The family of Grenville claimed descent from Rollo the Sea-King, and they did not belie their fierce and adventurous ancestor. They were fighters to the core. Rightly they had for their bearing three horseman’s rests, in which the lance or tilting spear was fixed. Some, of course, through the long centuries, were senators, magistrates, ecclesiastics; but as a rule they were men of the sword, serving their country by land and sea.

The first Sir Richard de Grenville, “near kinsman to the Conqueror,” sheathing his sword after the Conquest of South Wales, settled on the borders of Devon and Cornwall beside the Severn Sea. Concerning any feats of arms achieved by his immediate descendants the chronicles are silent. We have only their frequent summonses “to go with the King beyond the seas for their honour and preservation and profit of the Kingdom”; but another Sir Richard was Marshal of Calais under Henry VIII., and in the quaint language of Carew, “enterlaced his home magistracy with martial employments abroad”; whilst his son, Sir Roger, a sea captain, and the father of the future hero of the Revenge, after fighting the French off the Isle of Wight in 1545, went down in the Mary Rose off Portsmouth, when that ill-fated vessel, like the Royal George, two centuries later, capsized and sank with all on board.

His son, Richard, was then but two years old. The story of his boyhood has yet to be discovered, but he first gave vent to his fierce fighting spirit when, a stripling of some eighteen summers, he took service under the Emperor Maximilian against the Turks, obtaining therein the commendation of foreign historians for his intrepidity and early knowledge of the art of war. Next we find him taking part in suppressing the Irish rebellion, and though after this he settled for a while on his English estates, his restless spirit and natural thirst for distinction led him to participate in the perils and glories of the brilliant engagement at Lepanto in 1572, when Don John of Austria, with the combined squadrons of Christendom, defeated the Ottoman fleet. On his return to England he was knighted.

One of the features of the Elizabethan era was the zeal for colonization which pervaded the West of England. In common with Gilbert, Raleigh, and many others, Grenville petitioned the Queen to allow an enterprise for the discovery of “sundry ritche and unknowen landes.” Their request was granted, and in 1584 two ships, provided by Raleigh and Grenville, discovered Virginia; and the following spring, Sir Richard took command of seven ships fitted with the first colonists of that country. On his return journey he sighted a Spanish vessel of 300 tons, and his ship, the Tiger (which was but 140 tons), out-sailing the rest of his little squadron, had nearly overhauled the chase, when the wind suddenly dropped, and the little Tiger and her big quarry lay becalmed. Sir Richard’s boats had all been carried away in a gale of wind, but, determined not to lose his prize, he “boarded her,” says Hakluyt, “with a boat made with the boards of chests, which fell asunder and sank at the ship’s side as soon as ever he and his men were out of it.” The Spaniard proved richly laden, and Grenville’s dare-devilry won him £50,000 in prize money.

But his δαιμονίη ἀρετὴ (as Froude calls it) was soon to be exemplified in a still more striking manner in that last great service for his Queen and country, in which he so nobly sacrificed his life, and which has been told by Raleigh and Tennyson in “Letters of Gold.” To his great mortification, he had been prevented from sharing in the glories of the defeat of the Armada, having received the Queen’s special commands not to quit Cornwall during the peril; but in the summer of 1591 he was appointed Vice-Admiral, under Lord Thomas Howard, and despatched to the Azores to intercept an unusually rich treasure fleet, which was lying at Havannah ready for the homeward voyage. Grenville’s ship was the Revenge, a second-class galleon, carrying twenty-two heavy guns, twelve light ones, and twelve small pieces used for repelling boarders. She had carried Drake’s flag against the Armada three years before, and was considered one of the best types of a fighting ship.

On the 31st of August, Lord Thomas Howard’s squadron, consisting of six men of war and nine or ten victuallers and pinnaces, was riding at anchor in the bay of Flores; many of the crews were ashore digging for ballast, filling water casks, and obtaining fresh provisions and fruit for the sick, who numbered nearly half the strength of the fleet, for fever and scurvy had made havoc among the ships’ companies. Suddenly an English pinnace, the Moonshine, swept round a headland into the bay with the alarming intelligence that an armada of twenty Spanish men-of-war and over thirty transports and smaller craft were close at hand, despatched by Philip II. to protect his treasure ships.

