The following June, the Cornish army joined that under Prince Maurice and the Marquis of Hertford at Chard, and soon Taunton, Bridgwater, Glastonbury, and Dunster Castle were taken. They then proceeded to attack Sir William Waller, who had occupied an extremely strong position on the lofty ridge of Lansdown, near Bath. There he had raised a breastwork behind which his guns were posted, and he had so distributed his foot and horse as to defend all points of access. Realising the tremendous strength of his position, the Royalists wisely resolved not to break themselves upon it, and were actually turning to resume their march when the whole body of Waller’s horse came thundering down the hill upon their rear and flank, striking them with a crash they could not withstand, and throwing them into disorder from which they could not recover, till Slanning came up with a party of three hundred Cornish musketeers, and with his aid the enemy were beaten off and chased back to the hill again. Hopton now assumed the offensive. The blood of the whole army was beating hotly. It is said that the Cornishmen, under Sir Bevill, coveted Waller’s cannon, and begged at least to be allowed “to fetch off those cannon.” Leave was given, and up the steep height the Cornishmen went with a rush: the horse on the right, the musketeers on the left, and Sir Bevill himself leading the pikes in the centre. In this order the Cornish moved forward, much as they had moved at Stratton, slowly and doggedly. In the face of the enemy’s cannon and small shot from their breastworks, they at length gained the brow of the hill, having sustained two full charges from Waller’s horse, but in the third charge Sir Bevill’s horse had given way; the cohesion of the pikes was broken, and instantly the enemy was in among them, hewing them down; the officers were falling fast, and Sir Bevill himself, sorely wounded and fighting valiantly, was struck out of his saddle by a pole-axe, of which hurt he died very shortly. Young John Grenville, a lad of sixteen, sprang, it is said, into his father’s saddle, and led the charge, and the Cornishmen followed with their swords drawn and with tears in their eyes, swearing they would kill a rebel for every hair of Sir Bevill’s beard; and at last the whole Royalist force surged over Waller’s breastworks, and the victory was theirs.
Never was a man more universally or deservedly beloved than Sir Bevill, and it is said that his untimely death was as bitterly lamented by the Parliamentarian troops as it was by his own followers.
Of a very different character and temperament was his brother, another Sir Richard Grenville, of whose life as a soldier only the very briefest sketch can be given. He seems to have had little in common with the long line of his illustrious predecessors, except their just pride of ancestry and their appetite for fighting; for he was undoubtedly a brave soldier of no little experience and skill. He entered the army at an early age, and left England when he was eighteen, and saw much service in France, Holland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Next he took part in the disastrous expeditions to Cadiz and the Island of Rhe, in both of which he was accompanied by his young cousin, George Monk, who always regarded him as his father-in-arms. Like Sir Bevill, he accompanied Charles I. to Scotland, having also raised a troop of horse; and in 1641 he took a prominent part in suppressing the rebellion in Ireland, when in fire and blood the wretched Irish were made to do penance for their outburst of savagery, to which they had been goaded by Strafford’s imperious rule. Having been recalled to England in 1643 for insubordination to the Marquis of Ormond, Sir Richard pretended to adopt the Parliamentarian cause, and was made a Major-General of Horse; but having learnt all the secrets of their campaign, he treacherously marched his soldiers to Oxford, and joined the King. For such abominable treachery he was rightly denounced, and no epithets were too choice to apply to him. He was, moreover, excepted from all pardon, both as to life and estate. Shortly afterwards he was placed by Prince Rupert in command of the troops that were besieging Plymouth, and it was mainly by his successful tactics that Lord Essex was utterly defeated in Cornwall in 1644, when the King commanded the Cavaliers in person.
