East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations

Thou dwellest, and helpless on a soil unknown,
Poor, and receiving from a foreign hand
The aid denied thee in thy native land.’

It seems from this that the living at Stowmarket was under sequestration. A little while after Young is back in Stowmarket, and Milton thus describes his daily life – a personal experience of the poet’s, not a flight of fancy:

‘Now, entering, thou shalt haply seated see
Besides his spouse, his infants on his knee;
Or, turning page by page with studious look
Some bulky paper or God’s holy Book.’

Good times came to Dr. Young. The seed he had sown bore fruit. For awhile England had woke up to attack the Stuart doctrine of royal prerogative in Church and State. The men of Suffolk had been the foremost in the fight, and in 1643 we find the Doctor in Duke’s Place, London. A sermon was preached by him before the House of Commons, and printed by order of the House. A Stowmarket Rector speaks of it naturally as a very prolix, learned, somewhat dull and heavy effort to encourage them to persevere in their civil war against the King; but he has the grace to add: ‘There is much less of faction in it than many others, and it is rather the production of a contemplative than of an active partisan.’ ‘One of his examples,’ writes Mr. Hollingsworth, ‘is from 2 Sam. xiii. 28, where the command of Absalom was to kill Amnon: “Could the command of a mortal man infuse that courage and valour into the hearts of his servants as to make them adventure upon a desperate design? And shall not the command of the Almighty God raise up the hearts of His people employed by Him in any work to which He calls them, raise up their hearts in following at His command!”’ The Doctor had not cleared himself of all the errors of his times. He urged on his hearers, by the example of the Emperors, the necessity of maintaining the doctrine of the Trinity uncorrupt, by the aid of the civil power. He urged, however, on them personal holiness, in order that the reformation of the Church might be more easily accomplished. The two legislative enactments he wished them to pass were to confer a power upon the Presbyterian clergy to exclude men from the Sacrament, and enforce a better observance of the Sabbath-day. The sermon is scarce, but is bound up with others in the Library at Cambridge, preached at the monthly fasts before the House of Commons.

In the library of the Memorial Hall, Farringdon Street, where assuredly the portrait of the Stowmarket Rector should find a place, there is a copy of this sermon, which was preached at the last solemn fast. February 28, 1643, with the notice that ‘It is this day ordered by the Commoners’ House of Parliament that Sir John Trevor and Mr. Rous do from this House give thanks to Mr. Young for the great paines hee tooke in the sermon hee preached that day at the intreaty of the said House of Commons at St. Margaret’s, Westminster, it being the day of publike humiliation, and to desire him to print this sermon;’ which accordingly was done, under the title of ‘Hope’s Encouragement.’ The motto on the outside was: ‘Which hope we have as an anchor of the soul both sure and steadfast, and entereth into that which is within the veil.’ The sermon was printed in London for Ralph Smith, at the sign of the Bible, in Cornhill, near the Royal Exchange. In his sermon the preacher took for his text: ‘Be of good courage, and He shall strengthen your heart, all ye that wait upon the Lord.’ The three propositions established are: First, that God’s people are taught by the Lord in all their troubles to wait patiently on Him. The second is that such as wait patiently upon the Lord must rouse themselves with strength and courage to further wait upon Him; and that, thirdly, when God’s people wait upon Him, He will increase their courage. The preacher quotes the Hebrew and Augustine, and reasons in a most undeniable manner in support of his propositions; but above all things he is practical. ‘The work you are now called on to do,’ he says to the M.P.’s, ‘is a work of great concernment. It is the purging of the Lord’s floor. As it hath reference both to the Church and the Commonwealth, a work sure enough to be encountered with great opposition. Yet I must say it is a work with the managing whereof God hath not so honoured others which have gone before you in your places, but hath reserved it to make you the instruments of His glory in advancing it, and that doth much add unto your honour. Was it an honour to the Tyrians that they were counted amongst the builders of the Temple when Hiram sent to Solomon things necessary for that work? How, then, hath God honoured you, reserving to you the care of re-edifying His Church (the throne of the living God) and the repairing of the shattered Commonwealth, so far borne down before He raised you to support it, that succeeding ages may with honour to your names, say, “This was the Reforming Parliament,” a work which God, by His blessing on your unwearied pains, hath much furthered already, whilst He, by you, hath removed the rubbish that might hinder the raising up of that godly structure appointed and prescribed by the Lord in His Word.’ They were to stick to the truth, contended the preacher, quoting the edict of the Emperor Justinian in the Arian controversy, and the reply of Basil the Great to the Emperor’s deputy: ‘That none trained up in Holy Scriptures would suffer one syllable of Divine truth to be betrayed; but were ready, if it be required, to suffer any death in the defence thereof.’ People, he maintained, are ever carried on by the example of their governors. ‘How,’ he asks, ‘was the Eastern Empire polluted with execrable Arianism, whilst yet the Western continued in the truth? The historians give the reason of it. Constantine, an Arian, ruled in the East when at the same time Constans and Constantius, sons to Constantine the Great, treading in the steps of their pious father, adhered to the truth professed by him, and so did as far ennoble the Western Empire with the truth as the other did defile the Eastern with his countenancing of error and heresy.’ The preacher here asks his hearers to make no laws against religion and piety, and ‘recall such as have been made in time of ignorance against the same, and study to uphold and maintain such profitable and wholesome laws as have been formerly enacted for God and His people. Improve what was well begun by others before you, and not perfected by them.’ Under this latter head he dwelt on the possible abuse of the Holy Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, and the irreligious profanation of the Lord’s Day.