Howard at once determined that he was in no condition to fight a force so superior, and accordingly made signal to weigh anchor instantly. All obeyed but the Revenge, Grenville being delayed, according to Raleigh, in getting his sick men brought on board from the shore; and when at last she got under way, she had lost the wind, and was unable to follow the other vessels as they ran past the Spanish fleet to windward. A second line of retreat was still open to him: by cutting his mainsail, he could run before the wind, pass the Spaniards to leeward, and rejoin the flag in the open sea. But to pass an enemy to leeward was a confession of inferiority to which Grenville would not stoop, and, though urged to this course by his officers and crew, he scornfully and passionately refused, and, sword in hand, drove his men to their posts, swearing that he would hew his way single-handed through the whole Spanish fleet, or perish in the attempt.

For a while he prevailed, compelling several of the foremost to give way, who sprang their luff and fell under the lee of the Revenge. But his success was short-lived; the Revenge, coming under the lee of the great San Philip, of 1,500 tons, was becalmed. This was about three o’clock in the afternoon; and while the Revenge was hotly engaged with this gigantic adversary, four more Spanish ships-of-war ranged alongside, and, after a furious cannonade, attempted to board her, but in vain; and the San Philip, after receiving from the lower tier of guns of the Revenge an especially deadly salvo, “discharged with cross-bar shot, shifted herself with all diligence from her sides, utterly misliking her first entertainment.” But her place was at once taken by another Spaniard, and, indeed, through the twelve or fifteen hours during which the battle lasted, Grenville’s ship was constantly fighting against overwhelming odds. All through the August night the fight continued under the quiet stars, ship after ship washing up on the Revenge like clamouring waves upon a rock, only to fall back foiled and shattered amidst the roar of artillery:—

Though wounded early in the day, Grenville was able to fight his ship from the upper deck till an hour before midnight, when he was again wounded, this time in the body, with a musket ball. The sailors carried him below, and as his wounds were being dressed, a shot crashed through the Revenge, stretched the doctor lifeless, and inflicted an injury to Sir Richard’s head from which, in two or three days, he died.

And still the battle raged; and still ship after ship drew out of action, utterly defeated by the splendid gunnery and desperate courage of Grenville’s men. Gradually the fire slackened; before daylight it ceased altogether, for the Spaniards abandoned their attempts to sink the Revenge or carry her by board. Yet fifteen out of their twenty men-of-war had been hotly engaged with her: two of them she had sunk outright; a third was so damaged that her crew ran her on shore to save their lives; a fourth was in a sinking condition. Dawn found the enemy’s immense fleet encircling the one English ship like wolves round a dying lion, and wary of approaching him in his last agony. When the sun rose, the survivors of the crew began to realise their desperate plight. Sir Richard commanded the master-gunner to split and sink the ship, that thereby nothing might remain of glory or victory to the Spaniards, and endeavoured to persuade the crew “to yield themselves to God and to the mercy of none else, but as they had, like valiant resolute men, repulsed so many enemies, they should not now shorten the honour of their nation by prolonging their own lives by a few hours or a few days.”

The chief gunner and a few others consented; but the rest having dared quite enough for mortal men, refused to blow up the ship, and surrendered to the enemy. Grenville was carried in a dying condition to the ship of the Spanish Admiral, and as he lay upon his couch on the deck, the captains of the fleet crowded round to see the expiring hero, who, feeling his end approaching, showed not any sign of faintness, but spake these words in Spanish, and said: “Here die I, Richard Grenville, with a joyful and quiet mind, for that I have ended my life as a true soldier ought to do, that hath fought for his country, Queen, religion and honour. Wherefore my soul most joyfully departeth out of this body, and shall always leave behind it an everlasting fame of a valiant and true soldier that hath done his duty as he was bound to do.”

Such was the fight at Flores in that August of 1591—“a fight memorable even beyond credit and to the height of some heroic fable.” It has been called “England’s naval Thermopylæ.” It was from the first as hopeless a battle as that of the Spartans under the brave Leonidas, and its moral effects at the time were hardly less than that of Thermopylæ. Froude tells us it struck a deeper terror, though it was but the action of a single ship, into the hearts of the Spanish people—it dealt a more deadly blow upon their fame and moral strength than even the destruction of the Armada itself, and in the direct results which arose from it it was scarcely less disastrous to them. Men may blame Sir Richard Grenville for his obstinacy, and what they deem his false notion of honour in scorning to turn his back upon the foe when the odds were so overwhelmingly against him, but at least it must be conceded that his courage and that of his crew have immortalised his name.

