F LI O TT F r i e n d s o f S L D E
N G
E
Little Gidding I
D I
D
R
F
I
N
Newsletter E G H
November 2015 ç T pilgrims on the Little Gidding Camino
Some two hundred people walked from Leighton Bromswold to the tomb of Nicholas Ferrar at Little Gidding for this year’s Pilgrimage at the end of May, which was led by the former Archbishop of Canterbury, Rowan Williams. In his series of addresses through the day, Lord Williams read and reflected on a number of poems by Ferrar’s friend and contemporary, George Herbert. Report and more pictures on page 6.
1 Little Gidding Church Appeal Nicholas Ferrar Day – 5 December As reported in the last Newsletter, interest in this restoration work and This year’s celebration of the feast day Little Gidding Church is in need of attract further grants. of Nicholas Ferrar will be observed quite significant restoration, and an At the start of the year, the appeal on Saturday 5 December at Little appeal is under way to raise £40,000. organizers wrote to all members of Gidding. The Bishop of Huntingdon, The hard work of raising this money the Friends with more information David Thomson, will preside at the is the responsibility of Great Gidding about the Appeal. Please help us to Eucharist at 10.30 am, and afterwards PCC, as Little Gidding Church is part spread the word beyond the Friends to will talk on one of the most famous of the Giddings group. Great Gidding all who might be interested in ensur- legacies of the Ferrars, the Gospel Church is itself also in need of major ing the future of this beautiful historic harmonies they created, ‘Collages restoration at the moment, so their and holy place. for Christ: the Little Gidding Gospel efforts are divided and it is expected May we remind readers that dona- Harmonies then and now’. that the Little Gidding appeal will tions may be made by cheque payable After lunch we will hold the Annual take longer than had been previously to ‘St John’s Church Little Gidding’ and General Meeting of the Friends of Lit- thought. sent to: Mr John DeVal, Churchside tle Gidding. This is your opportunity Meanwhile, the Friends have made House, Main Street, Great Gidding, to elect the officers and committee a ‘seedcorn’ donation of £1000 from Huntingdon, pe28 5nx for the coming year, to receive reports our reserves. This is in addition to any Friends may like to accompany any dona- for the year ended, and to comment donations that individual members of tion with a note that they are giving on what the Friends have done or David Thomson is Chair of the the Friends may make. It is hoped that through the Friends of Little Gidding. Please what we might do. Members will have Council of Reference, which advises this donation will help to show vari- ask for a Gift Aid form if you can contribute received the formal notice of the AGM, the Little Gidding Trust. He is a pub- ous grant-making bodies that there is this way. but non-members are welcome too lished writer in the field of Middle (though they may not vote at the AGM). English, and a fellow of the Society of If you plan to come, please let us know Antiquaries, the Royal Society of Arts so that we can cater accordingly. and the Royal Historical Society. 2016 Pilgrimage Membership The 2016 Pilgrimage will be held on Our thanks to all who have renewed Saturday 21 May. Please put the date their membership this year; may we in your diary for 2016. The Pilgrimage encourage others to renew theirs, to leader will be the Very Revd Frances consider setting up a Standing Order, Ward, who is Dean of St Edmunds- and where possible, to ‘Gift Aid’ bury, and is also the Chair of the Little membership and other donations to Gidding Trust. Further details will the Friends? Please return forms and follow but it is expected that the day subscriptions to Sally Seaman, our will begin at 10.30 am at Leighton Membership Secretary, or email her at Bromswold.
2 3 Little Gidding Calendar Saturday 5 December 2015 Nicholas Ferrar Day 10.30 am Holy Communion, followed by lunch The Rt Revd Dr David Thomson, Bishop of Huntingdon, is our speaker at the annual Commemoration on Nicholas Ferrar Day. 1.30 pm AGM of the Friends of Little Gidding The AGM will begin after lunch, not earlier than 1.30pm. Saturday 21 May 2016 Annual Little Gidding Pilgrimage Led by the Very Revd Dr Frances Ward, Dean of St Edmundsbury and Chair of the Little Gidding Trust. More details to follow. Please put the date in your 2016 diary.
Saturday 9 July 2016 Eleventh Annual T S Eliot Festival Sunday 10 July Planning is already under way for next year’s Festival. Please make a note of the dates.
