Throcking

BY JOHN BERESFORD.

IDO not know what took me there first unless it was .i. the name, or it may have been the mural painting of St. Christopher close by at Cottered, so that after gazing at the huge legs of Christopher crossing the river, an odd background of fourteenth or fifteenth-century houses being on either side, one was beckoned on to Throcking, down one of those irresistible, winding country roads. It was in autumn, and, as it seemed, out of a reaped cornfield rose the church guarded, however, from the reaper by a ring of trees, elms, chestnuts and yews.

It is the merit of Gray's Elegy that, in its serene stanzas, the poet has described for evermore all English country churches and churchyards, so that if the flood came again and our island world was overwhelmed beneath the waters, the inhabitants of such parts of the earth as sur- vived would, through the printed word, understand something of the ancient peace of England.

Only something, however, for I exaggerate in claiming that the Elegy describes all country churches ; it would have been truer to say that Gray describes the type and conveys the atmosphere. For each one of the ten thousand English country churches is essentially original and has its own immemorial being, and its own compelling calm.

Throcking, for instance, at once summons the passing traveller to pause : it lies, by the way, not forty miles from London, some two miles from Buntingford in Hert- fordshire, and about the same distance to the left of the

great Ermine Street as you motor towards Cambridge. . .

The churchyard is unusually large, and unusually green, and little occupied even by grass-covered graves. An ancient yew tree stretches its consoling arms close by the tower, which itself begins in the thirteenth century and ends with old rose-red bricks, pleasant effort of a seven- teenth-century restorer who lies buried in the chancel, with his wife and three sons, "in certaine hope of a joyful resurrection." This was Sir Thomas Soame, Knight, who died in 1670 after an honourable life, Sheriff of the City of London in 1085, and Member of Parliament in the restless years preceding the outbreak of the Civil -War. He was on the Royalist side, and perhaps restored the tower of Throcking in gratitude for the restoration of his Prince ; for the rebuilding dates, they say, from the year 1660. He died at the ripe age of eighty-eight, having spanned with his father, Sir Stephen Soame, Lord Mayor of London in Queen Elizabeth's reign, near a century and a hail'. Three daughters of Sir Thomas—Anne, Elizabeth and Mary, tranquil trilogy of names, married and have, I trust, raised up some Soame seed under other surnames.

But the principal monuments in the church are those of the Elwes family, who owned the manor during the whole of the eighteenth century, and commissioned two of the most eminent sculptors of the age to commemorate them. It must be almost unique to find in so small a church—its whole length of early fifteenth century nave and chancel is fifty feet—a monument sculptured by Michael Rysbrack on the north wall, and another by Nollekens on the south wall of the nave. Both monu- ments, it must be admitted, are far too large for the church : they would more appropriately have adorned the transepts of a Cathedral. But the sculptors were doubtless well paid by the rich Elwes family—a collateral branch produced the amazing miser, John Elwes, whom Mr. Boffin so admired—and carved and chipped away till great expanses of marble and alabaster enshrined the memories of the dead.

Rysbrack, whose work was completed in 1753, com- memorates one Robert Elwes, who is described as "Lord of this Manor and of other Manors in the Counties of Lincoln and York." The inscription further explains that the vault where rest the bones of Robert and his wife has been "by law appropriated for their interment only, exclusive of all others."

Gazing at this vast piece of marble heavy with plinth and pediment and entablature, surmounted by a large urn and supported by the pomp of heraldic blazonry, you inevitably recall :

"Can storied urn or animated bust

Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath? Can Honour's voice provoke the silent dust,"

• Or Flattery smith the dull cold ear of Death ? "

Nollekens, on the other hand, working in pure alabaster against a background of grey marble, has produced an exquisite memorial of Hester Elwes, the wife of Cary Elwes, who caused the monument to be erected to his beloved wife.

Here is the eighteenth century in the perfection of its austere interpretation of plastic art, its many syllabled, grandiloquent prose, its poignant and solemn emotion: Hester Elwes is resting on a seat dressed in a white gown of loosely flowing linen ; her head is resting on her left hand, and in her right she holds an open book which she reads with deep attention. Immediately- in front of her is the invariable symbol of eighteenth-century mortality,

a funeral urn. -

The long epitaph below, after recording that she died at the age of forty-seven, on January 14th, 1770, inv..' ceeds in an almost impassioned encomium of her life and virtues as follows :

" In the elegance of her figure, in the sweetness and civility of her manners, in the excellence and improvement of her mind and understanding, _she excelled the generality of her sex ; Nor was she less distinguished for her extensive liberality and charity. Tier faith in God, founded alone on the merits of her Redeemer, was firm and unshaken ; she met her Dissolution with equal fortitude and resignation ; and died full of the hope of a blessed immortality ; to this, the best of wives and parents, as also to Robert Cary, his amiable son, cut off at a tender age ; to Martha, his beloved daughter, snatched from the breast of her uniformly tender mother, Cary Elwes, Esq., Lord of this Manor, her affectionate husband near twenty-eight years, erected this monument."