CHAPTER I. HOW THE GREAT BARON BECOMES AS GREAT A REBEL.
Hilyard was yet asleep in the chamber
assigned to him as his prison, when a rough grasp
shook off his slumbers, and he saw the earl before
him, with a countenance so changed from its usual open
majesty, so dark and sombre, that he said involuntarily,
“You send me to the doomsman, I am
ready!”
“Hist, man! Thou hatest Edward of York?”
“An it were my last word, yes!”
“Give me thy hand we
are friends! Stare not at me with those eyes of
wonder, ask not the why nor wherefore! This last
night gave Edward a rebel more in Richard Nevile!
A steed waits thee at my gates; ride fast to young
Sir Robert Welles with this letter. Bid him not
be dismayed; bid him hold out, for ere many days are
past, Lord Warwick, and it may be also the Duke of
Clarence, will join their force with his. Mark,
I say not that I am for Henry of Lancaster, I
say only that I am against Edward of York. Farewell,
and when we meet again, blessed be the arm that first
cuts its way to a tyrant’s heart!”
Without another word, Warwick left
the chamber. Hilyard at first could not believe
his senses; but as he dressed himself in haste, he
pondered over all those causes of dissension which
had long notoriously subsisted between Edward and
the earl, and rejoiced that the prophecy that he had
long so shrewdly hazarded was at last fulfilled.
Descending the stairs he gained the gate, where Marmaduke
awaited him, while a groom held a stout haquenée
(as the common riding-horse was then called), whose
points and breeding promised speed and endurance.
“Mount, Master Robin,”
said Marmaduke; “I little thought we should ever
ride as friends together! Mount! our
way for some miles out of London is the same.
You go into Lincolnshire, I into the shire of Hertford.”
“And for the same purpose?”
asked Hilyard, as he sprang upon his horse, and the
two men rode briskly on.
“Yes!”
“Lord Warwick is changed at last?”
“At last!”
“For long?”
“Till death!”
“Good, I ask no more!”
A sound of hoofs behind made the franklin
turn his head, and he saw a goodly troop, armed to
the teeth, emerge from the earl’s house and
follow the lead of Marmaduke. Meanwhile Warwick
was closeted with Montagu.
Worldly as the latter was, and personally
attached to Edward, he was still keenly alive to all
that touched the honour of his House; and his indignation
at the deadly insult offered to his niece was even
more loudly expressed than that of the fiery earl.
“To deem,” he exclaimed,
“to deem Elizabeth Woodville worthy of his throne,
and to see in Anne Nevile the only worthy to be his
leman!”
“Ay!” said the earl, with
a calmness perfectly terrible, from its unnatural
contrast to his ordinary heat, when but slightly chafed,
“ay! thou sayest it! But be tranquil; cold, cold
as iron, and as hard! We must scheme now, not
storm and threaten I never schemed before!
You are right, honesty is a fool’s
policy! Would I had known this but an hour before
the news reached me! I have already dismissed
our friends to their different districts, to support
King Edward’s cause he is still king, a
little while longer king! Last night, I dismissed
them last night, at the very hour when O
God, give me patience!” He paused, and added
in a low voice, “Yet yet how
long the moments are how long! Ere the sun sets,
Edward, I trust, will be in my power!”
“How?”
“He goes, to-day, to the More, he
will not go the less for what hath chanced; he will
trust to the archbishop to make his peace with me, churchmen
are not fathers! Marmaduke Nevile hath my orders;
a hundred armed men, who would march against the fiend
himself, if I said the word, will surround the More,
and seize the guest!”
“But what then? Who, if
Edward, I dare not say the word who is to
succeed him?”
“Clarence is the male heir.”
“But with what face to the people proclaim ”
“There there it is!”
interrupted Warwick. “I have thought of
that, I have thought of all things; my
mind seems to have traversed worlds since daybreak!
True! all commotion to be successful must have a cause
that men can understand. Nevertheless, you, Montagu you
have a smoother tongue than I; go to our friends to
those who hate Edward seek them, sound
them!”
“And name to them Edward’s infamy?”
“’S death, dost thou think
it? Thou, a Monthermer and Montagu: proclaim
to England the foul insult to the hearth of an English
gentleman and peer! feed every ribald Bourdour with
song and roundel of Anne’s virgin shame! how
King Edward stole to her room at the dead of night,
and wooed and pressed, and swore, and God
of Heaven, that this hand were on his throat!
No, brother, no! there are some wrongs we may not tell, tumours
and swellings of the heart which are eased not till
blood can flow!”
During this conference between the
brothers, Edward, in his palace, was seized with consternation
and dismay on hearing that the Lady Anne could not
be found in her chamber. He sent forthwith to
summon Adam Warner to his presence, and learned from
the simple sage, who concealed nothing, the mode in
which Anne had fled from the Tower. The king abruptly
dismissed Adam, after a few hearty curses and vague
threats; and awaking to the necessity of inventing
some plausible story, to account to the wonder of
the court for the abrupt disappearance of his guest,
he saw that the person who could best originate and
circulate such a tale was the queen; and he sought
her at once, with the resolution to choose his confidant
in the connection most rarely honoured by marital trust
in similar offences. He, however, so softened
his narrative as to leave it but a venial error.
He had been indulging over-freely in the wine-cup,
he had walked into the corridor for the refreshing
coolness of the air, he had seen the figure of a female
whom he did not recognize; and a few gallant words,
he scarce remembered what, had been misconstrued.
On perceiving whom he had thus addressed, he had sought
to soothe the anger or alarm of the Lady Anne; but
still mistaking his intention, she had hurried into
Warner’s chamber; he had followed her thither,
and now she had fled the palace. Such was his
story, told lightly and laughingly, but ending with
a grave enumeration of the dangers his imprudence had
incurred.
Whatever Elizabeth felt, or however
she might interpret the confession, she acted with
her customary discretion; affected, after a few tender
reproaches, to place implicit credit in her lord’s
account, and volunteered to prevent all scandal by
the probable story that the earl, being prevented
from coming in person for his daughter, as he had
purposed, by fresh news of the rebellion which might
call him from London with the early day, had commissioned
his kinsman Marmaduke to escort her home. The
quick perception of her sex told her that, whatever
license might have terrified Anne into so abrupt a
flight, the haughty earl would shrink no less than
Edward himself from making public an insult which
slander could well distort into the dishonour of his
daughter; and that whatever pretext might be invented,
Warwick would not deign to contradict it. And
as, despite Elizabeth’s hatred to the earl,
and desire of permanent breach between Edward and his
minister, she could not, as queen, wife, and woman,
but be anxious that some cause more honourable in
Edward, and less odious to the people, should be assigned
for quarrel, she earnestly recommended the king to
repair at once to the More, as had been before arranged,
and to spare no pains, disdain no expressions of penitence
and humiliation, to secure the mediation of the archbishop.
His mind somewhat relieved by this interview and counsel,
the king kissed Elizabeth with affectionate gratitude,
and returned to his chamber to prepare for his departure
to the archbishop’s palace. But then, remembering
that Adam and Sibyll possessed his secret, he resolved
at once to banish them from the Tower. For a
moment he thought of the dungeons of his fortress,
of the rope of his doomsman; but his conscience at
that hour was sore and vexed. His fierceness
humbled by the sense of shame, he shrank from a new
crime; and, moreover, his strong common-sense assured
him that the testimony of a shunned and abhorred wizard
ceased to be of weight the moment it was deprived
of the influence it took from the protection of a king.
He gave orders for a boat to be in readiness by the
gate of St. Thomas, again summoned Adam into his presence,
and said briefly, “Master Warner, the London
mechanics cry so loudly against thine invention for
lessening labour and starving the poor, the sailors
on the wharfs are so mutinous at the thought of vessels
without rowers, that, as a good king is bound, I yield
to the voice of my people. Go home, then, at once;
the queen dispenses with thy fair daughter’s
service, the damsel accompanies thee. A boat
awaits ye at the stairs; a guard shall attend ye to
your house. Think what has passed within these
walls has been a dream, a dream that, if
told, is deathful, if concealed and forgotten hath
no portent!”
Without waiting a reply, the king
called from the anteroom one of his gentlemen, and
gave him special directions as to the departure and
conduct of the worthy scholar and his gentle daughter.
Edward next summoned before him the warder of the
gate, learned that he alone was privy to the mode
of his guest’s flight, and deeming it best to
leave at large no commentator on the tale he had invented,
sentenced the astonished warder to three months’
solitary imprisonment, for appearing before
him with soiled hosen! An hour afterwards, the
king, with a small though gorgeous retinue, was on
his way to the More.
The archbishop had, according to his
engagement, assembled in his palace the more powerful
of the discontented seigneurs; and his eloquence
had so worked upon them, that Edward beheld, on entering
the hall, only countenances of cheerful loyalty and
respectful welcome. After the first greetings,
the prelate, according to the custom of the day, conducted
Edward into a chamber, that he might refresh himself
with a brief rest and the bath, previous to the banquet.
Edward seized the occasion, and told
his tale; but however softened, enough was left to
create the liveliest dismay in his listener. The
lofty scaffolding of hope upon which the ambitious
prelate was to mount to the papal throne seemed to
crumble into the dust. The king and the earl
were equally necessary to the schemes of George Nevile.
He chid the royal layman with more than priestly unction
for his offence; but Edward so humbly confessed his
fault, that the prelate at length relaxed his brow,
and promised to convey his penitent assurances to the
earl.
“Not an hour should be lost,”
he said; “the only one who can soothe his wrath
is your Highness’s mother, our noble kinswoman.
Permit me to despatch to her grace a letter, praying
her to seek the earl, while I write by the same courier
to himself.”
“Be it all as you will,”
said Edward, doffing his surcoat, and dipping his
hands in a perfumed ewer; “I shall not know rest
till I have knelt to the Lady Anne, and won her pardon.”
The prelate retired, and scarcely
had he left the room when Sir John Ratcliffe, [Afterwards
Lord Fitzwalter. See Lingard (note, vol.
iii. , quarto edition), for the proper date
to be assigned to this royal visit to the More, a
date we have here adopted, not, as Sharon Turner and
others place (namely, upon the authority of Hearne’s
Fragm., 302, which subsequent events disprove), after
the open rebellion of Warwick, but just before it;
that is, not after Easter, but before Lent.] one of
the king’s retinue, and in waiting on his person,
entered the chamber, pale and trembling.
“My liege,” he said, in
a whisper, “I fear some deadly treason awaits
you. I have seen, amongst the trees below this
tower, the gleam of steel; I have crept through the
foliage, and counted no less than a hundred armed
men, their leader is Sir Marmaduke Nevile,
Earl Warwick’s kinsman!”
“Ha!” muttered the king,
and his bold face fell, “comes the earl’s
revenge so soon?”
“And,” continued Ratcliffe,
“I overheard Sir Marmaduke say, ’The door
of the Garden Tower is unguarded, wait
the signal!’ Fly, my liege! Hark! even
now I hear the rattling of arms!”
The king stole to the casement; the
day was closing; the foliage grew thick and dark around
the wall; he saw an armed man emerge from the shade, a
second, and a third.
“You are right, Ratcliffe! Flight but
how?”
“This way, my liege. By
the passage I entered, a stair winds to a door on
the inner court; there I have already a steed in waiting.
Deign, for precaution, to use my hat and manteline.”
The king hastily adopted the suggestion,
followed the noiseless steps of Ratcliffe, gained
the door, sprang upon his steed, and dashing right
through a crowd assembled by the gate, galloped alone
and fast, untracked by human enemy, but goaded by
the foe that mounts the rider’s steed, over
field, over fell, over dyke, through hedge, and in
the dead of night reined in at last before the royal
towers of Windsor.
CHAPTER II. MANY THINGS BRIEFLY TOLD.
The events that followed the king’s
escape were rapid and startling. The barons assembled
at the More, enraged at Edward’s seeming distrust
of them, separated in loud anger. The archbishop
learned the cause from one of his servitors, who detected
Marmaduke’s ambush, but he was too wary to make
known a circumstance suspicious to himself. He
flew to London, and engaged the mediation of the Duchess
of York to assist his own. [Lingard. See for
the dates, Fabyan, 657.]
The earl received their joint overtures
with stern and ominous coldness, and abruptly repaired
to Warwick, taking with him the Lady Anne. There
he was joined, the same day, by the Duke and Duchess
of Clarence.
The Lincolnshire rebellion gained
head: Edward made a dexterous feint in calling,
by public commission, upon Clarence and Warwick to
aid in dispersing it; if they refused, the odium of
first aggression would seemingly rest with them.
Clarence, more induced by personal ambition than sympathy
with Warwick’s wrong, incensed by his brother’s
recent slights, looking to Edward’s resignation
and his own consequent accession to the throne, and
inflamed by the ambition and pride of a wife whom
he at once feared and idolized, went hand in heart
with the earl; but not one lord and captain whom Montagu
had sounded lent favour to the deposition of one brother
for the advancement of the next. Clarence, though
popular, was too young to be respected: many there
were who would rather have supported the earl, if
an aspirant to the throne; but that choice forbidden
by the earl himself, there could be but two parties
in England, the one for Edward iv.,
the other for Henry vi. Lord Montagu had
repaired to Warwick Castle to communicate in person
this result of his diplomacy. The earl, whose
manner was completely changed, no longer frank and
hearty, but close and sinister, listened in gloomy
silence.
“And now,” said Montagu,
with the generous emotion of a man whose nobler nature
was stirred deeply, “if you resolve on war with
Edward, I am willing to renounce my own ambition,
the hand of a king’s daughter for my son, so
that I may avenge the honour of our common name.
I confess that I have so loved Edward that I would
fain pray you to pause, did I not distrust myself,
lest in such delay his craft should charm me back
to the old affection. Nathless, to your arm and
your great soul I have owed all, and if you are resolved
to strike the blow, I am ready to share the hazard.”
The earl turned away his face, and
wrung his brother’s hand.
“Our father, methinks, hears
thee from the grave!” said he, solemnly, and
there was a long pause. At length Warwick resumed:
“Return to London; seem to take no share in
my actions, whatever they be; if I fail, why drag
thee into my ruin? and yet, trust me, I
am rash and fierce no more. He who sets his heart
on a great object suddenly becomes wise. When
a throne is in the dust, when from St. Paul’s
Cross a voice goes forth to Carlisle and the Land’s
End, proclaiming that the reign of Edward the Fourth
is past and gone, then, Montagu, I claim thy promise
of aid and fellowship, not before!”
Meanwhile, the king, eager to dispel
thought in action, rushed in person against the rebellious
forces. Stung by fear into cruelty, he beheaded,
against all kingly faith, his hostages, Lord Welles
and Sir Thomas Dymoke, summoned Sir Robert Welles,
the leader of the revolt, to surrender; received for
answer, that Sir Robert Welles would not trust the
perfidy of the man who had murdered his father! pushed
on to Erpingham, defeated the rebels in a signal battle,
and crowned his victory by a series of ruthless cruelties,
committed to the fierce and learned Earl of Worcester,
“Butcher of England.” [Stowe. “Warkworth
Chronicle” Cont. Croyl.
Lord Worcester ordered Clapham (a squire to Lord Warwick)
and nineteen others, gentlemen and yeomen, to be impaled,
and from the horror the spectacle inspired, and the
universal odium it attached to Worcester, it is to
be feared that the unhappy men were still sensible
to the agony of this infliction, though they appear
first to have been drawn, and partially hanged, outrage
confined only to the dead bodies of rebels being too
common at that day to have excited the indignation
which attended the sentence Worcester passed on his
victims. It is in vain that some writers would
seek to cleanse the memory of this learned nobleman
from the stain of cruelty by rhetorical remarks on
the improbability that a cultivator of letters should
be of a ruthless disposition. The general philosophy
of this defence is erroneous. In ignorant ages
a man of superior acquirements is not necessarily made
humane by the cultivation of his intellect, on the
contrary, he too often learns to look upon the uneducated
herd as things of another clay. Of this truth
all history is pregnant, witness the accomplished
tyrants of Greece, the profound and cruel intellect
of the Italian Borgias. Richard iii. and
Henry VIII. were both highly educated for their age.
But in the case of Tiptoft, Lord Worcester, the evidence
of his cruelty is no less incontestable than that
which proves his learning the Croyland
historian alone is unimpeachable. Worcester’s
popular name of “the Butcher” is sufficient
testimony in itself. The people are often mistaken,
to be sure, but can scarcely be so upon the one point,
whether a man who has sat in judgment on themselves
be merciful or cruel.]
With the prompt vigour and superb
generalship which Edward ever displayed in war, he
then cut his gory way to the force which Clarence
and Warwick (though their hostility was still undeclared)
had levied, with the intent to join the defeated rebels.
He sent his herald, Garter King-at-arms, to summon
the earl and the duke to appear before him within
a certain day. The time expired; he proclaimed
them traitors, and offered rewards for their apprehension.
[One thousand pounds in money, or one hundred pounds
a year in land; an immense reward for that day.]
So sudden had been Warwick’s
defection, so rapid the king’s movements, that
the earl had not time to mature his resources, assemble
his vassals, consolidate his schemes. His very
preparations, upon the night on which Edward had repaid
his services by such hideous ingratitude, had manned
the country with armies against himself. Girt
but with a scanty force collected in haste (and which
consisted merely of his retainers in the single shire
of Warwick), the march of Edward cut him off from the
counties in which his name was held most dear, in which
his trumpet could raise up hosts. He was disappointed
in the aid he had expected from his powerful but self-interested
brother-in-law, Lord Stanley. Revenge had become
more dear to him than life: life must not be
hazarded, lest revenge be lost. On still marched
the king; and the day that his troops entered Exeter,
Warwick, the females of his family, with Clarence,
and a small but armed retinue, took ship from Dartmouth,
sailed for Calais (before which town, while at anchor,
Isabel was confined of her first-born). To the
earl’s rage and dismay his deputy Vauclerc fired
upon his ships. Warwick then steered on towards
Normandy, captured some Flemish vessels by the way,
in token of defiance to the earl’s old Burgundian
foe, and landed at Harfleur, where he and his companions
were received with royal honours by the Admiral of
France, and finally took their way to the court of
Louis xi. at Amboise.
“The danger is past forever!”
said King Edward, as the wine sparkled in his goblet.
“Rebellion hath lost its head, and
now, indeed, and for the first time, a monarch I reign
alone!” [Before leaving England, Warwick and
Clarence are generally said to have fallen in with
Anthony Woodville and Lord Audley, and ordered them
to execution, from which they were saved by a Dorsetshire
gentleman. Carte, who, though his history is
not without great mistakes, is well worth reading by
those whom the character of Lord Warwick may interest,
says, that the earl had “too much magnanimity
to put them to death immediately, according to the
common practice of the times, and only imprisoned them
in the castle of Wardour, from whence they were soon
rescued by John Thornhill, a gentleman of Dorsetshire.”
The whole of this story is, however, absolutely contradicted
by the “Warkworth Chronicle” , edited
by Mr. Halliwell), according to which authority Anthony
Woodville was at that time commanding a fleet upon
the Channel, which waylaid Warwick on his voyage;
but the success therein attributed to the gallant Anthony,
in dispersing or seizing all the earl’s ships,
save the one that bore the earl himself and his family,
is proved to be purely fabulous, by the earl’s
well-attested capture of the Flemish vessels, as he
passed from Calais to the coasts of Normandy, an exploit
he could never have performed with a single vessel
of his own. It is very probable that the story
of Anthony Woodville’s capture and peril at this
time originates in a misadventure many years before,
and recorded in the “Pastón Letters,”
as well as in the “Chronicles.” In
the year 1459, Anthony Woodville and his father, Lord
Rivers (then zealous Lancastrians), really did fall
into the hands of the Earl of March (Edward iv.),
Warwick and Salisbury, and got off with a sound “rating”
upon the rude language which such “knaves’
sons” and “little squires” had held
to those “who were of king’s blood.”]
CHAPTER III. THE PLOT OF THE HOSTELRY THE MAID AND THE SCHOLAR IN THEIR
HOME.
The country was still disturbed, and
the adherents, whether of Henry or the earl, still
rose in many an outbreak, though prevented from swelling
into one common army by the extraordinary vigour not
only of Edward, but of Gloucester and Hastings, when
one morning, just after the events thus rapidly related,
the hostelry of Master Sancroft, in the suburban parish
of Marybone, rejoiced in a motley crowd of customers
and topers.
Some half-score soldiers, returned
in triumph from the royal camp, sat round a table
placed agreeably enough in the deep recess made by
the large jutting lattice; with them were mingled
about as many women, strangely and gaudily clad.
These last were all young; one or two, indeed, little
advanced from childhood. But there was no expression
of youth in their hard, sinister features: coarse
paint supplied the place of bloom; the very youngest
had a wrinkle on her brow; their forms wanted the
round and supple grace of early years. Living
principally in the open air, trained from infancy
to feats of activity, their muscles were sharp and
prominent, their aspects had something of masculine
audacity and rudeness; health itself seemed in them
more loathsome than disease. Upon those faces
of bronze, vice had set its ineffable, unmistaken
seal. To those eyes never had sprung the tears
of compassion or woman’s gentle sorrow; on those
brows never had flushed the glow of modest shame:
their very voices half belied their sex, harsh
and deep and hoarse, their laughter loud and dissonant.
Some amongst them were not destitute of a certain
beauty, but it was a beauty of feature with a common
hideousness of expression, an expression
at once cunning, bold, callous, licentious. Womanless
through the worst vices of woman, passionless through
the premature waste of passion, they stood between
the sexes like foul and monstrous anomalies, made up
and fashioned from the rank depravities of both.
