Chapter V: Part 5

But the end arrived. Money had become scarce, and the resources of the cave began to fail. More than one armed king’s cutter were seen day and night hovering off the land. Foreigners visited the house with tidings of peril. So he “who came with the water went with the wind.” His disappearance, like his arrival, was commemorated by a turbulent storm. A wrecker, who had gone to watch the shore, saw, as the sun went down, a full-rigged vessel standing off and on. By-and-by a rocket hissed up from the Gull Rock, a small islet with a creek on the landward side which had been the scene of many a run of smuggled cargo. A gun from the ship answered it, and again both signals were exchanged. At last a well-known and burly form stood on the topmost crag of the island rock. He waved his sword, and the light flashed back from the steel. A boat put off from the vessel with two hands at every oar--for the tide runs with double violence through Harty Race. They neared the rocks, rowed daringly through the surf, and were steered by some practised coxswain into the Gull Greek. There they found their man. Coppinger leaped on board the boat, and assumed the command. They made with strong efforts for their ship. It was a path of peril through that boiling surf. Still, bending at the oar like chained giants, the man watched them till they forced their way through the battling waters. Once, as they drew off the shore, one of the rowers, either from ebbing strength or loss of courage, drooped at his oar. In a moment a cutlass gleamed over his head, and a fierce stern stroke cut him down. It was the last blow of Cruel Coppinger. He and his boat’s crew boarded the vessel, and she was out of sight in a moment, like a spectre or a ghost. Thunder, lightning, and hail ensued. Trees were rent up by the roots around the pirate’s abode. Poor Dinah watched, and held in her shuddering arms her idiot-boy, and, strange to say, a meteoric stone, called in that country a storm-bolt, fell through the roof into the room at the very feet of Cruel Coppinger’s vacant chair.

FOOTNOTES:

[90] From _All the Year Round_, vol. xvi. pp. 537-540. 1866. For the historical basis of this article, see Appendix F.

[91] In the original form of this article, a second verse was added, and the first was slightly different.

“Will you hear of the bold, brave Coppinger?
How he came of a foreign kind?
He was brought to us by the salt water;
He’ll be carried away by the wind.

For thus the old wives croon and sing,
And so the proverbs say,
That whatsoever the wild waves bring
The winds will bear away.”

[92] See p. 38.

[93] Hawker himself used a seal engraved with the one word, “Thorough,” the motto, as he said, of Archbishop Laud.

[94] Mr. Baring-Gould, in his “Vicar of Morwenstow” (Edition 1899, p. 110), gives another reason for Coppinger’s wrath:--“The Kilkhampton parson hated rook-pie. Coppinger knew it. He invited him to dine with him one day. A large rook-pie was served at one end of the table, and roast rooks at the other, and the parson, who was very hungry, was forced to eat of them. When he departed he invited Coppinger to dine with him on the following Thursday. The smuggler arrived, and was regaled on pie, whether rabbit or hare he could not decide. When he came home he found a cat’s skin and head stuffed into his coat pocket, and thereby discovered what he had been eating.”

THOMASINE BONAVENTURE[95]

The aspect of rural England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries must have presented a strange and striking contrast, in the eye of a traveller, to the agricultural scenery of our own time. Thinly peopled--for the three millions of our chief city nowadays are in excess of the total population of the whole land of the Edwards and the Henrys--the inhabitants occupied hamlets few and far between, and a farm or grange signified usually a moated house amid a cluster of cultivated fields, gathered within fences from the surrounding forest or wold, and gleaming in the distance with rich or green enclosures, rescued from the wilderness, to give “fodder to the cattle, and bread to strengthen the heart of man.” But the great domains of the land for the most part expanded into woodland and marsh and moor, with glades or grassy avenues here and there for access to the lair of the red deer or the wild boar, or other native game, which afforded in that day a principal supply of human food. Yonder in the distance appeared ever and anon a beacon-tower, which marked the place and ward for the warning of hostile advances by night, and for the gathering rest of the hobbelars or horsemen, whose office it was to scour the country and to keep in awe the enemies of God and the king. Wheel-roads, except in the neighbourhood of cities or on the line of a royal progress, there were none; and among the bridle-paths men urged their difficult path in companies, for it was seldom safe for an honest or well-to-do man to travel alone. Rivers glided in silence to the sea without a sail or an oar to ruffle their waters; and there were whole regions, that now are loud with populous life, that might then have been called void places of the uninhabited earth. But more especially did this character of uncultured desolation pervade the extreme borders of the west of England, the country between the Tamar and the sea. There dwelt in scattered villages, or town-places as they are called to this day, the bold and hardy Keltic people, few in number, but, like the race of the Eastern wild man, never taught to bear the yoke. Long after other parts of England had settled into an improved agriculture, and submitted to the discipline of more civilised life, the Cornish were wont to hew their resources out of the bowels of their mother earth, or to haul into their nets the native harvest of the sea. Thus the merchandise of fish, tin, and copper became the vaunted staple of their land. These, the rich productions of their native county, were, even in remote periods of our history, in perpetual request, and formed, together with the wool of their moorland flocks, the great trade of the Cornish people. From all parts, and especially from that storied city whose merchants were then, as now, princes of the land, men were wont to encounter the perilous journey from the Thames to the Tamar, to pursue their traffic with the “underground folk,” as they termed the inhabitants of Cornwall, that rocky land of strangers, as, when literally interpreted, is the exact meaning of its name.

