Produced by Donald Lainson
WESTWARD HO!
by Charles Kingsley
TO
THE RAJAH SIR JAMES BROOKE, K.C.B.
AND
GEORGE AUGUSTUS SELWYN, D.D.
BISHOP OF NEW ZEALAND
THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED
By one who (unknown to them) has no other method of expressing his
admiration and reverence for their characters.
That type of English virtue, at once manful and godly, practical and
enthusiastic, prudent and self-sacrificing, which he has tried to depict
in these pages, they have exhibited in a form even purer and more
heroic than that in which he has drest it, and than that in which it was
exhibited by the worthies whom Elizabeth, without distinction of rank or
age, gathered round her in the ever glorious wars of her great reign.
C. K.
FEBRUARY, 1855.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
I. HOW MR. OXENHAM SAW THE WHITE BIRD
II. HOW AMYAS CAME HOME THE FIRST TIME
III. OF TWO GENTLEMEN OF WALES, AND HOW THEY HUNTED WITH THE HOUNDS, AND
YET RAN WITH THE DEER
IV. THE TWO WAYS OF BEING CROST IN LOVE
V. CLOVELLY COURT IN THE OLDEN TIME
VI. THE COMBES OF THE FAR WEST
VII. THE TRUE AND TRAGICAL HISTORY OF MR. JOHN OXENHAM OF PLYMOUTH
VIII. HOW THE NOBLE BROTHERHOOD OF THE ROSE WAS FOUNDED
IX. HOW AMYAS KEPT HIS CHRISTMAS DAY
X. HOW THE MAYOR OF BIDEFORD BAITED HIS HOOK WITH HIS OWN FLESH
XI. HOW EUSTACE LEIGH MET THE POPE'S LEGATE
XII. HOW BIDEFORD BRIDGE DINED AT ANNERY HOUSE
XIII. HOW THE GOLDEN HIND CAME HOME AGAIN
XIV. HOW SALVATION YEO SLEW THE KING OF THE GUBBINGS
XV. HOW MR. JOHN BRIMBLECOMBE UNDERSTOOD THE NATURE OF AN OATH
XVI. THE MOST CHIVALROUS ADVENTURE OF THE GOOD SHIP ROSE
XVII. HOW THEY CAME TO BARBADOS, AND FOUND NO MEN THEREIN
XVIII. HOW THEY TOOK THE PEARLS AT MARGARITA
XIX. WHAT BEFELL AT LA GUAYRA
XX. SPANISH BLOODHOUNDS AND ENGLISH MASTIFFS
XXI. HOW THEY TOOK THE COMMUNION UNDER THE TREE AT HIGUEROTE
XXII. THE INQUISITION IN THE INDIES
XXIII. THE BANKS OF THE META
XXIV. HOW AMYAS WAS TEMPTED OF THE DEVIL
XXV. HOW THEY TOOK THE GOLD-TRAIN
XXVI. HOW THEY TOOK THE GREAT GALLEON
XXVII. HOW SALVATION YEO FOUND HIS LITTLE MAID AGAIN
XXVIII.HOW AMYAS CAME HOME THE THIRD TIME
XXIX. HOW THE VIRGINIA FLEET WAS STOPPED BY THE QUEEN'S COMMAND
XXX. HOW THE ADMIRAL JOHN HAWKINS TESTIFIED AGAINST CROAKERS
XXXI. THE GREAT ARMADA
XXXII. HOW AMYAS THREW HIS SWORD INTO THE SEA
XXXIII. HOW AMYAS LET THE APPLE FALL
WESTWARD HO!
CHAPTER I
HOW MR. OXENHAM SAW THE WHITE BIRD
“The hollow oak our palace is,
Our heritage the sea.”
All who have travelled through the delicious scenery of North Devon must
needs know the little white town of Bideford, which slopes upwards from
its broad tide-river paved with yellow sands, and many-arched old bridge
where salmon wait for autumn floods, toward the pleasant upland on the
west. Above the town the hills close in, cushioned with deep oak woods,
through which juts here and there a crag of fern-fringed slate; below
they lower, and open more and more in softly rounded knolls, and fertile
squares of red and green, till they sink into the wide expanse of hazy
flats, rich salt-marshes, and rolling sand-hills, where Torridge joins
her sister Taw, and both together flow quietly toward the broad surges
of the bar, and the everlasting thunder of the long Atlantic swell.
Pleasantly the old town stands there, beneath its soft Italian sky,
fanned day and night by the fresh ocean breeze, which forbids alike the
keen winter frosts, and the fierce thunder heats of the midland; and
pleasantly it has stood there for now, perhaps, eight hundred years
since the first Grenville, cousin of the Conqueror, returning from the
conquest of South Wales, drew round him trusty Saxon serfs, and free
Norse rovers with their golden curls, and dark Silurian Britons from
the Swansea shore, and all the mingled blood which still gives to the
seaward folk of the next county their strength and intellect, and, even
in these levelling days, their peculiar beauty of face and form.
