The tapestries that decorated the walls of Cothele at its building still hang in its rooms, the furniture that innovating brides introduced, to bring the home up-to-date, has long since become the delight of antiquaries, and the extra plenishings provided for the visits of Charles the Second and George the Third and his Queen may be noted. So do inanimate things remain, while man is resolved into carrion and perishes in dust. I find no traces of the Early Victorian furnishings that probably smartened up Cothele for the visit of Queen Victoria and Prince Albert in 1846. They are well away.
Many are the royal personages who have visited Cothele. Sometimes they have been as desolating as the merely vulgar could be; as, for example, when one of them, disregarding the very necessary request not to handle the curious old polished steel mirrors that are numbered among the curiosities of the mansion, did so, with the result that a rusty finger-mark appeared. Here was a chance for the reverential! A Royal finger-mark, wrought in rust! It might have served the turn either of a snob or a cynic, equally well; but it was removed at last, not without much strenuous labour.
Cothele Quay stands deep down by the riverside, with a cottage or so near, but otherwise solitary amid the woods, where the little creek of Danescombe is spanned by an ancient Gothic bridge. The quay is the port, so to speak, of Cothele, and of the village of St. Dominic, high up on the hills; the readiest way for supplies of all kinds being from Plymouth, by water.
Up there, through St. Dominic, the lofty high road that runs between Callington and Saltash is reached. It runs through the village of St. Mellion, whose church contains monuments, some of them rather astonishing, to the Corytons of West Newton Ferrers, three miles to the west.
Passing through St. Mellion, the road comes presently to the lovely park of Pentillie, a wooded estate overlooking the Tamar in one of its loveliest and most circuitous loops, where the river may be seen through the woods winding and returning upon itself far below. Hidden away in luxuriant glades almost on a level with the river is the mansion of the Coryton family, itself of no great charm or interest; but there is on one of the heights above it, known as "Mount Ararat," a weird "folly," or monument, rather famous in its way, in which was buried, under peculiar conditions, the body of a former owner of Pentillie, who died in 1713. It is well worth seeing, but in those woody tangles is not so easily to be found. It stands, in fact, not so far from the road itself, down a lane on the left hand before coming to the lodge-gates of Pentillie, and then through a rustic gate or two; but the stranger might easily take the wrong one among the several rough footpaths, and the whole hillside is so overgrown with trees, that the tower is not seen until you are actually at the base of it. The better course is to proceed along the highway until you come to the lodge-gates and to the broad, smooth carriage-road leading lengthily down to the mansion. If you are on a bicycle, so much the better; you are down there and in the courtyard of Pentillie "Castle," as it is called, in a flash. Proceeding then straight through to the kitchen-gardens, there is a gardener's cottage, where, to those gifted with a proper degree of courtesy, the gardener will point out the hillside footpath by which you presently come to the tower, containing a forbidding statue of Sir James Tillie. "An' if ye look through a peephole in the wall," says the gardener, "ye can see th' owd twoad quite plainly."
THE TOWER, PENTILLIE.
Sir James Tillie was a person of very humble origin, born at St. Keverne in 1645. He was soon in the service of Sir John Coryton, Bart., of West Newton Ferrers, St. Mellion, who befriended him to a considerable extent, placing him with an attorney and afterwards making him his own steward. In 1680 the baronet died. Meanwhile Tillie, by industry and prudence, had grown pretty well-to-do, and had married the daughter of Sir Harry Vane, who brought him a fortune. She had died some years before the decease of Sir John Coryton, at whose death Tillie was a childless widower. His master had arranged that Tillie should continue steward to his eldest son, John, the next baronet, and guardian to his younger children. It was not long before the second Sir John died, and Tillie married his widow, and seems in the thirty years or so following to have been undisputed owner of Pentillie. How all these things came to pass does not exactly appear; but at any rate Tillie, who by false pretences of gentility and a considerable payment of money had secured the honour of knighthood in 1686, built Pentillie Castle, which he named after himself, and formed the park, and there he resided until his death in 1713. His wife survived him. He had no children, but was anxious to found a Tillie family, and left a will by which his nephew, James Woolley, son of his sister, should inherit his estates on assuming the name of Tillie.
Wild and fantastic legends fill up the mysterious lack of facts here and there in Tillie's life. He is said to have poisoned Sir John Coryton the younger, and was, among other things, reputed to be a coiner, on a large scale, of base coin. But there is no evidence for those tales. More certain it is that the College of Heralds in 1687 revoked the grant of arms to him, and fined him £200 for the mis-statements that led to his obtaining them.