Loughborough Parish Library at The Old Rectory Museum: New Digital Gallery and a Free Workshop

Loughborough Parish Library at The Old Rectory Museum: New Digital Gallery and a Free Workshop

New Digital Gallery

A few weeks ago I mentioned in this blog that I had attended an event celebrating the opening of a new exhibition, down at the Old Rectory, so you might be interested to know that some key extracts from items in the Parish Library have been digitised and can be found on the University of Nottingham, Manuscripts and Special Collections Digital Gallery. 

Once you’re on the site, click on an image, and this will take you to the catalogue record and give you the link to the single image view. Choose the second option: “View the digital file(s) with the Universal Viewer (allows zooming in)”

New FREE Workshop!

As well as the new Digital Gallery, you might also be interested to read about a forthcoming exciting opportunity being held down at the old Rectory … a hands-on workshop exploring Early Modern print culture using facsimile pages from the historic rare books. Decode the symbolism and powerful visual storytelling in images taken from Classical myths and Biblical stories.

The event is facilitated by Thomas Nixon-Roworth, who is studying for a PhD at Sheffield University and currently completes a placement at the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections with Dr Ursula Ackrill, Librarian (Special Collections), at that institution.

Ursula has catalogued the library of old and rare books which was originally kept in the Old Rectory, and, more recently, she has curated the exhibition Loughborough Parish Library. This exhibition runs at the Old Rectory Museum until the end of August 2024, and you are invited to visit the exhibition during the Museum’s opening times, 11am-3pm on Saturdays.

Accompanying the exhibition, a new workshop is being held by Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham, to which you are also invited. It is hosted by the Loughborough Archaeological and Historical Society, custodians of the Old Rectory Museum. The workshop has been developed by Manuscripts and Special Collections, who also provide all learning materials required on the day. You can find further details and a description of the workshop below.

The Details

Dates: Wednesday 28 August, Friday 30 August and Tuesday 3 September.

NB The same workshop runs on all three dates.

Time: 10am-12.30pm. Doors open at 9:30 to view the exhibition.

Venue: Old Rectory Museum, Loughborough LE11 1UW

The workshop is offered free of charge, however, places are limited.

To book your place please email mss-library@nottingham.ac.uk by 23 August 2024.

The Old Rectory Museum, 2024 © Manuscripts and Special Collections

The Workshop

The exhibition, which opened in June 2024 at the Old Rectory, saw the return of familiar sights back inside its walls: engravings from the 17^th and 18^th century; pages from old books with fine handwritten annotations; old letterpress ornaments. If walls could talk, they would salute these pages. The very same pages could have been glimpsed centuries ago over the shoulder of their reader: the Rev. James Bickham. He kept a formidable library of books. He lived at the Old Rectory from 1761 until his death in 1785.

As a student and later fellow of his College at Cambridge, Bickham had an interesting circle of friends. Among them were the poet Thomas Gray, who in 1751 became famous for writing the Elegy in a Country Church Yard, and the Bishop of Worcester Richard Hurd, who resided at Hartlebury Castle, with a library a thousand times bigger than Bickham’s. Unlike Bickham, his friends went on to pursue stellar careers as published authors. By reading the books of Gray, Hurd, and other former fellow students, Bickham rooted for their success from afar, as Rector of All Saints Church at Loughborough.

Bickham found plenty of work to do in the parish of All Saints. From 1772, as Archdeacon of Leicester, Bickham had responsibility for overseeing the maintenance of church buildings and sacral objects in the third largest of the six archdeaconries in the vast Lincoln diocese. However, the condition of his own private library, numbering 641 books, shows him to have been an avid reader, who studied, close-read - and sometimes made notes in the margins of - his books. Bickham and perhaps his wife Sarah were the sole readers of this library during their lifetime. In the solar, the upstairs room of the Old Rectory, we can imagine the Rector and his wife Sarah reciting the Elegy, looking out across to the graveyard, hearing the bells’ toll from All Saints Church. However, the library is now held at the University of Nottingham and can be read by all members of the public.

How can we today re-live the pleasure of knowing these books as Bickham did once? If only there was a quick and handy way in! We considered this, and realised that, whilst reading the books word for word would take more time than any one of us can spare, we have the gift of the images: the books contain illustrations! These images are rich with stories that can be “read” at a glance.

To offer you the experience of the library owner’s insight, we have created a workshop using facsimiles of select frontispieces, illustrations, printers’ devices, and ornaments.

Join us for a hands-on workshop exploring Early Modern print culture using facsimile pages from the historic rare books. Decode the symbolism and powerful visual storytelling in images taken from Classical myths and Biblical stories.

Frontispiece or second illustrated title page of Lucii Coelii Lactantii Firmiani opera (1660)

University of Nottingham, Loughborough Parish Library, Oversize BR65.L2.C60 facsimile

This engraving shows the early Christian author Lactantius presenting the emperor Constantine I with his main work, the Divine Institutes. Here Lactantius argues that the Christian doctrine is true and reasonable - against objections from pagan critics. The image shows the newly Christian emperor rule triumphant over smashed-up statues of the pagan world; he holds in his right hand a sword entwined with an olive branch.

