If we stand close below the church tower, and look carefully at the stones above us, we shall see the familiar badge of the ragged staff, the cognisance of the Kingmaker. The Foyens, when Warwick allowed them to go on with their piracies, naïvely put his badge upon their new church in acknowledgment of his kindness, and persevered in their filibustering ways. Edward IV., however, subdued them by a most unkingly trick. His first messenger they returned to him shorn of his ears, “at which affront the King was so distasted” that he sent a body of men to Lostwithiel, the shire town, ostensibly to enlist volunteers. The Gallants, who never asked for anything better than to fight the French, trooped to Lostwithiel at the summons of their King. They were all arrested; and the chain that guarded their harbour was given to Dartmouth. I believe there are two links of the chain still to be seen at Menabilly, behind the hill.
From the windows of the Fowey Hotel we can see, at Polruan, one of the square grey forts to which the ends of this chain were fastened. The ruins of the other are opposite to it. These valiant little forts have seen a good deal of service, and defended their port long after their chain was forfeited. There was a Dutch ship that came to this harbour-mouth one day in pursuit of an English fleet, and defied the forts in the insolence of her seventy guns--“to the great hurt,” says Hals, “of the Dutch ship … and the no small credit and reputation of Foy’s little castles.”
Fowey’s fighting reputation has always been great, since the day when she owned “sixty tall ships” and sent forty-seven of them to the siege of Calais. To see the harbour that has done so much for England we must loiter in a boat beside the jetties and among the creeks; we must pass the dripping walls of gardens, and the flights of steps where the seaweed clings, and the houses whose back-doors open on the water; we must watch the lading of the ships with china-clay--ships from Sweden and Russia and France--and pause before the picture that Bodinnick makes on the hillside. It was to this hillside, says the story, that Sir Reynold de Mohun came to fetch his hawk, when it killed its quarry in the Fitzwilliams’ garden up there at Hall. Walking in the garden was the fair Elizabeth Fitzwilliam, and on the moment he lost his heart to her, and as she thought him “a very handsome personable young gentleman,” they became the first Mohuns of Hall. Whether they were really introduced by the hawk is doubtful, but they were certainly married--and that not merely once but twice: for the bishop divorced them against their will, and it was only by appealing to the Pope that they won leave to live happily ever after.[8]