Both parties appear to have relied on alleged declarations,
each in his own favor, by the late duke, John of Brittany.

The Bretons it would seem, almost to a man, sided with
the Count de Montfort; and this would in these days go very
far towards settling the question.

King Philip of France naturally took part with his niece, the
wife of a great feudatory of his crown; Edward the Third of
England, as naturally, favored the opposite claimant; expecting
doubtless that he should receive the count's homage as his
vassal for Brittany, in case of his recovering his duchy by the
aid of British arms.

The Count de Montfort was summoned before the king and
peers of France to answer to the charge of having already done
homage to the English king, as suzerain of a French province—
a charge, by the way, which he absolutely denied—and to
prove his title to the duchy before Parliament. To their decision
he expressed his willingness to defer, and offered to abide
by their judgment; but the same night, suspecting ill faith on
the part of his rival and the French king, and fearing treachery,
he withdrew secretly into his own duchy, of which he
had already gained absolute possession, holding all its strong
places with the free consent of the lords, the burgesses, the
clergy, and the commonalty of the chief towns, and being
everywhere addressed as Duke of Brittany.

After the departure of the count from Paris, the Parliament,
almost as a matter of course, decided against him—firstly par
contumace, or as we should now say, by default—secondly, for
treason, as having done homage to a foreign liege lord—and
thirdly, because the Countess of Blois was the daughter of the
next brother of the late duke, while the Count John de Montfort
was the youngest of the family.

I may observe here, that it is more than doubtful whether the

[figure description] Page 034.[end figure description]

alleged homage to Edward was at this time rendered; that the
fact was positively denied by Montfort himself, and by his other
historians; and furthermore, that the descent to the female line
is very questionable in any French province or principality, the
Salique law, adverse to the succession of females, prevailing in
that country.

Be this, however, as it may, the princes and peers of France,
considering that the dispute between the rival claimants had
resolved itself into a question between the rival crowns of
France and England, which it virtually had, espoused to a man
the party of Charles of Blois.

Thereupon, the Dukes of Normandy, of Alençon, of Burgundy,
of Bourbon, the Lord Lewis of Spain, the Constable of
France, the Count de Blois, and the Viscount de Rohan, with
all the princes and barons present, undertook to maintain the
rights of Charles; entered Brittany with powerful forces; and,
after some sharp fighting, shut the Count of Montfort up in
Nantes, where he was shortly afterwards delivered to the enemy,
not without suspicion of treachery on the part of Sir Hervè de
Léon, his late chief adviser, whom he had blamed severely for
retreating too readily into the city, before the troops of Charles
de Blois.

John de Montfort hereupon nearly disappears from history;
Froissart supposing that he died a prisoner in the tower of the
Louvre. But it appears that, after three years' confinement, he
made good his escape to England, and then, not before, did homage
to Edward; who aided him with a force under William
de Bohun, Earl of Northampton, to recover his duchy, which
his sudden death, after an unsuccessful attempt on Quimperlè,
finally prevented. This is, however, in anticipation of the current
of history, and more especially of those events which it is
my purpose to illustrate in this sketch; for, from the very

[figure description] Page 035.[end figure description]

moment of his capture, the affairs, both civil and military,
of the duchy were administered with the most distinguished
energy, ability, and success by his wife, sister of Lewis Count
of Flanders, a race noble and brave by descent and nature,
“the Countess of Montfort, who possessed the courage of a
man and the heart of a lion.”

“She was in the city of Rennes,” says her historian, “when
she heard of the seizure of her lord; and, notwithstanding the
great grief she had at heart, she did all she could to reanimate
her friends and soldiers. Showing them a young child, called
John, after his father, she said, `Oh, gentlemen, do not be cast-down
for what we have suffered by the loss of my lord; he
was but one man. Look at my little child here; if it please
God, he shall be his restorer, and shall do you much service. I
have plenty of wealth, which I will distribute among you, and
will seek out for such a leader as may give you a proper confidence.
' When the Countess had, by these means, encouraged
her friends and soldiers at Rennes, she visited all the other
towns and fortresses, taking her young son John with her. She
addressed and encouraged them in the same manner as she had
done at Rennes. She strengthened her garrisons both with
men and provisions, paid handsomely for everything, and gave
largely wherever she thought it would have a good effect. She
then went to Hennebon, near the sea, where she and her son
remained all that winter, frequently visiting her garrisons, whom
she encouraged and paid liberally.”

Truly a noble woman—a true wife, a true mother, a true
princess of her principality—she sought no woman's rights, but
did a woman's duty—her duty as her absent husband's representative—
her duty as her orphaned son's protectress—her
duty as her unsovereigned people's sovereign lady. Nobility

[figure description] Page 036.[end figure description]

and circumstance obliged her; and nobly she discharged her
obligation.

Much as I contemn women whom a morbid craving after
notoriety and excitement urges to grasp the attire, the arms,
the attributes of the other sex; in the same degree do I honor,
in the same degree admire and laud, the true-hearted woman,
the true heroine, who not forcing or assailing, but obeying the
claims of her nature, compels her temper to put on strength
instead of softness, steels herself to do what she shrinks from
doing, not because she arrogates the power of doing it better
than the man could do it, but because she has no man to whom
she might confide the doing of it.

The hen fighting the sparrow-hawk careless of self for her
defenceless brood, is a spectacle beautiful to behold, filling
every heart with genuine sympathy, because her act itself is
genuine; is part and parcel of her sex, her circumstances, her
maternity; in a word, is the act of the God of nature. The
hen gaffed and cropped and fighting mains against the males of
her own family in the beastly and bloody cock-pit, is a spectacle
that would make the lowest frequenter of such vile arenas shudder
with disgust, would wring from his lips an honest cry of
shame.

Margaret of Anjou, in Hexham forest awing the bandit into
submission by the undaunted royalty of her maternal eye—
the Countess of Montfort, reanimating her faint-hearted garrisons,
even by donning steel harness for “her young child John”—
Elizabeth of England, a-horse at Tilbury, for her Protestantism
and her people—Maria Theresa, waving her sabre from the
guarded mount to the four quarters of heaven in the maintenance
of her kingdom and her cause—Marie Antoinette of
France, defying her accusers at the misnamed judgment seat,
fearless of her butchers at the guillotine—these are the true

[figure description] Page 037.[end figure description]

types of nature, the true types of their sex, the true heroines,
mastering the weakness of their sexual nature, through the
might of their maternal nature—these are the hens championing
their broods against the falcon.

But of this day of cant and fustian, the man-women, not
heroines, called by no duty to the attire or the attributes of
men, but panting indelicately for the notoriety, the fierce, passionate
excitement of the political, nay! for aught that appears,
of the martial arena—these are the hens, if they could but see
themselves as they see effeminate, unsexed men, gaffed and
cropped and fed to do voluntary battle in the sinks and
slaughterhouses of humanity, against the gamecocks of their
species.

The Lady Macbeths of a falser period, who fancy that, by
proving themselves so much less the woman, they can shine out
so much more the man.

“But I wish now to return,” with my old friend Froissart,
“to the Countess de Montfort, who possessed the courage of a
man, and the heart of a lion,” and I will add—the soul, the
instincts, and the excellence of a true woman.

During the winter succeeding the seizure of her lord, and
the treason of Sir Hervè de Léon, who had attached himself to
the Count de Blois, she remained peacefully occupied in Hennebon,
in the education of her young child John; and how she
educated him was seen his after career, as a knight valorous
and gentle, a prince beloved and popular.

But with the summer there came strife and peril, and protection
became paramount to everything beside.

During the winter, while the Countess de Montfort lay tranquil
in Hennebon, the Count Charles de Blois lay as tranquilly
in Nantes, which—as I have before related—had been treasonably
surrendered to him by Sir Hervè de Léon and the citizens

[figure description] Page 038.[end figure description]

of the place. But now that the fair weather had returned,
that the swallows were disporting themselves in the summer
air, the cuckoos calling by the river-sides, now that armies
could hold themselves in the fields with plenty of all sorts
around them, he summoned to him all those great princes of
the royal blood, and all the noble barons and valiant knights
who had fought with him in the last campaign. And, mindful
of their promises, they drew all their forces to a head, and
came with a great array of spears of France, and Genoese
cross-bowmen, and Spanish men-at-arms, under the leading of
the Lord Lewis d'Espagne, to re-conquer for him all that remained
unconquered of the fair land of Brittany.

During the last year the strong Castle of Chateauceux had
been won by them by sheer dint of arms, and Nantes, the capital
of the province, by the vileness of the traitor Hervè de
Léon; the next strongest place to these was the city of Rennes,
which had been put into complete readiness for war by its late
lord, and further fortified by the countess, who had intrusted it
to Sir William de Cadoudal, a brave Breton knight, and in all
probability an ancestor of the no less valiant George, of the
same patronymic, the great Vendean chief and victim of Napoleon,
co-murdered with the princely Duc d'Enghien.

This town the French lords surrounded on all sides, and assailed
it with fierce and continual skirmishes at the barricades,
and wrought it much damage by the persistency of their onslaughts;
but still the defenders defended themselves so
valiantly, resolute not to lose their liege-lady's city, that the
besiegers lost more than they gained—for many lives were lost
on both sides, but far most on the French part; and yet more
wounded—nor could they amend it anything; nor win a
tower, nor force a gate, though they made assaults daily, and
plied the walls from mighty engines, with great store of artillery.

[figure description] Page 039.[end figure description]

Now, when the Countess of Montfort heard how the French
lords had returned into Brittany, and were laying waste the
country and besieging her strong city, she sent one of the best
of all her knights, Sir Amauri de Clisson, who should repair
straightway to King Edward, in England, to entreat his assistance,
upon condition that her young son should take for
his wife one of the daughters of the king, and give her the title
of Duchess of Brittany.

And the king, well pleased to strengthen his claim on that
fair province, readily assented, and ordered Sir Walter Manny,
one of the prowest and most skilled in war of all his knights,
to gather together so many men-at-arms as he should with Sir
Amauri's advice judge proper; and to take with him three or
four thousand of the best archers in England, and to take ship
immediately to the succor of the Countess of Montfort.

And Sir Walter embarked with Sir Amauri de Clisson, and
the two brothers Sir Lewis and Sir John de Land-Halle, the
Haze of Brabant, Sir Herbert de Fresnoi, Sir Alain de Sirefonde,
and many others, leaders of note; and men-at-arms not
a few; and archers of England six thousand, the best men in
the realm, whose backs no man had seen. And they took
their ships, earnest to aid the countess with all speed; but they
were overtaken by a mighty storm and tempest, and forced to
remain at sea forty days, so that much ill fell out, and more
would have befallen, but that it was not to be otherwise in the
end, but that the countess should hold the duchy as her own,
and her son's for ever.

In the meantime, the Count Charles of Blois pressed closer
and closer to the town, and harassed the people sorely, so that
the gentlemen and soldiers being but a few, and the rogue
townsmen many, when they saw that no succors came nor
seemed like to come, they grew impatient; and when Sir

[figure description] Page 040.[end figure description]

William de Cadoudal was determined to make no surrender, they
rose on him by night, and cast him into prison; and so basely
and treacherously yielded up the place to the Count Charles,
on condition only that the men of the Montfort party should
have no let or hindrance to go whither they would, with their
effects and followings, under assurance.

Then Sir William de Cadoudal joined the Countess de Montfort
where she abode in Hennebon, but where she had yet no
tidings from the King Edward of England, or from Sir Amauri
de Clisson, or any whom she had sent in his company.

And she had with her in Hennebon the Bishop of Léon, the
uncle of that traitor Sir Hervè de Léon, Sir Yves de Tresiquidi,
the Lord of Landreman, Sir William de Cadoudal, the Governor
of Guincamp, the two brothers of Quirich, Sir Oliver, and
Sir Henry de Spinefort, and many others.

Now the Count de Blois well foresaw that the countess once
delivered into his hands with the child John de Montfort, the
war was at an end for ever; and, without tarrying at Rennes
when he had taken it, he marched direct upon Hennebon, to
take it if he might by assault, and if not, to sit down before it;
and the number of his host without was, as by thousands to
hundreds of those within; and there were among them many
great names for valor and for prowess—but there was that
within which without was lacking, the indomitable heart, the
immortal love of a true woman.

It was a little before noon on the 20th day of May, 1342,
when the vanguard of that great host might be seen from the
walls of Hennebon; and a beautiful sight it was to see them
come; to behold the pennons and pennoncells, the helmets
and habergeons, the plumes and surcoats, flashing and shimmering
in the sunshine, and waving in the light airs; and such
numbers of men-at-arms that the eye might not compass them;

[figure description] Page 041.[end figure description]

all marshalled fairly beneath the square banners of their lordly
and princely leaders, so that they seemed like a moving forest,
so upright did they hold their lances. Then came the dense
array, on foot, of the Genoese cross-bows, in their plate coats of
Italian steel, with terrible arbalasts; and the unrivalled infantry
of Spain, a solid column, bristling like the Greek phalanx of
old, with serried lines of spears.

The earth shook under the thick thunder of their horse-hoofs;
the air was alive with the clash and clang of their steel
harness; and all the echoes rang with the shrill flourishes of
their trumpets, and the stormy roar of their kettle-drums.

But no terror did such sights or sounds strike to the hearts
of that undaunted garrison—the deafening clang of the alarm-bells,
the tremendous toesin answered the kettle-drums and
clarions; and all within the city armed themselves in hot haste.
The flower of the French and Spanish chivalry galloped up to
skirmish at the barriers, and the iron bolts and quarrels of the
Genoese cross-bows fell like a hail-storm, even within the ramparts.

But ere that fierce storm had endured many minutes, up
grated the portcullises, down rattled the drawbridges, and as
the barriers were withdrawn—banners and spears, and barbed
destriers and knightly burgonets poured out from all the city
gates at once, and burst in full career upon the skirmishers of
the besiegers; then many a knight was borne to earth, and the
chivalry of France and Spain fared ill before the lances of the
Bretons; for they could not bide the brunt, but scattered back,
dismantled and discomfited, to their main body; while the
maces and two-handed glaives and battle-axes of the men-at-arms
did bloody execution on the Genoese, who were not armed
to encounter the charge of steel-clad horse, and to whom no
quarter was given, not only that they were foreigners and

[figure description] Page 042.[end figure description]

Condottieri, but that themselves sparing none, they neither
looked for nor received mercy.

At vesper time, on both sides they retired; the French in
great fury at their repulse, the garrison of Hennebon well content
with themselves and with that they had done.

On the next day again, with the first rays of the sun, “the
French made so very vigorous an attack on the barriers, that
those within made a sally. Among them were some of their
bravest, who continued the engagement till noon with great
courage, so that the assailants retired a little to the rear, carrying
with them numbers of their wounded, and leaving behind
them a great many dead.”

But not for that had they any respite or relaxation; for the
lords of the French were so enraged at the dishonor which
had thus twice befallen their arms, that they ordered them up
a third time to the attack, in greater numbers than before,
swearing that they would win the walls ere the sun should set;
but for all their swearing they did not win that day, nor for all
their fighting; for those of the town were earnest to make a
handsome defence, combating under the eyes of their heroic
chatelaine; and so stoutly held they out, that the assailants
sent still to the host for succors till their last men were in the
field, and none were left, with the baggage and the tents, but a
sort of horseboys, scullions, and such rascals.

And still from the hot noontide, till the evening breeze began
to blow in cool from the sea, the din of arms, and shouts and
war-cries, and the clamor of the wounded, rose from the barricades;
and many gallant deeds of arms were done on that day
on both sides, and many doughty blows given and received;
but still the Lord Charles and his men made no way, but lost
more than they gained.

[figure description] Page 043.[end figure description]

And in the end the los and glory of the day, for the most
daring deed, rested with a woman.

For the countess on that day had clothed herself cap-a-pie in
armor, and mounted on a war-horse; though ever till that day
she had been tender and delicate among women, of slender
symmetry and rare soft beauty, with large blue eyes and a
complexion of snow and golden tresses; and she galloped up
and down the streets encouraging the inhabitants to defend
themselves honorably—for she had no thought yet but to comfort
them and kindle their spirit by her show of example; nor
as yet did she know her own courage, or the strength that
resides in the heart of a true woman.

