Motor Tours in the West Country 5

Motor Tours in the West Country 5

It is steep indeed; both steep and very long. Before it is faced the

hill-climbing powers of the car should be carefully considered, for the

gradient at one point is at least one in five, and is extremely steep

for a considerable distance. But from this height the blue bay and red

rocks of Sidmouth look very lovely through the trees, and at the top of

the hill there are colours enough on a sunny day to repay us for much

climbing: pale blue hills and a dark blue sea, and a wide expanse of

varying greens, and to the left a red cliff, and to the right, perhaps,

a patch of brilliant heather. Very carefully--for the lanes are narrow

and steep--we run down the other side of the hill that has just been

laboriously climbed, and reach the pretty street of Otterton, with its

runnel and little bridges, and thatched cottages, and background of

trees. We cross the Otter, and are soon in East Budleigh, the twisting,

straggling village near which Sir Walter Raleigh was born.

 

In the grey church on the knoll above the street we may see the Raleigh

arms, and with them the three “horsemen’s rests” that figure in so many

shields--the arms of the great Grenvilles. The bench-end that bears them

is the first on the left side of the aisle, and was carved early in the

sixteenth century, when one of the Raleighs married Honor Grenville. Sir

Walter’s mother, we need not doubt, sat in this pew many a time, for the

Raleighs lived only a mile away at Hayes Barton. We can find the house

quite easily, standing beside a little sloping green: a low, gabled,

grey house, with a thatched roof and a gay old-fashioned garden. There

have been many changes here, of course, since that sixteenth-century baby

first blinked at the world he was destined to explore; but even then

this was a humble home for the daughter of the Champernownes, the mother

of two great men. For through this heavy oaken door that swings slowly

open to admit us has passed not only Walter Raleigh in his nurse’s arms,

but also the Eton boy who was his big half-brother, Humphrey Gilbert. Of

the life that was lived and the ideals that were taught under the gables

of Hayes Barton we may perhaps guess something, not over rashly, from

the last words of these two boys when they came to die, each his tragic

death. “This,” said Sir Walter with a smile as he felt the axe, “is a

sharp medicine that will cure all diseases.” “We are so near Heaven at

sea as on land,” said Sir Humphrey as his last storm broke over him.

 

That Sir Walter loved this house, of which his father was only a tenant,

we have good evidence; for when he was a man he tried in vain to buy

it. Here, in the room on the left side of the doorway, is a copy of the

letter he wrote to Mr. Duke. “I will most willingly give you what so:ever

in your conscience you shall deeme it worthe.… You shall not find mee an

ill neighbore.… For the naturall disposition I have to that place, being

borne in that howse, I had rather seat mysealf ther than any wher else.”

 

The little room where he was born, the room upstairs with the high

ceiling and the latticed windows, has not been changed, they say. They

say too--and for this one was prepared--that he smoked his first pipe in

England in the room over the porch. Sir Walter’s first pipe had evidently

some of the qualities of the widow’s cruse. Wherever his name is heard

the tradition of the first pipe lingers. He smoked it, we are told, on a

rock in the Dart, and beside a Devon fireplace, and in an Irish garden,

and here at Hayes.

 

And now, returning first to East Budleigh, we go on our way to the Ever

Faithful City by lovely woods of fir and beech, and wide heaths, and

hills and dales of richest green, with here a glimpse of sea and there

a wealth of heather. Through Woodbury we go; and Clyst St. George,

where the Champernownes lived; and Bishop’s Clyst, which was once Clyst

Sachvill. The last of the Champernownes of Clyst was the unconventional

Elizabeth, who married her first husband three days after her father’s

death, and her second husband two days after her first husband’s death.

“A frolic lady,” says John Prince. As for the Clyst that once belonged

to the Sachvills and afterwards to the bishops, it changed hands in this

manner. Sir Ralph Sachvill, being about to go to France in the service

of Edward I., was in sore need of a large sum of money, and mortgaged

the manor of Clyst to Bishop Branscombe of Exeter. The bishop, prudent

man, forthwith built largely on the land, and made so many improvements

that poor Sachvill, coming home from the wars with empty pockets, could

not redeem his estate. So Clyst Sachvill became Clyst Episcopi, and the

Bishops of Exeter visited it when they needed change of air. The time

came, however, when “as Brounscomb cuningly gott it, soe did Bishop

Voisey wastefully loose it.”

 

It was by this road that we are travelling on, this very excellent road

from Otterton, that the Duke of Monmouth once came riding into Exeter;

and it was somewhere near Bishop’s Clyst, I think, that a curious

spectacle met his eyes. Twenty thousand people came out to welcome him,

“but that which was more remarkable,” says the historian--and who will

deny it?--“was the appearance of a brave company of stout young men, all

clothed in linen waistcoats and drawers, white and harmless, having not

so much as a stick in their hands.” There were nine hundred or a thousand

of these innocents drawn up on a little hill. The Duke reviewed them

solemnly, riding round each company. Then the stout and harmless youths

marched two by two, hand in hand, before him into the city.

