of his father’s regiment at Lansdown when the latter fell mortally
wounded, met its recognition a month later at Bristol, when he was
knighted. After this he served under his uncle, Sir Richard, at the
siege of Plymouth and in Cornwall, and apparently accompanied Charles I.
in his march from the West after the defeat of Lord Essex; for the next
time we hear of him is at the second battle of Newbury (27th October,
1644), where he narrowly escaped his father’s fate. Being in the
thickest of the fight, and having received several other wounds, he was
at last felled to the ground with a very dangerous one in the head from
a halberd, which rendered him unconscious, and he was left for dead, nor
was he discovered until a body of the King’s horse, charging the enemy
afresh and beating them off the ground, found him covered with blood and
dust, but still living. He was carried to where the King and Prince of
Wales were, who sent him to Donnington Castle hard by, to be treated for
his wounds; but no sooner were the armies drawn off from the field of
battle than the castle itself was besieged by the enemy, and their
bullets constantly whistled through the room where the young sufferer
lay, during the twelve days which elapsed before the defenders were
relieved by the King at the third battle of Newbury. On his recovery
from his wounds, Sir John Grenville was promoted to the rank of a
Brigadier of Foot, and the following year was appointed a Gentleman of
the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales, who had formed a strong
attachment for him, which proved lifelong. He remained with the Prince
accordingly during the rest of the war, and accompanied him in his
flight to the Isles of Scilly, and afterwards to Jersey.
Towards the end of the year 1648 the Scilly Islands revolted from the
Parliament, and became the last rallying point of the Royalists under
Grenville, who was appointed Governor to hold them for the King; but he
had scarcely been there three weeks when tidings reached him of the
King’s execution. With passionate indignation, he at once proclaimed
Charles II. King, and could find no words hard enough for Cromwell and
the Regicides. He fortified the islands, already strong from their
natural position and existing earthworks; and in this he was ably
assisted by his brother, Bernard, then barely eighteen, who had run away
from his tutor, and lay concealed at Menabilly, near Fowey, whence he
managed to carry considerable reinforcements for the defence of the
islands. For two years Sir John carried on a guerilla warfare against
the English republic, and seized many merchant and other vessels; but
when Van Tromp made overtures to him to cede the islands to the States
General, and offered £100,000 as a bribe, Grenville indignantly refused
to yield an inch of British soil to a stranger, saying he was there “to
contend against treason, not to imitate it.” Admiral Blake, who was in
pursuit of Van Tromp, next appeared, and again attempted negotiations
for the cession of the islands, but Grenville was resolved to hold them
for the King alone, and for a whole month made such a stubborn
resistance that when at last Blake prevailed, Grenville secured terms so
exceptionally favourable to the Royalists that the Parliament refused to
ratify them, till Blake insisted and threatened to resign his
commission.
Sir John Grenville’s future career and the prominent part he took, in
conjunction with his cousin, George Monk, in the Restoration of Charles
II., who created him Earl of Bath, and showered countless honours and
endowments upon him, do not belong to a paper confined to giving the
fighting qualities of the family. These, however, found expression in
his two sons, Charles, Lord Lansdown, and John, afterwards created Lord
Granville of Potheridge. The latter was in the navy, and took part in
most of the naval engagements of his time, behaving with great bravery
and skill, particularly at the siege of Cork in 1690. Lord Lansdown took
part in the wars of Hungary against the Turks, and was present at the
battle of Kornenberch, the siege of Vienna, at Baracan, Gran, and
several smaller engagements, in all of which he displayed such unwonted
valour and intrepidity for one so young, that the Emperor Leopold, as a
special mark of honour, created him a Count of the Holy Roman Empire,
with the distinction of bearing his paternal coat-of-arms upon the
breast of the Roman Eagle. He also took part in the constant reprisals,
which marked the reign of William III., by the English and French upon
one another’s shores; and in one of these assisted in the bombardment of
his ancestral Norman town, Granville, and in another in the defence of
Teignmouth and Torbay.
The fighting spirit of the family was still handed on in another member
of the family—a second Sir Bevill, the eldest son of the Honourable
Bernard Granville (as the name was now spelt), who appears to have
inherited all the courage of the grandfather whose name he bore. On
leaving Cambridge, he entered the army, and served with distinction in
his uncle, Lord Bath’s, regiment in Ireland and Flanders, and was
knighted by James II. at the head of that regiment on Hounslow Heath on
the 22nd of May, 1686. When Lord Bath revolted to the side of the Prince
of Orange, Sir Bevill was despatched to Jersey to disarm the Papists and
secure the island—a mission which he carried out with complete success.
After this he took part in the Continental war against the French, and
behaved with conspicuous bravery at the battle of Steinkirk, August 4th,
1692. The battle was going against King William, when Prince Casimer of
Nassau, who was in command of the troops, galloped back to the English
in his right rear, and begged them to advance, as Count Solmes refused
to bring up his infantry. Rapidly forming Bath’s regiment, with the
pikes in the centre and the grenadiers and musketeers on either flank,
Sir Bevill put himself at its head, and, closely followed by the Buffs,
moved out from the line. He was only just in time. Baron Pibrach, the
Colonel of the Luxemburgers, had been desperately wounded whilst
endeavouring to rally his men, who were flying in disorder, hotly
pursued by the French. Suddenly out of the crowd of fugitives hurrying
to the rear there emerged a line of glistening steel, and Bath’s
regiment, scarcely discernible from its foes in its scarlet stockings
and breeches, its blue coats and buff cross-belts, strode sternly
forward, its three red banners waving overhead. A hail of musket balls
smote it in the face; a storm of iron from the batteries mangled and
tore its flanks; but it pressed irresistibly on, and amid a hurricane of
cheers that drowned even the roar of the cannons, hurled the French
infantry from its path, and recovered the position. But only for a
moment. Again and again the French batteries worked up in dense masses
along Granville’s front, only to surge back again, rent and maimed by a
pitiless fire. So for another hour the carnage grew, till Prince
Casimer, galloping to Granville’s side, gave him the order to retire. It
was six in the evening. The allied drums were everywhere beating the
retreat. William had at last given up the struggle, and the columns were
slowly winding to the rear. There was no pursuit. Sir Bevill’s gallantry
was long remembered and talked of with grateful admiration by the
British camp fires.
This paper must now close with a brief quotation from a letter written
by one who was the last but one of the representatives of this ancient
house in the senior male line, namely, George Granville (younger brother
of the last-mentioned Sir Bevill), afterwards created Baron Lansdown of
Bideford. Although no opportunity arose for him to distinguish himself
otherwise than in politics and as a poet, the old fighting spirit was
not lacking in him, and he was eager to gain his father’s permission to
take up arms against the Prince of Orange:—
Sir,—You having no prospect of obtaining a commission for me can no
way alter or cool my desire at this important juncture to venture my
life in some manner or other for my King and my country. I cannot bear
living under the reproach of lying obscure and idle in a country
retirement when every man, who has the least sense of honour, should
be preparing for the field. You may remember, Sir, with what
reluctance I submitted to your commands upon Monmouth’s rebellion,
when no importunity could prevail with you to permit me to leave the
Academy. I was “too young to be hazarded”; but give me leave to say it
is glorious at any age to die for one’s country, and the sooner, the
nobler the sacrifice. I am now older by three years. My uncle Bath was
not so old when he was left among the slain at the battle of Newbury,
nor you yourself, Sir, when you made your escape from your tutor’s to
join your brother at the defence of Scilly. The same cause is now come
round about again. The King has been misled; let those who have misled
him be answerable for it. Nobody can deny but he is sacred in his own
person, and it is every honest man’s duty to defend it. You are
pleased to say it is yet doubtful if the Hollanders are rash enough to
make such an attempt. But be that as it will, I beg leave to insist
upon it that I may be presented to his Majesty, as one whose utmost
ambition it is to devote his life to his service and my country’s,
after the example of my ancestors.
No unworthy extract, this, surely, wherewith to close the annals of six
centuries of stainless loyalty in a family whose motto has always been:
“Deo, Patriæ, Amicis.”
ROGER GRANVILLE.
THE AUTHOR OF _BRITANNIA’S| PASTORALS_ AND TAVISTOCK.[5] | |BY THE REV.
D. P. ALFORD, M.A.
If beautiful country could beget good poets, Tavistock ought to abound
in them. For, on one side, there is Dartmoor, with its rugged grandeur,
stretching out protecting arms to Brent Tor and Whitchurch Down; on the
other side, there is the majestic Tamar, winding through its
deeply-wooded valley, from Latchley Weir, past New Bridge and the
Morwell Rocks, to Gawton Quay; whilst through the midst, the sportive
Tavy runs down from its lonely cleave, and gathering up the Walla on its
way, with bright and tawny waters, now creeps, now rushes past, to break
through the beetling cliffs beyond Crowndale, and glide beneath the
Ramsham woods, to its happy meeting with the Walkham, and thence to the
copse-covered banks at Denham Bridge.
-----
Footnote 5:
_Chief authorities for this paper_: Dugdale and Oliver’s _Monasticon_;
old documents connected with Tavistock, recovered in ancient oak chest
in 1886; various papers on Tavistock Worthies, in the _Transactions of
the Devonshire Association_; Mr. A. H. Bullen’s “Life of William
Browne,” in the _Dictionary of National Biography_; and Mr. Wm. Carew
Hazlitt’s Introduction to the Roxburghe Club Edition of Browne’s
Works, 1868.
-----
Perhaps it was the rich and varied beauty round his home that forced
some scraps of verse from the rugged soul of our Puritan incumbent,
Thomas Larkham. At all events, two hundred years later, Vicar Bray was
versifying in the quiet seclusion of his vicarage, and inscribing his
best lines on slate slabs for the garden walls; and at the same time,
Mrs. Bray was writing her local tales in imitation of Scott, sending
letters to Southey about the borders of the Tamar and Tavy, and
commending to his kindly notice her poetical _protegée_, the modest and
gentle maid-servant, Mary Collins. Then, also, Miss Rachel Evans was
writing verse, as well as prose; and her brother-in-law, Mr. H. S.
Stokes, was beginning his career as a west-country poet here in
Tavistock.
[Illustration:
WEST VIEW OF TAVISTOCK ABBEY, 1734.
(_From an Engraving by S. and N. Buck._)
]
Transcription: [For the most noble John, Duke and Earl of Bedford,
Marquess of Tavistock, Baron Russel of Thornbaugh, and Baron Howland of
Streatham. Proprietor of these Remains. This Prospect is humbly
Inscrib’d by Your Grace’s most Dutiful, and Obedient Servants, Sam^l &
Nath^l Buck. Ordigarius or Orgarius Duke of Devonshire & Cornwall, whose
Daughter was married to K. Edgar, Very probably kept his Court here,
till his son Odulph built this Abbey Anno 961, for then the whole Mannor
of Tavistock, & Jurisdiction thereof, were given to the Monastery with
view of Frank Pledge, Gallowes Pillory assize of Bread Beer &c. The
Church was dedicated to St. Mary &. St Rumon. The Danes burnt it but it
was soon rebuilt. In the Reign of Ed. I. The abbot claim’d the aforesaid
Priveleges, which were by that King allow’d & confirm’d. There were some
famous Men Abbots thereof, particularly two Bishops & one Earl of
Devonshire; of the Courtenay family, Lectures were herein read in the
Saxon language to preserve it in Memory; it was of the Dignity of the
Mitred Abbots, who sat as Barons in Parliament. Their Power and
Priveleges continued till the Dissolution by K. H. 8. who gave it to
John L’^d Russel, in which Noble Family it still continues. Annual Value
£902 5 7¾.
