Published in Windlesora 15 (1997)
© WLHG
Like so many churches round the country, St John’s has its fair share of monuments of many styles and dates. Two in particular are worthy of notice: those of Topham Foote and Thomas Reeve.
Foote’s monument is noticed by everybody entering and leaving the church: the bust of a young man in front of a reredos crowned with a coat of arms and an inscription in Latin. Reeve’s monument is in the north vestibule and consists of busts of Reeve and his wife with putti on either side: one holds a roundel carved with a figure of Justice; the other carries an inverted torch. These figures stand in front of an obelisk and on a base on which is a Latin inscription. Both monuments are signed P. Scheemakers and there is an interesting history behind them.
Topham Foote, says Harwood, was the son and heir of Samuel Foote by his wife Arabella Topham. Samuel owned a number of local properties (including Tyle Place, Old Windsor) and on his death these passed to Topham, but as he was a minor his inheritance was held in trust, the trustees leasing it to Thomas Reeve.
Thomas Reeve was the son of Richard Reeve of Dagnall who ‘in consideration that he was born in the Castle of Windsor and out of the love he bore to the town and borough’ was responsible for establishing a number of charities, among them four almshouses later to be amalgamated with others to form Ellison House. Richard died in 1688 and is buried in St George’s Chapel.
In January 1712 it was ‘ordered that Topham Foote Esqr. be made free of this Corporacion and hee is now made free and sworn accordingly.’ (sic). Topham, however, did not enjoy his freedom long, for he died of smallpox that same year and his estates passed to his mother, who also in that year married Thomas Reeve, a condition of the marriage being that she was ‘absolutely free to dispose of her real and personal belongings as she pleased’. Arabella Reeve was the sister of Richard Topham, MP for Windsor from 1698 to 1713 and Keeper of the Records in the Tower of London. In 1729 he gave £500 towards the building of a workhouse, £100 to the Charity School and 40 shillings to be divided between the four persons in Reeve’s Almshouses. He died in 1730, leaving his collection of pictures to Eton College, while the rest of his estate went to his sister, Thomas Reeve being Richard’s executor.
Arabella, like her brother, was also of a charitable disposition. She also gave £500 towards the workhouse, £6 a year to be given to ‘six poor widows, born and inhabitants of the parish, that should be either lame or blind’, and ‘100 twelve-penny loaves to be distributed yearly among 100 of the poorest people in the parish’. When she died in 1732 Thomas Reeve was given permission to dispose of her possessions as he pleased: should he not wish to do so her property was to go (as in fact it did) to her kinsman Richard Mead.
Thomas Reeve was a lawyer by profession, becoming Judge of the Common Pleas and later Chief Justice of that division. He died in 1737, leaving money to the workhouse and Charity School.
It is Richard Mead who provides the reason for the erection of the monuments. One of the leading medical men of his day he became Physician to George II in 1727 having, as Thomas Hearne noted ten years previously, ‘recovered the Princess of Wales when the other physicians had certainly killed her, had their prescriptions been followed’. A wealthy man, his house stood on the site of the present Great Ormond Street Hospital. He was also a noted patron of the arts and it was through him that the Reeve monument was erected, part of the inscription being to that effect.
Peter Scheemakers lived and worked in England between 1730 and 1770, after which he retired to his native Antwerp. There are many monuments by him around the country, including one to Richard Mead in Westminster Abbey. Arabella Reeve, therefore, may have commissioned Scheemakers through Mead to execute the monument to her son, even though this was nearly twenty years after Topham’s death.
Both monuments of course stood in the earlier church. Pote says that Reeve was buried on the south side of the altar, so his monument may have stood in the sanctuary on the earlier building.
Leslie Grout
Mastermind Champion
Harwood: Windsor Old and New
Hearne: The Remains of Thomas Hearne
Tighe and Davies: Annals of Windsor Vol. II
Pote: History and Antiquities of Windsor
The First Hall Book of the Borough of New Windsor, 1653-1725
Windsor Local History Group 