Part 3

Blomfield, grandfather of the Bishop of London, kept a school here, and Crabbe Robinson was one of his pupils. The preacher at that time at the Independent chapel was Mr. Waldegrave. Crabbe Robinson describes him as “an ignorant, noisy, ranting preacher; he bawled loud, thumped the cushion, and sometimes cried; he was, however, a kind man, and of course he was a favourite of mine.” As an illustration of the state of religion among the Independents a hundred years ago, it is curious to notice Robinson’s mother’s experience, which he quotes. “There was no allusion to the Trinity,” he writes, “in it, or any other disputed doctrine. Indeed, the word belief scarcely occurs. The one sentiment which runs throughout is a consciousness of personal unworthiness, with which are combined a desire to be united to the Church, and a reliance on the merits of Christ.” One of the great men who lived later on at Bury was Capel Lofft, a gentleman of good family, an author also on an infinity of subjects. Capel Lofft is chiefly remembered now as the earliest patron of the poet Blomfield. He was acting as Magistrate at Bury, and was a leader among the Liberals of the place. Another distinguished East Anglian, who lived near Bury at that time was the celebrated agricultural writer, Arthur Young. It was to Bury Madame de Genlis fled for safety on the outbreak of the French Revolution. The celebrated Pamela escaped with her. Another French refugee who found temporary shelter at Bury was the Duke de Liancourt. It was he who brought the news of the capture of the Bastille to the unfortunate Louis, who exclaimed, “Why, that is a revolt.” “Sire,” answered Liancourt, “it is not a revolt—it is a revolution.” A Miss Bude, of Bury, who afterwards became the wife of Clarkson, the philanthropist, Mr. Robinson mentions as “the most eloquent woman I have ever known, with the exception of Madame de Staël.” It was at Bury that Robinson, who had been called to the bar, made his _debut_. At his first dinner with the barristers at the Angel Inn, among the company was Hart, one of the most remarkable men of the circuit. He was originally a preacher among the Calvinistic Methodists. It was said to him once, “Mr. Hart, when I hear you in the pulpit I wish you were never out of it; when I see you out of it, I wish you were never in it.” Bury Gaol had acquired some celebrity for the superior way in which its criminal population were looked after.

Bury St. Edmunds may claim to have given shelter to the immortal Daniel Defoe. He had been in the pillory before the Royal Exchange, in London, near the Conduit at Cheapside, and the third day at Temple Bar. He was the hero of the people, who garlanded him with flowers, repeating as they did so, with special gusto, the lines:—

Tell them the men that placed him here Are scandals to the times, Are at a loss to find his guilt, And can’t commit his crimes.

But his imprisonment ruined him financially, his brick works at Tilbury failing through his absence. On the intercession of Harley, he was released early in August, 1704, and at once retired to Bury St. Edmunds to avoid the public gaze, and to recruit his health. He was not idle there, for he issued pamphlets within a month, besides his reviews. The chapel where he attended yet remains. The old Presbyterian Chapel in Churchgate Street must have been erected when he was there. It is a fine old-fashioned red-brick building, where Rev. Mr. Kennard at present preaches to a rather scanty congregation.

