304 THE EXETER ROAD 



seated, impressive, in the centre, where, on a plateau, 

 closely hemmed in from the bustling, secular life of 

 the streets, rises the sombre mass of the cathedral, 

 the pride of this western land. 



XLIII 



Exeter is called by those who know her best and 

 love her most the ' Queen City of the West.' To 

 historians she is perhaps better epithetically remem- 

 branced as the ' Ever Faithful,' loyal and staunch 

 through the good fortune or adversity of the causes 

 for which she has, with closed and guarded gates, 

 held fast the Key of the West. She has suffered 

 much at different periods of her history for this 

 loyalty ; from the time when, declaring against the 

 usurpation of Stephen, her citizens fought and starved 

 within the walls ; through the centuries to the time 

 of Perkin Warbeck, the impostor, and so on to the 

 Civil War between King and Parliament, when the 

 citizens were more loyal than their rulers and were 

 disarmed and kept under surveillance until the 

 Royalists came and took the place, themselves to be 

 dispossessed a few years later. 



Loyalty, tried for so many centuries at so great a 

 cost, broke down finally in 1688, and the city gates 

 were opened to the Prince of Orange. Had James 

 been less of a bigot, and had his hell-hounds, Jeffreys 

 and Kirke, been animated with less zeal, who knows 

 what these Devonshire men would have done ? Pos- 



