Emmanuel Hospital Westminster

Illustrations

Herbert Railton

male of the Dacres, which was eventually settled by the apparent partition of the barony between the Lords Dacre of the North and the Lords Dacre of the South. At Herstmonceux the latter family might have flourished in honour till the present day ~ for the title is not even now extinct ~ but for the terrible event to which I have alluded.

A couple of miles to the north of Herstmonceux is Hellingley, and a field in the parish, not far, from the parish church, is still known as Pickhay Field. Here one fine night in 1541 Lord Dacre and some wild young friends, intent on robbing the deer-park of Sir Nicholas Pelham, close by, met a gamekeeper named John Busbridge. Him they smote so severely that he soon after died, and so Lord Dacre and three others were tried and beheaded ~ or, according to some authorities, hanged ~ at Tyburn in the same year. The law must have been strained. Few people have ever been put to death in England for what is called constructive murder. Dacre was not even in Pickhay Field when the affray took place, and there were not wanting those who thought his great wealth ~ which, it was supposed, would escheat to the  Crown ~ had more to do with his death than his part in an unlawful expedition in which somebody else fatally assaulted a gamekeeper. In this expectation the greedy courtiers of Henry VIII. were disappointed. The estates were so strictly entailed that in spite of the forfeiture of this third lord of the Fienes family they passed to his brother Gregory, who lived at Herstmonceux with his wife, Anne Sackville, until better days came. In 1558 Gregory was "restored in blood." In 1573 he was summoned to Parliament in the barony of his ancestors as Lord Dacre of the South, and in 1576 his wife succeeded her mother and stepfather in possession of the house at Chelsea long occupied by Sir Thomas More, the ill-fated Chancellor of  Henry VIII.

Lord and Lady Dacre had no children. The old race of Fienes was destined to become extinct, and the entailed estates to pass to the family of a sister. They resolved, however, that their memory should be kept alive in some better way than by titles and honours. Lord Dacre died in 1594, but his widow, whose wealth was in no way affected by the settlements of the Fienes family, decided to carry out his wishes. She only survived him till the beginning of the next year, but had meanwhile made a very careful will, by which, eventually, Westminster came into the possession of the almshouses called Emmanuel Hospital, certain presentations to which were left to the parish of Chelsea, on condition of her monument and that of her lord being kept in repair. This monument is still in existence, and is one of the principal ornaments of the old church.