East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations
by J. Ewing Ritchie · English · Gutenberg #30717 · 448,477 chars · public domain (US)
The Project Gutenberg eBook of East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.
Title: East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations
Author: J. Ewing Ritchie
Release date: December 20, 2009 [eBook #30717]
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/30717
Credits: Transcribed from the 1893 Jarrold & Sons edition by David Price
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EAST ANGLIA: PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS AND HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS ***
Transcribed from the 1893 Jarrold & Sons edition by David Price, email
ccx074@pglaf.org
_PRESS NOTICES OF THE FIRST EDITION_.
'We cordially recommend Mr. Ritchie's book to all who wish to pass an
agreeable hour and to learn something of the outward actions and
inner life of their predecessors. It is full of sketches of East
Anglian celebrities, happily touched if lightly limned.'--_East
Anglian Daily Times_.
'A very entertaining and enjoyable book. Local gossip, a wide range
of reading and industrious research, have enabled the author to
enliven his pages with a wide diversity of subjects, specially
attractive to East Anglians, but also of much general
interest.'--_Daily Chronicle_.
'The work is written in a light gossipy style, and by reason both of
it and of the variety of persons introduced is interesting. To a
Suffolk or Norfolk man it is, of course, especially attractive. The
reader will go through these pages without being wearied by
application. They form a pleasant and entertaining contribution to
county literature, and "East Anglia" will, we should think, find its
way to many of the east country bookshelves.'--_Suffolk Chronicle_.
'The book is as readable and attractive a volume of local chronicles
as could be desired. Though all of our readers may not see "eye to
eye" with Mr. Ritchie, in regard to political and theological
questions, they cannot fail to gain much enjoyment from his excellent
delineation of old days in East Anglia.'--_Norwich Mercury_.
'"East Anglia" has the merit of not being a compilation, which is
more than can be said of the great majority of books produced in
these days to satisfy the revived taste for topographical gossip.
Mr. Ritchie is a Suffolk man--the son of a Nonconformist minister of
Wrentham in that county--and he looks back to the old neighbourhood
and the old times with an affection which is likely to communicate
itself to its readers. Altogether we can with confidence recommend
this book not only to East Anglians, but to all readers who have any
affinity for works of its class.'--_Daily News_.
'Mr. Ritchie's book belongs to a class of which we have none too
many, for when well done they illustrate contemporary history in a
really charming manner. What with their past grandeur, their present
progress, their martyrs, patriots, and authors, there is plenty to
tell concerning Eastern counties: and one who writes with native
enthusiasm is sure to command an audience.'--_Baptist_.
'Mr. Ritchie, known to the numerous readers of the _Christian World_
as "Christopher Crayon," has the pen of a ready, racy, refreshing
writer. He never writes a dull line, and never for a moment allows
our interest to flag. In the work before us, which is not his first,
he is, I should think, at his best. The volume is the outcome of
extensive reading, many rambles over the districts described, and of
thoughtful observation. We seem to live and move and have our being
in East Anglia. Its folk-lore, its traditions, its worthies, its
memorable events, are all vividly and charmingly placed before us,
and we close the book sorry that there is no more of it, and
wondering why it is that works of a similar kind have not more
frequently appeared.'--_Northern Pioneer_.
'It has yielded us more gratification than any work that we have read
for a considerable time. The book ought to have a wide circulation
in the Eastern counties, and will not fail to yield profit and
delight wherever it finds its way.'--_Essex Telegraph_.
'Mr. Ritchie has here written a most attractive chapter of
autobiography. He recalls the scenes of his early days, and whatever
was quaint or striking in connection with them, and finds in his
recollections ready pegs on which to hang historical incident and
antiquarian curiosities of many kinds. He passes from point to point
in a delightfully cheerful and contagious mood. Mr. Ritchie's
reading has been as extensive and careful as his observation is keen
and his temper genial; and his pages, which appeared in _The
Christian World Magazine_, well deserve the honour of book-form, with
the additions he has been able to make to them.'--_British Quarterly
Review_.
* * * * *
EAST ANGLIA.
_PERSONAL RECOLLECTIONS_
AND
_HISTORICAL ASSOCIATIONS_.
* * * * *
BY
J. EWING RITCHIE.
* * * * *
'Behold, there came wise men from the East to Jerusalem.'
MATTHEW.
* * * * *
_SECOND EDITION_,
REVISED, CORRECTED, AND ENLARGED.
* * * * *
LONDON:
JARROLD & SONS, PATERNOSTER BUILDINGS, E.C.
1893.
PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION.
The chapters of which this little work consists originally appeared in
the _Christian World Magazine_, where they were so fortunate as to
attract favourable notice, and from which they are now reprinted, with a
few slight additions, by permission of the Editor. In bringing out a
second edition, I have incorporated the substance of other articles
originally written for local journals. It is to be hoped, touching as
they do a theme not easily exhausted, but always interesting to East
Anglians, that they may help to sustain that love of one's county which,
alas! like the love of country, is a matter reckoned to be of little
importance in these cosmopolitan days, but which, nevertheless, has had
not a little share in the formation of that national greatness and glory
in which at all times Englishmen believe.
One word more. I have retained some strictures on the clergy of East
Anglia, partly because they were true at the time to which I refer, and
partly because it gives me pleasure to own that they are not so now. The
Church of England clergyman of to-day is an immense improvement on that
of my youth. In ability, in devotion to the duties of his calling, in
intelligence, in self-denial, in zeal, he is equal to the clergy of any
other denomination. If he has lost his hold upon Hodge, that, at any
rate, is not his fault.
CLACTON-ON-SEA,
_January_, 1893.
CONTENTS.
CHAPTER I.
A SUFFOLK VILLAGE.
Distinguished people born there--Its Puritans and 1
Nonconformists--The country round
Covehithe--Southwold--Suffolk dialect--The Great Eastern
Railway
CHAPTER II.
THE STRICKLANDS.
Reydon Hall--The clergy--Pakefield--Social life in a village 37
CHAPTER III.
LOWESTOFT.
Yarmouth bloaters--George Borrow--The town fifty years 54
ago--The distinguished natives
CHAPTER IV.
POLITICS AND THEOLOGY.
Homerton academy--W. Johnson Fox, M.P.--Politics in 89
1830--Anti-Corn Law speeches--Wonderful oratory
CHAPTER V.
BUNGAY AND ITS PEOPLE.
Bungay Nonconformity--Hannah More--The Childses--The Queen's 122
Librarian--Prince Albert
CHAPTER VI.
A CELEBRATED NORFOLK TOWN.
Great Yarmouth Nonconformists--Intellectual life--Dawson 153
Turner--Astley Cooper--Hudson Gurney--Mrs. Bendish
CHAPTER VII.
THE NORFOLK CAPITAL.
Brigg's Lane--The carrier's cart--Reform demonstration--The 185
old dragon--Chairing M.P.'s--Hornbutton Jack--Norwich artists
and literati--Quakers and Nonconformists
CHAPTER VIII.
THE SUFFOLK CAPITAL.
The Orwell--The Sparrows--Ipswich 226
notabilities--Gainsborough--Medical men--Nonconformists
CHAPTER IX.
AN OLD-FASHIONED TOWN.
Woodbridge and the country round--Bernard Barton--Dr. 252
Lankester--An old Noncon.
CHAPTER X.
MILTON'S SUFFOLK SCHOOLMASTER.
Stowmarket--The Rev. Thomas Young--Bishop Hall and the 283
Smectymnian divines--Milton's mulberry-tree--Suffolk
relationships
CHAPTER XI.
IN CONSTABLE'S COUNTY.
East Bergholt--The Valley of the Stour--Painting from 311
nature--East Anglian girls
CHAPTER XII.
EAST ANGLIAN WORTHIES.
Suffolk cheese--Danes, Saxons, and Normans--Philosophers and 320
statesmen--Artists and literati
CHAPTER I.
A SUFFOLK VILLAGE.
Distinguished people born there--Its Puritans and Nonconformists--The
country round Covehithe--Southwold--Suffolk dialect--The Great Eastern
Railway.
In his published Memoirs, the great Metternich observes that if he had
never been born he never could have loved or hated. Following so
illustrious a precedent, I may observe that if I had not been born in
East Anglia I never could have been an East Anglian. Whether I should
have been wiser or better off had I been born elsewhere, is an
interesting question, which, however, it is to be hoped the public will
forgive me if I decline to discuss on the present occasion.
In a paper bearing the date of 1667, a Samuel Baker, of Wattisfield Hall,
writes: 'I was born at a village called Wrentham, which place I cannot
pass by the mention of without saying thus much, that religion has there
flourished longer, and that in much piety; the Gospel and grace of it
have been more powerfully and clearly preached, and more generally
received; the professors of it have been more sound in the matter and
open and steadfast in the profession of it in an hour of temptation, have
manifested a greater oneness amongst themselves and have been more
eminently preserved from enemies without (albeit they dwell where Satan's
seat is encompassed with his malice and rage), than I think in any
village of the like capacity in England; which I speak as my duty to the
place, but to my particular shame rather than otherwise, that such a dry
and barren plant should spring out of such a soil.' I resemble this
worthy Mr. Baker in two respects. In the first place, I was born at
Wrentham, though at a considerably later period of time than 1667; and,
secondly, if he was a barren plant--he of whom we read, in Harmer's
Miscellaneous Works, that 'he was a gentleman of fortune and education,
very zealous for the Congregational plan of church government and
discipline, and a sufferer in its bonds for a good conscience'--what am
I?
Nor was it only piety that existed in this distant parish. If the reader
turns to the diary of John Evelyn, under the date of 1679, he will find
mention made of a child brought up to London, 'son of one Mr. Wotton,
formerly amanuensis to Dr. Andrews, Bishop of Winton, who both read and
perfectly understood Hebrew, Greek, Latin, Arabic and Syriac, and most of
the modern languages, disputed in divinity, law and all the sciences, was
skilful in history, both ecclesiastical and profane; in a word, so
universally and solidly learned at eleven years of age that he was looked
on as a miracle. Dr. Lloyd, one of the most deep-learned divines of this
nation in all sorts of literature, with Dr. Burnet, who had severely
examined him, came away astonished, and told me they did not believe
there had the like appeared in the world. He had only been instructed by
his father, who being himself a learned person, confessed that his son
knew all that he himself knew. But what was more admirable than his vast
memory was his judgment and invention, he being tried with divers hard
questions which required maturity of thought and experience. He was also
dexterous in chronology, antiquities, mathematics. In sum, an
_intellectus universalis_ beyond all that we reade of Picus Mirandula,
and other precoce witts, and yet withal a very humble child.' This
prodigy was the son of the Rev. Henry Wotton, minister of Wrentham,
Suffolk. Sir William Skippon, a parishioner, in a letter yet extant,
describes the wonderful achievements of the little fellow when but five
years old. He was admitted at Katherine Hall, Cambridge, some months
before he was ten years old. In after-years he was the friend and
defender of Bentley and the antagonist of Sir William Temple in the great
controversy about ancient and modern learning. He died in 1726, and was
buried at Buxted, in Sussex. It is clear that there was no such
intellectual phenomenon in all London under the Stuarts as that little
Wrentham lad.
Of that village, when I came into the world, my father was the honoured,
laborious and successful minister. The meeting-house, as it was called,
which stood in the lane leading from the church to the highroad, was a
square red brick building, vastly superior to any of the ancient
meeting-houses round. It stood in an enclosure, one side of which was
devoted to the reception of the farmers' gigs, which, on a Sunday
afternoon, when the principal service was held, made quite a respectable
show when drawn up in a line. By the side of it was a cottage, in which
lived the woman who kept the place tidy, and her husband, who looked
after the horses as they were unharnessed and put in the stable close by.
The backs of the gigs were sheltered from the road by a hedge of lilacs,
and over the gateway a gigantic elm kept watch and ward. The house in
which we lived was also part of the chapel estate, and, if it was a
little way off, it was, at any rate, adapted to the wants of a family of
quiet habits and simple tastes. On one side of the house was a
water-butt, and I can well remember my first sad experience of the
wickedness of the world when, getting up one morning to look after my
rabbits and other live stock, I found that water-butt had gone, and that
there were thieves in a village so rural and renowned for piety as ours.
I say renowned, and not without reason. Years and years back there was a
pious clergyman of the name of Steffe, who had a son in Dr. Doddridge's
Academy, at Daventry, and it is a fact that the great Doctor himself, at
some time or other, had been a guest in the village.
In 1741 the Doctor thus records his East Anglian recollections, in a
letter to his wife: 'You have great reason to confide in that very kind
Providence which has hitherto watched over us, and has, since the date of
my last, brought us about sixty miles nearer London. From Yarmouth we
went on Friday morning to Wrentham, where good Mrs. Steffe lives, and
from thence to a gentleman's seat, near Walpole, where I was most
respectfully entertained. As I had twenty miles to ride yesterday
morning, he, though I had never seen him before last Tuesday, brought me
almost half-way in his chaise, to make the journey easier. I reached
Woodbridge before two, and rode better in the cool of the evening, and
had the happiness to be entertained in a very elegant and friendly
family, though perfectly a stranger; and, indeed, I have been escorted
from one place to another in every mile of my journey by one, and
sometimes by two or three, of my brethren in a most respectful and
agreeable manner.' Dr. Doddridge's East Anglian recollections seem to
have been uncommonly agreeable, owing quite as much, I must candidly
confess, to the presence of the sisters as of the brethren. Writing to
his wife an account of a little trip on the river, he adds: 'It was a
very pleasant day, and I concluded it in the company of one of the finest
women I ever beheld, who, though she had seven children grown up to
marriageable years, or very near it, is still herself almost a beauty,
and a person of sense, good breeding, and piety, which might astonish one
who had not the happiness of being intimately acquainted with you.' What
a sly rogue was Dr. Doddridge! How could any wife be jealous when her
husband finishes off with such a compliment to herself?
But to return to the good Mrs. Steffe, of whom I am, on my mother's side,
a descendant. I must add that as there were great men before Agamemnon,
so there were good people in the little village of Wrentham before Mrs.
Steffe appeared upon the scene. The Brewsters, who were an ancient
family, which seems to have culminated under the glorious usurpation of
Oliver Cromwell, were eminently good people in Dr. Doddridge's
acceptation of the term, and I fancy did much as lords of the manor--and
as inhabitants of Wrentham Hall, a building which had ceased to exist
long before my time--to leaven with their goodness the surrounding lump.
It seems to me that these Brewsters must have been more or less connected
with Brewster the elder--of Robinson's Church at Leyden, who, we are
told, came of a wealthy and distinguished family--who was well trained at
Cambridge, and, says the historian, 'thence, being first seasoned with
the seeds of grace and virtue, he went to the Court, and there served
that religious and godly Mr. Davison divers years, when he was Secretary
of State, who found him so discreet and faithful as he trusted him, above
all others that were about him, and only employed him in matters of great
trust and secrecy; he esteemed him rather as a son than a servant, and
for his wisdom and godliness in private, he would converse with him more
like a familiar than a master.' When evil times came, this Brewster was
living in the big Manor House at Scrooby, and how he and his godly
associates were driven into exile by a foolish King and cruel priests is
known, or ought to be known, to everyone. Of these Wrentham Brewsters,
one served his country in Parliament, or I am very much mistaken. It was
to their credit that they sought out godly men, to whom they might
entrust the cure of souls. In this respect, when I was a lad, their
example certainly had not been followed, and Dissent flourished mainly
because the moral instincts of the villagers and farmers and small
tradesmen were shocked by hearing men on the Sunday reading the Lessons
of the Church, leading the devotions of the people, and preaching
sermons, who on the week-days got drunk and led immoral lives. As to the
right of the State to interfere in matters of religion, as to the danger
to religion itself from the establishment of a State Church, as to the
liberty of unlicensed prophesying, such topics the simple villagers
ignored. All that they felt was that there came to them more of a
quickening of the spiritual life, a fuller realization of God and things
divine, in the meeting-house than in the parish church. They were not
what pious Churchmen so much dread nowadays--Political Dissenters; how
could they be such, having no votes, and never seeing a newspaper from
one year's end to the other?
