Among the “writings” that Richard thus got hold of was the deed of entail, which was her last weapon against him, albeit a double-edged one that might be turned against herself, since by virtue of that deed the estates should revert to the inimical uncle John.
In the morning Richard finally ejected the ladies, and barred the house doors against them.
The story of the legal proceedings that ensued is too long and too complicated for these pages, but may be summed up in the moral that “possession is nine points of the law.” Katherine and her mother obtained a judgment against Richard for detention of their personal effects, etc., for £900, plus costs, which sum he never paid. He perhaps counted on immunity from imprisonment by reason of his position in the King’s service. From a “State paper” it appears that the Earl of Cleveland, Captain of the Gentlemen Pensioners, was applied to for leave to arrest Richard, at the suit of his creditors, and refused permission; notwithstanding which Richard was arrested and committed to the Fleet Prison for debtors. From the moment of his incarceration all resentment of Richard’s iniquities may well be quenched in compassion, so grievous were the sufferings and degradations undergone by the inmates of those noisome and infectious precincts.
The old Fleet Prison was destroyed by the Great Fire of London on 4 September, 1666; and Richard was probably among the prisoners who were temporarily accommodated in Caron House, South Lambeth, and conveyed back to the Fleet on its re-erection, 21 January, 1668. But—though it may seem somewhat audacious to controvert on this point the deposition of his own son—he did not die therein. A “Coram Rege Roll” of the King’s Bench, dated 22–23 Charles II, bears record that Richard Weekes, of North Weeke, in county Devon, was then in custody for debt to one William Jolly, to whom he had given a bond for £40. Now the prison pertaining to the King’s Bench at that time became the Marshalsea Prison in 1811. It adjoins the burial-ground of St. George’s in the Borough; and in the registers of that church, under Burials, 5 February, 1670–1, is “Richard Week’s, K.B.” His relations declare that he “died not worth a groat,” and that a “gathering” (i.e. a collection) was made to defray the expenses of his funeral.
The demands of poetic justice are met by the fact that Richard Weekes, though virtually possessor of North Wyke, never reaped a penny from it. All that it brought in was consumed by the lawyers and his creditors; and Chancery suits between the several claimants to the estate were waged over it down to the eighteenth century.
The rightful line of Weekes proprietors had ended in John, the wrongful line ended in another John, Richard’s grandson, who is accused of having practised the “black arts,” and who, after a roving life, was buried at Lezant in Cornwall. The little boys of the neighbourhood, ever since his time, have found his tombstone a convenient surface for the game of marbles; but there is a crack in it through which one of these treasures occasionally disappears, so that the cry has become traditional, “There goes another down to old Weekes!” This John sold North Wyke, in consideration of an annuity, to George Hunt of North Bovey, who had married his sister Elizabeth, and Hunt’s grandsons divided the property and house into two, and sold the eastern moiety to one Tickell, of Sampford Courtenay, and the western, in 1786, to one Andrew Arnold, yeoman. Thus North Wyke was completely alienated from the race that had built and, for many centuries, had owned it. It has, however, returned by purchase to one of the old blood (on the distaff side), the Rev. William Wykes-Finch, who, by his extensive restorations and additions, is giving the time-worn place a fresh start in local history.
ETHEL LEGA-WEEKES.