Page:Highways and Byways in Lincolnshire.djvu/358

 At the south-west end of the church are three tablets to three remarkable brothers born in Spilsby towards the end of the eighteenth century.

Major James Franklin, who made the first military survey of India, and contributed a paper to the Geological Society in 1828, died in 1834. Sir Willingham Franklin who, after a distinguished career at Westminster and Oxford, died, with wife and daughter, of cholera, 1824, at Madras, where he was judge of the Supreme Court. And Sir John Franklin, the famous Arctic navigator, who fought at Trafalgar and Copenhagen, and died in the Arctic regions on June 11, 1847, before the historic disaster had overtaken the crews of the Erebus and Terror. His statue stands in his native town, and also in Hobart Town, where he lived for a time as Governor of Tasmania, and is one of the two statues in London which were set up by the nation. On his monument in Westminster Abbey are the beautiful lines by his friend and neighbour, and relative by marriage, Alfred Tennyson.

Not here! the white North has thy bones; and thou, Heroic sailor-soul, Art passing on thy happier Voyage now Towards no earthly pole.

The other brother, Thomas Adams Franklin, raised the Spilsby and Burgh battalion of volunteer infantry in 1801. Major Booth followed his good example and raised a company at Wainfleet to resist the invasion by Napoleon, and the men of the companies presented each of them with a handsome silver cup. Five Franklin sisters married and settled in the neighbourhood; and Catharine, the daughter of Sir Willingham, married Drummond, the son of the Rev. T. H. Rawnsley, vicar of Spilsby. Thus quite a clan was created, insomuch that forty cousins have been counted at one Spilsby ball. Drummond succeeded his father as rector of Halton, and very appropriately preached the last sermon in the old church at Spilsby at the closing service previous to its restoration, speaking from the pulpit which his father had occupied from 1813 to 1825. His sermon, a very fine one, called "The Last Time," was from 1 St. John ii. 18, and was delivered on Trinity Sunday, 1878.

The time to visit Spilsby is on market day, when, round the butter cross, besides eggs, butter and poultry, pottery is dis