It was to the Brewsters that the village was indebted for the ministry of
the Rev. John Phillip, who married the sister of the pious and learned
Dr. Ames, Professor of the University of Franeker. Calamy tells us that
by means of Dr. Ames, Mr. Phillip had no small furtherance in his
studies, and intimate acquaintance with him increased his inclination to
the Congregational way. Archbishop Abbot, writing to Winwood, 1611,
says: 'I have written to Sir Horace Vere touching the English preacher at
the Hague. We heard what he was that preceded, and we cannot be less
cognisant what Mr. Ames is, for by a Latin printed book he hath laden the
Church and State of England with a great deal of infamous contumely, so
that if he were amongst us he would be so far from receiving preferment,
that some exemplary punishment would be his reward. His Majesty had been
advertised how this man is entertained and embraced at the Hague, and how
he is a fit person to breed up captains and soldiers there in mutiny and
faction.' One of Dr. Ames's works, which got him into trouble, was
entitled 'A Fresh Suit against Ceremonies,' a work which we may be sure
would be as distasteful to the Ritualists of our day as it was to the
Ritualists of his own. One of his works, his 'Medulla Theologiae,' I
believe, adorned the walls of the paternal study. There is, belonging to
the Wrentham Congregational Church Library, a volume of tracts,
sixty-seven in number, of six or eight pages each, printed in 1622,
forming a series of theses on theological topics, maintained by different
persons, under the presidency of Dr. Ames; and I believe a son of the
Doctor is buried in Wrentham Churchyard, as I recollect my father, on one
occasion, had an old gravestone done up and relettered, which bore
testimony to the virtues and piety and learning of an Ames. Thus if Mr.
Phillip was chased out of Old England into New England for his
Nonconformity, some of the good old Noncons remained to uphold the lamp
which was one day to cast a sacred light on all quarters of the land.
That some did emigrate with their pastor is probable, since we learn that
there is a town called Wrentham across the Atlantic, said to have
received that name because some of the first settlers came from Wrentham
in England.
Touching Mr. Phillip, a good deal has been written by the Rev. John
Browne, the painstaking author of 'The History of Congregationalism in
Suffolk and Norfolk.' It appears that his arrival in America was not
unexpected, as the Christian people of Dedham had invited him to that
plantation beforehand. He did not, however, accept their invitation, but
being much in request, 'and called divers ways, could not resolve; but,
at length, upon weighty reasons concerning the public service and
foundations of the college, he was persuaded to attend to the call of
Cambridge;' and, adds an American writer, 'he might have been the first
head of that blessed institution.' On the calling of the Long
Parliament, he and his wife returned to England, and in 1642 we find him
ministering to his old flock. So satisfied were the neighbouring
Independents of his Congregationalism, that when, in 1644, members of Mr.
Bridge's church residing in Norwich desired to form themselves into a
separate community, they not only consulted with their brethren in
Yarmouth, but with Mr. Phillip also, as the only man then in their
neighbourhood on whose judgment and experience they could rely. In 1643
Mr. Phillip was appointed one of the members of the Assembly of Divines,
and was recognised by Baillie in his Letters as one of the Independent
men there. The Independents, as we know, sat apart, and were a sad thorn
in the Presbyterians' side. Five of them, more zealous than the rest,
formally dissented from the decisions of the Assembly, and afraid that
toleration would not be extended to them, appealed to Parliament, 'as the
most sacred refuge and asylum for mistaken and misjudged innocence.' Mr.
Phillip's name, however, I do not find in that list; and possibly he was
too old to be very active in the matter. He lived on till 1660, when he
died at the good old age of seventy-eight. In the later years of his
ministry he was assisted by his nephew, W. Ames, who in 1651 preached a
sermon at St. Paul's, before the Lord Mayor and Aldermen, 'On the Saint's
Security against Seducing Sports, or the Anointing from the Holy One.'
It is to be feared, in our more enlightened age, a good Wrentham
Congregational minister would have little chance of preaching before a
London Lord Mayor. Talent is supposed to exist only in the crowded town,
where men have no time to think of anything but of the art of getting on.
Other heroic associations--of men who had suffered for the faith, who
feared God rather than man, who preferred the peace of an approving
conscience to the vain honours of the world--also were connected with the
place. I remember being shown a bush in which the conventicle preacher
used to hide himself when the enemy, in the shape of the myrmidons of
Bishop Wren, of Norwich, were at his heels. That furious prelate, as
many of us know, drove upwards of three thousand persons to seek their
bread in a foreign land. Indeed, to such an extent did he carry out his
persecuting system, that the trade and manufactures of the country
materially suffered in consequence. However, in my boyish days I was not
troubled much about such things. Dissent in Wrentham was quite
respectable. If we had lost the Brewster family, whose arms were still
to be seen on the Communion plate, a neighbouring squire attended at the
meeting-house, as it was then the fashion to call our chapel, and so did
the leading grocer and draper of the place, and the village doctor, the
father of six comely daughters; and the display of gigs on a Sunday was
really imposing. Alas! as I grew older I saw that imposing array not a
little shorn of its splendour. The neighbouring baronet, Sir Thomas
Gooch, M.P., added as he could farm to farm, and that a Dissenter was on
no account to have one of his farms was pretty well understood. I fancy
our great landlords have, in many parts of East Anglia, pretty well
exterminated Dissent, to the real injury of the people all around. I
write this advisedly. I dare say the preaching in the meeting-house was
often very miserably poor. The service, I must own, seemed to me often
peculiarly long and unattractive. There was always that long prayer
which was, I fear, to all boys a time of utter weariness; but,
nevertheless, there was a moral and intellectual life in our Dissenting
circle that did not exist elsewhere. It was true we never attended
dinners at the village public-house, nor indulged in card-parties, and
regarded with a horror, which I have come to think unwholesome, the
frivolity of balls or the attractions of a theatre; but we had all the
new books voted into our bookclub, and, as a lad, I can well remember how
I revelled in the back numbers of the _Edinburgh Review_, though even
then I could not but feel the injustice which it did to what it called
the Lake school of poets, and more especially to Coleridge and
Wordsworth. Shakespeare also was almost a sealed book, and perhaps we
had a little too much of religious reading, such as Doddridge's 'Rise and
Progress,' or Baxter's 'Saint's Rest,' or Alleine's 'Call to the
Unconverted,' or Fleetwood's 'Life of Christ'--excellent books in their
way, undoubtedly, but not remarkably attractive to boys redolent of
animal life, who had thriven and grown fat in that rustic village, on
whose vivid senses the world that now is produced far more effect than
the terrors or splendours of the world to come.
The country round, if flat, was full of interesting associations. At the
back of us--that is, on the sea--was the village of Covehithe, and when a
visitor found his way into the place--an event which happened now and
then--our first excursion with him or her--for plenty of donkeys were to
be had which ladies could ride--was to Covehithe, known to literary men
as the birthplace of John Bale, Bishop of Ossory, in Ireland. In
connection with donkeys, I have this interesting recollection, that one
of the old men of the village told me. At the time of the Bristol riots,
he remembered Sir Charles Wetherall, the occasion of them, as a boy at
Wrentham much given to donkey-riding. In the history of the drama John
Bale takes distinguished rank. He was one of those by whom the drama was
gradually evolved, and all to whom it is a study and delight must
remember him with regard. His play of 'Kynge John' is described by Mr.
Collier as occupying an intermediate place between moralities and
historical plays--and it is the only known existing specimen of that
species of composition of so early a date. Bale, who was trained at the
monastery of White Friars, in Norwich, thence went to Jesus College,
Cambridge, and was expelled in consequence of the zeal with which he
exposed the errors of Popery. However, Bale had a friend and protector
in Cromwell, Henry VIII.'s faithful servant. On the death of that
nobleman Bale proceeded to Germany, where he appears to have been well
received and hospitably entertained by Luther and Melancthon, and on the
accession of Edward VI. he returned to England. In Mary's reign
persecution recommenced, and Bale fled to Frankfort. He again returned
at the commencement of Elizabeth's reign, and was made prebend of
Canterbury, at which place he died at the age of sixty-three. Covehithe
nowadays is not interesting so much as the birthplace of Bale, as on
account of its ecclesiastical ruins, which are covered with ivy and
venerable in their decay. The church was evidently almost a cathedral,
and surely at one time or other there must have been an enormous
population to worship in such a sanctuary; and yet all you see now is a
public-house just opposite the church, a few cottages, and a farmhouse.
A few steps farther bring you to the low cliff, and there is the sea ever
encroaching on the land in that quarter and swallowing up farmhouse and
farm. Miss Agnes Strickland, who lived at Reydon Hall--a few miles
inland--has thus sung the melancholy fate of Covehithe:
'All roofless now the stately pile,
And rent the arches tall,
Through which with bright departing smile
The western sunbeams fall.
* * * * *
'Tradition's voice forgets to tell
Whose ashes sleep below,
And Fancy here unchecked may dwell,
And bid the story flow.'
Ah! what was that story? How the question puzzled my young head, as I
walked in the sandy lane that led from my native village! How
insignificant looked the little church built up inside! What had become
of the crowds that at one time must have filled that ancient fane? How
was it that no trace of them remained? They had vanished in the
historical age, and yet no one could tell how or when. Nature was, then,
stronger than man. He was gone, but the stars glittered by night and the
sun shone by day, and the ivy had spread its green mantle over all. Yes!
what was man, with his pomp and glory, but dust and ashes, after all!
How I loved to go to Covehithe and climb its ruins, and dream of the
distant past!
Here in that eastern point of England it seemed to me there was a good
deal of decay. Sometimes, on a fine summer day, we would take a boat and
sail from the pretty little town of Southwold, about four miles from
Wrentham, to Dunwich, another relic of the past. According to an old
historian, it was a city surrounded with a stone wall having brazen
gates; it had fifty-two churches, chapels, and religious houses; it also
boasted hospitals, a huge palace, a bishop's seat, a mayor's mansion, and
a Mint. Beyond it a forest appears to have extended some miles into what
is now the sea. One of our local Suffolk poets, James Bird (I saw him
but once, when I walked into his house, about twelve miles from Wrentham,
having run away from home at the ripe age of ten, and told him I had come
to see him, as he was a poet; and I well remember how then, much to my
chagrin, he gave me plum-pudding for dinner, and sent me to play with his
boys till a cart was found in which the prodigal was compelled to
return), wrote and published a poetical romance, called 'Dunwich; or, a
Tale of the Splendid City;' and Agnes Strickland also made it the subject
of her melodious verse, commencing:
'Oft gazing on thy craggy brow,
We muse on glories o'er.
Fair Dunwich! Thou art lonely now,
Renowned and sought no more.'
Never has a splendid city more utterly collapsed. After a long ride over
sandy lanes and fields, you come to the edge of a cliff, on which stand a
few houses. There is all that remains of the Dunwich where the first
Bishop of East Anglia taught the Christian faith, and where was born John
Daye, the printer of the works of Parker, Latimer, and Fox, who, in the
reign of Mary, became, as most real men did then, a prisoner and an exile
for the truth. He has also the reputation of being the first in England
who printed in the Saxon character. In the records of type-founding the
name of Daye stands with that of the most illustrious. When the Company
of Stationers obtained their charter from Philip and Mary, he was the
first person admitted to their livery. In 1580 he was master of the
company, to which he bequeathed property at his death. The following is
the inscription which marks the place of his burial in Little Bradley,
Suffolk:
'Here lyes the DAYE that darkness could not blynd,
When Popish fogges had overcast the sunne;
This DAYE the cruel night did leave behind,
To view and show what bloudie actes were donne.
He set a FOX to write how martyrs runne
By death to lyfe, FOX ventured paynes and health.
To give them light Daye spent in print his wealth,
But GOD with gayne returned his wealth agayne,
And gave to him as he gave to the poore.
Two wyfes he had partakers of his payne:
Each wyfe twelve babes, and each of them one more,
Als was the last increaser of his store;
Who, mourning long for being left alone,
Sett up this tombe, herself turned to a stone.'
Unlike Covehithe, Dunwich has a history. In the reign of Henry II., a
MS. in the British Museum tells us, the Earl of Leicester came to attack
it. 'When he came neare and beheld the strength thereof, it was terror
and feare unto him to behold it; and so retired both he and his people.'
Dunwich aided King John in his wars with the barons, and thus gained the
first charter. In the time of Edward I. it had sixteen fair ships,
twelve barks, four-and-twenty fishing barks, and at that time there were
few seaports in England that could say as much. It served the same King
in his wars with France with eleven ships of war, well furnished with men
and munition. In most of these ships were seventy-two men-at-arms, who
served thirteen weeks at their own cost and charge. Dunwich seems to
have suffered much by the French wars. Four of the eleven ships already
referred to were captured by the French, and in the wars waged by Edward
III. Dunwich lost still more shipping, and as many as 500 men. Perhaps
it might have flourished till this day had if not been for the curse of
war. But the sea also served the town cruelly. That spared nothing--not
the King's Forest, where there were hawking and hunting--not the homes
where England nursed her hardy sailors--not even the harbour whence the
brave East Anglians sailed away to the wars. In Edward III.'s time, at
one fell swoop, the remorseless sea seems to have swallowed up '400
houses which payde rente to the towne towards the fee-farms, besydes
certain shops and windmills.' Yet, when I was a lad, this wreck of a
place returned two members to Parliament, and Birmingham, Manchester and
Sheffield not one. Between Covehithe and Dunwich stood, and still
stands, the charming little bathing-place of Southwold. Like them, it
has seen better days, and has suffered from the encroachments of the
ever-restless and ever-hungry sea. It was at Southwold that I first saw
the sea, and I remember naturally asking my father, who showed me the
guns on the gun-hill--pointing seaward--whether that was where the
enemies came from.