Interested in this workshop’s learning outcomes? Read on.

Learning outcomes of the workshop

You will…

• Get a sense of Early Modern people’s sensibilities.
• Re-familiarise yourself with stories from the Bible, classical antiquity, medieval and Early Modern history, which are captured in images printed in books.
• Refresh your understanding and memories, as you identify the references which these images depict.
• Unpick layers of different stories from disparate traditions gathered together in one image, and interpret the key message it conveys.
• Learn about the art of selling books by studying examples of printer’s devices from the UK and from continental Europe, understanding the rise of the commercial middle class over three centuries.
• Be able to identify techniques such as engraving and woodcut, and explain the different mechanisms required to print them.
• Feel proud of the library which was kept in your town and survived over centuries into our time.

·  

Here are the details again:

Dates: Wednesday 28 August, Friday 30 August and Tuesday 3 September. The same workshop runs on all three dates.

Time: 10am-12.30pm. Doors open at 9:30 to view the exhibition.

Venue: Old Rectory Museum, Loughborough LE11 1UW

Duration of workshop: 2.5 hours, including a 15-minute break. In fine weather bring a packed lunch to enjoy afterwards in the Rectory Garden.

The workshop is offered free of charge, however, places are limited. To book your place please email mss-library@nottingham.ac.uk by 23 August 2024.

____________________________________

About Ursula

As a librarian at Nottingham University with Manuscripts and Special Collections, Ursula has developed a wide range of skills that enable her to promote and interrogate unique collections of material, sharing them widely with people who are interested. Ursula is a member of the Loughborough Archaeological and Historical Society, and can be found at the Old Rectory on some Saturdays during the opening season of the museum. Ursula also gives talks and presentations to groups about her work, for example in February 2024, Ursula gave a talk about Parish Libraries at St Helen's Heritage Centre, Ashby.

About Thomas

Thomas Nixon-Roworth is studying for a PhD at Sheffield University and is currently undertaking a placement at the University of Nottingham’s Manuscripts and Special Collections with Dr Ursula Ackrill, Librarian (Special Collections), at that institution.

____________________________________

Please note, the views expressed in this Guest Blog Post are the views of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the blog owner, lynneaboutloughborough.

____________________________________

Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

_______________________________________________

Thank you for reading this blog.

Copyright:

The copyright © of all content on this blog rests with me, or in the case of guest blogposts, with the named Guest Blogger. However, you are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follows:

Surname, Forename (2024). Loughborough Parish Library at The Old Rectory Museum: New Digital Gallery and a Free Workshop. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2024/07/loughborough-parish-library-at-old.html [Accessed 28 July 2024]

Take down policy:

I post no pictures that are not my own, unless I have express permission so to do. All text is my own, and not copied from any other information sources, printed or electronic, unless identified and credited as such. If you find I have posted something in contravention of these statements, or if there are photographs of you which you would prefer not to be here, please contact me at the address listed on the About Me page, and I will remove these.

Blog archive and tags:

If you are viewing this blog in mobile format, you will not be able to easily access the blog archive, or the clickable links to various topics. These can be accessed if you scroll to the bottom of the page, and click 'View Web Version'. Alternatively, there is also a complete list of posts, which when clicked will take you to the page you are interested in.

Searching the blog:

You can search the blog using the dedicated search box that appears near the top of the blog when viewed in the web version. Alternatively, you can search using your usual search engine (e.g. Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo etc.) by following this example:

site: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/ “Radmoor House”

NOTE – the words you’re actually looking for must be in “” and the first of these must be preceded by a space

Thank you for reading this blog.

Lynne

Old Rectory Museum Parish Library Exhibition

A couple of weeks ago I was lucky enough to be invited along to the opening of what proved to be an exciting exhibition! This event was held at the Old Rectory in Loughborough, down on Rectory Place.

When the Home Front 1939-1945 Exhibition, held from late April until 15th June, closed, the Old Rectory travelled back in time, to the period when the Reverend James Bickham was rector of Loughborough, 1761 to 1785. 

If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you will have heard of the Revd. Bickham featured here back in early 2023, when we investigated who he was, and where he lived.

What was special about the Revd. Bickham was that he was an avid reader and a collector of, and subscriber to many books, and he left his vast collection (originally amounting to nearly 650 volumes) to subsequent rectors of Loughborough. Indeed, the collection did remain with the rectors of Loughborough, although at some point, and until 1950, the collection was housed in a small room above the porch of the parish church, and virtually inaccessible. Subsequent to this, and by 1975, the collection had moved to Loughborough Technical College, which ran a librarianship course, although it appears they arrived here via a stay in a nearby hall. Anyway, the library moved from the technical college to the university (possibly when the librarianship at the tech college closed), before being transferred to the University of Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections department.