These creatures seemed to have newly arrived from
some long wayfaring; their shoes and the hems of their
robes were covered with dust and mire; their faces
were heated, and the veins in their bare, sinewy,
sunburned arms were swollen by fatigue. Each
had beside her on the floor a timbrel, each wore at
her girdle a long knife in its sheath: well that
the sheaths hid the blades, for not one not
even that which yon cold-eyed child of fifteen wore but
had on its steel the dark stain of human blood!
The presence of soldiers fresh from
the scene of action had naturally brought into the
hostelry several of the idle gossips of the suburb,
and these stood round the table, drinking into their
large ears the boasting narratives of the soldiers.
At a small table, apart from the revellers, but evidently
listening with attention to all the news of the hour,
sat a friar, gravely discussing a mighty tankard of
huffcap, and ever and anon, as he lifted his head
for the purpose of drinking, glancing a wanton eye
at one of the tymbesteres.
“But an’ you had seen,”
said a trooper, who was the mouthpiece of his comrades “an’
you had seen the raptrils run when King Edward himself
led the charge! Marry, it was like a cat in a
rabbit burrow! Easy to see, I trow, that Earl
Warwick was not amongst them! His men, at least,
fight like devils!”
“But there was one tall fellow,”
said a soldier, setting down his tankard, “who
made a good fight and dour, and, but for me and my
comrades, would have cut his way to the king.”
“Ay, ay, true; we saved his
highness, and ought to have been knighted, but
there’s no gratitude nowadays!”
“And who was this doughty warrior?”
asked one of the bystanders, who secretly favoured
the rebellion.
“Why, it was said that he was
Robin of Redesdale, he who fought my Lord
Montagu off York.”
“Our Robin!” exclaimed
several voices. “Ay, he was ever a brave
fellow poor Robin!”
“‘Your Robin,’ and
‘poor Robin,’ varlets!”
cried the principal trooper. “Have a care!
What do ye mean by your Robin?”
“Marry, sir soldier,”
quoth a butcher, scratching his head, and in a humble
voice, “craving your pardon and the king’s,
this Master Robin sojourned a short time in this hamlet,
and was a kind neighbour, and mighty glib of the tongue.
Don’t ye mind, neighbours,” he added rapidly,
eager to change the conversation, “how he made
us leave off when we were just about burning Adam
Warner, the old nigromancer, in his den yonder?
Who else could have done that? But an’ we
had known Robin had been a rebel to sweet King Edward,
we’d have roasted him along with the wizard!”
One of the timbrel-girls, the leader
of the choir, her arm round a soldier’s neck,
looked up at the last speech, and her eye followed
the gesture of the butcher, as he pointed through
the open lattice to the sombre, ruinous abode of Adam
Warner.
“Was that the house ye would
have burned?” she asked abruptly.
“Yes; but Robin told us the
king would hang those who took on them the king’s
blessed privilege of burning nigromancers; and, sure
enough, old Adam Warner was advanced to be wizard-in-chief
to the king’s own highness a week or two afterwards.”
The friar had made a slight movement
at the name of Warner; he now pushed his stool nearer
to the principal group, and drew his hood completely
over his countenance.
“Yea!” exclaimed the mechanic,
whose son had been the innocent cause of the memorable
siege to poor Adam’s dilapidated fortress, related
in the first book of this narrative” yea;
and what did he when there? Did he not devise
a horrible engine for the destruction of the poor, an
engine that was to do all the work in England by the
devil’s help? so that if a gentleman
wanted a coat of mail, or a cloth tunic; if his dame
needed a Norwich worsted; if a yeoman lacked a plough
or a wagon, or his good wife a pot or a kettle; they
were to go, not to the armourer, and the draper, and
the tailor, and the weaver, and the wheelwright, and
the blacksmith, but, hey presto! Master
Warner set his imps a-churning, and turned ye out
mail and tunic, worsted and wagon, kettle and pot,
spick and span new, from his brewage of vapour and
sea-coal. Oh, have I not heard enough of the
sorcerer from my brother, who works in the Chepe for
Master Stokton, the mercer! and Master Stokton
was one of the worshipful deputies to whom the old
nigromancer had the front to boast his devices.”
“It is true,” said the friar, suddenly.
“Yes, reverend father, it is
true,” said the mechanic, doffing his cap, and
inclining his swarthy face to this unexpected witness
of his veracity. A murmur of wrath and hatred
was heard amongst the bystanders. The soldiers
indifferently turned to their female companions.
There was a brief silence; and, involuntarily, the
gossips stretched over the table to catch sight of
the house of so demoniac an oppressor of the poor.
“See,” said the baker,
“the smoke still curls from the rooftop!
I heard he had come back. Old Madge, his handmaid,
has bought cimnel-cakes of me the last week or so;
nothing less than the finest wheat serves him now,
I trow. However, right’s right, and ”
“Come back!” cried the
fierce mechanic; “the owl hath kept close in
his roost! An’ it were not for the king’s
favour, I would soon see how the wizard liked to have
fire and water brought to bear against himself!”
“Sit down, sweetheart,”
whispered one of the young tymbesteres to the last
speaker
“Come, kiss me, my darling,
Warm kisses
I trade for.”
“Avaunt!” quoth the mechanic,
gruffly, and shaking off the seductive arm of the
tymbestere “avaunt! I have neither
liefe nor halfpence for thee and thine. Out on
thee! a child of thy years! a rope’s
end to thy back were a friend’s best kindness!”
The girl’s eyes sparkled, she
instinctively put her hand to her knife; then turning
to a soldier by her side, she said, “Hear you
that, and sit still?”
“Thunder and wounds!”
growled the soldier thus appealed to, “more
respect to the sex, knave; if I don’t break thy
fool’s costard with my sword-hilt, it is only
because Red Grisell can take care of herself against
twenty such lozels as thou. These honest girls
have been to the wars with us; King Edward grudges
no man his jolly fere. Speak up for thyself,
Grisell! How many tall fellows didst thou put
out of their pain after the battle of Losecote?”
“Only five, Hal,” replied
the cold-eyed girl, and showing her glittering teeth
with the grin of a young tigress; “but one was
a captain. I shall do better next time; it was
my first battle, thou knowest!”
The more timid of the bystanders exchanged
a glance of horror, and drew back. The mechanic
resumed sullenly, “I seek no quarrel
with lass or lover. I am a plain, blunt man,
with a wife and children, who are dear to me; and
if I have a grudge to the nigromancer, it is because
he glamoured my poor boy Tim. See!” and
he caught up a blue-eyed, handsome boy, who had been
clinging to his side, and baring the child’s
arm, showed it to the spectators; there was a large
scar on the limb, and it was shrunk and withered.
“It was my own fault,”
said the little fellow, deprecatingly. The affectionate
father silenced the sufferer with a cuff on the cheek,
and resumed: “Ye note, neighbours, the
day when the foul wizard took this little one in his
arms: well, three weeks afterwards that
very day three weeks as he was standing
like a lamb by the fire, the good wife’s caldron
seethed over, without reason or rhyme, and scalded
his arm till it rivelled up like a leaf in November;
and if that is not glamour, why have we laws against
witchcraft?”
“True, true!” groaned the chorus.
The boy, who had borne his father’s
blow without a murmur, now again attempted remonstrance.
“The hot water went over the gray cat, too, but
Master Warner never bewitched her, daddy.”
“He takes his part! You
hear the daff laddy? He takes the old nigromancer’s
part, a sure sign of the witchcraft; but
I’ll leather it out of thee, I will!”
and the mechanic again raised his weighty arm.
The child did not this time await the blow; he dodged
under the butcher’s apron, gained the door,
and disappeared. “And he teaches our own
children to fly in our faces!” said the father,
in a kind of whimper. The neighbours sighed in
commiseration.
“Oh,” he exclaimed in
a fiercer tone, grinding his teeth, and shaking his
clenched fist towards Adam Warner’s melancholy
house, “I say again, if the king did not protect
the vile sorcerer, I would free the land from his
devilries ere his black master could come to his help.”
“The king cares not a straw
for Master Warner or his inventions, my son,”
said a rough, loud voice. All turned, and saw
the friar standing in the midst of the circle.
“Know ye not, my children, that the king sent
the wretch neck and crop out of the palace for having
bewitched the Earl of Warwick and his grace the Lord
Clarence, so that they turned unnaturally against
their own kinsman, his highness? But ’Manus
malorum suos bonos breaket,’ that
is to say, the fists of wicked men only whack their
own bones. Ye have all heard tell of Friar Bungey,
my children?”
“Ay, ay!” answered two
or three in a breath, “a wizard, it’s
true, and a mighty one; but he never did harm to the
poor; though they do say he made a quaint image of
the earl, and ”
“Tut, tut!” interrupted
the friar, “all Bungey did was to try to disenchant
the Lord Warwick, whom yon miscreant had spellbound.
Poor Bungey! he is a friend to the people: and
when he found that Master Adam was making a device
for their ruin, he spared no toil, I assure ye, to
frustrate the iniquity. Oh, how he fasted and
watched! Oh, how many a time he fought, tooth
and nail, with the devil in person, to get at the
infernal invention! for if he had that invention once
in his hands, he could turn it to good account, I
can promise ye: and give ye rain for the green
blade and sun for the ripe sheaf. But the fiend
got the better at first; and King Edward, bewitched
himself for the moment, would have hanged Friar Bungey
for crossing old Adam, if he had not called three
times, in a loud voice, ‘Presto pepranxenon!’
changed himself into a bird, and flown out of the
window. As soon as Master Adam Warner found the
field clear to himself, he employed his daughter to
bewitch the Lord Hastings; he set brother against
brother, and made the king and Lord George fall to
loggerheads; he stirred up the rebellion; and where
he would have stopped the foul fiend only knows, if
your friend Friar Bungey, who, though a wizard as
you say, is only so for your benefit (and a holy priest
into the bargain), had not, by aid of a good spirit,
whom he conjured up in the island of Tartary, disenchanted
the king, and made him see in a dream what the villanous
Warner was devising against his crown and his people, whereon
his highness sent Master Warner and his daughter back
to their roost, and, helped by Friar Bungey, beat his
enemies out of the kingdom. So, if ye have a mind
to save your children from mischief and malice, ye
may set to work with good heart, always provided that
ye touch not old Adam’s iron invention.
Woe betide ye, if ye think to destroy that! Bring
it safe to Friar Bungey, whom ye will find returned
to the palace, and journeyman’s wages will be
a penny a day higher for the next ten years to come!”
With these words the friar threw down his reckoning,
and moved majestically to the door.
“An’ I might trust you!”
said Tim’s father, laying hold of the friar’s
serge.
“Ye may, ye may!” cried
the leader of the tymbesteres, starting up from the
lap of her soldier, “for it is Friar Bungey himself!”
A movement of astonishment and terror
was universal. “Friar Bungey himself!”
repeated the burly impostor. “Right, lassie,
right; and he now goes to the palace of the Tower,
to mutter good spells in King Edward’s ear, spells
to defeat the malignant ones, and to lower the price
of beer. Wax wobiscum!”
With that salutation, more benevolent
than accurate, the friar vanished from the room; the
chief of the tymbesteres leaped lightly on the table,
put one foot on the soldier’s shoulder, and sprang
through the open lattice. She found the friar
in the act of mounting a sturdy mule, which had been
tied to a post by the door.
“Fie, Graul Skellet! Fie,
Graul!” said the conjurer “Respect for
my serge. We must not be noted together out of
door in the daylight. There’s a groat for
thee. Vade, execrabilis, that
is, good-day to thee, pretty rogue!”
“A word, friar, a word.
Wouldst thou have the old man burned, drowned, or
torn piecemeal? He hath a daughter too, who once
sought to mar our trade with her gittern; a daughter,
then in a kirtle that I would not have nimmed from
a hedge, but whom I last saw in sarcenet and lawn,
with a great lord for her fere.” The tymbestere’s
eyes shone with malignant envy, as she added, “Graul
Skellet loves not to see those who have worn worsted
and say walk in sarcenet and lawn. Graul Skellet
loves not wenches who have lords for their feres,
and yet who shrink from Graul and her sisters as the
sound from the leper.”
“Fegs,” answered the friar,
impatiently, “I know naught against the daughter, a
pretty lass, but too high for my kisses. And as
for the father, I want not the man’s life, that
is, not very specially, but his model,
his mechanical. He may go free, if that can be
compassed; if not, why, the model at all risks.
Serve me in this.”
“And thou wilt teach me the
last tricks of the cards, and thy great art of making
phantoms glide by on the wall?”
“Bring the model intact, and
I will teach thee more, Graul, the dead
man’s candle, and the charm of the newt; and
I’ll give thee, to boot, the Gaul of the parricide
that thou hast prayed me so oft for. Hum! thou
hast a girl in thy troop who hath a blinking eye that
well pleases me; but go now, and obey me. Work
before play, and grace before pudding!”
The tymbestere nodded, snapped her
fingers in the air, and humming no holy ditty, returned
to the house through the doorway.
This short conference betrays to the
reader the relations, mutually advantageous, which
subsisted between the conjuror and the tymbesteres.
Their troop (the mothers, perchance, of the generation
we treat of) had been familiar to the friar in his
old capacity of mountebank, or tregetour, and in his
clerical and courtly elevation, he did not disdain
an ancient connection that served him well with the
populace; for these grim children of vice seemed present
in every place, where pastime was gay, or strife was
rampant, in peace, at the merry-makings
and the hostelries; in war, following the camp, and
seen, at night, prowling through the battlefields
to dispatch the wounded and to rifle the slain:
in merrymaking, hostelry, or in camp, they could thus
still spread the fame of Friar Bungey, and uphold
his repute both for terrible lore and for hearty love
of the commons.
Nor was this all; both tymbesteres
and conjuror were fortune-tellers by profession.
They could interchange the anecdotes each picked up
in their different lines. The tymbestere could
thus learn the secrets of gentle and courtier, the
conjuror those of the artisan and mechanic.
Unconscious of the formidable dispositions
of their neighbours, Sibyll and Warner were inhaling
the sweet air of the early spring in their little
garden. His disgrace had affected the philosopher
less than might be supposed. True, that the loss
of the king’s favour was the deferring indefinitely perhaps
for life any practical application of his
adored theory; and yet, somehow or other, the theory
itself consoled him. At the worst, he should
find some disciple, some ingenious student, more fortunate
than himself, to whom he could bequeath the secret,
and who, when Adam was in his grave, would teach the
world to revere his name. Meanwhile, his time
was his own; he was lord of a home, though ruined
and desolate; he was free, with his free thoughts;
and therefore, as he paced the narrow garden, his
step was lighter, his mind less absent than when parched
with feverish fear and hope for the immediate practical
success of a principle which was to be tried before
the hazardous tribunal of prejudice and ignorance.
“My child,” said the sage,
“I feel, for the first time for years, the distinction
of the seasons. I feel that we are walking in
the pleasant spring. Young days come back to
me like dreams; and I could almost think thy mother
were once more by my side!”
Sibyll pressed her father’s
hand, and a soft but melancholy sigh stirred her rosy
lips. She, too, felt the balm of the young year;
yet her father’s words broke upon sad and anxious
musings. Not to youth as to age, not to loving
fancy as to baffled wisdom, has seclusion charms that
compensate for the passionate and active world!
On coming back to the old house, on glancing round
its mildewed walls, comfortless and bare, the neglected,
weed-grown garden, Sibyll had shuddered in dismay.
Had her ambition fallen again into its old abject
state? Were all her hopes to restore her ancestral
fortunes, to vindicate her dear father’s fame,
shrunk into this slough of actual poverty, the
butterfly’s wings folded back into the chrysalis
shroud of torpor? The vast disparity between
herself and Hastings had not struck her so forcibly
at the court; here, at home, the very walls proclaimed
it. When Edward had dismissed the unwelcome witnesses
of his attempted crime, he had given orders that they
should be conducted to their house through the most
private ways. He naturally desired to create
no curious comment upon their departure. Unperceived
by their neighbours, Sibyll and her father had gained
access by the garden gate. Old Madge received
them in dismay; for she had been in the habit of visiting
Sibyll weekly at the palace, and had gained, in the
old familiarity subsisting, then, between maiden and
nurse, some insight into her heart. She had cherished
the fondest hopes for the fate of her young mistress;
and now, to labour and to penury had the fate returned!
The guard who accompanied them, according to Edward’s
orders, left some pieces of gold, which Adam rejected,
but Madge secretly received and judiciously expended.
And this was all their wealth. But not of toil
nor of penury in themselves thought Sibyll; she thought
but of Hastings, wildly, passionately, trustfully,
unceasingly, of the absent Hastings. Oh, he would
seek her, he would come, her reverse would but the
more endear her to him! Hastings came not.
She soon learned the wherefore. War threatened
the land, he was at his post, at the head
of armies.
Oh, with what panoply of prayer she
sought to shield that beloved breast! And now
the old man spoke of the blessed spring, the holiday
time of lovers and of love, and the young girl, sighing,
said to her mournful heart, “The world hath
its sun, where is mine?”
The peacock strutted up to his poor
protectors, and spread his plumes to the gilding beams.
And then Sibyll recalled the day when she had walked
in that spot with Marmaduke, and he had talked of his
youth, ambition, and lusty hopes, while, silent and
absorbed, she had thought within herself, “Could
the world be open to me as to him, I too
have ambition, and it should find its goal.”
Now what contrast between the two, the
man enriched and honoured, if to-day in peril or in
exile, to-morrow free to march forward still on his
career, the world the country to him whose heart was
bold and whose name was stainless! and she, the woman,
brought back to the prison-home, scorn around her,
impotent to avenge, and forbidden to fly! Wherefore? Sibyll
felt her superiority of mind, of thought, of nature, wherefore
the contrast? The success was that of man, the
discomfiture that of woman. Woe to the man who
precedes his age; but never yet has an age been in
which genius and ambition are safe to woman!
The father and the child turned into
their house. The day was declining. Adam
mounted to his studious chamber, Sibyll sought the
solitary servant.
“What tidings, oh, what tidings?
The war, you say, is over; the great earl, his sweet
daughter, safe upon the seas, but Hastings ob,
Hastings! what of him?”
“My bonnibell, my lady-bird,
I have none but good tales to tell thee. I saw
and spoke with a soldier who served under Lord Hastings
himself; he is unscathed, he is in London. But
they say that one of his bands is quartered in the
suburb, and that there is a report of a rising in
Hertfordshire.”
“When will peace come to England
and to me!” sighed Sibyll.
CHAPTER IV. THE WORLD’S JUSTICE, AND THE WISDOM OF OUR ANCESTORS.
The night had now commenced, and Sibyll
was still listening or, perhaps, listening
not to the soothing babble of the venerable
servant. They were both seated in the little
room that adjoined the hall, and their only light
came through the door opening on the garden, a
gray, indistinct twilight, relieved by the few earliest
stars. The peacock, his head under his wing,
roosted on the balustrade, and the song of the nightingale,
from amidst one of the neighbouring copses, which studded
the ground towards the chase of Marybone, came soft
and distant on the serene air. The balm and freshness
of spring were felt in the dews, in the skies, in
the sweet breath of young herb and leaf; through the
calm of ever-watchful nature, it seemed as if you
might mark, distinct and visible, minute after minute,
the blessed growth of April into May.
Suddenly Madge uttered a cry of alarm,
and pointed towards the opposite wall. Sibyll,
startled from her revery, looked up, and saw something
dusk and dwarf-like perched upon the crumbling eminence.
Presently this apparition leaped lightly into the
garden, and the alarm of the women was lessened on
seeing a young boy creep stealthily over the grass
and approach the open door.
“Hey, child!” said Madge, rising.
“What wantest thou?”
“Hist, gammer, hist! Ah,
the young mistress? That’s well. Hist!
I say again.” The boy entered the room.
“I’m in time to save you. In half
an hour your house will be broken into, perhaps burned.
The boys are clapping their hands now at the thoughts
of the bonfire. Father and all the neighbours
are getting ready. Hark! hark! No, it is
only the wind! The tymbesteres are to give note.
When you hear their bells tinkle, the mob will meet.
Run for your lives, you and the old man, and don’t
ever say it was poor Tim who told you this, for Father
would beat me to death. Ye can still get through
the garden into the fields. Quick!”
“I will go to the master,”
exclaimed Madge, hurrying from the room.
The child caught Sibyll’s cold
hand through the dark. “And I say, mistress,
if his worship is a wizard, don’t let him punish
Father and Mother, or poor Tim, or his little sister;
though Tim was once naughty, and hooted Master Warner.
Many, many, many a time and oft have I seen that kind,
mild face in my sleep, just as when it bent over me,
while I kicked and screamed, and the poor gentleman
said, ’Thinkest thou I would harm thee?’
But he’ll forgive me now, will he not? And
when I turned the seething water over myself, and
they said it was all along of the wizard, my heart
pained more than the arm. But they whip me, and
groan out that the devil is in me, if I don’t
say that the kettle upset of itself! Oh, those
tymbesteres! Mistress, did you ever see them?
They fright me. If you could hear how they set
on all the neighbours! And their laugh it
makes the hair stand on end! But you will get
away, and thank Tim too? Oh, I shall laugh then,
when they find the old house empty!”
“May our dear Lord bless thee bless
thee, child,” sobbed Sibyll, clasping the boy
in her arms, and kissing him, while her tears bathed
his cheeks.
A light gleamed on the threshold;
Madge, holding a candle, appeared with Warner, his
hat and cloak thrown on in haste. “What
is this?” said the poor scholar. “Can
it be true? Is mankind so cruel? What have
I done, woe is me! what have I done to deserve this?”
