Where soon after several of his companions, or fellow officers and soldiers, viz. Mr. Leach, Mr. Morris, Mr. Brabyn, and others, were executed without trial or judgment, as guilty of high treason. But the said James Hals had his life spared or given him by the General Sir Richard Grenville, Knight, upon account of consanguinity, but not without many frowns and angry threats; (a sure token of his clemency, as his smiles and embraces were of death and destruction, suitable to those of King Richard III. and King James I. and Caius Caligula, Emperor of Rome,) to dissuade him from the Parliament service to that of the King’s, with promise of greater preferment in his army; all which proving ineffectual, he was sentenced a straight or close prisoner to that tremendous castle, in daily expectation of death; where he remained immured up for about twenty months space, in great want, durance, and misery, till General Essex came into those parts with the Parliament army, and set at liberty him and other Lidford prisoners, by Captain Braydon raised the siege of Plymouth, and sore distressed Hopton and Grenville in Cornwall.
During the time of this James Hals’ imprisonment in Lidford Castle, amongst others there came to visit him one Mr. Doctor William Brown, of Tavistock, who gave him a copy of rambling verses and observations he had made upon the borough and castle of Lidford, for his diversion; which verses, for want of the original, I find false and imperfectly set forth and printed in Mr. Prince’s Worthies of Devon, therefore I have hereunder set it down verbatim from the Doctor’s own copy, given Mr. Hals, viz.:
I oft have heard of Lidford Lawe,
How in the morn they hang and draw,
And sit in judgment after;
At first I wondered at it much,
But since I find the matter such,
As it deserves noe laughter.
They have a castle on a hill;
I took it for some old windmill,