The ancient and respectable family of Trevanion, like all others able
to trace themselves back, in influential situations, to remote
periods, has experienced the vicissitudes arising from civil
dissensions. In those times it is quite clear, that love of plunder,
and eagerness after confiscations, must have been the sole motives of
action on either side; since, trifling as have been the causes of
domestic as well as of foreign wars, no one can believe that, in the
absence of all contested political principles, men could be found who
would deluge their country with blood for the sake of seating on the
throne an individual whose name was Edward instead of another
designated as Henry, on the frivolous pretence, that, had England been
a farm, and its inhabitants farm stock, one of the parties possessed a
claim through females superior to the other, if it were not defeated
by legal fiction, or by the lapse of time.
In such a conflict three families at the least from Cornwall were
engaged, Bodrigan, Trevanion, and Edgecumbe; and when Richard the
Third obtained sovereign power, on the division which then look place
in the York faction, Bodrigan endeavoured to seize the property of
Edgcumbe, with little respect, as it would seem, for the life of the
possessor; but in the final struggle at Bosworth Field, where Henry
Tudor put an entire end to this contest for power under the guise of
property, by seizing the whole to himself, Trevanion and Edgcumbe had
the good fortune to appear on the winning side, and subsequently
availed themselves to the utmost of belligerent rights against
Bodrigan, as he had attempted to do before against them. The last of
that family was driven from his home, and seems to have perished in
exile. His property was divided between the two families opposed to
him, and after the lapse of three hundred and fifty years continues to
form a large portion of their respective possessions.
At a subsequent period, when wars were levied in support of
principles, and when men of honour and of virtue engaged on either
side, as their early prejudices, investigations, or accidental
experience induced them to believe that one or the other would prove
most conducive to the public good――the Trevanions were less
successful. They asserted their conviction in arms, that the country
would be best governed by concentrating hereditary power in a single
man; and Mr. John Trevanion, bearing a Colonel’s commission, shared in
the military glories of the western army, and fell under the walls of
Bristol. His father experienced the mitigated fate of those who were
vanquished in this contest, by compounding for his estate; and when,
after a long interval, his friends came again into power, and
succeeded in placing at the head of affairs the son of their former
chief, those immediately surrounding the seat of government possessed
but slender means, and still less inclination, to risk their own
safety by indemnifying those at a distance, who had suffered in the
Good Old Cause.
The grandson obtained however the popular reward of representing
Cornwall in parliament; and the Editor has in his possesssion a letter
addressed by Mr. John Trevanion to his great uncle Mr. Henry Davies, a
hundred and twenty-five years ago, declaring his readiness to spend
his fortune and to shed his blood, as his ancestors had done, in
support of the same cause. This gentleman died in 1740, leaving
William Trevanion his son and heir, and two daughters, the eldest of
whom married John Bettesworth, LL.D. Dean of the Arches, and the
younger married Admiral John Byron, well known in his younger days by
a narrative of the disastrous expedition of the Wager Store ship,
commanded by Captain Cheep, as a part of the fleet conducted by
Commodore Anson round the promontory of South America, in the year
1740, and of his own adventures after the ship was wrecked on the
coast of Patagonia, the dead reckoning giving them an erroneous
longitude of fifteen degrees to the west, till his return in 1746.
Admiral Byron is now better known as grandfather to the most popular
of recent poets.
William Trevanion served in parliament for the borough of Tregoney,
and died in 1767 without children, when the male line of this family
became extinct. He was succeeded by Mr. John Bettesworth, his sister’s
son, and his son John Trevanion Purnel Bettesworth Trevanion, esq. is
now the possessor of Carhayes, where he has substituted a magnificent
gothic castle, after a plan of Nash, the architect of Buckingham
Palace and of Regent Street, for the house described by Mr. Tonkin.
Mr. Trevanion married early in life, and was left a widower with
several children. He has for his second wife Miss Burdett, daughter of
the individual to whom the country mainly owes the great alteration in
the constitution of its government, on the ultimate effects of which
no one is yet qualified to form even a conjecture, still less an
opinion.
The family of Bettesworth have been settled on the manor of Fyning, a
part of Rogate parish in Sussex, since about the year 1570; and a
pedigree of nine descents is given in Dallaway’s History of the Rape
of Chichester, ending with Thomas Bettesworth, who assumed the name of
Bilson in 1740, and died in 1754, aged 58. This gentleman bequeathed a
life interest in his property to Thomas Bettesworth, of Chithurst, and
after his decease gave it to Henry Legge, fourth son of William Legge,
first Earl of Dartmouth, on condition of taking the name of Bilson.
Mr. Henry Bilson Legge married Mary Stawel, daughter and heir of
Edward Stawel, Lord Stawel, and was in consequence himself created
Lord Stawel in 1760. They were succeeded by their son Henry Stawel
Bilson Legge, who died in 1820.
The parish of Rogate is situated between Petersfield and Midhurst, on
the bank of a small river, which (after watering Selborne, a name made
familiar to every one by the admirable work of its vicar, Mr. White,)
flows into the county of Sussex, and joining the Arun, finally reaches
the sea through Arundale, a name mistaken by the Normans for that of a
swallow.
The manor of Fyning belonged to a monastery of Premonstratensian
Canons, founded at Dureford, an adjacent parish, about the year 1160,
by Henry Hosatus, or Husey, and augmented three hundred years
afterwards by Henry Guldeford. It was surrendered to King Henry the
Eighth, by John Simpson, the last superior. Temporary grants were made
of the lands, till they were finally bestowed in fee on Sir Edmund
Merwyn, a gentleman of Sussex, from whose descendants they passed to
the Bettesworths.
In the church of St. Michael Carhayes are several monuments to the
Trevanions, and pieces of armour, the trophies of former days; also a
sword, believed to have been the very one used by Sir Hugh Trevanion
at Bosworth Field.
Etymologies, deceptive at all times, become so in a tenfold degree
when they are sought in the varying pronunciations of an unwritten
language. But car, caer, &c. are known (like Rocca in the Italian) to
mean a fortress, a castellated house, a dwelling; and hay, running
colloquially into hayes, is an enclosed fence or yard. Carhayes may
therefore signify the castle surrounded by a basse court or enclosure.
Although Carhayes is several miles detached from the two adjoining
parishes of St. Stephen and St. Dennis, yet it forms with them one
united benefice, purchased by Mr. Pitt, with the other Mahon property.
This more than usually improper association cannot by possibility
escape the attention of those, who are engaged in reforming such
abuses as may have crept into our Church Establishment.
This parish measures 815 statute acres.
Annual value of the Real Property, as £. _s._ _d._
returned to Parliament in 1815, 1,114 0 0
Poor Rate in 1831 188 9 0
Population, { in 1801, | in 1811, | in 1821, | in 1831,
{ 86 | 104 | 174 | 197
giving an increase of 129 per cent. in 30 years.
Present Rector, the Rev. Charles Trevanion Kempe, presented in 1806
by Arthur Kempe, esq.