East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations

An intelligent foreman, after I have evaded the attack of a formidable dog which keeps watch and ward over the premises, explains to me the mystery of the trade. I find myself in the midst of a square. On one side are a great stack of oak and many casks of old salt. The latter, I gather, is sold to be used as manure. The former is applied to the fire, which gently smokes the Yarmouth bloater. On one side, the herrings, as they are received, are pickled – that is, first washed in fresh water, and then immersed in great tubs in which the water is mixed with salt. The next thing is to take them into a room in which several women are engaged in spitting them – that is, hanging them on rods – and then they are carried to the apartment where they are hung up, while oak logs are burnt beneath. In twelve hours they are sufficiently smoked, and then you have the real Yarmouth bloater. I am glad I have seen the process, as I have a horrible suspicion that the costermonger manufactures many a Yarmouth bloater in some filthy Whitechapel slum, the odour of which by no means tends to improve the flavour of so delicate a fish.

But we have to discuss the red-herring, not of the artful politician, anxious to dodge his hearers, but of the breakfast-table. For this purpose I am taken to a large oven filled with oak sawdust, gathered from Ipswich, and oak shavings, which are also brought from a distance, principally from Bass’s Brewery, and, indeed, from all the great works where oak is used; I see heaps of fire made from these ashes, which give out much heat, and at the same time much smoke. In a loft above are hung the herrings, and there they hang twelve days, till they gradually become of the colour of a guinea, when they are packed up and sent away in casks, while the bloaters go away in baskets of a hundred, in pots holding a smaller number, and in barrels in which as many as three hundred are stowed away. As to the kippered herring, he undergoes quite a different treatment. Some twenty or thirty women get hold of him, cut him open, take out his gut and wash him, and then he is hung over an oak fire and smoked for twelve hours, and thus, saturated with smoke inside and out, is regarded in many circles as a delicacy to be highly prized. But he must be got off the premises. Well, if we climb to a loft, we shall see a good many young women hard at work stripping the rods, on which he and his fellows have been suspended, and stowing the fish away. In the autumn especially the peculiar industries connected with the trade are very considerably exercised. All day long carts come in with the fish; all day long carts go out with the manufactured articles to the railway-station; day and night the men and women are at work; in one quarter the women make and mend the nets, which are then boiled in cutch and put on board the boats; in another quarter coopers are at work making boxes and casks and barrels. As to the baskets, the country is ransacked for them, and as soon as they are filled they take the train and away they go, to give a flavour to the potato dinner of the poor man, or to form a tasty adjunct to the dishes under which the breakfast table of his lord and master groans. In London we get the best – the smaller herrings go to the North, as the dwellers in those parts will not pay the price the Londoner does. Great is the joy and rejoicing, as well can be imagined, at Lowestoft when the herring season comes on. It is true, the Lowestoft fishers do not have it all to themselves. Yarmouth is a fierce rival in the race, and, as it has now superior accommodation, many a boat makes for that far-famed port. Then, the Scotch, when they have done their fishing, make for the English coast, and manage, as Scotchmen ever do, to gather a fair share of the spoil. As to the foreigners, they are not such formidable rivals as sometimes we are apt to believe. The Frenchman or the Dutchman comes, but that is when he is blown off by a gale from his own happy hunting-ground, and then we know, all the world over, the cry is, ‘Any port in a storm.’

Oh, these storms! how terrible they are! and how little, as we eat our Yarmouth bloater of a morning, or spread the bloater-paste as a covering to the thin slice of bread-and-butter, to tempt the languid appetite – how little do we who sit at home at ease realize their fury and their power! As I now write, twenty-one orphans are bewailing the loss of fathers who went out in a craft during the last gale, and of whom no sign has been seen, nor ever will. Hour by hour the women, weeping and watching on the sandy shore, saw one and another familiar boat come, more or less buffeted, into port. On more than one a hand had been washed away, but the craft and the rest of the crew were saved somehow. But one boat yet remained missing, and in vain the survivors were questioned as to what had become of the Skimmer of the Sea. Day by day anxious eyes swept the distant horizon. Day by day a sadder weight came down on weeping child and broken-hearted wife; and now all hope is gone, and all felt that in the fury of the gale the Skimmer of the Sea foundered with all her hands. Well, as the good old Admiral said, as he and his men were about to perish, ‘My lads, the way to heaven is as short by sea as by land.’ But the wounded heart in the agony of its grief is slow to realize that fact. Sailors ought to be serious men; every halfpenny they earn is won at the risk of a life. In Lowestoft, I am glad to find, many of them are. ‘The Salvation Army has done ’em a deal of good,’ says a decent woman, with whom I happened to scrape an acquaintance at the most attractive coffee-house I have ever seen – the Coffee Pot at Mutford Bridge. ‘Not that I holds with the Salvation Army myself, sir, but they’ve done the men a deal of good, and they don’t spend their wages, as they used to do, in drink.’

