cave began to fail. More than one armed king’s cutter were seen day and
night hovering off the land. Foreigners visited the house with tidings
of peril. So he “who came with the water went with the wind.” His
disappearance, like his arrival, was commemorated by a turbulent storm.
A wrecker, who had gone to watch the shore, saw, as the sun went down,
a full-rigged vessel standing off and on. By-and-by a rocket hissed up
from the Gull Rock, a small islet with a creek on the landward side
which had been the scene of many a run of smuggled cargo. A gun from
the ship answered it, and again both signals were exchanged. At last a
well-known and burly form stood on the topmost crag of the island rock.
He waved his sword, and the light flashed back from the steel. A boat
put off from the vessel with two hands at every oar--for the tide runs
with double violence through Harty Race. They neared the rocks, rowed
daringly through the surf, and were steered by some practised coxswain
into the Gull Greek. There they found their man. Coppinger leaped on
board the boat, and assumed the command. They made with strong efforts
for their ship. It was a path of peril through that boiling surf.
Still, bending at the oar like chained giants, the man watched them
till they forced their way through the battling waters. Once, as they
drew off the shore, one of the rowers, either from ebbing strength or
loss of courage, drooped at his oar. In a moment a cutlass gleamed over
his head, and a fierce stern stroke cut him down. It was the last blow
of Cruel Coppinger. He and his boat’s crew boarded the vessel, and
she was out of sight in a moment, like a spectre or a ghost. Thunder,
lightning, and hail ensued. Trees were rent up by the roots around the
pirate’s abode. Poor Dinah watched, and held in her shuddering arms
her idiot-boy, and, strange to say, a meteoric stone, called in that
country a storm-bolt, fell through the roof into the room at the very
feet of Cruel Coppinger’s vacant chair.
FOOTNOTES:
[90] From _All the Year Round_, vol. xvi. pp. 537-540. 1866. For the
historical basis of this article, see Appendix F.
[91] In the original form of this article, a second verse was added,
and the first was slightly different.
“Will you hear of the bold, brave Coppinger?
How he came of a foreign kind?
He was brought to us by the salt water;
He’ll be carried away by the wind.
For thus the old wives croon and sing,
And so the proverbs say,
That whatsoever the wild waves bring
The winds will bear away.”
[92] See p. 38.
[93] Hawker himself used a seal engraved with the one word, “Thorough,”
the motto, as he said, of Archbishop Laud.
[94] Mr. Baring-Gould, in his “Vicar of Morwenstow” (Edition 1899, p.
110), gives another reason for Coppinger’s wrath:--“The Kilkhampton
parson hated rook-pie. Coppinger knew it. He invited him to dine with
him one day. A large rook-pie was served at one end of the table, and
roast rooks at the other, and the parson, who was very hungry, was
forced to eat of them. When he departed he invited Coppinger to dine
with him on the following Thursday. The smuggler arrived, and was
regaled on pie, whether rabbit or hare he could not decide. When he
came home he found a cat’s skin and head stuffed into his coat pocket,
and thereby discovered what he had been eating.”
THOMASINE BONAVENTURE[95]
The aspect of rural England during the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries must have presented a strange and striking contrast, in
the eye of a traveller, to the agricultural scenery of our own time.
