The Hall & Associations

Evelyn Waugh described Hintlesham without ever seeing it. He confessed, through Charles Ryder in Brideshead Revisited:

'More even than the work of the great architects, I loved buildings that grew silently with the centuries, catching and keeping the best of each generation, while time curbed the artist's pride and the Philistine's vulgarity, and repaired the clumsiness of the dull workman.'

This is the way Hintlesham has grown: the hall, the church, and the tree-shaded village, approached over the undulations of the steep little valleys that drop to the Orwell estuary at Ipswich.

At Hintlesham, thoughts of Brideshead seem particularly appropriate, for the Hall was entirely rebuilt in the 1570s as the chief home of the Timperley family, whose inability to move with the times – from the Roman church of medieval England into the Church of England under Elizabeth I - led to heavy fines and the penalties of exclusion from local affairs. The Timperleys continued to live at Hintlesham until the end of the age of the Stuarts, and though they may have been at odds with political society, they seem to have remained on very good terms with the villagers, mostly people who were their tenants.

As I turn in off the old road, with its rather dangerous bend, I sometimes find myself thinking how the new Hall was probably topped out in about the year 1579, the year Queen Elizabeth I and her court trotted and trundled towards Ipswich in early August. She may have been keen to get to Ipswich but her recollections of the week she spent there in August 1561 were deeply disagreeable. She had held court at Christchurch Mansion, the cost not all that joyfully defrayed by the town. She was daily displeased by the clergy, who flaunted their wives and declined to wear vestments, even surplices, in church. In 1561, the Ipswich reformers were pushing far ahead of her intentions.

From the early fifteenth century, for nearly a century and a half, the Timperleys prospered as henchmen of a famous series of dukes of Norfolk. Sir Thomas, the rebuilder of the Hall, was a grandson of the 3^rd duke, cousin of the 4th duke and controller of his household. But the 4th duke was beheaded in 1572 with Mary Queen of Scots, and Mary still presented a danger in 1579 which Queen Elizabeth had somehow to surmount.

The rebuilding of Hintlesham Hall was the Timperleys' response to their regrettable retirement from the household of the Howards and thus from the thresholds of the royal household itself. The wind of royal favour was distinctly chilly in 1579. It veered in their favour a century later, during the brief ignoble reign of the Catholic James II.

Like so many of our country houses, Hintlesham was built for a family which had prospered by its service to the nobility but which had subsequently dropped out of the limelight of court life. Neither a palace nor any kind of chateau, it was the country home of a family of gentry; the cradle and the capital of the family, and the repository of their peculiar traditions. In those terms we try to look at it, as well as in terms of its impressive structure of brickwork and plaster work.

The plan is the familiar one: a central block containing the main public room, the hall, and on either side a long wing running forward towards whoever is arriving. The service wing is to the left and the private apartments to the right.

When the Timperleys first established themselves here in the middle of the fifteenth century, they would certainly have needed a defensive moat and some form of drawbridge. At that time, their political activities involved them closely with Gilbert Debenham, whose own base was three miles down the road at Little Wenham; a small, brick-built, battlemented thirteenth century castle, miraculously intact to this day. In 1455, John Timperley and Gilbert Debenham together represented the borough of Ipswich in parliament – the very year one of Debenham's ships, The George of Woodbridge was caught in the act of smuggling wool, cloth and hides out of the Orwell estuary. From Hintlesham and Little Wenham they effectively controlled Ipswich in the political interest of the Yorkist magnates. Their methods were the kind we can read about in the Paston Letters and in Shakespeare's plays about Henry VI and Richard III, and that we associate nowadays with the naked power and lawlessness of the Mafia. But that is the story of the earlier Hintlesham, before the Hall we see today was built, and it was the great glory of the Tudors that they brought such anarchy to an end.

As we approach today we see no obvious signs of any moat: the ornamental strip of water across the forecourt seems to be devised to control the arrival of carriages. The map of 1595, though very detailed, shows no trace of a moat in front of the house, but an unusually long moat runs back on either side, joining at right angles well to the rear of the house, where the present pond can be seen. You can easily trace the earlier moat on the ground, for the soil infill has subsided a little. I imagine that the medieval house stood somewhere within this big moated enclosure. The defensive effect of it from the front was abandoned when the house was rebuilt in the 1570s or at least before the 1595 map was made.