Passing over Sir Richard’s son, John, who followed Drake and was drowned in the ocean, “which became his bedde of honour,” and also another son, Sir Bernard, we come to the latter’s famous son, Sir Bevill—a man no whit inferior in loyalty and courage to his illustrious grandsire, and whom men called the English Bayard. When Charles I., in 1639, raised an army against the Scots, Bevill Grenville joined the Royal Standard at the head of a troop of horse at York. “I cannot contain myself within my doors,” he wrote, “when the King of England’s standard waves in the field upon so just an occasion, the cause being such as must make all those that die in it little inferior to martyrs. And for my own part, I desire to acquire an honest name or an honourable grave. I never loved my life or ease so much as to shun such an occasion, which if I should, I were unworthy of the profession I have held, or to succeed those ancestors of mine who have so many of them in several ages sacrificed their lives for their country.”

History shows this to have been a bloodless campaign, but the above extract proves Grenville’s hereditary spirit, and the King, in token of his approval, knighted him at Berwick-on-Tweed before the army broke up; and when, three years later, the storm at last burst over England, which had been so long threatening, Charles I. had no more loyal supporter than Sir Bevill Grenville. Clarendon says he was “the most generally loved man in Cornwall.” He was the soul of the Royalist cause there, and his influence was so great that he readily raised a body of volunteers fifteen hundred strong. At Bradock Down, near Liskeard, where the first important encounter with the Parliamentarian troops took place, Sir Bevill led the van. Describing the fight to his wife, he writes: “After solemn prayers at the head of every division, I led my part away, who followed me with so great a courage, both down the one hill and up the other, that it struck a terror into them,” with the result that twelve hundred prisoners were captured, and all the guns. The next engagement took place at Stratton (distant only a few miles from Grenville’s own home in the adjoining parish of Kilkampton) on May 16th, 1643, where he was again conspicuous for his personal courage. The Earl of Stamford, who commanded the Parliamentarian troops, which numbered close on 6,000, all perfectly equipped and victualled, had encamped in a very strong position on the top of a hill, now called Stamford Hill, near the village of Stratton. It is an isolated grassy hill on a ridge which runs nearly due north and south. The sides on the east and south are the steepest, whilst the western slope has an ancient earthwork near the summit, which Stamford had defended with guns that ought to have rendered it impregnable. The Royalist troops, less than half their number, short of ammunition, and so destitute of provisions that the best officers had but a biscuit a day, lay at Launceston. They nevertheless marched the twenty miles to Stratton “with a resolution to fight with the enemy upon every disadvantage of place or number.” In the evening they halted, footsore and hungry, a mile from the base of the high hill on which the Parliamentarian troops lay in overwhelming strength, and determined to attack them at daybreak. Weary as they were, the men stood to their arms all night, for the enemy were too near to make rest possible, and with the first light, Sir Bevill, to whom every inch of the ground was, of course, perfectly familiar, and to whom, consequently, was committed the ordering of the fight, divided the troops into four storming parties. The little army was too small to merit, when divided into such parts, any other designation. In the morning the fight commenced, and continued till the afternoon was well advanced, but no impression could be made by the gallant Cornishmen, who were repulsed again and again. At last powder began to fail, and it became a question between retreat, which implied certain disaster, or victory. A final and heroic effort was made; muskets were laid aside, and, trusting to pike and sword alone, the lithe Cornishmen pressed onwards and upwards. Grenville led the party on the western slope, and Sir John Berkeley that on the northern, while Hopton and the other commanders scaled the south and east sides. Their silent march seems to have struck their opponents with a sense of power, and the defence grew feebler. Grenville first reached the crest, and seized the entrenchment, and captured the thirteen brass field-pieces and one mortar by which it was defended; and when Berkeley prevailed on the north side, the Parliamentarian horse fled from the hill headlong down the steep descent, and made off. This had its moral effect on the defenders of the other two sides of the camp, and their resistance perceptibly slackened. Soon the other two storming parties, who had had the steepest climb, pressed upward, and the enemy, despite the efforts of their officers to rally them, made off to the adjoining heights. The victorious commanders embraced one another on the hard-won hilltop, thanking God for a success for which at one time they had hardly ventured to hope. It was no time to prolong their rejoicings, as the enemy, demoralised though they were, appear to have rallied somewhat, and to have shown a disposition to renew the combat; but Grenville quickly turned their own captured cannon on them, and a few rounds sufficed to dislodge them. Panic ensued, and a general stampede, in which arms and accoutrements were flung aside, concluded the fight of Stratton. By this decisive victory, not only was Cornwall cleared of the enemy and secured for the King, but the whole of Devon, excepting a few of the principal towns, fell into the hands of the Royalists. The King was not unmindful of the gallant Sir Bevill’s share in the fight, but wrote him a gracious letter promising further proofs of his bounty and favour.