Thinly peopled--for the three millions of our chief city nowadays are
in excess of the total population of the whole land of the Edwards and
the Henrys--the inhabitants occupied hamlets few and far between, and
a farm or grange signified usually a moated house amid a cluster of
cultivated fields, gathered within fences from the surrounding forest
or wold, and gleaming in the distance with rich or green enclosures,
rescued from the wilderness, to give “fodder to the cattle, and bread
to strengthen the heart of man.” But the great domains of the land for
the most part expanded into woodland and marsh and moor, with glades
or grassy avenues here and there for access to the lair of the red
deer or the wild boar, or other native game, which afforded in that
day a principal supply of human food. Yonder in the distance appeared
ever and anon a beacon-tower, which marked the place and ward for the
warning of hostile advances by night, and for the gathering rest of the
hobbelars or horsemen, whose office it was to scour the country and to
keep in awe the enemies of God and the king. Wheel-roads, except in
the neighbourhood of cities or on the line of a royal progress, there
were none; and among the bridle-paths men urged their difficult path
in companies, for it was seldom safe for an honest or well-to-do man
to travel alone. Rivers glided in silence to the sea without a sail
or an oar to ruffle their waters; and there were whole regions, that
now are loud with populous life, that might then have been called void
places of the uninhabited earth. But more especially did this character
of uncultured desolation pervade the extreme borders of the west of
England, the country between the Tamar and the sea. There dwelt in
scattered villages, or town-places as they are called to this day, the
bold and hardy Keltic people, few in number, but, like the race of the
Eastern wild man, never taught to bear the yoke. Long after other parts
of England had settled into an improved agriculture, and submitted to
the discipline of more civilised life, the Cornish were wont to hew
their resources out of the bowels of their mother earth, or to haul
into their nets the native harvest of the sea. Thus the merchandise
of fish, tin, and copper became the vaunted staple of their land.
These, the rich productions of their native county, were, even in
remote periods of our history, in perpetual request, and formed,
together with the wool of their moorland flocks, the great trade of
the Cornish people. From all parts, and especially from that storied
city whose merchants were then, as now, princes of the land, men were
wont to encounter the perilous journey from the Thames to the Tamar,
to pursue their traffic with the “underground folk,” as they termed
the inhabitants of Cornwall, that rocky land of strangers, as, when
literally interpreted, is the exact meaning of its name.
It was in the year 1463, when Edward IV. occupied the English throne,
that a tall and portly merchant, in the distinctive apparel of the
times, rode along the wilds of a Cornish moor. He sat high and firm
upon his horse, a bony gelding, with demipique saddle. A broad
beaver, or, as it was then called, a Flanders hat, shaded a grave and
thoughtful countenance, wherein shrewdness and good-humour struggled
for the mastery and the latter prevailed, and his full brown beard was
forked--a happy omen, as it was always held, of prosperous life. His
riding garb displayed that contrast of colours which was then so valued
by native taste, insomuch that the phrase “motley” had in its origin a
complimentary and not an invidious sound. Behind him and near rode his
servant, a stout and active-looking knave, armed to the teeth.
The traveller had crossed the ford of a moorland stream, when he halted
and reined up at a scene that greeted him on the bank. There, on a
green and rushy knoll and underneath a gnarled and wind-swept tree, a
damsel in the blossom of youth stood leaning on her shepherd-staff: her
companion, a peasant boy, drew back, half shaded by a rock. Sheep of
the native breed, the long-forgotten Cornish Knott, gathered around.
As he drew nigh, the stranger discovered that the maiden was tall and
well formed, and that her rounded limbs had the mould and movement
of a natural grace that only health and exercise could develop or
bestow. The sure evidence of her Keltic origin was testified by her
eyes of violet-blue and abundant hair of rich and radiant brown--the
hue that Italian poets delight to describe as the colour of the ripe
chestnut,[96] or the stalks and fibres of the maidenhair fern. She had
also the bashful nose that appears to retreat from the lip with the
unmistakable curve of the Kelt. She was clad in a grey kirtle of native
wool, and her bodice also was knitted at the hearth by homely hands.
The merchant was first to speak.
“Be not scared,” said he, “fair damsel, by a stranger’s voice. My name
is John Bunsby, of the city of London, and I am bound for the hostel of
Wike St. Marie, which must be somewhere nigh this moor. What did thy
gossips call thee, maiden, at the font?”
“My name, kind sir,” she answered, modestly, “is Thomasine Bonaventure,
and my father’s house is hard by at Wike. These are my master’s sheep.”
“The evening falls fast,” said the traveller; “I would fain hire safe
guidance to yonder inn.”
