XL

Rising from amid the trees immediately before you, at the entrance to the town and the branching of High Street and All Saints’ Street, is All Saints’ Church, the other of the two old churches of the Old Town. It stands immediately at the foot of that great chalky down which drops sheer to the sea and is known as East Cliff; and its crowded churchyard, hemmed in with grimy houses, runs at a steep angle up the hillside. I am not greatly impressed with the interior of the church, but its tower is altogether admirable. It has that best thing in towers, sturdiness, and with its deeply splayed buttresses, strongly marked stringcourses, and general air of refined emphasis, is the embodiment of strength and beauty. I feel especially grateful to it, for it stands just where it should for pictorial composition, at the head of the old street, and it and the old “White Hart” inn form excellent foils to one another, as Church and Inn should do. They are as antithetic, in the sentiment of the scene, as light and shade are in the rendering of it.

Let those who are desirous of immortal fame see that an eccentric epitaph marks the spot where they lie. There is no surer passport to eternal recollection. Thus, apart from “Old Humphrey,” a local celebrity who lies here, the hundreds of the dear departed might be anonymous for all any one cares; excepting three only. Even the casual, unobservant stranger entering the church can scarce help seeing the epitaph on “John Archdeacon,” who died in 1820, aged nine; but if he did not see it, it is quite certain his attention would soon be drawn that way, for it is a cherished local curiosity:

Here lies an only darling Boy

Who was his widow’d Mother’s joy;

Her grief and sad affliction prove

How tenderly she did him love.

In childish play he teas’d a mule

Which rag’d its angry owner’s soul,

And through whose angry blows and spleen

This child so soon a corpse was seen.

His Mother now is left to mourn

The loss of her beloved Son.

Though sighs and tears will prove in vain,

She hopes in Heaven to meet again.

The name of a modern public-house in the town, the “Kicking Donkey,” near St. Clement’s Church, would appear to have derived from this, although the pictorial sign represents the quite different scene of a seaside holiday-maker trying to keep his seat on the back of a restive jackass.

The second unusual epitaph is to a smuggler:

The third immortal is Edward Alldridge, “who was Maliciously shot, April 23rd, 1806. Aged 41 years.” It is curious that his son Edward was, according to the same stone, “accidentally shot, May 13th, 1810. Aged 15 years.”

ALL SAINTS’.

There is little time in this age for brooding over historical celebrities or notorieties, but if Hastings dwelt much upon the past, it could find little pleasure in the recollection that it was the birthplace of Titus Oates, whose baptism is registered in 1619, in the books of All Saints’, of which his father was afterwards rector. Titus was himself curate here.

Much, indeed, might be written of the clergy of All Saints’, but not a large proportion of it to their credit. I do not know if we may fairly include him who was hanged at Tyburn in 1586 for the crime of forging his presentation to the living. He was not properly rector. As he had to be hanged in any case, it seems a pity they did not suspend him from the tower of All Saints’; it would have been much more picturesque. He was practically wasted at Tyburn, where executions were an everyday dish.

Then there was the Reverend Mr. Hinson, royalist, who, busily denouncing the Roundheads in his sermon of Sunday, July 9th, 1643, was told that the subjects of his abuse were in the town, and the stern Colonel Morley even then on the way to make him prisoner. He left his discourse at a loose end and bunked, hooked it, vamoosed, cut his stick, fled, or merely went—just as you please. Only, perhaps, to say he “went” hardly meets the case, for he departed with such celerity that he had not time even to shift his surplice. The Roundheads thereupon occupied the church, made it a dormitory, preached burlesque sermons from the pulpit, and generally behaved like blasphemous blackguards, finally making off with all the surplices they could find.

Mr. Hinson was arrested three days later and lodged in a filthy gaol, with a tinker to match, who was not only dirty but rude, and, declaring he was the elder of the two, and therefore privileged, took the one bench in the place, leaving the curate the cold, cold floor. He had three weeks’ imprisonment at Hastings, and how much beside would have been awarded him in London, whither he was removed, we do not know, for he escaped and joined his King at Oxford, and so is heard of no more.

A tablet in the church to a former rector with the humorous name of Webster Whistler, a connection of Sir Whistler Webster, of Battle Abbey, reminds one of a curious incident. He died at the great age of eighty-four in 1831. A distinguished pluralist, he held the rather distant benefice of Newtimber, on the Brighton Road, in addition to this in Hastings. A quarrel with the squire of Newtimber led to the living of that tiny place being put up to auction in 1817. The clergyman was interested enough to be in London when the sale took place, and to his disgust heard the auctioneer describe Newtimber as held by an infirm and hoary vicar with one foot in the grave, and that consequently the reversion would soon fall in. The Reverend Whistler was then but seventy, and as hale and hearty as a ploughman. He arose in wrath, and so convinced the room of his being good for another twenty years that the advowson found no purchaser.

The much-beneficed Whistler was no ill friend to the smugglers, who then formed a considerable part of the population of Hastings, and passively lent his church to them for a cellar. It was told of him that, hearing movements one night in his garden, and preparing to fire upon those he thought to be burglars, a voice reassured him with the whisper, “Hush, your reverence, it’s the brandy!” It was the smugglers’ thank-offering. The only flaw in this story is the circumstance that the clergyman would not have mistaken his smuggling friends for midnight marauders, for he was used to find such gifts brought to his door. Later, when this kind of friendly understanding became too notorious, the kegs were deposited in the crowded churchyard, and visitors at his table sometimes heard him tell his man to “go and see if there’s any brandy in old Swain”: “old Swain” being one of the numerous clan of that very common name at Hastings, and lying in a table-like tomb which made an excellent and unsuspected cellar.

When this picturesque cleric happened to find his cellar low, he was not averse from hinting at the fact in the texts of his sermons. Discourses upon the “wine that maketh glad the heart of man” and on the miracle of turning water into wine, with applications readily understood by his congregation, rarely failed in their object; for we must by no means suppose that a smuggler was necessarily a lawless and an impious, or even an ungrateful man: and a fervent piety was no bar to “free trading.”

The most striking thing in All Saints’ Church is a curious notice in the belfry, with words and letters running together like those of an ill-read proof:

This is a belfry that is free

for all those that can civil be

and if you please to chime or ring

it is a very pleasant thing

There is no musick playd or sung

like unto Bells when they rwell rung

then ring your bells well if you can

Silence is best for every man.

But if you ring in Spur or hat

sixpence you pay besure of that

and if a bell you overthrow

pray pay a groat before you go

People who are commonly civil are not, as a rule, enjoined to show civility, and it is therefore fair to assume that there had been disturbances, and sweet bells jangled, before this old notice was set up.