St Mary is simply fabulous, my only regret being that I didn't visit on a sunnier day - any excuse for a revisit!
ST MARY. The W tower and the N porch are exceptionally lavish in their display of flushwork decoration. The W tower is 108 ft high. Bequests of money were made for it in 1444-53. It is faced with knapped flint all the way through. At the base is a frieze of initials and quatrefoils. The W doorway has spandrels with two shields, and above it is another frieze, of quatrefoils etc. Arched panelling l. and r. Two two-light bell-openings on each side. Tall parapet and battlements, with arched panels, and tracery. The side towards the town is the most ornate. The tower buttresses are interesting too. They start polygonal, but turn into angle buttresses and higher up into diagonal buttresses. The N porch, for which there was a bequest in 1455, also has a base with flushwork tracery panels and initials, arched panelling, another frieze with initials, and battlements with quatre-foils as well as arches. The crenellations are double-stepped, and there are pinnacles. On the front three niches above the entrance. The aisle walls are also knapped. Only the S chapel is quite different. It is built of brick and is now cemented. The E view displays flushwork parapets on the vestry chapel roofs and a higher E gable. There is no structural division between nave and chancel. The arcades run through six bays. The piers have four shafts and four thinner diagonal shafts. The clerestory has twice as many windows as the bays below. Nave roof of low pitch with hammerbeams alternating with tie-beams. - FONT. Panelled stem. The Seven Sacraments and the Crucifixion on the bowl. The background of the scenes has rays. Butterfly head-dresses prove a late C15 date. - ROOD SCREEN. The dado with painted figures now in the parclose between S chapel and chancel and in the N aisle. The inscription refers to John Albrede, a twill weaver, whose will is of 1444. CHANDELIER. Brass,- given in 1676. - STAINED GLASS. In the E window Adoration of the Magi, 1929 by Martin Travers. The scene is in the style of contemporary English wood engraving and surrounded by much clear glass. - PLATE. Two Cups 1636;Paten 1683; Paten and two Flagons 1752. MONUMENTS. In the chancel on the N side Thomas Seckford, who built the N chapel. He was Master of the Court of Requests and died in 1587. Tomb-chest with open arcades, not in its original state, as the lower slab has indents for brasses. No effigy left. The arches are depressed-rounded, the type the French call basket arches; the pilasters which separate them are panelled. - Jeoffrey Pitman d. 1627, S chapel. Large, and also commemorating his two wives and two sons. Two kneeling pairs, one on top of the other, both pairs facing each other across a prayer-desk. Below are the two sons, above the two wives, and on top of the whole high up Jeoffrey Pitman himself kneeling frontally. All flanking pilasters with ribbon work and bunches of fruit. - Access to the churchyard from Church Street by a pair of handsome C18 wrought-iron GATES.
WOODBRIDGE.
It is one of the most delightful small towns of this enchanting
countryside, though as crowded with houses as its past is crowded with
memories; its long street has hardly an inch to spare. The river bed has
silted up since Woodbridge built ships for the Navy, but still the
barges carry coal up the River Deben, and still there is much yachting
here, and flourishing industries that have to do with ships.
It
is one of the towns in which it is pleasant to walk about for the sake
of old buildings, old inns, and old houses, and as we walk there come
continually to mind the names of famous men who have walked before us
here. This town has richly served its country, and the sights we see
have been familiar to men whose names are known far and wide about the
world. The National Trust is now the guardian of a beautiful site by the
river that all Woodbridge people have loved, known as Kyson, and
another delightful green space now belonging to all is Elmshurst Park,
which has grown out of a beautiful private garden. Kyson was given to
the nation by Mr R. C. Notcut, Elmhurst Park was presented to the town
by Lord Woodbridge.
It is good to find that the Post
Office has admirably done its duty to a fine town by joining hands with
the Suffolk Preservation Society in preserving an ancient house. On the
site of this 16th century house the new post office has been set up in
such a way as to preserve the finest architectural features, the plaster
ceilings in the rooms, and a Jacobean fireplace. It is an example the
Post Oflice might well adopt in all our ancient towns.
In
the same way there has been preserved through all its reconstructions
since the 16th century the beauty of the Shire Hall, built on Market
Hill by the benefactor of Woodbridge, Thomas Seckford. He was the great
Elizabethan of this little town and will not be forgotten. His Shire
Hall is Flemish in design, and he set under it the old Corn Exchange,
originally open so that carts could be driven through, but now bricked
in. His almshouses have been rebuilt, but they are one of the noble
spectacles of the town, a delightful long row set on a hill, the home of
30 poor men who wear Thomas Seckford’s silver badges, a few married
couples, and a few women living in a separate house to nurse them when
they are ill.
A little after Thomas Seckford’s day the
Friends Meeting House was built (in 1678) and it has a simple graveyard
in which we find, among flowers and trees, a poet’s grave. It is in a
lane down which the feet of a host of men have walked to pay tribute to
Bernard Barton. He lived here about 40 years, son of a Quaker maltster,
starting life in shopkeeping and becoming clerk to the local corn
merchant, whose daughter he married. He lost his wife within a year and
was left with one child, Lucy, who lived to become the wife of another
and more famous poet, Edward FitzGerald - an unhappy marriage as it
proved, for they were not congenial, and agreed to part. Barton lived on
as a bank clerk after his wife’s death, and his poetry was the chief
interest of his life. He was one of Charles Lamb’s best friends, and a
consoling influence to him in the desperate crisis of his life. When he
was 36 he had so many admirers of his poems that they presented him with
£1200, and a few years before he died Sir Robert Peel invited him to
dine, and got for him a Civil List pension. His quiet life was
brightened by visits from Lamb and FitzGerald, and one of the pictures
it is pleasant to think of in this country scene is of these poets
walking on the river bank. When Barton died in 1849 his biography was
written by the hand that wrote the immortal translation of Omar Khayyam.
There
is another old graveyard in Woodbridge in which lies the father of one
man of fame and the grandfather of another; he was William Lankester,
father of Edwin Lankester, the pioneer of public health whose son was
the great Ray Lankester, one of the most delightful scientific men of
our time. In this graveyard now stands the Congregational Chapel.
Still
another small graveyard with a curious interest we come upon in the
tiny walled garden of the Bull Hotel, the old coaching inn on Market
Hill where Tennyson stayed. Edward FitzGerald had a room in a house near
it for 13 years, and the house has a tablet with his initials on it.
Through the hotel yard we come to the grave of George Carlow, who owned
the inn in 1738, when he died and was buried here. He left to the inn a
small charity to distribute bread each year to the poor, and the bread
is still distributed at his grave. On the stone is the doggerel from
Shakespeare's grave, blessing the men who spare these stones and cursing
them who move these bones.
The old Ship Inn near the
quay has been turned into cottages, but the Bell and the Crown both
remain. The Bell Inn, with its overhanging timbers, has kept from
generation to generation what is the only thing of its kind in Suffolk,
and one of very few left in England, the old steelyard for weighing hay,
wool, and hides. The Crown Inn has memories of the days when Woodbridge
was busy building ships for the Navy, and even of the days before that,
for from it there went out into the world an English seaman of the days
of Francis Drake, the little known John Fox, who set free a number of
Christian captives at Alexandria. His father owned the Crown. In later
days the inn was owned by Peter Pett, the man of whom we read much in
Pepys, who succeeded him at the Admiralty. He was a Commissioner of the
Navy in the bad old days, and it is said to have been his habit to pack
the well-paid ofiices with his relations. Pepys called him a knave who
deserved to be hanged for his neglect, and declared that he paid himself
for the entertainment he gave the king, that he sold timber to the Navy
under another name, and so on. He was charged with being the cause of a
disaster at Chatham and was sent to the Tower, but the matter was
dropped as it was apparently brought forward merely to make him a
scapegoat. Andrew Marvell put the case in these four lines:
After this loss, to relish discontent,
Some one must be accused by Parliament;
All our miscarriages on Pett must fall;
His name alone seems fit to answer all.
The
fine Woodbridge School has outgrown its old buildings, and was rehoused
last century with laboratories, workshops, swimming baths, and boarding
houses. The 17th century buildings are now used as a free library under
the trusteeship of the Seckford Governors, and there has been
discovered in one of the library windows in our own time a pane of glass
of much historic interest. Mr V. B. Redstone, the librarian (a great
authority on Suffolk’s history), discovered that certain old scratches
on the pane were actually names upside down, and he found the names to
be those of Francis Light and his schoolfriend James Lynn, who became a
surgeon. The names were scratched on the pane about 1747, and in view of
its curious interest the glass has now been taken out and preserved as a
witness that here lived a Woodbridge schoolboy all too little known to
fame.