In 1643 the Earl of Manchester ejected many of the Royalist clergymen from their livings who were scandalous ministers. Dr. Sterne having been deprived of the mastership of Jesus College, Cambridge, the Stowmarket Vicar was placed there in his stead. He held the situation till 1654, when, on his refusal of the engagement, Government deprived him of his office. At the time the sermon was preached Dr. Young was one of the far-famed Assembly of Divines which met in Henry VII.’s chapel in accordance with the Solemn League and Covenant, which proposed three grand objects: ‘To endeavour the extirpation of Popery, Prelacy superstition, heresy, and profaneness; to endeavour the preservation of the reformed religion in Scotland and the reformation of religion in the kingdoms of England and Ireland in doctrine, worship, discipline, and government according to the Word of God and the example of the best Reformed Church; and to endeavour to bring the Churches of God in the three kingdoms to the nearest conjunction and uniformity in religion – confession of faith, form of Church government, directory for worship and catechizing; that we and our posterity after us may as brethren live in faith and love, and that the Lord may delight to dwell in the midst of us.’ A clause was inserted to the effect that it was English prelacy which they contemned; and thus modified, after all due solemnities, and with their right hands lifted to heaven, was the Solemn League and Covenant sworn to by the English Parliament and by the Assembly of Divines in St. Margaret’s Church, September 25, 1643. It was, writes a Presbyterian divine, too much the creature of the Long Parliament who convoked the meeting, selected the members of Assembly, nominated its president, prescribed its bye-laws, and kept a firm hold and a vigilant eye on all their proceedings. Still, with all these drawbacks, it must be admitted that Parliament could hardly have made a selection of more pious, learned, and conscientious men. The Assembly consisted of men nominated by the members for each county sending in suitable names. The two divines appointed for Suffolk were Mr. Thomas Young, of Stowmarket, and Mr. John Phillips, of Rentall. The Vicar, it is said, sometimes acted as chairman, but this, as Mr. Hollingsworth remarks, is doubtful.

Mr. Young’s claim to fame rests on something greater than his sermon, or his position in the Assembly of Divines at Westminster, or his mastership of Jesus College. He was, as we have said, Milton’s schoolmaster. The poet tells us:

‘’Tis education forms the common mind;
Just as a twig is bent the tree’s inclined.’

If so, much of Milton’s piety and lofty principle and massive learning must have come to him from the Stowmarket Vicar. In our day there is little chance of a young scholar becoming imbued with Miltonian ideas on the subject of civil and religious liberty. That sublime genius which was to sing in immortal verse of

‘Man’s first disobedience, and the fruit
Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste
Brought death into the world, and all our woe,’

must have owed much to Dr. Young – a debt which the poet acknowledged, as we have already seen, in no niggardly way. Amongst Milton’s Latin letters is the following, which has been translated by Professor Masson thus: ‘Although I had resolved with myself, most excellent preceptor, to send you a certain small epistle composed in metrical numbers, yet I did not consider that I had done enough unless I also wrote something in prose: for, truly, the singular and boundless gratitude of my mind which your deserts justly claim from me was not to be expressed in that cramped mode of speech, straitened by fixed feet and syllables, but in a free oration – nay, rather, if it were possible, in an Asiatic exuberance of words. To express sufficiently how much I owe you, were a work far greater than my strength, even if I should call into play all those commonplaces of argument which Aristotle or that dialectician of Paris (Ramus) has collected, or even if I should exhaust all the fountains of oratory. You complain as justly that my letters have been to you very few and very short; but I, on the other hand, do not so much grieve that I have been remiss in a duty so pleasant and so enviable, as I rejoice, and all but exult, at having such a place in your friendship, as that you should care to ask for frequent letters from me. That I should never have written to you for over more than three years, I pray you will not misconceive, but, in accordance with your wonderful indulgence and candour, put the more charitable construction on it; for I call God to witness how much, as a father, I regard you, with what singular devotion I have always followed you in thought, and how I feared to trouble you with my writings. In sooth, I make it my first care, that since there is nothing else to commend my letters, that their rarity may commend them. Next, as out of that most vehement desire after you which I feel, I always fancy you with me, and speak to you, and beheld you as if you were present, and so, as always happens in love, soothe my grief by a certain vain imagination of your presence, it is, in truth, my fear, as soon as I meditate sending you a letter, that it should suddenly come into my mind by what an interval of earth you are distant from me, and so the grief of your absence, already nearly lulled, should grow fresh and break up my sweet dream. The Hebrew Bible, your truly most acceptable gift, I have already received. These lines I have written in London, in the midst of town distractions, not, as usual, surrounded by books; if, therefore, anything in this epistle should please you less than might be, and disappoint your expectations, it will be made up for by another more elaborate one as soon as I have returned to the haunts of the Muses.’

When the above letter was written, Milton had become a Cambridge student, where he was to experience a new kind of tutor. Milton could not get on with Chappell as he did with Young. The tie between the Stowmarket Vicar and the poet was of a much more cordial character.

Again the poet appears to have forwarded the following letter to the Stowmarket Vicarage. It is to be feared that few such precious epistles find their way there now. Milton writes to the Doctor: ‘On looking at your letter, most excellent preceptor, this alone struck me as superfluous, that you excused your slowness in writing; for though nothing could come to me more desirable than your letters, how could I or ought I to hope that you should have so much leisure from serious and more sacred affairs, especially as that is a matter entirely of kindness, and not at all of duty? That, however, I should suspect that you had forgotten me, your so many recent kindnesses to me would by no means allow. I do not see how you could dismiss out of your memory one laden with so great benefits by you. Having been invited by you to your part of the country, as soon as spring has a little advanced I will gladly come to enjoy the delights of the year, and not less of your conversation, and will then withdraw myself from the din of town to your Stoa of the Iceni, as to that most celebrated porch of Zeno or the Tusculan Villa of Cicero, where you with moderate means, but regal spirit, like some Serranus or Curius, placidly reign in your little farm, and contemning fortune, hold as it were a triumph over riches, ambition, pomp, luxury, and whatever the herd of man admire and are amazed by. But as you have deprecated the blame of slowness, you will also, I hope, pardon me the fault of haste; for having put off this letter, I preferred writing little, and that rather in a slovenly manner, to not writing at all. Farewell, much-to-be respected Sir.’