Southwold appears to have initiated an evangelical alliance, which may
yet be witnessed if ever a time comes of reasonable toleration on
religious matters. In many parts of the Continent the same place of
worship is used by different religious bodies. In Brussels I have seen
the Episcopalians, the Germans, the French Protestants, all assembling at
different times in the same building. There was a time when a similar
custom prevailed in Southwold, and that was when Master Sharpen, who had
his abode at Sotterley, preached at Southwold once a month. There were
Independents in the towns in those days, and 'his indulgence,' writes a
local historian, 'favoured the Separatists with the liberty and free use
of the church, where they resorted weekly, or oftener, and every fourth
Sunday both ministers met and celebrated divine service alternately. He
that entered the church first had the precedency of officiating, the
other keeping silence until the congregation received the Benediction
after sermon.' Most of the people attended all the while. It was before
the year 1680 that these things were done. After that time there came to
the church 'an orthodox man, who suffered many ills, and those not the
lightest, for his King and for his faith, and he compelled the
Independents not only to leave the church, but the town also. We read
they assembled in a malt-house beyond the bridge, where, being disturbed,
they chose more private places in the town until liberty of conscience
was granted, when they publicly assembled in a fish-house converted to a
place of worship.' At that time many people in the town were Dissenters;
but it was not till 1748 that they had a church formed. Up to that time
the Southwold Independents were members of the Church at Wrentham, one of
the Articles of Association of the new church being to take the Bible as
their sole guide, and when in difficulties to resort to the neighbouring
pastor for advice and declaration. Such was Independency when it
flourished all over East Anglia.
A writer in the _Harleian Miscellany_ says that 'Southwold, of sea-coast
town, is the most beneficial unto his Majesty of all the towns in
England, by reason all their trade is unto Iceland for lings.' In the
little harbour of Southwold you see nowadays only a few colliers, and I
fear that the place is of little advantage to her Majesty, however
beneficial it may be as a health-resort for some of her Majesty's
subjects. It is a place, gentle reader, where you can wander undisturbed
at your own sweet will, and can get your cheeks fanned by breezes unknown
in London. The beach, I own, is shingly, and not to be compared with the
sands of Yarmouth and Lowestoft; but, then, you are away from the Cockney
crowds that now infest these places at the bathing season, and you are
quiet--whether you wander on its common, till you come to the Wolsey
Bridge, getting on towards Halesworth, where, if tradition be
trustworthy, Wolsey, as a butcher's boy, was nearly drowned, and where he
benevolently caused a bridge to be erected for the safety of all future
butcher-boys and others, when he became a distinguished man; or ramble by
the seaside to Walberswick, across the harbour, or on to Easton
Bavent--another decayed village, on the other side. Southwold has its
historical associations. Most of my readers have seen the well-known
picture of Solebay Fight at Greenwich Hospital. Southwold overlooks the
bay on which that fight was won. Here, on the morning of the 28th May,
1672, De Ruyter, with his Dutchmen, sailed right against those wooden
walls which have guarded old England in many a time of danger, and found
to his cost how invincible was British pluck. James, Duke of York--not
then the drivelling idiot who lost his kingdom for a Mass, but James,
manly and high-spirited, with a Prince's pride and a sailor's heart--won
a victory that for many a day was a favourite theme with all honest
Englishmen, and especially with the true and stout men who, alarmed by
the roar of cannon, as the sound boomed along the blue waters of that
peaceful bay, stood on the Southwold cliff, wishing that the fog which
intercepted their view might clear off, and that they might welcome as
victors their brethren on the sea. I can remember how, when an old
cannon was dragged up from the depths of the sea, it was supposed to be,
as it might have been, used in that fight, and now is preserved at one of
the look-out houses on the cliff as a souvenir of that glorious struggle.
The details of that fight are matters of history, and I need not dwell on
them. Our literature, also, owes Southwold one of the happiest effusions
of one of the wittiest writers of that age; and in a county history I
remember well a merry song on the Duke's late glorious success over the
Dutch, in Southwold Bay, which commences with the writer telling--
'One day as I was sitting still
Upon the side of Dunwich Hill,
And looking on the ocean,
By chance I saw De Ruyter's fleet
With Royal James's squadron meet;
In sooth it was a noble treat
To see that brave commotion.'
The writer vividly paints the scene, and ends as follows:
'Here's to King Charles, and here's to James,
And here's to all the captains' names,
And here's to all the Suffolk dames,
And here's to the house of Stuart.'
Well, as to the house of Stuart, the less said the better; but as to the
Suffolk dames, I agree with the poet, that they are all well worthy of
the toast, and it was at a very early period of my existence that I
became aware of that fact. But the course of true love never does run
smooth, and from none--and they were many--with whom I played on the
beach as a boy, or read poetry to at riper years, was it my fate to take
one as wife for better or worse. In the crowded city men have little
time to fall in love. Besides, they see so many fresh faces that
impressions are easily erased. It is otherwise in the quiet retirement
of a village where there is little to disturb the mind--perhaps too
little. I can well remember a striking illustration of this in the
person of an old farmer, who lived about three miles off, and at whose
house we--that is, the whole family--passed what seemed to me a very
happy day among the haystacks or harvest-fields once or twice a year.
The old man was proud of his farm, and of everything connected with it.
'There, Master James,' he was wont to say to me after dinner, 'you can
see three barns all at once!' and sure enough, looking in the direction
he pointed, there were three barns plainly visible to the naked eye.
Alas! the love of the picturesque had not been developed in my bucolic
friend, and a good barn or two--he was an old bachelor, and, I suppose,
his heart had never been softened by the love of woman--seemed to him
about as beautiful an object as you could expect or desire. One emotion,
that of fear, was, however, I found, strongly planted in the village
breast. The boys of the village, with whom, now and then, I stole away
on a birds'-nesting expedition, would have it that in a little wood about
a mile or two off there were no end of flying serpents and dragons to be
seen; and I can well remember the awe which fell upon the place when
there came a rumour of the doings of those wretches, Burke and Hare, who
were said to have made a living by murdering victims--by placing pitch
plasters on their mouths--and selling them to the doctors to dissect. At
this time a little boy had not come home at the proper time, and the
mother came to our house lamenting. The good woman was in tears, and
refused to be comforted. There had been a stranger in the village that
day; he had seen her boy, he had put a pitch plaster on his mouth, and no
doubt his dead body was then on its way to Norwich to be sold to the
doctor. Unfortunately, it turned out that the boy was alive and well,
and lived to give his poor mother a good deal of trouble. Another thing,
of which I have still a vivid recollection, was the mischief wrought by
Captain Swing. In Kent there had been an alarming outbreak of the
peasantry, ostensibly against the use of agricultural machinery. They
assembled in large bodies, and visited the farm buildings of the
principal landed proprietors, demolishing the threshing machines then
being brought into use. In some instances they set fire to barns and
corn-stacks. These outrages spread throughout the county, and fears were
entertained that they would be repeated in other agricultural districts.
A great meeting of magistrates and landed gentry was held in Canterbury,
the High Sheriff in the chair, when a reward was offered of 100 pounds
for the discovery of the perpetrators of the senseless mischief, and the
Lords of the Treasury offered a further reward of the same amount for
their apprehension; but all was in vain to stop the growing evil. The
agricultural interest was in a very depressed state, and the number of
unemployed labourers so large, that apprehensions were entertained that
the combinations for the destruction of machinery might, if not at once
checked, take dimensions it would be very difficult for the Government to
control. When Parliament opened in 1830, the state of the agricultural
districts had been daily growing more alarming. Rioting and incendiarism
had spread from Kent to Suffolk, Norfolk, Surrey, Hampshire, Wiltshire,
Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Huntingdonshire, and Cambridgeshire, and a
great deal of very valuable property had been destroyed. A mystery
enveloped these proceedings that indicated organization, and it became
suspected that they had a political object. Threatening letters were
sent to individuals signed 'Swing,' and beacon fires communicated from
one part of the country to the other. With the object of checking these
outrages, night patrols were established, dragoons were kept in readiness
to put down tumultuous meetings, and magistrates and clergymen and landed
gentry were all at their wits' ends. Even in our out-of-the-way corner
of East Anglia not a little consternation was felt. We were on the
highroad nightly traversed by the London and Yarmouth Royal Mail, and
thus, more or less, we had communications with the outer world. Just
outside of our village was Benacre Hall, the seat of Sir Thomas Gooch,
one of the county members, and I well remember the boyish awe with which
I heard that a mob had set out from Yarmouth to burn the place down.
Whether the mob thought better of it, or gave up the walk of eighteen
miles as one to which they were not equal, I am not in a position to say.
All I know is, that Benacre Hall, such as it is, remains; but I can never
forget the feeling of terror with which, on those dark and dull winter
nights, I looked out of my bedroom window to watch the lurid light
flaring up into the black clouds around, which told how wicked men were
at their mad work, how fiendish passion had triumphed, how some honest
farmer was reduced to ruin, as he saw the efforts of a life of industry
consumed by the incendiary's fire. It was long before I ceased to
shudder at the name of 'Swing.'
The dialect of the village was, I need not add, East Anglian. The people
said 'I woll' for 'I will'; 'you warn't' for 'you were not,' and so on.
A girl was called a 'mawther,' a pitcher a 'gotch,' a 'clap on the
costard' was a knock on the head, a lad was a 'bor.' Names of places
especially were made free with. Wangford was 'Wangfor,' Covehithe was
'Cothhigh,' Southwold was 'Soul,' Lowestoft was 'Lesteff,' Halesworth was
'Holser,' London was 'Lunun.' People who lived in the midland counties
were spoken of as living in the shires. The 'o,' as in 'bowls,' it is
specially difficult for an East Anglian to pronounce. A learned man was
held to be a 'man of larnin',' a thing of which there was not too much in
Suffolk in my young days. A lady in the village sent her son to school,
and great was the maternal pride as she called in my father to hear how
well her son could read Latin, the reading being reading alone, without
the faintest attempt at translation. Sometimes it was hard to get an
answer to a question, as when a Dissenting minister I knew was sent for
to visit a sick man. 'My good man,' said he, 'what induced you to send
for me?' 'Hey, what?' said the invalid. 'What induced you to send for
me?' Alas! the question was repeated in vain. At length the wife
interfered: 'He wants to know what the deuce you sent for him for.' And
then, and not till then, came an appropriate reply. This story, I
believe, has more than once found its way into _Punch_; but I heard it as
a Suffolk boy years and years before _Punch_ had come into existence.
One of the prayers familiar to my youth was as follows:
'Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,
Bless the bed that I lie on;
Four corners to my bed,
Four angels at my head;
Two to watch and one to pray,
And one to carry my soul away.'
An M.P., who shall be nameless, supplies me with an apt illustration of
East Anglian dialect. It was at the anniversary of a National School,
with the great M.P. in the chair, surrounded by the benevolent ladies and
the select clergy of the district. The subject of examination was
Christ's entry into Jerusalem on an ass's colt. 'Why,' said the
M.P.--'why did they strew rushes before the Saviour? can any of you
children tell me?' Profound silence. The M.P. repeated the question. A
little ragamuffin held up his hand. The M.P. demanded silence as the apt
scholar proceeded with his answer. 'Why were the rushes strewed?' said
the M.P. in a condescending tone. I don't know,' replied the boy,
'unless it was to hull the dickey down.'
Roars of laughter greeted the reply, as all the East Anglians present
knew that 'hull' meant 'throw,' and 'dickey' is Suffolk for 'donkey,' but
some of the Cockney visitors present were for a while quite unable to
enjoy the joke.
It is to be feared the three R's were not much patronized in East Anglia,
if it be true that some forty or fifty years ago, in such a respectable
town as Sudbury, it was the fashion for some fifty of the leading
inhabitants to meet in the large bar-parlour of the old White Horse to
hear the leading paper of the eastern counties read out by a scholar and
elocutionist known as John. For the discharge of this important duty he
was paid a pound a year, and provided with as much free liquor as he
liked, and there were people who considered that the Saturday
newspaper-reading did them more good than what they heard at church the
next day.
In some cases our East Anglian dialect is merely a survival of old
English, as when we say 'axe' for 'ask.' We find in Chaucer:
'It is but foly and wrong wenging
To axe so outrageous thing.'
In his 'Envious Man,' Gowing made 'axeth' to rhyme with 'taxeth.' No
word is more common in Suffolk than 'fare'; a pony is a 'hobby'; a thrush
is a 'mavis'; a chest is a 'kist'; a shovel is a 'skuppet'; a chaffinch
is a 'spink.' If a man is upset in his mind, he tells us he is 'wholly
stammed,' and the Suffolk 'yow' is at least as old as Chaucer, who wrote:
'What do you ye do there, quod she,
Come, and if it lyke yow
To daucen daunceth with us now.'
An awkward lad is 'ungain.' A good deal may be written to show that our
Suffolk dialect is the nearest of all provincial dialects to that of
Chaucer and the Bible, and if anyone has the audacity to contradict me,
why, then, in Suffolk phraseology, I can promise him--'a good hiding.'
I am old enough to remember how placid was the county, how stay-at-home
were the people, what a sensation there was created when anyone went to
London, or any stranger appeared in our midst. From afar we heard of
railways; then we had a railway opened from London to Brentwood; then the
railways spread all over the land, and there were farmers who did think
that they had something to do with the potato disease. The change was
not a pleasant one: the turnpikes were deserted; the inns were void of
customers; no longer did the villagers hasten to see the coach change
horses, and the bugle of the guard was heard no more. For a time the
Eastern Counties Railway had a somewhat dolorous career. It was thought
to be something to be thankful for when the traveller by it reached his
journey's end in decent time and without an accident. Now the change is
marvellous. The Great Eastern Railway stands in the foremost rank of the
lines terminating in London. It now runs roundly 20,000,000 of train
miles in the course of a year. It carries a larger number of passengers
than any other line. It carries the London working man twelve miles in
and twelve miles out for twopence a day. It is the direct means of
communication with all the North of Europe by its fine steamers from
Harwich. It has yearly an increased number of season-ticket-holders. On
a Whit Monday it gives 125,000 excursionists a happy day in the country
or by the seaside. In 1891 the number of passengers carried was
81,268,661, exclusive of season-ticket-holders. It is conspicuous now
for its punctuality and freedom from accidents. It is, in short, a model
of good management, and it also deserves credit for looking well after
the interests of its employes, of whom there are some 25,000. It
contributes to the Accident Fund, to the Provident Society, to the
Superannuation Fund, and to the Pension Fund, to which the men also
subscribe, in the most liberal manner, and besides has established a
savings bank, which returns the men who place their money in it four per
cent. It is a liberal master. It does its duty to its men, who deserve
well of the public as of the Great Eastern Railway itself; but its main
merit, after all, is that it has been the making of East Anglia.
CHAPTER II.
THE STRICKLANDS.
Reydon Hall--The clergy--Pakefield--Social life in a village.
As I write I have lying before me a little book called 'Hugh Latimer; or,
The School-boy's Friendship,' by Miss Strickland, author of the 'Little
Prisoner,' 'Charles Grant,' 'Prejudice and Principle,' 'The Little
Quaker.' It bears the imprint--'London: Printed for A. R. Newman and
Co., Leadenhall Street.' On a blank page inside I find the following:
'James Ewing Ritchie, with his friend Susanna's affectionate regards.'
Susanna was a sister of Miss Agnes Strickland, the authoress, and was as
much a writer as herself. The Stricklands were a remarkable family,
living about four or five miles from Wrentham, on the road leading from
Wangford to Southwold, at an old-fashioned residence called Reydon Hall.
They had, I fancy, seen better days, and were none the worse for that.
