This is
Westcote's account of the plot, given in his "View of
Devonshire": . . . "Only Matthew Paris speaketh of one William de
Marisco who, conspiring the death of Henry III, persuaded a Knight
sometime of his Court to murder him, and with that intent got at night
by a window into the King's bedchamber; but He, in whose protection the
lives of princes are, disappointed him, for the King lay elsewhere. He
seeking from chamber to chamber with a naked weapon in his hand, Mrs.
Byset, one of the Queen's women, sitting late up at her devotions,
shrieking at the fearful sight of him, awakened the King's guard, who
presently took him."

The unhappy and probably demented youth was put to death, and de
Marisco fled to his island, which he further fortified, and there,
attaching to himself a band of outlaws and malefactors, lived by
piracy. Retribution came in its due course, for, having made himself
detested by all decent men, many knights and nobles joined against him,
and contrived to take him by strategem. He was brought to London,
tried, and condemned to death with sixteen accomplices, dragged from
Westminster to the Tower, and there hanged. "When he had there
breathed out his wretched soul," he was drawn and quartered--a literal
account of which, as given in Matthew Paris, I forbear to set down--and
the quarters of his body sent to the four principal cities of England.
His father, Geoffrey, fled to France, and the island came under the
government of Henry de Tracy for the Crown.

Yet in the reign of Edward I, one of the Irish branch of the Marisco
family was reinstated in possession for a few years, though Edward II
gave it to his favourite and his worst enemy, Hugh Spencer. It was
there also, be it remembered, that he purposed taking refuge from his
Barons, but was driven to Wales by contrary winds. In the time of
Edward III the island came to the Luttrells, the great family that
owned Dunster, Minehead, and many manors on the North Somerset coast;
in the time of Westcote, in the reign of James I, it was in the
possession of the Grenvilles.

It is difficult, and perhaps tedious, to attempt to follow in detail
the many families who had, or laid claim to, possession of Lundy
throughout the course of history; it is clear that it was a stronghold
of importance, from the frequent references to it in our records. It
was claimed and loaned and bought and held in fee from the eleventh to
the nineteenth century. It was