The People of the Town were exceeding Joyful, and began to drink the Prince of Orange’s Health. The Country People in the Town were well inclined towards us; and here was the first favour we met with worth mentioning. His Highness was most kindly receiv’d and entertain’d at Sir Will Courtney’s, the Souldiers generally well treated by the Vulgar.
Oldmixon, in his History of the Reign of the Stuarts, simply says that “the first place the Prince of Orange’s Declaration was publicly read was Newton Abbot, a market town near Exeter, and the first man who read it was a clergyman.” No doubt the fact that it was read by a clergyman gradually changed into the statement that it was read by the clergyman of the parish, and so Reynell became credited with a bold act, which, from Whittle’s account, he was far too cautious a man to commit, however favourable he may have been to the Prince’s cause. The lettering of the inscription[inscription] is evidently modern, and the Rev. H. Tudor, the present Rector of Wolborough, informs me that a man, now dead, told him he was employed to cut or re-cut it, and was never paid for doing so.
The question remains, and it is an interesting one, who was the divine who first proclaimed the Prince by reading the Declaration? I was first inclined to believe, from the detailed manner in which the story was told, that it was Whittle himself. It is not improbable, however, that it was the renowned Dr. Burnet, afterwards Bishop Burnet. He was the Prince’s own chaplain, and doubtless the head and chief of the clergy who accompanied the Prince, and from his undaunted spirit, and the leading part he took in the Cathedral at Exeter, he was undoubtedly the divine most likely to have performed this act. One gentleman with whom I have been in communication on the point, and whose opinion always carries weight, says:—
Burnet was such a busybody, that I feel certain if anything was to be done by a clergyman he would have put himself forward to do it.
No information is to be gleaned from the parish registers or the books I have inspected relative to what occurred at Newton during the time of the Prince’s visit, but I have been favoured with the following interesting story from a lady now residing at Newton, of the advanced age of ninety-six, told her by her father, who heard it from his grandmother, who was a Miss Joan Bearne, the daughter of Mr. Bearne, a lawyer of Newton Abbot; viz., that when a girl of sixteen, there was a stranger staying at her father’s house for about three weeks, who was only known as “the gentleman,” and who was out during the day, and only returned in the evening; that on the entry of William of Orange into Newton from Ford House, her father took her out to see him, and that walking by the side of the Prince was the strange gentleman, who, on passing where Mr. Bearne was standing, pointed him out as “his host for three weeks” to the Prince, who at once lifted his hat to him.
[This paper having been written in 1880, sundry allusions must be interpreted in the light of that circumstance.—The Editor.]
REYNOLDS’ BIRTHPLACE.
By James Hine, F.R.I.B.A.
Any interest attaching to Plympton belongs to the olden time. Of many other places it may be said that the new has entirely supplanted the old. Modern business requirements, new warehouses, and thoroughfares, have had the effect of stamping out all vestiges of the past, and even the traditions of them. An unpretending Railway Station and a dozen or more new houses have not had this effect at Plympton. The town has no novelties to shew us; the lions are just what they were two hundred years ago.