Mohun was created Baron of Okehampton in 1628. His great-grandson was
Charles, the fifth and last Lord Mohun. This man, possessed of a
passionate and vindictive temper, lost his father early; his mother
married again, and his education was neglected. When he had scarcely
attained the age of twenty he was mixed up in the murder of Mountford,
the actor. He was tried before his peers in 1692, and was acquitted;
but there can be no doubt that he was associated in the murder. Seven
years afterwards, in 1699, he was again tried for his life, along with
the Earl of Warwick, for the murder of Captain Coote. He was again
acquitted. This second escape sobered him for a while. For long he and
the Duke of Hamilton entertained ill-feeling towards each other,
occasioned by some money disagreement. This came to a head in 1712,
when it ended in a challenge. Which it was, however, who challenged the
other was never certainly decided. Colonel Macartney was Lord Mohun's
second, and Colonel Hamilton exercised the same office for the duke.
They met in Hyde Park on Saturday morning, the 15th November, and
swords were the weapons employed. A furious encounter ensued, the
combatants fighting to the death with the savagery of demons, so that
when the keepers of the park, hearing the clash of swords, hurried to
the spot, they found both the Duke of Hamilton and Lord Mohun weltering
in their blood and dying, and the two seconds also engaged in mortal
combat. The keepers separated the latter. Then Colonel Hamilton and one
keeper lifted the duke; Macartney and the other endeavoured to do the
same by Lord Mohun, who, however, expired, and his body was sent home
in the coach that had brought him. Swift, writing to Stella at the
time, says that, "while the duke was over him, Mohun shortened his
sword, and stabbed him in the shoulder to the heart." According to the
evidence of the surgeons who examined the bodies, each had received
four frightful wounds, and both appeared to have given each other the
mortal thrust at the same instant.
Fowey has for long been a nursery of Treffrys and Rashleighs, though
the latter really issue from a place called by the same name near
Eggesford, in Devon, where is an interesting old house, their mansion,
with beautiful Elizabethan plaster-work, and their very peculiar
arms--a cross or between, in the dexter chief quarter a Cornish chough
arg., beaked and legged gu., in the sinister chief quarter a text T,
and in base two crescents, all arg. A coat, this, that suggests that
some story must be connected with its origin, but what that story was
is now forgotten. The history of Fowey is interwoven with that of the
Rashleighs and the Treffrys.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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