So without the romantic obstacle of the moat, we enter the three-sided forecourt formed by the wings, and take stock. The great red brick chimneystacks and the steeply pitched roofs vanish as we approach, though the Elizabethan house structure is largely in place behind the parapet and stucco of the handsome early Georgian facade. As we shall see, the younger Richard Powys spent a large fortune in giving Hintlesham this mask in the 1740s. His refronting of the house was an ambitious attempt to replace what were probably vernacular' Tudor proportions, mullioned windows, and rather dark interiors.

To understand the building of two of the finest features of Hintlesham Hall - the first floor drawing room and the oak staircase - we must look to the seventeenth century. The first overt recusancy of the Timperley family - their conviction for non-attendance at church - was recorded in 1608. In 1610, Nicholas Timperley was suspected of keeping a priest in the house, and doubtless he was; he was the first uncompromising papist head of the family. Things got tougher for them during the Civil War when their estates were sequestered and their debts were formidable. But the property was extensive enough in Norfolk and Suffolk to enable them to hold on. However, after the restoration of Charles II in 1660, the head of the Timperley family began to mortgage the estates in order to maintain various relatives living in religious communities in France: in Paris they started an English community of Franciscans amusingly called the Blue Nuns of Paris. By 1672, many of the Timperley womenfolk were safely housed in convents overseas.

In 1686, the sixty-year-old Thomas Timperley IV died, unmarried, leaving the estate to Henry, his eldest surviving first cousin. As he lay here on his deathbed in the south wing that November, he was attended by his brother, also named Henry and otherwise known as Dom Gregory, a priest already officiating in Queen Mary of Modena's chapel at the court of James II. The witnesses of the will included Susanna Sparrow, the daughter and heiress of John Sparrow, Clerk-Comptroller of the Board of Green Cloth to lames II, who was knighted in July 1687. Her father's half-brother Robert celebrated the restoration of Charles II in exuberant pargeting, with Solomon and the Queen of Sheba (left), on The Ancient House, Buttermarket, Ipswich.

Susanna Sparrow married young Henry Timperley, presumably soon after he inherited Hintlesham in November 1686. Under the benign auspices of the Catholic James II, who took the throne in 1685, the young couple must have felt encouraged to hope for a period of prosperity and religious ease. As it turned out, the bride and groom had little time for enjoyment. In October 1688, their first child, a daughter, was buried at Hintlesham. Two months later, the king, perhaps the principal source of their new-found comfort, fled the country to France. The Timperleys and Susanna's father followed soon after to the English court at St Germain, on its ridge overlooking Paris from the south. By 1690 Susanna was a widow; her posthumous son she named Henry. She was reported to have an income of £2,000 a year - a consolation.

Before their flight from England, now under the joint rule of the Protestant, William of Orange and his wife Mary, Susanna and Henry had built an imposing and ambitious oak stairway to their new first floor apartments at Hintlesham.

Later on, this heavily carved staircase was moved by the Powyses to the north wing, where it remains. It was replaced by the elegant mahogany staircase which now leads to the first floor and the drawing room which Henry and Susanna Timperley remodelled and crowned so proudly with an undercut plaster work ceiling. Of the very highest London workmanship, it is still embellished at each corner with poor Henry's monogram, HT. This panelled drawing room has for some time erroneously, been called the Carolean room. Through it, at the end of the south wing, is their (still) very stately bedroom.

Above this bedroom the coved ceiling of the attic room suggests that it served as their secret chapel through the years when popery was proscribed. In their last year or two of occupancy, they may have been emboldened to create a new chapel on the first floor - conceivably in the commodious powder closet between bedroom and drawing-room.

Uncle Dom Gregory seems to have gone 'underground' at Hintlesham, with its friendly villagers and network of neighbouring Roman Catholics who needed his priestly offices, until, in old age, he retired to St Edmund's monastery in Paris, where he died in 1709.