“She had already,” to quote old Froissart, whose account is
here so spirited and graphic in his own words, that I prefer giving
the narration in that old quaint language, to adding anything,
or expanding the striking relation of facts too strong to
bear expansion, “she had already ordered the ladies and other
women to cut short their kirtles, carry the stones to the ramparts,
and throw them on their enemies. She had pots of quick-lime
brought to her for the same purpose. That same day the
countess performed a very gallant deed: she ascended a high
tower, to see how her people behaved; and, having observed
that all the lords and others of the army had quitted their
tents, and were come to the assault, she immediately descended,
mounted her horse, armed as she was, collected three hundred
horsemen, sallied out at their head by another gate that was
not attacked, and galloping up to the tents of her enemies, cut
them down, and set them on fire, without any loss, for there
were only servants and boys, who fled upon her approach. As
soon as the French saw their camp on fire, and heard the cries,
they immediately hastened thither, bawling out, `Treason!
Treason!' so that none remained at the assault. The countess

[figure description] Page 044.[end figure description]

seeing this, got her men together, and finding that she could
not reënter Hennebon without great risk, took another road,
leading to the castle of Brest, which is situated near. The
Lord Lewis of Spain, who was marshal of the army, had gone
to his tents, which were on fire; and, seeing the countess and
her company galloping off as fast as they could, he immediately
pursued them with a large body of men-at-arms. He
gained so fast upon them, that he came up with them, and
wounded or slew all that were not well mounted; but the
countess, and part of her company, made such speed that they
arrived at the castle of Brest, where they were received with
great joy.

“On the morrow, the lords of France who had lost their
tents and provisions took counsel, if they should not make huts
of the branches and leaves of trees near to the town, and were
thunderstruck when they heard that the countess herself had
planned and executed this enterprise; while those of the town,
not knowing what was become of her, were very uneasy; for
they were full five days without gaining any intelligence of her.
The countess, in the meanwhile, was so active that she assembled
from five to six hundred men, well armed and mounted,
and with them set out about midnight from Brest, and came
straight to Hennebon about sunrise, riding along one side of
the enemy's host, until she came to the gates of the castle,
which were opened to her: she entered with great triumph and
sounds of trumpets and other warlike instruments, to the astonishment
of the French, who began arming themselves to make
another assault upon the town, while those within mounted the
walls to defend it. This attack was very severe, and lasted till
past noon. The French lost more than their opponents; and
then the lords of France put a stop to it, for their men were
killed and wounded to no purpose. They next retreated, and

[figure description] Page 045.[end figure description]

held a council whether the Lord Charles should not go to besiege
the castle of Aurai, which King Arthur had built and
inclosed. It was determined that he should march thither, accompanied
by the Duke of Bourbon, the Earl of Blois, Sir
Robert Bertrand, Marshal of France; and that Sir Hervè de
Léon was to remain before Hennebon, with a part of the
Genoese under his command, and the Lord Lewis of Spain, the
Viscount of Rohan, with the rest of the Genoese and Spaniards.
They sent for twelve large machines which they had left at
Rennes, to cast stones and annoy the castle of Hennebon; for
they perceived that they did not gain any ground by their
assaults. The French divided their army into two parts: one
remained before Hennebon, and the other marched to besiege
the castle of Aurai. The Lord Charles of Blois went to this
last place, and quartered all his division in the neighborhood.”

With the Count Charles de Blois we have naught to do,
save in so much as his doings or sufferings have to do absolutely
with the Countess de Montfort; I shall leave him, therefore, to
win or lose the castle of Aurai, under the fortune of war, while
I shall follow the chances of that noble chatelaine, the countess,
who remained, as we shall see, not only beset by enemies without,
but by traitors within, the walls of Hennebon.

It may be as well to state here, however, that the Count
Charles of Blois did not take Aurai, whether it was built by
King Arthur or no—which, despite Dom Froissart, is rather
more than doubtful—any more than the Lord Lewis d'Espagne
took Hennebon, which he came perilous nigh to doing, yet had
to depart frustrate.

So soon as the French host had divided itself into two parts,
after the taste it had received of the quality of the Breton garrison
within the walls of Hennebon, and of the noble character
of its heroic chatelaine, they made no attempt any more to

[figure description] Page 046.[end figure description]

skirmish at the barriers, or to assault the walls, for in good
sooth they dared not, but day and night they plied those
dreadful engines hurling in mighty beams of wood, steel-headed
and ponderous iron bars, and vast blocks of stone, shaking the
walls and ramparts, wheresoever they struck them, so that the
defenders knew not at what moment they would be breached,
and the city laid open to the pitiless foe.

And now the hearts of all, save of that delicate and youthful
lady, failed them; and if she had set them before a fair
example of chivalric daring, she set them now a fairer of constancy,
more heroical than any action; of feminine endurance,
and fortitude, and faith, grander than any daring.

The false bishop, Guy de Léon, contrived to leave the town
on some false pretext, and hold a parley with his traitor kinsman
Hervè de Léon—but for whose villany that bright young
dame never had cased her gentle form in steel, nor wielded the
mortal sword in warfare. Where traitors are on both sides,
treason is wont to win; and so it well nigh proved in this instance;
for the bishop returned with offers of free pardon to
the garrison, and passports to go whither they would, with their
effects unhurt, so they would yield the town to Sir Hervè.

And, though the countess perceived what was on the wind,
and besought the lords of Brittany with tears and sighs, that
made her but more lovely, “for the love of herself, and of her
son; friendless but for them; for the love of God himself, to
have pity on her, and faith in heaven, that they should receive
succor within three days,” it seemed that she could not prevail.

Nor was there not cause for apprehension; since it was clear
to all that the ramparts could not stand one more day's breaching;
and, those once battered down, Hennebon and all within
it were at the mercy of the merciless.

The bishop was eloquent, and fear and hope more eloquent

[figure description] Page 047.[end figure description]

yet; and ere, long after midnight, the council closed, all minds
but those of three, Sir Yves de Tresiquidi, Sir Waleran de
Landreman, and the governor of Guincamp, were won over to
yield up the city to Sir Hervè; and even those three doubted.
None so hopeful but to trust that to-morrow's conference would
be final; none so strong in courage as to dare support one
other day's assault.

All passed the night in doubt and fear; the countess alone
in brave hope, and earnest prayer.

The day dawned, and—as men crowded to the ramparts,
gazing towards the camp and the plain where Sir Hervè might
be seen approaching with his Genoese, closing up to the town
to receive possession—the countess arose from her knees, and
she alone of all in Hennebon, turned her eyes towards the sea;
for she alone, of all in Hennebon, had faith in her God.

The sea! the sea! it was white with sails, from the mouth
almost of the haven, to the dark line of the horizon, flashing
to the new-risen sun with lance-heads and clear armor, fluttering
with pennoncelles and banners, blazing with embroidered
surcoats and emblazoned shields.

And the lady flung her casement wide, and gazed out on her
people, in the market-place, along the ramparts, in the tumultuous
streets, with dishevelled hair, and disordered raiment, and
clasped hands and flushed cheeks, and eyes streaming with
tears of joy—“God and St. George!” she cried, in tones that
rang to every heart like the notes of a silver trumpet—“God
and St. George! an English fleet! an English fleet! It is the
aid of God!”

And, as the people crowded to the seaward bastions, and saw
the great ships rushing in before a leading wind, with their
sails all emblazoned with Edward's triple leopards; and the
banners and shields of the English Manny, and of their own

[figure description] Page 048.[end figure description]

Amauri de Clisson, displayed from the yard-arms, and the immortal
red cross blazing, above all, on its argent field, they, too,
took up the cry.

“God and St. George! God and St. George! It is the aid
of England! it is the aid of God!”

“Thereafter,” adds my author, whom I quote once more, for
the last time, “when the Governor of Guincamp, Sir Yves de
Tresiquidi, Sir Waleran de Landreman, and the other knights,
perceived this succor coming to them, they told the bishop that
he might break up his conference, for they were not now inclined
to follow his advice. The bishop, Sir Guy de Léon, replied,
`My lords, then our company shall separate; for I will go to
him who seems to me to have the clearest right.' Upon which
he sent his defiance to the lady, and to all her party, and left
the town to inform Sir Hervè de Leon how matters stood. Sir
Hervè was much vexed at it, and immediately ordered the
largest machine that was with the army to be placed as near
the castle as possible, strictly commanding that it should never
cease working day or night. He then presented his uncle to
the Lord Lewis of Spain, and to the Lord-Charles of Blois, who
both received him most courteously. The countess, in the
meantime, prepared, and hung with tapestry, halls and chambers,
to lodge handsomely the lords and barons of England
whom she saw coming, and sent out a noble company to meet
them. When they were landed, she went herself to give them
welcome, respectfully thanking each knight and squire, and led
them into the town and castle, that they might have convenient
lodging; on the morrow she gave them a magnificent entertainment.
All that night, and the following day, the large
machine never ceased from casting stones into the town.

“After the entertainment, Sir Walter Manny, who was captain
of the English, inquired of the countess the state of the

[figure description] Page 049.[end figure description]

town, and of the enemy's army. Upon looking out of the
window, he said, he had a great inclination to destroy the large
machine which was placed so near, and much annoyed them,
if any would second him. Sir Yves de Tresiquidi replied, that
he would not fail him in this his first expedition; as did also
the Lord of Landreman. They went to arm themselves, and
sallied quietly out of one of the gates, taking with them three
hundred archers; who shot so well, that those who guarded
the machine fled; and the men-at-arms who followed the
archers, falling upon them, slew the greater part, and broke
down and cut in pieces this large machine. They then dashed
in among the tents and huts, set fire to them, and killed and
wounded many of their enemies before the army was in motion.
After this, they made a handsome retreat. When the enemy
were mounted and armed, they galloped after them like madmen.
Sir Walter Manny, seeing this, exclaimed, `May I never
be embraced by my mistress and dear friend, if I enter castle or
fortress before I have unhorsed one of these gallopers.' He
then turned round, and pointed his spear towards the enemy, as
did the two brothers of Lande-Halle, le Haze de Brabant, Sir
Yves de Tresiquidi, Sir Waleran de Landreman, and many
others, and spitted the first coursers. Many legs were made to
kick the air. Some of their own party were also unhorsed.
The conflict became very serious, for reinforcements were perpetually
coming from the camp; and the English were obliged
to retreat towards the castle, which they did in good order until
they came to the castle ditch: there the knights made a stand,
until all their men were safely returned. Many brilliant actions,
captures, and rescues might have been seen. Those of the
town who had not been of the party to destroy the large
machine now issued forth, and ranging themselves upon the
banks of the ditch, made such good use of their bows, that they

[figure description] Page 050.[end figure description]

forced the enemy to withdraw, killing many men and horses.
The chiefs of the army, perceiving they had the worst of it, and
that they were losing men to no purpose, sounded a retreat, and
made their men retire to the camp. As soon as they were gone,
the townsmen reëntered, and went each to his quarters. The
Countess of Montfort came down from the castle to meet them,
and with a most cheerful countenance, kissed Sir Walter Manny,
and all his companions, one after the other, like a noble and
valiant dame.”

Such was the heroism of that true lady. And so was her
heroism and her faith rewarded. Hennebon was relieved; and
the Count Charles de Blois soon died, but died not Duke of
Brittany.

p583-056 Philippa of Dainault: WIFE OF EDWARD III. OF ENGLAND. 1347.

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The great defect of history, so far as regards the general
reader, is its habit of systematizing and generalizing, its method
of dealing with principles to the almost entire exclusion of
persons, of narrating events, effects, and causes in the mass,
with little, if any, allusion to individual character or action;
of leaping from war to war, from revolution to revolution,
without condescending, for one instant, to customs or costumes,
to physical or social anecdotes, unless in the form of a lumping
supplemental summary at the end of a chapter, or of an epoch
so dry, so bald, and so mixed up with questions of political
economy, and other abstruse and unpopular topics, that they
are skipped as tedious and irrelevant episodes. It is to their
adopting the very reverse of this plan; to their introducing us
personally to the halls, the tournaments, the courts, the camps,
the oratories, and the prisons of individual characters of history;
to their letting us hear the very words that they did
speak, or might have spoken; letting us be present at their
banquets and beside their biers, that the school of historical
dramas introduced by Shakspeare, and of historical romances
having their origin in Scott; and yet more than these the

[figure description] Page 054.[end figure description]

delightful and artless contemporaneous narratives of the old
chroniclers, owe their deathless charm; and it is to this that
Macaulay owes the success of his brilliant and picturesque,
though partial and irresponsible history of England.

The consequence of this is, that men and women of the present
day, in general, depend for their events and facts of history
on the sparse and disjointed memories of the crude and bald
abridgments; of the, themselves, crude and bald generalizations,
passing for history, which they picked up as children,
abhorring, not unnaturally, that abhorrent task, while their
active and actual ideas of historical events as acted realities,
and of historical personages as real men and women, walking
and standing, eating and drinking, waking and sleeping, wearing
clothes and speaking their own thoughts, they owe one and
all to the historical plays of Shakspeare, the historical romances
of Scott and his followers. In some sort, it is well that this
should be so. It would be well altogether, were the readers
able to discriminate between that which is true and that which
is only truth-like in the dramatical or romantical fiction; were
they, in short, to limit their belief to the costume, the language,
and the social scenery only of the fiction, without giving to the
events of the narrative, or the actions of the personages, a credence
which they were not intended to deserve.

For, we say it distinctly, that no reader of English History,
of Hume or Lingard, or even Mackintosh himself, ignorant of
the chroniclers, can form half so correct an idea of the usages,
the language, the dress, and the demeanor, the daily lives and
the daily doings of the English Kings, Barons, and Commons,
from the days of King John in the early feudal ages, to those of
the immediate predecessors of Elizabeth; when constitutional
government, though irregular as yet and ill-defined, had taken
a firm foothold in the land; and yet, he who should accept as

[figure description] Page 055.[end figure description]

truths, Shakspeare's representations of the course of events, of
the characters and actions of men, forgetful that he wrote
according to the bias of his inclinations and his interest, and
reviewed history so as to gratify his patrons of the house of
Tudor, would err lamentably in his conclusions as to the great
and fundamental facts of history.

In like manner, the reader of Ivanhoe, of the Talisman, and
of the Betrothed, will gain more insight into the social life, the
domestic occupations, the military costume, the state of arts and
arms, the civil, religious, and literary condition of the people of
England, of all classes, in the times of the crusades—the reader
of Kenilworth will learn more of the state of England at large,
from the court to the cottage, during the heyday of Elizabeth,—
and the reader of the Fair Maid of Perth, and that noble novel,
Quentin Durward, of the real life of Scotland and of France, at
their respective periods, than the students of all the modern
histories of England, France, and Scotland, which still pass as
standards, and which boast high names of authors, published
from the reign of Anne, inclusively, to those of the elder
Georges. At the same time, however, while he may aseribe
perfect truth to the general coloring, and to all the details of
Scott's gorgeous historical pictures, he must not give implicit
credit to his individual portraitures; he must not, we would
say, accept events built into tales, having a true historical foundation,
in order to connect and ornament the superstructure, as
being themselves truths of history.

It is to these delightful creations of the two greatest poetical
creators and constructors, in our opinion, who have ever written
in any language, Shakspeare and Walter Scott, that we owe our
own love of history and historical research. It was the eloquent
eulogium of Froissart, ascribed by the latter to one of his most
questionable heroes, John Graham of Claverhouse, that first

[figure description] Page 056.[end figure description]

induced us to open that richest mine of romance and history—
of truth stranger and more exciting than fiction; of prose more
thrilling, more effective, and more picturesque than poetry, the
pages of the ancient chroniclers. It was then and it was thence,
that we learned that it is not history, not the living body, with
its muscles, its sinews, its energy and actions, its doings and sufferings,
its smiles and tears, its lights and shadows, of history
itself as it was, and as it was written by those who saw it, and
lived with, and were a part of it; but the marrowless and arid
skeleton into which the schools have boiled it down, and scraped
it clean, and distorted it, and set it up with wires, that we find
so cold, and base, and arid, so rigid in its lines, so pallid in its
hues, so distasteful to the human imagination, so unsatisfactory
to the human reasoning. It was then that we began to suspect
that the conquerors and prelates, the kings and queens, the
knights and ladies, who are so identical in their stiff-starched
effigies, as we are introduced to them, row after row, by grave
and cold historians, might possibly have been special individualities,
with characters and distinctions, each of their own and
different from those of others, with human hearts, human hopes,
human affections, human fears, and human sorrows; that they
might, nay that they must, have had their histories of intermingled
vice and virtue, of interconnected sin and sorrow;
their histories of the human heart of that olden day, with which
the human heart of this present day must have much with which
it can sympathize; must have much from which it can learn—
no word of which will be found in that great compendium of
national growth and grandeur, crime and conquest, treason and
triumph, debility and downfall, which those, whom the world
calls its historians, have given as the history of the world.

