“The rout of rural folk come thronging in,
(Their rudeness then is thought no sin)
Thy noblest spouse affords them welcome grace;
And the great heroes of her race
Sit mixt with loss of state, or reverence
Freedom doth with degree dispense.
The jolly wassal walks the often round,
And in their cups their cares are drown’d.”
Sir Robert Wroth died no 1614, leaving great debts and an infant son. The son survived him but two years; the Lady Mary, his widow, lived on for many, and her extravagance seems to have kept her in perpetual turmoil. It is quaint, in these democratic days, to read how, year by year, she received from the King protection-orders, by reason of her birth and quality, and the earnest intention she expressed of immediately satisfying her numerous creditors. She was a niece of Sir Philip Sydney, himself a strangely lavish and impecunious person, and, like him, she wrote a book—a big book, which made a stir at the time, less perhaps by reason of its merit than of certain slanders it contained. It was suppressed and is now forgotten, though occasionally one of the poems, with which it is interspersed, is quoted in some modern anthology. The death of her husband gave the succession to his property—sadly diminished since his father’s day, when the family owned from Luxborough to Lambourne—to his brother John. After him came a nephew, John the second, who died at Luxborough in 1661, leaving a young son, John the third, who married a daughter of Lord Maynard (the ancestor of Lady Warwick), and by her became father of John Wroth the fourth. John the fourth married a cousin, Elizabeth Wroth, and died childless. On the death of his widow, in 1738, a descendant of one of her sisters, William, Earl of Rochford, became possessor of the manor and advowson, which, in 1745, he sold to Alderman Whitaker, of London; in 1770 the Alderman’s daughter, Anne, succeeded her mother, and, in 1825, the estate passed to Mr. John Maitland, of Woodford Hall, the great-grandfather of the present owner (1913).
The Church of St. Nicholas.
Returning to the Reformation period we will pause to regard the site on which the Memorial Chapel now stands. The church itself, of which one or two illustrations are in existence, was unfortunately pulled down in 1847, when the new one was built. The first recorded church is mentioned in the second half of the 12th century, temp. Hen. II., and it seems as though some remains of that building were to be found in that which existed in 1846, if we may trust the illustration which shews two round-headed doorways on the north aisle. That it was added to in the 16th century, we know, from the will of George Stonard (proved in 1558), for he expresses a desire to be buried near his late wife ‘in the new chapel within the Church of Loughton.’ He it was who gave the large sum of £40—equivalent to some £300 nowadays—for a new frame for the hanging up of the bells: the nature of the frame can be judged by anyone who examines that in Chigwell Church. The brasses to the memory of George’s father, and his two wives, are still in the Memorial Chapel: and it is not improbable that yet another brass commemorates George himself, his wife and children, some of whom predeceased their parents. The stones belonging to the brasses are still in situ in the old churchyard. Mr. David Powell, writing in 1790, says that there was nothing remarkable about the church. Archdeacon Hamilton, who became rector in 1804, and undertook a restoration in 1820, took out one of the stone windows in the chancel and replaced it by another with a framework of iron—which seems to give the measure of his artistic and antiquarian aptitudes. As time went on and the population increased, the old church came to be regarded as too small, and inconveniently distant from the bulk of the population, and a movement was initiated which resulted in the erection of the existing parish church of St. John Baptist, with the church-house adjacent. The old church, picturesque as it was and in good repair, was condemned to destruction, a part being left standing, or rebuilt, to serve as a mortuary chapel. Part of the materials of the old church were used in building the church-house, and the rest was sold by auction. Later on, in 1876, the mortuary chapel was replaced by the new Memorial Chapel of St. Nicholas, familiar to you all.
Loughton Hall.
Hard by the church stood the old Hall, an ancient structure, which about the year 1600 was said to be in sad decay. Soon afterwards Sir Robert Wroth brought it, and, at great cost, converted it into the imposing mansion of which an old water-colour drawing gives some idea. It will be seen that the facade is Jacobean, while what lies behind it wears a familiar Tudor air. This house, and apparently its contents too, were sold with the estate, and all was kept by Miss Whitaker much as the Wroths left it. Mr. Maitland, on his accession, carried out considerable alterations; for, among other inconveniences, many rooms were accessible only through others, corridors and passages being details with which our ancestors seem to have been able to dispense. Unfortunately, as too often happens, the new wine proved too strong for the old bottle, and just after Mr. Maitland and his family had settled in their new home, a fire broke out at night owing to a beam in the library chimney having ignited. The story goes that the beam fell on a wire, which set a bell in the butlers room a-ringing. He gave the alarm and all the inmates of the house escaped. It was winter and a cold night: the ponds were frozen and little or no water was obtainable, so that the house, the pictures, and 10,000 printed books and MSS. perished, but not before many valuable objects had been rescued. For many years the site lay vacant behind the great iron gates, until, some five-and-twenty years ago (1879), the new Hall arose upon it, and the road was diverted to its present course.
A Pluralist Rector.
Mr. Hamilton, who became Rector in 1804, as already mentioned, affords a somewhat startling instance of the pluralism which was common less than a century ago. In addition to being Rector here, when the tithe was still uncommuted, he was also Archdeacon of Taunton, Canon Residentiary of Lichfield, Rector of St. Mary-le-Bow, Chaplain-in-Ordinary to the King, Librarian of St. Martin’s Library, and, to cap it all, Parish Clerk of St. Martin’s-in-the-Fields—a post worth £334 a year, with duties, as you may imagine, invariably performed by deputy. His son, Walter Kerr Hamilton, afterwards Bishop of Salisbury, was of another mind, and, being a Canon of Salisbury at the time of his father’s death, declined the offer of Loughton, though he would (says Dr. Liddon) gladly have enabled his widowed mother to live on in her old home, if his conscience had permitted him to accept it. Kerr Hamilton, in his younger days, got into trouble in the parish for making friends with the dissenting minister.
The Hamilton family came first to Loughton, it would seem, in 1746, when Alexander Hamilton married, as his third wife, Charlotte Stiles, a niece and co-heiress of Ady Collard, whose ancestors had held land in the parish, at any rate since the 16th century. Through that marriage Debden Hall and Holyfield Hall (in Waltham) came into the Hamilton family. Mr. Alexander Hamilton, we may note in passing, was an uncle of the famous ‘Single Speech’ Hamilton. By his second wife he left a son, William, who succeeded him at Debden Hall, where one of his daughters, who married Mr. Nicholas Pearse, afterwards lived. To her memory there is a window in the chancel of the parish church, and it is in illustration of her works of charity that the subject of it is Christ surrounded by little children. Of Alexander Hamilton’s great-great-grandsons one succeeded in establishing his claim to the ancient Scotch barony of Belhaven and Stenton; and another is the well-known friend of the late Mr. Gladstone. On the whole the Hamiltons have been our most distinguished family.
There was, however, until a few years ago, a family whose hereditary connexion with Loughton had remained unbroken for well-nigh three hundred years. I will not weary you with a long pedigree, but will merely tell you that Robert Dawges paid taxes here in 1546; that by a marriage his estate passed to the Eyres a century or so later; that a century after that, by another marriage, it passed to the Whalley’s, with whom a part of it remained until 1866. The Eyres owned Uplands, or Slyders as it then was called: the land last remaining to the Whalleys was Algors House and the fields on the other side of the main road.