But at the time whereof I write, Bideford was not merely a pleasant
country town, whose quay was haunted by a few coasting craft. It was
one of the chief ports of England; it furnished seven ships to fight the
Armada: even more than a century afterwards, say the chroniclers, “it
sent more vessels to the northern trade than any port in England, saving
(strange juxtaposition!) London and Topsham,” and was the centre of a
local civilization and enterprise, small perhaps compared with the
vast efforts of the present day: but who dare despise the day of small
things, if it has proved to be the dawn of mighty ones? And it is to the
sea-life and labor of Bideford, and Dartmouth, and Topsham, and Plymouth
(then a petty place), and many another little western town, that England
owes the foundation of her naval and commercial glory. It was the men
of Devon, the Drakes and Hawkins', Gilberts and Raleighs, Grenvilles and
Oxenhams, and a host more of “forgotten worthies,” whom we shall learn
one day to honor as they deserve, to whom she owes her commerce, her
colonies, her very existence. For had they not first crippled, by their
West Indian raids, the ill-gotten resources of the Spaniard, and then
crushed his last huge effort in Britain's Salamis, the glorious fight of
1588, what had we been by now but a popish appanage of a world-tyranny
as cruel as heathen Rome itself, and far more devilish?
It is in memory of these men, their voyages and their battles, their
faith and their valor, their heroic lives and no less heroic deaths,
that I write this book; and if now and then I shall seem to warm into
a style somewhat too stilted and pompous, let me be excused for my
subject's sake, fit rather to have been sung than said, and to have
proclaimed to all true English hearts, not as a novel but as an epic
(which some man may yet gird himself to write), the same great message
which the songs of Troy, and the Persian wars, and the trophies of
Marathon and Salamis, spoke to the hearts of all true Greeks of old.
One bright summer's afternoon, in the year of grace 1575, a tall and
fair boy came lingering along Bideford quay, in his scholar's gown,
with satchel and slate in hand, watching wistfully the shipping and the
sailors, till, just after he had passed the bottom of the High Street,
he came opposite to one of the many taverns which looked out upon the
river. In the open bay window sat merchants and gentlemen, discoursing
over their afternoon's draught of sack; and outside the door was
gathered a group of sailors, listening earnestly to some one who stood
in the midst. The boy, all alive for any sea-news, must needs go up
to them, and take his place among the sailor-lads who were peeping and
whispering under the elbows of the men; and so came in for the following
speech, delivered in a loud bold voice, with a strong Devonshire accent,
and a fair sprinkling of oaths.
“If you don't believe me, go and see, or stay here and grow all over
blue mould. I tell you, as I am a gentleman, I saw it with these eyes,
and so did Salvation Yeo there, through a window in the lower room; and
we measured the heap, as I am a christened man, seventy foot long, ten
foot broad, and twelve foot high, of silver bars, and each bar between
a thirty and forty pound weight. And says Captain Drake: 'There, my lads
of Devon, I've brought you to the mouth of the world's treasure-house,
and it's your own fault now if you don't sweep it out as empty as a
stock-fish.'”
“Why didn't you bring some of they home, then, Mr. Oxenham?”
“Why weren't you there to help to carry them? We would have brought
'em away, safe enough, and young Drake and I had broke the door abroad
already, but Captain Drake goes off in a dead faint; and when we came
to look, he had a wound in his leg you might have laid three fingers in,
and his boots were full of blood, and had been for an hour or more; but
the heart of him was that, that he never knew it till he dropped,
and then his brother and I got him away to the boats, he kicking and
struggling, and bidding us let him go on with the fight, though every
step he took in the sand was in a pool of blood; and so we got off. And
tell me, ye sons of shotten herrings, wasn't it worth more to save him
than the dirty silver? for silver we can get again, brave boys: there's
more fish in the sea than ever came out of it, and more silver in Nombre
de Dios than would pave all the streets in the west country: but of such
captains as Franky Drake, Heaven never makes but one at a time; and if
we lose him, good-bye to England's luck, say I, and who don't agree, let
him choose his weapons, and I'm his man.”
He who delivered this harangue was a tall and sturdy personage, with a
florid black-bearded face, and bold restless dark eyes, who leaned, with
crossed legs and arms akimbo, against the wall of the house; and seemed
in the eyes of the schoolboy a very magnifico, some prince or duke at
least. He was dressed (contrary to all sumptuary laws of the time) in
a suit of crimson velvet, a little the worse, perhaps, for wear; by his
side were a long Spanish rapier and a brace of daggers, gaudy enough
about the hilts; his fingers sparkled with rings; he had two or three
gold chains about his neck, and large earrings in his ears, behind one
of which a red rose was stuck jauntily enough among the glossy black
curls; on his head was a broad velvet Spanish hat, in which instead of a
feather was fastened with a great gold clasp a whole Quezal bird, whose
gorgeous plumage of fretted golden green shone like one entire precious
stone. As he finished his speech, he took off the said hat, and looking
at the bird in it--
“Look ye, my lads, did you ever see such a fowl as that before? That's
the bird which the old Indian kings of Mexico let no one wear but their
own selves; and therefore I wear it,--I, John Oxenham of South Tawton,
for a sign to all brave lads of Devon, that as the Spaniards are the
masters of the Indians, we're the masters of the Spaniards:” and he
replaced his hat.
