Chapter V: Part 5

History shows this to have been a bloodless campaign, but the above extract proves Grenville’s hereditary spirit, and the King, in token of his approval, knighted him at Berwick-on-Tweed before the army broke up; and when, three years later, the storm at last burst over England, which had been so long threatening, Charles I. had no more loyal supporter than Sir Bevill Grenville. Clarendon says he was “the most generally loved man in Cornwall.” He was the soul of the Royalist cause there, and his influence was so great that he readily raised a body of volunteers fifteen hundred strong. At Bradock Down, near Liskeard, where the first important encounter with the Parliamentarian troops took place, Sir Bevill led the van. Describing the fight to his wife, he writes: “After solemn prayers at the head of every division, I led my part away, who followed me with so great a courage, both down the one hill and up the other, that it struck a terror into them,” with the result that twelve hundred prisoners were captured, and all the guns. The next engagement took place at Stratton (distant only a few miles from Grenville’s own home in the adjoining parish of Kilkampton) on May 16th, 1643, where he was again conspicuous for his personal courage. The Earl of Stamford, who commanded the Parliamentarian troops, which numbered close on 6,000, all perfectly equipped and victualled, had encamped in a very strong position on the top of a hill, now called Stamford Hill, near the village of Stratton. It is an isolated grassy hill on a ridge which runs nearly due north and south. The sides on the east and south are the steepest, whilst the western slope has an ancient earthwork near the summit, which Stamford had defended with guns that ought to have rendered it impregnable. The Royalist troops, less than half their number, short of ammunition, and so destitute of provisions that the best officers had but a biscuit a day, lay at Launceston. They nevertheless marched the twenty miles to Stratton “with a resolution to fight with the enemy upon every disadvantage of place or number.” In the evening they halted, footsore and hungry, a mile from the base of the high hill on which the Parliamentarian troops lay in overwhelming strength, and determined to attack them at daybreak. Weary as they were, the men stood to their arms all night, for the enemy were too near to make rest possible, and with the first light, Sir Bevill, to whom every inch of the ground was, of course, perfectly familiar, and to whom, consequently, was committed the ordering of the fight, divided the troops into four storming parties. The little army was too small to merit, when divided into such parts, any other designation. In the morning the fight commenced, and continued till the afternoon was well advanced, but no impression could be made by the gallant Cornishmen, who were repulsed again and again. At last powder began to fail, and it became a question between retreat, which implied certain disaster, or victory. A final and heroic effort was made; muskets were laid aside, and, trusting to pike and sword alone, the lithe Cornishmen pressed onwards and upwards. Grenville led the party on the western slope, and Sir John Berkeley that on the northern, while Hopton and the other commanders scaled the south and east sides. Their silent march seems to have struck their opponents with a sense of power, and the defence grew feebler. Grenville first reached the crest, and seized the entrenchment, and captured the thirteen brass field-pieces and one mortar by which it was defended; and when Berkeley prevailed on the north side, the Parliamentarian horse fled from the hill headlong down the steep descent, and made off. This had its moral effect on the defenders of the other two sides of the camp, and their resistance perceptibly slackened. Soon the other two storming parties, who had had the steepest climb, pressed upward, and the enemy, despite the efforts of their officers to rally them, made off to the adjoining heights. The victorious commanders embraced one another on the hard-won hilltop, thanking God for a success for which at one time they had hardly ventured to hope. It was no time to prolong their rejoicings, as the enemy, demoralised though they were, appear to have rallied somewhat, and to have shown a disposition to renew the combat; but Grenville quickly turned their own captured cannon on them, and a few rounds sufficed to dislodge them. Panic ensued, and a general stampede, in which arms and accoutrements were flung aside, concluded the fight of Stratton. By this decisive victory, not only was Cornwall cleared of the enemy and secured for the King, but the whole of Devon, excepting a few of the principal towns, fell into the hands of the Royalists. The King was not unmindful of the gallant Sir Bevill’s share in the fight, but wrote him a gracious letter promising further proofs of his bounty and favour.

The following June, the Cornish army joined that under Prince Maurice and the Marquis of Hertford at Chard, and soon Taunton, Bridgwater, Glastonbury, and Dunster Castle were taken. They then proceeded to attack Sir William Waller, who had occupied an extremely strong position on the lofty ridge of Lansdown, near Bath. There he had raised a breastwork behind which his guns were posted, and he had so distributed his foot and horse as to defend all points of access. Realising the tremendous strength of his position, the Royalists wisely resolved not to break themselves upon it, and were actually turning to resume their march when the whole body of Waller’s horse came thundering down the hill upon their rear and flank, striking them with a crash they could not withstand, and throwing them into disorder from which they could not recover, till Slanning came up with a party of three hundred Cornish musketeers, and with his aid the enemy were beaten off and chased back to the hill again. Hopton now assumed the offensive. The blood of the whole army was beating hotly. It is said that the Cornishmen, under Sir Bevill, coveted Waller’s cannon, and begged at least to be allowed “to fetch off those cannon.” Leave was given, and up the steep height the Cornishmen went with a rush: the horse on the right, the musketeers on the left, and Sir Bevill himself leading the pikes in the centre. In this order the Cornish moved forward, much as they had moved at Stratton, slowly and doggedly. In the face of the enemy’s cannon and small shot from their breastworks, they at length gained the brow of the hill, having sustained two full charges from Waller’s horse, but in the third charge Sir Bevill’s horse had given way; the cohesion of the pikes was broken, and instantly the enemy was in among them, hewing them down; the officers were falling fast, and Sir Bevill himself, sorely wounded and fighting valiantly, was struck out of his saddle by a pole-axe, of which hurt he died very shortly. Young John Grenville, a lad of sixteen, sprang, it is said, into his father’s saddle, and led the charge, and the Cornishmen followed with their swords drawn and with tears in their eyes, swearing they would kill a rebel for every hair of Sir Bevill’s beard; and at last the whole Royalist force surged over Waller’s breastworks, and the victory was theirs.