Our object it is now, to endeavor to lay before the eyes of
our readers the portraiture of some whom they never regarded,

[figure description] Page 057.[end figure description]

if they have regarded them at all, in any other light than that
of historical pageants, in the new guise of real persons; and first
one, not the lowest or the least estimable, to whom two notices,
and those of the briefest, are given by Hume, and who, though
the wife and mother of two of the greatest and most estimable
heroes of the true chivalric era, and herself, in every respect, a
true heroine, and a true woman, is scarcely known to this day
as a real individual, other than an almost forgotten queen of
England.

Philippa, in after days the wife of Edward III., and mother
of Edward, the Black Prince of England, was the second
daughter of William, Earl of Hainault, and first became
acquainted with her future lord, then Prince of Wales, when
he was compelled to fly in company with his infamous mother,
Isabella, “the wolf of France,” of the poet Gray, and her companion
in evil, Roger of Mortimer, as well as his father's brother,
the Earl of Kent, from the intolerable tyranny and arrogance of
the Le de Spencers, who then, by the influence of the younger
Sir Hugh, over the weak, imbecile, and luxurious Edward II.,
held absolute dominion over England, for protection to the
court of her father.

The royal fugitives had, at first, found refuge in Paris with
King Charles, the brother of Isabella, who was as famous for
her beauty as she was infamous for her crimes, and, above all,
for her connivance in the atrocious butchery of her hapless
husband; but they had not long received asylum there, before
the Le de Spencers, fearing that the queen would be enabled to
make a descent on England by aid of her foreign allies, and so
to rally the malcontent barons to her standard and overthrow
their usurped authority, set all engines at work to bring about
her expulsion from the court of her brother. Cardinals and
prelates were bought with gold, until the Pope was induced to

[figure description] Page 058.[end figure description]

command Charles of France, on pain of excommunication, to
banish his sister the realm; nor, it is probable, had the same
puissant worker on the minds of men been brought to bear
upon the king himself, for we find it recorded by the Lord
Berners, in his graphic and eloquent translation of Froissart,
that “he was in sagude and will to make his sister to be taken;”
and it is an undoubted fact, that at the warning of her cousin,
the Count Robert of Artois, she set out at the dead of night for
the empire, apprehending the surrender of herself with Roger
Mortimer, the Prince Edward, and the Earl of Kent, into the
hands of Sir Hugh Le de Spencer; and that she there found a
refuge first in Ostrevant, at the house of a poor knight, Sir
Eustace d' Ambreticourt, afterwards one of her son's paladins,
and himself father of one of the first knights of the garter, and
thereafter at Valenciennes, in the house of the Earl William of
Hainault; “who, as well as his countess,” says old Jehan Froissart,
“received her very graciously. Many great feasts were
given on this occasion, as no one knew better than the countess
how to do the honors of her house. This Earl William had, at
that time, four daughters, Margaret, Philippa, Zoar, and Isabella;
the young King Edward,—it must be observed, however, that
he was, at this time, only Prince of Wales, and that a fugitive
prince, with no very direct prospects of obtaining his succession—
paid more court and attention to Philippa than to any of the
others; and the young lady also conversed with him more frequently,
and sought his company oftener than any of her
sisters.”

With this brief record ends all we know or can discover of
the courtship of the prince and his fair and virtuous bride, but
that their love must have been of that ardent and impulsive
character, which is known as love at first sight, cannot be
doubted, when we learn that they were only at this time in

[figure description] Page 059.[end figure description]

company during eight short-winged days, after which the young
prince departed with his mother, and such allies as his good
cause and the spirit of genuine knight-errantry, which was, at
that day, in its prime of real life, mustered to his standard, to
strike a blow for his crown, and for the emancipation of his
country from the abject state of degradation into which it had
fallen.

The uncle of Philippa, Sir John of Hainault, contrary to the
opinion of the earl, his brother, and of his council, who deemed
the enterprise hazardous, on account of the well known jealousy
of the English against foreign interference, resolved to accompany
the princely exiles, and aid in reinstating them in their
birthright, saying, in reply to all the remonstrances which were
made to him, “that he could die but once; that the time was
in the will of God; and that all true knights were bound to aid,
to the utmost extent of their power, all ladies and damsels driven
from their kingdoms, comfortless and forlorn.” When the earl
had heard this, he said to him—“Dear brother, God forbid that
there should be any hindrance to your wish, therefore I give
you leave, in the name of God.” He then kissed him, and
squeezed his hand, in sign of great affection.

How young Philippa parted from her princely lover history
has not thought it worth the while to record, but who can
doubt that, sprung from men whose every thought, every action,
was imbued with the very odor and sanctity of true chivalry,
brought up in the midst of all associations high and noble, held
far aloof from the contamination of any low, base, or ignoble
thought, any lucre-loving mercantile association, she sent him
away cheered with serene and soul-stirring encouragement; that
she bade him do kingly, and, if he might not live a king, die
kingly; that she assured him she would rather be the widowed
leal-love of one brave, royal Edward, dead under his shield

[figure description] Page 060.[end figure description]

knightly, than the crowned queen of the greatest king in Christendom.
And who can doubt that, when his tall plume faded
from her sight, and the gleam and glitter of his panoply was
lost in the distance among the mists of evening, the tears dimmed
her bright eyes, and darkness fell upon her heart; and
she doubted the truth of the high counsel she had been true
enough and brave enough to give—for, though she was nobly
born, and herself noble, and no recreant to her race, she was a
woman, a true woman, and she loved truly and wisely, and for
once, not too well; for he, the loved one, deserved and returned,
and forgot not ever, but awarded and prized to the last, the
true love of Philippa of Hainault.

For once, contrary to all that Shakspeare did ever hear, did
ever read, in tale or history, their tale of true love did run
smooth.

The expedition was successful, the faction of the Le de Spencers
was put down, and themselves overpowered by a party
scarcely less infamous than that of Isabella and Mortimer—for
Edward III., yet a minor, and taking no share in the government,
fortunately for him elf, took no share of the guilt—suffered
by the hands of the common executioner; and soon afterwards,
the unhappy and imbecile king ended an ignominious and
useless life by a death so ignominious and so horribly atrocious,
that, while history itself shrinks from recording it, it has almost
altered the sentence of utter condemnation of scorn and detestation,
which would otherwise have attached to his memory,
into something of that pity which is still nearer akin to contempt
than to love. Shortly afterwards, however, Edward, who
had attained his eighteenth year, and was already remarkable
for intellect and abilities, which might have been termed precocious,
but that they did not meet the fate of precocity in premature
decay, succeeded in emancipating himself from the

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arrogant domination of Mortimer, who, justly doomed by his
peers, died the deserved but bloody death of a traitor on the
scaffold; and was crowned with a royal diadem, in his palace
of Westminster, on Christmas day, among the rejoicings of his
subjects of all classes, and the happy auguries, all of which, by
a most unusual success for popular-succeeding monarchs, he
fulfilled to the letter, for the benefit of his people, the honor of
his country, and his own eternal glory.

He had not long sat upon the throne of England, his accession
to which was signalized, as was very wont in those days
to be the case, by an invasion of the Scots, which he repelled
in person, before he bethought himself seriously of the sweet
damsel whose heart he had won when but an exiled outlaw
prince, and whom, in the spirit of a true knight and true man,
he was now resolved to marry, “for that he loved her more
dearly, on her own and her father's account, than any other
lady.”

He sent, therefore, a sumptuous embassy to demand her hand
of her father, the Earl of Hainault; and having obtained a dispensation
from the Pope, which was necessary on account of
their near relationship, their mothers being cousins-german,
married her by procuration at Valenciennes; after which she
was escorted to London by her uncle, Sir John of Hainault,
and crowned amongst great rejoicings of the people, and
“great crowds of the nobility, and feastings and tournaments,
and sumptuous entertainments every day, which lasted three
weeks.”

Immediately on her being thus elevated to the throne of a
foreign country, she had the rare wisdom—most rare, indeed,
among crowned heads in the female line—to adjudge herself
entirely and wholly to the country of which she had become
one, to devote herself to studying the interests and gaining the

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affections of her people, and to identify herself wholly with
England by becoming herself an Englishwoman, as she was
already an English queen. Consequently, although but a little
while before her accession and coronation there had been sharp
feuds and even actual hostility between the English archers—a
force peculiarly national, English, and even Saxon in their
origin, and as such embodying the prejudices and expressing
the feelings of the people—and the Hainaulters, with her own
honored uncle at their head, we hear of no bickerings or
jealousies, much less of any partialities on the Queen's part
toward her own kin or countrymen—that block on which so
many queens have stumbled to their own disastrous downfall—
that we can find that “but few of our countrymen,” as
Froissart writes, who was himself a Hainaulter born, and an
especially grateful servant of Philippa—“remained with the
young queen; among whom was a youth called Wastelet de
Mauny, to attend on and carve for her, who performed afterward
so many gallant deeds of arms, in such various different
places, that they are not to be counted.”

To be the wife of such a champion, and such a king as
Edward, the mother and instructor of such a son as the Black
Prince—the only two men of actual existence, with the exception
of Bayard, le sans pen et sans reproach, and the good and
gallant Philip Sidney, who have ever realized the beau-ideal of
knight-errantry, and the blended greatness and prowess of true
chivalry, were glory enough for any one woman; but she added
to this to be the judicious and constant, as well as consistent
rewarder of true merit, whether in art or in arms; to be the
defender of her husband's crown and of her adopted country;
to show that, like her great successor, the lionlike Elizabeth,
though she were “but a weak woman, she had a man's heart
in her bosom, and that man's a king of England”—for she,

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too, when her liege lord and sovereign was abroad, fleshing his
victorious sword in the heart of France, feared not to mount
the war-horse and gird the steel upon her thigh, and to address
her troops, on the eve of battle, with words of fire, that lighted
up an equal daring in the heart of the meanest groom and of
the proudest earl that fought at Neville's cross, on English soil
against a Scottish foeman, and caused the capture of a Scottish
king, not many days before the monarch of the French yielded
himself, conquered in chivalry and courtesy alike, to the victorious
prowess of her son.

We are no admirers, not we, of military glory, as attached
to women. We believe that the mission of women, as the
slang of the present day runs, is a mission to the home and
the hearth, to the fireside and the cradle, to the nursery and
the sick bed—that it is a mission to civilize, and humanize, and
soften, not to teach or to preach or to conquer—that it is a
mission to cheer the toils, comfort the homes, sympathize with
the griefs, and by affectionate and gentle firmness to maintain
the courage of man against the shocks of this world, and the
apprehensions of the next. We believe, in a word, that the
God of nature, as nature itself indicates, intended them to be
the mothers and the wives of men, to love and to be loved, to
lean on the superior hardihood of man, and to soften and adorn
his hardness as the honeysuckle embellishes the oak, to which
it clings for shelter and support. We believe that the rights
of women are to be held highest and holiest of human things,
above all pollution, aloof from all insult, free from all harm, to
be loved, cherished, honored, worshipped next below God—but
neither to be orators nor statesmen, heads of firms nor chiefs of
battalions, champions of aristocracy nor propagandists of liberty.
We have no sympathy with your gallant dragoonesses of modern
Hungary or modern Poland, no respect for your Miss-Captain

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of Hussars, Emily this, or Countess-General of Artillery, Lady
Sarah that—we believe that if women choose voluntarily to
take to the work of men, and make themselves men, they have
no right to complain when they share the fate of men. Let
them follow squadrons, if they will, cheer their wounded, sustain
their dying husbands; so shall they earn that deathless
renown, as true heroines, which clings to the Baroness de
Reidesell, and the Lady Harriet Acland, of Saratoga and Stillwater—
but let them not presume to lead squadrons and unsex
themselves, descending into soldiers, else shall they merit their
true name of termagants and viragoes, and “taking to the
sword shall die by the sword,” whether on the field or on the
scaffold, by us at least unpitied and despised, not honored.

To all rules, however, there are exceptions—and the exception
to this rule is this, that when by accident of position, of
rank, or of circumstance, the woman is elevated or compelled
into such eminence or deadly necessity of trust, as compels her
to do actual battle in defence of those committed to her charge,
she is not only absolved of the charge of unsexing herself, of
the suspicion of unwomanly ambition for notoriety and loud
report, of yet more unwomanly love for masculine attire, masculine
display, perhaps masculine thirst for blood and glory,
but is entitled to the highest praise for daring, at the call of a
higher moral duty, to “overstep the modesty of nature,” and
forgetful of the gentleness of woman to put on the fiery courage
and the stern endurance of man, for daring, in a word, “to do
her duty in that sphere of life to which it has pleased God to
call her.”

Such was the position of Philippa, when her brave husband
and her brave son afar off in foreign lands, doing battle for
their country, herself appointed the vicegerent of the crown
and regent of the realm, with a foreign enemy polluting

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English soil with their footsteps, and foreign banners flouting the
free wind of England, she buckled the lion casque over her
matron pillet, and drew the sword, and breathed the breath of
liberty into the hearts of all who heard her thrilling words on
that wild plain of Cumberland, and filled the meanest of her
followers with that heaven-reaching valor which makes triumph
certain.

Such was the position of Elizabeth, when she rode her war-horse,
in full caparison, along the mustered train-bands and
militia of her realm, weak-seeming bulwark for the liberties
and the religion of her land, against the unconquered veterans
of the low country, the far famed Spanish infantry, the freight
of the invincible Armada, and swore that she would fight, and
if she could not live, then die, a king of England.

Such was the position of Maria Theresa, when she drew her
sabre, on the guarded mount, all as she harangued her tumultuous
legions of noble cavalry, before the unhallowed partition
of her realm, and her words of flame were answered by the
unanimous cry, while every sword leaped from its scabbard,
through that mighty host, moriamur, moriamur, pro rege nostro,
Maria Theresa.”

Such is the position of the backwoodsman's wife; Kentucky
and Tennessee, the dark and bloody ground, can tell of many
a one who, when alone at dead of night, or with her terrified
and helpless little ones only around, startled from sleep by the
appalling sounds of the war-whoop, far pealing through the
arches of the forest, has snatched the weapons of her absent
husband, and done victorious battle for her hearth and her
home against the fierce and wily savage.

And cold must be his heart, and weak his glow of manly
spirit, who does not in the same degree admire, and venerate,
and almost canonize such true examples of pure, legitimate, and

[figure description] Page 066.[end figure description]

holy feminine heroism, as he doubts, and tries, and finally condemns,
rejects as base and spurious, that false, fierce, unfeminine
spirit, which, assuming the garb of heroism to cover ambition
and love of notoriety, leaps to arms, backs chargers, and literally
slays men in hand to hand encounter, only to cringe and
quail—while the gulled, gaping mob, shrieks horror at the sight—
when taken in the soldier's self-elected trade, they are compelled
to abide by the soldier's doom.

But such was not the character, such not the action of the
gentle and brave Philippa. Compelled by her rank and state
to defend her husband's crown, and son's hereditary kingdom,
she came forward for one little moment, she showed herself for
one passing glance able to perform her duties, even if these
duties were the duties of a man, and the next, when victorious
over her foes, and the saviour of her country and her crown,
retired into the gentle and unassuming routine of her sweet
and humble life, and is next found—as we find recorded in
history—as crossing over the British channel, “to throw herself
at the feet of the indignant king, and beg with tears the
lives of the six rebellious burgesses of Calais, doomed to a base
death on the gallows, by the wrath of the unrelenting victor.”

We care not that this anecdote has no foundation in history—
as it has very clearly been proved to have none, from actual
and direct testimony, as well as from the internal evidence of
the legend—for, though it is totally inconsistent with the character
of Edward III., who, on no single occasion, is known to
have acted otherwise than generously, mercifully, and knightly
to all men, whether of high or low degree, and who in that
very siege of Calais had shown proof of mercy, very unusual
even in the comparatively humane warfare of modern times, in
permitting the unwarlike inhabitants of the city to withdraw
themselves from the hardships and sufferings of a beleaguered

[figure description] Page 067.[end figure description]

city, after the blockade had been completed—still it is evident
that no contemporaneous writer could have invented such an
anecdote had it been very much at variance with the spirit of
the times, or at all inconsistent with the known character of the
princess whom he desired to laud, that she should “with tears
have said, `Ah, gentle sir, since I have crossed the sea with
great danger to see you, I have never asked you one favor; now,
I most humbly ask as a gift, for the sake of the Son of the blessed
Mary, and for your love to me, that you will be merciful to
these six men;' ” or, that “the king should have looked at her
for some time in silence, and then said, `Ah, lady, that you had
been anywhere else than here; you have entreated in such a
manner that I cannot refuse you; I therefore give them to you,
do as you please with them.' ” The anecdote is known, proved,
and by all historians admitted to be untrue; it is therefore unworthy
of a place in history, except as a foot note, illustrative
of the spirit of the times, and the character by her own contemporaries
ascribed and believed to belong to Philippa of Hainault—
to her honor it was composed, and in her honor it ought in
some sort to hold good, since it is clearly what she was capable
of doing, might well have done, would probably have done had
it been in her way so to do, and was actually believed to have
done by her servant and historiographer.

