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."