An unusual, and welcome, feature of this church is the series of engravings, reproductions of seventeenth-century correspondence, and notes upon the history of the village, for the information of the cultured visitor. Here you may read something of the grim associations of the vanished Cumnor Place, and learn, in a chronological table drawn up by the vicar, to what tune the centuries have jogged along in this rural parish. That chronology ends with this remarkable thought, this astonishing intellectual effort: “1893. The Future is not yet!”
It never is.
Brasses, now placed upon the walls, commemorate the virtues and the benefactions of various persons, including “Katherin, sometyme the wyffe of Henry Staverton, who dyed a good Christian the xxvth day of December in ye yere of our lorde God, 1557.” It is perhaps even more important to have lived a good Christian; but, apart from such counsel of perfection, the inscription is a significant change from those piteous pre-Reformation invocations for mercy, and appeals for prayers, that were the commonplaces of all monumental inscriptions only a few years earlier.
James Welsh, who died in 1612, and Margery, who departed three years later, each leaving £5 in charity, are celebrated in verse, beginning:
“The body of James Welsh lyeth buryed here,
Who left this mortall life at fourscore yeare.”
In the south transept, dedicated to St. Thomas of Canterbury, lie two Abbots of Abingdon, one of them probably William de Comenore, who died in 1333. Latest of all the monuments here is that of Sir William Wilson Hunter, an Indian official, who died in 1900, aged 59.
But the chief interest centres in the fine canopied tomb of grey marble, on the north side of the chancel, to Anthony Forster and his wife: Forster, that “Tony Fire-the-Faggot” of Sir Walter Scott’s unhistorical “historical” romance of Kenilworth, in which he is held up to execration as a villain of the most varied villanies; a time-server and hypocrite: “Here you, Tony Fire-the-Faggot, papist, puritan, hypocrite, miser, profligate, devil, compounded of all men’s sins, bow down and reverence him who has brought into thy house the very mammon thou worshippest.”
This horrid portraiture of the man is an overdrawn picture. No need to paint the devil blacker than he really is; and although the evidence available tends to attach the stigma of “murderer” to him, it does not by any means follow that he practised all the meannesses and petty vices with which he is charged.
On the other hand, those whitewashers of smirched reputations who have long been so actively and unprofitably employed in cleansing historical characters under a cloud, have overstepped the mark in loudly declaring their belief in his innocence of all charges brought against him.