A Book of the West. Volume I Devon

The next point is – Did Judge Glanville preside at the trial?

Now we are informed by E. Foss (Biographia Juridica, 1870, p. 303) that Glanville "was promoted to the bench as a Justice of the Common Pleas on June 30th, 1598." Consequently he was not a judge at the time that Eulalia Page was tried. The judge who tried the case, as we learn from Wyot's diary, was Lord Anderson. Nevertheless, Glanville was present at Barnstaple at the assizes, for Wyot mentions him as Serjeant Glandye, who was one of the principal lawyers present, and he had been "called to the degree of the coif," Ford records, two years before. So, as far as we can discover: —

1. Eulalia was very probably sister of Judge Glanville, she being daughter of a merchant Glanville, of Tavistock, as he was son of one.

2. That she really was executed for the murder of her husband, Page, along with her lover, George Strangwich, and two assistants.

3. That Strangwich had not been in the Navy, but was a shop assistant of Mr. Glanville.

4. That John Glanville, Serjeant-at-Law, presumably her brother, was present at the trial, but was not judge at the time.

The tragic story was not only turned into ballads, but also was dramatised by Ben Jonson and Decker. In Halliwell's Dictionary of Old English Plays (1860) is this entry: —

"Page, of Plymouth. A play by Ben Johnson and Decker, written in 1599, upon the story of the murder of one Page at Plymouth."[33 - Dr. Brushfield has sifted the whole story in the pages of The Western Antiquary, ix., p. 35.]

A little way out of the town on the Plymouth road, by the Drake statue, is the gateway of old Fitzford House. About this a good deal of both history and legend hangs.

The house was that of old John Fitz, whose splendid monument is in Tavistock Church. Late in life he had a son of the name also of John, an only child, whose story is tragical. The heir was fourteen only when he lost his father. John Fitz, who was "a very comely person," was married before he had attained his majority to a daughter of Sir William Courtenay. Of this marriage one child, Mary, was born in 1596, when her father was just twenty-one years old.[34 - The story of John Fitz and of Lady Howard has been worked out very carefully by Mrs. George Radford, to whose paper in the Transactions of the Devonshire Association, 1890, I am much indebted for what follows.] The young gentleman being now of age, and finding himself free from all restraint, began to live a very rackety life for three years, when an incident happened that ought to have sobered him. What follows is quoted, condensed, from The Bloudie Booke: or The Tragical End of Sir John Fitz. London, 1605.

"Meeting (June 4th, 1599) at Tavistocke a dinner wyth manie of his neighbors and friends, with great varietie of merriments and discourse they outstript the noontide. Amongst other their table-talk Sir John (he was not knighted at the time) was vanting his free Tenure in holding his lande, boasting that he helde not a foote of any but the Queene in England; to whoome Mayster Slanninge replyed, that although of ceurtesie it were neglected, yet of dewe hee was to paye him so muche by the yeere for some small lande helde of him; uppon which wordes Sir John told him with a great oath he lyed, and withall gave fuell to his rage, offering to stab him. But Maister Slanning with a great knife warded the hazard."

Friends intervened and the quarrel was patched up, so that presently Slanning left and departed for his home at Bickleigh. He had not gone very far before, dismounting, he bade his man take the horses along the road, whilst he walked by a short cut across the fields.

At that moment he heard the tramp of horses, and saw John Fitz and four more galloping after him. So as not to seem to be running away Slanning remained on the spot, and on John Fitz coming up asked what he wanted. Fitz drew his sword and raved that he would revenge the insult offered him, and Slanning was forced to defend himself. He was wounded, and someone struck Slanning from behind, whereupon he staggered forwards and Fitz ran him through the body. Local tradition, and Prince in his Worthies, will have it that the affray took place at Fitzford Gate.

Nicolas Slanning was buried in Bickleigh Church, which, when "restored" and made desperately uninteresting, lost the great feature of Slanning's monument, which was fine, though of plaster. Now the inscription alone remains:

"Great was the lamentation that the country side made for the death of so beloved a Gentleman as Maister Slanning was."

John Fitz, then aged twenty-four, fled to France, where he remained until, by his wife's exertions, a pardon was procured for him, December 16th, 1599.

He returned home, and for a year or two led a blameless life – at least he did not murder any more of his friends – and at the coronation of King James I. was knighted.

Whether the honour conferred on him was too much for him, or whether there was a mad strain in his blood, cannot be said, but on his return from London he broke out into wild ways again. Finding the presence of his wife and only child a restraint on him, he turned them out of the house, and surrounded himself with dissolute companions, chief among whom was "Lusty Jacke, one whose deedes were indeed meane, whose good qualities altogether none."

In the summer of 1605 he received a summons to London to appear before the courts, in answer to a claim of compensation for their father's death made by the children of Nicolas Slanning. He set out attended by a single servant. He was a prey to terrors, particularly afraid of his father-in-law, Sir William Courtenay, who he knew was very incensed with him because of his behaviour to his wife, the daughter of Sir William. He had moreover been squandering money which had been settled on her by deed. Every day his fancies got more disordered, till he put up at Kingston-on-Thames, his last resting-place before reaching London; but there, a prey to alarms and fancies, he would not lie, and rode on to Twickenham, where he stopped at "The Anchor," a small hostelry kept by one Daniel Alley, whom he roused out of his bed about 2 a.m. The host, to accommodate him, was forced to surrender to him his own bed, and send his wife to sleep with the children. But the knight could not rest after he had lain down, and was heard crying out that he was pursued by enemies.

Very early, the host rose that he might go out and mow a field, but his wife entreated him not to leave the house. He laughed at her alarms, but she persisted, and a neighbour who was going to help in the mowing came in. Sir John Fitz started out of sleep on hearing voices, and persuaded that his fears were verified, rushed from his room in his nightgown, with his sword, and ran Alley through the body. He then wounded the unhappy wife, and finding the error into which he had fallen, finally mortally wounded himself. A doctor was sent for, but he tore off the bandages, and so died, lamented of none save Lusty Jack.

No sooner was he dead than the Earl of Northumberland hastened to buy the wardship of the little heiress, Mary Fitz, then nine years and one week old. At the time the Crown became the guardian of orphans whose lands were held in capite or direct from the Crown, and was wont to sell the wardships to the highest bidders. The guardian had complete control, to the exclusion of the mother, over the ward, and he could marry the ward as he liked, this also being generally an affair of money. As soon as Mary Fitz was twelve, the Earl, as she was a desirable heiress, disposed of her to his brother, Sir Allan Percy, aged thirty-one; she did not, however, live with her husband, but was placed under the charge of Lady Hatton. Sir Allan died in November, 1611, three years after, and then it was said: – "Sir Allan Percy is gone the way of all flesh, dying, his lady the way of all quicke flesh, having stolen out of my Lady Eliz. Hatton's house in London, in the edge of an evening, and coupled herself in marriage with Mr. Darcy, my lord Darcye's eldest son." This was on December 18th, 1611, just about a month after the death of husband number one. He was of her own age, and no doubt she found him to her liking; however, he lived only a few months after his marriage, and Lady Mary was again a widow, and was imposed (1612), hardly by her own choice, on Sir Charles Howard, fourth son of Thomas, Earl of Suffolk. So she had number three when scarcely sixteen. Sir Charles died in 1622; consequently they were together for ten years. She had two daughters by Sir Charles Howard, and a son, George Howard, is mentioned, but there is some doubt as to his parentage. In 1628 she took a fourth, Sir Richard Grenville, the younger brother of the gallant Sir Bevil. He was a very disreputable, bad-tempered, altogether ill-conditioned fellow. Lady Howard took good care, before accepting number four, to have her property well tied up to herself, so that he could not touch it. When he discovered this he was furious, and treated her with insolence and violence. By him she had two daughters, Elizabeth, who died early, and Mary.

The condition of family broil became at last so intolerable that she was forced to appeal to the justices of peace against him, and finally to endeavour to obtain a divorce, 1631-2. The revelations then made on both sides are not pleasant reading. If he was abusive, she did not keep her tongue shut behind her teeth.