From this time forth we hear little of her, a proof that her
life flowed evenly and serenely towards its close; it is the tortured
and the turbulent waters that are the most loudly bruited—
those which are most placid, which most brilliantly reflect the
hues of heaven, are the peaceful and the silent. She lived to
see her husband, who never varied from his love for her, or was
seduced from allegiance to her beauty by younger or more brilliant
charms, the greatest king in Christendom; she lived to
see her son, the Black Prince, the most famous champion, the

[figure description] Page 068.[end figure description]

bravest, gentlest, best knight in the world, the glory of his
native land, and the wonder of the world, as he lives in his
great renown to this day, for all the real attributes of the best
and brightest of earthly things—true Christian chivalry; a gentleman,
a soldier, a noble, a man, a Christian, and a knight par
excellence, for ever.

Happy as she had been in her life, she was no less happy in
her death, for she survived nothing—neither friends nor fame,
neither happiness nor love. She died as she had lived, the
honored of her children, the beloved of her husband, the adored
of her adopted country, the regretted of all—the best woman,
the best queen of her own day—almost the best of any.

Hear what fell out when this lovely woman passed away, for
the passage which relates to it is one of the gems of Froissart,
in the quaint, old, simple, Saxon English, of his best, if first
translator, Johan Bourchier, Lord Berners.

“There fell in Englande a heavy case and a common, howbeit
it was right pyteouse for the kinge, his children, and all
his realm. For the good queene of Englande, that so many good
deeds had done in her tyme, and so many knights succored,
and ladyes and damosels comforted, and had so largely departed
of her goods to her people, and naturally loved always the nation
of Heynaulte, the country where she was born. She fell sick
in the castle of Wyndsore, the which sickness continued on her
so long that there was no remedy but dethe. And the good
ladye, when she knew and perceived that there was with her no
remedy but dethe, she deigned to speke with the king, her husbande.
And when he was before her, she put out of her bed
her right hand, and took the king by his right hand, who was
right sorrowful in his heart. Then she said, `Sir, we have in
peace, joy, and great prosperity, used all our time together. Sir,
now, I pray you, at our departing, that ye will grant me three

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desires.' The kinge, right sorrowfully weeping, said, `Madame,
desire what ye will; I will grant it.' `Sir,' said she, `I require
of you, first of all that all, manner of people, and as I shall have
dealt with in merchandise, in this side of the sea or beyond it,
that it may please you to pay every thing that I owe them or
any other. And secondly, sir, all such ordnance and promises
as I have made to the churches, as well of this country as beyond
the sea, whereas I have had any devotion, that it may
please you to accomplish and fulfil the same. Thirdly, sir, I
require you that it may please you to take none other sepulture,
whensoever it shall please God to take you out of this transitory
life, but beside me in Westminster.' The kinge, all weeping,
said, `Madame, I grant you your desire.' Then the good ladye
and queene made on her the sign of the cross, and commended
the king, her husband, to God, and her youngest son, Thomas
who was then beside her. And anone, after, she yielded up the
spirit, the which I believe surely the holy angels received with
great joy up to heaven, for in all her life she did neither in
thought nor deed thing whereby to lose (hurt) her soul, as far
as any creature could know. Thus the good queene of England
died, in the year of our Lord MCCCLXIX. in the vigil of our
lady, in the myddle of August. Rest to her soul.”

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p583-076 The Forest of Le Mans, OR, THE FRENZY OF CHARLES VI. 1387.

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[figure description] Page 073.[end figure description]

It was a blazing day in August. For above six weeks the
earth had been scourged with intolerable heat; not a drop of
rain had fallen to refresh the fading verdure, or swell the channels
of the wasted rivulets. The meadows and the pasturelands
of Brittany were as sere and yellow as the sands of the
Olonne; the foliage of the forests had put on, two months before
their time, the melancholy tints of autumn. A few miserable,
half-starved cattle were to be seen, the only signs of life,
panting beneath the scanty shelter of the half-denuded trees, or
standing, fetlock-deep, in the muddy hollows which a little
while before had been cool ponds and watering places. No
song of birds was to be heard in the deserted woodlands; all
was sad, solitary, silent.

From the horizon to the zenith there was not a cloud so large
as a man's hand in the lurid sky, which shone with a strange
brassy glare, as if the light were transmitted through a dusty
haze, amid which the blood-red sun stood portentous, “shorn
of his beams,” yet withering and scorching everything within
the sphere of his malign influence.

Not a breath of wind moved the torpid air—not a leaf, not
a blade of grass quivered.

[figure description] Page 074.[end figure description]

All that preserved its green unaltered over a vast tract of
country was the dark prickly furze, patient of all extremes of
heat or cold, the long sprays of the Spanish broom, child of the
arid waste, the stunted furs which spotted, singly or in clumps,
the surface of that blasted heath, and the heavy masses of
almost black pine-forest, which gloomed on the level horizon.

The only sounds were the monotonous and droning cry of the
field-crickets, and the snapping of the seed-pods of the broom,
which crackled away continually like a pigmy fusillade under
the hot noon-tide. If the casual passage of a dull and weary
ox, or the stealthy tread of the fox, the wild-cat, or the wolf of
the neighboring forest, disturbed the deep dust, which lay six
inches deep on the many unfenced roads which meandered
through those sterile commons, it rose thick and dark, and hung
there long, fanned away by no breath of air, and immovable as
though it were a point of question whether the earthy particles,
or the atmosphere on which they seemed upborne, were the
heavier.

Such was the day, most strange, and most unfit, on which
it was determined that a royal army—one of those stupendous
chevauchées of mail-clad men-at-arms—numbering thousands
upon thousands of high-born cavalry, which formed the feudal
array—the ban and arrière ban of France—should take the field.

Charles the Sixth, the unhappy king of France, who but
twelve years before had mounted the throne with auguries so
proud and happy, whose gay youth had been blessed with
visions ominous of great glory, even while his mad orgies were
making the sepulchral vaults of St. Denys to resound with
revelry and riot, now a king in little more than name, betrayed
by whom he should most have trusted, deserted by his nearest
relatives, alone among traitors, had resolved—at length resolved

[figure description] Page 075.[end figure description]

when it was too late, to assert his royalty and rights, to be—no
longer seem—a king.

A few months before an atrocious crime had been committed
in the streets of Paris, on the holy festival of the Fête Dieu,
almost within ear-shot of the palace, whence the intended victim
had scarce departed, leaving the presence of the king. “This
was an attack of expiring feudality upon feudal right, traitorously
made by an arrière vassal on his suzerain's office, within
the very palace of his suzerain.”* That was a villanous night
attack, a murderous ambuscade, executed under the instigation,
if not by the positive orders of the Duke of Brittany—the secret
enemy of France, and sworn friend of the English.

The victim of this base outrage was Sir Oliver le Clisson, High
Constable of France, and the only man, perhaps, in all his realm
on whom the unfortunate monarch could really place reliance;
for his uncles, the Dukes of Burgundy and Berry, were his illcounsellors
at least, and ill-wishers, while his own brother, the
young and handsome Duke of Orleans, recently espoused to the
beautiful daughter of the Duke of Milan, was neither firm
friend, nor sure dependence.

By these men, and by all the secret evil-doers and enemies
of the king, Clisson was mortally hated, and in addition
feared.

“In France,† he was Constable, the king's sword against the
barons; in Brittany, on the contrary, he was the leader of the
barons against the duke. Closely allied to the houses of Anjou
and Penthievre, he only waited his opportunity to expel this
duke, and dismiss him to his friends the English. The duke,
who knew De Clisson thoroughly, lived in constant fear of him,

[figure description] Page 076.[end figure description]

and dreamed only of the terrible man with one eye, could never
forgive himself for having had his enemy within his hands—having
held him, and not having had the courage to make away
with him. Now there was one who had an interest in Clisson's
death, having everything to fear from the Constable, and the
house of Anjou. This was an Anquin lord, Pierre du Craon,
who, by his theft of the treasures of the Duke of Anjou, his
master, during his Neapolitan expedition, was the cause of his
perishing unsuccored. His widow never lost sight of this man;
and Clisson, the ally of the house of Anjou, never met the
thief without treating him as he deserved.

“These two fears, these two hates, came to an understanding.
Craon promised the Duke of Brittany to rid him of Clisson.
Returning secretly to Paris, he entered the city by night—the
gates being constantly open since the punishment of the Maillotins.
He filled his hotel in the market St. Jean with cut-throats,
and here they waited many days with doors and windows
closed. At last, on the 13th of June, the Fête Dieu, a
grand gala being given in the hotel Saint Paul, with jousts,
supper, and dances, till after midnight, the Constable returned
from it almost alone to his hotel, Rue de Paradis. The vast
and silent Marais, desert enough now, was much more so then;
great hotels, gardens, and convents being scattered here and
there over it. Craon stationed himself on horseback, with forty
bandits, at the corner of the rue St. Catherine. On Clisson's
coming up, they extinguished their torches, and fell upon him.
At first the Constable took it to be a freak of the king's younger
brother. But Craon would add to death the bitter pang of
letting him know by whose hand he died. `I am your enemy,'
he cried, `I am Pierre de Craon.'

“The Constable, who had no other weapon than a small
cutlass, defended himself as long as he could, but at length a

[figure description] Page 077.[end figure description]

blow on the head felled him, and, in falling, he luckily struck
against a half-open door—a baker's, who was heating his oven,
the night being far advanced. He had fallen head-foremost,
half into the shop, so that to complete the murder, it would
have been necessary to enter it. But not one of the forty durst
alight; and preferring to believe that the deed was done, they
escaped at full gallop through the gate St. Antoine.

“The news was instantly brought to the king, who had retired
to bed. He would not wait to dress, but throwing a cloak
over him, hurried off without waiting for his attendants. He
found the Constable come to himself, and promised that he
would avenge him, swearing that nothing should ever be more
dearly paid.

“Meanwhile the murderer had secreted himself in his castle
of Sable au Maine, and then in some secret nook of Brittany.
The king's uncles, who were overjoyed at the event, and who
had some intimation of it beforehand, to put off the king and
gain time, asserted that Craon was in Spain. But the king was
not to be deceived; it was the Duke of Brittany whom he desired
to punish.”

Some time had elapsed since the perpetration of the foul
deed of assassination, so great was the desire of the king's
uncles to shelter the miscreant, whose crime they in sooth
regarded as good service, and their reluctance to proceed to extremities
against the Duke of Brittany, who was of their party,
and their good friend.

But the king was very urgent, and for once resolute in his
will, so that nothing could make him change it. For he was
determined to drive the Duke of Brittany from his duchy, and
nominate a governor over it till his children should be of age,
that it might be restored to them. And it was of no avail that
while the king tarried at Le Mans, his uncles caused a letter to

[figure description] Page 078.[end figure description]

be written to him by the Lady Jolande de Bar, Queen of Arragon,
and cousin-german of the King of France, informing
him that she had caused to be arrested, and detained in prison
at Barcelona, a French knight, who had come thither with a
handsome array, intending to pass the sea to Naples, and whom
she believed to be Sir Pierre de Craon. The king, however,
was not to be deceived, but persisted in his resolve; and his
uncles could not refuse to accompany their sovereign with their
vassals, since they were bound in honor to do so; the rather
that in order “to put an end to their repugnances and delays,
he had restored to the Duke de Berri that Languedoc, of which
he had on such just grounds deprived him.”*

Now, although the king had been for some time past languishing
from the effects of a raging fever, from which he was
not well recovered, and was, moreover, heart-sick with impatience
and anger at the delays imposed upon him by his traitorous
kinsmen, he would now be held back no longer; nor
would he listen to any discussions, but ordered the oriflamme to
be unfurled, for that on the morrow he would surely march.

On the preceding evening he had sent for the marshals of his
army to his chamber, and ordered them to have the men-at-arms
ready by early morn to march to Angers; “For,” he
added, “we have determined never to return from Brittany until
we have destroyed the traitors who give us so much trouble.”

And in the morning of the terrible and oppressive August
day which I have described, in the middle of the month, when
the sun has the greatest force, after having heard mass and
drunk a cup, the king mounted his horse, and took his way into
the forest of Le Mans, accompanied by all the following of his
realm; his uncles, with their vassals, and all the great

[figure description] Page 079.[end figure description]

feudatories of the kingdom, and men-at-arms, from Artois, Beauvais,
Fermandois, and Picardy, and other distant countries; in seeming,
a right royal host. And yet, for all that, Charles was
alone with all that glorious following—alone in the midst of
traitors. The men were about him, by whose very hands, or at
whose instigation, his Constable had been attacked and stricken
down at his own palace-gates, and was it likely that such
should be over scrupulous about laying hands on him!

During the whole of his detention at Mans, the king had
labored hard at the council, where he had met more opposition
than assistance; he was feeble both in mind and body, daily
attacked by fever fits, which were increased by any contradiction
or fatigue; and these his counsellors thrust upon him
daily. No wonder if his intellects were at times disordered and
obscured—for it would seem they would have it so; and the
more that they observed his looks, wild and wandering, or his
words strange and inconsistent, the more they affronted his
desires and thwarted him.

Moreover, he felt, although he gave no inch to the feeling, that
he was beset with domestic enemies; that he was marked out
by the men of his own blood, by the nobles of his realm, the
clergy, the whole people, for hatred—perhaps for destruction.
“What, however, had he done, to be thus hated by all, he who
hated none, but rather loved all the world? his desires were for
the alleviation of his people's burdens—at least his heart was
good; and this all the right-minded knew full well.”

In this state of mind and body, the young king mounted his
horse between nine and ten o'clock of the morning, and rode
forth from Le Mans, followed by the whole of his mighty cavalcade,
across a wide and sandy plain, exposed to the full glare
of the scorching sun. And the dust surged up in clouds from
beneath the thousands of trampling hoofs, and hung fixed in the

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sweltering and stirless atmosphere, like the dread crimson cloud
that heralds the deadly simoom of the Arabian desert, stifling
and almost intolerable to both man and beast.

The horses, although travelling at a foot's pace only, literally
sprinkled the soil with the sweat that streamed from their
limbs—the stoutest of the men-at-arms could scarcely endure
the weight of their solid panoply, while the younger and weaker
of their number fainted from heat, or fell from their saddles,
overdone by the excess of toil. So insufferable, in fact, was the
closeness of the weather, that it was found utterly impossible,
not only to march in order, or to preserve anything like regular
rank, but even to hold together in compact bodies. And, consequently,
as they were marching through a friendly territory,
with no enemy within many leagues' distance, and as the country—
open, level, unencumbered by fences, and traversed by
innumerable roads, or rather tracks, running parallel one to the
other, over the heaths and commons—favored such operations,
the army subdivided itself into various bands, columns, and
divisions, each under the banner of its own lord or leader, and
each marching, at its own pleasure, without concert or order,
towards a common point.

Nor, when the vanguard entered the great wooded tract,
known as the forest of Le Mans, was the case materially altered.
For, in the first place, the woodland, like the commons, was
intersected by numerous wood-paths and glades, used by the
charcoal-burners; and, in the second, except in rare spots,
where the underwood grew into tangled thickets, or masses of
large timber-trees had overcrowded the coppice, the forest was
composed for the most part of thin straggling underwood,
scattered more or less sparsely over barrens overspread with
dwarf heather, fern, and broom, such as offered no impediment
to the progress of an array so open and loose, not to say

[figure description] Page 081.[end figure description]

undisciplined, as that of a chevauchée of feudal horse. Along the
principal causeway only, which ran in a direct line across the
forest, was the woodland dense and continuous; but here, and
on either side, for a breadth of a quarter of a mile, a dense and
almost impenetrable pine-wood still prevailed, with trees so
tall and shadowy, that at high noon the road was gloomy, and
at early evening dark as midnight.