It was in the year 1463, when Edward IV. occupied the English throne, that a tall and portly merchant, in the distinctive apparel of the times, rode along the wilds of a Cornish moor. He sat high and firm upon his horse, a bony gelding, with demipique saddle. A broad beaver, or, as it was then called, a Flanders hat, shaded a grave and thoughtful countenance, wherein shrewdness and good-humour struggled for the mastery and the latter prevailed, and his full brown beard was forked--a happy omen, as it was always held, of prosperous life. His riding garb displayed that contrast of colours which was then so valued by native taste, insomuch that the phrase “motley” had in its origin a complimentary and not an invidious sound. Behind him and near rode his servant, a stout and active-looking knave, armed to the teeth.

The traveller had crossed the ford of a moorland stream, when he halted and reined up at a scene that greeted him on the bank. There, on a green and rushy knoll and underneath a gnarled and wind-swept tree, a damsel in the blossom of youth stood leaning on her shepherd-staff: her companion, a peasant boy, drew back, half shaded by a rock. Sheep of the native breed, the long-forgotten Cornish Knott, gathered around. As he drew nigh, the stranger discovered that the maiden was tall and well formed, and that her rounded limbs had the mould and movement of a natural grace that only health and exercise could develop or bestow. The sure evidence of her Keltic origin was testified by her eyes of violet-blue and abundant hair of rich and radiant brown--the hue that Italian poets delight to describe as the colour of the ripe chestnut,[96] or the stalks and fibres of the maidenhair fern. She had also the bashful nose that appears to retreat from the lip with the unmistakable curve of the Kelt. She was clad in a grey kirtle of native wool, and her bodice also was knitted at the hearth by homely hands. The merchant was first to speak.

“Be not scared,” said he, “fair damsel, by a stranger’s voice. My name is John Bunsby, of the city of London, and I am bound for the hostel of Wike St. Marie, which must be somewhere nigh this moor. What did thy gossips call thee, maiden, at the font?”

“My name, kind sir,” she answered, modestly, “is Thomasine Bonaventure, and my father’s house is hard by at Wike. These are my master’s sheep.”

“The evening falls fast,” said the traveller; “I would fain hire safe guidance to yonder inn.”

She beckoned to the youth and whispered a word in his ear, to which, however, he seemed to listen with reluctance or dislike, and then, with her crook still in her hand, she herself went on to guide the stranger on his way. They arrived in due course at the hostel-door, at the sign of the Rose: but it was the Rose, mere, and without an epithet; for mine host had wisely omitted, in those dangerous days, to designate the hue of that symbolic flower. The traveller dismounted at the door, thanked and requited his gentle guide, and signified that as soon as his leisure allowed he would find his way to her father’s house. After a strict command to his own servant and the varlet of the stable that his horses should receive due vigilance and abundant food, Master Bunsby at last entered the inn. A hecatomb of wood blazed on the earth, shedding light as well as heat around the panelled room--for in those times of old simplicity a single apartment was allotted for household purposes and for the entertainment of guests. The traveller took an offered seat on the carved oak settle, in the place of honour by the fire, and looked on with interest at the homely but original scene. At his right hand a vast oven, with an entrance not unlike a church-door, was about to disgorge its manifold contents. Rye-loaves led the way, sweet and tasty to the final crust (wheat was in those days a luxury unknown in Cornwall); barley-bread and oaten cakes came forth in due procession from the steaming cave; and, last of all, the merchant’s sight and nostrils were greeted by the arrival of a huge and mysterious pie from its depths. The achievements of the dame, who was both cook and hostess in her own person, were duly and triumphantly arrayed upon the board, and the stranger-guest took the accustomed seat at the right hand of “mine host.” His eyes were fixed with curiosity and interest on the hillock of brown dough which stood before him, and reeked like a small volcano with steaming puffs of savoury vapour. At last, when the massive crust which lay like a tombstone over the mighty dish had been broken up, the pie revealed its strange contents. Conger-eels, pilchards, and oysters were mingled piecemeal in the mass beneath, their intervals slushed with melted butter and clotted cream, and the whole well seasoned, not without a savour of garlic, with spices, pepper, and salt. The stranger’s astonishment was manifest in gesture and look, although he by no means repulsed the trencher which came towards him loaded with his bountiful share.

“Sir guest,” said the host, “you doubtless know the byword--‘The Cornish cooks make everything into a pie.’ Our grandames say that the devil never dared cross the Tamar, or he would have been verily put under a crust.”