A murmur of applause followed: but one hinted that he “doubted the
Spaniards were too many for them.”
“Too many? How many men did we take Nombre de Dios with? Seventy-three
were we, and no more when we sailed out of Plymouth Sound; and before we
saw the Spanish Main, half were gastados, used up, as the Dons say, with
the scurvy; and in Port Pheasant Captain Rawse of Cowes fell in with us,
and that gave us some thirty hands more; and with that handful, my lads,
only fifty-three in all, we picked the lock of the new world! And whom
did we lose but our trumpeter, who stood braying like an ass in
the middle of the square, instead of taking care of his neck like a
Christian? I tell you, those Spaniards are rank cowards, as all bullies
are. They pray to a woman, the idolatrous rascals! and no wonder they
fight like women.”
“You'm right, captain,” sang out a tall gaunt fellow who stood close to
him; “one westcountry-man can fight two easterlings, and an easterling
can beat three Dons any day. Eh! my lads of Devon?
“For O! it's the herrings and the good brown beef,
And the cider and the cream so white;
O! they are the making of the jolly Devon lads,
For to play, and eke to fight.”
“Come,” said Oxenham, “come along! Who lists? who lists? who'll make his
fortune?
“Oh, who will join, jolly mariners all?
And who will join, says he, O!
To fill his pockets with the good red goold,
By sailing on the sea, O!”
“Who'll list?” cried the gaunt man again; “now's your time! We've got
forty men to Plymouth now, ready to sail the minute we get back, and we
want a dozen out of you Bideford men, and just a boy or two, and then
we'm off and away, and make our fortunes, or go to heaven.
“Our bodies in the sea so deep,
Our souls in heaven to rest!
Where valiant seamen, one and all,
Hereafter shall be blest!”
“Now,” said Oxenham, “you won't let the Plymouth men say that the
Bideford men daren't follow them? North Devon against South, it is.
Who'll join? who'll join? It is but a step of a way, after all, and
sailing as smooth as a duck-pond as soon as you're past Cape Finisterre.
I'll run a Clovelly herring-boat there and back for a wager of twenty
pound, and never ship a bucketful all the way. Who'll join? Don't think
you're buying a pig in a poke. I know the road, and Salvation Yeo, here,
too, who was the gunner's mate, as well as I do the narrow seas, and
better. You ask him to show you the chart of it, now, and see if he
don't tell you over the ruttier as well as Drake himself.”
On which the gaunt man pulled from under his arm a great white buffalo
horn covered with rough etchings of land and sea, and held it up to the
admiring ring.
“See here, boys all, and behold the pictur of the place, dra'ed out
so natural as ever was life. I got mun from a Portingal, down to the
Azores; and he'd pricked mun out, and pricked mun out, wheresoever he'd
sailed, and whatsoever he'd seen. Take mun in your hands now, Simon
Evans, take mun in your hands; look mun over, and I'll warrant you'll
know the way in five minutes so well as ever a shark in the seas.”
And the horn was passed from hand to hand; while Oxenham, who saw that
his hearers were becoming moved, called through the open window for
a great tankard of sack, and passed that from hand to hand, after the
horn.
The school-boy, who had been devouring with eyes and ears all which
passed, and had contrived by this time to edge himself into the inner
ring, now stood face to face with the hero of the emerald crest, and got
as many peeps as he could at the wonder. But when he saw the sailors,
one after another, having turned it over a while, come forward and offer
to join Mr. Oxenham, his soul burned within him for a nearer view of
that wondrous horn, as magical in its effects as that of Tristrem, or
the enchanter's in Ariosto; and when the group had somewhat broken up,
and Oxenham was going into the tavern with his recruits, he asked boldly
for a nearer sight of the marvel, which was granted at once.
And now to his astonished gaze displayed themselves cities and harbors,
dragons and elephants, whales which fought with sharks, plate ships
of Spain, islands with apes and palm-trees, each with its name
over-written, and here and there, “Here is gold;” and again, “Much gold
and silver;” inserted most probably, as the words were in English, by
the hands of Mr. Oxenham himself. Lingeringly and longingly the boy
turned it round and round, and thought the owner of it more fortunate
than Khan or Kaiser. Oh, if he could but possess that horn, what needed
he on earth beside to make him blest!
“I say, will you sell this?”
“Yea, marry, or my own soul, if I can get the worth of it.”
“I want the horn,--I don't want your soul; it's somewhat of a stale
sole, for aught I know; and there are plenty of fresh ones in the bay.”
And therewith, after much fumbling, he pulled out a tester (the only one
he had), and asked if that would buy it?
“That! no, nor twenty of them.”
