THE AUTHOR OF BRITANNIA’S| PASTORALS AND TAVISTOCK.^[5] | |By the Rev. D. P. Alford, M.A.

If beautiful country could beget good poets, Tavistock ought to abound in them. For, on one side, there is Dartmoor, with its rugged grandeur, stretching out protecting arms to Brent Tor and Whitchurch Down; on the other side, there is the majestic Tamar, winding through its deeply-wooded valley, from Latchley Weir, past New Bridge and the Morwell Rocks, to Gawton Quay; whilst through the midst, the sportive Tavy runs down from its lonely cleave, and gathering up the Walla on its way, with bright and tawny waters, now creeps, now rushes past, to break through the beetling cliffs beyond Crowndale, and glide beneath the Ramsham woods, to its happy meeting with the Walkham, and thence to the copse-covered banks at Denham Bridge.

Perhaps it was the rich and varied beauty round his home that forced some scraps of verse from the rugged soul of our Puritan incumbent, Thomas Larkham. At all events, two hundred years later, Vicar Bray was versifying in the quiet seclusion of his vicarage, and inscribing his best lines on slate slabs for the garden walls; and at the same time, Mrs. Bray was writing her local tales in imitation of Scott, sending letters to Southey about the borders of the Tamar and Tavy, and commending to his kindly notice her poetical protegée, the modest and gentle maid-servant, Mary Collins. Then, also, Miss Rachel Evans was writing verse, as well as prose; and her brother-in-law, Mr. H. S. Stokes, was beginning his career as a west-country poet here in Tavistock.

All these, however, are local celebrities; and our one poet of public fame is William Browne, the reverent disciple of Sidney and Spenser; the personal friend of Wither and Drayton, Selden and Ben Jonson; the poet’s poet, who suggested more than one idea to Milton, was admired by Keats, and highly commended by Mrs. Browning. He was a bright little man, beloved by his brother-poets for his simple manners and gentle character; such another as Hartley Coleridge, without his weakness of will; so that he was known amongst them as “Bonny Browne” and “Sweet Willy of the Western Main.”

William Browne probably came of a knightly family near Great Torrington; but he was born here in Tavistock in 1591—just the most stirring time for minds and morals that England has ever known. The Reformation had stimulated the conscience, as the New Learning had liberated the mind; and then our wonderful deliverance from the mighty power of Spain had produced an extraordinary national exultation. What wonder that this newly-awakened energy should find expression in Spenser and Shakspere, in Hooker and Bacon, and their innumerable, not unworthy satellites?

But apart from the general excitement, Tavistock had its own special atmosphere of stirring influences, both from the past and in the present. The inscribed stones in the vicarage garden show that the country was occupied by a Gaelic tribe of Celts early in the Roman times. But the town owed its fame, and probably its very existence, to the great Benedictine monastery, founded by Earl Ordulf, and sanctified by the relics of St. Rumon in the days of Edgar the Peaceable. For almost six centuries it had reflected, and even, for a short while, directly influenced, through its abbots, the changeful course of England’s progress. Two of its earlier abbots were leading statesmen, as well as active prelates. Lyfing, afterwards Bishop of Worcester, was Canute’s fellow-traveller to Rome in 1026, and the staunch friend of the patriotic Earl Godwin. Aldred, also Bishop of Worcester, and then Archbishop of York, was the wise counsellor of Edward the Confessor and of Harold, and the brave rebuker of William I.; he was the great church-builder and church-reformer of his time, and he was the first English Bishop to visit Jerusalem.

Our later abbots often illustrate public feeling, though they could not guide it as these two had done. Thus the general confusion at the close of Henry III.’s reign found such a bad sample in our monastery that Abbot John Chubbe was suspended in 1265, and deposed in 1269. The growing luxury and indifference of the fourteenth century was seen too plainly in Abbot John de Courtenay, who was reproved by the good Bishop Grandisson, in 1348, for neglecting his duties to the abbey and alienating its property, whilst he kept dogs for hunting. Bishop Brantyngham’s strong injunctions to Abbot Thomas Cullyng, in 1387, to restore discipline and to keep the monastic rules, show that disorder and dissipation had been tending from bad to worse.

But there is a brighter side to this picture of the past, and most of our abbots were more learnedly or more clerically disposed. Some had been slowly collecting a good library—an early promise of the present Public Library, the best, for the size of the town, in the West of England. Others had fostered the “Saxon School,” probably founded in the early days of the thirteenth century, and still represented by the Grammar School. In the spring of 1318, under Abbot John Campbell, Bishop Bronescombe consecrated the Parish Church, which had been rebuilt in the beautiful Decorated style of the day; and in the autumn of the same year, he came again to consecrate the Conventual Church, which, in its grand proportions, was almost a rival of Exeter Cathedral. Under Robert Bonus, in 1325, was established the Guild of the Brothers and Sisters of the Light of St. Mary in the Parish Church; and in 1370, Abbot Stephen Langdon showed his concern for the good of the town by appealing to the faithful to help in restoring the stone bridge over the rude waters of the Tavy. John Denyngton probably rebuilt much of the Abbey in the Perpendicular style then in vogue; and he certainly added to his own dignity and to that of his monastery by gaining the permission of Henry VI., in 1458, to apply to the Pope, Pius II., for the privilege of wearing the pontificalia. This, our first mitred abbot, like his predecessor, Allan of Cornwall, two hundred years earlier, had come back to Tavistock from presiding over the dependent Priory of Tresco, in the Isles of Scilly. Abbot John Banham was more ambitious than Denyngton; in 1513 a grant of Henry VIII. made him a spiritual peer, as Baron Hurdwick, and four years later, a bull of Leo X. exempted him from episcopal visitation. It was probably to Banham that the abbey owed an honour more considerable and more in keeping with the spirit of the age—the setting up within its precincts of the first printing-press in the West of England.

But the glory of our abbey had scarcely reached its height, before it faded suddenly and for ever. Anticipating the blow which shattered the larger monasteries in the spring of 1539, our abbot, John Peryn, not emulous of the fate of the abbots of Glastonbury, Woburn, and Fountains, assembled his twenty monks in the Chapter-house on March 20th, and then and there resigned all their claims into the hands of the King. For this ready surrender they were rewarded with their lives and various pensions. With his pension of £100 a year, the abbot withdrew to Stonepost, in West Street, and was probably the “Sir John Peryn” who, in 1543, was paid £6 as “Jesus’ Priest.”

When William Browne was a lad, middle-aged men must have known the last Abbot of Tavistock; and old people could recall—the poorer sort with regretful sighs, the good old times, when the frequent services still sounded from the Abbey Church, and the monks distributed alms at the arched gateway, beneath the present library. Even Browne himself, a child of the Renaissance, who hated superstition and loved the Pagan mythology, could grudge the misuse of sacred buildings; and amongst other evils done by the Tavy in flood, he tells us how the stream—

But though he was fond of Chaucer and our older poets, and though he felt the influence of the stately ruins that surrounded his school-house, he loved nature more than art, and was too full of present life to care very much for the past. As a boy with boys, he would spend his holidays breaking away from

chasing the “nimble Squirrel” in “Blanchdown Woods”; or, with his rod, following his “native Tavy” in her “many mazes, intricate meanders.” But as thought came with years, he would be stealing away alone to cherish his “Spring of Poesie” with Sidney’s Sonnets or Spenser’s Faërie Queen, as he wandered over the “Dazied Downes” that “sweetly environed” his home, or nestled beneath some shade in “Sweet Ina’s Combe,” half lulled to sleep by the Walla’s murmurings, or rousing himself to compose “the pleasing cadence of a line” in tune with those gentle murmurings.

Nor, indeed, had all the honour of Tavistock departed with the overthrow of her abbey. The Russells, who succeeded to the property, did not neglect the duties connected with it. They began—as they have continued—to maintain the religious and educational endowments. They supplied the borough with statesmen for Members of Parliament, in the generous patriot, Lord William Russell, in Lord John, the leader of Reform, and in the thoughtful, far-sighted Lord Arthur. They improved the town with wide streets and public buildings, and, more recently, with a fine statue, the first in the country, of Francis Drake.

Browne was but a little lad of five when his greatest townsman finished his heroic course in a sea-grave off Nombre de Dios, in 1596; but he kept his exploits in remembrance, and presently celebrated him as the—

Besides the Drakes, there were several families of distinction in and about Tavistock when Browne was a boy: there were Slannings, Kellys, and Champernownes near by; and in the parish, Glanvills, Maynards, Peeks, and Fitz.

