Cornish Characters and Strange EventsBaring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
History
Cornish Characters and Strange Events
Baring-Gould, S. (Sabine)
Cornwall (England : County) -- Biography; Cornwall (England : County) -- History; Legends -- England -- Cornwall (County)
"At the news whereof the other condemned wretches aforesaid at the
gallows lamented nothing more than that they had not the company of
that old Jezebel Killigrew at that place as in justice they ought to
be (to use their own words), and begged Almighty God that some
remarkable judgment might befall her and her posterity, nay, and all
those that were instrumental in procuring her freedom, and observed
hereupon it was, that her grandson Sir William Killigrew spent the
whole paternal estate of his ancestors, as did Sir Thomas Arundell,
Knt., son of Sir John Arundell, aforesaid, and John Hals, Esq., son of
Sir Nicolas Hals, Knt., in their own times, but alas, several and
public revolutions of this kind; and all other in worldly affairs are
carried on by the judgment and providence of God, not the
determination of men, especially such barbarous ruffians as these
criminals, though these things happened according to the malefactors'
direful imprecations in some sense."
Hals in the above account makes several blunders. The affair to which
he alludes took place in January, 1583, and the Dame Killigrew who was
involved in it was Mary, wife of Sir John, the grandfather of the Sir
John who divorced his wife Jane. Another mistake is that the ship was
not one of the Hanseatic town merchant vessels, but was Spanish.
Moreover, Hals is wrong in saying that the two Spanish merchants were
murdered. On the contrary, Lady Killigrew's ruffians threw overboard
and drowned the whole ship's crew, with the exception of the two
merchants, who were on shore and so escaped.
The facts are as follows:--
The _Mary_ of S. Sebastian, a Spanish ship of 144 tons burden, owned
by two merchants, John de Chavis and Philip de Oryo, the latter being
as well the captain, arrived in Falmouth harbour on January 1st,
1582-3, and cast anchor within the bar, just under Sir John
Killigrew's house of Arwenack. Here for lack of wind it remained, and
the owners went on shore and took up their quarters in an inn at
Penryn, awaiting a favourable breeze. At this time there was no open
breach of peace between England and Spain. It was not till 1585 that
Elizabeth sent over an army into the Netherlands to oppose the forces
of Philip II, and despatched a fleet under Sir Francis Drake into the
West Indies to molest the Spanish galleons and colonies there.
Lady Killigrew seems to have formed a scheme for robbing the merchant
vessel and massacring the crew and the owners, and several efforts
were made to induce the two merchants to quit their inn at Penryn and
return on board, so that the whole of those on the vessel and the
merchants might be got rid of, and not a witness left. However, this
failed; Chavis and Oryo did not return to their ship.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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