Satisfied with his fare, the merchant now inquired for the dwelling-place of his guide. It was not far off. The parents of the shepherdess inhabited a thatched hut in the village, with the usual walls of beaten cob, moulded of native clay: all within and without bespoke extreme poverty and want, but there Master John Bunsby soon found himself an honoured visitor seated by the hearth, with a blazing fire of dry gorse gathered from the moor to greet his arrival. There, while the mother stood by her turn or wheel, and span, and the maiden’s nimble fingers flashed her knitting-needles to and fro by the fitful light of the fire, the old man her father and the merchant conversed in a low voice far into the night, on a theme of deep interest to both. The talk was of Thomasine, the child of the house. The merchant related his own prosperous affairs, and spoke of his goodly house in London, governed by a thrifty and diligent wife: the household was one of grave and decent demeanour, with good repute in the vast city wherein dwelt the king. He had taken an immediate interest, he declared, in the old man’s daughter, and desired to rescue her from the life she led on the bleak, unsheltered moor. He pledged himself, if they should consent, to convey her in safety to London, and to place her in especial attendance on his wife; and there, if her conduct were in unison with her looks, he doubted not she would win many friends, and secure a happy livelihood for the rest of her days. He would await their decision at the inn, where he should be detained by business two or three days. Earnest and anxious were their thoughts and their language in the cottage that night and the next day. The aspect and speech of the rich patron were such as invited confidence and trust; but there were the love and fear of two aged hearts to satisfy and subdue. There was the fierce and stubborn repugnance also of the youth, the companion of the maid, who stood with her under the tree upon the moor. He was her cousin, John Dineham,[97] of Swannacote, and they had grown up together from childhood, till, unconsciously to themselves, the tenderness of kindred had strengthened into love. The damsel herself could not conceal a natural longing to visit the great city, where, they said, but it might be untrue, “that the houses were stuck as close together as Wike St. Marie church and tower;” but she would at all events behold for once in her life the dwelling-place of the king. “She would store up every coin, and come back with money enow to buy a flock of sheep of her own, which she and John would tend together, as aforetime, on the moor.” All this shook the scale.

When the merchant arrived to seek their decision, it was made, and in favour of his wish. A pillion or padded seat was obtained from some neighbouring farm, and belted behind the saddle of the merchant’s man. Thereon, with a small fardel in her hand, which held all her worldly goods and gear, mounted Thomasine Bonaventure, while all the villagers came around to bid her farewell--all but one, and it was her cousin John. He had gone, as he had told her, to the moor, and there among the branches of the tree which marked the greeting-place of Master Bunsby the youth waited to watch her out of sight. He lifted up his hand and waved it as she passed on with a gesture of warning, but which she interpreted and returned as a silent caress.

The travellers arrived at their journey’s end after being only a fortnight on the road--a speed so satisfactory and unusual, that it was Dame Bunsby’s emphatic remark that she verily thought they must have flown.

Her mistress received Thomasine with a kind and hearty welcome, and ratified, by her everyday approval, her husband’s choice of the Cornish maid. When she was first told that her name was Bonaventure, and her husband explained that it signified good luck, she said, “Well, sweetheart, when I was a girl they used to say that the name was a fore-sign of the life, and God grant that thine may turn out [so] to be.”

Time passed on, and in a year or two the wild Cornish lass had grown into a frame of thorough symmetry, firmness, and health. Her strong thews, of country origin, rendered her capable of long and active labour, and she had acquired with gradual ease the habits and appliances of city life. She was very soon the favoured and the favourite manager of the household. Her mistress, born and reared in a town, had been long a frail and delicate woman; and life in London in those days, as now, was fraught with the manifold perils of pestilent disease. To one of those ancient scourges of the population, the sweating-sickness, Dame Bunsby succumbed. Her death drew nigh, and, with the touching simplicity of the times, she told her true and tender husband, with smiling tears, that she thought he could not do better than, if they so agreed, to put Thomasine in her place when she was gone. “Tell her it was my last wish.”

This gentle desire so uttered--her strong and grateful feelings towards the master who had taken her, as she expressed it in her rural speech, lean from the moor, and fed her, so that her very bones belonged to him--her happy home, and the power she would acquire to make the latter days in the cottage at Wike St. Marie prosperous and calm,--all these impulses flocked into Thomasine’s heart, and controlled for the time even the remembrance of Cousin John. That poor young man, when the tidings came that she was about to become her master’s wedded wife, suddenly disappeared, and for a while the place of his retreat was unknown; but it afterwards transpired that he had crossed the moor to a “house of religious men,” called the White Monks of St. Cleer, and pleaded for reception there as a needy novice of the gate. His earnest entreaties had prevailed; and six months after his first love, and his last, had put on her silks as a city dame, and begun her rule as the mistress of a goodly house in London, her cousin had taken the vows of his novitiate, and received the first tonsure of St. John.

Her married life did not, however, long endure. Three years after the master became the husband, he took the “plague sore,” and died. They were childless; but he bequeathed “all his goods and chattel property, and his well-furnished mansion, to his dear wife Thomasine Bonaventure, now Bunsby;” and the maid of the moor became one of the wealthy widows of London city. Among the MSS. which still survive, there is a letter which announces the event of her husband’s death and bequest, and then proceeds to notify her solemn donation, as a year’s-mind of Master Bunsby, of ten marks to the Reeve of Wike St. Marie, “to the intent that he shall cause skeelful masons to build a bridge at the Ford of Green-a-Moor: yea, and with stout stonework well laid; and see,” she wrote, “that they do no harm to that tree which standeth fast by the brook, neither dispoyle they the rushes and plants that grow thereby; for there did I passe many goodly hours when I was a simple mayde, and there did I first see the kind face of a fathful frend.” But in another missive to her mother, about the same date, there is a touch of tenderness which shows that her woman’s nature survived all changes, and was strong within her still. She writes: “I know that Cousin John is engaged to the monks of St. Cleer. Hath he been shorn, as they do call it, for the second time? Inquire, I beseech, if he seeketh to dispart from that cell? And will red gold help him away? I am prospered in pouch and coffer, and he need not shame to be indebted unto me, that owe so much to him.” But this frank and kindly effort--“the late remorse of love”--did not avail. John had broken the last link that bound him to the world, and was lost to love and her. Reckless thenceforward, therefore, if not fancy-free, and it may be somewhat schooled by the habits and associations of city life, she did not wear the widow’s wimple long. After an interval of years, we find her the honoured wife “of that worshipful merchant-adventurer, Master John Gall of St. Lawrence, Milk Street.”

Gall was very rich, and he appears to have emptied his money-bags into his wife’s lap, as the gossip of the city ran, for it is on record that soon after her second marriage she manifested her prosperity like a true-hearted Cornish woman by ample “gifts” and largess to the borough of St. Marie, “my native place.” Twenty acres of woodland copse in the neighbourhood were bought and conveyed by that kind and gracious lady, Dame Thomasine Gall, to feoffees and trust-men for the perpetual use of the poor of the paroche, “for fewel to be hewn in parcels once a-year, and justly and equally divided for evermore on the vigil of St. Thomas the twin.” To her mother she sends by “a waggon which has gone on an enterprise into Cornwall for woollen merchandise, a chest with array of clothing, fair weather and foul, head-gear and body raiment to boot, all the choice and costly gifts to my loving parents of my goodman Gall, and in remembrance, as he chargeth me to say, that ye have reared for him a kindly and loving wife.” But the graphic and touching passage in this letter is the message which succeeds: “Lo! I do send you also herewithal in the coffer a litel boke: it is for a gift to my Cousin John. Tell him it is not written as the whilom usage was, and he was wont to teach me my Christ Cross Rhime;[98] but it is what they do call emprinted with a strange device of an iron engin brought from forrin parts. Bid him not despise it, for although it is so small that it will lie on the palm of your hand, yet it did cost me full five marks in exchange.” But her marriage life was doomed to bring her only brief and transitory intervals of wedded happiness. Five years after the date of her letter above quoted, she was again alone in the house. Master Gall died, but not until he had endowed his “tender wife with all and singular his moneys and plate, bills, bonds, and ventures now at sea,” etc., with a long inventory of the “precious things beneath the moon,” too long to rehearse, but each and all to the sole use, enjoyment, and behoof of Dame Thomasine, whose maiden name of Bonaventure was literally interpreted and fulfilled in every successive change of station.

We greet her then once more as a rich and buxom widow of city fame. Her wealth, added to her comeliness--for she was still in the prime of life--brought many “a potent, grave, and reverend seignor” to her feet, and to sue for her hand. Nor did she long linger in her choice. The favoured suitor now was Sir John Perceval, goldsmith and usurer--that is to say, banker, in the phrase of that day; very wealthy, of high repute, alderman of his ward, and in such a position of civic advancement that he would have been described in modern language as next the chair. He wooed and won the “Golden Widow”--for so, because of her double inheritance of the wealth of two rich husbands, she was merrily named. Their wedding was a kind of public festival, and the bride, in acknowledgment of her own large possessions, was invested with a stately dower at the church-door. One year after their marriage her husband, Sir John, was elected to that honourable office which is still supposed by foreign nations to be only second in rank to that of the monarch on the throne, Lord Mayor of the city of London.

Thus, by a strange succession of singular events, the barefooted shepherdess of a Cornish moorland became the Lady Mayoress of metropolitan fame; and the legend of Thomasine Bonaventure--for it was now well known--was the popular theme of royal and noble interest among the lords and ladies of the Court. She demeaned herself bravely and decorously in her ascent among the great and lofty ones of the land. Like all noble natures, her spirit rose with her personal elevation, and took equal place with her compeers of each superior rank. Nor did her true and simple woman’s nature undergo any depreciation or change. It breathes and survives in every sentence of her family letters, transcripts of which have been perpetuated and preserved to our own times. One part of her personal history is illustrative of a scene of life and manners when Henry VII. was king.

“Sweet mother,” she wrote, “thy daughter hath seen the face of the king. We were bidden to a banket at the royal palace, and Sir John and I dared not choose but go. There was such a blaze of lords and ladies in silks and samite, and jewels and gold, that it was like the city of New Jerusalem in the Scriptures; and I, thy maid Thomasine, was arrayed so fine, that they brought up the saying that I was dressed like an altar. When we were led into the chamber of dais, where his highness stood, the king did kiss me on the cheek, as the manner is, and he seemed gentle and kind. But then did he turn to my good lord and husband, and say, with a look stark and stern enow, ‘Ha, Sir John! see to it that thy fair dame be liege and true, for she comes of the burly Cornish kind, and they be ever rebels in blood and bone. Even now they be one and all for that knave Warbeck,[99] who is among them in the West.’ You will gesse, dear mother, how my heart did beat. But withal the king did drink to me at the banket, and did merrily call, ‘Health to our Lady Mayoress, Dame Thomasine Perceval, which now feedeth her flock in the rich pastures of our city of London.’ And thereat they did laugh, and fleer, and shout, and there was flashing of tankards and jingling of cups all down the hall.”

