194 CAMPDEN CH. VIII lectern still in use in the church; while most conspicuous among the rest are the Almshouses on the right as we leave the church and the market hall in the centre of the High Street. For pure craftsmanship in stone masonry it would be hard to find anything finer than these noble Almshouses, and they bear emphatic witness to the truth that however humble the edifice, it need never be either flimsy in construction or paltry in design. These benefactions would alone suffice to immortalise his memory, but it is also fitting that his bodily likeness should be preserved by the magnificent monument in this chapel erected by his widow. There they lie in marble for all time, himself and his wife, attired in coronets and robes of state, the central figures of a striking scene. For on their right in the act of stepping forth from the open doors of a marble sepulchre are two strange shapes hand in hand, their limbs wrapped in flowing shrouds and their heads crowned with coronets. These are Juliana daughter of Baptist Hicks, and her husband Edward Lord Noel, who succeeded his father-in-law as second Viscount Campden the scene depicted is that of the Resurrection, my Lord gracefully handing his lady from the tomb. From them descends the present Earl of Gainsborough. There are also marble busts of their daughter Penelope Noel, a "most beautiful and virtuous lady" to whose memory Milton's friend, Alexander Gill, dedicated an elegy, and of their son's first wife Lady Anne Noel, daughter of the Earl of Denbigh. Sir Baptist Hicks was the youngest son of a Gloucestershire man, who had set up business as a mercer in London. His shop was at the sign of the White Bear in Cheapside, and when Baptist succeeded to the business he made money so fast that he was able to advance large sums to King James, and the Scottish nobles who frequented the Court. In this connection his elder brother Michael (the ancestor of Sir Michael HicksBeach), who held a post about the Court, was able to render him much assistance. Indeed it seems to have been to his extensive money-lending transactions even more than to his regular 196 CAMPDEN HOUSE CHAP. business that he owed his large fortune, though his experience of the canny Scot was not always satisfactory, if we may judge from a remark in one of his letters to his brother still preserved among the Lansdowne MSS. "I fynde Scottyshe men are fayre speakers and slow performers being rydd of them I will cross them out of my bookes." It was in 1609 that he bought the manor of Campden, and about 1613 he built the splendid mansion to the south of the church, the scanty remains of which are among the first objects to arouse the curiosity of the stranger. In point of fact beyond the curtilage wall and a few outbuildings there is nothing left but a fragment of wall containing one side of the entrance, together with a couple of windows, and two pavilions or belvideres, one at either end of the terrace. The house must have been a magnificent one, considering that it cost £29,000 of the money of that time to build. Unfortunately no contemporary drawing of it exists, but it is said to have been built in the Italian style-which indeed would be antecedently probable-and to have been crowned with a transparent dome in which a light was kept burning after dark as a guide to benighted wanderers on the wolds. But costly and splendid as it was its term of life was short-Sir Baptist, who had been raised to the peerage in 1628 as Viscount Campden, died in 1629, and his house survived him less than a score of years. The cause of its destruction was the same that proved the ruin of many a stately pile throughout the land -the Civil War. At the beginning of 1645 Campden House was garrisoned by the Royalists under Sir Henry Bard, a good soldier, but a true specimen of the profane and rapacious cavalier, who had risen from the ranks, and who from his plundering excursions in the country round had made the garrison almost equally detested by both parties. These forays, which extended even as far as Winchcombe, where the victims complained they had not even " a Sunday shift of cloathes left them," went on till May. On the 7th of that month the king, attended by his nephews Rupert and Maurice, set out on his VIII THE CAMPDEN WONDER 197 march from Oxford to relieve the siege of Chester: on the 8th he held a council at Stow, where he spent the night, and on the 9th he passed within sight of Campden on his way over Broadway Hill. Meanwhile Bard had received an order from Prince Rupert to draw off his men and join the king's army, but "least the enemy should make use of the house for garrison when he had left it," he was further ordered to set the place on fire before he marched off. This was forthwith done, and as the rearguard quitted the high ground to march down Broadway Hill they took their last look at the blazing ruins of the mansion. The owner Baptist, third Viscount Campden, was serving the king elsewhere, and had no hand in this destruction, for which it is difficult to think that there was adequate reason, and which is condemned in strong terms by Clarendon. It is a coincidence that a week or two previously Lydney House, on the verge of the Forest of Dean in the same county, had been burnt by its owner, Sir John Wintour, and for the same reason. I have spoken of the third Viscount as the owner, but it seems that his mother, the Lady Juliana, who did not die till 1680, at the very respectable age of ninety-five, had a considerable interest in the Campden estate. At any rate it is in a steward of hers, one William Harrison, that the tale of mystery centres, famous for many generations as the Campden Wonder. The story has been told so often, and has so recently been examined by the most accomplished of our legendary critics, that I feel some hesitation in dragging it forth once more; but no account of the place would be considered complete without it, and I must console myself with the hope that to some of my readers, at any rate, it may yet be a novelty. I shall cut it as short as possible, with the proviso that it may be read at greater length in various places, notably in the Cornhill Magazine for February, 1904. On the 16th of August, 1660, the said William Harrison, who had been fifty years in the service of the Dowager Viscountess, and was now an old man of seventy or there |