On the 6th I went to Lynn, and on that evening and on the evening of the 7th, I spoke to about 300 people in the playhouse. And here there was more interruption than I have ever met with at any other place. This town, though containing as good and kind friends as I have met with in any other, and though the people are generally as good, contains also, apparently, a large proportion of dead-weight, the offspring, most likely, of the rottenness of the borough. Two or three, or even one man, may, if not tossed out at once, disturb and interrupt everything in a case where constant attention to fact and argument is requisite, to insure utility to the meeting. There were but three here; and though they were finally silenced, it was not without great loss of time, great noise and hubbub. Two, I was told, were dead-weight men, and one a sort of higgling merchant.
On the 8th I went to Holbeach, in this noble county of Lincoln; and, gracious God! what a contrast with the scene at Lynn! I knew not a soul in the place. Mr. Fields, a bookseller and printer, had invited me by letter, and had, in the nicest and most unostentatious manner, made all the preparations. Holbeach lies in the midst of some of the richest land in the world; a small market-town, but a parish more than twenty miles across, larger, I believe, than the county of Rutland, produced an audience (in a very nice room, with seats prepared) of 178, apparently all wealthy farmers, and men in that rank of life; and an audience so deeply attentive to the dry matters on which I had to address it, I have very seldom met with. I was delighted with Holbeach; a neat little town; a most beautiful church with a spire, like that of “the man of Ross, pointing to the skies;” gardens very pretty; fruit-trees in abundance, with blossom-buds ready to burst; and land, dark in colour, and as fine in substance as flour, as fine as if sifted through one of the sieves with which we get the dust out of the clover seed; and when cut deep down into with a spade, precisely, as to substance, like a piece of hard butter; yet nowhere is the distress greater than here. I walked on from Holbeach, six miles, towards Boston; and seeing the fatness of the land, and the fine grass and the never-ending sheep lying about like fat hogs, stretched in the sun, and seeing the abject state of the labouring people, I could not help exclaiming, “God has given us the best country in the world; our brave and wise and virtuous fathers, who built all these magnificent churches, gave us the best government in the world, and we, their cowardly and foolish and profligate sons, have made this once-paradise what we now behold!”
I arrived at Boston (where I am now writing) to-day, (Friday, 9th April) about ten o’clock. I must arrive at Louth before I can say precisely what my future route will be. There is an immense fair at Lincoln next week; and a friend has been here to point out the proper days to be there; as, however, this Register will not come from the press until after I shall have had an opportunity of writing something at Louth, time enough to be inserted in it. I will here go back, and speak of the country that I have travelled over, since I left Cambridge on the 29th of March.
From Cambridge to St. Ives the land is generally in open, unfenced fields, and some common fields; generally stiff land, and some of it not very good, and wheat, in many places, looking rather thin. From St. Ives to Chatteris (which last is in the Isle of Ely), the land is better, particularly as you approach the latter place. From Chatteris I came back to Huntingdon and once more saw its beautiful meadows, of which I spoke when I went thither in 1823. From Huntingdon, through Stilton, to Stamford (the two last in Lincolnshire), is a country of rich arable land and grass fields, and of beautiful meadows. The enclosures are very large, the soil red, with a whitish stone below; very much like the soil at and near Ross in Herefordshire, and like that near Coventry and Warwick. Here, as all over this country, everlasting fine sheep. The houses all along here are built of the stone of the country: you seldom see brick. The churches are large, lofty, and fine, and give proof that the country was formerly much more populous than it is now, and that the people had a vast deal more of wealth in their hands and at their own disposal. There are three beautiful churches at Stamford, not less, I dare say, than three [quære] hundred years old; but two of them (I did not go to the other) are as perfect as when just finished, except as to the images, most of which have been destroyed by the ungrateful Protestant barbarians, of different sorts, but some of which (out of the reach of their ruthless hands) are still in the niches.
From Stamford to Peterborough is a country of the same description, with the additional beauty of woods here and there, and with meadows just like those at Huntingdon, and not surpassed by those on the Severn near Worcester, nor by those on the Avon at Tewkesbury. The cathedral at Peterborough is exquisitely beautiful, and I have great pleasure in saying, that, contrary to the more magnificent pile at Ely, it is kept in good order; the Bishop (Herbert Marsh) residing a good deal on the spot; and though he did write a pamphlet to justify and urge on the war, the ruinous war, and though he did get a pension for it, he is, they told me, very good to the poor people. My daughters had a great desire to see, and I had a great desire they should see, the burial-place of that ill-used, that savagely-treated, woman, and that honour to woman-kind, Catherine, queen of the ferocious tyrant, Henry the Eighth. To the infamy of that ruffian, and the shame of after ages, there is no monument to record her virtues and her sufferings; and the remains of this daughter of the wise Ferdinand and of the generous Isabella, who sold her jewels to enable Columbus to discover the new world, lie under the floor of the cathedral, commemorated by a short inscription on a plate of brass. All men, Protestants or not Protestants, feel as I feel upon this subject; search the hearts of the bishop and of his dean and chapter, and these feelings are there; but to do justice to the memory of this illustrious victim of tyranny, would be to cast a reflection on that event to which they owe their rich possessions, and, at the same time, to suggest ideas not very favourable to the descendants of those who divided amongst them the plunder of the people arising out of that event, and which descendants are their patrons, and give them what they possess. From this cause, and no other, it is, that the memory of the virtuous Catherine is unblazoned, while that of the tyrannical, the cruel, and the immoral Elizabeth, is recorded with all possible veneration, and all possible varnishing-over of her disgusting amours and endless crimes.