The boy thought over what a good knight-errant would do in such case,
and then answered, “Tell you what: I'll fight you for it.”
“Thank 'ee, sir!
“Break the jackanapes's head for him, Yeo,” said Oxenham.
“Call me jackanapes again, and I break yours, sir.” And the boy lifted
his fist fiercely.
Oxenham looked at him a minute smilingly. “Tut! tut! my man, hit one of
your own size, if you will, and spare little folk like me!”
“If I have a boy's age, sir, I have a man's fist. I shall be fifteen
years old this month, and know how to answer any one who insults me.”
“Fifteen, my young cockerel? you look liker twenty,” said Oxenham, with
an admiring glance at the lad's broad limbs, keen blue eyes, curling
golden locks, and round honest face. “Fifteen? If I had half-a-dozen
such lads as you, I would make knights of them before I died. Eh, Yeo?”
“He'll do,” said Yeo; “he will make a brave gamecock in a year or
two, if he dares ruffle up so early at a tough old hen-master like the
captain.”
At which there was a general laugh, in which Oxenham joined as loudly as
any, and then bade the lad tell him why he was so keen after the horn.
“Because,” said he, looking up boldly, “I want to go to sea. I want to
see the Indies. I want to fight the Spaniards. Though I am a gentleman's
son, I'd a deal liever be a cabin-boy on board your ship.” And the lad,
having hurried out his say fiercely enough, dropped his head again.
“And you shall,” cried Oxenham, with a great oath; “and take a galloon,
and dine off carbonadoed Dons. Whose son are you, my gallant fellow?”
“Mr. Leigh's, of Burrough Court.”
“Bless his soul! I know him as well as I do the Eddystone, and his
kitchen too. Who sups with him to-night?”
“Sir Richard Grenville.”
“Dick Grenville? I did not know he was in town. Go home and tell your
father John Oxenham will come and keep him company. There, off with you!
I'll make all straight with the good gentleman, and you shall have your
venture with me; and as for the horn, let him have the horn, Yeo, and
I'll give you a noble for it.”
“Not a penny, noble captain. If young master will take a poor mariner's
gift, there it is, for the sake of his love to the calling, and
Heaven send him luck therein.” And the good fellow, with the impulsive
generosity of a true sailor, thrust the horn into the boy's hands, and
walked away to escape thanks.
“And now,” quoth Oxenham, “my merry men all, make up your minds what
mannered men you be minded to be before you take your bounties. I want
none of your rascally lurching longshore vermin, who get five pounds
out of this captain, and ten out of that, and let him sail without them
after all, while they are stowed away under women's mufflers, and
in tavern cellars. If any man is of that humor, he had better to cut
himself up, and salt himself down in a barrel for pork, before he meets
me again; for by this light, let me catch him, be it seven years hence,
and if I do not cut his throat upon the streets, it's a pity! But if any
man will be true brother to me, true brother to him I'll be, come wreck
or prize, storm or calm, salt water or fresh, victuals or none, share
and fare alike; and here's my hand upon it, for every man and all! and
so--
“Westward ho! with a rumbelow,
And hurra for the Spanish Main, O!”
After which oration Mr. Oxenham swaggered into the tavern, followed by
his new men; and the boy took his way homewards, nursing his precious
horn, trembling between hope and fear, and blushing with maidenly
shame, and a half-sense of wrong-doing at having revealed suddenly to a
stranger the darling wish which he had hidden from his father and mother
ever since he was ten years old.
Now this young gentleman, Amyas Leigh, though come of as good blood as
any in Devon, and having lived all his life in what we should even
now call the very best society, and being (on account of the valor,
courtesy, and truly noble qualities which he showed forth in his most
eventful life) chosen by me as the hero and centre of this story,
was not, saving for his good looks, by any means what would be called
now-a-days an “interesting” youth, still less a “highly educated” one;
for, with the exception of a little Latin, which had been driven into
him by repeated blows, as if it had been a nail, he knew no books
whatsoever, save his Bible, his Prayer-book, the old “Mort d'Arthur” of
Caxton's edition, which lay in the great bay window in the hall, and the
translation of “Las Casas' History of the West Indies,” which lay beside
it, lately done into English under the title of “The Cruelties of the
Spaniards.” He devoutly believed in fairies, whom he called pixies; and
held that they changed babies, and made the mushroom rings on the downs
to dance in. When he had warts or burns, he went to the white witch
at Northam to charm them away; he thought that the sun moved round the
earth, and that the moon had some kindred with a Cheshire cheese.
