Bisham Abbey is, of course, famed above all other things for the story of the wicked Lady Hoby, who so thrashed her son for spoiling his copy-books with blots that he died. A portrait of her, in the dress of a widow, is still in the house, and her ghost is yet said to haunt the place.[2] She was wife of Sir Thomas Hoby, Ambassador to France, who died in 1566, aged 36. The elaborate altar-tomb in Bisham church to him, and to his half-brother, Sir Philip, with effigies of the two knights, is worth seeing; and the rhymed epitaph written by her worth reading. The early death of the Ambassador, in Paris, was not without suspicion of poison. The sculptured figures of hawks at the feet of the brothers are “hobby”-hawks, a punning allusion to the family name.
Lady Hoby was a grief-stricken widow, and supplicated Heaven, rather quaintly, to “give me back my husband, Thomas,” or that being beyond possibility, to “give me another like Thomas.” She captured another, eight years later, when she married John, Lord Russell; but whether Heaven had thus given her one up to sample we are only left idly to conjecture. At any rate she outlived him too, by many years, and elected to be buried beside her Thomas. An elaborate monument to this fearsome lady discloses her in a wonderful coif, surmounted by a coronet. Before and behind her kneeling figure are the praying effigies of her children. It is recorded that she was particularly interested in mortuary observances, and that she even found it possible to be absorbed, as she lay dying, at the age of 81, in her own funeral rites; corresponding with Sir William Dethick as to precisely the number of mourners and heralds that were her due.
A little monument to two children in Bisham church is the subject of a very old legend to the effect that Queen Elizabeth was their mother! More scandal about Queen Elizabeth!
Bisham passed from the Hobys in 1768 to a family of Mills, who assumed the name; but in 1780 it again changed hands and was sold to the Vansittarts, of whom Sir H. J. Vansittart-Neale is the present representative. The old belief in disaster befalling families who hold property taken from the Church has been curiously warranted here from time to time, in the untimely death of eldest sons or direct heirs, and here indeed, upon entering Bisham church, the stranger is startled by the white marble life-size effigy confronting him of a kneeling boy, in a Norfolk jacket-suit; an inscription declaring it to represent George Kenneth Vansittart-Neale, who died in 1904, aged fourteen.
[1] The Old Inns of Old England, vol. ii., pp. 299-303.
[2] More fully discussed in Haunted Houses, pp. 36-42.
CHAPTER III
GREAT MARLOW—COOKHAM—CLIVEDEN AND ITS OWNERS—MAIDENHEAD