Unlike her husband's royal master, James II, Susanna Timperley was of course free to come and go. In 1694, she returned to Hintlesham Hall with her five-year-old son, Henry, to show him off to his relatives. He was sent back to France, but returned in 1699 to be naturalised. His mother married again in 1704. Henry came of age in 1710 and immediately began raising money on the estate. Late in 1711, he married Etheldreda Mannock of Giffords Hall, Stoke by Nayland, but she died two or three years later, and the childless Henry began to disperse or dissipate the family estate in about 1714, when the Protestant Hanoverian succession was accomplished, and George I came to the throne.

Did the residue of the Timperley fortunes go to help the Pretender in his fiasco of a rebellion in Scotland in 1715? We know Henry Timperley refused to take the oath of allegiance to George I, but then non-Catholics too, were often non-jurors (i.e. refused to swear that oath). Even after all recusancy penalties, Henry still had a rent roll of £ 1,600 a year, although much of it was mortgaged.

In August 1720, just before the South Sea Bubble burst, Henry Timperley sold everything to Richard Powys, one of the Principal Clerks of the Hanoverian Treasury - an opposite number to his father-in- law, but on the winning side. Henry withdrew abroad and nothing more is known of him, the last of the main line of the Timperleys. The local legend is naturally of a sell-out caused by profligacy, but there is no evidence. One can imagine the bitterness and dismay: the shattered hopes of his marriage, and - to a young French-bred Jacobite – the repugnant politics of the Hanoverians.

Richard Powys probably did very well out of the great South Sea Bubble. He was certainly in a position to. And we guess it was he who was responsible for stage one of the Georgian improvements, putting in vertical sash windows all over the house and adding stucco work to the courtyard faces of the two wings with their parapets and little sham pedimented doors.

As I reckon, stage two began with the succession of his son, young Richard Powys, who gave the central front of Hintlesham its Georgian facade in the 1740's. They were doing the kind of thing we delight in finding in the village of Dedham, say or in Bury St Edmunds - putting up-to-date faces on medieval or Tudor timbered houses. It is curious that some elements of the classical design attempted by the Powyses here had actually been accomplished two centuries earlier, in 1568-9, at Hill Hall, Theydon Mount, in south-west Essex, by Sir Thomas Smith, who had travelled very observantly in Italy and France.

At Hintlesham, a central, round-headed arch was abandoned in favour of a more emphatic 'frontispiece', which was intended, I think, to replace a prominent, two-storey, Tudor porch of the sort familiar in all E-plan houses of the period. The new frontispiece is composed slightly clumsily, with coupled Ionic columns each side of the entrance door, and with a central Venetian window above, flanked by single Corinthian pilasters. The rustication is not continued along the wings, which join it awkwardly.

The explanation for all this derives from Richard Powy's grandiose scheme to convert the single storey Tudor hall, with chamber over, into a tall 'saloon', occupying both storeys and lit by curious clerestory lights under the coved ceiling. This made a splendid room for receptions and large family parties, and indeed it is still used for formal dinners and grand receptions. The saloon was fitted with a fine chimney-piece with split pediment. The walls were panelled in pine to two-thirds of their height, and at the south end, a tall mahogany door is part of a triumphal mahogany arch leading to the elegant mahogany staircase which leads up to the drawing room.

Now, in order to create this saloon, the Powyses had effectively cut off all upstairs communication between the south and north wings, as Sir Robert Taylorand lames Wyatt did thirty years later, and in a more sumptuous way, at Heveningham in north east Suffolk. This was the moment, the occasion, of their brain-wave - the making of the Boughton corridor with the entrance hall arcade on the ground floor and, above, a fine gallery, leading across from the north service wing to the family's private apartments in the south wing. The creation of this architectural element caused the slight incongruity where the rustication of the front meets the flat stucco of the wings.

The north side of the house has always contained the kitchens. It was given a new range of stables running east-west (front-rear) in the late seventeenth century. On the upper floor, a clock-mechanism of perhaps the 1680s was given a delightful new circular brass plate saying: 'Repair'd 1791: S. Thorndike, Ipswich.' A dove in flight squawks its boring message: 'Tempus fugit'. The Powyses built an entirely new set of brick offices: you can distinguish them on the outside by their very fine brickwork: alternating black 'headers' (the brick placed small end on) and red 'stretchers' (the brick presenting its flank). These excellent early-Georgian buildings contain an old cobbled way and an arch to enable a coach-and-four to pass under.

