"Whan bells were rung, and mass was sung,
And every lady went hame,
Than ilka lady had her yong sonne,
But Lady Helen had nane."
_Old Ballad_.
"I have come home, Mother!"
It was Constance who spoke, standing in the hall at Cardiff, wrapped in
the arms of the Dowager Lady Le Despenser. And in every sense, from the
lightest to the deepest, the words were true. The wanderer had come
home. Home to the Castle of Cardiff, which she was never to leave any
more; home to the warm motherly arms of Elizabeth Le Despenser, who cast
all her worn-out theories to the winds, and took her dead son's hapless
darling to her heart of hearts; home to the great heart of God. And the
ear of the elder woman was open to a sound unheard by the younger. The
voice of that dead son echoed in her heart, repeating his dying charge
to her--"Have a care of my Lady!"
"My poor stricken dove!" sobbed the Lady Elizabeth. "Child, men's cruel
handling hath robbed thee of much, yet it hath left thee God and thy
mother!"
Constance looked up, with tears gleaming in her sapphire eyes, now so
much calmer and sadder than of old.
"Ay," she said, the remembrance thrilling through her of the heavy price
at which she had bought back her children; "and I have paid nought for
God and thee."
"Nay, daughter dear, Christ paid that wyte [forfeit] for thee. We may
trust Him to have a care of the quittance," [receipt].
The children now claimed their share of notice. Richard kissed the old
lady in an energetic devouring style, and proclaimed himself "so glad,
Grammer, so glad!" Isabel offered her cheek in her cold unchildlike
way. The baby Alianora at once accepted the new element as a perfectly
satisfactory grandmamma, and submitted to be dandled and talked nonsense
to with pleased equanimity.
"O Bertram!" said Maude that night, "surely our Lady's troubles and
travails be now over!"
"It is well, wife, that God loveth her better than thou," was the
answer. "He will not leave his jewel but half polished, because the
sound of the cutting grieveth thine ears."
"But how could she bear aught more?"
"Dear heart! how know we what any man can bear--aye, even our own
selves? Only God knoweth; and we trust Him. The heavenly Goldsmith
breaketh none of His gems in the cutting."
The doors of the prison in Windsor Castle were opened that spring to
release two of the state prisoners. The dangerous prisoner, Edmund Earl
of March, remained in durance; and his bright little brother Roger had
been set free already, by a higher decree than any of Henry of
Bolingbroke. The child died in his dungeon, aged probably about ten
years. Now Anne and Alianora were summoned to Court, and placed under
the care of the Queen. They were described by the King as "deprived of
all their relatives and friends." They were not quite that; but in so
far as they were, he was mainly responsible for having made them so.
The manner in which King Henry provided the purchase-money required by
the Duke of Milan for Lucia is amusing for its ingenuity. The sum
agreed upon was seventy thousand florins; and the King paid it out of
the pockets of five of his nobles. One was his own son, Thomas Duke of
Clarence; the second and third were husbands of two of Kent's sisters--
Sir John Neville and Thomas Earl of Salisbury--the latter being the son
of the murdered Lollard; the fourth was Lord Scrope, whose character
appears to have been simple to an extreme; and the last was assuredly
never asked to consent to the exaction, for he was the hapless March,
still close prisoner in Windsor Castle.
In the summer, Constance received a grant of all her late husband's
lands. The Court was very gay that summer with royal weddings. The
first bride was Constance's young stepmother, the Duchess Joan of York,
who bestowed her hand on Lord Willoughby de Eresby: the second was the
King's younger daughter, the Princess Philippa, who was consigned to the
ungentle keeping of the far-off King of Denmark. Richard of
Conisborough was selected to attend the Princess to Elsinore; but he was
so poor that the King was obliged to make all the provision he required
for the journey. It was not his own fault that his purse was light: his
godfather, King Richard, had left him a sufficient competence; but the
grants of Richard of Bordeaux were not held always to bind Henry of
Bolingbroke. But when the Earl of Cambridge returned to Elsinore, he
was rewarded for his labours, not with money nor lands, but by a grant
of the only thing for which he cared--the gift of Anne Mortimer. He was
penniless, and so was she. But though poverty was an habitual resident
within the doors, love did not fly out at the window.