But the modern inhabitants of Bury do not come up to the high literary standard of their predecessors, such as Richard D’Aunger Vyle, tutor to Edward III.; Jocelin of Brakeland, whose chronicle of the monastery is referred to as vividly personifying the religious life of the middle ages; and John Lydgate, who took charge of the School of Rhetoric in the town, and wrote numerous poems, such as the _Storie of Thebes_, _The __Troy Book_, and _London Lickpenny_, one of our earliest satires. Nor must we forget Richard Byfield, one of Tyndal’s friends, who was formerly Chamberlain for the Monastery. Richard de Bury, Chancellor to Edward III., and author of the _Philobiblion_, deserves honourable mention here as a native of the town. Fielding, in his _Amelia_, sends one of his characters to Bury for recovery of health, and describes it as a gay and busy town. Mrs. Inchbald, whose history reads like a romance, was born in a small farm-house at Standingfield, close by Bury St. Edmunds. The mother, Mrs. Simpson, had a strong taste for the theatre, and her family loved acting quite as much as she did. They all diligently attended the Bury Theatre—even the rehearsals. The actors and actresses were looked up to, almost worshipped, and when the theatre was closed the chief amusement of the family consisted in reading aloud the scenes which had been enjoyed so heartily. The unmarried son left the farm for the stage, and Elizabeth longed to do the same. Before reaching the age of thirteen, she frequently declared that she would rather die than live any longer without seeing the world. When a few years older, and ripe in maiden charms, she made her way to London, married an actor, and became an actress; wrote her simple story which yet finds readers, and died in the sixty-eighth year of her age, after she had burnt her memoirs, which would have been well worth reading, and for which she had been offered a thousand guineas. Another well-known name connected with Bury was that of Calamy, the elder, a rigid Presbyterian, who, about 1630, was one of the town lecturers at Bury. Subsequently he became Rector of Aldersmanbury, London, and one of the Assembly of Divines, and frequently preached before Parliament. He lived to see London in ashes, the sight of which broke his heart. His son Edmund was born at Bury, became a distinguished preacher, was ejected, and formed a congregation in Currier’s Hall, near Cripplegate, London. His son, who was likewise a leading London preacher, was the editor of the Abridgement of Mr. Baxter’s _History of His Life and Times_, and left behind him _An Historical Account of My Own Life_, a valuable contribution to the annals of his times published in 1829.

There is an anecdote of Rowland Hill, the eccentric preacher, in connection with Bury, too good to be omitted. He had come to preach at the Congregational Chapel, and, there being no railway then, had travelled in his own carriage, and with his own horses. Very properly he was anxious about the accommodation provided for the latter. The minister, Mr. Dewhirst, told him that he need be under no apprehension on that score, as he had a horse-dealer, a member of his church, who would look after them. “What!” said Rowland Hill, in astonishment, “a horse-dealer a member of a Christian Church! who ever heard of such a thing?” Evidently at that time horse-dealers had a somewhat doubtful reputation. Is it not delightful to think how much honester they are now?

Politically Bury St. Edmunds is extinct. It returned two members since 1292. Formerly the constituency consisted only of the Corporation. In 1832 it was enlarged so as to embrace the resident Freemen and the ten-pound householders, and it was the custom for the Duke of Grafton and the Marquis of Bristol each to return a member. Field-Marshal Conway, the friend of Horace Walpole, was the most distinguished man Bury St. Edmunds ever returned to Parliament. It is an anomaly that gives Bury the right to return the one member left it by recent legislation. But we rejoice in anomalies. For instance, look at Ireland. Ireland is inferior to the great metropolis, either in regard to population or property, but Ireland rejoices in nearly double the number of legislators it sends to the Imperial Parliament.

