East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations

But Shadwell never deviates into sense.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

‘King. – Good-morrow, old Sir Thomas Erpingham;
A good soft pillow for that good white head
Were better than a churlish turf of France.

‘Erp. – Not so, my liege; this lodging likes me better,
Since I may say, now lie I like a king.’

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

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

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

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

‘Some reforming ass
Would soon propose to pluck them down
And light the world with gas.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

THE END