We must add to this list Sir Richard and Lady Rokeby, who died in 1523, and Gawin Douglas, that good Bishop of Dunkeld who first translated Virgil into Lowland Scotch. He was pensioned by Henry VIII., was a friend of Polydore Virgil, and died of the plague in London in 1521. The brass is on the floor, about three feet south of the stove in the centre of the chapel.[213]
Dr. Cameron, the last victim executed for the daring rebellion of 1745, lies here also in good company among knights and bishops. His monument, by M. L. Watson, was not erected till 1846. Here, too, is that great admiral of Elizabeth—George, third Earl of Cumberland, who used to wear the glove which his queen had given him, set in diamonds, in his tilting helmet. He died in the Duchy House in the Savoy, October 3, 1605; but his bowels alone were buried here, the rest of his body lies at Skipton. He was the father of the brave, proud Countess, who, when Charles II.’s secretary pressed on her notice a candidate for Appleby, wrote that celebrated cannon-shot of a letter:—
“I have been bullied by an usurper; I have been neglected by a court, but I will not be dictated to by a subject. Your man shan’t stand.
“Anne, Dorset, Pembroke, and Montgomery.”
Here also there is a tablet to the memory of Richard Lander, the traveller, originally a servant of that energetic discoverer Captain Clapperton, who was the first to cross Africa from Tripoli and Benin. Lander had the honour also of first discovering the course of the Niger. He died in February 1834, from a gunshot-wound, at Fernando Po, aged only thirty-one. Such are the lion-men who extend the frontiers of English commerce.
In the Savoy reposes a true poet, but an unhappy man—George Wither, the satirist and idyllist, who died in 1667, and lies here between the east door and the south end of the chapel.[214] He was one of Cromwell’s major-generals, and had a hard time of it after the Restoration. It was to save Wither’s life that Denham used that humorous petition—“As long as Wither lives I should not be considered the worst poet in England.”
Wither anticipated Wordsworth in simple earnestness and a regard for the humblest subjects. The soldier-poet himself says—
“In my former days of bliss,
Her divine skill taught me this:
That from everything I saw
I could some invention draw,
And raise pleasure to her height
Through the meanest object’s sight,
By the murmur of a spring,
By the least bough’s rustling.”[215]
These charming lines were written when Wither lay in the Marshalsea, imprisoned for writing a satire—Abuses stripped and whipped.
In the same church lies one of the smallest of military heroes—Lewis de Duras, Earl of Feversham, who died in the reign of Queen Anne. He was nephew of the great Turenne, and was one of the few persons present when Charles II. received extreme unction. He commanded, or rather followed, King James II.’s troops at Sedgemoor, in 1685, and at that momentous crisis “thought only of eating and sleeping.”[216] Upon this shambling general the Duke of Buckingham wrote one of his latest lampoons.[217]