Memorials of Old Devonshire

by Unknown

There are few now left who can say as I can that they have heard their father and their wife’s father talking together of the men who saw the landing of William the Third at Torbay. I have heard Capt. Clements say he as a boy heard as many as seven or eight old men each giving the particulars of what he saw then. One said a ship load of horses hauled up to the Quay and the horses walked out all harnessed, and the quickness with which each man knew his horse and mounted it surprised them. Another old man said, “I helped to get on shore the horses that were thrown overboard and swam on shore, guided by only a single rope running from the ship to the shore”; and another would describe the difference in the rigging and build of the ships, but all appeared to welcome them as friends.

My father remembered only one “Gaffer Will Webber,” of Staverton, who served his apprenticeship with one of his ancestors, and who lived to a great age, say, that he went from Staverton as a boy, with his father, who took a cart-load of apples from Staverton to the high-road from Brixham to Exeter, that the soldiers might help themselves to them, and to wish them “God-speed.”

I merely mention this to show how easily tradition can be handed down, requiring only three or four individuals, for two centuries.

The lady I referred to as one of those who flocked to see the Prince was a Miss Juliana Babbage, from a brother of whom the late Charles Babbage, the famous mathematician, was descended. She came, when a girl of twelve, from Barbadoes, and was also a decided Nonconformist. On the 5th November, 1688, she was attending the old meeting-house in Totnes, at a thanksgiving service for the discovery of the gunpowder plot, and while there was told that the Prince of Orange was in Torbay landing his troops. She also hailed the news with joy, and as soon as service was over set off to walk to Brixham, accompanied by an old lady of her acquaintance, and making their way to the Prince, they boldly welcomed him to England. He shook hands with them, and gave them some of his proclamations to distribute, which they did so industriously that not one was left in the family as a memorial. A crimson velvet and gold purse, a pincushion, and a gold chain, which she is said to have worn on the occasion, as well as a curious gold locket with hair belonging to her, are still in the possession of our family.

These stories come to me from a relative who has attained an honoured old age, who, owing to the early death of her mother, passed her childhood and girlhood in an old family circle, and heard from the lips of those elderly relatives tales of old times, which they had received in like manner from their relatives. This lady says her grandmother told her she well recollected her father joking her mother as to what might have happened if the Prince had not succeeded, saying, “Oh! mistress, your aunt might have swung for it!”

The terror infused into the minds of the men of the West by the bitter persecution which followed the unsuccessful rising on behalf of the Duke of Monmouth, was doubtless sufficient to deter the leading men from openly espousing the Prince’s cause at this moment.

The first gentleman of any position to do so, and this he probably did at Brixham, as he lived in the neighbourhood, was Mr. Nicholas Roope, who was appropriately rewarded for his adhesion to the Prince by being appointed, within a short time of the Prince reaching St. James’, Governor of Dartmouth Castle, in the room of Sir Edward Seymour the elder, who had then recently died.

In an interesting letter from the last Governor of Dartmouth Castle (Governor Holdsworth) to Sir H. P. Seale, Bart., dated May 1st, 1857, the warrant for his appointment is set out in full. It runs in the name of William Henry, Prince of Orange, and is dated 7th of January, 1688–9, and this was followed, on the 18th July of the same year (1689), by a regular commission, when the Prince had become King of England.

The authority for the statement that Mr. Roope was the first to join the King is contained in a letter from Mr. Roope to the Earl of Nottingham in reply to one from his Lordship containing a complaint against him. These letters are set out in full in Governor Holdsworth’s letter.

At Berry Pomeroy, some few miles distant from the scene of the Prince’s landing, was then living Sir Edward Seymour the younger, sometime Speaker of the House of Commons, son of the Seymour who was Roope’s predecessor in the Governorship of Dartmouth Castle, and one of the most influential men of his time, whose birth, says Macaulay, put him on a level with the noblest subjects in Europe, and who, in political influence and in Parliamentary abilities was beyond comparison the foremost among the Tory gentlemen of England. He openly joined the Prince at Exeter, and he it was who contributed greatly to the success of the Prince’s cause by suggesting that an association should be founded, and that all the English adherents of the Prince should put their hands to an instrument binding them to be true to their leader and to each other. He doubtless was well informed of what was now going on at Brixham, and we can hardly imagine him to have been a passive spectator of the great enterprise. Tradition says that the Prince had a secret interview with him at a house, now a cluster of labourers’ cottages, still known as Parliament House, situate on the confines of Berry parish on the road from Berry House to Brixham, and that there he agreed to come out for the Prince at Exeter, for which city he was member. Another account gives the place of meeting at Marldon, at a spot now called Parliament Hill. The present Duke of Somerset, with whom I have communicated on this point, has been good enough to inform me that he believes the building called Parliament House to have been the place where the country gentlemen assembled and agreed to support the Prince, and that the latter probably had some interview with Seymour at that time, as it was by his inducement that the country gentlemen, when they met at Exeter, signed their names to the paper I have been referred to, promising to support the Prince, and that for this probably the Prince appointed him Governor of Exeter.