the scene of a wild and fantastic
adventure in the reign of Charles I, when three Turkish pirate-ships
swooped upon it, and made slave-raids into Devon and Cornwall, taking
sixty men out of a church one Sunday morning, and carrying them away
prisoner. "Egypt was never more infested with caterpillars," wrote the
captain of a ship of war in 1630, "than the Channel with Biscayers."

The Turks sailed south with their human booty, but the Channel and the
Devon coast became the prey of an English buccaneer, the famous Admiral
Nutt, who was more boldly and splendidly piratical even than the
buccaneers of "Treasure Isle," and who faced the King's navy and got
clear to his stronghold of Lundy, though they dropped thirty great shot
among his fleet, of which Nutt received ten through his own ship. What
became of the Admiral I do not know; he was not captured and hanged,
and so may have sailed away to the Barbadoes or the Mediterranean, and
there have met his death and scuttled his ship in a last fight against
odds, or perhaps been marooned by a mutinous crew, or set adrift in an
open boat to die of hunger and thirst, or been stabbed in a drunken
scuffle over a bottle of rum.

He passes away from the history of Lundy, but now a French man-o'-war
and now a Spanish made raids up the Bristol Channel and upon Lundy,
until Thomas Bushel held it for Charles I and established some measure
of order. It was claimed from Bushel by Lord Say and Sele as his
"inheritance," and he wrote to the King for permission to deliver it
up, but proposing:

". . . If your Majesty shall require my longer stay here, be confident,
sir, I shall sacrifice both life and fortune before the loyalty of

"Your obedient humble servant,
"THOMAS BUSHEL."

Bushel received the following letter from Charles, which I transcribe
because of the light which it throws on the King's character, a letter
written in answer to a faithful and disinterested servant in a mood of
petulant self-pity. ". . . Now, since the place is inconsiderable in
itself, and yet may be of great advantages to you in respect of your
mines, we do hereby give you leave to use your discretion in it, with
this caution, that you do take example from ourselves, and be not
over-credulous of vain promises, which hath made us great only in our
sufferings and will not discharge our debts." This letter, more than
any single document I know, shows the hopeless weakness of the Stuart
character, and