The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford and Cromer Road: Sport and history on an East Anglian turnpikeHarper, Charles G. (Charles George)
History
The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford and Cromer Road: Sport and history on an East Anglian turnpike
Harper, Charles G. (Charles George)
England -- Description and travel; England -- Social life and customs
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;
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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