The story of her further troubles during the Civil War, of Sir Richard's playing fast and loose with one party and then the other, of his masterful seizure of her house at Fitzford and her estates in Devon, need not here be told at length. She lived in London, and was put to desperate shifts for money. At last Sir Richard was thrown into prison, but escaped to France, 1646. Lady Grenville, or as she now called herself – for she held herself to be divorced – Lady Howard, at once returned to Fitzford, found it gutted and in a wretched condition, and set to work to cleanse, repair, and refurnish. Her son, George Howard, managed her business for her till his death in September, 1671, without issue. His mother, at this date very old, was probably bedridden; the shock of her son's death was too much for her, and she died a month later. Knowing her to be ill, her first cousin, Sir William Courtenay, hastened to her bedside, and, probably with the connivance of a trusted maid, Thomasine Wills, persuaded the old lady to make over to him all her landed estates, to the exclusion of her two daughters, who were alive and married. It was an infamous piece of roguery, and it brought no luck on the Courtenays.

Popular feeling was outraged and has revenged itself on her, who really was not so much to blame as Sir William Courtenay, in painting her in the blackest colours. She is popularly represented as having murdered her first three husbands, as conceiving a deadly hatred against her daughter Elizabeth, who apparently died early, but cannot be traced, and as not exactly walking but riding after death. When the clock strikes twelve every night she is supposed to start in a coach made of bones from the gateway of Fitzford House, drawn by headless horses; before the carriage runs a sable hound with one eye in the middle of his forehead. The spectral coach makes its way to Okehampton, where the hound plucks a blade of grass from the castle mound, and then the cortège returns to Fitzford, where the blade is laid on the threshold of the gate. This is Lady Howard's penance, and it will last till every blade of grass on the mound of Okehampton Castle hill has been plucked, which will not be till the crack of doom, as the grass grows faster than the hound can carry it off.

I frequently heard of the coach going from Okehampton to Tavistock when I was a boy; and there was a ballad about it, of which I was able to recall a few fragments, which I completed and published along with the original air in my Songs of the West. As a child I remember the deadly fear that I felt lest I should be on the road at night, and my nurse was wont to comfort me by saying there was no fear of the "Lady's Coach," except after midnight.

In the vicarage garden are some very early inscribed stones collected from the neighbourhood. There is no token on them that they are Christian. Their inscriptions are: —

1. Neprani fili Condevi

2. Sabini fili Maccodecheti

3. Dobunii Fabri fili Enabarri.

This latter has on it also in oghans Enabarr. The second has the test word Mac for Map or Mab, indicative of Irish occupation. Moreover Dechet was a name, probably of a sept or tribe in Kerry, where several stones inscribed with the same name are found.[35 - A member of the same clan or tribe was buried at Penrhos Llygwyin, Anglesea – "Hic jacet Maccudecheti."]

The third is interesting, for Dobun was a faber or smith. In Celtic organisation every tuatha or tribe had its chief smith, and every fine or clan had its smith and forge as well, all whose rights and dues were determined by law; moreover, the head smith of the tribe was a man of very considerable consequence, social and political.

Dobuni, in the third, is the Latin for the genitive Douvinias, also a Kerry name. A stone at Ballintaggart bears an inscription to a son of Dobunus, Muccoidovvinias. Another stone of another son is at Burnham, also in Kerry, in Lord Ventry's collection. Here, then, we have written and engraven in stone for our learning the record of an Irish settlement from Kerry in the neighbourhood of Tavistock. If S. Rumon preached there he could preach in Gaelic and be understood.

Of the abbey of Tavistock there are but poor remains. Betsy Grimbal's tower in the vicarage garden was a gate-house, and takes its name from a woman who was murdered there by a soldier. A porch into the refectory or abbot's hall is the dairy of the "Bedford Inn." Some fragments of the monastic buildings are united and converted into library and municipal buildings, but they are dominated and oppressed by an architectural monstrosity – an absurd Town Hall in nondescript style.

The Drake statue is of bronze, and fine, in front of the Fitzford gate, and possesses the bas-reliefs on the base, in which the replica on Plymouth Hoe is deficient. Sir Francis Drake was born at Crowndale, the first farm down the Tavy valley. The old house has been destroyed. The Drakes were of yeoman origin in Whitchurch, nothing more. They laboured to prove a kinship to the ancient family of Drake of Ash, but failed, and Sir Francis Drake was granted an entirely new coat of arms.

