COKE OF NORFOLK.*

THE contemporaries of Coke of Norfolk would hardly have believed that he would have to wait so long for a serious biography. Harriet Martineau used to say that she had grown up to regard him as the type of the patriot English gentle. man ; and he will stand for all time as the model of the wise and generous landowner. The impetus he gave to scientific farming was tremendous—the fame of his farming experiments resounded in two worlds—and the effect of it may be traced all over Norfolk to-day. He changed the north-west of Norfolk from a rye-growing country into a prosperous wheat. growing country ; thelarmers and labourers profited by the improved methods of cultivation and keeping livestock which he forced on them with infinite patience in spite of their own stupidity ; and when he died they had at last grasped the fact that he was a great man and a great friend, and his funeral was a public tribute to his genius of such an extraordinary kind that it still lives vividly in the memory of old people in Norfolk.

Mr. Stirling has done his work handsomely, and has plainly been helped by the goodwill of the Coke family and all its ramifications. Our only complaint is that it is too handsome,— much is included that is familiar to readers of the diarists who wrote at the end of the eighteenth and in the beginning of the nineteenth centuries. On the other hand, if the biography is unnecessarily long, it contains much new material that is well worth unrolling from its wrappers. Mr. Stirling says that in 1843 no less than six biographies of Coke were being written, but they were all abandoned on the announcement that Mr. Thomas Keppel was undertaking the authoritative Life. By a strange mischance, this Life, which occupied Mr. Keppel many years, was lost before publication, and Mr. Stirling attributes to this accident the fact that the name of Coke of Norfolk passed more or less out of public recollection.

Thomas William Coke was descended from the great lawyer Sir Edward Coke, who was so stout a champion of Parlia- mentary privilege, and drew up the Petition of Right. He succeeded to his great-uncle, the first Earl of Leicester, who built that vast Palladian house, Holkham Hall, unlike any other in England, and who died without eons. The earldom consequently became extinct, and when Thomas William Coke, the subject of this biography, was offered an earldom in 1837, he refused to take any title but that of Earl of Leicester. The head of the Townshend family was then Earl of Leicester, and Thomas William Coke had to be distinguished by the addition of " of Holkham." To those who understand the life and work of Coke, however, Holkham is the only im- portant name. To-day the Holkham estate is a noble example of what science and industry may do in bad circumstances. We eannot go so far as Mr. Stirling in his description of the uninviting character of the landscape, for the sand-dunes and great flats and marshes of this part of Norfolk have a wonderful beauty of their own. But it certainly was remark- able that Coke should have set to work in this place which, whatever grandeur we of to-day may find in bird-haunted wastes, was not to the common liking at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth. Marshes (now known as the meal-marshes) were reclaimed, and wheat began to grow where the sea had formerly thrown its arm at every high tide. The sand-barriers were made com- pact and firm by plantations of pines. Holkham Park was enclosed by a wall over nine miles long, and planting was carried out everywhere on the best-known principles of forestry. Perhaps the most romantic illustration of Coke's planting was the launching of an oak ship at the quaint port of Wells near by, which was built entirely from trees grown from acorns at Holkham. The present Lord Leicester, we may say, has been a scrupulous follower in the traditions of the place. One of the best bird-sanctuaries in England is in • Cots of Norfolk and his Friends: the Life of Thomas Waliam Coke, First Earl of Leicester of Holkham, containing an Account of his Ancestry, Surecundsngs, Public SEttliCeS and Private Friendships, and including many Unpublished Letters from Noted Men of Ms Day, English and Antsrican. By A.- M. W. Stirling. With 20 Photogravure and 43 other Illustrations reproduced from Con- temporary Portraits, Prints, iv. 2 vols. London : John Lane. [228. net.]

Holkham Park, and the late Mr. Cornish. wrote of the delights

of the reclaimed marshes, which are visited at night by the famous grey geese of Holkham.

Coke will always be remembered as a great agriculturist, but we dare say that to him his Whiggism was an equally serious part of his life. One may suppose that, as in the case of other great Whig families, his politics was a point of family honour and a sacred inheritance. " To be a Whig," said Mr. Gladstone, "one must be born a Whig." And recognising the

same force of family pride and tradition, Thackeray said : " I am not a Whig ; but, oh, how I should like to be one !" Coke professed his political faith with all the sententiousness and

robustness of his kind. Virtually a feudal lord on his own estate, he fought for the liberty of the people against the Tories,—" the vile Tories," as he used t9 call them, "and their viler head, Mr. Pitt." We must refer the reader to the enter- taining narrative of the way in which young Coke, when he first came to Holkham, was sent travelling about the country in a quite regal splendour. In Norwich old men still relate that their fathers told them that Mr. Coke had his horses shod with gold, and that his chariot had solid silver wheels, which, they surmise, are still preserved at Holkham. He was indeed "Coke of Norfolk "; in election lampoons in later life he was called " The Dictator." To-day the electioneering squib might say that he had bought the county.

We have not space to write of Coke's friendship with Fox,

and with Dr. Parr (the fact that Coke liked and admired Parr is almost enough to make the modern reader reconsider

his pretensions to fame,—but, then, he was a Whig, and that explains much), and with William Roscoe, the historian, and Sir James Smith, the founder of the Linnaean Society, and the many Americans who adored him for his opposition to the American War. In old age Coke married, for the second time, Lady Anne Keppel, who was nearly fifty years younger than himself. He had tried vainly to bring about a marriage between Lady Anne and his nephew, who was his heir- presumptive, but failing this he married her himself. The four eons born of this marriage, one of whom is the present Lord Leicester, excluded the recalcitrant heir-presumptive from the possession of Holkham; but the latter never wavered in his affection for his uncle, and consoled himself by riding bard to hounds for the rest of his life. Of course the marriage was received with mixed feelings. Let us give a letter of congratulation from Lord Sherborne as an example of the sardonic manner

" SHERBORNE Pins, February 19th, 1822.

My dear Uncle, It would ill become me to laugh, and I cannot cry at a measure you meditate for your Happiness, of which you must bo the best judge. You may be assured Mary and I sincerely wish you all you anticipate. We shall be happy in paying our Duty ; but don't you think, since my head has become eo bald, it will be as well not to intro- duce me as a Nephew P If I am to be shown up in that character, send me down some Macassar Oil, that I may make the best appearance I can. With Mary's love and best wishes, I am, my dear Sir, Most affectionately yours, SHERBORNE."

The marriage, at all events, was a happy one in every way ; and public malice hurt Coke, who was always genial and self- possessed, no more than he was injured in the long run by the bitter ridicule of his agricultural science. A man who has discovered an improved rotation of crops, and has introduced

sheep and beasts to a county where it was supposed that they

could not possibly live, can afford to laugh at having an improved light plough spoken of as a penknife drawn by a rabbit. In 1776, when Coke succeeded to Holkham, the rental was worth £2,200. From 1818 onwards it was worth over £20,000. The annual sheep-shearing at Holkham became a

festival to which agricultural pilgrims came from all over the kingdom. A well-known print, reproduced in this work, shows a similar ceremony at Woburn, where the sixth Duke of Bedford carried out all the Cokian system. Old Norfolk men, indeed, still tell of Coke's " clippings."