 

The story of Exeter has no beginning. To Norman and Saxon, Roman and

Celt, it was a fortified stronghold, the Gate of the West. For centuries

it was the desire of kings, the first thought of the invader, the

forlorn hope of the rebel. Yet, as we drive through the dull suburb

of Heavitree--which owes its grim name to the gallows--and pass into

the heart of the town we see no sign of the walls that endured so many

sieges, the walls that were built by Athelstane, that were attacked by

Alfred, that fell before the Conqueror, that withstood Warbeck, that

defended the cause of Charles: no sign of the towered archway that was

once the entrance to Exeter and had Henry VII.’s statue above it: nothing

to show us where poor Perkin, the king of straw, battered in his futile

way upon the gate, “with casting of stones, heaving of iron barres, and

kindling of fire,” nor where William the Conqueror, in ways that were

not futile, battered so successfully--“although the citizens smally

regarded him”--that it was believed “some part of the walls miraculously

of his owne accord fell downe.” Nor is there any sign of the western gate

that once stood at the further end of the High Street, the gate through

which another William, seeking the same crown, came in a later century.

Through this street, which Leland calls the fairest in Exeter, the great

procession of William of Orange swept in all its splendour of bright

armour and banners. Here where we are driving they passed by: the English

gentlemen on Flanders steeds; the two hundred blacks in embroidered

fur-lined caps with white feathers; the two hundred men of Finland in

bearskins and black armour, with broad flaming swords, very terrible

to unaccustomed eyes; the motto of the cause--“God and the Protestant

Religion”--fluttering on fifty banners borne by fifty gentlemen; the

led-horses and the pages and the grooms; and the prince himself, all

glittering in armour upon his milk-white palfry, surrounded by his

running footmen and followed by a mighty host. The billeting of this host

upon the citizens of Exeter, says an eye-witness in a Letter to a Person

of Quality, “was done so much to the content and satisfaction of the

inhabitants, and such just payments made for what the soldiers had, and

such civil behaviour among them, without swearing and damning as is usual

among some armies, that it is admiration to behold.”

 

[Illustration: GUILDHALL, EXETER.]

 

Of this brave show that meant so much to England there is no relic left;

but there is still a memorial to be soon of another kingly procession

that once passed down this street. Perkin Warbeck, after “mightily

and tempestuously,” but quite vainly, assaulting the walls of Exeter,

was pursued by Henry VII. to Taunton, and “about midnight departed in

wonderful celerity” to the sanctuary of Beaulieu. Then the King rode into

Exeter in state, and in his gratitude unbuckled the sword that Perkin

had not waited to see, and took the beaver from his head, and gave both

sword and hat to the citizens in acknowledgment of their “lusty hearts

and manly courage.” Here, in this old grey building that projects across

the pavement on our left, we may see them still. In this fairest street

of Exeter there is nothing now so fair as the Guildhall with the granite

pillars and the massive door of oak and the fluted panelling of Tudor

days. In the gallery above the great hall are the two swords that won

the crown of England, so to speak: the simple sword of Edward IV. and

the splendid gilded one of Henry VII.; and with them, cased in rich

embroidery, the black beaver hat in which Henry gained his easy triumph

over Perkin. And among the pictures on the dark walls of the hall itself

are two that have a special meaning in this place: Sir Peter Lely’s

portraits of the young Duchesse d’Orléans and of the Duke of Albemarle.

For it was in Exeter, in a house that has now vanished, that Charles I.’s

daughter Henrietta was born; and when the Articles of Surrender were

drawn up at Poltimore after the long siege, there was special provision

made for the safety of the little princess; so that it was in a “fit and

convenient carriage” that she started on that famous journey to Dover

which she ended, to her great annoyance, in the disguise of a French

peasant-boy. It was in Exeter, too, that young George Monk began his

fighting career by thrashing the under-sheriff of Devon. The exploit

drove him into the army, and when his talent for fighting had made him

Duke of Albemarle the civic authorities let bygones be bygones, and set

up his portrait here. Perhaps they recognised that the under-sheriff had

richly deserved his chastisement.[2]

 

Unfortunately the same Articles that provided a convenient carriage for

Princess Henrietta also decreed the destruction of Rougemont Castle, and

there is nothing but a tower and a gateway left of the stronghold that

Athelstane founded and William the Conqueror rebuilt. Yet even in this

fragment there is one window, they say, of Saxon date, one window that

has looked out on all the wild scenes that have been acted round the Red

Mount. Exactly how many sieges this scrap of masonry has endured I do

not know, nor how many crowned heads it has helped to shelter. William

the Conqueror and Stephen took possession of it in person; Edward IV.

and Richard III. visited it; and it was probably here that Henry VII.

stayed when he came to Exeter at the time of the Warbeck rebellion, to

try “the chief stirrers and misdoers.” “The commons of this shire of

Devon,” he wrote to the Mayor of Waterford, “come daily before us in

great multitudes in their shirts, the foremost of them having halters

about their necks, and full humbly with lamentable cries for our grace

and remission submit themselves unto us.” In the same vivid letter he

expresses a hope that Perkin’s wife will soon come to Exeter, “as she is

in dole.” It is not from Henry himself that we learn, however, that when

the poor lady actually arrived in this city he “wondered at her beauty

and her attractive behaviour.”

 

When William of Orange rode into the town with all his retinue of blacks

and Finlanders it was not to Rougemont that he came, for Fairfax had

nearly altogether destroyed it. He slept at the deanery, and on the