prosaic lands towards Hevingham, whose great church, overlooking the
road from its knoll, is a mile distant from the village. It is a church
with lofty nave, but no aisles, and, restored with more thoroughness
than discretion, has been swept clean of any possible interest. But its
noble south porch, and the gigantic sweet-chestnut tree in the
churchyard, give the spot an air of distinction.
Hevingham, with the three succeeding places, is celebrated (or rather,
made notorious) by a rhyme whose inner meaning no local antiquary has
yet followed. Thus it runs:—
Blickling flats, Aylsham fliers,
Marsham peewits, and Hevingham liars.
Marsham, a mile distant, lies at the foot of a hill. It is a scattered
village, its Dutch-gabled “White Hart” and the sign of the “Plough and
Shuttle” pointing to some bygone foregathering of local agricultural and
weaving interests; but the church is its principal feature. Not imposing
without, its interior is particularly beautiful, with clerestoried nave,
fine open-timbered roof, and splendid rood-screen. A feature that piques
the curiosity of enquiring minds, with no possibility of that curiosity
being satisfied, is the very ancient slab on the floor, outside the
chancel, with the word “oblivio” repeated eight times, and a Latin
inscription to the effect that the person buried here was of opinion
that he would be forgotten as soon as his heart ceased to beat. It would
appear as though he wished this oblivion, for the stone is without name
or date.
Marsham was the incumbency of the Reverend Samuel Oates, father of the
famous, or infamous, Titus Oates, who figures so pitifully in the reign
of Charles II., and is described, with much justice, in biographical
dictionaries as “Perjurer.” But Marsham escapes the odium of being his
birthplace, for he was born at Oakham, in Rutlandshire.
From Marsham an avenue of young oaks—young as oaks go, for they are only
some sixty years old, and mere infants—leads on to Aylsham, passing, on
the right hand, an old toll-house, and crossing the railway on the level
at Aylsham station.
Aylsham once manufactured linen and worsted, and the “lineners” and
worsted-weavers contributed greatly to the building of its fine church,
a church packed away inconspicuously in a corner off the Market Square;
but those old trades are dead now, and only the weekly market keeps the
little town alive. You enter the place along a street once called “the
straits,” and still remarkably narrow, past the old coaching-inn, the
“Dog”; but the little town does not fully disclose itself along this
narrow way, for its central point and focus is the Market Square,
reached on the left by a short and narrow street. Here stands that
curious old early seventeenth-century brick inn, the “Black Boys,”
remarkable for its coved eaves, still bearing the old decorative design
that gave the house its name. This is a device of foliage and fruit,
painted and gilt, running the two sides of the house, with three little
black, impish-looking figures in the centre of the side facing the
square and one at each corner, all blowing gilded horns. They look like
the “little demons” of Ingoldsby’s “Truants,” who had “broken loose from
the National School below,” but they are really only intended for
representations of Bacchus, and thus by a side-wind, as it were, to hint
to travellers of old of the good cheer of the house.
L
THE “Black Boys” owes its existence on this scale to the near
neighbourhood of Blickling Hall, perhaps the most famous mansion in
Norfolk, and certainly the most beautiful and stately. Blickling is
scarce a mile distant, and is so small a village that it must have been
to Aylsham in general, and to the “Black Boys” in particular, the custom
fell in those old days when the Hobarts of Blickling Hall entertained so
royally. We cannot forbear visiting Blickling, for not merely Hobarts,
but Anne Boleyn herself, most unhappy of queens, is associated with that
noble pile and has made it historic.
The first sight of Blickling Hall is one of the greatest surprises that
can possibly befall the traveller in search of the picturesque. Every
one, in these days of broadcast photographs, is in some sort familiar
with the look of the Hall, and most people can tell you it looks like
another, and a better, Hatfield House; but no one is prepared on coming
downhill past the church into the village, to find the main front of
this finest of Jacobean mansions, this dream of architectural beauty,
actually looking upon the road, unobstructedly, from behind its velvet
lawns. No theatrical manager, no scene-painter, cunning in all the
artful accessories of the stage, could devise anything more dramatic,
and you—Columbus of the roads, who steer into unwonted byways in search
of the beautiful—cannot repress the involuntary tribute of an admiratory
O! at sight of it. There it stands, like some proud conscious beauty,
isolated. No meaner building shoulders it, and for all the stir you see
or sound you hear, it might be some enchanted palace, not waked to life
and love. It has, indeed, its modern tragedy, for its owner, the young
Marquis of Lothian, is afflicted, and non-resident.
