Henry of Essex
Of St. Edmund's fearful avengements have they not the
remarkablest instance still before their eyes? He that will go
to Reading Monastery may find there, now tonsured into a mournful
penitent Monk, the once proud Henry Earl of Essex; and discern
how St. Edmund punishes terribly, yet with mercy! This Narrative
is too significant to be omitted as a document of the Time. Our
Lord Abbot, once on a visit at Reading, heard the particulars
from Henry's own mouth; and thereupon charged one of his monks
to write it down;--as accordingly the Monk has done, in ambitious
rhetorical Latin; inserting the same, as episode, among
Jocelin's garrulous leaves. Read it here; with ancient yet with
modern eyes.
Henry Earl of Essex, standard-bearer of England, had high places
and emoluments; had a haughty high soul, yet with various flaws,
or rather with one many-branched flaw and crack, running through
the texture of it. For example, did he not treat Gilbert de
Cereville in the most shocking manner? He cast Gilbert into
prison; and, with chains and slow torments, wore the life out of
him there. And Gilbert's crime was understood to be only that of
innocent Joseph: the Lady Essex was a Potiphar's Wife, and had
accused poor Gilbert! Other cracks, and branches of that
widespread flaw in the Standard-bearer's soul we could point out:
but indeed the main stem and trunk of all is too visible in this,
That he had no right reverence for the Heavenly in Man,--that far
from shewing due reverence to St. Edmund, he did not even shew
him common justice. While others in the Eastern Counties were
adorning and enlarging with rich gifts St. Edmund's resting-
place, which had become a city of refuge for many things, this
Earl of Essex flatly defrauded him, by violence or quirk of law,
of five shillings yearly, and converted said sum to his own poor
uses! Nay, in another case of litigation, the unjust Standard
bearer, for his own profit, asserting that the cause belonged not
to St. Edmund's Court, but to _his_ in Lailand Hundred, 'involved
us in travelings and innumerable expenses, vexing the servants of
St. Edmund for a long tract of time: In short, he is without
reverence for the Heavenly, this Standard-bearer; reveres only
the Earthly, Gold-coined; and has a most morbid lamentable flaw
in the texture of him. It cannot come to, good.
Accordingly, the same flaw, or St.-Vitus' _tic,_ manifests itself
ere long in another way. In the year 1157, he went with his
Standard to attend King Henry, our blessed Sovereign (whom _we_
saw afterwards at Waltham), in his War with the Welsh. A
somewhat disastrous War; in which while King Henry and his force
were struggling to retreat Parthian-like, endless clouds of
exasperated Welshmen hemming them in, and now we had come to the
'difficult pass of Coleshill,' and as it were to the nick of
destruction,--Henry Earl of Essex shrieks out on a sudden
(blinded doubtless by his inner flaw, or 'evil genius' as some
name it), That King Henry is killed, That all is lost,--and
flings down his Standard to shift for itself there! And,
certainly enough, all _had_ been lost, had all men been as he;--
had not brave men, without such miserable jerking _tic-
douloureux_ in the souls of them, come dashing up, with blazing
swords and looks, and asserted That nothing was lost yet, that
all must be regained yet. In this manner King Henry and his
force got safely retreated, Parthian-like, from the pass of
Coleshill and the Welsh War.* But, once home again, Earl Robert
de Montfort, a kinsman of this Standard-bearer's, rises up in the
King's Assembly to declare openly that such a man is unfit for
bearing English Standards, being in fact either a special
traitor, or something almost worse, a coward namely, or universal
traitor. Wager of Battle in consequence; solemn Duel, by the
King's appointment, 'in a certain Island of the Thames-stream at
Reading, _apud Radingas,_ short way from the Abbey there. King,
Peers, and an immense multitude of people, on such scaffoldings
and heights as they can come at, are gathered round, to see what
issue the business will take. The business takes this bad issue,
in our Monk's own words faithfully rendered:
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*See Lyttelton's _Henry II.,_ ii: 384.
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'And it came to pass, while Robert de Montfort thundered on him
manfully (_viriliter intonasset_) with hard and frequent strokes,
and a valiant beginning promised the fruit of victory, Henry of
Essex, rather giving way, glanced round on all sides; and lo, at
the rim of the horizon, on the confines of the River and land, he
discerned the glorious King and Martyr Edmund, in shining armour,
and as if hovering in the air; looking towards him with severe
countenance, nodding his head with a mien and motion of austere
anger. At St. Edmund's hand there stood also another Knight,
Gilbert de Cereville, whose armour was not so splendid, whose
stature was less gigantic; casting vengeful looks at him. This
he seeing with his eyes, remembered that old crime brings new
shame. And now wholly desperate, and changing reason into
violence, he took the part of one blindly attacking, not
skillfully defending. Who while he struck fiercely was more
fiercely struck; and so, in short, fell down vanquished, and it
was thought, slain. As he lay there for dead, his kinsmen,
Magnates of England, besought the King, that the Monks of Reading
might have leave to bury him. However, he proved not to be dead,
but got well again among them; and now, with recovered health,
assuming the Regular Habit, he strove to wipe out the stain of
his former life, to cleanse the long week of his dissolute
history by at least a purifying sabbath, and cultivate the
studies of Virtue into fruits of eternal Felicity:
Thus does the Conscience of man project itself athwart whatsoever
of knowledge or surmise, of imagination, understanding, faculty,
acquirement, or natural disposition he has in him; and, like
light through coloured glass, paint strange pictures 'on the rim
of the horizon' and elsewhere! Truly, this same 'sense of the
Infinite nature of Duty' is the central part of all with us; a
ray as of Eternity and Immortality, immured in dusky many-
coloured Time, and its deaths and births. Your 'coloured glass'
varies so much from century to century;--and, in certain money-
making, game-preserving centuries, it gets so terribly opaque!
Not a Heaven with cherubim surrounds you then, but a kind of
vacant leaden-coloured Hell. One day it will again cease to be
opaque, this 'coloured glass.' Nay, may it not become at once
translucent and uncoloured? Painting no Pictures more for us,
but only the everlasting Azure itself? That will be a right
glorious consummation!--
Saint Edmund from the horizon's edge, in shining armour,
threatening the misdoer in his hour of extreme need: it is
beautiful, it is great and true. So old, yet so modern, actual;
true yet for every one of us, as for Henry the Earl and Monk! A
glimpse as of the Deepest in Man's Destiny, which is the same for
all times and ages. Yes, Henry my brother, there in thy extreme
need, thy soul _is lamed;_ and behold thou canst not so much as
fight! For justice and Reverence _are_ the everlasting central
Law of this Universe; and to forget them, and have all the
Universe against one, God and one's own Self for enemies, and
only the Devil and the Dragons for friends, is not that a
'lameness' like few? That some shining armed St. Edmund hang
minatory on thy horizon, that infinite sulphur-lakes hang
minatory, or do not now hang,--this alters no whit the eternal
fact of the thing. I say, thy soul is lamed, and the God and all
Godlike in it marred: lamed, paralytic, tending towards baleful
eternal death, whether thou know it or not;--nay hadst thou never
known it, that surely had been worst of all!--
Thus, at any rate, by the heavenly Awe that overshadows earthly
Business, does Samson, readily in those days, save St. Edmund's
Shrine, and innumerable still more precious things.