CHAPTER TEN THE WHIG NURSERY AT CLOVELLY Clovelly is one of the ancient manors of Devon. It was the site of an important Celtic caer whose earthworks still survive. According to the Domesday book, in which it is called Cloveleia,' it had belonged before the Conquest to the Gloucestershire thegn Brihtric, who had his chief seat at Bristol. The old story, which modern research is unable to confirm,2 has it that this Saxon lord had been an ambassador in Flanders, and then refusing an offer of marriage from that spirited young lady the Countess Matilda of Flanders, won her undying hatred: when the Duke William of Normandy, who did marry her, had conquered England, the revengeful 1 Exon Domesday in Victoria History, Devon, i, 412. 2 Thierry (Conquete de l'angleterre, liv, iv) gave currency to the story on the authority of some monkish gossip preserved in Dugdale's Monasticon, and so excited Freeman's scorn (Norman Conquest, iii, 83; iv, 762). It will be recalled that in his Oxford lectures Freeman thundered from his Teutonic Olympus: "I would warn everyone, save the most advanced students, to forbear from reading Augustine Thierry"; and yet Thierry continues as pabulum of the "general reader," and, indeed, has recently been reproduced in the convenient Everyman's Library, while Freeman is still the mine of the specialist. Such are the vicissitudes of "truth." Matilda demanded for herself the estates of Brihtric. Be this romantic tale as it may, may, the Queen Matilda certainly appears in Domesday as the owner of the extensive property in Gloucestershire and Devon which had belonged to Brihtric, including Clovelly. Although claimed by her son Henry (afterwards Henry I) as an inheritance from his mother, these rich estates were by the Red King erected into the honour of Gloucester and bestowed on Robert Fitzhamon, whose daughter brought them in marriage to Robert Fitz Roy, the favorite bastard son of Henry I, in that respect created Earl of Gloucester: to him succeeded by inheritance the great family of Clare. Carved out of this old fee, Clovelly passed in time to the Giffards, temp. Henry III, then to the Stauntons (as appears from the fact that a Staunton made a presentation to the living in 1362), then by marriage of a Staunton heiress to John Crewkern, and at last by another marriage to Richard Bosun. We have seen that it became a Cary possession before 1388 through the marriage of William Cary, brother of the Chief Baron, with the heiress of Bosun; that after the attainder of the Chief Baron, temp. Richard II, Clovelly was the foundation of the renewed fortunes of his eldest son, who succeeded his uncle; and that it continued to be a Cary estate, though 1 Pole, Collections, etc. not their chief residence, until, surviving the attainder of the Wars of the Roses, Robert Cary, the Compostela pilgrim, made it his seat during a long life. After him Cary of Clovelly became a distinct branch of Cary of Devon, living in great dignity as private gentlemen for six generations and nearly two centuries. It so happened that long after the last Cary, who called himself lord of the manor of Clovelly, had gone to his eternal rest, bidding his ancestors to lie a little closer to make room for him beneath their series of elaborate monuments in their parish church, two popular modern authors "discovered" Clovelly: as a consequence the place has become a favorite holiday resort for tourists in search of the picturesque. The village is, indeed, unique. Its general situation on the sheer descent of a high wooded cliff, facing the Atlantic through the horns of Bideford Bay, with Lundy Island in the offing,1 has been well compared with the "in secessu longo locus," where Æneas and his surviving storm-wracked comrades found a haven after Neptune had rescued them from the malice of Juno:2 1Old Leland in his Itinerary (ed. Toulmin-Smith, 1907, i, 299) describes it in 1535: "Bytwix the mouth of Tawe and Hertley Point lyith a very cumpasid bay, and almost in the midle thereof is a place caullid Clovelle, whereabout Carye dwelleth: and here is the neerist trajectus into Lundey Isle." 2 Æneid, i, 159. We quote Taylor's spirited version. The local guide-books of North Devon even maintain that Virgil was describing Clovelly itself because there are remains of a Roman fort on the upland there. Servius says that, of course, there was no such In a far retreat There lies a haven: towards the deep doth stand Two towering crags, twin giants, guard the cove, Sleep hushed, and like a curtain frowns above Beneath a precipice, that fronts the wave Home of the Sea-Nymphs. A substantial part of the value of the manor of Clovelly has always been the feudal right with respect to the fisheries off its shore. Herring and mackerel there abound, and old Prince says that there were also cod which surpassed in quality if not in quantity those of the Newfoundland banks. Until the end of the sixteenth century this fishery was carried on under difficulties, for the only landing-place in the neighborhood was the narrow strip of shingle formed by the cascade of the brook Severn in its plunge through a steep winding combe, to the foot of the cliff below Clovelly Court. The lord of the manor, at that time George Cary, describes in his will,' dated place on the coast of north Africa, but by a justifiable poetical fiction Virgil has described the harbor of New Carthage in Spain and that it is a true description. 1P. C. C. Montague, 40. |