“Come, dear father, quick,”
said Sibyll, drying her tears, and wakened by the
presence of the old man into energy and courage.
“But put thy hand on this boy’s head,
and bless him; for it is he who has, haply, saved
us.”
The boy trembled a moment as the long-bearded
face turned towards him, but when he caught and recognized
those meek, sweet eyes, his superstition vanished,
and it was but a holy and grateful awe that thrilled
his young blood, as the old man placed both withered
hands over his yellow hair, and murmured,
“God shield thy youth!
God make thy manhood worthy! God give thee children
in thine old age with hearts like thine!” Scarcely
had the prayer ceased when the clash of timbrels,
with their jingling bells, was heard in the street.
Once, twice, again, and a fierce yell closed in chorus, caught
up and echoed from corner to corner, from house to
house.
“Run! run!” cried the boy, turning white
with terror.
“But the Eureka my
hope my mind’s child!” exclaimed
Adam, suddenly, and halting at the door.
“Eh, eh!” said Madge,
pushing him forward. “It is too heavy to
move; thou couldst not lift it. Think of thine
own flesh and blood, of thy daughter, of her dead
mother! Save her life, if thou carest not for
thine own!”
“Go, Sibyll, go, and thou, Madge;
I will stay. What matters my life, it
is but the servant of a thought! Perish master,
perish slave!”
“Father, unless you come with
me, I stir not. Fly or perish, your fate is mine!
Another minute Oh, Heaven of mercy, that
roar again! We are both lost!”
“Go, sir, go; they care not
for your iron, iron cannot feel. They
will not touch that! Have not your daughter’s
life upon your soul!”
“Sibyll, Sibyll, forgive me!
Come!” said Warner, conscience-stricken at the
appeal.
Madge and the boy ran forwards; the
old woman unbarred the garden-gate; Sibyll and her
father went forth; the fields stretched before them
calm and solitary; the boy leaped up, kissed Sibyll’s
pale cheek, and then bounded across the grass, and
vanished.
“Loiter not, Madge. Come!” cried
Sibyll.
“Nay,” said the old woman,
shrinking back, “they bear no grudge to me;
I am too old to do aught but burthen ye. I will
stay, and perchance save the house and the chattels,
and poor master’s deft contrivance. Whist!
thou knowest his heart would break if none were by
to guard it.”
With that the faithful servant thrust
the broad pieces that yet remained of the king’s
gift into the gipsire Sibyll wore at her girdle, and
then closed and rebarred the door before they could
detain her.
“It is base to leave her,” said the scholar-gentleman.
The noble Sibyll could not refute
her father. Afar they heard the tramping of feet;
suddenly, a dark red light shot up into the blue air,
a light from the flame of many torches.
“The wizard, the wizard!
Death to the wizard, who would starve the poor!”
yelled forth, and was echoed by a stern hurrah.
Adam stood motionless, Sibyll by his side.
“The wizard and his daughter!”
shrieked a sharp single voice, the voice of Graul
the tymbestere.
Adam turned. “Fly, my child, they
now threaten thee. Come, come, come!” and,
taking her by the hand, he hurried her across the fields,
skirting the hedge, their shadows dodging, irregular
and quaint, on the starlit sward. The father
had lost all thought, all care but for the daughter’s
life. They paused at last, out of breath and exhausted:
the sounds at the distance were lulled and hushed.
They looked towards the direction of the home they
had abandoned, expecting to see the flames destined
to consume it reddening the sky; but all was dark, or,
rather, no light save the holy stars and the rising
moon offended the majestic heaven.
“They cannot harm the poor old
woman; she hath no lore. On her gray hairs has
fallen not the curse of men’s hate!” said
Warner.
“Right, Father! when they found
us flown, doubtless the cruel ones dispersed.
But they may search yet for thee. Lean on me,
I am strong and young. Another effort, and we
gain the safe coverts of the Chase.”
While yet the last word hung on her
lips, they saw, on the path they had left, the burst
of torch-light, and heard the mob hounding on their
track. But the thick copses, with their pale green
just budding into life, were at hand. On they
fled. The deer started from amidst the entangled
fern, but stood and gazed at them without fear; the
playful hares in the green alleys ceased not their
nightly sports at the harmless footsteps; and when
at last, in the dense thicket, they sunk down on the
mossy roots of a giant oak, the nightingales overhead
chanted as if in melancholy welcome. They were
saved!
But in their home, fierce fires glared
amidst the tossing torch-light; the crowd, baffled
by the strength of the door, scaled the wall, broke
through the lattice-work of the hall window, and streaming
through room after room, roared forth, “Death
to the wizard!” Amidst the sordid dresses of
the men, the soiled and faded tinsel of the tymbesteres
gleamed and sparkled. It was a scene the she-fiends
revelled in, dear are outrage and malice,
and the excitement of turbulent passions, and the
savage voices of frantic men, and the thirst of blood
to those everlasting furies of a mob, under whatever
name we know them, in whatever time they taint with
their presence, women in whom womanhood
is blasted!
Door after door was burst open with
cries of disappointed rage; at last they ascended
the turret-stairs, they found a small door barred and
locked. Tim’s father, a huge axe in his
brawny arm, shivered the panels; the crowd rushed
in, and there, seated amongst a strange and motley
litter, they found the devoted Madge. The poor
old woman had collected into this place, as the stronghold
of the mansion, whatever portable articles seemed
to her most precious, either from value or association.
Sibyll’s gittern (Marmaduke’s gift) lay
amidst a lumber of tools and implements; a faded robe
of her dead mother’s, treasured by Madge and
Sibyll both, as a relic of holy love; a few platters
and cups of pewter, the pride of old Madge’s
heart to keep bright and clean; odds and ends of old
hangings; a battered silver brooch (a love-gift to
Madge herself when she was young), these,
and suchlike scraps of finery, hoards inestimable
to the household memory and affection, lay confusedly
heaped around the huge grim model, before which, mute
and tranquil, sat the brave old woman.
The crowd halted, and stared round
in superstitious terror and dumb marvel.
The leader of the tymbesteres sprang forward.
“Where is thy master, old hag,
and where the bonny maid who glamours lords, and despises
us bold lasses?”
“Alack! master and the damsel
have gone hours ago! I am alone in the house;
what’s your will?”
“The crone looks parlous witchlike!”
said Tim’s father; crossing himself, and somewhat
retreating from her gray, unquiet eyes. And,
indeed, poor Madge, with her wrinkled face, bony form,
and high cap, corresponded far more with the vulgar
notions of a dabbler in the black art than did Adam
Warner, with his comely countenance and noble mien.
“So she doth, indeed, and verily,”
said a hump-backed tinker; “if we were to try
a dip in the horsepool yonder it could do no harm.”
“Away with her, away!”
cried several voices at that humane suggestion.
“Nay, nay,” quoth the
baker, “she is a douce creature after all, and
hath dealt with me many years. I don’t care
what becomes of the wizard, every one knows,”
he added with pride, “that I was one of the
first to set fire to his house when Robin gainsayed
it! but right’s right burn the master,
not the drudge!”
This intercession might have prevailed,
but unhappily, at that moment Graul Skellet, who had
secured two stout fellows to accomplish the object
so desired by Friar Bungey, laid hands on the model,
and, at her shrill command, the men advanced and dislodged
it from its place. At the same tine the other
tymbesteres, caught by the sight of things pleasing
to their wonted tastes, threw themselves, one upon
the faded robe Sibyll’s mother had worn in her
chaste and happy youth; another, upon poor Madge’s
silver brooch; a third, upon the gittern.
These various attacks roused up all
the spirit and wrath of the old woman: her cries
of distress as she darted from one to the other, striking
to the right and left with her feeble arms, her form
trembling with passion, were at once ludicrous and
piteous; and these were responded to by the shrill
exclamations of the fierce tymbesteres, as they retorted
scratch for scratch, and blow for blow. The spectators
grew animated by the sight of actual outrage and resistance;
the humpbacked tinker, whose unwholesome fancy one
of the aggrieved tymbesteres had mightily warmed,
hastened to the relief of his virago; and rendered
furious by finding ten nails fastened suddenly on his
face, he struck down the poor creature by a blow that
stunned her, seized her in his arms, for
deformed and weakly as the tinker was, the old woman,
now sense and spirit were gone, was as light as skin
and bone could be, and followed by half
a score of his comrades, whooping and laughing, bore
her down the stairs. Tim’s father, who,
whether from parental affection, or, as is more probable,
from the jealous hatred and prejudice of ignorant
industry, was bent upon Adam’s destruction,
hallooed on some of his fierce fellows into the garden,
tracked the footsteps of the fugitives by the trampled
grass, and bounded over the wall in fruitless chase.
But on went the more giddy of the mob, rather in sport
than in cruelty, with a chorus of drunken apprentices
and riotous boys, to the spot where the humpbacked
tinker had dragged his passive burden. The foul
green pond near Master Sancroft’s hostel reflected
the glare of torches; six of the tymbesteres, leaping
and wheeling, with doggerel song and discordant music,
gave the signal for the ordeal of the witch,
“Lake or river, dyke
or ditch,
Water never drowns the
witch.
Witch or wizard would
ye know?
Sink or swim, is ay
or no.
Lift her, swing her,
once and twice,
Lift her,
swing her o’er the brim,
Lille lera twice
and thrice
Ha! ha!
mother, sink or swim!”
And while the last line was chanted,
amidst the full jollity of laughter and clamour and
clattering timbrels, there was a splash in the sullen
water; the green slough on the surface parted with
an oozing gurgle, and then came a dead silence.
“A murrain on the hag! she does
not even struggle!” said, at last, the hump-backed
tinker.
“No, no! she cares
not for water. Try fire! Out with her! out!”
cried Red Grisell.
“Aroint her! she is sullen!”
said the tinker, as his lean fingers clutched up the
dead body, and let it fall upon the margin. “Dead!”
said the baker, shuddering; “we have done wrong, I
told ye so! She dealt with me many a year.
Poor Madge! Right’s right. She was
no witch!”
“But that was the only way to
try it,” said the humpbacked tinker; “and
if she was not a witch, why did she look like one?
I cannot abide ugly folks!”
The bystanders shook their heads.
But whatever their remorse, it was diverted by a double
sound: first, a loud hurrah from some of the mob
who had loitered for pillage, and who now emerged from
Adam’s house, following two men, who, preceded
by the terrible Graul, dancing before them, and tossing
aloft her timbrel, bore in triumph the captured Eureka;
and, secondly, the blast of a clarion at the distance,
while up the street marched horse and foot,
with pike and banner a goodly troop.
The Lord Hastings in person led a royal force, by a
night march, against a fresh outbreak of the rebels,
not ten miles from the city, under Sir Geoffrey Gates,
who had been lately arrested by the Lord Howard at
Southampton, escaped, collected a disorderly body of
such restless men as are always disposed to take part
in civil commotion, and now menaced London itself.
At the sound of the clarion the valiant mob dispersed
in all directions, for even at that day mobs had an
instinct of terror at the approach of the military,
and a quick reaction from outrage to the fear of retaliation.
But, at the sound of martial music,
the tymbesteres silenced their own instruments, and
instead of flying, they darted through the crowd, each
to seek the other, and unite as for counsel. Graul,
pointing to Mr. Sancroft’s hostelry, whispered
the bearers of the Eureka to seek refuge there for
the present, and to bear their trophy with the dawn
to Friar Bungey at the Tower; and then, gliding nimbly
through the fugitive rioters, sprang into the centre
of the circle formed by her companions.
“Ye scent the coming battle?” said the
arch-tymbestere.
“Ay, ay, ay!” answered the sisterhood.
“But we have gone miles since
noon, I am faint and weary!” said
one amongst them.
Red Grisell, the youngest of the band,
struck her comrade on the cheek “Faint
and weary, ronion, with blood and booty in the wind!”
The tymbesteres smiled grimly on their
young sister; but the leader whispered “Hush!”
and they stood for a second or two with outstretched
throats, with dilated nostrils, with pent breath, listening
to the clarion and the hoofs and the rattling armour,
the human vultures foretasting their feast of carnage;
then, obedient to a sign from their chieftainess,
they crept lightly and rapidly into the mouth of a
neighbouring alley, where they cowered by the squalid
huts, concealed. The troop passed on, a
gallant and serried band, horse and foot, about fifteen
hundred men. As they filed up the thoroughfare,
and the tramp of the last soldiers fell hollow on
the starlit ground, the tymbesteres stole from their
retreat, and, at the distance of some few hundred
yards, followed the procession, with long, silent,
stealthy strides, as the meaner beasts,
in the instinct of hungry cunning, follow the lion
for the garbage of his prey.
CHAPTER V. THE FUGITIVES ARE CAPTURED—THE TYMBESTERES
REAPPEAR—MOONLIGHT ON THE REVEL OF THE LIVING—MOONLIGHT ON THE SLUMBER OF THE
DEAD.
The father and child made their resting-place
under the giant oak. They knew not whither to
fly for refuge; the day and the night had become the
same to them, the night menaced with robbers,
the day with the mob. If return to their home
was forbidden, where in the wide world a shelter for
the would-be world-improver? Yet they despaired
not, their hearts failed them not. The majestic
splendour of the night, as it deepened in its solemn
calm; as the shadows of the windless trees fell larger
and sharper upon the silvery earth; as the skies grew
mellower and more luminous in the strengthening starlight,
inspired them with the serenity of faith, for
night, to the earnest soul, opens the Bible of the
universe, and on the leaves of Heaven is written, “God
is everywhere.”
Their hands were clasped each in each,
their pale faces were upturned; they spoke not, neither
were they conscious that they prayed, but their silence
was thought, and the thought was worship.
Amidst the grief and solitude of the
pure, there comes, at times, a strange and rapt serenity, a
sleep-awake, over which the instinct of
life beyond the grave glides like a noiseless dream;
and ever that heaven that the soul yearns for is coloured
by the fancies of the fond human heart, each fashioning
the above from the desires unsatisfied below.
“There,” thought the musing
maiden, “cruelty and strife shall cease; there,
vanish the harsh differences of life; there, those
whom we have loved and lost are found, and through
the Son, who tasted of mortal sorrow, we are raised
to the home of the Eternal Father!”
“And there,” thought the
aspiring sage, “the mind, dungeoned and chained
below, rushes free into the realms of space; there,
from every mystery falls the veil; there, the Omniscient
smiles on those who, through the darkness of life,
have fed that lamp, the soul; there, Thought, but the
seed on earth, bursts into the flower and ripens to
the fruit!”
And on the several hope of both maid
and sage the eyes of the angel stars smiled with a
common promise.
At last, insensibly, and while still
musing, so that slumber but continued the revery into
visions, father and daughter slept.
The night passed away; the dawn came
slow and gray; the antlers of the deer stirred above
the fern; the song of the nightingale was hushed; and
just as the morning star waned back, while the reddening
east announced the sun, and labour and trouble resumed
their realm of day, a fierce band halted before those
sleeping forms.
These men had been Lancastrian soldiers,
and, reduced to plunder for a living, had, under Sir
Geoffrey Gates, formed the most stalwart part of the
wild, disorderly force whom Hilyard and Coniers had
led to Olney. They had heard of the new outbreak,
headed by their ancient captain, Sir Geoffrey (who
was supposed to have been instigated to his revolt
by the gold and promises of the Lancastrian chiefs),
and were on their way to join the rebels; but as war
for them was but the name for booty, they felt the
wonted instinct of the robber, when they caught sight
of the old man and the fair maid.
Both Adam and his daughter wore, unhappily,
the dresses in which they had left the court, and
Sibyll’s especially was that which seemed to
betoken a certain rank and station.
“Awake, rouse ye!” said
the captain of the band, roughly shaking the arm which
encircled Sibyll’s slender waist. Adam started,
opened his eyes, and saw himself begirt by figures
in rusty armour, with savage faces peering under their
steel sallets.
“How came you hither? Yon
oak drops strange acorns,” quoth the chief.
“Valiant sir,” replied
Adam, still seated, and drawing his gown instinctively
over Sibyll’s face, which nestled on his bosom,
in slumber so deep and heavy, that the gruff voice
had not broken it, “valiant sir! we are forlorn
and houseless, an old man and a simple girl. Some
evil-minded persons invaded our home; we fled in the
night, and ”
“Invaded your house! ha, it
is clear,” said the chief. “We know
the rest.”
At this moment Sibyll woke, and starting
to her feet in astonishment and terror at the sight
on which her eyes opened, her extreme beauty made a
sensible effect upon the bravoes.
“Do not be daunted, young demoiselle,”
said the captain, with an air almost respectful; “it
is necessary thou and Sir John should follow us, but
we will treat you well, and consult later on the ransom
ye will pay us. Jock, discharge the young sumpter
mule; put its load on the black one. We have
no better equipment for thee, lady; but the first haquenée
we find shall replace the mule, and meanwhile my knaves
will heap their cloaks for a pillion.”
“But what mean you? you
mistake us!” exclaimed Sibyll. “We
are poor; we cannot ransom ourselves.”
“Poor! tut!”
said the captain, pointing significantly to the costly
robe of the maiden “moreover his worship’s
wealth is well known. Mount in haste, we
are pressed.” And without heeding the expostulations
of Sibyll and the poor scholar, the rebel put his
troop into motion, and marched himself at their head,
with his lieutenant.
Sibyll found the subalterns sterner
than their chief; for as Warner offered to resist,
one of them lifted his gisarme, with a frightful oath,
and Sibyll was the first to persuade her father to
submit. She mildly, however, rejected the mule,
and the two captives walked together in the midst
of the troop.
“Pardie!” said the lieutenant,
“I see little help to Sir Geoffrey in these
recruits, captain!”
“Fool!” said the chief,
disdainfully, “if the rebellion fail, these
prisoners may save our necks. Will Somers last
night was to break into the house of Sir John Bourchier,
for arms and moneys, of which the knight hath a goodly
store. Be sure, Sir John slinked off in the siege,
and this is he and his daughter. Thou knowest
he is one of the greatest knights, and the richest,
whom the Yorkists boast of; and we may name our own
price for his ransom.”
“But where lodge them while we go to the battle?”
“Ned Porpustone hath a hostelry
not far from the camp, and Ned is a good Lancastrian,
and a man to be trusted.”
“We have not searched the prisoners,”
said the lieutenant; “they may have some gold
in their pouches.”
“Marry, when Will Somers storms
a hive, little time does he leave to the bees to fly
away with much money. Nathless, thou mayest search
the old knight, but civilly, and with gentle excuses.”
“And the damsel?”
“Nay! that were unmannerly,
and the milder our conduct, the larger the ransom, when
we have great folks to deal with.”
The lieutenant accordingly fell back
to search Adam’s gipsire, which contained only
a book and a file, and then rejoined his captain, without
offering molestation to Sibyll.
The mistake made by the bravo was
at least so far not wholly unfortunate that the notion
of the high quality of the captives for
Sir John Bourchier was indeed a person of considerable
station and importance (a notion favoured by the noble
appearance of the scholar and the delicate and highborn
air of Sibyll) procured for them all the
respect compatible with the circumstances. They
had not gone far before they entered a village, through
which the ruffians marched with the most perfect impunity;
for it was a strange feature in those civil wars that
the mass of the population, except in the northern
districts, remained perfectly supine and neutral.
And as the little band halted at a small inn to drink,
the gossips of the village collected round them, with
the same kind of indolent, careless curiosity which
is now evinced in some hamlet at the halt of a stage-coach.
Here the captain learned, however, some intelligence
important to his objects, namely, the night
march of the troop under Lord Hastings, and the probability
that the conflict was already begun. “If
so,” muttered the rebel, “we can see how
the tide turns, before we endanger ourselves; and
at the worst, our prisoners will bring something of
prize-money.”
While thus soliloquizing, he spied
one of those cumbrous vehicles of the day called whirlicotes
[Whirlicotes were in use from a very early period,
but only among the great, till, in the reign of Richard
ii., his queen, Anne, introduced side-saddles,
when the whirlicote fell out of fashion, but might
be found at different hostelries on the main roads
for the accommodation of the infirm or aged.] standing
in the yard of the hostelry; and seizing upon it,
vi et armis, in spite of all the cries and protestations
of the unhappy landlord, he ordered his captives to
enter, and recommenced his march.
As the band proceeded farther on their
way, they were joined by fresh troops of the same
class as themselves, and they pushed on gayly, till,
about the hour of eight, they halted before the hostelry
the captain had spoken of. It stood a little
out of the high road, not very far from the village
of Hadley, and the heath or chase of Gladsmore, on
which was fought, some time afterwards, the battle
of Barnet. It was a house of good aspect, and
considerable size, for it was much frequented by all
caravanserais and travellers from the North to the
metropolis. The landlord, at heart a stanch Lancastrian,
who had served in the French wars, and contrived,
no one knew how, to save moneys in the course of an
adventurous life, gave to his hostelry the appellation
and sign of the Talbot, in memory of the old hero
of that name; and, hiring a tract of land, joined
the occupation of a farmer to the dignity of a host.
The house, which was built round a spacious quadrangle,
represented the double character of its owner, one
side being occupied by barns and a considerable range
of stabling, while cows, oxen, and ragged colts grouped
amicably together in a space railed off in the centre
of the yard. At another side ran a large wooden
staircase, with an open gallery, propped on wooden
columns, conducting to numerous chambers, after the
fashion of the Tabard in Southwark, immortalized by
Chaucer. Over the archway, on entrance, ran a
labyrinth of sleeping lofts for foot passengers and
muleteers; and the side facing the entrance was nearly
occupied by a vast kitchen, the common hall, and the
bar, with the private parlour of the host, and two
or three chambers in the second story. The whirlicote
jolted and rattled into the yard. Sibyll and
her father were assisted out of the vehicle, and, after
a few words interchanged with the host, conducted
by Master Porpustone himself up the spacious stairs
into a chamber, well furnished and fresh littered,
with repeated assurances of safety, provided they maintained
silence, and attempted no escape.
