THE HOUSEHOLD AT BATTLE ABBEY AND THE LADY MAGDALEN'S ENTOURAGE

The end for the ageing first Viscount Montague came, relatively suddenly as it turned out, in October 1592. His will, of 19 July 1592, directed that he was to be buried either at Midhurst or at Battle – in the event it was Midhurst. The funeral expenses were not to exceed 1,000 marks. His executors were instructed ‘to erect a seemly tombe with three great images of himself and his two wyves and all their armes placed about it’.

Montague was an enthusiast for monuments. In Titchfield parish church there is a huge tomb constructed, from alabaster and marble, for the first earl and countess of Southampton and for the second earl (Montague's son-in-law) (see Figure 22). The second earl's will had ordered his executors to build two monuments, one for his parents and one for himself. But this composite and magnificent tomb was built instead. The craftsman who was hired to execute it was Gerard Johnson, a Flemish refugee resident in Montague Close in St Saviour's parish in Southwark. He also designed and built the funeral monument for the first viscount and his two wives, as well as the table-tomb and brass of 1595 constructed for Montague's cousin John Gage in the parish church of West Firle, and the monument in All Saints parish church at Wing to Sir William Dormer (d. 1575), whose son married Montague's daughter Elizabeth. Montague's monument was architecturally almost identical to the Wriothesley tomb.