Devonshire Characters and Strange Events

We come now to the attempted assassination. Matthew Paris tells the story under the date 1238, in the reign of Henry III.

“On the day after the Nativity of St. Mary, a certain learned esquire came to the King’s Court at Woodstock pretending that he was insane, and said to the King, ‘Resign thy kingdom to me’; he also added, that he bore the sign of royalty on his shoulder. The King’s attendants wanted to beat him, and drive him away from the royal presence, but the King interfered, saying, ‘Let the madman rave – such people’s words have not the force of truth.’ In the middle of the night, however, the same man entered the King’s bedchamber window, carrying an open knife, and approached the King’s couch, but was confused at not finding him there. The King was, by God’s providence, then sleeping with the Queen. But one of the queen’s maids, Margaret Bisett, was by chance awake, and was singing psalms by the light of a candle (for she was a holy maid and one devoted to God), and when she saw this madman searching all the private places to kill the King, she was greatly alarmed, and began to utter repeated cries. At her cry the King’s attendants awoke, and leaped from their beds with all speed, and running to the spot, broke open the door, which this robber had firmly secured with a bolt, and seized him, and notwithstanding his resistance, bound him fast. He, after a while, confessed that he had been sent to kill the King by William de Marisco, son of Geoffrey (or Jordan) de Marisco, and he stated that others had conspired to commit the same crime. On learning this, the King ordered him to be torn limb from limb by horses, at Coventry.”

The evidence incriminating William de Marisco was clearly worthless. If the would-be assassin had not been insane he would not have asserted a claim to the crown and drawn attention to himself before making the murderous attempt. De Marisco had nothing to gain by the King’s death, and he may certainly be acquitted of participation.

William fled to Lundy, “impregnable from the nature of the place, and having attached to himself many outlaws and malefactors, subsisted by piracies, taking more especially wine and provisions, and making frequent sudden descents on the adjacent lands, spoiling and injuring the realm by land and by sea, and native as well as foreign merchants. Many English nobles, having learnt how that the said William and his followers could not be surprised save by stratagem, apprised the King that the securing of this malefactor must be effected not by violence, but by craft. The King therefore ordered his faithful subjects to exert themselves strenuously in order to capture him and relieve their country.”

Nothing, however, was done for four years, during which the piracies continued. There was this excuse for De Marisco, that as the island grew neither corn nor wine, he was dependent on the mainland or on merchant vessels for his subsistence. As all those on the mainland were on the look-out to capture him as the supposed mover of the plot to kill the King, he was forced to live by piracy. In 1242, William of Worcester informs us, he was caught: how, he does not say, save that it was by surprise. “He was thrown into chains, and he and sixteen accomplices were condemned and sentenced to death. He was executed at the Tower on a gibbet with special ignominy, his body suspended in a sack, and when stiff in death, disembowelled, his bowels burnt, and his body divided into quarters.”

After the execution of Sir William, his father, Geoffrey (or Jordan) fled to France, and the island was then seized by the King, who appointed to it governors. But in 1281 Lundy was again granted to a Marisco, Sir William, son of Jordan, another of the progeny of old Geoffrey. He died in 1284, and his son John in 1289, leaving Herbert as his son and heir. But Edward II granted the island to the elder Despenser, and Herbert was unable to obtain possession of it. He died in 1327, and from that date no more is heard of the Mariscoes in connexion with the island.

From their time, however, other pirates obtained a footing on it. In the days of Henry VIII a gang of French pirates, under their captain, De Valle, seized Lundy and waylaid the Bristol traders, but the Clovelly fishermen made an expedition against them, burnt their ship, and killed or made prisoners of the whole gang.

A few years later, Lord Seymour, High Admiral of England, uncle of Edward VI, was charged, among other misdemeanours, with trying to get hold of Lundy, “being aided with shipps and conspiring at all evill eventes with pirates, (so that) he might at all tymes have a sure and saufe refuge, if anything for his demerites should have been attempted against him.” He was executed, having refused to answer the charges made against him.

