Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

Victorian connecting pieces…The many panels with the letters AC are said to come from the House of Anne of
Cleves at Bruges. (What has Anne of Cleves to do with Bruges?) 82
Clearly the brokers of Soho had seen Lord Ongley coming and made him very welcome.
Rather more discretion was observed at a nearby church, St John the Baptist, Cockayne Hatley.
Here a wealthy incumbent, Henry Cust, son of Lord Brownlow, whose estates were just over the
county boundary, found the church ‘ruinous’ when he arrived and left it ‘an object of admiration
to all, who appreciate Church decorations’. 83 Other members of the Cust family contributed to
the stained glass and woodwork bought on the Continent and in London and combined to
produce a celebratory publication which appeared in 1851. It gives details of the origin of pieces
including the carved woodwork from the Abbey d’Alne, destroyed at the Revolution and the
pulpit from St Andrew’s, Antwerp, of which the sounding board, as it was ‘not required for that
purpose’ was made into a front for the reading desk. 84 In his summing up Robert Needham Cust
notes, with an air of pride, that ‘the woodwork has been contributed by five celebrated Flemish
towns’. 85
The fact that these ‘contributions’ were anything but voluntary and that the integrity of
the material had been significantly compromised did not in any way detract from Cust’s
satisfaction. His interest, like, presumably Lord Ongley’s, was chiefly in visual effect. The young
John Keble, later a moving spirit in the Tractarian Movement, was happy to fill a church with
salvaged fragments, untroubled by their religious implications. Charlotte M Yonge (1823-1901),
whose father was the squire of Hursley and Otterbourne in Hampshire, recalled the two men’s
efforts after 1825 when Keble took charge of the parish of Hursley. Her account, written in the
closing years of the nineteenth century looks back serenely on the steady march of improving
taste. She is amused by the antiquarianism of her grandparents’ generation, recalling the naivety
of the previous squire, Thomas Dummer, who ‘transported several fragments from Netley
Abbey…and set them up in his park as an object from the windows’. 86 Keble and her father, by
contrast, went to Soho and, ‘in Wardour Street…succeeded in obtaining five panels representing
82
Pevsner, The Buildings of England, Bedfordshire Huntingdon and Peterborough, pp.130-131.
83
Cust, Some Account of the Church of Cockayne Hatley, p.8.
84
Cust, Some Account of the Church of Cockayne Hatley, p.8.
85
Cust, Some Account of the Church of Cockayne Hatley, p.8.
86
Yonge, John Keble’s Parishes, p.83.
194