The grandson obtained however the popular reward of representing Cornwall in parliament; and the Editor has in his possesssion a letter addressed by Mr. John Trevanion to his great uncle Mr. Henry Davies, a hundred and
twenty-five years ago, declaring his readiness to spend his fortune and to shed his blood, as his ancestors had done, in support of the same cause. This gentleman died in 1740, leaving William Trevanion his son and heir, and two daughters, the eldest of whom married John Bettesworth, LL.D. Dean of the Arches, and the younger married Admiral John Byron, well known in his younger days by a narrative of the disastrous expedition of the Wager Store ship, commanded by Captain Cheep, as a part of the fleet conducted by Commodore Anson round the promontory of South America, in the year 1740, and of his own adventures after the ship was wrecked on the coast of Patagonia, the dead reckoning giving them an erroneous longitude of fifteen degrees to the west, till his return in 1746. Admiral Byron is now better known as grandfather to the most popular of recent poets.
William Trevanion served in parliament for the borough of Tregoney, and died in 1767 without children, when the male line of this family became extinct. He was succeeded by Mr. John Bettesworth, his sister’s son, and his son John Trevanion Purnel Bettesworth Trevanion, esq. is now the possessor of Carhayes, where he has substituted a magnificent gothic castle, after a plan of Nash, the architect of Buckingham Palace and of Regent Street, for the house described by Mr. Tonkin.
Mr. Trevanion married early in life, and was left a widower with several children. He has for his second wife Miss Burdett, daughter of the individual to whom the country mainly owes the great alteration in the constitution of its government, on the ultimate effects of which no one is yet qualified to form even a conjecture, still less an opinion.
The family of Bettesworth have been settled on the manor of Fyning, a part of Rogate parish in Sussex, since about the year 1570; and a pedigree of nine descents is given in Dallaway’s History of the Rape of Chichester, ending with Thomas Bettesworth, who assumed the name
of Bilson in 1740, and died in 1754, aged 58. This gentleman bequeathed a life interest in his property to Thomas Bettesworth, of Chithurst, and after his decease gave it to Henry Legge, fourth son of William Legge, first Earl of Dartmouth, on condition of taking the name of Bilson.
Mr. Henry Bilson Legge married Mary Stawel, daughter and heir of Edward Stawel, Lord Stawel, and was in consequence himself created Lord Stawel in 1760. They were succeeded by their son Henry Stawel Bilson Legge, who died in 1820.
The parish of Rogate is situated between Petersfield and Midhurst, on the bank of a small river, which (after watering Selborne, a name made familiar to every one by the admirable work of its vicar, Mr. White,) flows into the county of Sussex, and joining the Arun, finally reaches the sea through Arundale, a name mistaken by the Normans for that of a swallow.
The manor of Fyning belonged to a monastery of Premonstratensian Canons, founded at Dureford, an adjacent parish, about the year 1160, by Henry Hosatus, or Husey, and augmented three hundred years afterwards by Henry Guldeford. It was surrendered to King Henry the Eighth, by John Simpson, the last superior. Temporary grants were made of the lands, till they were finally bestowed in fee on Sir Edmund Merwyn, a gentleman of Sussex, from whose descendants they passed to the Bettesworths.
In the church of St. Michael Carhayes are several monuments to the Trevanions, and pieces of armour, the trophies of former days; also a sword, believed to have been the very one used by Sir Hugh Trevanion at Bosworth Field.