But still, may gifts from Heaven on thee rest, And thus that house be glorified and blest.
Whatever there may still remain of life, At night and morn I contemplate my wife,
And at the time appointed may we meet, And her sweet Spirit be the first to greet.
Reader, observe, the life inscribed above, Evinced much happiness, more pain, most love.
Charles Edmund survived his beloved until
April 7, 1903, aged 83.
This also is his monument, he objects to more.
The living of Lamport is held jointly with that of Faxton, a good three miles away: a place with no road to it for the best part (or? “worst part”) of one of those three miles. Why, then, does the explorer explore in such forbidding circumstances? Aye, why indeed? I ask myself as, quartering a succession of phenomenally water-logged meadows in search of spots free from the fathomless mud, I make slow and painful progress, horribly aware that the way I have come is the only route back. Well, there is a reason in all things; even in this. In Faxton church there is a monument to Sir Augustine Nichols, Justice of the Common Pleas, who formerly resided here, and was poisoned in 1616, when on circuit at Kendal, by four women, to prevent him passing sentence of death on one of their relatives. Another monument is in Kendal church, where he is buried.
FAXTON.
The effigy of him is kneeling at a desk, and on either side he is supported by figures representing Justice and Fortitude, with Temperance and Prudence above. Justice once held her appropriate scales, but they have been broken off. The villagers, to whom classic imagery was unknown, were firmly convinced that the scales represented the weighing of the poison that put an end to the judge.
