Footprints of Former Men in Far Cornwall

by Robert Stephen Hawker

Gall was very rich, and he appears to have emptied his money-bags into his wife’s lap, as the gossip of the city ran, for it is on record that soon after her second marriage she manifested her prosperity like a true-hearted Cornish woman by ample “gifts” and largess to the borough of St. Marie, “my native place.” Twenty acres of woodland copse in the neighbourhood were bought and conveyed by that kind and gracious lady, Dame Thomasine Gall, to feoffees and trust-men for the perpetual use of the poor of the paroche, “for fewel to be hewn in parcels once a-year, and justly and equally divided for evermore on the vigil of St. Thomas the twin.” To her mother she sends by “a waggon which has gone on an enterprise into Cornwall for woollen merchandise, a chest with array of clothing, fair weather and foul, head-gear and body raiment to boot, all the choice and costly gifts to my loving parents of my goodman Gall, and in remembrance, as he chargeth me to say, that ye have reared for him a kindly and loving wife.” But the graphic and touching passage in this letter is the message which succeeds: “Lo! I do send you also herewithal in the coffer a litel boke: it is for a gift to my Cousin John. Tell him it is not written as the whilom usage was, and he was wont to teach me my Christ Cross Rhime;[98] but it is what they do call emprinted with a strange device of an iron engin brought from forrin parts. Bid him not despise it, for although it is so small that it will lie on the palm of your hand, yet it did cost me full five marks in exchange.” But her marriage life was doomed to bring her only brief and transitory intervals of wedded happiness. Five years after the date of her letter above quoted, she was again alone in the house. Master Gall died, but not until he had endowed his “tender wife with all and singular his moneys and plate, bills, bonds, and ventures now at sea,” etc., with a long inventory of the “precious things beneath the moon,” too long to rehearse, but each and all to the sole use, enjoyment, and behoof of Dame Thomasine, whose maiden name of Bonaventure was literally interpreted and fulfilled in every successive change of station.

We greet her then once more as a rich and buxom widow of city fame. Her wealth, added to her comeliness—for she was still in the prime of life—brought many “a potent, grave, and reverend seignor” to her feet, and to sue for her hand. Nor did she long linger in her choice. The favoured suitor now was Sir John Perceval, goldsmith and usurer—that is to say, banker, in the phrase of that day; very wealthy, of high repute, alderman of his ward, and in such a position of civic advancement that he would have been described in modern language as next the chair. He wooed and won the “Golden Widow”—for so, because of her double inheritance of the wealth of two rich husbands, she was merrily named. Their wedding was a kind of public festival, and the bride, in acknowledgment of her own large possessions, was invested with a stately dower at the church-door. One year after their marriage her husband, Sir John, was elected to that honourable office which is still supposed by foreign nations to be only second in rank to that of the monarch on the throne, Lord Mayor of the city of London.

Thus, by a strange succession of singular events, the barefooted shepherdess of a Cornish moorland became the Lady Mayoress of metropolitan fame; and the legend of Thomasine Bonaventure—for it was now well known—was the popular theme of royal and noble interest among the lords and ladies of the Court. She demeaned herself bravely and decorously in her ascent among the great and lofty ones of the land. Like all noble natures, her spirit rose with her personal elevation, and took equal place with her compeers of each superior rank. Nor did her true and simple woman’s nature undergo any depreciation or change. It breathes and survives in every sentence of her family letters, transcripts of which have been perpetuated and preserved to our own times. One part of her personal history is illustrative of a scene of life and manners when Henry VII. was king.

“Sweet mother,” she wrote, “thy daughter hath seen the face of the king. We were bidden to a banket at the royal palace, and Sir John and I dared not choose but go. There was such a blaze of lords and ladies in silks and samite, and jewels and gold, that it was like the city of New Jerusalem in the Scriptures; and I, thy maid Thomasine, was arrayed so fine, that they brought up the saying that I was dressed like an altar. When we were led into the chamber of dais, where his highness stood, the king did kiss me on the cheek, as the manner is, and he seemed gentle and kind. But then did he turn to my good lord and husband, and say, with a look stark and stern enow, ‘Ha, Sir John! see to it that thy fair dame be liege and true, for she comes of the burly Cornish kind, and they be ever rebels in blood and bone. Even now they be one and all for that knave Warbeck,[99] who is among them in the West.’ You will gesse, dear mother, how my heart did beat. But withal the king did drink to me at the banket, and did merrily call, ‘Health to our Lady Mayoress, Dame Thomasine Perceval, which now feedeth her flock in the rich pastures of our city of London.’ And thereat they did laugh, and fleer, and shout, and there was flashing of tankards and jingling of cups all down the hall.”

The Tower of St. Stephen’s Church, Dunheved, to which Dame Thomasine Perceval contributed 40 marks.

With increase of wealth came also many a renewed token of affectionate regard and sterling bounty to her old and well-beloved dwelling-place of Wike St. Marie. As her wedding-gift of remembrance she directed that “a firm and steadfast road should be laid down with stones,” at her whole cost, along the midst of Green-a-Moor, and fit for man and beast to travel on, with their lawful occasions, from Lanstaphadon to the sea. At another time, and for a New Year’s gift, she gave the sum of forty marks towards the building of a tower for St. Stephen’s church, above the causeway of Dunheved; and it was her desire that they should carry their pinnacles so tall that “they might be seen from Swannacote Cross, by the moor, to the intent that they who do behold it from the Burgage Mound may remember the poor maid which is now a wedded dame of London citie.”

During her three marriages she had no children, and it was her singular lot to survive her third husband, Sir John: it was in long widowhood after him that she lived and died. Her will, bearing date the vigil of the Feast of Christmas, A.D. 1510, is a singular document, for therein the memory and the impulses of her early life are recalled and condensed. She bequeaths large sums of money to be laid out and invested in land for the welfare of the village borough, whereto, amid all the strange vicissitudes of her existence, her heart had always clung with fond and lingering regret. She directs that a chantry[100] with cloisters was to be built near the church of Wike St. Marie, at the discretion and under the control of her executor and cousin, John Dineham, the unforgotten priest. She endows it with thirty marks by the year, and provides that there shall be established therein “a schole for young children born in the paroche of Wike St. Marie; and such to be always preferred as are friendless and poor.” They are to be “taught to read with their fescue from a boke of horn, and also to write, and both as the manner was in that country when I was young.” The well-remembered days of her girlhood appear to tinge every line of her last will. Her very codicil is softened with a touch of her first and fondest love. In it she gives to the priest of the church, where she well knew that her cousin John would serve and sing,[101] “the silver chalice gilt, which good Master Maskelyne the goldsmith had devised for her behoof, with a leetle blue flower which they do call a forget-me-not wrought in Turkess at the bottom of the bowl, to the intent that whensoever it is used the minister may remember her who was once a simple shepherd-maid by the wayside of Wike St. Marie, and who was so wonderfully brought by many great changes to be the Mayoress of London citie before she died.”

Doorway of old College, Week St. Mary.