CROWCOMBE CHURCH.
There are fine carved bench-ends in the church, one bearing the date 1534 in Roman figures. Upon another is represented two men in desperate combat with a double-headed dragon. In the churchyard there is a cross, and facing the village street another, the cross complete, which is exceptional.
Crowcombe Court, a stately red-brick house of the latter part of the seventeenth century, has replaced the older seat of the Carews. Among the fine collection of Vandycks is a full-length of Charles I. and his queen, given by the second Charles to the family in acknowledgment of their loyalty. Queen Henrietta looks prettier here than in many of her portraits. There is also a fine Vandyck of James Stuart, Duke of Richmond, and of Lady Herbert, and some of Lely's beauties, including Nell Gwynn and the Countess of Falmouth, whose buxom face recalls some of de Gramont's liveliest pages.
A few miles to the east of Crowcombe, on the other side of the range of hills, is the moated castle of Enmore, whose ponderous drawbridge can still be raised and lowered like that at Helmingham. It is a formidable barrack-like building of red stone, not of any great antiquity. In the earlier structure lived Elizabeth Malet, the handsome young heiress with whom the madcap Earl of Rochester ran away. Pepys on May 28, 1665, relates "a story of my Lord Rochester's running away on Friday night last with Mrs. Mallett, the great beauty of fortune and the north, who had supped at Whitehall with Mrs. Stewart, and was going home to her lodgings with her grandfather my Lord Haly [Hawley] by coach; and was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and foot men, and forcibly taken from him and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to receive her, and carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord of Rochester (for whom the king had spoken to the lady often, but with no success) was taken at Uxbridge; but the lady is not yet heard of, and the king mighty angry, and the lord sent to the Tower." As may be supposed, with so flighty a husband the pair did not live happily ever after.[24]
The Enmore estate passed to Anne, the eldest of their three daughters, who married a Baynton of Spye Park near Melksham, where memories of the profligate earl linger, as they do at Adderbury.
The famous "Abode" at Spaxton, as impenetrable as Enmore although it has no drawbridge, is close at hand. An adjacent hill, locally said to be a short cut to heaven, commands a superb view of the surrounding country. The original founder of the sect could scarcely have found a prettier nook in England.
A few miles to the north-west of Crowcombe is the picturesque village of Monksilver, the church of which is rich in oak carvings of the fifteenth century. The pulpit and bench-ends are particularly fine, but the screen has been much mutilated. There are some grotesque gargoyles, one representing a large-mouthed gentleman having his teeth extracted.
