Two Penniless Princesses by Charlotte M. Yonge (historical books to read TXT) 📕

CHAPTER 5. THE MEEK USURPER ‘Henry, thou of holy birth, Thou to whom thy Windsor gave Nativity and name and grave! Heavily upon his head Ancestral crimes were visited.’—SOUTHEY.

It suits not with the main thread of our story to tell of the happy and peaceful meetings between the Lady of Glenuskie and her old friend, who had given up almost princely rank and honour to become the servant of the poor and suffering strangers at the wharves of London. To Dame Lilias, Mother Clare’s quiet cell at St. Katharine’s was a blessed haven of rest, peace, and charity, such as was neither the guest-chamber nor the Prioress’s parlour at St. Helen’s, with all the distractions of the princesses’ visitors and invitations, and with the Lady Joanna continually pulling against the authority that the Cardinal, her uncle, was exerting over his nieces.

His object evidently was to keep them back, firstly, from the York party, and secondly, from the King, under pretext of their mourning for their mother; and in this he might have succeeded but for the interest in them that had been aroused in Henry by his companion, namesake, and almost brother, the King of Wight. The King came or sent each day to St. Helen’s to arrange about the requiem at Westminster, and when their late travelling companions invited the young ladies to dinner or to supper expressly to meet the King and the Cardinal—not in state, but at what would be now called a family party—Beaufort had no excuse for a refusal, such as he could not give without dire offence. And, indeed, he was even then obliged to yield to the general voice, and, recalling his own nephew from Normandy, send the Duke of York to defend the remnant of the English conquests.

He could only insist that the requiem should be the first occasion of the young ladies going out of the convent; but they had so many visitors there that they had not much cause for murmuring, and the French instructions of Sister Beata did not amount to much, even with Eleanor, while Jean loudly protested that she was not going to school.

The great day of the requiem came at last. The Cardinal had, through Sir Patrick Drummond and the Lady, provided handsome robes of black and purple for his nieces, and likewise palfreys for their conveyance to Westminster; and made it understood that unless Lady Joanna submitted to be completely veiled he should send a closed litter.

‘The doited auld carle!’ she cried, as she unwillingly hooded and veiled herself. ‘One would think we were basilisks to slay the good folk of London with our eyes.’

The Drummond following, with fresh thyme sprays, beginning to turn brown, were drawn up in the outer court, all with black scarves across the breast—George Douglas among them, of course—and they presently united with the long train of clerks who belonged to the household of the Cardinal of Winchester. Jean managed her veil so as to get more than one peep at the throng in the streets through which they passed, so as to see and to be seen; and she was disappointed that no acclamations greeted the fair face thus displayed by fits. She did not understand English politics enough to know that a Beaufort face and Beaufort train were the last things the London crowd was likely to applaud. They had not forgotten the penance of the popular Duke Humfrey’s wife, which, justly or unjustly, was imputed to the Cardinal and his nephews of Somerset.

But the King, in robes of purple and black, came to assist her from her palfrey before the beautiful entry of the Abbey Church, and led her up the nave to the desks prepared around what was then termed ‘a herce,’ but which would now be called a catafalque, an erection supposed to contain the body, and adorned with the lozenges of the arms of Scotland and Beaufort, and of the Stewart, in honour of the Black Knight of Lorn.

The Cardinal was present, but the Abbot of Westminster celebrated. All was exceedingly solemn and beautiful, in a far different style from the maimed rites that had been bestowed upon poor Queen Joanna in Scotland. The young King’s face was more angelic than ever, and as psalm and supplication, dirge and hymn arose, chanted by the full choir, speaking of eternal peace, Eleanor bowed her head under her veil, as her bosom swelled with a strange yearning longing, not exactly grief, and large tears dropped from her eyes as she thought less of her mother than of her noble-hearted father; and the words came back to her in which Father Malcolm Stewart, in his own bitter grief, had told the desolate children to remember that their father was waiting for them in Paradise. Even Jean was so touched by the music and carried out of herself that she forgot the spectators, forgot the effect she was to produce, forgot her struggle with her uncle, and sobbed and wept with all her heart, perhaps with the more abandon because she, like all the rest, was fasting.

With much reverence for her emotion, the King, when the service was over, led her out of the church to the adjoining palace, where the Queen of Wight and the Countess of Suffolk, a kinswoman through the mother of the Beauforts, conducted the ladies to unveil themselves before they were to join the noontide refection with the King.

There was no great state about it, spread, as it was, not in the great hall, but in the richly-tapestried room called Paradise. The King’s manner was most gently and sweetly courteous to both sisters. His three little orphan half-brothers, the Tudors, were at table; and his kind care to send them dainties, and the look with which he repressed an unseasonable attempt of Jasper’s to play with the dogs, and Edmund’s roughness with little Owen, reminded the sisters of Mary with ‘her weans,’ and they began to speak of them when the meal was over, while he showed them his chief treasures, his books. There was St. Augustine’s City of God, exquisitely copied; there was the History of St. Louis, by the bon Sire de Joinville; there were Sir John Froissart’s Chronicles, the same that the good Canon had presented to King Richard of Bordeaux.

Jean cast a careless glance at the illuminations, and exclaimed at Queen Isabel’s high headgear and her becloaked greyhound. Eleanor looked and longed, and sighed that she could not read the French, and only a very little of the Latin.

‘This you can read,’ said Henry, producing the Canterbury Tales; ‘the fair minstrelsy of my Lady of Suffolk’s grandsire.’

Eleanor was enchanted. Here were the lines the King of Wight had repeated to her, and she was soon eagerly listening as Henry read to her the story of ‘Patient Grisell.’

‘Ah! but is it well thus tamely to submit?’ she asked.

‘Patience is the armour and conquest of the godly,’ said Henry, quoting a saying that was to serve ‘the meek usurper’ well in after-times.

‘May not patience go too far?’ said Eleanor.

‘In this world, mayhap,’ said he; ‘scarcely so in that which is to come.’

‘I would not be the King’s bride to hear him say so,’ laughed the Lady of Suffolk. ‘Shall I tell her, my