With increase of wealth came also many a renewed token of affectionate regard and sterling bounty to her old and well-beloved dwelling-place of Wike St. Marie. As her wedding-gift of remembrance she directed that “a firm and steadfast road should be laid down with stones,” at her whole cost, along the midst of Green-a-Moor, and fit for man and beast to travel on, with their lawful occasions, from Lanstaphadon to the sea. At another time, and for a New Year’s gift, she gave the sum of forty marks towards the building of a tower for St. Stephen’s church, above the causeway of Dunheved; and it was her desire that they should carry their pinnacles so tall that “they might be seen from Swannacote Cross, by the moor, to the intent that they who do behold it from the Burgage Mound may remember the poor maid which is now a wedded dame of London citie.”

During her three marriages she had no children, and it was her singular lot to survive her third husband, Sir John: it was in long widowhood after him that she lived and died. Her will, bearing date the vigil of the Feast of Christmas, A.D. 1510, is a singular document, for therein the memory and the impulses of her early life are recalled and condensed. She bequeaths large sums of money to be laid out and invested in land for the welfare of the village borough, whereto, amid all the strange vicissitudes of her existence, her heart had always clung with fond and lingering regret. She directs that a chantry[100] with cloisters was to be built near the church of Wike St. Marie, at the discretion and under the control of her executor and cousin, John Dineham, the unforgotten priest. She endows it with thirty marks by the year, and provides that there shall be established therein “a schole for young children born in the paroche of Wike St. Marie; and such to be always preferred as are friendless and poor.” They are to be “taught to read with their fescue from a boke of horn, and also to write, and both as the manner was in that country when I was young.” The well-remembered days of her girlhood appear to tinge every line of her last will. Her very codicil is softened with a touch of her first and fondest love. In it she gives to the priest of the church, where she well knew that her cousin John would serve and sing,[101] “the silver chalice gilt, which good Master Maskelyne the goldsmith had devised for her behoof, with a leetle blue flower which they do call a forget-me-not wrought in Turkess at the bottom of the bowl, to the intent that whensoever it is used the minister may remember her who was once a simple shepherd-maid by the wayside of Wike St. Marie, and who was so wonderfully brought by many great changes to be the Mayoress of London citie before she died.”

FOOTNOTES:

[95] From _All the Year Round_, vol. xvii. pp. 276-280. 1867. For the origins of this story, see Appendix G.

[96]

“Straight, but as lissome as a hazel wand;
Her eyes a bashful azure, and her hair
In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell
Divides threefold to show the fruit within.”

TENNYSON, _The Brook_.

[97] One of Mr. Hawker’s sisters was the wife of John Dineham, surgeon, of Stratton.

[98] Hawker has a pretty poem for children with this title--

“Teach me, Father John, to say
Vesper-verse and matin-lay:
So when I to God shall plead,
Christ His Cross shall be my speed.”

[99] The love of the Lady Katherine Gordon for Perkin Warbeck is the subject of Hawker’s poem, “The Lady of the Mount.”

[100] The remains of this old building have been embodied in some cottages. The doorway shown in the illustration forms the front door of one of these. The other is occupied by the Cornwall County Police, and the unsuspecting pilgrim who rambles round without permission is liable to be startled by the gruff remark, “You’m trespassing!” Thus are we recalled from “the baseless fabric” of the past to the stern realities of the living present.

[101] Hawker gives a romantic turn of his own to this part of the story.

THE BOTATHEN GHOST[102]

There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the clergy in the west of England throughout the seventeenth century. The Church of those days was in a transitory state, and her ministers, like her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the new interpretation. Their wide severance also from the great metropolis of life and manners, the city of London (which in those times was civilised England, much as the Paris of our own day is France), divested the Cornish clergy in particular of all personal access to the masterminds of their age and body. Then, too, the barrier interposed by the rude rough roads of their country, and by their abode in wilds that were almost inaccessible, rendered the existence of a bishop rather a doctrine suggested to their belief than a fact revealed to the actual vision of each in his generation. Hence it came to pass that the Cornish clergyman, insulated within his own limited sphere, often without even the presence of a country squire (and unchecked by the influence of the Fourth Estate--for until the beginning of this nineteenth century, _Flindell’s Weekly Miscellany_ distributed from house to house from the pannier of a mule, was the only light of the West), became developed about middle life into an original mind and man, sole and absolute within his parish boundary, eccentric when compared with his brethren in civilised regions, and yet, in German phrase, “a whole and seldom man” in his dominion of souls. He was “the parson,” in canonical phrase--that is to say, The Person, the somebody of consequence among his own people. These men were not, however, smoothed down into a monotonous aspect of life and manners by this remote and secluded existence. They imbibed, each in his own peculiar circle, the hue of surrounding objects, and were tinged into distinctive colouring and character by many a contrast of scenery and people.[103] There was the “light of other days,” the curate by the sea-shore, who professed to check the turbulence of the “smugglers’ landing” by his presence on the sands, and who “held the lantern” for the guidance of his flock when the nights were dark, as the only proper ecclesiastical part he could take in the proceedings.[104] He was soothed and silenced by the gift of a keg of hollands or a chest of tea. There was the merry minister of the mines, whose cure was honeycombed by the underground men. He must needs have been artist and poet in his way, for he had to enliven his people three or four times a-year, by mastering the arrangements of a “guary,” or religious mystery, which was duly performed in the topmost hollow of a green barrow or hill, of which many survive, scooped out into vast amphitheatres and surrounded by benches of turf, which held two thousand spectators. Such were the historic plays, “The Creation” and “Noe’s Flood,” which still exist in the original Celtic as well as the English text, and suggest what critics and antiquaries Cornish curates, masters of such revels, must have been,--for the native language of Cornwall did not lapse into silence until the end of the seventeenth century. Then, moreover, here and there would be one parson more learned than his kind in the mysteries of a deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination. He was a man so highly honoured at college for natural gifts and knowledge of learned books which nobody else could read, that when he “took his second orders” the bishop gave him a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his shoulders in church, and his lordship had put such power into it that, when the parson had it rightly on, he could “govern any ghost or evil spirit,” and even “stop an earthquake.”

