Part 10

Satisfied with his fare, the merchant now inquired for the dwelling-place of his guide. It was not far off. The parents of the shepherdess inhabited a thatched hut in the village, with the usual walls of beaten cob, moulded of native clay: all within and without bespoke extreme poverty and want, but there Master John Bunsby soon found himself an honoured visitor seated by the hearth, with a blazing fire of dry gorse gathered from the moor to greet his arrival. There, while the mother stood by her turn or wheel, and span, and the maiden’s nimble fingers flashed her knitting-needles to and fro by the fitful light of the fire, the old man her father and the merchant conversed in a low voice far into the night, on a theme of deep interest to both. The talk was of Thomasine, the child of the house. The merchant related his own prosperous affairs, and spoke of his goodly house in London, governed by a thrifty and diligent wife: the household was one of grave and decent demeanour, with good repute in the vast city wherein dwelt the king. He had taken an immediate interest, he declared, in the old man’s daughter, and desired to rescue her from the life she led on the bleak, unsheltered moor. He pledged himself, if they should consent, to convey her in safety to London, and to place her in especial attendance on his wife; and there, if her conduct were in unison with her looks, he doubted not she would win many friends, and secure a happy livelihood for the rest of her days. He would await their decision at the inn, where he should be detained by business two or three days. Earnest and anxious were their thoughts and their language in the cottage that night and the next day. The aspect and speech of the rich patron were such as invited confidence and trust; but there were the love and fear of two aged hearts to satisfy and subdue. There was the fierce and stubborn repugnance also of the youth, the companion of the maid, who stood with her under the tree upon the moor. He was her cousin, John Dineham,[97] of Swannacote, and they had grown up together from childhood, till, unconsciously to themselves, the tenderness of kindred had strengthened into love. The damsel herself could not conceal a natural longing to visit the great city, where, they said, but it might be untrue, “that the houses were stuck as close together as Wike St. Marie church and tower;” but she would at all events behold for once in her life the dwelling-place of the king. “She would store up every coin, and come back with money enow to buy a flock of sheep of her own, which she and John would tend together, as aforetime, on the moor.” All this shook the scale.

When the merchant arrived to seek their decision, it was made, and in favour of his wish. A pillion or padded seat was obtained from some neighbouring farm, and belted behind the saddle of the merchant’s man. Thereon, with a small fardel in her hand, which held all her worldly goods and gear, mounted Thomasine Bonaventure, while all the villagers came around to bid her farewell--all but one, and it was her cousin John. He had gone, as he had told her, to the moor, and there among the branches of the tree which marked the greeting-place of Master Bunsby the youth waited to watch her out of sight. He lifted up his hand and waved it as she passed on with a gesture of warning, but which she interpreted and returned as a silent caress.

The travellers arrived at their journey’s end after being only a fortnight on the road--a speed so satisfactory and unusual, that it was Dame Bunsby’s emphatic remark that she verily thought they must have flown.

Her mistress received Thomasine with a kind and hearty welcome, and ratified, by her everyday approval, her husband’s choice of the Cornish maid. When she was first told that her name was Bonaventure, and her husband explained that it signified good luck, she said, “Well, sweetheart, when I was a girl they used to say that the name was a fore-sign of the life, and God grant that thine may turn out [so] to be.”

Time passed on, and in a year or two the wild Cornish lass had grown into a frame of thorough symmetry, firmness, and health. Her strong thews, of country origin, rendered her capable of long and active labour, and she had acquired with gradual ease the habits and appliances of city life. She was very soon the favoured and the favourite manager of the household. Her mistress, born and reared in a town, had been long a frail and delicate woman; and life in London in those days, as now, was fraught with the manifold perils of pestilent disease. To one of those ancient scourges of the population, the sweating-sickness, Dame Bunsby succumbed. Her death drew nigh, and, with the touching simplicity of the times, she told her true and tender husband, with smiling tears, that she thought he could not do better than, if they so agreed, to put Thomasine in her place when she was gone. “Tell her it was my last wish.”

This gentle desire so uttered--her strong and grateful feelings towards the master who had taken her, as she expressed it in her rural speech, lean from the moor, and fed her, so that her very bones belonged to him--her happy home, and the power she would acquire to make the latter days in the cottage at Wike St. Marie prosperous and calm,--all these impulses flocked into Thomasine’s heart, and controlled for the time even the remembrance of Cousin John. That poor young man, when the tidings came that she was about to become her master’s wedded wife, suddenly disappeared, and for a while the place of his retreat was unknown; but it afterwards transpired that he had crossed the moor to a “house of religious men,” called the White Monks of St. Cleer, and pleaded for reception there as a needy novice of the gate. His earnest entreaties had prevailed; and six months after his first love, and his last, had put on her silks as a city dame, and begun her rule as the mistress of a goodly house in London, her cousin had taken the vows of his novitiate, and received the first tonsure of St. John.

Her married life did not, however, long endure. Three years after the master became the husband, he took the “plague sore,” and died. They were childless; but he bequeathed “all his goods and chattel property, and his well-furnished mansion, to his dear wife Thomasine Bonaventure, now Bunsby;” and the maid of the moor became one of the wealthy widows of London city. Among the MSS. which still survive, there is a letter which announces the event of her husband’s death and bequest, and then proceeds to notify her solemn donation, as a year’s-mind of Master Bunsby, of ten marks to the Reeve of Wike St. Marie, “to the intent that he shall cause skeelful masons to build a bridge at the Ford of Green-a-Moor: yea, and with stout stonework well laid; and see,” she wrote, “that they do no harm to that tree which standeth fast by the brook, neither dispoyle they the rushes and plants that grow thereby; for there did I passe many goodly hours when I was a simple mayde, and there did I first see the kind face of a fathful frend.” But in another missive to her mother, about the same date, there is a touch of tenderness which shows that her woman’s nature survived all changes, and was strong within her still. She writes: “I know that Cousin John is engaged to the monks of St. Cleer. Hath he been shorn, as they do call it, for the second time? Inquire, I beseech, if he seeketh to dispart from that cell? And will red gold help him away? I am prospered in pouch and coffer, and he need not shame to be indebted unto me, that owe so much to him.” But this frank and kindly effort--“the late remorse of love”--did not avail. John had broken the last link that bound him to the world, and was lost to love and her. Reckless thenceforward, therefore, if not fancy-free, and it may be somewhat schooled by the habits and associations of city life, she did not wear the widow’s wimple long. After an interval of years, we find her the honoured wife “of that worshipful merchant-adventurer, Master John Gall of St. Lawrence, Milk Street.”

Gall was very rich, and he appears to have emptied his money-bags into his wife’s lap, as the gossip of the city ran, for it is on record that soon after her second marriage she manifested her prosperity like a true-hearted Cornish woman by ample “gifts” and largess to the borough of St. Marie, “my native place.” Twenty acres of woodland copse in the neighbourhood were bought and conveyed by that kind and gracious lady, Dame Thomasine Gall, to feoffees and trust-men for the perpetual use of the poor of the paroche, “for fewel to be hewn in parcels once a-year, and justly and equally divided for evermore on the vigil of St. Thomas the twin.” To her mother she sends by “a waggon which has gone on an enterprise into Cornwall for woollen merchandise, a chest with array of clothing, fair weather and foul, head-gear and body raiment to boot, all the choice and costly gifts to my loving parents of my goodman Gall, and in remembrance, as he chargeth me to say, that ye have reared for him a kindly and loving wife.” But the graphic and touching passage in this letter is the message which succeeds: “Lo! I do send you also herewithal in the coffer a litel boke: it is for a gift to my Cousin John. Tell him it is not written as the whilom usage was, and he was wont to teach me my Christ Cross Rhime;[98] but it is what they do call emprinted with a strange device of an iron engin brought from forrin parts. Bid him not despise it, for although it is so small that it will lie on the palm of your hand, yet it did cost me full five marks in exchange.” But her marriage life was doomed to bring her only brief and transitory intervals of wedded happiness. Five years after the date of her letter above quoted, she was again alone in the house. Master Gall died, but not until he had endowed his “tender wife with all and singular his moneys and plate, bills, bonds, and ventures now at sea,” etc., with a long inventory of the “precious things beneath the moon,” too long to rehearse, but each and all to the sole use, enjoyment, and behoof of Dame Thomasine, whose maiden name of Bonaventure was literally interpreted and fulfilled in every successive change of station.