She beckoned to the youth and whispered a word in his ear, to which,
however, he seemed to listen with reluctance or dislike, and then, with
her crook still in her hand, she herself went on to guide the stranger
on his way. They arrived in due course at the hostel-door, at the sign
of the Rose: but it was the Rose, mere, and without an epithet; for
mine host had wisely omitted, in those dangerous days, to designate
the hue of that symbolic flower. The traveller dismounted at the door,
thanked and requited his gentle guide, and signified that as soon as
his leisure allowed he would find his way to her father’s house. After
a strict command to his own servant and the varlet of the stable that
his horses should receive due vigilance and abundant food, Master
Bunsby at last entered the inn. A hecatomb of wood blazed on the earth,
shedding light as well as heat around the panelled room--for in those
times of old simplicity a single apartment was allotted for household
purposes and for the entertainment of guests. The traveller took an
offered seat on the carved oak settle, in the place of honour by the
fire, and looked on with interest at the homely but original scene. At
his right hand a vast oven, with an entrance not unlike a church-door,
was about to disgorge its manifold contents. Rye-loaves led the way,
sweet and tasty to the final crust (wheat was in those days a luxury
unknown in Cornwall); barley-bread and oaten cakes came forth in due
procession from the steaming cave; and, last of all, the merchant’s
sight and nostrils were greeted by the arrival of a huge and mysterious
pie from its depths. The achievements of the dame, who was both cook
and hostess in her own person, were duly and triumphantly arrayed upon
the board, and the stranger-guest took the accustomed seat at the right
hand of “mine host.” His eyes were fixed with curiosity and interest
on the hillock of brown dough which stood before him, and reeked like
a small volcano with steaming puffs of savoury vapour. At last, when
the massive crust which lay like a tombstone over the mighty dish had
been broken up, the pie revealed its strange contents. Conger-eels,
pilchards, and oysters were mingled piecemeal in the mass beneath,
their intervals slushed with melted butter and clotted cream, and
the whole well seasoned, not without a savour of garlic, with spices,
pepper, and salt. The stranger’s astonishment was manifest in gesture
and look, although he by no means repulsed the trencher which came
towards him loaded with his bountiful share.
“Sir guest,” said the host, “you doubtless know the byword--‘The
Cornish cooks make everything into a pie.’ Our grandames say that the
devil never dared cross the Tamar, or he would have been verily put
under a crust.”
Satisfied with his fare, the merchant now inquired for the
dwelling-place of his guide. It was not far off. The parents of the
shepherdess inhabited a thatched hut in the village, with the usual
walls of beaten cob, moulded of native clay: all within and without
bespoke extreme poverty and want, but there Master John Bunsby soon
found himself an honoured visitor seated by the hearth, with a blazing
fire of dry gorse gathered from the moor to greet his arrival. There,
while the mother stood by her turn or wheel, and span, and the maiden’s
nimble fingers flashed her knitting-needles to and fro by the fitful
light of the fire, the old man her father and the merchant conversed
in a low voice far into the night, on a theme of deep interest to
both. The talk was of Thomasine, the child of the house. The merchant
related his own prosperous affairs, and spoke of his goodly house
in London, governed by a thrifty and diligent wife: the household
was one of grave and decent demeanour, with good repute in the vast
city wherein dwelt the king. He had taken an immediate interest, he
declared, in the old man’s daughter, and desired to rescue her from the
life she led on the bleak, unsheltered moor. He pledged himself, if
they should consent, to convey her in safety to London, and to place
her in especial attendance on his wife; and there, if her conduct were
in unison with her looks, he doubted not she would win many friends,
and secure a happy livelihood for the rest of her days. He would await
their decision at the inn, where he should be detained by business
two or three days. Earnest and anxious were their thoughts and their
language in the cottage that night and the next day. The aspect and
speech of the rich patron were such as invited confidence and trust;
but there were the love and fear of two aged hearts to satisfy and
subdue. There was the fierce and stubborn repugnance also of the youth,
the companion of the maid, who stood with her under the tree upon the
moor. He was her cousin, John Dineham,[97] of Swannacote, and they had
grown up together from childhood, till, unconsciously to themselves,
the tenderness of kindred had strengthened into love. The damsel
herself could not conceal a natural longing to visit the great city,
where, they said, but it might be untrue, “that the houses were stuck
as close together as Wike St. Marie church and tower;” but she would at
all events behold for once in her life the dwelling-place of the king.
“She would store up every coin, and come back with money enow to buy a
flock of sheep of her own, which she and John would tend together, as
aforetime, on the moor.” All this shook the scale.
