The tomb of Sir Thomas Vyell, second Baronet, at whose house of Carwithiel in Cornwall our Collector spent some years of his boyhood, may yet be seen in the church of that parish, in the family transept. It bears the coat of the Vyells (gules, a fesse raguly argent) with no less than twenty-four quarterings: for an Odo of the name had fought on the winning side at Hastings, and his descendants, settling in the West, had held estates there and been people of importance ever since.
The Wars of the Roses, to be sure, had left them under a cloud, shorn of the most of their wealth and a great part of their lands. Yet they kept themselves afloat (if this riot of metaphor may be pardoned) and their heads moderately high, until Sir William, the first Baronet, by developing certain tin mines on his estate and working them by new processes, set up the family fortunes once more.
His son, Sir Thomas, steadily bettered them. A contemporary narrative describes him as "chief of a very good Cornish family, with a very good estate. His marrying a grand-daughter of the Lord Protector (Oliver) first recommended him to King William, who at the Revolution made him Commissioner of the Excise and some years after Governor of the Post Office. . . . The Queen, by reason of his great capacity and honesty, hath continued him in the office of Postmaster. He is a gentleman of a sweet, easy, affable disposition—a handsome man, of middle stature, towards forty years old." This was written in 1713. Sir Thomas died in 1726, of the smallpox, having issue (by his one wife, who survived him but a few years) seven sons and three daughters.
1. Thomas, the third Baronet: of whom anon.
2. William, who became a Senior Student of Christ Church, Oxford, a page to Queen Mary, and a Fellow of the Royal Society. A memoir of the time preserves him for us as "a tall sanguineman, with a merry eye and talkative in his cups." He married a Walpole, but his children died young.
3. John, who, going on a diplomatic mission to Hamburg, took a fever and died there, unmarried.
4. Henry, the father of our Collector. He married Jane, second daughter of the Marquis of Lomond; increased his wealth in Bengal as governor of the East India Company's Factory, and while yet increasing it, died at Calcutta in 1728. His children were two sons, Oliver and Henry, with both of whom our story deals.
5. Algernon, who went to Jesus College, Cambridge, became a Fellow there, practised severe parsimony, and dying unmarried in 1742, had his eyes closed by his college gyp and weighted with two penny pieces—the only coins found in his breeches pocket. He left his very considerable savings to young Oliver, whom he had never seen.
6. Frederick Penwarne, barrister-at-law. We shall have something to do
with him.
7. Roger, who traded at Calcutta and making an expedition to the
Persian Gulf, was killed there in a chance affray with some Arabs.