He held that the swallows slept all the winter at the bottom of the
horse-pond; talked, like Raleigh, Grenville, and other low persons,
with a broad Devonshire accent; and was in many other respects so very
ignorant a youth, that any pert monitor in a national school might have
had a hearty laugh at him. Nevertheless, this ignorant young savage,
vacant of the glorious gains of the nineteenth century, children's
literature and science made easy, and, worst of all, of those improved
views of English history now current among our railway essayists, which
consist in believing all persons, male and female, before the year 1688,
and nearly all after it, to have been either hypocrites or fools, had
learnt certain things which he would hardly have been taught just now
in any school in England; for his training had been that of the old
Persians, “to speak the truth and to draw the bow,” both of which savage
virtues he had acquired to perfection, as well as the equally savage
ones of enduring pain cheerfully, and of believing it to be the finest
thing in the world to be a gentleman; by which word he had been taught
to understand the careful habit of causing needless pain to no human
being, poor or rich, and of taking pride in giving up his own pleasure
for the sake of those who were weaker than himself. Moreover, having
been entrusted for the last year with the breaking of a colt, and the
care of a cast of young hawks which his father had received from Lundy
Isle, he had been profiting much, by the means of those coarse and
frivolous amusements, in perseverance, thoughtfulness, and the habit
of keeping his temper; and though he had never had a single “object
lesson,” or been taught to “use his intellectual powers,” he knew the
names and ways of every bird, and fish, and fly, and could read, as
cunningly as the oldest sailor, the meaning of every drift of cloud
which crossed the heavens. Lastly, he had been for some time past, on
account of his extraordinary size and strength, undisputed cock of the
school, and the most terrible fighter among all Bideford boys; in which
brutal habit he took much delight, and contrived, strange as it may
seem, to extract from it good, not only for himself but for others,
doing justice among his school-fellows with a heavy hand, and succoring
the oppressed and afflicted; so that he was the terror of all the
sailor-lads, and the pride and stay of all the town's boys and girls,
and hardly considered that he had done his duty in his calling if he
went home without beating a big lad for bullying a little one. For the
rest, he never thought about thinking, or felt about feeling; and had
no ambition whatsoever beyond pleasing his father and mother, getting by
honest means the maximum of “red quarrenders” and mazard cherries,
and going to sea when he was big enough. Neither was he what would be
now-a-days called by many a pious child; for though he said his Creed
and Lord's Prayer night and morning, and went to the service at the
church every forenoon, and read the day's Psalms with his mother every
evening, and had learnt from her and from his father (as he proved well
in after life) that it was infinitely noble to do right and infinitely
base to do wrong, yet (the age of children's religious books not having
yet dawned on the world) he knew nothing more of theology, or of his
own soul, than is contained in the Church Catechism. It is a question,
however, on the whole, whether, though grossly ignorant (according to
our modern notions) in science and religion, he was altogether untrained
in manhood, virtue, and godliness; and whether the barbaric narrowness
of his information was not somewhat counterbalanced both in him and in
the rest of his generation by the depth, and breadth, and healthiness of
his education.
So let us watch him up the hill as he goes hugging his horn, to tell all
that has passed to his mother, from whom he had never hidden anything
in his life, save only that sea-fever; and that only because he foreknew
that it would give her pain; and because, moreover, being a prudent and
sensible lad, he knew that he was not yet old enough to go, and that, as
he expressed it to her that afternoon, “there was no use hollaing till
he was out of the wood.”
So he goes up between the rich lane-banks, heavy with drooping ferns and
honeysuckle; out upon the windy down toward the old Court, nestled
amid its ring of wind-clipt oaks; through the gray gateway into the
homeclose; and then he pauses a moment to look around; first at the wide
bay to the westward, with its southern wall of purple cliffs; then at
the dim Isle of Lundy far away at sea; then at the cliffs and downs of
Morte and Braunton, right in front of him; then at the vast yellow sheet
of rolling sand-hill, and green alluvial plain dotted with red cattle,
at his feet, through which the silver estuary winds onward toward the
sea. Beneath him, on his right, the Torridge, like a land-locked lake,
sleeps broad and bright between the old park of Tapeley and the charmed
rock of the Hubbastone, where, seven hundred years ago, the Norse rovers
landed to lay siege to Kenwith Castle, a mile away on his left hand; and
not three fields away, are the old stones of “The Bloody Corner,”
where the retreating Danes, cut off from their ships, made their last
fruitless stand against the Saxon sheriff and the valiant men of Devon.
Within that charmed rock, so Torridge boatmen tell, sleeps now the old
Norse Viking in his leaden coffin, with all his fairy treasure and his
crown of gold; and as the boy looks at the spot, he fancies, and almost
hopes, that the day may come when he shall have to do his duty against
the invader as boldly as the men of Devon did then. And past him, far
below, upon the soft southeastern breeze, the stately ships go sliding
out to sea. When shall he sail in them, and see the wonders of the deep?
And as he stands there with beating heart and kindling eye, the cool
breeze whistling through his long fair curls, he is a symbol, though he
knows it not, of brave young England longing to wing its way out of its
island prison, to discover and to traffic, to colonize and to civilize,
until no wind can sweep the earth which does not bear the echoes of an
English voice. Patience, young Amyas! Thou too shalt forth, and westward
ho, beyond thy wildest dreams; and see brave sights, and do brave deeds,
which no man has since the foundation of the world. Thou too shalt face
invaders stronger and more cruel far than Dane or Norman, and bear thy
part in that great Titan strife before the renown of which the name of
Salamis shall fade away!
