“And the sun went down and the stars came out, far over the summer sea,
But never for a moment ceased the fight of the one and the fifty-three.
Ship after ship, the whole night long, those high-built galleons came,
Ship after ship, the whole night long, with her battle, thunder, and flame;
Ship after ship, the whole night long, then back with her dead and her shame,
For some were sunk and many were shattered, and so could fight us no more—
God of battles, was ever a battle like this in the world before?”
The Revenge yielded only when, of all her men, there were left only twenty alive, and most of them grievously wounded, the ship herself a wreck, and the ammunition expended. Such were the Elizabethans! “All the powder to the last barrell was now spent, all her pikes broken, the masts all beaten over board, all her tackle cut asunder, her upper worke altogether rased, and in effect euened shee was with the water, and but the verie foundacion or bottom of a ship, pierced with eight hundred shot of great artillerie.” Grenville, himself mortally wounded, would have sunk the poor remains of his ship:
“Sink me the ship, Master Gunner—sink her, split her in twain,
Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain!”
But the crew, brought to this pass entirely by Grenville’s hot-headed bravery, rightly considered something was due to them. After all, a Spanish fighting man had also some sense of chivalry, and knew how to respect a brave enemy, conquered by superior force. So the Revenge was surrendered on honourable terms, and Grenville himself taken aboard the San Pablo, the Admiral’s ship, to die, three days later, of his wounds. It was no craven surrender, and the battered Revenge almost immediately emphasised that, by sinking, with numbers of Spanish wounded aboard.
Grenville died with, as it were, a confession of patriotic faith. He spake it in the Spanish tongue, that all might hear: “Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind for that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, that hath fought for his country, queen, religion, and honour. Whereby my soul most joyfully departeth out of this body, and shall always leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier, that hath done his duty as he was bound to do.”
Sir Bevil Grenville, grandson of this hero, was born in 1596, and after upholding the King’s standard with success in the West, and winning the Battle of Stratton, May 16th, 1643, was killed on July 5th, following, at the Battle of Lansdowne, on the heights above Bath. There are now no representatives of the Grenvilles left in the neighbourhood of Bideford.
They were not all loyalists in the West. We have seen the Puritan spirit, militant, at Barnstaple; and Bideford stood out against the King’s men; the fort erected on the hill-top at East-the-Water by Major-General Chudleigh still remaining, and indeed restored, as a witness to historic times.
Other and much more interesting relics than those empty embrasures upon the sky-line are found in the eight Armada guns that lie in a row outside the Technical School, on the quay and in the neighbourhood of the Kingsley statue. Or, at any rate, they are reputed to be Armada guns; which, with the sure fact that they are foreign, and the probability of their being Spanish, is as far as their story is likely to be told. In these parts they were so used to bring home captured ships, and to litter the quays with the spoils of other people, that the thing became commonplace and not worth recording at the time. And by that later time, when the story of the relics got beyond recording, and no one really knew anything at all about them, they were all at once found to be curious and interesting—with the key to their story lost. They were then buried half their length in the quay and served the commonplace, if useful, purpose of posts, from which they have now been rescued. Long and slender, with long sloping shoulders, something in shape like exaggerated hock-bottles, they certainly resemble the indubitable Armada guns found on the wrecked ship at Tobermory in recent years. Nor are these all existing in the neighbourhood. There is one, astonishingly encrusted with long lying in the sea, thrown carelessly aside, opposite the Royal Hotel, Westward Ho!; two that formerly stood as posts on Instow quay are now at Tapeley Park, three are at Portledge, three others on the quay at Clovelly, and it is currently reported that several have been seen on the sea-bottom off Westward Ho! at exceptionally low tides.
Bideford Quay, that figures in circumstances of considerable stress in the great romance by Kingsley, is a very different place from the quay of Elizabethan days. A broad roadway runs now, where water and mudbanks once stood. Kingsley himself would scarce recognise it. Paradoxically enough, all these works and improvements have been undertaken since the commerce of the town has declined. There is no fierce energy at Bideford to-day, and such shipping as there remains is very casual. Some few old houses—older than they look from without, remain by quayside; in especial, the “Three Tuns” inn, with a seventeenth-century plaster mantelpiece in an upstairs room, with figures in the costume of the time, clinging uncouthly to Renaissance ornament.