The Stricklands came over with William the Conqueror. One of them was
the first to land, and hence the name. A good deal of blue blood flowed
in their veins. Kate--to my eyes the fairest of the lot--was named
Katherine Parr, to denote that she was a descendant of one of the wives
of the too-much-married Henry VIII., and in the old-fashioned
drawing-room of Reydon Hall I heard not a little--they all talked at
once--of what to me was strange and rare. Mr. Strickland had deceased
some years, and the widow and the daughters kept up what little state
they could; and I well remember the feeling of surprise with which I
first entered their capacious drawing-room--a room the size of which it
had never entered into my head to conceive of. It is to the credit of
these Misses Strickland that they did not vegetate in that old house, but
held a fair position in the world of letters. Miss Strickland herself
chiefly resided in town. Agnes, the next, whose 'Queens of England' is
still a standard book, was more frequently at home. The only one of the
family who did not write was Sarah, who married one of the Radical
Childses of Bungay, and who not till after the death of her husband
became respectable and atoned for her sins by marrying a clergyman.
Kate, as I have said, the fairest of the whole, married an officer in the
army of the name of Traill, and went out to Canada, and wrote there a
book called 'The Backwoods of Canada,' which was certainly one of the
most popular of the four-and-sixpenny volumes published under the
auspices of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful and Entertaining
Knowledge. Our friend was Susanna, who wrote a volume of poems on
Enthusiasm, and who seemed to me, with her dark eyes and hair, a very
enthusiastic personage indeed. The reason of her friendship with our
family was her deeply religious nature, which impelled her to leave the
cold and careless service of the Church--not a little to the disgust of
her aristocratic sisters, who, as of ancient lineage, not a little
haughty, and rank Tories, had but little sympathy with Dissent.. Susanna
was much at our house, and when away scarcely a day passed on which she
did not write some of us a letter or send us a book. Then there was a
brother Tom, a midshipman--a wonderful being to my inexperienced
eyes--who once or twice came to our house seated in the family
donkey-chaise, which seemed to me, somehow or other, not to be an
ordinary donkey-chaise, but something of a far superior character. I
have pleasant recollections of them all, and of the annuals in which they
all wrote, and a good many of which fell to my share. Like her sister,
Susanna married an officer in the army--a Major Moodie--and emigrated to
Canada, where the Stricklands have now a high position, where she had
sons and daughters born to her, and wrote more than one novel which found
acceptance in the English market. The Stricklands gave me quite a
literary turn. When I was a small boy it was really an everyday
occurrence for me to write a book or edit a newspaper, and with about as
much success as is generally achieved by bookmakers and newspaper
editors, whose merit is overlooked by an unthinking public. Let me say
in the Stricklands I found an indulgent audience. On one occasion I
remember reciting some verses of my own composition, commencing,
'I sing a song of ancient men,
Of warriors great and bold,
Of Hercules, a famous man,
Who lived in times of old.
He was a man of great renown,
A lion large he slew,
And to his memory games were kept,
Which now I tell to you,'
which they got me to repeat in their drawing-room, and which, though I
say it that should not, evinced for a boy a fair acquaintance with
'Mangnall's Questions' and Pinnock's abridgment of Goldsmith's 'History
of Rome.' Happily, at that time, Niebuhr was unknown, and sceptical
criticism had not begun its deadly work. We had not to go far for truth
then. It was quite unnecessary to seek it--at any rate, so it seemed to
us--at the bottom of a well; there it was right underneath one's
nose--before one's very eyes in the printed pages of the printed book.
Agnes Strickland did all she could to confer reputation on her native
county. The tall, dark, self-possessed lady from Reydon Hall was a lion
everywhere. On one occasion she visited the House of Lords, just after
she had written a violent letter against Lord Campbell, charging him with
plagiarism. Campbell tells us he had a conversation with her, which
speedily turned her into a friend. He adds: 'I thought Brougham would
have died with envy when I told him the result of my interview, and
Ellenborough, who was sitting by, lifted his hands in admiration.
Brougham had thrown me a note across the table, saying: "So you know your
friend Miss Strickland has come to hear you."' Miss Strickland often
visited Alison, the historian, at Possil House. He says of her that she
had strong talents of a masculine rather than feminine
character--indefatigable perseverance, and that ardour in whatever
pursuit she engaged in without which no one could undergo similar
fatigue. On one occasion she was descanting on the noble feeling of
Queen Mary, 'That may all be very true, Miss Strickland,' replied the
historian; 'but unfortunately she had an awkward habit of burning
people--she brought 239 men, women, and children to the stake in a reign
which did not extend beyond a few years!' 'Oh yes,' was her reply, 'it
was terrible, dreadful, but it was the fault of the age--the temper of
the times; Mary herself was everything that is noble and heroic.' Such
was her feminine tendency to hero-worship. Another tendency of a
feminine character was her love of talking. 'She did,' instances Sir
Archibald, 'not even require an answer or a sign of mutual intelligence;
it was enough if the one she was addressing simply remained passive. One
day when I was laid up at Possil on my library sofa from a wound in the
knee, she was kind enough to sit with me for two hours, and was really
very entertaining, from the number of anecdotes she remembered of queens
in the olden time. When she left the room she expressed herself kindly
to Mrs. Alison as to the agreeable time she had spent, and the latter
said to me on coming in, "What did you get to say to Miss Strickland all
this time? She says you were so agreeable, and she was two hours here."
"Say!" I replied with truth; "I assure you I did not say six words to her
the whole time."' Agnes was a terrible one to talk--as, indeed, all the
Stricklands were. In Suffolk such accomplished conversationalists were
rare.
It must have been, now I come to think of it, a dismal old house,
suggestive of rats and dampness and mould, that Reydon Hall, with its
scantily furnished rooms and its unused attics and its empty barns and
stables, with a general air of decay all over the place, inside and out.
It had a dark, heavy roof and whitewashed walls, and was externally
anything but a showy place, standing, as it did, a little way from the
road. It must have been a difficulty with the family to keep up the
place, and the style of living was altogether plain; yet there I heard a
good deal of literary life in London, of Thomas Pringle, the poet, and
the Secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, whose 'Residence in South
Africa' is still one of the most interesting books on that quarter of the
world, and of whom Josiah Conder, one of the great men of my smaller
literary world at that time, wrote an appreciative biographical sketch.
Mr. Pringle, let me remind my readers, was the original editor of
_Blackwood's Magazine_, a magazine which still maintains its reputation
as being the best of its class. Mr. Pringle, I believe, at some time or
other, had visited Wrentham; at any rate, the Stricklands, especially
Susanna, were among his intimate friends, and, from what I heard, I could
well believe, when, at a later period, I visited his grave in Bunhill
Fields, what I found recorded there--that 'In the walks of British
literature he was known as a man of genius; in the domestic circle he was
loved as an affectionate relative and faithful friend; in the wide sphere
of humanity he was revered as the advocate and protector of the
oppressed,' who 'left among the children of the African desert a memorial
of his philanthropy, and bequeathed to his fellow-countrymen an example
of enduring virtue.' At the home of the Pringles the Stricklands made
many literary acquaintances, such as Alaric Watts, and Mrs. S. C. Hall,
and others of whom I heard them talk. At that time, however, literature
was not, as far as women were concerned, the lucrative profession it has
since become, and I have a dim remembrance of their paintings--for in
this respect the Stricklands, like my own mother, were very
accomplished--being sold at the Soho Bazaar, a practice which helped to
maintain them in the respectability and comfort becoming their position
in life. But in London they never forgot the old home, and wrote so much
about it in their stories, that there was not a flower, or shrub, or
tree, or hedge, or mossy bank redolent in early spring of primroses and
violets, to which they had not given, to my boyish eyes, a glory and a
charm. This reference to painting reminds me of a feature of my young
days, not without interest, in connection with the name of Cunningham--a
name at one time well known in the religious world.
The reader must be reminded that the reverend gentleman referred to was a
_rara avis_, and that between him and the neighbouring clergy there was
little sympathy--unless the common rallying cry of 'The Church in
Danger!' was raised as an electioneering dodge. The clergyman at
Wrentham at that time, who declared himself the appointed vessel of grace
for the parish, I have been led to believe, since I have become older,
was by no means a saint, and his brethren were notorious as evil-livers.
Some twenty years ago one of them had his effects sold off, and his
library was viewed with no little amusement by his parishioners, to many
of whom, if popular fame be an authority, he was more than a spiritual
father. The library contained only one book that could be called
theological, and the title of that wonderfully unique volume was, 'Die
and be Damned; or, An End of the Methodists.' All the other books were
exclusively sporting, while the pictures were such as would have been a
disgrace to Holywell Street. It was of him that the clerk said that
'next Sunday there would be no Divine sarvice, as maaster was going to
Newmarket.' Once upon a time after a sermon one of his flock approached
him, as he had been preaching on miracles, to ask him to explain what a
miracle really was. The reverend gentleman gave his rustic inquirer a
kick, adding, 'Did you feel that?'
'Oh yes, sir; but what of that?'
'Why,' said the reverend gentleman, 'if you had not felt it, it would
have been a miracle, that is all.' Yet that man was as popular as any
parson in the district, perhaps more so, and it was with some indignation
in certain quarters that the people learned that a new Bishop had come to
Norwich, and that the parson had been deprived of his living for immoral
conduct. Of another it is said that, calling on a poor villager, dying
and full of gloomy anticipations as to the future, all he could say was,
'Don't be frightened; I dare say you will meet a good many people you
know.' I have often heard old men talk of the time when they used to
take the parson home in a wheelbarrow--but that was before we had a
Sunday-school, at which I was a regular teacher. The church had a
Sunday-school, but not till after the one in the chapel had existed many
years. Of these ornaments of the Church and foes of Dissent, some had
apparently a sense of shame--one of them, at any rate, committed suicide.
At Pakefield, some seven miles from Wrentham, and just on the borders of
Lowestoft, then, as now, the most eastern extremity of England, resided
the Rev. Francis Cunningham. He was a clergyman of piety and
philanthropy, rare at that time in that benighted district, and in this
respect he was aided by his wife, a little dark woman whom I well
remember, a sister of the far-famed John Joseph Gurney, of Earlham. It
is with pleasure I quote the following from the Journal of Caroline Fox:
'A charming story of F. Cunningham coming in to prayers just murmuring
something about the study being on fire, and proceeding to read a long
chapter and make equally long comments thereupon. When the reading was
over, and the fact became public, he observed, "Yes, I saw it was a
little on fire, but I opened the window on leaving the room."' Mr.
Cunningham had much to do with establishing a branch of the British and
Foreign Bible Society in Paris in connection with the Buxtons. In this
way, but on a smaller scale, the Cunninghams were equally distinguished,
and one of the things they had established at Pakefield was an infant
school, to which I, in company with my parents--indeed, I may add, the
whole family--was taken, in order, if possible, that our little village
should possess a similar institution. But my principal pilgrimages to
the Pakefield vicarage were in connection with some mission to aid
Oberlin in his grand work amongst the mountains and valleys of
Switzerland. It appeared Mr. and Mrs. Cunningham had visited the good
man, and watched him in his career, and had come back to England to gain
for him, if possible, sympathy and friends. Mrs. Cunningham had taken
drawings of the principal objects of interest, which had been
lithographed, and these lithographs my mother, who in her way was as
great an enthusiast as Susanna Strickland herself, was very anxious to
obtain; the financial position of the family, however, forbade any
thought of purchase. But she had a wonderful gift of painting, and she
painted while we children were learning the Latin grammar, or preparing
our lessons in the Delectus, much to my terror, as I had a habit of
restlessness which, by shaking the table, not only impaired her work, but
drew down upon me not a little of reproach; and with these paintings I
was despatched on foot to Pakefield, where, in return for them, I was
given the famous lithographs, which were to be preserved for many a year
in the spare room we called the parlour--drawing-rooms at that time in
East Anglia were, I think, unknown. What a joy it was to us children
when that parlour had its fire lit, and we found out that company was
coming--partly, I must add, for sensual reasons. We knew that the best
tea-things were to be used, that unusual delicacies were to be placed
upon the table, and I must do my mother the justice to say that she could
cook as well as she could paint; but for other and higher motives, and
not as an occasion of feasting or for the disuse of the economical
pinafore which was always worn to keep our clothes clean, did we rejoice
when we found there was to be tea in the parlour. If young people were
coming, we were sure to dissect puzzles, or play some game which combined
amusement with instruction; and if the party consisted of seniors, as on
the occasion of the Book Club--almost all Dissenting congregations had
their Book Clubs then--it was a pleasure to listen to my father's talk,
who was a well-read man, and who, being a Scotchman, had inherited his
full share of Scotch wit, which, however, was enlivened with quotations
from 'Hudibras,' the only poet, alas! in whom he seemed to take any
particular interest. There, in the parlour, were the fraternal meetings
attended by all the neighbouring Independent ministers, all clad in sober
black, and whose wildest exploits in rollicking debauchery were confined
to a pipe and a glass of home-made wine. Madeira, port and sherry were
unknown in ministers' houses, though now and then one got a taste of them
at the houses of men better to do, and who, perhaps, had been as far as
London once or twice in their lives. Of these neighbouring ministers,
one of the most celebrated at that time was the Rev. Edward Walford, then
of Yarmouth, who afterwards became tutor of Homerton College, and who,
after the death of a favourite and accomplished daughter--I can still
remember the gracefulness of her person--sank into a state of profound
melancholy, which led him to shut himself from his friends, to give up
all public preaching and tutorial work, and to consider himself as
hopelessly lost. It is a curious fact that he dated his return to reason
and happiness and usefulness after a visit paid him by my father, who
happened to be in town, and who naturally was drawn to see his afflicted
friend, with whom, in the days of auld lang syne, he had smoked many a
pipe and held many an argument respecting Edwards on Freedom of the Will,
and his favourite McKnight. Mrs. Walford, who was aware of my father's
intended visit, had thoughtfully prepared pipes and tobacco, and placed
them on the table of the room where the interview was to take place. My
father went and smoked his pipe and talked as usual, poor Mr. Walford
sitting sad and dejected, and refusing to be comforted all the while.
When my father had left--owing, I suppose, to the force of old
associations--actually the poor man approached the table, took up a pipe,
filled it with tobacco, and smoked it. From that hour, strange to say,
he recovered, wrote a translation of the Psalms, became a trustee of
Coward's College, and took charge of a church at Uxbridge. This is 'a
fac,' as Artemus Ward would say, and 'facs' are stubborn things. Of this
Mr. Walford, the well-known publisher of that name in St. Paul's
Churchyard was a son, and the firm of Hodder and Stoughton may be said to
carry on his business, though on a larger scale.
Dressed in rusty black, with hats considerably the worse for wear, with
shoes not ignorant of the cobbler's art, unconscious of and careless for
the fashions of the world, rarely in London, except on the occasion of
the May Meetings--no one can tell, except those who, like myself, were
admitted behind the scenes, as it were, how these good men lived to keep
alive the traditions of freedom, civil and religious, in districts most
under the sway of the ignorant squire and the equally ignorant parson of
the parish. If there has been a decency and charm about our country life
it is due to them, and them alone. Perhaps, more in the country than in
the crowded city is the pernicious influence felt of sons of Belial,
flushed with insolence and wine. It is difficult to give the reader an
idea of the utter animalism, if I may so term it, of rural life some
fifty years ago. For small wages these Dissenting ministers did a noble
work, in the way of preserving morals, extending education, promoting
religion, and elevating the aim and tone of |the little community in
which they lived, and moved, and had their being. At home the
difficulties of such of them as had large families were immense. The
pocket was light, and too often there was but little in the larder. But
they laboured on through good and bad report, and now they have their
reward. Perhaps one of their failings was that they kept too much the
latter end in view, and were too indifferent to present needs and
requirements. They did not try to make the best of both worlds. I can
never forget a remark addressed to me by all the good men of the class
with whom I was familiar in my childhood as to the need of getting on in
life and earning an honest penny, and becoming independent in a pecuniary
point of view. I was to be a good boy, to love the Lord, to study the
Assembly's Catechism, to read the Bible, as if outside the village there
was no struggle into which sooner or later I should have to plunge--no
hard battle with the world to fight, no temporal victory to win.