The story is told that Sir Francis and Sir Bernard, – the latter the head of the Ash family – had a heated quarrel over the matter in the presence of Queen Elizabeth, Sir Bernard objecting to the navigator assuming the wyvern gules.

"Well," said Bess, "I will give Sir Francis a new coat, a ship in full sail, with the wyvern turned head over heels at the poop."

But Sir Bernard was too important a man to be offended; she thought better of it, and gave Sir Francis the noble coat of a fess wavy between two pole stars.

The story is pronounced to be apocryphal.

Sir Francis became possessor by purchase of Buckland Abbey (1581), which is not only beautifully situated, but is interesting. It is, in fact, the cruciform abbey church converted into an Elizabethan mansion. The nave has been floored, and the drawing-room upstairs is in it; the hall below is also in part therein. There is here some splendid plaster-work. The choir was pulled down and a kitchen wing built at right angles. In the grounds are some remarkably fine tulip trees.

Buckland Monachorum Church is large, Perpendicular, but cold, and has a naked, unfurnished look internally from being without its screen.

There are two points on no account to be missed by a visitor to Tavistock, and both can be combined in one drive or walk – the Raven Rock above the Virtuous Lady Mine, opposite the point where the Walla falls into the Tavy; the other the better known Morwell Rocks. The former, hardly inferior to the other, but less known, is reached from the Bere Alston road.

At Morwell is the hunting-lodge of Abbot Courtenay, cousin of Bishop Grandisson, and appointed by him to Tavistock Abbey. It was a very unsatisfactory appointment. He alienated the property of the abbey, and allowed its buildings and discipline to fall into decay, and got the monastery into a debt equivalent to twenty thousand pounds of our money. All he cared for was sport, like the jolly monk in Chaucer's Prologue.

The quadrangle, which was in a singularly untouched condition, with hall and butteries and kitchens, was somewhat wantonly mutilated some fifty years ago and turned into farmhouse and cottages.

From Tavistock Lydford can be visited with ease. This was a very strong place at one time, a sort of inland cliff-castle, situated in a fork between ravines, with mounds and trenches drawn across the neck. The castle, an uninteresting ruin, occupies a natural mound artificially shaped; it was long the Stannary prison. The waterfall is graceful rather than fine, a steep slide of seventy feet in height in the midst of woods. From this the river Lyd should be ascended for three miles by a path through a ravine that grows in grandeur till it is spanned by a bridge. The ascent may well be continued to Kits Steps, another fall of a totally different character, much spoiled by refuse-heaps from an abandoned mine. From Lydford a visitor should take a walk across the shoulder of Hare Tor to the rocks of Tavy Cleave, perhaps the grandest scene on Dartmoor.

Another excursion is to be made to Brent Tor, a subaqueous volcanic cone, crowned by a little church. The base of the hill has been fortified. The banks are most perfect on the east. The view from the top of the tor is remarkably extensive and fine. Endsleigh, the country seat of the Duke of Bedford, is almost unsurpassed in England for beauty of scenery. Mary Tavy Church has a good new screen, and Peter Tavy a scrap of an old one and remains of a magnificent early Tudor pew, wantonly demolished.

From either Whit Tor may be ascended, a tor of gabbro, or volcanic traplike formation. The summit has been fortified. On Peter Tavy Moor is a fine circle of upright stones, and a menhir. Peter Tavy Combe should on no account be passed over unseen.

Note. – Books on Tavistock: —

Alford (Rev. D.), The Abbots of Tavistock. Plymouth, 1891.

Bray (Mrs.), The Borders of the Tamar and the Tavy, 2 vols. new edition. London: Kent and Co., 1879. A valuable book for old stories and superstitions. Mr. Bray was also the first to explore Dartmoor for its antiquities. But all the rubbish about Druids must be put aside. When written in 1832 antiquaries knew no better; they talked and wrote nonsense on such subjects.

Evans (R.), Home Scenes; or, Tavistock and its Vicinity. Tavistock, 1846; now not easily procured.