If one studies the north range of the house (now concealed behind the new service wing), one can see the unusually wide chimney-breast of the stack halfway along the wing. It is crow-stepped, a familiar Tudor way of decorating sloping brickwork. More interesting, there is a recess with a small, (blocked), window-opening Arthur Oswald, writing in Country life in 1928, spotted this as a likely breathing valve for a priest's hiding-place. An examination of the space behind certainly supports his suggestion.

After transforming Hintlesham Hall, Richard Powys died in 1743, nearly £4,000 in debt. His widow married Thomas Bowlby, Controller of Army Accounts, and their portraits were painted by Gainsborough at Bath in 1766. Hers may be seen on permanent view at Gainsborough's House in Sudbury, a dozen miles from Hintlesham. In 1747, Powys's widow sold the estate to Richard Lloyd, a successful political lawyer. Jacobite Hintlesham had changed hands with a vengeance. Lloyd was a very able Solicitor-General in the incomparable Lord Mansfield's day and secured the death penalty for two of the Jacobite lords, Balmerino and the deplorable Lovat, for their part in the rebellion of 1745.

That year Richard Lloyd had a windfall. Back in 1681, Lady Winchilsea had married Heneage Finch, earl of Winchilsea. She was his fourth wife, aged twenty, and eight years later was widowed. In 1735 she made her will, appointing Richard Lloyd her sole executor and leaving him everything, perhaps in gratitude for his legal help in fending off her husband's family from their interest in his estate.

She died in 1745. Gossips like Horace Walpole seem silent on the subject of Lloyd's surprising inheritance, but their minds may have been distracted by the more serious Jacobite rebellion. Anyway, one sees why one of Lloyd's children was given the name Heneage Lloyd, a combination made immortal by Gainsborough who counted Richard Lloyd amongst his patrons in the halcyon Ipswich years, the blissful decade of the 1750's, before Gainsborough went to Bath and fame.

There seems to be a real possibility that when Gainsborough walked from Ipswich to paint the Lloyd children (over page), they may have taken him to the Home Wood to show him their favourite place for games and story-telling. If it was 1753, as from their costumes it quite possibly was, the boy Heneage Lloyd would have been ten, his sister a little older. and Gainsborough himself twenty-six.

The wood is a few hundreds yards east of the very pleasant kitchen garden, although one has to loop around the neighbouring farm to reach it. Here the remains of the Powyses' landscape gardening can best be seen. In the same Country Life article of 1928, Arthur Oswald could write: 'A beautiful wood garden has been laid out round three small lakes formed by damming a stream at descending levels. It contains a variety of flowering shrubs and many fine trees, among which are a number of exceptionally tall and stately firs.' This pleasant wood, severely damaged in the 1987 storm, still contains its cadence of small lakes.

J.W. Goodison, in the Fitzwilliam Museum Catalogue of Paintings, III, British School, 1977, p.81, describing Heneage Lloyd and his Sister, notes 'the possibility of a scene in the park of Hintlesham Hall', but adds, 'no such scene can now be recognised.' In the Home Wood, the essentials of the setting are, I believe, still there. Gainsborough would, of course, already have been priding himself on his own imaginative creation. As with the even more famous Mr and Mrs Robert Andrews, he revelled in the freshness of the two sitters: but he was probably inclined in this, as he certainly was with the Andrews, to refer to an authentic setting. In each picture the church tower supplied a distant focal-point, and was a stageprop, such as even Constable reached for occasionally. Heneage Lloyd and his Sister was hanging here at Hintlesham until 1895, when Colonel Lloyd Anstruther sold it to Colnaghi and Co. The picture is signed on the stone beneath the boy's foot, T.G.