Francis Light, who went out into the world from
this old grammar school, is a striking figure in the annals of the
British Empire, for he founded the city of Penang and was the father of
the founder of the city of Adelaide. Penang has his statue and Adelaide
has his son’s. Remarkable stories have been told about him, but the old
story that he married the daughter of a king is not true. He found the
Island of Penang a vast jungle of 100 square miles with only 50 people
on it, and left it a prosperous place with 10,000 people, having watched
over the interests of settlers and natives so that they mourned him as a
father. The East India Company, for whom he secured the island, agreed
to pay tribute “to last so long as the sun and moon shall give light.”
This remarkable man was born at Dallinghoo, where we come upon him
again.
On the school’s roll of fame is the honoured
name of Edwin Lankester, the name of John Brinkley (Ireland’s first
Astronomer Royal), and that of Baron Hatherley, Lord Chancellor. Edwin
Lankester was plunged into poverty as a boy by the collapse of an
investment in property, and he left school at 12 to become a
watchmaker’s apprentice. He grew up to be a famous botanist and
naturalist, but is chiefly remembered for his books on the microscope
and his services to public health, which began when he was a coroner. He
was shocked by some of the things he discovered, and made a sensation
by insisting on proper evidence of the cause of death whatever it might
cost. John Brinkley, the astronomer, was made a bishop by George the
Fourth. Lord Chancellor Hatherley, brought up at his grandmother’s house
in Woodbridge, lived through 80 years of last century, and before he
was 30 was earning £1000 a year at the Bar. He was a good churchman and a
good Liberal, and it fell to him to announce that Lord Rothschild
should take his seat in the House of Lords. He was for more than 40
years a Sunday School teacher in the parish of St Margaret’s,
Westminster.
Woodbridge has an interest, as we have
seen, in the Australian city of Adelaide which was founded by Sir
Francis Light’s son William, and Australia has another town founded by a
Woodbridge boy, for George Miles, emigrating from here about the middle
of last century, founded a settlement and named it after his own town.
There should also be remembered in any description of Woodbridge the
well known Suffolk artist Thomas Churchyard, a solicitor by profession
but a painter of much skill, a friend of Edward FitzGerald, and often
mentioned in his letters. Though FitzGerald himself is perhaps the most
famous man who has been familiar in these streets, he has no memorial
except his initials on the house where he lived on Market Hill, and the
house called Little Grange, in which he lived after that; we come upon
him at Boulge, where he lies. We talked in a shop at Woodbridge to two
ladies whose grandmother had been housekeeper to FitzGerald, and had
often told them of the strange figure walking about with a wide hat and a
flowing cloak. It was while he was living on Market Hill that Tennyson
came to see him, and it would seem that the meat for dinner was tough,
and that FitzGerald was crochety.
We have yet to come
to the finest building in Woodbridge, which is, of course, the 15th
century church of St Mary, set on a hill and built of black flints, with
a tower 108 feet high. The walls of the tower are neatly built, the
flints forming designs, the corners crowned with filials and
weathercocks. Over the porch are set in niches three figures of the
Madonna, St Anne, and St Cecilia, all with crosses, and in the spandrels
of the doorway is St Michael with the dragon. Among the fine treasures
within are fragments of John Albrede’s 15th century screen still in
their place, and 14 panels of the screen are preserved with traces of
portraits of saints fading away on them. The marks of a lost brass which
had two figures on it suggest that the brass may have been in memory of
John Albrede and his wife. A brass of a child’s figure is to John
Shorlond, a boy of seven who died in the last years of Queen Elizabeth,
and there is a brass tablet to John Sayre, who died in the last year of
Shakespeare’s life, and has in his epitaph this touch of humour:
Reader, thou shalt find
Heaven takes the best, still leaves the worst behind.
A
monument to Jeffrey Pitman, fashioned in marble and painted and gilded,
has five kneeling Elizabethans wearing great rulfs. Pitman was a local
tanner who became Sheriff of Suffolk in the time of James the First, and
was a liberal benefactor of the town. By his tomb hang two old helmets
about 400 years old.
