The Parochial History of Cornwall, Volume 3 (of 4)
History
The Parochial History of Cornwall, Volume 3 (of 4)
Cornwall (England : County) -- History; Geology -- England -- Cornwall (County)
At a subsequent period, when wars were levied in support of
principles, and when men of honour and of virtue engaged on either
side, as their early prejudices, investigations, or accidental
experience induced them to believe that one or the other would prove
most conducive to the public good――the Trevanions were less
successful. They asserted their conviction in arms, that the country
would be best governed by concentrating hereditary power in a single
man; and Mr. John Trevanion, bearing a Colonel’s commission, shared in
the military glories of the western army, and fell under the walls of
Bristol. His father experienced the mitigated fate of those who were
vanquished in this contest, by compounding for his estate; and when,
after a long interval, his friends came again into power, and
succeeded in placing at the head of affairs the son of their former
chief, those immediately surrounding the seat of government possessed
but slender means, and still less inclination, to risk their own
safety by indemnifying those at a distance, who had suffered in the
Good Old Cause.
The grandson obtained however the popular reward of representing
Cornwall in parliament; and the Editor has in his possesssion a letter
addressed by Mr. John Trevanion to his great uncle Mr. Henry Davies, a
hundred and twenty-five years ago, declaring his readiness to spend
his fortune and to shed his blood, as his ancestors had done, in
support of the same cause. This gentleman died in 1740, leaving
William Trevanion his son and heir, and two daughters, the eldest of
whom married John Bettesworth, LL.D. Dean of the Arches, and the
younger married Admiral John Byron, well known in his younger days by
a narrative of the disastrous expedition of the Wager Store ship,
commanded by Captain Cheep, as a part of the fleet conducted by
Commodore Anson round the promontory of South America, in the year
1740, and of his own adventures after the ship was wrecked on the
coast of Patagonia, the dead reckoning giving them an erroneous
longitude of fifteen degrees to the west, till his return in 1746.
Admiral Byron is now better known as grandfather to the most popular
of recent poets.
William Trevanion served in parliament for the borough of Tregoney,
and died in 1767 without children, when the male line of this family
became extinct. He was succeeded by Mr. John Bettesworth, his sister’s
son, and his son John Trevanion Purnel Bettesworth Trevanion, esq. is
now the possessor of Carhayes, where he has substituted a magnificent
gothic castle, after a plan of Nash, the architect of Buckingham
Palace and of Regent Street, for the house described by Mr. Tonkin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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