LYNTON--THE WICHEHALSE FAMILY, IN FICTION AND IN FACT
There is more difference between Lynmouth and Lynton than is found in
the mere geographical fact that the one is situated over four hundred
and twenty feet below the other; a certain jealousy on the one side
and a little-veiled contempt on the other exist. Lynmouth people do
not speak in terms of affection of Lynton. “Suburban,” they say, and
certainly Lynton is overbuilt. Moreover, at Lynton, although it is on
a height, you stew in the sun. It is cooler down below, at Lynmouth,
rejoicing in the refreshing breezes blowing off the sea.
And there is no doubt that Lynmouth prides itself on being exclusive.
As already shown, it does not cater for the crowd. Up at Lynton you
are in the world and of the world, and find something of all sorts.
Lynmouth’s idea of Lynton is instructive. It is that of a place where
the gnomes work, who labour for the convenience and enjoyment of the
village down by the sea: only here you have the paradox that the
underworld of these labouring sprites is above, and that the socially
superior place is the, geographically, nether world. It is only fair
to remark that Lynton does by no means agree with these estimates of
itself, and is indeed, a bright, clean, pretty little town, with its
own individuality, and an amazing number of hotels, boarding-houses,
and lodgings, the houses mostly built in excellent taste; and I assure
you I have seen no such thing as a gnome there. You do not, generally,
on the North Devon coast, as so often in South Devon, find the scenery
outraged by a terrible lack of taste, displayed in a plenitude of
plaster.
When Mr. Louis Jennings passed this way, about 1890, the Cliff Railway,
or lift, was newly opened, but the Lynton and Barnstaple Railway was
not yet in being. Lynton, nevertheless, was in the throes of expansion,
and he found “the hand of man doing its usual fatal work on one of the
loveliest spots our country has to boast of. Flaring notices everywhere
proclaim the fact that building sites are procurable through the usual
channels; this estate and the other has been ‘laid out’; the lady
reduced in circumstances, and with spare rooms on her hands, watches
you from behind the window-blinds; red cards are stuck in windows
denoting that anything and everything is to be sold or let. A long and
grievous gash has been torn in the side of the beautiful hill opposite
Lynmouth--a gash which must leave behind it a broad scar never to be
healed.
“‘Who has done this?’ I sorrowfully asked the waiter at the hotel.
“‘_Tit-Bits_, sir.’
“‘Who?’ said I, thinking the waiter was out of his mind.
“‘_Tit-Bits_,’ the man replied.
“‘Well, then,’ said I, ‘what has _Tit-Bits_ done it for?’
“‘To make a lift, sir. Some people complain of the hill, and so this
lift will shoot ’em up and down it, like it does at Scarborough. They
say it will be a very good spec. You see, sir, he came along here and
bought the land; and I have heard say that _Rare-Bits_ is coming too,
and means to make a railroad.’”
However, as this horrified traveller was fain to acknowledge,
even although these things had come to pass and though the once
old-fashioned hotel had been changed into “a huge, staring structure,
assailing the eye at every turn”--he meant the Valley of Rocks
Hotel--“it will take a long time to spoil Lynton utterly.”
Very much more has been done to Lynton since then, and building has
gone on uninterruptedly. The narrow-gauge Lynton and Barnstaple
Railway--the “Toy Railway,” as it is often called, from its rather
less than two-foot gauge--opened in 1898, has been a disappointing
enterprise for its shareholders, but has brought much expansion.
Probably it would have been a better speculation had its Lynton
terminus been in the town, rather than hidden on the almost
inaccessible heights of “Mount Sinai,” another climb of about two
hundred feet. The service is so infrequent and the pace so slow that,
coupled with the initial difficulty of finding it at all, the traveller
can perform a good deal of his journey by road to any place along the
route, before the train starts. And an energetic cyclist can, any day,
make a very creditable race with it.
[Illustration: LYNTON.]
