Margaret Shurland, daughter and heiress of this personage, married one William Cheyney. The altar-tomb of their descendant, Sir Thomas Cheyney, Warden of the Cinque Ports in the time of Queen Elizabeth, stands in the church and is a noble monument. He was a remarkable man, for he filled important offices of State in the reigns of Henry the Eighth, Edward the Sixth, Mary, and Elizabeth, and in all the tragic changes of those changeful times lost neither head, fortune, nor repute. He was Knight of the Garter, Constable of Dover Castle, a Privy Councillor, and Treasurer of the Household. A man of wealth, he demolished the old castle of Shurland and built in its stead the mansion yet standing, long used as a farmhouse.
[Illustration: TOMB OF SIR ROBERT DE SHURLAND, MINSTER-IN-SHEPPEY CHURCH.]
Among the other monuments in Minster church is an alabaster effigy sometimes considered to be that of one Jeronimo Magno, a Spanish prisoner of war captured by Drake off Calais Harbour in Armada time. For three years this unhappy hidalgo was kept prisoner aboard ship at the Nore, and then death ended his trials, in 1591. Later criticism, however, identifies the chain worn by the effigy as that of the Yorkist faction: the chain of Suns and Roses, worn by adherents of Edward the Fourth and the House of York; which would date back the monument by some seventy years and thus dispose of the Spanish prisoner theory.
Another very interesting effigy is that of one Jordanus de Scapeia, found in 1833 in the churchyard, buried five feet deep. The clasped mailed hands hold a little mystic oval at the tips of the fingers, bearing a tiny effigy intended to typify the soul.
Out in Minster churchyard on sunny days of wandering breezes the guns of the distant forts and battleships that guard the coast are heard to roar and mutter and rumble, according to their distance, and above the peaked roof of the church tower twirls the odd horse-head weather-vane which gives the local name, the “Horse Church.” Here are many stones to the memory of Sheerness dockyard men; among them one with quaint and weatherworn sculpture and curious verses to one Henry Worth, a gunner, who died in 1770, aged fifty-seven:
“Pallida Mors æquo pede pauperum Tabernas Regumque Turres.