John's daughter, Lady Howard, round whose name many tales have gathered.
In Mrs Bray's time Lady Howard was regarded as 'a female Bluebeard,' but
a later verdict is more charitable, and it is now thought that the
unhappy lady has been much maligned. Being a great heiress, her hand was
disposed of when she was only twelve years old, and she was married to
Sir Alan Percy, who died three years afterwards. There is a proverb--

'Winter-time for shoeing,
Peascod-time for wooing;'

but Lady Howard must have been wooed at all seasons. One month after her
husband's death she escaped from her chaperon, and secretly married Lord
Darcy's son, who only survived a few months. When she was hardly
sixteen, she found a third husband in Sir Charles Howard, by whose name
she is always known, although after his death she married Sir Richard
Grenville. Her last 'venture,' as Prince calls it, was a very wretched
one; Sir Richard treated her abominably, and she retaliated to the worst
of her power. After her death, Mrs Bray says (in that delightful
storehouse of local traditions, 'The Borders of the Tamar and the
Tavy'), there arose a belief that she was 'doomed to run in the shape of
a hound from the gateway of Fitzford to Okehampton Park, between the
hours of midnight and cock-crowing, and to return with a single blade of
grass in her mouth whence she started; and this she was to do till every
blade was picked, when the world would be at an end.'

'Dr Jago, the clergyman of Milton Abbot, however, told me that
occasionally she was said to ride in a coach of bones up the West Street
towards the Moor.... My husband can remember that, when a boy, it was a
common saying with the gentry at a party, "It is growing late; let us be
gone, or we shall meet Lady Howard as she starts from Fitzford."'

A still more conspicuous monument in the church is connected with the
other tragedy. The family of Glanvills had long been settled near
Tavistock, and the figure is of Judge Glanvill in his robes. At his feet
kneels a life-size figure of his wife. 'Her buckram waist, like armour,
sleeves, ruff, and farthingale are all monstrous; and her double-linked
gold chains are grand enough for the Lord Mayor. On the whole she looks
so very formidable, that thus seen stationed before the Judge, she might
be considered as representing Justice herself, but it would be in her
severest mood.'

The mournful story is that of another member of the family, Eulal