There is something of a village, a little way removed; but only a few
houses, themselves picturesque, are to be found, together with an inn,
the “Buckinghamshire Arms,” displaying the heraldic achievement of the
Earls of Buckinghamshire and their motto, _Auctor pretiosa fecit_ (“The
giver makes them valuable”), one of those delightfully bumptious and
self-sufficient phrases abounding in titled families.
[Illustration: BLICKLING HALL.]
Blickling is generally associated with the unhappy Anne Boleyn, but her
birthplace is quite uncertain, and although her early years were passed
at this place, it was not Blickling Hall, but the long-vanished Dagworth
Manor, with which she was familiar. The present stately building was not
commenced until 1619, eighty-three years after her death. Dagworth Manor
stood nearly a mile distant from the present Hall, and was built towards
the close of the fourteenth century by Sir Nicholas Dagworth, who was
succeeded by that Sir Thomas de Erpingham who built the Erpingham Gate
in the Cathedral Close at Norwich, together with the tower and the
greater part of Erpingham church, and was that stout old warrior who in
his old age fought at Agincourt, as we read in Shakespeare’s _Henry V._,
where the King says:—
Good morrow, old Sir Thomas Erpingham:
A good soft pillow for that good white head
Were better than a churlish turf of France.
It was that brave old knight who led the onslaught with the war-cry to
his men, “Nestroke” (“Now strike!”).
Erpingham was followed by Sir John Fastolfe, who sold the property about
1459 to Sir Geoffrey Boleyn, mercer and Lord Mayor of London, who was
son of Geoffrey Boleyn of Salle. The Boleyns are thought to have derived
their name from one of their family who traded to Boulogne. Sir Geoffrey
was great-grandfather of Anne Boleyn, who became Queen to Henry VIII.
and mother of Queen Elizabeth. Sir James Boleyn, uncle to Anne, lived at
Dagworth in reduced circumstances, and finally sold the estate to Sir
John Clere, of Ormesby, whose spendthrift son alienated it to Sir Henry
Hobart, Lord Chief Justice, and grandson of Henry VII.’s
Attorney-General. It was this Sir Henry who began to build Blickling
Hall, in 1619. His son completed it in 1628. The Hobarts in time became
ennobled as Earls of Buckinghamshire, and finally the property came by
marriage to the Kerrs, Marquises of Lothian.
The striking general resemblance of Blickling Hall to Hatfield House is
accounted for by the belief that the same architectural draughtsman
designed both. Its interior is worthy of the lovely outward view, and is
still rich in magnificent old furniture, in the famous Blickling
library, and in relics of unhappy Anne Boleyn. It is curious to observe
how the Hobarts, who had no family connection with the Boleyns, and did
not even purchase the estate from them, preserved the memory of their
sometime ownership, in the sculptured figures of rampant bulls that
flank the main entrance and make punning allusion to Boleyn.
The church of Blickling was restored in 1874, after the death of the
eighth Marquis of Lothian, to whose memory a most ornate altar-tomb,
with marble recumbent portrait effigy and marble angels at head and
foot, has been erected. The guide-books tell with reverence how it cost
£5,000, and how it was sculptured by G. F. Watts, R.A.; but we need not
necessarily be impressed, save, indeed, by such senseless squandering of
money and by the appalling marmoreal solidity of those angels, who do by
no means aid and abet the imagination in its conception of angels as
ethereal beings. In short, if we resolutely refuse to be snobbishly
affected by the cost of this monument and by the Royal Academical
initials of its sculptor, we shall have no difficulty in perceiving it
to be a gross failure. The last grotesque touch is in the selection of a
marble streaked with brown veins. One such streak discolours one side of
the effigy’s face, and gives it the dreadful appearance of one suffering
from a loathsome skin disease.
Within this church are many pretty and fanciful epitaphs. Here you may
read the verses on various members of the Hargraves, citizens of London
and members of the Companies of Joiners and “Shoomakers,” and those of
their children, untimely dead. “Sleep, sweetly sleep,” says one:
Sleep, sweetly sleep, slumber this night away,
The world at last shall burn, and then it will be day;
and by the light of that conflagration the youthful Hargrave is
doubtless expected to rise, Phœnix-like, and soar into the realms of
eternal bliss!