V. IPSWICH: THE PRIDE OF THE ORWELL.

LYING in a valley surrounded by hills, up which the town is gradually climbing, and watered by the picturesque Orwell, which elevates the town to the dignity of a port, and within little more than an hour and a half’s run from London by the Great Eastern Railway, Ipswich may claim to be a place well worth visiting, while to the trader it is known and appreciated as a busy and thriving town. When I first knew it—at a time a little antecedent to the advent of the illustrious Mr. Pickwick—it was not much of a place to look at. With the exception of the space opposite the Town Hall, a handsome building all of the modern time, the people seemed sadly hampered for want of room. In this respect the place has been wonderfully improved of late, as much as any town in Her Majesty’s dominions; not even Birmingham more. It was one of the first places to have an Arboretum, which is well kept up for the health and comfort of its people. Then by the river a pleasant promenade has been formed, where, when the tide comes up from Harwich, bringing with it a faint touch of the briny, you may fancy that you are by the side of the sea itself. That River Orwell is a sight in itself, and is utilised by the young and vigorous as regards boating and bathing in a way conducive to the development of health and muscle alike. The corn market at Ipswich is one of the most important in the kingdom, and the public buildings are numerous, and boast not a little of architectural skill, as, for instance, the Grammar School, the theatre, Tacket Street Chapel—one of the oldest representatives of Nonconformity in the place—the pile of buildings forming the offices of _The East Anglian Daily Times_—the most successful of the East Anglian dailies, which would be a credit even to the metropolis. One of the handsomest piles of buildings in the town is that occupied by the Museum, the Schools of Art and Science, and the Victorin Free Library. Since their completion in 1881, the whole of the valuable books and archælogical treasures belonging to the Corporation have been classified and attractively arranged for inspection by visitors. The old Judge’s chambers have now been turned into a club, which supplies a want felt in such a place. I think Ipswich was one of the first towns to start a Mechanics’ Institute, still in vigorous existence; while all over Europe you may meet with agricultural machines that had their birth in the great works of Ransomes, Sims, and Jefferies—names dear to the farmer all the land over. Ipswich is now also becoming celebrated for its boots and shoes, while its tasteful shops indicate a considerable amount of intelligence and wealth as existing among its people to the present day.

Ipswich contains no less than thirteen churches, built, for the most part, in the Perpendicular style of architecture. Portions of some, however, are of earlier date. The oak door at St. Mary at the Elms, for instance, is in the Norman style, but slightly enriched, and therefore probably of the older or primary Norman. The Town Hall stands upon the Cornhill, upon the site of St. Mildred’s Church, many centuries disused. There also stood an ancient Hall of Pleas; and a Sociary or Seating Room of the Corpus Christi Guilds was erected there in Henry VIII.’s time. The mansions of Ipswich merchants in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, still to be found ornamenting the parish of St. Clement’s, are worthy of close inspection, as they attest the wealth and importance of those who once inhabited them. Very many of the houses bear dates, and have fine ornamental exteriors. Many of the fine carved corner posts of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries still remain. A gateway, an interesting relic of the great Cardinal Wolsey, who was a native of Ipswich, stands abutting upon College Street, and near the East end of St. Peter’s Church. It is of brick and small, and was probably not the chief place of egress attached to the building, which was undoubtedly built in a style of magnificence, and in accordance with the fine taste in architecture which the Cardinal was known to have possessed. Over the doorway are the arms of Henry VIII., and on each side of the Royal coat is a trefoil-headed niche, though now containing no figures. The place was erected in 1528. In the early part of the present century Ipswich was evidently a declining town. In 1813 its population was only 13,670, when Windham, the great statesman, who visited the place, speaks of it in very favourable terms as a town, picturesque and pleasant. At this present time the town has a population of 57,260. One of the most eminent men born in Ipswich was Firmin, the London draper, who was a philanthropist of the noblest character, and who did much for the poor both at Ipswich and in London. He was a Unitarian when to be anything but orthodox was considered in all circles as a matter of serious censure, and yet he was a friend of a Liberal Bishop. He is buried in Christ Church, Newgate Street, close to the great school for which he did so much, and to the funds of which he was such a liberal contributor. In every way he is to be considered a credit to his native town, and as one of the foremost men of the age in which he lived, and which he so greatly adorned. He set a good example that many of our merchant princes have not been slow to imitate. Had he been orthodox his fame would have been greater still.

