CHAPTER XXXVIII
CORONATION OF THE BOY HENRY
Among the provincial cities of England at the opening of the thirteenthcentury, Gloucester was accounted one of the strongest, fairest, andmost stoutly loyal. It had long, indeed, been of importance, and boastedof historical associations which connected it with the ancient world.Occupied by the Romans, sacked by the sea-kings, and known to fame asthe scene of the memorable single combat between Edmund Ironside andCanute the Great--the crown of England being the stake--and a favouriteresidence of Edward the Confessor, its importance as a barrier againstthe Welsh had been recognised by William the Conqueror, who selected itscastle as his winter palace, and strongly fortified the city on thenorth and south with strong gates and stone walls, surmounted byfrowning battlements. The town consisted of four streets forming across, and named Northgate and Southgate, Eastgate and Westgate, andboasted of a royal castle, with a chase or park, and a grand Gothicabbey, with lofty tower and oriel window, surrounded by its fish-ponds,or “vivaries,” and physic garden, and vineyards, and all “the means andappliances” for making monastic life comfortable and pleasant. Thestrength and wealth of the place were such that while England wasringing with arms and the shouts of “Montjoie St. Denis!” Queen Isabeland her son Henry had remained within its walls in thorough security;and while towns had been besieged and fortresses taken, Gloucester hadneither been taken nor besieged up to the hour when King John died, inmisery, at Newark-on-the-Trent.
It was Friday, the 28th of October, 1216, the Feast of St. Simon and St.Jude, and Gloucester presented a scene of considerable excitement,though the weather was the reverse of exhilarating. Not a glimpse wasthere of the “merry sunshine, which makes the heart so gay.” The sky wasobscured with a drizzling mist; gloom hung over the whole city; theSevern, swollen with recent rain, threatened to overflow its sedgybanks; the orchards and woodlands around were soddened with wet; and thedeer in the king’s park crouched together, sought shelter under thedripping branches of the trees, looking for all the world as if they hadsome instinctive dread of a return of the flood of Deucalion--
“Piscium cum summâ genus hæsit ulmo, Nota quæ sedes fuerat columbis, Et superjecto pavidæ natarunt Æquore damæ.”
Nevertheless Gloucester was excited. Men with white crosses on theirbreasts strode hither and thither, gossiping citizens ventured forthinto the wet streets to hear the latest news, and laughing nymphs withfair faces gazed watchfully from basement and loophole, as if impatientfor some spectacle to gratify their curiosity; for on that day, in spiteof Louis of France and the Anglo-Norman barons who had brought him intoEngland, Henry, the son of John, was to be crowned king, and the placeappointed for the ceremony was the abbey of Gloucester--that abbey towhich, more than a hundred years later, the remains of his murderedgrandson were to be brought by Abbot Thokey from Berkeley Castle, undercircumstances so melancholy.
At this time Henry of Winchester was in his tenth year. He was a strong,healthy boy, and good-looking, with the fair hair and fair complexion ofthe Plantagenets. But one unfortunate defect there was in hiscountenance. Part of one of his eyelids hung down in such a way aspartly to cover the eyeball, and thus gave an unpleasant expression to aface which would otherwise have been handsome. Such as the boy was,William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, took him by the hand, led him to thecastle hall in which were assembled Neville, William Ferrars, Earl ofDerby, and the few magnates who had come at his invitation toGloucester, and, placing him in the midst of them, said--
“Behold your king!”
The nobles, who had been accustomed to the second Henry, and Richard,and John, and who had never pictured to themselves a monarch of ten,scarcely knew how to act. Never, indeed, save in the case of EdgarAtheling, had a child figured as King of England, and how he was to dealwith the difficulties that beset the throne was more than they couldimagine. For a time they remained silent. But Pembroke again spoke,pointed out the degradation of a foreign prince being in possession ofthe kingdom, and asked them earnestly to crown the rightful heir anddrive out the foreigner and his myrmidons. Suddenly, as if byinspiration, they all threw off their reserve, and cried with onevoice--
“So let it be: let the boy be king. Long live King Henry!”