S. & N. buck delim et sculp 1733 ]
All these, however, are local celebrities; and our one poet of public
fame is William Browne, the reverent disciple of Sidney and Spenser; the
personal friend of Wither and Drayton, Selden and Ben Jonson; the poet’s
poet, who suggested more than one idea to Milton, was admired by Keats,
and highly commended by Mrs. Browning. He was a bright little man,
beloved by his brother-poets for his simple manners and gentle
character; such another as Hartley Coleridge, without his weakness of
will; so that he was known amongst them as “Bonny Browne” and “Sweet
Willy of the Western Main.”
William Browne probably came of a knightly family near Great Torrington;
but he was born here in Tavistock in 1591—just the most stirring time
for minds and morals that England has ever known. The Reformation had
stimulated the conscience, as the New Learning had liberated the mind;
and then our wonderful deliverance from the mighty power of Spain had
produced an extraordinary national exultation. What wonder that this
newly-awakened energy should find expression in Spenser and Shakspere,
in Hooker and Bacon, and their innumerable, not unworthy satellites?
But apart from the general excitement, Tavistock had its own special
atmosphere of stirring influences, both from the past and in the
present. The inscribed stones in the vicarage garden show that the
country was occupied by a Gaelic tribe of Celts early in the Roman
times. But the town owed its fame, and probably its very existence, to
the great Benedictine monastery, founded by Earl Ordulf, and sanctified
by the relics of St. Rumon in the days of Edgar the Peaceable. For
almost six centuries it had reflected, and even, for a short while,
directly influenced, through its abbots, the changeful course of
England’s progress. Two of its earlier abbots were leading statesmen, as
well as active prelates. Lyfing, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, was
Canute’s fellow-traveller to Rome in 1026, and the staunch friend of the
patriotic Earl Godwin. Aldred, also Bishop of Worcester, and then
Archbishop of York, was the wise counsellor of Edward the Confessor and
of Harold, and the brave rebuker of William I.; he was the great
church-builder and church-reformer of his time, and he was the first
English Bishop to visit Jerusalem.
Our later abbots often illustrate public feeling, though they could not
guide it as these two had done. Thus the general confusion at the close
of Henry III.’s reign found such a bad sample in our monastery that
Abbot John Chubbe was suspended in 1265, and deposed in 1269. The
growing luxury and indifference of the fourteenth century was seen too
plainly in Abbot John de Courtenay, who was reproved by the good Bishop
Grandisson, in 1348, for neglecting his duties to the abbey and
alienating its property, whilst he kept dogs for hunting. Bishop
Brantyngham’s strong injunctions to Abbot Thomas Cullyng, in 1387, to
restore discipline and to keep the monastic rules, show that disorder
and dissipation had been tending from bad to worse.
But there is a brighter side to this picture of the past, and most of
our abbots were more learnedly or more clerically disposed. Some had
been slowly collecting a good library—an early promise of the present
Public Library, the best, for the size of the town, in the West of
England. Others had fostered the “Saxon School,” probably founded in the
early days of the thirteenth century, and still represented by the
Grammar School. In the spring of 1318, under Abbot John Campbell, Bishop
Bronescombe consecrated the Parish Church, which had been rebuilt in the
beautiful Decorated style of the day; and in the autumn of the same
year, he came again to consecrate the Conventual Church, which, in its
grand proportions, was almost a rival of Exeter Cathedral. Under Robert
Bonus, in 1325, was established the Guild of the Brothers and Sisters of
the Light of St. Mary in the Parish Church; and in 1370, Abbot Stephen
Langdon showed his concern for the good of the town by appealing to the
faithful to help in restoring the stone bridge over the rude waters of
the Tavy. John Denyngton probably rebuilt much of the Abbey in the
Perpendicular style then in vogue; and he certainly added to his own
dignity and to that of his monastery by gaining the permission of Henry
VI., in 1458, to apply to the Pope, Pius II., for the privilege of
wearing the pontificalia. This, our first mitred abbot, like his
predecessor, Allan of Cornwall, two hundred years earlier, had come back
to Tavistock from presiding over the dependent Priory of Tresco, in the
Isles of Scilly. Abbot John Banham was more ambitious than Denyngton; in
1513 a grant of Henry VIII. made him a spiritual peer, as Baron
Hurdwick, and four years later, a bull of Leo X. exempted him from
episcopal visitation. It was probably to Banham that the abbey owed an
honour more considerable and more in keeping with the spirit of the
age—the setting up within its precincts of the first printing-press in
the West of England.
