Rowse Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge

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ISBN: 978-0-571-30043-3
Verlag: Faber & Faber
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 368 Seiten

Sir Richard Grenville (1542-1591), English sea captain and explorer, became a legendary figure in the resistance to the Spanish Armada, dying as a result of wounds sustained at the helm of the galleon Revenge in the Battle of Flores: a fight in which he struggled against overwhelming odds. First published in 1937, Sir Richard Grenville of the Revenge was A.L. Rowse's first full-length historical monograph. 'There is no doubt that Mr Rowse's book will establish itself as the standard biography of Grenville, and he deserves our unstinting thanks for the patient research that he has put into it.' J.E. Neale, Sunday Times 'Magnificent... I was delighted, too, by the masterful descriptions of the Elizabethan era and the brilliant figures of that age.' Lloyd George, in a letter to A.L. Rowse

A. L. Rowse

Autoren/Hrsg.

Rowse, A. L.

Leseproben

CHAPTER II

THE MARSHAL OF CALAIS: FROM GRANDFATHER TO GRANDSON

Who seeks the way to win renown,

Or flies with wings of high desire;

Who seeks to wear the laurel crown,

Or hath the mind that would aspire:

Tell him his native soil eschew,

Tell him go range and seek anew.

SIR RICHARD GRENVILLE: In Praise of Sea-faring Men in Hopes of Good Fortune

TWO figures dominated the family history of the Grenvilles in the first half of the sixteenth century. These were Sir Richard Grenville the elder, Marshal of Calais, grandfather of our Sir Richard, who succeeded him as a minor owing to the early death of his father, Roger, the Marshal’s son; and Honor Grenville, Lady Lisle, the Marshal’s aunt, whose marriage to Arthur Plantagent, Lord Lisle, a natural son of Edward IV, and Lord Deputy of Calais, made her much the most exalted member of the family and brought the Grenvilles, so long as her good fortune held, into close contact with the court circle. It was a dazzling situation, not without its disappointments and its dangers.

It was to this marriage that Sir Richard owed his office as High Marshal of Calais, a military position of considerable importance at the one outpost remaining of all our former possessions upon French soil. The position of the Lord Deputy corresponded to that of a modern Viceroy or Governor-General; it was one of great state and responsibility, more especially the latter in these last years of English rule. So long as the Lisles and their nephew Grenville remained at Calais – Lisle was Deputy from 1533 to 1540 – the effective centre of the family was there and Stowe remained deserted, waiting for its master to return.

Lady Lisle’s good fortune did not hold for long; for after seven years in high office, a sudden blow descended upon her husband, as upon so many other persons in the storms of Henry VIII’s later years. Lisle was summoned from Calais, and sent to the Tower, where he ended his days after two years of imprisonment. All his correspondence was impounded, and so we come by the Lisle Papers, which form a sort of Paston Letters for the reign of Henry VIII, in many ways more intimate and revealing than those. From it we derive a most detailed and attractive picture of the life of that society; what is more important for us, it portrays the characters of members of the family circle fully and personally, in a way not possible before, nor for very long after.

But, first, for the family succession at Stowe. Lady Lisle’s father, and the Marshal’s grandfather, was that Sir Thomas with whom we crossed the threshold of the sixteenth century, the first Grenville of whom we have a personal glimpse. He left behind him a mass of children; among others, two sons, Roger his heir and John who was destined for the Church. Of the daughters, Katherine married Sir John Arundell of Lanherne, a very successful match for her, the richest in the county. But we do not hear anything more of her in connection with the family at Stowe, and later there was not much love lost between the Grenvilles and the Arundells. Jane, the eldest daughter, married Sir John Arundell of Trerice, with whose family the Grenvilles remained on the friendliest terms. Unlike the people at Lanherne, who remained straightest and most unyielding of Catholics, the Trerice Arundells went hand-in-hand with the Grenvilles in sympathy with the Reformation and with the new trends in national policy. A third daughter, Agnes, married John Roscarrock. Later we shall find that there was great friendship between our Sir Richard, the younger, and his cousins at Roscarrock, where we find him frequently paying visits. Though the Roscarrocks have all gone now, something of their house remains, an oriel window high up under the roof, a little cramped Tudor courtyard, hidden behind the Georgian front of a farm-house, lying among the same wide placid fields, the sea-gulls coming in from the coast, and from above the house, the view away to Pentire Head and the mouth of Padstow haven.