Lowestoft, when I was there last, had just lost one of its heroes – I mean the late Mr. George Borrow – whose ‘Bible in Spain’ was the talk of the season in religious and worldly circles alike, and whose writings on Gipsies and Wild Wales and the ‘Bible in Spain’ achieved at one time an enormous popularity. He lived – I can still remember his tall form – on a bank a couple of miles out of Lowestoft, sloping down to a large piece of water known in those parts as Oulton Broad. The tourist, if he looks to his right just after he has passed Mutford Bridge on the rail from Lowestoft to Beccles, across the wide sheet of water, which, as I saw it last, lay calm and blue in the fading glory of an autumnal sun, will perhaps see a white house at a distance, nestled in among the fir-trees – that was where George Borrow lived, and where he died, though he was buried in Brompton Cemetery by the side of his wife. You cannot make a mistake, for houses are rare in those parts. As his step-daughter observed to me, the proper way is by water; to get to the house by land – at least as I did – you walk along the rail for a couple of miles, then break off across a bit of a swamp, to a little lane that conducts you to Oulton Church – a very ancient one, which, however, is in a state of good repair and is noted partly on account of the fact that the steeple is built in the middle, and partly on account of its containing, so it is said, the earliest example of a brass to an ecclesiastic which is to be found in England. A narrow path from the church leads you to Oulton Hall, which came into the possession of Borrow by marriage, really a very plain, red-brick, capacious, comfortable-looking old farmhouse, only of a superior class. Keeping the Hall to the right, you reach a gate, which opens into a very narrow lane, full of mud in the winter and dust in the summer. The lane loses itself in the marshland, on the borders of Lake Lothing – a name supposed to have been derived from a certain Danish prince, murdered on the spot by a jealous Court retainer; and it is a fitting place for a murder, as in that lonely district there was no eye to pity, no ear to hear, no hand to save. Even to-day, as you look away from the train, there is little sign of life, save the sail of a distant wherry as it makes sluggishly for Norwich or Beccles, as it goes either into the Waveney or the Yare; or the gray wing of the heron as it flies heavily along the marsh; and that is all. Far away, perhaps, rises a ridge, with a house on it; or a steeple, with a few trees struggling to yield the barren spot a shelter from the suns of summer or the howling winds of winter; but all is still life there, and the habitations of men are few and far between. In the particular lane to which I have introduced the reader – there are but two – there is a little cottage on your left, and beyond, under a group of trees, mostly fir, which almost hide it from view, a home of a rather superior character, in a very dilapidated condition, with everything around it more or less untidy – that was where George Borrow lived and worked in his way for many a long day. The step-daughter and her husband reside there now – very ancient people, who are to be seen driving about Lowestoft in a little wicker car, drawn by an amiable and active donkey, an aged dog guarding the cottage during their temporary absence. The female, an ancient one, who did for the house, lives in the little cottage which the tourist will have already observed, and the interior of which presented, when I peeped in, a far greater idea of comfort than did Oulton Cottage, the residence of the late George Borrow. The picture one gets is rather a melancholy one. ‘He was a funny-tempered man’ – that seems to have been the idea of the few people around. Latterly he kept no company, and no one came to see him. All who did call on him, however, tell me that he was well dressed, but that all the interior of the house was dirty. Well, that was to be expected of a man who loved to live with the gipsies, and patter to them in Romany of Egyptian lore, for it could not have been want of means. Borrow must have made a good deal of money by his books, and I have heard his landed property estimated at five hundred per year. The house looked like the residence of a miser who would not lay out a penny in keeping up appearances or in repairs. It must be remembered, however, that the grand old man had long become bowed with age; that for some years before his death he was scarcely able to move himself without help; that the grasshopper, as it were, had become a burden. In summer time such a residence, in good repair and well furnished, would be perfectly charming. The house contains a sitting-room on each side of the entrance-hall. Behind is the kitchen, and above are four bedrooms and two attics – none of them large, I own, but at any rate capable of being made very cosy. On your right, in a little niche in the cliff, is a small stable. Lower down is a large summer-house, then full of books (amongst them, I believe, there were a hundred lexicons), where their learned proprietor loved to write. Farther down the lawn you come to the lake, where Borrow could enjoy his morning bath without fear of being disturbed, and where any amount of fish can be got. Just previous to my last visit to the spot a pike of more than twenty pounds’ weight – I am afraid to say how many pounds more, lest the reader should think I was exaggerating – had been caught. For a real angler or sportsman such a house as that in which George Borrow spent the latter years of his long life must have been a perfect paradise. The world is utterly away from you, and, what is better still, in such a spot the world has no chance of finding you out. Approaching by road, you see no sign of the house till you are in it, so completely is it hidden in the nook of trees in which it stands. Only to the water is it open. It would be really beautiful to live there in the summer, and have a gondola to row into Beccles or Lowestoft or Bungay when you wanted to be gay.

One good anecdote I heard of George Borrow the last time I was in the neighbourhood, which is worth repeating. My informant was an Independent minister, at that time supplying the pulpit at Lowestoft, and staying at Oulton Hall, then inhabited by a worthy Dissenting tenant. One night a meeting of the Bible Society was held at Mutford Bridge, at which the party from the Hall attended, and where George Borrow was one of the speakers. After the meeting was over, all the speakers went back to supper at Oulton Hall, and my friend among them, who, in the course of the supper, found himself attacked very violently by the clergyman for holding Calvinistic opinions. Naturally my friend replied that the clergyman was bound to do the same. ‘How do you make that out?’ ‘Why, the Articles of your Church are Calvinistic, and to them you have sworn assent.’ ‘Oh yes, but there is a way of explaining them away.’ ‘How so?’ said my friend. ‘Oh,’ replied the clergyman, ‘we are not bound to take the words in their natural sense.’ My friend, an honest, blunt East Anglian, intimated that he did not understand that way of evading the difficulty; but he was then a young man, and did not like to continue the discussion further. However, George Borrow, who had not said a word hitherto, entered into the discussion, opening fire on the clergyman in a very unexpected manner, and giving him such a setting down as the hearers, at any rate, never forgot. All the sophistry about the non-natural meaning of terms was held up by Borrow to ridicule, even contempt; and the clergyman was beaten at every point. ‘Never,’ says my friend, ‘did I hear one man give another such a dressing as on that occasion.’ It was not always, however, that Borrow thus shone. In the neighbourhood of Bungay lived a gentleman much given to collect around him men of literary taste and culture. A lecture was to be given in the neighbourhood, and all the men of light and leading around were invited. George Borrow was one of the earliest arrivals, and seated himself before the fire with a book in his hand, over which he nodded superciliously, as the host brought up all his guests in succession to be introduced to the lion of the town. At dinner which followed, which was rather a jovial one, and at which the bottle went round freely, so loud and general was the conversation that my friend, a clever lawyer, with remarkably good ears, was quite unable to catch a sentence from the great author’s lips. Perhaps Borrow really did say nothing, or next to nothing. It is quite as likely that he did as not, as I have already informed the reader that ‘he was a funny-tempered man.’