The year 1408 brought another sanguinary struggle in favour of March's
title, headed by the old white-haired sinner Northumberland, who fell in
his attempt, at the battle of Bramham Moor, on the 29th of February. He
had armed in the cause of Rome, which he hoped to induce March to
espouse yet more warmly than Henry the Fourth. He probably did not know
the boy personally, and imagined him the counterpart of his gallant,
fervent father. He was as far from it as possible. Nothing on earth
would have induced March to espouse any cause warmly. He valued far too
highly his own dearly beloved ease.
Matters dragged themselves along that autumn as lazily as even March
could have wished. All over England the rain came down, sometimes in a
dashing shower, but generally in an idle dreary dripping from eaves and
ramparts. Nothing particular was happening to any body. At Cardiff all
was extremely quiet. Constance had recovered as much brightness as she
would ever recover, but never any more would she be the Constance of old
time.
"Surely our Lady's troubles be over now!" said Maude sanguinely.
On the evening on which that remark was made,--the fifteenth of
September--two sisters of Saint Clare sat watching, in a small French
convent, by the dying bed of a knight. At the siege of Briac Castle,
five days earlier, he had been mortally wounded in the head by a bolt
from a crossbow; and his squires bore him into the little convent to die
in peace. The sufferer had never fully recovered his consciousness. He
seemed but dimly aware of any thing--not fully sensible even to pain.
His words were few, incoherent, scarcely intelligible. What the nuns
could occasionally disentangle from his low mutterings was something
about "blue eyes," and "watching from the lattice." The last rites of
the Church were administered, but there could be no confession; a
crucifix was held before his eyes, but they doubted if he recognised
what it was. And about sunset of that autumn evening he died.
So closed the few and evil days of the vain, weak, self-loving Kent.
His age was only twenty-six; he left no child but the disinherited
Alianora, and his sisters took good care that she should remain
disinherited. They pounced upon the lands of the dead brother with an
eagerness which would have been rather more decent had it been a little
less apparent; and to the widowed Lucia, who was the least guilty party
to the conspiracy for which she had been made the decoy, they left
little beyond her wardrobe. She was actually reduced to appeal to the
King's mercy for means to live. Henry responded to her piteous petition
by the offer of his brother of Dorset as a second husband. Lucia was
one of those women who are born actresses, and whose nature it is to do
things which seem forced and unnatural to others. She flattered the
King with anticipations that she was on the point of complying with his
wishes, till the last moment; and then she eloped with Sir Henry de
Mortimer, possibly a distant connection of the Earl of March. It may be
added, since Lucia now disappears from the story, that she survived her
second marriage for fourteen years, and showed herself at her death a
most devout member of the orthodox Church, by a will which was from
beginning to end a string of bequests for masses, to be sung for the
repose of her soul, and of the soul of Kent.
Bertram and Maude, to whom the news came first, scarcely knew how to
tell Constance of Kent's death. At last Maude thought of dressing the
little Alianora in daughter's mourning, and sending her into her
mother's room alone. The gradations of mourning were at that time so
distinct and minute that Constance's practised eye would read the
parable in an instant. So they broke in that manner the news they dared
not tell her.
For the whole day there was no sign from Constance that she had even
noticed the hint. Her voice and manner showed no change. But at night,
when the little child of three years old knelt at her mother's knee for
her evening prayer, said Lollard-wise in simple English, they found it
had not escaped her. As the child came to the usual "God bless my
father and mother,"--which, fatherless as she had always been, she had
been taught to say,--Constance quietly checked her, and made her say,
"God bless my mother" only. And at the close, little Alianora was
instructed to add,--"God pardon my father's soul."
Knowing how passionately Constance had once loved Kent, this calm show
of indifference puzzled Maude Lyngern sorely. But to the Dowager Lady
it was no such riddle.
"Her love is dead, child," she said, when Maude timidly expressed her
surprise. "And when that is verily thus, it were lighter to bid a dead
corpse live than a dead love."
All this time the Lollard persecution slowly waxed hotter and hotter.
Men began to thank God when any "heretics" among their friends were
permitted to die in their beds, and to whisper in hushed accents that
when the Prince of Wales should be King, whose nature was more merciful
than his father's, matters might perchance mend. They little knew what
the future was to bring. The worst was not yet over,--was not even to
come during the reign of Henry of Bolingbroke.
