholar, Robert Grossetête, Bishop of Lincoln, was born at Stradbrook. Of him Roger Bacon wrote that he was the only man living who was in possession of all the sciences. Wycliff, on innumerable occasions, refers to him with respect. Arthur Young, the celebrated agriculturist, some of whose sentences are preserved as golden ones – especially that which says, ‘Give a man the secure possession of a rock, and he will make a garden of it’ – and whose valuable works, I am glad to see, are republished, was born and lived near Bury St. Edmunds. Echard, the historian, was born at Barsham, in 1671. Porson was a Norfolk lad.