CHAPTER III
LOWESTOFT.
Yarmouth bloaters--George Borrow--The town fifty years ago--The
distinguished natives.
'I'm a-thinking you'll be wanting half a pint of beer by this time, won't
you?'
Such were the first words I heard as I left the hotel where I was a
temporary sojourner about nine o'clock. Of course I turned to look at
the speaker. He wore an oilskin cap, with a great flap hanging over the
back of the neck; his oilskin middle was encased in a thick blue
guernsey; his trousers were hidden in heavy jack-boots, which came up
above his knees; his face was red, and his body was almost as round as
that of a porpoise. When I add that the party addressed was similarly
adorned and was of a similar build, the reader will guess at once that I
was amongst a seafaring community, and let me add that this supposition
is correct. I was, in fact, at Lowestoft, and Lowestoft just now is,
with Yarmouth, the headquarters of the herring fishery. The truth is, as
the poet tells us, 'Things are not what they seem,' and that many of the
Yarmouth bloaters which we are in the habit of indulging in at breakfast
in reality come from Lowestoft.
It is worth going from London at the season of the year when the finest
bloaters are being caught, to realize the peril and the enterprise and
the industry connected with the herring trade, which employs some five
hundred boats, manned by seven to twelve men, who work the business on
the cooperative system, which, when the season is a good one, gives a
handsome remuneration to all concerned, and which drains the country of
young men for miles around. Each boat is furnished with some score of
nets, and each net extends more than thirty-two yards. The boat puts off
according to the tide, and if it gets a good haul, at once returns to the
harbour with its freight; if the catch is indifferent, the boat stays
out; the fish are salted as they are caught, and then the boat, generally
at a distance of about twenty miles from the shore, waits till a
sufficient number have been caught to complete the cargo. When that is
the case, the boat at once makes for Lowestoft, and the fish are unloaded
under a shed in heaps of about half a last (a last is professedly 10,000
herrings, but really much more). At nine a bell rings and the various
auctioneers commence operations. A crowd is formed, and in a very few
minutes a lot is sold off to traders who are well known, and who pay at
the end of the week. The auctioneer then proceeds to the next group,
which is disposed of in a similar way. Other auctioneers in various
parts of the enormous shed erected for their accommodation do the same,
and then, as more boats arrive, other cargoes are sold, the sailors
bringing a hundred as a sample from the boat. And thus all day long the
work of selling goes on, and as soon as a lot are sold they are packed up
with ice, if fresh, or with more salt, if already salted, and despatched
by train to various quarters of England, where, it is to be presumed,
they meet with a speedy and immediate sale. In this way as many as one
hundred and ninety-eight trucks are sometimes sent off in a single day.
But in London we are familiar with the kipper, the red herring, and the
Yarmouth bloater, and to see how they are prepared for consumption I
leave the market--always wet and fishy and slippery--and make my way to
the extensive premises on the beach belonging to Mr. Thomas Brown--the
only Brown whose name is familiar to the fish-dealer in every market in
England, and the extent of whose business may be best realized by the
reader when I state that Mr. Brown sends off from his factory as many as
forty lasts a week.
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
_regime_ 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 pounds, but I will begin if I can get one.' 'Then, I will
give thee 500 pounds.' Joseph Sturge immediately followed with a promise
of 250 pounds, and Mr. Wilberforce twenty guineas; and 1,000 pounds 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.
I have a very strong idea that the calm of the country and the peaceful
occupations of the people had not a very rousing influence upon the
intellect. I may go further, and say that the cares of the farm, when
high farming was unknown, did not much lift at that time the master above
the man. The latter wore a smock-frock, while the former, perhaps,
sported a blue coat with brass buttons, and had rather a better kind of
head-dress, and ambled along on a little steady cob, that knew at which
ale-house to call for the regular allowance, quite as well as his master.
But as regards talk--which was chiefly of bullocks and pigs--well, there
really was no very great difference after all. To such religion was the
mainspring which kept the whole intellect going; and religion was to be
had at the meeting. And I can well remember how strange it seemed to me
that these rough, simple, untutored sons of the soil could speak of it
with enthusiasm, and could pray, at any rate, with astonishing fervour.
Away from the influence of the meeting-house there existed a Boeotian
state of mind, only to be excited by appeals to the senses of the most
palpable character, a state of mind in which faith--the evidence of
things not seen, according to Paul--was quite out of the question; and I
regret to say that, notwithstanding the activity of the last fifty years
and the praiseworthy and laborious efforts of the East Anglian clergy in
all quarters, suitably to rouse and feed the intellect of the East
Anglian peasantry, a good deal yet remains to be done. Only a year or
two ago, riding on an omnibus in a Suffolk village, the driver asked me
if people could go to America by land. 'Of course not,' was my reply.
'Why do you ask such a question?' Well, it came out that he had 'heerd
tell how people got to Americay in ten days; and he did not see how they
could do that unless they went by land, and had good hosses to get 'em
there at that time.' On my explaining the real state of affairs, he
admitted, by way of apology, that he was not much of a traveller himself.
Once he had been to Colchester; but that was a long time ago.
But to return to the _Suffolk Chronicle_. It was my duty as a lad, when
it had been duly studied at home, to take it to the next subscriber, and
I fancy by the time the paper had gone its round it was not a little the
worse for wear. But there were other political impulses which tended to
create and feed the sacred flame of civil and religious liberty. In one
corner of the village lived a small shopkeeper, who stored away, among
his pots and pans of treacle and sugar and grocery, a few well-thumbed
copies, done up in dirty brown paper, of the squibs and caricatures
published by Hone, whom I can just remember, a red-faced old gentleman in
black, in the _Patriot_ office, and George Cruikshank, with whom I was to
spend many a merry hour in after-life. This small shopkeeper was one of
the chapel people--a kind of superintendent in the Sunday-school, for
which office he was by no means fitted, but there was no one else to take
the berth, and as the family also dealt with him in many ways, I had
often to repair to his shop. It was then our young eyes were opened as
to the wickedness in high places by the perusal of the 'Political House
that Jack built,' and other publications of a similar revolutionary
character. Nothing is sacred to the caricaturist, and half a century ago
bishops and statesmen and lords and kings were very fair subjects for the
exercise of his art. In our day things have changed for the better,
partly as the result of the Radical efforts, of which respectability at
that time stood so much in awe. London newspapers rarely reached so far
as Wrentham. It was the fashion then to look to Ipswich for light and
leading. However, as the cry for reform increased in strength, and the
debates inside the House of Commons and out waxed fiercer, now and then
even a London newspaper found its way into our house, and I can well
remember how our hearts glowed within us as some one of us read, while
father smoked his usual after-dinner pipe, previous to going out to spend
the afternoon visiting his sick and afflicted; and how such names as Earl
Grey, and Lord John Russell, and Lord Brougham--the people then called
him Harry Brougham; it was a pity that he was ever anything else--were
familiar in our mouths as household words.
In another way also there came to the children in Wrentham the growing
perception of a larger world than that in which we lived, and moved, and
had our being. One of the historic sites of East Anglia is Framlingham,
a small market town, lying a little off the highroad to London, a few
miles from what always seemed to me the very uninteresting village of
Needham Market, though at one time Godwin, the author of 'Caleb
Williams,' preached in the chapel there. There is now a public school
for Suffolk boys at Framlingham, and it may yet make a noise in the
world. Framlingham in our time has given London Mr. Jeaffreson, a
successful man of letters, and Sir Henry Thompson, a still more
successful surgeon. In my young days it was chiefly noted for its
castle. The mother of that amiable and excellent lady, Mrs. Trimmer,
also came from Framlingham; and it is to be hoped that the old town may
have had something to do with the formation of the character of a woman
whom now we should sneer at, perhaps, as goody-goody, but who, when
George the Third was King, did much for the education and improvement of
the young. I read in Mrs. Trimmer's life 'that her father was a man of
an excellent understanding, and of great piety; and so high was his
reputation for knowledge of divinity, and so exemplary his moral conduct,
that, as an exception to their general rule, which admitted no laymen, he
was chosen member of a clerical club in the town (Ipswich) in which he
resided. From him,' continues the biographer of the daughter, 'she
imbibed the purest sentiments of religion and virtue, and learnt betimes
the fundamental principles of Christianity.' Well, it is hoped Mr. Kirby
did his best for his daughter; but, after all, how much more potent is
the influence of a mother! And hence I may claim for Framlingham a fair
share in the formation of even so burning and shining a light as Mrs.
Trimmer.
The name Framlingham, say the learned, or did say--for what learned men
say at one time does not always correspond with what they say at
another--is composed of two Saxon words, signifying the habitation of
strangers; and to strangers the place is still rich in interest. In its
church sleeps the unfortunate, but heroic, Earl of Surrey, whose
harmonious verse still delights the students of English literature. Some
say he was born at Framlingham. This is matter of doubt; but there is no
doubt about the fact that he was buried there by his son, the Earl of
Northampton, who erected a handsome monument to his father's memory. The
monument is an elevated tomb, with the Earl's arms and those of his lady
in the front in the angles, and with an inscription in the centre. It
has his effigy in armour, with an ermined mantle, his feet leaning
against a lion couchant. On his left is his lady in black, with an
ermined mantle and a coronet. Both have their hands held up as in
prayer. On a projecting plinth in front is the figure of his second son,
the Earl of Northampton, in armour, with a mantle of ermine, kneeling in
prayer. Behind, in a similar plinth, kneeling with a coronet, and in
robes, is his eldest daughter, Jane, Countess of Westmoreland, on the
right; and his third daughter Catherine, the wife of Lord Henry Berkeley
on the left. The monument is kept in order, and painted occasionally, as
directed by the Earl of Northampton, out of the endowment of his hospital
at Greenwich. In repairing the monument in October, 1835, the Rev.
George Attwood, curate of Framlingham, discovered the remains of the Earl
lying embedded in clay, directly under his figure on his tomb. It is
difficult now to find what high treason the chivalrous and poetic and
gallant Earl had been guilty of; but at that time our eighth Henry ruled
the land, and if he wished anyone out of the way, he had not far to go
for witnesses or judge or jury ready to do his wicked and wanton will.
To the shame of England be it said, the Earl of Surrey was beheaded when
he was only thirty years of age. No particulars are preserved of his
deportment in prison or on the scaffold, but from the noble spirit he
evinced at his trial, and from his general character, it cannot be
doubted that he behaved in the last scene of his existence with fortitude
and dignity. On the barbarous injustice to which he was sacrificed
comment is unnecessary; but regret at his early fate is increased by the
circumstance that Henry was in extremities when he ordered his execution,
and that his swollen and enfeebled hands were unequal to the task of
signing his death-warrant. In this respect more fortunate was the father
of Surrey, the Duke of Norfolk, who is buried near the altar of the
church at Framlingham. He also was condemned to death, but in the
meanwhile the King died, and his victim was set free. Not far off is the
tomb of Henry Fitzroy, a natural son of King Henry. He was a friend of
Surrey, and was to have married his sister. The other monuments which
adorn the interior of this magnificent church are a table of black
marble, supported by angels, to the memory of Sir Robert Hitcham, a mural
monument by Roubillac, and others to commemorate virtues and graces, as
embodied in the lives of decent men and women in whom the world has long
ceased to take any interest.
The venerable castle--here I quote Dr. Dugdale's 'British
Traveller'--with its eventful history, imparts the strongest interest to
the town of Framlingham. Tradition refers its origin to the sixth
century, and ascribes it to Redwald, one of the early Saxon monarchs.
St. Edmund the Martyr fled hither in 870, and was besieged by the Danes,
who took Framlingham and held it fifty years. The Norman King gave the
castle to the Bigods. The castle passed through many hands. It was
there Queen Mary took shelter when, after the death of Edward VI., Lady
Jane Grey was called to the throne, and thence she came to London, on the
capture of the former, to take possession of the crown. It was an evil
day for England when she came to Framlingham Castle and beguiled the
hearts of the Suffolk men. Old Fox tells us that when Mary had returned
to her castle at Framlingham there resorted to her 'the Suffolke men,
who, being alwayes forward in promoting the proceedings of the Gospel,
promised her their aid and help, so that she would not attempt the
alteration of the religion which her brother, King Edward, had before
established by laws and orders publickly enacted, and received by the
consent of the whole realm in his behalf. She afterwards agreed with
such promise made unto them that no innovation should be made of
religion, as that no man would or could then have misdoubted her.
"Victorious by the aid of the Suffolke men," Queen Mary soon forgot her
promise. They of course remonstrated. It was, methinks,' adds Fox, 'an
heavie word that she answered to the Suffolke men afterwards which did
make supplication unto her grace to performe her promise. "For so much,"
saith she, "as you being but members desire to rule your head, you shall
one day perceive the members must obey their head, and not look to rule
over the same."' Well, Queen Mary was as good as her word. As Fox adds,
'What she performed on her part the thing itself and the whole story of
the persecution doth testifie.' But the stubborn Suffolk gospellers were
not to be put down, and a remnant had been left in Framlingham, as well
as in other parts of the country. At Framlingham we find a Richard
Goltie, son-in-law of Samuel Ward, of Ipswich, was instituted to the
rectory in 1630. In 1650 he refused the engagement to submit to the then
existing Government, and was removed, when Henry Sampson, M.A., a fellow
of Pembroke Hall, Cambridge, was appointed by his college to the vacancy.
He continued there till the Restoration, when Mr. Goltie returned and
took possession of the living, which he continued to hold till his death.
Not being satisfied to conform, Mr. Sampson continued awhile preaching at
Framlingham to those who were attached to his ministry, in private houses
and other buildings, and by his labours laid the foundation of the
Congregational or Independent Church in that town, as appears from a note
in the Church Book belonging to the Dissenters meeting at Woodbridge, in
the Quay Lane. Mr. Sampson collected materials for a history of
Nonconformity, a great part of which is incorporated in Calamy and
Palmer's works. It was to him that John Fairfax, of Needham Market,
wrote, when he and some other ministers were shut up in Bury Gaol for the
crime of preaching the Gospel. It appears that they had met in the
parish church, at Walsham-le-Willows, where, after the liturgy was read
by the clergyman of the parish, a sermon was preached by a non-licensed
minister. The party were then taken and committed to prison, where they
remained till the next Quarter Sessions, when they were released upon
their recognisances to appear at the next Assizes. Then, it seems,
though not convicted upon any other offence, upon the suggestion of the
justices, to whom they were strangers, they were committed again to
prison, on the plea that _they were persons dangerous to the public
peace_. Thus were Dissenters treated in the good old times. Mr. Sampson
seems to have fared somewhat better. After his removal, he travelled on
the Continent, returned to London, entered himself at the College of
Physicians, and lived and died in good repute. The old congregation
having become Unitarian, a new one was formed, and of this Church a
pillar was Mr. Henry Thompson--a gentleman well known and widely honoured
in his day. This Mr. Thompson had a son, who was sent to Wrentham to be
educated for awhile with myself. An uncle of his, one of the most
amiable of men, lived at Southwold, close by, and I presume it was by his
means that the settlement was effected. Be that as it may, the change
was a welcome one, as it gave me a pleasant companion for nearly five
years of boyish life. I confess my two sisters--one of whom has, alas!
long been in her grave--did all they could in the way of sports and
pastimes to meet my wants and wishes, and act like boys; but the fact is,
though it may be doubted in these days of Women's Rights, girls are not
boys, nor can they be expected to behave as such.