Consalus Hargrave died in his second year, 1626:—
Had he lived to be a man,
This inch had growne but to a span.
Nowe he is past all feare and paine
’Twere sin to wish him here againe.
Veiwe but the way by which we come,
Thou’lt say his is best that’s first at home.
Here, too, are some Boleyn memorials, among them a brass to an Anna
Boleyn, who died in childhood in 1476. She was aunt to the historical
Anne.
A very striking feature in this church is the altar-tomb of the Cleres,
whose armorial bearings, with those of the distinguished families with
whom they claimed to be allied, are gorgeously repeated very many times
around the four sides of the monument. It is a work of the Jacobean
period, and retrospectively includes the old coats of alliances as far
back as the eleventh century. Modern research proves most of these
claims to be deliberately false.
[Illustration: “WOODROW INN” AND THE HOBART MONUMENT.]
Among the many Hobarts who lie in the vaults beneath Blickling church is
one who met with a very tragical end. This is that Sir Henry Hobart,
Bart., who was knighted by Charles II. in 1671, on that monarch’s
progress through Norfolk, after having been entertained with princely
magnificence at Blickling Hall. Sir Henry was no thick-and-thin
supporter of the Stuarts, for he fought for King William against James
II. at the Battle of the Boyne, and when Dutch William’s rule was
established, settled down here at his Norfolk home, where he might have
lived to a green old age, had it not been for his overbearing temper. It
was in 1698, in a dispute over an election in which he had borne a
losing part, that Sir Henry Hobart’s career was cut short. He resented
some expressions of opinion used by a neighbouring gentleman, Mr. Oliver
le Neve, and challenged him to a duel. Hobart had the reputation of
being one of the most accomplished swordsmen of his day, and doubtless
expected to do Le Neve’s business at that spot on Cawston Heath where
the meeting was arranged to take place. Le Neve was notoriously a bad
swordsman, and probably made his will and went forth to that encounter
never hoping to return; but the conflict had an unexpected result.
Hobart drew first blood, running his sword through his adversary’s arm,
but immediately afterwards fell, mortally wounded, with a thrust in the
stomach, of which he died the next day, Sunday, August 21st, 1698. He
fell not so much from any unwonted skill on Le Neve’s part as from the
circumstance that Le Neve was a left-handed man and his sword-play
difficult to follow. Le Neve had to fly the country for a time; not in
fear of the law, which then countenanced the duello, but from the
threatened vengeance of the powerful Hobart clan. The spot where the
duel was fought is some four miles from Blickling. Cawston Heath has
long been enclosed and brought under cultivation, but the place is
marked by a rude stone pillar surmounted by an urn and simply inscribed
with the letters “H.H.” This monument stands within a dense strip of
plantation beside the Norwich and Holt road, close to where it is
crossed by the road between Aylsham and Cawston. Adjoining the place is
an old coaching hostelry—the “Woodrow” inn—with a curious gallows sign
spanning the highway
LI
FROM Aylsham to Cromer is little more than ten miles; downhill from
Aylsham town to the levels at Ingworth, whose name, meaning the “meadow
village,” illustrates that it is, in fact, set down beside the
water-meads bordering the river Bure. Ingworth has a dilapidated church
picturesquely overlooking the road from a little hillock, with only the
lower part of its round tower left.
Erpingham church is presently seen, away to the left, standing lonely in
the ploughlands, without any village, and on the right hand an avenue
leads to Lord Suffield’s place, Gunton Park. Hanworth is out of sight,
but the toll-house at Hanworth Corner, now converted into a post office,
argues its near neighbourhood. To this succeeds Roughton, where a pond,
a scrubby piece of common, another round-towered church, and a
comfortable homely inn comprise the salient features of the place.
[Illustration: INGWORTH.]
The last miles into Cromer from Roughton wear a wind-swept appearance.