Lynton has now become no inconsiderable town, very bustling and
cheerful in summer: its narrow street quite built in with the tall
“Valley of Rocks Hotel” aforesaid, and a large number of shops and
business premises not in the least rural. Between them, they contrive
to make the old parish church look singularly out of place. That is
just the irony of it! The interloping, hulking buildings themselves are
alien from the spirit of the neighbourhood, but they have contrived
to impress most people the other way. “How odd,” unthinking strangers
exclaim, as they see a rustic church and grassy, tree-shaded churchyard
amid the bricks and mortar; not pausing to consider that the church has
been here hundreds of years, and few of the buildings around more than
twenty. But there is little really ancient remaining of the church,
for it was rebuilt, with the exception of the tower, in 1741, and has
been added to and altered at different times since then. Quite recently
it has again, to all intents, been rebuilt, and fitted and furnished
most artistically, in the newer school of ecclesiastical decoration.
Those who are sick at heart with the stereotyped patterns of the usual
ecclesiastical furnisher, with his stock designs in lecterns and
anæmic stained-glass saints, his encaustic tiles with an eternity of
repetitive geometrical patterns, and indeed everything that is his,
will welcome the something individual that here, and in some few other
favoured places, may be found to redress the dreary monotony.
Everything within Lynton church has been smartened up and clean-swept;
even the old wall-tablet in memory of Hugh Wichehalse has been gilded
and tended until it glows like a modern antique, unlike the genuinely
old relic it is. And since much of the ancient history of Lynton and
its neighbourhood is inseparable from the story of the Wichehalse
family, let that story be told here.
In the many old guide-books that treat of Lynton, it is stated,
with much show of circumstantial evidence, that the Wichehalses
were of Dutch origin, and fled from Holland about 1567, to escape
the persecution of the Protestants. We are even told how “Hughe de
Wichehalse” was “head of a noble and opulent family,” and learn how
he had fought in the Low Countries against the persecuting Spaniards.
Harrowing accounts are even given of his narrow escape, with wife and
family, to England.
But the supremest effort is the legend, narrated in a score of
guide-books, of Jennifrid Wichehalse and the false “Lord Auberley,”
who loved and who rode away, in the days of Charles the First. It is a
tale, narrated with harrowing details, of a daughter’s despair, of a
tragic leap from the heights of “Duty Point” at Lee, and of a father’s
revenge upon the recreant lover at the Battle of Lansdowne; where,
with his red right hand (you know the sort of thing), he struck down
the forsworn lord in death. Follows then the sequel: how the father, a
Royalist, was persecuted, and forced, with kith and kin, to put off in
a boat from Lee. “The surf dashed high over the rocky shore, as a boat
manned by ten persons, the faithful retainers of this branch of the
house of de Wichehalse, pushed desperately into the raging waters. It
was never more heard of.”
But that is all fudge and nonsense. There was never a Jennifrid
Wichehalse; still less, if that be possible, was there ever a Lord
Auberley, and the Wichehalse family did not end in the way described.
All those things are doubtless creditable to the imagination of their
compilers, but they do not redound either to their sincerity, or to
the tepid interest taken in the neighbourhood by past generations of
visitors. Any cock-and-a-bull story sufficed until recently, but now
that local history is acknowledged to be not unworthy of research,
it has been proved to demonstration by painstaking local antiquaries
that the Wichehalses were not Dutch, but of an ancient Devon stock,
and that they consequently could not have been the heroes of those
hair’s-breadth ’scapes ascribed to them.
But their own true story is sufficiently interesting. They are traced
back to about 1300, to the hamlet of Wych, near Chudleigh, in South
Devon, a hamlet itself deriving its name from a large wych-elm that
grew there. From the hamlet the family drew their own name, spelled
at various times and by many people in some twenty different ways;
commonly, besides the generally-received style, “Wichelse,” and
“Wichalls.”
It was in 1530 that the Wichehalses first came to North Devon;
Nicholas, the third son of Nicholas Wichehalse, of Chudleigh, having
settled at Barnstaple in that year. Like most younger sons in those
days, even though they might be sons of considerable people, he went
into trade, and became partner of one Robert Salisbury, wool merchant,
and prospered. Robert Salisbury died, and Nicholas Wichehalse married
his widow in 1551; prospered still more, became Mayor of Barnstaple
in 1561, and lived in considerable state in his house in what is now
Cross (formerly Crock) Street. The great wealth he accumulated may best
be judged by mentioning merely some of the manors he purchased: those
of Watermouth, Fremington, Countisbury, and Lynton. To this eminently
successful kinsman, the nine children of his brother John, who had died
in 1558, were sent, as wards. His own family numbered but two, Joan and
Nicholas, who came of age in 1588.
