XLIV
And then it stood in this noble situation for well over four hundred and fifty years, growing in architectural splendour and worldly wealth, but decaying in religious life and morals, in common with all other monasteries. Its income was equal to £10,000 per annum of our money: the Abbot entertained guests of the noblest, and the brethren’s indiscriminate charity made Battle a centre for all the “mighty beggaris, sturdye vagrantes, idle mychers, and foule cozeners” in Sussex. It was rotten-ripe and full fit to be plucked when Henry the Eighth ended the monasteries and when his Commissioners appeared before its doors on May 27th, 1538.
To sentimentalise over the suppression of places like Battle Abbey would be excusable in the ignorant; in those fully informed it would be criminal. It cannot be too often repeated that the work undertaken by Henry the Eighth was no mere capricious act of tyranny, was no unwarrantable or unprovoked attack upon the religious houses. Wyclif had long before, at the close of the fourteenth century, declared that the rotting trunk of the monastic establishments cumbered the ground. In 1414 over one hundred alien priories were suppressed. In 1489 Pope Innocent the Eighth issued to the Archbishop of Canterbury a commission for a general investigation. Parliament itself had petitioned Henry the Fourth for seizure of the possessions they administered so ill. Wolsey had from within the Church seen the decadence of the Abbeys and Priories, and himself suppressed a number of the smaller houses and devoted their property to the better use of education.
It is a cloud of witness to the general and cumulative disgust of the times with the enclosed life.
The Commissioners came to Battle, dressed fantastically in the plunder of other religious houses they had ransacked on their way, “decked in the spoils of the desecrated chapels, with copes for doublets, tunics for saddle-cloths, and the silver relic-cases hammered into sheaths for their daggers.” They, in short, committed on their side almost as many excesses as the foul-living, blasphemous monastic brethren had on theirs; but they had this excuse: that if they indeed made a mockery of religion, it was the monks themselves first showed them the way of it.
The report of Dr. Layton, Chief Commissioner, described the conduct of Battle as “the worst that ever I see in all other places, whereat I see specially the blake sort of dyvellyshe monks.” Their doings, however, had not been so bad as those of establishments subsequently visited, whose sins will scarce bear mention.
But the monks of Battle had always been prepared to go considerable lengths for money. In the monastery was hung the famous “Roll of Battle Abbey,” purporting to be the roll-call of the Norman knights on the morning of the Battle of Hastings, to which they answered “Here,” or “Ici,” or “Adsum,” as might be. This historical parchment is reported to have been removed to Cowdray, where it perished in the fire of 1793, but it had, centuries before, been so tampered with by the monks that all its value had been destroyed. It early became a foible among noble or wealthy families to declare that their ancestors “came over with the Conqueror,” and Battle Abbey was always ready to oblige a liberal patron by adding his name to the Roll. In the words of Dugdale: “Such hath been the subtility of some Monks of old, that, finding it acceptable unto most to be reputed descendants to those who were companions with Duke William in that memorable Expedition whereby he became Conqueror of this Realm, as that, to gratify them (but not without their own advantage) they inserted their Names into this antient Catalogue”; and Camden repeats the charge. “Whosoever,” he says, “considers well shall find them always to be forged, and those names inserted which were never mentioned in that authenticated record.”
On the surrender of Battle Abbey, it and its lands were granted by the King to Sir Anthony Browne, in 1538. The knight did not come into his property with the good will of the neighbourhood, which, pauperised by and dependent on the monks, with anger saw them thrust forth into the world, and loved to tell how the last of the brethren to issue from the gate turned and cursed him with the doom of the sacrilegious. “By fire and water,” he declared, his line should end. We are not told whether Sir Anthony Browne quailed—as on the stage he certainly would have done—or if he merely laughed; but there can be no doubt that the people of Battle awaited the issue with great interest, and that, when nothing happened, they were disappointed. Instead of Sir Anthony Browne or any of his family being cut off untimely, they flourished exceedingly, and his son became a peer, under the title of Viscount Montagu.
The estates of Battle passed from the family in the time of the sixth Viscount, who in 1719 sold them to Sir Thomas Webster, the first of a long line of Baronets who (with an interval from 1857 to 1901) have held them ever since. In all that time the curse slept, and possibly when the sixth Viscount Montagu parted with Battle and retired wholly to his great mansion and beautiful park of Cowdray, he thought the spell had been effectually broken by this severance.