“Ye are in time,” said
Ned Porpustone to the captain. “Lord Hastings
made proclamation at daybreak that he gave the rebels
two hours to disperse.”
“Pest! I like not those
proclamations. And the fellows stood their ground?”
“No; for Sir Geoffrey, like
a wise soldier, mended the ground by retreating a
mile to the left, and placing the wood between the
Yorkists and himself. Hastings, by this, must
have remarshalled his men. But to pass the wood
is slow work, and Sir Geoffrey’s crossbows are
no doubt doing damage in the covert. Come in,
while your fellows snatch a morsel without; five minutes
are not thrown away on filling their bellies.”
“Thanks, Ned, thou art a good
fellow; and if all else fail, why, Sir John’s
ransom shall pay the reckoning. Any news of bold
Robin?”
“Ay, he has ’scaped with
a whole skin, and gone back to the North,” answered
the host, leading the way to his parlour, where a flask
of strong wine and some cold meat awaited his guest.
“If Sir Geoffrey Gates can beat off the York
troopers, tell him, from me, not to venture to London,
but to fall back into the marshes. He will be
welcome there, I foreguess; for every northman is
either for Warwick or for Lancaster, and the two must
unite now, I trow.”
“But Warwick is flown!” quoth the captain.
“Tush! he has only flown as
the falcon flies when he has a heron to fight with, wheeling
and soaring. Woe to the heron when the falcon
swoops! But you drink not!”
“No; I must keep the head cool
to-day; for Hastings is a perilous captain. Thy
fist, friend! If I fall, I leave you Sir John
and his girl to wipe off old scores; if we beat off
the Yorkists I vow to Our Lady of Walsingham an image
of wax of the weight of myself.” The marauder
then started up, and strode to his men, who were snatching
a hasty meal on the space before the hostel.
He paused a moment or so, while his host whispered,
“Hastings was here before daybreak:
but his men only got the sour beer; yours fight upon
huffcap.”
“Up, men! to your pikes!
Dress to the right!” thundered the captain,
with a sufficient pause between each sentence.
“The York lozels have starved on stale beer, shall
they beat huffcap and Lancaster? Frisk and fresh-up
with the Antelope banner [The antelope was one of the
Lancastrian badges. The special cognizance of
Henry vi. was two feathers in saltire.], and
long live Henry the Sixth!”
The sound of the shout that answered
this harangue shook the thin walls of the chamber
in which the prisoners were confined, and they heard
with joy the departing tramp of the soldiers.
In a short time, Master Porpustone himself, a corpulent,
burly fellow, with a face by no means unprepossessing,
mounted to the chamber, accompanied by a comely housekeeper,
linked to him, as scandal said, by ties less irksome
than Hymen’s, and both bearing ample provisions,
with rich pigment and lucid clary [clary was wine
clarified], which they spread with great formality
on an oak table before their involuntary guest.
“Eat, your worship, eat!”
cried mine host, heartily. “Eat, lady-bird, nothing
like eating to kill time and banish care. Fortune
of war, Sir John, fortune of war, never
be daunted! Up to-day, down to-morrow. Come
what may York or Lancaster still
a rich man always falls on his legs. Five hundred
or so to the captain; a noble or two, out of pure
generosity, to Ned Porpustone (I scorn extortion),
and you and the fair young dame may breakfast at home
to-morrow, unless the captain or his favourite lieutenant
is taken prisoner; and then, you see, they will buy
off their necks by letting you out of the bag.
Eat, I say, eat!”
“Verily,” said Adam, seating
himself solemnly, and preparing to obey, “I
confess I’m a hungered, and the pasty hath a
savoury odour; but I pray thee to tell me why I am
called Sir John. Adam is my baptismal name.”
“Ha! ha! good very
good, your honour to be sure, and your father’s
name before you. We are all sons of Adam, and
every son, I trow, has a just right and a lawful to
his father’s name.”
With that, followed by the housekeeper,
the honest landlord, chuckling heartily, rolled his
goodly bulk from the chamber, which he carefully locked.
“Comprehendest thou yet, Sibyll?”
“Yes, dear sir and father, they
mistake us for fugitives of mark and importance; and
when they discover their error, no doubt we shall go
free. Courage, dear father!”
“Me seemeth,” quoth Adam,
almost merrily, as the good man filled his cup from
the wine flagon, “me seemeth that, if the mistake
could continue, it would be no weighty misfortune;
ha! ha!” He stopped abruptly in the unwonted
laughter, put down the cup; his face fell. “Ah,
Heaven forgive me! and the poor Eureka
and faithful Madge!”
“Oh, Father! fear not; we are
not without protection. Lord Hastings is returned
to London, we will seek him; he will make
our cruel neighbours respect thee. And Madge poor
Madge! will be so happy at our return,
for they could not harm her, a woman, old
and alone; no, no, man is not fierce enough for that.”
“Let us so pray; but thou eatest not, child.”
“Anon, Father, anon; I am sick
and weary. But, nay nay, I am better
now, better. Smile again, Father.
I am hungered, too; yes, indeed and in sooth, yes.
Ah, sweet Saint Mary, give me life and strength, and
hope and patience, for his dear sake!”
The stirring events which had within
the last few weeks diversified the quiet life of the
scholar had somewhat roused him from his wonted abstraction,
and made the actual world a more sensible and living
thing than it had hitherto seemed to his mind; but
now, his repast ended, the quiet of the place (for
the inn was silent and almost deserted) with the fumes
of the wine a luxury he rarely tasted operated
soothingly upon his thought and fancy, and plunged
him into those reveries, so dear alike to poet and
mathematician. To the thinker the most trifling
external object often suggests ideas, which, like Homer’s
chain, extend, link after link; from earth to heaven.
The sunny motes, that in a glancing column came
through the lattice, called Warner from the real day, the
day of strife and blood, with thousands hard by driving
each other to the Hades, and led his scheming
fancy into the ideal and abstract day, the
theory of light itself; and the theory suggested mechanism,
and mechanism called up the memory of his oracle, old
Roger Bacon; and that memory revived the great friar’s
hints in the Opus magnus, hints which outlined
the grand invention of the telescope; and so, as over
some dismal precipice a bird swings itself to and fro
upon the airy bough, the schoolman’s mind played
with its quivering fancy, and folded its calm wings
above the verge of terror.
Occupied with her own dreams, Sibyll
respected those of her father; and so in silence,
not altogether mournful, the morning and the noon passed,
and the sun was sloping westward, when a confused sound
below called Sibyll’s gaze to the lattice, which
looked over the balustrade of the staircase into the
vast yard. She saw several armed men, their harness
hewed and battered, quaffing ale or wine in haste,
and heard one of them say to the landlord,
“All is lost! Sir Geoffrey
Gates still holds out, but it is butcher work.
The troops of Lord Hastings gather round him as a net
round the fish!”
Hastings! that name! he
was at hand! he was near! they would be saved!
Sibyll’s heart beat loudly.
“And the captain?” asked Porpustone.
“Alive, when I last saw him;
but we must be off. In another hour all will
be hurry and skurry, flight and chase.”
At this moment from one of the barns there emerged,
one by one, the female vultures of the battle.
The tymbesteres, who had tramped all night to the spot,
had slept off their fatigue during the day, and appeared
on the scene as the neighbouring strife waxed low,
and the dead and dying began to cumber the gory ground.
Graul Skellet, tossing up her timbrel, darted to the
fugitives and grinned a ghastly grin when she heard
the news, for the tymbesteres were all
loyal to a king who loved women, and who had a wink
and a jest for every tramping wench! The troopers
tarried not, however, for further converse, but, having
satisfied their thirst, hurried and clattered from
the yard. At the sight of the ominous tymbesteres
Sibyll had drawn back, without daring to close the
lattice she had opened; and the women, seating themselves
on a bench, began sleeking their long hair and smoothing
their garments from the scraps of straw and litter
which betokened the nature of their resting-place.
“Ho, girls!” said the
fat landlord, “ye will pay me for board and bed,
I trust, by a show of your craft. I have two right
worshipful lodgers up yonder, whose lattice looks
on the yard, and whom ye may serve to divert.”
Sibyll trembled, and crept to her father’s side.
“And,” continued the landlord,
“if they like the clash of your musicals, it
may bring ye a groat or so, to help ye on your journey.
By the way, whither wend ye, wenches?”
“To a bonny, jolly fair,”
answered the sinister voice of Graul,
“Where a mighty Showman
dyes
The greenery
into red;
Where, presto! at the
word
Lies his
Fool without a head;
Where he gathers in
the crowd
To the trumpet
and the drum,
With a jingle and a
tinkle,
Graul’s
merry lasses come!”
As the two closing lines were caught
by the rest of the tymbesteres, striking their timbrels,
the crew formed themselves into a semicircle, and
commenced their dance. Their movements, though
wanton and fantastic, were not without a certain wild
grace; and the address with which, from time to time,
they cast up their instruments and caught them in
descending, joined to the surprising agility with which,
in the evolutions of the dance, one seemed now to
chase, now to fly from, the other, darting to and
fro through the ranks of her companions, winding and
wheeling, the chain now seemingly broken
in disorder, now united link to link, as the whole
force of the instruments clashed in chorus, made
an exhibition inexpressibly attractive to the vulgar.
The tymbesteres, however, as may well
be supposed, failed to draw Sibyll or Warner to the
window; and they exchanged glances of spite and disappointment.
“Marry,” quoth the landlord,
after a hearty laugh at the diversion, “I do
wrong to be so gay, when so many good friends perhaps
are lying stark and cold. But what then?
Life is short, laugh while we can!”
“Hist!” whispered his
housekeeper; “art wode, Ned? Wouldst thou
have it discovered that thou hast such quality birds
in the cage noble Yorkists at
the very time when Lord Hastings himself may be riding
this way after the victory?”
“Always right, Meg, and
I’m an ass!” answered the host, in the
same undertone. “But my good nature will
be the death of me some day. Poor gentlefolks,
they must be unked dull, yonder!”
“If the Yorkists come hither, which
we shall soon know by the scouts, we must
shift Sir John and the damsel to the back of the house,
over thy tap-room.”
“Manage it as thou wilt, Meg;
but thou seest they keep quiet and snug. Ho,
ho, ho! that tall tymbestere is supple enough to make
an owl hold his sides with laughing. Ah! hollo,
there, tymbesteres, ribaudes, tramps, the devil’s
chickens, down, down!”
The host was too late in his order.
With a sudden spring, Graul, who had long fixed her
eye on the open lattice of the prisoners, had wreathed
herself round one of the pillars that supported the
stairs, swung lightly over the balustrade; and with
a faint shriek the startled Sibyll beheld the tymbestere’s
hard, fierce eyes, glaring upon her through the lattice,
as her long arm extended the timbrel for largess.
But no sooner had Sibyll raised her face than she
was recognized.
“Ho, the wizard and the wizard’s
daughter! Ho, the girl who glamours lords, and
wears sarcenet and lawn! Ho, the nigromancer who
starves the poor!”
At the sound of their leader’s
cry, up sprang, up climbed the hellish sisters!
One after the other, they darted through the lattice
into the chamber.
“The ronions! the foul fiend
has distraught them!” groaned the landlord,
motionless with astonishment; but the more active Meg,
calling to the varlets and scullions, whom the
tymbesteres had collected in the yard, to follow her,
bounded up the stairs, unlocked the door, and arrived
in time to throw herself between the captives and the
harpies, whom Sibyll’s rich super-tunic and
Adam’s costly gown had inflamed into all the
rage of appropriation.
“What mean ye, wretches?”
cried the bold Meg, purple with anger. “Do
ye come for this into honest folk’s hostelries,
to rob their guests in broad day noble
guests guests of mark! Oh, Sir John!
Sir John! what will ye think of us?”
“Oh, Sir John! Sir John!”
groaned the landlord, who had now moved his slow bulk
into the room. “They shall be scourged,
Sir John! They shall be put in the stocks, they
shall be brent with hot iron, they ”
“Ha, ha!” interrupted
the terrible Graul, “guests of mark! noble guests,
trow ye! Adam Warner, the wizard, and his daughter,
whom we drove last night from their den, as many a
time, sisters, and many, we have driven the rats from
charnel and cave.”
“Wizard! Adam! Blood
of my life!” stammered the landlord, “is
his name Adam after all?”
“My name is Adam Warner,”
said the old man, with dignity, “no wizard a
humble scholar, and a poor gentleman, who has injured
no one. Wherefore, women if women
ye are would ye injure mine and me?”
“Faugh, wizard!” returned
Graul, folding her arms. “Didst thou not
send thy spawn, yonder, to spoil our mart with her
gittern? Hast thou not taught her the spells
to win love from the noble and young? Ho, how
daintily the young witch robes herself! Ho, laces
and satins, and we shiver with the cold, and
parch with the heat and doff
thy tunic, minion!”
And Graul’s fierce gripe was
on the robe, when the landlord interposed his huge
arm, and held her at bay.
“Softly, my sucking dove, softly!
Clear the room and be off!”
“Look to thyself, man.
If thou harbourest a wizard against law, a
wizard whom King Edward hath given up to the people, look
to thy barns, they shall burn; look to
thy cattle, they shall rot; look to thy
secrets, they shall be told. Lancastrian,
thou shalt hang! We go! we go! We have friends
amongst the mailed men of York. We go, we
will return! Woe to thee, if thou harbourest
the wizard and the succuba!”
With that Graul moved slowly to the
door. Host and housekeeper, varlet, groom, and
scullion made way for her in terror; and still, as
she moved, she kept her eyes on Sibyll, till her sisters,
following in successive file, shut out the hideous
aspect: and Meg, ordering away her gaping train,
closed the door.
The host and the housekeeper then
gazed gravely at each other. Sibyll lay in her
father’s arms breathing hard and convulsively.
The old man’s face bent over her in silence.
Meg drew aside her master. “You must rid
the house at once of these folks. I have heard
talk of yon tymbesteres; they are awsome in spite
and malice. Every man to himself!”
“But the poor old gentleman,
so mild, and the maid, so winsome!”
The last remark did not over-please
the comely Meg. She advanced at once to Adam,
and said shortly,
“Master, whether wizard or not
is no affair of a poor landlord, whose house is open
to all; but ye have had food and wine, please
to pay the reckoning, and God speed ye; ye are free
to depart.”
“We can pay you, mistress!”
exclaimed Sibyll, springing up. “We have
moneys yet. Here, here!” and she took from
her gipsire the broad pieces which poor Madge’s
precaution had placed therein, and which the bravoes
had fortunately spared.
The sight of the gold somewhat softened
the housewife. “Lord Hastings is known
to us,” continued Sibyll, perceiving the impression
she had made; “suffer us to rest here till he
pass this way, and ye will find yourselves repaid
for the kindness.”
“By my troth,” said the
landlord, “ye are most welcome to all my poor
house containeth; and as for these tymbesteres, I value
them not a straw. No one can say Ned Porpustone
is an ill man or inhospitable. Whoever can pay
reasonably is sure of good wine and civility at the
Talbot.”
With these and many similar protestations
and assurances, which were less heartily re-echoed
by the housewife, the landlord begged to conduct them
to an apartment not so liable to molestation; and after
having led them down the principal stairs, through
the bar, and thence up a narrow flight of steps, deposited
them in a chamber at the back of the house, and lighted
a sconce therein, for it was now near the twilight.
He then insisted on seeing after their evening meal,
and vanished with his assistant. The worthy pair
were now of the same mind; for guests known to Lord
Hastings it was worth braving the threats of the tymbesteres;
especially since Lord Hastings, it seems, had just
beaten the Lancastrians.
But alas! while the active Meg was
busy on the hippocras, and the worthy landlord was
inspecting the savoury operations of the kitchen, a
vast uproar was heard without. A troop of disorderly
Yorkist soldiers, who had been employed in dispersing
the flying rebels, rushed helter-skelter into the
house, and poured into the kitchen, bearing with them
the detested tymbesteres, who had encountered them
on their way. Among these soldiers were those
who had congregated at Master Sancroft’s the
day before, and they were well prepared to support
the cause of their griesly paramours. Lord Hastings
himself had retired for the night to a farmhouse nearer
the field of battle than the hostel; and as in those
days discipline was lax enough after a victory, the
soldiers had a right to license. Master Porpustone
found himself completely at the mercy of these brawling
customers, the more rude and disorderly from the remembrance
of the sour beer in the morning, and Graul Skellet’s
assurances that Master Porpustone was a malignant Lancastrian.
They laid hands on all the provisions in the house,
tore the meats from the spit, devouring them half
raw; set the casks running over the floors; and while
they swilled and swore, and filled the place with the
uproar of a hell broke loose, Graul Skellet, whom
the lust for the rich garments of Sibyll still fired
and stung, led her followers up the stairs towards
the deserted chamber. Mine host perceived, but
did not dare openly to resist the foray; but as he
was really a good-natured knave, and as, moreover,
he feared ill consequences might ensue if any friends
of Lord Hastings were spoiled, outraged, nay,
peradventure murdered, in his house, he
resolved, at all events, to assist the escape of his
guests. Seeing the ground thus clear of the tymbesteres,
he therefore stole from the riotous scene, crept up
the back stairs, gained the chamber to which he had
so happily removed his persecuted lodgers, and making
them, in a few words, sensible that he was no longer
able to protect them, and that the tymbesteres were
now returned with an armed force to back their malice,
conducted them safely to a wide casement only some
three or four feet from the soil of the solitary garden,
and bade them escape and save themselves.
“The farm,” he whispered,
“where they say my Lord Hastings is quartered
is scarcely a mile and a half away; pass the garden
wicket, leave Gladsmore Chase to the left hand, take
the path to the right, through the wood, and you will
see its roof among the apple-blossoms. Our Lady
protect you, and say a word to my lord on behalf of
poor Ned.”
Scarce had he seen his guests descend
into the garden before he heard the yell of the tymbesteres,
in the opposite part of the house, as they ran from
room to room after their prey. He hastened to
regain the kitchen; and presently the tymbesteres,
breathless and panting, rushed in, and demanded their
victims.
“Marry,” quoth the landlord,
with the self-possession of a cunning old soldier-"think
ye I cumbered my house with such cattle after pretty
lasses like you had given me the inkling of what they
were? No wizard shall fly away with the sign
of the Talbot, if I can help it. They skulked
off I can promise ye, and did not even mount a couple
of broomsticks which I handsomely offered for their
ride up to London.”
“Thunder and bombards!”
cried a trooper, already half-drunk, and seizing Graul
in his iron arms, “put the conjuror out of thine
head now, and buss me, Graul, buss me!”
Then the riot became hideous; the
soldiers, following their comrade’s example,
embraced the grim glee-women, tearing and hauling them
to and fro, one from the other, round and round, dancing,
hallooing, chanting, howling, by the blaze of a mighty
fire, many a rough face and hard hand smeared
with blood still wet, communicating the stain to the
cheeks and garb of those foul feres, and the whole
revel becoming so unutterably horrible and ghastly,
that even the veteran landlord fled from the spot,
trembling and crossing himself. And so, streaming
athwart the lattice, and silvering over that fearful
merry-making, rose the moon.
But when fatigue and drunkenness had
done their work, and the soldiers fell one over the
other upon the floor, the tables, the benches, into
the heavy sleep of riot, Graul suddenly rose from amidst
the huddled bodies, and then, silently as ghouls from
a burial-ground, her sisters emerged also from their
resting-places beside the sleepers. The dying
light of the fire contended but feebly with the livid
rays of the moon, and played fantastically over the
gleaming robes of the tymbesteres. They stood
erect for a moment, listening, Graul with her finger
on her lips; then they glided to the door, opened
and reclosed it, darted across the yard, scaring the
beasts that slept there; the watch-dog barked, but
drew back, bristling, and showing his fangs, as Red
Grisell, undaunted, pointed her knife, and Graul flung
him a red peace-sop of meat. They launched themselves
through the open entrance, gained the space beyond,
and scoured away to the battlefield.
Meanwhile, Sibyll and her father were
still under the canopy of heaven, they had scarcely
passed the garden and entered the fields, when they
saw horsemen riding to and fro in all directions.
Sir Geoffrey Gates, the rebel leader, had escaped;
the reward of three hundred marks was set on his head,
and the riders were in search of the fugitive.
The human form itself had become a terror to the hunted
outcasts; they crept under a thick hedge till the
horsemen had disappeared, and then resumed their way.
They gained the wood; but there again they halted at
the sound of voices, and withdrew themselves under
covert of some entangled and trampled bushes.
This time it was but a party of peasants, whom curiosity
had led to see the field of battle, and who were now
returning home. Peasants and soldiers both were
human, and therefore to be shunned by those whom the
age itself put out of the pale of law. At last
the party also left the path free; and now it was
full night. They pursued their way, they cleared
the wood; before them lay the field of battle; and
a deeper silence seemed to fall over the world!
The first stars had risen, but not yet the moon.
The gleam of armour from prostrate bodies, which it
had mailed in vain, reflected the quiet rays; here
and there flickered watchfires, where sentinels were
set, but they were scattered and remote. The
outcasts paused and shuddered, but there seemed no
holier way for their feet; and the roof of the farmer’s
homestead slept on the opposite side of the field,
amidst white orchard blossoms, whitened still more
by the stars. They went on, hand in hand, the
dead, after all, were less terrible than the living.