At a distance, the deep green shadows of this avenue seemed
to promise something of coolness and relief from the hourly-increasing
rage of the sunbeams, and to it therefore the king
directed his way, followed only by a few of his personal attendants,
and some men-at-arms of his immediate guard.

It is hardly possible, on reviewing the history of the singular
occurrences which followed, not to believe that deep treason was
intended on this occasion to the unhappy monarch; and that,
although in some degree hideously successful, the plans of the
conspirators were frustrated, or, at least, fell out differently from
what they intended, since the final consequences of the catastrophe
were such as could scarcely have been contemplated, and
were, moreover, too distant and too little certain to have been
devised aforehand.

Certain it is, that no advanced party was thrown forward—
no flankers detached to scour the woods on either hand—no
precautions taken against treachery or ambuscade, in a place
singularly adapted for the harbor of lurking assassins, and in an
age when no place was safe to those in power, and when precautions,
the strictest and most ceremonious, were of daily
custom.

No friend, moreover, no man of rank, or councillor, with
whom he could hold converse, by which to while away the
weariness of the hot and tedious march, or to distract the heavy

[figure description] Page 082.[end figure description]

and distempered gloom which weighed on his spirits, accompanied
him, or was within call.

It can hardly be imagined that he was not so left alone of set
purpose; so that, whatever might occur—and it was probably
well known that something would occur—there should be no
ready aid at hand, nor any witnesses.

So the king rode along, slowly, in gloom—in distempered
spirits—in dreamy and unsettled mood. It must be remembered,
that, from his childhood, he had been different from other
children, that he had ever a strange and visionary turn of mind,
that he believed himself to have seen visions and have held
intercourse with things supernatural.

Hunting the stag some twelve years before in the forest of
Senlis, he had encountered a miraculous deer, which had survived
to display the golden collar with which it had been decorated
by Julius Cæsar, fourteen centuries ago, to the infant king
of Christendom—who was destined, his flattering courtiers
swore, to emulate the glories of the first emperor of Rome.

From that day the mystic stag had been his chosen emblem;
from that day the wildest mysticism of occult science, of mythical
romance, of awful superstition had laid hold of him; and
that they doubtless knew full well, and counted on, who devised
that which followed. There is a narrow, scanty rill, which traverses
that wide, thirsty tract, fed by perennial sources, crossing
the high road not many miles from Le Mans, and nourishing
along its banks to the present day a heavy coppice of alders
and water-willows. Even in that burning drought its shallow
channel, too insignificant to require a bridge which should span
it, contained a small thread of water.

A huge oak tree completely overhung it, and the path
beneath its heavy umbrage was cool with grateful exhalations
from the brooklet.

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The king, merciful to his beast by nature—and the horse he
rode was a favorite—drew him in as he set his fore-feet in the
channel, and casting his reins down upon his glossy neck,
suffered him to bend down his head and drink, smiling the
while with a faint, melancholy smile at the eagerness with
which he plunged his muzzle into the cool current, and clapping
him on his neck with his ungloved hand. Seeing that
the king paused, his pages, who rode next behind him, halted at
some hundred yards' distance, and the men-at-arms again a
little space behind them, unwilling to intrude upon the monarch
in his mood of gloom.

Suddenly, a wild, prolonged, plaintive wail arose from the
thicket, more like to the dolorous howl of some animal in mortal
suffering than to any sound of human agony or sorrow;
and before any one might even surmise what was the meaning
of the outcry, a hideous apparition glided out from the forest
shadows, and confronted the astounded monarch.

It was a tall, emaciated figure of a man, barefooted and
bareheaded, with wild, knotted elf-locks, hollow-eyed, hollow-checked,
white-lipped, liker to an animated corpse than to any
living thing. He was clad in a miserable cassock of white
russet, and nothing can be imagined more deplorable than his
whole aspect and condition—the like of him was never seen
before that day, nor was he ever seen or heard tell of by any
after it.

As he confronted the king, startling his horse, which threw
up its head at the strange vision, he caught the reins boldly;
and the charger, one of the bravest and most fiery that was
ever backed of man, stood snorting, with wide eyes and expanded
nostrils, trembling in every limb, sweating at every pore.

“Ride back!” he cried, in a low, deep, monotonous voice,
“ride back, noble king. You are betrayed!—betrayed!”

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And whether it was an echo, or an accomplice, or something
beyond nature, a deep response, “Betrayed! betrayed!” appeared
to the distempered senses of the king—who sat in his
saddle, rigid, glaring on his strange visitant like one stricken
with catalepsy—to resound through the thickets. But, at this
moment, some of the men-at-arms came up at the gallop, and
beat the hands and bare arms of the man, maniac, impostor, or
seer—be he which he might—until he let go his hold, and the
terrified horse sprang forward, and bore his royal master onward,
almost unconscious as it seemed of all that had passed,
and plunged in profound meditation.

But no one stayed to arrest or question that strange personage—
it might be, because no persons of authority were at
hand; it might be, because the men-at-arms were themselves
shaken by superstitious fancies; it might be because they were
so ordered.

And the figure ran along the way, beside the army, until the
men-at-arms had all passed him by, still waving his arms aloft,
and screaming in that dismal, doleful tone—“Ride back, ride
back, sir king! betrayed! betrayed!” and none harmed him,
nor meddled with him at all. But when the last men-at arms
had outstripped and passed him by, some of them looked
back—it may be trembling—and he had disappeared; nor from
that day did any human eyes behold him.

But the king rode on—for none came near to comfort him,
or converse with him, or question him of what had passed; not
his uncles, nor his brother of Orleans, nor any of his nobles—
on “through the weary forest, stunted and affording no shade;
on, into the sultry heaths and dazzling mirages of southern
sand”*—solitary, alone, with a multitude around him.

[figure description] Page 085.[end figure description]

It was high noon, when they cleared the forest and entered
on the vast, open plains; on which, as all the separate bands
defiled out of the forest, and spread out, as best they might, to
avoid the dust and the pressure of the multitude, all might
behold each other, and each one the king, his master.

And the sun was resplendent, and the heat was intolerable;
so that there was none so well used to arms but he suffered by
it fearfully, and many of the horses perished.

At this time the king rode by himself, as before, to avoid the
dust, and the Dukes of Berri and Burgundy, conversing together,
kept on his left hand, at about two acres' distance from
him. The other lords—such as the Count de la Marche, Sir
James of Bourbon, Sir Charles d'Albret, Sir Philip d'Artois,
Sir Henry and Sir Philip de Bar, Sir Peter de Navarre—rode
in different paths. The Duke of Bourbon, the Lord de Coucy,
Sir Charles d'Angers, the Baron d'Ivry, were following at a
gentle pace, talking together, at some distance from the king,
nothing suspecting, as it seemed, the misfortune that should
befall him.

The sandy plain reflected the heat fearfully; and, as it fell
out, the king was dressed, or buried rather, in a dress of black
velvet, and wore on his head “only a single hood of crimson,
ornamented with a chaplet of beautiful pearls, which the queen
had given him on leaving her. He was followed by one of his
pages, who had a Montauban cap of polished steel upon his
head, that glittered in the sun; and behind him another page
rode on horseback, carrying a vermilion-coloured lance, enveloped
with silk, for the king, the head of which lance was
broad, sharp, and bright.

“As they were thus riding, the pages—who were but children—
grew negligent of themselves and their horses; and the
one who bore the lance fell asleep, and forgetful of what he had

[figure description] Page 086.[end figure description]

in his hand, let it fall on the casque of the page before him,
which made both the casque and the lance ring loudly.”*

At the clash and glimmer of the steel, the king's frame was
shaken as if by a convulsive spasm, and he started in his
saddle, and erected his head, which had hung drooping on his
breast, and glared about him for a moment with the clear, keen
glance of an awakened eagle; he gathered up his reins, giving
his horse the spur, and made a demivolt, unsheathing his
sword as he did so, and flashing it in the hot sunlight.

“Forward!” he shouted. “Forward, and set on! God and
Saint Denys! Set upon these traitors who would sell us!”

And, with the words, he dashed between the terrified pages,
who scattered as they saw him coming, and charged full upon
the knights who followed him, reining his horse, and dealing
sweeping blows with his sword from side to side at all whom
he approached; for he was quite distraught, and fancied that
all around him were his enemies. The Duke of Orleans, his
brother, saw him coming, and fled in terror; for he saw that the
king knew him not, or, perhaps, fancied that he knew him too
well. And Charles spurred after him at full speed, shouting
and gaining on him at every stride of his horse—for he was
the better mounted. And of a surety, he had there, on that
day, overtaken and slain him, but that he turned and winded
his horse, and so eluded him; and now, as he did so, some
knights or men-at-arms rode in between and interposed themselves—
not resisting the king or defending themselves, but
striving to avoid him. But right dearly did they pay for their
gallantry and devotion: for the king was in no sort himself,
but was as one possessed; and he struck hard blows with his
sword, which was well tempered of fine Bordeaux steel, and cut

[figure description] Page 087.[end figure description]

down all who crossed his path—four gallant men-at-arms, who
all died afterwards of the wounds which he dealt them; and
lastly a good knight of Gascony, the bastard of Polignac, whom
he slew outright at a single blow.

And there was a mighty concourse of men galloping in all
directions, and shouting; for those who were near at hand, and
saw what was to do, spurred this way and that—some striving
to avoid the king, and some to lay hold on him, that he might
do no more evil, and called to each other that he should do
likewise; and they who were at a distance, and might not see,
fancied that it was a deer or a hare that they were hunting—
but it was the king. And they, too, shouted and galloped;
and the wilder the tumult waxed the madder grew the king;
until, at length, “when he was quite jaded and streaming with
sweat, and his horse in a lather from fatigue, a Norman knight,
who was one of his chamberlains and much beloved by him,
came behind and caught him in his arms, though he had his
sword still in his hand. When he was thus held, all the other
lords came up, and took the sword from him. He was dismounted,
and gently laid on the ground, that his jerkin might
be stripped from him, to give him more air and cool him.”*

They had done better and shown more mercy had they slain
him on that day; for, thenceforth, his life was crueller to him and
sadder than any death had been, how cruel soever—and those
who were the causes of it God will judge, for he knoweth.

Then they laid him on his litter, and carried him back to Le
Mans; and the marshals called back the van, and told them
that the expedition was at an end for that season.

But, as they returned, the word passed among the knights
and men-at-arms, how, that “to ruin France, the king was
poisoned, or bewitched, before he left Le Mans this morning.”

[figure description] Page 088.[end figure description]

And the word reached the ears of the Duke of Orleans and
the princes of the blood-royal. So when they reached Le Mans,
they questioned his physicians what was his distemper; and
they laid it on his fever, and cleared themselves honestly—
showing that they had advised him to rest quiet, and forbear
from riding in the heat, but he would not.

And they inquired of his chamberlain and butler, Sir Robert
de Lignac and Robert Tulles, who had given him his last wine
and tasted it, and they cleared themselves, and brought bottles
of the same wine which he had drunk of, and proffered themselves
to drink.

“Then said the Duke of Berry—

“ `We are debating here about nothing. The king is poisoned,
or bewitched only by bad advisers—but it is not time, at
present, to talk of these matters. Let us bear the misfortune
as well as we can for the moment.'

“And the Duke of Burgundy said—

“ `We must return to Paris—the expedition is at an end.'

“They did not then say all they thought; but they made
their intentions very apparent to those who were not in their
good graces, on their return to Paris.”*

p583-094 The Maid of Orleans: 1429.

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[figure description] Page 091.[end figure description]

It is not within the compass of argument to maintain that
the progress of society, the advance of civilization, and the
growth of science, have not, in some degree, affected and even
altered the standards, by which men judge of thoughts, principles,
and actions, as praiseworthy or culpable—nay, in the
abstract, as virtuous and vicious. So, if we are in error, it is
perfectly possible and consistent that, in two different periods of
the world—two different constitutions of society, the very same
line of conduct in man or woman should call forth the highest
admiration, and acquire deathless fame, or awaken criticism
only, and be judged dubious at the least, if not disgraceful.

We might instance the recorded hardihood of Spartan
mothers, inaccessible to the slightest touch of womanly or
motherly feeling, a hardihood which it is still the fashion to
laud in Fourth of July orations as the beau-ideal of patriotism,
heroism, and a genuine love of freedom, whereas it was in truth
no more than the cold and stupid insensibility of minds unrefined
by civilization, unswayed by sentiment, and unsoftened by any
of those redeeming graces, which, it is said, even among the
most barbarous and savage hordes, are observed to relieve the
primitive ruggedness of nature in the softer sex—a hardihood

[figure description] Page 092.[end figure description]

which, were it now affected or put on by maiden, wife, or mother
of our race, would consign her to endless scorn and loathing,
as a woman deprived of the best attributes of womanhood,
and differing only from the lost and lowest of her sex as inferior
to them in the want of that “one touch of nature,” which, in
the words of the great English dramatist, “makes the whole
world kin.”

In like manner, we might adduce the practice—for, among
the ancients, before the Christian era, it was a practice, and a
time-honored practice, too, among the wisest and the best of
men—of deliberate and long premeditated suicide. For in
those days, not to die by his own hand, for one guiltlessly sentenced
to the hand of the executioner, or fallen into the power
of unrelenting enemies, was certainly regarded as an act of
cowardice and dishonor; while self-murder, in a similar state
of circumstances, was held an added title to the immortal honor
of the sage, the patriot, or the unsuccessful hero.

At a much later period, to decline the arbitration of the sword
in quarrels of a private and social nature, and, whether in the
case of receiving a wrong at the hands of another, or inflicting
it at his own, to deny the appeal to single combat, was sufficient—
nay, in some countries, to this very hour, is sufficient—to
deprive the highest member of society of all claim to social
position, to stigmatize him as a poltroon, and banish him,
deprived of caste for ever, from the companionship of men of
honor; whereas, it is now the cry of that popular voice, which
some infatuated Roman once defined as being the voice of God,
that to endure obloquy, calumny, insult, nay blows, without
resenting them, is the best proof of manhood, of gentlemanly
bearing, and of a clear and correct sense of honor.

Without entertaining the slightest idea of entering into the
discussion of any one of these vexed and disputed questions,

[figure description] Page 093.[end figure description]

we have thought it well to dwell somewhat at length upon the
alteration of popular sentiment on these several points, the
rather that in the very person of the Heroine, whom we have
selected as the subject of the present article, we have an
instance directly in point—an instance of conduct on the part
of a young woman, which occurring as it did, in the early
part of the fifteenth century, we cannot hesitate to pronounce
the offspring of genuine patriotism, of genuine heroism, and
absolved, in consequence of the mode of thinking and acting
in those days, from any censure of indecorum or want of those
feminine attributes, to which everything else is now, and most
justly, held subservient.

We are the more especially called upon to note this discrepancy,
as we might otherwise ourselves fall under the charge
of inconsistency, since in a preceding paper on the character of
Philippa of Hainault, the admirable and womanly wife of the
third Edward of England, we took occasion to express our
abhorrence and loathing of those women, who in an age of
gentleness, civilization, refinement, and a thorough apportionment
of their appropriate rights, duties, and tasks to the two
sexes, have chosen, in defiance of the laws of nature, the modesty
of nature, and the wholesome prescriptions of society, and
in obedience to a morbid love of excitement, or masculine lust
for power or fame, to undertake the parts, unsolicited and
uncalled for by anything of duty or of station, of propagandists,
conspirators, patriots, and statesmen; and have actually so
far forgotten themselves as to don—not figuratively, but actually—
the breeches, to become colonels of dragoons, and to fight
hand to hand among the shock of martial gladiators. Of a truth,
little as we can sympathize with the executioners—the scourgers,
as it is alleged, of women, quite as little can we feel for the
scourged; who, according to our judgment, having made their

[figure description] Page 094.[end figure description]

election, were bound to abide by the consequences; and, having
adopted the duties of manhood, had no right to complain of
finding that they had thereby incurred the responsibilities of
manhood also.

It is to her gentleness, to her weakness, and to her alleged
incapacity to contend with man, in braving the shocks of the
world, the inclemency of seasons, the severity of toils, and more
especially the brunt of battle, that woman is entitled to the protection,
the reverence and—even when perverse and reprobate—
to the pitiful clemency and considerate tolerance of man. The
moment she assumes an equality of mental hardness, of physical
robustness, or of active hardihood and daring, she forfeits
the indulgences willingly conceded to the implied weakness of
her feminine organization, and having deliberately unsexed
herself, may properly and most righteously be judged as one
of those among whom she has chosen to enrol herself, not as
one of those whom she has deserted, in defiance of every principle
of decorum, decency, or nature.