When the merchant arrived to seek their decision, it was made, and in
favour of his wish. A pillion or padded seat was obtained from some
neighbouring farm, and belted behind the saddle of the merchant’s man.
Thereon, with a small fardel in her hand, which held all her worldly
goods and gear, mounted Thomasine Bonaventure, while all the villagers
came around to bid her farewell--all but one, and it was her cousin
John. He had gone, as he had told her, to the moor, and there among the
branches of the tree which marked the greeting-place of Master Bunsby
the youth waited to watch her out of sight. He lifted up his hand and
waved it as she passed on with a gesture of warning, but which she
interpreted and returned as a silent caress.
The travellers arrived at their journey’s end after being only a
fortnight on the road--a speed so satisfactory and unusual, that it was
Dame Bunsby’s emphatic remark that she verily thought they must have
flown.
Her mistress received Thomasine with a kind and hearty welcome, and
ratified, by her everyday approval, her husband’s choice of the Cornish
maid. When she was first told that her name was Bonaventure, and
her husband explained that it signified good luck, she said, “Well,
sweetheart, when I was a girl they used to say that the name was a
fore-sign of the life, and God grant that thine may turn out [so] to
be.”
Time passed on, and in a year or two the wild Cornish lass had
grown into a frame of thorough symmetry, firmness, and health. Her
strong thews, of country origin, rendered her capable of long and
active labour, and she had acquired with gradual ease the habits
and appliances of city life. She was very soon the favoured and the
favourite manager of the household. Her mistress, born and reared in a
town, had been long a frail and delicate woman; and life in London in
those days, as now, was fraught with the manifold perils of pestilent
disease. To one of those ancient scourges of the population, the
sweating-sickness, Dame Bunsby succumbed. Her death drew nigh, and,
with the touching simplicity of the times, she told her true and tender
husband, with smiling tears, that she thought he could not do better
than, if they so agreed, to put Thomasine in her place when she was
gone. “Tell her it was my last wish.”
This gentle desire so uttered--her strong and grateful feelings
towards the master who had taken her, as she expressed it in her
rural speech, lean from the moor, and fed her, so that her very bones
belonged to him--her happy home, and the power she would acquire to
make the latter days in the cottage at Wike St. Marie prosperous
and calm,--all these impulses flocked into Thomasine’s heart, and
controlled for the time even the remembrance of Cousin John. That poor
young man, when the tidings came that she was about to become her
master’s wedded wife, suddenly disappeared, and for a while the place
of his retreat was unknown; but it afterwards transpired that he had
crossed the moor to a “house of religious men,” called the White Monks
of St. Cleer, and pleaded for reception there as a needy novice of the
gate. His earnest entreaties had prevailed; and six months after his
first love, and his last, had put on her silks as a city dame, and
begun her rule as the mistress of a goodly house in London, her cousin
had taken the vows of his novitiate, and received the first tonsure of
St. John.
Her married life did not, however, long endure. Three years after the
master became the husband, he took the “plague sore,” and died. They
were childless; but he bequeathed “all his goods and chattel property,
and his well-furnished mansion, to his dear wife Thomasine Bonaventure,
now Bunsby;” and the maid of the moor became one of the wealthy widows
of London city. Among the MSS. which still survive, there is a letter
which announces the event of her husband’s death and bequest, and then
proceeds to notify her solemn donation, as a year’s-mind of Master
Bunsby, of ten marks to the Reeve of Wike St. Marie, “to the intent
that he shall cause skeelful masons to build a bridge at the Ford of
Green-a-Moor: yea, and with stout stonework well laid; and see,” she
wrote, “that they do no harm to that tree which standeth fast by the
brook, neither dispoyle they the rushes and plants that grow thereby;
for there did I passe many goodly hours when I was a simple mayde,
and there did I first see the kind face of a fathful frend.” But in
another missive to her mother, about the same date, there is a touch of
tenderness which shows that her woman’s nature survived all changes,
and was strong within her still. She writes: “I know that Cousin John
is engaged to the monks of St. Cleer. Hath he been shorn, as they do
call it, for the second time? Inquire, I beseech, if he seeketh to
dispart from that cell? And will red gold help him away? I am prospered
in pouch and coffer, and he need not shame to be indebted unto me,
that owe so much to him.” But this frank and kindly effort--“the
late remorse of love”--did not avail. John had broken the last link
that bound him to the world, and was lost to love and her. Reckless
thenceforward, therefore, if not fancy-free, and it may be somewhat
schooled by the habits and associations of city life, she did not wear
the widow’s wimple long. After an interval of years, we find her the
honoured wife “of that worshipful merchant-adventurer, Master John Gall
of St. Lawrence, Milk Street.”
Gall was very rich, and he appears to have emptied his money-bags into
his wife’s lap, as the gossip of the city ran, for it is on record that
soon after her second marriage she manifested her prosperity like a
true-hearted Cornish woman by ample “gifts” and largess to the borough
of St. Marie, “my native place.” Twenty acres of woodland copse in the
neighbourhood were bought and conveyed by that kind and gracious lady,
Dame Thomasine Gall, to feoffees and trust-men for the perpetual use of
the poor of the paroche, “for fewel to be hewn in parcels once a-year,
and justly and equally divided for evermore on the vigil of St. Thomas
the twin.” To her mother she sends by “a waggon which has gone on an
enterprise into Cornwall for woollen merchandise, a chest with array of
clothing, fair weather and foul, head-gear and body raiment to boot,
all the choice and costly gifts to my loving parents of my goodman
Gall, and in remembrance, as he chargeth me to say, that ye have reared
for him a kindly and loving wife.” But the graphic and touching passage
in this letter is the message which succeeds: “Lo! I do send you also
herewithal in the coffer a litel boke: it is for a gift to my Cousin
John. Tell him it is not written as the whilom usage was, and he was
wont to teach me my Christ Cross Rhime;[98] but it is what they do call
emprinted with a strange device of an iron engin brought from forrin
parts. Bid him not despise it, for although it is so small that it
will lie on the palm of your hand, yet it did cost me full five marks
in exchange.” But her marriage life was doomed to bring her only brief
and transitory intervals of wedded happiness. Five years after the date
of her letter above quoted, she was again alone in the house. Master
Gall died, but not until he had endowed his “tender wife with all and
singular his moneys and plate, bills, bonds, and ventures now at sea,”
etc., with a long inventory of the “precious things beneath the moon,”
too long to rehearse, but each and all to the sole use, enjoyment,
and behoof of Dame Thomasine, whose maiden name of Bonaventure was
literally interpreted and fulfilled in every successive change of
station.
We greet her then once more as a rich and buxom widow of city fame.
Her wealth, added to her comeliness--for she was still in the prime of
life--brought many “a potent, grave, and reverend seignor” to her feet,
and to sue for her hand. Nor did she long linger in her choice. The
favoured suitor now was Sir John Perceval, goldsmith and usurer--that
is to say, banker, in the phrase of that day; very wealthy, of
high repute, alderman of his ward, and in such a position of civic
advancement that he would have been described in modern language as
next the chair. He wooed and won the “Golden Widow”--for so, because
of her double inheritance of the wealth of two rich husbands, she was
merrily named. Their wedding was a kind of public festival, and the
bride, in acknowledgment of her own large possessions, was invested
with a stately dower at the church-door. One year after their marriage
her husband, Sir John, was elected to that honourable office which is
still supposed by foreign nations to be only second in rank to that of
the monarch on the throne, Lord Mayor of the city of London.
Thus, by a strange succession of singular events, the barefooted
shepherdess of a Cornish moorland became the Lady Mayoress of
metropolitan fame; and the legend of Thomasine Bonaventure--for it was
now well known--was the popular theme of royal and noble interest among
the lords and ladies of the Court. She demeaned herself bravely and
decorously in her ascent among the great and lofty ones of the land.
Like all noble natures, her spirit rose with her personal elevation,
and took equal place with her compeers of each superior rank. Nor did
her true and simple woman’s nature undergo any depreciation or change.
It breathes and survives in every sentence of her family letters,
transcripts of which have been perpetuated and preserved to our own
times. One part of her personal history is illustrative of a scene of
life and manners when Henry VII. was king.