Never was a man more universally or deservedly beloved than Sir Bevill, and it is said that his untimely death was as bitterly lamented by the Parliamentarian troops as it was by his own followers.

Of a very different character and temperament was his brother, another Sir Richard Grenville, of whose life as a soldier only the very briefest sketch can be given. He seems to have had little in common with the long line of his illustrious predecessors, except their just pride of ancestry and their appetite for fighting; for he was undoubtedly a brave soldier of no little experience and skill. He entered the army at an early age, and left England when he was eighteen, and saw much service in France, Holland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Next he took part in the disastrous expeditions to Cadiz and the Island of Rhe, in both of which he was accompanied by his young cousin, George Monk, who always regarded him as his father-in-arms. Like Sir Bevill, he accompanied Charles I. to Scotland, having also raised a troop of horse; and in 1641 he took a prominent part in suppressing the rebellion in Ireland, when in fire and blood the wretched Irish were made to do penance for their outburst of savagery, to which they had been goaded by Strafford’s imperious rule. Having been recalled to England in 1643 for insubordination to the Marquis of Ormond, Sir Richard pretended to adopt the Parliamentarian cause, and was made a Major-General of Horse; but having learnt all the secrets of their campaign, he treacherously marched his soldiers to Oxford, and joined the King. For such abominable treachery he was rightly denounced, and no epithets were too choice to apply to him. He was, moreover, excepted from all pardon, both as to life and estate. Shortly afterwards he was placed by Prince Rupert in command of the troops that were besieging Plymouth, and it was mainly by his successful tactics that Lord Essex was utterly defeated in Cornwall in 1644, when the King commanded the Cavaliers in person.

After this he was appointed “The King’s General in the West,” a title of which he was justly proud, and which was eventually carved on his tombstone at Ghent. Considering himself thus constituted Commander-in-Chief, he afterwards refused, when called upon to do so by the Prince’s Council, to act in any subordinate position; and hence arose those unhappy dissensions and jealousies which finally wrecked the royal cause in the West. Grenville was placed under arrest, and cashiered from his command without any court-martial. In spite of his overbearing manners and tyrannical conduct, of which frequent complaints had been made, public opinion was strongly in his favour and clamoured for his release, whilst the soldiers refused to be commanded by Hopton or anyone else, and both officers and men, to the number of four thousand, petitioned the Prince in his favour. Sir Richard’s imprisonment and the dissensions that arose in consequence undoubtedly gave the finishing stroke to the war in the West; the service everywhere languished; the soldiers gradually deserted, and Lord Hopton was compelled, after some faint resistance, to disband, and accept of such conditions as the enemy would give. Sir Richard, it must be confessed, represented the worst type of Cavalier. He was frequently actuated by the dictates of a violent and revengeful disposition, and was intriguing and unscrupulous. He died abroad in exile in 1659.

The heroism of young John Grenville, Sir Bevill’s son, in taking command of his father’s regiment at Lansdown when the latter fell mortally wounded, met its recognition a month later at Bristol, when he was knighted. After this he served under his uncle, Sir Richard, at the siege of Plymouth and in Cornwall, and apparently accompanied Charles I. in his march from the West after the defeat of Lord Essex; for the next time we hear of him is at the second battle of Newbury (27th October, 1644), where he narrowly escaped his father’s fate. Being in the thickest of the fight, and having received several other wounds, he was at last felled to the ground with a very dangerous one in the head from a halberd, which rendered him unconscious, and he was left for dead, nor was he discovered until a body of the King’s horse, charging the enemy afresh and beating them off the ground, found him covered with blood and dust, but still living. He was carried to where the King and Prince of Wales were, who sent him to Donnington Castle hard by, to be treated for his wounds; but no sooner were the armies drawn off from the field of battle than the castle itself was besieged by the enemy, and their bullets constantly whistled through the room where the young sufferer lay, during the twelve days which elapsed before the defenders were relieved by the King at the third battle of Newbury. On his recovery from his wounds, Sir John Grenville was promoted to the rank of a Brigadier of Foot, and the following year was appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales, who had formed a strong attachment for him, which proved lifelong. He remained with the Prince accordingly during the rest of the war, and accompanied him in his flight to the Isles of Scilly, and afterwards to Jersey.

Towards the end of the year 1648 the Scilly Islands revolted from the Parliament, and became the last rallying point of the Royalists under Grenville, who was appointed Governor to hold them for the King; but he had scarcely been there three weeks when tidings reached him of the King’s execution. With passionate indignation, he at once proclaimed Charles II. King, and could find no words hard enough for Cromwell and the Regicides. He fortified the islands, already strong from their natural position and existing earthworks; and in this he was ably assisted by his brother, Bernard, then barely eighteen, who had run away from his tutor, and lay concealed at Menabilly, near Fowey, whence he managed to carry considerable reinforcements for the defence of the islands. For two years Sir John carried on a guerilla warfare against the English republic, and seized many merchant and other vessels; but when Van Tromp made overtures to him to cede the islands to the States General, and offered £100,000 as a bribe, Grenville indignantly refused to yield an inch of British soil to a stranger, saying he was there “to contend against treason, not to imitate it.” Admiral Blake, who was in pursuit of Van Tromp, next appeared, and again attempted negotiations for the cession of the islands, but Grenville was resolved to hold them for the King alone, and for a whole month made such a stubborn resistance that when at last Blake prevailed, Grenville secured terms so exceptionally favourable to the Royalists that the Parliament refused to ratify them, till Blake insisted and threatened to resign his commission.

Sir John Grenville’s future career and the prominent part he took, in conjunction with his cousin, George Monk, in the Restoration of Charles II., who created him Earl of Bath, and showered countless honours and endowments upon him, do not belong to a paper confined to giving the fighting qualities of the family. These, however, found expression in his two sons, Charles, Lord Lansdown, and John, afterwards created Lord Granville of Potheridge. The latter was in the navy, and took part in most of the naval engagements of his time, behaving with great bravery and skill, particularly at the siege of Cork in 1690. Lord Lansdown took part in the wars of Hungary against the Turks, and was present at the battle of Kornenberch, the siege of Vienna, at Baracan, Gran, and several smaller engagements, in all of which he displayed such unwonted valour and intrepidity for one so young, that the Emperor Leopold, as a special mark of honour, created him a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, with the distinction of bearing his paternal coat-of-arms upon the breast of the Roman Eagle. He also took part in the constant reprisals, which marked the reign of William III., by the English and French upon one another’s shores; and in one of these assisted in the bombardment of his ancestral Norman town, Granville, and in another in the defence of Teignmouth and Torbay.

The fighting spirit of the family was still handed on in another member of the family—a second Sir Bevill, the eldest son of the Honourable Bernard Granville (as the name was now spelt), who appears to have inherited all the courage of the grandfather whose name he bore. On leaving Cambridge, he entered the army, and served with distinction in his uncle, Lord Bath’s, regiment in Ireland and Flanders, and was knighted by James II. at the head of that regiment on Hounslow Heath on the 22nd of May, 1686. When Lord Bath revolted to the side of the Prince of Orange, Sir Bevill was despatched to Jersey to disarm the Papists and secure the island—a mission which he carried out with complete success. After this he took part in the Continental war against the French, and behaved with conspicuous bravery at the battle of Steinkirk, August 4th, 1692. The battle was going against King William, when Prince Casimer of Nassau, who was in command of the troops, galloped back to the English in his right rear, and begged them to advance, as Count Solmes refused to bring up his infantry. Rapidly forming Bath’s regiment, with the pikes in the centre and the grenadiers and musketeers on either flank, Sir Bevill put himself at its head, and, closely followed by the Buffs, moved out from the line. He was only just in time. Baron Pibrach, the Colonel of the Luxemburgers, had been desperately wounded whilst endeavouring to rally his men, who were flying in disorder, hotly pursued by the French. Suddenly out of the crowd of fugitives hurrying to the rear there emerged a line of glistening steel, and Bath’s regiment, scarcely discernible from its foes in its scarlet stockings and breeches, its blue coats and buff cross-belts, strode sternly forward, its three red banners waving overhead. A hail of musket balls smote it in the face; a storm of iron from the batteries mangled and tore its flanks; but it pressed irresistibly on, and amid a hurricane of cheers that drowned even the roar of the cannons, hurled the French infantry from its path, and recovered the position. But only for a moment. Again and again the French batteries worked up in dense masses along Granville’s front, only to surge back again, rent and maimed by a pitiless fire. So for another hour the carnage grew, till Prince Casimer, galloping to Granville’s side, gave him the order to retire. It was six in the evening. The allied drums were everywhere beating the retreat. William had at last given up the struggle, and the columns were slowly winding to the rear. There was no pursuit. Sir Bevill’s gallantry was long remembered and talked of with grateful admiration by the British camp fires.

This paper must now close with a brief quotation from a letter written by one who was the last but one of the representatives of this ancient house in the senior male line, namely, George Granville (younger brother of the last-mentioned Sir Bevill), afterwards created Baron Lansdown of Bideford. Although no opportunity arose for him to distinguish himself otherwise than in politics and as a poet, the old fighting spirit was not lacking in him, and he was eager to gain his father’s permission to take up arms against the Prince of Orange:—

Sir,—You having no prospect of obtaining a commission for me can no
way alter or cool my desire at this important juncture to venture my
life in some manner or other for my King and my country. I cannot bear
living under the reproach of lying obscure and idle in a country
retirement when every man, who has the least sense of honour, should
be preparing for the field. You may remember, Sir, with what
reluctance I submitted to your commands upon Monmouth’s rebellion,
when no importunity could prevail with you to permit me to leave the
Academy. I was “too young to be hazarded”; but give me leave to say it
is glorious at any age to die for one’s country, and the sooner, the
nobler the sacrifice. I am now older by three years. My uncle Bath was
not so old when he was left among the slain at the battle of Newbury,
nor you yourself, Sir, when you made your escape from your tutor’s to
join your brother at the defence of Scilly. The same cause is now come
round about again. The King has been misled; let those who have misled
him be answerable for it. Nobody can deny but he is sacred in his own
person, and it is every honest man’s duty to defend it. You are
pleased to say it is yet doubtful if the Hollanders are rash enough to
make such an attempt. But be that as it will, I beg leave to insist
upon it that I may be presented to his Majesty, as one whose utmost
ambition it is to devote his life to his service and my country’s,
after the example of my ancestors.

No unworthy extract, this, surely, wherewith to close the annals of six centuries of stainless loyalty in a family whose motto has always been: “Deo, Patriæ, Amicis.”

ROGER GRANVILLE.

THE AUTHOR OF _BRITANNIA’S| PASTORALS_ AND TAVISTOCK.[5] | |BY THE REV. D. P. ALFORD, M.A.

If beautiful country could beget good poets, Tavistock ought to abound in them. For, on one side, there is Dartmoor, with its rugged grandeur, stretching out protecting arms to Brent Tor and Whitchurch Down; on the other side, there is the majestic Tamar, winding through its deeply-wooded valley, from Latchley Weir, past New Bridge and the Morwell Rocks, to Gawton Quay; whilst through the midst, the sportive Tavy runs down from its lonely cleave, and gathering up the Walla on its way, with bright and tawny waters, now creeps, now rushes past, to break through the beetling cliffs beyond Crowndale, and glide beneath the Ramsham woods, to its happy meeting with the Walkham, and thence to the copse-covered banks at Denham Bridge.