We greet her then once more as a rich and buxom widow of city fame. Her wealth, added to her comeliness--for she was still in the prime of life--brought many “a potent, grave, and reverend seignor” to her feet, and to sue for her hand. Nor did she long linger in her choice. The favoured suitor now was Sir John Perceval, goldsmith and usurer--that is to say, banker, in the phrase of that day; very wealthy, of high repute, alderman of his ward, and in such a position of civic advancement that he would have been described in modern language as next the chair. He wooed and won the “Golden Widow”--for so, because of her double inheritance of the wealth of two rich husbands, she was merrily named. Their wedding was a kind of public festival, and the bride, in acknowledgment of her own large possessions, was invested with a stately dower at the church-door. One year after their marriage her husband, Sir John, was elected to that honourable office which is still supposed by foreign nations to be only second in rank to that of the monarch on the throne, Lord Mayor of the city of London.

Thus, by a strange succession of singular events, the barefooted shepherdess of a Cornish moorland became the Lady Mayoress of metropolitan fame; and the legend of Thomasine Bonaventure--for it was now well known--was the popular theme of royal and noble interest among the lords and ladies of the Court. She demeaned herself bravely and decorously in her ascent among the great and lofty ones of the land. Like all noble natures, her spirit rose with her personal elevation, and took equal place with her compeers of each superior rank. Nor did her true and simple woman’s nature undergo any depreciation or change. It breathes and survives in every sentence of her family letters, transcripts of which have been perpetuated and preserved to our own times. One part of her personal history is illustrative of a scene of life and manners when Henry VII. was king.

“Sweet mother,” she wrote, “thy daughter hath seen the face of the king. We were bidden to a banket at the royal palace, and Sir John and I dared not choose but go. There was such a blaze of lords and ladies in silks and samite, and jewels and gold, that it was like the city of New Jerusalem in the Scriptures; and I, thy maid Thomasine, was arrayed so fine, that they brought up the saying that I was dressed like an altar. When we were led into the chamber of dais, where his highness stood, the king did kiss me on the cheek, as the manner is, and he seemed gentle and kind. But then did he turn to my good lord and husband, and say, with a look stark and stern enow, ‘Ha, Sir John! see to it that thy fair dame be liege and true, for she comes of the burly Cornish kind, and they be ever rebels in blood and bone. Even now they be one and all for that knave Warbeck,[99] who is among them in the West.’ You will gesse, dear mother, how my heart did beat. But withal the king did drink to me at the banket, and did merrily call, ‘Health to our Lady Mayoress, Dame Thomasine Perceval, which now feedeth her flock in the rich pastures of our city of London.’ And thereat they did laugh, and fleer, and shout, and there was flashing of tankards and jingling of cups all down the hall.”

With increase of wealth came also many a renewed token of affectionate regard and sterling bounty to her old and well-beloved dwelling-place of Wike St. Marie. As her wedding-gift of remembrance she directed that “a firm and steadfast road should be laid down with stones,” at her whole cost, along the midst of Green-a-Moor, and fit for man and beast to travel on, with their lawful occasions, from Lanstaphadon to the sea. At another time, and for a New Year’s gift, she gave the sum of forty marks towards the building of a tower for St. Stephen’s church, above the causeway of Dunheved; and it was her desire that they should carry their pinnacles so tall that “they might be seen from Swannacote Cross, by the moor, to the intent that they who do behold it from the Burgage Mound may remember the poor maid which is now a wedded dame of London citie.”