Pembroke having succeeded so far, lost no time in bringing the businessto a conclusion. On Friday, the 28th of October, Henry was ceremoniouslyconducted by the barons and prelates to the abbey church, placed upon athrone, and consecrated; and the crown of St. Edward not being withinreach, he was crowned with the golden collar which his mother was in thehabit of wearing round her neck. In the absence of Langton, the bishopof Bath performed the ceremony, and the royal boy, having taken theoaths usually taken by the kings of England at their coronation, “tobear reverence and honour to God and to his Holy Church, and to do rightand justice to all his people,” did homage besides to the Church ofRome, for his kingdom of England and Ireland.
But so utterly had the public mind been poisoned against King John andall related to him, that even in Gloucester, the stronghold of royalty,popular opinion was divided, and the partisans of the young king, whowere known by the white cross of Guienne which they wore on theirbreasts, had frays in the streets with the adherents of Prince Louis.
“By my faith,” remarked the Earl of Derby to Pembroke as they returnedfrom the abbey to the castle, riding on either hand of the royal boy, “Imuch marvel to see that even in this city of Gloucester many facesfrown sullenly on King Henry’s state.”
“Even so,” replied Pembroke, thoughtfully, “and the sky is dull anddismal. A little while, and the clouds will clear away and the sun shineas of yore.”
“May God and the saints so order it!” said Derby.
A few days later, Henry, at the suggestion of the papal legate, took thecross, that his cause might appear the more sacred in the eyes of bothfriends and foes; and Pembroke, having been appointed Protector, withthe title of “Rector regis et regia,” during Henry’s minority, appointedHenry de Marisco Keeper of the Great Seal, gave notice of the coronationto continental countries, and issued a proclamation of pardon to alloffenders who should make their submission within a reasonable time. Inconsequence, Salisbury, Warren, Arundel, Roger Merley de Merley, andWilliam Marshal, eldest son of the Protector, broke with Louis and sworeallegiance to Henry. But still the aspect of affairs appeared mostgloomy, for Louis was in possession of a large portion of England, andRobert Fitzwalter and the confederate barons were still, in spite of hiscoldness and affronts, bent on placing the heir of France on the Englishthrone.
And what did Isabel of Angoulême do in this emergency? Not certainlywhat a woman with a fine sense of duty would have thought of doing, norwhat she would have done if she could have foreseen the future. But atthat time clouds and darkness rested on the house of Plantagenet, and ifa magician could have shown Isabel her future and that of the royal raceof England in one of those magic mirrors in which Catherine de Mediciwas in the habit of seeing the fortunes of her descendants, she would,doubtless, either have deemed the whole a delusion or shrunk from thefate that awaited her new venture in life.
However, she consulted no mirror except that in which she had been inthe habit of surveying the fair oval face and the regular majesticfeatures which had won her so much fame throughout Christendom as “theHelen of the Middle Ages,” and she had no difficulty in learning thatshe still retained the charms necessary to fascinate the hearts of men.In England, indeed, she could not cherish the hope of any greatmatrimonial success, but there were countries beyond the narrow seaswhere she might yet achieve conquests, so she thought of her nativeland, with its sparkling rivers and its beautiful climate, and a fewmonths after John’s death, leaving the boy-king and his infant brotherRichard and his three sisters to their fate, she embarked for theContinent and repaired to Angoulême.
Now it happened that Hugh, Count de la Marche, had not exactly beenguilty of betraying “the noon of manhood to a laurel shade,” but he hadrefrained f
rom taking a wife for better or for worse. He had, indeed,entered into a contract of marriage with one of Isabel’s daughters, butthe princess was still an infant, and Count Hugh soon showed a decidedpreference for the mother. Accordingly, a marriage was speedily broughtabout, and Isabel, as wife of the Count de la Marche, lived many years,and wrought so much mischief that, when finally she fled to Fontrevaudand died penitent within that religious house, people said that sheought to be called Jezebel rather than Isabel for having sown the seedsof so many crimes; and she begged that she might not be laid in thechoir with the second Henry and Eleanor of Guienne and Cœur-de-Lion,but buried in the common cemetery as a penance for her sins, which weremany.
It was well, perhaps, for the young King of England and for the peoplewhich he was to rule under circumstances so difficult, that Isabel ofAngoulême took her departure and left him to begin his reign underhappier auspices. An intriguing and ambitious woman might have spoiledall. As it happened, Pembroke had his own way, and felt that he wasequal to the crisis.
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