‘Catherine Gurney,’ writes Caroline Fox, ‘gave us a note to George Borrow, so on him we called – a tall, ungainly man, with great physical strength, quick, penetrating eye, a confident manner, and a disagreeable tone and pronunciation.’ We gather from the same lady that it was Joseph John Gurney who recommended George Borrow to the Committee of the Bible Society. ‘So he stalked up to London, and they gave him a hymn to translate into the Manchow language, and the same to one of their people to translate also. When compared they proved to be very different. When put before their reader, he had the candour to say that Borrow’s was much the better of the two. On this they sent him to Petersburg to get it printed, and then gave him business in Portugal.’

One thing is clear – that Borrow was a lonely man, and evidently one who did not hold the resources of civilization in such esteem as Mr. Gladstone does. He loved Nature and her ways, and people like the gipsies, who are supposed to be of a similar way of thinking. He eschewed the hum of cities and the roar of the ‘madding crowd.’ He was big in body and in mind, and wanted elbow-room; and yet what would he have been if he had not lived in a city, and come under the stimulative influence of such men as Edward Taylor, of Norwich? It is idle to complain of cities, however they sully the air, and deface the land, and pollute the water, and rear the weak and vicious and the wicked – to remind us how low and depraved human nature can become when it is cut off from communion with Nature and Nature’s God. Borrow owed much to cities, and was best appreciated by the men who dwelt in them. There is often a good deal of affectation about the love of rural solitude, nor does it often last long when there is a wife to have a voice in the matter. Yet in Borrow undoubtedly the feeling was sincere, and of him Wordsworth might have written —

‘As in the eye of Nature he has lived,
So in the eye of Nature let him die.’

Lowestoft was a frequent attraction for a youthful ramble – perhaps almost too far, unless one could manage to get a lift in a little yellow-painted black-bodied vehicle called a whisky, which was grandfather’s property, and into the shafts of which could be put any spare quadruped, whether donkey, or mule, or pony, it mattered little, and which afforded a considerable relief when a trip as far as Lowestoft was determined on. At that time there was no harbour, and the town consisted simply of one High Street, gradually rising towards the north, with a fine space for boys to play in between the cliff and the sea, called the denes. I can well remember being taken to view the works of the harbour before the water was let in, and not a little astonished at what then was to me a new world of engineering science and skill. In the High Street there was a little old-fashioned and by no means flourishing Independent Chapel, where at one time the preacher was the Rev. Mr. Maurice, the father of the Mr. Maurice to whom many owe a great awakening of spiritual life, and whose memory they still regard as that of a beloved and honoured teacher. Mr. Maurice was a Unitarian, I believe, and, when he retired, handed over the chapel to my father with the remark that it was no use his preaching there any longer. The preacher in my time was the Rev. George Steffe Crisp, a kindly, timid, tearful man, always in difficulties with his people, and who often resorted to Wrentham for advice. Latterly he retired from the ministry, and kept a shop and school. In this capacity one day my old friend John Childs, of Bungay, the far-famed printer – of whom I shall have much to say anon – called on him, when the following dialogue took place: ‘Good-morning, Mr. Crisp.’ ‘Good-morning, Mr. Childs.’ ‘Well, how are you getting on?’ ‘Oh, very well; but there is one thing that troubles me much.’ ‘What is that?’ ‘That I am getting deaf, and can’t hear my minister.’ ‘Oh,’ was the cynical reply, ‘you ought to be thankful for your privileges.’

