olonel Venner commanded a regiment in
Monmouth's haphazard and ill-fated army in 1685. Wade, a renegade lawyer
from Holland, with a captain's commission, served in his regiment, and
after the defeat of Monmouth at Sedgemoor, Wade and Ferguson (a notorious
factious Scotchman, and the father of all plots) escaped to Bridgewater
and from thence got passage down to Ilfracombe. There they hired a small
ship and worked their way up the coast, hoping to rescue other refugees;
they were sighted and chased by one of the King's frigates, and were
forced to run ashore, when Lynton became the scene of one of those grim
and terrible rebel hunts which made the West Country tragic and bloody
during that summer of 1685. Wade was discovered at Brendon by John de
Wichehalse; he made a run for it, and was shot by de Wichehalse's
servant, John Babb. The Babbs were said never to have prospered
afterwards; their crops failed, the fisheries failed, and they became
extinct in the second generation. The last of them, Ursula Babb, the
grand-daughter of John, was to be seen wandering up and down the little
beach of Lynmouth, a half-crazed old crone, cursed with the evil-eye, and
babbling disjointed and incoherent stories of the ruin of the de
Wichehalses.

Partly because of discord between him and the Venner family, partly
because of the strong feeling which was aroused locally by the action of
de Wichehalse, who had the body of a rebel who was shot in Bonham Wood
quartered and hung on the paled gate opposite Lee, he left Lynton and
went to live in London. The simple Devonshire estates could not support
the expenses of living in London; bit after bit his property was
mortgaged and frittered away, and when he died he possessed East Leymouth
(now Lynmouth) only, which he left to his daughter Mary. She it was who
became the heroine of all the stories of the "last of the de
Wichehalses," which, indeed, she was. She met a sudden and unexplained
death off Duty Point, and the White Lady of Castle Rock--a phenomenon
caused by a small aperture, bearing a slight resemblance to a woman's
figure, among the dark masses of the rock--is popularly supposed to be
connected with her fate. Of her brothers, Charles, the younger, was
killed at the Battle of Almanza in 1707, when the English, under Lord
Galway, lost 18,000 men and all their transport, and the elder brother,
John, died at Port Mahon, in Minorca, in 1721, while on garrison duty,
and this branch