Nicholas, succeeding his father, retired from trade, and is described
in local records as “gentleman,” and appears incidentally in them as
wounding another gentleman with a knife, in a quarrel. Something of a
young blood, without a doubt, this young Nick. He never lived to be an
old one, at any rate, dying in 1603, aged thirty-eight, leaving five
sons and three daughters.
Large families appear to have been a rule not often broken among the
Elizabethan Wichehalses. It was indeed in every way a spacious era,
and one of the most continuously astonishing things to any one who
travels greatly in England, and notices the late sixteenth and early
seventeenth century monuments in the churches, is the inevitable
repetition of family groups, with the reverend seniors facing one
another, in prayer, above, and the Quakers’ meeting of children below,
boys on one side and girls on the other, gradually receding from
grown-up men and women, down to babies in swaddling clothes. Early and
late the Elizabethans laboured to replenish the earth and people the
waste places.
Hugh, the eldest son of Nicholas, the buck, or blood as I shall call
him, was seventeen years of age when his father died. He also had nine
children, and resided at the family mansion in Crock Street, until
1628, when that terrible scourge, the plague, frightened away for a
time the trade of the town and such of the inhabitants as could by any
means remove. It was a sorry time for Barnstaple, for the political and
religious wrangles that were presently to break out in Civil War were
already troubling it. For many reasons, therefore, Hugh Wichehalse, who
appears to have been an amiable person, and above all, a lover of the
quiet life, resolved to leave Barnstaple and reside at Lee, or Ley, in
the old thatched manor-farm that then stood where Lee “Abbey” does now.
Here he died twenty-five years later, as his monument in Lynton church
duly informs us. The epitaph, characteristic of its period, is worth
printing, not only as an example of filial piety, but as an instance
of extravagant praise. From what we know of him, he certainly seems to
have been the flower of his race; but, even so, he probably was not
quite everything we are bidden believe.
HUGH WICHEHALSE OF LEY,
WHO DEPARTED THIS LIFE
Christide Eve, 1653,
æt. 66.
No, not in silence, least these stones below,
That hide such worth, should in spight vocal grow;
We’ll rather sob it out, our grateful teares
Congeal’d to Marble shall vy threnes with theirs.
This weeping Marble then Drops this releife
To draw fresh lines to fame, and Fame to griefe:
Whose name was Wichehalse--’twas a cedar’s fall.
For search this Urn of Learned dust, you’le find
Treasures of Virtue and Piety enshrin’d,
Rare Paterns of blest Peace and Amity,
Models of grace, emblems of Charity,
Rich Talents not in niggard napkin Layd,
But Piously dispenced, justly payd,
Chast Spousal Love t’his Consort; to Children nine,
Surviving th’ other fowre his care did shine
In Pious Education; to Neighbours, friends,
Love seal’d with Constancy, which knowes no end.
Death would have stolne this Treasure, but in vaine
It stung, but could not kill; all wrought his gaine,
His life was hid with Christ; Death only made this story,
Christ call’d him hence his Eve, to feast with Him in glory.
The play upon words, “’twas a Cedar’s fall,” should be noticed above:
it is by way of contrast to the “Wiche”--_i.e._, wych-elm, in the
Wichehalse name.
Four years before the death of Hugh Wichehalse, his eldest surviving
son, John, had married one Elizabeth Venner. He distinguished himself
as one of the most bitter and relentless among the Puritans of
Barnstaple, and especially as a persecutor of the loyal clergy. He
found it prudent in after years to retire to Lee, and endeavour to
efface himself when the Royalists returned to power. Whether it was for
love he married again, a woman of Royalist sympathies, after the death
of his first wife, who had been as bitterly Puritan as himself, or
whether it was policy, does not appear; but, at any rate, when he died
in 1676, aged fifty-six, he left the family estates much shrunken. The
enriched Wichehalse family was already on the decline.
His eldest son, John, was an ineffectual and extravagant person, with
a bent, that almost amounted to perverse genius, to muddling away
his property; and a wife who in every respect aided and abetted him.
