Volume 1 — THE ARUNDELLS, (continued 2)
Reading edition
An offshoot, as I take him to be, of the Menadarva Arundells, one Francis, who was born about the year 1620, is said to have settled at Trengwainton, near Penzance, where they lived for some generations; and one of them, Francis Arundell, served with some distinction on the side of the Parliament during the Civil War, ranking as captain. I fancy it must be his son who mourned in Latin verse, after the fashion of the time, the deaths of two Queens of England, while, as a Commoner of Trinity College, Cambridge, he was under the tuition of Isaac Barrow.
Yet another minor branch of the Arundells remains to be noticed, viz. a younger branch of the Arundells of Lanherne, descended from that Sir John Arundell who married Elizabeth Danet, of Danet's Hall. They had their seat at Trevithick, some two miles west of the town of St. Columb Major, and not much farther from Lanherne itself. The representative of the family who was alive at the time of the Herald's Visitation in 1620, was named Thomas, who married Rachel, the daughter of Sir Giles Montpesson, Knight, and who, Hals tell us, died 'without issue, but not without wasting a great part of his estate.'
Now, to adopt a metaphor of Sir Humphry Davy's, at length the great stream of the Arundells of Cornwall, like some mighty river losing itself among the sands as it approaches the ocean shore, becomes so divided that we can no longer easily trace its course. After the names and dates to which we have been referring, no Arundell of distinction seems to have arisen in Cornwall; and their places soon 'knew them no more.' They became scattered throughout the county,[44] and by the help of the Bishop of Exeter's transcripts, and the Parish Registers of Camborne, St. Erme, St. Ewe, Falmouth, Fowey, Gulval, Mawnan, Menheniot, Mevagissey, Sheviock, and Sithney, we find that down to the year 1725 there were still indeed Arundells in Cornwall being christened, dying, marrying,—but no longer 'great Arundells' as of yore: in fact, the entry in the year 1725, in the St. Erme Register, merely records the baptism of Charles, the son of Richard Arundell, 'a day labourer.'
Yet, by a strange freak of fortune, not only did the female line continue, but one of the Arundells—William by name—married nearly two and a quarter centuries ago, Dorothy, a daughter of that Theodore Palæologus[45] who was buried in Landulph Church in 1636. She is described in the Parish Register as being 'ex stirpe Imperatorum.' So that there probably flows in the veins of many a rustic of the neighbourhood of Callington and Saltash the mingled blood of those Arundells who came over to England with the Conqueror, and that of the Byzantine Emperors of the East.