Mr. Oxenham came that evening to supper as he had promised: but as
people supped in those days in much the same manner as they do now, we
may drop the thread of the story for a few hours, and take it up again
after supper is over.
“Come now, Dick Grenville, do thou talk the good man round, and I'll
warrant myself to talk round the good wife.”
The personage whom Oxenham addressed thus familiarly answered by a
somewhat sarcastic smile, and, “Mr. Oxenham gives Dick Grenville” (with
just enough emphasis on the “Mr.” and the “Dick,” to hint that a liberty
had been taken with him) “overmuch credit with the men. Mr. Oxenham's
credit with fair ladies, none can doubt. Friend Leigh, is Heard's great
ship home yet from the Straits?”
The speaker, known well in those days as Sir Richard Grenville,
Granville, Greenvil, Greenfield, with two or three other variations, was
one of those truly heroical personages whom Providence, fitting always
the men to their age and their work, had sent upon the earth whereof it
takes right good care, not in England only, but in Spain and Italy, in
Germany and the Netherlands, and wherever, in short, great men and great
deeds were needed to lift the mediaeval world into the modern.
And, among all the heroic faces which the painters of that age have
preserved, none, perhaps, hardly excepting Shakespeare's or Spenser's,
Alva's or Farina's, is more heroic than that of Richard Grenville, as it
stands in Prince's “Worthies of Devon;” of a Spanish type, perhaps
(or more truly speaking, a Cornish), rather than an English, with just
enough of the British element in it to give delicacy to its massiveness.
The forehead and whole brain are of extraordinary loftiness, and
perfectly upright; the nose long, aquiline, and delicately pointed;
the mouth fringed with a short silky beard, small and ripe, yet firm
as granite, with just pout enough of the lower lip to give hint of that
capacity of noble indignation which lay hid under its usual courtly calm
and sweetness; if there be a defect in the face, it is that the eyes are
somewhat small, and close together, and the eyebrows, though delicately
arched, and, without a trace of peevishness, too closely pressed
down upon them, the complexion is dark, the figure tall and graceful;
altogether the likeness of a wise and gallant gentleman, lovely to all
good men, awful to all bad men; in whose presence none dare say or do a
mean or a ribald thing; whom brave men left, feeling themselves nerved
to do their duty better, while cowards slipped away, as bats and
owls before the sun. So he lived and moved, whether in the Court of
Elizabeth, giving his counsel among the wisest; or in the streets of
Bideford, capped alike by squire and merchant, shopkeeper and sailor; or
riding along the moorland roads between his houses of Stow and Bideford,
while every woman ran out to her door to look at the great Sir Richard,
the pride of North Devon; or, sitting there in the low mullioned window
at Burrough, with his cup of malmsey before him, and the lute to which
he had just been singing laid across his knees, while the red western
sun streamed in upon his high, bland forehead, and soft curling locks;
ever the same steadfast, God-fearing, chivalrous man, conscious (as far
as a soul so healthy could be conscious) of the pride of beauty, and
strength, and valor, and wisdom, and a race and name which claimed
direct descent from the grandfather of the Conqueror, and was tracked
down the centuries by valiant deeds and noble benefits to his native
shire, himself the noblest of his race. Men said that he was proud; but
he could not look round him without having something to be proud of;
that he was stern and harsh to his sailors: but it was only when he saw
in them any taint of cowardice or falsehood; that he was subject, at
moments, to such fearful fits of rage, that he had been seen to snatch
the glasses from the table, grind them to pieces in his teeth, and
swallow them: but that was only when his indignation had been aroused by
some tale of cruelty or oppression, and, above all, by those West Indian
devilries of the Spaniards, whom he regarded (and in those days rightly
enough) as the enemies of God and man. Of this last fact Oxenham was
well aware, and therefore felt somewhat puzzled and nettled, when, after
having asked Mr. Leigh's leave to take young Amyas with him and set
forth in glowing colors the purpose of his voyage, he found Sir Richard
utterly unwilling to help him with his suit.
“Heyday, Sir Richard! You are not surely gone over to the side of those
canting fellows (Spanish Jesuits in disguise, every one of them, they
are), who pretended to turn up their noses at Franky Drake, as a pirate,
and be hanged to them?”
“My friend Oxenham,” answered he, in the sententious and measured style
of the day, “I have always held, as you should know by this, that Mr.
Drake's booty, as well as my good friend Captain Hawkins's, is lawful
prize, as being taken from the Spaniard, who is not only hostis humani
generis, but has no right to the same, having robbed it violently, by
torture and extreme iniquity, from the poor Indian, whom God avenge, as
He surely will.”
“Amen,” said Mrs. Leigh.
“I say Amen, too,” quoth Oxenham, “especially if it please Him to avenge
them by English hands.”