Sometimes a stern, upturned face, distorted by the
last violent agony, the eyes unclosed and glazed,
encountered them with its stony stare; but the weapon
was powerless in the stiff hand, the menace and the
insult came not from the hueless lips; persecution
reposed, at last, in the lap of slaughter. They
had gone midway through the field, when they heard
from a spot where the corpses lay thickest piled,
a faint voice calling upon God for pardon; and, suddenly,
it was answered by a tone of fiercer agony, that
did not pray, but curse.
By a common impulse, the gentle wanderers
moved silently to the spot.
The sufferer in prayer was a youth
scarcely passed from boyhood: his helm had been
cloven, his head was bare, and his long light hair,
clotted with gore, fell over his shoulders. Beside
him lay a strong-built, powerful form, which writhed
in torture, pierced under the arm by a Yorkist arrow,
and the shaft still projecting from the wound, and
the man’s curse answered the boy’s prayer.
“Peace to thy parting soul,
brother!” said Warner, bending over the man.
“Poor sufferer!” said
Sibyll to the boy; “cheer thee, we will send
succour; thou mayest live yet!”
“Water! water! hell
and torture! water, I say!” groaned
the man; “one drop of water!”
It was the captain of the maurauders
who had captured the wanderers.
“Thine arm! lift me! move me!
That evil man scares my soul from heaven!” gasped
the boy.
And Adam preached penitence to the
one that cursed, and Sibyll knelt down and prayed
with the one that prayed. And up rose the moon!
Lord Hastings sat with his victorious
captains over mead, morat, and wine in
the humble hall of the farm.
“So,” said he, “we
have crushed the last embers of the rebellion!
This Sir Geoffrey Gates is a restless and resolute
spirit; pity he escapes again for further mischief.
But the House of Nevile, that overshadowed the rising
race, hath fallen at last, a waisall, brave
sirs, to the new men!”
The door was thrown open, and an old
soldier entered abruptly.
“My lord! my lord! Oh,
my poor son! he cannot be found! The women, who
ever follow the march of soldiers, will be on the ground
to despatch the wounded, that they may rifle the corpses!
O God! if my son, my boy, my only son ”
“I wist not, my brave Mervil,
that thou hadst a son in our bands; yet I know each
man by name and sight. Courage! Our wounded
have been removed, and sentries are placed to guard
the field.”
“Sentries! O my lord, knowest
thou not that they wink at the crime that plunders
the dead? Moreover, these corpse-riflers creep
stealthily and unseen, as the red earth-worms, to
the carcass. Give me some few of thy men, give
me warrant to search the field! My son, my boy not
sixteen summers and his mother!”
The man stopped, and sobbed.
“Willingly!” said the
gentle Hastings, “willingly! And woe to
the sentries if it be as thou sayest! I will
go myself and see! Torches there what
ho! the good captain careth even for his
dead! Thy son! I marvel I knew him
not! Whom served he under?”
“My lord! my lord! pardon him!
He is but a boy they misled him! he fought
for the rebels. He crossed my path to-day, my
arm was raised; we knew each other, and he fled from
his father’s sword! Just as the strife
was ended I saw him again, I saw him fall! Oh,
mercy, mercy! do not let him perish of his wounds
or by the rifler’s knife, even though a rebel!”
“Homo sum!” quoth the
noble chief; “I am a man; and, even in these
bloody times, Nature commands when she speaks in a
father’s voice! Mervil, I marked thee to-day!
Thou art a brave fellow. I meant thee advancement;
I give thee, instead, thy son’s pardon, if he
lives; ten Masses if he died as a soldier’s
son should die, no matter under what flag, antelope
or lion, pierced manfully in the breast, his feet to
the foe! Come, I will search with thee!”
The boy yielded up his soul while
Sibyll prayed, and her sweet voice soothed the last
pang; and the man ceased to curse while Adam spoke
of God’s power and mercy, and his breath ebbed,
gasp upon gasp, away. While thus detained, the
wanderers saw not pale, fleeting figures, that had
glided to the ground, and moved, gleaming, irregular,
and rapid, as marsh-fed vapours, from heap to heap
of the slain. With a loud, wild cry, the robber
Lancastrian half sprung to his feet, in the paroxysm
of the last struggle, and then fell on his face, a
corpse!
The cry reached the tymbesteres, and
Graul rose from a body from which she had extracted
a few coins smeared with blood, and darted to the
spot; and so, as Adam raised his face from contemplating
the dead, whose last moments he had sought to soothe,
the Alecto of the battlefield stood before him, her
knife bare in her gory arm. Red Grisell, who had
just left (with a spurn of wrath for the
pouch was empty) the corpse of a soldier, round whose
neck she had twined her hot clasp the day before,
sprang towards Sibyll; the rest of the sisterhood flocked
to the place, and laughed in glee as they beheld their
unexpected prey. The danger was horrible and
imminent; no pity was seen in those savage eyes.
The wanderers prepared for death when,
suddenly, torches flashed over the ground. A
cry was heard, “See, the riflers of the dead!”
Armed men bounded forward, and the startled wretches
uttered a shrill, unearthly scream, and fled from
the spot, leaping over the carcasses, and doubling
and winding, till they had vanished into the darkness
of the wood.
“Provost!” said a commanding
voice, “hang me up those sentinels at day-break!”
“My son! my boy! speak, Hal, speak
to me. He is here, he is found!” exclaimed
the old soldier, kneeling beside the corpse at Sibyll’s
feet.
“My lord! my beloved! my Hastings!”
And Sibyll fell insensible before the chief.
CHAPTER VI. THE SUBTLE CRAFT OF RICHARD OF GLOUCESTER.
It was some weeks after the defeat
of Sir Geoffrey Gates, and Edward was at Shene, with
his gay court. Reclined at length within a pavilion
placed before a cool fountain, in the royal gardens,
and surrounded by his favourites, the king listened
indolently to the music of his minstrels, and sleeked
the plumage of his favourite falcon, perched upon
his wrist. And scarcely would it have been possible
to recognize in that lazy voluptuary the dauntless
soldier, before whose lance, as deer before the hound,
had so lately fled, at bloody Erpingham, the chivalry
of the Lancastrian Rose; but remote from the pavilion,
and in one of the deserted bowling alleys, Prince
Richard and Lord Montagu walked apart, in earnest
conversation. The last of these noble personages
had remained inactive during these disturbances, and
Edward had not seemed to entertain any suspicion of
his participation in the anger and revenge of Warwick.
The king took from him, it is true, the lands and earldom
of Northumberland, and restored them to the Percy,
but he had accompanied this act with gracious excuses,
alleging the necessity of conciliating the head of
an illustrious House, which had formally entered into
allegiance to the dynasty of York, and bestowed upon
his early favourite, in compensation, the dignity
of marquis. [Montagu said bitterly of this new dignity,
“He takes from me the Earldom and domains of
Northumberland, and makes me a Marquis, with a pie’s
nest to maintain it withal.” Stowe:
Edward iv. Warkworth Chronicle.] The
politic king, in thus depriving Montagu of the wealth
and the retainers of the Percy, reduced him, as a
younger brother, to a comparative poverty and insignificance,
which left him dependent on Edward’s favour,
and deprived him, as he thought, of the power of active
mischief; at the same time more than ever he insisted
on Montagu’s society, and summoning his attendance
at the court, kept his movements in watchful surveillance.
“Nay, my lord,” said Richard,
pursuing with much unction the conversation he had
commenced, “you wrong me much, Holy Paul be my
witness, if you doubt the deep sorrow I feel at the
unhappy events which have led to the severance of
my kinsmen! England seems to me to have lost
its smile in losing the glory of Earl Warwick’s
presence, and Clarence is my brother, and was my friend;
and thou knowest, Montagu, thou knowest, how dear
to my heart was the hope to win for my wife and lady
the gentle Anne.”
“Prince,” said Montagu,
abruptly, “though the pride of Warwick and the
honour of our House may have forbidden the public revelation
of the cause which fired my brother to rebellion,
thou, at least, art privy to a secret ”
“Cease!” exclaimed Richard,
in great emotion, probably sincere, for his face grew
livid, and its muscles were nervously convulsed.
“I would not have that remembrance stirred from
its dark repose. I would fain forget a brother’s
hasty frenzy, in the belief of his lasting penitence.”
He paused and turned his face, gasped for breath,
and resumed: “The cause justified the father;
it had justified me in the father’s cause, had
Warwick listened to my suit, and given me the right
to deem insult to his daughter injury to myself.”
“And if, my prince,” returned
Montagu, looking round him, and in a subdued whisper,
“if yet the hand of Lady Anne were pledged to
you?”
“Tempt me not, tempt me not!”
cried the prince, crossing himself. Montagu continued,
“Our cause, I mean Lord Warwick’s
cause, is not lost, as the king deems it.”
“Proceed,” said Richard,
casting down his eyes, while his countenance settled
back into its thoughtful calm.
“I mean,” renewed Montagu,
“that in my brother’s flight, his retainers
were taken by surprise. In vain the king would
confiscate his lands, he cannot confiscate
men’s hearts. If Warwick to-morrow set his
armed heel upon the soil, trowest thou, sagacious
and clear-judging prince, that the strife which would
follow would be but another field of Losecote? [The
battle of Erpingham, so popularly called, in contempt
of the rebel lions runaways.] Thou hast heard of the
honours with which King Louis has received the earl.
Will that king grudge him ships and moneys? And
meanwhile, thinkest thou that his favourers sleep?”
“But if he land, Montagu,”
said Richard, who seemed to listen with an attention
that awoke all the hopes of Montagu, coveting so powerful
an ally “if he land, and make open
war on Edward we must say the word boldly what
intent can he proclaim? It is not enough to say
King Edward shall not reign; the earl must say also
what king England should elect!”
“Prince,” answered Montagu,
“before I reply to that question, vouchsafe
to hear my own hearty desire and wish. Though
the king has deeply wronged my brother, though he
has despoiled me of the lands, which were, peradventure,
not too large a reward for twenty victories in his
cause, and restored them to the House that ever ranked
amongst the strongholds of his Lancastrian foe, yet
often when I am most resentful, the memory of my royal
seigneur’s past love and kindness comes over
me, above all, the thought of the solemn
contract between his daughter and my son; and I feel
(now the first heat of natural anger at an insult offered
to my niece is somewhat cooled) that if Warwick did
land, I could almost forget my brother for my king.”
“Almost!” repeated Richard, smiling.
“I am plain with your Highness,
and say but what I feel. I would even now fain
trust that, by your mediation, the king may be persuaded
to make such concessions and excuses as in truth would
not misbeseem him, to the father of Lady Anne, and
his own kinsman; and that yet, ere it be too late,
I may be spared the bitter choice between the ties
of blood and my allegiance to the king.”
“But failing this hope (which
I devoutly share), and Edward, it must be
owned, could scarcely trust to a letter, still
less to a messenger, the confession of a crime, failing
this, and your brother land, and I side with him for
love of Anne, pledged to me as a bride, what
king would he ask England to elect?”
“The Duke of Clarence loves
you dearly, Lord Richard,” replied Montagu.
“Knowest thou not how often he hath said, ’By
sweet Saint George, if Gloucester would join me, I
would make Edward know we were all one man’s
sons, who should be more preferred and promoted than
strangers of his wife’s blood?’”
[Hall.]
Richard’s countenance for a
moment evinced disappointment; but he said dryly:
“Then Warwick would propose that Clarence should
be king? and the great barons and the honest
burghers and the sturdy yeomen would, you think, not
stand aghast at the manifesto which declares, not that
the dynasty of York is corrupt and faulty, but that
the younger son should depose the elder, that
younger son, mark me! not only unknown in war and
green in council, but gay, giddy, vacillating; not
subtle of wit and resolute of deed, as he who so aspires
should be! Montagu, a vain dream!” Richard
paused and then resumed, in a low tone, as to himself,
“Oh, not so not so are kings cozened
from their thrones! a pretext must blind men, say
they are illegitimate, say they are too young, too
feeble, too anything, glide into their place, and then,
not war not war. You slay them not, they
disappear!” The duke’s face, as he muttered,
took a sinister and a dark expression, his eyes seemed
to gaze on space. Suddenly recovering himself
as from a revery, he turned, with his wonted sleek
and gracious aspect, to the startled Montagu, and said,
“I was but quoting from Italian history, good
my lord, wise lore, but terrible and murderous.
Return we to the point. Thou seest Clarence could
not reign, and as well,” added the prince, with
a slight sigh, “as well or better
(for, without vanity, I have more of a king’s
mettle in me), might I even I aspire
to my brother’s crown!” Here he paused,
and glanced rapidly and keenly at the marquis; but
whether or not in these words he had sought to sound
Montagu, and that glance sufficed to show him it were
bootless or dangerous to speak more plainly, he resumed
with an altered voice, “Enough of this:
Warwick will discover the idleness of such design;
and if he land, his trumpets must ring to a more kindling
measure. John Montagu, thinkest thou that Margaret
of Anjou and the Lancastrians will not rather win thy
brother to their side? There is the true danger
to Edward, none elsewhere.”
“And if so?” said Montagu,
watching his listener’s countenance. Richard
started, and gnawed his lip. “Mark me,”
continued the marquis, “I repeat that I would
fain hope yet that Edward may appease the earl; but
if not, and, rather than rest dishonoured and aggrieved,
Warwick link himself with Lancaster, and thou join
him as Anne’s betrothed and lord, what matters
who the puppet on the throne? we and thou
shall be the rulers; or, if thou reject,” added
the marquis, artfully, as he supposed, exciting the
jealousy of the duke, “Henry has a son a
fair, and they say, a gallant prince carefully
tutored in the knowledge of our English laws, and
who my lord of Oxford, somewhat in the confidence of
the Lancastrians, assures me would rejoice to forget
old feuds, and call Warwick ‘father,’
and my niece ‘Lady and Princess of Wales.’”
With all his dissimulation, Richard
could ill conceal the emotions of fear, of jealousy,
of dismay, which these words excited.
“Lord Oxford!” he cried,
stamping his foot. “Ha, John de Vere, pestilent
traitor, plottest thou thus? But we can yet seize
thy person, and will have thy head.”
Alarmed at this burst, and suddenly
made aware that he had laid his breast too bare to
the boy, whom he had thought to dazzle and seduce to
his designs, Montagu said falteringly, “But,
my lord, our talk is but in confidence: at your
own prayer, with your own plighted word of prince
and of kinsman, that whatever my frankness may utter
should not pass farther. Take,” added the
nobleman, with proud dignity “take
my head rather than Lord Oxford’s; for
I deserve death, if I reveal to one who can betray
the loose words of another’s intimacy and trust!”
“Forgive me, my cousin,”
said Richard, meekly; “my love to Anne transported
me too far. Lord Oxford’s words, as
you report them, had conjured up a rival, and but
enough of this. And now,” added the prince,
gravely, and with a steadiness of voice and manner
that gave a certain majesty to his small stature,
“now as thou hast spoken openly, openly also
will I reply. I feel the wrong to the Lady Anne
as to myself; deeply, burningly, and lastingly, will
it live in my mind; it may be, sooner or later, to
rise to gloomy deeds, even against Edward and Edward’s
blood. But no, I have the king’s solemn
protestations of repentance; his guilty passion has
burned into ashes, and he now sighs gay
Edward for a lighter fere. I cannot
join with Clarence, less can I join with the Lancastrians.
My birth makes me the prop of the throne of York, to
guard it as a heritage (who knows?) that may descend
to mine, nay, to me! And, mark me well
if Warwick attempt a war of fratricide, he is lost;
if, on the other hand, he can submit himself to the
hands of Margaret, stained with his father’s
gore, the success of an hour will close in the humiliation
of a life. There is a third way left, and that
way thou hast piously and wisely shown. Let him,
like me, resign revenge, and, not exacting a confession
and a cry of peccavi, which no king, much less King
Edward the Plantagenet, can whimper forth, let him
accept such overtures as his liege can make. His
titles and castles shall be restored, equal possessions
to those thou hast lost assigned to thee, and all
my guerdon (if I can so negotiate) as all my ambition,
his daughter’s hand. Muse on this, and for
the peace and weal of the realm so limit all thy schemes,
my lord and cousin!”
With these words the prince pressed
the hand of the marquis, and walked slowly towards
the king’s pavilion.
“Shame on my ripe manhood and
lore of life,” muttered Montagu, enraged against
himself, and deeply mortified. “How sentence
by sentence and step by step yon crafty pigmy led
me on, till all our projects, all our fears and hopes,
are revealed to him who but views them as a foe.
Anne betrothed to one who even in fiery youth can
thus beguile and dupe! Warwick decoyed hither
upon fair words, at the will of one whom Italy (boy,
there thou didst forget thy fence of cunning!) has
taught how the great are slain not, but disappear!
no, even this defeat instructs me now. But right,
right! the reign of Clarence is impossible, and that
of Lancaster is ill-omened and portentous; and after
all, my son stands nearer to the throne than any subject,
in his alliance with the Lady Elizabeth. Would
to Heaven the king could yet But out on
me! this is no hour for musing on mine own aggrandizement;
rather let me fly at once and warn Oxford imperilled
by my imprudence against that dark eye
which hath set watch upon his life.”
At that thought, which showed that
Montagu, with all his worldliness, was not forgetful
of one of the first duties of knight and gentleman,
the marquis hastened up the alley, in the opposite
direction to that taken by Gloucester, and soon found
himself in the courtyard, where a goodly company were
mounting their haquenées and palfreys, to enjoy
a summer ride through the neighbouring chase.
The cold and half-slighting salutations of these minions
of the hour, which now mortified the Nevile, despoiled
of the possessions that had rewarded his long and
brilliant services, contrasting forcibly the reverential
homage he had formerly enjoyed, stung Montagu to the
quick.
“Whither ride you, brother Marquis?”
said young Lord Dorset (Elizabeth’s son by her
first marriage), as Montagu called to his single squire,
who was in waiting with his horse. “Some
secret expedition, methinks, for I have known the
day when the Lord Montagu never rode from his king’s
palace with less than thirty squires.”
“Since my Lord Dorset prides
himself on his memory,” answered the scornful
lord, “he may remember also the day when, if
a Nevile mounted in haste, he bade the first Woodville
he saw hold the stirrup.”
And regarding “the brother marquis”
with a stately eye that silenced and awed retort,
the long-descended Montagu passed the courtiers, and
rode slowly on till out of sight of the palace; he
then pushed into a hand-gallop, and halted not till
he had reached London, and gained the house in which
then dwelt the Earl of Oxford, the most powerful of
all the Lancastrian nobles not in exile, and who had
hitherto temporized with the reigning House.
Two days afterwards the news reached
Edward that Lord Oxford and Jasper of Pembroke uncle
to the boy afterwards Henry VII. had sailed
from England.
The tidings reached the king in his
chamber, where he was closeted with Gloucester.
The conference between them seemed to have been warm
and earnest, for Edward’s face was flushed,
and Gloucester’s brow was perturbed and sullen.
“Now Heaven be praised!”
cried the king, extending to Richard the letter which
communicated the flight of the disaffected lords.
“We have two enemies the less in our roiaulme,
and many a barony the more to confiscate to our kingly
wants. Ha, ha! these Lancastrians only serve to
enrich us. Frowning still, Richard? smile, boy!”
“Foi de mon âme,
Edward,” said Richard, with a bitter energy,
strangely at variance with his usual unctious deference
to the king, “your Highness’s gayety is
ill-seasoned; you reject all the means to assure your
throne, you rejoice in all the events that imperil
it. I prayed you to lose not a moment in conciliating,
if possible, the great lord whom you own you have
wronged, and you replied that you would rather lose
your crown than win back the arm that gave it you.”
“Gave it me! an error, Richard!
that crown was at once the heritage of my own birth
and the achievement of my own sword. But were
it as you say, it is not in a king’s nature
to bear the presence of a power more formidable than
his own, to submit to a voice that commands rather
than counsels; and the happiest chance that ever befell
me is the exile of this earl. How, after what
hath chanced, can I ever see his face again without
humiliation, or he mine without resentment?”
“So you told me anon, and I
answered, if that be so, and your Highness shrinks
from the man you have injured, beware at least that
Warwick, if he may not return as a friend, come not
back as an irresistible foe. If you will not
conciliate, crush! Hasten by all arts to separate
Clarence from Warwick. Hasten to prevent the
union of the earl’s popularity and Henry’s
rights. Keep eye upon all the Lancastrian lords,
and see that none quit the realm where they are captives,
to join a camp where they can rise into leaders.
And at the very moment I urge you to place strict
watch upon Oxford, to send your swiftest riders to
seize Jasper of Pembroke, you laugh with glee to hear
that Oxford and Pembroke are gone to swell the army
of your foes!”
“Better foes out of my realm
than in it,” answered Edward, dryly.
“My liege, I say no more,”
and Richard rose. “I would forestall a
danger; it but remains for me to share it.”
The king was touched. “Tarry
yet, Richard,” he said; and then, fixing his
brother’s eye, he continued, with a half smile
and a heightened colour, “though we knew thee
true and leal to us, we yet know also, Richard, that
thou hast personal interest in thy counsels. Thou
wouldst by one means or another soften or constrain
the earl into giving thee the hand of Anne. Well,
then, grant that Warwick and Clarence expel King Edward
from his throne, they may bring a bride to console
thee for the ruin of a brother.”
“Thou hast no right to taunt
or to suspect me, my liege,” returned Richard,
with a quiver in his lip. “Thou hast included
me in thy meditated wrong to Warwick; and had that
wrong been done ”
“Peradventure it had made thee
espouse Warwick’s quarrel?”
“Bluntly, yes!” exclaimed
Richard, almost fiercely, and playing with his dagger.