The current exhibition at the Old Rectory, curated by Ursula Ackrill one of the librarians at Nottingham Manuscripts and Special Collections, is a result of work done by Ursula and the department to catalogue the books that remain today in Bickham’s library. Sadly, some items have been lost, and the collection has been added to by subsequent rectors, and now amounts to around 540 volumes. The exhibition serves to showcase some of the items from the collection (with the help of facsimiles) and to put the collection in the context of the time, focussing on contemporaneous literary works, religious works, and those showing developments in science. In addition, there is information about the circles in which Bickham moved, as well as artefacts like Wedgewood pottery, and toile de Jouy printed fabric.

So, I will stop here, as if I tell you any more of the exhibition, there will be no need for you to visit and!! But, you must go along and experience the exhibition, the Old Rectory, and the atmosphere for yourself!!! And remember to go upstairs, too! Hurry, as you only have a few Saturdays left in which to do this!

As I spent the whole time chatting to friends, or people I was introduced to, I didn't actually take any photographs of the event myself, so here's a selection taken by a member of the Loughborough Archaeological and Historical Society, which is the organisation that runs the Old Rectory Museum. Enjoy!

About the Reverend Bickham

The display of classics!

The case of elegies!

The science of the day

Printed Toile de Jouy

Part of the archive held at Nottingham University Manuscripts and Special Collections

____________________________________

Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

_______________________________________________

Thank you for reading this blog.

Copyright:

The copyright © of all content on this blog rests with me, however, you are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follows:

Dyer, Lynne (2024). Old Rectory Museum Parish Library Exhibition. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2024/07/old-rectory-museum-parish-library.html [Accessed 16 July 2024]

Take down policy:

I post no pictures that are not my own, unless I have express permission so to do. All text is my own, and not copied from any other information sources, printed or electronic, unless identified and credited as such. If you find I have posted something in contravention of these statements, or if there are photographs of you which you would prefer not to be here, please contact me at the address listed on the About Me page, and I will remove these.

External Links:

By including links to external sources I am not endorsing the websites, the authors, nor the information contained therein, and will not check back to update out-of-date links. Using these links to access external information is entirely the responsibility of the reader of the blog.

Blog archive and tags:

If you are viewing this blog in mobile format, you will not be able to easily access the blog archive, or the clickable links to various topics. These can be accessed if you scroll to the bottom of the page, and click 'View Web Version'. Alternatively, there is also a complete list of posts, which when clicked will take you to the page you are interested in.

Searching the blog:

You can search the blog using the dedicated search box that appears near the top of the blog when viewed in the web version. Alternatively, you can search using your usual search engine (e.g. Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo etc.) by following this example:

site: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/ “Radmoor House”

NOTE – the words you’re actually looking for must be in “” and the first of these must be preceded by a space

Thank you for reading this blog.

Lynne

U is for Ursula

Looking back through the blog, I can see I’ve already written about Unity House and some of the people and things associated with it (like Gertrude Mary Hutton, Dr Corcoran, and the British Restaurant) many posts about the university, and some posts about Unitarians, which also made an appearance in one of my virtual walks. I also noticed that two of my guest bloggers have been named Ursula!!

Ursula Ackrill is a librarian at the University of Nottingham, working in the Manuscripts and Special Collections area, which is based on the Kings Meadow campus. Ursula’s guest post focused on John Cleveland, a Loughborough poet who was born in 1613. 

My own work with Ursula was on the Loughborough parish library, a collection of books used by the Reverend James Bickham, and left by him to the parish. This was an interesting project which led to me writing many blogposts about the Reverend Bickham, his home, and his library!!

Ursula has given talks on Reverend Bickham’s library, and on parish libraries in our areas, and is currently a committee member of the Loughborough Archaeological and Historical Society, and can sometimes be found down at the Old Rectory on a Saturday during the building’s open season. 

The guest post which Ursula Davis wrote for this blog, was back in the early days of the lockdown in 2020. Ursula was a student at Loughborough University at the time, so it was very interesting to read about what strategies she had for keeping well – both physically and mentally – during that unprecedented situation. Absolutely fascinating to see how the chance to slow down, to stay local really helped with an appreciation of all that Loughborough and its surroundings have to offer – like Burleigh Woods, the old railway lines, Charnwood Water, Queen’s Park and so much more!

____________________________________

This post is one in a series of posts for the ‘April A-Z Blogging Challenge’

____________________________________

Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

_______________________________________________

Thank you for reading this blog.

Copyright:

The copyright © of all content on this blog rests with me, however, you are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follows:

Dyer, Lynne (2024). U is for Ursula. Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2024/04/u-is-for-ursula.html  [Accessed 24 April 2024]

Take down policy:

I post no pictures that are not my own, unless I have express permission so to do. All text is my own, and not copied from any other information sources, printed or electronic, unless identified and credited as such. If you find I have posted something in contravention of these statements, or if there are photographs of you which you would prefer not to be here, please contact me at the address listed on the About Me page, and I will remove these.

External Links:

By including links to external sources I am not endorsing the websites, the authors, nor the information contained therein, and will not check back to update out-of-date links. Using these links to access external information is entirely the responsibility of the reader of the blog.

