Полная версия
Cornish Characters and Strange Events
As Dr. Johnson said, "There are some families like potatoes, whose only good parts are underground."
The authorities for the life of Sir John Call are Playfair's British Family Antiquity, 1809; Clement R. Markham's Memoir on the Indian Surveys, 1878; H. G. Nicholl's Forest of Dean; and Neota, by Charlotte Hawkey, 1871.
The grant of the baronetcy to Sir John Call, dated 1795, is now in the Museum of the Royal Institution of Cornwall, at Truro.
JOHN KNILL
In August, 1853, appeared the following account in the Gentleman's Magazine: —
"An eccentric old gentleman of the name Knill, a private secretary some fifty or sixty years ago to the Lord-Lieutenant of Ireland, becoming afterwards collector of the port of S. Ives, built a three-sided pyramid of granite on the top of a high hill, near the town of S. Ives. The pyramid is represented as a pocket edition of an Egyptian one, and in it this gentleman caused a chamber to be built, with a stone coffin, giving out his intention to be buried there, and leaving a charge on an estate to the corporation of S. Ives for the maintenance and repair, etc., of the pyramid. He, however, died in London; and by his latest will, so far from perpetuating the ostentatious idea, desired that his body should be given up to the surgeons for dissection, a penance, it is supposed, for past follies, after which the remains were buried in London. The pyramid, however, still stands as a landmark. On one side, in raised letters in granite, appear the words 'Hic jacet nil.' It was understood that the 'K' and another 'l' would be added when the projector should be placed within; and on the other side, 'Ex nihilo nil fit,' to be filled up in like manner, Knill. The mausoleum obtained then, and still bears the name of Knill's Folly."
This account, full of inaccuracies, called forth a letter to the editor from a relative of John Knill, at Penrose, by Helston, dated October, 1853, which appeared in the November issue of the same magazine. He stated that John Knill was educated for the law, but did not adopt it as a profession. He preferred to accept the office of collector of customs at S. Ives. After a while he was sent as Inspector-General of Customs to the West Indies, whence he returned to his duties at S. Ives, after having discharged his office of inspectorship. In 1777 the Earl of Buckinghamshire, who was recorder of S. Ives, invited Mr. Knill to accompany him to Ireland as his private secretary, when he, the earl, had been made lord-lieutenant. The offer was accepted.
In 1782, thirty years before his death, he erected the mausoleum, partly actuated by a philanthropic motive as affording a landmark to ships approaching the port, and partly by a wish to find employment for men at a time of considerable distress, having also a desire to be buried there, if the ground could be consecrated. This intention was afterwards abandoned.
Mr. Knill resided for some years previous to his death in Gray's Inn, and was a bencher of that society. He died there in 1811, and was buried in the vaults of S. Andrew's, Holborn. On one side of the monument is the word "Resurgam." On the second side, "I know that my Redeemer liveth," and on the third is no inscription at all, and the silly puns given by the informant of the Gentleman's Magazine had no existence save in the imagination of the correspondent.
The same writer adds: "Though he had a wide circle of acquaintances and he was highly esteemed by all who knew him, he resisted every invitation to dine in private society, and for many years past dined at Dolly's Coffee House, Paternoster Row, walking through the chief avenues of the town in the course of the day, in order to meet his friends and to preserve his health by moderate exercise."
We are able to supplement this scanty record from a memoir of him by Mr. John Jope Rogers, of Penrose, published in 1871 by Cunnack, of Helston.
John Knill was born at Callington on January 1st, 1733. His mother was a Pike of Plympton, and her mother was an Edgcumbe of Edgcumbe, it is stated in the memoir, but no entry of any such marriage is in the pedigree of the Edgcumbes in Vivian's Heralds' Visitations of Devon.
Mr. Knill was very desirous to trace a descent from the family of Knill of Knill, in Hereford, but entirely failed to do so.
John Knill's mother, one of the seven daughters of Mr. Pike, married secondly Mr. Jope, and it is thus that the portrait of the subject of this memoir came into the possession of Mr. John Jope Rogers, of Penrose, author of the memoir.
John Knill, according to Davies Gilbert, "served his clerkship as an attorney in Penzance, and from thence removed to the office of a London attorney, where, having distinguished himself by application and intelligence, he was recommended to the Earl of Buckinghamshire, who, at that time, held the political interests of S. Ives, to be his local agent." In the year 1762 he was appointed collector of customs at S. Ives, in Cornwall, and held it during twenty years, at the end of which time he wrote to Mr. William Praed, March 30th, 1782: "I purpose to be in London in May, in order to resign my office of collector, which I shall finally quit at the end of next midsummer quarter."
In November, 1767, he was chosen mayor of S. Ives, and lived in a red-brick house facing the beach, in Fore Street. Although mayor and collector of customs, it was strongly believed that he was in league with smugglers and wreckers.
One day, during the latter half of the eighteenth century, a strange vessel ran on the rocks on the Hayle side of Carrick Gladden, and the crew escaped to land and disappeared. The ship, now a derelict, had apparently no owner, and next day a number of people boarded her, and found her full of chinaware and other smuggled goods. The ship's papers could not be found; they had been carried off when the crew deserted her, and it was strongly supposed that they were destroyed, as implicating Knill and Praed, of Trevetho. The customs officer, Roger Wearne, went on board and stuffed his clothes full of china; having a pair of trousers on with a very ample and baggy seat, he thought he could not do better than stow away some of the choicest pieces of porcelain there. But as he was getting down the side of the ship into the boat, very leisurely, so as not to injure his spoils, a comrade, getting impatient, struck him on the posteriors with the blade of his oar, shouting to him, "Look out sharp, Wearne!" and was startled at the cracking noise that ensued, and the howl of Wearne when the broken splinters of china entered his flesh.