Seeing that Constance was now restored to her lands, and basking in the
sunshine of Court favour, it struck Lady Abergavenny, a niece of
Archbishop Arundel, who was a politic woman--as most of his nieces
were--that an alliance between her son and Isabel Le Despenser would be
a good speculation. And her Ladyship, being moreover a strong-minded
woman, whose husband was of very little public and less private
consequence, carried her point, and the marriage of Isabel with young
Richard Beauchamp took place at Cardiff on the eleventh birthday of the
bride.
The ceremony was slightly hastened at the wish of the Dowager Lady Le
Despenser. She was anxious not to distress Constance by breaking the
news too suddenly to her, but she felt within herself that the golden
bowl was nearing its breaking at the fountain, and that the silver cords
of her earthly house of this tabernacle were not far from being taken
down. She was an old woman,--very old, for a period wherein few lived
to old age; she had long outlived her husband, and had seen the funerals
of nearly all her children. The greater part even of her earthly
treasures were already safe where moth and rust corrupt not, and her own
feeling of earnest longing to rejoin them grew daily stronger. It was
for the daughter's sake alone that she cared to live now; the daughter
to whom men had left only God and that mother. A new lesson was now to
be taught to Constance--to rest wholly upon God.
It was very tranquilly at last that Elizabeth Le Despenser passed away
from earth. She took most loving leave of Constance, blessed and said
farewell to all her children, and charged Bertram and Maude to remain
with her and be faithful to her.
Twenty years' companionship, fellowship in sorrow, and fellowship in
faith, had effected a complete revolution in the feelings of Constance
towards her mother-in-law.
"O Mother, Mother!" she sobbed; "what shall I do without you!"
"My child," answered Elizabeth, "had the heavenly Master not seen that
thou shouldst well do without me, He had left me yet here."
"You yourself said, Mother, that He had left me but Him and you!"
"Ay, dear daughter; and yet He hath left thee Himself. Every hour He
shall be with thee; and every hour of thy life moreover shall be an hour
the less betwixt thee and me."
The last thing that they heard her murmur, which had reference to that
land whither she was going, was--"Neither schulen they die more."
They laid her in the family vault at Tewkesbury Abbey; and once more
there was mourning at Cardiff.
It was only just begun when news came of another death, far more
unexpected than hers. Richard of Conisborough and Anne Mortimer were
already the parents of a daughter; and two months after the death of the
Lady Le Despenser a son was born, who was hereafter to become the father
of all the future kings of England. And while the young mother lay
wrapped in her first tender gladness over her new treasure, God called
her to come away to Him. So she left the little children who would
never call her "mother," left the husband who was all the world to her;
and--fragile White Rose as she was--Anne Mortimer "perished with the
flowers." She died "with all the sunshine on her," aged only twenty-one
years. Perhaps those who stood round her coffin thought it a very sad
and strange dispensation of Providence. But we, who know what lay
hidden in the coming years, can see that God's time for her to die was
the best and kindest time. And indications are not quite wanting,
slight though they may be, that Richard of Conisborough was not a
political, but a religious Lollard, and that this autumn journey of Anne
Mortimer to the unknown land may have been a triumphal entry into the
City of God.
The news that Constance had of set purpose cast in her lot with the
Lollards was not long in travelling to Westminster. And she soon found
that the lot of a Lollard was no bed of roses. In his anger, Henry of
Bolingbroke departed from his usual rule of rigid justice, and revoked
the grant which Constance may be said to have purchased with her heart's
blood. Her favourite Richard, now a fine youth of sixteen, was taken
from her, and his custody, possessions, and marriage were granted to
trustees, of whom the chief persons were Archbishop Arundel and Edward
Duke of York. This meant that the trustees were to sell his hand to the
father of some eligible damsel, and pocket the proceeds; and also to
convert to their own use the rents of young Richard's estates until he
was of age. The Duke of York was just now a most devout and orthodox
person. It was time, for any one who cared to save his life, as Edward
did; for a solemn decree against Wycliffe's writings had just been
fulminated at Rome; and while Henry of Bolingbroke sat on the throne,
England lay at the feet of the Pope. The trustees took advantage at
once of the favour done them, and sold young Richard (without consulting
Constance) to the Earl of Westmoreland, for the benefit of one of his
numerous daughters, the Lady Alianora Neville. She was a little girl of
about ten years old, and remained in the charge of her mother, the
King's sister. In the April following it pleased the Duke of York to
pay a visit to his sister, and to bring her son in his train. Edward
was particularly silent at first. He appeared to have heard no news, to
be actuated by no motive in coming, and generally to have nothing to
say. Richard, on the contrary, was evidently labouring under suppressed
excitement of some kind. But when they sat down to supper, York called
for Malvoisie, and threw a bomb into the midst of the company by the
wish which he uttered as he carried the goblet to his lips.
