Westward Ho!

C >> Charles Kingsley >> Westward Ho!


Mr. Oxenham came that evening to supper as he had promised: but as
people supped in those days in much the same manner as they do now, we
may drop the thread of the story for a few hours, and take it up again
after supper is over.

"Come now, Dick Grenville, do thou talk the good man round, and I'll
warrant myself to talk round the good wife."

The personage whom Oxenham addressed thus familiarly answered by a
somewhat sarcastic smile, and, "Mr. Oxenham gives Dick Grenville" (with
just enough emphasis on the "Mr." and the "Dick," to hint that a liberty
had been taken with him) "overmuch credit with the men. Mr. Oxenham's
credit with fair ladies, none can doubt. Friend Leigh, is Heard's great
ship home yet from the Straits?"

The speaker, known well in those days as Sir Richard Grenville,
Granville, Greenvil, Greenfield, with two or three other variations, was
one of those truly heroical personages whom Providence, fitting always
the men to their age and their work, had sent upon the earth whereof it
takes right good care, not in England only, but in Spain and Italy, in
Germany and the Netherlands, and wherever, in short, great men and great
deeds were needed to lift the mediaeval world into the modern.

And, among all the heroic faces which the painters of that age have
preserved, none, perhaps, hardly excepting Shakespeare's or Spenser's,
Alva's or Farina's, is more heroic than that of Richard Grenville, as it
stands in Prince's "Worthies of Devon;" of a Spanish type, perhaps
(or more truly speaking, a Cornish), rather than an English, with just
enough of the British element in it to give delicacy to its massiveness.
The forehead and whole brain are of extraordinary loftiness, and
perfectly upright; the nose long, aquiline, and delicately pointed;
the mouth fringed with a short silky beard, small and ripe, yet firm
as granite, with just pout enough of the lower lip to give hint of that
capacity of noble indignation which lay hid under its usual courtly calm
and sweetness; if there be a defect in the face, it is that the eyes are
somewhat small, and close together, and the eyebrows, though delicately
arched, and, without a trace of peevishness, too closely pressed
down upon them, the complexion is dark, the figure tall and graceful;
altogether the likeness of a wise and gallant gentleman, lovely to all
good men, awful to all bad men; in whose presence none dare say or do a
mean or a ribald thing; whom brave men left, feeling themselves nerved
to do their duty better, while cowards slipped away, as bats and
owls before the sun. So he lived and moved, whether in the Court of
Elizabeth, giving his counsel among the wisest; or in the streets of
Bideford, capped alike by squire and merchant, shopkeeper and sailor; or
riding along the moorland roads between his houses of Stow and Bideford,
while every woman ran out to her door to look at the great Sir Richard,
the pride of North Devon; or, sitting there in the low mullioned window
at Burrough, with his cup of malmsey before him, and the lute to which
he had just been singing laid across his knees, while the red western
sun streamed in upon his high, bland forehead, and soft curling locks;
ever the same steadfast, God-fearing, chivalrous man, conscious (as far
as a soul so healthy could be conscious) of the pride of beauty, and
strength, and valor, and wisdom, and a race and name which claimed
direct descent from the grandfather of the Conqueror, and was tracked
down the centuries by valiant deeds and noble benefits to his native
shire, himself the noblest of his race. Men said that he was proud; but
he could not look round him without having something to be proud of;
that he was stern and harsh to his sailors: but it was only when he saw
in them any taint of cowardice or falsehood; that he was subject, at
moments, to such fearful fits of rage, that he had been seen to snatch
the glasses from the table, grind them to pieces in his teeth, and
swallow them: but that was only when his indignation had been aroused by
some tale of cruelty or oppression, and, above all, by those West Indian
devilries of the Spaniards, whom he regarded (and in those days rightly
enough) as the enemies of God and man. Of this last fact Oxenham was
well aware, and therefore felt somewhat puzzled and nettled, when, after
having asked Mr. Leigh's leave to take young Amyas with him and set
forth in glowing colors the purpose of his voyage, he found Sir Richard
utterly unwilling to help him with his suit.

"Heyday, Sir Richard! You are not surely gone over to the side of those
canting fellows (Spanish Jesuits in disguise, every one of them, they
are), who pretended to turn up their noses at Franky Drake, as a pirate,
and be hanged to them?"

"My friend Oxenham," answered he, in the sententious and measured style
of the day, "I have always held, as you should know by this, that Mr.
Drake's booty, as well as my good friend Captain Hawkins's, is lawful
prize, as being taken from the Spaniard, who is not only hostis humani
generis, but has no right to the same, having robbed it violently, by
torture and extreme iniquity, from the poor Indian, whom God avenge, as
He surely will."