Blog archive and tags:

If you are viewing this blog in mobile format, you will not be able to easily access the blog archive, or the clickable links to various topics. These can be accessed if you scroll to the bottom of the page, and click 'View Web Version'. Alternatively, there is also a complete list of posts, which when clicked will take you to the page you are interested in.

Searching the blog:

You can search the blog using the dedicated search box that appears near the top of the blog when viewed in the web version. Alternatively, you can search using your usual search engine (e.g. Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo etc.) by following this example:

site: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/ “Radmoor House”

NOTE – the words you’re actually looking for must be in “” and the first of these must be preceded by a space

Thank you for reading this blog.

Lynne

A blue plaque for John Cleveland?

While I'd heard of the Reverend James Bickham, Rector of Loughborough, and his library which he left for future generations of Loughborough clergy, I didn't get involved in a project to make his books more well-known and accessible until November 2022, and that is also when I met Ursula. The Manuscripts and Special Collections at the University of Nottingham hold quite a few collections that are relevant to Loughborough, Bickham's Library being one of them, and Ursula is keen to promote these. In her guest post, Ursula tells us about the metaphysical poet from Loughborough, John Cleveland.                     

A Blue Plaque for John Cleveland?

 by Ursula Ackrill

 Librarian at Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham

Engraving by James Basire (1730–1802) after a portrait by Isaac Fuller (1606-1672), published 1781. © National Portrait Gallery, London

Loughborough was the birthplace of the poet and Royalist John Cleveland (1613–1658). According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography he “was baptized on 20 June 1613 at Loughborough, the son of Thomas Cleveland (d. 1652) and Elizabeth Hebbe (d. 1649). He was the second of their eleven children, not all of whom survived, and their eldest son. Thomas Cleveland was then assistant to the rector of the parish church as well as usher at Burton's Grammar School.”

For the first seven years of his life John Cleveland lived in Loughborough. He attended the Grammar School where his father was usher. His early memories would have been of All Saints Church and the Old Rectory, where his father assisted the Rector John Browne, and he would have minded his Ps and Qs for headmasters Mr Spong and Mr Woodmansey, to whom his father reported as usher.

Right next to the church stood the manor house of Loughborough, owned by the Hastings family [now an Italian restaurant]. They possessed a large portion of the town until Henry Hastings, younger brother of Ferdinando Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, threw his fate in with the Royalists and ended up losing the family seat: Ashby-de-la-Zouch Castle. The castle was rendered uninhabitable by the Parliamentarians in 1648 and the family forced to sell land to recover its war debts. All this upheaval lay in a distant future as the child John Cleveland ran his first errands in the triangle between church, manor house and rectory. When the Earl and his Lady passed through town bellringers announced his coming and the town offered hospitality, pouring out wine and beer for the Earl’s gentlemen and followers (White 1969, p.79). Children would have banged about amid the peals of the bells to make the cortege halt on the road.

In 1621 the Cleveland family moved to Hinckley, where John attended Hinckley Grammar School for the next six years. On 4 September 1627 he was then admitted to Christ's College, Cambridge. Cleveland spent a long and productive stint at Cambridge; critics presume that his love poetry (more on that later) was written in College. He left Cambridge under pressure in June 1642, just before the outbreak of the Civil War in August that year; the town supported the Parliamentarian side. He joined the King at his headquarters, established at Oxford in November 1642. There Cleveland wrote The Rebell Scot, his most famous poem, and part of a larger body of satirical works in which political enemies are skewered with wit and “critical intelligence”, “hauteur” and “bitterness” (Cousins, 1981, p.61). Cleveland’s poetry lives in the tradition of metaphysical poetry established under the influence of John Donne (1572-1631).

What is metaphysical poetry, you ask? It aims to reflect on experience truthfully in figures of speech that no other poets have used before and prefers to do this with paradoxes, bringing - or even forcing - together opposing concepts into startling, mind-stretching formulations. Cleveland found fertile ground for his poetry in imbalances of power, and it is because of his use of inequalities that his readers should be made aware that Cleveland’s poetry is due content warnings. [1]

There are instances where the lyrical subject speaks from a place of powerlessness, artfully self-erasing their power to uplift the power of the addressee, by contrast, to towering heights. In The Hecatomb to his Mistresse the subject plays the tongue-tied poet putting into verse his inability to express how great his mistress is, calling the very idea of praising her “sacrilege” as her femininity baffles poets as much as tropical infections confound medics. Physicians, Cleveland tells us, cannot cure quartans, a recurring malarial fever. But Cleveland argues all this in verses which prove the opposite as we read through them. We read accomplished poetry in print [2]:

“Say the Astrologer, who spells the Stars,

In that fair Alphabet reads Peace and Wars,

Mistakes his Globe, and in her brighter eye

Interprets Heavens physiognomy.

Call her the Metaphysics of her Sex,

And say she tortures wits, as Quartans vex

Physitians; call her the Square Circle, say

She is the very rule of Algebra.

What ere thou understand’st not, say’t of her,

For that’s the way to write her Character.

Say this and more, and when thou hop’st to raise

Thy fansie so as to inclose her praise,

Alas poor Gotham with thy Cookko hedge,

Hyperboles are here but sacriledge.”