"God pardon King Henry's soul!"
He was answered by varying exclamations in different tones.
"Ay, Madam, 'tis too true!" broke forth young Richard, addressing his
mother; "but mine uncle's Grace willed me not to speak thereof until he
so should."
"Harry of Bolingbroke is dead?--Surely no!"
"Dead as a door-nail," said York unfeelingly.
"Was he sick of long-time?"
"Long enough!" responded York in the same manner. "Long enough to weary
every soul that ministered to his fantasies, and to cause them ring the
church bells for joy that their toil was over. Leprosy, by my troth!--a
sweet disorder to die withal!"
"Ned, I pray thee keep some measure in speech."
"By the Holy Coat of Treves! but if thou wouldst love to deal withal,
Custance, thy tarrying at Kenilworth hath wrought mighty change in thee.
Marry, it pleased the Lady Queen to proffer unto me an even's watch in
the chamber. `Good lack! I thank your Grace,' quoth I, `but 'tis mine
uttermost sorrow that I should covenant with one at Hackney to meet with
me this even, and I must right woefully deny me the ease that it should
do me to abide with his Highness.' An honest preferment, to be his sick
nurse, by Saint Lawrence his gridiron! Nay, by Saint Zachary his
shoe-strings, but there were two words to that bargain!"
"Then what did your Grace, Uncle?" said Isabel in her cool, grown-up
style.
"Did? Marry, little cousin, I rade down to Norwich House, and played a
good hour at the cards with my Lord's Grace of Norwich; and then I lay
me down on the settle and gat me a nap; and after spices served, I
turned back to Westminster, and did her Grace to wit that it were rare
cold riding from Hackney."
"Is your Grace yet shriven sithence, Uncle?" inquired young Richard
rather comically.
"The very next morrow, lad, my said Lord of Norwich the confessor. I
bare it but a night, nor it did me not no disease in sleeping."
"Maybe it should take a heavy sin to do that, fair Uncle," said Isabel
with a sneer.
"What wist, such a chick as thou?" returned York, holding out his goblet
to the dispenser of Malvoisie.
A little lower down the table, Sir Bertram Lyngern and Master Hugh
Calverley were discussing less serious subjects in a more sober and
becoming manner.
"Truly, our new King hath well begun," said Hugh. "My Lord of March is
released of his prison, and shall be wed this next summer to the Lady
Anne of Stafford, and his sister the Lady Alianora unto my Lord of Devon
his son; and all faithful friends and servants of King Richard be set in
favour; and 'tis rumoured about the Court that your Lady shall receive
confirmation of every of his father's grants made unto her."
"I trust it shall so be verily," said Bertram.
"And further yet," pursued Hugh, slightly dropping his voice, "'tis said
that the King considereth to take unto the Crown great part of the
moneys and lands of the Church."
"Surely no!"
"Ay, so far as my judgment serveth, 'tis so soothly."
"But that were sacrilege!"
"Were it?" asked Hugh coolly.
For the extreme Lollards, of whom he was one, looked upon the two
political acts which we have learned to call disestablishment and
disendowment, as not only permissible, but desirable. In so saying, I
speak of the political Lollards. All political Lollards, however, were
not religious ones, nor were all religious Lollards sharers in these
political views. John of Gaunt, a strong political Lollard, was never a
religious one in his life; while King Richard, who decidedly leaned to
them in religion, disliked their politics exceedingly. In fact, it was
rather the fervent, energetic, practical reformers who took up with such
aims; while those among them who walked quietly with God let the matter
alone. Hugh Calverley had been drawn into these questions rather by
circumstances than choice. While he was emphatically one that "sighed
and that cried for all the abominations that were done in the midst of"
his Israel, he was sagacious enough to know that even from his own point
of view, the abolition of the hierarchy, or the suppression of the
monastic orders, were no more than lopping off branches, while the root
remained.
