NOTES ON
ST. DAVID'S CHURCH, MUCH DEWCHURCH by
Hubert Reade (1936)
Part 7 :
Sir Walter
Pye began life as a lawyer and by marrying into the family of Rudhall of Rudhall, whose beautiful monuments are still to be
seen in the Church of Ross on Wye, and whose representative
had taken part with Sir Richard Grenville in that
attack on the Spaniards in the Azores in 1596 in which the "Revenge" made herself immortal, he had acquired not only
some money but also connections with several families who had influence
at Court, - for it must be remembered that nearly everyone who rose to power
under the Tudors (including Burleigh) had family
relationships with Herefordshire and the Welsh Marches.
It was probably owing to this marriage that Walter Pye
became connected with the Court and he found his opportunity when
Buckingham - then the penniless George Villiers - first came
under the notice of James I.
Pye, to judge
from the effigy on his tomb and from a portrait by Cornelis Janssens in the collection of his descendant
Sir Geoffrey Cornewall at Moccas, was a strikingly handsome man with
black hair and a sunburnt face, and he had evidently a courtly bearing and a
great taste for art and painting, for his name occurs frequently in the
correspondence of the great painter Rubens, who
seems to have known him well. He was a clever
lawyer and a shrewd financier, and must have been of great use to Buckingham
during his rise to power, for he was eventually
appointed Attorney General of the Court of Laws, and
as such had much to do with the marriages of some of the greatest heirs and heiresses in the Kingdom. In Loudon he
was more envied than respected and backbiters railed at him as a butcher's son. That he was the friend of the Duchess
of Buckingham, by birth a Manners, as well as of her husband, is evident from the fact that his
tomb is closely modelled on those of
the
Pye, by
birth a small landowner of very modest means, when he died in 1637 left an estate of about £25,000 a year which,
in our money, would be worth about £113,000, and nearly all of which was
spent by his heirs within the following 80 years in
supporting the Royalist cause. He left a family of 14 children
whose effigies can be seen on his monument.
His consort
Lady Pye, a worthy woman who certainly had not the fatal
gift of beauty, died in 1625, and his monument bears an epitaph which seems strange from the pen of Buckingham's trusted
agent
: "Fides et spes sunt anchora animae" - "Faith and hope are the
anchor of the soul".
His funeral helmet of steel, beautifully inlaid with gold,
still hangs above his monument, whilst a stone cannon-ball - evidently
fired during some skirmish in the Civil War till lately lay on a ledge at the side.
The other monuments in the Church are not very striking and
mostly
date from the 18th and 19th centuries. Those in the Chancel are to the Symons family, the earliest dating from 1763,
whilst
in the nave is one (copied from a slab dated 1716 in Much Dewchurch
Churchyard) to the late Sir James Rankin, M.P. of Bryngwyn who, as has been
said, was a great benefactor to the Church.
We ought not
to omit to mention the font, which is of very early Norman work, and has heads representing the virtues and vices
sculptured
on its base. In the porch are lying a stone with a knight's head scraped out of it which was used as a Holy Water
basin
and dates from the Eleventh Century. The long and short work on the left hand side of the Chancel Arch is also of a very
early
design.
The Churchyard is most beautifully kept by the caretaker Mr. George
Payne, and the large yew tree near the Church door goes back
to mediaeval times. None of the monuments go back further than the late Seventeenth Century, but a tomb on which are planted
figures made of some kind of evergreen, trimmed to represent three
foxhounds in pursuit of a fox is worth notice.
The old vicarage to the east of the Churchyard contains work as early as
the Thirteenth Century, and the Church House at the west
gate was built in
It is now
used as a house for the schoolmistress.
Such are the Church and Churchyard of St. David's Much Dewchurch.
(signed)
HUBERT READS