The following June, the Cornish army joined that under Prince Maurice and the Marquis of Hertford at Chard, and soon Taunton, Bridgwater, Glastonbury, and Dunster Castle were taken. They then proceeded to attack Sir William Waller, who had occupied an extremely strong position on the lofty ridge of Lansdown, near Bath. There he had raised a breastwork behind which his guns were posted, and he had so distributed his foot and horse as to defend all points of access. Realising the tremendous strength of his position, the Royalists wisely resolved not to break themselves upon it, and were actually turning to resume their march when the whole body of Waller’s horse came thundering down the hill upon their rear and flank, striking them with a crash they could not withstand, and throwing them into disorder from which they could not recover, till Slanning came up with a party of three hundred Cornish musketeers, and with his aid the enemy were beaten off and chased back to the hill again. Hopton now assumed the offensive. The blood of the whole army was beating hotly. It is said that the Cornishmen, under Sir Bevill, coveted Waller’s cannon, and begged at least to be allowed “to fetch off those cannon.” Leave was given, and up the steep height the Cornishmen went with a rush: the horse on the right, the musketeers on the left, and Sir Bevill himself leading the pikes in the centre. In this order the Cornish moved forward, much as they had moved at Stratton, slowly and doggedly. In the face of the enemy’s cannon and small shot from their breastworks, they at length gained the brow of the hill, having sustained two full charges from Waller’s horse, but in the third charge Sir Bevill’s horse had given way; the cohesion of the pikes was broken, and instantly the enemy was in among them, hewing them down; the officers were falling fast, and Sir Bevill himself, sorely wounded and fighting valiantly, was struck out of his saddle by a pole-axe, of which hurt he died very shortly. Young John Grenville, a lad of sixteen, sprang, it is said, into his father’s saddle, and led the charge, and the Cornishmen followed with their swords drawn and with tears in their eyes, swearing they would kill a rebel for every hair of Sir Bevill’s beard; and at last the whole Royalist force surged over Waller’s breastworks, and the victory was theirs.

Never was a man more universally or deservedly beloved than Sir Bevill, and it is said that his untimely death was as bitterly lamented by the Parliamentarian troops as it was by his own followers.

Of a very different character and temperament was his brother, another Sir Richard Grenville, of whose life as a soldier only the very briefest sketch can be given. He seems to have had little in common with the long line of his illustrious predecessors, except their just pride of ancestry and their appetite for fighting; for he was undoubtedly a brave soldier of no little experience and skill. He entered the army at an early age, and left England when he was eighteen, and saw much service in France, Holland, Germany, and the Netherlands. Next he took part in the disastrous expeditions to Cadiz and the Island of Rhe, in both of which he was accompanied by his young cousin, George Monk, who always regarded him as his father-in-arms. Like Sir Bevill, he accompanied Charles I. to Scotland, having also raised a troop of horse; and in 1641 he took a prominent part in suppressing the rebellion in Ireland, when in fire and blood the wretched Irish were made to do penance for their outburst of savagery, to which they had been goaded by Strafford’s imperious rule. Having been recalled to England in 1643 for insubordination to the Marquis of Ormond, Sir Richard pretended to adopt the Parliamentarian cause, and was made a Major-General of Horse; but having learnt all the secrets of their campaign, he treacherously marched his soldiers to Oxford, and joined the King. For such abominable treachery he was rightly denounced, and no epithets were too choice to apply to him. He was, moreover, excepted from all pardon, both as to life and estate. Shortly afterwards he was placed by Prince Rupert in command of the troops that were besieging Plymouth, and it was mainly by his successful tactics that Lord Essex was utterly defeated in Cornwall in 1644, when the King commanded the Cavaliers in person.