During her three marriages she had no children, and it was her singular lot to survive her third husband, Sir John: it was in long widowhood after him that she lived and died. Her will, bearing date the vigil of the Feast of Christmas, A.D. 1510, is a singular document, for therein the memory and the impulses of her early life are recalled and condensed. She bequeaths large sums of money to be laid out and invested in land for the welfare of the village borough, whereto, amid all the strange vicissitudes of her existence, her heart had always clung with fond and lingering regret. She directs that a chantry[100] with cloisters was to be built near the church of Wike St. Marie, at the discretion and under the control of her executor and cousin, John Dineham, the unforgotten priest. She endows it with thirty marks by the year, and provides that there shall be established therein “a schole for young children born in the paroche of Wike St. Marie; and such to be always preferred as are friendless and poor.” They are to be “taught to read with their fescue from a boke of horn, and also to write, and both as the manner was in that country when I was young.” The well-remembered days of her girlhood appear to tinge every line of her last will. Her very codicil is softened with a touch of her first and fondest love. In it she gives to the priest of the church, where she well knew that her cousin John would serve and sing,[101] “the silver chalice gilt, which good Master Maskelyne the goldsmith had devised for her behoof, with a leetle blue flower which they do call a forget-me-not wrought in Turkess at the bottom of the bowl, to the intent that whensoever it is used the minister may remember her who was once a simple shepherd-maid by the wayside of Wike St. Marie, and who was so wonderfully brought by many great changes to be the Mayoress of London citie before she died.”

FOOTNOTES:

[95] From _All the Year Round_, vol. xvii. pp. 276-280. 1867. For the origins of this story, see Appendix G.

[96]

“Straight, but as lissome as a hazel wand; Her eyes a bashful azure, and her hair In gloss and hue the chestnut, when the shell Divides threefold to show the fruit within.”

TENNYSON, _The Brook_.

[97] One of Mr. Hawker’s sisters was the wife of John Dineham, surgeon, of Stratton.

[98] Hawker has a pretty poem for children with this title--

“Teach me, Father John, to say Vesper-verse and matin-lay: So when I to God shall plead, Christ His Cross shall be my speed.”

[99] The love of the Lady Katherine Gordon for Perkin Warbeck is the subject of Hawker’s poem, “The Lady of the Mount.”

[100] The remains of this old building have been embodied in some cottages. The doorway shown in the illustration forms the front door of one of these. The other is occupied by the Cornwall County Police, and the unsuspecting pilgrim who rambles round without permission is liable to be startled by the gruff remark, “You’m trespassing!” Thus are we recalled from “the baseless fabric” of the past to the stern realities of the living present.

[101] Hawker gives a romantic turn of his own to this part of the story.

THE BOTATHEN GHOST[102]