They relate at Peterborough, that the same sexton who buried Queen Catherine, also buried here Mary, Queen of Scots. The remains of the latter, of very questionable virtue, or, rather, of unquestionable vice, were removed to Westminster Abbey by her son, James the First; but those of the virtuous Queen were suffered to remain unhonoured! Good God! what injustice, what a want of principle, what hostility to all virtuous feeling, has not been the fruit of this Protestant Reformation; what plunder, what disgrace to England, what shame, what misery, has that event not produced! There is nothing that I address to my hearers with more visible effect than a statement of the manner in which the poor-rates and the church-rates came. This, of course, includes an account of how the poor were relieved in Catholic times. To the far greater part of people this is information wholly new; they are deeply interested in it; and the impression is very great. Always before we part, Tom Cranmer’s church receives a considerable blow.
There is in the cathedral a very ancient monument, made to commemorate, they say, the murder of the abbot and his monks by the Danes. Its date is the year 870. Almost all the cathedrals, were, it appears, originally churches of monasteries. That of Winchester and several others, certainly were. There has lately died, in the garden of the bishop’s palace, a tortoise that had been there more, they say, than two hundred years; a fact very likely to be known; because, at the end of thirty or forty, people would begin to talk about it as something remarkable; and thus the record would be handed down from father to son.
From Peterborough to Wisbeach, the road, for the most part, lies through the Fens, and here we passed through the village of Thorney, where there was a famous abbey, which, together with its valuable domain, was given by the savage tyrant, Henry VIII., to John Lord Russell (made a lord by that tyrant), the founder of the family of that name. This man got also the abbey and estate at Woburn; the priory and its estate at Tavistock; and in the next reign he got Covent Garden and other parts adjoining; together with other things, all then public property. A history, a true history of this family (which I hope I shall find time to write) would be a most valuable thing. It would be a nice little specimen of the way in which these families became possessed of a great part of their estates. It would show how the poor-rates and the church-rates came. It would set the whole nation right at once. Some years ago I had a set of the Encyclopædia Britannica (Scotch), which contained an account of every other great family in the kingdom; but I could find in it no account of this family, either under the word Russell or the word Bedford. I got into a passion with the book, because it contained no account of the mode of raising the birch-tree; and it was sold to a son (as I was told) of Mr. Alderman Heygate; and if that gentleman look into the book, he will find what I say to be true; but if I should be in error about this, perhaps he will have the goodness to let me know it. I shall be obliged to any one to point me out any printed account of this family; and particularly to tell me where I can get an old folio, containing (amongst other things) Bulstrode’s argument and narrative in justification of the sentence and execution of Lord William Russell, in the reign of Charles the Second. It is impossible to look at the now-miserable village of Thorney, and to think of its once-splendid abbey; it is impossible to look at the twenty thousand acres of land around, covered with fat sheep, or bearing six quarters of wheat or ten of oats to the acre, without any manure; it is impossible to think of these without feeling a desire that the whole nation should know all about the surprising merits of the possessors.
Wisbeach, lying farther up the arm of the sea than Lynn, is, like the latter, a little town of commerce, chiefly engaged in exporting to the south, the corn that grows in this productive country. It is a good solid town, though not handsome, and has a large market, particularly for corn.
To Crowland, I went, as before stated, from Wisbeach, staying two nights at St. Edmund’s. Here I was in the heart of the Fens. The whole country as level as the table on which I am now writing. The horizon like the sea in a dead calm: you see the morning sun come up, just as at sea; and see it go down over the rim, in just the same way as at sea in a calm. The land covered with beautiful grass, with sheep lying about upon it, as fat as hogs stretched out sleeping in a stye. The kind and polite friends, with whom we were lodged, had a very neat garden, and fine young orchard. Everything grows well here: earth without a stone so big as a pin’s head; grass as thick as it can grow on the ground; immense bowling-greens separated by ditches; and not the sign of dock or thistle or other weed to be seen. What a contrast between these and the heath-covered sand-hills of Surrey, amongst which I was born! Yet the labourers, who spuddle about the ground in the little dips between those sand-hills, are better off than those that exist in this fat of the land. Here the grasping system takes all away, because it has the means of coming at the value of all: there, the poor man enjoys something, because he is thought too poor to have anything: he is there allowed to have what is deemed worth nothing; but here, where every inch is valuable, not one inch is he permitted to enjoy.