Through East Anglia in a Motor Car

Who were these Cokes who attained so much magnificence? That is a natural question. The name is first traceable in a deed of 1206, referring to a Coke of Didlington. From him descended Edward Coke, the commentator on Littleton, who was Attorney-General, Speaker of the House of Commons, and Chief Justice of the King's Bench in 1613. Oddly enough, from our modern point of view, it was after this that he was elected member for Buckinghamshire, and drafted and moved the Petition of Rights. No doubt he made a great deal of money himself; he acquired more by marrying first one of the Pastons, and after her death, the Lady Elizabeth Cecil, daughter of the first Earl of Exeter. Such was the real founder of the family, who bought, or acquired by inheritance, much of the existing Holkham estate. His grandson died unmarried, and the estate fell to a kinsman, Henry Coke, of Thorington. From him sprung Sir Thomas Coke, the first Earl of Leicester, whose son died in 1739, when the peerage became extinct. But the estate went to Sir Thomas Coke's nephew, Wenham Roberts, who naturally took the name of Coke, and also naturally called his son Thomas; and this son was "Coke of Norfolk," "the handsome Englishman," as he was called at Rome, in whose favour the peerage was most justly revived. It was due not so much to his magnificence as to his service to agriculture. "All the country from Holkham to Houghton was a wild sheep-walk," writes Arthur Young, "before the spirit of improvement seized the inhabitants; and this spirit has wrought amazing effects; for instead of boundless wilds and uncultivated wastes, inhabited by scarcely anything but sheep, the country is all cut up into enclosures, cultivated in a most husbandlike manner, richly manured, well-peopled, and yielding an hundred times the produce that it did in its former state. What has wrought these great works is the marling; for under the whole country run veins of a very rich kind, which they dig up, and spread upon the old sheep-walks, and then by means of inclosing they throw their farms into a regular course of crops, and gain immensely by the improvement." For this Coke of Norfolk was principally responsible, and for this his name deserves all honour.

At Walsingham the remains of the Priory are interesting: a magnificent door, a gateway, the walls, windows and arches of the refectory, a Norman arch with zigzag mouldings—the rest of the remains are later, Decorated and Perpendicular. But the record of the foundation and of the pilgrimages to the shrine, which was second only to Canterbury in importance, is much more entertaining. First the Chapel of the Virgin was founded by the widow of Richoldie, the mother of Geoffrey de Favraches. (Of course everybody knows all about them!) Then Geoffrey himself started on a pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre, having previously executed a deed in which granted "to God and St. Mary, and to Edwy, his clerk," the chapel which his mother Richoldie had built at Walsingham, and other real property, to the intent that Edwy should establish a priory there. The supreme treasure was a relic, the alleged milk of the Virgin, purchased, as an inscription seen by Erasmus high upon a wall stated, from an old woman at Constantinople with an assurance that it was far superior to any other relic of the same kind, as it alone had been taken from the breast, the other having fallen to the ground first. It was enclosed in crystal and set in a crucifix. This, says the matter-of-fact Erasmus, occasionally looked like chalk, mixed with the white of eggs, and was quite solid. That the more pilgrims, the richer the better, might be attracted to visit this relic and to lay down their offerings, often very costly, it was stated by the monks that the Milky Way in the firmament pointed to Walsingham. So it did no doubt, so it does on occasion now, and to a lot of other places besides. "The Virgin and her Son, as they made their salute, also appeared to Erasmus and his friend, to give them a nod of approbation."

The sentence last quoted, wherein the meaning is a great deal clearer than the construction, comes from Messrs. Timbs and Gunn. Let me place side by side with it another quotation from Froude's lecture on "Times of Erasmus and Luther." "The rule of the Church was, nothing for nothing. At a chapel in Saxony there was an image of a Virgin and Child. If a worshipper came in with a good handsome offering, the child bowed and was gracious; if the present was unsatisfactory it turned away its head, and withheld its favours till the purse-strings were untied again. There was a great rood or crucifix of the same kind at Boxley, in Kent, where the pilgrims went in thousands. This figure used to bow, too, when it was pleased; and a good sum of money was sure to secure its good will. When the Reformation came, and the police looked into the matter, the images were found to be worked with wires and pulleys. The German lady was kept as a curiosity in the cabinet of the Elector of Saxony. Our Boxley Rood was brought up and exhibited in Cheapside, and was afterwards torn to pieces by the people." No sort of disrespect towards the Roman Catholic religion is involved in recording this absolutely true statement of historical fact. The trick described was undoubtedly played upon pilgrims in Saxony and in Kent; whether it was justifiable from some points of view matters not at all. The Roman Catholic religion is a great truth, may conceivably be the most exact and precise truth, behind all this kind of thing. It is considerably more than likely that similar devices were employed at Walsingham. They may even have been employed by ecclesiastics otherwise blameless, for the rules of professional practice still occasionally justify strange conduct, or seem to justify it. But the evidence, if there was any, was destroyed at the Dissolution, when Thomas Cromwell took the sacred image away to Chelsea, and burned it. Henry VIII on this occasion, by the way, got some of his own back. He, too, like other kings and queens, native and foreign, had made the pilgrimage to Walsingham before his quarrel with Rome, and had walked the last four miles or so, from Barsham, barefooted. Quære, whether, when a king was on pilgrimage bent, the roads were spread with soft sand as they are now, with sand and gravel, when King Edward is going to make a progress in London. Henry gave an offering in the shape of a priceless necklace; but he secured it again in later life, and may even have given it to one of the wives, of whom, it may be remembered, he had several.

An account of the ceremonies used, quoted again from Messrs. Timbs and Gunn, is not without interest. "The pilgrim who arrived at Walsingham entered the sacred precinct by a narrow wicket. It was purposely made difficult to pass, as a precaution against the robberies which were frequently committed at the shrine. On the gate in which the wicket opened was nailed a copper image of a knight on horseback, whose miraculous preservation by the Virgin formed the subject of one of the numerous legendary stories with which the place abounded. To the east of the gate, within, stood a small chapel, where the pilgrim was allowed, for money, to kiss a gigantic bone, said to have been the finger-bone of St. Peter. After this he was conducted to a building thatched with reeds and straw, inclosing two wells in high repute for indigestion and headaches; and also for the rare virtue of ensuring to the votary, within certain limits, whatever he might wish for at the time of drinking their water. The building itself was said to have been transported through the air many centuries before, in a deep snow; and as a proof of it, the visitor's attention was gravely pointed to an old bearskin attached to one of the beams. The 'Tweyne Wells,' called also 'the Wishing Wells,' an anonymous ballad speaks of:—

A chappel of Saynt Laurence standeth now thereFast by, tweyne wallys, experience do thus and lore;There she (the widow) thought to have sette this chappel,Which was begun by our Ladie's Counsel.All night the wedowe permayning in this prayer,Our blessed Ladie with blessed minystrys,Herself being her chief artificer,Arrered this sayde house with Angells handys,And not only rered it but sette in there it is,That is twyne hundred feet more in distanceFrom the first place folk make remembraince."

Of a very truth, as Froude said, "The world is so changed that we can hardly recognize it as the same." Imagination retires baffled from the effort to picture kings and queens walking barefoot over primitive Norfolk roads, passing through a wild waste too, for Coke of Norfolk was not yet born, to go through these ceremonies and to present their gifts. Erasmus, with his tongue in his cheek, is easily conjured up; so are the robbers whom the shrine attracted. But why were there not any number of pilgrims in the sceptical mood of Erasmus? There seem to have been plenty of robbers.

We pass (the roads hereabout are flat as the sands of the sea, the land about them richly timbered, and there is nothing else to be said of them) from the ruins of a religious house to one indissolubly associated with the names of two men, each exceptionally worldly, each in his own singular way, and with that of one remarkably eccentric. Houghton Hall was built by Sir Robert Walpole from the designs of Colin Campbell, while the former was Prime Minister, and Ripley, say Messrs. Timbs and Gunn (who speak with authority), undoubtedly improved on Colin Campbell. Pope, it is true, wrote:—

Heaven visits with a taste the wealthy fool,And needs no rod but Ripley with a rule.*…*...*…*So Ripley, till his destined space is filled,Heaps bricks on bricks and fancies 'tis to build.

Pope, always bitter and not a little of a snob, was hardly likely to have a good word to say for an architect who had been a working carpenter. It is true, too, that Lady Hervey wrote in 1765: "I saw Houghton, which is the most triste, melancholy, fine place I ever beheld. 'Tis a heavy, ugly, black building, with an ugly black stone. The Hall, saloon, and gallery very fine; the rest not in the least so." Time, it may be, has given the stone mellowness; certain it is that Houghton now, in spite of a certain pretentiousness of Ionic columns, is really pleasing.

