ceeded to Cockington, whose career we are about to relate, and the fourth son that John Cary, called "of Dudley," through whom the existing families of Tor Abbey and Follaton descend. Thomas Cary appears to have been a prudent man of business and to have augmented his inheritance. We have record of his acquisition by purchase of two of the manors which had long been inheritances of his ancestors, Northlew and Ashwater, and he had profitable transactions with his neighbor the last abbot of Tor, before the dissolution of the monasteries.2 He made a will on January 17, 1566,3 died and was buried in the chancel of Tor Mohun Church, where his tomb bears the following inscription:5 Hic jacet Thomas Carius Armiger, Qui obiit 27° die Martii An domini 1567. Cuius animae deus propitietu.' Like his father he was a good Roman Catholic. 1 Cal. Tor Abbey Mun., H. & G., vii, 117; and Vivian, 151. 2 H. & G., viii, 119. 3P.C.C. Stonard, 11. 4 Tor Mohun Church took its name from Reginald de Mohun (d. 1258) of the Somerset family, whose mother was a daughter of the William Brewer who founded Tor Abbey, whence he inherited Brewer's manor of Tor. While Tor Mohun has always been the parish church of Cockington (that bearing the name Cockington being merely a chapel of ease), it does not appear why his son buried Thomas Cary (as he did later his own wife also) in Tor Mohun in preference to Cockington, where he himself lies; but after the Carys acquired Tor Abbey several others of them were there buried or have been commemorated by monuments. 3 Dymond, H. & G., vi, 9. His eldest son, SIR GEORGE CARY1 (1541-1617) of Cockington, born2 a subject of Henry VIII in the same year as that greater Devon man Sir Francis Drake, and growing up through the reigns of Edward VI and Mary,3 had an interesting public career under Elizabeth and James I. He did 1 Sir George Cary of Cockington is one of that select company of Englishmen of achievement for good or for evil who have been omitted from the curious and useful pages of Sir Leslie Stephen's Dictionary of National Biography. This omission is a distinction, like the failure to be assessed for taxation, due not to personal privilege, but obviously to accident. He is, however, the subject of sympathetic notices by old Prince in his Worthies of Devon and by Mr. Robert Dymond in Transactions of the Devon Association (1873), vi, 276, but neither had access to the sources now available. Unless otherwise noted, the authorities here used are, on the public side, the series of calendars of State Papers, Domestic, and State Papers, Ireland, for the appropriate years; and, on the private side, Mr. Dymond's calendar of parish registers and the Tor Abbey muniments. 2 The evidence for his birth in 1541 is conclusive. The Ing. p.m., 9 Elizabeth, No. 26, taken on his father's death in 1567, records him to be then "aged 26 years." (See Vivian, 151.) Mr. Williamson, History of Portrait Miniatures, i, 32, interprets the inscription on Isaac Oliver's miniature of him as "Free from all filthie fraude. Anno Dmi. 1581, Aetatis snae 57." This must be a misreading of the obscure text so far as concerns the age. The date is clearly legible, but it might be either 1581 or 1587. Mr. Lionel Cust says (Dict. Nat. Biog., reissue ed., xiv, 1040) that the earliest known miniature by Isaac Oliver, with a date, is one of 1583. If, as so seems likely, the date is 1587, it would have been painted in George Cary's forty-seventh year, just after he had finished his work on the Dover defenses when there would be occasion for the motto. The portrait itself is of a man clearly younger than fifty-seven. 3 Fortunately for himself, George Cary was too young in 1553 to be involved in his kinsman Sir Peter Carew's Protestant plot against Mary, which included a plan to kidnap the Princess Elizabeth, carry her off to the West Country and there marry her to Edward Courtenay, Earl of Devonshire. Devon was then in a ferment. See the graphic glimpses of local history in Froude, Mary Tudor, ch. ii. not go to either of the universities,' but at eighteen his father sent him up to London and entered him at the Inner Temple to study law, in the very month of the accession of Queen Elizabeth. It was then, doubtless, that he first met Francis Walsingham, ten years his senior, who, after an educational self-exile on the continent during Mary's reign, in 1558 returned to England to commence statesman. Walsingham's mother had married George Cary's kinsman Sir John Cary "of Plashy," and this association perhaps led the elder lawyer to take an interest in the student, and to initiate him in the doctrines of the Reformation. He made other acquaintances among the older men then at the bar, some of them destined to the most distinguished legal careers. The immediate impulse to the law doubtless came with maternal blood. George Cary's grandfather John Southcott is described in the Visitation of 1620 as "Clerk of the Peace," but he had a close kinsman and contemporary of the same name who had achieved a large law practice in London and in time became a distinguished judge of the Queen's Bench and so 3 1 Roger Ascham, writing in The Scholemaster (1570), says: "If a father have foure sons, three faire and well formed, both mynde and bodie, the fourth wretched, lame and deformed, his choice shal be to put the worst to learning, as one good enough to becum a scholer. I have spent the most parte of my life in the Universitie and therefore can beare good witness that many fathers commonlie do thus." 2 Joseph Foster's MS. notes of the admission register. 3 Prince, Worthies, 717. may have held out inducements. But if George Cary ever had any intention of practising law he soon abandoned it: he preferred the maxim which Major Pendennis afterwards formulated for another law student: "A woman with a good jointure is a doosid deal easier a profession than the law, let me tell you!" That he developed early the characteristics of canniness and disregard of the opinion of his fellows, with which he was reproached at the end of his career, is evident in his marriage. Before he came of age he took to wife a great heiress whom it was necessary to disentangle from an unhappy prior engagement. For all the experience of Henry VIII and his brotherin-law the Duke of Suffolk, or perhaps the more because of it, a divorce in England in the sixteenth century was rare, and we can imagine that George Cary's start in life was attended by no little wagging of the tongues of contemporary Devon gossips. Wilmot Giffard' of Yeo, in the Clovelly neighborhood, was the heiress of a Norman family established in Devon since the Conquest, kin to those great feudal barons the Clares, earls of Gloucester and Hertford. Her father died the 1 There is an exhaustive account of all the branches of the Giffard family in Historical Collections Staffordshire (Publications William Salt Society), N. S., v. (1902). Wilmot, as a feminine form of William, was a favorite name in the west of England. |