Sir Thomas had willed his son John, ‘if he be disposed to be a priest, to have the next avoidance of one of the benefices of Bideford or of Kilkhampton.’ He was fortunately so disposed, and thus Kilkhampton came by its Rector (1524–80) who remained in possession throughout all the changes of the Reformation, under seven Bishops of Exeter, Catholic and Protestant, under Henry VIII, Edward VI, Mary and well into the reign of Elizabeth. While still a student at Oxford, he was presented to the family living; he retained it, along with Launcells from 1533 to 1545, then with Week St. Mary till his death in 1580. Altogether he must have had a comfortable time. A trusty servant of the great lady his sister, wrote to her when Latimer and Shaxton resigned their bishoprics: ‘they be not of the wisest sort methinks, for few nowadays will leave and give over such promotions for keeping of opinion.’1 That must have been much what John Grenville thought.

What he did with all his time we do not certainly know. Perhaps he gave himself up to the pleasures of avuncularity, for Richard Carew, that delightful antiquary, says: ‘Sir John Chamond was uncle and great-uncle to at least 300, wherein yet his uncle and neighbour, Master Grenville, Parson of Kilkhampton, did exceed him.’2 The Grenvilles were a prolific lot at this time, but on the whole not long-lived. The Rector’s long span must have meant that he came at the end to represent the family’s continuity more than any other of its numerous figures. Four generations of Grenvilles passed before him; he must have been a very familiar figure, part of the landscape at Kilkhampton, to his great-great-nephew, our Sir Richard. When he came at length to die, in 1580, most of the younger Sir Richard’s career was over: it was only some eleven years away from that fatal day in the Azores.

Parson John’s elder brother, Sir Roger, did not reign long at Stowe, only from 1513 to 1523 – so short a time, indeed, that one wonders how he came by the title ‘the great housekeeper’ with which his descendant endows him.3 He seems to have spent all his time in the west, taking more than his share of local responsibilities, for he was three times Sheriff, in 1510, 1518, and 1522. Like his father he begot a large family of children. It must have been something of a strain to settle them all, and the marriages his children made were on a more homely level than those of the previous generation. Nobody repeated the perilous experiment in grandeur of their aunt, Lady Lisle. They married Cornish Eriseys, Bevils and Tremaynes, Devonshire Fitzes and Specotts. Sir Roger himself left home on one occasion for a celebrated, a too celebrated event, since we find his name among the Cornish gentlemen attending the King to the Field of the Cloth of Gold. That was in 1520. On 21 July, 1523, we find his son Richard, Sewer of the Chamber, named as Sheriff of Cornwall in place of his father, who had died in his year of office, evidently unexpectedly.4 He was only forty-six. And Richard his son reigned in his stead.

Richard very early got down to the duties of his position. The fact that he held the office of Sewer of the Chamber meant that already as a young man he was acquainted with the Court; his subsequent career brought him still more closely into contact. But first he turned his attention to Cornwall. He was one of the Commissioners to collect the subsidy there, next year; he was Sheriff in 1526, and in 1529 was chosen knight of the shire. Along with Sir Piers Edgcumbe, he was returned to that great Parliament which carried through the breach with Rome and with it the Reformation in England. These were years of momentous consequence for the country: one after another the cables were cut which throughout the ages had held this country to the Catholic Church. The gentry of the shires and the burgesses from the towns were consenting parties to every step that was taken, from the abolition of appeals to Rome, to the Act of Supremacy by which the process was consummated. Grenville was in all this: he served throughout that Parliament and was in agreement with what it did; he helped to destroy what it destroyed, the age-long independence of the Church, and to set up what it set up, the supremacy of the Tudor monarchy.

In the early years, he passed his time partly in the west, partly in attendance on Parliament. In 1522, there was an interesting struggle between the Arundells and him for nomination as Sheriff of Devon: it is the first evidence we have of the ill-feeling between them, which was to culminate so tragically in the next generation. We find Thomas Arundell, the clever and intriguing younger son of Sir John – he had been trained as a lawyer and later married the sister of Queen Katherine Howard – writing to Cromwell: ‘Pray let not Sir Richard Grenville be Sheriff of Devonshire; for sith I cannot have it myself, I am so full of charity that I would be right glad that he should go without it.’5 A regular Tudor sentiment, and one that is understandable at all times. However, Grenville had a powerful friend at Court in Sir Francis Bryan, one of the Boleyn circle; and these were the brief days of Anne Boleyn’s ascendancy. Grenville was made Sheriff; and next year, at the splendid...