In the words of the great French author Émile Zola: ‘The artist is nothing without the gift, but the gift is nothing without work.’ The Cobbold family is not particularly renowned for its artists (here considered in the wider sense of the word), though through the generations it has certainly had its ‘tryers’ – those with perhaps a little of the ‘gift’ and plenty of the ‘work’. For example, the family's best-known book, The History of Margaret Catchpole, a Suffolk Girl, by Reverend Richard Cobbold (see Chapter 2), owes its fame more to the controversy surrounding its historical accuracy than to its merit as a work of literature. One of the ‘artists’ included here might also be considered a ‘tryer’ with an unexceptional talent who happened to do rather well by exploiting a set of very exceptional circumstances. The others, ironically less well known, represent the cream of the family's artistic crop. They were blessed with genuine flair and their work is still esteemed.

Two Williams, a father and son from Norwich, born during the Tudor age, excelled in very different fields. The elder was Norwich's foremost gold and silversmith whose workshop produced some of the most important provincial pieces of the period, a good number of which survive. His son was an organist and composer, best known for his madrigals and pieces for voices and viols. His compositions continue to stimulate academic interest and one was recorded commercially as recently as 2002.