Lynton and Lynmouth: A Pageant of Cliff & Moorland. John Presland
wife and his son among them—swarming about his ears. This northern coast of Devon is linked with that dark crypt in Canterbury where Becket fell in the sacerdotal robes of High Mass; for it was a Tracy who was one of the four knights who spurred from London to rid Henry "of this turbulent priest," and the Tracys owned Lynton, Countisbury, and Morthoe. It is to Morthoe that Tracy is supposed to have come after the murder, with the curse upon him which descended to his family—that, wherever they went,
"the Tracys
Have always the wind and the rain in their faces"—
and to have lived out the bitter end of his life with the horror of sacrilege in his heart. There is a monument in the church of Morthoe of William de Tracy, but it is of early fourteenth-century date, and belongs to a descendant of King Henry's knight, who was rector of the parish. A later Tracy was Baron of Barnstaple, and was appointed Governor of the island of Lundy in the reign of Henry III.
Nearly a century later Edward II, flying from the armies of his Queen and the turbulent barons, took ship for Lundy, but was driven back to Wales by contrary winds. And of this event a poem was made in the reign of James I, which is quoted by Westcote as written by a "modern poet," though he does not give us the name. The verse still retains a smack of the Elizabethan diction—not the Shakespeare magic, indeed, but the euphuistic, antithetical, fantastic balance of phrases:
"To Lundy which in Sabrin's mouth doth stand,
Carried with hope (still hoping to find ease),
Imagining it were his native land,
England itself; Severn, the narrow seas;
With this conceit, poor soul, himself doth please.
And sith his rule is over-ruled by men,
On birds and beasts he'll king it once again."
Devon took its unhappy share in the Wars of the Roses, and Perkin Warbeck besieged Exeter in 1497, but unsuccessfully, like most other exploits of that unlucky adventurer. Fifty years later the West rose in arms against Henry VIII, in support of the "old religion," and to protest against the dissolution of the monasteries; but the rising was put down, and Henry took and subdued Exeter, and carried through his bold and often ruthless policy.
But it is in the reign of Elizabeth that Devon takes on the special glamour with which it is still associated in most minds. For it was the sixteenth century which gave to England such men as Richard and John Hawkins, Adrien and Humphrey Gilbert, John Davies—that sailor friend of Adrien Gilbert's who, inspired by him, made the first dark voyage into the Polar regions, and traded with the Esquimaux, as told in Hakluyt's "Voyages"—and Sir Richard Grenville, with his "men of Bideford in Devon," with whom he fought the Revenge single-handed against the fifty and three Spanish galleons in that last, greatest fight of all; and Sir Walter Raleigh, a philosopher among courtiers, a poet among princes, statesman, dreamer, adventurer, who planned nobly and executed daringly, and failed more greatly than other men succeed. Millais has drawn him for us, in his boyhood, sitting on the beach at Budleigh Salterton, with the wind blowing his hair round his sensitive, eager face, hugging his knees as he listens to the stories of the sailor with the bright parrot-feathers in his hat, one of the men, perhaps, who sailed with Frobisher or terrible John Hawkins, round the world to the far-off coasts of adventure, the lands of gold and spices. It is to Raleigh, and to his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, that we owe the first colony of America, "Virginia," called so by Raleigh from the Virgin Queen, in the compliment of his day—to them is due the praise of having seen that "colonization, trade, and the enlargement of Empire, were all more important for the welfare of England than the acquisition of gold," and this in an age which was dazzled by the facilities of wealth lying ready to the greedy hand in that "New World."
And this mind, so daring, so original, so diverse, which could turn a sonnet or design a battleship (for the Ark Raleigh, built after his plans, was admittedly the best ship of our fleet that met the Armada), which had experienced the favour and disfavour of princes in the fullest degree, which had known triumph and discouragement beyond the ordinary measure of humanity, turned in the last dark years of imprisonment to a steady contemplation of human activity, and, largely conceiving here, as in all else, planned a "History of the World." Let his own noble words be his epitaph:
"O eloquent, just, and mighty Death! whom none could advise, thou hast persuaded; what none have dared, thou hast done; and whom all the world have flattered, thou only hast cast out of the world and despised; thou hast drawn together all the far-stretched greatness, all the pride, cruelty and ambition of man, and covered it all over with these two narrow words, 'Hic jacet.'"
And then there was Drake—Drake, whose name perhaps overshadows all other names in Devon; Drake, who
"was playing a rubber of bowls
When the great Armada came;"
but, being told of the sighting of the fleet, remarked that "they must wait their turn, good souls," and continued his game; Drake, who, the year before the sailing of the Armada, "singed the King of Spain's beard" most mightily, going up and down the coasts of Spain and Portugal, plundering and burning the ships in their very harbours; who sailed round the world, with the sun for "fellow traveller," as an epitaph under his portrait in the Guildhall says of him; who, on the first independent expedition which he led to America, received a dangerous wound in his attack on Nombre de Dios, but concealed it from his men, and led them to the public treasury, telling them "that he had brought them to the mouth of the treasury of the world," and then fainted over the great bars of silver and gold, and when they took him up he was losing "so much blood as filled his very footsteps in the sand;" Drake, who has become a legend and a myth in Devon, so that the country-people say that he brought water from Dartmoor to Plymouth, by compelling a stream to follow his horse's heels all the way into the town; who, like King Arthur and Barbarossa, is not dead, but will return again to his country if his people in their need strike on his drum and call him.
But beyond and behind all these great names, which ring in our ears like martial music, are the nameless crowd of Devon men who sailed with them, and fought with them, and worked with them, and loved them. Men from Bideford and Appledore and Barnstaple, from Teignmouth and Budleigh and Dartmouth, from every little harbour along the bold north coast, from every creek and bay of the south, from the sheltered villages among their trees, from the wind-swept, hilly little towns, from the busy quayside or the lonely farm, came the men whose courage and whose will, whose love of profit and greater love of adventure, gave a lustre to England in the "golden days of Elizabeth."
Those days passed, and were followed presently by the unhappy years of the great Civil Wars. It was perhaps not unfitting that a Grenville—Sir Bevil Grenville—led an army against the Parliamentarian troops in the Battle of Lansdown Hill, though it was an army of Cornishmen he led, and not of Devonshire men, for the Grenvilles were then living at their Cornish home of Stowe. Sir Bevil was killed in battle, but Anthony Payne, his servant, a great giant of a man, and a true friend to his master, set Sir Bevil's young son upon his father's horse, and bade him lead his father's men to victory, as, had he lived, his father would have done. Afterwards Anthony Payne brought Sir Bevil's body back to Stowe, and he wrote to Lady Grenville a letter which deserves to be recorded for its true and simple dignity:
"HONOURED MADAM—
"Ill news flieth apace: the heavy tidings hath no doubt already travelled to Stowe that we have lost our blessed master by the enemies' advantage. You must not, dear lady, grieve too much for your noble spouse. You know, as we all believe, that his soul was in heaven before his bones were cold. He fell, as he did often tell us he wished to die, for the good Stewart cause, for his country and his King. He delivered to me his last commands, and with such tender words for you and for his children as are not to be set down with my poor pen, but must come to your ears upon my best heart's breath. … I am coming down with the mournfullest burden that ever a poor servant did bear, to bring the great heart that is cold to Kilkhampton vault. Oh, my lady, how shall I ever brook your weeping face? … "
This perhaps, is Cornish history and not Devonshire, except that the name of Grenville is so inseparably linked in our minds with Devon.
During