In Sir John Maclean’s Life and Times of Sir Peter Carew, Knt., are printed two letters written by Queen Elizabeth in the year 1564, directing Sir Peter – “forasmuch as that cost of Devonshyre and Cornwall is by report mucch hanted with pyratts and Rovers … to cause on or twoo apt vessells to be made redy with all spede in some portes ther about.” In the apprehension of such pirates, with her characteristic economy the Queen bargains that the parties “must take ther benefitt of ye spoyle, and be provijded only by us of victell.” She goes a little further in thriftiness, and suggests that possibly “ye sayd Rovers might be entyced, with hope of our mercy, to apprehend some of the rest of ther Company, which practise we have knowen doone good long agoo in the lyke.”

Although Lundy is not specified in this as the rendezvous of the pirates, we know that at this time it was so.

In the year 1587 the authorities of Barnstaple appear to have undertaken on their own account a raid upon the pirates who were accustomed to shelter themselves under Lundy Island.

Connected with the “setting forth of divers men from this town to apprehend divers rovers and pirates at Londey,” the following items of expenditure in the municipal records show that the expedition was not unsuccessful: “Paid to six watchmen for watching the prisoners that were taken, 12s 1d. Paid for a watch put, and for candlelyght for the same prisoners, 11d. Paid for meat and drink for the same prisoners, 2sh.”8

Stow tells us that a batch of ten sea-rovers were hanged at once at Wapping. They distributed among their friends their murrey velvet doublets with great gold buttons and crimson taffeta, and great Venetians laid with broad gold lace, “too sumptuous apparel,” Stow remarks, “which they had worn at the seas.”

In 1608, a commission was issued to the Earl of Bath, who took the depositions of three persons at Barnstaple, to the effect that the merchants were daily robbed at sea by pirates who took refuge in Lundy. In 1610, another commission was issued to the Earl of Nottingham to authorize the town of Barnstaple to send out ships for the capture of pirates, and the deposition was taken of one William Young, who had been made prisoner by Captain Salkeld, who entitled himself “King of Lundy,” and was a notorious pirate.

On 31 August, 1612, the town of Barnstaple sent out a ship and a bark – the John of Braunton and the Mayflower– to capture pirates who had robbed a London vessel and also a pinnace of the Isle of Wight, in the roads of Lundy. It is satisfactory to learn that the offenders – “as notorious Rogues as any in England” – were caught at Milford Haven, brought to Barnstaple, and lodged in Exeter Gaol. What their ultimate fate was is not known.

In 1625, the Mayor of Bristol reported to the Council that three Turkish pirate vessels had surprised and taken the island of Lundy, and had carried off the inhabitants, to sell them as slaves, and that they were threatening Ilfracombe.

In 1628, it was the headquarters of some French pirates. In June, 1630, Captain Plumleigh reported that “Egypt was never more infested with catterpillars than the Channel with Biscayers. On the 23rd instant there came out of St. Sebastian twenty sail of sloops; some attempted to land on Lundy, but were repulsed by the inhabitants.”

In 1632, a notorious buccaneer, Captain Robert Nutt, made Lundy one of his stations, and defied the efforts of several ships of war and smaller vessels called “whelps” to capture him.

In 1633, Sir Bernard Grenville reported to the Secretary of State that a great outrage had been committed by a Spanish man-of-war of Biscay, which had landed eighty men on the island of Lundy, where, after some small resistance, they had killed one man, called Mark Pollard, and bound the rest, and surprised and took the island, which they rifled and cleared of all the best provisions they could find, and then departed to sea again.

From the depositions of William Skynner, of Kilkhampton, dyer, and others, it appears that the Biscayner was a vessel of 150 tons with about 120, under a Captain Meggor, and that these pirates had previously robbed a French bark, and also a pinnace of George Rendall, which happened to be at Lundy, taking from him his money and all the provisions of his pinnace.

Capt. John Pennington, of the Vanguard, was commissioned to put down the pirates, and he appears to have proclaimed martial law on the island. In the year 1663, a Frenchman, Captain Pressoville, established himself on Lundy. In consequence of these events one Thomas Bushell was appointed governor of the island to hold it for the King.