After this he was appointed “The King’s General in the West,” a title of which he was justly proud, and which was eventually carved on his tombstone at Ghent. Considering himself thus constituted Commander-in-Chief, he afterwards refused, when called upon to do so by the Prince’s Council, to act in any subordinate position; and hence arose those unhappy dissensions and jealousies which finally wrecked the royal cause in the West. Grenville was placed under arrest, and cashiered from his command without any court-martial. In spite of his overbearing manners and tyrannical conduct, of which frequent complaints had been made, public opinion was strongly in his favour and clamoured for his release, whilst the soldiers refused to be commanded by Hopton or anyone else, and both officers and men, to the number of four thousand, petitioned the Prince in his favour. Sir Richard’s imprisonment and the dissensions that arose in consequence undoubtedly gave the finishing stroke to the war in the West; the service everywhere languished; the soldiers gradually deserted, and Lord Hopton was compelled, after some faint resistance, to disband, and accept of such conditions as the enemy would give. Sir Richard, it must be confessed, represented the worst type of Cavalier. He was frequently actuated by the dictates of a violent and revengeful disposition, and was intriguing and unscrupulous. He died abroad in exile in 1659.

The heroism of young John Grenville, Sir Bevill’s son, in taking command of his father’s regiment at Lansdown when the latter fell mortally wounded, met its recognition a month later at Bristol, when he was knighted. After this he served under his uncle, Sir Richard, at the siege of Plymouth and in Cornwall, and apparently accompanied Charles I. in his march from the West after the defeat of Lord Essex; for the next time we hear of him is at the second battle of Newbury (27th October, 1644), where he narrowly escaped his father’s fate. Being in the thickest of the fight, and having received several other wounds, he was at last felled to the ground with a very dangerous one in the head from a halberd, which rendered him unconscious, and he was left for dead, nor was he discovered until a body of the King’s horse, charging the enemy afresh and beating them off the ground, found him covered with blood and dust, but still living. He was carried to where the King and Prince of Wales were, who sent him to Donnington Castle hard by, to be treated for his wounds; but no sooner were the armies drawn off from the field of battle than the castle itself was besieged by the enemy, and their bullets constantly whistled through the room where the young sufferer lay, during the twelve days which elapsed before the defenders were relieved by the King at the third battle of Newbury. On his recovery from his wounds, Sir John Grenville was promoted to the rank of a Brigadier of Foot, and the following year was appointed a Gentleman of the Bedchamber to the Prince of Wales, who had formed a strong attachment for him, which proved lifelong. He remained with the Prince accordingly during the rest of the war, and accompanied him in his flight to the Isles of Scilly, and afterwards to Jersey.

Towards the end of the year 1648 the Scilly Islands revolted from the Parliament, and became the last rallying point of the Royalists under Grenville, who was appointed Governor to hold them for the King; but he had scarcely been there three weeks when tidings reached him of the King’s execution. With passionate indignation, he at once proclaimed Charles II. King, and could find no words hard enough for Cromwell and the Regicides. He fortified the islands, already strong from their natural position and existing earthworks; and in this he was ably assisted by his brother, Bernard, then barely eighteen, who had run away from his tutor, and lay concealed at Menabilly, near Fowey, whence he managed to carry considerable reinforcements for the defence of the islands. For two years Sir John carried on a guerilla warfare against the English republic, and seized many merchant and other vessels; but when Van Tromp made overtures to him to cede the islands to the States General, and offered £100,000 as a bribe, Grenville indignantly refused to yield an inch of British soil to a stranger, saying he was there “to contend against treason, not to imitate it.” Admiral Blake, who was in pursuit of Van Tromp, next appeared, and again attempted negotiations for the cession of the islands, but Grenville was resolved to hold them for the King alone, and for a whole month made such a stubborn resistance that when at last Blake prevailed, Grenville secured terms so exceptionally favourable to the Royalists that the Parliament refused to ratify them, till Blake insisted and threatened to resign his commission.