Regular Services Ferrar House – from the Warden Evensong is normally said at Little Gidding when there is a fifth Sunday in the month: 31 January (3 pm), 29 May (6 pm), 31 July (6 pm), 30 October (3 pm). It is a great privilege for me to serve days by secular groups and charities. A monthly service is held at noon on the second Friday of each month and is followed by this unique place, a place that has Pilgrims and retreatants have included lunch in Ferrar House. For catering purposes please email
4 5 Little Gidding Pilgrimage The 2015 Pilgrimage was held on a lovely spring day at the end of May. The presence of Bishop Rowan Williams, Lord Williams of Oystermouth, as pilgrimage leader had raised the pro- file of the day, and our organizational skills were tested to the full, as just about 200 people spent some or all of the day at Leighton Bromswold, Little Gidding, or the walk between the two churches. Bishop Rowan took as his theme for the day a number of George Herbert’s poems: first reading them and then giving an address or short reflection at the various stations. It was wonderful to welcome so many pilgrims – familiar faces, some who had never been before and oth- ers returning after a long absence. We hope that many of them will come back regularly and bring their friends with them, that the life of Nicholas Ferrar, and the beauty of Little Gidding might be more widely appreciated. If you missed the day, then put next year’s date (21 May) in your diary now.
6 7 Looking to the Future Rowan Williams: Vice-President of the friends The Very Revd Frances Ward, Chair of the Dean of York, and now have a vision Following this year’s Pilgrimage the Committee of the Little Gidding Trust, tells about recent think- that the Bishop thinks is exciting, and Friends invited Bishop Rowan Williams to become Vice- ing by the Trust, the owner of Ferrar House. we are increasingly happy with, as President of the Society of the Friends, and we are delighted For some time now the Directors of we revise it in the light of comments that he has accepted our invitation. Little Gidding Trust – Frances Ward, received. The President of the Friends is Stephen Conway, David and Rosemary Way, Fiona Ches- It will involve, over the next ten Bishop of Ely, a position which successive Bishops of Ely terton, Mary Jepp, Berkeley Zych, John years, developing the barn, the houses, have occupied since the Friends was first founded in 1948. Harrison and Don Simmonds – have building a house for retreatants, and T S Eliot was Vice-President from that original foundation been thinking carefully about how to Ferrar House itself in a staged and until his death in January 1965. ensure that Little Gidding fulfils the careful way, preserving the wonderful It is a great delight to welcome Bishop Rowan as Vice-President. Now Lord purpose of the Trust – to promote pil- sense of history and domestic feel of Williams of Oystermouth and Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, he grimage – in the best possible way. the place. The first stage is a feasibility was after his ordination a young priest in the diocese of Ely, and it was then that We talked with the Bishop of Ely study, and until that is done, hope- he first came to Little Gidding. The College of which he is Master is also the and have listened and shared thoughts fully by the New Year, we don’t want home of the Ferrar Papers, a great treasure of the 17th century and an important with him, and he suggested that we to be too specific, as all our thinking source of information about the early colonization of Virginia by the English, spend a couple of days together to may come to nothing, and we don’t a venture in which the Ferrar family, including Nicholas, played an important develop a vision document for the want to raise expectations just yet! But role. next ten years. We were ably led by the please pray for Little Gidding and its We hope to arrange a visit to Magdalene College for Friends to view some of Very Revd Keith Jones, who used to be future, and watch this space! the Ferrar archives and portraits held at the College. Frances Ward The Ferrar Papers back in print First published in 1938, Bernard Blackstone’s Conference: THE FERRARS OF LITTLE GIDDING edition of The Ferrar Papers contains a selection Magdalene College, Cambridge is to host a conference in September 2016 on from the family papers held at Magdalene Col- The Ferrars of Little Gidding. The College, whose Master is Bishop Rowan Williams, lege, Cambridge, including extracts from what is the custodian of the historic Ferrar Papers, containing an extensive collection remains of John Ferrar’s detailed notes for a of personal and business papers, as well as a significant record of the work of life of his brother Nicholas (not quite a biog- the Virginia Company, in which the Ferrars were strongly involved as it sought raphy, but underpinning most if not all of the to create and sustain the first English colony in America. The Conference will subsequent biographies), an account of one look at the influence of the family from their involvement with the Virginia com- of the dialogues that formed part of the ‘Little pany, to their relationship with George Herbert and the planned construction Academy’, a collection of short moral histories, of a Harmony of the Gospels. The conference coincides with the completion of and a selection from the family letters. a major project to conserve the 600 Ferrar prints (collected by the family from Out of print for many years, and hard to the late sixteenth century) at the college and there will be an open exhibition of obtain second-hand, this important collection items from the Ferrar papers, including newly-conserved prints, and the Ferrar is being re-published by Cambridge University portraits. There will also be a concert, a gala dinner, and a visit to Little Gidding. Press on 3 December, priced £25.99. For further details, including costs, see www.littlegidding.org.uk.