The question is, Did Milton carry out this intention, and pay Stowmarket a visit? Professor Masson thinks he may have been there in the memorable summer and autumn of 1630. The Rev. Mr. Hollingsworth, the Stowmarket historian argues that it is not unlikely that several, if not many, visits, extending over a period of thirty years, while the tutor held the living, were made by the poet to the place. Tradition has constantly associated his name with the mulberry-trees of the Vicarage, which he planted, but of these only one remains. ‘This venerable relic of the past,’ continues the Vicar, ‘is much decayed, and is still in vigorous bearing. Its girth, before it breaks into branches, is ten feet, and I have had in one season as much as ten gallons from the pure juices of its fruits, which yields a highly flavoured and brilliant-coloured wine.’ It stands a few yards distant from the oldest part of the house, and opposite the windows of an upstair double room, which was formerly the sitting-parlour of the Vicar, and where, it is to be believed, the poet and his friend had many a talk of the way to advance religion and liberty in the land, to remove hirelings out of the Church, and to abolish the Bishops. There too, perhaps, might have come to the guest visions of ‘Paradise Lost.’ In his first work Milton throws out something like a hint of the great poem which he was in time to write. ‘Then, amidst,’ to quote his own sonorous language, ‘the hymns and hallelujahs of saints, someone may, perhaps, be heard offering in high strains, in new and lofty measures, to sing and celebrate Thy Divine mercies and marvellous judgments in this land throughout all ages.’ We can easily believe how, in the Stowmarket Vicarage, the plan of the poet may have been talked over, and the heart of the poet encouraged to the work. Regarding Young as Milton did, we may be sure that he would have been only too glad to listen to his suggestions and adopt his advice. There must have been a good deal of plain living and high thinking at the Stowmarket Vicarage when Milton came there as an occasional guest. This is the more probable as Milton’s earliest publications were in support of the views of Smectymnian divines. His friendship for Young probably led him into the field of controversy, for he owns that he was not disposed to this manner of writing ‘wherein, knowing myself inferior to myself, led by the genial power of nature to another task, I have the use, as I may account, but of my left hand.’ It is a fact that Milton was thus drawn into the controversy, and what more natural than that he should have been induced to do so by the Stowmarket Vicar in the Stowmarket Vicarage? The poet’s family were familiar with that part of Suffolk, and his brother, Sir Christopher, who was a stanch Royalist and barrister, lived at Ipswich, but twelve miles off. He went to see Milton, and Milton might have visited Ipswich and Stowmarket at the same time. Be that as it may, tradition and probability alike justify the belief that Milton came to Stowmarket, and that he went away all the wiser and better, all the stronger to do good work for man and God, for his age and all succeeding ages. Young, as it may be inferred, was held in high honour by his friends. He was spoken of by two neighbouring ejected Rectors as the reverend, learned, orthodox, prudent, and holy Dr. Young. When he died, an epitaph was inscribed with some care by a friendly hand, and an unwilling admission is made of the opposition he had encountered. It is now illegible, and some of its lines appear to have been carefully erased – by some High Church chisel, probably. But the following copy was made when the epitaph was fresh and legible:

‘Here is committed to earth’s trust
Wise, pious, spotlesse, learned dust,
Who living more adorned the place
Than the place him. Such was God’s grace.’

Is the verse of this epitaph from Milton’s pen or not? Mr. Hollingsworth writes: ‘The probability is quite in favour that the pupil should write the last memorial of one whom he so highly honoured and loved as his old master. Nor is the verse itself, with the exception of the last line, unlike the character of Milton’s poetry, and this last may have been mutilated and rendered inharmonious by the action of the stone-cutter, who also confused the death of the father and son.’ It is pleasant to think, not only that Milton now and then came to the Stowmarket Vicarage, but that in the church itself there is a slight record of his poetical fame. Let me add, as a further illustration of the connection of the great poet with the county of Suffolk, that I am informed one of the family of the Meadowses, of Witnesham, was for a time one of his secretaries.

