Birchington, the place of the birchen trees, is an ancient village which has not yet become swamped and overwhelmed by seaside villas, although there are a good many to be found if you care to seek them. That, however, would be a sorry quest, even though “Rossetti Bungalow,” the house in which Dante Gabriel Rossetti died in 1882, in his fifty-fourth year, be among them. Hard by the south porch of the ancient church stands a memorial cross designed by Ford Madox Browne, inscribed:
“Here sleeps
Gabriel Charles Dante Rossetti
Honoured under the name of
Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Among painters as a painter
And among poets as a poet,
Born in London,
Of parentage mainly Italian, 12 May 1828
Died at Birchington, 9 April 1882.”
Here is also a stained-glass window to his memory, in the church.
There is discretion and reticence in that epitaph. If you would know how Rossetti conveyed (“convey the wise it call”) the methods of the Pre-Raphaelites, and how he was the author of many of the “bluest” Limericks of his era, you must read Holman Hunt’s autobiography, and dip into the various memoirs of their set.
Among the ancient brasses in the church are examples to John Quek and child, 1449; Richard Quek, 1459; Alys Crispe, 1518; John Henyns, vicar, 1523; Margaret Crispe, 1528; and another Margaret Crispe and chrisom child, 1533.
The Quex family were anciently seated at Quex Park, near Birchington. In the sixteenth century the last of their race, the daughter and heiress of John Quex, married John Crispe, whose descendants died out in 1680. Their reign at Quex Park was unremarkable, except for one very strange incident in the life of Henry Crispe, who was abducted in 1657. The story of it seems more like romance than reality, but the incident is historical. The unsuspecting Henry Crispe was aroused late one August night by a party of desperadoes who had landed at Gore End, Birchington, under the command of a filibustering Royalist, one Captain Golding. He was bundled into his own coach and driven to the shore, whence sail was made to Ostend. Crispe was eventually taken to Bruges, and kept a prisoner there. A curious part of the affair is that he had evidently been expecting an attack; and had had the walls of his house loop-holed for musketry. A ransom of £3,000 was demanded; and all he could do was to write to his nephew, Thomas Crispe, his son being ill at the time, to come and help him. Thomas and the son did what they could, in the face of difficulties, Cromwell having a suspicion that the whole affair was a plot to procure £3,000 for Charles the Second, at that time on the Continent, in very narrow circumstances. He therefore for a time forbade the payment of ransom, and it was eight months before the money was forthcoming and the captive set free.
Henry Crispe was no linguist, and was known until his death in 1663 as “Bon Jour Crispe,” the only foreign phrase he had learnt in his exile.
THE WATERLOO TOWER, QUEX PARK.
Quex Park is unquestionably the finest demesne in Thanet. It is a richly wooded estate nearly four miles in circuit, the seat at the present time of Major Powell Cotton, whose park of assorted artillery just within the lodge-gates consists of some thirty ancient guns, some of them dating back to the sixteenth century: all very curious and interesting. The gilded vane and odd-looking spire seen above the massed woodlands in the distance are in the centre of the park, and are most difficult to find when once within the lodge gates. One might, in fact, easily lose one’s way at Quex. They crest a lofty red-brick structure called the “Waterloo Tower,” built in 1820, and hung with a peal of twelve bells. The spire is a cast-iron one, of a design fondly thought to be Gothic, but very weird and gruesome. The tower itself is used as a mausoleum, and was restored in 1896.