A few years passed, and this Elizabeth Grenville made another attempt to see and soften her mother. She went to her at Walreddon, but when Lady Howard saw her she rushed from the room up the stairs pursued by her daughter, who implored her to stay and hear and love her. Elizabeth clung to her mother’s dress on the landing, as Lady Howard passed into one of the upper rooms. The unnatural mother swung back the door with such violence that it broke her daughter’s arm. If this took place at all it was probably before Elizabeth departed for the Continent with her father, when she was aged sixteen. She never after met her mother.
Lady Howard was getting on in life; her son George lived with her at Fitzford and managed her property. Feeling old age creeping on, she by deed made over all her estates to him, in the hopes that when she was gone he would live on in her ancestral home. But in the prime of life George Howard died on 17 September, 1671. To his mother the shock was so great that she did not recover from it, and she also died, just one month after him. Hearing that she was ill, her first cousin, Sir William Courtenay, hurried to her bedside, and gained such power over Lady Howard as to induce her to make a will leaving all her possessions to him, to the exclusion of her daughters. Mary Howard, married to one Vernon, was to be given £500 within four years after her decease, and £1000 to her daughter Elizabeth, married to Captain Lennard, to be paid within two years, and £20 within one year; but should she protest against the will, then what she was to receive would be reduced to £20. The will was signed on 14 October, 1671, and she died on the seventeenth of the same month. “This is the one action of Lady Howard’s life,” says Mrs. Radford, “that seems to have shocked her contemporaries. They have not a word to say against her moral character; but she disinherited her children. Could anything be more dreadful?”
Walreddon to the present day belongs to the Earl of Devon; but Fitzford was sold in 1750 to the Duke of Bedford.
Lady Howard was a person of strong will and imperious temper, and left a deep and lasting impression on the people of Tavistock. Mrs. Bray collected several traditions relative to her, which she published in her Notes to Fitz, of Fitzford, in 1828. She bore the reputation of having been hard-hearted in her lifetime. For some crime she had committed (nobody knew what), she was said to be doomed to run in the shape of a hound from the gateway of Fitzford to Okehampton Park, between the hours of midnight and cock-crowing, and to return with a single blade of grass in her mouth to the place whence she had started; and this she was to do till every blade was picked, when the world would be at an end.
“Dr. Jago, the clergyman of Milton Abbot, however, told me that occasionally she was said to ride in a coach of bones up West Street, Tavistock, towards the moor; and an old man of this place told a friend of mine the same story, adding that ‘he had seen her scores of times.’ A lady also who was once resident here, and whom I met in company, assured me that, happening many years before to pass the old gateway at Fitzford, as the church clock struck twelve, in returning from a party, she had herself seen the hound start.”
When a child I heard the story, but somewhat varied, that Lady Howard drove nightly from Okehampton Castle to Launceston Castle in a black coach driven by a headless coachman, and preceded by a fire-breathing black hound; that when the coach stopped at a door, there was sure to be a death in that house the same night. There was a ballad about it, of which I can only recall fragments. Mr. Sheppard picked it up also at South Brent from old Helmore the miller; but being more concerned about the tune than the words, and thinking that I had the latter already, he did not trouble himself to take down the whole ballad.
In the first edition of Songs of the West, I gave the ballad reconstructed by me from the poor fragments that I recollected; and as such I give it here:—
My ladye hath a sable coach,
And horses two and four;
My ladye hath a black blood-hound