The old wool-merchants and clothiers often rose to the peerage on their own account, or married their sons and daughters into its ranks. William Grevel, who was a descendant of other mercantile Grevels, never became more than a wealthy trader. As such he died in 1401, and it was not until just over two centuries had passed that his descendant, Fulke Greville, entered the lists of the coroneted as Baron Brooke; the eighth Baron Brooke not becoming Earl of Warwick until 1759. The Grevels—or “Grevilles,” as they afterwards spelt their name—therefore only belatedly won to that haven where they would be; but most others were more fortunate. Baptist Hicks, for example, is an extraordinary instance of swift accumulation of wealth. He, however, made it in London, as a mercer and perhaps a good deal more as a moneylender. He lent money to James the First among others, and became so warm a man that he returned in 1609 to his native Gloucestershire and purchased the manor of Campden, building a magnificent country seat next the church. The cost of this was £29,000: over £200,000 according to present value. He had so much money and so fine a house that he, being already a Knight, was in 1628 created a Viscount. He died the following year, not like Tennyson’s Countess of Burleigh, because of the weight of an honour to which he had not been born, but by reason of age and possibly chagrin that he had not been created an Earl.
He was a benefactor to Campden, and built the charming group of almshouses that stand on the left-hand on the way to the church.
Past these almshouses, the way goes directly to the church, a noble building of date somewhere about 1530. It owes its present stately proportions and Perpendicular style largely to the benefactions of Grevel and others. The tower is remarkable for a buttress which is in some ways a kind of highly-developed mullion running through the centre of the window of the lower stage. It is perhaps rather more curious than beautiful, and as it cannot be of any constructional value and adds little if anything to the stability of the tower, we can only regard it as one of those freaks of the last phase of Gothic architecture which tell us, if we have but the wit to understand, that, Reformation or no Reformation, with Henry the Eighth or without, the Gothic spirit was dying.
The curious ogee-shaped roof of a building seen in the foreground of the accompanying view of the church is that of a garden-pavilion, or gazebo, of Campden House, the lordly mansion built in 1613 by Sir Baptist Hicks, first Viscount Campden. I have seen curious old illustrations of this fine house, by which it would seem to have been a place of extraordinary grandeur. It is said to have been the largest house ever built in England, and stood upon eight acres of ground. This truly extensive mansion existed no longer than thirty-two years, for it was burnt by order of Prince Rupert in 1645. During that time of civil war Campden House had been a notable rallying-place for the Royalists, who under a rough soldier, Sir Henry Bard, had made themselves a pestilent nuisance, not only to their natural enemies, but even to sympathisers. If they needed anything in the way of food, forage, or apparel, they took it where it was to be found, whether from Roundhead or Royalist. They raped the very clothes off the country people’s backs. “A man,” says one of these lamenting rustics, “need keep a tight hold of his very breeches, or ’tis odds but what these Sabines will have them, and if he is let keep his shirt, it is thought a matter of grace.” So it was not altogether regretfully that they saw Bard and his brigands depart while there remained one of those indispensable articles, or a hat, or pair of shoes in the neighbourhood. When the garrison left, they fired the mansion. It was never rebuilt, and to this day its ruins stand to keep the tale in mind.
That the church was rebuilt in the very last years of the Late Perpendicular style is more and more evident as you approach and examine it. William Grevel in 1401 left a hundred marks towards the work, and you will be told locally that the present building is the result of that gift. But not very much could have been done with such a sum, and in any event, the fabric is distinctly and unmistakably over a hundred years later in date. The ogee pinnacles and mouldings, and especially the flattened arches of the nave-arcade tell their architectural tale in a way that cannot be gainsaid.
On the floor of the chancel is the fine brass to William Grevel, 1401, and Marion, his wife, 1386. It is, with its canopied work, eight feet nine inches high; the figure of Grevel himself being five feet four inches. We see him habited in the merchant’s dress of his period, and with the forked beard that was then the usual wear of the elderly among his class, as Chaucer says, in his Canterbury Tales: “A marchant was there with a forked beard.”
Other brasses are to William Welley, merchant, 1450, and wife Alice; John Lethenard, merchant, 1467, and his wife Joan; and William Gybbys, 1484, with his three wives, Alice, Margaret and Marion, and seven sons and six daughters.
The stately monument of Baptist Hicks, first Viscount Campden, and his wife occupies the south chancel chapel. It is one of the works of Nicholas Stone and his sons, whose extraordinarily fine craftsmanship as sculptors and designers of monuments in the seventeenth century redeemed to a great extent the rather vulgar ostentation which marked in general the neo-classic style of the age. The monument takes up nearly all the floor space and rises to a great height. Beneath a canopy formed by it rest the recumbent marble effigies of that ennobled wool-merchant and sometime Lord Mayor of London, and his wife, habited in the robes of their rank, and with coronets on their heads. They are impressive in a very high degree. A long Latin inscription narrates his good deeds and expatiates upon the good fortune of Campden which benefited by them.
It is not easy to excuse the deplorable taste which produced the large monument against the wall to Edward Noel, 2nd Viscount Campden, who died 1642, and his widow, Juliana, 1680. We would like to believe that the idea of it was none of Nicholas Stone’s, but was dictated by the mortuary grief of that thirty-eight years’ long widow, who no doubt found great satisfaction and consolation in coming every now and then to open its doors and look at the gruesome white marble figures, larger than life, of herself and her husband, representing them standing hand in hand, in their shrouds. They remind one very vividly of the lines in Ruddigore—