It is worth noting that the south Notts village of Gotham lies only some 8 miles away from Loughborough and Cleveland may have heard the stories about the mad men of Gotham as a child. The first printing that introduced The Merry Tales of the Mad Men of Gotham to a wider audience, dates from 1630, when Cleveland was at Cambridge. [3]

Having seen the conceit of speaking praise to “power” only to empower the subject by stealth, we ought to look at one of Cleveland’s poems that needs to be tagged with content warnings for misogyny and ageism: A young Man to an old Woman Courting him. The poem is a variation on a theme that was popular in northern European art and literature during the 16th and 17th centuries: the ill-matched couple. The term comprises both the coupling of old men with young women or old women with young men. To begin with, in the 16th century, painters used caricature and stereotypical conventions to make people laugh and to caution against such mismatches. A convention is for instance an inane smile painted on the older partner’s face, revealing their predatory assuredness together with missing teeth. Conventional in the depiction of the younger partner is a glazed, dead-eyed expression, whilst hands are grasping coins. Today’s workplaces call it “quiet quitting”. [4]

Painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder (Budapest Museum of Fine Arts): Ill-Matched Couple: Young Man and Old Woman between 1520 and 1522. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

However, in the 17th century we see painters’ attempts to humanise the genre by bringing nuance to set pieces: in de Cordua’s painting [below] the old woman is shown holding the money purse firmly shut, whilst the young man’s bright white hand is used to highlight her face. She looks wise and more heedful rather than foolish.

Painting by Johann de Cordua (Museum: Bavarian State Painting Collections): The ill-matched couple, 1676. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

The genre evolved. The painting by Simon Vouet uses the conventions of the ill-matched couple-genre to tell a story of connection despite the ill match, the old man and the young woman looking equally vulnerable in the presence of the skull, which sits on their table.

Painting by Simon Vouet (Museum: National Museum in Warsaw): Ill matched (Couple mal assorti), c.1621. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Were it not for the superfine scarf surrounding the woman’s outline like a band of gold - and which the man’s right-hand ring finger touches intently, - we might not place this painting inside the genre. The painter has created a window of possibility in which whatever goes on is actually alright. The effect is the exact opposite to what earlier ill-matched couples-images wanted us viewers to think. Unsurprisingly, should you search for paintings of an equivalent “alright” match with a woman as the older partner, none such seem to exist. Post a Comment if you know better …

Cleveland’s poem ridicules the belief that an old woman can be desirable. At the beginning of the poem stands the young man’s refusal:

“Peace Beldam Eve: surcrease thy suit,

There’s no temptation in such fruit.”

However, the poem is more than a suite of rejections morphing from stereotype to original invention and back again; it is Cleveland’s virtuoso show of talent. The ill-matched coupling is a vehicle for working with contrasts, challenging himself to outdo all previous attempts by coining new similes, such as:

“I love to weare cloathes that are flush,

Not prefacing old rags with plush:

Like Aldermen, or Monster Shreeves,

With Canvas Backs and Velvet Sleeves.

And just such discord there would be

Betwixt thy Skeleton and me.”

Cleveland draws on his knowledge of the classics he studied at Cambridge, when he writes:

“If my affection thou would’st win,

First cast thy Hieroglyphick skin.

My modern lips know not (alack)

The old Religion of thy smack.

I count that primitive embrace,

As out of fashion as thy face.

And yet so long ‘tis since thy fall,

Thy Fornication’s Classicall.”

Cleveland’s ambition to contrast and counterbalance went as far as the creation of another poem titled On an Alderman who married a very young wife, which nevertheless remained unpublished. It is overall a weaker poem and much cruder in its humour. The topic does not seem to have exerted the same hold on Cleveland’s imagination. Ideally, we would like to know what Cleveland would make of a real person who lived both scenarios in succession, such as Margarete Cranmer, second wife of the reformation Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer.

Cranmer met his wife in 1532 when he was aged 43. We do not know her age, but we can assume she would have been a lot younger than Cranmer. As a widow 32 years later, in 1564, Margarete married Bartholomew Scott, a friend of her son-in-law, and therefore presumably some 15-20 years her junior.  According to the Dictionary of National Biography quoted in Wikipedia “Scott had won Margaret, it was alleged, by flattery and expressions of deepest sympathy, but after marriage he dissembled no more. The marriage was without love, comfort, or mutuality”. In her youth and up until she married Cranmer, Margarete had lived under the care of her aunt in the house of the German theologian and reformer Andreas Osiander in Nuremberg. She would have been surrounded by newly printed protestant literature and art prints must have laid around in heaps. She may even have laughed at the popular cautionary ill-matched couples’ prints, back then. It would be interesting to know whether the idea of someone like Margarete entertained Cleveland’s imagination.

During the Civil War Cleveland stood by his King and returned to the East Midlands on this duty. He served as judge advocate with the royal garrison at Newark from spring 1645 to spring the following year. Cleveland was in the presence of the King at least twice, according to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. He delivered a speech to the King in March 1642, whilst still at Cambridge, and he certainly would have seen the King at Newark in November 1645. Newark was besieged by the Scots in that month and the King left in secrecy shortly before the siege was laid. It was Cleveland who wrote in refusal of a demand for the city's surrender.

