Above the ship, in the handwriting of Coke, is the couplet:
‘It deserveth not to be read in schools,
But to be freighted in the ship of fools.’
Thomas Shadwell, the Poet Laureate and historiographer of William III., was a Norfolk man. He is buried in Westminster Abbey. It is said by Noble that he was an honest man. Of course he was. Chalmers accuses him of indecent conversation, or Lord Rochester would not have said that he had more wit and humour than any other poet. I am afraid he confers little honour on his native county. ‘Others,’ wrote Dryden in one of his satires,
‘To some faint meaning make pretence,
But Shadwell never deviates into sense.’
Sir Robert Walpole, who saved England from wooden shoes and slavery, was of a Norfolk family, yet flourishing; as are the Townshends, to whom we owe the introduction of the turnip. Norfolk also can boast of Sir Thomas Gresham and Sir Francis Walsingham. In Norfolk was born that ‘great oracle of law, patron of the Church, and
glory of England,’ as Camden calls him, Sir Henry Spelman. At Bickling, in the same county, was born that ill-starred Anne Boleyn, of whom it is written that
‘Love could teach a monarch to be wise,
And Gospel light first beamed from Boleyn’s eyes.’
In the same neighbourhood, also, was born John Baconthorpe, the resolute doctor, of whom Pantias Pansa has written: ‘This one resolute doctor has furnished the Christian religion with armour against the Jews stronger than that of Vulcan.’ Pansa was a Norfolk man, and so was the great botanist Sir W. Hooker.
Who has not heard of Lynn, in Norfolk, where, when Eugene Aram was the usher,
‘Four-and-twenty happy boys
Came bounding out of school’?