Devon and Cornwall's Oddest Historical Tales E-Book

John Fisher

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Sachliteratur, Reportagen, Biografien
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 321

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

The West Country's colourful past encompasses a pageant of historical figures and peculiar stories – from Lawrence of Arabia's flamboyant motorbike forays across Dartmoor and the terrifying account of a lion attack on the Exeter mail coach, to Devonian wives still being sold at auction until the 1900s and the unsolved mystery of the Devil's footprints at Dawlish. Here too lies the truth about the location of Arthur's Lyonesse, the devilish deeds of the murderous pirate queen of Penryn, and the Cornish knight who ordered his corpse to overlook St Mullion for eternity. All these tales and more can be found in this collection of amusing, surprising and downright odd true stories from Devon and Cornwall.

Leseprobe

For Margherita Peretti who began it all

First published 2021

The History Press 97 St George’s Place, Cheltenham, Gloucestershire, GL50 3QBwww.thehistorypress.co.uk

© John Fisher, 2021

The right of John Fisher to be identified as the Author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without the permission in writing from the Publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ISBN 978 0 7509 9688 4

Typesetting and origination by The History Press Printed in Great Britain

eBook converted by Geethik Technologies

YOU COULDN’T MAKE IT UP

The tales in this book are all factual. Some, but not all, are about the great and the good from Devon and Cornwall’s historic past but others, by contrast, are about the small and the not so good – ordinary people with extraordinary stories – tales that have hardly seen the light of day before in a book of this kind. All of them have been chosen to interest the general reader, be they a resident or a visitor to this most historic and fascinating bottom left-hand corner of our beautiful island. Although times change and people move on, memories of their lives and the places in which they lived remain and are a joy to revisit as they are brought back to life again in this personal retelling of their unique stories.

CONTENTS

DEVON

Ship of Fools

Hablas Español?

The Spanish are Coming!

The Rise and Fall of Walter Raleigh

Devon Divided in ‘A World Turned Upside-Down’

Will the Real Lorna Doone Please Stand Up?

Dirty Work at the Crossroads

Accidental Death of a Revenue Officer

King of the Gypsies – and Dog Stealer

The (Fairly) Glorious Revolution

The French Prisoners on Dartmoor

Napoleon’s Farewell to Torbay

The Ladies who Lived on the Hill

The Lion Attack on the Exeter Coach

Dickens’ Christmas Present to the West of England

The Bishop and the Slavers

Wife for Sale!

Rule Britannia!

The Man They Couldn’t Hang

The Devil’s Hoof-Prints

Lawrence of Arabia in Devon

How Sidmouth Inspired Betjeman

CORNWALL

Land of Myth and Legend

In at the Deep End

A Realm of Saints and Poets

The Pirate Queen of Penryn

The Massacre of Cornwall’s Peasantry

Cloudesley Shovell’s Horrific Shipwreck

A Tomb With a View

The Race Home From Trafalgar

The Lieutenant and the Toppling of the Logan Stone

Dolly’s Ancient Tongue

Defoe as Travel Writer in Cornwall

They Called Him ‘The Cornish Wonder’

The Queen and the Cornish Fishwife

A Man on Fire

Singing Trevithick’s Praises

Never ‘Lord Byron’s Jackal’

‘That Bloody Woman!’

Cornish Weather Lore

Sea Watching and Stargazing

The Unvarnished Truth About Mermaids

It wasn’t all beer and skittles for West Country monks in the Middle Ages – there was also hawking, wenching and real tennis.

SHIP OF FOOLS

It’s not surprising that with much of Devon and Cornwall bounded on two sides by ocean, this is also England’s foremost domain of seafaring folk. It can also lay claim to being the first in England to utter the phrase ‘a ship of fools’, an expression now universally applied to any group that has lost its moral compass. It began in 1508 in land-locked Ottery St Mary and the collegiate church of St Mary on the hill above the town.