"Amen," said Mrs. Leigh.

"I say Amen, too," quoth Oxenham, "especially if it please Him to avenge
them by English hands."

"And I also," went on Sir Richard; "for the rightful owners of the said
goods being either miserably dead, or incapable, by reason of their
servitude, of ever recovering any share thereof, the treasure, falsely
called Spanish, cannot be better bestowed than in building up the state
of England against them, our natural enemies; and thereby, in building
up the weal of the Reformed Churches throughout the world, and the
liberties of all nations, against a tyranny more foul and rapacious than
that of Nero or Caligula; which, if it be not the cause of God, I, for
one, know not what God's cause is!" And, as he warmed in his speech, his
eyes flashed very fire.

"Hark now!" said Oxenham, "who can speak more boldly than he? and yet he
will not help this lad to so noble an adventure."

"You have asked his father and mother; what is their answer?"

"Mine is this," said Mr. Leigh; "if it be God's will that my boy should
become, hereafter, such a mariner as Sir Richard Grenville, let him go,
and God be with him; but let him first bide here at home and be
trained, if God give me grace, to become such a gentleman as Sir Richard
Grenville."

Sir Richard bowed low, and Mrs. Leigh catching up the last word--

"There, Mr. Oxenham, you cannot gainsay that, unless you will be
discourteous to his worship. And for me--though it be a weak woman's
reason, yet it is a mother's: he is my only child. His elder brother is
far away. God only knows whether I shall see him again; and what are all
reports of his virtues and his learning to me, compared to that sweet
presence which I daily miss? Ah! Mr. Oxenham, my beautiful Joseph is
gone; and though he be lord of Pharaoh's household, yet he is far away
in Egypt; and you will take Benjamm also! Ah! Mr. Oxenham, you have no
child, or you would not ask for mine!"

"And how do you know that, my sweet madam!" said the adventurer, turning
first deadly pale, and then glowing red. Her last words had touched him
to the quick in some unexpected place; and rising, he courteously laid
her hand to his lips, and said--"I say no more. Farewell, sweet madam,
and God send all men such wives as you."

"And all wives," said she, smiling, "such husbands as mine."

"Nay, I will not say that," answered he, with a half sneer--and then,
"Farewell, friend Leigh--farewell, gallant Dick Grenville. God send I
see thee Lord High Admiral when I come home. And yet, why should I come
home? Will you pray for poor Jack, gentles?"

"Tut, tut, man! good words," said Leigh; "let us drink to our merry
meeting before you go." And rising, and putting the tankard of malmsey
to his lips, he passed it to Sir Richard, who rose, and saying, "To the
fortune of a bold mariner and a gallant gentleman," drank, and put the
cup into Oxenham's hand.

The adventurer's face was flushed, and his eye wild. Whether from the
liquor he had drunk during the day, or whether from Mrs. Leigh's last
speech, he had not been himself for a few minutes. He lifted the cup,
and was in act to pledge them, when he suddenly dropped it on the table,
and pointed, staring and trembling, up and down, and round the room, as
if following some fluttering object.

"There! Do you see it? The bird!--the bird with the white breast!"

Each looked at the other; but Leigh, who was a quick-witted man and an
old courtier, forced a laugh instantly, and cried--"Nonsense, brave Jack
Oxenham! Leave white birds for men who will show the white feather. Mrs.
Leigh waits to pledge you."

Oxenham recovered himself in a moment, pledged them all round, drinking
deep and fiercely; and after hearty farewells, departed, never hinting
again at his strange exclamation.

After he was gone, and while Leigh was attending him to the door, Mrs.
Leigh and Grenville kept a few minutes' dead silence. At last--"God help
him!" said she.

"Amen!" said Grenville, "for he never needed it more. But, indeed,
madam, I put no faith in such omens."

"But, Sir Richard, that bird has been seen for generations before the
death of any of his family. I know those who were at South Tawton when
his mother died, and his brother also; and they both saw it. God help
him! for, after all, he is a proper man."

"So many a lady has thought before now, Mrs. Leigh, and well for him if
they had not. But, indeed, I make no account of omens. When God is ready
for each man, then he must go; and when can he go better?"

"But," said Mr. Leigh, who entered, "I have seen, and especially when
I was in Italy, omens and prophecies before now beget their own
fulfilment, by driving men into recklessness, and making them run
headlong upon that very ruin which, as they fancied, was running upon
them."