Young died, aged sixty-eight, in the year 1655, when Milton was fully embarked in public life, when he could spare but little time; but we may be sure that he would be the last at that time of life to forget all that he owed to his tutor Young. Wife and son had predeceased the Vicar. It seems as if there was no one left but the poet to record on the marble in the middle aisle, in front of the present reading-desk, the virtues of a character which had long exercised so beneficial an influence on his own, and which he had loved so well. Milton’s regret for the loss of such a guide, philosopher, and friend must have been lasting and sincere.

CHAPTER XI.

IN CONSTABLE’S COUNTY

East Bergholt – The Valley of the Stour – Painting from nature – East Anglian girls.

Charles Kingsley was wont to glorify the teaching of the hills, and to maintain that the man of the mountain is more imaginative and poetical than the man of the plain. There are many Scotch people, mostly those born in the Highlands, who tell us much the same. If the theory be true – and I am not aware that it is – the exceptions are striking and many. Lincolnshire is rather a flat country, but it gave us (I can never bring myself to call him Lord) Alfred Tennyson. Many of our greatest poets and artists were cockneys; and Constable, that sweet painter of cornfields and shady lanes and quiet rivers, used to say that the scenes of his boyhood made him a painter. I was one autumn in Constable’s county, and I do not wonder at it. It is a wonderful district. I trod all the while, it seemed to me, on enchanted ground: in the gilded mist of autumn, with its river and its marsh lands, where the cows lazily fed – or got under the pollards to be out of the way of the flies – where laughing children swarmed along the hedges in pursuit of the ripe blackberry, where every cottage front was a thing of beauty, with its ivy creeping up the roof or over the wall; while the little garden was a mass of flowers. We expected to see the old gods and goddesses again to participate in the joyousness of an ancient mirth.

Nor was it altogether a flat land, sacred to fat cattle and wheat and turnips. All round me were the elements of romance. At one end of the Vale of Dedham is a hill whence you may look all along the valley (Constable has made it the subject of one of his pictures) as far as Harwich; and as I lingered by the Stour – the river which divides Essex and Suffolk – East Bergholt, clothed with woods and crowned with a church, in which there is a stained-glass window put up in honour of Constable, and a baptismal font, the gift of Constable’s brother, unfolded to my wondering eye all her rural charms. There are people who love to climb hills; I hate to do so. It is all vanity and vexation of spirit; when you get to the top of one hill the chances are all you see is another hill, to the top of which you will have to climb. Give me a country lane, with its luxuriant hedges, its shady trees, its flowers, its richness of greensward, its pigs and poultry and farmyard; there is poetry in such nooks and corners of the earth, as Burns and Bloomfield and Gerald Massey found. No wonder the place made Constable an artist, and an artist whose name will not speedily pass away. My dear sir or madam, the next time you are on your way from London to Ipswich, don’t rush along at express speed; get out at Ardleigh, make your way to the Vale of Dedham, then walk along the Stour, and cross it by a couple of rustic bridges, and you are at East Bergholt, in Suffolk, where Constable was born, and if you do so you will bless me evermore. Then, if you like, rejoin the train at Manningtree, and resume your journey. Few East Anglians even are aware of the wealth of beauty in that quiet corner. ‘The beauty of the surrounding scenery,’ writes Constable’s biographer, ‘its gentle declivities, its luxuriant meadows, flats sprinkled with flocks and herds, its well-cultivated Uplands, its woods and rivers, with mansions scattered, and churches, farms, and picturesque cottages – all impart to this spot an amenity and elegance hardly anywhere else to be found.’