I confess the advent of this young Thompson from Framlingham was a great
event in our small family circle. In the first place he came from a
town, and that at once gave him a marked superiority. Then his father
kept a horse and gig, for it was thus young Thompson came to Wrentham,
and all the world over a gig has been a symbol of the respectability dear
to the British heart; and he had been for that time and as an only son
carefully and intelligently trained by one of the family who, in the
person of the late Edward Miall, founder of the _Nonconformist_, and M.P.
for Bradford, was supposed to be the incarnation of what was termed the
dissidence of Dissent. Young Thompson was also what would be called a
genteel youth, and gave me ideas as to wearing straps to my trousers,
oiling my hair, and generally adorning my person, which had never entered
into my unsophisticated head. He also had been to London, and as
Framlingham was some twenty miles nearer the Metropolis--the centre of
intelligence--than Wrentham, the intelligence of a Framlingham lad was of
course expected, _a fortiori_, to be of a stronger character than that of
one born twenty miles farther from the sun of London. There was also a
good deal of talent in the family on the mother's side. Mrs. Thompson
was a Miss Medley, and Mr. Medley was an artist of great merit, the son
of Mr. Medley, of Liverpool, a leading Baptist minister in his day, and a
writer of hymns still sung in Baptist churches. Mr. Medley was also
active as a Liberal, and was credited by us boys with a personal
acquaintance with no less illustrious an individual than the great
Brougham himself. Once or twice he came to lodge during the summer at
Southwold; naturally he was visited there by his grandson, who would
return well primed with political anecdote to our rustic circle, and was
deemed by me more of an authority than ever. Once or twice, too, I had
the honour of being a visitor, and heard Mr. Medley, a fine old
gentleman, who lived to a very advanced age, talk of art and artists and
other matters quite out of my usual sphere. It is not surprising, then,
that the grandson became in time quite an artist himself, though he is
better known to the world, not so much in that capacity, but as Sir Henry
Thompson, certainly not the least distinguished surgeon of our day. In
Lord Beaconsfield's last novel, 'Endymion,' we have a passing reference
to one Wrentham lad, Sir Charles Wetherell, as 'the eccentric and too
uncompromising Wetherell.' Assuredly the fame of another lad, Sir Henry
Thompson, connected with Wrentham, will longer live.
This reference to Sir Henry Thompson reminds me of his early attempts at
rhyme, which I trust he will forgive me for rescuing from oblivion. Once
upon a time we captured a young cuckoo, and having carefully gorged it
with bread-and-milk, and left it in a nest in an outhouse, which we
devoted mainly to rabbits, the next morning the poor bird was found to be
dead. A prize was offered for the best couplet. Three of us contended.
My sister wrote:
'This lonely sepulchre contains
A little cuckoo's dead remains.'
I wrote:
'To our grief, cuckoo sweet
Is lying underneath our feet.'
Thompson took quite a different and, read by the light of his subsequent
career, a far more characteristic view of the case. He took care, as a
medical man, to dwell on the cause which had terminated the career of so
interesting a bird. According to him,
'It had a breast as soft as silk,
And died of eating bread-and-milk.'
Assuredly in this case the child was father to the man.
But the great awakening of the time, that which made the dry bones live,
and fluttered the dove-cotes of Toryism--we never heard the word
Conservative then--was the General Election. At that time we were always
having General Elections. We had one, of course, when George IV. died
and King William reigned in his stead; we had another when the Duke was
out and the Whigs came in; and then we had another when the cry ran
through the land, and reached even the most remote villages of East
Anglia, of 'The Bill, the whole Bill, and nothing but the Bill!' Voters
were brought down, or up, as the case might be, from all quarters of the
land. Coaches-full came tearing along, gorgeous with election flags, and
placarded all over with names of rival candidates. Gentlemen of ancient
lineage called to request of the meanest elector the favour of his vote
and influence. It was with pain the Liberals of our little village
resolved to vote against our Benacre neighbour, Sir Thomas Gooch, who had
long represented the county, but of whom the Radicals spoke derisively as
Gaffer Gooch, or the Benacre Bull, and chose in his stead a country
squire known as Robert Newton Shaw, utterly unknown in our quarter of the
county.
It was rather a trying time for the Wrentham Liberals and Dissenters to
do their duty, for Sir Thomas was a neighbour, and always was a pleasant
gentleman in the parish, and had power to do anyone mischief who went
against him. Our medical man did not vote at all. Our squire actually,
I believe, supported Sir Thomas, and altogether respectable people found
themselves in an extremely awkward position. At Southwold the people
were a little more independent, for Gaffer Gooch rarely illuminated that
little town with his presence; and as my father, with the economy which
is part and parcel of the Scotchman as he leaves his native land, but
which rarely extends to his children, had, by teaching gentlemen's sons
and other ways, been able to save a little, which little had been devoted
to the purchase of cottage property in Southwold (well do I remember the
difficulty there was in collecting the rents; never, assuredly, were
people so much afflicted or so unfortunate when the time of payment
came), it was for Southwold that he claimed his vote. I, as the son, was
permitted to share in the glories of that eventful day. The election
took place at school-time, and my companion was Henry Thompson. We had
to walk betimes to Frostenden, where Farmer Downing lived, who was that
_rara avis_ a Liberal tenant farmer; but of course he did not vote tenant
farmer, but as a freeholder. It was with alarm that Mrs. Downing saw her
lord and master drive off with us two lads in the gig. There had been
riots at London, riots as near as Ipswich, and why not at Halesworth? A
mile or two after we had started we met, per arrangement, the Southwold
contingent, who joined us with flags flying and a band playing, and all
the pride and pomp and circumstance of war. We rode in a gig, and our
animal was a steady-going mare, and behaved as such; but all had not gigs
or steady-going mares. Some were in carts, some were on horseback, some
in ancient vehicles furbished up for the occasion; and as the band played
and the people shouted, some of the animals felt induced to dance, and
especially was this restlessness on the part of the quadrupeds increased
as we neared Halesworth, in the market-place of which was the
polling-booth, and in the streets of which we out-lying voters riding in
procession made quite a show. Halesworth, or Holser, as it was called,
was distant about nine miles, lying to the left of Yoxford, a village
which its admirers were wont to call the Garden of Suffolk. In 1809 the
Bishop of Norwich wrote from Halesworth: 'The church in this place is
uncommonly fine, and the ruins of an old castle (formerly the seat of the
Howards) are striking and majestic.' But when we went there the ruins
were gone--the more is the pity--and the church remained, at that time
held by no less a Liberal than Richard Whately, afterwards Archbishop of
Dublin. I used at times to meet with a country gentleman--a brother of a
noble lord--who after he had spent a fortune merrily, as country
gentlemen did in the good old times, came to live on a small annuity,
and, in spite of his enormous daily consumption of London porter at the
leading inn of the town, managed to reach a good old age. The hon.
gentleman and I were on friendly terms, and sometimes he would talk of
Whately, who had often been at his house. But, alas! he remembered
nothing of a man who became so celebrated in his day except that he would
eat after dinner any number of oranges, and was so fond of active
exercise that he would take a pitchfork and fill his tumbrels with
manure, or work just like a labourer on a farm. Of the Doctor's aversion
to church-bell ringing we have a curious illustration in a letter which
appeared in the _Suffolk Chronicle_ in 1825: 'A short time since a
wedding took place in the families of two of the oldest and most
respectable inhabitants of the town, when it was understood that the
Rector had, for the first time since his induction to his living, given
permission for the bells to greet the happy pair. After, however,
sounding a merry peal a short hour and a half, a message was received at
the belfry that the Rector thought they had rung long enough. The
tardiness with which this mandate was obeyed soon brought the rev.
gentleman in person to enforce his order, which was then reluctantly
complied with to the great disappointment of the inhabitants, and
mortification of the ringers, several of whom had come from a
considerable distance to assist in the festivities of the day.' The
Independent chapel was an old-fashioned meeting-house, full of heavy
pillars, which, as they intercepted the view of the preacher, were
favourable to that gentle sleep so peculiarly refreshing on a Sunday
afternoon--especially in hot weather--in the square and commodious family
pew. The minister was an old and venerable-looking divine of the name of
Dennant, who was always writing little poems--I remember the opening
lines of one,
'A while ago when I was nought,
And neither body, soul, nor thought'--
and whose 'Soul Prosperity,' a volume of sober prose, reached a second
edition. His grandson, Mr. J. R. Robinson, now the energetic manager of
the _Daily News_, may be said to have achieved a position in the world of
London of which his simple-hearted and deeply-devotional grandfather
could never have dreamed. As I was the son of a brother minister, Mr.
Dennant's house was open to myself and Thompson, though we did not go
there on the particular day of which I write. The leading tradesman of
the town was a Liberal, and had at least one pretty daughter, and there
we went. Most of the day, however, we mixed with the mob which crowded
round, while the voters--you may be sure, not all of them sober--were
brought up to vote. The excitement was immense; there was the hourly
publication of the state of the poll--more or less unreliable, but,
nevertheless, exciting; and what a tumult there was as one or other of
the rival candidates drove up to his temporary quarters in a carriage and
pair, or carriage and four, made a short speech, which was cheered by his
friends and howled at derisively by his foes, while the horses were being
changed, and then drove off at a gallop to make the same display and to
undergo the same ordeal elsewhere! To be sure, there was a little rough
play; now and then a rush was made by nobody in particular, and for no
particular reason; or, again, an indiscreet voter--rendered additionally
so by indulgence in beer--gave occasion for offence; but really, beyond a
scrimmage, a hat broken, a coat or two torn or bespattered with mud, a
cockade rudely snatched from the wearer, little harm was done. The
voters knew each other, and had come to vote, and had stayed to see the
fun. For the timid, the infirm, the old, the day was a trying one; but
there was an excitement and a life about the affair one misses now that
the ballot has come into play, and has made the voter less of a man than
ever. Of course the shops were shut up. All who could afford to do so
kept open house, and at every available window were the bright, beaming
faces of the Suffolk fair--oh, they were jolly, those election days of
old! Well, in East Anglia, as elsewhere, spite of the parsons, spite of
the landlords, spite of the slavery of old custom, spite of old
traditions, the freeholders voted Reform, and Reform was won, and
everyone believed that the kingdom of heaven was at hand. In ten years,
I heard people say, there would be no tithes for the farmer to pay, and
welcome was the announcement; for then, as now, the agricultural interest
was depressed, and the farmer was a ruined man. Now one takes but a
languid interest in the word Reform, but then it stirred the hearts of
the people; and how they celebrated their victory, how they hoisted flags
and got up processions and made speeches, and feasted and hurrahed,
'twere tedious to tell. All over the land the people rejoiced with
exceeding joy. Old things, they believed, had passed away--all things
had become new.
CHAPTER V.
BUNGAY AND ITS PEOPLE.
Bungay Nonconformity--Hannah More--The Childses--The Queen's
Librarian--Prince Albert.
In the beginning of the present century, a disgraceful attack on
Methodism--by which the writer means Dissent in all its
branches--appeared in what was then the leading critical journal of the
age, the _Edinburgh Review_. 'The sources,' said the writer, a clergyman
(to his shame be it recorded) of the Church of England--no less
distinguished a divine than the far-famed Sydney Smith--'from which we
shall derive our extracts are the Evangelical and Methodistical magazines
for the year 1807, works which are said to be circulated to the amount of
18,000 or 20,000 every month, and which contain the sentiments of
Arminian and Calvinistic Methodists, and of the Evangelical clergymen of
the Church of England. We shall use the general term of Methodism to
designate these three classes of fanatics, not troubling ourselves to
point out the finer shades and nicer discriminations of lunacy, but
treating them as all in one general conspiracy against common-sense and
rational orthodox Christianity.' To East Anglia came the reputed worthy
Canon for an illustration of what he termed their policy to have a great
change of ministers. Accordingly, he reprints from the _Evangelical
Magazine_ the following notice of an East Anglian Nonconformist
ordination, which, by-the-bye, in no degree affects the charge unjustly
laid at the door of these 'fanatics,' as engaged 'in one general
conspiracy against common-sense and rational orthodox Christianity.'
'Same day the Rev. W. Haward, from Hoxton Academy, was ordained over the
Independent Church at Rendham, Suffolk; Mr. Pickles, of Walpole, began
with prayer and reading; Mr. Price, of Woodbridge, delivered the
introductory discourse, and asked the questions; Mr. Dennant, of
Halesworth, offered the ordinary prayer; _Mr. Shufflebottom_ [the italics
are the Canon's], of Bungay, gave the charge from Acts xx. 28; Mr.
Vincent, of Deal, the general prayer; and Mr. Walford, of Yarmouth,
preached to the people from Phil. ii. 16.' As a lad, I saw a good deal
of Bungay, though I never knew the Shufflebottom whose name seems to have
been such a stumbling-block and cause of offence to the Reverend Canon of
St. Paul's. I say Reverend Canon of St. Paul's, because, though the
writer had not gained that honour when the review appeared, it was as
Canon he returned to the charge when he sanctioned the republication of
it in his collected works. It was at Bungay that I had my first painful
experience of the utter depravity of the human heart--a truth of which,
perhaps, for a boy, I learned too much from the pulpit. The river
Waveney runs through Bungay, and one day, fishing there, I lent a
redcoat--with whom, like most boys, I was proud to scrape an
acquaintance--my line, he promising to return it when I came back from
dinner. When I did so, alas! the red-coat was gone.
Nonconformity in Bungay seems to have originated in the days of the Lord
Protector, in the person of Zephaniah Smith, who was the author of: (1)
'The Dome of Heretiques; or, a discovery of subtle Foxes who were tyed
tayle to tayle, and crept into the Church to do mischief'; (2) 'The
Malignant's Plot; or, the Conspiracie of the Wicked against the Just,
laid open in a sermon preached at Eyke, in Suffolk, January 23, 1697.
Preached and published to set forth the grounds why the Wicked lay such
crimes to the charge of God's people as they are cleare off'; (3) 'The
Skillful Teacher.' Beloe says of this Smith that 'he was a most singular
character, and among the first founders of the sect of the Antinomians.'
One of the first leaders of this sect is said by Wood to have been John
Eaton, who was a minister and preacher at Wickham Market, in which
situation and capacity Smith succeeded him. This Smith published many
other tracts and sermons, chiefly fanatical and with fantastical titles.
One is described by Wood, and is called 'Directions for Seekers and
Expectants, or a Guide for Weak Christians in these discontented times.'
