Deep down below, in midst of the narrowest lanes, lies the sequestered village of Batcombe, from which this down immediately above takes its name. The church stands almost in the shadow of the hills. This also is a place of marvellous legends, for a battered old Gothic tomb in the churchyard, innocent of inscription, standing near the north wall of the church, is, according to old tales the resting-place of one “Conjuring Minterne,” a devil-compeller and astrologer of sorts, who was originally buried half in and half out of the church, for fear his master, “the horny man,” as a character in one of Mr. Hardy’s romances calls Old Nick, should have him, if buried otherwise. One would like to learn more about “Conjuring Minterne” and his strange tricks, but history is silent.
Returning to Evershot, or, as it is styled in the sources of our pilgrimage, “Evershead,” we come to Melbury Park, the seat of the Earl of Ilchester, and the principal scene of that charming story, The First Countess of Wessex, in the collection of “A Group of Noble Dames.” The great house of oddly diversified architecture, stands in the midst of this nobly wooded and strikingly varied domain, but can readily be seen, for the carriage-drive is a public right of way. This is the broad roadway through the park described in the passage where Tupcombe, riding towards “King’s Hintock Court”—as Mr. Hardy disguises the identity of the place—from Mells, on Squire Dornell’s errand, saw it stretching ahead “like an unrolled deal shaving.”
Like most of the stories of those noble dames, this romance of Betty Dornell, the First Countess of Wessex, is founded upon actual people, and largely upon their real doings. Squire Dornell of Falls Park—really Mells Park—was in real life that Thomas Horner who in 1713 married Susannah Strangways, heiress of the Strangways family and owner of Melbury Sampford; and their only child was Elizabeth, born in 1723, who in 1736, in her thirteenth year, almost precisely as in the story, was married to Stephen Fox, afterwards Earl of Ilchester, who died in 1776. The Countess died in 1792.
But this passage of family history is best set forth in the manner customary to genealogists:
The father of the first Countess of Wessex was, it is curious to know, descended from Little Jack Horner, that paragon of selfishness who sat in a corner, eating his Christmas pie, and who, the familiar nursery rhyme goes on to tell us,
“Put in his thumb and pulled out a plum,
And said, What a good boy am I!”
The nursery rhyme was that, and something more. It was, in fact a satire upon that John Horner who, upon the dissolution of the monasteries, purchased for much less than it was worth the confiscated Mells estate of Glastonbury Abbey. This prize, the “plum” of the rhyme, is said to have been worth £10,000. The Horners, represented by Sir John Horner, espoused the side of the Parliament in the war with Charles I. but they have kept their plum, at every hazard and in all chances, and Mells Park is still in the family.