"And which," said Sir Richard, "they might have avoided, if, instead of
trusting in I know not what dumb and dark destiny, they had trusted in
the living God, by faith in whom men may remove mountains, and quench
the fire, and put to flight the armies of the alien. I too know, and
know not how I know, that I shall never die in my bed."

"God forfend!" cried Mrs. Leigh.

"And why, fair madam, if I die doing my duty to my God and my queen? The
thought never moves me: nay, to tell the truth, I pray often enough that
I may be spared the miseries of imbecile old age, and that end which
the old Northmen rightly called 'a cow's death' rather than a man's. But
enough of this. Mr. Leigh, you have done wisely to-night. Poor Oxenham
does not go on his voyage with a single eye. I have talked about him
with Drake and Hawkins; and I guess why Mrs. Leigh touched him so home
when she told him that he had no child."

"Has he one, then, in the West Indies?" cried the good lady.

"God knows; and God grant we may not hear of shame and sorrow fallen
upon an ancient and honorable house of Devon. My brother Stukely is woe
enough to North Devon for this generation."

"Poor braggadocio!" said Mr. Leigh; "and yet not altogether that too,
for he can fight at least."

"So can every mastiff and boar, much more an Englishman. And now come
hither to me, my adventurous godson, and don't look in such doleful
dumps. I hear you have broken all the sailor-boys' heads already."

"Nearly all," said young Amyas, with due modesty.. "But am I not to go
to sea?"

"All things in their time, my boy, and God forbid that either I or your
worthy parents should keep you from that noble calling which is the
safeguard of this England and her queen. But you do not wish to live and
die the master of a trawler?"

"I should like to be a brave adventurer, like Mr. Oxenham."

"God grant you become a braver man than he! for, as I think, to be bold
against the enemy is common to the brutes; but the prerogative of a man
is to be bold against himself."

"How, sir?"

"To conquer our own fancies, Amyas, and our own lusts, and our ambition,
in the sacred name of duty; this it is to be truly brave, and truly
strong; for he who cannot rule himself, how can he rule his crew or his
fortunes? Come, now, I will make you a promise. If you will bide quietly
at home, and learn from your father and mother all which befits a
gentleman and a Christian, as well as a seaman, the day shall come when
you shall sail with Richard Grenville himself, or with better men than
he, on a nobler errand than gold-hunting on the Spanish Main."

"O my boy, my boy!" said Mrs. Leigh, "hear what the good Sir Richard
promises you. Many an earl's son would be glad to be in your place."

"And many an earl's son will be glad to be in his place a score years
hence, if he will but learn what I know you two can teach him. And now,
Amyas, my lad, I will tell you for a warning the history of that Sir
Thomas Stukely of whom I spoke just now, and who was, as all men know,
a gallant and courtly knight, of an ancient and worshipful family in
Ilfracombe, well practised in the wars, and well beloved at first by our
incomparable queen, the friend of all true virtue, as I trust she will
be of yours some day; who wanted but one step to greatness, and that
was this, that in his hurry to rule all the world, he forgot to rule
himself. At first, he wasted his estate in show and luxury, always
intending to be famous, and destroying his own fame all the while by
his vainglory and haste. Then, to retrieve his losses, he hit upon the
peopling of Florida, which thou and I will see done some day, by God's
blessing; for I and some good friends of mine have an errand there as
well as he. But he did not go about it as a loyal man, to advance the
honor of his queen, but his own honor only, dreaming that he too should
be a king; and was not ashamed to tell her majesty that he had rather be
sovereign of a molehill than the highest subject of an emperor."

"They say," said Mr. Leigh, "that he told her plainly he should be a
prince before he died, and that she gave him one of her pretty quips in
return."

"I don't know that her majesty had the best of it. A fool is many times
too strong for a wise man, by virtue of his thick hide. For when she
said that she hoped she should hear from him in his new principality,
'Yes, sooth,' says he, graciously enough. 'And in what style?' asks she.
'To our dear sister,' says Stukely: to which her clemency had nothing to
reply, but turned away, as Mr. Burleigh told me, laughing."

"Alas for him!" said gentle Mrs. Leigh. "Such self-conceit--and Heaven
knows we have the root of it in ourselves also--is the very daughter of
self-will, and of that loud crying out about I, and me, and mine, which
is the very bird-call for all devils, and the broad road which leads to
death."

