Sir Richard Grenville arrived in Devon in 1628, determined to be the richest man in England by any means necessary. He did it all – he married for money, murdered and kidnapped and exterminated for money; he was a war profiteer and an outrageous thief who killed anyone who stood in his way. He was brought up on the heroic tales of his grandfather and namesake, an Elizabethan privateer. Sir Richard wanted to be a great man like his grandfather, but the 1600s proved to be a very different age, where Englishmen fought amongst themselves over issues of sovereignty and social mobility, culminating in a devastating Civil War. Meanwhile, Sir Richard still craved only gold; it was money he knew would give him status, and as a General fighting for the King, he would besiege Plymouth and bring Devon to its knees to claim his fortune.
His wife Mary Howard still haunts the old roads of Dartmoor, a ghostly figure in a spectral coach rattling past the notorious gaol at Lydford; a demon bride luring unsuspecting travellers to their deaths. Her coach, it is said, was made by Satan himself, from the bones of her victims, four blazing skulls at its corners, a demonic dog with fiery eyes running alongside. Condemned to ride, night after night, it was Mary Howard who brought Sir Richard Grenville to Devon, who escaped his brutal fists and destroyed his fortunes as she fled into the night, so initiating decades of his violent retribution. To recover his money and property, Sir Richard Grenville kidnapped men for ransom, killed his fellow officers and hanged men with his own hands.
One man would finally defeat Richard Grenville and pay the ultimate price. Of humble origins, George Cutteford worked as a customs officer in Plymouth before finding employment as land agent for the wealthy heiress Mary Howard. Cutteford was her trusted friend and her lover, an illicit liaison that brought great prosperity to his puritan family, but then Mary chose to marry the dashing Sir Richard Grenville. From the outset, Cutteford saw Grenville for what he was, and set about destroying Grenville’s claim over Mary’s estates, but Grenville’s friendship with King Charles I gave him the upper hand. Promoted to General in the King’s Army on the outbreak of Civil War, Grenville seized his opportunity to have Cutteford’s family thrown out of their estates, and Cutteford tortured and imprisoned in Lydford Gaol.
However, Mary Howard and George Cutteford had a secret that would bring an end to Grenville’s reign of terror, that would bring men together from opposing sides of the war to conspire against Grenville and allow a boy with no name to become the wealthiest man in Devon.
About the Author
Laura Quigley is a full-time writer who lives in Plymouth. Her interest in Mary Howard’s life was sparked after a visit to Okehampton Castle, scene of the legendary Howard haunting. In 2010, Amnesty International held a public reading of her play, The Advocate, based on the stunning material in this book and directed by a member of the RSC.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Mary Howard’s ghost, it is said, haunts the heart of Dartmoor. Some say they have seen her spectral form at the gatehouse of her old home in Tavistock, others that they have glimpsed a mysterious coach travelling across the moors, and her dog with demonic eyes has been seen running along the dark lanes to Okehampton Castle. The stories have been told over and over in the old pubs in Tavistock and Okehampton, perhaps as a warning to unwary travellers or to hurry the drunks off home to bed. Even the famous lyricist and historian Sabine Baring-Gould recalled a number of eyewitness accounts of the famous white lady who appears every night at midnight by the Tavistock gatehouse. There she boards a spectral coach made of human bones, the skulls of her four husbands at each corner, and driven by a headless coachman.
A skeletal black dog with fiery eyes accompanies her, running alongside the coach, as she rides across the winding roads of Dartmoor, past the ruins of old Lydford Gaol and out towards Okehampton. On arrival at Okehampton Castle, she plucks a blade of grass, and then rides back again, all the way back to that gatehouse, back and forth every night from midnight till dawn. She must make this same journey every night for eternity as penance for her sins, for murdering her four husbands so they say, and when she has taken every blade of grass from Okehampton Castle, the world will end.
If someone sees the white lady on the road, there will be a death, according to the legend. Perhaps there is some truth in that, as the moment an attorney called George Cutteford met the young Mary Howard, his life was over.
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