But the long-dormant curse woke up and worked itself out in 1793, when the beautiful mansion of Cowdray was destroyed by fire. In the following month the eighth Lord Montagu, while yet ignorant of this disaster, met his death by drowning in the Falls of Lauffen, near Schaffhausen, when attempting to shoot the rapids in a boat. He was but twenty-four years of age.
The next heir to the estates of Cowdray, the ninth and last Viscount, was a Roman Catholic priest, who died childless, in 1797, in spite of the fact that he was dispensed from his vows in order that he might marry and continue the line. The property was then inherited by his sister, Mrs. Stephen Poyntz, whose two sons were shortly afterwards drowned at Bognor. Her husband then sold Cowdray.
All this proves how very careful it behoves those to be who launch curses on roving commissions. Even the Websters seem to have shared to some degree in this malediction, for the fourth Baronet committed suicide, June 3rd, 1800, by shooting himself with a pistol at his London house in Tenterden Street, Hanover Square. He had been embarrassed by heavy losses at cards. This eccentric and unfortunate man, Sir Godfrey Webster, married Elizabeth Vassall, a great Jamaican heiress, who in 1795, at Florence, while her husband was away in England on business, left him and her two children for the third Lord Holland. Lord Stavordale, in his memoir, skates cautiously over the thin ice of this affair. He says the meeting of that guilty pair “was destined to alter the whole course of their lives. They became deeply attached to one another, and after many months spent in various parts of the Continent, returned to England in 1796.”
Sir Godfrey obtained a divorce in July, 1797, and two days later Lord Holland married the lady, known to diarists and writers of memoirs as “the celebrated Lady Holland.” Had she been less rich she would doubtless have been merely “the notorious.” Her entertainments and her biting wit (she was a kind of female Douglas Jerrold) absolved her from the ostracism that would have been the lot of one less wealthy, less acid, and less hospitable. She lived a long life in the centre of political and social functions, and died in 1845.
This Sir Godfrey Webster is “the very worthy Baronet” referred to by “Thomas Ingoldsby” in the preface to the second edition of the “Ingoldsby Legends” as “protesting against a defamatory placard at a general election”:
Who steals my purse steals stuff!—
’Twas mine—’tisn’t his—nor nobody else’s!
But he who runs away with my Good Name,
Robs me of what does not do him any good,
And makes me deuced poor:
a novel reading of Iago’s passionate declaration, Othello, Act iii., Scene 3:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he, that filches from me my good name,
Robs me of that, which not enriches him,
And makes me poor indeed.
His also was the reading:
Pray, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty cock-horses?—
a new version of Bolingbroke’s speech in Richard the Second:
Oh, who can hold a fire in his hand
By thinking on the frosty Caucasus?
A DESCENDANT OF THE SAXON CHURLS.
Sir Godfrey Webster, sixth Baronet, in 1857 sold Battle Abbey to Lord Harry Vane, afterwards Duke of Cleveland, chiefly because of the extraordinary situation brought about by there being at that time no fewer than five dowager Lady Websters drawing jointures from the already impoverished property. It had long been a cherished dream of the Websters to repurchase their old home, and this was realised in 1901 by Sir Augustus Webster, the present and eighth Baronet, on the death of the Duchess of Cleveland. But although he effected that aim, he could not maintain the Abbey itself, and accordingly let it to Mr. Grace, the wealthy American who resides there now and lords it over this historic spot and this beautiful park occupied by English gentlemen when the place whence he came was the primeval forest roamed by the North American redskin. It is a picturesque example of the newer conquering of England by the dollar, over eight hundred years after the famous battle that won it with the sword.
It is in a remote and picturesque corner of the park, in Powder Mill House, that Sir Augustus Webster resides; in a house which, as indicated by its name, was one of those gunpowder factories whose numerous accidents, according to Horsfield, historian of Sussex, “it would be harrowing to relate and uncharitable to publish.”
The manufacture is a thing of the past at Battle, but the great pond, used in the work, remains, and so do those brushwood thickets that contributed charcoal to the industry. Brushwood coppices are still one of the character-touches of the place, and those “leather-legged chaps, the clay and coppice people,” as Cobbett names them, are, as they have been from Saxon times, the greater proportion of the inhabitants. Any day their rustic and toil-worn figures, bent under huge faggots, may be seen in Battle street, and they serve to show how, although the Normans and the monks in turn have gone, the rural Saxon people remain.
When Sir Anthony Browne came into possession of Battle, he lost no time in demolishing the church of the Abbey and many of its domestic surroundings. The Abbot’s great hall and apartments he converted into a mansion, and with a portion of the stones from the demolished church added other rooms.
BATTLE ABBEY.