Enter one Alexander Barclay, a somewhat straight-laced Doctor of Divinity at Oxford and now the newly appointed chaplain. What he finds appals him. The church and its many hangers-on are in total disarray. Here are monks and priests who, instead of going about their religious duties, while away their days (not to mention nights) in hunting, ‘hawking at Honitone’, wenching, drunkenness, gambling and – wait for it – ‘the playing of Real Tennis’. He unpacks hurriedly, reaches for his quill pen and parchment and, closeting himself away from the hubbub, begins to write his satirical poem ‘The Ship of Fools’, some of which he translates from the original German. The poem is an allegory and a product of the medieval conception of the Shrovetide Fool and his crew. Here is the scholar surrounded by books but who learns nothing from them; the judge who takes bribes; the followers of fashion; the priests who fornicate or spend their time in church telling ‘gestes’ of Robin Hood – and so on. Although his critics say that his style is stiff and his verse uninspired, the phrase ‘a ship of fools’ has been usefully employed in the language ever since, but it did not make him popular in Devon. Having rubbed so many people up the wrong way, he left the county in 1513, eventually changing his religion and entering into the history books as ‘Maistre Barkleye, the Blacke Monke and Poete’ – a Franciscan at Canterbury. He died in Croydon on 10 June 1552.

Alas, there is no monument in Devon to the man or his epic works but if you have time to while away, you will find the woodcuts which illustrated his work online and, of course, the ageless words themselves, which remain those of a very wise man.

To be all but shipwrecked on a strange island was only the start of the tragedy for the little Spanish princess, Catherine of Aragon.

HABLAS ESPAÑOL?

Catherine of Aragon was not supposed to come up the A30 at all.

Her mother, Queen Isabella of Spain, had wanted her to land at Southampton because she had been told that it was England’s safest harbour and that is where it was planned that the seriously diminutive 16-year-old Infanta was to meet up with her husband-to-be, Prince Arthur, a delicate boy more than a year her junior and half a head shorter.

But time and tide are no respecters of princes and the regal reception that awaited her in Hampshire was thrown into disarray as a great storm blew up in the Channel. This was later reckoned to be a bad omen and a forerunner of what was to follow. At 3 o’clock in the afternoon of Saturday, 7 October 1501, the future Queen of England and her entourage, all of them decidedly green and ‘fearing for their lives throughout the storm’, set foot on English soil for the first time, in Plymouth, where they straightaway fell on their knees on the dockside and gave thanks. Mild panic ensued as lodgings were found and the princess (who spoke only Spanish and Latin, with just a little French) was persuaded to cool her heels for a week as messengers were sent ahead, hot foot, to Winchester. For, once upon a time, wise men had told Henry Tudor that Winchester was Camelot and it was why the wily Welshman had packed his wife off to that fair city as soon as he had heard that she was pregnant – fingers crossed that there she might be safely delivered of a son and heir that he could then name Arthur. The Once and Future King. But that was fifteen years earlier.

Right now, Catherine, Arthur’s bride-to-be, had reached Exeter on 19 October amid a cavalcade of escorting gentry in time for an official reception hosted and arranged by Henry VII’s specially appointed event organiser, Lord Willoughby de Broke. He must have been a remarkable man and probably set up some kind of new land speed record to have covered the ground between Southampton, Winchester and Exeter to get the whole welcome back on track in such a short space of time. He found Catherine lodged at the deanery in Exeter, close by the cathedral, where the squeaky weather vane atop the church of St Mary Major had kept her awake at night until a hapless servant of the dean’s was ordered aloft in the pitch dark and with a full gale blowing, to put an end to something that ‘did so whistle that the princess could not sleep’.

Awaiting her party at Honiton the next day were twelve palfreys (small riding horses) for her ladies, while a litter – a covered chair mounted on poles and carried between two horses – transported Catherine herself. She objected. She was a fine horsewoman but the litter had been ordered for her by Henry himself. Thus began her progress proper, following roughly what was to become the A30, with comfort stops every 12 miles or so. Just west of Crewkerne, Somerset, she bid adios to the great and the good of Devon and Cornwall and hola to those of Somerset’s dignitaries who could be mustered in time. Here was Sir Amyas Paulet from Hinton St George, and by his side Sir John Speke, a widower, from White Lackington. Whilst Paulet was well and truly married with a year-old son, Speke’s 59-year-old eye, though probably dimming, was still roving, and here at the roadside on that chill October day it settled on one of Catherine’s young maids of honour. She would have been about the same age as her mistress, Catherine. Her name, the records show, was Alicia or Alice (the Speke family tree spells her name Allice), and whether he courted her in English, Spanish or Latin, the old boy must have had something going for him because the following year they were married and together had one son, John, to keep the Speke line going. Fast forward 357 years to 1858 and their great (umpteenth great) grandson, John Hanning Speke was the man who discovered the source of the Nile, crossing Lake Victoria (as he himself named it) in a little collapsible boat called The Lady Alice.

Meanwhile, back on the Great South-West Road, Catherine’s progress continued through Dorset, with overnight stops at Sherborne and Shaftesbury. She finally arrived at Dogmersfield, in Hampshire, not far from today’s Fleet services. Here she took a welcome break from her journey and sent a message ahead to the rapidly approaching King Henry and groom-to-be, Arthur, telling them to hold off a while. It was, her messengers reminded the English Court, forbidden for either of them, king or prince alike, to have sight of her face before the wedding day. Catherine came from a court much influenced by Moorish Spain and would become the first veiled bride ever to be wed in the British Isles.

Nothing daunted, Henry rode roughshod over Catherine’s protestations, the young couple were brought together and an impromptu party and ball were held, although history relates that the diminutive Spanish princess and her even shorter English prince did not dance together: this would have been too much of an affront to Spanish etiquette. But by this great folly, some say, the marriage was cursed, and Arthur died just five months later while they were on honeymoon at Ludlow Castle in Shropshire. When questioned on the subject many, many years later, Catherine told her inquisitors words to the effect that she had indeed been ‘wedded but never bedded’.

As poor young Catherine was delivered to her destiny – and the wildly cheering crowds of London – she abandoned the litter the English had provided and chose instead to demonstrate her Spanishness to court and crowd alike by riding into the city on a broad-backed Murcian mule (hastily provided by the Spanish Ambassador), which she chose to ride side-saddle – and to the right – ‘in the Spanish style’. She and her entourage were lodged south of the river at the area known then, as now, as Elephant & Castle, which some say is the South Londoners’ corruption of the pronunciation of ‘La Infanta de Castilla’.

Yet an even greater curse than the loss of her husband was to follow, of course, when following the untimely death of Arthur she was married off to his younger brother Henry, later to become Henry VIII, and she, poor woman, the first of his six wives. Divorced. Beheaded. Died. Divorced. Beheaded. Survived. She died in 1536 aged 50, set aside for Anne Boleyn, and is buried in Peterborough Cathedral where, on the anniversary of her death each year a bouquet of yellow flowers - which some historians believe to be the colour of mourning in the Spanish Court - appears on her grave, left there by an unknown hand.

How Devon stood alone in the West as Elizabeth dithered and Spain sent its great Armada against us.

THE SPANISH ARE COMING!

It’s easy to picture Queen Elizabeth I facing down the Spanish Armada in her guise as the semi-divine being promoted so skilfully by the Tudor propaganda machine and portrayed in Gower’s famous depiction of her in The Armada Portrait. ‘God blew and they were scattered!’

In reality, today’s historians reveal Good Queen Bess as a serial tightwad whose miserliness and dithering brought about suffering and even death on an extraordinary scale to many of the brave men who served under her. Her sailors, at Plymouth, lived on such short rations that they were forced to fish off the sides of their ships in harbour as they awaited provisions and ammunition to fight the Armada.

She was finally persuaded to loosen her grip on her purse strings after naval commander, Lord Howard, had been forced to urge her, ‘For the love of Jesus Christ, Madam, awake and see the villainous treasons around about you, against your majesty and the realm.’

One month’s rations finally arrived in Devon on 23 June 1588 and were distributed to the fleet. They were told that they should make them last for six weeks. With the provisions came a warning from the queen, relates the renowned Devon-born historian James Froude, that she had forbidden further preparations to be made for supply till the month was out, after which it would take a further two weeks to assemble the rations and a further week to ship them to Devon.

The men bore their suffering without complaint but the beer that had arrived was sour and poisonous and brought dysentery, an enemy more dreaded than the Spanish, that carried them off in scores. Unable to endure the sight of this suffering, Lord Howard, the commander of the English fleet and Drake, both wealthy men, ordered wine and arrowroot for the sick at Plymouth on their own responsibility. Elizabeth later called them to sharp account for their extravagance, which had saved possibly a thousand brave men to fight for her. Drake took it on the chin. Howard refused to defend his actions and paid the bill out of his own purse.

It is late afternoon on Friday, 29 July 1588, and the first alarms are sounded out of Cornwall that the Spanish Armada is in sight off the Lizard Peninsula. Church bells ring out faint but clear across the Tamar and greenery is thrown on to blazing signal fires to create smoke and alert Plymouth, and thence the rest of England, that the invasion has come.

News of the number and disposition of the enemy ships reaches Drake and Frobisher and their fellow captains by sea the next day as a lookout ship, the Golden Hind, beats into Plymouth where Lord Howard’s fleet awaits the news, locked in by an inclement wind and the dictates of the tide.

Plymouth’s protective breakwater does not exist at this point in history. The smaller vessels – armed merchantmen for the most part – are sheltering in the mouth of the Tamar, the larger fighting ships are in the Sound, where they will stand a better chance of getting out against the tide by ‘kedging’. This will involve moving a vessel forward by dropping a small anchor ahead of it and then manning winches on deck to pull the ship along.

This is a laborious process but one that will nevertheless save the day and allow Howard’s men to escape and wait in the lee of Rame Head, the headland to the west of Plymouth Sound, for whatever is to come.

It is not yet dawn on the morning of Sunday, 31 July and Howard’s ships now lie hidden but ready for action. If they can slip out behind the Armada as it passes they will have the weather gauge – the windward position in relation to the enemy – answering the prayer of every English captain for the battle ahead.

First blood comes before noon. The Armada’s supreme commander, Alonso Perez de Guzman, Duke of Medina Sidonia, is called to the rail of his 1,000-ton flagship, the San Martin, which, through the clearing sea mist, sights eighty-five English ships to windward of them. His own great bow-shaped crescent of ships known as the lunula formation proceeds up-Channel – transports and troopships protected in depth in the centre – warships on either side in two horns, in an unbreakable formation.

So the English are out. He ignores the entreaties of his captains to attack Plymouth and continues their progress slowly eastwards, resolved not to risk an attack on Plymouth but to follow the orders of his king and sail to the rendezvous with the Spanish army from the Netherlands he believes to be waiting to join him at Calais.

Howard has no knowledge of Spain’s intentions but knows that he must harass the main central body of the Armada and prevent it from landing troops anywhere. Drake’s and Hawkins’s squadrons will attack the horns of the lunula.

Onshore, thousands have waited and watched and prayed throughout the short summer night, and as morning wears on there is a shout that sounds along the coast like a breaking wave, from Wembury to Salcombe and round to Dartmouth and beyond, as the sails of the Spanish galleons come into view.

They count them – 10, 20, 50, 130 sail. Then orange flashes and puffs of white smoke and seconds later the distant thunder of cannon fire as the galleons back their sails and slow in an attempt to entice these English into close combat. But their tormentors keep their distance, snapping at the heels of their quarry.

Like greyhounds, they bear down on the sterns of this slow-moving prey, each English vessel attempting to describe a figure-of-eight as it fires, first its long-range bow-chaser, then as it turns, a raking broadside, followed by a second as it goes about.

Devon watches the running battle unfold across the broad expanse of Lyme Bay, from Start Point to Portland Bill, attack after attack, hour upon hour. A quarter of the crews that man this English fleet are from Devon, many of them the loved ones of these townsfolk and villagers who have come to view this great drama.

Some stay to watch. Others hurry homewards and look to the safety of families, homes and belongings. Able-bodied men of the trained bands (between the ages of 16 and 60) gather up the weapons they have bought at their own expense – still longbows and pikes for the most part – and hurry to the local assembly points laid down by the Lord Lieutenant of the county, the Earl of Bath. Orders to Cornwall’s and Devon’s and Dorset’s trained bands are the same given to all the other coastal counties. They are to march eastwards along the coast, gathering in strength as they progress, so that wherever the Spaniards choose to make landfall they can be met in numbers.

No help comes from the far west. The Cornish trained bands march only as far as the Tamar before returning to their barley harvest. Devon stands alone and the whole of Devon is in motion. Gallopers leave the crowds that gather at village squares and urge their mounts up, up to the headlands and promontories to put fresh flame to the braziers that continue to smoke the word along the coast to Beachy Head in Sussex, where, at dusk, they turn suddenly inland towards London, this time as a string of bright fires.

At sea the 29,453 men, soldiers and sailors of the Spanish Armada cross themselves as they peer through the smoke of battle upon this foreign realm, ‘the great bastion of heresy’ they have come to destroy. Perhaps Medina Sidonia – briefly overcoming the seasickness from which he suffers so badly – permits himself a smile at the thought of the panic he and his men must be bringing to these Western counties. For only he and his senior officers know that Devon and Cornwall are safe awhile. This great crusading force has been charged with avoiding engagements if possible and making its way up the Channel to meet up with a great fleet of barges he believes to be waiting at Calais where some 27,000 hardened Spanish troops from the occupied territory of the Netherlands will embark and cross to England with the Armada as escort.

Those troops will land between Dover and Margate, and with the Armada escorting their right flank as it sails up the Thames, will advance and put London to the flame – along with England’s ‘heretic and illegitimate’ Protestant queen – restore Catholicism to ‘this blighted realm’ and crown Philip of Spain as its king.

So much for the plans of men – a plan never to unfold, thanks to the bravery of England’s seamen and a great summer storm. The rest, as they say, is history.

The running battle up the Channel pauses briefly off Calais, where the Armada anchors only to discover that there is no waiting army. Fire ships are sent against them and in a desperate attempt to escape many of the galleons cut their anchor cables. For many it foreshadows the disasters that are to come.

The largest of the English attacks follows on 8 August, off Gravelines, Flanders, after which the Spanish turn on their heels and flee northwards with the English in pursuit as far as the Firth of Forth.

As they round the Shetlands in a storm and head west to follow the west coast of Ireland to home, all thoughts of invasion vanish and survival becomes paramount. Ships sink or run aground, and in the teeth of what now turns into a full-blown hurricane, unable to anchor or find shelter, twenty-four more ships founder. Their crews either drown or are slaughtered by Elizabeth’s troops as they drag themselves ashore.

What Pope Sixtus V in Rome has blessed and declared Spain’s Holy Crusade has turned into a disaster. England, on the other hand, dubs the storm the Protestant Wind and sees it as a sign that God supports the Reformation.

First news of the defeat reaches Spain in early September, prompting Philip to write: ‘I hope that God has not permitted so much evil, for everything has been done for His service.’

Of the 130 ships sent by him against England, more than thirty-six capital ships are lost and a score and more of smaller vessels, supply ships and galleasses never return. More than 15,000 seamen and soldiers die, including those who either drown, are killed in action or later die of wounds.

Amazingly after such a tragedy, Philip strikes at England again in October 1592, with another army and a fleet of 126 ships. The orders this time are simple. Don’t chance the Channel. They are to invade England via the West Country by landing in Cornwall, occupying the port of Falmouth and then marching on into Devon via Plymouth, which will simultaneously be attacked from the sea.

With most of the English fleet being refitted, Philip’s cunning plan might well have succeeded – save for the October gales. This time thirty galleons are lost before they even sight the Scillies and the rest turn back.

Once more England is reminded of the inscription Elizabeth has had engraved on the Armada medals she had struck after the defeat of the first Armada: Flavit Deus et dissipati sunt. ‘God blew and they were scattered.’

(Footnote: All dates therein are those we use in the modern calendar.)

The remarkable life, loves and tragic death of Devon’s most illustrious son, his secret daughter and his loyal wife.

THE RISE AND FALL OF WALTER RALEIGH

Nobody knows for sure what became of Sir Walter Raleigh’s head after he was executed.

He was publicly beheaded as a traitor in Old Palace Yard, Westminster, in 1618 and his body was laid to rest in the chancel of St Margaret’s Church, Westminster, on the south side of the altar. But his devoted wife, Bess Throckmorton, took that severed head from the scaffold, wrapped it in a cloak and thence put it into a red leather, drawstring bag that she kept close by her until her own death some twenty-nine years later.

The mystery is further compounded by the fact that quite where that poor lady herself is buried is unknown. Was it put into her own coffin with her, that cherished head of Devon’s most illustrious son whose life was brought to such a tragic end by a complex conspiracy of intrigue, jealousy and lies that thrived at the court of the paranoid James I? For favourite of Good Queen Bess he had been and swashbuckling braggart of a sea-dog certainly, but traitor he never was – as James well knew.

Raleigh was born at Hayes Barton in Devon in about 1553, near East Budleigh to a Protestant family – the head of which was the landed gentleman, Walter Raleigh (a former deputy vice-admiral in the South West) and his third wife Katherine. Her sister, ‘Kat’, was governess to the young princess Elizabeth and remained a close friend to her in the queen’s later years.

So the man who was to become Devon’s most famous son, a knight of the realm, writer, poet, philosopher, soldier, adventurer (dare we say pirate?) politician, courtier – and latterly a healer – set out from his farmhouse home in deepest Devon – after completing his education at Oriel College Oxford – with some useful connections that the youthful and ambitious Raleigh was soon to exploit.

Sir Carew Raleigh, a Member of Parliament, was his elder brother, while his half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, introduced him to the royal court, where his good looks and charm made him popular – he was a legendary ladies’ man – and after serving the Crown as a soldier in the French wars and then later by putting down a rebellion in Ireland, the dashing young blade became the 27-year-old favourite of the 48-year-old Queen Elizabeth, becoming captain of her personal bodyguard.

She would certainly have guessed that this tall, poetic ‘softly spoken Devon lad’ (he never lost his broad Devon accent, which endeared him to her) would already have sown an acre or two of wild oats during his military career but there was one particular secret he kept hidden so deeply that it only emerged in the 1970s when a will was uncovered in the archives of his Sherborne estates in Dorset.

It revealed that he left 500 marks (£332) ‘To my Reputed Daughter, begotten on the body of Alice Goold, now in Ireland’. Now in Ireland? Good, Gould or Gold are all old Devon names, so was Alice a Devon lass who was later secreted away to his estates in Cork as his fame grew?

The legendary throwing down of his cloak into a puddle apart, he first attracted the attention of the queen, it is said, by taking a diamond ring and scratching words on a window pane at Greenwich Palace, where he knew she would see them.

It read, ‘Fain would I climb, yet fear to fall’, to which the Virgin Queen added underneath, ‘If thy heart fail thee, climb not at all’. He stayed her firm favourite for ten years, could do no wrong in her eyes, took advantage of the fact and generally behaved badly to men and women of rank, making many enemies who suffered silently and bided their time waiting for his fall.

Under her wing he became ‘the best-hated man in the world and she took him for a kind of oracle’. She knighted him, gave him property in England (including Sherborne Lodge in Dorset in 1592), land in Ireland, and granted him an exclusive license to import wine that was worth some £700 a year – this in an age when a wealthy merchant might live comfortably on £100. Remarkably, he was also allowed to benefit from a levy imposed on every pack of playing cards sold – which must have been an anathema to a court that did little but haunt the corridors and antechambers of the royal palaces seeking to win the queen’s favour by either composing some of history’s worst love poetry – or playing cards. Raleigh, by contrast, has been dubbed, quite rightly, one of the great ‘silver poets’ of his time.

That fall came as a result of his secret dalliance with one of the Queen’s Gentlewomen of the Privy Chamber, one Bess Throckmorton (née Carew). She had come to court in 1584, aged 19. Now, aged 25, she began an affair with the now 37-year-old Raleigh and became pregnant by him.

Contemporary descriptions of her differ but are perhaps best evidenced by her portraits as being ‘a tall, unusual beauty with her long face, luminous eyes, strong nose and provocatively modest lips’. Theirs was certainly a love match that endured to the grave – and beyond.

A secret marriage followed and they both returned to court after the birth of their child, Damerel, on 29 March: but there were few secrets in the Tudor court and as their marriage was exposed – by the sinister Robert Cecil – the queen became incandescent with rage for ‘betraying her royal person’ by marrying without her permission and had them both thrown into the Tower on 7 August, he in the Brick Tower, she elsewhere, there to remain, ‘at Her Majesty’s pleasure’.

He kept up a steady flow of glittering love poems to her and was released five weeks later, although an historian has written, ‘Elizabeth was irritated rather than pacified by these gestures, smacking as they did of implicit defiance and a wholesale lack of remorse’. Bess, on the other hand, was kept under lock and key and only released three days before Christmas, when she learned that their child had died of the plague some time before.

Raleigh had been packed off to Dartmouth – on a mission of reprisal against the Spanish – and in the charge of a fellow Devonian, the extraordinarily wealthy and influential Sir John Hawkins – who had pleaded his case – and Bess made her way to her own family home and later to the South West, from where they were expected to plead for forgiveness. When neither of them did, Raleigh was nevertheless taken back into the fold.

Two more children were born to Walter and Bess: Walter at Lillington in Dorset and Carew at Sherborne.

His daring-do and exploits beyond the court – in which he was trapped and found stifling – are, of course, all the stuff of British history. Raleigh the seafarer, the explorer who masterminded and financed the colonising expeditions to North America – naming Virginia in his monarch’s honour. He was the scourge of the Spanish Main and made himself and people around him, but especially his queen, wealthy with plundered treasure.

Although both tobacco and potatoes were already known from Spanish explorers, Raleigh popularised them, introducing the potato to Ireland – first to his own estates there – and actually promoted tobacco as a good cure for coughs.

Raleigh designed and built his own warship, which he named the Ark Raleigh but later gave it to the queen, who renamed it the Ark Royal. It became the flagship of the English fleet against the Spanish Armada. He was the queen’s naval adviser and with Hawkins improved the design of the ships that were so successful against the Spanish.

Even monarchs sometimes know which side their bread is buttered and Elizabeth’s anger abated, as she consented to his idea of pursuing his long-held dream of discovering the fabled golden land of El Dorado, which he believed to be in Guiana, now Venezuela. Although the mission was unsuccessful, it did not put an end to his dream, which he attempted to fulfil one final time by playing it as a ‘Get-out-of-jail-free card’ with Elizabeth’s successor, James.

At Elizabeth’s death in 1603, Raleigh fell foul of the ex-king of Scotland and was again imprisoned in the Tower, this time under the trumped up charge that he had been involved in a Catholic plot to unthrone James. There he tended a small herb garden, was granted an exercise walk along part of the battlements, concocted ‘cordials’ and healing balms of many kinds (he regularly prescribed for Ann of Denmark herself, the wife of the king) and writing.

His philosophical writings and poetry are all still in print and wonderful to read. Most famous of all perhaps is his Historie of the World, first taking the reader through Biblical times and grinding to a halt in AD 168. But there he drew the line, writing ‘for whosoever in writing a modern history shall follow truth too near the heels, it may haply strike out his teeth’.

In 1616 he was pardoned and allowed to form a second expedition to find the elusive city of El Dorado on his oath that he would attack neither Spanish ships nor colonies, there having now been a peace treaty signed between the two countries. That 1617 expedition was to prove a disaster.

No gold was found and while Raleigh was elsewhere, his close friend and captain (and one-time fellow prisoner in the Tower with him) Lawrence Kemys, attacked and burned a Spanish settlement. Raleigh’s eldest son, Walter, just 22, was shot and killed in that same action.

Hearing the news, Raleigh told Kemys, ‘You have undone me’, Kemys replying simply, ‘I know then, Sir, what course to take’. He returned to his own cabin and shot himself. Raleigh returned, empty handed, was arrested, tried and sentenced to death to appease Spain.