Of Houghton's most noted masters, the Walpoles, a few words must be said, but of two of them not many, for they are well known to all. The first Lord Orford was Sir Robert Walpole, the great Prime Minister who believed in letting well alone, in corruption as a method of Government, in the venality of all men, and in the collection of pictures. It is curious, but true, that this most sagacious statesman was, in a scholarly age, no scholar, and that this fastidious connoisseur of Art was, in a coarse age, exceptionally plain spoken and free-living. When the then Lord Townshend heard that Lord Orford was at Houghton he made a rule of leaving Rainham and Norfolk himself. The second Lord Orford was of no account. Of the third I shall write a little more here than of the fourth, because the eccentricities of the third are not so well known as are many of the details, whimsical rather than eccentric, of Horace Walpole, the fourth and last Lord Orford.

Sir Robert Walpole collected pictures by Guido, Vandyke, Claude, Rubens, Rembrandt, Salvator Rosa, Teniers, Paul Veronese, Wouvermans, Titian, Poussin, Snyders—in a word, by most of the best of the old masters, and housed them in his majestic Norfolk home, girt by a park whose trees testify to this day to his skill in planting. Horace Walpole, who had loved Houghton in his youth, himself wrote in after life a catalogue of these pictures and a description of the apartments in which they hung. The first Lord Orford slept with his fathers—they had been Walpoles of Walpole in Marshland since the time of Richard I—and his son reigned in his stead. Meanwhile his youngest son Horace, of whom it has been suspected on good grounds that he was not truly the son of the Prime Minister, lived that curious life in that curious house, Strawberry Hill, details of which are known to many because they have passed into English literature. He was the best letter-writer of modern times, or of nearly modern times, and his eccentricities are easily forgiven. He could afford them by virtue of two sinecures for life which his all-powerful father had secured for him; and he appears to have been perfectly happy building and altering his toy palace, collecting all sorts of curios, writing the most charming letters to his lady friends, writing for the press also (and childishly vain of his work), and hardly dreaming that he might succeed to the estate and the title. Even when, after the death of the second earl, the property fell to his eccentric son, Horace Walpole hardly seems to me to have realized that he might some day succeed to the title and the estate. He was growing to be an old man. His grief over the sale of the celebrated gallery was not that of an expectant heir.

What of the third earl, who died without issue, and so left Horace Walpole to be the fourth and last Lord Orford? The world at large knows him as the madman who sold the first Lord Orford's unparalleled collection of pictures to Catherine of Russia. But he did many madder things than that for, commercially speaking, he did not make a bad bargain over the sale of the pictures, for which he received more than his father had given. In him the English love of sport ran to insane excess. Indeed it even brought him to his death. At a time when he was under restraint the date came when his greyhound Czarina was matched to run a course. Devoted to coursing as he had always been, he determined to be present and, with the cunning of a madman, he jumped out of a window while his attendant was out of the room, ran to the stable, saddled his favourite pony, a piebald, galloped to the scene of the match, refused to go home in spite of all entreaties, saw Czarina win, fell from his saddle, and died there and then. George, third earl, could not have died more appropriately, nor, from his own point of view, more happily. He was mad, of course, very mad indeed; but he was a thorough sportsman. Perhaps the maddest and at the same time most sporting thing he did was to train four stags to go four-in-hand. "He had reduced the deer to perfect discipline and, as he sat in his phaeton and drove the handsome animals, he, no doubt, fancied he was performing no inconsiderable achievement." If the writer of that pompous sentence tried to break four stags, or even a pair, to harness with his own hands, he would not have much doubt of the quality of the achievement; that is assuming he survived the effort. But the stag four-in-hand almost brought Lord Orford to a sporting death before his time. He was driving his strange team to Newmarket, where he was a familiar figure, when a pack of hounds came across the scent and gave chase in full cry. The sequel, except for Lord Orford, must have been simply paralysingly funny. Picture it for a moment. Think of the stags, thoroughly panic-stricken, no longer trotting, but tearing along the road with huge bounds; of Lord Orford helpless on the box as the phaeton leapt and swayed; of the hounds racing behind and of the savage music of their cry. It was, it must have been, a sight for gods and men; and many men saw it; for the run ended in the yard of the "Ram" at Newmarket, where phaeton, stags, and noble driver disappeared into a barn and the doors were shut in the face of the clamouring pack. Surely this is the maddest, funniest true story that ever was told, and the oddest part about it is that Lord Orford was not then and there clapped into a madhouse. Yet one cannot help feeling a lurking regard for this mad sportsman. His foibles are more to the taste of some of us than the affectations of Horace Walpole.