After this he was appointed “The King’s General in the West,” a title of which he was justly proud, and which was eventually carved on his tombstone at Ghent. Considering himself thus constituted Commander-in-Chief, he afterwards refused, when called upon to do so by the Prince’s Council, to act in any subordinate position; and hence arose those unhappy dissensions and jealousies which finally wrecked the royal cause in the West. Grenville was placed under arrest, and cashiered from his command without any court-martial. In spite of his overbearing manners and tyrannical conduct, of which frequent complaints had been made, public opinion was strongly in his favour and clamoured for his release, whilst the soldiers refused to be commanded by Hopton or anyone else, and both officers and men, to the number of four thousand, petitioned the Prince in his favour. Sir Richard’s imprisonment and the dissensions that arose in consequence undoubtedly gave the finishing stroke to the war in the West; the service everywhere languished; the soldiers gradually deserted, and Lord Hopton was compelled, after some faint resistance, to disband, and accept of such conditions as the enemy would give. Sir Richard, it must be confessed, represented the worst type of Cavalier. He was frequently actuated by the dictates of a violent and revengeful disposition, and was intriguing and unscrupulous. He died abroad in exile in 1659.
The heroism of young John Grenville, Sir Bevill’s son, in taking command of his father’s regiment at Lansdown when the latter fell mortally wounded, met its recognition a month later at Bristol, when he was knighted. After this he served under his uncle, Sir Richard, at the siege of Plymouth and in Cornwall, and apparently accompanied Charles I. in his march from the West after the defeat of Lord Essex; for the next time we hear of him is at the second battle of Newbury (27th October, 1644), where he narrowly escaped his father’s fate. Being in the thickest of the fight, and having received several other wounds, he was at last felled to the ground with a very dangerous one in the head from a halberd, which rendered him unconscious, and he was left for dead, nor was he discovered until a body of the King’s horse, charging the enemy afresh and beating them off the ground, found him covered with blood and dust, but still living. He was carried to where the King and Prince of Wales were, who sent him to Donnington Castle hard by, to be treated for his wounds; but no sooner were the armies drawn off from the field of battle than the castle itself was besieged by the enemy, and their bullets constantly whistled through the room where the young sufferer lay, during the twelve days which elapsed before the defenders were relieved by the King at the third battle of Newbury. On his recovery from his wounds, Sir John Grenville was promoted to the rank of a Brigadier of Foot, and the following year was appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales, who had formed a strong attachment for him, which proved lifelong. He remained with the Prince accordingly during the rest of the war, and accompanied him in his flight to the Isles of Scilly, and afterwards to Jersey.
Towards the end of the year 1648 the Scilly Islands revolted from the Parliament, and became the last rallying point of the Royalists under Grenville, who was appointed Governor to hold them for the King; but he had scarcely been there three weeks when tidings reached him of the King’s execution. With passionate indignation, he at once proclaimed Charles II. King, and could find no words hard enough for Cromwell and the Regicides. He fortified the islands, already strong from their natural position and existing earthworks; and in this he was ably assisted by his brother, Bernard, then barely eighteen, who had run away from his tutor, and lay concealed at Menabilly, near Fowey, whence he managed to carry considerable reinforcements for the defence of the islands. For two years Sir John carried on a guerilla warfare against the English republic, and seized many merchant and other vessels; but when Van Tromp made overtures to him to cede the islands to the States General, and offered £100,000 as a bribe, Grenville indignantly refused to yield an inch of British soil to a stranger, saying he was there “to contend against treason, not to imitate it.” Admiral Blake, who was in pursuit of Van Tromp, next appeared, and again attempted negotiations for the cession of the islands, but Grenville was resolved to hold them for the King alone, and for a whole month made such a stubborn resistance that when at last Blake prevailed, Grenville secured terms so exceptionally favourable to the Royalists that the Parliament refused to ratify them, till Blake insisted and threatened to resign his commission.
Sir John Grenville’s future career and the prominent part he took, in conjunction with his cousin, George Monk, in the Restoration of Charles II., who created him Earl of Bath, and showered countless honours and endowments upon him, do not belong to a paper confined to giving the fighting qualities of the family. These, however, found expression in his two sons, Charles, Lord Lansdown, and John, afterwards created Lord Granville of Potheridge. The latter was in the navy, and took part in most of the naval engagements of his time, behaving with great bravery and skill, particularly at the siege of Cork in 1690. Lord Lansdown took part in the wars of Hungary against the Turks, and was present at the battle of Kornenberch, the siege of Vienna, at Baracan, Gran, and several smaller engagements, in all of which he displayed such unwonted valour and intrepidity for one so young, that the Emperor Leopold, as a special mark of honour, created him a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, with the distinction of bearing his paternal coat-of-arms upon the breast of the Roman Eagle. He also took part in the constant reprisals, which marked the reign of William III., by the English and French upon one another’s shores; and in one of these assisted in the bombardment of his ancestral Norman town, Granville, and in another in the defence of Teignmouth and Torbay.