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Footnote 5:

_Chief authorities for this paper_: Dugdale and Oliver’s _Monasticon_;
old documents connected with Tavistock, recovered in ancient oak chest
in 1886; various papers on Tavistock Worthies, in the _Transactions of
the Devonshire Association_; Mr. A. H. Bullen’s “Life of William
Browne,” in the _Dictionary of National Biography_; and Mr. Wm. Carew
Hazlitt’s Introduction to the Roxburghe Club Edition of Browne’s
Works, 1868.

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Perhaps it was the rich and varied beauty round his home that forced some scraps of verse from the rugged soul of our Puritan incumbent, Thomas Larkham. At all events, two hundred years later, Vicar Bray was versifying in the quiet seclusion of his vicarage, and inscribing his best lines on slate slabs for the garden walls; and at the same time, Mrs. Bray was writing her local tales in imitation of Scott, sending letters to Southey about the borders of the Tamar and Tavy, and commending to his kindly notice her poetical _protegée_, the modest and gentle maid-servant, Mary Collins. Then, also, Miss Rachel Evans was writing verse, as well as prose; and her brother-in-law, Mr. H. S. Stokes, was beginning his career as a west-country poet here in Tavistock.

WEST VIEW OF TAVISTOCK ABBEY, 1734.
(_From an Engraving by S. and N. Buck._)
]

Transcription: [For the most noble John, Duke and Earl of Bedford, Marquess of Tavistock, Baron Russel of Thornbaugh, and Baron Howland of Streatham. Proprietor of these Remains. This Prospect is humbly Inscrib’d by Your Grace’s most Dutiful, and Obedient Servants, Sam^l & Nath^l Buck. Ordigarius or Orgarius Duke of Devonshire & Cornwall, whose Daughter was married to K. Edgar, Very probably kept his Court here, till his son Odulph built this Abbey Anno 961, for then the whole Mannor of Tavistock, & Jurisdiction thereof, were given to the Monastery with view of Frank Pledge, Gallowes Pillory assize of Bread Beer &c. The Church was dedicated to St. Mary &. St Rumon. The Danes burnt it but it was soon rebuilt. In the Reign of Ed. I. The abbot claim’d the aforesaid Priveleges, which were by that King allow’d & confirm’d. There were some famous Men Abbots thereof, particularly two Bishops & one Earl of Devonshire; of the Courtenay family, Lectures were herein read in the Saxon language to preserve it in Memory; it was of the Dignity of the Mitred Abbots, who sat as Barons in Parliament. Their Power and Priveleges continued till the Dissolution by K. H. 8. who gave it to John L’^d Russel, in which Noble Family it still continues. Annual Value £902 5 7¾.

S. & N. buck delim et sculp 1733 ]

All these, however, are local celebrities; and our one poet of public fame is William Browne, the reverent disciple of Sidney and Spenser; the personal friend of Wither and Drayton, Selden and Ben Jonson; the poet’s poet, who suggested more than one idea to Milton, was admired by Keats, and highly commended by Mrs. Browning. He was a bright little man, beloved by his brother-poets for his simple manners and gentle character; such another as Hartley Coleridge, without his weakness of will; so that he was known amongst them as “Bonny Browne” and “Sweet Willy of the Western Main.”

William Browne probably came of a knightly family near Great Torrington; but he was born here in Tavistock in 1591—just the most stirring time for minds and morals that England has ever known. The Reformation had stimulated the conscience, as the New Learning had liberated the mind; and then our wonderful deliverance from the mighty power of Spain had produced an extraordinary national exultation. What wonder that this newly-awakened energy should find expression in Spenser and Shakspere, in Hooker and Bacon, and their innumerable, not unworthy satellites?

But apart from the general excitement, Tavistock had its own special atmosphere of stirring influences, both from the past and in the present. The inscribed stones in the vicarage garden show that the country was occupied by a Gaelic tribe of Celts early in the Roman times. But the town owed its fame, and probably its very existence, to the great Benedictine monastery, founded by Earl Ordulf, and sanctified by the relics of St. Rumon in the days of Edgar the Peaceable. For almost six centuries it had reflected, and even, for a short while, directly influenced, through its abbots, the changeful course of England’s progress. Two of its earlier abbots were leading statesmen, as well as active prelates. Lyfing, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, was Canute’s fellow-traveller to Rome in 1026, and the staunch friend of the patriotic Earl Godwin. Aldred, also Bishop of Worcester, and then Archbishop of York, was the wise counsellor of Edward the Confessor and of Harold, and the brave rebuker of William I.; he was the great church-builder and church-reformer of his time, and he was the first English Bishop to visit Jerusalem.

Our later abbots often illustrate public feeling, though they could not guide it as these two had done. Thus the general confusion at the close of Henry III.’s reign found such a bad sample in our monastery that Abbot John Chubbe was suspended in 1265, and deposed in 1269. The growing luxury and indifference of the fourteenth century was seen too plainly in Abbot John de Courtenay, who was reproved by the good Bishop Grandisson, in 1348, for neglecting his duties to the abbey and alienating its property, whilst he kept dogs for hunting. Bishop Brantyngham’s strong injunctions to Abbot Thomas Cullyng, in 1387, to restore discipline and to keep the monastic rules, show that disorder and dissipation had been tending from bad to worse.