The Constables have been long in the district. The grandfather was a farmer at a village close by. The father, who was well-to-do, purchased a water-mill at Dedham and two windmills at East Bergholt, where he lived. The great artist, his son John, was born in the last century, and was educated at Lavenham and the Dedham Grammar School, and when the lad had reached sixteen or seventeen became addicted to painting, his studio being in the house of a Mr. John Dunthorne, a painter and glazier, with whom he remained on terms of the greatest intimacy for many years. The father would fain have made the son a farmer. He preferred to be a miller, and in his young days was known in the district as the handsome miller. His windmills, when he took to painting, were wonderful, and well deserved the criticism of his brother, who used to say, ‘When I look at a windmill painted by John, I see that it will go round, which is not always the case with those of other artists,’ for the simple reason that John knew what he was about, which the others did not. Again, his industrial career helped him in another way. A miller learns to study the clouds, and Constable’s clouds were exceptionally life-like and real. The handsome young miller soon acquired artistic friends, one of them being Sir George Beaumont, the guide, philosopher, and friend of most of the geniuses of that time. Said another to him, ‘Do not trouble yourself about inventing figures for a landscape; you cannot remain an hour in a spot without the appearance of some living thing, that will in all probability better accord with the scene and the time of day than any invention of your own.’ After a visit to his artist friends in London, he resumed his mill life, and in 1779 he finally commenced his artistic career, and painted all the country round. His studies were chiefly Dedham, East Bergholt, the Valley of the Stour, and the neighbouring village of Stratford. At Stoke Nayland he painted an altar-piece for the church. There is also another altar-piece in a neighbouring church, but his altar-pieces are not known or treasured like his other works.

Cooper tells a good story of Constable. One day Stodart, the sculptor, met Fuseli starting forth with an old umbrella. ‘Why do you carry the umbrella?’ asked the sculptor. ‘I am going to see Constable,’ was the reply, ‘and he is always painting rain.’ One can only remark that, if Constable was always painting rain, he always did it well.

Another good story was told Redgrave by Lee. ‘I hear you sell all your pictures,’ said Constable to the younger landscape-painter. ‘Why, yes,’ said Lee; ‘I’m pretty fortunate. Don’t you sell yours?’ ‘No,’ said Constable, ‘I don’t sell any of my pictures, and I’ll tell you why: when I paint a bad picture I don’t like to part with it, and when I paint a good one I like to keep it.’ It is well known that one year when Constable was on the Council of the Royal Academy, one of his own pictures was passed by mistake before the judges. ‘Cross it,’ said one. ‘It won’t do,’ said another. ‘Pass on,’ said a third. And the carpenter was just about to chalk it with a cross, when he read the name of ‘John Constable.’ Of course there were lame apologies, and the picture was taken from the condemned heap and placed with the works of his brother Academicians. But after work was over Constable took the picture under his arm, and, despite the remonstrance of his brother colleagues, marched off with it, saving: ‘I can’t think of its being hung after it has been fairly turned out. The work so condemned was the ‘Stream bordered in with Willows,’ now in the South Kensington Museum. Leslie once remarked to Redgrave that he would give any work he had painted for it, so warmly did he admire it.

‘Constable is the best landscape-painter we have,’ wrote Frith to his mother in 1835. ‘He is a very merry fellow, and very rich. He told us an anecdote of a man who came to look at his pictures; he was a gardener. One day he called him into his painting-room to look at his pictures, when the man made the usual vulgar remarks, such as, “Did you do all this, sir?” “Yes.” “What, all this?” “Yes.” “What, frame and all?” At last he came to an empty frame that was hung against the wall without any picture in it, when he said to Constable, “But you don’t call this picture quite finished, do you, sir?” Constable said that quite sickened him, and he never let any ignoramuses ever see his pictures again, or frames either.’

Constable’s great merits, writes Mr. Frith, were first recognised in France, with the result upon French landscape art that is felt at the present time. His advice to Frith was: ‘Never do anything without nature before you if it be possible to have it. See those weeds and the dock leaves? They are to come into the foreground of this picture. I know dock leaves pretty well, but I should not attempt to introduce them into a picture without having them before me.’