'I shall not give an extract from these sermons,' writes Beloe, who is
clearly, like Wood, by no means a sympathetic or appreciative critic,
'though very curious, but they are not characterized by any peculiarity
of diction, and are chiefly remarkable for the enthusiasm with which the
doctrine of the sect to which the preacher belonged is asserted and
vindicated. The hearers also must have been endowed with an
extraordinary degree of patience, as they are spun out to a great
length.' Mr. Smith's ministry at Bungay led to a contention, which
resulted in an appeal to the young Protector, Richard Cromwell. Then we
find Mr. Samuel Malbon silenced by the Act of Uniformity, who is
described as a man mighty in the Scriptures, who became pastor to the
church in Amsterdam. In 1695 we hear of a conventicle in Bungay, with a
preacher with a regularly paid stipend of 40 pounds a year. Till 1700
the congregation worshipped in a barn; but in that year the old
meeting-house was built, and let to the congregation at 10 pounds per
annum. In 1729 it was made over to the Presbyterians or Independents
worshipping there, 'for ever.' The founders of that conventicle seem to
have suffered for their faith; yet the glorious Revolution of 1688 had
been achieved, and William of Orange--who had come from a land which had
nobly sheltered the earlier Nonconformists--was seated on the throne.
Bungay, till Sydney Smith made it famous, was not much known to the
general public. It was on the borders of the county and out of the way.
The only coach that ran through it, I can remember, was a small one that
ran from Norwich through Beccles and Bungay to Yarmouth; and, if I
remember aright, on alternate days. There was, at any rate, no direct
communication between it and London. Bungay is a well-built market town,
skirted on the east and west by the navigable river Waveney, which
divides it from Norfolk, and was at one time noted for the manufacture of
knitted worsted stockings and Suffolk hempen cloth; but those trades are
now obsolete. The great Roger Bigod--one of the men who really did come
over with the Conqueror--built its castle, the ruins of which yet remain,
on a bold eminence on the river Waveney. 'The castle,' writes Dugdale,
'once the residence and stronghold of the Bigods, and by one of them
conceived to be impregnable, has become the habitation of helpless
poverty, many miserable hovels having been reared against its walls for
the accommodation of the lowest class.' The form of the castle appears
to have been octangular. The ruins of two round fortal towers and
fortresses of the west and south-west angles are still standing, as also
three sides of the great tower or keep, the walls of which are from 7 to
11 feet thick and from 15 to 17 feet high. In the midst of the ruins, on
what is called the Terrace, is a mineral spring, now disused, and near it
is a vault, or dungeon, of considerable depth. Detached portions of the
wall and their foundations are spread in all directions in the castle
grounds, a ridge of which, about 40 yards long, forms the southern
boundary of a bowling-green which commands delightful prospects. The
mounds of earth raised for the defence of the castle still retain much of
their original character, though considerably reduced in height. One of
them, facing the south, was partly removed in 1840, with the intention of
forming a cattle market. As a boy I often heard of the proud boast of
Hugh Bigod, second Earl, one of King Stephen's most formidable opponents,
as recorded by Camden:
'Were I in my castle of Bungay,
Upon the river Waveney,
I would not care for the King of Cockeney.'
In ancient times the Waveney was a much broader stream than it is now,
and Bungay was called _Le Bon Eye_, or the good island, then being nearly
surrounded by water. Hence the name, in the vulgar dialect, of Bungay.
To 'go to Bungay to get a new bottom' was a common saying in Suffolk.
In 1777 we find Hannah More writing to Garrick from Bungay, which she
describes as 'a much better town than I expected, very clean and
pleasant.' 'You are the favourite bard of Bungay'--at that time the
tragedians of the city of Norwich were staying there--'and,' writes
Hannah, who at that time had not become serious and renounced the
gaieties of the great world, 'the dramatic furore rages terribly among
the people, the more so, I presume, from being allowed to vent itself so
seldom. Everybody goes to the play every night,--that is, every other
night, which is as often as they perform. Visiting, drinking, and even
card-playing, is for this happy month suspended; nay, I question if, like
Lent, it does not stop the celebration of weddings, for I do not believe
there is a damsel in the town who would spare the time to be married
during this rarely-occurring scene of festivity. It must be confessed,
however, the good folks have no bad taste.' It must be recollected that
Hannah More in reality belongs to East Anglia. She was the daughter of
Jacob More, who was descended from a respectable family at Harleston. He
was a High Churchman, but all his family were Nonconformists. His mother
used to tell young people that they would have known how to value Gospel
privileges had they lived like her, when at midnight pious worshippers
went with stealthy steps through the snow to hear the words of
inspiration delivered by a holy man at her father's house; while her
father, with a drawn sword, guarded the entrance from violent or profane
intrusion, adding that they boarded the minister and kept his horse for
10 pounds a year. An unfortunate lawsuit deprived the Mores of their
property, and thus it was that the celebrated Hannah was born at
Gloucestershire, and not in Suffolk or Norfolk. The family mansion was
at Wenhaston, not very far from Wrentham.
In my young days Bungay owed all its fame and most of its wealth to the
far-famed John Childs, who was one of our first Church Rate martyrs, to
whom is due mainly the destruction of the Bible-printing monopoly, and to
whom the late Edward Miall was much indebted for establishing the
_Nonconformist_ newspaper. For many years it was the habit of Mr. Childs
to celebrate that event by a dinner, at which the wine was good and the
talk was better. Old John Childs, of Bungay, had a cellar of port which
a dean might have envied; and many was the bottle that I cracked with him
as a young man, after a walk from Wrentham to Bungay, a distance of
fourteen miles, to talk with him on things in general, and politics in
particular. He was emphatically a self-made man--a man who would have
made his way anywhere, and a man who had a large acquaintance with the
reformers of his day in all parts of the country. On one occasion the
great Dan O'Connell came to pay him a visit, much to the delight of the
Suffolk Radicals, and to the horror of the Tories. The first great
dinner at which I had the honour of being present, and to which I was
taken by my father, who was a great friend of Mr. Childs, was on the
occasion of the presentation to the latter of a testimonial by a
deputation of distinguished Dissenters from Ipswich in connection with
his incarceration in the county gaol at Ipswich, for having refused to
pay rates for the support of a Church in which he did not believe, and
for the performance of a service in which he took no part. At that time
'the dear old Church of England,' while it was compelled to tolerate
Dissent, insisted on Dissent being taxed to the uttermost farthing; and
that it does not do so now, and that it is more popular in consequence,
is due to the firm stand taken by such men as John Childs of Bungay. He
was a great phrenologist. In his garden he had a summer-house, which he
facetiously termed his scullery, where he had some three hundred plaster
casts, many of which he had taken himself of public individuals and
friends and acquaintances. My father was honoured in this way, as also
my eldest sister. Sir Henry Thompson and I escaped that honour, but I
have not forgotten his dark, piercing glance at our heads, when, as boys,
we first came into his presence, and how I trusted that the verdict was
satisfactory. Of course the Childses went to Meeting, but when I knew
Bungay Mr. Shufflebottom had been gathered to his fathers, and the Rev.
John Blaikie, a Scotchman, and therefore always a welcome guest at
Wrentham, reigned in his stead. Mr. Childs had a large and promising
family, few of whom now remain. His daughter was an exceptionally gifted
and glorious creature, as in that early day it seemed to me. She also
died early, leaving but one son, Mr. Crisp, a partner in the well-known
legal firm of Messrs. Ashurst, Morris, and Crisp. It was in the little
box by the window of the London Coffee House--now, alas! no more--where
Mr. Childs, on the occasion of his frequent visits to London, always
gathered around him his friends, that I first made the acquaintance of
Mr. Ashurst, the head of the firm--a self-made man, like Mr. Childs, of
wonderful acuteness and great public spirit. In religion Mr. Ashurst was
far more advanced than the Bungay printer. 'It is not a thing to reason
about,' said the latter; and so to the last he remained orthodox,
attended the Bungay Meeting-house, invited the divines of that order to
his house, put in appearance at ordination services, and openings of
chapels, and was to be seen at May Meetings when in town, where
occasionally his criticisms were of a freer order than is usually met
with at such places.
'The Bungay Press,' wrote a correspondent of the _Bookseller_, on the
death of Mr. Charles Childs, who had succeeded his father in the
business, 'has been long known for its careful and excellent work.
Established some short time before the commencement of the present
century, its founder had, for twenty years, limited its productions to
serial publications and books of a popular and useful character, and in
the year 1823, soon after Mr. John Childs had taken control of the
business, upwards of twenty wooden presses were working, at long hours,
to supply the rapidly-increasing demand for such works as folio Bibles,
universal histories, domestic medicine books, and other publications then
issuing in one and two shilling numbers from the press.' Originally Mr.
Childs had been in a grocer's shop at Norwich. There he was met with by
a Mr. Brightley, a printer and publisher, who, originally a schoolmaster
at Beccles, had suggested to young Childs that he had better come and
help him at Bungay than waste his time behind a counter. Fortunately for
them both the young man acceded to the proposal, and travelled all over
England driving tandem, and doing everywhere what we should now call a
roaring trade. Then he married Mr. Brightley's daughter, and became a
partner in the firm, which was known as that of John and R. Childs, and,
latterly of Childs and Son. 'Uncle Robert,' as I used to hear him
called, was little known out of the Bungay circle. He had a nice house,
and lived comfortably, marrying, after a long courtship, the only one of
the Stricklands who was not a writer. Agnes was often a visitor at
Bungay, and not a little shocked at the atrocious after-dinner talk of
the Bungay Radicals. 'Do you not think,' said she, in her somewhat
stilted and tragic style of talk, one day, to a literary man who was
seated next her, author of a French dictionary which the Childses were
printing at the time--'Do you not think it was a cruel and wicked act to
murder the sainted and unfortunate Charles I.?' 'Why, ma'am,' stuttered
the author, while the dinner-party were silent, 'I'd have p-p-poisoned
him.' The gifted authoress talked no more that day. Naturally, as a
lad, seeing so much of Bungay, I wished to be a printer, but Mr. Childs
said there was no use in being a printer without plenty of capital, and
so that idea was renounced.
But to return to Mr. John Childs. About the year 1826, in association
with the late Joseph Ogle Robinson, he projected and commenced the
publication of a series of books known in the trade as the 'Imperial
Edition of Standard Authors,' which for many years maintained an
extensive sale, and certainly then met an admitted literary want,
furnishing the student and critical reader, in a cheap and handsome form,
with dictionaries, histories, commentaries, biographies, and
miscellaneous literature of acknowledged value and importance, such as
Burke's works, Gibbon's 'Decline and Fall,' Howe's works, the writings of
Lord Bacon--books which are still in the market, and which, if I may
speak from a pretty wide acquaintance with students' libraries fifty
years ago, were in great demand at that time. The disadvantage of such a
series is that the books are too big to put in the pocket or to hold in
the hand. But I do not know that that is a great disadvantage to a real
student who takes up a book to master its contents, and not merely to
pass away his time. To study properly a man must be in his study. In
that particular apartment he is bound to have a table, and if you place a
book on a table to read, it matters little the size of the page, or the
number of columns each page contains. Mr. Childs set the fashion of
reprinting standard authors on a good-sized page, with a couple of
columns on each page. That fashion was followed by Mr. W. Smith--a Fleet
Street publisher, than whom a better man never lived--and by Messrs.
Chambers; but now it seems quite to have passed away. On the failure of
Mr. Robinson, Mr. Childs' valuable reprints were placed in the hands of
Westley and Davis, and subsequently with Ball, Arnold, and Co.; and
latterly, I think, the late Mr. H. G. Bohn reissued them at intervals.
As to his part publications, when Mr. Childs had given up pushing them,
he disposed of them all to Mr. Virtue, of Ivy Lane, Paternoster Row, who
then secured almost a monopoly of the part-number trade, and thus made a
large fortune. 'I love books that come out in numbers,' says Lord
Montford in 'Endymion,' 'as there is a little suspense, and you cannot
deprive yourself of all interest by glancing at the last part of the last
volume.' And so I suppose in the same way there will always be a
part-number trade, though the reapers in the field are many, and the
harvest is not what it was.
Active and fiery in body and soul, Mr. John Childs, at a somewhat later
period, with the sympathy and advocacy of Mr. Joseph Hume and other
members of Parliament, and aided to a large extent by Lord Brougham,
succeeded in procuring the appointment of a Committee of the House of
Commons to inquire into the existing King's Printers' Patent for printing
Bibles and Acts of Parliament, the period for the renewal of which was
near at hand. The principle upon which the patent was originally granted
appeared to be _correctness secured only by protection_--a fallacy which
the voluminous evidence of the Committee most completely exposed. The
late Alderman Besley, a typefounder, and a great friend of John Childs,
as well as Robert Childs, practical printers, gave conclusive evidence on
this head, and the result was that, although the patent was renewed for
thirty years, instead of sixty as before, the Scriptures were sold to the
public at a greatly reduced price, and the trade in Bibles, though
nominally protected, has ever since been practically free.
Nor did Mr. Childs' labours end here. In Scotland the right of printing
Bibles had been granted exclusively to a company of private persons,
Blaire and Bruce, neither of whom had any practical knowledge of the art
of printing, or took any interest in the different editions of the Bible.
The same men also had the supplying all the public revenue offices of
Government with stationery, by which means they enjoyed an annual profit
of more than 6,000 pounds a year. When the Government, in an economical
mood, ordered them to relinquish the latter contract, not only were they
compensated for the loss, but were continued in their vested rights as
regards Bible-printing. In Scotland there was no one to interfere with
their rights. In England patents had been given not only to the firm of
Messrs. Strahan, Eyre and Spottiswoode, but to each of the two
Universities of Cambridge and Oxford. Up to 1821 the Bibles of the
English monopolists came freely into Scotland, but then a prohibition,
supported by decisions in the Court of Sessions and the House of Lords,
was obtained. In 1824 Dr. Adam Thompson, of Coldstream, and three
ministers were summoned to answer for the high crime and misdemeanour of
having, as directors of Bible societies, delivered copies of an edition
of Scriptures which had been printed in England, but which the Scotch
monopolists would not permit to circulate in Scotland. Bible societies
in Scotland had received, in return for their subscription to the London
society, copies of an octavo Bible in large type, to which the Scotch
patentees had no corresponding edition, and which was much prized by the
aged. And it was because Dr. Thompson and others helped to circulate it,
as agents of the London Bible Society, that they were proceeded against.
The Scotch Bible, in consequence of the monopoly, was as badly printed as
the English one. In order to show how monopoly had failed to secure good
work, a gentleman sent to the Archbishop of Canterbury an enormous list
of errors which he had found in the Oxford Nonpareil Bible. In an old
Scotch edition the apostle is made to say, 'Know ye not that the
righteous shall _not_ inherit the kingdom of God?' In another edition
'The four beasts of the Apocalypse' are '_sour_ beasts.' Dr. Lee,
afterwards Principal of Edinburgh University, felt deeply the injustice
done by the monopoly, and the heavy taxation consequently imposed upon
the British and Foreign Bible Society; but he was a man of the study
rather than of the street. Yet in 1837 the monopoly, powerfully defended
as it was by Sir Robert Inglis, who dreaded cheap editions of the Word of
God, as necessarily incorrect and leading to wickedness and infidelity of
all kinds, fell, and it was to John Childs, of Bungay, that in a great
measure the fall was due, while owing to the repeated labours of Dr. Adam
Thompson and others, we got cheaper Bibles and Testaments on the other
side of the Tweed.