Sir John Grenville’s future career and the prominent part he took, in conjunction with his cousin, George Monk, in the Restoration of Charles II., who created him Earl of Bath, and showered countless honours and endowments upon him, do not belong to a paper confined to giving the fighting qualities of the family. These, however, found expression in his two sons, Charles, Lord Lansdown, and John, afterwards created Lord Granville of Potheridge. The latter was in the navy, and took part in most of the naval engagements of his time, behaving with great bravery and skill, particularly at the siege of Cork in 1690. Lord Lansdown took part in the wars of Hungary against the Turks, and was present at the battle of Kornenberch, the siege of Vienna, at Baracan, Gran, and several smaller engagements, in all of which he displayed such unwonted valour and intrepidity for one so young, that the Emperor Leopold, as a special mark of honour, created him a Count of the Holy Roman Empire, with the distinction of bearing his paternal coat-of-arms upon the breast of the Roman Eagle. He also took part in the constant reprisals, which marked the reign of William III., by the English and French upon one another’s shores; and in one of these assisted in the bombardment of his ancestral Norman town, Granville, and in another in the defence of Teignmouth and Torbay.

The fighting spirit of the family was still handed on in another member of the family—a second Sir Bevill, the eldest son of the Honourable Bernard Granville (as the name was now spelt), who appears to have inherited all the courage of the grandfather whose name he bore. On leaving Cambridge, he entered the army, and served with distinction in his uncle, Lord Bath’s, regiment in Ireland and Flanders, and was knighted by James II. at the head of that regiment on Hounslow Heath on the 22nd of May, 1686. When Lord Bath revolted to the side of the Prince of Orange, Sir Bevill was despatched to Jersey to disarm the Papists and secure the island—a mission which he carried out with complete success. After this he took part in the Continental war against the French, and behaved with conspicuous bravery at the battle of Steinkirk, August 4th, 1692. The battle was going against King William, when Prince Casimer of Nassau, who was in command of the troops, galloped back to the English in his right rear, and begged them to advance, as Count Solmes refused to bring up his infantry. Rapidly forming Bath’s regiment, with the pikes in the centre and the grenadiers and musketeers on either flank, Sir Bevill put himself at its head, and, closely followed by the Buffs, moved out from the line. He was only just in time. Baron Pibrach, the Colonel of the Luxemburgers, had been desperately wounded whilst endeavouring to rally his men, who were flying in disorder, hotly pursued by the French. Suddenly out of the crowd of fugitives hurrying to the rear there emerged a line of glistening steel, and Bath’s regiment, scarcely discernible from its foes in its scarlet stockings and breeches, its blue coats and buff cross-belts, strode sternly forward, its three red banners waving overhead. A hail of musket balls smote it in the face; a storm of iron from the batteries mangled and tore its flanks; but it pressed irresistibly on, and amid a hurricane of cheers that drowned even the roar of the cannons, hurled the French infantry from its path, and recovered the position. But only for a moment. Again and again the French batteries worked up in dense masses along Granville’s front, only to surge back again, rent and maimed by a pitiless fire. So for another hour the carnage grew, till Prince Casimer, galloping to Granville’s side, gave him the order to retire. It was six in the evening. The allied drums were everywhere beating the retreat. William had at last given up the struggle, and the columns were slowly winding to the rear. There was no pursuit. Sir Bevill’s gallantry was long remembered and talked of with grateful admiration by the British camp fires.

This paper must now close with a brief quotation from a letter written by one who was the last but one of the representatives of this ancient house in the senior male line, namely, George Granville (younger brother of the last-mentioned Sir Bevill), afterwards created Baron Lansdown of Bideford. Although no opportunity arose for him to distinguish himself otherwise than in politics and as a poet, the old fighting spirit was not lacking in him, and he was eager to gain his father’s permission to take up arms against the Prince of Orange:—

No unworthy extract, this, surely, wherewith to close the annals of six centuries of stainless loyalty in a family whose motto has always been: “Deo, Patriæ, Amicis.”