BRIXHAM—LANDING OF WILLIAM OF ORANGE
Along the curving shores you come, past Tor Abbey Sands, Livermead,
and the little red knob of Corbyn’s Head, with a hole in the rock like
an eye, to Paignton. The reason for Paignton’s modern existence as a
populous seaside town is found in its excellent sands and safe bathing,
Torquay itself lacking any but the most meagre foreshore, and the tides
coming up to its sea-walls. The best feature of Paignton is, after all,
an extraneous thing: the lovely view from it of Torquay. In the old days,
when Paignton was merely a village of cob-built and thatched cottages,
grouped at hazard round the large, ancient and beautiful church, it must
have been well worthy an artist’s attention—but that day was long since
done, and Paignton is now merely a modern town, built on a flat site,
with a conventional pier, public gardens, and band stand, and a weird
freak building on the edge of the sands, known as Redcliffe Towers, or
sometimes as “Smith’s Folly”; the Colonel Smith who built it many years
ago apparently taking as models for his eccentric residence the round
tower of Windsor Castle and the would-be Oriental monstrosities of the
Pavilion at Brighton. The result is that it looks a kind of poor relation
of both.
Being a good deal more recent than Torquay, Paignton is not so
stucco-smothered; and its villas and the buildings of its very busy and
smart chief street are largely in brick and terra-cotta.
The exceptionally beautiful church, which, however, is sadly hidden away
amid these later developments, is due to Paignton having been the site
of a Bishop’s palace. A few ruins only of that palace remain, with a
romantic-looking tower, in which according to a picturesque legend, Miles
Coverdale translated the Bible.
At the secluded sands of Goodrington and Elbury Cove, that look perhaps
their best from the trains that hurry by, the traveller bids farewell
to the red rocks of Devon, and comes into the regions of limestone and
slate. The way leads on to Brixham: the railway itself proceeding to
Kingswear, opposite Dartmouth, and throwing off at “Churston Junction”
a little two-mile branch to the heights above Brixham town. All day
and every day a short train shuttlecocks those two miles, the engine
pulling one way and pushing another. If there be any three persons better
qualified above their fellows to speak of monotony, they must surely be
the engine-driver, stoker, and guard of this train.
The little terminus, so high above the town, smells like a fish-shop,
for Brixham is pre-eminently in Devon the place of fish, and great
trainloads go forth every day. You look astonishingly down upon roof-tops
from this place.
[Illustration: MILES COVERDALE’S TOWER, PAIGNTON.]
Down there is Brixham, perched with seeming precariousness along the
steeply sloping sides of the hills overlooking the pool that forms
its crowded harbour. To those who have never seen the fisher towns of
Cornwall it is an amazing place: those who know the Cornish coast realise
that this is the first of the true West Country fishing harbours, and
it seems to them to have strayed over into Devon by mistake. To speak
by the card, the “Brixham” of modern speech is strictly “Brixham Quay,”
and Higher Brixham, away up-along, on the high table-land, is the real
original Brixham; but Brixham Quay long since supplanted the original
place in importance. It is by far the largest and busiest fishing-port in
Devon, and as different from Torquay in character as chalk proverbially
is from cheese, marching-boots from patent-leathers, salt from sugar,
or any other picturesque and striking antithesis you can think of.
In Torquay you commonly hear Brixham spoken of as a “dirty, stinking
hole” and by similar terms, the reverse of endearing, but while we may
not deny it to be that, it is that and something more. It is natural,
and characteristic of the real old seafaring and fishing life of this
coast, and Torquay, however delightful, is not. Torquay and all “seaside
resorts” are excrescences, and utterly uncharacteristic of the real
indigenous life. No artist would choose to paint or sketch Torquay
and its delightful but pictorially impossible villas, and smart but
artistically desolating visitors; but Brixham is an artistic paradise.
It is dirty but natural, smelly but picturesque at every turn. An
excellent opportunity offers here, had we the leisure, for a philosophic
disquisition on the delightfully picturesque qualities of dirt and
untidiness, and the negation, artistically, of order and sanitation.
Because of its wallowing in fish-offal and its generally rough-and-ready
ways, Brixham is no place for the visitor, as generally understood; but
artists rejoice in it and its ways.
It must by no means be understood that the houses of Brixham are
picturesque. They are nothing of the kind, being simply gaunt, stark
unlovely structures of cob, or stone, or lath and plaster, as the case
may be, generally stuccoed and slate-roofed; with a resultant effect of
greyness. But they are arrayed in such amazing tiers of terraces, one
above the other, and are huddled so nearly together, and hang so closely
over the harbour that the general effect is highly picturesque.
Brixham changes little, and appears to be very much as P. H. Gosse,
visiting it in 1853, found it; “close, mean and dirty,” with “refinements
of filth” which he had never seen paralleled. One feels quite sorry for
that distinguished naturalist; but on the shore, at low water, under the
stones, he found _Trochus ziziphinus_ numerously, which seems to have
been some consolation. One feels irresistibly tempted to suggest that,
had he stayed at Brixham the night, he might also have found _pulex
irritans_, at the least of it, which would not have been so satisfactory.
It was to this fishy place that William, Prince of Orange, came on
November 5th, 1688, intent upon saving the liberties of England from
extinction at the hands of his bigoted father-in-law, James the Second.
The “Protestant Deliverer” came invited and welcomed by the majority of
Englishmen, for the country was so shiftless that it could not make out
to save itself; and, because of the mutual jealousies that would have
forbidden the success of any rising headed by one of our own, must needs
call in the cold, silent Dutchman, whom none loved. One’s sympathies are
distinctly with the debonnair Duke of Monmouth, whose rebellion had ended
so disastrously, three years earlier.
The Hollander preparations for this invasion were great, and spread over
a considerable period of time; and there was, moreover, no secret made
of them. The flotilla gathered together for the enterprise consisted of
fifty men-o’-war, and over five hundred transports, carrying an army of
fourteen thousand men. It was thus not very much the inferior in strength
to that of the great Armada itself. It waited long in the harbour of
Helvoetsluys, attendant upon the wind, which had been blowing steadily in
an unfavourable direction. At last, October 16th, it changed from west
to east, and the hour seemed to have come. The prince took leave of the
States-General, which wept copiously over him; while he remained, as was
his wont, grave and phlegmatic, only recommending the princess to their
care, should anything happen to him.
The great fleet sailed on the 19th, but the next day the wind changed to
north, and then worked round with violent gales from the west, so that,
in distress, they were obliged to put back to port. No vessels were lost,
and only one man was drowned, but five hundred horses died.
The States at once gave orders for the replenishing of all stores, the
princess, for her part, ordered prayers four times daily, and at last,
on the evening of November 1st, the fleet again put forth, with an east
wind. The original idea was to have landed in the mouth of the Humber,
and it must have seemed, to many of the Englishmen who accompanied the
expedition, an ill-omen that they were carried down channel into that
identical West Country which had proved so fatal to Monmouth.
The English fleet was assembled, watchful, at the mouth of the Thames,
but unable, in the teeth of the east wind, to emerge; and saw, with
helplessness, the great concourse of ships go, full sail, down channel.
Despite the fears of those who looked upon the west as ominous of ill,
the elements were thus working for the success of William, who thus,
unchallenged, arrived off the coast of Devon. Arrived there, the more
timorous began to fear being carried too far west to Plymouth, or beyond,
from which the intended march to the capital, along the heavy roads of
autumn, would be a toilsome and hazardous undertaking.
But all things made for success, and, arrived in Torbay on the night
of November 4th, the easterly wind ceased and changed to soft breezes
from the south. The next morning the landing began, in this harbour of
Brixham. It was November 5th, the auspicious anniversary of the famous
failure of the Popish “Gunpowder Treason and Plot,” and the bells of
Brixham rang out joyously, to celebrate History made, and History in the
making.
[Illustration: OBELISK MARKING THE SPOT WHERE WILLIAM OF ORANGE LANDED.]
Brixham Quay was then just a quay, and little else. The crowded houses of
this later age were represented only by a few scattered fish-cellars and
sheds, and in place of the stone piers and artificial harbour we now see
was merely a pool formed by nature, unassisted by art.
Many legends of this landing survive at Brixham. One tells how the
prince, standing in the boat that brought him towards the shore,
exclaimed in the best English he could command, to the people who
crowded the quay, “Mine goot beoble, I mean you goot, I am come here for
your goot—for all your goots”; but I think that is suspiciously like
one of the famous Ben Trovato’s stories, and it certainly has been told
of other aliens coming to these shores. The legends then go on to tell
how the prince asked if he were welcome, and being assured of the fact
replied that, if he were really welcome, they should come and fetch him;
which means no more than that there were then no stairs to the water, and
that, if a fine gentleman wished to land dry and clean, he must needs be
carried ashore.
One Peter Varwell, a fisherman, described as a short, thick-set little
man, then jumped into the water and carried the Deliverer to land. We are
not told how the Duke of Schomberg and Bishop Burnet, among other great
ones, came ashore; I am afraid they had to hoof it through the water and
the fish-offal. But when Burnet _did_ set foot upon the quay, the prince,
turning to him and taking his hand, asked if he did not believe now, more
than ever, in predestination. This was by way of a gentle rebuke to that
distinguished Churchman’s want of faith during the preparations for the
expedition, when at every mischance he had dejectedly said the enterprise
seemed to be predestined to failure.