It is stated that Charles II., in a gay moment asked Rochester to write his epitaph. Rochester immediately wrote:—
Here lies the mutton-eating king,
Whose word no man relied on;
Who never said a foolish thing,
Nor ever did a wise one.
On which the King wrote the following comment:—
If death could speak, the king would say,
In justice to his crown,
His acts they were the minister’s,
His words they were his own.
Our friend, Mr. Thomas Broadbent Trowsdale, F.R.H.S., who has written much and well in history, folk-lore, etc., tells us: “In the fine old church of Chepstow, Monmouthshire, nearly opposite the reading desk, is a memorial stone with the following curious acrostic inscription, in capital letters:—
Here Sept. 9th, 1680,
was buried
A True Born Englishman,
Who, in Berkshire, was well known
To love his country’s freedom ’bove his own:
But being immured full twenty year
Had time to write, as doth appear—
HIS EPITAPH.
H ere or elsewhere (all’s one to you or me)
E arth, Air, or Water gripes my ghostly dust,
N one knows how soon to be by fire set free;
R eader, if you an old try’d rule will trust,
Y ou’ll gladly do and suffer what you must.
M y time was spent in serving you and you,
A nd death’s my pay, it seems, and welcome too;
R evenge destroying but itself, while I
T o birds of prey leave my old cage and fly;
E xamples preach to the eye—care then, (mine says)
N ot how you end, but how you spend your days.
This singular epitaph points out the last resting place of Henry Marten, one of the judges who condemned King Charles I. to the scaffold. On the Restoration, Marten was sentenced to perpetual imprisonment, Chepstow Castle being selected as the place of his incarceration. There he died in 1680, in the twenty-eighth year of his captivity, and seventy-eighth of his age. He was originally interred in the chancel of the church; but a subsequent vicar of Chepstow, Chest by name, who carried his petty party animosities even beyond the grave, had the dead man’s dust removed, averring that he would not allow the body of a regicide to lie so near the altar. And so it was that Marten’s memorial came to occupy its present position in the passage leading from the nave to the north aisle. We are told that one, Mr. Downton, a son-in-law of this pusillanimous parson, touched to the quick by his relative’s harsh treatment of poor Marten’s inanimate remains, retorted by writing this satirical epitaph for the Rev. Mr. Chest’s tombstone:—
Here lies at rest, I do protest,
One Chest within another!
The chest of wood was very good,—
Who says so of the other?
Some doubt has been thrown on the probability of a man of Marten’s culture having written, as is implied in the inscription, the epitaph which has a place on his memorial.
The regicide was a son of Sir Henry Marten, a favourite of the first James, and by him appointed Principal Judge of the Admiralty and Dean of Arches. Young Henry was himself a prominent person during the period of the disastrous Civil War, and was elected Member of Parliament for Berkshire in 1640. He was, in politics, a decided Republican, and threw in his lot with the Roundhead followers of sturdy Oliver. When the tide of popular favour turned in Charles II.’s direction, and Royalty was reinstated, Marten and the rest of the regicides were brought to judgment for signing the death warrant of their monarch. The consequence, in Marten’s case, was life-long imprisonment, as we have seen, in Chepstow Castle.”