However, on 5 May 1646 the King surrendered himself to the Scots at Southwell, not far from Newark. The interim days spent by the King in a state of limbo, straying in disguise, expecting capture, preyed on Cleveland’s mind. He wrote a disquieting poem about this, The King’s Disguise, pre-empting the loss of identity and foothold in the world that he himself was to experience in the aftermath of the war. Cleveland remained unreconciled with the shift in government, unable to justify or even admit the Parliamentarian cause. He survived on the charity and goodwill of friends and died in London of an intermittent fever on 29 April 1658. As far as surviving records go, he never returned to Loughborough.

Frontispiece of the book Eikōn basilikē : the pourtraicture of His Sacred Majestie in his solitudes and sufferings: together with his private prayers used in the time of his restraint, and delivered to Dr. Juxon, Bishop of London, immediately before his death. 

The book in the photograph above is a purported spiritual autobiography attributed to King Charles I of England. It was published on 9 February 1649, ten days after the King was beheaded by Parliament. The heavily allegorical frontispiece of the Eikōn basilikē depicts the King as a Christian martyr, an image Cleveland would have found entirely relatable. This particular print is from the copy of Eikōn basilikē which belonged to Rev. James Bickham, curator of the Loughborough Parish Library. Rev. Bickham lived in the Old Rectory between 1761-1785. His library is kept at Manuscripts and Special Collections, University of Nottingham. [5]

____________________________________

NOTES

[1] Issuing a content warning has become de rigueur in the world of metadata: it’s simply a way of alerting potential readers/watchers/listeners that what they are about to consume contains topics, ideas, and beliefs that are no longer popular, and as such, may cause offence, or be upsetting. Of course, at the time the resource was created this would not have been the case.

[2] Full text of the poem is available.

[3] Mad Men of Gotham – rest assured the men of Gotham were most certainly not mad, but rather feigned madness in order to deter King John from building a hunting lodge in their village, which would deprive the villagers of valuable land. See https://www.historic-uk.com/CultureUK/Wise-Men-of-Gotham/

[4] Quiet quitting as applied to the working environment means putting in the minimum amount of effort to retain a job, but not going any extra mile for an employer, so perhaps not speaking up in meetings, not volunteering for some tasks, and refusing to work overtime.

[5] You can find more information about the Reverend James Bickham in several posts on this blog:

Who Was Reverend Bickham? 

Reverend James Bickham’s Library 

Letters to, from, and related to Loughborough 

Reverend James Bickham’s home 

A short account of John Cleveland also appears in 'A-Z of Loughborough'

____________________________________

Sources

Brian Morris and Eleanor Withington (eds.), The poems of John Cleveland (1967)

A.D. Cousins: The Cavalier World and John Cleveland, in Studies in philology, 1981, Vol.78 (1), p.61-86

Alfred White, A history of Loughborough endowed schools (1969)

Oxford Dictionary of National Biography: in association with the British Academy. Oxford: OUP, 2004. 9780198614111 [Set]

____________________________________

About Ursula

As a librarian at Nottingham University with Manuscripts and Special Collections, Ursula has developed a wide range of skills that enable her to promote and interrogate unique collections of material, sharing them widely with people who are interested. Ursula has recently joined the Loughborough Archaeological and Historical Society, and can be found at the Old Rectory on some Saturdays during the opening season of the museum. Ursula also gives talks and presentations to groups about her work, for example on 27th February 2024, Ursula will talk about Parish Libraries at St Helen's Heritage Centre, Ashby.    

____________________________________

Posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

_______________________________________________

Thank you for reading this blog.

Copyright:

The copyright © of all content on this blog rests with me, or in the case of guest blogposts, with the named Guest Blogger. However, you are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follows:

Ackrill, Ursula (2023). A blue plaque for John Cleveland? Available from: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2023/08/a-blue-plaque-for-john-cleveland.html [Accessed 22 August 2023]

Take down policy:

I post no pictures that are not my own, unless I have express permission so to do. All text is my own, and not copied from any other information sources, printed or electronic, unless identified and credited as such. If you find I have posted something in contravention of these statements, or if there are photographs of you which you would prefer not to be here, please contact me at the address listed on the About Me page, and I will remove these.

Blog archive and tags:

If you are viewing this blog in mobile format, you will not be able to easily access the blog archive, or the clickable links to various topics. These can be accessed if you scroll to the bottom of the page, and click 'View Web Version'. Alternatively, there is also a complete list of posts, which when clicked will take you to the page you are interested in.

Searching the blog:

You can search the blog using the dedicated search box that appears near the top of the blog when viewed in the web version. Alternatively, you can search using your usual search engine (e.g. Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo etc.) by following this example:

site: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/ “Radmoor House”

NOTE – the words you’re actually looking for must be in “” and the first of these must be preceded by a space

Thank you for reading this blog.