The fighting spirit of the family was still handed on in another member of the family—a second Sir Bevill, the eldest son of the Honourable Bernard Granville (as the name was now spelt), who appears to have inherited all the courage of the grandfather whose name he bore. On leaving Cambridge, he entered the army, and served with distinction in his uncle, Lord Bath’s, regiment in Ireland and Flanders, and was knighted by James II. at the head of that regiment on Hounslow Heath on the 22nd of May, 1686. When Lord Bath revolted to the side of the Prince of Orange, Sir Bevill was despatched to Jersey to disarm the Papists and secure the island—a mission which he carried out with complete success. After this he took part in the Continental war against the French, and behaved with conspicuous bravery at the battle of Steinkirk, August 4th, 1692. The battle was going against King William, when Prince Casimer of Nassau, who was in command of the troops, galloped back to the English in his right rear, and begged them to advance, as Count Solmes refused to bring up his infantry. Rapidly forming Bath’s regiment, with the pikes in the centre and the grenadiers and musketeers on either flank, Sir Bevill put himself at its head, and, closely followed by the Buffs, moved out from the line. He was only just in time. Baron Pibrach, the Colonel of the Luxemburgers, had been desperately wounded whilst endeavouring to rally his men, who were flying in disorder, hotly pursued by the French. Suddenly out of the crowd of fugitives hurrying to the rear there emerged a line of glistening steel, and Bath’s regiment, scarcely discernible from its foes in its scarlet stockings and breeches, its blue coats and buff cross-belts, strode sternly forward, its three red banners waving overhead. A hail of musket balls smote it in the face; a storm of iron from the batteries mangled and tore its flanks; but it pressed irresistibly on, and amid a hurricane of cheers that drowned even the roar of the cannons, hurled the French infantry from its path, and recovered the position. But only for a moment. Again and again the French batteries worked up in dense masses along Granville’s front, only to surge back again, rent and maimed by a pitiless fire. So for another hour the carnage grew, till Prince Casimer, galloping to Granville’s side, gave him the order to retire. It was six in the evening. The allied drums were everywhere beating the retreat. William had at last given up the struggle, and the columns were slowly winding to the rear. There was no pursuit. Sir Bevill’s gallantry was long remembered and talked of with grateful admiration by the British camp fires.
This paper must now close with a brief quotation from a letter written by one who was the last but one of the representatives of this ancient house in the senior male line, namely, George Granville (younger brother of the last-mentioned Sir Bevill), afterwards created Baron Lansdown of Bideford. Although no opportunity arose for him to distinguish himself otherwise than in politics and as a poet, the old fighting spirit was not lacking in him, and he was eager to gain his father’s permission to take up arms against the Prince of Orange:—
Sir,—You having no prospect of obtaining a commission for me can no way alter or cool my desire at this important juncture to venture my life in some manner or other for my King and my country. I cannot bear living under the reproach of lying obscure and idle in a country retirement when every man, who has the least sense of honour, should be preparing for the field. You may remember, Sir, with what reluctance I submitted to your commands upon Monmouth’s rebellion, when no importunity could prevail with you to permit me to leave the Academy. I was “too young to be hazarded”; but give me leave to say it is glorious at any age to die for one’s country, and the sooner, the nobler the sacrifice. I am now older by three years. My uncle Bath was not so old when he was left among the slain at the battle of Newbury, nor you yourself, Sir, when you made your escape from your tutor’s to join your brother at the defence of Scilly. The same cause is now come round about again. The King has been misled; let those who have misled him be answerable for it. Nobody can deny but he is sacred in his own person, and it is every honest man’s duty to defend it. You are pleased to say it is yet doubtful if the Hollanders are rash enough to make such an attempt. But be that as it will, I beg leave to insist upon it that I may be presented to his Majesty, as one whose utmost ambition it is to devote his life to his service and my country’s, after the example of my ancestors.