Finem respice

One of the great pleasures, and privileges, of living in this corner of north Kent is the woodland. Near to where I live, there are three interconnected woods: Ashenbank, Shorne Wood and Cobham Wood, sadly bisected by the A2 and the Eurostar railway line. Each is an ancient woodland, made all the more interesting for the traveller by their location on the ups and downs of the Kentish North Downs. Each is a Site of Special Scientific Interest, and each is to be treasured not only by what nature is currently allowed to show, but by the traces of human occupation over many millennia.

These range from the flint tools dating from 12,000 years ago in Shorne, to a Bronze Age barrow in Ashenbank, to the outlines of a medieval manor and Second World War air shelters that belonged to an RAF camp at Shorne, to memorials associated with the families that for centuries asserted their ownership over these lands. All three woods were once part of the vast Cobham Hall estate, and three memorials associated with Cobham make for an instructive journey through the countryside and time.

The first of these is in village of Cobham itself, on the edge of the woodland areas. It gained its name from the Cobham family (originally de Cobham), who established themselves in the area in the 13th century. Home for the Cobhams was Cooling castle, which is to the north on the Hoo peninsula, but it was Cobham which took their name and contained their church, St Mary Magdalene. It is accurate to call it their church, rather than something belonging to any community. The church was their personal domain, within which they positioned themselves as close to God as they saw possible.

This is demonstrated by what is perhaps the most exceptional display of monumental brasses in any church anywhere. They are impossible to miss. Walk down the nave, and there they are are – fifteen of them, laid out in two rows in front of the altar, or rather in front of the tomb of Sir George Brooke, 9th Lord Cobham, and his wife Lady Ann Braye, both of whom died in 1558, whose central positioning make it clear that this is a place for worshipping the Cobhams, with the deity keeping respectfully in the background. Remarkably, the chancel (the front part of a church, where the altar is to be found) is larger than the nave. The brasses show members of the Cobham and Brooke families, dating from the 13th to 16th century. Originally brasses were reserved solely for bishops and senior clergy. Increasingly over the 14th and 15th centuries they became available to commoners, albeit rich and well-born ones, and in the Cobham brasses we see something of the common look. Of course, as the guidebooks tell us, the images are not from life but rather designate status, but it very hard not sense character among the clothes, hairstyles, armoury, and looks of stern piety.

The brasses look as though they have been in place since they were first set in the floor of the church. In reality, given the conflicts over religion that came to Cobham as they did everywhere else, they have had a chequered history. They were taken up and stored away for a period in the 18th century, were relaid somewhat inexpertly in 1837 and more expertly so in the 1860s. It was at this time that missing or heavily worn parts were replaced, specifically inscriptions, shields and canopy shafts. The past only ever survives because we have changed it.

The Cobhams’s fortunes were to fall dramatically in 1603. Henry Brooke, 11th Baron Cobham became involved with, indeed may have headed, a plot to replace King James I on the throne of England and Scotland with his cousin Lady Arbella Stuart. The plot failed, Henry Brooke’s co-conspirator brother George was executed, Henry was sentenced to life imprisonment in the Tower, and all his his estates were forfeited to the Crown and then granted to the Duke of Lennox.

Walk northwards out of the village, past the war memorial, and there are two adjacent paths. The one on the left leads to Cobham Hall. This grand country house dates from the 16th century, when William Brooke, 19th Baron Cobham, rebuilt what had originally been a 12th-century manor house. The Lennox family rebuilt it further in the 17th century, before ownership was passed on in the 18th century to the Bligh family, who became Earls of Darnley and the subjects of our next two memorials. Cobham Hall is now a private girls’ boarding school.

The path to the right takes us into Cobham Wood. These woodlands are thick with oak, beech, hornbeam and coppiced sweet chestnut trees, with the central path criss-crossed by a plethora of routes inviting you to wander into different pasts. A herd of highland cattle can often be seen, benignly chewing amid the trees, while if you are up early enough you can see deer skipping across the path into the safety of the thickets.

In the centre of the woods is an extraordinary building. I have had some sturdy debates with people when I have described it to them as the ugliest building in England, but the only qualification I will allow is to say that the Darnley mausoleum is the ugliest Grade 1-listed building in the country. It’s the grey drabness of it, the formulaic classical design, but above all the absurd plain pyramid roof that offends these eyes each time I walk past. The sense of insult is exacerbated by knowledge of the building’s uselessness, since it is a mausoleum for no one.

The intended incumbent was the 3rd Earl of Darnley, John Bligh (1719-1781). He wanted a family mausoleum of square stone design topped by a pyramid and surrounded by a dry moat, which is what architects James Wyatt and George Dance the Younger produced, in high neoclassical form and at great expense. It was completed, after the earl’s death, in 1786. However, owing to a dispute with the Bishop of Rochester, the exact nature of which has remained obscure, the mausoleum was never consecrated. He seems to have found its combination of Roman and Masonic design un-Christian, and presumably all subsequent Bishops of Rochester have felt the same. Consequently it was never occupied, and has remained empty ever since, a monument to nothing.

Over 240 years, the Darnley mausoleum has stood there, purposelessly. The land around it changed, being more parkland than woodland for a long while, until by the mid-20th century the area had become greatly neglected. It became notorious for the number of wrecked cars left strewn about the place, while the mausoleum itself was vandalised and in 1980 subject to an arson attack that caused the floor of the interior chapel to collapse. After this came efforts to save the place – first a failed effort to turn into a residential building, then funding from the Heritage Lottery Fund and a transfer of ownership to the National Trust.