“But” (he added, with a sudden change of
voice) “I understand and know thee better than
the earl did or could. I know what in thee is
but thoughtless impulse, haste of passion, the habit
kings form of forgetting all things save the love
or hate, the desire or anger, of a moment. Thou
hast told me thyself, and with tears, of thy offence;
thou hast pardoned my boy’s burst of anger;
I have pardoned thy evil thought; thou hast told me
thyself that another face has succeeded to the brief
empire of Anne’s blue eye, and hast further pledged
me thy kingly word, that if I can yet compass the
hand of a cousin dear to me from childhood, thou wilt
confirm the union.”
“It is true,” said Edward.
“But if thou wed thy bride, keep her aloof from
the court, nay, frown not, my boy, I mean
simply that I would not blush before my brother’s
wife!”
Richard bowed low in order to conceal
the expression of his face, and went on without further
notice of the explanation. “And all this
considered, Edward, I swear by Saint Paul, the holiest
saint to thoughtful men, and by Saint George, the
noblest patron to high-born warriors, that thy crown
and thine honour are as dear to me as if they were
mine own. Whatever sins Richard of Gloucester
may live to harbour and repent, no man shall ever
say of him that he was a recreant to the honour of
his country [so Lord Bacon observes of Richard, with
that discrimination, even in the strongest censure,
of which profound judges of mankind are alone capable,
that he was “a king jealous of the honor of
the English nation"], or slow to defend the rights
of his ancestors from the treason of a vassal or the
sword of a foreign foe. Therefore, I say again,
if thou reject my honest counsels; if thou suffer Warwick
to unite with Lancaster and France; if the ships of
Louis bear to your shores an enemy, the might of whom
your reckless daring undervalues, foremost in the
field in battle, nearest to your side in exile, shall
Richard Plantagenet be found!” These words, being
uttered with sincerity, and conveying a promise never
forfeited, were more impressive than the subtlest
eloquence the wily and accomplished Gloucester ever
employed as the cloak to guile, and they so affected
Edward, that he threw his arms around his brother;
and after one of those bursts of emotion which were
frequent in one whose feelings were never deep and
lasting, but easily aroused and warmly spoken, he declared
himself really to listen to and adopt all means which
Richard’s art could suggest for the better maintenance
of their common weal and interests.
And then, with that wondrous, if somewhat
too restless and over-refining energy which belonged
to him, Richard rapidly detailed the scheme of his
profound and dissimulating policy. His keen and
intuitive insight into human nature had shown him
the stern necessity which, against their very will,
must unite Warwick with Margaret of Anjou. His
conversation with Montagu had left no doubt of that
peril on his penetrating mind. He foresaw that
this union might be made durable and sacred by the
marriage of Anne and Prince Edward; and to defeat
this alliance was his first object, partly through
Clarence, partly through Margaret herself. A
gentlewoman in the Duchess of Clarence’s train
had been arrested on the point of embarking to join
her mistress. Richard had already seen and conferred
with this lady, whose ambition, duplicity, and talent
for intrigue were known to him. Having secured
her by promises of the most lavish dignities and rewards,
he proposed that she should be permitted to join the
duchess with secret messages to Isabel and the duke,
warning them both that Warwick and Margaret would
forget their past feud in present sympathy, and that
the rebellion against King Edward, instead of placing
them on the throne, would humble them to be subordinates
and aliens to the real profiters, the Lancastrians.
[Comines, 3, ; Hall; Hollinshed] He foresaw what
effect these warnings would have upon the vain duke
and the ambitious Isabel, whose character was known
to him from childhood. He startled the king by
insisting upon sending, at the same time, a trusty
diplomatist to Margaret of Anjou, proffering to give
the princess Elizabeth (betrothed to Lord Montagu’s
son) to the young Prince Edward. ["Original Letters
from Harleian Manuscripts.” Edited by Sir
H. Ellis (second series).] Thus, if the king, who had,
as yet, no son, were to die, Margaret’s son,
in right of his wife, as well as in that of his own
descent, would peaceably ascend the throne. “Need
I say that I mean not this in sad and serious earnest?”
observed Richard, interrupting the astonished king.
“I mean it but to amuse the Anjouite, and to
deafen her ears to any overtures from Warwick.
If she listen, we gain time; that time will inevitably
renew irreconcilable quarrel between herself and the
earl. His hot temper and desire of revenge will
not brook delay. He will land, unsupported by
Margaret and her partisans, and without any fixed
principle of action which can strengthen force by
opinion.”
“You are right, Richard,”
said Edward, whose faithless cunning comprehended
the more sagacious policy it could not originate.
“All be it as you will.”
“And in the mean while,”
added Richard, “watch well, but anger not, Montagu
and the archbishop. It were dangerous to seem
to distrust them till proof be clear; it were dull
to believe them true. I go at once to fulfil
my task.”
CHAPTER VII. WARWICK AND HIS FAMILY IN EXILE.
We now summon the reader on a longer
if less classic journey than from Thebes to Athens,
and waft him on a rapid wing from Shene to Amboise.
We must suppose that the two emissaries of Gloucester
have already arrived at their several destinations, the
lady has reached Isabel, the envoy Margaret.
In one of the apartments appropriated
to the earl in the royal palace, within the embrasure
of a vast Gothic casement, sat Anne of Warwick; the
small wicket in the window was open, and gave a view
of a wide and fair garden, interspersed with thick
bosquets and regular alleys, over which the rich
skies of the summer evening, a little before sunset,
cast alternate light and shadow. Towards this
prospect the sweet face of the Lady Anne was turned
musingly. The riveted eye, the bended neck, the
arms reclining on the knee, the slender fingers interlaced, gave
to her whole person the character of revery and repose.
In the same chamber were two other
ladies; the one was pacing the floor with slow but
uneven steps, with lips moving from time to time, as
if in self-commune, with the brow contracted slightly:
her form and face took also the character of revery,
but not of repose.
The third female (the gentle and lovely
mother of the other two) was seated, towards the centre
of the room, before a small table, on which rested
one of those religious manuscripts, full of the moralities
and the marvels of cloister sanctity, which made so
large a portion of the literature of the monkish ages.
But her eye rested not on the Gothic letter and the
rich blazon of the holy book. With all a mother’s
fear and all a mother’s fondness, it glanced
from Isabel to Anne, from Anne to Isabel, till at
length in one of those soft voices, so rarely heard,
which makes even a stranger love the speaker, the fair
countess said,
“Come hither, my child Isabel;
give me thy hand, and whisper me what hath chafed
thee.”
“My mother,” replied the
duchess, “it would become me ill to have a secret
not known to thee, and yet, methinks, it would become
me less to say aught to provoke thine anger!”
“Anger, Isabel! Who ever knew anger for
those they love?”
“Pardon me, my sweet mother,”
said Isabel, relaxing her haughty brow, and she approached
and kissed her mother’s cheek.
The countess drew her gently to a seat by her side.
“And now tell me all, unless,
indeed, thy Clarence hath, in some lover’s hasty
mood, vexed thy affection; for of the household secrets
even a mother should not question the true wife.”
Isabel paused, and glanced significantly at Anne.
“Nay, see!” said the countess,
smiling, though sadly, “she, too, hath thoughts
that she will not tell to me; but they seem not such
as should alarm my fears, as thine do. For the
moment ere I spoke to thee, thy brow frowned, and
her lip smiled. She hears us not, speak
on.”
“Is it then true, my mother,
that Margaret of Anjou is hastening hither? And
can it be possible that King Louis can persuade my
lord and father to meet, save in the field of battle,
the arch-enemy of our House?”
“Ask the earl thyself, Isabel;
Lord Warwick hath no concealment from his children.
Whatever he doth is ever wisest, best, and knightliest, so,
at least, may his children always deem!”
Isabel’s colour changed and
her eye flashed. But ere she could answer, the
arras was raised, and Lord Warwick entered. But
no longer did the hero’s mien and manner evince
that cordial and tender cheerfulness which, in all
the storms of his changeful life, he had hitherto
displayed when coming from power and danger, from council
or from camp, to man’s earthly paradise, a
virtuous home.
Gloomy and absorbed, his very dress which,
at that day, the Anglo-Norman deemed it a sin against
self-dignity to neglect betraying, by its
disorder, that thorough change of the whole mind, that
terrible internal revolution, which is made but in
strong natures by the tyranny of a great care or a
great passion, the earl scarcely seemed to heed his
countess, who rose hastily, but stopped in the timid
fear and reverence of love at the sight of his stern
aspect; he threw himself abruptly on a seat, passed
his hand over his face, and sighed heavily.
That sigh dispelled the fear of the
wife, and made her alive only to her privilege of
the soother. She drew near, and placing herself
on the green rushes at his feet, took his hand and
kissed it, but did not speak.
The earl’s eyes fell on the
lovely face looking up to him through tears, his brow
softened, he drew his hand gently from hers, placed
it on her head, and said in a low voice, “God
and Our Lady bless thee, sweet wife!”
Then, looking round, he saw Isabel
watching him intently; and, rising at once, he threw
his arm round her waist, pressed her to his bosom,
and said, “My daughter, for thee and thine day
and night have I striven and planned in vain.
I cannot reward thy husband as I would; I cannot give
thee, as I had hoped, a throne!”
“What title so dear to Isabel,”
said the countess, “as that of Lord Warwick’s
daughter?”
Isabel remained cold and silent, and
returned not the earl’s embrace.
Warwick was, happily, too absorbed
in his own feelings to notice those of his child.
Moving away, he continued, as he paced the room (his
habit in emotion, which Isabel, who had many minute
external traits in common with her father, had unconsciously
caught from him),
“Till this morning I hoped still
that my name and services, that Clarence’s popular
bearing and his birth of Plantagenet, would suffice
to summon the English people round our standard; that
the false Edward would be driven, on our landing,
to fly the realm; and that, without change to the
dynasty of York, Clarence, as next male heir, would
ascend the throne. True, I saw all the obstacles,
all the difficulties, I was warned of them
before I left England; but still I hoped. Lord
Oxford has arrived, he has just left me. We have
gone over the chart of the way before us, weighed
the worth of every name, for and against; and, alas!
I cannot but allow that all attempt to place the younger
brother on the throne of the elder would but lead
to bootless slaughter and irretrievable defeat.”
“Wherefore think you so, my
lord?” asked Isabel, in evident excitement.
“Your own retainers are sixty thousand, an
army larger than Edward, and all his lords of yesterday,
can bring into the field.”
“My child,” answered the
earl, with that profound knowledge of his countrymen
which he had rather acquired from his English heart
than from any subtlety of intellect, “armies
may gain a victory, but they do not achieve a throne, unless,
at least, they enforce a slavery; and it is not for
me and for Clarence to be the violent conquerors of
our countrymen, but the regenerators of a free realm,
corrupted by a false man’s rule.”
“And what then,” exclaimed
Isabel, “what do you propose, my father?
Can it be possible that you can unite yourself with
the abhorred Lancastrians, with the savage Anjouite,
who beheaded my grandsire, Salisbury? Well do
I remember your own words, ’May God
and Saint George forget me, when I forget those gray
and gory hairs!’”
Here Isabel was interrupted by a faint
cry from Anne, who, unobserved by the rest, and hitherto
concealed from her father’s eye by the deep
embrasure of the window, had risen some moments before,
and listened, with breathless attention, to the conversation
between Warwick and the duchess.
“It is not true, it is not true!”
exclaimed Anne, passionately. “Margaret
disowns the inhuman deed.”
“Thou art right, Anne,”
said Warwick; “though I guess not how thou didst
learn the error of a report so popularly believed that
till of late I never questioned its truth. King
Louis assures me solemnly that that foul act was done
by the butcher Clifford, against Margaret’s knowledge,
and, when known, to her grief and anger.”
“And you, who call Edward false, can believe
Louis true?”
“Cease, Isabel, cease!”
said the countess. “Is it thus my child
can address my lord and husband? Forgive her,
beloved Richard.”
“Such heat in Clarence’s
wife misbeseems her not,” answered Warwick.
“And I can comprehend and pardon in my haughty
Isabel a resentment which her reason must at last
subdue; for think not, Isabel, that it is without
dread struggle and fierce agony that I can contemplate
peace and league with mine ancient foe; but here two
duties speak to me in voices not to be denied:
my honour and my hearth, as noble and as man, demand
redress, and the weal and glory of my country demand
a ruler who does not degrade a warrior, nor assail
a virgin, nor corrupt a people by lewd pleasures,
nor exhaust a land by grinding imposts; and that honour
shall be vindicated, and that country shall be righted,
no matter at what sacrifice of private grief and pride.”
The words and the tone of the earl
for a moment awed even Isabel; but after a pause,
she said suddenly, “And for this, then, Clarence
hath joined your quarrel and shared your exile? for
this, that he may place the eternal barrier
of the Lancastrian line between himself and the English
throne?”
“I would fain hope,” answered
the earl, calmly, “that Clarence will view our
hard position more charitably than thou. If he
gain not all that I could desire, should success crown
our arms, he will, at least, gain much; for often
and ever did thy husband, Isabel, urge me to stern
measures against Edward, when I soothed him and restrained.
Mort Dieu! how often did he complain of slight and
insult from Elizabeth and her minions, of open affront
from Edward, of parsimony to his wants as prince, of
a life, in short, humbled and made bitter by all the
indignity and the gall which scornful power can inflict
on dependent pride. If he gain not the throne,
he will gain, at least, the succession in thy right
to the baronies of Beauchamp, the mighty duchy, and
the vast heritage of York, the vice-royalty of Ireland.
Never prince of the blood had wealth and honours equal
to those that shall await thy lord. For the rest,
I drew him not into my quarrel; long before would he
have drawn me into his; nor doth it become thee, Isabel,
as child and as sister, to repent, if the husband
of my daughter felt as brave men feel, without calculation
of gain and profit, the insult offered to his lady’s
House. But if here I overgauge his chivalry and
love to me and mine, or discontent his ambition and
his hopes, Mort Dieu! we hold him not a captive.
Edward will hail his overtures of peace; let him make
terms with his brother, and return.”
“I will report to him what you
say, my lord,” said Isabel, with cold brevity
and, bending her haughty head in formal reverence,
she advanced to the door. Anne sprang forward
and caught her hand.
“Oh, Isabel!” she whispered,
“in our father’s sad and gloomy hour can
you leave him thus?” and the sweet lady burst
into tears.
“Anne,” retorted Isabel,
bitterly, “thy heart is Lancastrian; and what,
peradventure, grieves my father hath but joy for thee.”
Anne drew back, pale and trembling,
and her sister swept from the room.
The earl, though he had not overheard
the whispered sentences which passed between his daughters,
had watched them closely, and his lip quivered with
emotion as Isabel closed the door.
“Come hither, my Anne,”
he said tenderly; “thou who hast thy mother’s
face, never hast a harsh thought for thy father.”
As Anne threw herself on Warwick’s
breast, he continued, “And how camest thou to
learn that Margaret disowns a deed that, if done by
her command, would render my union with her cause
a sacrilegious impiety to the dead?”
Anne coloured, and nestled her head
still closer to her father’s bosom. Her
mother regarded her confusion and her silence with
an anxious eye.
The wing of the palace in which the
earl’s apartments were situated was appropriated
to himself and household, flanked to the left by an
abutting pile containing state-chambers, never used
by the austere and thrifty Louis, save on great occasions
of pomp or revel; and, as we have before observed,
looking on a garden, which was generally solitary and
deserted. From this garden, while Anne yet strove
for words to answer her father, and the countess yet
watched her embarrassment, suddenly came the soft
strain of a Provencal lute; while a low voice, rich,
and modulated at once by a deep feeling and an exquisite
art that would have given effect to even simpler words,
breathed
The lay of
the heir of Lancaster
“His birthright but
a father’s name,
A grandsire’s
hero-sword,
He dwelt within the
stranger’s land,
The friendless,
homeless lord!”
“Yet one dear hope,
too dear to tell,
Consoled
the exiled man;
The angels have their
home in heaven
And gentle
thoughts in Anne.”
At that name the voice of the singer
trembled, and paused a moment; the earl, who at first
had scarcely listened to what he deemed but the ill-seasoned
gallantry of one of the royal minstrels, started in
proud surprise, and Anne herself, tightening her clasp
round her father’s neck, burst into passionate
sobs. The eye of the countess met that of her
lord; but she put her finger to her lips in sign to
him to listen. The song was resumed
“Recall the single sunny
time,
In childhood’s
April weather,
When he and thou, the
boy and girl,
Roved hand
in band together.”
“When round thy young
companion knelt
The princes
of the isle;
And priest and people
prayed their God,
On England’s
heir to smile.”
The earl uttered a half-stifled exclamation,
but the minstrel heard not the interruption, and continued,
“Methinks the sun hath
never smiled
Upon the
exiled man,
Like that bright morning
when the boy
Told all
his soul to Anne.”
“No; while his birthright
but a name,
A grandsire’s
hero sword,
He would not woo the
lofty maid
To love
the banished lord.”
“But when, with clarion,
fife, and drum,
He claims
and wins his own;
When o’er the
deluge drifts his ark,
To rest
upon a throne.”
“Then, wilt thou deign
to hear the hope
That blessed
the exiled man,
When pining for his
father’s crown
To deck
the brows of Anne?”
The song ceased, and there was silence
within the chamber, broken but by Anne’s low
yet passionate weeping. The earl gently strove
to disengage her arms from his neck; but she, mistaking
his intention, sank on her knees, and covering her
face with her hands, exclaimed,
“Pardon! pardon! pardon him, if not me!”
“What have I to pardon?
What hast thou concealed from me? Can I think
that thou hast met, in secret, one who ”
“In secret! Never, never,
Father! This is the third time only that I have
heard his voice since we have been at Amboise, save
when save when ”
“Go on.”
“Save when King Louis presented
him to me in the revel under the name of the Count
de F , and he asked me if I could
forgive his mother for Lord Clifford’s crime.”
“It is, then, as the rhyme proclaimed;
and it is Edward of Lancaster who loves and woos the
daughter of Lord Warwick!”
Something in her father’s voice
made Anne remove her hands from her face, and look
up to him with a thrill of timid joy. Upon his
brow, indeed, frowned no anger, upon his lip smiled
no scorn. At that moment all his haughty grief
at the curse of circumstance which drove him to his
hereditary foe had vanished. Though Montagu had
obtained from Oxford some glimpse of the desire which
the more sagacious and temperate Lancastrians already
entertained for that alliance, and though Louis had
already hinted its expediency to the earl, yet, till
now, Warwick himself had naturally conceived that
the prince shared the enmity of his mother, and that
such a union, however politic, was impossible; but
now indeed there burst upon him the full triumph of
revenge and pride. Edward of York dared to woo
Anne to dishonour, Edward of Lancaster dared not even
woo her as his wife till his crown was won! To
place upon the throne the very daughter the ungrateful
monarch had insulted; to make her he would have humbled
not only the instrument of his fall, but the successor
of his purple; to unite in one glorious strife the
wrongs of the man and the pride of the father, these
were the thoughts that sparkled in the eye of the
king-maker, and flushed with a fierce rapture the
dark cheek, already hollowed by passion and care.
He raised his daughter from the floor, and placed
her in her mother’s arms, but still spoke not.
“This, then, was thy secret,
Anne,” whispered the countess; “and I half
foreguessed it, when, last night, I knelt beside thy
couch to pray, and overheard thee murmur in thy dreams.”
“Sweet mother, thou forgivest
me; but my father ah, he speaks not.
One word! Father, Father, not even his love could
console me if I angered thee!”
The earl, who had remained rooted
to the spot, his eyes shining thoughtfully under his
dark brows, and his hand slightly raised, as if piercing
into the future, and mapping out its airy realm, turned
quickly,
“I go to the heir of Lancaster;
if this boy be bold and true, worthy of England and
of thee, we will change the sad ditty of that scrannel
lute into such a storm of trumpets as beseems the
triumph of a conqueror and the marriage of a prince!”
CHAPTER VIII. HOW THE HEIR OF LANCASTER MEETS THE KING-MAKER.
In truth, the young prince, in obedience
to a secret message from the artful Louis, had repaired
to the court of Amboise under the name of the Count
de F . The French king had long
before made himself acquainted with Prince Edward’s
romantic attachment to the earl’s daughter, through
the agent employed by Edward to transmit his portrait
to Anne at Rouen; and from him, probably, came to
Oxford the suggestion which that nobleman had hazarded
to Montagu; and now that it became his policy seriously
and earnestly to espouse the cause of his kinswoman
Margaret, he saw all the advantage to his cold statecraft
which could be drawn from a boyish love. Louis
had a well-founded fear of the warlike spirit and
military talents of Edward iv.; and this fear
had induced him hitherto to refrain from openly espousing
the cause of the Lancastrians, though it did not prevent
his abetting such séditions and intrigues as
could confine the attention of the martial Plantagenet
to the perils of his own realm. But now that
the breach between Warwick and the king had taken
place; now that the earl could no longer curb the desire
of the Yorkist monarch to advance his hereditary claims
to the fairest provinces of France, nay,
peradventure, to France itself, while the
defection of Lord Warwick gave to the Lancastrians
the first fair hope of success in urging their own
pretensions to the English throne, he bent all the
powers of his intellect and his will towards the restoration
of a natural ally and the downfall of a dangerous foe.
But he knew that Margaret and her Lancastrian favourers
could not of themselves suffice to achieve a revolution, that
they could only succeed under cover of the popularity
and the power of Warwick, while he perceived all the
art it would require to make Margaret forego her vindictive
nature and long resentment, and to supple the pride
of the great earl into recognizing as a sovereign
the woman who had branded him as a traitor.