Despite the astonishing similarities, Gainsborough's companion portrait of their elder brother and sister, Richard Savage Lloyd and Miss Cecil Lloyd, was sold in the Hintlesham sale of 1909 as a work by Zoffany. Here, even more than with the picture of the younger children, the drop down into Home Wood looks authentic - although, of course, it contains famous elements from Gainsborough's picture of Cornard Wood, (or Gainsborough's Forest), in the National Gallery. It is undeniable that here the girl's dress and her work-basket interested Gainsborough rather more than their faces, and we remember his description of portrait painting as 'journeyman-work in the face way'. Cecil would have been about nineteen and her brother twenty-three. She died unmarried at Margate in 1791, but lives on as a slightly defensive nineteen-year old in the collection of the Yale Center for British Art in Connecticut.

There is another link between Gainsborough and Hintlesham - this time a musical one. The four young Lloyds whom he painted at Hintlesham, had a sister Lucy In a later generation it was to her progeny that Hintlesham descended in 1837. By her first husband she had no children, but she married again, to a Lieutenant-Colonel James Hamilton of the Coldstream Guards, who was a gifted violinist.

The story is recorded that the Colonel was playing the violin in Gainsborough's studio, when some visitors arrived. The painter raised a finger to silence them while Colonel Hamilton played the violin for an hour. Gainsborough was so enchanted by the playing that he insisted on giving the violinist the picture of The Boy at the Stile, which the Colonel had been trying to persuade Gainsborough to sell him. Gainsborough also gave him drawings that he would never part with for money, and one sees why the pictures of her youthful brothers and sisters at Hintlesham were cherished by Lucy Hamilton and passed on to her Hintlesham grandson and great grandson, who sold them with the Hall. The Boy at the Stile continues with the senior branch of the Anstruthers in Fifeshire.

The Lloyd family lived at Hintlesham Hall – very happily one would suppose - from 1747 until the beginning of our own century. The lineal descent of the family was less direct than in the Timperley centuries. Richard Savage Lloyd I, the elder of the brothers painted here by Gainsborough, had a son, Richard Savage Lloyd 11, who died unmarried in 1818. His two sisters, also unmarried, succeeded to the Hall and are commemorated in the church. When the surviving sister died in 1837, she left the estate to the grandson of her aunt Lucy and uncle James - Colonel James Hamilton, that agreeable violinist.

The Hamilton's only daughter had married Robert Anstruther, an admirable soldier of the Napoleonic War. At the outset of the Peninsular campaign, Anstruther commanded the rear-guard in Sir John Moore's small but well trained army, bringing them safely to Corunna over 250 miles of wild country in mid-winter. It was like Dunkirk in 1940. The army was thus delivered from the overwhelming 'blitzkrieg' unleashed by Napoleon, and was soon back in the Peninsula under Wellington. But Anstruther died the day after reaching Corunna, and Sir John Moore, the Commander-in-Chief, was killed four days later, and buried alongside him.

'Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note,' according to the echoing verse of the Rev. Charles Wolfe, who ended:

'We carved not a line and we raised not a stone, But we left him alone with his glory.'

They were not alone. One monument went up over them both on the rampart of the citadel at Corunna. Their best monument is the recollection of those far-off days when, like Nelson, they died thanking God they had done their duty.

The Anstruthers' eldest son succeeded to the family baronetcy in Scotland. It was their second son, James Hamilton Lloyd-Anstruther, who at 31 in 1837, inherited Hintlesham from his mother's first cousin Harriot (sic). Next year, he married Georgiana Charlotte Burrell. They were succeeded at Hintlesham in 1882 by their son Robert Hamilton Lloyd-Anstruther, Lieutenant-Colonel in the Rifle Brigade, and M.P. for south-east Suffolk from 1886 to 1892, the years of Lord Salisbury's prime, Randolph Churchill's debacle, the partition of Africa, the Queen's Golden Jubilee, and the wreck of the Irish hopes upon the adultery of Parnell with Mrs O'Shea.

Colonel Robert Hamilton Lloyd-Anstruther married a FitzRoy. His heir married in 1898, and assumed his wife's name (Anstruther-Gough-Calthorpe) by Royal Licence in 1910. (He was created a baronet in 1929). His change of name presumably signified disapproval of his father's conduct. The previous years, 1908-9, his father, the Colonel, had sold Hintlesham and its contents.

Simon Dewes (whose real name was John Muriel) was the son of the doctor of nearby Hadleigh, brought up there during the First World War, and his book of reminiscences, A Suffolk Childhood, first published in 1959, is one of the most delightful and moving books of its kind. His chapter on Hintlesham goes straight to the point:

'The last people of the 'old aristocracy' to live in Hintlesham Hall had been the three Miss Lloyds. They were just before my time, but they were the children of old Colonel Anstruther by his cook. He left the Hall and a very considerable sum of money to them. Anstruther-Wilkinson (Hintlesham's rector 1900-1924) was a cousin of theirs and a nephew of the former rector (Mr Deane) whose sister Lottie continued to live on in an inconvenient little house (Mill House).'

Her brother was the third consecutive rector named Deane: the first, the Rev. W.H. Deane, rector 1822-1854, had married an Elizabeth Christian Anstruther, a daughter of the general who died at Corunna. Through Simon Dewes, Miss Lottie (Charlotte Emily) Deane, who died at Hintlesham in November 1928 aged 86, is revealed to us as the liveliest of all the Hintlesham Lloyds.

'When I knew Miss Dean, she was very, very old. She had a maid named Ellen, who, for years, went without teeth. When Mr Payne James, the dentist, went to live at Hyntle Place, he put some teeth in Nellie's mouth, and in no time she was engaged. Miss Deane was delighted at Nellie's good luck but horrified at the thought of losing her. The solution was reached by Nellie's husband coming to live in Miss Deane's house.

'The other residents were Nora, the donkey, and Major Stukley, Miss Deane's nephew, who came for a fortnight and stayed for years.

'Nora was no figure-head donkey. She was a working donkey for Miss Deane drove out in her donkey chaise every afternoon. As she had no coachman, she unashamedly kept one of the village children away from school, and he trudged along beside Nora, beating her rhythmically with a little switch, while Miss Deane rode in state in the chaise. If the donkey-boy stopped whacking Nora, even for a minute, Nora stopped dead and had to be dragged by her bridle into a walk again... When nearly ninety, Miss Deane was still holding up Lady Ryan's Rolls Royce, Sir William Burton's hunters, and the Eastern Counties Bus Services as she drove along on the crown of the road in her donkey chaise, drawn by the reluctant Nora. When Miss Dean drove out in the afternoon she wore all her jewels ...

'Major Stukley was the other member of her household: and there is no doubt that Miss Deane knew that Ma]or Stukley was one of the greatest drinkers ever known in those parts. But never, never did she admit it.... When her nephew disappeared for a week at a time and was lying-out in some rather disreputable village pub, Miss Deane said he had gone on a walking tour. In that way, she was not expected to know when he would come home. When he fell down in the street on the way home from a session, she said it was his malaria. When he did not turn up for meals, he was off-colour. And when Roger Southgate, the publican, brought his watch back and demanded two pounds which he had lent on it, Miss Deane gave him the two pounds as a reward for finding it.

'Sometime later, Major Stukley disappeared, no one knew where. A party from Hintlesham visited the Wembley exhibition, and there was the unfortunate Major taking the sixpences at the turnstile. It was like a reunion of old friends, and the queue waiting for admission grew longer and more impatient. When the Hintlesham people got back to their parish, one of them, who should have known better, told Miss Deane he had met the Major taking sixpences at the Exhibition. The old lady never faltered, though it must have been a great shock to her. "Yes", she said, "he took up a Directorship and he has always made it a point to know every business from every angle." She and Nora died in the same week.'

Whatever the reason, the estate was divided and sold in 1909. The Hall, park and manor were bought by another baronet, Sir Gerald Ryan, who with my old friend Lilian Redstone wrote a very scholarly book, Timperley of Hintlesham, in 1931. When he died the Hall became the home of Mr Anthony Stokes, a director of the big Ipswich engineering firm, Ransome & Rapier, whose brother Dick was chairman and managing director, Labour M.P. for Ipswich during World War II, and a Privy Councillor. Anthony Stokes established a rather eccentric little music festival at the Hall, with an amphitheatre on the site of the present fine pond. Much of its charm rested on an element the unexpected, but the frolics were very much enjoyed, especially by him.

