There is little time in this age for brooding over historical celebrities or notorieties, but if Hastings dwelt much upon the past, it could find little pleasure in the recollection that it was the birthplace of Titus Oates, whose baptism is registered in 1619, in the books of All Saints’, of which his father was afterwards rector. Titus was himself curate here.
Much, indeed, might be written of the clergy of All Saints’, but not a large proportion of it to their credit. I do not know if we may fairly include him who was hanged at Tyburn in 1586 for the crime of forging his presentation to the living. He was not properly rector. As he had to be hanged in any case, it seems a pity they did not suspend him from the tower of All Saints’; it would have been much more picturesque. He was practically wasted at Tyburn, where executions were an everyday dish.
Then there was the Reverend Mr. Hinson, royalist, who, busily denouncing the Roundheads in his sermon of Sunday, July 9th, 1643, was told that the subjects of his abuse were in the town, and the stern Colonel Morley even then on the way to make him prisoner. He left his discourse at a loose end and bunked, hooked it, vamoosed, cut his stick, fled, or merely went—just as you please. Only, perhaps, to say he “went” hardly meets the case, for he departed with such celerity that he had not time even to shift his surplice. The Roundheads thereupon occupied the church, made it a dormitory, preached burlesque sermons from the pulpit, and generally behaved like blasphemous blackguards, finally making off with all the surplices they could find.
Mr. Hinson was arrested three days later and lodged in a filthy gaol, with a tinker to match, who was not only dirty but rude, and, declaring he was the elder of the two, and therefore privileged, took the one bench in the place, leaving the curate the cold, cold floor. He had three weeks’ imprisonment at Hastings, and how much beside would have been awarded him in London, whither he was removed, we do not know, for he escaped and joined his King at Oxford, and so is heard of no more.
A tablet in the church to a former rector with the humorous name of Webster Whistler, a connection of Sir Whistler Webster, of Battle Abbey, reminds one of a curious incident. He died at the great age of eighty-four in 1831. A distinguished pluralist, he held the rather distant benefice of Newtimber, on the Brighton Road, in addition to this in Hastings. A quarrel with the squire of Newtimber led to the living of that tiny place being put up to auction in 1817. The clergyman was interested enough to be in London when the sale took place, and to his disgust heard the auctioneer describe Newtimber as held by an infirm and hoary vicar with one foot in the grave, and that consequently the reversion would soon fall in. The Reverend Whistler was then but seventy, and as hale and hearty as a ploughman. He arose in wrath, and so convinced the room of his being good for another twenty years that the advowson found no purchaser.
The much-beneficed Whistler was no ill friend to the smugglers, who then formed a considerable part of the population of Hastings, and passively lent his church to them for a cellar. It was told of him that, hearing movements one night in his garden, and preparing to fire upon those he thought to be burglars, a voice reassured him with the whisper, “Hush, your reverence, it’s the brandy!” It was the smugglers’ thank-offering. The only flaw in this story is the circumstance that the clergyman would not have mistaken his smuggling friends for midnight marauders, for he was used to find such gifts brought to his door. Later, when this kind of friendly understanding became too notorious, the kegs were deposited in the crowded churchyard, and visitors at his table sometimes heard him tell his man to “go and see if there’s any brandy in old Swain”: “old Swain” being one of the numerous clan of that very common name at Hastings, and lying in a table-like tomb which made an excellent and unsuspected cellar.
When this picturesque cleric happened to find his cellar low, he was not averse from hinting at the fact in the texts of his sermons. Discourses upon the “wine that maketh glad the heart of man” and on the miracle of turning water into wine, with applications readily understood by his congregation, rarely failed in their object; for we must by no means suppose that a smuggler was necessarily a lawless and an impious, or even an ungrateful man: and a fervent piety was no bar to “free trading.”
The most striking thing in All Saints’ Church is a curious notice in the belfry, with words and letters running together like those of an ill-read proof:
This is a belfry that is free
for all those that can civil be