Hardly, however, had the King passed them by when the citizens had a new excitement of their own. The noise of a quarrel broke in upon the gloom of the stricken city. Those within hearing ran to the spot and found a sight worth seeing. For there in the light of day, under the King's very nose, as it were, a stalwart young gentleman of about sixteen years of age was thrashing the under-sheriff of Devonshire within an inch of his life. With some difficulty, so furious was his assault, the lad was dragged off his victim before grievous bodily harm was done, and people began to inquire what it was all about.
Every one must have known young George Monk, who lived with his grandfather, Sir George Smith, at Heavytree, close to Exeter. Sir George Smith of Maydford was a great Exeter magnate, and his grandson and godson George belonged to one of the best families in Devonshire, and was connected with half the rest; and had they known how the handsome boy was avenging the family honour in his own characteristic way, they would certainly have sympathised with him for the scrape he was in.
For the honour of the Monks of Potheridge in North Devon was a very serious thing. There for seventeen generations the family had lived. Ever since Henry the Third was King they had looked down from their high-perched manor-house over the lovely valley of the Torridge just where the river doubles upon itself in three majestic sweeps as though it were loath to leave a spot so beautiful. By dint of judicious marriages they had managed to be still prosperous and well connected. It was no secret indeed that they claimed royal blood by two descents on the distaff side. For the grandmother of George's father, Sir Thomas, was Frances Plantagenet, daughter and co-heiress of Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle; and his grandfather's grandmother, as co-heiress of Richard Champernown of Insworth, had brought him the Cornish bordure and kinship with King John through Richard, King of the Romans, and his son, the Earl of Cornwall.
But of late things had been going very hard at Potheridge. Sir Thomas had succeeded to a heavily encumbered estate, and his attempts at economy had done little or nothing to better his position. An increasing family added to his difficulties and his sorrows. Ten children had already been born to him, and four, including his two eldest boys, were in the grave. Thomas was now the future heir, and then came George. After him was his favourite brother, the quiet studious Nicholas who was to be a parson; and then little Arthur the baby, who became a soldier like George. George had been born on December 8th, 1608, and was now nearly seventeen years old. He grew up a handsome lusty boy, and from his earliest years his daring and spirit had destined him to be a soldier. It was the career of all younger sons of metal, and few can have looked forward to it more ardently than George Monk. It was the tradition of his family. His uncle Richard had died a captain; his uncle Arthur had fallen in 1602 at the glorious defence of Ostend by that renowned captain, Sir Francis Vere. His great-uncle, Captain Francis Monk, had sailed with Drake and Norris in their famous descent upon Portugal in 1589, and having been severely wounded at the storm of Corunna, had died a few days afterwards when the fleet was driven by stress of weather into Peniché.
The very soil he trod was fertile with the romance of war. For George was born in the heart of the country which bred the greatest of the Elizabethan heroes. The soldiers and sailors who most adorned the great Queen's age were living memories in his childhood, their exploits were the tales of his nursery, their names the first words he learnt to lisp. Hard by lived his aunt Grace, who had married the brilliant young Bevil Grenville, heir and grandson of the immortal Sir Richard himself. His aunt Elizabeth was wife to Luttrell of Hartland Abbey, and through her he could claim kinship with the Howards; while all around the home by Tor and Torridge were clustered the old North Devon families with whom Kingsley's undying romance has made us so familiar. Nor were these influences lessened as time went on. Sir George Smith took such a fancy to the fearless high-spirited boy that he one day offered to educate him if he might live half the year at Maydford. Poor embarrassed Sir Thomas could only consent, and George entered a new sphere of life even fuller of romance and adventure than the old. At Larkbere, within easy distance of his new home, lived Sir Nicholas Smith, Sir George's eldest son, where the lad found endless cousins to foster the dreams of Devon boyhood. But all his games and stories there were tame beside the attractions of his aunt Frances's house at Farringdon. For Frances Monk had married Sir Lewis Stukeley, Vice-Admiral of Devon, and there George must have found for a play-fellow little Tom Rolfe, the child of Pocahontas, whose guardian Stukeley had become since the Indian beauty's death. Sir Lewis, too, was a cousin and intimate friend of Raleigh himself, and George must have seen in the company of his uncle that latest born child of the sixteenth century and even heard his stirring adventures from his own lips. He would certainly have missed no opportunity of seeing the famous navigator. Raleigh was the hero of every lad with an English spirit or an ear for a tale. His Discovery of Guiana was a book that was in every one's hands, and George and his cousins must have known by heart its wonderful stories of El Dorado and the Amazons. At any rate the lad was old enough to have witnessed with eager eyes the setting forth of Sir Walter's last expedition to find the land of gold; to have heard with sinking heart how his uncle Stukeley had gone forth to arrest the hero upon his disastrous return; to mourn with all England when Raleigh's head fell on Tower Hill, and to burn with shame and anger when he heard the cry of execration that rose against his uncle, the treacherous friend who betrayed the last of the Elizabethans.
