THE GRENVILLES OF STOW,
HEROES BY SEA AND LAND.
'Tell me, ye skilful men, if ye have read,
In all the faire memorials of the dead,
Of names so formidably great,
So full of wonder and unenvied love;
In which all virtues and all graces strove,
So terrible and yet so sweete?'
From a 'Pindaric Ode' of 1686.
'The four wheels of Charles's wain—
Grenville, Godolphin, Trevanion, Slanning slain.'
Old Cornish Distich.
In his 'Worthies of Devon,' Prince, no doubt willingly enough, offers a compromise with Cornwall as to the ownership of the Grenvilles, and quotes Dugdale and Fuller to the effect that both Cornwall and Devon are so fruitful of illustrious men, that each can spare to the other a hero or two, even if wrongfully deprived of her own; even Carew has a somewhat similar passage, in which he says, 'The merits of this ancient family are so many and so great, that ingrossed they would make one County proud, which, divided, would make two happy.'
But, as it appears to me, Cornwall could not, even if she would, spare the Grenvilles—especially the two most celebrated of them, Sir Richard and Sir Bevill—from her roll of Worthies. True it is that the Grenvilles usually took the sea at Bideford (By-the-ford), for it was their nearest port, though they always kept a keen eye upon the possibility of utilizing Boscastle, Tintagel and other North Cornwall ports; true also that Sir Theobald Grenville (probably with the assistance of a priest named Sir Richard Gornard, or Gurney, and others), who flourished in the reign of Edward III., mainly built the famous great Bideford bridge of twenty-four arches; doubtless, too, they had lands and knights' fees, and a house or houses at Bideford in which they occasionally resided: but the seat of the Grenvilles was, from at least the time of William Rufus, at Stow (which even Prince calls 'their chiefest habitation'[1]), in the parish of Kilkhampton, well within the Cornish border, and separated, on the northern side, from the fair sister county of Devon by the whole of the broad parish of Morwenstow.[2] For five centuries or more their monuments were placed in Kilkhampton Church, on which they bestowed from time to time many benefactions, and of which parish many members of the family were Rectors. Carew says that one of the Grenvilles was parson of Kilkhampton, and that he lived so long as to see himself uncle and great-uncle to more than 300 persons: this was probably John Grenville, temp. Edward IV. Of another Rector of this parish the Rev. C. W. Boase, in his 'Registers of Exeter College,' has recorded that, shortly after the year 1316, Richard Grenfield founded a chest of money for making loans to the poor scholars of that Society. According to Lake's 'Parochial History of Cornwall,' the following Grenvilles were Rectors of Kilkhampton, namely: Richard, son of Sir Bartw. Grenville, 1312; John Grenville, 1524, who also held Week St. Mary; Dennis Grenville, 10th July, 1661; Chamond Grenville, 1711. The Church Registers, as might be expected, abound in references to the family. Their descent, too, is given in the 'Heralds' Visitations' for Cornwall[3] (p. 217); and Tuckett rightly omits them from his edition of the 'Devonshire Pedigrees' (p. 38, etc.). They commanded the Cornish forces during the Civil War; and, from their earliest settlement in the county, they intermarried with such old Cornish families as Tregomynion, Trewent, Vivian, Roscarrick, Killigrew, Arundell of Lanherne, Basset, St. Aubyn, Bevill, Fortescue, Prideaux, and Tremayne. That keen observer, the late Canon Kingsley, has, moreover, not failed to detect, in the portrait of the great Sir Richard, the thoroughly Cornish type of face; and, finally, they are rightly included in the 'Bibliotheca Cornubiensis.' It is, in view of all these facts, probably unnecessary to dwell any further on the supremacy of Cornwall's claims to the Grenvilles.
But it must be reluctantly confessed that they are, after all, not of strictly Cornish origin; for, though they lived for centuries in the county, they came in, like the Bevills (with whom they intermarried more than once), with the Conqueror; and, as an early form of their name suggests[4] had their first home in Normandy, and were descended from Duke Rollo, and from Hamon Dentatus, Earl of Carboyle (? Corbeil), and Lord of Thorigny and Granville in that country. Their name has been variously spelt Grenville, Greenville, Grenvile, Greenvil, Granville, Grainvilla, Granaville, Greenvil and otherwise—it even occurs in one place as Grinfillde;[5] but it seems likely to be best known in history in the form prefixed to this chapter, and which has been adopted by the Poet Laureate in that stirring 'Ballad of the Fleet,' with which we have all of us lately been delighted, and to which we shall presently have occasion to refer more fully.
Younger branches of the family settled in Bucks and in Somerset, and preserved the favourite old Christian name of Richard, which was also perpetuated in the elder, or Cornish, branch: in fact it has been said that Cornwall was not without a Richard Grenville for 200 consecutive years. Among the earliest of them was one of the twelve knights amongst whom the Conqueror partitioned Wales: he built the monastery in South Wales, now known as Neath Abbey, the ruins of which are a familiar and picturesque object to the traveller by rail to Swansea. In 1653, a Mr. John Nichols, of Hartland, had in his possession 'a prophecy,' written in the year 1400, said to have been found in Neath Abbey, and which was kept in a curious box of jet. It referred to the founder; and ran as follows: