come and fetch him ashore; whereupon one Peter Varwell ran into the sea, and carried the new King to the shore, gaining much renown for doing so.  This happened on November 5th, the date for landing doubtless having been arranged to coincide with the anniversary of the attempt of Guy Fawkes to blow up the Houses of Parliament with gunpowder eighty-three years before, so that bonfire day served afterwards to celebrate the two occasions.  The house where William stayed that night was still pointed out in Brixham.

In 1690 James II, who had been dethroned and exiled to France, told Tourville, the French Admiral, that if he would take his fleet to the South of England he would find all the people there ready to receive him back again, so he brought his ships off Torbay.  Instead of a friendly reception here, he found the people decidedly hostile to James’s cause, so he detached two or three of his galleys to Teignmouth, quite a defenceless place, where they committed great ravages and practically destroyed the town.  These galleys were a class of boat common in the Mediterranean, where they had been employed ever since the warlike times of the Greeks and Romans.  In addition to sails, they were propelled with oars manned by slaves; and a similar class of ship worked by convicts was used by the French down to the middle of the eighteenth century.  The men of Teignmouth, who had no wish to be captured and employed as galley slaves, seeing that they were in a hopeless position, retreated inland.  Lord Macaulay thus describes the position in his History: 

The Beacon on the ridge above Teignmouth was kindled, Hey-Tor and Cawsand made answer, and soon all the hill tops of the West were on fire.  Messengers were riding all night from deputy lieutenant to deputy lieutenant; and early the next morning, without chief, without summons, five hundred gentlemen and yeomen, armed and mounted, had assembled on the summit of Haldon Hill, and in twenty-four hours all Devonshire was up.

It was therefore no wonder that Trouville found his landing opposed by thousands of fierce Devonshire men, who lined the shores and prevented him from landing his troops; the expedition was a complete failure, and he returned to France.

In those days, when railways and telegraphy were unknown, the whole country could be aroused very quickly and effectively by those beacon fires.  The fuel was always kept ready for lighting on the Beacon hills, which were chosen so that the fire on one hill could be seen from the other.  On our journey through England we passed many of these beacons, then used for more peaceful purposes.