Long before Lord Oxford’s
arrival, Louis, with all that address which belonged
to him, had gradually prepared the earl to familiarize
himself to the only alternative before him, save that,
indeed, of powerless sense of wrong and obscure and
lasting exile. The French king looked with more
uneasiness to the scruples of Margaret; and to remove
these, he trusted less to his own skill than to her
love for her only son.
His youth passed principally in Anjou that
court of minstrels young Edward’s
gallant and ardent temper had become deeply imbued
with the southern poetry and romance. Perhaps
the very feud between his House and Lord Warwick’s,
though both claimed their common descent from John
of Gaunt, had tended, by the contradictions in the
human heart, to endear to him the recollection of
the gentle Anne. He obeyed with joy the summons
of Louis, repaired to the court, was presented to Anne
as the Count de F , found himself
recognized at the first glance (for his portrait still
lay upon her heart, as his remembrance in its core),
and, twice before the song we have recited, had ventured,
agreeably to the sweet customs of Anjou, to address
the lady of his love under the shade of the starlit
summer copses. But on this last occasion, he had
departed from his former discretion; hitherto he had
selected an hour of deeper night, and ventured but
beneath the lattice of the maiden’s chamber when
the rest of the palace was hushed in sleep. And
the fearless declaration of his rank and love now
hazarded was prompted by one who contrived to turn
to grave uses the wildest whim of the minstrel, the
most romantic enthusiasm of youth.
Louis had just learned from Oxford
the result of his interview with Warwick. And
about the same time the French king had received a
letter from Margaret, announcing her departure from
the castle of Verdun for Tours, where she prayed him
to meet her forthwith, and stating that she had received
from England tidings that might change all her schemes,
and more than ever forbid the possibility of a reconciliation
with the Earl of Warwick.
The king perceived the necessity of
calling into immediate effect the aid on which he
had relied, in the presence and passion of the young
prince. He sought him at once; he found him in
a remote part of the gardens, and overheard him breathing
to himself the lay he had just composed.
“Pasque Dieu!” said the
king, laying his hand on the young man’s shoulder,
“if thou wilt but repeat that song where and
when I bid thee, I promise that before the month ends
Lord Warwick shall pledge thee his daughter’s
hand; and before the year is closed thou shalt sit
beside Lord Warwick’s daughter in the halls
of Westminster.”
And the royal troubadour took the counsel of the king.
The song had ceased; the minstrel
emerged from the bosquets, and stood upon the
sward, as, from the postern of the palace, walked with
a slow step, a form from which it became him not,
as prince or as lover, in peace or in war, to shrink.
The first stars had now risen; the light, though serene,
was pale and dim. The two men the one
advancing, the other motionless gazed on
each other in grave silence. As Count de F ,
amidst the young nobles in the king’s train,
the earl had scarcely noticed the heir of England.
He viewed him now with a different eye: in secret
complacency, for, with a soldier’s weakness,
the soldier-baron valued men too much for their outward
seeming, he surveyed a figure already masculine and
stalwart, though still in the graceful symmetry of
fair eighteen.
“A youth of a goodly presence,”
muttered the earl, “with the dignity that commands
in peace, and the sinews that can strive against hardship
and death in war.”
He approached, and said calmly:
“Sir minstrel, he who woos either fame or beauty
may love the lute, but should wield the sword.
At least, so methinks had the Fifth Henry said to
him who boasts for his heritage the sword of Agincourt.”
“O noble earl!” exclaimed
the prince, touched by words far gentler than he had
dared to hope, despite his bold and steadfast mien,
and giving way to frank and graceful emotion, “O
noble earl! since thou knowest me; since my secret
is told; since, in that secret, I have proclaimed a
hope as dear to me as a crown and dearer far than
life, can I hope that thy rebuke but veils thy favour,
and that, under Lord Warwick’s eye, the grandson
of Henry V. shall approve himself worthy of the blood
that kindles in his veins?”
“Fair sir and prince,”
returned the earl, whose hardy and generous nature
the emotion and fire of Edward warmed and charmed,
“there are, alas! deep memories of blood and
wrong the sad deeds and wrathful words
of party feud and civil war between thy
royal mother and myself; and though we may unite now
against a common foe, much I fear that the Lady Margaret
would brook ill a closer friendship, a nearer tie,
than the exigency of the hour between Richard Nevile
and her son.”
“No, Sir Earl, let me hope you
misthink her. Hot and impetuous, but not mean
and treacherous, the moment that she accepts the service
of thine arm she must forget that thou hast been her
foe; and if I, as my father’s heir, return to
England, it is in the trust that a new era will commence.
Free from the passionate enmities of either faction,
Yorkist and Lancastrian are but Englishmen to me.
Justice to all who serve us, pardon for all who have
opposed.”
The prince paused, and, even in the
dim light, his kingly aspect gave effect to his kingly
words. “And if this resolve be such as you
approve; if you, great earl, be that which even your
foes proclaim, a man whose power depends less on lands
and vassals broad though the one, and numerous
though the other than on well-known love
for England, her glory and her peace, it rests with
you to bury forever in one grave the feuds of Lancaster
and York! What Yorkist who hath fought at Towton
or St. Albans under Lord Warwick’s standard,
will lift sword against the husband of Lord Warwick’s
daughter? What Lancastrian will not forgive a
Yorkist, when Lord Warwick, the kinsman of Duke Richard,
becomes father to the Lancastrian heir, and bulwark
to the Lancastrian throne? O Warwick, if not
for my sake, nor for the sake of full redress against
the ingrate whom thou repentest to have placed on my
father’s throne, at least for the sake of England,
for the healing of her bleeding wounds, for the union
of her divided people, hear the grandson of Henry V.,
who sues to thee for thy daughter’s hand!”
The royal wooer bent his knee as he
spoke. The mighty subject saw and prevented the
impulse of the prince who had forgotten himself in
the lover; the hand which he caught he lifted to his
lips, and the next moment, in manly and soldierlike
embrace, the prince’s young arm was thrown over
the broad shoulder of the king-maker.
CHAPTER IX. THE INTERVIEW OF EARL WARWICK AND QUEEN MARGARET.
Louis hastened to meet Margaret at
Tours; thither came also her father René, her brother
John of Calabria, Yolante her sister, and the Count
of Vaudemonte. The meeting between the queen
and René was so touching as to have drawn tears to
the hard eyes of Louis xi.; but, that emotion
over, Margaret evinced how little affliction had humbled
her high spirit, or softened her angry passions:
she interrupted Louis in every argument for reconciliation
with Warwick. “Not with honour to myself
and to my son,” she exclaimed, “can I
pardon that cruel earl, the main cause of King Henry’s
downfall! in vain patch up a hollow peace between us, a
peace of form and parchment! My spirit never
can be contented with him, ne pardon!”
For several days she maintained a
language which betrayed the chief cause of her own
impolitic passions, that had lost her crown. Showing
to Louis the letter despatched to her, proffering the
hand of the Lady Elizabeth to her son, she asked if
that were not a more profitable party , and if it
were necessary that she should forgive, whether
it were not more queenly to treat with Edward than
with a twofold rebel?
In fact, the queen would perhaps have
fallen into Gloucester’s artful snare, despite
all the arguments and even the half-menaces [Louis
would have thrown over Margaret’s cause if Warwick
had demanded it; he instructed mm. de Concressault
and du Plessis to assure the earl that he would aid
him to the utmost to reconquer England either for the
Queen Margaret or for any one else he chose (on pour
qui il voudra): for that he loved the
earl better than Margaret or her son. Brante,
t. i.] of the more penetrating Louis, but for
a counteracting influence which Richard had not reckoned
upon. Prince Edward, who had lingered behind
Louis, arrived from Amboise, and his persuasions did
more than all the representations of the crafty king.
The queen loved her son with that intenseness which
characterizes the one soft affection of violent natures.
Never had she yet opposed his most childish whim, and
now he spoke with the eloquence of one who put his
heart and his life’s life into his words.
At last, reluctantly, she consented to an interview
with Warwick. The earl, accompanied by Oxford,
arrived at Tours, and the two nobles were led into
the presence of Margaret by King Louis.
The reader will picture to himself
a room darkened by thick curtains drawn across the
casement, for the proud woman wished not the earl
to detect on her face either the ravages of years or
the emotions of offended pride. In a throne chair,
placed on the dais, sat the motionless queen, her
hands clasping, convulsively, the arms of the fauteuil,
her features pale and rigid; and behind the chair leaned
the graceful figure of her son. The person of
the Lancastrian prince was little less remarkable
than that of his hostile namesake, but its character
was distinctly different. ["According to some of the
French chroniclers, the Prince of Wales, who was one
of the handsomest and most accomplished princes in
Europe, was very desirous of becoming the husband
of Anne Nevile,” etc. Miss Strickland:
Life of Margaret of Anjou.] Spare, like Henry V.,
almost to the manly defect of leanness, his proportions
were slight to those which gave such portly majesty
to the vast-chested Edward, but they evinced the promise
of almost equal strength, the muscles hardened
to iron by early exercise in arms, the sap of youth
never wasted by riot and debauch. His short purple
manteline, trimmed with ermine, was embroidered with
his grandfather’s favourite device, “the
silver swan;” he wore on his breast the badge
of St. George; and the single ostrich plume, which
made his cognizance as Prince of Wales, waved over
a fair and ample forehead, on which were even then
traced the lines of musing thought and high design;
his chestnut hair curled close to his noble head;
his eye shone dark and brilliant beneath the deep-set
brow, which gives to the human countenance such expression
of energy and intellect, all about him,
in aspect and mien, seemed to betoken a mind riper
than his years, a masculine simplicity of taste and
bearing, the earnest and grave temperament mostly
allied in youth to pure and elevated desires, to an
honourable and chivalric soul.
Below the dais stood some of the tried
and gallant gentlemen who had braved exile, and tasted
penury in their devotion to the House of Lancaster,
and who had now flocked once more round their queen,
in the hope of better days. There were the Dukes
of Exeter and Somerset, their very garments soiled
and threadbare, many a day had those great
lords hungered for the beggar’s crust! [Philip
de Comines says he himself had seen the Dukes of Exeter
and Somerset in the Low Countries in as wretched a
plight as common beggars.] There stood Sir John Fortescue,
the patriarch authority of our laws, who had composed
his famous treatise for the benefit of the young prince,
overfond of exercise with lance and brand, and the
recreation of knightly song. There were Jasper
of Pembroke, and Sir Henry Rous, and the Earl of Devon,
and the Knight of Lytton, whose House had followed,
from sire to son, the fortunes of the Lancastrian
Rose; [Sir Robert de Lytton (whose grandfather had
been Comptroller to the Household of Henry iv.,
and Agister of the Forests allotted to Queen Joan),
was one of the most powerful knights of the time;
and afterwards, according to Perkin Warbeck, one of
the ministers most trusted by Henry VII. He was
lord of Lytton, in Derbyshire (where his ancestors
had been settled since the Conquest), of Knebworth
in Herts (the ancient seat and manor of Plantagenet
de Brotherton, Earl of Norfolk and Earl Marshal),
of Myndelesden and Langley, of Standyarn, Dene, and
Brekesborne, in Northamptonshire, and became in the
reign of Henry VII. Privy Councillor, Uuder-Treasurer,
and Keeper of the great Wardrobe.] and, contrasting
the sober garments of the exiles, shone the jewels
and cloth-of-gold that decked the persons of the more
prosperous foreigners, Ferri, Count of Vaudemonte,
Margaret’s brother, the Duke of Calabria, and
the powerful form of Sir Pierre de Breze, who had
accompanied Margaret in her last disastrous campaigns,
with all the devotion of a chevalier for the lofty
lady adored in secret.
When the door opened, and gave to
the eyes of those proud exiles the form of their puissant
enemy, they with difficulty suppressed the murmur
of their resentment, and their looks turned with sympathy
and grief to the hueless face of their queen.
The earl himself was troubled; his
step was less firm, his crest less haughty, his eye
less serenely steadfast.
But beside him, in a dress more homely
than that of the poorest exile there, and in garb
and in aspect, as he lives forever in the portraiture
of Victor Hugo and our own yet greater Scott, moved
Louis, popularly called “The Fell.”
“Madame and cousin,” said
the king, “we present to you the man for whose
haute courage and dread fame we have such love and
respect, that we value him as much as any king, and
would do as much for him as for man living [Ellis:
Original Letters, vol. i., letter 42, second series];
and with my lord of Warwick, see also this noble earl
of Oxford, who, though he may have sided awhile with
the enemies of your Highness, comes now to pray your
pardon, and to lay at your feet his sword.”
Lord Oxford (who had ever unwillingly
acquiesced in the Yorkist dynasty), more prompt than
Warwick, here threw himself on his knees before Margaret,
and his tears fell on her hand, as he murmured “Pardon.”
“Rise, Sir John de Vere,”
said the queen, glancing with a flashing eye from
Oxford to Lord Warwick. “Your pardon is
right easy to purchase, for well I know that you yielded
but to the time, you did not turn the time
against us; you and yours have suffered much for King
Henry’s cause. Rise, Sir Earl.”
“And,” said a voice, so
deep and so solemn, that it hushed the very breath
of those who heard it, “and has Margaret
a pardon also for the man who did more than all others
to dethrone King Henry, and can do more than all to
restore his crown?”
“Ha!” cried’ Margaret,
rising in her passion, and casting from her the hand
her son had placed upon her shoulder, “ha!
Ownest thou thy wrongs, proud lord? Comest thou
at last to kneel at Queen Margaret’s feet?
Look round and behold her court, some half-score
brave and unhappy gentlemen, driven from their hearths
and homes, their heritage the prey of knaves and varlets,
their sovereign in a prison, their sovereign’s
wife, their sovereign’s son, persecuted and hunted
from the soil! And comest thou now to the forlorn
majesty of sorrow to boast, ’Such deeds were
mine?’”
“Mother and lady,” began the prince
“Madden me not, my son.
Forgiveness is for the prosperous, not for adversity
and woe.”
“Hear me,” said the earl, who,
having once bowed his pride to the interview, had
steeled himself against the passion which, in his
heart, he somewhat despised as a mere woman’s
burst of inconsiderate fury, “for
I have this right to be heard, that not
one of these knights, your lealest and noblest friends,
can say of me that I ever stooped to gloss mine acts,
or palliate bold deeds with wily words. Dear
to me as comrade in arms, sacred to me as a father’s
head, was Richard of York, mine uncle by marriage
with Lord Salisbury’s sister. I speak not
now of his claims by descent (for those even King Henry
could not deny), but I maintain them, even in your
Grace’s presence, to be such as vindicate, from
disloyalty and treason, me and the many true and gallant
men who upheld them through danger, by field and scaffold.
Error, it might be, but the error of men
who believed themselves the defenders of a just cause.
Nor did I, Queen Margaret, lend myself wholly to my
kinsman’s quarrel, nor share one scheme that
went to the dethronement of King Henry, until pardon,
if I speak bluntly; it is my wont, and would be more
so now, but for thy fair face and woman’s form,
which awe me more than if confronting the frown of
Coeur de Lion, or the First Great Edward pardon
me, I say, if I speak bluntly, and aver that I was
not King Henry’s foe until false counsellors
had planned my destruction, in body and goods, land
and life. In the midst of peace, at Coventry,
my father and myself scarcely escaped the knife of
the murderer. In the
streets of London the very menials and hangmen employed
in the service of your Highness beset me unarmed [Hall,
Fabyan]; a little time after and my name was attainted
by an illegal Parliament. [Parl. Rolls, 370;
W. Wy.] And not till after these things did
Richard Duke of York ride to the hall of Westminster,
and lay his hand upon the throne; nor till after these
things did I and my father Salisbury say to each other,
’The time has come when neither peace nor honour
can be found for us under King Henry’s reign.’
Blame me if you will, Queen Margaret; reject me if
you need not my sword; but that which I did in the
gone days was such as no nobleman so outraged and
despaired [Warwick’s phrase. See Sir H.
Ellis’s “Original Letters,” vol.
i., second series.] would have forborne to do, remembering
that England is not the heritage of the king alone,
but that safety and honour, and freedom and justice,
are the rights of his Norman gentlemen and his Saxon
people. And rights are a mockery and a laughter
if they do not justify resistance, whensoever, and
by whomsoever, they are invaded and assailed.”
It had been with a violent effort
that Margaret had refrained from interrupting this
address, which had, however, produced no inconsiderable
effect upon the knightly listeners around the dais.
And now, as the earl ceased, her indignation was arrested
by dismay on seeing the young prince suddenly leave
his post and advance to the side of Warwick.
“Right well hast thou spoken,
noble earl and cousin, right well, though
right plainly. And I,” added the prince,
“saving the presence of my queen and mother, I,
the representative of my sovereign father, in his
name will pledge thee a king’s oblivion and pardon
for the past, if thou on thy side acquit my princely
mother of all privity to the snares against thy life
and honour of which thou hast spoken, and give thy
knightly word to be henceforth leal to Lancaster.
Perish all memories of the past that can make walls
between the souls of brave men.”
Till this moment, his arms folded
in his gown, his thin, fox-like face bent to the ground,
Louis had listened, silent and undisturbed. He
now deemed it the moment to second the appeal of the
prince. Passing his hand hypocritically over
his tearless eyes, the king turned to Margaret and
said,
“Joyful hour! happy union!
May Madame La Vierge and Monseigneur
Saint Martin sanctify and hallow the bond by which
alone my beloved kinswoman can regain her rights and
roiaulme. Amen.”
Unheeding this pious ejaculation,
her bosom heaving, her eyes wandering from the earl
to Edward, Margaret at last gave vent to her passion.
“And is it come to this, Prince
Edward of Wales, that thy mother’s wrongs are
not thine? Standest thou side by side with my
mortal foe, who, instead of repenting treason, dares
but to complain of injury? Am I fallen so low
that my voice to pardon or disdain is counted but as
a sough of idle air! God of my fathers, hear
me! Willingly from my heart I tear the last thought
and care for the pomps of earth. Hateful to me
a crown for which the wearer must cringe to enemy and
rebel! Away, Earl Warwick! Monstrous and
unnatural seems it to the wife of captive Henry to
see thee by the side of Henry’s son!”
Every eye turned in fear to the aspect
of the earl, every ear listened for the answer which
might be expected from his well-known heat and pride, an
answer to destroy forever the last hope of the Lancastrian
line. But whether it was the very consciousness
of his power to raise or to crush that fiery speaker,
or those feelings natural to brave men, half of chivalry,
half contempt, which kept down the natural anger by
thoughts of the sex and sorrows of the Anjouite, or
that the wonted irascibility of his temper had melted
into one steady and profound passion of revenge against
Edward of York, which absorbed all lesser and more
trivial causes of resentment, the earl’s
face, though pale as the dead, was unmoved and calm,
and, with a grave and melancholy smile, he answered,
“More do I respect thee, O queen,
for the hot words which show a truth rarely heard
from royal lips than hadst thou deigned to dissimulate
the forgiveness and kindly charity which sharp remembrance
permits thee not to feel! No, princely Margaret,
not yet can there be frank amity between thee and
me! Nor do I boast the affection yon gallant gentlemen
have displayed. Frankly, as thou hast spoken,
do I say, that the wrongs I have suffered from another
alone move me to allegiance to thyself! Let others
serve thee for love of Henry; reject not my service,
given but for revenge on Edward, as much,
henceforth, am I his foe as formerly his friend and
maker! [Sir H. Ellis: Original Letters, vol.
i., second series.] And if, hereafter, on the throne,
thou shouldst remember and resent the former wars,
at least thou hast owed me no gratitude, and thou
canst not grieve my heart and seethe my brain, as the
man whom I once loved better than a son! Thus,
from thy presence I depart, chafing not at thy scornful
wrath; mindful, young prince, but of thy just and
gentle heart, and sure, in the calm of my own soul
(on which this much, at least, of our destiny is reflected
as on a glass), that when, high lady, thy colder sense
returns to thee, thou wilt see that the league between
us must be made! that thine ire as woman
must fade before thy duties as a another, thy affection
as a wife, and thy paramount and solemn obligations
to the people thou hast ruled as queen! In the
dead of night thou shalt hear the voice of Henry in
his prison asking Margaret to set him free; the vision
of thy son shall rise before thee in his bloom and
promise, to demand why his mother deprives him of a
crown; and crowds of pale peasants, grinded beneath
tyrannous exaction, and despairing fathers mourning
for dishonoured children, shall ask the Christian
queen if God will sanction the unreasoning wrath which
rejects the only instrument that can redress her people.”
This said, the earl bowed his head
and turned; but, at the first sign of his departure,
there was a general movement among the noble bystanders.
Impressed by the dignity of his bearing, by the greatness
of his power, and by the unquestionable truth that
in rejecting him Margaret cast away the heritage of
her son, the exiles, with a common impulse, threw
themselves at the queen’s feet, and exclaimed,
almost in the same words,
“Grace! noble queen! Grace for the
great Lord Warwick!”
“My sister,” whispered
John of Calabria, “thou art thy son’s ruin
if the earl depart!”
“Pasque Dieu! Vex not my
kinswoman, if she prefer a convent to a
throne, cross not the holy choice!” said the
wily Louis, with a mocking irony on his pinched lips.
The prince alone spoke not, but stood
proudly on the same spot, gazing on the earl, as he
slowly moved to the door.
“Oh, Edward! Edward, my
son!” exclaimed the unhappy Margaret, “if
for thy sake for thine I must
make the past a blank, speak thou for me!”
“I have spoken,” said
the prince, gently, “and thou didst chide me,
noble mother; yet I spoke, methinks, as Henry V. had
done, if of a mighty enemy he had had the power to
make a noble friend.”
