Cornwallis

“ On his return from France, Cornwallis retired to Culford, where he lived a peaceful life for three years until a demand was suddenly made upon him to go to India again as governor-general and commander-in-chief, he felt that it was a desperate thing for a man of sixty-six to undertake such a task, but his sense of duty forbade him to refuse, and he left England in March 1805. ”

“ As they sat thus talking, Cornwallis passed the house. He appeared tall and sat very erect, wearing his scarlet uniform, richly trimmed with gold lace and heavy epaulets. Most of the officers, our narrator says, "were rather short, portly men, well dressed and of genteel appearance, and did not look as if they had ever been exposed to any hardship, their skins being as white and delicate as is customary for females brought up in large cities or towns." ”

“ This independence lost him his seat at the board of trade, but his influence remained so great, that he was one of the ten chief persons in Ireland to whom Cornwall is broached the first idea of a legislative union with England in 1798. Cornwallis, in his despatch of 27 Nov. 1798, writes that he had consulted seven leading peers, the attorney- and solicitor-general, and Conolly on the subject, and says that 'Mr. Conolly had always been a decided friend to an union, and was ready to give it his best assistance' (Cornwallis Correspondence ii. 450) . ”

“ In this interval, Cornwallis arrived with the troops under his command, thus adding to the strength of the enemy, and greatly increasing their confidence and courage.
Indeed, Cornwallis was not slow in deciding to hazard an engagement, although he knew that the contest would still be unequal. Gates had superior numbers. But a retreat would be to abandon all that he had gained in South Carolina and Georgia; and in effect would be the ruin of the royal cause. ”

“ According to Cornwallis, they professed that this decision was taken against their inclination, and that the French had threatened them with destruction at the hands of the Indians if they remained. [Footnote: Public Archives, Canada. Nova Scotia A, vol. xxxvii, p. 7.] On May 25 the inhabitants of Annapolis Royal came with a like petition.
In reply to these petitions Cornwallis reminded the inhabitants that the province was the country of their fathers, and that they should enjoy the product of their labours. ”

“ On leaving Cambridge, where he apparently took no degree, Cornwallis obtained a commission in the guards, and some years later succeeded his brother Frederick in the command of the independent company in Jersey. In 1709 the system of parliamentary lotteries was introduced, and Cornwallis is credited with having been the original projector. ”

“ Papa almost never. He and Nellie went to matinées and dime-museums galore, the gardener made him a garden, he had rabbits bought for him, white mice, too; also a squirrel. Life was apparently one orgy of bewildering novelties.
Then the baby began to be cunning. If Cornwallis knelt close by Mrs. Tray and put his head closer yet, the baby's little hands would flap against his face and delight his very soul. One day when he was enjoying the feeble little blows, he suddenly made a remark which drove Mrs. Tray to give his sister to Nellie and rush from the room. ”

“ The action affords a remarkable proof of the moral superiority which the victory of the 1st of June, and the known efficiency of the crews, had given to the British navy. The reputation of Cornwallis was immensely raised, and the praise given him was no doubt the greater because he was personally very popular with officers and men. ”

“ Meantime a rumor of the capture of Cornwallis and his army at Yorktown was wafted along upon the southern breeze; the effect of which was such upon the people, as to induce Allen and Fay to write to the British commissioners with St Leger, that it would be imprudent at that particular conjuncture for him to promulgate the royal proclamation, and urging delay to a more auspicious moment The messenger with these despatches had not been longer than an hour at the head-quarters of St. Leger at Ticonderoga, before the rumor respecting Cornwallis was confirmed by an express. ”

“ That evening, a wonder far greater than the coming of any mere baby took place in Cornwallis's existence—he went to Grandpapa's to sleep! He had never slept outside of his papa's house before—except at the cottage by the sea which Papa bought some summers—and so he was all excitement when Nellie told him. They had asked Nellie to come, too; Grandmamma was going to let them have the room next to the billiard-room. It was most pleasantly important to pack up, and bundle the velocipede into the tonneau of the Fearless Kerosene, and Nellie liked it, too. ”

“ They drove to a side door, and he and Papa got down and went inside.
“Now, Major, listen to me,” said Papa, not exactly crossly, but in such a way that Cornwallis felt he must be obeyed, whatever came. “Your mamma is ill. She has been ill a long time. She may not know you; she hasn't known anyone for all the long time; she doesn't know that there is a baby—any baby except you. You mustn't mind what she says, and you mustn't mind if she says nothing.” ”

“ Cornwallis sobbed. “I was what she wanted—I'm her baby; I always was what she wanted. I used to run away from her because she wanted me so tight always. I've thought how I used to run away every one of these days. That's why I let Elaine pull my hair. She's never had Mamma hug her—she's only just had Mrs. Tray—and I let her pull as hard as she could because I was always thinking how was she going to—to live—without any mamma{bar|2}}””
“Cornwallis, stop,” said his father, very gently but very firmly; “grown-up people make mistakes often, but we are trying to do right just as much as you are. ”

“ Cornwallis was the first to become sober.
“Well, it's no wonder we feel happy,” he said; “we all know we're all right here today, and all this year we've been crying because everybody thought somebody wasn't.
I don't think that's right in a family.”
Mamma put out her hand and pulled him closer yet (by that same unfortunate collar) .
“Oh, Baby,” she said, “you always knew more than all the rest of us put together.”
“I do when I'm told things I ask,” he replied with dignity.
Just then Norah came in with Elaine's cunning little birthday cake on a silver tray. ”

“ Tray (who came and went spasmodically) and Lotty, who cooked, and the runabout, and Star to drive. There was a telephone between the two houses, and a system of inter-domestic dining and lunching far too intricate for me to elucidate, and Grandpapa always came at six o'clock and took Mamma out in the motor, and Cornwallis went regularly on his velocipede to see Grandmamma every day at ten in the morning, and again after his nap at half-past three in the afternoon. It was during one of the latter calls that his grandmother asked him his ideas as to Santa Claus's bringing a baby. ”

“ Strikingly like Brittany in physical aspects, Southern and Western Cornwall is a land of the sea, of rolling plains and moorlands rather than of high hills and mountains, a land of golden-yellow furze-bloom, where noisy crowds of black crows and white sea-gulls mingle together over the freshly-turned or new-sown fields, and where in the spring-time the call of the cuckoo is heard with the song of the skylark. Like the Isle of Man, from the earliest ages Cornwall has been a meeting-place and a battle-ground for contending races. ”

“ One of the charms of Cornwall is that it gives one the sense of being such an old country, as if things had gone exactly as they do now, not merely since the days of King Arthur, but for ever so long before then. The Romans, the Phœnicians, nay, the heroes of pre-historic ages, such as Jack the Giantkiller and the giant Cormoran, seemed to be not impossible myths, as we gradually quitted civilisation in the shape of a village or two, and a few isolated farm-houses, and came out upon the wild district known as Goonhilly Down. ”

“ Here in out-of-the-way places are relics of forgotten creeds and peoples, earthworks, amphitheatres, castles, the caves of smugglers, and the subterranean hiding-places of neolithic man. There is so much to interest, so much to see—almost too much it would seem, certainly too much for any one holiday; but Cornwall is a place to go to again and again, to go to till it seems as your own land, and its people have forgiven you for being a "foreigner."
This Cornish folk, clannish but kindly, has of late years been decreasing. ”

“ The early history of Cornwall is inextricably mixed up with that of the saints who settled there, or who sprang from the native royal family. We have unhappily no annals, hardly a Cornish record, of those early times. Irish, Welsh, Bretons, have been wiser, and have preserved theirs; and it is to them we are forced to appeal to know anything of the early history of our peninsula. As to the saintly lives, it is true that they contain much fable ”

“ There is no part of our native country of England so little known, no region so seldom trodden by the feet of the tourist or the traveller, as the middle moorland of old Cornwall. A stretch of wild heath and stunted gorse, dotted with swelling hills, and interspersed with rugged rocks, either of native granite or rough-hewn pillar, the rude memorial of ancient art, spreads from the Severn Sea on the west to the tall ridge of Carradon on the east, and from Warbstow Barrow on the north to the southern civilisation of Bodmin and Liskeard. ”

“ Cornwall has received princes from thence, and they from us. We had heretofore mutual interchanges of private families, but as to our speech we are alike careless. We can understand words of one another, but have not the benefit of conferences with one another in our ancient tongue. I have met with some Friars born and bred there, who, one would think, should be able to discourse of their own pristine tongue, and of their own birthplaces, yet found them, though not totally ignorant that such things had been, yet insensible and careless of their former condition. ”

“ Domesday Book shows that, with three exceptions, all the landholders in Cornwall were, in the days of Edward the Confessor, Saxons. When William the Norman set about the conquest of England, he was joined by several Breton nobles, who, by way of reward, received considerable grants of land in Cornwall. Richard Fitz Turold, the ancestor of the baronial house of Cardinan, received thirty-one manors, Brient six, Blohiu five, Jovin thirteen, Wihumar three and Judhel one. ”

“ Mr. Hals' work is given without alteration, except considerable omissions of long histories, from the Bollandists and other writers of legends, relative to obscure Saints, little known, or deserving of being known; and in many cases owing their supposed connection with Cornwall, entirely to the writer's imagination; and in the opposite extreme, of the lives of personages most worthy of being preserved and studied in general history, of Apostles, of Emperors of Rome, and Kings, but quite as irrelevant as the former, to a History of Cornwall. ”

“ Cornwall has produced admirable sailors, men who have won deathless renown in warfare at sea, as "Old Dreadnought" Boscawen, Pellew, Lord Exmouth, etc., and daring and adventurous smugglers, like "The King of Prussia," who combined great religious fervour with entire absence of scruple in the matter of defrauding the king's revenue. It has produced men of science who have made for themselves a world-fame, as Adams the astronomer, and Sir [Pg viii] Humphry Davy the chemist; men who have been benefactors to their race, as Henry Trengrouse, Sir Goldsworthy Gurney, and Trevithick. ”

“ The Bookworm said Cornwall was a bigger place than it looked, or than could be gripped between the arms of the Atlantic, because of the tributaries it sent all over the world, every man taking with him a bit of Cornish earth and love, and setting up a new colony beyond the seas, just as the old Greeks carried with them some of the fire from the ancient hearths. ”

“ His chief dwelling and place of residence was at Jutsworth, near Saltash and Trematon, where he married and had issue one only daughter named Agnes, as some say, others Beatrix, who was married to Reginald Fitz-Harry, base son of King Henry I., by his concubine Anne Corbett, in whose right he was made Earl of Cornwall, after William Earl of Cornwall aforesaid had forfeited the same, by attainder of treason against the Conqueror and his sons, and was deprived thereof. ”

“ On looking at the map of Cornwall, one is surprised to see it studded with the names of saints, of whom one knows nothing, and these names of a peculiarly un-English sound. The fact is, that Cornwall was, like Ireland, a land of saints in the fifth and sixth centuries. These were either native Cornwelsh, or were Welsh saints who migrated thither to seek on the desolate moors or wild, uninhabited coasts of Cornwall solitary places, where they might live to God, and fight demons, like the hermits of Egypt. Cornwall was the Thebaid of the Welsh. ”

“ The seeds of Puritanism sown by men like Orchard and Innes did not die, but lay germinating in the hearts of the Cornish people, rendering possible the great work of John Wesley a hundred years later. Such men succeeded in a great measure in destroying the pre-Reformation mechanical ideals of salvation in the hearts of the people, which prepared the way for the stirring of the dry bones in future years.
Richard Carew's Survey of Cornwall, published in 1602, gives a vivid picture of the conditions of life in Cornwall prevailing during the period we have been considering in this chapter. ”

“ It is no uncommon thing for a Cornishman to build his own house, make his own shoes, be both fisherman and miner, and, possibly, small shop-keeper besides; and wherever the Cornish miner emigrates, he is pretty sure to take the lead in enterprise and danger.
Wilkie Collins says: "As a body of men they are industrious, intelligent, sober, and orderly, neither soured by hard work, nor depressed by harsher privations"; and the old poet Taylor, in 1649, writes: "Cornwall is the compleate and repleate Home of Abundance, for high, churlish hills and affable, courteous people. ”