In the year 1727 there was born in Sudbury, and baptized in the Independent Meeting there, Thomas Gainsborough, one of the earliest and the greatest of English painters.  The family were Dissenters, and in the meeting-house, now under the care of the Rev. Ira Bosely, who seems very happy and successful in his new sphere of labour, are the memorials of two of them who were buried in the graveyard attached.  There are two bequests of the Gainsborough family for the support of the minister for the time being, of which the present incumbent made favourable mention when I saw him the other day, in the comfortable manse attached to the meeting-house.  One of the items in the ancient account-book seemed to be curious.  It was as follows: “Four shillings for tobacco.”  I have only to assume in the good old times our pious ancestors had an idea of Pleasant Sunday Afternoon Services, and for that purpose possibly the tobacco had been acquired.  Be that as it may, we may be sure the Gainsborough family were as remarkable as any that then attended on the means of grace.  In person, Mr. Gainsborough’s father is represented as a fine old man, who wore his hair carefully parted, and was remarkable for the whiteness and regularity of his teeth.  According to the custom of the last century he always wore a sword and was an adroit fencer, possessing the fatal facility of using the weapon in either hand.  He introduced into Sudbury the straw trade from Coventry, and p. 53he managed to keep it in his own hands.  He had a large family of five sons and four daughters.  One of the latter married a Dissenting Minister at Bath.  One son, John, was a great mechanical genius, and invented wings, by means of which he essayed to fly, but, to the amusement of the spectators, found himself, instead of soaring into the air, dropped in a ditch by the way.  Humphrey Gainsborough, the painter’s second brother, settled as a Dissenting Minister at Henley-on-Thames.  Of him, the celebrated Edgeworth, the father of the equally celebrated daughter, says he had never known a man of a more inventive mind.  Thomas, the artist, must have inherited something of his artistic skill from his mother, for she herself loved to paint fruit and flowers, but with the boy, painting became the one great object of his life, and he was always at it, even when he should have been studying at the ancient grammar school where he was a pupil; and thus it is Sudbury has two great men to boast of—Thomas Gainsborough, the artist, and Simon de Sudbury, Archbishop of Canterbury, who was beheaded by the populace in Wat Tyler’s rebellion, and whose skull is still shown you in St. Gregory’s Church.  I have known many thick skulls in East Anglia, but surely that of the martyred Archbishop must have been one of the thickest to have lasted all this time.

Sudbury was the painter’s studio.  It is now a clean, well-built, and slightly uninteresting provincial town, with a population of about eight thousand.  But, said a commercial traveller to me, as I was deploring the barrenness of the land, “It is a good place for business.”  It lies in the flat country of the valley of the Stour, a river which expands into a lake when the waters are out.  When Gainsborough was a boy it was ancient and picturesque—and dirty.  At any rate it is thus described in a poem written by Daniel Herbert, one of the old Noncons., a bunting manufacturer, and occasional preacher in the old meeting-house, who tells us

    I live at Sudbury, that dirty place,
    Where are a few poor sinners saved by grace.

p. 54—Well, the dirt is gone; but when as late as the disfranchisement of the burgh, for bribery and corruption, which took place early in the reign of Queen Victoria, when the free and independent returned to Parliament a gentleman of colour, renowned for his vanity and wealth, it was evident that a good many poor sinners remained who had not been saved by grace.

Allan Cunningham treats the marriage of Gainsborough as all conventional writers do.  The lady—her name was Margaret Burr, and she had ￡200 a year of her own—made Gainsborough “a prudent, a kind, and a submissive wife.”  As the lady was but sixteen, and her husband was eighteen, at the time of their wedding, one cannot be surprised to find at a later period Gainsborough looking upon his wife as a somewhat unsuitable companion.  Cunningham writes, “The courtship was short.  The young pair left Sudbury, leased a small house at a rent of ￡24 a year in Ipswich, and, making themselves happy in mutual love, conceived they were settled for life.”

Sudbury was the birth-place of Enfield, whose Speaker was a well-known text book in the past generation.  Then our William Durbyn, author of the well-known Commentary on the Epistle of Jude, was also born there.  He died a martyr for the truth’s sake in Newgate in 1685.  The Grammar School of Sudbury dates as far back as 1591.  Protestant as the town was, the Sudbury burghers marched to Framlingham to defend Mary’s rights against the attempted usurpation of Northumberland and his faction, she assuring them of her protection in the observance of their religion—a promise she shamefully failed to keep.  It seems that Wilson, the Sudbury lecturer and preacher, was so harassed by the Bishop and Archbishop, that with Winthrop, afterwards Governor of Massachusetts, he went over with a large band of the later Pilgrim Fathers to New England.  Sudbury itself at one time seems to have rejoiced in a Christian toleration as refreshing as it was rare.  In 1670, or thereabouts, it p. 55was the practice of the Nonconformists to preach in All Saints Church, while one of the early pastors of the Congregational Church lived with his family in All Saints Vicarage for eleven years.  It appears from the town records that this church was without a regular incumbent for a long time, and that after the Dutch war, the church was used as a prison for the Dutch prisoners, there being at one time 500 of them quartered in the............