An effeminate, and effete, and unsexed man, the Hercules
degraded into a willing Omphale, has at all times been regarded
with scorn, abhorrence, and that disgust which is felt for reptiles
beyond and below the attributes of nature. Men shrink
from him with plainly discovered loathing, and true women
shake the contamination of his vile presence from the very
skirts of their raiment.

Why is it then? why should it be? How can it be?—for
it is, alas!—it is even among ourselves, that the loud-tongued
viragoes, the sword-drawing termagants, who, ashamed of their
highest attributes, the delicate sensibilities, the finer organization,
the more perfect perceptions, purer motives, holier aspirations,
and more admirable powers of their own sex, who, in
love with the brute force, the fierce ambition, the fiery

[figure description] Page 095.[end figure description]

excitement peculiar to us, “Pagod things of sabre way, with fronts
of brass and feet of clay,”—who forgetful of all modesty, propriety,
decorum, nature, unsex themselves even to the putting
on not the garb only, but the feelings of the gladiator, looking
on death with wolfish eyes, nay! dealing death with gory
hands. How can it be that these, and such as these, can meet
with sympathy, nay! but with raptures of applause, triumphs
of adulation, not from the men alone—though that were bad
enough—but from the women—the sensitive, the delicate, the
feminine, would that we could add, the true-hearted women of
America?

Even in men, and with a good cause to boot, heroism of the
battle-field—is it not a bloody and a beastly business? and if the
state of society may not dispense with it, nor the constitution of
the human heart deny its thrill of admiring sympathy to the
brave man, the strength and daring of whose spirit conquers
the weakness of his flesh, and in whom the love of country or
of glory is greater than the fear of death—in Heaven's high
name let us at least limit the license of the sword to the male
hero, and doom the woman who betakes herself to so bloody
work to a sentence as disgraceful as that which in the male
attaches to the coward. It were a just doom, sanctioned by
nature and analogy, for each is alike guilty of unfitness to
rational duties, of rebellion against the veriest law of nature—
and here the woman is the worst sinner, as offences of commission
must needs be heavier than those of omission, and as wilfulness
is at all times less the subject of pity than weakness
which cannot always be controlled.

But, as I have before remarked, there have been ages of the
world, in which the generally received opinions concerning
duties, obligations, and the appropriate functions and fitnesses
of the sexes have been so different from these which now exist,

[figure description] Page 096.[end figure description]

that the historian of modern days is bound to judge of the
actions and principles, the characters and conduct of the great
and good, as well as of the base and bad, in accordance with
the lights which they possessed and the views which then
obtained, not as if they had occurred under the clearer blaze
of recent knowledge, or under the better ordered standards of a
wiser and more generous society. So that many deeds may
have been done, nay have been done, in the troublous times
of the middle ages, which we must admire, must elaborate, must
hold aloft, as examples of splendid heroism; though they would
nowadays be stigmatized with propriety as indecorous, and as
indicative of feelings and impulses which must be regarded as
anything rather than honorable. And again, many deeds which
would now be recorded with execrations on the heads of the
perpetrators, as prodigies of cruelty and horror, must be narrated
as lamentable instances of the ignorance and semi-barbarism of
general society at that period, but by no means as examples of
unusual or peculiar ferocity, or insensibility, or ignorance of the
individual. Of the former class are many of the most highly
lauded warlike exploits of the middle ages, many of which are
tinctured with a degree of hardness, ruthlessness, insensibility,
and love of battle, if not of bloodshed, which would be pronounced
in the nineteenth century as purely detestable. Highbred
and gentle women looked upon strife and slaughter, not
with dismay and loathing, but with applause and admiration,
and rewarded the most bloodstained homicide with renown and
love. The dearest ties of affection were broken on trivial points
of honor. Insensibility to the death of children, parents, wives,
nay, the sacrifice of near kinsmen to small points of chivalry,
were held claims for honorable note and fame of patriotic heroism.
Quarter was rarely given on the field of battle, until the
victors were weary and worn out with slaying, unless for the

[figure description] Page 097.[end figure description]

sake of immeasurable ransoms; and men of the highest rank,
character, and condition, were suffered to languish miserable
years in closer durance than the worst felons of our days, if once
they were so hapless as to fall into the hands of an enemy as
prisoners of war.

Of the second class are the judicial combats, the fearful punishments
inflicted on innocent persons for witchcraft, magic,
devil-worship, and the like, all which absurdities were then
more generally believed to be positive truths, and atrocities of
hourly occurrence, by the nations at large, from the highest
and best to the lowest intellects, than are the truths of Holy
Writ accepted as truths by the masses of even the most Christian
communities. It is much to be doubted whether down to
the fourteenth century there were even ten men living in Europe,
from the Danube to the Bay of Biscay, who disbelieved the
actual and present agency of the Supreme Being in judicial
battles, or of the Evil Being in necromancies, magical murders,
false prophecies, and all the fanciful wickedness comprised under
the vulgar name of witchcraft.

In reviewing, therefore, the first class, we must not be deterred
by the ruggedness, the hardness, the impossibility, nor
even by the fierce and sanguinary habits of the times, from attributing
the praise of true heroism to many who were in their
days, and according to their acceptance of the nature of heroism,
true heroes, whatever might be the title which should be
justly given to their deeds done nowadays.

In like manner, recording the events of the second order, we
must beware of attributing individual cruelty and savageness
to rulers and magistrates who ordered the infliction of penalties
which make our blood run cold, for offences which we
know to have no existence, but in the reality of which they
implicitly believed; for they were in reality in no wise more

[figure description] Page 098.[end figure description]

censurable than the judge or jury of a modern court is for pronouncing
a sentence, or finding a verdict of death, this year,
for an offence, which the milder law of another year pronounces
worthy only of a milder penalty.

In both these classes of events and actions, so long as the
actors have acted up to the standards which their own ages
considered best, highest, purest, noblest, they must be acquitted
of all blame, and entitled to all honor. It is only where they
have fallen below the spirit of their time in morality, or clemency,
or virtue, or where they have grossly exceeded it in
superstition, intolerance, bigotry, or severity, or, once more,
where being themselves endued with clearer lights, purer perceptions,
and higher talents, they have used and perverted the
less elevated spirit of the times to their own selfish, views that
they deserve our sternest denunciations.

The heroine to whom I have assigned this paper, presents a
remarkable case in point, under both the views in question—
under the first, as regards her character, and the light in which
we are to regard her—under the second, as relates to her
lamentable and unmerited end.

The first question, as regards written history, has always been
decided in her favor, though it is quite certain that, according
to existing ideas, a woman playing such a part to-day would
receive no higher credit from the judicious or the right-minded
than a Marie Ambræ, an Augustina of Saragossa, an Apollonia
Jagello, or any other high-spirited vivandière, whom we puff
in newspaper columns and praise in after dinner speeches, yet
never dream of introducing to our wives, or holding up as
objects of imitation to our daughters. The second question
has as generally been mistreated by historians, and attributed
nationally as a peculiar disgrace to England, and, individually,
as an act of unusual atrocity, to the regent Bedford, though it

[figure description] Page 099.[end figure description]

is perfectly evident that her fate would have been identical, if
her captors had been Frenchmen, and her judges Charles or
Dunois, for as the winning side really believed her mission,
inspiration, and powers to be divine, the losers as readily supposed
them to be fiendish: and in truth, the whole of her
career is so strange, unaccountable, and marvellous, even apart
from the supernatural wonders added to it by the one party,
and implicitly received by both, that it would be scarce surprising
if, in much milder and more recent times, and among
more enlightened actors, such a course of success were considered
by the vulgar minds, of which by the way there are many
in every place, as the result of superhuman powers. Nay! I
believe that, could such a thing have occurred, as the checking
of the career of the French arms, after Lodi, Marengo, Austerlitz,
and Jena, the total and repeated overthrow of Napoleon,
and the rolling back the refluent tide of battle from the Po and
Danube to the Seine and Loire, by an Austrian or Italian peasant
maiden, half the consular or imperial armies would have
cried sorcery, and the other treason; and if taken, she would
unquestionably have shared the fate, if not of Joan of Arc, at
least of Hofer, and a hundred Spanish partisans, shot in cold
blood as brigands. Nor do I think the case would have been
much altered if Wellington had been driven from the conquered
Pyrenees to the Tagus by a French paysanne, or the victor of
Buena Vista into the Rio Grande by a black-browed Mexicana—
at least I am sure that such events would go further to justify
the belief of supernatural agency, than any part of the performance
of the Misses Fox of Rochester with their assistant knockers,
which are believed by many, of what some are pleased to
call “the best minds in the country,” to be, not only superhuman
and divine, but the best, if not sole convincing proofs
of the immortality of the soul. Oh! Plato, Plato, if thy

[figure description] Page 100.[end figure description]

reasonings were well, some of them have been received into
most ill understandings.

But to come more directly to the personality of my heroine,
it cannot, I think, be doubted, whatever hypothesis we may take
of her career, that she was a very extraordinary, unusual, and in
some sort superior person. That she was an impostor is incredible;
and if, as I doubt not to have been the case, she was a
visionary or enthusiast, and perhaps something approaching to
what we call a somnambulic or mesmeric personage, she must
have had very rare faith in her own mission as a reality, and,
what is more, very rare powers of making others also believe in
its truth and divinity, to have effected what she did, with the
means which she had at her command. For the minds with
which, and against which, she acted, were all minds of greatly
above average capacity; and yet it appears to me to be very
certain that the leaders of both hosts did believe in her real
possession of superhuman powers—indeed, I scarcely see how
at that day and in the then state of the human mind, they
could have believed otherwise—though the French would of
course regard the supernaturalism as a divine, the English as a
diabolical agency; for such is the natural constitution of the
human mind, the partisans of any cause, which they have once
fairly adopted, under whatever views, coming in the end to
regard it as the true and heaven-favored cause.

But in order to get a little more nearly at this let us see
what was the state of France at her appearance; what the circumstances
of her success, and what the real extent of her services
to her king and country.

About fourteen years before, the tremendous battle of Agincourt,
won by the fifth Henry of England, had more than
decimated the aristocracy, and completely subdued the feudal
military power of France; all the leading princes of the blood

[figure description] Page 101.[end figure description]

royal, and a fearful proportion of the nobility of the realm, had
been slain on the fatal field, or still languished in English dungeons.
From that day forth every species of calamity had
befallen the unhappy France; the Queen-mother hostile to her
own son, a minor, the dauphin Charles; the furious factions of
the Armagroes and Burgundians literally deluging the streets
of Paris with French blood; province against province; prince
against prince; and ever and anon the English profiting by the
dissensions and disasters of the enemy to break in and overrun,
and desolate and take possession, until it really did seem
as though the boastful pretensions of the English king were
true; and as though his utmost ambition was about to be
realized, when he replied to the Cardinal des Ursias, who would
have persuaded him to peace—“Do you not see that God has
led me hither as by the hand? France has no sovereign; I
have just pretensions to the kingdom; everything here is in
the utmost confusion—no one thinks of resisting me. Can I
have a more sensible proof that the Being who disposes of empires
has determined to put the crown of France upon my head?”

And shortly afterward, though the battle of Baugé, wherein
the Duke of Clarence fell by the spear of the Scottish champion,
Allan Swinton, and Dorset, Somerset, and Huntingdon
were made prisoners, threw a solitary gleam of lustre over the
dark affairs of France, it availed not to retard the progress of
Henry, who had, in fact, conquered all the northern provinces,
and held, them in quiet possession; who was master of the
capital, Paris, wherein his son, afterwards Henry VI., of most
hapless memory, was born amid general acclamations, and
almost unanimously hailed as heir to both crowns; and who
had chased the Dauphin beyond the Loire, whither he was
pursued, almost in despair, by the victorious and united arms
of Burgundy and England.

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Had Henry's life been prolonged, it is difficult to conjecture
what would have been the end, for he was no less politic as a
prince, and shrewd as a man, than daring, skilful, and successful
as a leader. But the Disposer of empires, whose fiat he had so
recently anticipated, had already disposed of his tenure of his
own, much more of his half-conquered and rashly-expected
crown, and he was summoned from the captured capital of
France before that throne where kings and clowns are judged
equally, in the thirty-fourth year of his age, and the tenth of
his reign—a great king, a great conqueror, a brave, honorable,
and, in the main, a just and good man. Few men have performed
more splendidly ambitious acts from less personally selfish
motives; few kings have attained such glorious greatness
through their own personal action, with less alloy of evil or
detraction.

His son, whom he left not nine months old, and “whose
misfortunes in the course of his life,” to quote the language of
Hume, “surpassed all the glories and successes of his father,”
succeeded to the crown of his father, and to his claims on that
of France; nor, although minorities are proverbially weak, and
the times were turbulent and stormy, did his tenure of the one,
or his accession to the other, appear at first doubtful.

This appears to me to be in no degree tenable. In the first
place, no person can be half-real enthusiast, half-impostor—the
one or other phase of character must prevail. The impostor who
knows his own jugglery, cannot believe in his own supernatural
power; the enthusiast who does believe, has no need to have
recourse to imposture. Secondly, so general a religious imposture,
to which jurists, doctors of divinity, and ignorant, superstitious
warriors must have lent themselves, is wholly inconsistent
with the spirit of the age and the character of the popular
mind. Thirdly, Dunois, and the other French leaders, had been

[figure description] Page 103.[end figure description]

daily and hourly beaten, and had never shown either the talents
or the force which they subsequently displayed. Fourthly, it is
little likely that on the faith of so shallow and childish an imposture
as dressing up a simple village girl, not only sane but
shrewd and wise men, who had not previously ventured to undertake
the most trivial sally, now boldly should set armies in
the field, carry out enterprises of great pith and moment, and
utterly paralyse foes so able as Suffolk, Talbot, Scales, and
Falstoffe, by a series of well directed blows, stunningly delivered
and rapidly followed up. Fifthly, it is incredible, that,
if the French had been such fools as to try so silly a trick, if a
mere trick, the English could be so miserably gulled. And
lastly, the empty and useless pageant of the procession to
Rheims, the whole distance through the heart of an enemy's
country, and in the midst of his hostile and undismayed garrisons,
cannot be accounted for by political, military, or rational
grounds, or by any supposition, unless this, that every person of
the French army, and of the English army also, was thoroughly
convinced of her supernatural powers and irresistible
prowess.

This supposition accounts for the attempt, and accounts also
for its success. And such a conviction only could be wrought
upon such minds as those of Charles VII. and Dunois, of Suffolk
and Sir John Talbot, by a person who did really possess extraordinary
talents, extraordinary enthusiasm, and did really perform
extraordinary things. No one now believes that Oliver
Cromwell really heard a voice, at the dead of night, telling him
in his obscure boyhood that he should be “not king, but the
first man in England,” nor is it probable that John Hampden
then believed the vision—but he did believe the enthusiasm,
and did believe the fact, as he told Sir Philip Warwick, that
“you slave would be the greatest man in England.” The belief

[figure description] Page 104.[end figure description]

made the enthusiasm of the man—the enthusiasm of the man
made the belief of the followers, and the enthusiasm and belief
excited made the imagined vision to come to pass in a palpable
fact.

The facts are, that she relieved Orleans, in the first giving up
her own opinion to the advice of Dunois, hers being the more
daring council—that she then threw herself into the city,
marching, according to her own plan, directly through the
English lines, the hitherto victorious Britons, before a dozen of
whom hundreds of French had been daily flying in panic terror,
not daring to attack her—that she stormed the lines of Suffolk,
and utterly defeated his whole army with prodigious loss—that
then, following up her successes, she stormed Jergean, whither the
Regent had retired, carried the town by assault, Suffolk himself
being obliged to surrender himself—and that a few days after,
she again attacked the rear of the late victorious army with such
headlong valor, that the redoubted Falstoffe fled like a poltroon
before her, and was deprived of his garter for cowardice, while
Talbot and Scales were made prisoners, and the whole army
and cause of the English utterly disorganized and lost.

These are not the acts of an impostor, nor of men palming an
enthusiast, in whom they did not believe, on inferior minds.
Where did Charles and Dunois gain the audacity, the skill, and
the fortune to recover all that they had lost in fourteen years,
in as many days—where, indeed, if not in the conviction that
Joan's enthusiasm, visionary possession, and energetic will, were
indeed of heaven, and themselves consequently destined to be
victorious?