But there is a brighter side to this picture of the past, and most of our abbots were more learnedly or more clerically disposed. Some had been slowly collecting a good library—an early promise of the present Public Library, the best, for the size of the town, in the West of England. Others had fostered the “Saxon School,” probably founded in the early days of the thirteenth century, and still represented by the Grammar School. In the spring of 1318, under Abbot John Campbell, Bishop Bronescombe consecrated the Parish Church, which had been rebuilt in the beautiful Decorated style of the day; and in the autumn of the same year, he came again to consecrate the Conventual Church, which, in its grand proportions, was almost a rival of Exeter Cathedral. Under Robert Bonus, in 1325, was established the Guild of the Brothers and Sisters of the Light of St. Mary in the Parish Church; and in 1370, Abbot Stephen Langdon showed his concern for the good of the town by appealing to the faithful to help in restoring the stone bridge over the rude waters of the Tavy. John Denyngton probably rebuilt much of the Abbey in the Perpendicular style then in vogue; and he certainly added to his own dignity and to that of his monastery by gaining the permission of Henry VI., in 1458, to apply to the Pope, Pius II., for the privilege of wearing the pontificalia. This, our first mitred abbot, like his predecessor, Allan of Cornwall, two hundred years earlier, had come back to Tavistock from presiding over the dependent Priory of Tresco, in the Isles of Scilly. Abbot John Banham was more ambitious than Denyngton; in 1513 a grant of Henry VIII. made him a spiritual peer, as Baron Hurdwick, and four years later, a bull of Leo X. exempted him from episcopal visitation. It was probably to Banham that the abbey owed an honour more considerable and more in keeping with the spirit of the age—the setting up within its precincts of the first printing-press in the West of England.

But the glory of our abbey had scarcely reached its height, before it faded suddenly and for ever. Anticipating the blow which shattered the larger monasteries in the spring of 1539, our abbot, John Peryn, not emulous of the fate of the abbots of Glastonbury, Woburn, and Fountains, assembled his twenty monks in the Chapter-house on March 20th, and then and there resigned all their claims into the hands of the King. For this ready surrender they were rewarded with their lives and various pensions. With his pension of £100 a year, the abbot withdrew to Stonepost, in West Street, and was probably the “Sir John Peryn” who, in 1543, was paid £6 as “Jesus’ Priest.”

When William Browne was a lad, middle-aged men must have known the last Abbot of Tavistock; and old people could recall—the poorer sort with regretful sighs, the good old times, when the frequent services still sounded from the Abbey Church, and the monks distributed alms at the arched gateway, beneath the present library. Even Browne himself, a child of the Renaissance, who hated superstition and loved the Pagan mythology, could grudge the misuse of sacred buildings; and amongst other evils done by the Tavy in flood, he tells us how the stream—

Here, as our wicked age doth sacriledge,
Helpes downe an Abbey.

But though he was fond of Chaucer and our older poets, and though he felt the influence of the stately ruins that surrounded his school-house, he loved nature more than art, and was too full of present life to care very much for the past. As a boy with boys, he would spend his holidays breaking away from

An Orchard, whence by stealth he takes
A churlish Farmer’s Plums, sweet Peares or Grapes;

chasing the “nimble Squirrel” in “Blanchdown Woods”; or, with his rod, following his “native Tavy” in her “many mazes, intricate meanders.” But as thought came with years, he would be stealing away alone to cherish his “Spring of Poesie” with Sidney’s _Sonnets_ or Spenser’s _Faërie Queen_, as he wandered over the “Dazied Downes” that “sweetly environed” his home, or nestled beneath some shade in “Sweet Ina’s Combe,” half lulled to sleep by the Walla’s murmurings, or rousing himself to compose “the pleasing cadence of a line” in tune with those gentle murmurings.

Nor, indeed, had all the honour of Tavistock departed with the overthrow of her abbey. The Russells, who succeeded to the property, did not neglect the duties connected with it. They began—as they have continued—to maintain the religious and educational endowments. They supplied the borough with statesmen for Members of Parliament, in the generous patriot, Lord William Russell, in Lord John, the leader of Reform, and in the thoughtful, far-sighted Lord Arthur. They improved the town with wide streets and public buildings, and, more recently, with a fine statue, the first in the country, of Francis Drake.

Browne was but a little lad of five when his greatest townsman finished his heroic course in a sea-grave off Nombre de Dios, in 1596; but he kept his exploits in remembrance, and presently celebrated him as the—

—valiant, well-resolvèd Man,
Seeking new paths i’ th’ pathlesse Ocean.

Besides the Drakes, there were several families of distinction in and about Tavistock when Browne was a boy: there were Slannings, Kellys, and Champernownes near by; and in the parish, Glanvills, Maynards, Peeks, and Fitz.

In that year, 1596, there was born in the mansion at Fitzford the daughter of John Fitz and Bridget Courtenay, who, as Lady Howard, was to be so cruelly maligned by false rumours and fictitious romance. The family had been long settled at Fitzford, and a John Fitz was M.P. for Tavistock in 1427. Lady Howard’s grandfather married Mary Sydenham, of Brympton, Somerset; and at the back of their quiet tomb in the Parish Church is the kneeling figure of her father, Sir John Fitz. He was but a youth of fifteen at his father’s death, in 1589; and his riotous, wasted life was an ironical commentary on his kneeling posture. After a wild and reckless youth, in 1699, when he was twenty-five, he killed Nicholas Slanning, of Bickley, in a cowardly brawl. Coming home from a short sojourn abroad, he was more quiet for a while; but presently, returning from London, whither he had gone to be knighted at the Coronation of James I., he was more dissipated than ever. He drove his wife and daughters to seek refuge at Powderham, and upset the usually decent parish with drunkenness and disorder. At last, on a second journey to London, in a fit of mad panic, he killed the innkeeper at Twickenham, and then so stabbed himself that he died in a few days.