Such a powerful minister, in combat with supernatural visitations, was one Parson Rudall,[105] of Launceston, whose existence and exploits we gather from the local tradition of his time, from surviving letters and other memoranda, and indeed from his own “diurnal”[106] which fell by chance into the hands of the present writer. Indeed the legend of Parson Rudall and the Botathen Ghost will be recognised by many Cornish people as a local remembrance of their boyhood.

It appears, then, from the diary of this learned master of the grammar-school--for such was his office as well as perpetual curate of the parish--“that a pestilential disease did break forth in our town in the beginning of the year A.D. 1665; yea, and it likewise invaded my school, insomuch that therewithal certain of the chief scholars sickened and died.” “Among others who yielded to the malign influence was Master John Eliot, the eldest son and the worshipful heir of Edward Eliot, Esquire of Trebursey, a stripling of sixteen years of age, but of uncommon parts and hopeful ingenuity.[107] At his own especial motion and earnest desire I did consent to preach his funeral sermon.” It should be remembered here that, howsoever strange and singular it may sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance at the hands of his master, it was in consonance with the habitual usage of those times. The old services for the dead had been abolished by law, and in the stead of sacrament and ceremony, month’s mind and year’s mind, the sole substitute which survived was the general desire “to partake,” as they called it, of a posthumous discourse, replete with lofty eulogy and flattering remembrance of the living and the dead. The diary proceeds:--

“I fulfilled my undertaking, and preached over the coffin in the presence of a full assemblage of mourners and lachrymose friends. An ancient gentleman, who was then and there in the church, a Mr. Bligh of Botathen,[108] was much affected with my discourse, and he was heard to repeat to himself certain parentheses therefrom, especially a phrase from Maro Virgilius, which I had applied to the deceased youth, ‘Et puer ipse fuit cantari dignus.’

“The cause wherefore this old gentleman was thus moved by my applications was this: He had a first-born and only son--a child who, but a very few months before, had been not unworthy the character I drew of young Master Eliot, but who, by some strange accident, had of late quite fallen away from his parent’s hopes, and become moody, and sullen, and distraught. When the funeral obsequies were over, I had no sooner come out of church than I was accosted by this aged parent, and he besought me incontinently, with a singular energy, that I would resort with him forthwith to his abode at Botathen that very night; nor could I have delivered myself from his importunity, had not Mr. Eliot urged his claim to enjoy my company at his own house. Hereupon I got loose, but not until I had pledged a fast assurance that I would pay him, faithfully, an early visit the next day.”

“The Place,” as it was called, of Botathen, where old Mr. Bligh resided, was a low-roofed gabled manor-house of the fifteenth century, walled and mullioned, and with clustered chimneys of dark-grey stone from the neighbouring quarries of Ventor-gan. The mansion was flanked by a pleasaunce or enclosure in one space, of garden and lawn, and it was surrounded by a solemn grove of stag-horned trees. It had the sombre aspect of age and of solitude, and looked the very scene of strange and supernatural events. A legend might well belong to every gloomy glade around, and there must surely be a haunted room somewhere within its walls. Hither, according to his appointment, on the morrow, Parson Rudall betook himself. Another clergyman, as it appeared, had been invited to meet him, who, very soon after his arrival, proposed a walk together in the pleasaunce, on the pretext of showing him, as a stranger, the walks and trees, until the dinner-bell should strike. There, with much prolixity, and with many a solemn pause, his brother minister proceeded to “unfold the mystery.”

