The interior of the church, which has weathered so greatly in the few years of its existence that it resembles an ancient building, is rich in monuments, but at one time possessed many more. The oldest is a lozenge-shaped Flemish brass dated 1529 to one Margaret Svanders, with a curious head-and-shoulders representation of the lady herself; but the oddest of all the memorials here is that to John, Viscount Mordaunt, including a statue of that nobleman, rather larger than life-size, in white marble. It has now been banished to the tower, from the prominent position it formerly occupied in the south aisle, and is not a little startling, seen suddenly and unexpectedly in a half light. The weird-looking figure is like that of a lunatic policeman standing on a dining-room table in his socks, and pretending to direct the traffic, with a sheet wound partly round his nakedness, and something like a rolling-pin in his hand.
It stands on a raised slab of polished black marble, with a black background throwing it into further relief. This extraordinary effigy was sculptured by Bird, author of the original statue of Queen Anne in front of St. Paul’s Cathedral, of which an exact replica by Richard Belt now occupies the same spot.
The mad-policeman idea is due, of course, to the sculptor having chosen to represent that distinguished nobleman as a Roman, with a truncheon, which he is seen to be wielding with a mock-heroic gesture. The truncheon typifies the official position he held as Constable of Windsor Castle.
Lord Mordaunt was a younger son of the first Earl of Peterborough. Born in 1627, he was active among the younger Royalists, and figured at last in the restoration of Charles the Second, who created him Viscount Aviland, a title which seems to have been somewhat thrust into the background. He died of a fever in 1675, and appears to have led an active and an honourable life, which ought to have excused him from this posthumous grotesquery. The whole monument is indeed a prominent example of the fantastic taste of its period, and is set about with marble pedestals bearing epitaph and family genealogy, and sculptured gauntlets and coronets.
A number of very distinguished personages lie in the great churchyard. Prominent among the later monuments, as you enter along Church Row and past the Powell almshouses, is that of the fifth and last Viscount Ranelagh and Baron Jones, who died November 13, 1885, in his seventy-third year. There are still very many who well recollect the distinguished-looking figure of Lord Ranelagh: a tall, slim, bearded man, with his hair brushed in front of his ears in an old-world style, a silk hat rakishly poised at an angle, a tightly buttoned frock-coat, in which always appeared a scarlet geranium, throughout the year, and light-tinted trousers. He gave the general impression of one who had seen life in circles where it is lived rapidly; and to this his broken nose, which he had acquired in thrashing a coal-heaver who had been rude to him in the street, picturesquely contributed. He looked in some degree like a survival from the fast-living age of the Regency, although, as a matter of fact, he was born only when that riotous period was nearly over. The very title “Ranelagh” has something of a reckless, derring-do sound. He was one of the early Volunteers, and raised the Second (South) Middlesex corps, of which he remained colonel until his death. The military funeral given him by his men would have been of a much more imposing, and even national, character, befitting the important part he took in the Volunteer movement, had it not been that a general election was in progress at the time. At such times the military and auxiliary forces are by old statutes not allowed to assemble. The theory is the old one of possible armed interference with the free choice of electors.
Numerous monuments to long-dead and forgotten Bishops of London are found here. A group of them, eight in number, chiefly of the eighteenth century, is found to the east of the church. They are a grim and forbidding company. Amid them is found the meagre headstone and concise inscription to a humorist of considerable renown: “Theodore Edward Hook, died 24th August, 1841, in the 53rd year of his age.” Efforts to provide a better monument have failed to secure support. Perhaps it is thought by those who withhold their subscriptions that the reading his books is the best memorial an author can be given.
THE TOWER, FULHAM CHURCH.