The hedgerow trees that have hitherto stood boldly erect now begin to
cower and grow in contorted shapes, all with one general inclination
away from the prevalent easterly gales of winter and bitter spring. The
physical aspect of the country also changes. From the long levels and
the gentle undulations we come to the exposed table-land of Roughton
Common, the gorse and bracken-grown land around Crossdale Street, and
the gravelly tumbled ups and downs of Felbrigg. We seem to have
exchanged the suavities of Norfolk for the bold and picturesque
ruggedness of the Scottish littoral.
Felbrigg, whose name seems to have been brought from Denmark by the
early piratical settlers from that country, in fond remembrance of their
own Felborg, lies on a slip road into Cromer, beside the main highway,
and is worth notice, not merely on account of this heathy
picturesqueness, like that of a sublimated Hampstead Heath, innocent of
houses, Cockneys, and County Council notice-boards, but by reason of its
ancient Hall and the Windhams who for centuries owned the property. The
Windhams came originally from Wymondham in the fifteenth century, and at
first spelled their name in precisely the same way as that of the town.
They replaced the ancient knightly family of De Felbrigge, whose stately
monuments in brass still remain on the pavements of the church. There is
the brass to Simon de Felbrigge, 1351, and the particularly fine one to
a Sir Simon, who died in 1443, and is represented here as a Knight of
the Garter and Standard-Bearer to Richard II. The ancient home of the
Felbrigges was rebuilt by Windhams in a mixed Jacobean and Dutch style,
and is a stately residence deeply bowered in a densely wooded Park. The
pierced parapet inscription, “Gloria Deo in Excelsis,” seen against the
sky, is earnest of the piety of the Windhams of that time.
The Windhams—the real Windhams, for the later ones were merely Lukins,
who assumed the name on inheriting the property—ended with William
Windham, the statesman, who, having played an enlightened and patriotic
part as Secretary for War under Pitt from 1794 to 1801, and as Secretary
for War and the Colonies in Lord Grenville’s Administration of 1806,
died in 1810. With him ended the high reputation of that family, and
although romance of a kind speedily made the name better known all over
England than ever it had been before, it was a romance that conferred
notoriety rather than fame.
Felbrigg does not merely _look_ romantic: every circumstance of
latter-day romance attaches to that noble Hall, those green o’er-arching
glades. It is true that the story is of an ignoble and sordid type, but
what it lacks in sweetness and good savour it fully makes up for in the
matter of human interest. It is the way of latter-day romance to be
unsavoury, and the story of Felbrigg Hall and “Mad Windham,” the talk of
England in the early sixties, and still vividly recollected in Norfolk,
reeked with foulness beyond the common run of public washings of dirty
linen.
[Illustration: FELBRIGG HALL.]
It was a tale of family degeneracy, in which the honoured name of
Windham should, strictly speaking, have had no part. When the famous
statesman died, the historic property went to his nephew, William Howe
Lukin, who assumed the name of Windham, and married Lady Sophia Hervey,
sister of the Marquis of Bristol. In November, 1854, the self-styled
William Howe “Windham” died, leaving a widow and an only son, William
Frederick, at that time fourteen years of age, and already, at Eton and
elsewhere, an ill-disposed and uncontrollable buffoon and vicious idiot.
Among the guardians of this promising heir to the name and lands of the
Windhams were his mother and his uncle, General Windham, whose actions
and motives were so severely and unjustly criticised by the Radical
press and the lower orders in course of the notorious “Windham Trial.”
William Frederick Windham would, in the ordinary course, have come of
age and succeeded to his inheritance, without question, in 1861; but his
conduct as a boy and as a growing man was so extraordinary and
outrageous that it was reluctantly decided by General Windham and others
to petition for a judicial inquiry into the state of mind of this heir,
who, they claimed—and after-events fully supported that claim—could not
be safely entrusted with the management of his own affairs.
The Commission “_de Lunatico Inquirendo_,” popularly known as the
“Windham Trial,” granted to the petitioners, began on December 16th,
1861, and lasted thirty-four days. Extraordinary interest was taken in
the proceedings, and even now the pamphlets printed and sold by
thousands, containing the dreadful evidence taken in those thirty-four
days, may be occasionally met with in the cottage homes of Norfolk.
