“Elizabeth Powlet lies interred here
A spotless corpes, a corps from scandal clere.
Deny her not the trouble of your eye,
She a saint in Heaven free from misery,” etc.
Over the pretty turf crosses, which are a peculiarity of this churchyard, a gay peacock walks, very unconscious that he is the old emblem of that immortality which shall survive “when all that seems shall suffer shock.”
Through the deep porch we pass into the church where the pallid marble monuments of many Pouletts go far to overpower the little building, but are relieved by the warm tones of the pinkish fawn stone roof of the chancel, the tender yellow of the Ham stone columns, and the unassuming white plaster of the walls. A beautiful window by Clayton and Bell sends red and purple lights along the stone floor that rest on the heads of little Elizabethan Pouletts who kneel in prayerful line beneath their placid parents in ruff and doublet, seeking—
“For past transgressions to atone
By saying endless prayers in stone.”
We do not linger long over the virtues of the earls of last century, though we are amused at the wire-drawn periods of the epitaph to the Honourable Anne Poulett, fourth son of the first Earl Poulett, to whom Queen Anne was godmother. A suite of rooms was prepared for the Queen in the great house hidden in its cedars, and her bed used to be shown there; but death called her to follow her eighteen dead babies before the visit came to pass. She stood sponsor for the fourth son of the first earl and named him Anne just as she did Lord Anne Hamilton, the third son of the Jacobite duke who was killed by Lord Mohun in the famous Hyde Park duel described by Thackeray in Esmond. Lord Anne Poulett’s epitaph tells us that his “sedate fortitude, propriety of judgment, and universal knowledge, could not avert that death which tore him from his afflicted family”!