Lowestoft is reported to have been a fishing station as early as the time of the Romans; but the ancient town is supposed to have been long engulfed by the resistless sea, for there was to be seen till the 25th of Henry VIII. the remains of an old house upon an inundated spot – left dry at low water about four furlongs east of the present beach. The town has been the birthplace of many distinguished men – of Sir Thomas Allen, for instance, who was steadily attached to the Royal cause, and who after the Restoration rose high in command, and won many a victory over the Dutch and the Algerines; of Sir Andrew Leake, who fell in the attack on Gibraltar; of Rear-Admiral Richard Utbar, also a renowned fighter when England and Holland were at war. To the same town also belong Admiral Sir John Ashby, who died in 1693, and his nephew Vice-Admiral James Mighells. Nor must we fail to do justice to Thomas Nash, a facetious writer of considerable reputation in the latter part of the sixteenth century. The most witty of his productions is a satirical pamphlet in praise of red herrings, intended as a joke upon the great staple of Yarmouth, and the pretensions of that place to superiority over Lowestoft. It must be confessed that Nash is chiefly famous as a caustic pamphleteer and an unscrupulous satirist. For illustration we may point to his battle with Gabriel Harvey, the friend of Edmund Spenser, who desired that he might be epitaphed the inventor of the not yet naturalized English hexameter; and his other battle with Martin Mar Prelate, or the writer or writers who passed under that name, and who have acquired a reputation to which poor Nash can lay no claim. His one conspicuous dramatic effort is ‘Summer’s Last Will and Testament.’ Nash wrote for bare existence – to use his own words, ‘contending with the cold, and conversing with scarcity.’ Nash lived in an unpropitious age. A recent French writer has placed him in the foremost rank of English writers. Dr. Jusserand, the author referred to, in his accounts of the English novel in the time of Shakespeare, tells us Nash was the most successful exponent in England of the picturesque novel. The picturesque novel is the forerunner of the realistic novel of modern times. It portrays the life and fortunes of the picaro – the adventurer who tries all roads to fortune. Spanish in its origin, it developed into a school in which Defoe and Thackeray distinguished themselves. ‘Nash,’ writes the French author, ‘mingled serious scenes with his comedy, in order that his romances might more nearly resemble real life.’ In fact (he writes), ‘Nash does not only possess the merit of learning how to observe the ridiculous side of human nature, and of portraying in a full light picturesque figures – now worthy of Teniers and now of Callot – some fat and greasy, others lean and lank; he possesses a thing very rare with the picturesque school, the faculty of being moved. He seems to have foreseen the immense field of study which was to be opened later to the novelist. A distant ancestor of Fielding, as Lilly and Sidney appear to us to be distant ancestors of Richardson, he understands that a picture of active life, reproducing only in the Spanish fashion scenes of comedy, is incomplete and departs from reality. The greatest jesters, the most arrogant, the most venturesome, have their days of anguish. No hero has ever yet remained imprisoned from the cradle to the grave, and no one has been able to live an irresponsible spectator, and not feel his heart sometimes beat the quicker, nor bow his head unmoved. Nash caught a glimpse of this.’ As an illustration, Dr. Jusserand points to his ‘Jack Wilton’ – ‘The best specimen of the picturesque tale in English literature anterior to Defoe.’ In Lowestoft they ought to keep his memory green.

The writer well remembers the day when Mr., afterwards Sir, Morton Peto, assembled the inhabitants of Lowestoft in the then dilapidated Town Hall, and promised that if they would sell their ruined harbour works, and back him in making a railway, their mackerel and herrings should be delivered almost alive in Manchester, Liverpool, and London. The inhabitants believed in the power of the enchanter, and Lowestoft is metamorphosed. The old town remains upon its beautiful eminence, and memory clings to the cliffs and to the denes, tenanted only, the one by wild rabbits, the other by the merry children and the nets of the fishermen. But a new town has grown up around the harbour – a grand hotel, excellent lodging-houses, a new church; a great population have upset the romance, and borne witness to the spirit of enterprise which characterizes this generation. The new town has spread to Kirkley, has Londonized even quiet Pakefield, and awakened a sleeping neighbourhood to what men call life.

At Lowestoft commence what are known to sailors as the Yarmouth Roads – a grand stretch of sea protected by the sands, where an armada might anchor secure; and it was a sight not to be seen now, when gigantic steamers do all the business of the sea, to watch the hundreds of ships that would come inside the Roads at certain seasons of the year. There, in the winter-time – that is, from Lowestoft to Covehithe – I have seen the beach strewed with wrecks, chiefly of rotten colliers, or ships in the corn trade; but inside ‘Lowestoft Roads,’ to which they were guided by a lighthouse on the cliff, they were supposed to be secure. Lowestoft at that time, with its charming sands, was little known to the gay world, and depended far more on the fishing than the bathing season. The former was a busy time, and kept all the country round in a state of excitement. Many were the men, for instance, who, even as far off as Wrentham, went herring or mackerel fishing in the big craft, which, drawn up on the beach when the season was over, seemed to me ships such as never had been seen by the mariners of Tyre and Sidon; but the chief interest to me were the vans in which the fish were carried from Lowestoft to London – light spring-carts with four wheels and two horses, that, after changing horses at our Spread Eagle, raced like lightning along the turnpike-road, at all hours, and even on Sundays – a sad grievance to the godly – beating the Yarmouth mail.

Now and then, even at that remote period, when railways were not, and when Lowestoft was no port, nothing but a fishing-station, distinguished people came to Lowestoft, attracted by its bracing air and exceptional bathing attractions. I can in this way recollect Sir Edward Parry and M. Guizot. But there were other personages equally distinguished. One of these was Mrs. Siddons, with whom an old Dissenting minister – the Rev. S. Sloper, of Beccles, whom I can well remember – contracted quite an intimacy. She had already passed the zenith of her celebrity. ‘Providence,’ writes my friend, Mr. Wilton Rix, of Beccles, in his ‘East Anglian Nonconformity,’ published as far back as 1851, ‘had repeatedly and recently called her to tread in domestic life the path of sorrow, and her religious advantages, however few, had taught her that

‘“That path alone
Leads to the land where sorrow is unknown.”

‘“Sweet, sometimes,” said she, “are the uses of adversity. It not only strengthens family affection, but it teaches us all to walk humbly with God.” It is not surprising that she was disposed to cultivate the society of those who could blend piety with cheerfulness, and with whom she might be on friendly terms without ceremony. Such acquaintances she found in Mr. Sloper’s family. Mrs. Siddons, with unassuming kindness, contributed to their amusement by specimens of her powerful reading. She joined willingly in the worship of the family, and maintained the same invaluable practice at her own lodgings.’ Mr. Rix continues: ‘Just at that time Mr. Sloper was requested to preach to his own people on an affecting and mournful occasion, the death of a suicide. Though he keenly felt the delicacy and difficulty of the task, a sense of duty and a possibility of usefulness overcame his scruples. He selected for his text the impressive sentiment of the Apostle, “The sorrow of the world worketh death.” Mrs. Siddons was one of his auditors. She, who had been the honoured guest of Royalty, who had been enthroned as the Tragic Muse, and whose voice had charmed applauding multitudes, was seen in the humble Dissenting meeting-house at Beccles shedding abundant and unaffected tears at the plain and faithful exhibition of religious truth. Mr. Sloper’s preaching was as powerfully recommended to her by the delightful illustration of Christian principles exhibited in his private character, as by the intrinsic importance of those principles, and the simple gravity and penetrating earnestness with which they were announced from his lips. He afterwards procured for her, at her request, a copy of Scott’s admirable “Commentary on the Bible,” which he accompanied with a letter, warmly urging upon her attention the great realities her profession had so manifest a tendency to exclude from her contemplations. Mrs. Siddons,’ again I quote Mr. Rix, ‘more than once expressed her gratitude for the interest Mr. Sloper had evinced in her eternal welfare; she thanked him in writing for the advice he had given her, adding an emphatic wish that God might enable her to follow it – a wish which her pious and amiable correspondent echoed with all the fervour of his heart. She returned into the glare of popularity, but a hope may easily be indulged that the pressure of subsequent relative afflictions and of old age were not permitted to come upon her unaccompanied by the impressions and consolations of true religion. Her elegant biographer, Mr. Campbell, draws a veil over the state of her mind during her last hours, which it would be deeply interesting to penetrate. Would she not then, if reason were undimmed, reflect upon the faithful counsel she received with Scott’s Bible as being of infinitely greater value than the applause of myriads or the fame of ages?’

Beccles, where this good Mr. Sloper lived, and where the writer of this extract was a respectable solicitor – I believe the firm of Rix and Son still exists – was a small market town about eight miles from Wrentham, inland. At that time it ranked as the third town in Suffolk. Towards the west it is skirted by a cliff, once washed by the estuary which separated the eastern portions of Norfolk and Suffolk. There is every reason to believe that ages back the mouth of the Yare was an estuary or arm of the sea, and extended with considerable magnitude for many miles up the country. The herring fishery was thus a principal source of emolument to the inhabitants, and in the time of the Conqueror the fee farm rent of the manor of Beccles to the King was 60,000 herrings, and in the time of the Confessor 20,000. About 956 the manor and advowson of Beccles were granted by King Edwy to the monks of Bury, and remained in their possession until the dissolution of the religious houses under Henry VIII.

As I have said, and as I repeat, in these languid days – when the old creeds have lost their power and the old bottles are bursting with new wine – the glory of East Anglia was that it was the first to stand up in the face of priest or king for the truth – or what it held to be such. Amongst the early martyrs under Mary were three burnt at Beccles – Thomas Spicer, of Winston, labourer, John Deny, and Edmond Poole. This was in the year 1556. Their crime in the indictment, drawn up by Dr. Hopton, Bishop of Norwich, and his Chancellor, Dunning, according to Fox, was:

‘1. First was articulate against them that they belieued not the Pope of Rome to bee supreame head immediately in Christ on earth of the Universall Catholike Church.

‘2. That they belieued not holie bread and holie water, ashes, palmes, and all other like ceremonies used in the Church to bee good and laudable for stirring up the people to devotion.

‘3. Item that they belieued not afterwards of consecration spoken by the priest, the very naturall body of Christ, and no other substance of bread and wine to bee in the Sacrament of the altar.

‘4. Item that they belieued it to bee idolatry to worship Christ in the Sacrament of the altar.

‘5. Item that they tooke bread and wine in remembrance of Christ’s Passion.

‘6. Item that they would not followe the crosse in procession nor bee confessed to a priest.

‘7. Item that they affirmed no mortal man to have in himself free will to do good or evill.’

It appears that the writ had not come down, nevertheless these brave men were burnt at the stake. ‘When they came,’ continues Fox, ‘to the reciting of the creed, Sir John Silliard spake to them, “That is well said, sirs. I am glad to heare you saie you do belieue the Catholike Church; that is the best word I heard of you yet.”

‘To which his sayings Edmond Poole answered, “Though they belieue the Catholike Church, yet do they not belieue in their Popish Church, which is no part of Christ’s Catholike Church, and, therefore, no part of their beliefe.”

‘When they rose from praier they all went joyfullie to the stake, and, being bound thereto, and the fire burning about them, they praised God in such an audible voice that it was wonderful to all those who stood bye and heard them. Then one Robert Bacon, dwelling in the said Beccles, a very enemy to God’s truth, and a persecutor of His people, being then present, within the hearing thereof willed the tormentors to throwe on faggots to stop the knaues breathes, as he termed them; so hot was his burning charitie. But these good men, not regarding their malice, confessed the truth, and yielded their lives to the death for the testimonie of the same very gloriouslie and joyfullie.’