According to the opening statement, the alleged lunatic would, on coming
of age, have been entitled to Felbrigg Hall and rents of £3,100 per
annum, subject to the deductions of an annuity of £1,500 for his mother
and £350 for upkeep of property. In all, he would have enjoyed an income
of about £1,300, to be increased by 1869 to between £4,000 and £5,000,
on succession to the neighbouring Hanworth estates. The object of the
petitioners seeking to have their ward adjudged incapable of managing
his own affairs was not to deprive him of liberty, but merely to procure
legal sanction of their proposal for themselves to be made guardians of
the property during his lifetime, in the interests of the lunatic
himself, who was not, and had never been, according to their contention,
a sane and reasoning human being. To support that contention, they made,
by the opening statement of counsel, and in the evidence of troops of
witnesses, a long series of allegations, showing that he had exhibited
simple imbecility in early childhood, and that with his physical growth
his mental powers had continually decayed. The cold, dispassionate
opening speech of counsel for the petitioners, recounting Windham’s
idiotcies, still, even though the actors in that drama are now all dead,
makes the reader shiver at its businesslike unfolding of a nature scarce
removed from that of a beast. Sent to Eton, he was a buffoon there, and
commonly known as “Mad Windham.” His indescribable habits led to his
being early removed and placed under the care of a long succession of
tutors, none of whom could make anything of him, and threw up the
impossible task, or were relieved of it, one after another. Many
testified in court that he was incapable of reasoning, addicted to low
associates, filthy and profane language, and wanton and capricious
cruelty to animals. He would gorge his food, feeding without the aid of
knife and fork, and, eating until he was sick, would begin again, like a
dog. This extraordinary conduct was not caused by drink, for, among all
his failings, drunkenness was not one. His violent and capricious temper
had led to extraordinary scenes. At an evening party he had rushed at a
gentleman whom he had never before seen and to whom he had not spoken a
word, and, shrieking like a wild Indian, had pinned him to the wall by
his whiskers. He was exceptionally and consistently rude and offensive
to ladies, and delighted to tear their clothes and make grimaces at
them. He could not follow out any train of thought, and acted from one
minute to another without reference to previous actions, becoming the
laughing-stock of servants. He would throw money away in the streets,
and laugh when saner people scrambled for it; would fondle a horse one
moment and thrash it unmercifully the next. These actions, said counsel,
could not be those of a person enjoying reasonable use of his faculties,
but there was worse to come. It was only with reluctance General Windham
was obliged to bring these painful affairs of his unhappy nephew into
the light of publicity; but there was no other course, for his vile
associates had persuaded him that all the efforts being made to prevent
his moral, physical, and financial ruin were only part of a scheme by
his uncle to deprive him of his liberty and property. That it was not so
might be at once explained by the statement that, as a matter of fact,
whichever way the inquiry resulted, or whatever happened to his nephew,
in no case would General Windham be the heir.
Witnesses were then called who bore out the opening statement, and added
a great deal more. Some told how Windham would at times pretend to be a
fireman, and, dressing in character, go about in a devastating manner
with an axe and chop down doors and smash windows. At other times the
fancy took him to act the part of a railway guard. With uniform made for
the character, he would frequent railway platforms, blow a whistle, and
wave a flag. Once, performing these pranks, he nearly caused a railway
disaster. At other times he would make off with passengers’ luggage.
Altogether, it will be conceded, from the public, as well as from the
family, point of view, he should have been put under restraint.
But the real compelling cause of the action was the connection he had
recently formed with a woman whom he had picked up in London, during
Ascot week. Agnes Willoughby, _alias_ Rogers, in the words of counsel,
“was not the chastest of the chaste; her favours in love-affairs were
not few; she was known to the police.” On August 30th, 1861, having come
of age on the 9th, he married her and settled £800 a year on her, to be
increased in 1869 to £1,500. She had been, up to that time, living with
a man named Roberts, and after the marriage the three lived together.
The action was defended by Windham and his associates, who, in the event
of his being declared a lunatic, would have lost the rich harvest of
plunder they were reaping. A pitiful feature of the case, and one
tending to prejudice the public against the petitioners, was that
Windham’s mother, naturally unwilling to see her son branded as a
madman, gave evidence for him.
“What,” asked Pilate, “what is truth?” Of the more than 150 witnesses
called during the progress of the case, a number declared they had never
noticed any peculiarity about Windham, save “perhaps he was exceedingly
high-spirited. He always behaved like a gentleman.” Yet his career
forbids us to believe anything of the kind.