William Rashleigh (MP for Fowey), of Menabilly

Foy and Daphne had been told of the thrilling story of the skeleton found at Menabilly when William Rashleigh carried out alterations to the building in 1824, by Oenone's Great-Aunt Alice. In a letter to Oenone, Daphne said:

I so remember your great aunt Alice telling Foy and me the story and she was very annoyed with the Rashleigh who discovered the place for bricking it up again but she said it was probably done because of servants' gossip. . .I long to discover the place. I remember her saying there were supposed to be little stairs leading down to the room . . . It surprises me that your grandfather has nothing in his writings about the story, as it seems to be such a well-known family tale, and your great-aunt recounted it in much dramatic fashion, even down to the clothes the cavalier was found in, and the little trencher that was empty on the table in front of him. And how the clothes fluttered to pieces when the air got into the room (Letter ref. 1063/17 Cornwall Records Office).

It was supposed that the cavalier was one of the Grenvilles (who were known to have used the house as a refuge from Parliamentarian troops) who had somehow been forgotten and been unable to escape from the secret room. Daphne asked Oenone to show her father a plan of the buttresses which she had made, one of which was supposed to conceal the entrance, and ask him which he thought it was.

Margaret Forster writes in her biography Daphne du Maurier:

Oenone, who knew her father was, in fact, opposed to the idea, nevertheless helped Daphne as much as possible. She sent her copies of various family letters from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries together with a family tree, copious notes on the different family members, and a résumé of local history in so far as it affected the family. A.L. Rowse who lived nearby, also advised her on which books to consult (he had been introduced to Daphne by the Quiller-Couches two years before and she was greatly impressed) (Forster, 1994, p.190).

Daphne wrote to Oenone when the book was finished:

I return your most helpful note-book with many thanks – I finished the book a week or so ago, and I found I got so interested in the character of Richard Grenville that there is really more about him in the book than the Rashleighs.

I have called it 'The King's General' and you shall have one of the first copies. But owing to paper shortage, it is not likely to be out before the Spring (Ref. 1063/18, Cornwall Records Office).

Martin Shallcross, who became a friend of Daphne's, comments in The Private World of Daphne du Maurier, that:

Publicly, she said many times that she had never seen a ghost; but in private she would confide that the young cavalier stood beside the fireplace in the drawing room and smiled at her. She told people that nothing remained of the seventeenth-century house that Sir Richard Grenville would have known, but in fact the Long Gallery survived as the drawing-room (Shallcross, 1991, p.97).

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