“A singular infelicity,” he declared, “had befallen young Master Bligh, once the hopeful heir of his parents and of the lands of Botathen. Whereas he had been from childhood a blithe and merry boy, ‘the gladness,’ like Isaac of old, of his father’s age, he had suddenly, and of late, become morose and silent--nay, even austere and stern--dwelling apart, always solemn, often in tears. The lad had at first repulsed all questions as to the origin of this great change, but of late he had yielded to the importunate researches of his parents, and had disclosed the secret cause. It appeared that he resorted, every day, by a pathway across the fields, to this very clergyman’s house, who had charge of his education, and grounded him in the studies suitable to his age. In the course of his daily walk he had to pass a certain heath or down where the road wound along through tall blocks of granite with open spaces of grassy sward between. There in a certain spot, and always in one and the same place, the lad declared that he encountered, every day, a woman with a pale and troubled face, clothed in a long loose garment of frieze, with one hand always stretched forth, and the other pressed against her side. Her name, he said, was Dorothy Dinglet,[109] for he had known her well from his childhood, and she often used to come to his parents’ house; but that which troubled him was, that she had now been dead three years, and he himself had been with the neighbours at her burial; so that, as the youth alleged, with great simplicity, since he had seen her body laid in the grave, this that he saw every day must needs be her soul or ghost. ‘Questioned again and again,’ said the clergyman, ‘he never contradicts himself; but he relates the same and the simple tale as a thing that cannot be gainsaid. Indeed, the lad’s observance is keen and calm for a boy of his age. The hair of the appearance, sayeth he, is not like anything alive, but it is so soft and light that it seemeth to melt away while you look; but her eyes are set, and never blink--no, not when the sun shineth full upon her face. She maketh no steps, but seemeth to swim along the top of the grass; and her hand, which is stretched out alway, seemeth to point at something far away, out of sight. It is her continual coming; for she never faileth to meet him, and to pass on, that hath quenched his spirits; and although he never seeth her by night, yet cannot he get his natural rest.’

“Thus far the clergyman; whereupon the dinner clock did sound, and we went into the house. After dinner, when young Master Bligh had withdrawn with his tutor, under excuse of their books, the parents did forthwith beset me as to my thoughts about their son. Said I, warily, ‘The case is strange, but by no means impossible. It is one that I will study, and fear not to handle, if the lad will be free with me, and fulfil all that I desire.’ The mother was overjoyed, but I perceived that old Mr. Bligh turned pale, and was downcast with some thought which, however, he did not express. Then they bade that Master Bligh should be called to meet me in the pleasaunce forthwith. The boy came, and he rehearsed to me his tale with an open countenance, and, withal, a modesty of speech. Verily he seemed ‘ingenui vultus puer ingenuique pudoris.’ Then I signified to him my purpose. ‘To-morrow,’ said I, ‘we will go together to the place; and if, as I doubt not, the woman shall appear, it will be for me to proceed according to knowledge, and by rules laid down in my books.’”

The unaltered scenery of the legend still survives, and, like the field of the forty footsteps in another history, the place is still visited by those who take interest in the supernatural tales of old. The pathway leads along a moorland waste, where large masses of rock stand up here and there from the grassy turf, and clumps of heath and gorse weave their tapestry of golden and purple garniture on every side. Amidst all these, and winding along between the rocks, is a natural footway worn by the scant, rare tread of the village traveller. Just midway, a somewhat larger stretch than usual of green sod expands, which is skirted by the path, and which is still identified as the legendary haunt of the phantom, by the name of Parson Rudall’s Ghost.

But we must draw the record of the first interview between the minister and Dorothy from his own words. “We met,” thus he writes, “in the pleasaunce very early, and before any others in the house were awake; and together the lad and myself proceeded towards the field. The youth was quite composed, and carried his Bible under his arm, from whence he read to me verses, which he said he had lately picked out, to have always in his mind. These were Job vii. 14, ‘Thou scarest me with dreams, and terrifiest me through visions;’ and Deuteronomy xxviii. 67, ‘In the morning thou shalt say, Would to God it were evening, and in the evening thou shalt say, Would to God it were morning; for the fear of thine heart wherewith thou shalt fear, and for the sight of thine eyes which thou shalt see.’

“I was much pleased with the lad’s ingenuity in these pious applications, but for mine own part I was somewhat anxious and out of cheer. For aught I knew this might be a _dæmonium meridianum_, the most stubborn spirit to govern and guide that any man can meet, and the most perilous withal. We had hardly reached the accustomed spot, when we both saw her at once gliding towards us; punctually as the ancient writers describe the motion of their ‘lemures, which swoon along the ground, neither marking the sand nor bending the herbage.’ The aspect of the woman was exactly that which had been related by the lad. There was the pale and stony face, the strange and misty hair, the eyes firm and fixed, that gazed, yet not on us, but on something that they saw far, far away; one hand and arm stretched out, and the other grasping the girdle of her waist. She floated along the field like a sail upon a stream, and glided past the spot where we stood, pausingly. But so deep was the awe that overcame me, as I stood there in the light of day, face to face with a human soul separate from her bones and flesh, that my heart and purpose both failed me. I had resolved to speak to the spectre in the appointed form of words, but I did not. I stood like one amazed and speechless, until she had passed clean out of sight. One thing remarkable came to pass. A spaniel dog, the favourite of young Master Bligh, had followed us, and lo! when the woman drew nigh, the poor creature began to yell and bark piteously, and ran backward and away, like a thing dismayed and appalled. We returned to the house, and after I had said all that I could to pacify the lad, and to soothe the aged people, I took my leave for that time, with a promise that when I had fulfilled certain business elsewhere, which I then alleged, I would return and take orders to assuage these disturbances and their cause.

_“January 7, 1665._--At my own house, I find, by my books, what is expedient to be done; and then, Apage, Sathanas!

_“January 9, 1665._--This day I took leave of my wife and family, under pretext of engagements elsewhere, and made my secret journey to our diocesan city, wherein the good and venerable bishop then abode.

_“January 10._--_Deo gratias_, in safe arrival at Exeter; craved and obtained immediate audience of his lordship; pleading it was for counsel and admonition on a weighty and pressing cause; called to the presence; made obeisance; and then by command stated my case--the Botathen perplexity--which I moved with strong and earnest instances and solemn asseverations of that which I had myself seen and heard. Demanded by his lordship, what was the succour that I had come to entreat at his hands? Replied, licence for my exorcism, that so I might, ministerially, allay this spiritual visitant, and thus render to the living and the dead release from this surprise. ‘But,’ said our bishop, ‘on what authority do you allege that I am intrusted with faculty so to do? Our Church, as is well known, hath abjured certain branches of her ancient power, on grounds of perversion and abuse.’ ‘Nay, my lord,’ I humbly answered, ‘under favour, the seventy-second of the canons ratified and enjoined on us, the clergy, anno Domini 1604, doth expressly provide, that “no minister, _unless he hath_ the licence of his diocesan bishop, shall essay to exorcise a spirit, evil or good.” Therefore it was,’ I did here mildly allege, ‘that I did not presume to enter on such a work without lawful privilege under your lordship’s hand and seal.’ Hereupon did our wise and learned bishop, sitting in his chair, condescend upon the theme at some length with many gracious interpretations from ancient writers and from Holy Scripture, and I did humbly rejoin and reply, till the upshot was that he did call in his secretary and command him to draw the aforesaid faculty, forthwith and without further delay, assigning him a form, insomuch that the matter was incontinently done; and after I had disbursed into the secretary’s hands certain moneys for signitary purposes, as the manner of such officers hath always been, the bishop did himself affix his signature under the _sigillum_ of his see, and deliver the document into my hands. When I knelt down to receive his benediction, he softly said, ‘Let it be secret, Mr. R. Weak brethren! weak brethren!’”

This interview with the bishop, and the success with which he vanquished his lordship’s scruples, would seem to have confirmed Parson Rudall very strongly in his own esteem, and to have invested him with that courage which he evidently lacked at his first encounter with the ghost.

The entries proceed: _“January 11, 1665._--Therewithal did I hasten home and prepare my instruments, and cast my figures for the onset of the next day. Took out my ring of brass, and put it on the index-finger of my right hand, with the _scutum Davidis_[110] traced thereon.

_“January 12, 1665._--Rode into the gateway at Botathen, armed at all points, but not with Saul’s armour, and ready. There is danger from the demons, but so there is in the surrounding air every day. At early morning then, and alone,--for so the usage ordains,--I betook me towards the field. It was void, and I had thereby due time to prepare. First, I paced and measured out my circle on the grass. Then did I mark my pentacle[111] in the very midst, and at the intersection of the five angles I did set up and fix my crutch of _raun_[112] [rowan]. Lastly, I took my station south, at the true line of the meridian, and stood facing due north.[113] I waited and watched for a long time. At last there was a kind of trouble in the air, a soft and rippling sound, and all at once the shape appeared, and came on towards me gradually. I opened my parchment-scroll, and read aloud the command. She paused, and seemed to waver and doubt; stood still; then I rehearsed the sentence again, sounding out every syllable like a chant. She drew near my ring, but halted at first outside, on the brink. I sounded again, and now at the third time I gave the signal in Syriac--the speech which is used, they say, where such ones dwell and converse in thoughts that glide.

“She was at last obedient, and swam into the midst of the circle, and there stood still, suddenly.[114] I saw, moreover, that she drew back her pointing hand. All this while I do confess that my knees shook under me, and the drops of sweat ran down my flesh like rain. But now, although face to face with the spirit, my heart grew calm, and my mind was composed. I knew that the pentacle would govern her, and the ring must bind, until I gave the word. Then I called to mind the rule laid down of old, that no angel or fiend, no spirit, good or evil, will ever speak until they have been first spoken to. _N.B._--This is the great law of prayer. God Himself will not yield reply until man hath made vocal entreaty, once and again. So I went on to demand, as the books advise; and the phantom made answer, willingly. Questioned wherefore not at rest? Unquiet, because of a certain sin. Asked what, and by whom? Revealed it; but it is _sub sigillo_, and therefore _nefas dictu_; more anon. Inquired, what sign she could give that she was a true spirit and not a false fiend? Stated, before next Yule-tide a fearful pestilence would lay waste the land and myriads of souls would be loosened from their flesh, until, as she piteously said, ‘our valleys will be full.’ Asked again, why she so terrified the lad? Replied: ‘It is the law: we must seek a youth or a maiden of clean life, and under age, to receive messages and admonitions.’ We conversed with many more words, but it is not lawful for me to set them down. Pen and ink would degrade and defile the thoughts she uttered, and which my mind received that day. I broke the ring, and she passed, but to return once more next day. At even-song, a long discourse with that ancient transgressor, Mr. B. Great horror and remorse; entire atonement and penance; whatsoever I enjoin; full acknowledgment before pardon.