Indeed, Kilkhampton Church is as it were the shrine of the gallant Grenvilles, and deserves that high honour. A shady avenue leads from the modern lych-gate to the porch that was built by a Grenville and the Norman door through which so many Grenvilles have passed to their prayers, and so many have been carried to their graves: Roger, who for his lavish table was called the Great Housekeeper, and John the privateer, and Richard the Marshal and poet,[13] and Sir Bernard, son of the greatest of the Grenvilles and father of Sir Bevill. Sir Richard of the Revenge, as we all know, died “with a joyful and quiet mynde” on a distant sea, leaving behind him “an everlastynge fame of a valyante and true soldier that has done hys dutie as he was bounde to do.”[14] But Sir Bevill, thanks to Anthony Payne, lies in the vault of Kilkhampton, and with him is the wife who could not live long without him, and the boy who rode into the war like a young prince and became as ardent a royalist as his father.
Everywhere we see the Grenville arms: the three strange objects that some call “horsemen’s rests,” and some call rudders, and some clarions. They are outside the south-east door, and in the chancel, and on one of the elaborately carved bench-ends, and on the old granite font, and in much magnificence of paint and gilding on the south wall. And here on the same wall is the ugly eighteenth-century monument to Sir Bevill, with its long epitaph. “A brighter courage and a gentler disposition were never marryed together,” said Lord Clarendon. A better memorial of his bright courage than this thing of gilt and marble is the well-worn helmet that hangs beside it; and of his gentle disposition we have proof enough in his own and his wife’s letters, with their engaging mixture of romance and domesticity. “Would God but grant you were home,” writes Lady Grenville, “till when my heart will never be quiett.” “The Plaisters you sent, I trust in God, hath done me much good.” “I pray you make haste and come home.… I am and still will be yours ever and only.… PS.—I pray you let your Coate be well ayr’d and lye abroad awhile before you weare it. To my dearest and best Frend Mr. Bevill Grenvile, these.” “Beseeching God to encline yr heart to love her who will in spite of the divill ever be yrs immoveably.” “If you please to bestowe a plaine black Gownd of any cheape Stufe on me I will thanke you.”[15]
MORWENSTOW.
Not far from Kilkhampton is another church that some of us may care to see, though the long lane that leads to Morwenstow is by no means one that has no turning. Indeed, it would need some ingenuity to find room for any more corners in these narrow ways; but if progress is slow the country is attractive and the sea is before us, with flat-topped Lundy Island in the distance. We come rather suddenly on the church in its steep and narrow valley, with the tower darkly outlined against the blue sea, and a bold sweep of heather for background: the remote romantic glen where Morwenna the hermit had her cell near the sea, and died with her eyes fixed upon her native Wales: the glen of which Hawker wrote: “Here within the ark we hear only the voices of animals and birds, and the sound of many waters.”
He must have heard the voices of a good many animals; for even when he went to church he was followed by nine or ten cats, they say, which wandered, while he was preaching, about this beautiful building with the Norman arches, and the chancel with the marble floor. Here at the foot of the pulpit is the grave of his wife, the devoted wife who was older than his mother. Morwenstow, in its utter loneliness, its wild beauty, its deep, full colouring, needs nothing to give it charm; but its name, probably, would be known to few if it had not had, for many years, a vicar whose eccentric, poetical, heroic nature made his name and his dwelling-place memorable. We can forgive his errant cats to a man who wrote verses so sonorous—and above all to a man who fought the wreckers as Hawker fought them here.[16] His dust is not in the church he loved and cared for; but his epitaph is on the lips of those who knew him. “His door was always open to the poor,” they say.
The twisted lanes take us back to the main road, and on a splendid surface we cross the border into Devon.