His nine-year-old daughter, the prey of greedy guardians, after being forced into early marriages, enjoyed some years of wedded happiness with her third husband, Sir Charles Howard, fourth son of the Earl of Suffolk. Then, having suffered years of neglect and annoyance from her fourth husband, the clever soldier, but treacherous politician, Sir Richard, brother of the chivalrous Sir Bevil Grenville, at last, after Fitzford had been sacked by the Roundheads, and her husband had fled the country, she settled down in her old home for twenty-five quiet years, from 1646 to 1671. Her son, George Howard, managed her property, joined her in such local contributions as that, in 1670, for the “redemption of captives in Turkey,” and represented Tavistock with Lord William Russell in 1660. But as he died some weeks before her, Lady Howard left her large estates bordering the Tavy, the mansion of Fitzford, the pleasant country house of Walreddon, with many goodly farms, Browne’s favourite Ramsham amongst them, to her first cousin, Sir William Courtenay, of Powderham.

It was about the year 1606 that William Browne left the Grammar School for Exeter College, Oxford. He did not then matriculate or take his degree, but he made friends with his colleagues, several of whom showed their poetical taste in commendatory verses to his _Pastorals_ in 1613. Meanwhile, in November, 1611, Browne had passed on to the Inner Temple, where he largely increased his poetical acquaintance. He was on good terms with Ben Jonson, Chapman, and Massinger amongst our dramatists, and was therefore probably known to Shakspere; but his most intimate friends were John Davies, the able author of _Nosce Teipsum_; Christopher Brooke, the close ally of the famous poet and preacher, John Donne; George Wither, and Michael Drayton. He and Brooke, in 1613, published in one volume their elegies on the death of Prince Henry. He had much in common with the early poems of Wither: their _Pastorals_ exhibit the same charming simplicity, the same full content in verse-making, the same indifference to irresponsive maidens. These lines of Browne:—

And gentle Swaine, some counsel take of me;
Love not where still thou maist; love who loves thee;

strike the same note as that of Wither’s spirited song:—

Shall I wasting in despair,
Die because a woman’s fair?
. . . . . .
If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?

To Drayton, as his “Honor’d Friend,” Browne addressed some verses introductory to the second part of the _Polyolbion_. Regretting the loss to letters when great Eliza died, with Chapman’s _Homer_ in mind, he boasts that we can still render the classics into English without loss:—

Whilst our full language, musical and high,
Speaks, as themselves, their best of Poesy.

Browne’s regret at the general falling-off since the death of Elizabeth suggests that the verses in her honour, which were removed with the plastering from Tavistock Parish Church in 1845, may have been amongst his earliest efforts. They ended with these flattering words:—

This! This was she, that in despite of Death,
Lives still ador’d, admir’d Elizabeth.
Spain’s rod, Rome’s ruin, Netherland’s relief;
Heaven’s gem, Earth’s joy, World’s wonder, Nature’s chief.

Browne’s elegy on Prince Henry was reprinted as one of the songs in the first book of his _Britannia’s Pastorals_, which was also published in 1613, with commendatory verses from Drayton and Brooke and the learned Selden, besides those from his college friends. In doing the same kindly office for the second book, in 1616, Ben Jonson spoke thus highly of the care and finish of Browne’s work:—

which is so good
Upon th’ Exchange of Letters, that I wou’d
More of our Writers would, like thee, not swell
With the _how much_ they set forth, but th’ _how well_.

Other verses prefixed to this book came from Tavistock, and were written by Sir John Glanvill, probably Browne’s relation, and an old schoolfellow.

After the Fitz, the Glanvill family was the most important in Tavistock. Settled at Holwell, in Whitchurch, for many generations, about 1550 they sent a younger son into the town as a merchant. His son, John, passed from an attorney’s office to the Bar, and in 1598, two years before his death, he was made a Justice of the Common Pleas. In 1615, the fine Jacobean monument against the south wall of the chancel was erected to his memory by his widow, probably in gratitude to her sons, who in that year had conveyed to her Sortridge, her own family estate, also in Whitchurch, probably forfeited by her second marriage; for in the interval she had married Sir Francis Godolphin, and become a second time a widow. She occupied a dower house in Barley Market Street, and her second name still lingers in the “Dolvin Road,” across the Tavy. The Judge, Prince tells us, lived in part of the Abbey, this being, most likely, the Abbey House, which Oliver says was occupied in 1635 by Serjeant Maynard. The Barton at Kilworthy was bought by Judge Glanvill, but it was his eldest son, Sir Francis, who built the mansion and laid out the terrace gardens, of which some charming portions are still in use. This Sir Francis Glanvill sat, as M.P. for Tavistock, in 1625 and 1628, with the great Commoner, John Pym. On January 21st, 1626, his son, Francis, was baptized at Mary Tavy, by reason of the plague raging so fiercely at Tavistock. So dreadful was the scourge, that six hundred people died in twelve months; and the little town had scarcely recovered its normal population in a hundred and fifty years. The younger Francis dying without issue, left Kilworthy to his nephew, Francis Kelly; and he left it to the Manatons, who held it till it was bought by the Russells about 1770. By his sisters, daughters, and grand-daughters, Judge Glanvill’s family became allied to the Brownes, Hamlyns, and Glubbs of Tavistock, the Grylls of Launceston, to Heles, Eastcourts, and Polwheles; to the Fowells, the Sawles of Penrice, and the Doidges of Hurlesditch; besides the Kellys and Manatons. One of his sisters was the second wife of Robert Knight, probably the first _married_ Vicar of Tavistock; and his third son, George, was Vicar from 1662 to 1673.

