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. It was subsequently purchased in the seventeenth century by Royalist Thomas Cullum, a former Sheriff of London. 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.