Pope to Borlase.
The little parish of Ludgvan[71] (or as it is sometimes called, Ludgvan-Lees), on the north shore of the Mount's Bay, can boast of having contributed at least its share to the list of illustrious Cornishmen. Small, remote, and obscure as it is, Ludgvan is one of the places mentioned as the birthplace of Sir Humphry Davy; it was for more than half a century the residence of the subject of this article; and here, too, at Tremenheere, was born one of the most illustrious professors of the healing art that the county has ever produced—himself the friend and medical attendant of Borlase and of Pope—I refer to Dr. William Oliver, of Bath.
That the pursuits of a keen inquirer, endowed with no ordinary powers of observation and considerable artistic talent, should, in such an out-of-the-way corner of England as Ludgvan still is, have been directed towards natural history, and to the megalithic remains of antiquity with which the neighbourhood once abounded, and of which there are still numerous examples, is not to be wondered at. And it cannot be denied that the study of those sciences, both in Cornwall and elsewhere, was materially benefited by the numerous and careful drawings and descriptions of the stone monuments of a mysterious and almost unknown race of men, which it was one of the main objects of Dr. Borlase's learned leisure to investigate and record. Many of these ancient remains have altogether disappeared since his time, and many others have been mutilated or altered; but in the Doctor's volumes such minute descriptions of them have been preserved that the loss of the monuments themselves has been rendered of much less serious importance than would have been the case but for his careful and elaborate records. Of the deductions and suggestions which are appended to those descriptions something will be said hereafter.
But, in accordance with the method adopted in the case of the other Worthies of Cornwall, it is well first to say something of the stock from which Dr. Borlase sprang. A Norman origin is claimed for the family—they are said to have descended from one Taillefer: presumably some connexion of him who is reported to have struck the first blow at the Battle of Hastings. Coming into Cornwall, as, by the way, very few other followers of the Norman Conqueror did, the Borlases seem to have adopted a custom which has always more or less prevailed in the county of merging their own name into that of their place of residence; and here it may be observed that the name of Borlase, supposed by some to mean 'the high green summit,' is still attached to two or three little homesteads in the parish of St. Wenn, three or four miles north-east of St. Columb Major.[72] The direct male line became extinct in the time of Elizabeth, when the coheiresses married a Tonkin and a Bray; and the family does not appear to have risen to any distinction until they moved farther westward, and about the middle of the seventeenth century took up their abode (which is still in the possession of a member of the family) at Pendeen, in the parish of St. Just.
The early Pendeen Borlases seem to have been staunch Royalists, for it seems that one of them assisted his cousin, Colonel Nicholas Borlase, in raising a troop of horse for the King. Of this troop a writer in the Quarterly Review for 1875, quotes the following story:
'Being on one occasion much pressed by the Puritan forces, and making a running fight, he set fire to a large brake of furze in the night, which the enemy taking for the fires made on the approach of the King's army, immediately fled with great precipitation, and left him both bag and baggage, which he seized the next morning.'
By way of comment on these proceedings, Fairfax quartered some of his troopers at Pendeen,—doubtless to the intense annoyance of the owner thereof; and as regards Colonel Nicholas, a letter from Cromwell to Lenthall tells all that I have been able to gather as to that hero's career. It is dated Edinburgh, 13th June, 1651, and asks the Speaker to hasten the hearing of Borlase's case, which seems to have been involved in the conditions of the hurried treaty of Truro, when Hopton surrendered to Fairfax, and terminated the supremacy of the Royal cause in the West country.
The Borlases were not, however, without some sort of barren reward for their faithfulness to the Stuart cause; for Humphry, who was Sheriff of Cornwall during the last two years of the reign of James II., was created a peer by that monarch after his abdication. Under these circumstances he, of course, never enjoyed the title. He sometimes resided at Truthan, in the parish of St. Erme, near Truro, and left his estates to the Borlases of Pendeen.
Dr. Borlase was born at Pendeen, on 2nd February, 1695, the second son of his father, 'John of Pendeen, twice Member of Parliament for St. Ives in Cornwall in the reign of Queen Anne, and Lydia Harris, of Hayne, county Devon, his wife,' a lady descended, so the writer in the Quarterly Review informs us, through the Nevilles and Bouchiers, from Edward III. But the Borlases had also plenty of good Cornish blood in their veins; and amongst other old families of the soil with whom they intermarried may be named their not very distant neighbours, the Godolphins.