"It will lead him to his," said Sir Richard; "God grant it be not upon
Tower-hill! for since that Florida plot, and after that his hopes of
Irish preferment came to naught, he who could not help himself by fair
means has taken to foul ones, and gone over to Italy to the Pope, whose
infallibility has not been proof against Stukely's wit; for he was soon
his Holiness's closet counsellor, and, they say, his bosom friend; and
made him give credit to his boasts that, with three thousand soldiers he
would beat the English out of Ireland, and make the Pope's son king of
it."

"Ay, but," said Mr. Leigh, "I suppose the Italians have the same fetch
now as they had when I was there, to explain such ugly cases; namely,
that the Pope is infallible only in doctrine, and quoad Pope; while
quoad hominem, he is even as others, or indeed, in general, a deal
worse, so that the office, and not the man, may be glorified thereby.
But where is Stukely now?"

"At Rome when last I heard of him, ruffling it up and down the Vatican
as Baron Ross, Viscount Murrough, Earl Wexford, Marquis Leinster, and
a title or two more, which have cost the Pope little, seeing that
they never were his to give; and plotting, they say, some hare-brained
expedition against Ireland by the help of the Spanish king, which must
end in nothing but his shame and ruin. And now, my sweet hosts, I must
call for serving-boy and lantern, and home to my bed in Bideford."

And so Amyas Leigh went back to school, and Mr. Oxenham went his way to
Plymouth again, and sailed for the Spanish Main.



CHAPTER II

HOW AMYAS CAME HOME THE FIRST TIME

"Si taceant homines, facient te sidera notum,
Sol nescit comitis immemor esse sui."

Old Epigram on Drake.

Five years are past and gone. It is nine of the clock on a still, bright
November morning; but the bells of Bideford church are still ringing for
the daily service two hours after the usual time; and instead of going
soberly according to wont, cannot help breaking forth every five minutes
into a jocund peal, and tumbling head over heels in ecstasies of joy.
Bideford streets are a very flower-garden of all the colors, swarming
with seamen and burghers, and burghers' wives and daughters, all
in their holiday attire. Garlands are hung across the streets, and
tapestries from every window. The ships in the pool are dressed in all
their flags, and give tumultuous vent to their feelings by peals of
ordnance of every size. Every stable is crammed with horses; and
Sir Richard Grenville's house is like a very tavern, with eating
and drinking, and unsaddling, and running to and fro of grooms and
serving-men. Along the little churchyard, packed full with women,
streams all the gentle blood of North Devon,--tall and stately men, and
fair ladies, worthy of the days when the gentry of England were by due
right the leaders of the people, by personal prowess and beauty, as well
as by intellect and education. And first, there is my lady Countess of
Bath, whom Sir Richard Grenville is escorting, cap in hand (for her good
Earl Bourchier is in London with the queen); and there are Bassets
from beautiful Umberleigh, and Carys from more beautiful Clovelly, and
Fortescues of Wear, and Fortescues of Buckland, and Fortescues from all
quarters, and Coles from Slade, and Stukelys from Affton, and St. Legers
from Annery, and Coffins from Portledge, and even Coplestones from
Eggesford, thirty miles away: and last, but not least (for almost all
stop to give them place), Sir John Chichester of Ralegh, followed
in single file, after the good old patriarchal fashion, by his eight
daughters, and three of his five famous sons (one, to avenge his
murdered brother, is fighting valiantly in Ireland, hereafter to rule
there wisely also, as Lord Deputy and Baron of Belfast); and he meets
at the gate his cousin of Arlington, and behind him a train of four
daughters and nineteen sons, the last of whom has not yet passed the
town-hall, while the first is at the Lychgate, who, laughing, make way
for the elder though shorter branch of that most fruitful tree; and so
on into the church, where all are placed according to their degrees, or
at least as near as may be, not without a few sour looks, and shovings,
and whisperings, from one high-born matron and another; till the
churchwardens and sidesmen, who never had before so goodly a company to
arrange, have bustled themselves hot, and red, and frantic, and end by
imploring abjectly the help of the great Sir Richard himself to tell
them who everybody is, and which is the elder branch, and which is the
younger, and who carries eight quarterings in their arms, and who only
four, and so prevent their setting at deadly feud half the fine
ladies of North Devon; for the old men are all safe packed away in the
corporation pews, and the young ones care only to get a place whence
they may eye the ladies. And at last there is a silence, and a looking
toward the door, and then distant music, flutes and hautboys, drums and
trumpets, which come braying, and screaming, and thundering merrily
up to the very church doors, and then cease; and the churchwardens
and sidesmen bustle down to the entrance, rods in hand, and there is a
general whisper and rustle, not without glad tears and blessings from
many a woman, and from some men also, as the wonder of the day enters,
and the rector begins, not the morning service, but the good old
thanksgiving after a victory at sea.

And what is it which has thus sent old Bideford wild with that "goodly
joy and pious mirth," of which we now only retain traditions in
our translation of the Psalms? Why are all eyes fixed, with greedy
admiration, on those four weather-beaten mariners, decked out with knots
and ribbons by loving hands; and yet more on that gigantic figure who
walks before them, a beardless boy, and yet with the frame and stature
of a Hercules, towering, like Saul of old, a head and shoulders above
all the congregation, with his golden locks flowing down over his
shoulders? And why, as the five go instinctively up to the altar, and
there fall on their knees before the rails, are all eyes turned to the
pew where Mrs. Leigh of Burrough has hid her face between her hands,
and her hood rustles and shakes to her joyful sobs? Because there was
fellow-feeling of old in merry England, in county and in town; and
these are Devon men, and men of Bideford, whose names are Amyas Leigh of
Burrough, John Staveley, Michael Heard, and Jonas Marshall of Bideford,
and Thomas Braund of Clovelly: and they, the first of all English
mariners, have sailed round the world with Francis Drake, and are come
hither to give God thanks.

It is a long story. To explain how it happened we must go back for a
page or two, almost to the point from whence we started in the last
chapter.

For somewhat more than a twelvemonth after Mr. Oxenham's departure,
young Amyas had gone on quietly enough, according to promise, with the
exception of certain occasional outbursts of fierceness common to all
young male animals, and especially to boys of any strength of character.
His scholarship, indeed, progressed no better than before; but his home
education went on healthily enough; and he was fast becoming, young as
he was, a right good archer, and rider, and swordsman (after the old
school of buckler practice), when his father, having gone down on
business to the Exeter Assizes, caught (as was too common in those days)
the gaol-fever from the prisoners; sickened in the very court; and died
within a week.

And now Mrs. Leigh was left to God and her own soul, with this young
lion-cub in leash, to tame and train for this life and the life to
come. She had loved her husband fervently and holily. He had been often
peevish, often melancholy; for he was a disappointed man, with an estate
impoverished by his father's folly, and his own youthful ambition, which
had led him up to Court, and made him waste his heart and his purse in
following a vain shadow. He was one of those men, moreover, who possess
almost every gift except the gift of the power to use them; and though
a scholar, a courtier, and a soldier, he had found himself, when he was
past forty, without settled employment or aim in life, by reason of
a certain shyness, pride, or delicate honor (call it which you will),
which had always kept him from playing a winning game in that very world
after whose prizes he hankered to the last, and on which he revenged
himself by continual grumbling. At last, by his good luck, he met with
a fair young Miss Foljambe, of Derbyshire, then about Queen Elizabeth's
Court, who was as tired as he of the sins of the world, though she had
seen less of them; and the two contrived to please each other so well,
that though the queen grumbled a little, as usual, at the lady for
marrying, and at the gentleman for adoring any one but her royal self,
they got leave to vanish from the little Babylon at Whitehall, and
settle in peace at Burrough. In her he found a treasure, and he knew
what he had found.

Mrs. Leigh was, and had been from her youth, one of those noble old
English churchwomen, without superstition, and without severity, who
are among the fairest features of that heroic time. There was a certain
melancholy about her, nevertheless; for the recollections of her
childhood carried her back to times when it was an awful thing to be a
Protestant. She could remember among them, five-and-twenty years ago,
the burning of poor blind Joan Waste at Derby, and of Mistress Joyce
Lewis, too, like herself, a lady born; and sometimes even now, in her
nightly dreams, rang in her ears her mother's bitter cries to God,
either to spare her that fiery torment, or to give her strength to bear
it, as she whom she loved had borne it before her. For her mother, who
was of a good family in Yorkshire, had been one of Queen Catherine's
bedchamber women, and the bosom friend and disciple of Anne Askew. And
she had sat in Smithfield, with blood curdled by horror, to see the
hapless Court beauty, a month before the paragon of Henry's Court,
carried in a chair (so crippled was she by the rack) to her fiery doom
at the stake, beside her fellow-courtier, Mr. Lascelles, while the very
heavens seemed to the shuddering mob around to speak their wrath and
grief in solemn thunder peals, and heavy drops which hissed upon the
crackling pile.