We recently enjoyed watching the movie Gold Run (Gulltransporten) (2022), which is currently available to watch for free on BBC iPlayer.
It is a white-knuckle true story of the 1940 mission to smuggle Norway’s gold reserves out of the country before the Nazi occupiers could seize them.
While the film celebrates the “ordinary” people—bank clerks, truck drivers, and poets—who were pressed into extraordinary service, it also highlights a deeper historical truth: the role of the powerful insider. In the film, the mission succeeds because high-ranking officials and those with hidden helpers use their status to coordinate a “disappearing act” under the enemy’s nose.
This mirrors the high-stakes double life of “Old” Sir Rowland Hill at Soulton Hall.
To understand Sir Rowland Hill, one must understand the danger of his position. He was not an accidental hero; he was a colossus of the Tudor state. Hill was the first Protestant Lord Mayor of London and, crucially, served on the Commissions of Inquisition (Ecclesiastical Commissions) for both Queen Mary and Queen Elizabeth. While he sat on these commissions—tasked with seizing “heretical” books and enforcing state dogma—he was secretly operating a “Renaissance Ark” at Soulton Hall. Recent historical research has revealed that Hill used his proximity to power to act as a clandestine curator of England’s heritage.
It is now increasingly understood that when the state ordered the destruction of the relics of St. Erkenwald in Old St. Paul’s, Hill used his authority to save the relics and the High Altar stone, smuggling them to Soulton. The house itself was built as a “memory” of that lost shrine, its dimensions and geometry coded with the proportions of the St. Paul’s monument to preserve in the house a stone and relics the iconoclasts tried to erase.
As Master of the Mercers’ Company, Hill also likely oversaw the secret burial of the Mercers’ Christ statue, which remained hidden for 400 years until its rediscovery after the Blitz.
The “Gold Run” of the 17th century reached its peak during the English Civil War. In 1643, the Battle of Wem brought the conflict to Soulton’s very doorstep. History has traditionally viewed this as a local skirmish, but the presence of thousands of troops suggests a more targeted objective. Like the strategic movement of the Corpus Christi and Lambeth libraries, the library of Old Sir Rowland—containing the foundational works of the Elizabethan age, his involvement in the Geneva Bible work, and potentially a copy of Magna Carta—was a focus of intense attention. Under a military cordon, this “intellectual gold” was evacuated to safety. The frustration of the Parliamentarian forces is written in the family tradition: unable to seize the knowledge, the soldiers instead smashed Sir Rowland’s Chair of Estate in an act of vengeful vandalism.
The most haunting parallel between the Norwegian gold and Hill’s work is the long silence.
In times of deep crisis, we often find a strange paradox: the things that end up mattering most are often the most “impractical.” In a survival situation, one might prioritize food or weapons, yet history shows us that we risk everything for the richly symbolic. The Norwegian gold was more than just metal; it was the physical manifestation of a nation’s sovereignty and its future ability to rebuild.
Similarly, the items Sir Rowland Hill sought to save—ancient stones, relics, a library, and a statue—could not feed a village or win a battle, yet they were the very anchors of a culture’s identity.
These “impractical” treasures are the things that tell a people who they are when the smoke clears, which is why the extraordinary effort to move them becomes a moral necessity rather than a logistical burden.
The heroes of 1940 had to remain hidden, and their helpers were often shielded from public view; similarly, Sir Rowland Hill’s full legacy and his role as a hidden guardian remained unexposed for nearly five centuries. Both stories remind us that when the world catches fire, the survival of civilization depends on those who have the courage to be “in” the world of power, but not “of” it—the insiders who build arks while the storms are still gathering.