If you turn to the life of Dr. Adam Thompson, of Coldstream, the man who
had the most publicly to do with the fall of the monopoly, there can be
no doubt on this head. Though specially interested in the English
patents, Mr. Childs was aware that the one for Scotland fell, to be
renewed sooner by twenty years, and he kept dunning Joseph Hume on the
subject, who, Radical Reformer, at that time had his hands pretty full.
Mr. Childs had got so far as to have his Committee, and to get the
evidence printed. What was the next step? Dr. Thompson's biographer
shall tell us. 'Mr. Childs had been looking out for a Scottish
Dissenting minister of proved ability, zeal, and influence, who should
feel the immense and urgent importance of the question, and after
mastering the unjust principles and the injurious results of the
monopoly, should testify to these before the Committee, in a weighty and
pointed manner, and effectively bring them also before the ministers and
people of Scotland. He fixed upon Dr. Thompson, and the letter in which
he wrote to the Doctor to prepare for becoming a witness was the
beginning of a ten years' copious correspondence, the first in a series
of many hundreds of very lengthy letters, in which Mr. Childs, with great
shrewdness, sagacity, and vigour, and with perfect confidence of always
being in the right, acted as universal censor, pronouncing oracularly
upon all ecclesiastical and political men and organs, expressing
unqualified contempt for the House of Lords, and very small satisfaction
with the House of Commons, showing no mercy to Churchmen, and little but
asperity to Dissenters, and denouncing all British journals as base or
blind except the _Nonconformist_.' Only two of these letters are
published in Dr. Thompson's biography. I give one, partly because it is
interesting, and partly because it is characteristic. Unfortunately, of
all John Childs' letters to myself, written in a fine, bold hand, exactly
reproduced by his son and grandson, so that I could never tell one from
the other, I have preserved none. Childs thus wrote to Dr. Thompson,
July 15th, 1839:
'MY DEAR FRIEND,
'You will be happy to know that I went into Newgate this morning with
my friend Ashurst, and heard their pardon read to the Canadians.
They were released this afternoon, and Mr. Parker and Mr. Wixon have
been dining with me, and are gone to a lodging, taken for them by Mr.
A., where they may remain till their departure on Wednesday. I have
just sent to Mr. Tidman to inform him they will worship God and
return thanks in his place to-morrow, if all be well. How
wonderfully God has appeared for these people! My dear friend, when
I first saw them in January all things appeared to be against them,
but all has been overruled for good.
'At the time you left on Monday evening, Lord John was making known
to the House of Commons, in your own words, the plan proposed by
yourself, and adopted by him, to my amazement. Most heartily do I
congratulate you on the termination of the event, so decidedly
honourable to yourself in every way. I do not expect you will
approve of all that I have done, but I felt it to be my duty to
address a letter to the _Pilot_ on the subject, calling attention to
the liberty taken with you, and the manner in which you were
humbugged when in concert with the London societies, and the absolute
triumph of your cause when conducted with single-handed integrity,
intelligence, and energy. If it shall happen that you do not approve
of all I have said, I am sure you ought, because without you, and
with you, if you had left it to the fellows here, Scotland's
Dissenters would have now appeared the degraded things which, on the
Bible subject, the English Dissenters have appeared in my eyes for
some years past. It is due to you. I was fairly rejoiced when I saw
Lord John's declaration, because I could see from his answer to Sir
James Graham that he meant the thing should be done. Scotland ought
to have a day of rejoicing and thanksgiving, and as I said to a
friend to whom I wrote in Edinburgh, "You ought to have a
monument--the Thompson monument." "That, sir," the guide would say,
"is erected to honour a man by whose honest energy and zeal Scotland
was freed from the most degrading tyranny--that of a monopoly in
printing the Word of God." The tablet should bear that memorable
sentence of yours on the first day of your examination, "All
monopolies are bad." Of all monopolies religious monopolies are the
worst, and of all religious monopolies a monopoly of the Word of God
is the most outrageous.' Alas! I have heard nothing of the Thompson
monument.
Such a man was John Childs. One more busy in body and brain I never
knew. That he was disposed to be cynical was natural. Most men who see
much of the world, and who do not wear coloured glasses, are so. Take
the history of the Bible monopoly. The work of its abolition was
commenced by John Childs, of Bungay, carried on and completed as far as
Scotland was concerned by Dr. Adam Thompson, while the British public in
its usual silliness awarded 3,000 pounds to Dr. Campbell, on the plea--I
quote the words of the late Dr. Morton Brown, of Cheltenham--that, 'God
gave the honour very largely to our friend, Dr. Campbell, to smite this
bloated enemy of God and man full in the forehead.' The bloated enemy,
as regards Scotland, was dead before Dr. Campbell had ever penned a line.
As regards England, I believe it still exists.
It must have been about 1837 that the name of John Childs, of Bungay, was
made specially notorious by reason of his refusal to pay Church-rates,
and when he had the honour of being the first person imprisoned for their
non-payment. He was proceeded against in the Ecclesiastical Courts, and
as his refusal to pay was solely on conscientious grounds, he did not
contest the matter. The result was, he was sent to Ipswich Gaol for the
non-payment of a rate of 17s. 6d., the animus of the ecclesiastical
authorities being manifested by the endorsement of the writ, 'Take no
bail.' It was the first death-blow to Church-rates. The local
excitement it created was intense and unparalleled. In the House of
Commons Sir William Foulkes presented several petitions from Norfolk, and
Mr. Joseph Hume several from Suffolk, on the subject. One entire sitting
of the House of Commons was devoted to the Bungay Martyr, as Sir Robert
Peel ironically termed him. The Bungay Martyr had however, right on his
side. It was found that a blot had been hit, and it had to be removed.
The excitement produced by putting Mr. Childs into gaol was intense at
that time all over the land. 'I beg to inform you,' wrote a Halesworth
Dissenter, Mr. William Lincoln, to the editor of the _Patriot_, at that
time the organ of Dissent, 'that my highly-esteemed and talented friend,
Mr. John Childs, of Bungay, has just passed through this town, in custody
of a sheriff's officer, on his way to our county gaol, by virtue of an
attachment, at the suit of Messrs. Bobbet and Scott, churchwardens of
Bungay, for non-payment of 17s. 6d. demanded of him as a Church-rate, and
subsequent refusal to obey a citation for appearance at the Bishop's
Court.' Naturally the writer remarked: 'It will soon be seen whether
proceedings so well in harmony with the days of fire and faggot are to be
tolerated in this advanced period of the nineteenth century.' When, in
due time, Mr. Childs obtained his release, the event was celebrated at
Bungay in fitting style. I find in a private diary the following note:
'This day week was a grand day at Bungay. I heard there were not less
than six or seven thousand people there to welcome his return, and the
request of the police, that the greatest order might be observed, was
fully acted up to. Miss C. did not enter Bungay with her father. I
suppose when she found so great a multitude of horsemen, gigs,
pedestrians and banners, they thought it better for the young lady and
the younger children to retire to the close carriages. Mr. C. during his
imprisonment had letters from all parts of the kingdom.' I remember the
leading Dissenters came to Bungay with a piece of plate, to present to
Mr. Childs, to commemorate his heroism. A dinner was given by Mr. Childs
in connection with the presentation. At that dinner, lad as I was, I was
permitted to be present. I had never seen anything so grand or stately
before; and that was my first interview with John Childs, a dark,
restless, eagle-eyed man, whom I was to know better and love more for
many a long day. I took to Radical writing, and nothing could have
pleased John Childs better. I owed much to his friendship in after-life.
In 1833 the Church-rate question was originally raised in Bungay, and
many of the Dissenters refused to pay. The local authorities at once
took high ground, and put twelve of the recusants into the Ecclesiastical
Court. They caved in, leaving to John Childs the honour of martyrdom.
At the time of Mr. Childs' imprisonment he had recently suffered from a
severe surgical operation, and it was believed by his friends impossible
that he could survive the infliction of imprisonment. The Rev. John
Browne writes: 'A committee very generously formed at Ipswich undertook
the management of his affairs, and when they learned at the end of eleven
days' imprisonment that he had undergone a most severe attack, indicating
at least the possibility of sudden death, they sent a deputation to the
Court to pay the sum demanded. The Court, however, required, as well as
the money, the usual oath of canonical obedience, and this Mr. Childs
refused to give. He was told by his friends that he would surely die in
prison, but his reply was, 'That is not my business.' But it seems so
much had been made of the matter by the newspapers that Mr. Childs was
released without taking the oath. Charles Childs, the son, followed in
his father's steps. At Bungay the Churchmen seemed to have determined to
make Dissenters as uncomfortable as possible. Actually five years after
they had thrown the father into prison, the churchwardens proceeded
against the son, having been baffled in repeated attempts to distrain
upon his goods, and cited him into the Ecclesiastical Court, where it
took two and a half years to determine whether the sum of three shillings
and fourpence was due. At the end of that time the judge decided it was
not, and the churchwardens had to pay Mr. Childs' costs as well as their
own, which in the course of time amounted to a very respectable sum.
Charles Childs, who died suddenly a few years since, and who never seemed
to me to have aged a day since I first knew him, was truly a chip of the
old block. He was much in London, as he printed quite as much as his
father for the leading London publishers. An enlightened patriot, he was
in very many cases successful in resisting the obstacles raised from time
to time by party spirit or Church bigotry. On more than one occasion he
conducted a number of his workmen through an illegally-closed path, and
opened it by the destruction of the fences, repeated appeals to the
persistent obstructions having proved unavailing. He was a man of
scholarly and literary attainments, a clever talker, well able to hold
his own, and during the Corn Law and Currency agitation he contributed
one or more articles on these subjects to the _Westminster Review_, then
edited by his friend, the late General Perronet Thompson, a very foremost
figure in Radical circles forty years ago, always trying to get into
Parliament--rarely succeeding in the attempt. 'How can he expect it,'
said Mr. Cobden to me one day, 'when, instead of going to the principal
people to support him, he finds out some small tradesman--some little
tailor or shoemaker--to introduce him?' Once upon a time the _Times_
furiously attacked Charles Childs. His reply, which was able and
convincing, was forwarded, but only procured admission in the shape of an
advertisement, for which Mr. Childs had to pay ten pounds. The corner of
East Anglia of which I write rarely produced two better men than the
Childs, father and son. They are gone, but the printing business still
survives, though no longer carried on under the well-known name. By
their noble integrity and public spirit they proved themselves worthy of
a craft to which light and literature and leading owe so much. It is to
such men that England is under lasting obligations, and one of the
indirect benefits of a State Church is that it gives them a grievance,
and a sense of wrong, which compels them to gird up their energies to act
the part of village Hampdens or guiltless Cromwells. All the manhood in
them is aroused and strengthened as they contend for what they deem right
and just, and against force and falsehood. Poets, we are told, by one
himself a poet,
'Are cradled into poetry by wrong;
They learn in suffering what they teach in song.'
Nonconformists have cause especially to rejoice in the bigotry and
persecution to which they have been exposed, since it has led them by a
way they knew not, to become the champions of a broader creed and a more
general right than that of which their fathers dreamed. It is easy to
swim with the stream; it requires a strong man to swim against it. Two
hundred years of such swimming had made the Bungay Nonconformists strong,
and gave to the world two such exceptionally sturdy and strengthful men
as John and Charles Childs. I was proud to know them as a boy; in
advancing years I am prouder still to be permitted to bear this humble
testimony to their honest worth. It is because Nonconformity has raised
up such men in all parts of the land, that a higher tone has been given
to our public life, that politics mean something more than a struggle
between the ins and the outs, and that 'Onward' is our battle-cry.
Of the young men more or less coming under the influence of the Childs's,
perhaps one of the most successful was the late Bernard Bolingbroke
Woodward, Librarian to her Majesty. When I first knew him he was in a
bank at Norwich. Thence he passed to Highbury College, and in due time,
after he had taken his B.A. degree, settled as the Independent minister
at Wortwell, near Harleston, in Norfolk. There he became connected with
John Childs, and, amidst much hard work, edited for the firm a new
edition of 'Barclay's Universal English Dictionary.' In 1860, on the
death of Mr. Glover, who had for many years filled the post of Librarian
to the Queen at Windsor Castle, Mr. Woodward's name was mentioned to the
Prince, in reply to inquiries for a competent successor. Acting on the
advice of a friend at head-quarters, Mr. Woodward forwarded to Prince
Albert the same printed testimonials which he had sent in when he was a
candidate for the vacant secretaryship of a large and popular society,
and to those alone he owed his appointment to the office of Librarian to
the Queen. An interview took place at Windsor Castle, which was highly
satisfactory; but before the appointment was finally made, Mr. Woodward
informed Her Majesty and the Prince that there was one circumstance which
he had omitted to mention, and which might disqualify him for the post.
'Pray, what is that disqualification?' asked the Prince. 'It is,'
replied Mr. Woodward, 'that I have been educated for, and have actually
conducted the services of an Independent congregation in the country.'
'And why should that be thought to disqualify you?' asked the Prince.
'It does nothing of the sort. If that is all, we are quite satisfied,
and feel perfectly safe in having you for a librarian.' Am I not
justified in saying that at one time Bungay influences reached far and
near?
CHAPTER VI.
A CELEBRATED NORFOLK TOWN.
Great Yarmouth Nonconformists--Intellectual life--Dawson Turner--Astley
Cooper--Hudson Gurney--Mrs. Bendish.
When David Copperfield, Dickens tells us, first caught sight of Yarmouth,
it seemed to him to look rather spongy and soppy. As he drew nearer, he
remarks, 'and saw the whole adjacent prospect, lying like a straight, low
line under the sky, I hinted to Peggotty that a mound or so might have
improved it, and also that if the land had been a little more separated
from the sea, and the town and the tide had not been quite so much mixed
up, like toast-and-water, it would have been much nicer.' He adds: 'When
we got into the street, which was strange to me, and smelt the fish, and
pitch, and oakum, and tallow, and saw the sailors walking about, and the
carts jingling up and down over the stones, I felt that I had done so
busy a place injustice.' In this opinion his readers who know Yarmouth
will agree. Brighton and Hastings and Eastbourne might envy Yarmouth its
sandy beach, where you can lead an amphibious life, watching the
fishing-smacks as they come to shore with cargoes often so heavy as to be
sold for manure; watching the merchant-ships and yachts that lie securely
in the Roads, or the long trail of black smoke of Scotch or northern
steamers far away; watching the gulls ever skimming the surface of the
waves; or the children, as they build little forts and dwellings in the
sand to be rudely swept to destruction by the advancing tide. In the
golden light of summer, how blue is the sky, how green the sea, how
yellow the sand, how jolly look the men and handsome the women! What
health and healing are in the air, as it comes laden with ozone from the
North Sea! You have the sea in front and on each side to look at, to
walk by, to splash in, to sail on. The danger is, that you grow too fat,
too ruddy, too hearty, too boisterous. As we all know, Venus was born
out of the sea, and out there on that eastern peninsula, of which
Yarmouth is the pride and ornament, there used to flourish bonny lasses,
as if to show that the connection between the ocean and lovely woman is
as intimate as of yore. Yarmouth and Lowestoft owe a great deal to the
Great Eastern Railway, which has made them places of health-resort from
all parts of England; and truly the pleasure-seeker or the holiday-maker
may go farther and fare worse.
I was a proud boy when first I set foot in Yarmouth. How I came to go
there I can sca
Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/30717