THE PALMER SAMPLER
WORKED ABOUT 1620.
This beautiful piece of needlework, done in coloured silks, has the unusual feature of presenting, as it were, a kind of Palmer portrait-gallery of that period. In the midst is a shield of the Palmer arms impaling those of Shurley of Isfield, Sussex. This identifies that particular Palmer as Sir Thomas, of Wingham, the second Baronet, who married Elizabeth, daughter and heiress of Sir John Shurley, and succeeded his grandfather in the title 1625. That baronetcy became extinct in 1838.
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.