“You go, and round that head, like banners in the air,
Shall float full many a loving hope and many a tender prayer.”
Footnote 4:
This story of the Moors’ heads derives considerable countenance from
the following circumstance related in Owen and Blakeway’s “History of
Shrewsbury.” It appears that a Mr. Richard Ridley married Elizabeth
Benbow, a sister of the admiral. Their daughter, Sarah Ridley, married
Richard Briscoe, and Helen Briscoe, great granddaughter of this
marriage, married John Powell, of the Castle Foregate, Shrewsbury; and
in his possession might be seen a curious kind of cup or punch-bowl
edged with silver, on which was engraved “The First Adventure of
Captain John Benbo, and Gift to Richard Ridley, 1687.” On close
inspection this cup was found to consist of cane very closely matted
together, and coated on both sides with varnish. The vessel was
evidently such a covering for the head as is in use among the Moors,
so that it might have been worn by one of the thirteen pirates who
boarded the _Benbow_ frigate.
Footnote 5:
My friend, Albert W. Woods, Esq., Lancaster Herald, informs me that no
registry or entry of these augmented arms is to be found in the
Heralds’ College. The only Benbow arms there are those of the Benbows
of Newport, viz., “Sa. two string-bows endorsed in pale or garnished
gu., between two bundles of arrows in fesse, three in each bundle,
gold, barbed and headed arg., and tied up proper. _Crest_—A harpy
close, or, face proper, wreathed round the head with a chaplet of
roses gu.” Mr. Woods also kindly furnishes me with a pedigree of the
Benbows of Newport from Vincent’s “Collection for the County of
Salop,” which nowhere shows connection with the family of the admiral,
but in it I find a “Thomas Benbow, ætatis 20, 1623.” May not this have
been (though no uncle of the admiral) the Colonel Thomas Benbow of the
Civil War, who, as nothing proves that he was shot after the Battle of
Worcester, may have lived to be the old cavalier whom Charles II.
discovered in poverty in the Tower?
Footnote 6: