Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/268

258[February 13, 1869] with a rude effigy of the ruthless murderer of Prince Arthur. Two candles weighing a pound each are lit, and until they are burnt out the visitors at this festive Dutch auction have a right to sit bemusing themselves with "jolly good ale and old." A marble tablet in the vestry room records the sacred customs to be observed on this occasion, but does not insist on inebriety.

A flight further westward and the crow feels the fresh wind from the Blackdown Hills ruffle the fan feathers of his strong wings. He rests at Wellington on a pleasant red roof and looks up at the Wellington monument. After Talavera, where Arthur Wellesley won his peerage, he chose the name of this town for his title, because his family is supposed to derive its name from Wellesleigh, a place near Wells, and this town is near Wensley, which sounds like Wesley, the name afterwards altered to Wellesley. On being made viscount the duke tried to purchase an estate here, but failed. In the civil wars the Wellington people were notorious Roundheads.

The crow has passed the frontier, and spreads his wings in sunny Devonshire air. Red Devons feed below him in the green meadows. Mossy apple boughs of countless orchards spread beneath him; homely cob walls square out the pastures; thatched cottages cheerily greet the eye.

On the honeycombed battlement of St. Peter's, the central church of the old clothing town of Tiverton, the crow first descends, lightly. This is one of those Devonshire towns that has suffered so much from fire, in consequence of the use of thatched roofs. In June, 1731, when the thatch had dried almost to tinder, a fire broke out in Tiverton, and destroyed at one fell swoop two hundred and ninety-eight of those picturesque, but dangerous, old thatched timber houses. Tiverton has produced at least one celebrated person, for Hannah Cowley, the authoress of the Belle's Stratagem, a lively and clever play that long held the Georgian stage, was born here in 1743. She was the daughter of Philip Parkhouse, a bookseller in the town, and she married an officer in the service of the Company.

The crow having rested on theatre roofs before now, has pleasure in the old clothing town between the Exe and Loman, in recalling snatches of the pleasant play by the bookseller's daughter, for was not Elliston the incomparable lover, the Doricourt at Drury Lane in 1815, Lewis the Doricourt at Covent Garden in 1780; Wrench, Flutter; and Mrs. Orger, the Lady Frances Touchwood; and is there not a stage tradition that Miss Younge, as Letitia, always burst into real tears when she took off the mask, in the last scene, and discovered herself to Doricourt? The feigned madness of Doricourt, and the feigned rusticity of Letitia, seem stale enough now, but they delighted audiences once, and Tiverton was proud of the play the royal family had commanded once a season for many years. In 1780 what could have brought the gallery down sooner than such expressive patriotic sentiments as those of Doricourt: "True. There I plead guilty; but I have never yet found any man whom I could cordially take to my heart and call friend, who was not born beneath a British sky, and whose heart and manners were not truly English?" Or, again: "Cursed be the hour—should it ever arrive—in which British ladies shall sacrifice to foreign graces the grace of modesty?"

That old church on which the crow rests, has a chapel and south porch carved all over with coats of arms, and ships, and woolpacks, and staple marks, by John Greenway, a cloth merchant in 1517, and has seen a good deal of fighting in its time. In the reign of Edward the Sixth, the Devonshire priests roused the commonalty in Devonshire, when Wiltshire and other counties began to rise. Ten thousand of them met under Humphrey Arundel, the Governor of St. Michael's Mount, armed themselves with bows, halberds, hackbuts, and spears, and despising Lord Russell's small force, moved on towards Exeter, carrying before them crosses, banners, holy water, candlesticks, the host covered with a canopy, and all the pomp of Catholic ritualism. Exeter shut her gates against them, they failed in all their attacks, and Lord Russell, reinforced by Sir William Herbert and Lord Gray, bore down at last on the fanatical peasantry with some rough German horse and prompt Italian arquebusiers. The battle was fought at Cranmore, near Collipriest. Tiverton saw that day the insurgents fly before the whirling two-handed swords of the fierce German mercenaries, and the Protector had soon good tidings from Devonshire.

In the civil wars Tiverton streets grew red again with blood freely spilt, for in 1643 the Parliament troops were chased out of it by Cavalier swords; in 1644 it was occupied in force by the king, first, and then by the Earl of Essex; and in 1645 Massey and Fairfax took it by storm. Fairfax, in his stolid way, soon dismantled the castle of the Earls of Devon, built by Richard de Redvers in 1100, and left only those ivied towers which the Carews and the crows now jointly possess; the great fourteenth century gateway still remains.

It was during the storm that Fairfax battered the church so much, the cavaliers having fortified themselves in it, dragged their guns on to the roof, and thrust their muskets out of every loop and window. It was then that the fine carved tombs of the Courtenays were trodden and struck to pieces. There was a monument to Catherine, the daughter of Edward the Fourth, and widow of an Earl of Devonshire, and another to the admiral, the third earl, generally called "the blind and good earl." His epitaph was one of those in which the corpse itself is supposed to talk to you: