The last shoot of that ancient tree
Was budding fair as fair might be;
Its buds they crop
Its branches lop
Then leave the sapless stem to die.
--SOPHOCLES (Anstice).
Harry Clifford lay fevered, and knowing little of what passed, for
several days, only murmuring sometimes of his flock at home, sometimes
of the royal hermit, and sometimes in distress of the men-at-arms with
whom he had been thrown, and whose habits and language had plainly been
a great shock to his innocent mind, trained by the company of the sheep,
and the hermit. He took the Prioress’s hand for Good-wife Dolly’s, but
he generally knew Anne, who could soothe him better than any other.
Master Lorimer was fully occupied by combatants who came to have their
equipments renewed or repaired, and he spent the days in his shop in
London, but rode home in the long evenings with his budget of news. King
Henry was in the Tower again, as passive as ever, but on the very day of
the battle of Barnet Queen Margaret had landed at Weymouth with her son,
and the war would be renewed in Somersetshire.
Search for prisoners being over at Barnet, Hal was removed to the guest
chamber of his hosts, where he lay in a huge square bed, and in the
better air began to recover, understand what was going on round him,
and be anxious for his friends, especially Sir Giles Musgrave and Simon
Bunce. The ladies still attended to him, as Lorimer pronounced the
journey to be absolutely unsafe, while so many soldiers disbanded, or on
their way to the Queen’s army, were roaming about, and the Burgundians
brought by Edward might not be respectful to an English Prioress. It was
safer to wait for tidings from Lord St. John, which were certain to come
either from Bletso or the Minoresses’.
So May had begun when Lorimer hurried home with the tidings that a
messenger had come in haste from King Edward from the battlefield of
Tewkesbury, with the tidings of a complete victory. Prince Edward, the
fair and spirited hope of Lancaster, was slain, Somerset and his friends
had taken sanctuary in the Abbey Church, Queen Margaret and the young
wife of the prince in a small convent, and beyond all had been flight
and slaughter.
For a few days no more was known, but then came fuller and sadder
tidings. The young prince had been brutally slain by his cousins,
Edward, George, and Richard, excited as they were to tiger-like ferocity
by the late revolt. The nobles in the sanctuary, who had for one night
been protected by a cord drawn in front of them by a priest, had in the
morning been dragged out and beheaded. Among them was Anne’s father,
Lord St. John of Bletso, and on the field the heralds had recognised the
corpse of her suitor, Lord Redgrave. To expect that Anne felt any acute
sorrow for a father whom she had never seen since she was six years old,
and who then had never seemed to care for her, was not possible.
And what was to be her fate? Her young brother, the heir of Bletso, was
in Flanders with his foreign mother, and she knew not what might be
her own claims through her own mother, though the Prioress and Master
Lorimer knew that it could be ascertained through the seneschal at
Bletso, if he had not perished with his lord, or the agents at York
through whom Anne’s pension had been paid. If she were an heiress, she
would become a ward of the Crown, a dreary prospect, for it meant to be
disposed of to some unknown minion of the Court.