And, though visits inside are occasionally organised, it remains firmly locked and empty, without so much as a sign outside to tell anyone what it is or what it is a memorial to.

A little further along the path going east, there is a turning down the slope to the right. Proceed down this path for a few metres, look right, and there within a clump of yew trees are some scattered stones. Overlooked by most passers-by, these are what remains of our third memorial, that to Edward Bligh, 5th Earl of Darnley (1795-1835).

Bligh was, by accounts, a man of some intelligence, a commendable landowner and a loving husband and father, who had served as a Whig MP for Canterbury before joining the House of Lords as the next Earl of Darnley, following the death of his father in 1831. Yet all that is remembered of him now is the manner of his death. He was undertaking some work on his lands, demonstrating to workmen some pruning work that he wanted to have done, when he cut off one of his toes and a slice of another with a billhook. Early reports suggested that the offending instrument had been an axe, but the Kentish Gazette was more accurate:

The instrument with which he gave himself the wound that so unexpectedly proved mortal, was not, as stated, an axe, but a woodman’s hooked bill, such as is used for cutting down underwood and pruning hedges. The medical attendant who was first called in, wished the Earl to permit the great toe to be taken out at the socket, but his lordship refused, observing that his laborers frequently met with worse injuries, and yet easily got over them, although not able to command the professional attendance and comforts he could.

Kentish Gazette, 24 February 1835, p. 3

Tragically, tetanus set in, and he died four days after sustaining the injury. He was interred in the family vault at Cobham church. Letters from family and friends about these events have been preserved, which combine moving statement of sorrow and pious declarations, with unconsciously comical descriptions of the injury itself. To die absurdly is a tragedy all in itself.

Some time later (I’ve not been able to find out when) a memorial was built for him close by the Darnley mausoleum, reportedly at the spot where the accident had occurred. Placed amid a quartet of yew trees, the memorial had a stone base with iron fencing surrounding a tall pillar with an ornate top. Such a memorial might have been expected to have been raised in Cobham churchyard, but his widow – who it is assumed commissioned the memorial – must have wanted it placed amid the woodland that he knew and loved, a gesture both modest and proprietorial.

The memorial was still in place to the 1920s at least, as a photograph from that time exists. But sorry times followed. Cobham Woods became severely neglected, at one time notorious for the wrecked cars that littered the land, while the memorial itself was vandalised, much as happened to the interior of the mausoleum, which left it in pieces.

The car wrecks have gone and the woodlands restored, but the memorial has been left as it is. The iron fencing and pillar are gone, the former doubtless melted down, the latter perhaps propped up in some garden somewhere. What remains are the base and lumps of stone from what once surrounded the base of the pillar, now strewn across the ground. The visitor can try mentally to piece together the jigsaw. One stone, which may have been the centrepiece at the base of the pillar, has on one side a just about discernible griffin from the Darnley family coat of arms. On another there is a Latin motto, not easy to read, words which can also be seen atop the mausoleum, ‘Finem Respice’ (“Look to the end”).

Perhaps the pieces would be better placed in a museum, or Cobham church, but they have special poignancy and appropriateness lying where they are. As with barrow, manor house, air raid shelters and mausoleum, they are scattered amid the woods, in some way turned into natural things. This is how we will all end, dotted among the trees, half-hidden by the undergrowth, a thing to stumble over but most likely never to be seen at all.

Links:

• The monumental brasses at Cobham are well described and illustrated in the booklet The History and Treasures of St Mary Magdalene Church, Cobham Kent, available at the church
• The National Trust has an illustrated article on the history of the Darnley mausoleum
• There is an entertaining account of the Darnley memorial, ‘Memorial to “Lord Darnley’s Toe” – 1835‘ on Geoff Rambler’s Weird and Wonderful Kent site, with a gruesome illustration imagining the injury and a helpful map reference giving the memorial’s exact location
• There are several accounts of the death of Edward, Fifth Earl of Darnley, taken from family letters, in Lady Elizabeth Cust and Evelyn Georgiana Pelham (eds.), Edward, Fifth of Earl of Darnley and Emma Parnell, his Wife: the story of a short and happy married life told in their own letters and other family papers (Leeds: Richard Jackson, 1913)
• Cobham Hall was once home to another family memorial. The most celebrated member of the Bligh family was Ivo Bligh, the 8th Earl of Darnley, who was the England cricket captain for the first series held between Australia and England in 1882-1883. Following England’s loss at the Oval in 1882, the Sporting Times wrote that English cricket has died and that “the body will be cremated and the ashes taken to Australia”. Later, when in Melbourne, Bligh was presented with an urn that is said to have contained the ashes of a wooden bail. The urn ended up in Cobham Hall, where it remained until Bligh’s widow presented to the Marylebone Cricket Club in 1927. A facsimile urn is held in Cobham Hall; the original urn is in the Lord’s cricket ground museum. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Ashes_urn

A map of the Cobham lands, with Ashenbank and Cobham church to the left, Shorne Wood to the north, Cobham Hall close to the golf course, and the Darnley mausoleum bottom right. The shattered memorial is not marked by Google, but is about 100 metres to the east of the mausoleum.