It was perfectly true that Henry the Fifth seriously contemplated the
policy of disendowment, which Parliament had in vain suggested to his
father. And it continued to be true for some six months longer. The
clue has not yet been discovered to the mysterious and sudden change
which at that date came over, not only the policy, but the whole
character of Henry of Monmouth. Up to that date he had himself been
something very like a political Lollard; ever after it he was fervently
orthodox. The suddenness of the change was not less remarkable than its
completeness. It took place about the first of October, 1413; and it
exactly coincides in date with a visit from Archbishop Arundel, to urge
upon the reluctant King the apprehension of his friend Lord Cobham.
Whatever may have been the means of the alteration, there can be but
little question as to who was the agent.
The King's confirmation of grants to his cousin Constance occurred
before this ominous date; and, revoking the last penalty inflicted, it
restored her son to her custody. Richard therefore came home in July,
where he remained until September. His attendance was then commanded at
Court, and he left Cardiff accordingly.
"Farewell, Madam!" he said brightly, as his mother gave him her farewell
kiss and blessing. "God allowing, I trust to be at home again ere
Christmas; and from London I will seek to bring your Grace and my
sisters some gear of pleasance."
"Farewell, my Dickon!" said Constance, lovingly. "Have a care of
thyself, fair son. Remember, thou art now my dearest treasure."
"No fear, sweet Lady!"
So he sailed off, waving his hand or his cap from the boat, so long as
he could be seen.
A letter came from him three weeks later--a doubtful, uneasy letter,
showing that the mind of the writer was by no means at rest concerning
the future. The King had received him most graciously, and every one at
Court was kind to him; but the sky was lowering ominously over the
struggling Church of God--that little section of the Holy Catholic
Church, on which the "mother and mistress of all churches" looked down
with such supreme contempt. The waves of persecution were rising higher
now than to the level of poor tailors like John Badby, or even of
priestly graduates like William Sautre.
"Lady, I do you to wit," wrote young Richard, "that as this day, Sir
John Oldcastle, Lord Cobham, was put to his trial, and being convinced
[convicted], was cast [sentenced]; the beginning and end of whose
offence is that he is a Lollard confessed, and hath harboured other men
of the like opinions. And the said Lord is now close prisoner in the
Tower of London, nor any of his kin ne lovers [friends] suffered to come
anigh him. And at the Court it is rumoured that Sir William Hankeford
(whom your Ladyship shall well remember) should be sent into our parts
of South Wales, there to put down both heresy and sedition: which
sedition, methinks, your Ladyship's favour allowing, shall point at Sir
Owain Glendordy [the name is usually spelt thus in contemporary
records]; and the heresy so called, both your Ladyship and I, your
humble son and servant, do well know what it doth signify. So no more
at this present writing; but praying our Lord that He would have your
Ladyship in His good keeping, and that all we may do His good pleasure,
I rest."
Twelve days later came another letter, written in a strange hand. It
was dated from Merton Abbey, in Surrey, was attested by the Abbot's
official cross and seal, and contained only a few lines. But never
throughout her troubled life had any letter so wrung the heart of
Constance Le Despenser. For those few formal lines brought the news
that never again would her eyes be gladdened by her heart's dearest
treasure--that the Angel of Death had claimed for his own her bright,
loving, fair-haired Richard.
No details have been handed down concerning that early and lamented
death of the last Lord Le Despenser. We do not even know how the boy
died--whether by the visitation of God in sudden illness, or by the fiat
of Thomas de Arundel, making the twelfth murder which lay upon that
black, seared soul. He was buried where he died, in the Abbey of
Merton--far from his home, far from his mother's tears and his father's
grave. It was always the lot of the hapless buds of the White Rose to
be scattered in death.
There was only one person at Cardiff who did not mourn bitterly for its
young Lord. To his sister Isabel, the inheritance to which she now
became sole heiress--the change of her title from "Lady Isabel de
Beauchamp" to "The Lady Le Despenser"--were amply sufficient
compensation to outweigh the loss of a brother. But little Alianora
wept bitterly.
"Ay me! what a break is this in our Lady's line!" lamented Maude to
Bertram. "God grant it the last, _if_ His will is!"
It was only one funeral of a long procession.