There was something very painful and peculiar in the position of the clergy in the west of England throughout the seventeenth century. The Church of those days was in a transitory state, and her ministers, like her formularies, embodied a strange mixture of the old belief with the new interpretation. Their wide severance also from the great metropolis of life and manners, the city of London (which in those times was civilised England, much as the Paris of our own day is France), divested the Cornish clergy in particular of all personal access to the masterminds of their age and body. Then, too, the barrier interposed by the rude rough roads of their country, and by their abode in wilds that were almost inaccessible, rendered the existence of a bishop rather a doctrine suggested to their belief than a fact revealed to the actual vision of each in his generation. Hence it came to pass that the Cornish clergyman, insulated within his own limited sphere, often without even the presence of a country squire (and unchecked by the influence of the Fourth Estate--for until the beginning of this nineteenth century, _Flindell’s Weekly Miscellany_ distributed from house to house from the pannier of a mule, was the only light of the West), became developed about middle life into an original mind and man, sole and absolute within his parish boundary, eccentric when compared with his brethren in civilised regions, and yet, in German phrase, “a whole and seldom man” in his dominion of souls. He was “the parson,” in canonical phrase--that is to say, The Person, the somebody of consequence among his own people. These men were not, however, smoothed down into a monotonous aspect of life and manners by this remote and secluded existence. They imbibed, each in his own peculiar circle, the hue of surrounding objects, and were tinged into distinctive colouring and character by many a contrast of scenery and people.[103] There was the “light of other days,” the curate by the sea-shore, who professed to check the turbulence of the “smugglers’ landing” by his presence on the sands, and who “held the lantern” for the guidance of his flock when the nights were dark, as the only proper ecclesiastical part he could take in the proceedings.[104] He was soothed and silenced by the gift of a keg of hollands or a chest of tea. There was the merry minister of the mines, whose cure was honeycombed by the underground men. He must needs have been artist and poet in his way, for he had to enliven his people three or four times a-year, by mastering the arrangements of a “guary,” or religious mystery, which was duly performed in the topmost hollow of a green barrow or hill, of which many survive, scooped out into vast amphitheatres and surrounded by benches of turf, which held two thousand spectators. Such were the historic plays, “The Creation” and “Noe’s Flood,” which still exist in the original Celtic as well as the English text, and suggest what critics and antiquaries Cornish curates, masters of such revels, must have been,--for the native language of Cornwall did not lapse into silence until the end of the seventeenth century. Then, moreover, here and there would be one parson more learned than his kind in the mysteries of a deep and thrilling lore of peculiar fascination. He was a man so highly honoured at college for natural gifts and knowledge of learned books which nobody else could read, that when he “took his second orders” the bishop gave him a mantle of scarlet silk to wear upon his shoulders in church, and his lordship had put such power into it that, when the parson had it rightly on, he could “govern any ghost or evil spirit,” and even “stop an earthquake.”

Such a powerful minister, in combat with supernatural visitations, was one Parson Rudall,[105] of Launceston, whose existence and exploits we gather from the local tradition of his time, from surviving letters and other memoranda, and indeed from his own “diurnal”[106] which fell by chance into the hands of the present writer. Indeed the legend of Parson Rudall and the Botathen Ghost will be recognised by many Cornish people as a local remembrance of their boyhood.

It appears, then, from the diary of this learned master of the grammar-school--for such was his office as well as perpetual curate of the parish--“that a pestilential disease did break forth in our town in the beginning of the year A.D. 1665; yea, and it likewise invaded my school, insomuch that therewithal certain of the chief scholars sickened and died.” “Among others who yielded to the malign influence was Master John Eliot, the eldest son and the worshipful heir of Edward Eliot, Esquire of Trebursey, a stripling of sixteen years of age, but of uncommon parts and hopeful ingenuity.[107] At his own especial motion and earnest desire I did consent to preach his funeral sermon.” It should be remembered here that, howsoever strange and singular it may sound to us that a mere lad should formally solicit such a performance at the hands of his master, it was in consonance with the habitual usage of those times. The old services for the dead had been abolished by law, and in the stead of sacrament and ceremony, month’s mind and year’s mind, the sole substitute which survived was the general desire “to partake,” as they called it, of a posthumous discourse, replete with lofty eulogy and flattering remembrance of the living and the dead. The diary proceeds:--

“I fulfilled my undertaking, and preached over the coffin in the presence of a full assemblage of mourners and lachrymose friends. An ancient gentleman, who was then and there in the church, a Mr. Bligh of Botathen,[108] was much affected with my discourse, and he was heard to repeat to himself certain parentheses therefrom, especially a phrase from Maro Virgilius, which I had applied to the deceased youth, ‘Et puer ipse fuit cantari dignus.’