The White Rose of Langley Part 45

"It is well, wife, that G.o.d 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 G.o.d 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 n.o.bles. 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 a.s.suredly 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 d.u.c.h.ess 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 G.o.dfather, 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 t.i.tle, 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 das.h.i.+ng 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 pet.i.tion 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 antic.i.p.ations 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 ma.s.ses, 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 "G.o.d 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, "G.o.d bless my mother" only. And at the close, little Alianora was instructed to add,--"G.o.d pardon my father's soul."

Knowing how pa.s.sionately 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 G.o.d 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 Ladys.h.i.+p, 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 G.o.d and that mother. A new lesson was now to be taught to Constance--to rest wholly upon G.o.d.

It was very tranquilly at last that Elizabeth Le Despenser pa.s.sed 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' companions.h.i.+p, fellows.h.i.+p in sorrow, and fellows.h.i.+p 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, G.o.d 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 suns.h.i.+ne 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 G.o.d'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 G.o.d.

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.

"G.o.d 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!"