Hardwick House, Suffolk

Hardwick House was a manor house near Bury St Edmunds, Suffolk, owned by Sir Robert Drury, Speaker of the House of Commons of Hawstead Place, and subsequently purchased in the seventeenth century by Royalist and former Sheriff of London Robert Cullum. Experts in Suffolk county history as well as noted authorities in antiquarian and botanical matters, the Cullum family of eight successive baronets authored works on the county and its fauna and flora. Sir Thomas Gery Cullum, a Charterhouse graduate, medical doctor and member of the Royal Academy and the Linnean Society, was a well-regarded author on science and botany.

Lords of the manor of Hardwick, the Cullum family lived at Hardwick House for almost three centuries, from 1656 until the 1920s, producing a line of baronets who were physicians, botanists, antiquarians, authors, horticulturalists, ministers and two of whom served as Bath King of Arms for the Order of the Bath for nearly 60 years. Ultimately, the Cullum family estate was sold during the Depression of the 1920s when the last family member died without direct heir, and it was later dismantled for building materials in 1926-1927.

Hardwick House was built on what were formerly the medieval grazing lands of St Edmundsbury Abbey, which were sold during the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Eventually the properties fell to Sir Robert Drury of nearby Hawstead Place, a former moated manor now demolished. The Drury family lived at Hawstead for 150 years before Sir Robert – who had removed his paintings and furniture to his newly built Hardwick House in 1610 – died in 1615 and the Drury family became extinct. The only standing remains of Hawstead are the brick gate pillars at the entrance to the manor and some other brickwork and the moat: however the painted emblematic panels of the last Lady Drury's private oratory or chamber of meditation were transferred to Hardwick, and are now kept at Christchurch Mansion, Ipswich.Queen Elizabeth I spent one night at Hawstead Place in 1578, when she was said to have knighted the owner, Sir William Drury, after he restored to her the silver-handled fan she had dropped into the moat at Hawstead Place. The Hawstead and Hardwick Estates were sold by the heirs of Robert Drury in 1656 to Sir Thomas Cullum, first Cullum Baronet who had grown rich as a London draper and been Sheriff of London in 1646.

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