The Issue Roll for Michaelmas, 1413 to 1414, bears two terribly
significant entries--the expenses for the custody of Katherine Mortimer
and her daughters, who were "in the King's keeping"--and the costs of
the funerals of the same persons, buried in Saint Swithin's Church,
London. This was the hapless daughter of Owain Glyndwr, the wife of
Edmund Mortimer, uncle of the Earl of March. A mother and two or more
daughters do not usually require burial together, unless they die of
contagious disease. Of course that may have been the case; but the
entry looks miserably like a judicial murder.
Stirring events followed in rapid succession. Lord Cobham escaped
mysteriously from the Tower, and as mysteriously from an armed band sent
to apprehend him by Abbot Heyworth of Saint Albans. Old Judge Hankeford
made his anticipated visit to South Wales, and ceremoniously paid his
respects to the Lady of Cardiff, whose associations with his name were
not of the most agreeable order. With the new year came the unfortunate
insurrection of the political Lollards, goaded to revolt partly by the
fierce persecution, partly by a chivalrous desire to restore the beloved
King Richard, whom many of them believed to be still living in Scotland.
Wales and its Marches were their head-quarters. Thomas Earl of
Arundel--son of a persecutor--was sent to the Principality at the head
of an army, to "subdue the rebels;" Sir Roger Acton and Sir John
Beverley, two of the foremost Lollards of the new generation, were put
to death; and strict watch was set in every quarter for Lord Cobham,
once more escaped as if by miracle.
And then suddenly came another death--this time by the distinct and
awful sentence of God Almighty. He stooped to disconcert for a moment
the puny plans of men who had set themselves in array against the Lord
and His Christ. On the chief of all the persecutors, Sir Thomas de
Arundel himself, the angel of God's vengeance laid his irresistible
hand. Cut off in the blossom of his sin--struck down in a moment by
paralysis of the throat, which deprived him of all power of speech or
swallowing--the dreaded Archbishop passed to that awful tribunal where
his earthly eloquence was changed to silence and shame. He died,
probably, not unabsolved; they could still lay the consecrated wafer
upon the silent tongue, and touch with the chrism the furrowed brow and
brilliant eyes: but he must have died unconfessed--a terrible thing to
him, if he really believed himself the doctrines which he spent his life
in forcing upon others.
Arundel was dead; but the infernal generalissimo of the persecutors, who
could not die, was ready with a worthy successor. Henry Chichele
stepped into the vacant seat, and the fierce battle against the saints
went on.
The nephew of the deceased Archbishop, Thomas Earl of Arundel, presented
himself at Cardiff early in the year. He lost no time in delicate
insinuations, but came at once to his point. Was the Lady of Cardiff
ready to give all possible aid to himself and his troops, against those
traitors and heretics called Lollards? The answer was equally distinct.
With some semblance of the old fire flashing in her eyes, the Lady of
Cardiff refused to give him any aid whatever.
The Earl hinted in answer, with a sarcastic smile, that judging by the
rumours which had reached the Court, he had scarcely expected any other
conduct from her.
"Look ye for what ye will," returned the dauntless Princess. "Never yet
furled I my colours in peace; and I were double craven if I should do it
in war!"
Her words were reported to the relentless hearts at Westminster. The
result was an order to seize all the manors of the Despenser heritage,
and to deliver them to Edward Duke of York, the King's dearly beloved
cousin, by way of compensation (said the grant) for the loss which he
had sustained by the death of Richard Le Despenser. But the
compensation was estimated at a high figure.
There were some curious contradictory statutes passed this year. A
hundred and ten monasteries were suppressed by order of Council, and at
the same time another order was issued for the extirpation of heresy.
But, as usual, "the blood of the martyrs was the seed of the Church."
Wycliffism increased rapidly among the common people. Meanwhile Henry
was preparing for his French campaign; and at Constance the seventeenth
General Council of Christendom was just gathering, and John Huss, with
the Emperor's worthless safe-conduct in his pocket, was hastening
towards his prison--not much larger than a coffin--in the Monastery of
Saint Maurice. The Council ended their labours by burning Huss. They
would have liked to burn Wycliffe; but as he had been at rest with God
for over thirty years, they took refuge in the childish revenge of
disinterring and burning his senseless bones. And "after that, they had
no more that they could do."