In that year, 1596, there was born in the mansion at Fitzford the daughter of John Fitz and Bridget Courtenay, who, as Lady Howard, was to be so cruelly maligned by false rumours and fictitious romance. The family had been long settled at Fitzford, and a John Fitz was M.P. for Tavistock in 1427. Lady Howard’s grandfather married Mary Sydenham, of Brympton, Somerset; and at the back of their quiet tomb in the Parish Church is the kneeling figure of her father, Sir John Fitz. He was but a youth of fifteen at his father’s death, in 1589; and his riotous, wasted life was an ironical commentary on his kneeling posture. After a wild and reckless youth, in 1699, when he was twenty-five, he killed Nicholas Slanning, of Bickley, in a cowardly brawl. Coming home from a short sojourn abroad, he was more quiet for a while; but presently, returning from London, whither he had gone to be knighted at the Coronation of James I., he was more dissipated than ever. He drove his wife and daughters to seek refuge at Powderham, and upset the usually decent parish with drunkenness and disorder. At last, on a second journey to London, in a fit of mad panic, he killed the innkeeper at Twickenham, and then so stabbed himself that he died in a few days.

His nine-year-old daughter, the prey of greedy guardians, after being forced into early marriages, enjoyed some years of wedded happiness with her third husband, Sir Charles Howard, fourth son of the Earl of Suffolk. Then, having suffered years of neglect and annoyance from her fourth husband, the clever soldier, but treacherous politician, Sir Richard, brother of the chivalrous Sir Bevil Grenville, at last, after Fitzford had been sacked by the Roundheads, and her husband had fled the country, she settled down in her old home for twenty-five quiet years, from 1646 to 1671. Her son, George Howard, managed her property, joined her in such local contributions as that, in 1670, for the “redemption of captives in Turkey,” and represented Tavistock with Lord William Russell in 1660. But as he died some weeks before her, Lady Howard left her large estates bordering the Tavy, the mansion of Fitzford, the pleasant country house of Walreddon, with many goodly farms, Browne’s favourite Ramsham amongst them, to her first cousin, Sir William Courtenay, of Powderham.

It was about the year 1606 that William Browne left the Grammar School for Exeter College, Oxford. He did not then matriculate or take his degree, but he made friends with his colleagues, several of whom showed their poetical taste in commendatory verses to his Pastorals in 1613. Meanwhile, in November, 1611, Browne had passed on to the Inner Temple, where he largely increased his poetical acquaintance. He was on good terms with Ben Jonson, Chapman, and Massinger amongst our dramatists, and was therefore probably known to Shakspere; but his most intimate friends were John Davies, the able author of Nosce Teipsum; Christopher Brooke, the close ally of the famous poet and preacher, John Donne; George Wither, and Michael Drayton. He and Brooke, in 1613, published in one volume their elegies on the death of Prince Henry. He had much in common with the early poems of Wither: their Pastorals exhibit the same charming simplicity, the same full content in verse-making, the same indifference to irresponsive maidens. These lines of Browne:—

strike the same note as that of Wither’s spirited song:—

To Drayton, as his “Honor’d Friend,” Browne addressed some verses introductory to the second part of the Polyolbion. Regretting the loss to letters when great Eliza died, with Chapman’s Homer in mind, he boasts that we can still render the classics into English without loss:—

Browne’s regret at the general falling-off since the death of Elizabeth suggests that the verses in her honour, which were removed with the plastering from Tavistock Parish Church in 1845, may have been amongst his earliest efforts. They ended with these flattering words:—

Browne’s elegy on Prince Henry was reprinted as one of the songs in the first book of his Britannia’s Pastorals, which was also published in 1613, with commendatory verses from Drayton and Brooke and the learned Selden, besides those from his college friends. In doing the same kindly office for the second book, in 1616, Ben Jonson spoke thus highly of the care and finish of Browne’s work:—

Other verses prefixed to this book came from Tavistock, and were written by Sir John Glanvill, probably Browne’s relation, and an old schoolfellow.

