So considerable, indeed, was the damage done that no less a personage than the King of France himself, Charles VIII, known as the Affable, took the matter up and lodged a complaint with Edward IV. It was often a case of rough justice, or rather injustice, in those days. Indeed, justice unalloyed was not easily obtained, as the men of Fowey were speedily to find, for when the king appointed a commission of inquiry to sit at Lostwithiel, some at least of the commissioners appear to have remembered that Fowey men were quick to avenge themselves. That, indeed, on occasion, they had been no respecters of authority (having but a short time before docked a king’s herald of his ears), and so they did not come straight to the point with the men who had transgressed, but entrapped them, and in this manner. The commissioners having let it be known that they were come into those parts because the king required men and ships for a new expedition, the Fowey men were induced to ascend the river to Lostwithiel, and promptly (for their loyalty was unquestionable, though their obedience at times left something to be wished for) placed their lives and ships at their Sovereign’s disposal. But the appeal to their loyalty was but a ruse of the commissioners, who, “when the chief men of Fowey were come, promptly seized upon them, took their goods, and without any delay hung their leader.” But this was not all, nor the worst, that could happen, for their rivals, the men of the Dart, were allowed to come to Fowey, to seize the vessels in harbour, and remove the chain which (like the one that guarded approach to Dartmouth) was stretched across the mouth of the haven to bar the entrance against their enemies. What the feelings of the Fowey men may have been at this severe and somewhat unjust punishment (for, after all, they were not worse pirates than the men of other Devon and Cornish ports) history does not tell us, but certain it is that the town never entirely recovered from the blow, and that its later prosperity was but a poor shadow of its old wealth and reputation. No longer did the men of Fowey range the Channel, making strenuous and successful warfare upon the king’s enemies, and thus for full two centuries the town played no great part in the history of the west country. Indeed, it is not until the reign of Charles II and the year of the Great Fire that the veil which hides the doings of Fowey lifts for a moment, and shows us that the ancient daring and the sturdy spirit of the inhabitants still survived. After the action in the Channel between the Dutch and English fleets in June, 1666, the latter chased the Virginia fleet, which took refuge in the Fowey estuary and river, and, as Hals puts it, “sailed up the branches thereof as far as they could and grounded themselves on the mud lands thereof.”