8 9 Eliot Festival 2015 2015’s Eliot Festival was blessed with fine weather: not too hot, but warm and dry and not windy – probably the best conditions the Festival has expe- rienced in its history. However the day was not without problems, principal among them that the coaches bringing the members of the International Summer School from London got stuck in a major old friend of the Festival, and this was traffic jam south of Cambridge and his third visit, having read Little Gid- were about an hour late arriving at ding twice, once notably with Seamus Little Gidding. Not only were many Heaney, and subsequently with Daljit of the audience on the coaches, but Nagra. The Festival ended with Little so were three of our speakers. Hast- Gidding, lovingly read by the President ily, we rejigged the programme and of the Eliot Society, Graham Fawcett. after a slight delay the day began with This was the tenth Festival, a mile- of an Eliot Festival at Little Gidding Gidding. And thirdly we remembered the audience participation of ‘My stone in its own right, and a quick to mark the 70th anniversary in 2006 the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Favourite Eliot’. Much loved by the show of hands on the day indicated of Eliot’s visit, and had subsequently T S Eliot himself in January 1965. festival-goers, this is when anyone that four people claimed to have been founded the T S Eliot Society. Without Those important people were who wants to can come up on stage at all ten (for the record: Susanna Fer- Bob’s vision there would be no Fes- remembered and their lives celebrated and read a bit of Eliot poetry or prose. rar, Graham Pechey, Megan Smedley in the reading of poetry and the study And so the coach travellers reached and Simon Kershaw). It was also a day and enjoyment of the life of Eliot and Little Gidding and found us enjoying on which we remembered three peo- his contemporaries. poetry both humorous and serious. ple. First, Bob Miller, who had the idea Once all had arrived, Lyndall Gor- don talked about Eliot as an expatriate, and how the influence of this could be seen in his poetry. In the afternoon Ronald Schuchard returned with an tival and no Society. Secondly, Peter update on the Eliot publishing pro- Cochran who at the last four Festivals gramme. The Eliot Society lecture was had entranced the audience with his given by Robert Crawford. With his renditions of Eliot poetry. With Jenny recently-published biography Young Sargent he memorably read The Waste left: Robert Crawford (top); Lyndall Gordon, Eliot, he has been popular on the liter- Land, and on other occasions read Pru- Graham Fawcett (below); this page: Bob ary circuit this year, but Robert is an frock, East Coker and, just last year, Little Miller (left); Peter Cochran (right)
10 11 Dr Michael Hudson and Little Gidding that they may have spent the next in Lincolnshire and the North East night at Downham before reaching under the Earl of Newcastle. Among As defeat in the English Civil War with the King in disguise as a servant. Newark on 5 May. On the day before, the most loyal of all the cavaliers, the loomed and danger drew closer, King The King had also cropped his hair 4 May, Parliament declared that those King nicknamed Hudson his ‘plain- Charles I made the ill-fated decision in somewhat inexpertly. who harboured the king would both speaking chaplain’. April 1646 to leave the Royalist Head- During the journey they lodged forfeit their estates and lose their lives. At Newark the King was handed quarters at Oxford and join the Scots at various places including a stay Several members of Stamford Corpo- over to Parliament but Hudson was Army at Newark in Nottinghamshire. with the Christian community at Lit- ration were subsequently dismissed kept by the Scots, despite Parliament Oxford was finally to fall to the Parlia- tle Gidding, occupied at the time by from their positions. on 23 May 1646 having despatched a mentary forces in June 1646. For his John Ferrar and his family. They left It must have been an anxious time Sergeant-at-Arms for his arrest. He two companions he chose John Ash- there and spent the night, 3 May, in for both the fugitives and for the mem- was however seized shortly afterwards burnham and his devoted chaplain, Dr Alderman Wolph’s house on Barn bers of the Little Gidding community and imprisoned in London House. Michael Hudson. John Ashburnham Hill, Stamford, which is no longer who were present. The arrangements On 18 June 1646 he was examined by was also to accompany the King on in existence. It was said by the histo- were apparently made by Hudson, a Committee of Parliament as to the his subsequent flight from Hampton rian Dr William Stukeley that this was who, as a clergyman, had a number King’s journey to Newark. He gave a Court in 1648. The party slipped out of the last night the King ‘may be said of connections in the area and would vague description of extensive wander- Oxford just before midnight on Mon- to have slept a free man’, but Rush- have been fully aware of the com- ings without apparently mentioning day 27 April 1646 by separate gates worth’s Historical Records indicate munity. He was Rector of both West Little Gidding. The record does have a Deeping and Uffington in South Lin- description of a barber’s criticisms of colnshire, near Stamford, and knew the King’s poor haircut. the wider district. On 18 November 1646 Hudson Hudson had been born in 1605. escaped from London. He re-estab- He was a graduate of Oxford Univer- lished contact with the King and sity and had married about 1630 a carried letters on the King’s behalf Miss Pollard of Newnham Courtney, to Major General Laughern in Wales. Oxfordshire and about the same time Laughern was one of the Presbyteri- was