By the road over which the mad Earl of Orford used to career with his extraordinary team, over which Horace Walpole doubtless drove when he left his beloved London and "Strawberry"—for so he called it "all short"—to fight an election at Lynn, we also drove in a chariot which, to the eighteenth-century Norfolkian, would have seemed just as strange as the phaeton and four stags would appear to us in the twentieth. The motor-car, however, attracts less attention in north-western Norfolk, perhaps, than in any other part of the kingdom; for at Sandringham are many motor-cars of many makes, and some there are at the Cottage also. This part of the country learned before others did the elementary truth that there is no essential connection between speed and peril, and it was good for automobolism that an object-lesson should have been given in this respect by the magnificent cars, Daimlers for the most part, of him whom the law regards as incapable of offence, because he is the spring and source of the law itself. Of this country of heather, bracken, fir and oak, of glorious gorse and of glowing rhododendrons, of the numerous acclivities and declivities, sufficient to give variety to the scene without trying the powers of any competent car, of its air, an incomparably sweet mixture of the breaths of the sea and of the moorland, little will be said at this moment, for the simple reason that, in the next and final chapter, I hope to be able to give an impression of its beauties at many times of the year, from the point of view of a frequent eye-witness.

The whole distance from Wells to King's Lynn, by way of Fakenham, which was our way, is a generous thirty miles; but the going was so good and the roads were so clear that we entered the great square of the old-fashioned Lynn a little too early for luncheon, having regard to the fact that engagements in the world which we had put out of sight began to bulk rather large in the near future. The single town of any interest we passed through before reaching Lynn was Fakenham; and we agreed with Mr. Rye that it is "a particularly clean and pleasant market town, with several good old-fashioned inns, especially the 'Crown.'" That is to say the first statement is endorsed from experience; as to the second the responsibility rests with Mr. Rye. Here also, for those who care to halt, is a singularly fine church showing many a crowned "L" in stone to testify that Fakenham was once the head-quarters in Norfolk of the Duchy of Lancaster. As for Lynn, some of us had visited it before, one had sojourned in it long (but his tale is postponed), and time, as has been mentioned, began to press a little. Drifting on the roads, careless of where you shall eat or where sleep, is delightful, but for most of us it cannot go on indefinitely, and therein, probably, consists its chief charm. It is of the essence of a "treat," to use the good old word of childhood, that it should be more or less exceptional. So, at King's Lynn, we did but halt for a space at the "Globe" in the corner of the wide and cobbled square and, although a little rain began to fall, compel the new-comers to walk about a little, and look at the narrow streets, the estuary of the Ouse, and the Custom-house. The compulsion had better have been omitted, for Lynn with its streets empty of people, with the rain falling, and with the tide out, assuredly does not allure, and that was the state of things on this Sunday morning in April. In other circumstances, as it is hoped to prove ere long, Lynn and its people are much more attractive.