One of the oldest houses in Ipswich is that known as Christ Church, the dwelling place of the Fonnereaus for many generations. It is one of the oldest houses in England, and has been inhabited for 350 years. There is not a better example of Elizabethan building to be met with anywhere. More than once has Royalty been hospitably entertained there. The most celebrated Royal visitor was Queen Elizabeth, who made a tour of the Eastern Counties in 1589, and rode through Essex and Suffolk with a crowd of attendant cavaliers. Her Majesty reached Ipswich in August, and was entertained there four days. Local tradition says that the bed Her Majesty slept in may be seen to this day in the haunted chamber of the old mansion. Long before the house was built, there was on the spot the convent and priory of Christ Church, tenanted by monks, known as Black Canons of St. Augustine, who took an active part in the business of the town, and to whom King John granted a charter for a market, which became a very popular one. As regards the park, the legend is that the bowling-green on the summit, now surrounded by a double avenue of magnificent limes, was one of those places selected by the Druids for purposes of worship. It is certain that the Danes, who were much given to sailing up and down the Orwell, on plunder bent, chose this very spot as the site of what may be called a hall of justice. There is reason to believe that on this very green Charles II. played bowls. There was a celebrated Lord Rochester who visited the house, and found the park-keeper driving two donkeys for the purpose of keeping the turf in good order. Further tradition says that in order not to hurt the turf the donkeys wore boots, which induced the facetious Earl to observe that Ipswich was “a town without people, that there was a river without water, and that asses wore boots.” Christ Church is now on sale. Ultimately it is to be hoped it will be purchased by the Corporation for a people’s palace and park.

In the old times Ipswich must have been a much more picturesque place than it is to-day. All its old records are religiously preserved by a worthy townsman, Mr. John Glyde, in his _Illustrations of Old Ipswich_, a handsome work, which is a credit to the town, and which ought to find a place in the library of East Anglians wealthy enough to purchase it. He writes lovingly of its gates and walls indicating the lamentable state of insecurity by which our forefathers were embarrassed in those good old times, when the Curfew Bell tolled every evening at eight o’clock. “There is, perhaps,” says an antiquarian writer, “no house in the kingdom which, for its size, is more curiously or quaintly ornamented than the ancient house still standing in the Butter Market.” The tradition is that Charles II. was hidden for awhile in that house after his defeat at Worcester. Be that as it may, the Ipswich traders, like John Gilpin, were men of credit and renown, and Fuller, in the seventeenth century, spoke of the number of wealthy merchant houses in Ipswich. It was in the reign of Elizabeth, remarks Mr. Glyde, that Ipswich seems to have attained the zenith of its fame. There is scarcely a branch of foreign commerce carried on at the present time, with the exception of trade with China, that was not prosecuted with more or less entirety in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. At that time Ipswich was much richer in shipping than Yarmouth, Southampton, or Lynn. Foreign weavers discovered the advantage of using English wool, and the gold of Flanders found its way into the pockets of English traders. The town still boasts a memorial of Cardinal Wolsey’s munificent liberality. One of its representatives was no less a distinguished person than Bacon—

The wisest, greatest, meanest of mankind.

Cavendish, the explorer of the world, was one of the personages at one time often to be seen in its streets—streets along which had ridden in triumph Queens Mary and Elizabeth, to say nothing of the Saxon Queen, who at one time resided in the town. But if Ipswich knows no longer the grandeur and pageantry of the past, if its Black Friars are vanished, it is still the abiding place of that new and better spirit to which Cromwell appealed, and not in vain, when he sought to make this England of ours great and free.

“I knew of no town to be compared to Ipswich,” wrote old Cobbett, “except it be Nottingham, and there is this difference that Nottingham stands high and on one side looks over a fine country whereas Ipswich is in a dell, meadows running up above it and a beautiful arm of the sea below it. From the town itself you can see nothing, but you can in no direction go from it a charter of a mile without finding views that a painter might crave, and then the country round is so well cultivated.” A good deal has been done for Ipswich since Cobbett’s day. It has its public promenades and in the neighbourhood of the river there still lingers somewhat of the scenery Gainsborough loved to paint. There is also a good deal of literary association connected with Ipswich. The White Horse Inn still remains in much the same state as it was in the times of Mr. Pickwick, “famous,” wrote Dickens, “in the neighbourhood, in the same degree as a prize ox, or county paper chronicled turnip or unwieldy pig for its enormous size.” Any one who has sojourned there will find it easy to understand how the illustrious Pickwick came to mistake a lady’s bed-chamber for his own. Why should not the Great White Horse be as dear to the admirers of Dickens as the Leather Bottle at Cobham? If the admirers of Pickwick rush as they do by hundreds to Cobham to view the room where Pickwick slept, why, it may be asked, should not a similar patronage be extended to the Great White Horse at Ipswich.