The rest of her career is explained yet more easily on the
same hypothesis. She next declared that her future mission
was to conduct Charles in triumph, at the head of a small force,
to Rheims, across one half the breadth of France, and there to

[figure description] Page 105.[end figure description]

crown him with the due ceremonial of the kings of France;
and this, too, she accomplished without a banner raised, a
trumpet blown, or a spear couched against her. The attempt
justified the success, for the very rashness of the undertaking
and inadequacy of the object increased the panic of the English.
But in what possible light must we regard the statesmen and
warriors whom Hume believes to have been the moving actors
of this wonderful drama, if we believe them, when it was their
business to have hunted the invaders from post to post, while
their panic was fresh upon them, until they left the land they
had so long held as their own; if we believe them, I say, at
such a time to have risked all they had won, and their army
and king to boot, for the sake of a mere empty pageant, which
might well have followed, but absurdly preceded the invasion
of the enemy?

This done, Joan declared her mission ended, her powers revoked,
and made public her desire to resume the dress of her
sex and her former condition. She was overruled, and a few
days afterward taken in a sally from Compiegne, by John of
Luxembourg, and transferred to the Duke of Bedford, by whom
she was delivered over to the ecclesiastical power, tried by a
court of bishops at Rouen, in which only one Englishman sate,
and sentenced to be burned to death as a witch. Assailed on
all sides by doctors and divines, by promises and threats, and
naturally and consistently doubting, from her fall, the origin of
her former successes, she declared her visions to be illusions
and her powers impostures, and had her sentence thereupon
commuted. Having, however, resumed male habits, said to
have been purposely thrown in her way, and again returned to
her former belief in her supernatural inspiration, probably from
the idea that the male habiliments were supernaturally sent to
her, she was adjudged a relapsed heretic and magician, and

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she was cruelly, but in direct accordance with the notions and
ideas of the age, burnt to ashes in the market-place at Rouen.

I see no cause to agree in the belief that any peculiar cruelty
prompted, or that any political tactics actuated either Bedford
or her judges, nor that it was any “pretence,” as Hume terms
it, “of heresy and magic,” by which she was consigned to the
flames, but as full a belief on the part of her slayers that she
was a foul and fiendish wizard, as her own conviction, and that
of her followers, was full and certain that she was a messenger
of heaven.

Heroine and enthusiast as she was, spotless of life, dauntless
of courage, hapless of death, but most fortunate of glory—
certainly an agent and minister of providence, not by divine
mission, but by the working of natural causes—for she redeemed
the throne of France to its native owners, never again
to be seriously disputed by an English claimant— few heroines
have a fairer title to the name, and none a fame more spotless.

Soon after the death of Henry, his rival, Charles VI., died
also. He had for many years possessed mere nominal authority
in France, and his life had been as unhappy to himself
as disastrous to his country. To his son he left only a disputed
crown and a divided country, and that he ever owned the
one unquestioned and the other entire, he owned in part to his
own high qualities, and in part to the character and achievements
of Joan, the maid of Are and Orleans. He was crowned
at Poictiers Charles VI.; his Paris, and Rheims—the sacred coronation
city—being both in the hands of the English. This event
occurred in the year 1422, and, although Henry was an infant,
and when even he arrived at manhood little better than imbecile,
so splendid was the administration of the protector, the
Duke of Bedford, and so great the talents of the renowned
generals who commanded under him, Somerset, Warwick,

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Arundel, Salisbury, Suffolk, and the still greater Talbot, that
they not only held Guienne, the capital, and all the northern
provinces, but pressed the war with vigor in the south and west,
so that the position of Charles VI. had become almost desperate,
when the disastrous battle of Verneuil, second only in the
slaughter of nobility to the fields of Cressy, Poictiers, and Agincourt,
reduced him to the last extremity, and to such a state of
hopeless poverty and depression that not only was he compelled
to abandon every effort at sustaining the parade of a court, but
was scarcely enabled to procure daily subsistence for himself and
a few faithful followers.

Just at this moment some dissensions occurred in the English
ministry, and the Duke of Bedford was recalled home, his
place being ably filled by Suffolk; and, although the Duke of
Brittany was beginning to look distastefully on the English alliance,
and Montargis was relieved by the bastard of Orleans,
better known in after days as the Count of Dunois, so little
effect did the change of hands appear to have produced on the
conduct of the war, that Orleans, the most important city of
France in the possession of Charles, was closely invested and
on the point of yielding, while the king himself was dissuaded
from retreating into the remote provinces of Dauphiny and
Languedoc by the entreaties of the fair but frail Agnes Sorel.

At this time an incident occurred so strange, and with consequences
so extraordinary, that one can scarce wonder at the
credulity of a French historian, who, describing the first appearance
of Joan on the scene of history, commences thus: “But at
this crisis the Lord, not desiring that France should be entirely
undone, sent a woman,” &c., &c., evidently esteeming her mission
as positive and direct as that of St. John or any of the
Holy Apostles—nor, I conceive, is it at all to be doubted that she

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herself, and those to whom she revealed her visions, were as
confident of her divine inspiration and superhuman power.

She was a poor girl, of the small village of Domremi, near
Vaucouleurs, in Lorraine, of the very lowest class of society.
She is variously stated to have been a hostler-wench at an inn,
and shepherdess; but of irreproachable conduct, and undoubted
virtue. It is said that she had manifested no singularity nor
given any tokens of possessing superior genius, until she was
seized by a sudden idea that she saw visions and heard voices
commissioning her to re-establish the throne of France and
expel the foreign invaders. She first made her way to the
presence of Baudricourt, the governor of Vaucouleurs, to whom
she declared her mission, and, although he at first treated her
with neglect, she at length so far convinced him that he sent
her on with an escort to the French court, at the little town of
Chinon. Here, it is asserted, that she at once recognised the
king, though purposely disguised and surrounded by his courtiers,
and that she claimed and described, even to its minutest
ornaments, and the place where it had long lain concealed, a
curious antique sword, which was found in the church of St.
Catharine de Fierbois. Hume, who is ever sceptical, leans to the
view that all this was jugglery, not exactly on Joan's part, but
on that of the French king and Dunois, who were determined
to use her as an instrument; and to the talents and skill of the
leaders, whose tactics he supposed were followed, Joan being
merely led as a puppet through the host, he ascribes all that
follows.

p583-114 The Lady Catherine Douglass: 1437.

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That was a dark and bloody age all the world over; an age
in which, for the most part, might made right, and the law of
force was the only law in existence; an age in which, if some
restraint of chivalry and courteousness was still maintained—
some relics of the resplendent heroism and gentle gallantry of
knight-errantry still animated the bosom and actuated the conduct
of the warrior nobility of England, France, and Spain—
scarcely a ray of civilization enlightened the deep gloom which
still brooded over the masses even of those great and powerful
countries, who were in fact little elevated above the beasts their
companions, and like them easily satisfied so long as they
possessed a shelter against the weather, and nutriment to supply
their merest wants. In the neighboring realm of Scotland,
however, the gloom of barbarism was impervious; no gentleness
tempered the savage and unlettered valor of the fierce nobility,
which was at this period their sole virtue; no gentleness even
towards the fair sex; nor were these weaker and softer portions
of creation exempt from the hardness, the rigor, and sometimes
the cruelty of the age. The common people, whether on the
Borders, or the Lothians, and the Merse, were scarcely superior
to the veriest savages, either in their habits of thought or in
their mode of life; and it was among the highest of the larger

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cities only that any of the comforts or refinements of life, only
among the monastic orders that any tincture of the rude letters
of the middle ages, could be found existing.

Distracted by the feuds which existed among all the noble
families of Scotland—feuds fought out with all the deadly rancor
peculiar to family dissensions, with indiscriminate slaughter of
all ages, sexes, qualities—waged with the unmitigated ferocity
of the times—with the storming of the castle, but without the
sparing of the cottage—with the devastation of the open country,
the conflagration of sparse hamlets and smaller borough towns,
even in periods of the profoundest foreign peace—that the unhappy
realm of Scotland presented everywhere south of the
Highland line the aspect of a country visited with the extremities
of fire and sword by an invading enemy; while to the
northward of that dreaded demarcation, the Highland clans
were wilder in their costumes, and no less terrible to their
neighbors, than were the wildest Indian tribes of North America
at the commencement of the present century.

Yet, in this dark and bloody time, in this distracted and almost
savage country, it was the fate of a sovereign to hold sway
over those ferocious barons, and over that turbulent and brutal
commons, whose virtues and whose talents would have done
honor to any age or nation, while his whole career speaks volumes
of reproach against those in which his lot was cast.

James the First, of Scotland, the first monarch of that most
unhappy of all royal houses, the house of Stuart, which, commencing
miserably with his own troubled and disastrous reign,
terminated no less miserably with that of his second English
namesake, more than two centuries later, leaving, as its annals,
little more than one continual record of civil war and domestic
slaughter, of perjury, tyranny, persecution, and treason, equally
on the one and the other side, of exile and assassination, of judicial

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combats and judicial executions—James the First, of Scotland, was
the son of Robert the Third, by Annabella Drummond, herself a
distant relative of the reigning house, born in 1394 to the perilous
heirship of that throne which proved so fatal to his race. His
father—a weak and priest-ridden prince, constantly over-ruled,
and, indeed, virtually dethroned by his ambitious brother, the
Duke of Albany—dreading the worst from that false kinsman,
sent his young son, then in his eleventh year, to France, where
he might be brought up and educated by the allied and friendly
monarch of that civilized and warlike kingdom, until he should
attain the age of manhood, when he should return and claim
his own, a man and a king indeed.

Fate interposed, however, and by her interposition sealed the
doom of the fated line, and determined, as it would seem, by
that one act, the subjugation of the Scottish realm and its ultimate
union with the cognate crown of England—a union prolifie
of prosperity and peace alike to either country. An English
squadron, cruising in the North sea, intercepted the vessel,
freighted with the fortunes of a nation, and, as the respective
countries were then involved in war, carried it to the
Thames as lawful prize of war; whereafter the young prince
and his suite were consigned, according to the custom of the
day, state prisoners to the Tower of London.

Henry IV. was at that period king of England; and being
engaged in the heat and fierceness of the French wars, imagined
that by the detention of the young prince, who, in the following
year, by the demise of his weak father, became the young king,
he could deprive France of her Scottish alliance, and therefore
held him in a species of free captivity, half a hostage, half a
captive, but subject to no other personal restraints than those
of compulsory residence within the guarded limits of one or the
other of the Royal Palaces. Ungenerous treatment of a surety.

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But when or where, in what period or what country, has policy
been generous?—policy, whose very nature is selfishness—whose
only object is to win the present greatest good for the man of
the nation, irrespective altogether of the fate or sufferings of
others. When we think on Napoleon, pining within the narrow
limits of his ocean isle—a boundless empire and domain to the
untutored, unambitious rustic—yet to his overvaulting spirit
strait in dimension as the narrowest of dungeons; when we
think on the noble Abd-el-Kader, gnashing his teeth, if not actually
in fetters, yet pent within the circuit of stone walls; his
eye accustomed to range over the illimitable desert, over the
topmost peaks of his native Atlas, bleared and blinking in the
glimmering twilight of his prison-house—when we think on
these, the victims of modern policy, how shall we visit with too
light reproach the sins, the crimes of that same policy, committed
when the lights of truth, of science, of religion, burned
dimly with a wavering flame over the doubtful nations!

Richard, the Lion Heart, tuning the cithern of the Troubadour
in that Austrian fortalice—James Stuart composing “the
King's Aubair” in the green slopes of Windsor—John of
Valois, a languid captive in the Tower, “that den of drunkards
with the blood of Princes”—Joan of Arc, writhing on her pile
in Rouen's crowded market-place—Louis of Enghien, in the
ditch of Vincennes, at murky morning's dawn—Napoleon glaring
over the blue Atlantic from the steep crags of St. Helena—
and the wild Arab champion wasting like a chained eagle, in
slow agony, far from his sandy wastes—a paradise to him—in the
heart of republican, free France, are but so many tokens that
the nature of man and policy of nations is the same as it was,
as it has been, is now—will it not be the same for ever?—
and that the watchword of the conqueror is still the same, Vœ victis!

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But save in this the ungenerousness of national policy and
natural humanity, Henry IV. was generous to his captive, for
in his guarded solitudes of Windsor the youthful James of
Scotland received such an education as he could not have
hoped to enjoy in the barren and unlettered battle fields of
Caledonia. He grew up fair and powerful, accomplished in all
manly exercises, fully up to the standard of that day's accomplishments
of exercise and arms and manhood—accomplished
in all gentle virtues, liberal letters, antique lore, and modern
fashions, how far beyond all his contemporaneous rivals!
While his youthful equal, Harry of Monmouth, one day to
paralyse the heart of France by the fruitless prowess, fruitless
carnage of Agincourt, was learning how to “turn and wind his
fiery Pegasus,” that he might “witch the world” of his own day
with “noble horsemanship,” young James of Scotland was already
drinking deep at the well of English undefiled” in the shades
not long before semi-deified by the rich chaunts of Chaucer,
soon to be made immortal by the wild wood-notes of the Swan
of Avon; had already tuned his pipe to those strains which
shall survive the memory of his conquerors; had already won
by the witcheries of his arts, the graceful gallantry of his demeanor,
the gentle manners of his courteous youth, the heart
of one who claimed the style already of a right royal English
lady, one day, alas! to bear the thorny crown and troublous
title of a right royal Scottish Queen—beautiful, high-born
Joanna Beaufort, whom he first saw, first loved, a captive, from
his prison casements in the round tower of Windsor, while she
was wandering, fancy-free, amid the verdant slopes and royal
gardens towards the Little Park and the smooth meads of Datchet—
places which live, gardens which glow, and meads which
bloom to this day, happy memorials of the happier past, lusty
mementoes of the time when English life was lusty, when men

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wore manhood with their beards, and women sought no rights
beyond the rights of womanhood; of conquering by their very
inability to conquer, and governing by virtue of submission.
And yet the women of that time, unprescient as they were in
that old day of “what fantastic tricks” their sex should some
time “play before high heaven, most ignorant of what they're
most assured, their glossy essence, making the angels weep,”
and all undreaming of the rights which they should one day
claim through their unborn posterity in a yet undiscovered
hemisphere, had, notwithstanding, a more clear insight into
the nature of their duties, and a more infinite capacity to do
and dare, and, if need were, to die, at duty's bidding, than ever
had the strongest-minded female of this nineteenth century
who pants to don the masculine attire and to achieve manly
laurels in the field, the forum, and the senate, seeing not that
they overstep the modesty of nature.

Hear therefore all, especially ye who burn in the advocacy of
the rights, hear a tale of the olden time, and a true tale, of the
duties—or what a Scottish maiden took to be such—of a true
woman.

It may seem a strange tale, it may seem a mistaken duty to
those who, reared in very different days, in a far distant clime,
and under circumstances most diverse—to those I say, who far
from believing loyalty to be a duty or a virtue, can scarcely be
induced to regard it as a principle, or as a fact at all; or induced
to consider it as other than the slavish truckling of a base
spirit, or the fanatical veneration of a superstitious spirit, to
something casually set above it; to such I say, it may seem a
strange tale and a mistaken duty; but I, for one, believe that,
in her line and season, the Lady Catherine Douglass did her
duty, as she understood it, and as it was; and did it well—and
that where she has gone, and where sooner or later we all must

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follow her, she hath her exceeding great reward before Him,
who if he has said that he hath no regard for princes more
than for other men, has surely never said that he hath regard
for other men more than for princes; but bade with his own
immortal voice, “Render unto Cæsar the things which are
Cæsar's.”

Years had flown—as they will fly, joyous or unhappy, swift
or slow—on ignoble and noiseless wings, with their unvarying,
unalterable flight, and the boy captive had waked into the captive
man, the princely bud had bloomed into the royal flower.
Henry the Fourth, usurping Bolingbroke, had departed, murmuring
with his last sigh, as he saw in the clearsightedness of
coming death, his son untimely grasping at the royal circlet,
which he, himself, had grasped untimely, and now first felt to
be no blessing but a burden—

Henry the Fifth, the merry mad Prince Hal, the Victor of
Agincourt, had departed, and even in departing had discovered
that

The Earl of Bedford, the wise regent, had succeeded to the
sway of England, and so much of France as yet remained submissive
to the English sword and sceptre.