Grose, in his Antiquities, gives a curious story of an occurrence during the reign of William and Mary. “A ship of force pretending to be a Dutchman, and driven into the roads by mistaking the channel, sent a boat ashore desiring some milk for their captain who was sick, which the unsuspecting inhabitants granted for several days. At length the crew informed them of their captain’s death, and begged leave, if there were any church or consecrated ground on the island, to deposit his corpse in it, and also requested the favour of all the islanders to be present, which was accordingly complied with. After the corpse was brought in, the islanders were required to quit the chapel for a few minutes when they should be readmitted to see the corpse interred. They had not waited long without the walls before the doors were suddenly thrown open, and a body of armed men furnished from the feigned receptacle of the dead marched out and made them prisoners. The poor islanders then discovered the pretended Dutchmen to be their natural enemies the French. They then seized 50 horses, 300 goats, 500 sheep, and some bullocks, and reserving what they required, hamstringed the rest of the horses and bullocks, threw the goats and sheep into the sea, and stripped the inhabitants of every valuable, even to their clothes, and spoiled and destroyed everything, and then, satiated with plunder and mischief, they threw the guns over the cliffs, and left the island in a most desolate and disconsolate condition.”

There is no other evidence that this really occurred, and the same story is told of the island of Sark, so that it is very doubtful whether the story be true.

It is, however, certain that for a considerable portion of the reigns of William and Mary and of Queen Anne, Lundy was a continual resort of the outcasts of the various parties who betook themselves to piracy as a means of subsistence, as also that it was for a time in the hands of the French in the reign of Queen Anne, and that they used it as a privateering station, and preyed upon the merchant-men who sailed from Barnstaple and Bideford, and that they made so many prizes that they termed Barnstaple Bay as “the Golden Bay.”

In 1748, Thomas Benson obtained a lease of the island from Lord Gower. He was a man of substance, a native of Bideford, and had inherited a fortune of £40,000. His predecessors had been successful merchants, carrying on trade with France, Portugal, and the colonies.

In 1749 he aspired to get into Parliament, and was elected for Barnstaple. He had in 1745 presented to the mayor and corporation a large silver punch-bowl, which still forms one of their cherished possessions, and has recently been copied in Barum ware for presentation to the association of “Barumites in London.”

When, however, the borough authorities received the bowl, they discovered that they had no ladle, and this they humbly and respectfully intimated to the donor. So Benson added to his gift a silver ladle, with the inscription, “He that gave the Bowl gave the Ladle.”9

Soon after he entered into a contract with the Government for the exportation of convicts to Virginia and Maryland, and gave the usual bond to the sheriff for so doing. But instead of doing this he shipped them to Lundy, where he employed them in building walls and other work in the island. Every night they were locked up in the old keep of the Mariscoes. He regarded himself as king of Lundy, and ruled with a high hand.

Presently he got into difficulties through smuggling and piracy. In a cave he stored his smuggled goods, and a raid was made upon these. He was exchequered, and fined £5000.

A fieri facias was directed to the Sheriff of Devon to levy the penalties, under which the officers seized a large quantity of tobacco and other goods secreted in the caves of Lundy. He excused himself for not fulfilling his compact to transport the convicts to Virginia and Maryland by saying that he considered Lundy to be quite as much out of the world as these colonies. As the fieri facias did not realize the sum of his fine, an extent was issued in 1753 for £7872 duties, under which his patrimonial estate of Napp was seized, and retained during his life by the Government.

“The most villainous transaction, however, in which he was implicated was the conspiracy to defraud the insurance offices, by lading a vessel with a valuable cargo of pewter, linen, and salt, which he heavily insured. The vessel sailed for Maryland, but by a secret arrangement between the Master and Benson, put back in the night and landed the greater part of the cargo at Lundy, where Benson had repaired, concealing it in the caves there; and then the Master, Lancey, put to sea, and burnt and scuttled his vessel, some leagues to the westward, the crew being taken off by a homeward-bound vessel. The roguery was, however, discovered by the confession of one of the crew. Lancey was apprehended with some of his shipmates, seized and condemned, hung at Execution Dock and afterwards in chains. Benson escaped to Portugal; he is said, however, to have returned to Napp incognito for a time, some years afterwards, when the affair was nearly forgotten, but ultimately returned to Portugal, and died there.” I quote from a manuscript journal of a visit to Lundy by a friend of Benson’s some particulars of the island and of Benson himself at this time.