Sir John Glanvill, the second son, was equally distinguished in law and politics. He was made Recorder of Plymouth in 1614, Serjeant in 1637, and Recorder of Bristol in 1640. As M.P. for Plymouth from 1614 to 1628, he was attached to the country party with Elliott and Pym, and he had charge of the Petition of Right before the Lords. Returned for Bristol in 1640, he was chosen Speaker of the Short Parliament, as a man of reasonable judgment and soothing speech; but having joined the King at Oxford in 1643, from 1645 to 1648 he was imprisoned in the Tower as a delinquent. He was re-appointed King’s Serjeant at the Restoration, and died soon after at Broad Hinton, his estate in Wiltshire. It was this worthy fellow-townsman who, in 1616, addressed William Browne in verses overflowing with kindly appreciation, and beginning:—

Ingenious Swaine! that highly dost adorne
Clear Tavy! on whose brinck we both were borne!

Another eminent fellow-townsman, John Maynard, might have been with Browne at the Grammar School, and certainly followed him to Exeter College and to the Inns of Court. Like Sir John Glanvill, Maynard was a man of mark, both in law and politics; but he was more of a time-server. He was clever enough to be leader of the Western Circuit during fifty of the most turbulent years of our annals. He was “Protector’s Serjeant” under Cromwell; “Ancient Serjeant” under Charles II. and James II.; and “Lord Commissioner” after the Revolution of 1688. He also sat in every Parliament from the first of Charles I. to the first of William and Mary. He was presented to the new King at Whitehall when he was nearly ninety; and William observed that he must have outlived all the lawyers of his time. “Yes, sire,” he promptly replied; “and if your Highness had not come over to help us, I should have outlived the law, too.” As Maynard took part both in the impeachment of Strafford and also of Sir Henry Vane, it is no wonder that Roscommon, Strafford’s nephew and godson, should write of him:—

The robe was summoned, Maynard at the head,
In legal murder none so deeply read;

or that the author of _Hudibras_ should enquire, in his witty doggrel:—

Did not the learned Glynne and Maynard,
To make good subjects traitors, strain hard?

It is to Maynard’s credit that he spent part of his fortune in founding a free school at Bere Alston, which he had represented in Parliament. Maynard and Courtenay are names still pleasantly associated in Tavistock with provision for the deserving poor, in convenient almshouses; whilst an exhibition to help some “Grammar scholar,” “of the best ingenuity and towardliness,” on his way to the University, is a lasting memorial of Sir John Glanvill.

In 1626, Browne probably received from another old schoolfellow, Richard Peeke, a copy of his _Three to One_, a short and vigorous account of his recent exploits in Spain. This Richard Peeke, a gentleman of good family in Tavistock, had volunteered, in 1625, for the ill-starred expedition to Cadiz, and being taken prisoner, by his prowess in defeating three fully-armed Spaniards with a quarter-staff, had won his life and liberty, and was presently celebrated in ballads as “Manly Peeke,” and in a fine old play as “Dick of Devonshire.” He was invited by King Philip IV. to serve him by land or sea, but Peeke said he must return to the wife and children who were sighing for him in Tavistock; so he came back to settle down quietly in the old home, and, as one of our pewter flagons tells, he was churchwarden in 1638.

And what was William Browne doing all this time? In 1614 he had written his masque of “Ulysses and Circe” for the Inner Temple, where it was performed 13th January, 1614–5. The subject may have been suggested by Chapman’s _Odyssey_, printed in 1614, or by Samuel Daniel’s lyric, “Ulysses and the Siren” (1605), and it is more than likely that Browne’s masque gave Milton some hints for his “Comus.” In 1614 he also contributed seven Eclogues to the “Shepheard’s Pipe,” the other contributors being C. Brooke, Davies, and Wither. Browne worked into his first Eclogue the “Jonathas” of the little-known Occleve, and the fourth is an Elegy on Thomas, the son of Sir Peter Manwood.

Our little and learned poet, as Prince describes him, is said to have been appointed, in 1615, Pursuivant of Wards and Liveries for life. He married a daughter of Sir Thomas Eversfield, and had two sons, who both died young. In 1624 he returned to Oxford as tutor to the Hon. Robert Dormer, afterwards Earl of Carnarvon, who was killed at Newbury in 1643. Browne, being thirty-three, matriculated from Exeter College on 30th April, 1624, and on 16th November took his M.A., being commended for his knowledge of humane letters and the fine arts. He seems to have gone abroad with his pupil, and in 1640 he wrote from Dorking to Sir Benjamin Ruddyerd, congratulating him on his “late speech in Parliament, wherein they believe the spirit which inspired the Reformation, and genius which dictated the Magna Charta, possessed you. In my poore cell and sequestration from all businesse, I blesse God and praye for more such members in the Commonwealth.” Anthony Wood says he was afterwards domesticated with the Herberts at Wilton, and prospered there; and it has been fairly proved that he, and not Ben Jonson, wrote that most perfect epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke:—

Underneath this sable hearse
Lies the subject of all verse,
Sidney’s sister, Pembroke’s mother;
Death! ere thou hast slain another,
Learn’d and fair, and good as she,
Time will throw a dart at thee.

We do not know when or where our poet ended his days, but if, oppressed with sorrow or sickness, he turned with longing to the native scenes which in early youth he had loved so well, it is likely enough that he is referred to in the simple entry of the Tavistock register:—“27th March, 1643, William Browne was buried.”

As poets will, Browne went on writing all through life, but he published nothing new after 1616. He left in MS. a third book of the Pastorals, which was first printed in 1852, and a number of smaller poems, sonnets, epistles, visions, allegories, epigrams, epitaphs, and some jocular pieces. Amongst the last were the Lydford stanzas, which contained the first notice of the wild Gubbingses, and the sharp satire on Lydford Law; about 1630 they were “commonly sung by many a fiddler” as a Devonshire ballad.

