Haunted London walks with Richard Jones (walks of london)

Founded in the 15th century, the churches dedication to St Nicholas, patron saint of sailors and fishermen, remembers the days when Chiswick was a busy riverside fishing village. Although the main body of the church was rebuilt in 1882, the tower remains much as it was five hundred years ago. Amongst those buried in its churchyard are painter and engraver, William Hogarth, artist J.M. Whistler, and Barbara Villiers, Duchess of Cleveland. Meanwhile, Mary Fauconberg and Frances Rich, daughters of Oliver Cromwell, lie buried in a vault beneath the churches chancel, along with - so rumour has it - the remains of their father.

It has long been suspected that, following Oliver Cromwell’s posthumous beheading, Mary Fauconberg, having bribed a guard to allow her to smuggle her father’s headless cadaver away from Tyburn, brought his body to Chiswick where he was secretly interred in the vault where she and her sister would eventually be buried. During the rebuilding of the church in 1882, their vault was opened in order to see if there was any veracity in the rumours surrounding Cromwell’s final resting place. Captain Dale, the then vicar’s son, claimed that, along with the coffins of the two sisters, he spied a third coffin that showed signs of rough usage, which was pushed hard against the far side of the vault. Since Cromwell’s name still aroused violent emotion at the time, the vicar, fearing the arrival of groups of sightseers to moralise over the Lord Protector, had the vault bricked up and then left it unmarked. Perhaps it is the fact that their resting place was desecrated by a clergyman, who by his own admission, resented everything their father stood for, that has caused the ghosts of the two ladies to roam the churchyard in the hours before dawn. Their white-clad figures drift silently amongst the graves, until with the coming of the first light of day, they melt slowly into the fabric of the church and return to their unmarked grave.