Golden Cavalier Monument, St. Mary's Lydiard Tregoze, seventeenth century

The last great St.John family monument commemorates Sir John’s St.John's son, Captain Edward St.John, who was fatally injured fighting for the king at the second Battle of Newbury. Edward died five and a half months later at home at Lydiard. The statue was erected in 1645 by his grieving father, who had already lost two elder sons fighting for the Royalist cause, though Edward is the only one to be commemorated at Lydiard.

Edward is seen emerging from his battle tent wearing an exactly modelled cavalry officer’s uniform of the day, right down to the string across his shoulder from which the spanner to wind his wheel-lock pistol would have hung. His glittering figure was a late nineteenth-century introduction; paint investigations show the statue was originally a marbled black. At the statue's base, a stone relief shows Edward leading his troop of sixteen men into battle.

Alan Turton in English Civil War Notes & Queries (1985) writes "the whole design may show Captain Edward St.John parading his troop in the park; hence the railings of his family home at Lydiard Tregoze where there is also a Windmill Hill on the estate."

The monument inspired a striking painting by the twentieth-century English artist John Piper, which can be seen in the Library of Lydiard House.