In 1773 the Government sent him to Jamaica to inspect the ports there; he remained in the West Indies one year, and used his eyes and ears, for in 1779 he wrote an account of the religion of the Coromandel negroes for Bryant Edwards' History of the West Indies, from information he then and there gathered. For his services he received from the Board of Customs the substantial sum of £1500. He returned to his duties at S. Ives in 1774. In 1777 he became private secretary to the Earl of Buckinghamshire, in Dublin, but he returned to S. Ives after six months in Ireland. In 1779 he speculated in a bootless search for treasure, which the notorious pirate, Captain John Avery, was supposed, on his return from Madagascar, to have secreted near the Lizard. But, as none of the Lives of that freebooter gave any hint of his having done so, the attempt was not the least likely to lead to satisfactory results. Davies Gilbert says that Knill equipped some small vessels to act as privateers against smugglers, but if local tradition may be relied on, these vessels were only nominally for this purpose, and were actually engaged in running contraband goods; but this is highly improbable.
In 1782 he was employed in the service of the customs as inspector of some of the western ports, making occasional visits to London, where he settled for the rest of his days. In 1784 he purchased chambers in Gray's Inn Square, where he died on March 29th, 1811, at the age of seventy-seven. He was painted by Opie in 1779, dressed in a plain suit of blue, with frilled shirt and ruffles. He made his half-brother, the Rev. John Jope, of S. Cleer, his sole executor.
It was in the year 1782 that John Knill erected his mausoleum on Worral Hill, on land purchased from Henry, Lord Arundell, for five guineas. The total cost of the monument was £226 1s. 6d. Sixpence a year is paid to the owner of Tregenna for a right of way to the obelisk. By a deed dated May 29th, 1797, Knill settled upon the mayor and capital burgesses of S. Ives, and their successors for ever, an annuity of £10 as a rent-charge, to be paid out of the manor of Glivian, in Mawgan, which sum is annually to be put into a chest which is not to be opened except at the end of every five years. Then, out of the accumulated sum, a dinner was to be given to the mayor, collector of customs, and vicar of S. Ives, and two friends to be invited by each of them, and £15 to be equally divided among ten girls, natives of S. Ives, under ten years old, who should, between 10 a.m. and noon on S. James the Apostle's Day, dance and sing round the mausoleum, to the fiddling of a man who was to receive a pound for so doing and for fiddling as the procession of girls went to the obelisk and returned. One pound was to be laid out in white ribbons for the damsels and a cockade for the fiddler. Some of the money was to go to keep the mausoleum in repair, and there were certain benefactions also recorded.
The first Knillian celebration took place in July, 1801, when, according to the will of the founder, a band of little girls, all dressed in white, with two widows and a company of musicians, marched in procession to the top of the hill, where they danced about the monument, then, as Knill desired, sang the Hundredth Psalm to its old melody, and after that returned in the same order to S. Ives. The ceremony still takes place every fifth year.
In dancing the children sing the following in chorus: —
Shun the bustle of the bay,Hasten, virgins, come away;Hasten to the mountain's brow,Leave, O leave, S. Ives below.Haste to breathe a purer air,Virgins fair, and pure as fair;Fly S. Ives and all her treasures,Fly her soft voluptuous pleasures;Fly her sons and all their wiles,Lushing in their wanton smiles;Fly the splendid midnight halls;Fly the revels of her balls;Fly, O fly the chosen seat,Where vanity and fashion meet.Hither hasten from the ring,Round the tomb in chorus sing,And on the lofty mountain's brow, aptly dight,Just as we should be, all in white,Leave all our troubles and our cares below.THOMAS TREGOSS
A certain Roscadden going on a pilgrimage in the days before the Reformation, and being absent some years, was surprised on his return to find that his wife had borne one if not more children. Very much and very naturally put out, he consulted with one John Tregoss, who advised him to settle his estate upon some friend whom he could trust, for the use and benefit of his children whom he would own, and for the wife not to be left absolutely destitute in the event of his death. Mr. Roscadden approved of this counsel, and constituted John Tregoss his heir absolutely, but always with the understanding that the said Tregoss should administer his estate according to the wishes and instructions of Roscadden. But this gentleman dying soon after, John Tregoss entered on possession of the estate, "turned the wife and children out of doors, who for some time were fain to lye in an hog-stye, and every morning went forth to the Dung-hill, and there upon their faces imprecated and prayed that the vengeance of God might fall upon Tregoss and his posterity for this so perfidious and merciless deed.
Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.
Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».
Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.
Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.
1
The letter is given in Household Words, 1852, p. 234.
2
Froude, Hist. of England, X, p. 410.
3
Ibid., XI, 471-2.
4
We have only Peters' own word for this sum. It was probably much less.
5
Vita, J. Barwick, London, 1721.
6
Stubbe, Justification of the War, 1673, pt. ii. p. 83.
7
Whitfeld, Plymouth and Devonport in War and Peace, Plymouth, 1900.
8
Morning Leader, 29th October, 1902.
9
There is an engraving of it in the Annual Report of the Society of Arts for 1821. The life-preserving rocket was exhibited on the Serpentine before the Duke of Clarence, afterwards King William IV, on May 28th, 1819. People looked on as at some firework display, and nothing came of it.
10
Trengrouse's apparatus fitted into a case 4 ft. 3 in. long by 1 ft. 6 in. wide.
11
The cup is still in the possession of the Corporation of Penryn. It is of silver, will hold about three quarts, and is inscribed: "From Mayor to Mayor of the town of Penryn, where they received me in great misery. Jane Killygrew, 1613."