“And I also,” went on Sir Richard; “for the rightful owners of the said
goods being either miserably dead, or incapable, by reason of their
servitude, of ever recovering any share thereof, the treasure, falsely
called Spanish, cannot be better bestowed than in building up the state
of England against them, our natural enemies; and thereby, in building
up the weal of the Reformed Churches throughout the world, and the
liberties of all nations, against a tyranny more foul and rapacious than
that of Nero or Caligula; which, if it be not the cause of God, I, for
one, know not what God's cause is!” And, as he warmed in his speech, his
eyes flashed very fire.
“Hark now!” said Oxenham, “who can speak more boldly than he? and yet he
will not help this lad to so noble an adventure.”
“You have asked his father and mother; what is their answer?”
“Mine is this,” said Mr. Leigh; “if it be God's will that my boy should
become, hereafter, such a mariner as Sir Richard Grenville, let him go,
and God be with him; but let him first bide here at home and be
trained, if God give me grace, to become such a gentleman as Sir Richard
Grenville.”
Sir Richard bowed low, and Mrs. Leigh catching up the last word--
“There, Mr. Oxenham, you cannot gainsay that, unless you will be
discourteous to his worship. And for me--though it be a weak woman's
reason, yet it is a mother's: he is my only child. His elder brother is
far away. God only knows whether I shall see him again; and what are all
reports of his virtues and his learning to me, compared to that sweet
presence which I daily miss? Ah! Mr. Oxenham, my beautiful Joseph is
gone; and though he be lord of Pharaoh's household, yet he is far away
in Egypt; and you will take Benjamm also! Ah! Mr. Oxenham, you have no
child, or you would not ask for mine!”
“And how do you know that, my sweet madam!” said the adventurer, turning
first deadly pale, and then glowing red. Her last words had touched him
to the quick in some unexpected place; and rising, he courteously laid
her hand to his lips, and said--“I say no more. Farewell, sweet madam,
and God send all men such wives as you.”
“And all wives,” said she, smiling, “such husbands as mine.”
“Nay, I will not say that,” answered he, with a half sneer--and then,
“Farewell, friend Leigh--farewell, gallant Dick Grenville. God send I
see thee Lord High Admiral when I come home. And yet, why should I come
home? Will you pray for poor Jack, gentles?”
“Tut, tut, man! good words,” said Leigh; “let us drink to our merry
meeting before you go.” And rising, and putting the tankard of malmsey
to his lips, he passed it to Sir Richard, who rose, and saying, “To the
fortune of a bold mariner and a gallant gentleman,” drank, and put the
cup into Oxenham's hand.
The adventurer's face was flushed, and his eye wild. Whether from the
liquor he had drunk during the day, or whether from Mrs. Leigh's last
speech, he had not been himself for a few minutes. He lifted the cup,
and was in act to pledge them, when he suddenly dropped it on the table,
and pointed, staring and trembling, up and down, and round the room, as
if following some fluttering object.
“There! Do you see it? The bird!--the bird with the white breast!”
Each looked at the other; but Leigh, who was a quick-witted man and an
old courtier, forced a laugh instantly, and cried--“Nonsense, brave Jack
Oxenham! Leave white birds for men who will show the white feather. Mrs.
Leigh waits to pledge you.”
Oxenham recovered himself in a moment, pledged them all round, drinking
deep and fiercely; and after hearty farewells, departed, never hinting
again at his strange exclamation.
After he was gone, and while Leigh was attending him to the door, Mrs.
Leigh and Grenville kept a few minutes' dead silence. At last--“God help
him!” said she.
“Amen!” said Grenville, “for he never needed it more. But, indeed,
madam, I put no faith in such omens.”
“But, Sir Richard, that bird has been seen for generations before the
death of any of his family. I know those who were at South Tawton when
his mother died, and his brother also; and they both saw it. God help
him! for, after all, he is a proper man.”
“So many a lady has thought before now, Mrs. Leigh, and well for him if
they had not. But, indeed, I make no account of omens. When God is ready
for each man, then he must go; and when can he go better?”
“But,” said Mr. Leigh, who entered, “I have seen, and especially when
I was in Italy, omens and prophecies before now beget their own
fulfilment, by driving men into recklessness, and making them run
headlong upon that very ruin which, as they fancied, was running upon
them.”
“And which,” said Sir Richard, “they might have avoided, if, instead of
trusting in I know not what dumb and dark destiny, they had trusted in
the living God, by faith in whom men may remove mountains, and quench
the fire, and put to flight the armies of the alien. I too know, and
know not how I know, that I shall never die in my bed.”
“God forfend!” cried Mrs. Leigh.
“And why, fair madam, if I die doing my duty to my God and my queen? The
thought never moves me: nay, to tell the truth, I pray often enough that
I may be spared the miseries of imbecile old age, and that end which
the old Northmen rightly called 'a cow's death' rather than a man's. But
enough of this. Mr. Leigh, you have done wisely to-night. Poor Oxenham
does not go on his voyage with a single eye. I have talked about him
with Drake and Hawkins; and I guess why Mrs. Leigh touched him so home
when she told him that he had no child.”