After the Fitz, the Glanvill family was the most important in Tavistock. Settled at Holwell, in Whitchurch, for many generations, about 1550 they sent a younger son into the town as a merchant. His son, John, passed from an attorney’s office to the Bar, and in 1598, two years before his death, he was made a Justice of the Common Pleas. In 1615, the fine Jacobean monument against the south wall of the chancel was erected to his memory by his widow, probably in gratitude to her sons, who in that year had conveyed to her Sortridge, her own family estate, also in Whitchurch, probably forfeited by her second marriage; for in the interval she had married Sir Francis Godolphin, and become a second time a widow. She occupied a dower house in Barley Market Street, and her second name still lingers in the “Dolvin Road,” across the Tavy. The Judge, Prince tells us, lived in part of the Abbey, this being, most likely, the Abbey House, which Oliver says was occupied in 1635 by Serjeant Maynard. The Barton at Kilworthy was bought by Judge Glanvill, but it was his eldest son, Sir Francis, who built the mansion and laid out the terrace gardens, of which some charming portions are still in use. This Sir Francis Glanvill sat, as M.P. for Tavistock, in 1625 and 1628, with the great Commoner, John Pym. On January 21st, 1626, his son, Francis, was baptized at Mary Tavy, by reason of the plague raging so fiercely at Tavistock. So dreadful was the scourge, that six hundred people died in twelve months; and the little town had scarcely recovered its normal population in a hundred and fifty years. The younger Francis dying without issue, left Kilworthy to his nephew, Francis Kelly; and he left it to the Manatons, who held it till it was bought by the Russells about 1770. By his sisters, daughters, and grand-daughters, Judge Glanvill’s family became allied to the Brownes, Hamlyns, and Glubbs of Tavistock, the Grylls of Launceston, to Heles, Eastcourts, and Polwheles; to the Fowells, the Sawles of Penrice, and the Doidges of Hurlesditch; besides the Kellys and Manatons. One of his sisters was the second wife of Robert Knight, probably the first married Vicar of Tavistock; and his third son, George, was Vicar from 1662 to 1673.

Sir John Glanvill, the second son, was equally distinguished in law and politics. He was made Recorder of Plymouth in 1614, Serjeant in 1637, and Recorder of Bristol in 1640. As M.P. for Plymouth from 1614 to 1628, he was attached to the country party with Elliott and Pym, and he had charge of the Petition of Right before the Lords. Returned for Bristol in 1640, he was chosen Speaker of the Short Parliament, as a man of reasonable judgment and soothing speech; but having joined the King at Oxford in 1643, from 1645 to 1648 he was imprisoned in the Tower as a delinquent. He was re-appointed King’s Serjeant at the Restoration, and died soon after at Broad Hinton, his estate in Wiltshire. It was this worthy fellow-townsman who, in 1616, addressed William Browne in verses overflowing with kindly appreciation, and beginning:—

Another eminent fellow-townsman, John Maynard, might have been with Browne at the Grammar School, and certainly followed him to Exeter College and to the Inns of Court. Like Sir John Glanvill, Maynard was a man of mark, both in law and politics; but he was more of a time-server. He was clever enough to be leader of the Western Circuit during fifty of the most turbulent years of our annals. He was “Protector’s Serjeant” under Cromwell; “Ancient Serjeant” under Charles II. and James II.; and “Lord Commissioner” after the Revolution of 1688. He also sat in every Parliament from the first of Charles I. to the first of William and Mary. He was presented to the new King at Whitehall when he was nearly ninety; and William observed that he must have outlived all the lawyers of his time. “Yes, sire,” he promptly replied; “and if your Highness had not come over to help us, I should have outlived the law, too.” As Maynard took part both in the impeachment of Strafford and also of Sir Henry Vane, it is no wonder that Roscommon, Strafford’s nephew and godson, should write of him:—

or that the author of Hudibras should enquire, in his witty doggrel:—

It is to Maynard’s credit that he spent part of his fortune in founding a free school at Bere Alston, which he had represented in Parliament. Maynard and Courtenay are names still pleasantly associated in Tavistock with provision for the deserving poor, in convenient almshouses; whilst an exhibition to help some “Grammar scholar,” “of the best ingenuity and towardliness,” on his way to the University, is a lasting memorial of Sir John Glanvill.

In 1626, Browne probably received from another old schoolfellow, Richard Peeke, a copy of his Three to One, a short and vigorous account of his recent exploits in Spain. This Richard Peeke, a gentleman of good family in Tavistock, had volunteered, in 1625, for the ill-starred expedition to Cadiz, and being taken prisoner, by his prowess in defeating three fully-armed Spaniards with a quarter-staff, had won his life and liberty, and was presently celebrated in ballads as “Manly Peeke,” and in a fine old play as “Dick of Devonshire.” He was invited by King Philip IV. to serve him by land or sea, but Peeke said he must return to the wife and children who were sighing for him in Tavistock; so he came back to settle down quietly in the old home, and, as one of our pewter flagons tells, he was churchwarden in 1638.

And what was William Browne doing all this time? In 1614 he had written his masque of “Ulysses and Circe” for the Inner Temple, where it was performed 13th January, 1614–5. The subject may have been suggested by Chapman’s Odyssey, printed in 1614, or by Samuel Daniel’s lyric, “Ulysses and the Siren” (1605), and it is more than likely that Browne’s masque gave Milton some hints for his “Comus.” In 1614 he also contributed seven Eclogues to the “Shepheard’s Pipe,” the other contributors being C. Brooke, Davies, and Wither. Browne worked into his first Eclogue the “Jonathas” of the little-known Occleve, and the fourth is an Elegy on Thomas, the son of Sir Peter Manwood.