These men were the precursors of that Nonconformity which has made England the home of the free, and such men abounded in East Anglia. Under Queen Elizabeth they had as bad a time of it almost as under Queen Mary. For instance, we find under Dr. Freke, Bishop of Norwich, and in the reign of glorious Queen Bess, as her admirers term her, Mathew Hammond, a poor ploughwright, of Hethersett, was condemned as a heretic, had his ears cut off, and after the lapse of a week was committed, in the Castle ditch at Norwich, to the more agonizing torment of the flames. The translation of Dr. Whitgift to the See of Canterbury was the signal for augmented rigour. He was charged by his imperious mistress to restore religious uniformity, which she confessed, notwithstanding all her precautions, ran out of square. One of the first victims to this new régime was William Fleming, Rector of Beccles. The living of Beccles at this period was vested in Lady Anne Gresham, the widow of Sir Thomas Gresham, the founder of the Royal Exchange. Previously to her marriage, she was the widow of William Rede, merchant, of London and Beccles. Under James I. and Bishop Wren, men of integrity and conscience fared worse than under Queen Elizabeth, and naturally the people thus persecuted formed themselves into a Church. That in Beccles dated from 1652, and in the covenant drawn up on the occasion we find it was resolved:

‘1. That we will for ever acknowledge and admit the Lord to be our God in Jesus Christ, giving up ourselves to Him to be His people.

‘2. That we will alwaies endevour, through the grace of God assisting us, to walke in all His waies and ordinances, according to His written Word, which is the only sufficient rule of good life for every man. Neither will we suffer ourselves to be polluted by any sinful waies, either publike or private, but endeavour to abstaine from the very appearance of evill, giving no offence to the Jew or Gentile, or the Churches of Christ.

‘3. That we will humbly and willingly submit ourselves to the government of Christ in this Church – in the administration of the Word, the seals, and discipline.

‘4. That we will in all love approve our communion as brethren by watching over one another, and as such shall be; counsel, administer, relieve, assist, and bear with one another, serving one another in love.

‘5. Lastly, we do not covenant or promise these things in our own, but in Christ’s strength; neither do we confine ourselves to the words of this covenant, but shall at all time account it our duty to embrace any further light or covenant which shall be revealed to us out of God’s Word.’

This covenant, however, was not to prevent in after time censure being cast on others who, endeavouring to preserve its spirit, were led to think differently from the majority. For instance, we find in 1656 two persons, who had been members of the Independent church at Beccles, received adult baptism, and in so doing were considered to have given ‘offence’ to the church, and were desired to appear and give an account of their practices.

At one time there was little of what we know as congregational singing. In 1657 it was agreed by the Beccles church ‘that they do put in practice the ordinance of singing in the publick upon the forenoon and afternoon of the Lord’s daies, and that it be between praier and sermon; and also it was agreed that the New England translation of the Psalmes be made use of by the church at their times of breaking of bread, and it was agreed that the next Lord’s day, seventh night, might be the day to enter upon the work of singing in publick.’ It is interesting to note that one of the pastors of the Beccles church was a Mr. Nokes, who had been trained – where Calamy and many others were trained – at the University of Utrecht, and that in the same year in which Dr. Watts accepted the pastoral office, he addressed to Mr. Nokes a poem on ‘Friendship,’ which is still included in the Doctor’s works. Dissent, when I was a boy, was considered low. We were contemptuously termed ‘pograms,’ a term of reproach the origin of which I have never learnt. The landed gentry, the small squires, the lawyers and the doctors, and the tradespeople who pandered to their prejudices and fattened on their patronage, were slow to say a word in favour of a Dissenter. The poor who went to chapel were excluded from many benefits enjoyed by their fellow-parishioners. It was the fashion to treat them with scorn, yet I have heard one of the most excellent and finished gentlemen in the district declare that he heard better talk in my father’s parlour than he did anywhere else in the neighbourhood, and I can well believe it, for the Dissenting minister, as a rule, at that time, was a better read man, and a more studious one, than the clergyman of the district, in spite of his University education; and in matters affecting the welfare of the nation, and that came under the denomination of politics, his views were far more rational than those of Churchmen in general, and the clergy in particular. We learn from Milton’s State Papers that the churches of East Anglia petitioned Oliver Cromwell that the three nations might enjoy the blessings of a godly, upright magistracy; that they might have Courts of Judicature in their own country; and that honest men of known fidelity and uprightness might be authorized to determine trivial matters of debt or difference. Assuredly the East Anglian saints – the latter term was, and, strange to say, is still, used as a term of reproach – were wise and right-thinking men where Church government and public policy were concerned. We love to read the story of the Pilgrim Fathers. With what rapture Mrs. Hemans wrote:

‘What sought they thus afar?
Bright jewels of the mine?
The wealth of seas? the spoils of war?
They sought a faith’s pure shrine.

‘Ay, call it holy ground,
The soil where first they trod;
They left unstained what there they found —
Freedom to worship God.’

But it seems to me that a greater glory was won by, and a greater honour should be paid to, the men who did not cross the Atlantic; who did not seek an asylum in a foreign land; who remained at home to suffer – to die, if need be, to uphold the rights of conscience, and to fight the good fight of faith. It is not even in our tolerant, and, as we deem it, more enlightened day, that full justice is done to these men. In what calls itself good society you meet men and women whose ancestors were Dissenters, and yet who are ashamed of the fact – a fact of which no one can be ashamed who feels how in East Anglia, at any rate, the religious teaching of Dissent purified the life of the people, enlarged their political views, and helped this great land of ours to sweep into a better and a younger day.