made a fellow of Queen’s College, ans disaffected by the development Oxford. He came into contact with the of extremism and minded to change King and was for a time tutor to the allegiance from the Parliamentarians Prince. He was made a Doctor of Divin- to the Royalists. After further employ- ity at Oxford in February 1643. He was ment on behalf of the King, Hudson known as an agent, a messenger and a was again captured in Hull in January spy. Later during the Civil War, he had 1647 and imprisoned in the Tower of been until 1644 Chief of intelligence London. While in the Tower he wrote (described in the language of the day ‘The Divine Right of (Monarchical) as Scout-master) to the Royal Army Government’ and an ‘Account of King left: title page of Hudson’s ‘Divine Right of Charles I’. The dispute over ‘the divine Government’; Magdalen College Oxford right of Kings‘ was one of the main
12 13 issues in the Civil War. Early in 1648 was then Northamptonshire, not far Map OF LITTLE GIDDING Hudson was one of the few in history from West Deeping. All of the defend- to escape from the Tower, in his case ers except Hudson were allowed to by means of a disguise and by carrying surrender but Hudson was refused a basket of apples on his head. quarter. As the Parliamentary soldiers The Second Civil War in 1648 was broke their way into the building he a much more serious affair than is retreated to the battlements. There sometimes appreciated. It was highly he was forced over the side into the coordinated with risings in Wales and surrounding moat where on 6 June various parts of England, an invasion 1648 he was killed with considerable from Scotland and a planned landing savagery by a man called Egborough of a fleet with the Prince of Wales, the from Stamford and others. future King Charles II. Major General The fictitious character, Dr Roche- Laughern did transfer allegiance and cliffe, in Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley with others was besieged by Cromwell novel, ‘Woodstock’, was said by Scott in Pembroke Town and Castle for to have been based on Hudson (see some weeks in June and July 1648 the Editor’s note in that book). before capture. It is fitting that the troubles of the Hudson took part in the Second times and the visit of the King and Civil War by forming a body of horse his companions to Little Gidding in as a military commander on behalf search of sanctuary should be kept in of the Royalists. He was besieged in remembrance. Woodcroft Castle, in Etton, between John Specer is retired justices’ clerk who In August this magnificent map of the parish of Little Gidding dating from 1596 Peterborough and Stamford, in what has written extensively on legal and was purchased (with funding from the V&A Purchase Grant Fund and Hunting- historical themes donshire Local History Society) for Cambridgeshire Libraries, and is now at the continued from page opposite Huntingdonshire Archives at Huntingdon Library. It shows the village of Little perhaps, is the position and depiction of the manor house, both of which have Gidding, and the manor house itself in elevation, as it existed just after the birth been a mystery until the discovery of this map. Are they as accurate as the field of Nicholas Ferrar. It was drawn in 1596 by the cartographer John Hexham and boundaries? If they are then this gives us, for the first time, some indication of shows the estate of Little Gidding landowner Gervase Clifton. the house as the Ferrars knew it. If you compare this with a modern map, or modern satellite photograph The map is now kept in a temperature-controlled archive strongroom (e.g., on an online map), then the parish boundaries and many of the modern at Huntingdon Library, but you may ask to see it. The Archives are open on field boundaries can easily be identified. The Alconbury Brook, at the west edge Mondays, Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Fridays. You are advised to check open- of the map, runs a somewhat straighter course nowadays, but the hedges and ing times before travelling – search for ‘Huntingdon Archives’, phone 01480 roads that form the rest of the boundaries are unchanged over 400 years later. 372738 or email
14 15 Watercolours by Cuthbert Bede
Cuthbert Bede was the pen-name of the Revd Edward Bradley (1827–89) who between 1851 and 1853 was an assistant curate at Glatton and Holme, close to Little Gidding. He was a prolific artist, illustrator and writer, and eventually became the incumbent of various parishes in the Stamford area, where he was well-acquainted with William Hopkinson, restorer of Little Gidding Church in the 1850s, and who died almost exactly 150 years ago, on 1 September 1865. These two watercolours depict the interior and exterior of Little Gidding Church in 1851, just before Hopkinson’s restoration, and some 50 years after Carter’s line drawing of the interior in 1798. The paintings have been undis- turbed in the collection of the British Museum until very recently, although a monochrome etching of the interior was known. Thanks to the efforts of Canon Bill Girard, the paintings have been redis- covered, and with the permission of the British Museum they have been photographed. Copies of each of them are available as A5 postcards at £1.25 each, and net proceeds will be donated to the Little Gidding Church appeal. Additionally, Bill is preparing a portfolio containing full-size copies of the paintings, a biographical sketch and photograph of Edward Bradley, a bio- graphical sketch of William Hopkinson, with a copy of Hopkinson’s porrait, and a narrative Little Gidding Church: Dereliction to Restoration: 1626 to 1853. All enquiries about the portfolio may be made through Ferrar House, or directly to Canon Girard by email
16