In 1613, Stourbridge fair acquired such celebrity, that hackney-coaches attended it from London. Subsequently not less than sixty coaches plied at this fair, which was the largest in England. Vast quantities of butter and cheese found there a ready market; it stocked the people of Norfolk, Suffolk, Essex, and other counties with clothes, and all other necessaries; and shopkeepers supplied themselves from thence with the commodities wherein they dealt.[328]
Jacob Butler, Esq. who died on the 28th of May, 1765, stoutly maintained the charter of Stourbridge fair: he was of Bene’t-college, Cambridge, and a barrister-at-law. In stature he was six feet four inches high, of determined character, and deemed “a great eccentric” because, among other reasons, he usually invited the giants and dwarfs, who came for exhibition, to dine with him. He was so rigid in seeing the charter literally complied with, that if the ground was not cleared by one o’clock on the day appointed, and he found any of the booths standing, he had them pulled down, and the materials taken away. On one occasion when the wares were not removed by the time mentioned in the charter, he drove his carriage among the crockery and destroyed a great quantity.
The rev. John Butler, LL.D. rector of Wallington, in Hertfordshire, father of Mr. Butler, who was his eldest son, endeavoured in the year 1705, to get Stourbridge fair rated to the poor. This occasioned a partial and oppressive assessment on himself that involved him in great difficulties. Dr. Butler died in 1714, and Jacob Butler succeeded to his difficulties and estates in the parish of Barnwell. As a trustee under an act for the turnpike road from Cambridge to London, Mr. Butler was impeached of abuses in common with his co-trustees. Being obnoxious, he was singled out to make good the abuse, and summoned to the county sessions, where he appeared in his barrister’s gown, was convicted and fined ten pounds, which he refused to pay, and was committed. He excepted to the jurisdiction, wherein he was supported by the opinion of sir Joseph Yorke, then attorney-general, and to save an estreat applied to the under-sheriff, who refused his application, and afterwards went to the clerk of the peace at Newmarket, from whom he met the like treatment; this forced him to the quarter-sessions, where he obtained his discharge, after telling the chairman he felt it hard to be compelled to the trouble and expense of teaching him and his brethren law. He appears to have been a lawyer of that school, which admitted no law but the old common law of the land, and statute law. In 1754, “to stem the venality and corruption of the times, he offered himself a candidate to represent the county in parliament, unsupported by the influence of the great, the largess of the wealthy, or any interest, but that which his single character could establish in the esteem of all honest men and lovers of their country. But when he found the struggles for freedom faint and ineffectual, and his spirits too weak to resist the efforts of his enemies, he contented himself with the testimony of those few friends who dare to be free, and of his own unbiassed conscience, which, upon this, as well as every other occasion, voted in his favour; and upon these accounts he was justly entitled to the name of the old Briton.” He bore this appellation to the day of his death. The loss of a favourite dog is supposed to have accelerated his end; upon its being announced to him, he said, “I shall not live long now my dog is dead.” He shortly afterwards became ill, and, lingering about two months, died.
His coffin, which was made from a large oak by his express order, some months before his death, became an object of public curiosity; it was of sufficient dimensions to contain several persons, and wine was copiously quaffed therein by many of those who went to see it. To a person, who was one of the legatees, the singular trust was delegated of driving him to the grave, on the carriage of a waggon, divested of the body: seated in the front, he was to drive his two favourite horses, Brag and Dragon, to Barnwell church, and should they refuse to receive his body there, he was to return and bury him in the middle of the grass-plat in his own garden. Part only of his request was complied with, for the body being put into a leaden coffin, and the leaden one into a shell, was conveyed in a hearse, and the coffin made before his death was put upon the carriage of his waggon, and driven before the hearse by the gentleman above mentioned when arrived at the church door, it was taken from the carriage by four men, who received half-a-guinea each; it was then put into the vault, and the corpse being taken from the hearse was carried to the vault, there put into the coffin, and then screwed down.
Jacob Butler, Esq.
The late rev. Michael Tyson of Bene’t-college, “a good antiquary and a gentleman artist,” amused himself with etching a few portraits; among them “were some of the old masters of his college, and some of the noted characters in and about Cambridge, as Jacob Butler of Barnwell, who called himself the old Briton,” which Mr. Nichols says “may be called his best, both in design and execution; for it expresses the very man himself.” A gentleman of the university has obligingly communicated to this work a fine impression of Mr. Tyson’s head of “the old Briton,” from whence the present [portrait] is engraven.