“In the month of July, 1752, I sailed from Appledore on a Monday morning with Sir Thomas Gunstone in a little vessel bound to Wales which dropped us at Lundy road. We came from Benson’s house, of Napp, who rented the island of the Lords Carteret and Gower for £60. We landed about two o’clock. Mr. Benson did not accompany us, expecting letters from the insurance office for the vessel and cargo which was to have taken us there. The vessel then lay off his quay with convicts bound for Virginia, but he came to us on Wednesday. The island was at this time in no state of improvement, the houses miserably bad, one on each side of the platform, that on the right inhabited by Mr. Benson and his friends, the other by the servants. The old fort was occupied by the convicts whom he had sent there some time before, and occupied in making a wall across the island. They were locked up every night when they returned from their labour. About a week before we landed seven or eight of them took the long-boat and made their escape to Hartland, and were never heard of afterwards. Wild fowl were exceeding plenty and a vast number of rabbits. The island was overgrown with ferns and heath, which made it almost impossible to go to the extreme of the island. Had it not been for the supply of rabbits and young sea-gulls our tables would have been but poorly furnished, rats being so plenty that they destroyed every night what was left of our repast by day. Lobsters were tolerably plenty, and some other fish we caught. The deer and goats were very wild and difficult to get at. The path to the house was so narrow and steep that it was scarcely possible for a horse to ascend it. The inhabitants by the assistance of a rope climbed up a rock in which were steps cut to place their feet, to a cave or magazine where Mr. Benson lodged his goods. There happened to come into the roads one evening near 70 sail of vessels. The colours were hoisted on the fort, and they all as they passed that island returned the compliment except one vessel, which provoked Mr. Benson to fire at her with ball, though we used every argument in our power to prevent him. He replied that the island was his, and every vessel that passed it and did not pay him the same compliment as was paid to the King’s forts he would fire on her. He talked to us about his contract for exportation of convicts to Virginia, and often said that the sending of convicts to Lundy was the same as sending them to America; they were transported from England, it mattered not where it was, so long as they were out of the kingdom.”10

TOM D’URFEY

Tom D’Urfey was born in Exeter in the year 1653. The date usually given, 1649, is incorrect. He came of a very ancient and well-connected family. Under Charles VII of France, Pierre d’Ulphé was Grand Master of the crossbow-men of France. His son, Peter II, changed the spelling of his name from Ulphé to Urfé. He died in 1508, after having served with distinction under Charles VIII and Louis XII. Francis, the nephew of Peter II, Baron d’Oroze, fought along with Bayard in a combat of thirteen Frenchmen against thirteen Spaniards. The son of Peter II, Claude, was ambassador of France at the Council of Trent, and governor of the royal children. He loved letters, had a fine library at his Château de la Bâtie, near Montbrison. Jacques, his son, was chamberlain to Henry II; he died in 1574, leaving several sons, of whom two were Anne and Honoré, both staunch Leaguers, and in their day considered to be poets. Honoré, however, made his fame by his interminable and tedious romance of Astrée. The Dictionary of National Biography says that Tom’s uncle was this same Honoré; but this is impossible. Honoré, the fifth son of Jacques I, was born 1572. He had four elder brothers – Anne, who died without issue; Claude, who died young; Jacques II, who had one son; Claude Emmanuel, who died in 1685. Christopher died without issue, and Antoine became a bishop. Consequently it is not possible to fit Tom D’Urfey into the pedigree. It is possible enough that the grandfather who quitted La Rochelle before the end of the siege in 1628 and brought his son with him to England, and who settled at Exeter, may have been a connexion by blood, possibly enough illegitimate, as no trace of him can be found in the D’Urfé pedigree. The grandfather broke away from the traditions of the family entirely by becoming a Huguenot, for not only were Anne and Honoré Leaguers, but Anne entered Orders and Antoine became Bishop of Saint Flores.

Charles Emmanuel called himself De Lascaris, and was created Marquis D’Urfé and De Baugé, Count of Sommerive and St. Just, Marshal, and died in 1685 at the age of eighty-one. His son Louis became Bishop of Limoges; another, Francis, became Abbé of St. Just, and devoted himself to missionary work in Canada; he died in 1701. The third son, Claude Yves, became a priest of the Oratoire; the fourth, Emmanuel, Dean of Le Puy, died in 1689; the fifth, Charles Maurice, was the only one who did not enter the ministry, and he died unmarried; thus the family came to an end, and it is characteristic of it that it was intensely Catholic. Thus if the grandfather of Tom D’Urfey did belong to the stock, he was a sport of a different colour. The father of Tom D’Urfey married Frances of the family of the Marmions, of Huntingdonshire. Tom certainly claimed kinship with the D’Urfés, of Forez, and was proud of the fame that attached to his relative Honoré.

