exeter is called by those who know her best and love her most the ‘queen city of the west.’ to historians she is perhaps better epithetically remembranced as the ‘ever faithful,’ loyal and staunch through the good fortune or adversity of the causes for which she has, with closed and guarded gates, held fast the key of the west. she has suffered much at different periods of her history for this loyalty; from the time when, declaring against the usurpation of stephen, her citizens fought and starved within the walls; through the centuries to the time of perkin warbeck, the impostor, and so on to the civil war between king and parliament, when the citizens were more loyal than their rulers and were disarmed and kept under surveillance until the royalists came and took the place, themselves to be dispossessed a few years later.
the key of the west
loyalty, tried for so many centuries at so great a cost, broke down finally in 1688, and the city gates were opened to the prince of orange. had james been less of a bigot, and had his hell-hounds, jeffreys and kirke, been animated with less zeal, who knows what these devonshire men would have done? possibly{305} it may be said that william’s fleet would, under such circumstances, never have found its way into tor bay, nor that historic landing have been consummated at brixham. true enough; but granting the landing, the proclamation at newton abbot, and the advance to the gates of exeter, how then if james had been less of the stubborn oak and more of the complaisant willow? can it be supposed that they would have welcomed this frigid, hawk-nosed foreigner of the cold eye and silent tongue? and if the dutchman and his mynheers had been ill-received at exeter, what then? take the map and study it for answer. you will see that the ‘ever faithful’ stands at the gates of the west. the traveller always has had to enter these portals if he would go in either direction, and the more imperative was this necessity to those coming from west to east. even now the traveller by railway passes through exeter to reach further devon and cornwall, equally with him who fares the high-road.
what chance, then, of success would a foreign expedition command were its progress barred at this point? less mobile than a single traveller, or party of mere travellers, it could not well evade the struggle for a passage by taking another route. william and his following might, in such an event, have at great risk forced the passage of the treacherous exe estuary, but even supposing that feat achieved, there is difficult country beyond, before the road to london is reached. to the northwards of his march from brixham lies dartmoor and its outlying hills, and let those who have explored those inhospitable wastes{306} weigh the chances of a force marching through the hostile countryside in the depth of winter to outflank exeter.
but all hope for james’s cause was gone, and although the spirits of the ambitious william sank when, on entering the streets of exeter, he was only received with a chilly curiosity, he was not to know—for how could that most stony of champions read into the hearts of these people?—that their generous enthusiasm for faith and freedom was quite crushed out of existence by the bloody work of three years before, when the peasantry saw with horror the progress of the fiendish jeffreys marked by a line of gibbets; when they could not fare forth upon the highways and byeways without presently arriving at some golgotha rubricated with the dishonoured remains of one or other of their fellows; and when many a cottage had its empty chair, the occupants dead or sold into a slavery worse than death.
the people received william with a well-simulated lack of interest, because they knew what would be their portion were he defeated and james again triumphant. they could not have cherished any personal affection for the prince of orange, but can only, at the best of it, have had an impersonal regard for him as a champion of their liberties; and of helping such champions they had already acquired a bitter surfeit. thus it was that the back of loyalty was broken, and exeter, for once in her story, belied her motto, semper fidelis, the gift of queen elizabeth.
the city sword-bearer
the gifts that loyalty has brought exeter may soon be enumerated, for they comprise just a number of{307} charters conferred by a long line of sovereigns; an elizabethan motto; a portrait of his sister, presented by charles the second; a sword of honour, and an old hat, the gifts of henry the seventh in recognition of exeter’s stand against perkin warbeck in 1497. against these parchments, this picture, and the miscellaneous items of motto, sword, and old hat, there are centuries of lighting and of spoliation on account of loyalty to be named. it seems a very one-sided affair, even though the old hat be a cap of maintenance and heraldically notable. among the maces and the loving-cups, and all the civic regalia of exeter, these objects are yet to be seen. old headgear will wear out, and so the cap, in its present form, dates back only to the time of james the first. it is by no means a gossamer, weighing, as it does, seven pounds. as may be seen by the accompanying illustration, it is a broad-brimmer of the most pronounced type.
the crown fixed upon the point of the sword-sheath belongs to the same period, while a guinea of the same reign may be seen let into the metal of the pommel. on occasions of state, at exeter, this sword is carried before the mayor and corporation by their official sword-bearer.
image unavailable: the exeter city sword-bearer.
the exeter city sword-bearer.
the dignified effect of the affair, however, is{308} generally spoiled by the commonplace black kid gloves worn by him, and by his everyday clothes visible under the official robes, which can be seen in the illustration.
of late the cap has been replaced by one built on the lines of those worn by the yeomen of the guard in the tower of london, the old cap being thought too historical to be any longer exposed to the danger of being worn, while possibly some feelings of humanity towards the sword-bearer may have dictated the replacing of the seven-pound hat by something lighter. it is now preserved in the guildhall, where it may be seen by curious visitors.