The day that heard Huss's sentence pronounced in the white-walled
Cathedral of Constance, Edward Duke of York--accompanied by a little
group of knights and squires, one of whom was Hugh Calverley--walked his
oppressed horse across the draw-bridge at Cardiff. Life had agreed so
well with York that he had become very fat upon it. He had no children,
his wife never contradicted him, and he did not keep that troublesome
article called a conscience; so his sorrows and perplexities were few.
On the whole, he had found treachery an excellent investment--for one
life; and York left the consideration of the other to his death-bed. It
may be that at times, even to this Dives, the voice from Heaven
mercifully whispered, "Thou fool!" But he never stayed his
chariot-wheels to listen--until one autumn evening, by Southampton
Water, when the end loomed full in view, the Angel of Death came very
near, and there rose before him, suddenly and awfully, the dread
possibility of a life which might not close with a death-bed. But it
was yet bright summer when he reached Cardiff; and not yet had come that
dark, solemn August hour, when Edward Duke of York should dictate his
true character as "of all sinners the most wicked."
On this particular summer day at Cardiff, York was, for him, especially
gay and bright. Yet that night in the Cathedral of Constance stood John
Huss before his judges; and in the Convent of Coimbra an English
Princess [Philippa Queen of Portugal, eldest daughter of John of Gaunt],
long ago forgotten in England, yet gentlest and best daughters of
Lancaster, lay waiting for death. Somewhere in this troublesome world
the bridal is always matched by the burial, the festal song by the
funeral dirge. Men and women are always mourning, somewhere.
York's mind was full of one subject, the forthcoming campaign in France.
He was to sail from Southampton with his royal master in August.
Bedford was to be left Regent, the King's brother--Bedford, who,
whatever else he were, was no Lollard, and was not likely to let a
Lollard escape his fangs. And on this interesting topic York's tongue
ran on glibly--how King Henry meant to march at once upon Paris,
proclaim himself King of France, be crowned at Saint Denis, marry one of
the French Princesses--which, it did not much signify--and return home a
conquering hero, mighty enough to brave even the Emperor himself on any
European battle-plain.
A little lower down the table, Hugh Calverley's mind was also full of
one subject.
"Nay," he whispered earnestly to Bertram: "he is yet hid some whither,--
here, in Wales. Men wit not where; and God forbid too many should!"
"Then men be yet a-searching for him?"
"High and low, leaving no stone unturned. God keep His true servant
safe, unto His honour!"
It needs no far-fetched conjecture to divine that they were speaking of
Lord Cobham.
"And goest unto these French wars, sweet Hugh?"
"Needs must; my Lord's Grace hath so bidden me."
"But thou wert wont to hold that no Christian man should of right bear
arms, neither fight."
"Truth; and yet do," said Hugh quietly. This was the view of the
extreme Lollards.
"Then how shall thine opinion serve in the thick of fight?"
"As it hath aforetime. I cannot fight."
"But how then?" asked Bertram, opening his eyes.
"I can die, Bertram Lyngern," answered the calm, resolute voice. "And
it may be that I should die as truly for my Master Christ there, as at
the martyr's stake. For sith God's will hath made yonder noble Lord my
master, and hath set me under him to do his bidding, in all matters not
sinful, his will is God's will for me; and I can follow him to yonder
battle-plain with as easy an heart and light as though I went to lie
down on my bed to sleep. Not to fight, good friend; not to resist nor
contend with any man; only to do God's will. And is that not worth
dying for?"
Bertram made no reply. But his memory ran far back to the olden days at
Langley--to a scriptorius who had laid down his pen to speak of two
lads, both of whom he looked to see great men, but he deemed him the
greater who was not ashamed of his deed. And Bertram's heart whispered
to him that, knight as he was, while Hugh remained only a simple squire,
yet now as ever, Hugh was the greater hero. For he knew that it would
have cost him a very bitter struggle to accept an unhonoured grave such
as Hugh anticipated, only because he thought it was God's will.
They parted the next morning. Edward's last words to his sister were
"Adieu, Custance, I will send thee a fleur-de-lis banner as trophy from
the fight. The oriflamme [Note 1], if the saints will have it so!"
But Hugh's were--"Farewell, dear friend Bertram. Remember, both thou
and I may do God's will!"
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Note 1. The oriflamme was _the_ banner of France, kept in the Cathedral
of Saint Denis, and held almost sacred.