CHAPTER IV.

POLITICS AND THEOLOGY

Homerton academy – W. Johnson Fox, M.P. – Politics in 1830 – Anti-Corn Law speeches – Wonderful oratory.

About 1830 there was, if not a good deal of actual light let into such dark places as our Suffolk village – where it was considered the whole duty of man, as regards the poor, to attend church and make a bow to their betters (a rustic ceremony generally performed by pulling the lock of hair on the forehead with the right hand), and to be grateful for the wretched station of life in which they were placed – at any rate, a great shaking among the dry bones. One summer morning an awe fell on the parish as it ran from one to another that the guard of the Yarmouth and London Royal Mail had left word with the ostler at the Spread Eagle that George the Fourth was dead; then a certain dull sound as of cannon firing afar off had been wafted across the German Ocean, and had given rise to mysterious speculations on the subject of Continental wars, in which Suffolk lads might have to ‘’list’ as ‘sogers’; and last of all there came that grand excitement when – North and South, East and West – the nation rose as one man to demand political and Parliamentary Reform. It was a delusion, perhaps, that cry, but it was a glorious one, nevertheless; that the millennium could be delayed when we had Parliamentary Reform no one for a moment doubted. The sad but undeniable fact that mostly men are fools with whom beer is omnipotent had not then entered into men’s minds, and thus England and Scotland some sixty years ago wore an aspect of activity and enthusiasm of which the present generation can have no idea, and which, perhaps, can never occur again.

Far away in the distant city which the Suffolk villagers called Lunnon, there was a Suffolk lad, whose relations kept a very little shop just by us, who was born at Uggeshall – pronounced Ouchell by the common people – on a very small farm, and who, as Unitarian preacher and newspaper writer, had been and was doing his best in the good cause; but it was not the influence of W. Johnson Fox – for it is of him I write – that did much in our little village to leaven the mass with the leaven of Reform. While quite a lad the Foxes went to Norwich, where the future preacher and teacher worked as a weaver boy. In after-years it was often my privilege to meet Mr. Fox, who had then attained no small share of London distinction, amongst whose hearers were men, often many of the most distinguished literati of the day – such as Dickens and Forster – and who was actually to sit in Parliament as M.P. for Oldham, where, old as he was – and Mr. Gladstone says, ‘People who wish to succeed in Parliament should enter it young’ – he occupied a most respectable position, all the more creditable when you remember that Parliament, even at that recent date, was a far more select and aristocratic assembly than any Parliament of our day, or of the future, can possibly be. Mr. Fox had been educated at Homerton Academy – as such places were then termed (college is the word we use now) – under the good and venerable Dr. Pye-Smith, whose ‘Scripture Testimony to the Messiah’ was supposed to have given Unitarianism a deadly blow, but whom I chiefly remember as a very deaf old man, and one of the first to recognise the fact that the Bible and geology were not necessarily opposed to each other, and to welcome and proclaim the truth – at that time received with fear and trembling, if received at all – that the God of Nature and the God of Revelation were the same. There was a good deal of free inquiry at Homerton Academy, which, however, Mr. Fox assured me, gradually subsided into the right amount of orthodoxy as the time came for the student to exchange his sure and safe retreat for the fiery ordeal of the deacon and the pew. My father and Johnson Fox had been fellow-students, and for some time corresponded together. The correspondence in due time, however, naturally ceased, as it was chiefly controversial, and nothing can be more irksome than for two people who have made up their minds, and whom nothing can change, to be arguing continually, and the friendship between them in some sense ceased as the one remained firm to, and the other wandered farther and farther from, the modified Calvinism of the Wrentham Church and pulpit, where, as in all orthodox pulpits at that time, it was taught that men were villains by necessity, and fools, as it were, by a Divine thrusting on; that for some a Saviour had been crucified, that there might be a way of escape from the wrath of an angry and unforgiving God; whilst for the vast mass – to whom the name of Christ had never been made known, to whom the Bible had never been sent – there was an impending doom, the awful horror of which no tongue could tell, no imagination conceive. But to the last Mr. Fox – especially if you met him with his old-fashioned hat on in the street – looked far more of a Puritan divine than of the literary man, or the chief of the advanced thinkers in Church and State, or an M.P. At a later time what pleasure it gave me to listen to this distinguished East Anglian as he appeared at the crowded Anti-Corn Law meetings held in Covent Garden or Drury Lane! Ungainly in figure, monotonous in tone, almost without a particle of action, regarded as free in his religious opinions by the vast majority of his audience, who were, at that time, prone, even in London, to hold that Orthodoxy, like Charity, covered a multitude of sins. What an orator he was! How smoothly the sentences fell from his lips one after the other; with what happy wit did he expose Protectionist fallacies, or enunciate Free Trade principles, which up to that time had been held as the special property of the philosopher, far too subtle to be understood and appreciated by the mob! With what felicity did he illustrate his weighty theme; with what clearness did he bring home to the people the wrong and injustice done to every one of them by the landlord’s attempt to keep up his rent by a tax on corn; and then with what glowing enthusiasm did they wait and listen for the climax, which, if studied, and perhaps artificial, seemed like the ocean wave to grow grander and larger the nearer it came, till it fell with resistless force on all around. It seems to me like a dream, all that distant and almost unrecorded past. I see no such meetings, I hear no such orators now. As Mr. Disraeli said of Lord Salisbury when he was Lord Robert Cecil, there was a want of finish about his style, and the remark holds good of the orator of to-day as contrasted with the platform speaker of the past. It is impossible to fancy anyone in our sober age attempting, to say nothing of succeeding in the attempt (my remarks, of course, do not apply to Irish audiences or Irish orators), to get an audience to rise en masse and swear never to fold their arms, never to relax their efforts, till their end was gained and victory won; yet Mr. Fox did so, and long as I live shall I remember the night when, in response to his impassioned appeal, the whole house – and it was crowded to the ceiling – rose, ladies in the boxes, decent City men in the pit, gods in the gallery – to swear never to tire, never to rest, never to slacken, till the peasant at the plough, the cotton-spinner in the mill, the collier in the mine, the lone widow stitching for life far into the early morning in her wretched garret, and the pauper in his still more wretched cellar, ate their untaxed loaf. As the ‘Publicola’ of the Weekly Dispatch, Mr. Fox laboured to the end of his life in the good cause of Peace, Retrenchment, and Reform. It is not right that his memory should remain unrecorded – his life assuredly was an interesting one. Harriet Martineau writes in her autobiography that ‘his editorial correspondence with me was unquestionably the reason, and in great measure the cause, of the greatest intellectual progress I ever made before the age of thirty.’

