On the surrender of Battle Abbey, it and its lands were granted by the King to Sir Anthony Browne, in 1538. The knight did not come into his property with the good will of the neighbourhood, which, pauperised by and dependent on the monks, with anger saw them thrust forth into the world, and loved to tell how the last of the brethren to issue from the gate turned and cursed him with the doom of the sacrilegious. “By fire and water,” he declared, his line should end. We are not told whether Sir Anthony Browne quailed—as on the stage he certainly would have done—or if he merely laughed; but there can be no doubt that the people of Battle awaited the issue with great interest, and that, when nothing happened, they were disappointed. Instead of Sir Anthony Browne or any of his family being cut off untimely, they flourished exceedingly, and his son became a peer, under the title of Viscount Montagu.
The estates of Battle passed from the family in the time of the sixth Viscount, who in 1719 sold them to Sir Thomas Webster, the first of a long line of Baronets who (with an interval from 1857 to 1901) have held them ever since. In all that time the curse slept, and possibly when the sixth Viscount Montagu parted with Battle and retired wholly to his great mansion and beautiful park of Cowdray, he thought the spell had been effectually broken by this severance.
But the long-dormant curse woke up and worked itself out in 1793, when the beautiful mansion of Cowdray was destroyed by fire. In the following month the eighth Lord Montagu, while yet ignorant of this disaster, met his death by drowning in the Falls of Lauffen, near Schaffhausen, when attempting to shoot the rapids in a boat. He was but twenty-four years of age.
The next heir to the estates of Cowdray, the ninth and last Viscount, was a Roman Catholic priest, who died childless, in 1797, in spite of the fact that he was dispensed from his vows in order that he might marry and continue the line. The property was then inherited by his sister, Mrs. Stephen Poyntz, whose two sons were shortly afterwards drowned at Bognor. Her husband then sold Cowdray.
All this proves how very careful it behoves those to be who launch curses on roving commissions. Even the Websters seem to have shared to some degree in this malediction, for the fourth Baronet committed suicide, June 3rd, 1800, by shooting himself with a pistol at his London house in Tenterden Street, Hanover Square. He had been embarrassed by heavy losses at cards. This eccentric and unfortunate man, Sir Godfrey Webster, married Elizabeth Vassall, a great Jamaican heiress, who in 1795, at Florence, while her husband was away in England on business, left him and her two children for the third Lord Holland. Lord Stavordale, in his memoir, skates cautiously over the thin ice of this affair. He says the meeting of that guilty pair “was destined to alter the whole course of their lives. They became deeply attached to one another, and after many months spent in various parts of the Continent, returned to England in 1796.”
Sir Godfrey obtained a divorce in July, 1797, and two days later Lord Holland married the lady, known to diarists and writers of memoirs as “the celebrated Lady Holland.” Had she been less rich she would doubtless have been merely “the notorious.” Her entertainments and her biting wit (she was a kind of female Douglas Jerrold) absolved her from the ostracism that would have been the lot of one less wealthy, less acid, and less hospitable. She lived a long life in the centre of political and social functions, and died in 1845.
This Sir Godfrey Webster is “the very worthy Baronet” referred to by “Thomas Ingoldsby” in the preface to the second edition of the “Ingoldsby Legends” as “protesting against a defamatory placard at a general election”:
Who steals my purse steals stuff!—
’Twas mine—’tisn’t his—nor nobody else’s!
But he who runs away with my Good Name,