But the glory of our abbey had scarcely reached its height, before it
faded suddenly and for ever. Anticipating the blow which shattered the
larger monasteries in the spring of 1539, our abbot, John Peryn, not
emulous of the fate of the abbots of Glastonbury, Woburn, and Fountains,
assembled his twenty monks in the Chapter-house on March 20th, and then
and there resigned all their claims into the hands of the King. For this
ready surrender they were rewarded with their lives and various
pensions. With his pension of £100 a year, the abbot withdrew to
Stonepost, in West Street, and was probably the “Sir John Peryn” who, in
1543, was paid £6 as “Jesus’ Priest.”
When William Browne was a lad, middle-aged men must have known the last
Abbot of Tavistock; and old people could recall—the poorer sort with
regretful sighs, the good old times, when the frequent services still
sounded from the Abbey Church, and the monks distributed alms at the
arched gateway, beneath the present library. Even Browne himself, a
child of the Renaissance, who hated superstition and loved the Pagan
mythology, could grudge the misuse of sacred buildings; and amongst
other evils done by the Tavy in flood, he tells us how the stream—
Here, as our wicked age doth sacriledge,
Helpes downe an Abbey.
But though he was fond of Chaucer and our older poets, and though he
felt the influence of the stately ruins that surrounded his
school-house, he loved nature more than art, and was too full of present
life to care very much for the past. As a boy with boys, he would spend
his holidays breaking away from
An Orchard, whence by stealth he takes
A churlish Farmer’s Plums, sweet Peares or Grapes;
chasing the “nimble Squirrel” in “Blanchdown Woods”; or, with his rod,
following his “native Tavy” in her “many mazes, intricate meanders.” But
as thought came with years, he would be stealing away alone to cherish
his “Spring of Poesie” with Sidney’s _Sonnets_ or Spenser’s _Faërie
Queen_, as he wandered over the “Dazied Downes” that “sweetly environed”
his home, or nestled beneath some shade in “Sweet Ina’s Combe,” half
lulled to sleep by the Walla’s murmurings, or rousing himself to compose
“the pleasing cadence of a line” in tune with those gentle murmurings.
Nor, indeed, had all the honour of Tavistock departed with the overthrow
of her abbey. The Russells, who succeeded to the property, did not
neglect the duties connected with it. They began—as they have
continued—to maintain the religious and educational endowments. They
supplied the borough with statesmen for Members of Parliament, in the
generous patriot, Lord William Russell, in Lord John, the leader of
Reform, and in the thoughtful, far-sighted Lord Arthur. They improved
the town with wide streets and public buildings, and, more recently,
with a fine statue, the first in the country, of Francis Drake.
Browne was but a little lad of five when his greatest townsman finished
his heroic course in a sea-grave off Nombre de Dios, in 1596; but he
kept his exploits in remembrance, and presently celebrated him as the—
—valiant, well-resolvèd Man,
Seeking new paths i’ th’ pathlesse Ocean.