Lynne

Letters to, from and related to Loughborough

I recently bumped into a postie friend of mine, and we got to discussing … ummm … post! Years ago, you’d have sent your friend or relative a postcard at, say 11 in the morning, and suggested meeting them in the park at 1 on the afternoon of the same day! Your postcard would have been quickly and safely delivered, and you’d have met your friend or relative in the park at 1pm as you’d suggested!

Writing letters and postcards was also important as a way of sharing news and updates, events, and feelings, and so on. If you were ‘important’ or your recipient thought highly of you, or considered your communications to be important to them, some of your letters and postcards might have been saved, and passed down through generations. This is particularly so with communications sent during troubled times, like during wartime. Eventually, your letters may have been donated to a record office, to be shared more widely, and someone might even collect your letters together and publish them.

These days the letterboxes [NOTE 1] are not filling as quickly as they used to. In fact, the letterboxes are barely filling at all. Lots of reasons for this, but possibly because many folk are using emails and social media apps to communicate, rather than putting pen to paper. If we did write more letters, what would we do with those we received in reply? Save them all? Save a selection? Throw them all out?

Hmmmm, so where am I going with this?? Ah, yes, connections with Loughborough!

Volumes 1 and 2 of Life and letters of Ambrose Phillippps de Lisle

As I mentioned above, sometimes people’s letters are saved, for a wide variety of reasons, which might include your being well-known, or popular, or a prolific and expert letter-writer. So, if you were the well-known poet, Philip Larkin, and you wrote regular letters to family, friends, and lovers, someone might have saved your letters, deposited them in some repository [Note 2], and someone else might have come along and gathered a selection together and published them [NOTE 3]. This, of course, did happen, and Larkin gives us a unique take on Loughborough, a place he came to, to visit his mother, his sister, her husband, and their child. 

In a letter dated 27 July 1949, which Larkin sent from the Lupton Hotel in Churston Ferrers, to his mother who was staying with his sister, Kitty, at 53 York Road, Larkin wrote:

“Mind you see a bit of life in Loughborough, always supposing there is any, which seems highly improbable to me, as Bruce [Montgomery, a friend of Larkin’s] wd say.”

If you were Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle (1809-1878), son of Charles March Phillips (who had attended Sherborne public school, as had James Bickham) and father of Ambrose Charles (the first of 16 children), you would have attended public school and Trinity College, Cambridge University, inherited the Grace Dieu estate, and later Garendon Hall and estate, from your father, converted from Anglican to Roman Catholic, commissioned a new hall to be built at Grace Dieu, and struck up a friendship with Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin [NOTE 4], and the Honourable George Spencer, son of the second Earl Spencer. All of which meant that you would have been a prolific letter-writer, with plenty to say, and someone would later collect a selection of your correspondence and publish it! [NOTE 5]

Names of de Lisle’s correspondents are both well-known and familiar – Lord Shrewsbury, the Duke of Rutland, Augustus Pugin, W.E. Gladstone, and more. Here are a couple of extracts, one a letter to the Duke of Rutland, the other to Mr Gladstone:

“GARENDON PARK, MAY 6, 1868.

MY DEAR DUKE [to the Duke of Rutland] – I thank you very much for your kind letter of the 1 st, from which I am delighted to find that you are so well and quite free from gout. This is specially agreeable to me to hear at such a critical moment in our National History …”

“GARENDON PARK, FEB. 28, 1877.

MY DEAR MR GLADSTONE – I little thought when I wrote to you, and when I was reading with so much interest and pleasure your kind answer to that letter, that I was on the eve of one of the greatest afflictions of my life. And yet sot it was , on the 6 th Feb. my poor dear son-in-law Arthur Strutt went to show a little niece of his the great wheel (Which his grandfather had invented) in the Family Mill at Milford, when by the mysterious permission of Divine Providence his foot slipped and he fell into the wheel, between the great outer one and the smaller cogg [sic.] wheel, and was instantly killed. Thus in one terrible and unlooked for moment a dear and affectionate son-in-law was carried off, and my favourite Daughter Alice was at a very early period of her Life plunged into all the grief and forlorn solitude of widowhood.”

Or, if you were Henry Alford, the Dean of Canterbury, with many friends amongst your contemporaries, and who had once been the vicar of Wymeswold, and were a personal friend of Loughborough’s Rector, Henry Fearon, a selection of your letters would have been saved, and later brought together to be published and read by succeeding generations [NOTE 6].

Below is an extract from one of the many letters Reverend Alford wrote upon the occasion of the death of his 10-year-old son, Ambrose, in 1850, this to Reverend Henry Fearon:

“TO THE REV. H. FEARON, RECTOR OF LOUGHBOROUGH.

I know, my dear Mr. Fearon, you are interested in us and ours, and therefore include you in the list of my friends to whom I have to announce the sad news of the death of our dearest and only boy. We only knew of his danger about an hour before, We had very few parting words, but those very sweet, it seemed like a dream. He died peacefully: so we have lost his happy voice and his bright promise from amongst us – a sad trial, but not, we hope, beyond the power of faith to see through in course of time.”