“Has he one, then, in the West Indies?” cried the good lady.
“God knows; and God grant we may not hear of shame and sorrow fallen
upon an ancient and honorable house of Devon. My brother Stukely is woe
enough to North Devon for this generation.”
“Poor braggadocio!” said Mr. Leigh; “and yet not altogether that too,
for he can fight at least.”
“So can every mastiff and boar, much more an Englishman. And now come
hither to me, my adventurous godson, and don't look in such doleful
dumps. I hear you have broken all the sailor-boys' heads already.”
“Nearly all,” said young Amyas, with due modesty.. “But am I not to go
to sea?”
“All things in their time, my boy, and God forbid that either I or your
worthy parents should keep you from that noble calling which is the
safeguard of this England and her queen. But you do not wish to live and
die the master of a trawler?”
“I should like to be a brave adventurer, like Mr. Oxenham.”
“God grant you become a braver man than he! for, as I think, to be bold
against the enemy is common to the brutes; but the prerogative of a man
is to be bold against himself.”
“How, sir?”
“To conquer our own fancies, Amyas, and our own lusts, and our ambition,
in the sacred name of duty; this it is to be truly brave, and truly
strong; for he who cannot rule himself, how can he rule his crew or his
fortunes? Come, now, I will make you a promise. If you will bide quietly
at home, and learn from your father and mother all which befits a
gentleman and a Christian, as well as a seaman, the day shall come when
you shall sail with Richard Grenville himself, or with better men than
he, on a nobler errand than gold-hunting on the Spanish Main.”
“O my boy, my boy!” said Mrs. Leigh, “hear what the good Sir Richard
promises you. Many an earl's son would be glad to be in your place.”
“And many an earl's son will be glad to be in his place a score years
hence, if he will but learn what I know you two can teach him. And now,
Amyas, my lad, I will tell you for a warning the history of that Sir
Thomas Stukely of whom I spoke just now, and who was, as all men know,
a gallant and courtly knight, of an ancient and worshipful family in
Ilfracombe, well practised in the wars, and well beloved at first by our
incomparable queen, the friend of all true virtue, as I trust she will
be of yours some day; who wanted but one step to greatness, and that
was this, that in his hurry to rule all the world, he forgot to rule
himself. At first, he wasted his estate in show and luxury, always
intending to be famous, and destroying his own fame all the while by
his vainglory and haste. Then, to retrieve his losses, he hit upon the
peopling of Florida, which thou and I will see done some day, by God's
blessing; for I and some good friends of mine have an errand there as
well as he. But he did not go about it as a loyal man, to advance the
honor of his queen, but his own honor only, dreaming that he too should
be a king; and was not ashamed to tell her majesty that he had rather be
sovereign of a molehill than the highest subject of an emperor.”
“They say,” said Mr. Leigh, “that he told her plainly he should be a
prince before he died, and that she gave him one of her pretty quips in
return.”
“I don't know that her majesty had the best of it. A fool is many times
too strong for a wise man, by virtue of his thick hide. For when she
said that she hoped she should hear from him in his new principality,
'Yes, sooth,' says he, graciously enough. 'And in what style?' asks she.
'To our dear sister,' says Stukely: to which her clemency had nothing to
reply, but turned away, as Mr. Burleigh told me, laughing.”
“Alas for him!” said gentle Mrs. Leigh. “Such self-conceit--and Heaven
knows we have the root of it in ourselves also--is the very daughter of
self-will, and of that loud crying out about I, and me, and mine, which
is the very bird-call for all devils, and the broad road which leads to
death.”
“It will lead him to his,” said Sir Richard; “God grant it be not upon
Tower-hill! for since that Florida plot, and after that his hopes of
Irish preferment came to naught, he who could not help himself by fair
means has taken to foul ones, and gone over to Italy to the Pope, whose
infallibility has not been proof against Stukely's wit; for he was soon
his Holiness's closet counsellor, and, they say, his bosom friend; and
made him give credit to his boasts that, with three thousand soldiers he
would beat the English out of Ireland, and make the Pope's son king of
it.”
“Ay, but,” said Mr. Leigh, “I suppose the Italians have the same fetch
now as they had when I was there, to explain such ugly cases; namely,
that the Pope is infallible only in doctrine, and quoad Pope; while
quoad hominem, he is even as others, or indeed, in general, a deal
worse, so that the office, and not the man, may be glorified thereby.
But where is Stukely now?”
“At Rome when last I heard of him, ruffling it up and down the Vatican
as Baron Ross, Viscount Murrough, Earl Wexford, Marquis Leinster, and
a title or two more, which have cost the Pope little, seeing that
they never were his to give; and plotting, they say, some hare-brained
expedition against Ireland by the help of the Spanish king, which must
end in nothing but his shame and ruin. And now, my sweet hosts, I must
call for serving-boy and lantern, and home to my bed in Bideford.”
And so Amyas Leigh went back to school, and Mr. Oxenham went his way to
Plymouth again, and sailed for the Spanish Main.