He was now an old man, broken by ill health and imprisonment, and wrote these lines in his final night in the Tower. ‘I cannot write much, God he knows how hardly I steale time while others sleep, and it is also time that I should separate my thoughts from the world.’ And then, ‘Even Such is Time’:

Even such is time, that takes in trust, Our youth, our joys, our all we have, And pays us but with age and dust; Who, in the dark and silent grave, When we have wandered all our ways, Shuts up the story of our days. But from this earth, this grave, this dust, My God shall raise me up, I trust.

In his final note to Bess he wrote, ‘Begg my dead body which living was denied thee; and either lay it at Sherburne or in Exeter Church, by my Father and Mother; I can say no more, time and death call me away.’

He was beheaded outside the Palace of Westminster early on the bitterly cold morning of 29 October 1618. From the scaffold he told the crowd: ‘I have lived a sinful life, in all sinful callings; for I have been a soldier, a captain, a sea-captain, and a courtier, which are all places of wickedness and vice.’

Then he asked the executioner to hurry because it was cold and he did not want his enemies to think that he trembled for fear. ‘Make haste,’ he said, ‘for I have a long journey ahead of me.’ It took two strokes of the axe to sever his head and when it was held aloft at the executioner’s customary cry of ‘Behold the head of a traitor’ it was met with silence from the crowd save for a lone voice that cried out, ‘We have not such another head to be cut off!’

In preparing this chapter, the Carew family historian Sir Rivers Carew was consulted on the subject of the mystery surrounding the burials of both Sir Walter and Bess Throckmorton (née Carew). He wrote that Bess had wanted her husband’s body to be buried at her brother’s church of St Mary the Virgin, Beddington, in Surrey.

Sir Rivers spoke of the author and historian Ronald Michell, who speculates ‘that Raleigh’s body may actually have been buried at Beddington after all’. ‘He based this on the letter she wrote to‘My best brother Sir Nicholas Carew at Beddington’ asking him to allow this, saying, ‘The Lords have given me his ded boddi’ and ‘This nit hee shall be brought you with two or three of my men’.

Sir Rivers said: ‘Michell argued that Sir Nicholas would hardly have refused his sister’s appeal, and that this is what actually happened. In her letter she also expressed her wish to be buried there; I don’t know if she was.’

The mystery remains but it may explain why Raleigh’s youngest son, Carew Raleigh, who was ‘killed’ in London in 1680 (how and why is not known) was first buried in St Margaret’s Church, Westminster ‘with his father’ but then later reburied at Beddington. Was his father’s head entrusted to him on his mother’s death in 1647 and eventually placed in his own coffin at his own death? And is Bess also buried there so that all of them might be together at last?

Perhaps we shall never know for certain. The last word on that particular subject therefore is with Ann Smith, the archivist at Sherborne Castle in Dorset, who wrote: ‘The ghost of Sir Walter is reputed to walk the grounds of Sherborne Castle on 29 October, but I must say I have never seen him in all the years I have worked here (nor met anyone who has). If ever I do, I hope I have the presence of mind to ask him some searching questions!’

But looking for an alternative and more fitting ending to Raleigh’s life should properly lie with his biographer, William Stebbing, who concluded his authoritative work on Devon’s most illustrious son by writing:

Yet, with all the shortcomings, no figure, no life gathers up in itself more completely the whole spirit of an epoch; none more firmly enchains admiration for invincible individuality or ends by winning a more personal tenderness and affection.

Trust in God and keep your powder dry!’ (Oliver Cromwell). ‘Who shall govern this realm, King or Parliament?’ (Charles I).

DEVON DIVIDED IN ‘A WORLD TURNED UPSIDE-DOWN’

For some of us, the English Civil War has never ended: today’s splendid re-enactment societies such as The Sealed Knot, for example, attract huge crowds throughout the summer months as they continue to play out the bloody battles and skirmishes that once split our nation in two.

If so much of our contemporary story-telling is to be believed, the flamboyant long-haired ‘Cavaliers’ are most often portrayed as the good guys, while the kill-joy close-cropped ‘Roundheads’ take the role of the not so good. But both names were coined by the protagonists themselves to insult each other, so more properly we were all of us in those days either Royalists or Parliamentarians, whether we liked it or not.