It is not difficult to imagine how a boy of George's nature, brought up in the midst of such surroundings, must have chafed to see his friends and kinsmen joining their colours while he was too young to be allowed to go. Richard Grenville, Sir Bevil's brother, whom George must have known well, was with the expedition, and George can have wished nothing better than to serve under him. Sir Richard Grenville, though he afterwards disgraced himself by his excesses in the Civil War, was then the very hero for a boy like George. He was a typical Low Country soldier. From an early age he had served with Prince Maurice, the first captain of his time, in the regiment of that pattern soldier Lord Vere. In a few years he had risen to the rank of captain, and was now commanding a company in the regiment of Sir John Borough, chief of the staff to the expedition. It was a splendid opportunity for George to begin his career, but it was not to be, and it must have been with mixed feelings that he heard the expedition was not to be delayed a year.
When the King came down it was of course impossible that a man of such a position as Sir Thomas Monk should not go and pay him his respects like the other county gentlemen. Unfortunately there was an annoying difficulty in the way. He was by this time hopelessly in debt, and so many judgments were out against him that he was little better than a prisoner at Potheridge. To appear in public meant certain arrest. There was but one escape from the dilemma, and that was to bribe the under-sheriff. The only question was to whom so delicate a mission was to be entrusted, and it cannot but raise our opinion of young George that he was chosen for the task. His mission was successfully carried out, and in due course Sir Thomas rode out to meet his sovereign with all the best blood in Devon. But before the royal party came in sight the proceedings were interrupted by a painful incident. Either the under-sheriff had blabbed, or George had been boasting of his diplomacy. At all events the rascally attorney had received a bigger bribe from the other side, and now at this solemn moment and in face of the whole county the villain came forward and arrested Sir Thomas.
George Monk was not a boy to sit down quietly under such an indignity. Without saying anything to anybody he took the first opportunity of slipping off into Exeter regardless of the plague. Once inside the gates he went straight to the perfidious attorney, and having told him in the plainest words what he thought of him, there and then proceeded to administer the cudgelling in the midst of which he has been already introduced, and which was to prove his introduction to an eventful career.
For George was in a desperate scrape. The bruised lawyer threatened merciless proceedings, and to cudgel an under-sheriff was an outrage of which the law was likely to take a very serious view. It was clear that the boy must be concealed till the storm blew over. There was only one way of doing it. The fleet was lying in Plymouth nearly ready to sail. Once there he would be safe. So George, to his intense delight we may be sure, was smuggled off and hurriedly engaged as a volunteer under his kinsman Sir Richard Grenville. Early in October the expedition sailed. The baffled attorney had to hang up his unserved writ on the office-files, and George Monk, by the force of the straitened circumstances of the family, found himself prematurely a soldier with the burden of an imperfect education to carry through life.
It is unnecessary to follow closely the disastrous expedition to Cadiz in 1625. Ill-planned, ill-disciplined, ill-officered, and ill-supplied, it was doomed from the first to failure. For young George Monk it was a bitter awakening from the dreams a boy will have of the glories of a soldier's life. The ship in which he sailed and the company in which he served, bad as it was, can hardly have been so bad as the rest. Grenville was at least a soldier by profession and a good officer. Borough's regiment must at least have tasted discipline. The veteran general was one of the most distinguished and scholarly soldiers of his time; a man who had seen grow up under the Veres that immortal English brigade which by patient effort and undaunted perseverance had wrested from the Spaniards their till then unchallenged claim to be the finest infantry in the world. He had seen more service than any man in the army, and in all questions of military science his word was law.