Besides the Drakes, there were several families of distinction in and
about Tavistock when Browne was a boy: there were Slannings, Kellys, and
Champernownes near by; and in the parish, Glanvills, Maynards, Peeks,
and Fitz.
In that year, 1596, there was born in the mansion at Fitzford the
daughter of John Fitz and Bridget Courtenay, who, as Lady Howard, was to
be so cruelly maligned by false rumours and fictitious romance. The
family had been long settled at Fitzford, and a John Fitz was M.P. for
Tavistock in 1427. Lady Howard’s grandfather married Mary Sydenham, of
Brympton, Somerset; and at the back of their quiet tomb in the Parish
Church is the kneeling figure of her father, Sir John Fitz. He was but a
youth of fifteen at his father’s death, in 1589; and his riotous, wasted
life was an ironical commentary on his kneeling posture. After a wild
and reckless youth, in 1699, when he was twenty-five, he killed Nicholas
Slanning, of Bickley, in a cowardly brawl. Coming home from a short
sojourn abroad, he was more quiet for a while; but presently, returning
from London, whither he had gone to be knighted at the Coronation of
James I., he was more dissipated than ever. He drove his wife and
daughters to seek refuge at Powderham, and upset the usually decent
parish with drunkenness and disorder. At last, on a second journey to
London, in a fit of mad panic, he killed the innkeeper at Twickenham,
and then so stabbed himself that he died in a few days.
His nine-year-old daughter, the prey of greedy guardians, after being
forced into early marriages, enjoyed some years of wedded happiness with
her third husband, Sir Charles Howard, fourth son of the Earl of
Suffolk. Then, having suffered years of neglect and annoyance from her
fourth husband, the clever soldier, but treacherous politician, Sir
Richard, brother of the chivalrous Sir Bevil Grenville, at last, after
Fitzford had been sacked by the Roundheads, and her husband had fled the
country, she settled down in her old home for twenty-five quiet years,
from 1646 to 1671. Her son, George Howard, managed her property, joined
her in such local contributions as that, in 1670, for the “redemption of
captives in Turkey,” and represented Tavistock with Lord William Russell
in 1660. But as he died some weeks before her, Lady Howard left her
large estates bordering the Tavy, the mansion of Fitzford, the pleasant
country house of Walreddon, with many goodly farms, Browne’s favourite
Ramsham amongst them, to her first cousin, Sir William Courtenay, of
Powderham.
It was about the year 1606 that William Browne left the Grammar School
for Exeter College, Oxford. He did not then matriculate or take his
degree, but he made friends with his colleagues, several of whom showed
their poetical taste in commendatory verses to his _Pastorals_ in 1613.
Meanwhile, in November, 1611, Browne had passed on to the Inner Temple,
where he largely increased his poetical acquaintance. He was on good
terms with Ben Jonson, Chapman, and Massinger amongst our dramatists,
and was therefore probably known to Shakspere; but his most intimate
friends were John Davies, the able author of _Nosce Teipsum_;
Christopher Brooke, the close ally of the famous poet and preacher, John
Donne; George Wither, and Michael Drayton. He and Brooke, in 1613,
published in one volume their elegies on the death of Prince Henry. He
had much in common with the early poems of Wither: their _Pastorals_
exhibit the same charming simplicity, the same full content in
verse-making, the same indifference to irresponsive maidens. These lines
of Browne:—
And gentle Swaine, some counsel take of me;
Love not where still thou maist; love who loves thee;
strike the same note as that of Wither’s spirited song:—
Shall I wasting in despair,
Die because a woman’s fair?
. . . . . .
If she be not so to me,
What care I how fair she be?
To Drayton, as his “Honor’d Friend,” Browne addressed some verses
introductory to the second part of the _Polyolbion_. Regretting the loss
to letters when great Eliza died, with Chapman’s _Homer_ in mind, he
boasts that we can still render the classics into English without loss:—
Whilst our full language, musical and high,
Speaks, as themselves, their best of Poesy.