The captive prince was now, through Bedford's wiser, nobler
policy, the wise, accomplished, and good king of the unruly,

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turbulent, and traitorous Scottish barons, of the tumultuous,
unlettered, savage Scottish people. The imprisoned bard of
Windsor was now the avenging judge of past crimes and past
abuses, the reforming monarch of an unreformed aristocracy,
the prince at peace with all foreign powers, but at the worst of
wars with the most perilous of all foes, his own jealous people.

His fate was, of course, that of all first reformers, to be abandoned
and misunderstood by those whom the reform should
have profited even to the raising them from brute nature to
humanity—to be overmastered and destroyed by the opponents
of all reform.

Deserted by his parliament, at terms of defiance with his bad
barons, misconceived by his rude people, never, perhaps, had
the captive's chain been so galling to his soul as was now the
king's crown—and often when served with bended knees, and
circled by uncovered heads, each of which, as he well knew
plotted daggers; bearing the style and title, but not the liberty
or power of a king—aye, often did he sigh for the tuneful days
of his peaceful prison-house, when his whole pride was confined
to his own heart, his whole kingdom comprised in the allgiance
of one other heart—now as then, fond, loyal, and his
own—the heart of bright and beautiful Joanna Beaufort.

For eighteen years he struggled wearily, yet well, against the
discontents and disorders which met him on every hand, having
no solace from his cares save in the society of his fair, accomplished
wife, and the ladies of her court, whom she had selected
not merely for their beauty or their birth, but for their taste,
their literary or musical talents: and of whom she had formed
a circle which, while it excited the rude scorn and boisterous
mockery of the prince barons of the Marches, was to her unfortunate
lord the only brighter phase of his existence.

That eighteenth year was marked by one event which seemed

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for a moment to give promise of brighter fortunes in the future,
but like the most of the smiles of fortune, this also proved delusive,
and in the end disastrous. He had renewed the ancient
and time-honored alliance between France and his native land,
giving his daughter Margaret in marriage to the youthful heir
of the French throne, the then dauphin, afterwards Louis the
Eleventh, of evil memory, long before whose majority she had
the good fortune to pass into the peace of the quiet grave.
With splendid pomp, and a gorgeous train of northern knights
and nobles, accompanied moreover by a powerful body of life-guards,
who, in after days, formed the nucleus of the famous
mercenary bands of Louis—known as the Scottish archers, long
after the bow had become obsolete and given place to the
musket—the child-wife and infant princess set sail from the dark
and misty shores of Caledonia for the sunny plains of “la belle
France,” which she reached uninterrupted, although the English
fleet put to sea to intercept her; encouraged by their success in
her father's case, to adopt the same procedure in her own.
They failed as far as the daughter was concerned; but indirectly
their attempt proved the destruction of the hapless king
and father, whose life had been embittered from its very outset
by the intolerance and bitterness of their national hatred.

Exasperated by the cruel and ungenerous attempt, James set
a force on foot, and, declaring war on England, moved southwards
to invade the northern provinces of Cumberland, Northumberland,
and Durham, which were then to the ever-warring
borderers of the two Island kingdoms, what Flanders has been
in all modern ages to the rest of Europe, the common battle-field,
and as it were, the lists open at all times to all comers
with the trumpet note and challenge-call to combat à l'outrance.
But such was the ill-will of his nobles, curbed in their violence,
limited in their covetous ambition, and straitened in their

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revenues by the confiscation of their wrongfully alienated crownlands,
that James speedily discovered that his ill-regulated army
was like to prove more dangerous to himself than to his enemies;
and learning the formation of conspiracies against his
person, disbanded it at once, and suddenly retired to Perth, in
which his royal father had for the most part resided, and where
he had himself founded a Carthusian Monastery—the abbot and
brothers of which were his firm, and perhaps his only adherents.

It was a dark and gusty evening of February, when the Court
was assembled in an upper chamber—one of a long connected
suite of apartments in the Carthusian Monastery, to which the
unfortunate monarch had retreated in the hope—fruitless hope,
as it proved to be—of being permitted to pass the remainder of
his blameless days in the pursuit of literary ease and the gratification
of his gentle social tastes, and, for that age, almost
unnatural accomplishments. There can, perhaps, be no greater
misfortune for any man than to be born either far behind or far
in advance of his age; to be the former, is to be scoffed at as an
old-time dotard, a mere laudator temporis acti—to be the latter,
is to be persecuted, perhaps martyred, for opinion's sake, as a
heretic to admitted holy doctrines, or a vile innovator on time-hallowed
usages; and if so to a private individual, how much
more so to a monarch, untimely set to govern a people yet
unripe for change, and bigoted against reform.

Such was the case with the first of the Stuarts. Had he been
in his own day the king of France or England, he would have
still been a century in advance of the spirit of his kingdom.
Had he been, two centuries later in his own land, born to the
throne so fatally filled by the last Scottish sovereign of his race,
incomparable, guilty, hapless Mary, he would have still found
himself as unable to control the Ruthvens and the Lyndesays,

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the Murrays and the Mortons, who drove her an exile to the
false hospitality of her southron sister-queen, as he was to compel
the respect and force the submission of his own Atholes and
Grahams.

The barons of his own fierce land required to be ruled by a
man as brave and fierce as themselves, who should govern them
with a sword for a sceptre; and in James Stuart they had one
whom they regarded as a sort of foreign jongleur; and this
weak, frivolous, vain, outlandish thing, neither all woman nor
half man, attempting to enforce over them, who owned no superior
but the wearer of a sharper sword, that supremacy which
they the most despised and loathed—the supremacy of the
law.

Therefore between him and them, as between the antagonistic
principles of diverse and conflicting ages, it was war for
existence—war à l'outrance.

The chamber in which, on that wild gusty night, James sat
with his queen and her ladies in easy and familiar state,—which,
indeed, scarcely could be called state,—was a large, low-ceiled,
vaulted hall, with huge round arched and mullioned casements.
Through these the merry glare of the great wood-fire, as it went
soaring up the chimney in sheets of ruddy flame and volumes
of illuminated smoke, mixed with the lustre of fifty waxen
sconces with broad silver reflectors, shone out far into the
murky night, beaconing to all the city that there the king held
court. The other decorations of that stately room were as
superior to the modes of the time, as were the personal habits
of its royal resident to those of his contemporaneous kings.
Instead of rushes, the floor was covered with rich tapestries, the
walls were draped with embossed and gilded Moorish leather
from Cordova, and, instead of arms and weapons, implements of
the chase, and trophies of the battle, were adorned with works

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of art, such as art then was—ere its revival from the darkness
of the Middle Ages; with musical instruments, some of the
king's own construction—for in addition to his unquestioned
merit as a poet, he was a musician and composer of no mean
order; and with a few shelves of rare illuminated manuscripts.
One table strewn with missals, music, rude sketches, and a few
objects of what we should now call vertu, such as lacrymatories,
bronze and golden ornaments, antique arms, and funeral vases
extracted from the graves without the Roman native camps, or
the yet more ancient Pictish barrows; and another spread with
the delicacies of what was then termed a rare supper—for the
proper supper, which was the principal meal of the day, had
taken place some hours ago—with a due complement of the
cumbrous-looking, but picturesque settees and high-backed
arm-chairs, composed the furniture of this most unroyal royal
chamber—unroyal, for in it there was neither dais nor canopy;
neither footstool nor chair of state; neither the treasured fleursde-lis,
and unicorn of Scotland, nor any of the insignia of Caledonian
royalty; and in it there stood neither lords in waiting,
nor gentlemen of the household; neither pensioners nor ushers
of the rod; but only in attendance, by the board, two unarmed
pages, in the black and scarlet liveries of the realm, ready to
hand wine or refreshments to the company.

And that company—the king himself clad merely as a gentleman
of birth in plain black velvet; a gentleman of noble
stature and fine features—the latter marked with something of
that melancholy which was the characteristic of all his race,
and especially of his equally unhappy descendant, the first
Charles of England, in whom it was believed—long before the
first shadow gloomed on his political horizon—to be a prognostic
of violent and early death; the queen, stately, and finely
formed, and fair, with the rich complexion and luxuriant sunny

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hair of England, and the high, aquiline features, still lineal in
the princely family of the house of Beaufort; and, lastly, her
four maids of honor—damsels whose very names denoted that
they were of the highest blood of Scotland; and of the blood,
from first to last, true and devoted to the Stuart—for there was
a Seyton and a Beatoun, a Carmichael and a Douglass—but of
these four, though all were young, graceful, and gentle, and fair
enough each one to be the cynosure, we have to do only with
the last; for she, the Lady Catherine Douglass, differed from
all the rest, not only in the style and character of her beauty,
but in her demeanor; and, indeed, her whole aspect on that
eventful evening was unusual at least, if not unbecoming in
such a presence.

She was very tall, very largely formed, and though delicate
and even slender, so fully rounded in her figure as to give the
idea of her having attained years far more mature than she
indeed had, for she was scarcely yet seventeen. Her profuse
hair, closely banded over her tresses, and falling in luxuriant
masses over her neck and shoulders, was black as night, as
were her heavy, straight brows, which imparted a character of
unusual sternness to features naturally grave and almost austere.
She sate apart from the rest in an embrasure of one of those
high windows, gazing steadfastly towards the town, and evidently
all untouched by the fine music and fine poetry which
were enriching all the atmosphere around her, although the
music and the words were both the composition of a king—of a
king beloved and present. So still she sate that the others had
entirely forgotten her presence, the rather that she was concealed
from their view by a stout clustered pillar casting a massive
shadow over the embrasure within which she had taken
post. But though she heeded not the company, nor was heeded
by them, it was evident that she was anything but pensive or

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abstracted, for her face wore that air of strange excitement
which Scottish superstition believes to be the consequence of a
preternatural foresight, and which is commonly known to that
people as a raised look. Her lips are half apart; her eyes fixed
on vacancy; her ear turned in the peculiar attitude of listening.
One hand was pressed upon her heart as if it would repress its
beating; the other, as it hung down by her side, was clinched
as tightly as though it was closed upon the dudgeon of a
dagger.

Men said that Catherine Douglass loved her king with a love
that surpassed a subject's love of loyalty—even as a later Douglass
of the ruder sex loved the loveliest of all the Stuarts —
unhappy Mary. Had the strong blood of Douglass been mated
with the weak stream that ran in the veins of the Stuarts, it
might, perhaps, in either case, have saved its sovereign. As it
was, in both cases, the weak in falling dragged the stronger
down.

But now the time was close at hand—the hour had come, and
the men. And still the gay song went on, and the rich music
poured its stream unheard—unheard by those inspired ears of
Catherine, which, deaf to their merry minstrelsy, were filled
with sounds they could not hear, as were her eyes alive to sights
they could not see.

Without, the city had already sunk to sleep, and no sounds
had been heard over the streets and wynds late so populous and
noisy for above two hours, except the sad, soft sough of the
westland wind, as it came wailing down from the Highland
hills; and the dull, monotonous rush of the flooded Tay, as it
poured along beneath the city walls, swollen with the melting
snows, for it had thawed for several days, and the river was
bankful; and from hour to hour the clang of the convent bell
telling how the night rolled away.

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No guard was set at the convent gate; only within the porch
beside a close-barred picket, under a blinking lanthorn, dozed,
muffled in his cowl, an old Carthusian.

Hard by, but close concealed within the mouths of several
narrow and filthy wynds or lanes, debouching into the High
street of Perth, between rows of houses so disproportionately
tall as to cause their openings to resemble the cavernous gorges
between precipitous cliffs, rather than human thoroughfares
between human dwellings, about forty or fifty powerfully built
men had been standing on the watch motionless for above two
hours, closely wrapped in heavy serge cloaks, fitted with capes
projecting far over their faces, which they completely concealed
from view. At length the echoes of the convent bell died into
silence, after the twelve stern notes that tell of midnight, and as
they died away, a faint and guarded footstep, accompanied by
a muffled clash of metal, was heard approaching.

“It is he at length!” whispered one of the watchers, uttering
a single low whistle, which was answered at once by two
similar notes, and followed by the approach of a person similarly
clad, but of more dignified port and taller stature than the
others.

“The time has come,” he said. “The lights are all out!
They have retired this half hour. Silence, and follow!”

And as they went in single file, their feet gave scarce a
sound on the rugged pavement, so thickly were they clothed in
felt, gliding along through the dim streets like fleeting ghosts,
in total silence, unless when that strange muffled clash was
heard, ominous of evil.

They reached the convent gate, and the leader, knocking
very gently, and whispering a countersign, it opened seemingly
automatous, for, when they entered, the sleeping Carthusian
was no longer there, and the blinking lanthorn only kept the

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wicket. They entered one by one, and filed off silently one by
one into the cloistered court, the leader carrying the dull lanthorn
with him, and the ten who entered last, remaining within
the porch to guard against interruption from without.

The others, as they reached the grass-plat in the centre of
the cloister, threw off their mufflings, and stood revealed, a
band of grim and grisly warriors, with scar-seared faces, and
many with grey hair, and all with indubitable marks of high
birth and station in the insolent daring of their aspect, and the
fierce haughtiness of their bearing. All were armed cop-a-pie
in steel, but they had no crests on their basnets, no blazonings
on their steel coats, and they bore no weapons save—each in
his right hand—a long broad dagger, known as the misericorde,
unsheathed and ready for assassination. The tall, gaunt man
who led them still wore his vizor up, and the dark grizzled face
and snow-white hair revealed the uncle of the king—Walter,
the Earl of Athole. Lowering his aventaille, with a mute gesture,
he led onward, and all followed silently, for they still wore
their felt shoes over their mail hose, though little need there
seemed for such precaution.

No human being met them in the cloisters, nor in the vaulted
corridors, nor on the vast stone staircase—no human eye looked
down on them from the tall casements—no owl screeched at
the murderers, “not a mouse budged” for all their dull resounding
footsteps.

But within one faithful heart presaged their coming.

Within her embrasure, still as a marble statue, with lips
apart, clinched hand, and glaring, sate Catherine Douglass.

When the royal company arose for the night, she had not
arisen, and, none observing her where she sate withdrawn, all
fancied that she had retired before them, and was a-bed already.

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The dying brands glimmered feebly through the great hall—
the waxen lights were dead in the sconces, and the pale watcher
scarcely seemed less dead than they.

Hark! hark! one by one—one by one—stealthy, ghostlike,
only not silent—on they came, up the stairs, through the corridor,
those muffled footsteps. They paused.

A loud, clear voice woke the night.

“The king! The king! To arms! to arms! within there,
Brandanes, look to your bills and bows! The traitors are
without! The doors are barred! Treason! fie, treason!”

It was the voice of Catherine Douglass—and at her cry there
was a rush from within, but it was not the steelclad rush of the
trusty Brandanes, the faithful body-guard, the men of Bute
and Islay—only the rush of unshod girlish feet, the rustle of
female garbs, and the firm stride of one manly foot—the foot
of a king come forth unarmed to die.

At the same instant came a hoarse whisper from without,
while a heavy hand pressed the door inward, as if expecting
to find no resistance. “Away! silly minion! There be no
Brandanes, nor no bars wherewithal to bar the gate!”

“Traitor, thou liest!” was the firm reply. “For I have
thrust mine arm into the staples, and when was not the blood
and bone of a Douglass stronger than bars of wood or bolts of
iron? Fly, my liege, fly— by the back stairway, and the postern—
McLouis and the Brandanes keep the river gate! away!
I will hold them!”

“Curses upon thee! Yield, minion! force it, Graham; break
in, Ruthven! Curses on her! curses! What if she be a
woman, or what avails a paltry wench's bones, when a king's
blood and a kingdom are at stake!”

There was the energetic rush of ten heavy shoulders of strong
men against the oaken door without— within there was the

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steady and undaunted nerve of one pale girl in agony—and for
an instant's space the girl's nerve carried.

Then came a fearful, craunching, shivering crash— low but distinct,
and then the tearing of the white flesh and sinews,
drowned in the splintering din of wood, and the fierce tramp
of the armed assassins as they rushed in resistless.

No scream passed her pale lips in that extremity of torture—
her dying eyes swam towards her king, to see if her devotion
had availed to save him. But there he stood, horror-stricken,
trammelled by the clinging arms of his shrieking queen and
her maidens. Had he been free he would have dragged her
from that fatal, fruitless post; had he been armed he had
avenged her.

As it was, he died with her; manfully, as becomes a man,
in silence—royally, as becomes a king who cannot resist effectually,
unresistingly.

Fearfully in after days did the assassins rue their crime in
unheard-of tortures. But what tortures could expiate the
blood of that devoted girl, what price repay her glorious self-abandonment,
save that which we will not doubt she has
received—

The Crown of Martyrdom in Heaven!