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 wide-spread 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 showing due reverence to St. Edmund, he did not
even show 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 travellings
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.[19] 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:
'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 skilfully
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.'[20]
* * * * *
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 _un_coloured? 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.
FOOTNOTES:
[19] See Lyttelton's _Henry II._, ii. 384.
[20] _Jocelini Chronica_, p, 52.