No, not in silence, least these stones below,
That hide such worth, should in spight vocal grow;
We’ll rather sob it out, our grateful teares
Congeal’d to Marble shall vy threnes with theirs.
This weeping Marble then Drops this releife
To draw fresh lines to fame, and Fame to griefe:
Whose name was Wichehalse—’twas a cedar’s fall.
For search this Urn of Learned dust, you’le find
Treasures of Virtue and Piety enshrin’d,
Rare Paterns of blest Peace and Amity,
Models of grace, emblems of Charity,
Rich Talents not in niggard napkin Layd,
But Piously dispenced, justly payd,
Chast Spousal Love t’his Consort; to Children nine,
Surviving th’ other fowre his care did shine
In Pious Education; to Neighbours, friends,
Love seal’d with Constancy, which knowes no end.
Death would have stolne this Treasure, but in vaine
It stung, but could not kill; all wrought his gaine,
His life was hid with Christ; Death only made this story,
Christ call’d him hence his Eve, to feast with Him in glory.
The play upon words, “’twas a Cedar’s fall,” should be noticed above: it is by way of contrast to the “Wiche”—i.e., wych-elm, in the Wichehalse name.
Four years before the death of Hugh Wichehalse, his eldest surviving son, John, had married one Elizabeth Venner. He distinguished himself as one of the most bitter and relentless among the Puritans of Barnstaple, and especially as a persecutor of the loyal clergy. He found it prudent in after years to retire to Lee, and endeavour to efface himself when the Royalists returned to power. Whether it was for love he married again, a woman of Royalist sympathies, after the death of his first wife, who had been as bitterly Puritan as himself, or whether it was policy, does not appear; but, at any rate, when he died in 1676, aged fifty-six, he left the family estates much shrunken. The enriched Wichehalse family was already on the decline.
His eldest son, John, was an ineffectual and extravagant person, with a bent, that almost amounted to perverse genius, to muddling away his property; and a wife who in every respect aided and abetted him. After a while, they removed to Chard, in Somerset; then, returning, he sold the manor of Countisbury, to pay his debts. He raised repeated mortgages on his other properties, borrowed right and left from his own relatives and his wife’s; and finally, at his death in London, after the foreclosure of mortgages and many actions at law, practically all his lands had been dispersed.
His misfortunes were largely caused, according to popular superstition at the time, by the part he took in the capture of Major Wade, one of the fugitives after the Battle of Sedgemoor, on July 6th, 1685. Wade and some companions had fled across country after the battle, and, coming to Ilfracombe, seized a vessel there, intending to make off by sea. But being forced ashore by ships cruising in the Channel, they were obliged to separate and skulk along the coast. At Farley farm, above Bridgeball and Lynmouth, Wade was so fortunate as to excite the compassion of the wife of a small farmer named How. She brought food to him, hidden among the rocks, and induced a farmer named Birch to hide him in his still more secluded farm on the verge of Exmoor. Information leaked out that a fugitive was concealed in one of the few houses at Farley, and on the night of July 22nd, John Wichehalse, Mr. Powell, the parson of Brendon, Robert Parris, and John Babb, one of Wichehalse’s men, searched the place. Three houses were entered unsuccessfully, but in the fourth—which happened to be Birch’s—Major Wade was hiding behind the front door, as the search-party, armed, came in. Grace How admitted the party. Wade, who was disguised in Philip How’s rough country farmer’s clothes, ran off through the back door, with two other men, and John Babb, raising his gun, fired and hit him in the side. Wade was made prisoner. His wound was healed, and himself afterwards pardoned. It is a pleasing thing to record that he afterwards pensioned Grace How, who had succoured him in time of need.
The only tragedy of the affair was the suicide of Birch, who, afraid of his part, hanged himself some few days after the capture.
This affair deeply impressed the country-folk. Wichehalse was thought never after to have prospered, and it was told how John Babb was thenceforward a man accurst. He left his master’s service and went into the herring-fishery; whereupon the herrings deserted Lynmouth. He died unhonoured, and his granddaughter, Ursula Babb, was afflicted with the evil eye. She married and had one son, who was drowned at sea; and thenceforward lived lonely at Lynmouth, half-crazed; telling old stories of the departed grandeur of the Wichehalses which grew more and more marvellous and confused with every repetition. It was she who told the Reverend Matthew Mundy the legends, which he took down and first printed—with many embellishments of his own—of Jennifrid’s Leap.
There was never (let it be repeated) a Jennifrid Wichehalse. The feckless John Wichehalse, who ruined the family, had three sons and one daughter. The sons died without issue; the last vestiges of the family wealth being dissipated in their time by the effectual means of a Chancery suit. Mary, the daughter, married at Caerleon one Henry Tompkins, and had one son, Chichester Tompkins. She returned, in a half-demented condition, to Lynmouth, and was used to wander along the cliffs, the scene of her ancestors’ former prosperity, accompanied by one old retainer, Mary Ellis. At last Mary Tompkins fell over a steep rock into the sea, her body never being recovered; and so ended the last Wichehalse. To-day, in spite of those large families of the various Wichehalse branches, you shall not find one of that name remaining in Devonshire.
To-day the Newnes’ interest dominates Lynton. I shall draw no satirical picture of what has been made possible by the Elementary Education Act of 1869 and Tit-Bits. Such an alliance carries a man into unexpected horizons, but with so many Richmonds now crowding the field, the thing will not be so easily repeated. On the crest of Holiday Hill stands the residence of Sir George Newnes, Bart., and in the town the Town Hall he gave is a prominent object: picturesqueness itself, in its combined Gothic and Jacobean architectural styles, and contrasted masonry and magpie timber and plaster.
There is always, in the summer, a cheerful stir in Lynton, and the railway has by no means abolished the four-horsed coach that plies between Ilfracombe and this point, and even on to Minehead. But when the close of the season has come and the holiday world has gone home, what then? The hotel-keepers and all the ministrants to the crowds of visitors must surely, to protect themselves from sheer ennui, institute a kind of desperate “general post,” and go and stay with each other, on excessive terms, to keep their hands in, so to say.