Plymouth (24 page)
Authors: Laura Quigley
Grenville proved more sadistic and corrupt than even the Plymouth leaders could have imagined. Grenville became a war profiteer, kidnapping rich men in Devon and holding them in the horrors of Lydford Gaol until their families paid a large ransom; he thereby amassed a personal fortune in land and money. One story is particularly famous: while travelling between Plympton and Tavistock, Grenville and his party came upon four Plymouth soldiers gathering wood. Rather than take them prisoner, Grenville forced one of the Plymouth soldiers to hang each of his company from the nearest tree. Grenville then hanged the last man himself.
Throughout the English Civil War, the gaol on St Nicholas’ Island (now called Drake’s Island) was used to imprison Royalist dissenters and traitors. After the Restoration, it was the turn of the anti-Royalists and non-conformers to be imprisoned there.
One such was Abraham Cheare, who was a pastor of Plymouth’s Nonconformist Church and a victim of the religious intolerance that hounded Plymouth’s inhabitants. In 1661, he was sent first to Exeter Gaol, charged with encouraging religious assemblies; he was then released in 1662, just as King Charles II removed 2,000 religious dissidents from their parishes (including the preacher for St Andrew’s church in Plymouth). Cheare was imprisoned again in Exeter for holding unlawful assemblies. The conditions in Exeter Gaol were appalling and he spent many hours writing to his congregation telling them how he was relying on his faith to survive. His sister finally secured his release in 1665, but his return to Plymouth brought him back into the hands of his enemies, and he was held in the noxious prison near the Guildhall for a month before being banished to St Nicholas’ Island, where he soon fell ill and died, aged just forty.
Drake’s Island in 1900, with the pier in the foreground. Prisoners were held on the island during the civil war. (LC-DIG-ppmsc-08786)
By January 1645, Grenville had had enough of fighting skirmishes with Plymouth’s forces and launched a full-scale attack – with over 6,000 of the King’s men – against the central forts along the line. But the weather saved the city. The weather in Plymouth is notoriously wet in the winter months, and in January 1645 it didn’t just rain – it rained for two days, a torrent that filled the ditches with water and made earthworks into mud. Again and again, Grenville sent in his forces to take the earthworks at all costs, only for his men and their horses to drown, sucked into the mud. When one of Grenville’s own officers protested at the useless loss of life, Grenville ran him through with his sword.
Hundreds of years later, the defenses can still be seen. (LC-DIG-ppmsc-08785)
Royalist cannon thundered through the night and at last Grenville’s forces managed to take two of the forts along Plymouth’s line of defences. However, Plymouth’s soldiers battled on and killed sixty of Grenville’s men at Maudlyn Fort, turning Grenville’s own cannon against the oncoming Royalists.
At the fort of Little Pennycomequick, Grenville’s men launched a trap: they somehow managed to take the fort, silently slaughtering every man inside. Then, quietly, they lay in wait, poised for their moment to take the town. But a Plymouth officer called Birch, approaching Little Pennycomequick, realised that the stillness inside the fort was not a good sign. He calmly approached the structure and someone within cried, ‘Stand, who are you for?’ Birch replied, ‘for the Parliament’ – and the rain of gunfire that responded told Birch the fort was taken. He instructed his soldiers to wait for Grenville’s men to run out of ammunition. Then, while they were reloading, Birch and his men charged the fort. Hand-to-hand combat left the fort’s walls and floor soaked in blood – and Plymouth victorious yet again.
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