STAMFORD'S GREAT MEN
- bouring hills and wooded park, make it a town more than ordinarily
attractive. Of distinguished natives, we need only mention the great Lord Burleigh, who served with distinction through four reigns, and Archdeacon Johnson, the founder of the Oakham and Uppingham Schools and hospitals in 1584, though Uppingham as it now is, was the creation of a far greater man, the famous Edward Thring, a pioneer of modern educational methods, in the last half of the nineteenth century. Archbishop Laud, who is so persistently mentioned as having been once Vicar of St. Martin's, Stamford, was never there; his vicarage was Stanford-on-Avon. But undoubtedly Stamford's greatest man in one sense was Daniel Lambert, whose monument, in St. Martin's churchyard, date 1809, speaks of his "personal greatness" and tells us that he weighed 52 stone 11 lbs., adding "N.B. the stone of 14 lb." The writer once, when a schoolboy, went with another to see his clothes, which were shown at the Daniel Lambert Inn; and, when the two stood back to back, the armhole of his spacious waistcoat was slipped over their heads and fell loosely round them to the ground.
This enormous personage must not be confounded with another Daniel Lambert, who was Lord Mayor and Member for the City of London in Walpole's time, about 1740.
It is quite a matter of regret that "Burleigh House near Stamford town" is outside the county boundary. Of all the great houses in England, it always strikes me as being the most satisfying and altogether the finest, and a fitting memorial of the great Lincolnshire man William Cecil, who, after serving in the two previous reigns, was Elizabeth's chief Minister for forty years. "The Lord of Burleigh" of Tennyson's poem lived two centuries later, but he, too, with "the peasant Countess" lived eventually in the great house. Lady Dorothy Nevill, in My Own Times published in 1912, gives a clear account of the facts commemorated in the poem. She tells us that Henry Cecil, tenth Earl of Exeter, before he came into the title was divorced from his wife in 1791, owing to her misconduct; being almost broken-hearted he retired to a village in Shropshire, called Bolas Magna, where he worked as a farm servant to one Hoggins who had a mill. Tennyson makes him more picturesquely "a landscape painter." He often looked in at the vicarage and had a mug of ale with the servants, who
