Thames Valley Villages, Volume 2 (of 2) — John Shaqi
Thames Valley Villages, Volume 2 (of 2)Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
Thames Valley Villages, Volume 2 (of 2)
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
Thames Valley (England)
There are eight needlework portraits of men in this sampler, obviously
Palmers, since each holds a shield of the family arms; and evidently
portraits, because each one is clearly distinguished from the others in
age, costume, and features, and the first is easily to be identified by
the wounded right arm he bears in a sling. Among those other quaintly
attired men, who yet are made to seem so very real to us, one notices
a figure with a tilting-lance, another, in the lower range, holding a
weapon probably intended to represent the axe carried by the honourable
corps of gentlemen pensioners in attendance upon the Sovereign; while
the last carries a bunch of keys, in allusion to some official position.
The sampler appears to have been carried out of the Palmer family by the
marriages in the eighteenth century of the two daughters and heiresses of
a Sir Thomas Palmer with an Earl of Winchilsea and his brother.
But to revert to the figure with the wounded arm. This personage was Sir
Henry Palmer, Knight, second of the famous triplet sons of Sir Edward
Palmer, of the Angmering family, who were born in 1487, according to
tradition, on three successive Sundays. This remarkable parturition
is still famous at Angmering, where the rustics readily point out the
identical house, now divided into cottages, near the Decoy. It was this
Henry who established the Wingham line that ascended from knighthood to a
baronetcy and became extinct in 1838, having in the meanwhile thrown off
a branch now represented at Dorney. Let us take the triplet brothers in
their proper sequence. John, the eldest, who inherited Angmering, came
to a bad end. He was much at the dangerous Court of Henry the Eighth,
and was particularly intimate with that monarch, not only playing cards
continually with him, but always winning. A careful courtier in those
times did well to lose occasionally. It was not well to be always winning
from the Eighth Henry, and that fierce Tudor did in fact hang him on some
pretext.
Henry Palmer, the second brother, was a distinguished soldier, and Master
of the Ordnance. He received a shot-wound in the arm at Guisnes, of which
he eventually died, at Wingham, in 1559. The sampler clearly shows this
wounded soldier, with his arm bound up, and supporting himself with a
stick. The third brother, Thomas, died on Tower Hill, by the headsman’s
axe, as an adherent of the Lady Jane Grey. He suffered with the Duke of
Northumberland and Sir John Gates, and chroniclers tell how the unhappy
trio quarrelled to the last as to whose was the responsibility for
the failure of that rising. But Palmer made the boldest exit of all,
declaring with his last breath on the scaffold that he died a Protestant.
[Illustration: DORNEY COURT.]
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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