The lovely font has been one of
the best in Suffolk, but has lost the colour given to it in the 15th
century. Its carvings represent the Seven Sacraments, and one of the
panels shows an imp, who is supposed to be fleeing through the door of
the church porch; the font also has a carving of the Crucifixion, and on
its shaft is a pot of lilies, symbol of the Madonna. It is in this
church that the good Thomas Seckford lies, but this noble benefactor of
the town has no sculptured splendour to preserve his name. He needs it
not. If we seek his monument we look around - at his Shire Hall, his
almshouses, and at the beautiful Woodbridge Abbey, now a private house
in the old monastic grounds near the church, and still with some of its
Tudor structure unspoilt since the Seckford family owned it.
Woodbridge
has known more famous men, but none who served the town so well as
Thomas Seckford. He was a lawyer and member of Parliament for Ipswich in
Queen Elizabeth’s day, and he helped William Harrison with a book on
the rivers and streams of England, a dream which has not yet been
properly fulfilled, for not even the Government of this country has a
list of its rivers; there is no complete book on them in existence. A
more notable service still did Thomas Seckford render to this country,
for to his generosity we owe the work of Christopher Saxton, who made
the first proper maps of England. His was the first map survey of our
counties, and it is to Thomas Seckford that we are indebted for them,
for Saxton was his servant and Seckford paid for the maps, which took
five years to make, and were dedicated to Queen Elizabeth.
It
was here at Woodbridge that we came upon what we must regard as one of
the most sacred and astonishing things we have seen in all our tour of
England, the head of Oliver Cromwell.
Cromwell ’s Head
IT
is an almost incredible spectacle with the hair still clinging to it,
with teeth still there, with the forehead we are familiar with (even
with the marks of the wart), and we are indebted to Canon Wilkinson for
allowing us to see this astonishing relic of our greatest man of action.
We found it wrapt in silk, enclosed in many outer wrappings, and kept
in a box, from which it was taken so that we might hold it in our hands
and look at this uncanny thing, and say, Alas, poor Cromwell! where be
your great orations, your thunderings, which were wont to set kings and
parliaments and armies in a roar?
By an act of revenge
unthinkable to us now the body of Cromwell was dragged from its grave
among our kings and hanged at Tyburn, and the head was stuck with a
spike through the skull on Westminster Hall, where it stayed for 25
years, until at last it was blown down into the road by an angry wind,
picked up by a sentry or a passer-by, and long kept in concealment, for a
placard was issued for its recovery, and the finder apparently feared
he would be blamed. Eventually it was sold to a member of the Russell
family into which Cromwell’s youngest daughter had married, and after
this the record tells that the head passed into the possession of an
actor who, being in need of money, exhibited it, and finally sold it for
exhibition to James Cox, a jeweller in Shoe Lane, who showed it for a
time and then sold it to a syndicate of three people. The last survivor
of the three was a lady, who, becoming superstitious about her gruesome
property, first placed it in the custody of her doctor, Dr Josiah Henry
Wilkinson, living at Shortlands in Kent, and then gave it to him. Mr
Wilkinson drew up a detailed history of what had happened to the head
between the time it was at Westminster and when it reached him. From him
it has descended through generations of Wilkinsons to Canon Horace
Wilkinson who showed it to us.
We do not think there
can be any reasonable doubt that it is the head of the Protector. It has
been subjected to every enquiry possible, and has been scientifically
examined by Dr Karl Pearson and Dr G. M. Morant, who have applied every
known test, and after every possible measurement and comparison with
masks and portraits, and every investigation of associated
circumstances, have come to the conclusion that it is morally certain
that the head is the actual head of Cromwell. These are the last words
of their report, which is accompanied by 100 plates:
We
started this enquiry in an agnostic frame of mind, tinged only by
scepticism as to whether the positive statements made in the past were
not based solely on impressions unjustified by any attempt at a
scientific investigation. We finish our enquiry with the conclusion that
it is a moral certainty drawn from the circumstantial evidence that the
Wilkinson head is the genuine head of Oliver Cromwell, Protector of the
Commonwealth.
In our grand tour of England we have
been in the bare attic of Newburgh Priory in Yorkshire, where it is
believed the body of Cromwell was taken by his daughter Lady Fauconberg.
It is supposed that the body was walled up in what is still called
Cromwell’s room, but the wall has never been opened. If it should be
true that the body is there, the nation has now the opportunity for a
national act of atonement which will restore the Protector to the Abbey,
and it is difficult to conceive a more impressive spectacle than the
national burial of our hero with the fame and glory of nearly three
centuries heaped upon his name.
