Si genus aut nomen quæras, insignia monstrant:
Si vitam, aut mortem, sat pia facta docent.
Non opus est tumulo, cujus tot viva sepulchra
Commemorant meritum, terra quot ora tenet.
At the end of the verses is an achievement, containing the arms of Hooker, with several quarterings.
THE EDITOR.
The ancient and respectable family of Trevanion, like all others able to trace themselves back, in influential situations, to remote periods, has experienced the vicissitudes arising from civil dissensions. In those times it is quite clear, that love of plunder, and eagerness after confiscations, must have been the sole motives of action on either side; since, trifling as have been the causes of domestic as well as of foreign wars, no one can believe that, in the absence of all contested political principles, men could be found who would deluge their country with blood for the sake of seating on the throne an individual whose name was Edward instead of another designated as Henry, on the frivolous pretence, that, had England been a farm, and its inhabitants farm stock, one of the parties possessed a claim through females superior to the other, if it were not defeated by legal fiction, or by the lapse of time.
In such a conflict three families at the least from Cornwall were engaged, Bodrigan, Trevanion, and Edgecumbe; and when Richard the Third obtained sovereign power, on the division which then look place in the York
faction, Bodrigan endeavoured to seize the property of Edgcumbe, with little respect, as it would seem, for the life of the possessor; but in the final struggle at Bosworth Field, where Henry Tudor put an entire end to this contest for power under the guise of property, by seizing the whole to himself, Trevanion and Edgcumbe had the good fortune to appear on the winning side, and subsequently availed themselves to the utmost of belligerent rights against Bodrigan, as he had attempted to do before against them. The last of that family was driven from his home, and seems to have perished in exile. His property was divided between the two families opposed to him, and after the lapse of three hundred and fifty years continues to form a large portion of their respective possessions.
At a subsequent period, when wars were levied in support of principles, and when men of honour and of virtue engaged on either side, as their early prejudices, investigations, or accidental experience induced them to believe that one or the other would prove most conducive to the public good—the Trevanions were less successful. They asserted their conviction in arms, that the country would be best governed by concentrating hereditary power in a single man; and Mr. John Trevanion, bearing a Colonel’s commission, shared in the military glories of the western army, and fell under the walls of Bristol. His father experienced the mitigated fate of those who were vanquished in this contest, by compounding for his estate; and when, after a long interval, his friends came again into power, and succeeded in placing at the head of affairs the son of their former chief, those immediately surrounding the seat of government possessed but slender means, and still less inclination, to risk their own safety by indemnifying those at a distance, who had suffered in the Good Old Cause.