Curious people besides Pickwick and his friends have favoured Ipswich. There lived there in the reign of William III., a family known as the “odd family,” a most appropriate name, as the following facts clearly prove. Every event, good, bad, or indifferent, came to that family in an odd year, or on an odd day of the month, and every member of it was odd in person, manner, or behaviour. Even the letters of their christian names always amounted to an odd number. The father and mother were Peter and Rahab; their seven children (all boys) bore the names of Solomon, Roger, James, Matthew, Jonas, David, and Ezekiel. The husband possessed only one leg, and his wife only one arm; Solomon was blind in his left eye, and Roger lost his right optic by an accident. James had his left ear pulled off in a quarrel; Matthew’s left hand had but three fingers; Jonas had a stump foot; David was humpbacked; and Ezekiel was 6ft. 2in at the age of 19. Every one of the children had red hair, notwithstanding the fact that the father’s hair was jet black and the mother’s white. Strange at birth all died as strange. The father fell into a deep sawpit and was killed; the wife died five years after of starvation. Ezekiel enlisted, was afterwards wounded in 23 places, but recovered. Roger, James, Matthew, Jonas, and David died in 1713, in different places on the same day; Solomon and Ezekiel were drowned in the Thames in 1723.

Thomas Colson, known to Ipswich people as Robinson Crusoe, died in the year 1811. He was originally a wool-comber, then a weaver, but the failure of that employment induced him to enter the Suffolk Militia, and while quartered in Leicester with his Regiment, he learned the trade of stocking weaving, which he afterwards followed in Suffolk. But this occupation he shortly exchanged for that of fisherman on the Orwell. His little craft, which he made himself, was a curiosity in its way, and seemed too crazy to live in bad weather, and yet in it he toiled day and night, in calm or storm. Subject to violent chronic complaints, with a mind somewhat disordered, in person tall and thin, with meagre countenance and piercing blue eyes, he was thus described by a contemporary poet—

With squalid garments round him flung, And o’er his bending shoulders hung, A string of perforated stones, With knots of elm and horses bones. He dreams that wizards leagued with hell, Have o’er him cast their deadly spell; Though pinching pains his limbs endure, He holds his life by charms secure, And, while he feels the torturing ban, No wave can drown the spell-bound man.

—But this security was the means of his death. In October, 1811, there was a great storm on the Orwell, and he was driven in his boat on the mud. He refused to leave his vessel, though advised and implored to do so. The ebb of the tide drew his boat into deep water, and he was drowned.

Amongst the charitable women of Ipswich must be mentioned Miss Parish, a maiden lady, who died there in 1810. She seems to have relieved everyone who was in distress. At the time of her death she had actually twenty pensioners living in her house, besides children supported at different schools, while numbers were cheered by her occasional donations. She was a good Samaritan indeed. It is to be hoped there are to be found many such in the Ipswich of to-day.

VI. LIVING NORWICH.

WE have heard a good deal of Norwich. When the summer comes, some enterprising journalist manages to find his way there, and if he has a copy of Evelyn, waxes eloquent over its gardens, and market-place, and ancient castle, and its memories of Sir Thomas Browne. I write of the Norwich of to-day—of living Norwich—a city with a population of more than a hundred thousand—that has renewed its youth—that is marching on like John Brown’s soul; a Norwich that was, as I first remember it, a seat of Parliamentary and political corruption, of vice and ignorance, of apathy and sloth. It is a grand old city, none grander anywhere in England. It is a place to me of pleasant memories, and the stranger within its gates must admit the charm of its grey towers and churches, its cathedral, its well-wooded suburbs extending over a wide range of hills. In that respect some claim for Norwich that it resembles Jerusalem. From all I can make out I should be inclined to give Norwich the preference. It has fewer Jews and not so many fleas.