Why did Browne print nothing new after 1616? He had not lost the poetic gift, for much that he left in MS. is as good as anything he ever wrote. We have examples in the first and second songs of the third book of the Pastorals, and nothing that he published is brighter than the song in the Lansdowne MS. with the pleasant refrain:

Welcome! Welcome! do I sing!
Far more welcome than the Spring!
He that parteth from you never,
Shall enjoy a Spring for ever!”

In truth, William Browne was, as his friend Drayton styled him, “a rightly-born Poet.” If, like the “Faërie Queene,” his Pastorals are vague and diffuse in narrative, and deficient in human interest, yet, like the “Faërie Queene,” they abound in happy visions, and fine descriptions, and wholesome thoughts, expressed in easy, flowing melody. Browne was akin to Keats and Tennyson in his love of well-sounding words and sonorous lines. It gave him keen pleasure—

To linger on each line’s enticing graces.

And his enjoyment of the simple beauties of nature was as true and heartfelt as Cowper’s. Vivid pictures of country scenes, and homely sketches of country life, are presented to us again and again in verse that is always clear and lucid, though soft and sweet, or rough and rugged, according to the subject. His carefully-constructed verses, in their clearness and in their varying tone, would really seem to have been attuned to the “voiceful Tavy” which he loved so dearly and celebrated so gladly, and by whose side many of them were written.

Why, then, with such a gift, so obviously unexhausted, did he decline to publish anything after the appearance of the second book of _Britannia’s Pastorals_, in 1616? Probably he felt, as S. Daniel had felt before him, that a people entirely devoted to action and incident could have little taste for pure poetry. Even as early as 1613 he had described a poor poet, sitting up late, wasting ink and paper, and wearing out “many a gray goose quill,” in the vain hope of immortal renown:—

When Loe! (O Fate!) his worke not seeming fit
To walk in equipage with better wit,
Is kept from light, there gnawne by Moathes and Wormes,
At which he frets.

And, in 1623, when he wrote his commendatory verses for Massinger’s _Duke of Millaine_, he was convinced that there was no demand for any poetry but the drama:—

I am snapt already, and may go my way;
The Poet-Critic’s come; I hear him say:
This Youth’s mistook, the Author’s work’s a Play.

It would be easy to make a pleasant little volume of selections from the more striking or more beautiful passages in Browne’s Pastorals, but here we can hardly find room for half-a-dozen specimens. Of death he writes:—

Death is no stranger,
And generous Spirits never fear for danger.

Of cheerful content:—

Where there’s content, ’tis ever Holy-day.

Of the Good Shepherd he says that from

the stem
Of that sweet singer of Jerusalem,
Came the best Shepherd ever flocks did keepe,
Who yeelded up his life to save his sheepe.

In Book 2 we have such satire as this, of the “fawning citizen,”

Who “lives a Knave to leave his sonne a Knight”;

such strong lines as this of the sea:—

The vast insatiate Sea doth still devour;

such vivid pictures as this:—

The whistling Reeds upon the water’s side,
Shot up their sharpe heads in a stately pride;

or sweetly-soothing verses like these, on the stillness of nightfall:—

Onely the curled Streames soft chidings kept;
And little Gales that from the greene leafe swept
Dry summer dust, in fearefull whisp’rings stir’d,
As loth to waken any singing bird.

Such passages as these must be admired by every lover of nature, but the poet will always be doubly dear to those who have lived amongst the scenes he describes so tenderly and so faithfully. My own feeling of indebtedness to one whose poetry had given a sort of sacredness to his native haunts was thus expressed when I was in clerical charge of the Tamar side of Tavistock, more than thirty years ago:—

Nature’s true Poet, blest with fancies sweet,
And voice as swift and changeful as our brooks,
We country swains cast often wondering looks
On those great singers that around thee meet;
For Spenser, Sidney, thy chief teachers were,
And Wither, Drayton, Jonson, called thee friend;
And, like enough, kind Shakespere did commend
Thy “modest muse.” And yet, we all may share
The scenes of beauty that inspired thy lay;
For still, by “Blanchdown Wood” the Tamar sweeps;
Still trickle streamlets down the “Dartmoor” steeps,
And sing blithe music to the lambs at play;
Still through “sweet Ina’s Combe” the Walla leaps,
Hurrying to greet the Tavy on its way.

D. P. ALFORD.

THE BLOWING UP OF GREAT
TORRINGTON CHURCH.

BY GEORGE M. DOE.

The town of Great Torrington played a not inconspicuous part in the Civil Wars, the culminating and dramatic incident of which was the blowing up of the Parish Church after the defeat and flight of the Royalist forces who were then in the town. The fight at Torrington, too, was the last important engagement of the campaign in the West, being the final decisive blow to the Royalist cause there. A very accurate and full account of the whole of the doings in North Devon during this stirring time is to be found in the late Mr. R. W. Cotton’s invaluable work on _Barnstaple and the Northern part of Devonshire during the Great Civil War_, 1642–1646, and the incidents more particularly relating to Great Torrington were collected by me and embodied in a little book entitled, _A few Pages of Great Torrington History_, 1642–1646, and the blowing up of the Church is also dealt with in my paper in the _Transactions of the Devonshire Association for the year 1894_.

Though of far less importance than the final battle, there were two other previous engagements at Great Torrington. The first of these took place in December, 1642, when a party of Parliamentarian horse and foot from Barnstaple attacked the Royalists then in the town. From the varying accounts given by each party, it is, however, uncertain which side came off best in the encounter.

There are entries of burials in the Parish Register of Great Torrington of this date, one being that of Christopher Awberry, a trooper of Sir Ralph Hopton, who was killed by the “goeing off of a muskett unawares upon the maine gard,” and was buried “Souldier Like,” and another of Thomas Hollamore, “slaine by ye goeing off of a muskett.”