East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations

Sir Thomas Hanmer was one of the most independent men that ever sat for the county of Suffolk. Mr. Glyde, of Ipswich, terms him the Gladstone of his age. Pope appears to stigmatize him as a Trimmer,

‘Courtiers and patrols in two ranks divide;Through both he passed, and bowed from side to side.’

His garden at Mildenhall was celebrated for the quality of its grapes, and Sir Thomas used to send every year hampers filled with these grapes, and carried on men’s shoulders, to London for the Queen. That stubborn Radical and Freethinker, Tom Paine, was born at Thetford. Sir John Suckling, a Suffolk poet, has written, at any rate, one verse never excelled:

‘Her feet beneath her petticoat,Like little mice, stole in and out,As if they feared the light.But oh, she dances such a way,No sun upon an Easter dayIs half so fine a sight.’

England has in all parts of the world sons and daughters who have deserved well of the State, and not a few of them are East Anglians by birth and breeding. May their fame be cherished and their examples followed by their successors in that calm, quiet, Eastern land – far from the madding crowd – where the roar and rush of our modern life are almost unknown – where farmers weep and wail but look jolly nevertheless!

THE END