Constable died very suddenly in 1837. His fame, now that he is dead, is greater than when he was alive. His work abides in all its strength.

There is little in East Bergholt to remind one of Constable, where his reputation remains as that of a genial and kindly-hearted man; but the landscape in all its essential features remains the same. The house in which he was born was pulled down in 1841, which is a great pity, as it is described as a large and handsome mansion. But I never saw a small village with so many attractive residences, though why anybody should live in any of them I could not, for the life of me, understand. Yet there they were, quite a street of them, all in beautiful order, as if they were the residences of wealthy citizens in the suburbs of a busy town. They ought to have been filled with handsome girls, as Charles Kingsley tells us East Anglia is famed for the beauty of its women; all I can say, however, is that I saw none of them, or any sign of life anywhere, beyond the inevitable tradesmen’s carts. Independently of Constable, East Bergholt claims to be worth a pilgrimage for its rustic beauty, which, however, becomes tame and common as you get away from it. The church is old, and has a history – of little consequence, however, to anyone now. One of its rectors was burned at Ipswich in Queen Mary’s reign. His name, Samuel, ought to be preserved by a Church which, till lately, had few martyrs of its own. East Bergholt has also a Congregational and Primitive Methodist chapel, and a colony of Benedictine nuns, driven away from France by the great Revolution. We are a hospitable people, and we are proud to be so, but have we not just at this time too many refugee nuns and monks in our midst?

CHAPTER XII.

EAST ANGLIAN WORTHIES

Suffolk cheese – Danes, Saxons, and Normans – Philosophers and statesmen – Artists and literati.

Abbo Floriacencis, who flourished in the year a. d. 910, describes East Anglia as ‘very noble, and particularly because of its being watered on all sides. On the south and east it is encompassed by the ocean, on the north by the moisture of large and wet fens which, arising almost in the heart of the island, because of the evenness of the ground for a hundred miles and more, descend in great rivers into the sea. On the west the province is joyned to the rest of the island, and, therefore, may be entered (by land); but lest it should be harassed by the frequent incursions of the enemy it is fortifyed with an earthen rampire like a high wall, and with a ditch. The inner parts of it is a pretty rich soil, made exceeding pleasant by gardens and groves, rendered agreeable by its convenience for hunting, famous for pasturage, and abounding with sheep and all sorts of cattle. I do not insist upon its rivers full of fish, considering that a tongue as it were of the sea itself licks it on one side, and on the other side the large fens make a prodigious number of lakes two or three miles over. These fens accommodate great numbers of monks with their desired retirement and solitude, with which, being enclosed, they have no occasion for the privacy of a wilderness.’ Before the monks came the place was held by the Iceni – a stout and valiant people, as Tacitus describes them. In the time of the Heptarchy, King Uffa was their lord and master. In later times Suffolk, when explored by Camden, was celebrated for its cheeses, which, to the great advantage of the inhabitants, were bought up through all England, nay, in Germany also, with France and Spain, as Pantaleon Medicus has told us, who scruples not to set them against those of Placentia both in colour and taste. To the Norfolk people, it must be admitted, Camden gives the palm. The goodness of the soil of that country, he argues, ‘may be gathered from hence, that the inhabitants are of a bright, clear complexion, not to mention their sharpness of wit and admirable quickness in the study of our common law. So that it is at present, and always has been, reputed the common nursery of lawyers, and even amongst the common people you shall meet with a great many who (as one expresses it), if they have no just quarrel, are able to raise it out of the very quirks and niceties of the law.’ In our time it is rather the fashion to run down the East Anglians, yet that they have done their duty to their country no one can deny. ‘They say we are Norfolk fules,’ said a waiter at a Norfolk hotel, to me, a little while ago; ‘but I ain’t ashamed of my county, for all that.’ Why should he be, the reader naturally asks?

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 silver
He 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,