After the Restoration had ejected him, Culmer resided in obscurity at Monkton, and is said to have died two years later.
It behoves us now, after having, as in duty bound, visited the ecclesiastical capital of Thanet, to return to the coast. This we will do by way of Acol, near which is found the huge chalk-pit called by Ingoldsby the “Smuggler’s Leap.” This way we skirt Quex Park, and come to Birchington.
“Birchington,” says Sir F. C. Burnand, “ought to be a town of schools in association with preparatory academies at Whippingham.” N.B.--This is intended to be funny; but we can, with very little thought, and a glance at the gazetteer, beat the humorist at his own game, and point out that he forgot, as other preparatory academies, Much Birch and Caynham, in Herefordshire, and Waxham in Norfolk.
Birchington, the place of the birchen trees, is an ancient village which has not yet become swamped and overwhelmed by seaside villas, although there are a good many to be found if you care to seek them. That, however, would be a sorry quest, even though “Rossetti Bungalow,” the house in which Dante Gabriel Rossetti died in 1882, in his fifty-fourth year, be among them. Hard by the south porch of the ancient church stands a memorial cross designed by Ford Madox Browne, inscribed:
“Here sleeps GABRIEL CHARLES DANTE ROSSETTI Honoured under the name of DANTE GABRIEL ROSSETTI Among painters as a painter And among poets as a poet, Born in London, Of parentage mainly Italian, 12 May 1828 Died at Birchington, 9 April 1882.”
Here is also a stained-glass window to his memory, in the church.
There is discretion and reticence in that epitaph. If you would know how Rossetti conveyed (“convey the wise it call”) the methods of the Pre-Raphaelites, and how he was the author of many of the “bluest” Limericks of his era, you must read Holman Hunt’s autobiography, and dip into the various memoirs of their set.
Among the ancient brasses in the church are examples to John Quek and child, 1449; Richard Quek, 1459; Alys Crispe, 1518; John Henyns, vicar, 1523; Margaret Crispe, 1528; and another Margaret Crispe and chrisom child, 1533.
The Quex family were anciently seated at Quex Park, near Birchington. In the sixteenth century the last of their race, the daughter and heiress of John Quex, married John Crispe, whose descendants died out in 1680. Their reign at Quex Park was unremarkable, except for one very strange incident in the life of Henry Crispe, who was abducted in 1657. The story of it seems more like romance than reality, but the incident is historical. The unsuspecting Henry Crispe was aroused late one August night by a party of desperadoes who had landed at Gore End, Birchington, under the command of a filibustering Royalist, one Captain Golding. He was bundled into his own coach and driven to the shore, whence sail was made to Ostend. Crispe was eventually taken to Bruges, and kept a prisoner there. A curious part of the affair is that he had evidently been expecting an attack; and had had the walls of his house loop-holed for musketry. A ransom of £3,000 was demanded; and all he could do was to write to his nephew, Thomas Crispe, his son being ill at the time, to come and help him. Thomas and the son did what they could, in the face of difficulties, Cromwell having a suspicion that the whole affair was a plot to procure £3,000 for Charles the Second, at that time on the Continent, in very narrow circumstances. He therefore for a time forbade the payment of ransom, and it was eight months before the money was forthcoming and the captive set free.