=Source.=--Henry of Huntingdon, _Epistola de Contemptu Mundi_, ed.
Arnold, p. 299. (Rolls Series.)
Experience of evil is a fatal hook to catch at men’s hearts and enslave
them to riches and transitory pleasures. This I have learned from my
own life. For when I was a child, a boy and a young man, I used to see
the glory of Robert, our bishop, his gallant knights, his noble pages,
his costly horses, his vessels of gold and silver gilt, his store
of plate, his gorgeous waiting-men, his purple robes and fine linen,
and I thought there could be no happier condition. And when all men,
even they who lectured in the schools on the vanity of the world, were
obsequious to him, and he himself, honoured as the father and god of
all, loved and valued the world overmuch, with what countenance, with
what temper would I have regarded any man who should have told me then
that this splendour, which all admired, was contemptible? I would have
judged him more mad than Orestes, more querulous than Thersites. I
thought there could be no flaw in the exalted happiness of so exalted
a man. But when I became a man, I heard stories of the vilest abuse
being levelled at him, and felt that I would have fainted if the same
words had been spoken to me, who possess nothing, before the same high
audience. I began therefore to deem of less account that inestimable
happiness.
But since many worldly folk commonly experience the bitterest reverses
before their death, I will relate what befel him before his end. He
who had been justiciar of the whole of England and greatly feared by
all men, was twice impleaded by the king at the end of his life before
a justice of low birth, and twice condemned with disgrace in the
heaviest damages; whereby his anguish of heart so affected him, that
when I, now his archdeacon, sat by him at dinner, I saw that he had
been moved to tears. I asked the cause, and he replied, “At one time my
attendants were sumptuously clothed; now the fines exacted by the king,
whose favour I have always sought, have reduced them to sheepskins.”
After this his despair of winning the king’s friendship was so great
that when the high praise lavished on him by the king in his absence
was reported to him, he said with a sigh, “The king only praises a
subject whom he has determined utterly to ruin.” For king Henry, if one
may dare to say so, exercised consummate duplicity and possessed an
inscrutable mind. A few days afterwards, at Woodstock, where the king
had appointed a hunt, while conversing with the king and the bishop of
Salisbury, who were the highest in the kingdom, our bishop was struck
with apoplexy. Alive, but speechless, he was carried into his house,
and soon afterwards died in the king’s presence. The great king, whom
he had always served, whom he had loved much and feared much, whom he
held in such honour, whom he trusted so entirely, no more availed him
in his last necessity than a beggar. Note therefore that it was not
said in vain, “Cursed be he that trusteth in man and maketh flesh his
arm.” When therefore the child or the boy or the young man regards the
prosperous, let him take thought of the uncertainty of their end, and
remember that even in this world they may be doomed to suffer a decline
full of misery. Bishop Robert was gentle and humble, advancing many and
crushing none, the father of orphans, beloved by his household; yet
this was the end of him.