So the halt was not prolonged and, the rain abating, we started on the drive of forty-five miles roughly for Ely and Cambridge. It took us through the heart of the East Anglian Fens, and the day was one in which the spirit of them entered into me, or perhaps I, having set my mind thereto, entered into their spirit. Of a truth the task was one presenting little difficulty, so far as the general mood was concerned. For me, at any rate, there has never been any real gulf between the useful and the romantic. To one nurtured at the foot of the mighty amphitheatre of the Penrhyn Slate Quarries, scooped out from the heart of a mountain, rising in purple tiers of Cyclopean scale, the work of man, so long as it be grand in outline and in purpose, has always seemed to possess an entrancing beauty of its own. Men live who find the Fens flat and uninteresting. They demand our compassion, by no means our censure or our scorn. One does not despise a blind man because he cannot see; and these men simply suffer from partial blindness, physical and mental. There is, beyond all question, a beauty of the Fens as they are, appealing to the eye alone; they had another beauty for the eye in their original state, original that is to say so far as human history reaches, and of the nature of that original beauty a miniature presentment may be seen still at Wicken Fen, which lies between the Isle of Ely and Newmarket Heath. Happy is the man or woman who can rejoice in both of these aspects of the Fenland. Happier still, because more intelligently charmed, are those who, while they travel through the rich cornland, following the banks of rivers whose waters run at a level higher than those of the surrounding fields, can picture to themselves the scene as it was before the skill and the courage of man made the good wheat grow where the reeds once waved, made firm pasture for sleek cattle out of the quagmire, caused domestic fowls to thrive in the sometime domain of the bittern and the heron. Men never tire of singing the praises of the Dutch who, by dogged courage and centuries of unrelaxing effort, made a country for themselves, a country to which they cling with a love passing the love of women. The conquest of the Fens, begun, so far as we know, by the Romans, was, in its way, an enterprise of equal nobility and courage, and Vermuyden, Francis, Duke of Bedford, and Rennie deserve credit great as any given to any Dutch engineer. The details are perhaps dull; they would certainly be out of place here; the result is grand, a colossal gain for humanity which can best be realized and valued, be admired most cordially and warmly, as one rolls along solid roads where the Fenman of old stalked gingerly on stilts.

Who will not remember the last words of Kingsley's Hereward the Wake, when they are quoted?

"Let us send over to Normandy for a fair white stone of Caen, and let us carve a tomb worthy of thy grand-parents."

"And what shall we write thereon?"

"What but that which is there already? 'Here lies the last of the English.'"

"Not so. We will write, 'Here lies the last of the old English.' But upon thy tomb, when thy time comes, the monks of Crowland shall write, 'Here lies the first of the new English; who, by the inspiration of God, began to drain the Fens.'"

Here is absolute truth of sentiment, and to say this is by no means to deny sympathetic appreciation of the dogged resistance offered by the Fenmen of many generations to those who rescued the Fens from the condition of a watery wilderness. Of course the Fenmen hated the very idea of the subjugation of the Marshland. Their feeling towards those who began the long and arduous work differed only in degree from that with which the savage inhabitants of a new country—new to us, that is to say—regard the advance of civilization. They were not savages, but they were hard men and hardy, for only the fittest survived the agues and the fevers, accustomed to a free out-door life, having its pleasures no less than its trials. Let me quote Kingsley:—

"Overhead the arch of heaven spread more ample than elsewhere, as over the open sea; and that vastness gave, and still gives, such cloudlands, such sunrises, such sunsets, as can be seen nowhere else within these isles. They might well have been star worshippers, those Gervii, had their sky been clear as that of the East; but they were like to have worshipped the clouds rather than the stars, according to the too universal law, that mankind worship the powers which do them harm, rather than the powers which do them good. Their priestly teachers, too, had darkened still further their notion of the world around, as accursed by sin and swarming with evil spirits. The gods and fairies of their old mythology had been transformed by the Church into fiends, alluring or loathsome, but all alike destructive to man, against whom the soldier of God, the celibate monk, fought day and night with relics, Agnus Dei, and sign of Holy Cross. And therefore the Danelagh men, who feared not mortal sword or axe, feared witches, ghosts, Pucks, Wills-o'-the-Wisp, Werewolves, spirits of the wells and the trees, and all dark, capricious and harmful beings whom their fancy called up out of the wild, wet, and unwholesome marshes, or the dark, wolf-haunted woods. For that fair land, like all things on earth, had its dark aspect. The foul exhalations of the autumn called up fever and ague, crippling and enervating, and tempting, almost compelling, to that wild and desperate drinking which was the Scandinavian's special sin. Dark and sad were those short autumn days, when all the distances were shut off, and the air reeked with foul brown fog and drenching rains from the eastern sea; and pleasant the bursting forth of the keen north-east wind, with all its whirling snowstorms. For though it sent men hurrying into the storm, to drive the cattle in from the fen, and lift the sheep out of the snow-wreaths, and now and then never to return, lost in mist and mire, in ice and snow; yet all knew that after the snow would come the keen frost and bright sun and cloudless blue sky, and the Fenman's yearly holiday, when, work being impossible, all gave themselves up to play, and swarmed upon the ice on skates and sledges, to run races, township against township, or visit old friends forty miles away; and met everywhere faces as bright and ruddy as their own, cheered by the keen wind of that dry and bracing frost."