Our little and learned poet, as Prince describes him, is said to have been appointed, in 1615, Pursuivant of Wards and Liveries for life. He married a daughter of Sir Thomas Eversfield, and had two sons, who both died young. In 1624 he returned to Oxford as tutor to the Hon. Robert Dormer, afterwards Earl of Carnarvon, who was killed at Newbury in 1643. Browne, being thirty-three, matriculated from Exeter College on 30th April, 1624, and on 16th November took his M.A., being commended for his knowledge of humane letters and the fine arts. He seems to have gone abroad with his pupil, and in 1640 he wrote from Dorking to Sir Benjamin Ruddyerd, congratulating him on his “late speech in Parliament, wherein they believe the spirit which inspired the Reformation, and genius which dictated the Magna Charta, possessed you. In my poore cell and sequestration from all businesse, I blesse God and praye for more such members in the Commonwealth.” Anthony Wood says he was afterwards domesticated with the Herberts at Wilton, and prospered there; and it has been fairly proved that he, and not Ben Jonson, wrote that most perfect epitaph on the Countess of Pembroke:—

We do not know when or where our poet ended his days, but if, oppressed with sorrow or sickness, he turned with longing to the native scenes which in early youth he had loved so well, it is likely enough that he is referred to in the simple entry of the Tavistock register:—“27th March, 1643, William Browne was buried.”

As poets will, Browne went on writing all through life, but he published nothing new after 1616. He left in MS. a third book of the Pastorals, which was first printed in 1852, and a number of smaller poems, sonnets, epistles, visions, allegories, epigrams, epitaphs, and some jocular pieces. Amongst the last were the Lydford stanzas, which contained the first notice of the wild Gubbingses, and the sharp satire on Lydford Law; about 1630 they were “commonly sung by many a fiddler” as a Devonshire ballad.

Why did Browne print nothing new after 1616? He had not lost the poetic gift, for much that he left in MS. is as good as anything he ever wrote. We have examples in the first and second songs of the third book of the Pastorals, and nothing that he published is brighter than the song in the Lansdowne MS. with the pleasant refrain:

In truth, William Browne was, as his friend Drayton styled him, “a rightly-born Poet.” If, like the “Faërie Queene,” his Pastorals are vague and diffuse in narrative, and deficient in human interest, yet, like the “Faërie Queene,” they abound in happy visions, and fine descriptions, and wholesome thoughts, expressed in easy, flowing melody. Browne was akin to Keats and Tennyson in his love of well-sounding words and sonorous lines. It gave him keen pleasure—

And his enjoyment of the simple beauties of nature was as true and heartfelt as Cowper’s. Vivid pictures of country scenes, and homely sketches of country life, are presented to us again and again in verse that is always clear and lucid, though soft and sweet, or rough and rugged, according to the subject. His carefully-constructed verses, in their clearness and in their varying tone, would really seem to have been attuned to the “voiceful Tavy” which he loved so dearly and celebrated so gladly, and by whose side many of them were written.

Why, then, with such a gift, so obviously unexhausted, did he decline to publish anything after the appearance of the second book of Britannia’s Pastorals, in 1616? Probably he felt, as S. Daniel had felt before him, that a people entirely devoted to action and incident could have little taste for pure poetry. Even as early as 1613 he had described a poor poet, sitting up late, wasting ink and paper, and wearing out “many a gray goose quill,” in the vain hope of immortal renown:—

And, in 1623, when he wrote his commendatory verses for Massinger’s Duke of Millaine, he was convinced that there was no demand for any poetry but the drama:—

It would be easy to make a pleasant little volume of selections from the more striking or more beautiful passages in Browne’s Pastorals, but here we can hardly find room for half-a-dozen specimens. Of death he writes:—

Of cheerful content:—

Of the Good Shepherd he says that from

In Book 2 we have such satire as this, of the “fawning citizen,”

such strong lines as this of the sea:—

such vivid pictures as this:—

or sweetly-soothing verses like these, on the stillness of nightfall:—

Such passages as these must be admired by every lover of nature, but the poet will always be doubly dear to those who have lived amongst the scenes he describes so tenderly and so faithfully. My own feeling of indebtedness to one whose poetry had given a sort of sacredness to his native haunts was thus expressed when I was in clerical charge of the Tamar side of Tavistock, more than thirty years ago:—