As we mount some steps into the Earl’s great pew, upholstered in red cloth, we pass a severely simple pulpit which is so in harmony with the church that it seems to melt into it, and leave all to the eloquence of the preacher. The low stone rail, bound with fair worked brass, recalls George Herbert’s words about the reading-desk and pulpit in his church of Layton Ecclesia, “for he would often say Prayer and Preaching, being equally useful, might agree like brethren and have an equal honour and estimation.” The red pew is spoiled by a very ugly window which, happily, is so far back from the main aisle of the church that it does not spoil the general effect. A little door leads us down into a space which was perhaps once the Lady Chapel, and which contains many monuments of great interest.
Much might be written about the early Paulets from Pawlet, near Bridgwater, and their descendant who wedded a Deneband, and so came to Hinton St. George; but in this family the chief interest centres in the early sixteenth century and the age of Elizabeth. In the mailed warriors under the north wall with their dames in curious head-dresses we see probably the warlike Sir Amias, who helped defeat Lambert Simnel at Newark in the days of Henry VII., built much at Hinton, and left his mark on the Middle Temple in London, where chiefly he lived. Beyond lies his son Sir Hugh, who helped Henry VIII. in his French war with Francis I., and is said to have put Wolsey in the stocks when he was a youth at Lymington School. This Sir Hugh perhaps helped to bring misfortune on the house, for he had the ill-fated office laid upon him of being supervisor of all the manors, etc., lately belonging to Richard Whiting, last abbot of Glastonbury.
But by far the most interesting monument in the whole church is that in the west wall of this chapel to the memory of Sir Amyas Poulett, son of Sir Hugh, and gaoler of Mary Queen of Scots during the last two years of her life. It is seldom indeed that so much personal character is expressed in marble as in the curious veins of this pale alabaster. One would think that many a Londoner must have paused, struck by the stern even irritable face, before the monument was removed from St. Martin’s, where it was situate so long under the same roof as Nell Gwynne and many another notable. How strangely it brings us into touch with past times to look at this strong face of the man who had so much to put up with! There he lies motionless in ruff and doublet upon a marble pillow, and yet he moved in the stirring world we know so well from Froude’s vivid pages and Alexandre Dumas’ bustling novels. In 1576 he was sent ambassador by Elizabeth to that frivolous court of Henry III., the king of favourites, who lives again in the pages of Chicot the Jester, with his swarms of little spaniels and his effeminate hands smeared with cream, surrounded by the plots and counter-plots of the Guises and the aged queen-mother Catherine of Medici.
Whilst Sir Amyas was in Paris, the negotiations were afoot for marrying Queen Elizabeth, a woman of forty-six, to the French King Henry’s brother Alençon, Duke of Anjou, a lad of twenty-three, “a small brown creature, deeply pock-marked, with a large head, a knobbed nose, and a hoarse croaking voice.” When he came to visit her in 1579, Elizabeth pretended to like him and called him her “grenouille,” her frog-prince, but the English nation had not forgotten the massacre of St. Bartholomew seven short years ago, and would have none of him. Sir Philip Sidney wrote out his indignation in an honest memorial to the Queen, and then retired for some time from Court to Wilton, where he wrote the Arcadia. On Stubbs, a Puritan pamphleteer, who opposed the match, the Queen vented her spleen by having his hand chopped off by the common hangman. “Long live Queen Elizabeth!” cried the loyal Englishman as he waved his hat with his left hand. Feeling such as this proved to the Queen that her Englishmen would have none of the Italianated foreigner, but with her usual intricate diplomacy she kept up the negotiations for years, and Sir Amyas Poulett had to bear the brunt of Parisian indignation. “I have been baited here for a month or more as a bear at a stake, and had nothing to say,” he writes, “but stood still at my defence for fear to take hurt.”
HINTON ST. GEORGE.
We can fancy that the knowledge which Sir Amyas gained of French stratagems and spoils made him a suitable warder for the resourceful Scottish queen whom he watched over at Tutbury, Chartley and Fotheringay with a surly fidelity, for the last two out of her eighteen years’ captivity. His restless desire to force his own particular tenets upon her must have added to the trials of her last moments, though his honest refusal to let her be murdered by any secret assassin made the last sad pageant of execution possible, in which her unwavering fortitude won for her the sympathy of posterity. Sir Amyas liked plain dealing, and seems to have fretted much at the tortuous policy of Walsingham and Burghley. He discovered a priest in disguise in the Queen’s household at gloomy Tutbury, but knew not what to do with him, because Elizabeth, as he said, “so dandled the Catholics.” Sir Amyas yielded to Walsingham so far as to give in, perhaps perforce, to the shameful plot which entrapped Mary into a treasonable correspondence carried on by means of a water-tight box at the bottom of the ale-casks supplied to her at Chartley by a brewer from Burton, and then shamelessly copied for Walsingham. This double-dealing must have been grievous to the old man, and the terrible responsibility laid upon him, added to the pangs of the gout, shortened his own life. Poor Queen Mary was so unconscious of the toils she was in that hope improved her health, her swollen legs healed, and she was able to ride hunting with the hounds and kill a deer with her cross-bow.
Stand with me in fancy in the little chapel at Hinton, and recall some of the strange scenes beheld by that marble face.
Think of the sunny August morning in 1586, when Sir Amyas persuaded the unconscious queen to ride out nine miles to Tixall and kill a buck in Sir Walter Aston’s park. Mary is in high spirits, perhaps her many plots have seared her conscience, and if she does know of the purposed assassination of Elizabeth, it seems to her no high price to pay for her liberty. Sir Amyas on the other hand knows that Babington’s conspiracy is discovered, that he has had to flee from the forest of St. John’s Wood, and that in a few moments Queen Mary will be arrested for high treason. Deeply as he detests her Popish wiles, a little sympathy must surely cross his harsh features when the armed men whom she hails as her deliverers arrest her as a traitor in the Queen’s name.
Again. The fortnight of neglect and hardship at Tixall is over, and the queen returns to Chartley with her doom upon her to find her treasures and secrets all torn open, and her favourite attendant Barbara Curle stricken by terror to a bed of sickness with the new-born baby unchristened at her side. You can fancy the furrowed forehead of Sir Amyas as he harshly refuses to christen the poor babe by the traitor’s name of Mary, and the queen, ever with an instinct for the drama of history, as she promptly lays the infant on her lap and baptises it Mary in the Name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Ghost.