During the 2nd World War, he moved into Rose Cottage and the Red Cross took over the Hall. Under Matron Hunter and her V.A.D. nurses, it became a convalescent home. In the grounds, convalescing servicemen, in their standard light-blue suits and red ties, provided at once a cheerful and melancholy sight to passers-by.

When Anthony Stokes died, the Hall stood empty, and the county planning committee were reduced to allowing the sale of some of the park for farmland, and wondering whether anyone would ever come forward to take on the house.

In 1972, Robert Carrier, the prestigious food and cookery writer, saw it, bought it, and undertook the considerable rehabilitation of the fabric. In particular, very hefty iron bracing was needed to stop the spreading of the south-wing walls, which was in turn causing the famous plasterwork ceiling to sag, there was a real risk that it would collapse completely. In just ten years, he gave the house an international reputation, and after a very lively decade, he sold.

Ruth and David Watson took on the tradition of superlatively good cooking, and added to it all the comforts of a distinguished and utterly delightful hotel. All the rooms, including the attics and the first floor of the north wing, which had been left untouched and semi-derelict since Victorian times, were restored. Once more, the Hall seemed like a country house - a large friendly family house - and not just for week-ending. Hosts and staff were welcoming, attentive and efficient. The house itself had never felt happier, even when young Thomas Gainsborough walked over from Ipswich to paint Heneage Lloyd and his brother and sisters.

Hintlesham's church, probably wooden, was already recorded, as were over four hundred of Suffolk's medieval churches, in the Domesday Book of 1086. The village congregation of the sixteenth rind seventeenth centuries must have experienced unusual degrees of tension as between popery, puritanism and moderate anglicanism.

We pass the old yews and limes of the churchyard, and the timber south porch, and enter the church cautiously, wondering if much of this tension has left its mark. Down two steps, we find ourselves on the homely brick farmhouse floor, in a church with a very welcoming feel, not too spruced up, very seemly. 'Though much is taken, much abides.' Notice the obvious antiquity of the masonry: the aisle-arcades on alternate round and octagonal piers have stood fast since the thirteenth century, heedless of the East Anglian earthquake of April 1884, that shattered the Elizabethan chimney-stack of the saloon up at the Hall. The chance! and nave are continuous, on the same level: there is no suggestion of a rise in the chancel. That suggests a very low' church! There are clear signs that the large rood-stair led up from the east side on to the rood- loft, where the carving of Christ's crucifixion stood until it was abolished by the puritans. In patches on the nave's north wall, the whitewash with which they protected themselves from seeing the 'superstitious' pictures of Bible stories and legends of the saints, has receded to give glimpses of the thirteenth or fourteenth centuries' scheme of decoration. As you step in through the south doorway, you face St Christopher's right leg alongside a very lively flat-fish as the (invisible) rest of him carries Christ across the stream on his shoulders. One might have thought that travellers need the moral support of that saint more today then ever.

Next to the ancient vestry door, an incised slab says: 'Here lieth interred the body of Captain John Timperley Esq.'. He is dressed in early seventeenth-century armour, home from fighting in Europe, on the Catholic side. He died in 1629 after a skirmish at Martlesham near Woodbridge, in which he was acting second to a friend in a duel. His Oxfordshire wife caused this memorial to be inscribed: 'Too little to express either his desert or her affection ...

There's a trew hart entomb'd him and that bears

A silent and sad epitaph writ in teares.

On the opposite wall, look well at the alabaster wall monument showing two kneeling couples with all their children. On the left, is Thomas Timperley, the rebuilder of the Hall, who was so pointedly ignored by Queen Elizabeth I when she passed on her progress to Ipswich in 1579. On the right, his son Nicholas, with wife and family, which included Captain John Timperley. Nicholas was the first of the long line of Timperleys to be convicted of Catholic recusancy. It is touching to find him represented here by, presumably, a competent provincial sculptor. In effigy he survives in the fabric of a country church whose Christian practice his inflexible faith could not embrace. And so he set his family along the path to their exile with the Jacobites in France, and made way here for the easier-going Powyses and Lloyds, and their successors.

The Hall & Its Associations