The elder of the sons of Jacques I, viz. Anne, had married a splendid beauty, Diana de Château Morand, who was also an heiress. But the union was not happy, and it was annulled by the Ecclesiastical Court at Lyons (1598) at the joint petition of husband and wife. Then Anne, after trifling with the Muses, took Holy Orders. Thereupon Honoré, having money to pay for it, bought a dispensation at Rome, and married his brother’s late wife, not out of love, but for the purpose of retaining in the family her great estates. He was then aged thirty-two, and she was in her fortieth year. She was haughty, vain of her beauty, which had made her famous at one time, and spent her time in trying to disguise the ravages of time on her face. She lived mainly in her room surrounded by dogs, “qui répandaient partout, jusque dans son lit, une saleté insupportable.”

Very different was the life of Tom D’Urfey’s father, and one of the touching incidents in his character was his devotion and tenderness towards his wife to her dying day.

Tom had been intended for the law, but, as he said, “My good or ill stars ordained me to be a knight errant in the fairy fields of poetry.”

He wrote plays that were well received for the most part, but all were tainted with intolerable grossness. But at this period of revulsion from Puritanism, licentiousness of intrigue, indelicacy of wit, most strongly appealed to the popular taste, at least in London, and among the hangers-on of a profligate court. In 1676, he produced The Siege of Memphis and The Fond Husband; or, The Plotting Sisters. In 1677, Madame Pickle. In all, down to his death, thirty-two dramatic pieces. But that which obtained for D’Urfey his greatest reputation was a peculiarly happy knack that he possessed in writing satires and songs. In the latter style of composition he knew how to start with a telling line. There was in his composition a vein of genuine poetry, but the trail of the serpent was over it all: he could not leave his best pieces without something foul to spoil it. Many of his songs were set to music by his friends Henry Purcell, Thomas Farmer, and Dr. John Blow; but a good many were adapted to folk airs. In 1683, he brought out his New Collection of Songs and Poems, in which was “The Night her Blackest Sables Wore,” which was afterwards claimed for Francis Semple, of Beltrees. D’Urfey wrote a good many songs in fancy Scottish dialect, as a taste for North-country songs came in after James, Duke of York, afterwards James II, was sent to govern Scotland in 1679 and 1680. Although there can be no doubt whatever as to the authorship of “The Night her Blackest Sables Wore,” about fifty years after its first publication the song and tune in a corrupt form appear in Thomson’s Orpheus Caledonicus (1733), with some change in the words so as to make it appear to be Scottish, as “She rose and let me in,” altered to “She raise and loot me in.” Mr. Chappell says: “It is a common error to suppose that England was inundated with Scotch tunes at the union of the two Crowns. The first effect was directly the reverse.” In fact, a stream of English popular melodies flowed into Scotland, and this in a flood in the reign of Charles II, carrying with them the English words, which Scottish compilers adapted and appropriated, and these have come back to us as “made in Scotland,” whereas they are genuine English songs, words and music and all.

Tom Brown, venomous and scurrilous as Tom D’Urfey was not, lampooned the latter, and called him “Thou cur, half French, half English breed,” and mocked him regarding a duel at Epsom, in 1689, with one Bell, a musician.

I sing of a Duel, in Epsom befell’Twixt Fa-so-la D’Urfey and Sol-la-mi Bell.

Tom took it in good part. It was only by Jeremy Collier that he could be prevailed to reply, and even then it was chiefly in a song.

Jeremy Collier had published in 1697 his famous Short View of the Profaneness and Immorality of the English Stage, which dealt a terrible blow at what little prosperity the theatres enjoyed, and aroused a wholesome spirit of resentment against the outrages committed on the stage against Christian virtue and common decency. The castigation was well deserved, for the licentiousness of the stage both before and behind the curtain had become a monstrous evil.