After a while, they removed to Chard, in Somerset; then, returning, he
sold the manor of Countisbury, to pay his debts. He raised repeated
mortgages on his other properties, borrowed right and left from his own
relatives and his wife’s; and finally, at his death in London, after
the foreclosure of mortgages and many actions at law, practically all
his lands had been dispersed.
His misfortunes were largely caused, according to popular superstition
at the time, by the part he took in the capture of Major Wade, one of
the fugitives after the Battle of Sedgemoor, on July 6th, 1685. Wade
and some companions had fled across country after the battle, and,
coming to Ilfracombe, seized a vessel there, intending to make off by
sea. But being forced ashore by ships cruising in the Channel, they
were obliged to separate and skulk along the coast. At Farley farm,
above Bridgeball and Lynmouth, Wade was so fortunate as to excite the
compassion of the wife of a small farmer named How. She brought food
to him, hidden among the rocks, and induced a farmer named Birch to
hide him in his still more secluded farm on the verge of Exmoor.
Information leaked out that a fugitive was concealed in one of the
few houses at Farley, and on the night of July 22nd, John Wichehalse,
Mr. Powell, the parson of Brendon, Robert Parris, and John Babb, one
of Wichehalse’s men, searched the place. Three houses were entered
unsuccessfully, but in the fourth--which happened to be Birch’s--Major
Wade was hiding behind the front door, as the search-party, armed,
came in. Grace How admitted the party. Wade, who was disguised in
Philip How’s rough country farmer’s clothes, ran off through the back
door, with two other men, and John Babb, raising his gun, fired and
hit him in the side. Wade was made prisoner. His wound was healed, and
himself afterwards pardoned. It is a pleasing thing to record that he
afterwards pensioned Grace How, who had succoured him in time of need.
The only tragedy of the affair was the suicide of Birch, who, afraid of
his part, hanged himself some few days after the capture.
This affair deeply impressed the country-folk. Wichehalse was thought
never after to have prospered, and it was told how John Babb was
thenceforward a man accurst. He left his master’s service and went
into the herring-fishery; whereupon the herrings deserted Lynmouth.
He died unhonoured, and his granddaughter, Ursula Babb, was afflicted
with the evil eye. She married and had one son, who was drowned at sea;
and thenceforward lived lonely at Lynmouth, half-crazed; telling old
stories of the departed grandeur of the Wichehalses which grew more and
more marvellous and confused with every repetition. It was she who told
the Reverend Matthew Mundy the legends, which he took down and first
printed--with many embellishments of his own--of Jennifrid’s Leap.
There was never (let it be repeated) a Jennifrid Wichehalse. The
feckless John Wichehalse, who ruined the family, had three sons and
one daughter. The sons died without issue; the last vestiges of the
family wealth being dissipated in their time by the effectual means
of a Chancery suit. Mary, the daughter, married at Caerleon one Henry
Tompkins, and had one son, Chichester Tompkins. She returned, in a
half-demented condition, to Lynmouth, and was used to wander along the
cliffs, the scene of her ancestors’ former prosperity, accompanied
by one old retainer, Mary Ellis. At last Mary Tompkins fell over a
steep rock into the sea, her body never being recovered; and so ended
the last Wichehalse. To-day, in spite of those large families of the
various Wichehalse branches, you shall not find one of that name
remaining in Devonshire.
To-day the Newnes’ interest dominates Lynton. I shall draw no satirical
picture of what has been made possible by the Elementary Education Act
of 1869 and _Tit-Bits_. Such an alliance carries a man into unexpected
horizons, but with so many Richmonds now crowding the field, the thing
will not be so easily repeated. On the crest of Holiday Hill stands
the residence of Sir George Newnes, Bart., and in the town the Town
Hall he gave is a prominent object: picturesqueness itself, in its
combined Gothic and Jacobean architectural styles, and contrasted
masonry and magpie timber and plaster.
There is always, in the summer, a cheerful stir in Lynton, and the
railway has by no means abolished the four-horsed coach that plies
between Ilfracombe and this point, and even on to Minehead. But when
the close of the season has come and the holiday world has gone home,
what then? The hotel-keepers and all the ministrants to the crowds of
visitors must surely, to protect themselves from sheer ennui, institute
a kind of desperate “general post,” and go and stay with each other, on
excessive terms, to keep their hands in, so to say.