Or, if you were Richard Hurd, at one time Rector of All Saints Church in Thurmaston, before becoming Bishop of Coventry, then Lichfield, then Worcester, and had attended Emmanuel College, Cambridge University, at the same time as Loughborough’s Reverend James Bickham, and later had your portrait painted by Thomas Gainsborough, then your letters were sure to be saved and later published! [NOTE 7]

Interestingly, Hurd lived at Hartlebury Castle in Worcestershire, and, like Bickham, was a keen collector of books. He bequeathed his library to successive generations of clergy, and is still housed in the Castle, which I believe is open to the public.  

Here's an extract from Hurd’s letter to Thomas Balguy - who at the time of the correspondence was the Rector of North Stoke, near Grantham, and who later went on to become Archdeacon of Salisbury, then Archdeacon of Winchester – in which he mentions James Bickham:

Thurcaston, Jan. 29, 1762.

“I know nothing of the intrigues of the late Bishop of London [Dr. Hayter, died 1762]: and now they are of no concern to any body. Your prediction of him was, I fancy, accomplished somewhat sooner than you imagined. His successor you see is the Bishop of Carlisle [Dr. Osbaldeston, died 1764], to nobody’s joy, that I know of, expect Dr Browne’s; and he, I dare say, believes that I wish him no joy from it, in which however he is mistaken.

I had the greatest pleasure, as you would have, in the news of Mason’s preferments in the Church of York. I know nothing yet of the history of the Precentorship. The Residentiary’s place was owing to Lord Montague, for which I honour him.

…

Mr. Bickham is married, and is coming to reside at Loughborough in the spring, very early. Without doubt, as you say, he will be a good neighbour, but I am got into a way of living without any, which is much better.”

So, we’ve looked at a range of letters from across the years, including the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries! But, will there be any letters saved from the 21st century for future generations to enjoy?

____________________________________

NOTES

[NOTE 1] There is an extensive study of letterboxes in Loughborough, on this blog:

Part 1 https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2022/10/loughboroughs-letterboxes-pt-1.html

Part 2 https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2022/10/loughboroughs-letterboxes-pt-2.html

Part 3 https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2022/10/loughboroughs-letterboxes-pt-3.html

Part 4 https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2022/10/loughboroughs-letterboxes-pt-4.html

Part 5 https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2022/10/loughboroughs-letterboxes-pt-5.html

The case of the Burton Street pillar box https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-case-of-burton-street-pillar-box.html

[NOTE 2] The Larkin archive is held at the University of Hull

[NOTE 3] Edited by James Booth, and published in 2018, ‘Philip Larkin: letters home, 1936-1977’ is a volume of a selection of Larkin’s letters

[NOTE 4] Together, Ambrose Phillipps and Augustus Pugin were known as the two APs!

[NOTE 5] In 1900, a collection of de Lisle’s letters were published by Macmillan, in two volumes, and entitled: ‘Life and letters of Ambrose Phillipps de Lisle’. The author was Edmund Sheridan Purcell, and the volumes were edited by Edwin De Lisle.

[NOTE 6] From: ‘Life, journals and letters of Henry Alford, D.D. late Dean of Canterbury’, edited by his wife, and published by Lippincott in 1873.

[NOTE 7] The Rev. Francis Kilvert, collected together some of the work of Richard Hurd, in a volume entitled: ‘Memoirs of the life and writings of the Right Rev. Richard Hurd. D.D., Lord Bishop of Worcester’, which contained a selection from his correspondence and other unpublished papers. This was published in 1860, by Richard Bentley of New Burlington Street, London.

____________________________________

posted by lynneaboutloughborough

With apologies for typos which are all mine!

____________________________________

Thank you for reading this blog. The copyright © of all content on this blog rests with me, however, you are welcome to quote passages from any of my posts, with appropriate credit. The correct citation for this looks as follows:

Dyer, Lynne (2023). Letters to, from and related to Loughborough. Available from: [ URL e.g. https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/2023/03/loughborough-and-isaac-newton.html] [Accessed: 20 March 2023]

Take down policy:

I post no pictures that are not my own, unless I have express permission so to do. All text is my own, and not copied from any other information sources, printed or electronic, unless identified and credited as such. If you find I have posted something in contravention of these statements, or if there are photographs of you which you would prefer not to be here, please contact me at the address listed on the About Me page, and I will remove these.

Blog archive and tags:

If you are viewing this blog in mobile format, you will not be able to easily access the blog archive, or the clickable links to various topics. These can be accessed if you scroll to the bottom of the page, and click 'View Web Version'. Alternatively, there is also a complete list of posts, which when clicked will take you to the page you are interested in.

Searching the blog:

You can search the blog using the dedicated search box that appears near the top of the blog when viewed in the web version. Alternatively, you can search using your usual search engine (e.g. Bing, Google, DuckDuckGo etc.) by following this example:

site: https://lynneaboutloughborough.blogspot.com/ “Radmoor House”

NOTE – the words you’re actually looking for must be in “” and the first of these must be preceded by a space

Thank you for reading this blog.

Lynne