East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical AssociationsRitchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
History
East Anglia: Personal Recollections and Historical Associations
Ritchie, J. Ewing (James Ewing)
East Anglia (England)
A chapter might be written about the Norfolk Cokes. Sir Edward Coke, the
great lawyer, was buried at Tittleshale, in Norfolk. The well-known
Coke, the distinguished agriculturist, inhabited that splendid Holkham,
the fame of which exists in our day. It was begun by Lord Leicester in
1734, and finished by his Countess in 1764. Blomefield, the well-known
Norfolk historian, speaks of it as a noble, stately, and sumptuous
palace. Lord Coke and Lord Burlington were men of similar tastes and
pursuits, and were diligent students of classical and Italian art. The
Holkham Library still contains treasures rich and rare. Many of the
latter formed part of the library of Sir Edward Coke; the title-page of
the first edition of the ‘Novum Organum,’ published in 1620, bears the
design of a ship passing through the Pillars of Hercules into an
undulating sea. The Holkham copy is adorned by the inscription, ‘Ex dono
auctoris.’
Above the ship, in the handwriting of Coke, is the couplet:
‘It deserveth not to be read in schools,
But to be freighted in the ship of fools.’
Thomas Shadwell, the Poet Laureate and historiographer of William III.,
was a Norfolk man. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. It is said by
Noble that he was an honest man. Of course he was. Chalmers accuses him
of indecent conversation, or Lord Rochester would not have said that he
had more wit and humour than any other poet. I am afraid he confers
little honour on his native county. ‘Others,’ wrote Dryden in one of his
satires,
‘To some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.’
Sir Robert Walpole, who saved England from wooden shoes and slavery, was
of a Norfolk family, yet flourishing; as are the Townshends, to whom we
owe the introduction of the turnip. Norfolk also can boast of Sir Thomas
Gresham and Sir Francis Walsingham. In Norfolk was born that ‘great
oracle of law, patron of the Church, and glory of England,’ as Camden
calls him, Sir Henry Spelman. At Bickling, in the same county, was born
that ill-starred Anne Boleyn, of whom it is written that
‘Love could teach a monarch to be wise,
And Gospel light first beamed from Boleyn’s eyes.’
In the same neighbourhood, also, was born John Baconthorpe, the resolute
doctor, of whom Pantias Pansa has written: ‘This one resolute doctor has
furnished the Christian religion with armour against the Jews stronger
than that of Vulcan.’ Pansa was a Norfolk man, and so was the great
botanist Sir W. Hooker.
Who has not heard of Lynn, in Norfolk, where, when Eugene Aram was the
usher,
‘Four-and-twenty happy boys
Came bounding out of school’?
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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