But it was not from William Johnson Fox that at that time came to our small village the grain of light that was to leaven the lump around. Lecturing and oratory, and even public tea-meetings, were things almost unknown. Now and then a deputation from the London Missionary Society came to Wrentham, and in this way I remember William Ellis, then a missionary from Madagascar, and Mr. George Bennett, who, in conjunction with the Rev. Mr. Tyerman, had been on a tour of inspection to the islands of the South Seas, and to whose tales of travel rustic audiences listened with delight. Once upon a time – but that was later – the Religious Tract Society sent a deputation in the shape of a well-known travelling secretary, Mr. Jones. This Mr. Jones was inclined to corpulency, and I can well remember how we all laughed when, on one occasion, the daughter of a neighbouring minister, having opened the door in reply to his knock, ran delightedly into her papa’s study to announce the arrival of the Tract Society!

A great impression was also made in all parts of the country by the occasional appearances of the Anti-Slavery Society’s lecturers. In 1831, as Sir G. Stephen tells us, the younger section of the Anti-Slavery body resolved to stir up the country by sending lecturers to the villages and towns of the country. The M.P.’s did not much like it. The idea was novel to them. ‘Trust to Parliament,’ said they; the outsiders replied, ‘Trust to the people.’ This scheme of agitation, however, was rejected, and would have fallen to the ground had not a benevolent Quaker of the name of Cropper come forward. ‘Friend S., what money dost thou want?’ ‘I want £20,000, but I will begin if I can get one.’ ‘Then, I will give thee £500.’ Joseph Sturge immediately followed with a promise of £250, and Mr. Wilberforce twenty guineas; and £1,000 was raised, and competent agents sent out. It proved by no means an easy matter to obtain these lecturers, for their duty was not confined to lecturing; they had also to revive drooping anti-slavery societies and to establish new ones. Also they were to have collections at the end of every lecture. One of them who came to Wrentham was Captain Pilkington. ‘Pilkington,’ writes Sir George Stephen, ‘was a pleasing lecturer, and won over many by his amiable manners; but he wanted power, and resigned in six months.’ We in Wrentham, however, did not think so, and I can to this day recall the sensation he created in our rustic minds as he described the horrors of slavery, and showed us the whip and chains by which those horrors were caused. To the Dissenting chapel most of these lecturers were indebted for their audience, and if I ever worked hard as a boy, it was to get signatures to anti-slavery petitions. Naturally, a Church parson came to regard all that was attacked by Reformers as a bulwark of the Establishment, and in our part the Meetingers’ were the sole friends of the slave.

As was to be expected, the reading of the village was of the most limited description. It is true we children jumped for joy as once a month came the carrier’s cart from Beccles, with the books for the club – the Evangelical Magazine, for all the principal families of the congregation, and the Penny Magazine and Chambers’s Journal– then but in their infancy – for ourselves; but, apart from that, there was no reading worth mentioning. That which most astonishes the tourist in Ireland is the way in which people read the newspapers. In our Suffolk village the very reverse was the case, partly because there were few newspapers to read, partly because there were few to read them, and partly because they were dear to buy. The one paper which we took in was the Suffolk Chronicle, which made its appearance on Saturday morning, the price of which was sixpence, and which was edited by a sturdy Radical of the name of King, who to the last held to the belief that to have a London letter full of literary or critical talk for the Suffolk farmers was, not to put too fine a point on it, to throw pearls before swine. And perhaps he was right. I can well remember, when one of my early poetical contributions appeared in its columns, how a fear was expressed to me by a farmer’s widow in our parish, lest ‘it had cost me a lot o’ money’ to have that effort of my muse in print. Mr. Childs, of Bungay, had many experiences, equally rustic and still more illustrative of the simplicity of the class. Once upon a time one of them came in a great state of excitement for a copy of the ‘Life of Mr. General Gazetteer.’ On another occasion a farmer’s wife came in search of a Testament. She wanted it directly, and she wanted it of a large type. A specimen was selected, which met with the worthy woman’s approval. But the question was, could she have it in half an hour, as she would be away for that time shopping in the town, and would call for it on her return. She was told that she could, and great was her astonishment when, on calling on her return for the Testament, there it was, printed in the particular type she had selected, ready for her use.