A short, convulsive sob was heard
from the throne chair; and as suddenly as it burst,
it ceased. Queen Margaret rose, not a trace of
that stormy emotion upon the grand and marble beauty
of her face. Her voice, unnaturally calm, arrested
the steps of the departing earl.
“Lord Warwick, defend this boy,
restore his rights, release his sainted father, and
for years of anguish and of exile, Margaret of Anjou
forgives the champion of her son!”
In an instant Prince Edward was again
by the earl’s side; a moment more, and the earl’s
proud knee bent in homage to the queen, joyful tears
were in the eyes of her friends and kindred, a triumphant
smile on the lips of Louis, and Margaret’s face,
terrible in its stony and locked repose, was raised
above, as if asking the All-Merciful pardon for
the pardon which the human sinner had bestowed! [Ellis:
Original Letters from the Harleian Manuscripts, letter
42.]
CHAPTER X. LOVE AND MARRIAGE DOUBTS OF CONSCIENCE DOMESTIC
JEALOUSY AND HOUSEHOLD TREASON.
The events that followed this tempestuous
interview were such as the position of the parties
necessarily compelled. The craft of Louis, the
energy and love of Prince Edward, the representations
of all her kindred and friends, conquered, though
not without repeated struggles, Margaret’s repugnance
to a nearer union between Warwick and her son.
The earl did not deign to appear personally in this
matter. He left it, as became him, to Louis and
the prince, and finally received from them the proposals,
which ratified the league, and consummated the schemes
of his revenge.
Upon the Very Cross [Miss Strickland
observes upon this interview: “It does
not appear that Warwick mentioned the execution of
his father, the Earl of Salisbury, which is almost
a confirmation of the statements of those historians
who deny that he was beheaded by Margaret.”]
in St. Mary’s Church of Angers, Lord Warwick
swore without change to hold the party of King Henry.
Before the same sacred symbol, King Louis and his
brother, Duke of Guienne, robed in canvas, swore to
sustain to their utmost the Earl of Warwick in behalf
of King Henry; and Margaret recorded her oath “to
treat the earl as true and faithful, and never for
deeds past to make him any reproach.”
Then were signed the articles of marriage
between Prince Edward and the Lady Anne, the
latter to remain with Margaret, but the marriage not
to be consummated “till Lord Warwick had entered
England and regained the realm, or most part, for
King Henry,” a condition which pleased
the earl, who desired to award his beloved daughter
no less a dowry than a crown.
An article far more important than
all to the safety of the earl and to the permanent
success of the enterprise, was one that virtually
took from the fierce and unpopular Margaret the reins
of government, by constituting Prince Edward (whose
qualities endeared him more and more to Warwick, and
were such as promised to command the respect and love
of the people) sole regent of all the realm, upon
attaining his majority. For the Duke of Clarence
were reserved all the lands and dignities of the duchy
of York, the right to the succession of the throne
to him and his posterity, failing male
heirs to the Prince of Wales, with a private
pledge of the viceroyalty of Ireland.
Margaret had attached to her consent
one condition highly obnoxious to her high-spirited
son, and to which he was only reconciled by the arguments
of Warwick: she stipulated that he should not
accompany the earl to England, nor appear there till
his father was proclaimed king. In this, no doubt,
she was guided by maternal fears, and by some undeclared
suspicion, either of the good faith of Warwick, or
of his means to raise a sufficient army to fulfil
his promise. The brave prince wished to be himself
foremost in the battles fought in his right and for
his cause. But the earl contended, to the surprise
and joy of Margaret, that it best behooved the prince’s
interests to enter England without one enemy in the
field, leaving others to clear his path, free himself
from all the personal hate of hostile factions, and
without a drop of blood upon the sword of one heralded
and announced as the peace-maker and impartial reconciles
of all feuds. So then (these high conditions
settled), in the presence of the Kings René and Louis,
of the Earl and Countess of Warwick, and in solemn
state, at Amboise, Edward of Lancaster plighted his
marriage-troth to his beloved and loving Anne.
It was deep night, and high revel
in the Palace of Amboise crowned the ceremonies of
that memorable day. The Earl of Warwick stood
alone in the same chamber in which he had first discovered
the secret of the young Lancastrian. From the
brilliant company, assembled in the halls of state,
he had stolen unperceived away, for his great heart
was full to overflowing. The part he had played
for many days was over, and with it the excitement
and the fever. His schemes were crowned, the
Lancastrians were won to his revenge; the king’s
heir was the betrothed of his favourite child; and
the hour was visible in the distance, when, by the
retribution most to be desired, the father’s
hand should lead that child to the throne of him who
would have degraded her to the dust. If victory
awaited his sanguine hopes, as father to his future
queen, the dignity and power of the earl became greater
in the court of Lancaster than, even in his palmiest
day, amidst the minions of ungrateful York; the sire
of two lines, if Anne’s posterity
should fail, the crown would pass to the sons of Isabel, in
either case from him (if successful in his invasion)
would descend the royalty of England. Ambition,
pride, revenge, might well exult in viewing the future,
as mortal wisdom could discern it. The House of
Nevile never seemed brightened by a more glorious
star: and yet the earl was heavy and sad at heart.
However he had concealed it from the eyes of others,
the haughty ire of Margaret must have galled him in
his deepest soul. And even as he had that day
contemplated the holy happiness in the face of Anne,
a sharp pang had shot through his breast. Were
those the witnesses of fair-omened spousailles?
How different from the hearty greeting of his warrior-friends
was the measured courtesy of foes who had felt and
fled before his sword! If aught chanced to him
in the hazard of the field, what thought for his child
ever could speak in pity from the hard and scornful
eyes of the imperious Anjouite?
The mist which till then had clouded
his mind, or left visible to his gaze but one stern
idea of retribution, melted into air. He beheld
the fearful crisis to which his life had passed, he
had reached the eminence to mourn the happy gardens
left behind. Gone, forever gone, the old endearing
friendships, the sweet and manly remembrances of brave
companionship and early love! Who among those
who had confronted war by his side for the House of
York would hasten to clasp his hand and hail his coming
as the captain of hated Lancaster? True, could
he bow his honour to proclaim the true cause of his
desertion, the heart of every father would beat in
sympathy with his; but less than ever could the tale
that vindicated his name be told. How stoop to
invoke malignant pity to the insult offered to a future
queen? Dark in his grave must rest the secret
no words could syllable, save by such vague and mysterious
hint and comment as pass from baseless gossip into
dubious history. [Hall well explains the mystery which
wrapped the king’s insult to a female of the
House of Warwick by the simple sentence, “The
certainty was not, for both their honours, openly known!”]
True, that in his change of party he was not, like
Julian of Spain, an apostate to his native land.
He did not meditate the subversion of his country by
the foreign foe; it was but the substitution of one
English monarch for another, a virtuous
prince for a false and a sanguinary king. True,
that the change from rose to rose had been so common
amongst the greatest and the bravest, that even the
most rigid could scarcely censure what the age itself
had sanctioned. But what other man of his stormy
day had been so conspicuous in the downfall of those
he was now as conspicuously to raise? What other
man had Richard of York taken so dearly to his heart,
to what other man had the august father said, “Protect
my sons”? Before him seemed literally to
rise the phantom of that honoured prince, and with
clay-cold lips to ask, “Art thou, of all the
world, the doomsman of my first-born?” A groan
escaped the breast of the self-tormentor; he fell
on his knees and prayed: “Oh, pardon, thou
All-seeing! plead for me, Divine Mother!
if in this I have darkly erred, taking my heart for
my conscience, and mindful only of a selfish wrong!
Oh, surely, no! Had Richard of York himself lived
to know what I have suffered from his unworthy son, causeless
insult, broken faith, public and unabashed dishonour;
yea, pardoning, serving, loving on through all, till,
at the last, nothing less than the foulest taint that
can light upon ’scutcheon and name was the cold,
premeditated reward for untired devotion, surely,
surely, Richard himself had said, ’Thy honour
at last forbids all pardon!’”
Then, in that rapidity with which
the human heart, once seizing upon self-excuse, reviews,
one after one, the fair apologies, the earl passed
from the injury to himself to the mal-government of
his land, and muttered over the thousand instances
of cruelty and misrule which rose to his remembrance, forgetting,
alas, or steeling himself to the memory, that till
Edward’s vices had assailed his own hearth and
honour, he had been contented with lamenting them,
he had not ventured to chastise. At length, calm
and self-acquitted, he rose from his self-confession,
and leaning by the open casement, drank in the reviving
and gentle balm of the summer air. The state apartments
he had left, formed as we have before observed, an
angle to the wing in which the chamber he had now
retired to was placed. They were brilliantly
illumined, their windows opened to admit the fresh,
soft breeze of night; and he saw, as if by daylight,
distinct and gorgeous, in their gay dresses, the many
revellers within. But one group caught and riveted
his eye. Close by the centre window he recognized
his gentle Anne, with downcast looks; he almost fancied
he saw her blush, as her young bridegroom, young and
beautiful as herself, whispered love’s flatteries
in her ear. He saw farther on, but yet near, his
own sweet countess, and muttered, “After twenty
years of marriage, may Anne be as dear to him as thou
art now to me!” And still he saw, or deemed he
saw, his lady’s eye, after resting with tender
happiness on the young pair, rove wistfully around,
as if missing and searching for her partner in her
mother’s joy. But what form sweeps by with
so haughty a majesty, then pauses by the betrothed,
addresses them not, but seems to regard them with so
fixed a watch? He knew by her ducal diadem, by
the baudekin colours of her robe, by her unmistakable
air of pride, his daughter Isabel. He did not
distinguish the expression of her countenance, but
an ominous thrill passed through his heart; for the
attitude itself had an expression, and not that of
a sister’s sympathy and love. He turned
away his face with an unquiet recollection of the
altered mood of his discontented daughter. He
looked again: the duchess had passed on, lost
amidst the confused splendour of the revel. And
high and rich swelled the merry music that invited
to the stately pavón. He gazed still; his
lady had left her place, the lovers too had vanished,
and where they stood, stood now in close conference
his ancient enemies, Exeter and Somerset. The
sudden change from objects of love to those associated
with hate had something which touched one of those
superstitions to which, in all ages, the heart, when
deeply stirred, is weakly sensitive. And again,
forgetful of the revel, the earl turned to the serener
landscape of the grove and the moonlit green sward,
and mused and mused, till a soft arm thrown round
him woke his revery. For this had his lady left
the revel. Divining, by the instinct born of
love, the gloom of her husband, she had stolen from
pomp and pleasure to his side.
“Ah, wherefore wouldst thou
rob me,” said the countess, “of one hour
of thy presence, since so few hours remain; since,
when the sun that succeeds the morrow’s shines
upon these walls, the night of thine absence will
have closed upon me?”
“And if that thought of parting,
sad to me as thee, suffice not, belle amie,
to dim the revel,” answered the earl, “weetest
thou not how ill the grave and solemn thoughts of
one who sees before him the emprise that would change
the dynasty of a realm can suit with the careless
dance and the wanton music? But not at that moment
did I think of those mightier cares; my thoughts were
nearer home. Hast thou noted, sweet wife, the
silent gloom, the clouded brow of Isabel, since she
learned that Anne was to be the bride of the heir
of Lancaster?”
The mother suppressed a sigh.
“We must pardon, or glance lightly over, the
mood of one who loves her lord, and mourns for his
baffled hopes! Well-a-day! I grieve that
she admits not even me to her confidence. Ever
with the favourite lady who lately joined her train, methinks
that new friend gives less holy counsel than a mother!”
“Ha! and yet what counsels can
Isabel listen to from a comparative stranger?
Even if Edward, or rather his cunning Elizabeth, had
suborned this waiting-woman, our daughter never could
hearken, even in an hour of anger, to the message
from our dishonourer and our foe.”
“Nay, but a flatterer often
fosters by praising the erring thought. Isabel
hath something, dear lord, of thy high heart and courage;
and ever from childhood, her vaulting spirit, her
very character of stately beauty, hath given her a
conviction of destiny and power loftier than those
reserved for our gentle Anne. Let us trust to
time and forbearance, and hope that the affection
of the generous sister will subdue the jealousy of
the disappointed princess.”
“Pray Heaven, indeed, that it
so prove! Isabel’s ascendancy over Clarence
is great, and might be dangerous. Would that she
consented to remain in France with thee and Anne!
Her lord, at least, it seems I have convinced and
satisfied. Pleased at the vast fortunes before
him, the toys of viceregal power, his lighter nature
reconciles itself to the loss of a crown, which, I
fear, it could never have upheld. For the more
I have read his qualities in our household intimacy,
the more it seems that I could scarcely have justified
the imposing on England a king not worthy of so great
a people. He is young yet, but how different the
youth of Lancastrian Edward! In him what earnest
and manly spirit! What heaven-born views of the
duties of a king! Oh, if there be a sin in the
passion that hath urged me on, let me, and me alone,
atone! and may I be at least the instrument to give
to England a prince whose virtues shall compensate
for all!”
While yet the last word trembled upon
the earl’s lips, a light flashed along the floors,
hitherto illumined but by the stars and the full moon.
And presently Isabel, in conference with the lady whom
her mother had referred to, passed into the room,
on her way to her private chamber. The countenance
of this female diplomatist, whose talent for intrigue
Philip de Comines [Comines, ii; Hall, Lingard,
Hume, etc.] has commemorated, but whose name,
happily for her memory, history has concealed, was
soft and winning in its expression to the ordinary
glance, though the sharpness of the features, the thin
compression of the lips, and the harsh dry redness
of the hair corresponded with the attributes which
modern physiognomical science truly or erringly assigns
to a wily and treacherous character. She bore
a light in her hand, and its rays shone full on the
disturbed and agitated face of the duchess. Isabel
perceived at once the forms of her parents, and stopped
short in some whispered conversation, and uttered
a cry almost of dismay.
“Thou leavest the revel betimes,
fair daughter,” said the earl, examining her
countenance with an eye somewhat stern.
“My lady,” said the confidant,
with a lowly reverence, “was anxious for her
babe.”
“Thy lady, good waiting-wench,”
said Warwick, “needs not thy tongue to address
her father. Pass on.”
The gentlewoman bit her lips, but
obeyed, and quitted the room. The earl approached,
and took Isabel’s hand, it was cold
as stone.
“My child,” said he, tenderly,
“thou dost well to retire to rest; of late thy
cheek hath lost its bloom. But just now, for many
causes, I was wishing thee not to brave our perilous
return to England; and now, I know not whether it
would make me the more uneasy, to fear for thy health
if absent or thy safety if with me!”
“My lord,” replied Isabel,
coldly, “my duty calls me to my husband’s
side, and the more, since now it seems he dares the
battle but reaps not its rewards! Let Edward
and Anne rest in safety, Clarence and Isabel go to
achieve the diadem and orb for others!”
“Be not bitter with thy father,
girl; be not envious of thy sister!” said the
earl, in grave rebuke; then, softening his tone, he
added, “The women of a noble House should have
no ambition of their own, their glory and
their honour they should leave, unmurmuring, in the
hands of men! Mourn not if thy sister mounts
the throne of him who would have branded the very
name to which thou and she were born!”
“I have made no reproach, my
lord. Forgive me, I pray you, if I now retire;
I am so weary, and would fain have strength and health
not to be a burden to you when you depart.”
The duchess bowed with proud submission,
and moved on. “Beware!” said the
earl, in a low voice.
“Beware! and of what?” said
Isabel, startled.
“Of thine own heart, Isabel.
Ay, go to thine infant’s couch ere thou seek
thine own, and, before the sleep of innocence, calm
thyself back to womanhood.”
The duchess raised her head quickly,
but habitual awe of her father checked the angry answer;
and kissing, with formal reverence, the hand the countess
extended to her, she left the room. She gained
the chamber in which was the cradle of her son, gorgeously
canopied with silks, inwrought with the blazoned arms
of royal Clarence; and beside the cradle
sat the confidant.
The duchess drew aside the drapery,
and contemplated the rosy face of the infant slumberer.
Then, turning to her confidant, she said,
“Three months since, and I hoped
my first-born would be a king! Away with those
vain mockeries of royal birth! How suit they the
destined vassal of the abhorred Lancastrian?”
“Sweet lady,” said the
confidant, “did I not warn thee from the first
that this alliance, to the injury of my lord duke and
this dear boy, was already imminent? I had hoped
thou mightst have prevailed with the earl!”
“He heeds me not, he cares not
for me!” exclaimed Isabel; “his whole
love is for Anne, Anne, who, without energy
and pride, I scarcely have looked on as my equal!
And now to my younger sister I must bow my knee, pleased
if she deign to bid me hold the skirt of her queenly
robe! Never, no, never!”
“Calm thyself; the courier must
part this night. My Lord of Clarence is already
in his chamber; he waits but thine assent to write
to Edward, that he rejects not his loving messages.”
The duchess walked to and fro, in
great disorder. “But to be thus secret
and false to my father?”
“Doth be merit that thou shouldst
sacrifice thy child to him? Reflect! the king
has no son! The English barons acknowledge not
in girls a sovereign; [Miss Strickland ("Life of Elizabeth
of York”) remarks, “How much Norman prejudice
in favour of Salic law had corrupted the common or
constitutional law of England regarding the succession!”
The remark involves a controversy.] and, with Edward
on the throne, thy son is heir-presumptive. Little
chance that a male heir shall now be born to Queen
Elizabeth, while from Anne and her bridegroom a long
line may spring. Besides, no matter what parchment
treaties may ordain, how can Clarence and his offspring
ever be regarded by a Lancastrian king but as enemies
to feed the prison or the block, when some false invention
gives the seemly pretext for extirpating the lawful
race?”
“Cease, cease, cease!”
cried Isabel, in terrible struggles with herself.
“Lady, the hour presses!
And, reflect, a few lines are but words, to be confirmed
or retracted as occasion suits! If Lord Warwick
succeed, and King Edward lose his crown, ye can shape
as ye best may your conduct to the time. But
if the earl lose the day, if again he be driven into
exile, a few words now release you and yours from everlasting
banishment; restore your boy to his natural heritage;
deliver you from the insolence of the Anjouite, who,
methinks, even dared this very day to taunt your highness ”
“She did she did!
Oh that my father had been by to hear! She bade
me stand aside that Anne might pass, ’not
for the younger daughter of Lord Warwick, but for
the lady admitted into the royalty of Lancaster!’
Elizabeth Woodville, at least, never dared this insolence!”
“And this Margaret the Duke
of Clarence is to place on the throne which your child
yonder might otherwise aspire to mount!”
Isabel clasped her hands in mute passion.
“Hark!” said the confidant, throwing open
the door
And along the corridor came, in measured
pomp, a stately procession, the chamberlain in front,
announcing “Her Highness the Princess of Wales;”
and Louis xi., leading the virgin bride (wife
but in name and honour, till her dowry of a kingdom
was made secure) to her gentle rest. The ceremonial
pomp, the regal homage that attended the younger sister
thus raised above herself, completed in Isabel’s
jealous heart the triumph of the Tempter. Her
face settled into hard resolve, and she passed at once
from the chamber into one near at hand, where the Duke
of Clarence sat alone, the rich wines of the livery,
not untasted, before him, and the ink yet wet upon
a scroll he had just indited.
He turned his irresolute countenance
to Isabel as she bent over him and read the letter.
It was to Edward; and after briefly warning him of
the meditated invasion, significantly added, “and
if I may seem to share this emprise, which, here and
alone, I cannot resist, thou shalt find me still,
when the moment comes, thy affectionate brother and
loyal subject.”
“Well, Isabel,” said the
duke, “thou knowest I have delayed this till
the last hour to please thee; for verily, lady mine,
thy will is my sweetest law. But now, if thy
heart misgives thee ”
“It does, it does!” exclaimed
the duchess, bursting into tears.
“If thy heart misgives thee,”
continued Clarence, who with all his weakness had
much of the duplicity of his brothers, “why,
let it pass. Slavery to scornful Margaret, vassalage
to thy sister’s spouse, triumph to the House
which both thou and I were taught from childhood to
deem accursed, why, welcome all! so that
Isabel does not weep, and our boy reproach us not
in the days to come!”
For all answer, Isabel, who had seized
the letter, let it drop on the table, pushed it, with
averted face, towards the duke, and turned back to
the cradle of her child, whom she woke with her sobs,
and who wailed its shrill reply in infant petulance
and terror, snatched from its slumber to the arms
of the remorseful mother.
A smile of half contemptuous joy passed
over the thin lips of the she-Judas, and, without
speaking, she took her way to Clarence. He had
sealed and bound his letter, first adding these words,
“My lady and duchess, whatever her kin, has
seen this letter, and approves it, for she is more
a friend to York than to the earl, now he has turned
Lancastrian;” and placed it in a small iron coffer.
He gave the coffer, curiously clasped
and locked, to the gentlewoman, with a significant
glance “Be quick, or she repents!
The courier waits, his steed saddled! The instant
you give it, he departs, he hath his permit
to pass the gates.”
“All is prepared; ere the clock
strike, he is on his way.” The confidant
vanished; the duke sank in his chair, and rubbed his
hands.
“Oho, father-in-law, thou deemest
me too dull for a crown! I am not dull enough
for thy tool. I have had the wit, at least, to
deceive thee, and to hide resentment beneath a smiling
brow! Dullard, thou to believe aught less than
the sovereignty of England could have bribed Clarence
to thy cause!” He turned to the table and complacently
drained his goblet.
Suddenly, haggard and pale as a spectre,
Isabel stood before him.
“I was mad mad, George!
The letter! the letter it must not go!”
At that moment the clock struck.
“Bel enfant,” said the duke, “it
is too late!”