Greatly to the surprise of himself and friends, Lieutenant Bird was not only arrested and tried, but found guilty and sentenced to death. The historian of these things is surprised, too; for gentlemen of fashion were in those times very much what German officers became—privileged murderers—and waiters were earthworms. I cannot understand it at all.
AN EXIT AT TYBURN
At any rate, Edward Bird took it ill and declined the ministrations of the Ordinary, saying “He was very busy, was to write Letters, expected Company, and such-like frivolous Excuses.” The Ordinary does not tell us in so many words, but we may suspect that the condemned man told him to go to the Devil. He was, indeed, an altogether hardened sinner, and would not even go to chapel, and was so poor a sportsman that he tried to do the rabble of Tyburn out of the entertaining spectacle of his execution, taking poison and stabbing himself in several places on the eve of that interesting event.
He seems to have been afraid of hurting himself, for he died neither of poison nor of wounds, and was duly taken to Tyburn in a handsome mourning coach, accompanied by his mother, by other Christians and gentlemen, by the Ordinary, and three other clergymen, to see him duly across the threshold into the other world. He stood an hour under the fatal tree, talking with his mother, and no hour of his life could have sped so swiftly. Then the chaplain sang a penitential psalm and the other divines prayed, and the candidate for the rope was made to repeat the Apostles’ Creed, after which he called for a glass of wine. No wine being available, he took a pinch of snuff, bowed, and said, “Gentlemen, I wish your health,” and then “was ty’d up, turned off, and bled very much at the Mouth or Nose, or both.”
The mystery of his being accorded a monument in Reigate Church is explained when we learn that his uncle, the Rev. John Bird, was both patron and vicar. A further inscription beyond that already quoted was once in existence, censuring the judge and jury who condemned him. Traditions long survived of his mother, on every anniversary of his execution, passing the whole day in the church, sorrowing.
The date of the monument’s disappearance is not clearly established, but old inhabitants of Reigate have recollections of the laughing workmen, during the rebuilding of the tower in 1874, throwing marble figures out of the windows, and speak of the fragments being buried in the churchyard.
For the rest, Reigate Church is only of mild interest; excepting, indeed, the parish library, housed over the vestry, containing among its seventeen hundred books many of great interest and variety. The collection was begun in 1701 by the then vicar.
A little-known fact about Reigate is that the notorious Eugene Aram for a year lived here, in a cottage oddly named “Upper Repentance.”
TABLET: BATSWING COTTAGES.